Tag Archive - Advertising

Three Reasons Facebook is No Longer Fun

August 23, 2012 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

By the River

By the River (Photo credit: urbanworkbench)

More and more, I am seeing how Mr. Zuckerburg might have missed the mark on his transparency mantra. Our lives are multifaceted. There is certainly a place for separation between these facets, especially one’s professional life and personal life. Not because we have something to hide personally, or professionally for that matter. But simply because in the new world of Facebook being used for business, our personal feeds are so polluted by messages that are “work” that they are no longer “fun”.

We live and work in an era of unprecedented connectivity. Many of us watch television with an iPad on our laps – viewing two screens simultaneously. And that same connectivity allows us freedom to work from anywhere and therefore at any time. This benefit brings a risk: the only way to shut down professionally could be to disconnect personally. Isn’t that sad?

I live on the opposite side of the world from my family and many of my friends. When I moved to Australia, Facebook was a wonderful way to share what I was up to, how my kids were growing, and to hear about the important and banal moments in their lives. And then the marketing started.

In order to promote my business, I need to be connected to a number of organisations, many of whom do most of their communicating through Facebook. And so I can only really log on for enjoyment if I’m also prepared to respond to work related things. And even though I own a small business, and I’m usually prepared to jump on a good opportunity, I’m old enough to know from experience that I’m no good to my business if I’m burnt out or unfocussed.

Here are the three problems I see with Facebook that have reduced how much I use it as a consumer:

1. Interlaced personal and business messages have made my timeline a scrolling marketing billboard.

Who doesn’t want some leisure time that is not trying to sell you something?

2. Requirement to be friends with someone before they can become an admin on your page.

Working virtually means that I don’t actually know some of these people, though they do a great job and are indispensible to my business.

3. Requirement to use Facebook as a business tool results in it moving to the list of things I only want to use with a professional hat on.

Meaning that I’d rather share my life somewhere else. I just don’t know what that somewhere else is yet.

And it seems that many of my “in real life” friends have noticed this too as the updates they post (or Facebook’s algorithm allows me to see) have reduced substantially over recent months. Yes, Facebook is a great tool with a phenomenal user base. No, Facebook is not going to thrive as the information superhighway’s billboard service that it has become.

Algorithmic tweaking is clearly focussed on that ever important number of how many posts we each see from any of the contributors to our newsfeed. Facebook is still thinking about their customer, but that customer is no longer each of us as a person, it is the businesses they need to pay  for ads and feed Wall Street.

If you have a solution for keeping it fun, please share it in the comments. 

Diary of a Mumpreneur: Next Up Display Advertising

June 17, 2012 in Australian Digital, Digital, Lessons from Oola with 0 Comments

When I sat down to write this post, the sheer number of things that have been done in the past month to move Oola forward was really exciting. And it could not have come at a better time to recall those small accomplishments as we draw to the end of the school term, and I know that I’m facing a couple of weeks where very little gets done apart from entertaining the eager and energetic school kids I love so dearly.

It’s funny how with each accomplishment comes a list of lessons learned and new actions to complete! Here’s a couple of things I’ve learned this month that hopefully can help you with some ideas without having to make the mistake first.

1. Communicate every new product. We’ve grown our inventory by about 50% over the past 4-6 weeks which has been exciting, but I realised that we’ve added lots more than I’ve managed to communicate. I sometimes put new products on Facebook through a photo gallery, and sometimes in our newsletter, but other times they just go up on the site quietly. A definite area for improvement! And for those of you spending a winter afternoon indoors, we’ve added lots of beautiful wooden puzzles for toddlers and preschoolers as well as significantly increasing our range of Ravensburger Jigsaws for older kids. We’ve also added 500 piece puzzles which I’ve heard are difficult to find in bricks and mortar stores.

2. Newsletter experiments. I’m very aware that people are reading newsletters more and more on mobile phones – a really high proportion of Oola newsletters are opened on iphones. So I adapted it to be easy to read on a mobile phone. And then I had my lowest click through ever! I brooded over this for a few days, and am still not certain whether it was the content, the format, or the timing. This is a lesson in progress …

3. Use a Virtual Assistant! A couple of months ago, I wrote about needing a team. I’ve since started working with Michelle from Consider It Sorted. Just having someone else to help pick up some of the details I can’t manage has been invaluable. This is one where I wish I’d done it sooner and am delighted with the results.

Despite all the activity, I’m ready to embark on a new advertising approach: display. I’d love the thoughts and advice of any of you who’ve used display advertising – what sites worked well, not well, did you use an ad network like Nuffnang or Google, did you use the same creative across all channels, the list goes on.

The irony of me asking these questions is that in my past career, I’ve been the media owner, the one trying to convince advertisers to spend their dollars with my company. It is amazing how intimidating it is to be on the other side of that equation. I could really use some advice.

Thanks so much in advance!

Photo credit: BrittneyBush via Flickr

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This post originally appeared on Diary of a Mumpreneur 14 June 2012. 

 

 

 

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7 Things Facebook Should Improve for Advertisers

February 26, 2012 in Digital, Media with 0 Comments

Facebook Logo

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…

Is Facebook Boosting Pre-IPO Revenue?

February 24, 2012 in Digital with 0 Comments

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.

How Important is Facebook in Today’s Marketing Mix?

October 10, 2011 in Australian Digital, Digital, Media with 1 Comment

Ever experienced those times where you feel like you don’t know how to really make the most of a channel, but everything you read from the “experts” just tells you what you already know?

I’m having that experience right now, and it is driving me crazy. The problem is Facebook. And the real problem is that for me as a user, most brand pages just don’t resonate. I like them because I actually want to hear from the brand (and in some cases it’s competitive research), and then I unlike them because I’m tired of having my personal newsfeed that I use for entertainment and keeping up with my “in real life” friends cluttered with marketing messages and low quality content begging to be ‘liked’.

I’ve been thinking about some of the philosophy behind Facebook and transparency outlined in David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect to help me find the solution to using this channel better. Fundamentally, the race for fans, likes, and the lot, is not the actual answer. And there are many companies measuring all sorts of things – comments to fans, likes to fans, and other engagement ratios. All this is good and well, but I still think we’re all missing something.

The skeptic within me thinks that this can’t work for brands because it is a tool by Facebook to benefit Facebook. But there are some (a few) who swear by the channel.  Today, 247wallst.com reported on some of the most successful.  Most people I know admit that building fans doesn’t translate as efficiently into sales as other channels.

This was reinforced for me a couple of weeks ago at the Online Retailer Conference in Sydney. Many people were talking about f-commerce, and one exhibitor would even take a fairly high payment for setting up a page for their customers. But the nail in the coffin came when Jon Kamaluddin from Asos was asked how important Facebook was as a channel and his response was simply “I wouldn’t rush to do it”.

However, Facebook is an important part of many of our lives, like it or not. So there must be a way to take advantage of this commercially in an unobtrusive way. After all, Advertising in the digital world continues to evolve becoming ever more integrated with a user experience so that soon we’re learning about products and services we want when we want them. I know I still want to know about what new products are out there in a range of categories. I just find it really difficult to get good information about where to find them. Surely there must be a good way to use Facebook for this. Or isn’t there?

If you have a good example of Facebook being used to promote a brand, please share it in the comments.

 

Related Posts: Finally, I Notice A Banner Ad

 

Finally, I notice a banner ad

October 8, 2011 in Digital, Media with 1 Comment

Anyone in the digital media world knows that Advertising is both critical to long term success, but also often ineffective in the traditional banner formats that have been in use for most of the past decade. Today, I noticed an ad. And by that I mean involuntarily noticed an ad and thought “wow, I looked and I understand”.  They don’t want me to click, but they want me to remember.  A great example of understanding the reader in creating the advertisement.

Here it is …

 

 

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