Jon Loomer – the Professional who was not let down by his lay off, even after years of experience; and saw it as an ‘opportunity’ to make a difference. The site that started as a bilateral resume, looking for ‘good’ job openings, has now revolutionized into a full-fledged consulting and digital tutorials destination. Today, Jon Loomer is a digital marketing consultant with a sui generis viewpoint on social media. His rendezvous with Facebook began in 2007 and carries on till date.
The blog offers daily tips and touches upon breaking news to make sure you don’t miss a step while marketing your brand. It gives you the opportunity to learn and be a better Facebook marketer and blogger. And like many others, you can either subscribe to his blog Jon Loomer Digital or simply like his Facebook Page, Jon Loomer Digital. The website focuses on helping you make a difference in marketing with social media – the platform in focus being Facebook.
The latest update from Digital Marketer Extraordinaire, Jon Loomer, is his Facebook ads glossary; knowing it is currently trending in social media and not many have a clear idea of how to go about using them. And it has gone viral, just like the rest of his tips do. Not because he is ‘just’ a favorite among a few, but because his content is authentic and always – legit.
Facebook advertising – understanding the unfathomable terms and features can be a bit knotty and this infographic, Facebook ADs Glossary, by Jon Loomer is only to give you an astute understanding of all that you need to know.
This isn\’t the first time the finest of Professionals with an ‘obviously’ credible background has published information acquired in their years of empiricism; which makes it evident that there are many out there, who despite their busy schedules take time out to guide those who are still ‘in making’ in their respective fields. The reason why people follow them word by word (if not, then most of them), is because the kind of content they publish, the kind of infographics they offer not just speak of their experience but years of gaining knowledge.
The thing that stood for me in this infographic which made me share it here was the simplicity and straightforwardness of the infographic. There aren’t any little men jumping around, and there isn’t any additional graphic or element that isn’t needed. All separate terms are in separate background colors, with the exact term defined with a crisp one-liner. In barely 150 seconds, you’re able to go through the entire infographic and grasp everything that it’s all about.
For those of you just starting out in Facebook Ads – we suggest that you take a printout of this and tape it to your desk! This will come in handy for the first month of your experiments.
Once into Social Media, you are forever ‘on the job’ – even during the ‘holidays’! Work never slows down during the festive season; but the slog hours do. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s bring with them a short respite for all those who are ponderously into Social media as part of their job or as a hobby/ passion.
When the festive season approaches, all brands worry about one thing – how are they going to manage their social images – whether they should post new content or give it a miss for few days – what content will attract people when there is so much bling around to look at! Yes, that is a whole lot of decision making. Many brands either don’t post interactive content on their sites/ pages, fearing who will do a follow up or they come back after vacations, merrily posting belated wishes! Who stays in that festive mood once back to work? Right – no one.
Remember – people relate to consistency (living, non – living, virtual). Because even though for all Social media Professionals, the festive season is a break from ‘Social media’; there are others for whom it is all about social media – from uploading pictures, to check-ins, to status updates, to just about anything! It is all about building long lasting relations. I\’m not letting you guys get out of having a strategy over the holidays!
All marketing managers work really hard building their brand’s social image and the last thing they want, is to lose out on their driving force. Even though you have to work really hard to get into that ‘festive mood’; publicly, you need to present an image of festive ‘cheer’. According to Mashable, 65% of shoppers turn to social media to find the perfect gifts, so be there to welcome them with offers they can’t resist.
And it is not all that hard to keep up with your user’s festive spirit; not to forget, your own too! So if you don’t already have a holiday social media plan, here are a few tips to wrap up your work in a bright shiny cheery manner:
Your Social media plan should be handy. Prepare beforehand. Schedule your posts and tweets – there is a feature that lets you set time and date to publish your posts – on Facebook as well as Twitter – waiting to be explored by you!The only thing you can’t schedule is the interaction you make with your users; and it is okay! They understand how involved you are eulogizing with friends and family.
Keep users in the loop. Your users should be well aware of your presence or absence from the social media. Inform them about the days you are closed, the helpline they might want to use (they might not be able to do without you!), the happy hours, etc. You don’t want them to miss out on all that you have worked so hard on.
Voice your Festive Cheer. Consider your audience and maintain your brand voice in a cheery manner. (Festive season! Yay!) But make sure you don’t sound silly while doing so.
Less is GOOD. Don’t force yourself to post something just because you feel ‘you have to’; post when you feel like it! And the days you don’t, give it a miss. It’s OK to take a break.
Treat your social media channels like your privy condo. Give a personal touch to your profile picture or your cover – something that goes along with the theme of ‘festive cheer.’ Basically, revamp the way you market yourself. Show how blithely muddled you are with festivities and not just hell bent on ‘selling’!
Create some ‘fancy’ pins. People tend to plan things ahead of time. Pin! Pin! Pin! I might just need this!, I could buy this!, I could gift this! Create an album/ board full of such awesome stuff. You don’t want to drown your sales, only because you were ‘holidaying.’
Give them a visual treat. (You can’t really go about gifting everyone!) Visuals. Work on lots of visuals! It is all about what catches the eye. Something like-able and share-able really boosts your reputation as ‘creative.’
Gear up for some Holiday Contests. Conduct interesting Holiday Contests/ Competitions and give away some really interesting gifts to the winners! The whole idea is to engage users sitting at home, browsing your site; and not lose out on prospects coming your way during the ‘holidays.’
Find a stand-in. If you are one of those who can’t do without replying to their users, you might just want to start looking for someone who is ready to take on the job, while you are away. (And hopefully, you’ll find someone!)
Holiday experience – the creation of great social content. Use your holidays to create some great social content! Take a note of the experience and of course, stock up on some original images to share.
If you haven’t been paying attention – hashtags are no longer just a “Twitter” or a “Pinterest” thing. The latest to join the hashtag bandwagon is Facebook, having rolled out their first phase of global use of hashtags on June 12, 2013. Quick crash course: Hashtags are basically used to help organize timely conversations around popular topics, such as current events and public personalities. It is just another form of tagging someone in your post, even though they aren’t your “Facebook Friend”. The technology may seem young, but its use dates back to the early days of IRC, where hashtags were used as a type of metadata to categorize content that is posted.
On Facebook, this feature connects people and posts with categories in common; to help surface conversations. The social networking site only wants to make it easier for people to find related content already available on Facebook, and hashtags is the first step. (Well, at least that was the intention when they came up with this plan!) Users can now compose posts directly from a hashtag feed and search results, making addition of real time content to specific topics easier than before.
The actual intention behind introducing Facebook hashtags, was to reach out to more people – to make content/ pages go viral. But, according to EdgeRank’s study, this hasn’t really worked out. At all. Posts with hashtags were supposed to notice an increase in their reach – weren’t they? Wasn’t that the plan, Zuck? But, marketers have been let down. What else is new. The study says that the posts with hashtags have a far lesser reach than those without hashtags.
Twitter follows the same hashtag technology and brands have noticed over 70% increase in ReTweets (Twitter’s equivalent to Viral Reach), when using hashtags versus not using any. This indicates that hashtags tend to increase the likelihood of ReTweets! But, this fact remains true only for Twitter – the only platform to do something nice with hashtags. Maybe we should just let it be a Twitter thing and let it stay there.
Then why are brands experiencing a downfall in their reach? Is it because the content they use hashtags with is not as relevant as the users may want it to be? Or is it because users tend to click more on the ‘related’ content instead of the Page posts and the bounce – off rates have increased unknowingly (and alarmingly)? For example, if I click on #socialmedia, I get a chance to view other pages that have used the same hashtag.
The typical content shared by brands weighs more towards Photos (Obviously! We all know photos do a better job than text content!) Again, thanks to EdgeRank’s survey we have a clear idea about the usage of hashtags with content and their distribution is clearly depicted in the graph.
But why are Facebook hashtags such a big failure? According to the survey conducted by EdgeRank, it is clear that people don’t tend to click on the ‘hashtag’; else posts with hashtags would have noticed a considerable increase in their reach. And this raises further questions – Why are posts with hashtags experiencing lesser reach when they have the same content as those without hashtags? This is clearly because brands are using hashtags mostly in posts for their promotional campaigns, and these campaigns as it is experience lesser engagement, lesser clicks and hence, LESSER REACH! Could it really be that simple? Surely a hashtag like #SocialMedia should get more reach then?
Another problem that wasn’t predicted, was the use of Facebook hashtags – how good are its users at relating and categorizing content? Evidently, not very good. The maximum number of hashtags used in a single post is 19 ‘individual’ hashtags and 60% of the posts with hashtags use a ‘single’ hashtag! (That’s what the survey says!) Personally – using more than 3 hashtags in a post does seem a little wonky.
This would certainly worry all marketers, considering their brands aren’t doing too well with or without the hashtags. Perhaps, they could use ‘exclusive’ hashtags instead of the common hashtags, in their posts – but wait, isn’t that the reason hashtags aren’t doing so well in the first place? It does however – provide a consistent stream of data for users interested in that hashtag, as they’ll see posts only by that brand. Long story short – hashtags aren’t doing jack for your Facebook post, so don’t use them.
Twitter Inc. was forced to fall back on its old “block” feature, on December 12, 2013; less than 12 hours after the new feature enticed a lot of criticism from its users who accused it of empowering executioners of online misconduct. The U.S users of the social platform took to trending #RestoreTheBlock hashtag in its protest against the new block feature.
All of us are aware of the old blocking policy – a blocked user could not interact with the tweets of the person who blocked them – no Retweets, no Favoritism, no adding to the list, etc. But under the new policy, a blocked user could still see your activity and interact with it; and not even be ‘aware’ of being ‘blocked.’ (A modest change that received a colossal response!)
Twitter introduced this change, firmly believing that this would end the vindictive behavior displayed by users in response to being blocked – mockery, abusive language, etc.
A company that fights for free speech rights of users (even when they use abhorrent language) shows their commitment towards the whole idea of tweeting; but it has a major flaw – harassment and abuse (a general case of misuse of freedom). Balancing out both has been quite a task for Twitter.
The company’s blog states, “We’ve built Twitter to help you create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers. That vision must coexist with keeping users safe on the platform.”
Tweets are ‘public’ by default (an entirely private profile is of no use when you want to share ideas!) and the asymmetric following model allows anyone to follow you – whether you appreciate their presence or not. (Something that Facebook lets you decide!) The block function was an attempt to pin privacy protection of its users. Even though the block function is helpful, Twitter would need to cater for more tools for users. (Considering the latest change to ‘block’ was all in vain)
Twitter’s Chief Executive, Dick Costolo and Communications officer, Jim Prosser initially sought to justify the changes as a response to the requests from victims of abuse, but did not! Because surprisingly the protest surfaced many facts that are hard to believe (if you too are a believer of ‘busy lifestyle’) – Users who were blocked, would simply log out of their current accounts and register a new one, making the process of interacting with the person who blocked them easy breezy!
There is a speculation that Twitter might have an economic interest in changing the way this feature works – as many branded accounts or advertisers were blocked by users to avoid being spammed by their promotional tweets (and of course, the new ‘block’ curbs them no more!)
Even though individual tweets can be reported for abuse and emails can be sent to Twitter in case of illegal or perilous content, and you can block that user – is it enough to protect users on Twitter? Twitter is entangled between playing the ‘Knight in shining armor’; safeguarding users and offering a platform for free jargon (as it is in the company’s DNA)! Tweet patrolling is going to take away the open, spontaneous edge of the platform! But can the user disapproval be ignored? Apparently not, as even Twitter took into consideration the points that came forward against the ‘shadow’ blocking policy! (Ignorance is not bliss, when it is about the company’s long term success!)
Customer feedback has always been top priority to companies, as their views help better their business – listening to them, lets them know how important they are to you and to your business. The more satisfied your users are, the more viral you go (that is the power of ‘word of mouth’). And Twitter seems to have taken to this aphorism! They offer exactly what a ‘community’ is meant to – feedback on services from their users.
Analytics and data give us the desired insights into what our users demand or expect from our business. But wouldn’t it be easier if you could just ask your users directly and save all the statistics for later?
All you need to do – be a good “LISTENER.” And here are some ‘listening tools ’you could use, the next time you need your services reviewed:
Surveys: They are the bread and butter for getting feedback. They are easily created, implemented, executed and analyzed! (Keep it short!)
Feedback boxes: Does your site have a defined process for receiving feedback? It is just a small box that can most certainly be adjusted! (You can’t lose out on customer comments!)
User activity: Now you can use your statistics to know user interaction/ activity. (It shows how interesting (or boring) your site is!)
Social listening: Listening through social media, by engaging users in surveys/ polls/ general interaction, surely ensures some candid feedback from your users. (You want the truth!)
If you’ve noticed a dip in the organic Facebook reach on your Facebook page lately, you’ve most likely been panicking like most social media marketers around the world. It’s a well known fact that as your page grows, the organic reach (number of people a post is shown to without promotions) tends to slowly dip.
However, of late a multitude of Facebook pages have been showing massively decreasing Facebook reach stats – except for a special few. Not that there is any decline in the quality of the content on their page, it’s just Facebook playing with the newsfeed algorithm all over again.
Akin to the Dark Knight’s Joker saying, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free” – Facebook has decided to take his advice and implement it sadly, on the news feed algorithm. Given that Facebook’s good at helping brands reach out to their target audience, they aren’t going to let you do it for free any more. At least not as much as you’d like.
To increase organic Facebook reach on their Page’s posts, companies will have to completely revamp their Social Media Strategies, and invest more time and money to boost / promote their posts, to reach out to a larger audience.
According to Facebook’s new algorithm (we’ve lost track of which version this is) – Facebook displays more timely and relevant posts, which automatically shifts focus to creating unique content for Company pages on a regular basis. The idea is to present likeable / shareable content to the audience; and avoid being a ‘blink n miss’ or being ‘scrolled down’ at.
Mostly, we observe people sharing images/ statuses/ videos/ links on their walls, thereby increasing ‘that’ page’s reach.
Publishing houses such as the Daily Mail, the Independent have seen a vast increase in their page’s organic Facebook reach, given that Facebook’s newsfeed is now going to focus on more news. Frankly – this seems like a very bad idea.
Facebook has clearly stated on its company blog – “Ultimately, what’s good for people on Facebook is good for the businesses that use Facebook to reach and engage them. One of the ways we maintain a good balance between the two is by making sure News Feed is as interesting and timely as possible.”
Facebook might as well come out and say, “We’re going to show your posts to 5% of the people who have liked your page, and if you’d like more people to see it – throw some money at us.”
Is this fair? Probably not. Companies have vested money, time and effort into making sure that thousands of people like their pages and stay up to date with their content, only to have Facebook strip them of the right of showcasing the content that they’ve previously asked for to be shown on their newsfeed.
The only hope we have as community managers is that the next newsfeed update (which will probably happen in the next four minutes) – brings with it change that reverses this experiment.
