It is important to note here that ‘PAGE LIKES’ is also considered in calculating the PTAT. Industry average for PTAT  is anywhere between 1% – 3%, safely saying, if it is below 1% then you need to review your strategy and if it is above 3% then you’re doing pretty well.

But this is where things get tricky. PTAT will show high spikes especially when you’re running a Facebook  Ad Campaign. Depending upon the number of fans you are acquiring your PTAT can reach as high 40% or more in some cases.

So, should you assume you’re engaging your fans with great content? No.

Considering only PTAT can be misleading in this case. A higher percentage is a result of NEW PAGE LIKES and not mainly because of the content.

Hence, it is important for a brand to consider other important, but not so popular metrics. One of them is VIRALITY. Virality is the percentage of people who have created a story from your Page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it. In simple words –

Talking About This (post wise) / Reach (post wise)  * 100

Industry benchmark for virality is 1.86 as reported by Edgerankchecker. Considering the fact that Facebook maintains median reach of brand’s page content to 16% of total fan base (since 2012) it can be said that average Virality percentage has remained steady and continues to be reliable.

Having said that, PTAT should not be ignored as it is still fairly a pretty broad measurement of how fans engage with your page. A healthy way to determine the performance of your page is to generate a holistic report based on various insights provided by Facebook, rather than just checking your PTAT numbers every week and assuming your page is doing a fantastic job.

The post Why Relying Solely On People Talking About This Can Be Misleading appeared first on SOVEDO.

While ad creative would greatly determine the interest in online video ads (Think Dollar Shave Club), the sweet spot seems to be 30-60 second ad duration that can bring in the highest ad engagement.

While YouTube remains the king of online video advertising, it’s interesting to see that Twitter and even, Facebook are getting active in this channel. For Twitter, it can combine promoted tweets along with videos made on Vine to target audiences and chip away a portion of the video advertising market.

As for Facebook, the company is in the process of testing video ads (up to 15 seconds long) that will appear in the News Feed. In addition to this, users can expect pre-roll advertising in videos uploaded to Facebook.

As a user,  how do you engage with online video ads?

The post Video Advertising Continues To Gain Momentum appeared first on SOVEDO.

For instance, it’s hard to get a convert on Facebook because the purchase intent is missing. Even though you’re targeting a user who’s interested in what you sell, but on social media he’s socializing. The purchase intent which he has when he goes on Google is not present when he’s on Facebook.

But, he notices your brand; he shares/likes/tweets your content. Your product or service may not sell instantly but you register your brand in his mind. And that has an intangible value. By engaging with them on a daily basis, you’re not only instilling a brand recall but also building a relationship which will benefit in long run.

Let’s assume a scenario where you’re a brand which sells t-shirts. And you have a very active Facebook page where you interact with your fans on a daily basis with interesting content which is not always promotional in nature. Later, your user feels the need to buy one, and goes to Google with purchase intent. He enters the query, say, buy tshirts online. Now, he’s not only overwhelmed with organic search results but also with the sponsored results of your competitors. You’re in that sponsored list too.

This is the moment of truth – if he’s familiar with your brand, and engages with you on social media, chances are high that he might visit your website to buy one. Further, you would have already gained preference over your competitors because of the affinity level which has been established between your brand and the user on social media.

Such kind of intangible value is added by social media to your brand. It is hard to measure it. And it takes time to show up. Social Media influences your target audience as we pointed out in one of our previous articles.

Leading Indian ecommerce websites like Myntra, Snapdeal, Yepme, HomeShop18, and others are investing a lot of time and money in building communities on social media. A common objective for all of them is ‘engaging users’. They then juice out ROI by running various contest and campaigns which help them generate leads, drive traffic, and boost brand recall.

What’s your opinion? Please share your thoughts below.

The post The Pursuit Of Social Media ROI appeared first on SOVEDO.

People are getting more comfortable with the idea of online shopping. This could be attributed to various factors such as busy modern lives, longer working hours, ability to browse products from the comfort of one’s home, and wide range of options available, thanks to international shipping and so on. While all this sounds good and easy from a consumer’s perspective, the seller finds the going tough as the company faces competition from several online and bricks-and-mortar stores, targeting the same audience.

Hence, it becomes imperative for the seller to use all available media and reach out to prospective buyers. As the famous proverb goes ‘Out of sight, out of mind’, the seller’s place is lost if the company is not in the ‘sight zone’. While SEO remains top priority and – rightly so- but to beat the competition, online stores need to stay on top of the mind and this is where social media comes into the picture.

It is quite natural that a person would possibly do a search on a product he/she wishes to buy. Some people also trust online ads, and then there are those who trust the opinions of friends and community.

CONNECTION

Connecting with target market is essential to remaining at the top of  mind. Social media is effective in this regard as a happy fan is more likely to click on your link on Google when searching for products to buy.  Also, when your fans/followers talk about the positive experiences they had with you, they influence a hundred or thousands more who are then more inclined to choose you over your competition.

COMMUNITY

Social media offers the ability to target people with common interests. You can easily identify the particular community of prospective buyers. Here, you are not trying hard to create interest in a person. You are easily associating with a person who has a liking for your product, and is simply looking for the best bargain. With the interest level already existing, the conversion remains a challenge. Thus, social media makes it easy for you by helping you build a community of prospective buyers.

REACH

Social Media enables a customer to reach out to the whole world.  Hence, a business cannot afford to overlook the woes of a customer. Lack of service, poor quality and poor after sales service will result in a business losing not only existing customers but also prospective buyers. On an average a Facebook user has 130 friends, and Twitter virtually has no limits as it is an open platform. One bad mention on Twitter could possibly make your brand ‘trend’, affecting your online reputation, and turning  potential customers against you. That’ the power of social media influence.

EXPERIENCE

While some people love to be the early adopters,  most prefer to go by other’s experience. Social media, quite often, works on the ‘let us wait and watch’ attitude in the buyer. When the prospective buyer finds statements from a user that substantiates the claims made by a company, the person  is naturally inspired. Tweets and comments on Facebook go a long way in influencing the decision of the consumer. People tweet asking other users about their experiences regarding a particular brand.

Famous Indian ecommerce websites like Myntra, Jabong, and Snapdeal have invested heavily in social media. They effectively use social media to connect with existing and prospective customers, and promote their offers. Social Media helps them monitor customer sentiments and take appropriate actions. On Facebook they engage their fans on a daily basis which keeps them on top of the consumer’s mind.

Social Media In The Driver’s Seat

Social media plays a dominant role in online marketing as it is considered trustworthy and hence reliable. SEO and Social Media go hand in hand. Every online store strives to have a strong presence on social media for a simple reason -  while avenues like SEO, Online ads and Email Marketing help you reach target audience, Social Media, along with reach, also plays a crucial part in influencing them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rohit likes to travel and but remain connected to his friends and family using social media platforms. He believes social media to be a modern revolution of the current time. He is currently also working for CouponLava (http://www.couponlava.com), which is an online coupon website in India.

The post How Social Media Influences Purchase Decision When Buying Online appeared first on SOVEDO.

Does this idea cross the boundary of showing right column and newsfeed ads on Facebook? Maybe…Why?

It’s true that every time Facebook introduces a change, users voice their opinion against it till they get accustomed to it. In reality, it’s safe to say that the only reason Facebook is free is because people are obtaining something valuable to them in exchange for personal information. The data is the product.

Permission Marketing – the term popularized by Seth Godin is respecting the privilege of reaching customers. In his own words, “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” – Seth Godin

For brands, it’s important to understand that liking a page may not be the same as loving the brand…A user could like a page, but choose to remove the brand’s message from Newsfeed…there are multiple ways in which fans can exhibit “contradictory” behaviour. For a marketer to assume that it’s OK to reach a user’s inbox without the explicit permission is a bit dangerous.

Facebook Messages have evolved significantly and now includes several elements of what you would expect from Email. It’s also the one place on Facebook where you can keep conversations private.  With this, the expectations from Facebook Messages would be similar to that from Email.

A good email subscription involves:

• Subscription by a user (opt-in)
• Confirmation of subscription (double opt-in)
• “Add to Safe List” (further proof of relevance to the user)

Looking at this process, it seems that the new Facebook feature breaks all these levels of permission marketing. Bear in mind that Facebook has said that will be experimenting the new feature in the coming weeks so we are still in the early stages of it.

As a user, what do you think about this new feature? Do you treat your Facebook Inbox as a supplementary email and would be OK with receiving marketing messages from people/brands?

The post $1 Tag To Reach Your Facebook Inbox – What About Permission Marketing? appeared first on SOVEDO.

Note: Here’s the original article that I found while writing this post.

The ease of pinning content across Pinterest allows for greater share-ability, and with the holiday season in full swing, brands can take advantage of themed content across boards to generate interest in their offerings. As with most things, brands will have to be selective about the channels they choose to participate in and engage customers. The key here is, 10% of social traffic, not 10% of actual purchases. Social commerce directly accounted for .31% of thanksgiving purchases. That’s right. E-commerce in itself accounts for ~6-7% of total retail sales.

In the absolute sense, these are not great numbers. Social commerce has not exactly taken off as it was expected. Gamestop, Nordstorm opened their Facebook stores, only to close them shortly sighting lack of transactions. With much more robust systems and customer trust placed in e-commerce stores, many users did not any value in making the same purchase on Facebook. What’s mostly missing from social media channels is the lack of “commercial intent”. A person doing a search for a product/service is different from a user hanging out, viewing news feed and engaging in conversation with friends. CTR’s for Facebook average at 0.051% while it’s 0.4% for Google.

Coming back to Pinterest, the fact that it’s driving traffic to e-commerce stores cannot be ignored by marketers. The remaining piece of the puzzle is finding out if users from Pinterest are actually making purchases or not. As using a last-click model is flawed because it discounts the efforts put in by other channels/campaigns in meeting the objectives, Attribution Modeling tool in Google Analytics is a much way (especially for e-commerce websites) for finding out the path that a user takes in ultimately making a purchase. Ultimately, marketers would like to measure ROI and with Pinterest continuing to make waves, the holiday season might be a good reason to take advantage of it.

Pinterest and E-Commerce

The post 10% of Social E-Commerce Visits Coming From Pinterest appeared first on SOVEDO.

But, often you simply don’t have the monetary resources or technical know-how to develop a Facebook application. Some Facebook apps, like games, are more customized so you’ll need to hire a developer to implement those apps for you. But other apps are quite simple and open source applications that allow you to build custom tabs should suffice.

These are my top three picks of iFrame application builders that might help especially with contests, promotions and sweepstakes on Facebook.

1. Short Stack App (www.shortstackapp.com) – User friendly, intuitive and easy to use (love the drag and drop functionality!), Short Stack is something to look out for. It offers good templates which are easy to customize and upload to Facebook. For any theme that is a little complicated (and requires some basic coding), Short Stack provides easy to understand videos and regular support by email. Additionally, all of Short Stack’s templates are mobile friendly so it’s perfect for markets where mobile phone penetration is high. The few considerations here are that it is free for a fan base of 2000 or less. For anything above that, you would need upgrade and pay a minimum of $30 every month. So if you are running a promotion that would last less than a month, then it’s probably worth using their services. If however, you want something permanently on your page (a ‘Contact Us’ form, for instance), then it’s better to have your app custom coded to receive a long term cost efficiency.

2. Wild Fire (www.wildfireapp.com) – Wild Fire is possibly one of the more popular providers of iFrame apps (and is acquired by Google now). Like Short Stack, WildFire is also suitable for running short run promotions and pages. It offers almost all the features that Short Stack offers but I personally find its analytic and targeting tools to be very useful for measuring the effectiveness of the campaign. The library of Plug ins that Wild Fire provides is also very useful and helps add a lot more functionality to the app.

3.Tab Site (www.tabsite.com) – Tab Site is another easy to use iFrame app suitable for contests, sweepstakes and presenting information. Unlike WildFire or Short Stack, Tab Site has divided its pricing packages by number of tabs and widgets that you need. (There is also a free option that allows you to have 2 tabs and 4 widgets). They also have a decent array of templates that you can select from for the purpose of your app. For agencies and re-sellers,  Tab Site also has a very favorable referral program (or partner program).

Which open source iFrame app builders do you like? Let us know on the comments section this post.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Disha Pagarani

An entrepreneur who loves all things digital. Co-Founder and Managing Partner at The Basement Project (www.basementprojectme.com). Interested in consumer behavior, digital strategy, guerrilla marketing and social media management.

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Here’s another mind blowing video by Erik Qualman. The numbers just keep getting bigger and facts more startling.

Watch it and Share it with the world!!!

The post Social Media Statistics and Facts 2013 [VIDEO] appeared first on SOVEDO.

Simple ways to improve your LinkedIn profile, and make it stand out.

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