Facebook Stats that Every Social Marketer Should Know

With over 1.23 billion active users (including 71% of online adults in the United States), a 94% increase in shared content since 2012, and enough spending money to buy several small countries, it’s clear that Facebook isn’t going anywhere soon. Smart marketers are already using Facebook’s impressive reach to their own advantage, but the network is still relatively new and constantly evolving. It’s hard enough to keep up with Facebook’s changing algorithms – how can marketers be sure they’re using Facebook strategically, not just “marketing at random”?

In addition to arming yourself with a rock solid social media tactical plan (click the link for a comprehensive sample plan, including high-level objectives and granular action items), marketers need to approach their Facebook strategy with the most up-to-date insights and stats.

With that in mind, I was excited to read a new report from competitive intelligence platform TrackMaven: The Marketing Maven’s Guide to Facebook. This report analyzes 5,804 Facebook pages, spanning a total of 1,578,006 posts, and examining patterns in Likes, Comments, and Shares. As a marketer, this kind of data is invaluable – read on to get a prime sample of their findings:

Is There a “Best” Day to Post on Facebook?

TrackMaven focused their investigation on Facebook pages with – at minimum – 1,000 Likes. Of the 5,804 pages they analyzed, posts were published almost evenly throughout the workweek, but then then dropped off during the weekend.

The least popular day for Facebook posts is Sunday, on which only 8.73% of total posts are published. But if you look at effectiveness by day of week, weekend posts actually get a lot more engagement than those published on weekdays:

In fact, posts published on Sundays – the least popular day for posting – are 25% more effective, in terms of engagement (or average interactions per post), than posts published on Wednesdays. So while there’s no “best” day to post on Facebook, if you’re looking to tap into a little more engagement per post, why not experiment with some posts on the weekends? If you see increased engagement, make weekend posts a habit.

How to Make Facebook Work “After Hours”

To get a little more granular, TrackMaven also looked at the time of day most people post, and the time of day posts get the most engagement. Surprisingly, Facebook posts published after work hours (between 5pm and 1am) seem to get the highest engagement.

Keep in mind that because TrackMaven limited their report to official pages, rather than profiles, these posts were coming from brands, not people. So the numbers above show that we’re more likely to engage with brands (not just with our personal networks) during our own free time.

Marketers can find two key takeaways from that fact:

1) Schedule your posts. If you’re not using Facebook’s scheduler function to publish posts after work hours, you should definitely start. Scheduling posts ahead of time will keep your cadence steady throughout the evening.

As you can see below, scheduling posts on your Facebook Page is easy. Simply click on the clock icon below your message, and choose the date/hour. You can actually schedule these out as much as six months in advance.

2) Facebook is a “social” network, not a business network. As we’ve mentioned, consumers are now engaging with marketing messages on Facebook during their free time – in the midst of their personal social networking interactions.

So when you’re posting on Facebook, think about how your sales pitch will look amongst the wedding pictures and new baby photos…that’s right, not so good. Instead, use a conversational (maybe even humorous!) tone, and post content that is fun, entertaining, and human.

Higher Word Count Equals Higher Facebook Engagement

But while a simple, conversational message is key to successful Facebook marketing, you don’t want to dumb your message down. Although TrackMaven’s report found that the average length of a Facebook post is between 10 and 19 words (posts with between 0 and 9 words were the second most common), posts with between 80 and 89 words were actually the most effective:

In fact, posts with over 80 words they had twice the amount of engagement of any other post. This may be because of that intriguing “Keep Reading” link, but it also may be because Facebook users are interested in lengthier, more valuable content that tells a story — not sales pitches.

Need help with more followers, likes or targeted traffic?
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3 REASONS WHY YOU NEED TO LEARN SEO

Even if you decide to outsource your SEO campaign execution and management to full service SEO company I believe it is incredibly important that site owners and marketing managers take the time to learn SEO for themselves, even if it’s just an understanding of the basics. I know what you’re thinking—Why do I have to learn SEO when I can just pay someone to do it for me? I know that site owners and SMB marketing managers are incredibly busy and their daily to-do list only seems to get longer and longer and learning SEO seems like just another time mongering but I promise that it is well worth your time in the end. Here’s why:

1. LEARN SEO TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM SPAMMY, CHEAP SEO SERVICE PROVIDERS.

There are plenty of great, white hat SEO agencies out there that will do a phenomenal job with your SEO program and you’ll never lose a wink of sleep over it. There are also more than a few low-end, spammy, cheap SEO service providers that are just looking to make a quick buck and don’t really care about the long term impact their actions might have on your website. If you don’t learn SEO for yourself (at least enough to understand what is and isn’t Okayed by the Google Webmaster Guidelines) you are putting yourself and your website in a vulnerable position. What if the advice your SEO firm is giving you is bad advice? Obviously you don’t have to become an expert, but you should want to learn SEO well enough so that you can at least notice the red flags should they pop up. You don’t want to get penalized 6 months from now because your SEO provider was engaging in black hat SEO tactics and you didn’t know about it.

2. YOU’LL BE ABLE TO TACKLE YOUR SEO INTERNALLY.

Even with a great white hat SEO firm at your side, there are some things that need to be done internally when it comes to SEO. For instance, you are going to be the in-house SEO champion that makes sure every department is onboard and understands how what they do fits into the SEO program at large. Everything you do can be leveraged for SEO provided you know how to look at it! A little SEO knowledge helps you find the SEO value in everything else that you do to market your business online.

If you understand how SEO works you’ll also be able to explain the “grand plan” to your own managers and make sure everyone has realistic expectations. For instance, if you learn the fundamentals of SEO you’ll come to understand that SEO is a long term, building process and that link building is really something you’ll be doing forever. You can’t hit a certain benchmark and call it quits and expect things to stay that way! But if you didn’t take the time to learn SEO for yourself you might be expecting bigger results faster than your SEO program can deliver them. I’ve seen plenty of good SEO programs get the legs cut out from underneath them because site owners were too impatient.

3. LEARNING SEO ON YOUR OWN MAKES YOU A VALUABLE ASSET TO YOUR SEO PROVIDER.

If you learn SEO for yourself that also means you’ll be better able to help your SEO partner. There are some link building tactics that require your cooperation or approval (like joining an association that has a membership fee or becoming a guest blogger somewhere) and the more you know about and understand SEO the more you can help move your own SEO campaign forward. As you learn SEO you start to see link building and content marketing opportunities in everything, including things your SEO provider might not find. You know your business inside and out and learning SEO is only going to bring good things your way in the long run.

You need some SEO improving?
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4 Tips to Setting Your Social Media Budget in 2016

As we are half-way through the year, many marketers are starting the exercise of looking ahead to 2016 and beginning to think about what their social budgets should be.  Since we frequently consult with brands on social media planning (including the budgeting exercise) we wanted to share some tips on how to set your social media budget for next year.

1. Compare benefits with spend

The first part of every budget exercise should be an evaluation of your spend to its actual performance and benefit.  While every line item may not help you achieve your social
objectives, it’s good to scrutinize costs and to fully understand the benefits you received from them. In this exercise, don’t overlook tool costs.  While they may seem like they are the cost of “keeping the lights on”, they should be cut if they aren’t resulting in efficiencies, insights, or meaningful outcomes to your strategy or tactics.

2. Diversify media dollars beyond Facebook and Twitter

In previous years, most social media advertising dollars were primarily allocated to Facebook and Twitter.  Now that we’ve seen many other platforms starting to offer new media opportunities, it’s important for marketers to think ahead and allocate enough money to test new ad units as they arise. Go ahead and earmark media dollars so that when the opportunities arise your brand can have budget to try them in 2016.

3. Invest in content that is sharable

Take a critical look at the content your brand is producing to-date.  Is it sharable?  If it isn’t – uncover why.  Odds are that your brand doesn’t have a ton of highly visual or organic content at its fingertips. And even if you feel your brand is killing it, I bet your brand still has some work to do if you were to ask your customers.  The truth is, it’s hard to create content that people naturally want to share, simply because the brand always has a hidden agenda.  Creating highly sharable content that accomplishes a business objective is a craft, and you need to invest in the creation of it.

4. Account for rising costs

While highly efficient, the costs of social media marketing are obviously rising.  With more competition entering the space, and continual platform changes that make it more difficult to reach your audiences, you’ll need to account for these rising costs in your budgeting.

The following are a list of rising costs to consider as you plan your budgets:

• Reaching your audience organically and paid (expect increases in media costs per quarter)
• Developing visual & video content
• Working with influencers
• Social network fragmentation (more channels to manage than before)
• Developing social programs with mobile in mind
• Developing & optimizing content
• Retaining & attracting social media talent

Increase your visibility and Sales Today.
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Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines

Use search tools to maintain updates

Search engines won’t notice changes to your site instantaneously. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site’s search presence. Whenever you make major changes to your site, you can request that a search engine re-index your content by using these services. For help, visit the following guides:

• Verifying your site with Google Search Console
• Verifying your site with Bing Webmaster Tools

Customize page and site titles

Search engines typically prioritize site titles, page titles, blog post titles, and headings. These titles also appear in browser tabs and search results, so it’s important to write them so they’re friendly to both search bots and human readers.

In the SEO panel, you can set default title formats for the homepage, collections like Blog, Gallery, Album, Products, and Event Pages, and items like blog posts and events. You can manually enter text or use default variables. The benefit of using default title formats (versus customizing them for every post) is to keep them consistent for all content.

For step-by-step instructions, visit Customizing title formats.

Differentiate page titles and navigation titles

Every page in your site has a Navigation Title and Page Title. You can edit these titles in Page Settings. Page Titles appear in browser tabs and search results and are indexed by search engines. The Navigation Title is what displays in your navigation menu.

You may want to title these separately. For example, you can use the page title to promote keywords for search engines, but keep the navigation title short to help it fit in your navigation menu. To learn more, visit Renaming a page.

Structure content with headings

When adding content to Text Blocks, select Heading 1 or Heading 2 from the text format drop-down menu to organize content. These styles automatically create <h1> and <h2> tags in the page’s HTML, so there’s no need to add them manually.

Like titles, search engines typically give headings a higher priority. Clear headings that describe the content that follows make it easier for search engines to detect the major themes of your site. At the same time, they helps visitors scan your page and quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Add alt text to images

Alt text is text associated with an image that people can view by hovering over it. Search engines usealt text to identify the content of a page, since bots can only read text. Adding alt text to images lets search engines understand what the image is so they can include it in relevant searches.

When adding alt text, it’s best to use short terms that describe the image and relate to your overall site content. To learn more about adding alt text, visit Adding alt text to images.

Tags and categories

Search engines scan tags and categories to identify what products, blog posts, or gallery images are about. Adding tags and categories that accurately describe the item could help it appear in search results. For our guide on tags and categories, visit Using tags and categories.

Start blogging

All Squarespace sites include blogging capabilities. Blogging involves updating your site frequently, which helps search engines see it as an active site. Even if you’re a business and not a blogger, adding a Blog Page and updating it regularly with relevant content could potentially benefit your SEO while building your brand.

When adding blog posts, use tags, categories, and H1 and H2 tags to label content.

Physical location

If you’re a business with a physical location, listing your address on your site could potentially help visitors find you in location-based services. There are many places where you can add your location:

• Map Blocks
• Basic Information Settings
• Text Blocks on a Contact page
• Text Blocks in a footer

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What is Digital Marketing? :: True Website Traffic

What is Digital Marketing? :: True Website Traffic.

5 Tips to Avoid Social Media Disaster

2. Be Authentic

You don’t have to hire an actor to appear in your marketing videos. Let the company speak for itself.

Would an actor have been as charming as Blendtec Founder, Tom Dickson, using his high-end blenders toblend high-end electronics? Sales at the company (whose blenders will set you back $400) increased 500% along with their viral videos.

4. Avoid Social Media Done Wrong

Dave Carroll’s viral “United Breaks Guitars” video has attracted over 10 million views on YouTube. Amber cited a recent study that concluded United Airlines had lost 180 million dollars and 10 percent of their share price as a result of the damage to their reputation. That’s enough to have bought Dave 80,000 of the Taylor guitars that United refused to replace.

6. Keep up on Trends: What’s Hot This Year on the Web?

• Group buying: Groupon and others have become the fastest growing web sector. Watch out forUforce, a reverse Groupon business model that allows customers to band together and propose bulk buying to businesses in return for discounts.
• Quora is a crowdsourcing question and answer resource that’s gaining traction. Your brand’s presence could position it as an authority on topics related to your products.

7. Key Social Media Statistics

Here are some stats from the presentation that caught our eye:

• 66 percent of women don’t check in with Foursquare due to the “creepiness factor.” Simply put, many women don’t want to constantly publicize where they are out of concern for their safety. This might be something to consider if you’re trying to find appropriate social channels for a brand with a largely female customer base.
• 35 percent of people use mobile applications before they get out of bed in the morning. No word yet as to how many of those applications are alarm clocks.

1. Have a Social Media Policy

Social media sites have a home in today’s workplace, but each company needs to develop its own rules for its employees about how and when social media should be used at work.

Does anybody like writing policy agreement? Nope. So use Policy Tool, a free web-based policy generator that will write your company’s policy based on a 12-question survey. You can customize it from there.

4 Ways of Rethinking Your Referral Traffic

1. Reliance on Google Organic

Just as you can be overly reliant on social media, you can also be too reliant on Google organic. While organic search is your best traffic referrer in terms of engagement, site stickiness, and returning visits, if you accidentally trigger an algorithm negatively and it takes a slap at your site, well you might wake up with a cliff dive on your analytics and a sunken feeling in your stomach.

2. Organic Is Still King

Organic traffic is not just Google, though we typically think of that first. It can also be Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo, or even a contest or event. Whatever your organic source, the users are likely to be more engaged and user intent is typically going to be more aligned with your site content. While Google organic should and will be the largest organic referrer, building up your alternative referral sources will help protect you from getting hit in one area or another.

3. Watch Out for the Bots

Semalt, Buttons-For-Websites, and other bots visit your site and show up in your analytics. These referrals are not real humans, but bots meant to send traffic back to its owner by you clicking on the referrals in your analytics. There is no reason to support this traffic and there is no reason to not get rid of it. There are several methods for doing this, however Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools has the most comprehensive post explaining the issue and how to get rid of it.

4. Reliance on Social Media

Often we see sites that get a lot of their traffic from social media. If your site is one of those sites, congratulations – that is not the easiest code to crack. You have done good things.

Social traffic is a positive signal. It means your site is being shared and talked about. It means your site has relevancy to your user base. However, it is imperfect traffic and a strategy that is unsustainable on its own. Why is this?

First, if you are relying too heavily on your social media presence for traffic and the site you are getting that traffic from decides to change a factor that takes away that traffic, you have little recourse. There is really nothing you can do. Well, you can pay, but that requires more money and time, which following a loss of large amounts of traffic, you might now have to invest.

5 ESSENTIAL MARKETING TIPS FOR EVERYONE

Follow these ten easy easy wins for an instant marketing boost…

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMERS

Getting to know your customers is the most important stage of marketing process. The more accurate your information and knowledge, the more effective you will be at selling. Use all the information at your disposal to understand customer’s behavior, demographics, and requirements. This information should steer your major business decisions and allow you to write a marketing plan.

2. OBSERVE THE MARKETING ENVIRONMENT

Knowing your customer is vital, but there may also be business opportunities which emerge as a result of changing global circumstances. For example, in recession budget brands such as camp sites or cheap food stores tend to flourish as people dial down their annual spending. Emerging technologies may make new products possible, and new legislation may shift consumers behaviors – a good example is the reduction in road tax for low polluting cars. Make sure you regularly ‘scan’ the external environment for opportunities (and threats).

3. DESIGN YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE AROUND THE CUSTOMER

Once you have a marketing plan in place, you need to make sure your product or service is tailored to your customers – from the packaging to the way it is promoted. Entrepreneurs often fall into the trap of making the product they want to sell, rather than designing and presenting things in the way the customer wants.

4. ENSURE YOU ARE SMOOTH AND EFFICIENT

The process of conducting your business is almost as important as the product itself – make sure delivery is quick, returns are dealt with courteously, your staff greet customers with a smile and a cup of coffee. Surprise and delight your customers by going above and beyond the call of duty for them. Word of mouth is a powerful selling tool and this is exactly the way to generate it.

5. DESIGN TARGETING ADVERTISING & CUSTOMER COMMUNICATIONS

Placing a few ads just isn’t enough to get noticed any more. Consumers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing messages every day of their lives and take less and less notice. You need to do something pretty special to stand out, so make sure your messages are clear and appeal to exactly the people you are trying to sell to. Use both emotional and rational arguments to demonstrate what you are selling and why they need it.

The 4 Steps to Effective Email Marketing

Segment your Audience

Segmenting allows you to match content to recipients’ interests, creating a level of personalization that can achieve far greater results. Types of segmentation:

1. Geographic – adding a little local flavor to your emails can help give prospects the feeling that you know and understand their situation.
2. Behavioral – segmenting based on behavior is another easy way to provide relevant and timely information to prospects.
3. Purchasing power – position within a company is another valuable way to segment your audience. It ensures that you’re providing the right content to drive decisions.

Test your Deliverability

Even the best email in the world won’t be effective if it never reaches your audience. You need to test the deliverability of your emails in three key areas to give your email to best chance of being read.

1. Compatibility – make sure your email displays correctly on all devices, including desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms.
2. Spam Analysis – run your email through a spam analysis tool to ensure your hard work won’t wind up in a spam filter.
3. Format – your email should have both HTML and TEXT formats to ensure readability in all email clients and platforms.

Use the Right Tools

Drag-and-drop-builder – well designed emails no longer require complex coding. The best email services include easy to use builders that allow you to drag and drop elements and easily change colors and themes. WYSIWYG Interface – you should never be left wondering how your email will display. Your email service should allow you to preview the final product as you are creating your email to ensure that the design is just right.

Track, Analyze, and Adjust

Tracking produces actionable metrics that can be used to determine the effectiveness of an entire campaign or any of its elements (such as the timing of particular email offers) and to compare the success of each campaign. What to Track?

• Open rates: how many people opened your email
• Click-throughs: how many people clicked on your links
• Bounces: how many emails are returned undeliverable

About the Author

My name is Lissa Anderson I am a full time SEO consultant. I’ve been doing freelancing,web development,web designing & internet marketing stuff for more than 8 years. Now I am affiliate with one of the world’s largest online advertising company. If you need Increase your SALES or SEO contact me.

20 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

You spent hours researching, writing, finding graphics and uploading your blogs posts, but your work isn’t done yet. To get the most out of each blog post, you need to promote it as much as you can.

Blog Success Tips

• Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. Write in your own voice and be authentic. There’s only ONE you!
• If you want to gain readers be consistent with your blogging efforts, even if that means you blog less frequently. Pick a frequency – daily, weekly, monthly, etc. – and stick with it.
• Building a following takes time. The adage “if you build it, they will  come” is incorrect. Instead think, “if you market it, they will come”.

Social Media

Sharing each post on social media should be your first avenue for promotion.

1. Facebook – add it on your personal & business pages, groups & through ads
2. Twitter – schedule it on Twitter 2-3 times per day for the next 30 days (change the title)
3. Pinterest – create a board specifically for all your blog posts and pin each post to it
4. LinkedIn – share on your LinkedIn profile, in groups you belong to and through ads
5. Google Plus – share with your circles and publicly, on Google+ for added SEO benefits

Bookmarking Sites

Bookmarking sites have millions of users. Add them to your strategy.

1. Create an account at StumbleUpon and start stumbling your posts.
2. Submit each post to Digg.com to share with others and help them discover.
3. One of the most popular bookmark sites , Reddit.com is a must.
4. Help others discover your posts when you submit to Delicious.com
5. The top search engine for blogs, Technorati.com is a must.

Don’t forget to optimize each blog post for specific keywords.

Other Blogs

Leverage other bloggers’ networks to gain more exposure.

1. Comment on relevant blogs and  include a link to your blog post.
2. Submit it as a guest post to other relevant blogs (with a bit of rewriting).
3. Ask influential bloggers to link to your relevant blog posts.
4. Submit it as a reprint to other relevant blogs.
5. Join blogging community and exchange links with other blogger.

Your Contacts

They signed up for your Newsletter or RSS feed because they want to hear from you.

1. Add your latest blog post in your email newsletters.
2. Add your latest blog posts to your email signature using Wisestamp.com
3. An RSS feed automatically pushes your posts to those who sign up.
4. Share your blog post with people in groups or forum you belong to.
5. Send an email to your list with your latest blog post and ask them for feedback.

And remember! – Quality has more Impact than Quantity.

About the Author

My name is Lissa Anderson I am a full time SEO consultant. I’ve been doing freelancing,web development,web designing & internet marketing stuff for more than 8 years. Now I am affiliate with one of the world’s largest online advertising company. If you need Increase your SALES or SEO contact me.