Top 5 Reasons to Use Facebook for Your Business

Established in 2006 as a social site for college students to mingle, Facebook has since gone on to attract millions upon millions of users of all ages worldwide, making it one the most popular sites ever in Internet history.

Facebook users flock to the site for a variety of reasons, such as online games, photo sharing, catching up, planning events, and more. However, a good majority of users have found that Facebook provides a convenient way to make informed buying decisions, keep up with their favorite brands, discover new products, and find new companies and businesses.

In fact, Facebook now has more than 1 BILLION users. This, of course, is beneficial to businesses as they have the potential to draw in customers from all over the globe.

If you have not yet made a business presence on Facebook – the 5 reasons listed below may change your mind.

* Facebook gives your company a personality. Since Facebook is all about engaging with others and sharing information, it’s the perfect platform for a business to humanize itself through one-on-one conversations, community messages, contests, Q&A sessions, and more. Companies that actively communicate with customers and followers have better chances of obtaining new customers and retaining current ones. Moreover, real-time customer service allows consumers to have a sense of trust, which ultimately will lead to more business.

* Facebook is currently visited more than any other social media site. Although it’s always a good idea to have a presence on all the major social networking sites, Facebook is extremely important as it brings in millions of daily regular users worldwide. In addition, a good number of Facebook users use the site to learn about new products and trends, get service recommendations, and help others make informed buying decisions.

* Facebook offers all companies and professionals their own free business page. In a matter of minutes, you can easily create your own page, complete with company information, pictures, events, product listings, and more. Additionally, your followers and customers will have a convenient way to engage with other like-minded people and share recommendations. If you have not yet set up your own business page, click the link below to get started: https://www.facebook.com/pages

* You can track the effectiveness of your company’s online social media presence. Facebook’s integrated tools and applications on business pages allows you to determine the makeup of your customer base, their shopping habits, and how likely they are to purchase from your business. Moreover, Facebook offers an “Insights” feature on all business accounts. The “Insights” feature allows you to see what kind of reach and impact each of your posts have had. It also can determine the age group, gender, and locations of the people that have read your posts.

* Your business page is public and searchable by millions of Facebook users. In addition, when people give your page a “Like,” it becomes visible in their News Feed. This means that their own Facebook friends will most likely see your company name as long as they share the pages they are fans of. Furthermore, Facebook ranks high on major search engines. By incorporating the proper keywords and staying active on your account, not only will your Facebook business page move up in search engine results, but your company website and other social media accounts can potentially move up as well.

 

Did you know that we can fully manage your Facebook Business presence. Currently we manage well over 200 Business pages. We know what works and can help you get the most out of your social media presence.

Want to know more? check out a few of our plans at:

http://eziadvertising.com/packages-available/social-media/

 

 

5 Reasons to Use Social Media for Your Business

No matter if you love them or hate them, Social media sites are here to stay.

Combined, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest, have more than 2 BILLION users. With the massive amount of people using social media sites, there hasn’t been a better time for businesses to join in.

Social media has opened up some new doors in terms of marketing to your local consumers. Most of them are using these social media platforms, so there’s no reason why your business should not put yourself right in front of them.

In case you are still waiting to get started, I have put together a list of 5 great reason why your local business needs to get started with Social Media.

* More and more people are searching for businesses on social media sites. In fact, approximately 1/3 of consumers say that they usually search for and check out a company’s Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter page before considering a purchase. If the company is new and has no social media page, these consumers typically move on and look for a company with a social media presence. When a business has social media sites, it helps customers feel more at ease about purchases and in their mind, reinforces the company’s credibility.

* Customer service has never been easier and more convenient. Instead of customers having to wait days for a returned call or email, you can quickly resolve issues in real-time. You also have a simple way to engage with many customers all at once, which helps promote a sense of trust between you and your consumers. In addition, you’ll be able to give your business its own unique personality which will attract like-minded people.

* Social media helps your company get more online visibility. The more pages you have, the more likely your company will rank higher in the major search engines. Social media sites already rank strongly in Google and other essential search engines. If you have a presence in the popular social media sites, not only will your social media accounts rank higher in searches, but your company website can be pushed higher as well. If you’re in a high-competition industry, having your business presence show up on the first page of search engine results is imperative.

* The way consumers shop for products and services has dramatically changed. People are conducting more business via the Internet and social media sites than ever before. A good majority of consumers who shop online are regularly active on at least one social media site. Most of these consumers become social media fans of the businesses and companies they purchase from, and almost all would post positively on social media sites about their experiences with these companies.

* Social media is free. Aside from optional advertising costs that you can usually purchase for a nominal fee, creating and using social media doesn’t cost a penny. It’s free exposure for your business and a way to reach customers worldwide. Despite Internet hoaxes and rumors claiming that the top social media sites will start charging, all of the major sites have confirmed that the services will remain free. In addition, not only is social media here to stay, it’s expected to grow exponentially as users can now use their smartphones to check out their favorite sites.

Twitter Advertising Seeks to Evolve with New “ads editor” Tool

Advertising on social media has been a dominant force for several years now. In fact, search advertising has even taken a hit in recent years due to the amount of time people spend browsing social networking sites. It’s not like Google’s trembling in their Adwords boots right now, but it’s probably been on their radar.

That said, social advertising has had the disadvantage of being relatively uncertain for a time, due to the platforms and tools that facilitate it not having as much time to evolve like the ones that support more traditional online advertising. Twitter, long the number two social media network in the English-speaking world, is looking to rectify this by rolling out a feature they call “ads editor” – yes, all lower case – which allows advertisers to bulk edit the parameters and copy of their twitter ads using excel spreadsheet uploads. The use of such techniques is far from new, but it could certainly be a blessing for those who manage hundreds or thousands of different twitter advertisements for their clients’ campaigns (or their own, for that matter).

Things like end dates, budgets, and targeting criteria can be changed en masse by simply downloading a spreadsheet of your campaign, making the appropriate edits, and re-uploading it, explains twitter’s project manager Deepak Rao. Once uploaded, a single click will apply the changes you’ve specified to all affected campaigns; it’s that easy.

The tool will be especially useful to large-volume advertisers, who have the budget to bankroll massive trial and error campaigns based around hashtags and keywords much in the same way Adwords giants work: They begin with ads based around thousand of keywords, sometimes with multiple variants of copy each, and slowly trim the fat, taking away those that perform poorly and focusing instead on split-testing frontrunners. In theory, twitter’s new ads editor will allow advertisers to conduct these types of changes with relative ease compared to the manual editing required before.

Of course, your own intuitive (or learned) marketing savvy will be your best tool here, but no one ever complained about a little time-saving help from technology, right? The tool itself is not available to the public yet, but twitter plans to begin rolling it out to select advertising partners over the next few days. These individuals and firms will get the first chance to test the new product, before twitter expects to have the platform fully rolled out for everyone within two to three weeks. If you’re keep to see if you’re one of the chosen few for this tiered testing, keep your eyes peeled for a notification from ads.twitter.com

Of course, early skeptics of the tool have already emerged, arguing that the use of such a primitive tool as Excel might mean limiting the capabilities of users on ads editor. For example, finding a simple way to factor potential reach and suggested bid into spreadsheets will be difficult, as a spreadsheet will exist as a static, offline document once you edit it on your computer. If the tool worked in a browser-based office variant, however, it might be able to make suggestions in real time in accordance with your edits.

Of course, only time will tell how well the tool actually catches on, but here’s to hoping for the best.

Social Media Managers to Get New Tool for Fielding Feedback on Facebook

Social media has forever transformed the way that reputation managers and PR professionals go about their daily business. So much has this been true, that companies now regularly hire “social media managers,” professionals who are solely responsible for posting on social media, responding to customer mentions and messages, and sourcing/writing new content to keep people interested in liking, sharing, and interacting with a brand.

Facebook, which still sits atop its throne as the biggest social media platform around, is about to roll out the ability to answer comments privately. In the past, companies were limited to responding via the same Facebook channel that they were contacted on (responding to comments by commenting, messages by messaging, etc.). Now, Facebook page managers will have a new option to click when fielding page comments which will take the comment conversation into a private thread with that individual. The thread will include a link to the original comment, and will allow the two parties to communicate privately.

Of course, as the tool is used more and more, more individuals will likely take advantage of the increased speed and communication with companies on Facebook. This will mean an increase in the amount of messaging threads that social media managers have to deal with. To help alleviate message overload, Facebook also announced that they will be introducing new messaging tools.

One of the most welcome additions will be the way in which companies can save boilerplate responses and messages to commonly asked questions. Customers can therefore be easily responded to and would cut down on the time spent servicing the most common, easy-to-fix issues. This feature has been in testing for several months now, but it will soon be available to everyone.

Facebook itself is one of the fastest growing customer support platforms on the planet, and Facebook has created more incentives for companies to use their pages as their primary response method. For one, the company has created a badge that will display on company pages in order to let customers know that a page is very responsive to its messages and feedback. For the badge to display, Facebook pages will have to respond to 90% or more of their customer messages and have a median response time of five minutes or less; data will be based upon the last seven days. It’s unclear if “hours of operation” will be available so that companies won’t lose face their status if their support would not normally be open 24 hours per day (or perhaps this itself is a requirement).

What does this mean for you? It means that Facebook is getting more useful as a customer management tool, but along with it will come more responsibility and the need to learn new tools and functions. Let’ be honest, though: If you’re managing social media for a company you’re already likely a digital native who gets excited about such updates, rather than shying away from a new social challenge.

Trimming the Fat – Copy Tips for Saying More With Less

Copywriting doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. From the billions of dollars in sales each day that hinge on a well-formatted sales letter, to a polished TV commercial script, to the catchy jingle or slogan you just can’t get out of your head, effective professional, persuasive writing, “copywriting,” does a lot for us as marketers.

It’s unfortunate then that copy is often neglected as a luxury expense or an unnecessary cog in many marketers’ or business owners’ sales funnels. The reason, inevitably, is cost. Good copywriters know that their words will have a direct effect on your conversion rates, and thus the money you make, and leverage that knowledge for a nice payday. It then goes to follow that many marketers begin crafting their own copy. To be honest, even if you don’t have the polish and practice of a professional, someone who is a good writer in general can learn to produce decent copy to keep them growing and selling until they can afford a dedicated copywriter. The key word there, however, is “learn.”

Amateur copy is almost always identifiable by a lack of brevity; people often write too much and get too wordy, losing their vital, important, life-changing points amongst superfluous, unnecessary adjectives and ineffective anecdotes. See what I did there? That sentence could have been a lot shorter! Today, we’ll take a look at how you can catch yourself and self-edit copy to stay effective and to the point.

1) Cut out very. The concept of “cutting out very” is probably referenced in proper copywriting books somewhere, but here’s my take on it. The tendency in sales writing is to be, well, selly. The way to do this however is with proper punctuation and, more importantly, by getting inside your audience’s head and telling them what they want to hear. Unfortunately, amateur writers usually use “filler” words. The word ‘very’ is one prominent example, because it is a false enhancer that is rarely needed. Don’t say “It’s very good,” say “it’s the best.” Another example is the use of very before the word ‘unique’, which is redundant. Something is either unique or it isn’t, it’s not “very unique.”

2) Boil it down to exactly what someone needs to know. One of the biggest things you can do to make your copywriting effective is to put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re writing to. This gets you out of salesman mode and helps you think about what someone with the problem you’re offering a solution for actually wants to hear. Sometimes, doing this can help us see that what we’re put down is over the top, too selly or spammy, or even just flat out unhelpful!

3) Proofread 80 times. And I’m not just talking about any usual proofread. Sure, you’re going to be checking your spelling and grammar and making sure everything lines up, but a copywriting proofread should see you putting on another hat as well, the “could this possibly sound any better?!” hat. Read each sentence and look for words that could be dropped, phrases that could be made more appropriate for your customers, etc.

Of course, just like every facet of IM, there’s always more to learn on the copywriting front, but this should get you headed in the right direction until you can hire a personal Don Draper of your own.