6 Reasons you should outsource your Facebook advertising

Facebook advertising is made so easy, that practically anyone can setup an ad. Interestingly enough, you don't even need artwork as your logo and a couple lines of text are merely enough to get you started. You go on and kick off your Facebook campaign, a certain time later, you are happy to have achieved a beautiful number of impressions, slightly less clicks and slightly less actions (# of followers).

You are surprised a little bit later, that your friend, who has outsourced this campaign, has achieved higher numbers (on all front) with the same budget you did. So what did you miss out on?

Here are 6 Reasons you should outsource your Facebook advertising:

1. Time and Spending: Your campaign might be bound by a short time limit, and Facebook hasn't credited you enough trust yet to allow you to spend as much as you want. For example, you would like to spend $1,000 on a 3 days campaign, yet your daily limit is still $50. Digital Agencies on the other hand have ran multiple previous campaign that has allowed Facebook to gain trust in them, and further increase their daily spending limit.

2. CPC Optimization: The Digital Agency will actively work on multiple ads simultaneously targeting various segments, or the same segments but in a different manner, allowing them to optimize the CPC, plain and simple: cut the expensive ads, and keep the cheap ones running. This is an exercise that can be done twice a day. Creating new ads on a daily basis need accessible designers and talented copywriters that would grab the attention span within that small area allocated to your ad (YES, your logo is NOT enough for your ad).

3. Reporting, Conversion and ROI: The Facebook reports are beautiful, they practically cover everything you need to measure and make you feel proud. NO THEY DON'T. 

What you actually need to measure from your ad performance is its impact on your wall (The %Feedback and %Social), on your daily views, tab views, how many followers joined your page and remained active VS. the ones that liked your page, and became dormant. You need to measure the impact of the ad on your website and other digital medium. Such reports would allow you to create a benchmark for your next and future campaigns.

4. Money: Digital Agencies do not seek profit out of advertising (Not to confuse digital agencies with media buying businesses), they are handling ads merely to increase the engagement on your Facebook page, to support a campaign or to create a snowball effect, which is part of a longer term strategy that you are paying for. Typically any digital agency would charge a small % on top of the budget allocated for ads to cover: The management fee, the credit card charges and the time spent on generating the reports. This small % is nothing compared to the time you would spend on it, while you should be doing something else.

5. Experience: No matter how you deal with it, digital agencies have done that same job much more often than you did; Which allowed them to get a better insight on targeting, ad bids and textual/visual content

6. Experience (Again): This time it is about the user experience and managing the whole digital medium. Users clicking on ads need to be kept interested, and this is done by creating the appropriate content, landing page (before/after LIKE), necessary tabs for explanations, matching your other digital mediums with the ad (Twitter, website, blog, LinkedIn...etc..)

In a nutshell, you can still do all of the above wonderfully, but unless you have a full fledged team that is handling your digital activities, you should outsource this and spend your time on something that is more beneficial for your business. (And companies that have built a digital entity within their organizational chart can be counted on your fingers - in Saudi Arabia that is).

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Social Media Consultants...Abundant Supply

Important note: For the sake of this post, and this post only, a social media consultant is referred to a person who self attributed the term "consultant" to himself, knowing that his experience lies in creating a Facebook page, a Twitter account, occasional a YouTube channel, and playing around them mildly, by either posting some random posts, or installing applications left, right and center.

The events mentioned below are from my personal observation of the market in the gulf area, mainly in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Social media...The Demand

It has become a fact, that every business would like to tap into social media, especially B2Cs. Those businesses are aware of the strong benefits of social media such as the ability to target their audience, direct more traffic to the website, engage and gather feedback and so on; They have heard some wild success stories, and excited about it. Yet, since they are not the industry experts, the only KPI they see is the number of followers. So this is the demand

Social media....The Supply

The businesses are asking for followers....Yay! Here comes the social media consultant to the rescue. "You want Facebook followers? I give you Facebook followers" says the social media consultant, and the randomness begins...

A Facebook page is created, an ad is created, random text and images are loaded, miscellaneous apps are integrated and the followers start rolling in. 3 months afterwards, the social media consultant has reached a Facebook page with 20,000 followers (or whatever budget was spent on advertising has allowed him to reach), the website traffic has slightly increased, more forms have been filled online, yet the client is unsure whether he should be happy or not...There seems to be something missing

Social media...The Adventure

After all, it was a nice adventure, now comes the real challenge...No more ads for driving additional followers it is time to grow the page based on the existing followers. This is where randomness can no longer be tolerated, to make a long story short, below is a sample graph:

The area on the left of the red circle, is actually the social media consultant, randomly posting stuff on the page, till a critical point has been reached (the red circle), where the number of Dislikes are actually surpassing the number of Likes...In other words, the page is starting to lose followers. (The area on the right of the circle will be discussed later on within this post).

Sustainability is something that the social media consultant did not consider, and without the support of an ad the page simply became a collection of followers that is practically useless for the client.

A great quote come to mind: "Activate your fans, don’t just collect them like Baseball cards" - Jay Baer

Social media...The Report

To answer the original demand, the social media consultant reported two things: The number of followers on that Facebook page, and the number of visitors on the website. And about the ROI....well....not really.

Strangely, the "report" section should be largest of this post, but the social media consultant is simply measuring two things :)

What was not portrayed?

The social media consultant:

• Acted independently on the Facebook page, and forgot about the other mediums his client is enabled on
• Measured the number of followers only, instead of measuring the number of interactions
• Linked the number of followers to the number of visits to the website, but did not include in his analysis the bounce rate, the number of pages viewed on the site, the average time spent on the site, the entry and exit pages. In brief, he was unable to detect problems with User Experience and User Journeys on the website and rectify them
• Did not assign a dollar value to the follower, in order to benchmark his campaign and improve with time. i.e.: Did the follower cost 1$? 0.1$?
• Did not properly manage the ads CPC, and yielded (for the sake of this example) 20,000 followers, whereby double that amount could have been generated with the same budget, if multiple ads were created, with different targets, with different appearance dates...etc...
• Did not speak his audience' language, whether by using the appropriate tone or character. He simply spoke to them as if it was himself, which might be good sometimes, but not suitable to the business's audience
• Did not plan ahead, and integrate the social media strategy within a wider marketing strategy
• Focused on monologues, and did not create dialogs

and in the near future...

The client is expected to have the following problems:

• Problem with administration, page transfer and delegation
• Page unique names, especially if the business is part of an international entity, has affiliates or subsidiaries
• Burdened with a major collection of idle followers due to the Facebook News Feed policy

What is the social media consultant missing?

Creative team to help design landing pages, banners and attractive visuals based on engagements. Posting a banner stating "thank you" is more efficient and reactive to simply typing in "thank you" (Example).

Usability experts to help read, analyse and react based on statistics generated by all the business digital mediums

Developers and producers to help develop custom made application that are suited for the business, promoting the viral effect

Copywriters to help adapting the content, make it attractive and suitable for the target audience

Social Media, and Search Engine Optimization specialists/strategists to enable a long term campaign of engagement and making sure ROI is crystallized and KPIs clearly defined

Having the above components, would put the client in the right section of the circle highlighted above in the graph. Main reason for that is that social media is not an independent activity held by a business, it is part of a holistic strategy including multiple social media platform, the website itself, offline marketing activities...etc... Thus the need for multiple resources of different skill set to properly maintain and sustain the platforms.

For the sake of honesty, and ethical business, social media consultant should spend time educating their clients and providing them real insights on social media by uncovering the real data, and the real reports. There is no need to hide behind the "number of followers", social media for every business has its learning curve, and it is best for businesses to listen to their followers and react accordingly.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that post, and please do follow me on Twitter @rafyouni

The 10 commandments of Social Media for Retailers

“Our head of #social media is the customer.” – McDonald’s. If you believe in such a statement, then below are your 10 commandments that help enforce the credibility of your brand as well as build a healthy and engaging atmosphere. A definitive must, since statistics have revealed that 51% of people who follow a brand, will purchase from that same brand.

1. You shall balance out your hearing and listening skills
2. You shall create a dialog, and never a monologue
3. Do not take the name of your brand in vain, and do not take it personal
4. You shall honor your followers, whether praising or criticizing you
5. You shall not compare two or more items/topics suggested by your followers and present your opinion
6. You shall not take side in any discussion that arises involving politics, religion, controversial topics (ethnic differences, animal care, sex, violence...etc...)
7. You shall not attempt to be funny by stating jokes, using sarcasm or other common methods as hilarity is relative
8. You shall not delete any post from your followers, without clearly stating the reasons
9. You shall not flirt with your follower, nor comment on their profile picture
10. You shall not treat SEO and SMO independently

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Top 7 Social Media Sites in Saudi Arabia 2010

Below is a graph showing the popularity of social media platform in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Total dominance of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the next in place.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Social Media Market Share


This should definitely be an indication to corporates and B2C businesses...Make sure you are present there!

Will you soon pay for your social media accounts?

Social media is witnessing an impressive growth in terms of usage, visits and interactivity. Facebook now has half a billion registered users only 6 years after its launch (Source: Mashable), Twitter unique visitors in June 2010 surpassed visitors of the same month in 2009 by an impressive 109% (Source: Marketing Charts), Linkedin celebrated its forty million users in its 6 anniversary as well on May 2009 (Source: Linkedin) and so on, practically every type of social networking platform is living a growth, whether targeting the global populace or niche markets.

Commonly, corporates are also tapping into the social networking world, and creating profiles, pages, group...etc... and engaging their customers on a daily basis, getting feedback, promoting and awarding. Leading social networking sites offer customization of URLs, for example: www.facebook.com/myPage; Twitter account most often represent brands rather than personal names, with this impressive growth and a "want" turning into a "need" would those usernames remain for free?

Facebook guarantees that it would not allow selling of page URLs (transfer prohibited), but can it also protect usernames creation? and if Yes, how long would the process take in order to prove, validate and give back a username and a page URL?
Something to think about, since ICANN also protects brands when it comes to domain names, but it is quite a long process (and sometimes costly), maybe time is something a corporate cannot afford, so it might choose to pay a couple of thousands of dollars to the "username" holder and skip the long validation process.

One has to think about the next steps, since social media has become an essential part of any corporate presence and a main traffic generator for any website, will you be able to secure your accounts on all social media platforms? or would you have to buy them from an "auctions" site?

Makes you wonder...

9 things to consider on your Facebook page

Facebook business pages are showing great success when it comes to brand awareness and engaging users. It has been proven that social media is the next best thing to have when you are tapping into the digital world, and since Facebook is one of the most growing social networking site (recently passed half a billion users), it is very important to consider the below point when managing your Facebook page:


1. Consistent: Decide on whether you want to engage users using "I", "WE" or "Brand-Name" and stick to it throughout the lifetime of your page. People need to feel that they are talking to a "person", so this "person" needs to have a tone, character, attitude and specific communication skills.

2. Consice: People will visit and ask you questions, answer concisely with detailed step by step procedures in order to help your users (YES! time consuming, but very beneficial on the long run)...in other words, avoid the common tagline: "Visit our website for more information"

3. Clutter: Be easy on adding new tabs, remember that it is a Facebook "PAGE", keep on updating your page and remove whatever has become obsolete, remember that the page is to create an engaging platform, while your website should hold the archives

4. Spam: Do not spam users with boring news and links, make sure that you are constantly engaging them, asking questions, gathering insights...etc... Frequent posts about "standard" news items might increase your "dislike" rate. Remember Facebook is not a business platform, everything there is suppose to be fun!

5. Compete: Your Facebook page should not compete with your website, on the contrary it should act as a supporting tool to drive more traffic to the website, put snapshots on the pages and make sure you redirect people to your website

6. Organize: Manage the topics you are discussing properly (whether on your wall or on your discussion tabs), make sure you give ample time to users to participate and share their thoughts before starting up another topic. Remove obsolete items or old items, the Facebook page is an engaging platform, not an archive.

7. Enjoy: Depending on the type of your business, you need to select your proper tone: Are you friendly?, strictly business? Preferably to aim for the friendly tone and engage in a 1-1 communication. Do not hesitate to include smillie faces whenever appropriate. In brief: create an enjoyable atmosphere

8. Escalate: You will receive complaints on your wall, maybe due to a mishap with one of your users, a complaints about the service or product you offer; in all cases, carefully review when to handle things openly on the Facebook wall, and know when to escalate and move to a private conversation. You might move the conversation to private messaging, emails or ask the user to re-submit his complaint on the website (You might as well do that for him and share with him the tracking number)

9. Time: Make sure you plan and time your activities on Facebook properly, do not create large gaps of time between events or conversation triggers, and vice versa, do not flood your fans with constant new posts. Plan properly and adjust your timings as per your audience and stick to it. Going silent for a long while will result in some "dislikes"

Who to expect on your Facebook Page!

I am sure you have a million and one reasons to get your business into social media, Facebook offers a very fertile platform for this. So once you have established your page on Facebook, who would you expect? How would you react to them? and what would you do?

No need to mention that leaving your page idle would quickly kill it and reflect very negatively on your brand.

Below are a couple of user types you might expect popping up as fans on your page:

"Spammers": Spammers are those who invade your page with relatively useless content to you. Typically they would show up on your Facebook page when you have a considerable number of fans, and post links to their website on discussions you have started. Very annoying behavior and usually might result in a few "dislikes".

Recommendations:

• Be on the alert: always be ready to delete inappropriate posts
• Be strict: do not hesitate to ban the spammer from your page, you might loose one fan, but that might save you from loosing a whole bunch of others
• Monitor all your tabs: Spammers crawl all of your Facebook tabs, photo gallery, and they might just post everywhere. Make sure that your most recent posts are "spam"-free
• If you are unable to quickly react to random posts, make sure that you prevent users from starting their own comments (That can be done by adjusting the page settings), this way you will reduce the impact of your page acting as a "spam-promoter" on everybody's wall

"Smart Heads": Smart heads are usually on your page trying to prove they are funny, looking out for friends or a date companion. Most of their comments are rather irrelevant and sometimes they annoy your other fans. They should be treated in a very similar fashion to "spammers" but with slightly less strictness.

Recommendations:

• Be on the alert and intervene whenever a "smart head" is abusing your fans
• Know when to ban, when to answer and when to delete
• Monitor all conversations between your fans, and make sure that your Fan page does not become a ground for settling differences

"Idles": Idle fans are usually people who just "liked" your page, but were never interested in what you are posting. The new insights developed by Facebook should give you an overview about how many impressions, feedback and comments you are getting on your actions. These numbers are indicative, and should give you directions on the interests of your fans.

Recommendations

• Ask yourself: Am I interesting enough or am I just dumping in news about my company on Facebook? Am I really adding value to my fans or just pasting in links to my promotions? Am I a friendly brand or I just refer people to my website whenever they have any question?

"Critics": critics are fans who did not fully endorse your brand, and might have some questions, doubts or trust issues with the services or products you provide. They usually react to your new posts, pictures with questions or inquiries that put your offerings to the test.

Recommendations:

• Be sure to answer queries posted by the critics and use them as a platform to promote the "hidden" services you provide. Never delete their posts as it would immediately back fire on you.
• Keep in mind that the "critics are not always" right, make sure that whatever claims are put forth against your brand are supported by evidence, in other words, whenever you hear a complaint, ask for evidence and more information, and react accordingly.

"Loyals": Loyal fans are those who believe in your brand and are dedicated customers. They usually support your activities and are the first to "Like" them. You can rely on them to back your statements whenever critics or smart heads are out there speaking, but do not take them for granted and make sure you reward them every once in a while.

Recommendations

• Reward loyals, The reward can be a simple "Thank you" message or email, a gift voucher, a loyalty card, a status upgrade on your website...etc...
• Do not clearly overpower them over other users
• Remember that loyals do not work with you, they are out there giving out their opinions and thoughts, endorse them but do not give them the free-will to represent your brand

Rarely you would come up with identity thieves that would endorse your identity and speak on your behalf,

"Exploiters": exploiters simply try to ruin your presence on Facebook, they would register themselves as users with usernames very close to your company, for example, if your company name is: MyBrand, they would use a username like: MyBrand1 or MeBrand...etc... and assign a profile pictures similar to the one you have on your page and promote wrong, negative and erroneous messages on your fan page.

Recommendation:

• Only one recommendation in this case: Ban, Block and Report!

To recap, tapping into social media, similar to real life, involves multiple types of personalities and characters; know how to react to each and make sure that your brand is properly represented. Contrary to traditional media, the audience is in control of the conversation, be part of it and establish the character of your company on the social media platforms.