We are sometimes asked why we place such an emphasis on Facebook as the centerpiece for our clients’ social media strategies. In case you missed it, Nick O’Neil’s article yesterday on All Facebook does a good job of laying out some of the key reasons why Facebook Pages have thoroughly established themselves as the community platform of choice.
Interestingly, this article states that one of the few drawbacks of the platform “is that you can’t customize the design.” This too however is easily overcome with an agency like enter:new media that gives you the ability to not only promote and manage social media programs, but also to create highly customized pages and applications – all through the same team.
Look for examples of custom designed Facebook Pages from the enter:new media in upcoming posts.
TopRank’s “Online Marketing Blog” hit on a topic this week that nearly all of our current clients can identify with – the importance of content planning in social media strategy and execution. Social communities demand value from brands in exchange for their time, attention, interaction, and engagement. While there are many ways to deliver value in social media, content is king. Creating content strategies that reinforce brand goals and contribute recognized value to community members is essential. Likewise, it is critical to effectively execute those strategies across multiple social platforms like blogs, twitter, and Facebook.
As this is so often a key factor in the success of social media strategies, we will be sharing more best practices, tips and real-world examples of social media content management with you over the coming months.
Brands often ask us if we design and build websites. Of course we do! In fact the sites we build kick bootay. Check out our latest creation. We gave our beloved client WeightView a new web makeover more in line with their brand and maturity of their overall business. It’s been pretty fun giving WeightView their very own before and after image.
If it wasn’t enough that we created the #1 FB application for WV, according to WeFollow, WeightView is now the #1 tweeter in the weight category. We started tweeting for WeightView only a few months ago and it has taken off beyond our expectations. We truly believe the secret to this success is, well… we take that back, it is not a secret at all. We mix up the type of things we tweet about, such as post links to interesting articles, comment on what others in the community are doing, and engage with our community with frequent one-on-one conversations. Most importantly, we provide motivation, which is what WeightView is all about!
It’s not just search that is losing power to the increasingly relevant social platforms. Blogs, once the most immediate source for news and real-time reporting on “what’s hot” are now facing stiff competition from the constant streaming of Twitter and Facebook. This is why you saw so many blogs this week rushing to add Facebook streaming to their distribution platform that already included RSS and Twitter feeds.
Why is this happening? Let’s take a deeper look. Blogs first rose to power as a major challenge to mainstream media since virtually anybody could create a blog and begin to publish information in real-time to an unlimited audience. Still, you needed to “set up” the blog, build a user base, and then generate a steady flow of content a step further. With virtually no technical set up, and no pressure to publish anything more than a single phrase of content at a time, blogs are starting to look a lot like the old guard.
We got Parenting magazine to give WeightView a shoutout this month in their piece, “Working in Working out”. The story gives moms tips on how-to fit excercise into their busy day, and it recommends using WeightView as a visual motivator for achieving their weight loss goal!
Advertising Age reported this week that more and more sites such as Café Mom, Evite, Tagged.com, Twitter, PerezHilton.com, and Dlisted are all receiving a greater portion of their traffic from Facebook than from the big “G.” We see this as being the beginning of a major shift in power. Watch for two things to happen:
1. More budgets once designated for SEO to shift to FB management.
2. Look for news reports of Google making a play to buy Twitter. Now that would make things really interesting.
<!–[endif]–>
It’s now hot to tell your audience to “follow you” on Facebook, as opposed to simply becoming a fan, as the new public profile enables brands to share a stream of content in a much more fluid way than the old way of pushing out “updates.”
You can now target people within 10, 20, or 50 miles of a particular city. This radius targeting greatly expands the reach for our geo-targeted campaigns. In addition, we can now target users by language.
Need to reach single Spanish-speaking gay men in their twenties who live within 20 miles of San Francisco and work for Google? Yeah, we can help you with that.