There are so many cliches about living with change, and yet it continues to be one of the most difficult parts of our lives. Over and over again.
Today is Leap Day. It’s an unusual and special day which to the cynics of the world is no different from any other. But this additional day in the calendar gives us: Continue Reading…
I’ve been using Facebook for my small business actively for the past 2 weeks. Most of that experience has been learning – you know the stuff that doesn’t work and needs to be different. I promise a full post about what has not worked for me so far, but here, I want to share my observations about a few things that Facebook could improve to make things easier for their advertisers. In my experience, the easier a company makes the process of spending money, the more their customers do it. How many of you wouldn’t want to see this these things improved? Continue Reading…
My morning Facebook fix alerted me to this post by Facebook Marketing Solutions, emphasis mine:
I have been experimenting with the page post ad over the past two weeks and for some posts, it can have a great benefit at extending reach and awareness. The social feature on Facebook ads is cool, fairly clever and impactful. However, as I build up my fan base from essentially a standing start – I should pass 100 likes today! – I am not expecting to have to ‘re-acquire’ each of those fans in order for them to see my content.
Clearly, it is in any company’s interest to promote their business and drive revenue. The irony here is that Facebook’s employees (see the About section highlighted above) are coming right out and saying that Facebook will require you to advertise to your likers. I will probably run an experiment over the weekend to determine whether this results in a lower CPC to target existing page likes, though I’m not impressed at the idea of siphoning off my acquisition marketing budget to direct at retention of prospects who may not even have become customers yet.
With my Digital Media Strategist hat on, it seems obvious that Facebook is trying to push advertisers, especially smaller businesses who rely on Facebook for much of their traffic, to spend more on Facebook. And the timing is not by accident. Facebook gets to announce a surge in Advertising revenues just ahead of IPO day, even more investors clamour for shares, the already anticipated biggest IPO on record exceeds expectations, and Facebook is laughing all the way to the bank.
With my Small Business Owner hat on, Facebook might be becoming an increasingly less cost effective channel. Don’t worry yet, with 800 million prospects, we’re still going to use the platform. However, as soon as you throw additional obstacles in front of entrepreneurs, we simply innovate and work around them. Likers stop becoming a direct communication channel, so we shift them to email or a blog. I realise that it’s one thing for me to write this in my own blog post and an entirely separate thing to do it. But if you think we won’t figure it out, think again!
Just like Twitter, Facebook is a place where we offer up discussions about issues, teasers about our products, services and specials, and address customer service queries. If our likers stop seeing our posts, we’ll have to reach them another way. On the flip side, if a page post ad on Facebook is the most cost effective, no doubt we’ll use it.
I am pleased that Facebook is thinking like a public company already. It will hopefully make advertising on Facebook easier (future post on this coming).
Let us know how you use Facebook for your business in the comments.
Building a business takes time, and patience. And it simultaneously requires running 100 miles per hour (which is like 160 kph -eeek!).
Some days these things are at odds with each other in my world. I want to do something and immediately see results. Something like this chart reminds me that I’m doing something right. But then the next day comes and the spike was just a spike. Continue Reading…
Image via Wikipedia
As we head off into the weekend, possibly thinking about all the things we didn’t manage to accomplish in the week gone by, it’s a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the bigger picture.
There’s lots of fancy management science which will confirm this very simple message. But in reality, we can all consider our personal capacity and realise that we can really only concentrate on a small number of things at once. So put away the to do list, and remember that the number one way to achieve a goal is Continue Reading…
I have always been a career girl. And I had always wanted kids. Once I had both, I saw no reason why I should not be able to work hard and succeed at both. And so for seven long years and three babies later, I did. I pushed myself by day to compete with my male colleagues as if I had no children, burying a part of myself each morning when I left home, often under cover of darkness to jump on my bike and cycle into the office – the only possible way I could squeeze in a little exercise.
For the first several years of my working motherhood, I could not fathom that I would ever feel the need to deny the existence of the most precious part of my life. Continue Reading…