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The Only Way To Do Social Media Right

August 28, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Yeah, Yeah… I know what you’re thinking. Here’s another social media “expert” that’s going to say “this is how you do it”. Actually, I’m not. (As an aside: What does it mean and can anyone really be an “expert” in a field that’s relatively new.)

I, like any other social media person, have my opinions, methods and strategies that I believe work well. I believe these methods work well through many tests and practical implementation. These are, obviously, what I teach and advise. That being said, there are many other social media “experts” that have different opinions, different methods, and different strategies. Whether I agree with them or not is irrelevant. In most cases, when I hear other social media people say “this is how it should be done”, I cringe inside.

Because of the ambiguousness of what it means to be an expert in combination with the fact that this field is constantly changing and new, many dealers (or clients) don’t really know how to judge/evaluate whether a social media consultant/company is “good” at what they do. The easiest way (and how many dealers do it) is to judge a person or company by their own social media presence: How many “likes” do they have? How many followers? Etc.

I personally, don’t believe that either one of these things constitutes a valid assessment point when considering who to partner with in your social media efforts. “Likes” and “followers” can be bought. Does that mean they’re good at what they do? No. It just means they have money to spend. The same philosophy I have in regards to using “likes” to determine the success (or not) for a client’s social media identities applies. You can have a million followers but if none of them would ever do business with you, you’re wasting your breath and your efforts are worthless and a waste of time. If you are a dealer (or business) in Florida, would you pay for traditional advertising in California? Why not? Exactly.

I’m not going to go into what my philosophies are as that’s not the point of this blog post. The point is that there IS no single way to do it right. Numbers of likes and followers or a consultant’s/company’s Klout score don’t mean anything. If you’re looking for a social media partner, for the love of God, please do not use these factors in your decision-making process.

Find a partner who fits well into your company’s strategy, is willing to integrate with your existing marketing, collaborates with you and, most importantly, is willing to make a personalized plan and strategy geared towards your specific audience, not one who fits YOU into THEIR cookie-cutter template process.

If their sales pitch centers around how many “likes” they’ll get you and how many more followers they’ll get you and the reasons they give you for hiring them in any way involves how many likes or followers they have, run away. As fast as you can.

Keep in mind, this person/company is you in the online space. There is no differentiation from a customer’s perspective.

You better be sure that the voice they use is YOURS, not THEIRS.

Filed Under: Editorial, Internet, Marketing, Social Media, Uncategorized Tagged With: Dealer, decision, editorial, followers, klout, likes, partner, Social Media, vendor

The Game-Changing Google Program Auto Dealers Can’t Afford to Ignore

August 13, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Google’s online ventures are usually anything but under the radar. Yet recently, in what may be a game-changing play, the search engine giant quietly entered the third-party lead provider business for car dealerships.

The beta version of Google Comparison Ads for Autos (which is unofficially being referred to as “Google Cars” within the industry) was launched to very little fanfare a few weeks ago in the San Francisco Bay area. The service invites participating dealers to send their inventory to Google, allowing consumers direct access to inventory, price comparison, and the ability to request quotes from within Google search results. As shown below, the program—and associated inventory—is prominently displayed on page one of a relevant search.

While the program is currently limited to dealers within the San Francisco Bay area, program-specific search results are available throughout the state of California, not just for people located within the Bay area—contrary to what others are reporting. As evidenced by the above screen-grab, I did not have to change my location to get Comparison Ad results, and I live almost 500 miles away, in Southern California.

Google is currently testing a number of similar Comparison Ads programs for other products, including credit cards, CDs, and checking and savings accounts. Results have been controversial, with many advertisers in these industries reporting dissatisfaction, especially since Google is not obligated to play by its own rules and is, in effect, competing with its own advertisers. In November 2011, Google temporarily suspended its Comparison Ads service to the mortgage industry with plans to reboot the program after revamping it.

While specifics of the program for auto dealers have yet to be announced, Google is promoting the new service with the following program highlights:

“Higher-quality leads: Our leads come directly from motivated, purchase-ready consumers who have specifically chosen to contact your dealership. Leads are unique, never resold, and delivered immediately to you.

Free inventory listings: You can have your inventory shown to consumers on Google for free, even if you decide not to receive leads.

More than just inventory: Consumers can choose to connect with you even when you don’t have a specific car in inventory. We know that you can order the car, dealer trade, or find other solutions to help consumers get the cars they want.

Greater control over leads: You choose how much you’re willing to pay for a lead and target consumers based on distance and specific type of car, so you get the leads that are most valuable to you.”

This is all the information that Google currently has publicly available about the program. However, the operational processes used in the suspended Comparison Ads program for mortgages may offer additional insights. Here’s a run-down of how the program functioned:

1. Google looked at maximum bids placed by each competing bidder and then set a reserve price based on those bids. Once set, the reserve price was the minimum fee bidders would have to pay to appear on a desired search results page.

2. Anyone bidding below the reserve price was dropped from the auction. Google also dropped the bottom 10% of bidders who bid at or above the reserve price.

3. Results were then displayed (in this industry’s case) from lowest to highest APR. This leads me to believe automotive results would be displayed with the lowest prices first.

Furthermore, this is how, in an unlisted video, Google described the highlights of the program to the mortgage industry:

• The ads were included in the “Sponsored Listing” section but are not counted in the AdWords auction.

• Pricing was pulled directly from the companies’ “pricing engine product feed,” which would presumably be the equivalent of a dealer’s DMS or pricing tool, and updated multiple times per day.

• Bids could be highly targeted to reach the consumers most likely to convert, and an advertiser could place different bids for each targeted criteria.

Google mentions that they are working on a different ranking system for the mortgage program (one of the reasons provided for its suspension) in which Google will reward high-quality advertisers using factors such as:

• Accuracy of offers as determined by mystery shopping

• Turnaround time on lead follow-up

• Customer satisfaction as measured by surveys

It is probably safe to assume that Google will eventually apply these ranking criteria across all industries serviced by their Google Comparison Ad program.

Google is promoting the Comparison Ads for Autos program as a way for dealers to source fresh leads from consumers’ Google searches, but given the above information I have several concerns regarding how beneficial the program will really prove to be.

First and foremost, Google claims that the leads generated by the program are “unique,” yet in the final step of a lead submission, the program offers the consumer the choice to contact other dealers who may have similar cars available. A single person inputting a lead and requesting contact by multiple dealers would hypothetically generate multiple leads, a complication Google does not currently address.

On a related note, Google is telling consumers that even if they are interested in a particular vehicle that has already been identified by VIN, they may be able to get the same vehicle from another dealer. As Google puts it, “if you see a particular car (specified by a unique VIN) showing in a dealer’s inventory, you may be able to get that car from other dealers as well. Dealers often times trade inventory with each other, so you can buy from the dealer that you prefer.” Thus, Google is negating the edge a dealer may have in winning the consumer’s business simply by having the exact vehicle they are looking for in stock.

In addition, while Google says that dealers can list their inventory on the program free of charge, it is unclear what would happen to any leads generated if the dealer chose not to “pay to play.”

For those who are willing to pay, Google allows dealers to “[choose] what [they’re] willing to pay for a lead.” According to Automotive News, the price-per-lead is determined via a bidding model, with dealers competing for prominent positioning within search results for their inventory.

The final component of the program is that Google emphasizes the protection of consumer privacy. There are three ways in which a consumer can contact you as a participating advertiser:

1. Inbound Phone Lead: This comes via a Google-generated phone number; the consumer’s phone is blocked from the advertiser’s phone system.

2. E-mail Inquiry: The advertiser is given the consumer’s name and the details of the product they are interested in, but the consumer’s e-mail address is masked.

3. Request a Call-Back: The advertiser is given a masked phone number with which to call the consumer.

Google states that lead delivery is compatible with CRMs, but how those leads would actually populate is unclear.

The fact that Google commands such a large percentage of internet searches means that this program is a potential game-changer. Google’s ability to position this program wherever it likes, regardless of its other ad programs, may mean that dealers are forced to participate to remain competitive. Because Comparison Ads currently appear just above the first organic search results, these results will likely divert a portion of traffic that would otherwise have gone directly to dealers’ websites.

Not only will Google’s Comparison Ads for Autos impact many components of your online marketing efforts, including search engine optimization strategy and pay-per-click campaigns, but it may also even affect the lead quantity that your current third-party lead providers are able to offer you. Obviously, dealers would be well-advised to pay close attention to the program as it develops.

via the July 2012 edition of the 3 Birds Marketing newsletter

Filed Under: Automotive, internet sales, Marketing, News, Reputation Management Tagged With: Automotive, Dealers, google, local, rankings, reputation management, reviews, scoring, zagat

Facebook Promoted Posts: Are They Right For You?

July 31, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina


Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm
—the formula used to determine the order content appears in a given newsfeed based on which content is deemed most relevant to that user—may make the Facebook experience more seamless for casual browsers, but it’s a challenge for businesses that harness the social media platform as part of a marketing strategy. After all, thanks to Edgerank, each post on Facebook only makes it onto the newsfeed of about 12-17% of its fans. The fans that do see it are more likely to be those that have already chosen to visit your page, or that regularly interact with your posts. Edgerank’s feedback-loop effect makes it harder than ever to reach and engage consumers that don’t self-select your business’s content.

To counter those daunting odds, Facebook recently introduced a new service allowing business pages with greater than 400 “likes” to pay a fee to promote individual posts. This new feature allows a page owner to select a single post, which could be a status update, photo, video, question, or offer, and pay a premium to increase the reach for that post beyond the circle of fans that are already engaged with your content. Not only that, but promoted posts are supposedly more likely to be seen in the newsfeeds of friends of fans, too.

Promoted posts have a one-time, pre-set budget that remains in place for the life of the post.  While setting up a promoted post, you will be asked to choose a budget from a suite of options that includes the post’s estimated reach at each payment level. The promotion can be suspended or stopped at any time regardless of whether your maximum budget has been used. Promoted posts do have some targeting capabilities, including geographical location and language, but these can only be applied to posts that are less than three days old.

Sounds Great—but Do They Work?

I set out to test the promoted posts feature on my blog’s fan page (which has 613 fans) to see how it performed versus a normal, “organic” post. I’d recently created a page on my blog that consists of a dedicated list of available educational events and conferences for automotive dealers. I shared this blog page via a status update on May 23rd, prior to the launch of Promoted Posts. The post performed as expected, reaching roughly 13% of my page’s fans with a marginal viral reach (a measure of how many impressions came from non-fans who encountered the post because a fan of the page shared or interacted with the post).

  

Keep in mind that my Facebook page isn’t particularly active, nor do I put too much effort into engaging my fans, which limits the reach of posts. I mainly use the page to post blog articles, so I don’t expect high engagement, but these statistics are in line with the average reach reported by others.

On June 2, I decided to test out the new Promoted Posts feature. Upon creating the new post, the only option presented to me was to pay $5 to reach an estimated 300 people.

The post I promoted was essentially the same as the previous one – a status update which included an external link to the same page on my blog. I did no other social media promotion at all for this post and let it run for the full three days.

Here were the results:

  

As you can see, the post exceeded the estimated paid reach (with 324 rather than 300 paid impressions), and it also reached 1200% more non-fans (13 vs. 164) via viral sharing, substantially increasing exposure to my fans’ social networks. Organic displays also increased by almost double (70 vs. 132). The promoted post didn’t increase engagement but, the post itself wasn’t really designed to encourage engagement. I also didn’t see a noticeable difference in traffic to the external page on my blog, with the average number of daily visitors to that specific page remaining roughly the same.

Two interesting side notes: First, Facebook defines paid results as “the number of people who saw your page post in an Ad or Sponsored Story.” But when signing up for the service, Facebook never mentioned that my promoted post could potentially be displayed via an Ad (on the right of the newsfeed) versus as a Sponsored Story (within the newsfeed itself). In my estimation, Ads constitute weaker exposure than Sponsored Stories, but I have to assume that at least some of the paid exposure for my promoted post came via Ads.

Second, as mentioned previously, I was initially only given the option to reach 300 people for $5. However, when I looked into promoting another post following my initial trial, I was given a second option to reach 700 people for $10, as well. This tells me that Facebook underestimated the results they could deliver.

Are Promoted Posts for You?

As in any form of advertisement, you must have clearly defined goals before spending any money. Here are some questions you should ask yourself before making a decision one way or another regarding promoted posts.

1.    How large is your page’s fan base? Keep in mind that the larger your fan base, the more potential reach each promoted post will have, which will result in a higher upfront cost.

2.    Are these actual customers, or are they a random assortment of individuals who were collected in an effort to grow the number of fans at all costs? I consider fans to be relevant if they are potential or existing customers who could realistically do business with you—whether that’s via sales, service, or parts—and whose social networks will, in all likelihood, include more relevant people. In the case of dealerships, for example, it does you no good to increase exposure to people outside your PMA, vendors, or anyone else who doesn’t have the ability to spend money with you. Note, however, that the geo-targeting option does allow you to more efficiently reach relevant fans.

3.    What is your goal for promoting a particular post? Is it to increase engagement? Increase exposure for an offer or event? Share important information with your fans? Lead people to an external website or conversion page?

In my opinion, promoting a post just for the sake of promoting it is ill-advised. If you have clear goals in mind, you should be able to accurately track whether your money was spent wisely. Did you actually increase engagement, and was that engagement by new people rather than those who already regularly engage with you? Did more people take advantage of your offer? Did you receive more traffic (via Facebook) to the external link you included in your post?

If you’ve built your fan page organically via your website, in-store signage, or via inclusion in other marketing channels, I could see a promoted post helping to jumpstart your page by potentially increasing your fans via increased exposure to THEIR networks. Keep in mind that the majority of the people you will be reaching already like your page so, in my opinion, the greatest potential of Facebook Promoted Posts is in its ability to extend your exposure beyond your fans and into their social networks.

That being said, a well-thought-out promoted post with clearly defined goals has the potential to increase reach and revenues—all at a relatively low cost.

via the June 2012 edition of the 3 Birds Marketing newsletter

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Advertising, Automotive, business, Facebook, Marketing, page, promoted posts, Sales

Foursquare Launches Local Updates for Businesses

July 19, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

If you haven’t heard, foursquare announced yesterday the launch of what they’re calling “Local Updates”.

What are these and how can you use them?

Essentially, Local Updates will allow businesses to push messages to consumers who have either “liked” their business or frequent it. Updates can include things like specials, pictures of a new car (or a used car you just got in stock), it can include coupons, service specials, or whatever else you’d like your customers to see.

Your customers will be able to see these updates while in the same city as you. While certainly not as geo-targeted as it could be (like in the auto mall or within 10 miles of your dealership), being in the same city is a start.

In the past, the only way (or type) of message you could put out there for consumers on foursquare were “special offers” which required a check-in. While you can still make an offer to a customer, the ability to simply provide updates to consumers is another way of engaging them and staying top of mind.

Here’s an example of what an update would look like:

With nearly 1,000,000 business pages claimed and 10,000,000 users, foursquare is simply something you cannot afford to ignore. It’s fairly low-maintenance when set up and, since its free, the benefits vastly outweigh the possibility of lost business. Engaging your customers (or potential customers) is something that’s not only necessary but integral to increasing customer loyalty and retention.

The Local Updates feature will be rolled out to businesses that have claimed their page this week sometime so stay tuned.

Here is a brief video intro created by foursquare:

 

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Automotive, based, car dealer, Dealership, foursquare, geo-targeting, local updates, location, Marketing, push, Social Media, specials

Google Cars Encourages Dealer Trades

June 27, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Yesterday, Brian Pasch posted a great article with the first examples of a new live Google product called Google Cars – Google’s entry into the 3rd party lead provider business for car dealers.

Other than all the obvious tactics that other third-party lead providers employ to maximize revenue from a consumer lead (as illustrated by Brian), I did some digging and found another component of their program that I thought was very interesting.

In Google’s support article explaining the program exists this piece of advice for consumers:

“If you see a particular car (specified by a unique VIN) showing in a dealer’s inventory, you may be able to get that car from other dealers as well. Dealers often times trade inventory with each other, so you can buy from the dealer that you prefer.”

What?!?!

The only way Google could have a dealer’s inventory is via the dealer feeding it to them. If you’re a dealer sending your inventory to Google, be advised that Google is telling consumers that if they find the exact car they’re looking for (down to the specific VIN) in YOUR inventory, that a consumer doesn’t have to buy it from you.

In my internet sales career, there were many times that myself and a competing dealer were working with the same customer online. One of the things I always had to look at was if the exact car the customer was looking for was available and who had it. There were plenty of occasions where the only convenient place that had the exact car the consumer wanted was my dealership. One of the strongest value propositions I had when quoting and/or trying to convince a customer to do business with me versus my competitor was that I had the car.

Since Google doesn’t release the consumer’s information to the dealer, it’s going to be much harder to identify the cases in which my competitor is working the same customer and trying to sell them a car that I have in stock with the intention of dealer trading with me for the vehicle.

One has to assume that only dealers providing inventory and/or participating in this program have the “Contact Dealer” button available as not every dealer does (as illustrated in the image below).

cars

As you can see in the example above, it appears that dealer C and F are participating in this program while dealer D and E are not based on the existence (or absence) of the “Contact Dealer” button. So, as a consumer, I’m guessing that only inventory from dealer C and F would be available for a consumer to view. However, using Google’s own advice, I now know that since dealer D is closer to me, I could hypothetically buy dealer C’s car from dealer D.

I don’t necessarily want a provider that I am paying telling the consumers I am paying to attract that they can buy MY cars from my competitor.

My other thoughts on Google Cars:

Not only is this new program by Google hijacking dealer’s SEO efforts by making Google Cars the “most relevant” result in searches but the inventory itself is hosted on Google’s own site which could also eliminate the need for a consumer to visit your own website.

Google is also considering the vehicle results delivered via search as “Sponsored” versus organic results so now they are also competing with you for your PPC ad placement.

It’s going to be pretty difficult for dealer’s to NOT participate in Google Cars. Unlike other third party lead providers who rely on organic result positioning and PPC ads, a dealer can combat this if it has an aggressive SEO strategy. Google, on the other hand, is always going to deliver their program at the top of the search results, right above the first true organic search result.

Does anyone truly believe Google is going to bury their income-producing program in search results?

On top of this, Google’s recently formed automotive division has been invited to (and spoken at) many of our industry’s educational events in the last year or so giving advice and “assisting” dealers when all along they were preparing to bring to market a product that would compete with those very same dealers for not only their money but also in their search engine marketing strategies.

Google is the new Honey Badger. They don’t care. They’ll just take what they want.

Filed Under: Automotive, industry trends, Internet, Marketing, Sales Tagged With: Dealers, Dealership, google, google cars, inventory marketing, leads, pay per click, ppc, Sales, search engine, seo

When Customers Attack

June 25, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Dealers are continuously struggling to keep customers happy. Most dealers want their customers to be happy as a happy customer can lead to more sales through word-of-mouth and referrals. CSI scores in both sales and service are essential in many ways to dealerships and can cause a multitude of problems if they’re not up to par.

Sometimes dealers are unfairly treated by customers for minor things, however.

I came across this video on YouTube quite by accident and was absolutely astounded.

I wasn’t searching for that particular dealership nor was I searching their brand or even searching their area. I’m about as far away geographically from the dealership as you could get so I can’t even blame geographical relevance. In fact, I had very broad search terms. This video still showed up on Page 4 of a Google search.

The video’s description makes this even more astounding:

“The dealership provides free Wi-Fi internet access to it’s customers, while waiting for their vehicle to be serviced. One problem: It doesn’t work.
Watch me walk around nearly the entire dealership, only to get a signal enough to grab a few bits of data, and crap out. There was a point I got a good signal, but it never returned.
It’s very hard to see, but you can see that the signal meters remain red pretty much the whole time, until the media player shut itself off. At that point, I gave up. My car was about done anyhow. This is the ONLY part of Ron Bouchard’s that is not good. Sorry Ron. 🙁
EPIC FAIL Internet.”

Seriously?

This YouTuber knows the power of the internet. He’s uploaded over 1,500 videos and has amassed over 2.5 million views. He’s in a dealership that he even agrees on video deserves its 5-star rating and states in the video description that this is the only part of the dealership that is not good yet he feels compelled to make a video complaining about the lack of free wi-fi despite it being advertised in the service waiting area. It’s obvious that he didn’t “mean” any harm but this dealership now shows up ranking high for search terms like “car dealer” and “fail”. In the comments, he follows up TWO YEARS LATER, stating that the wi-fi still didn’t work.

Reputation management begins with knowing what’s being said about you.

This is completely unfair to the dealership but it’s a perfect example to illustrate the importance of perfection in your customer’s dealership experience as well as the importance of monitoring what people are saying about you online.

What would you have done had this video been made about your dealership?

Filed Under: Automotive, Internet, Marketing, Reputation Management, Reviews, Service, Social Media Tagged With: car dealer, csi, Dealership, details, fail, google, reputation management, search engine, youtube

Facebook Likes: Don’t Get Scammed

June 21, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

One of the easiest metrics dealers use to judge the success of their Facebook page is how many people like it. It’s also the most irrelevant.

I’ve said this many times and I’ll keep repeating it:

You’re better off having 1,000 fans to your page that can actually do business with you than 10,000 fans that will never spend a cent.

How do you expect to get ROI from your social media efforts if all your social media fans/followers are in Thailand? (Unless, of course, you have a booming export business to Thailand) The answer is, you won’t.

Also, many companies are delivering “fake” fans anyways through shady methods. This article by AllFacebook.com illustrates some of the methods these companies use.

Having a lot of Facebook fans that you bought is meaningless and a waste of money. Companies that prey on dealers with a service that increases “likes” to your Facebook page with random people are scam artists. It’s a waste of money and either these companies don’t realize that (which means they are incompetent and shouldn’t be in the social media business) or they do realize that (which means they are intentionally selling a service that has no value).

Dealers, please don’t fall into the trap of equating quantity with success. If you build your fan base organically with customers in your market, your social media marketing efforts will bear fruit.

If you “buy” fans, you’re actually sabotaging your own Facebook page and social media marketing efforts and you’ll only accomplish one thing:

Do you want to make money or be able to say “mine is bigger than yours”? You decide.

(P.S. There’s a great conversation over in the DealerRefresh forums talking about this.)

(P.S.S. Yes, I love the gorilla graphic.)

Filed Under: Best Practices, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Automotive, facebook page, likes, Marketing, Social Media, vendors

Facebook Promoted Posts

June 15, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm—the formula used to determine the order content appears in a given newsfeed based on which content is deemed most relevant to that user—may make the Facebook experience more seamless for casual browsers, but it’s a challenge for businesses that harness the social media platform as part of a marketing strategy. After all, thanks to Edgerank, each post on Facebook only makes it onto the newsfeed of about 12-17% of its fans. The fans that do see it are more likely to be those that have already chosen to visit your page, or that regularly interact with your posts. Edgerank’s feedback-loop effect makes it harder than ever to reach and engage consumers that don’t self-select your business’s content.

To counter those daunting odds, Facebook recently introduced a new service allowing business pages with greater than 400 “likes” to pay a fee to promote individual posts. This new feature allows a page owner to select a single post, which could be a status update, photo, video, question, or offer, and pay a premium to increase the reach for that post beyond the circle of fans that are already engaged with your content. Not only that, but promoted posts are supposedly more likely to be seen in the newsfeeds of friends of fans, too.

Promoted posts have a one-time, pre-set budget that remains in place for the life of the post. While setting up a promoted post, you will be asked to choose a budget from a suite of options that includes the post’s estimated reach at each payment level. The promotion can be suspended or stopped at any time regardless of whether your maximum budget has been used. Promoted posts do have some targeting capabilities, including geographical location and language, but these can only be applied to posts that are less than three days old.

Sounds Great—but Do They Work?

I set out to test the promoted posts feature on my blog’s fan page (which has 613 fans) to see how it performed versus a normal, “organic” post. I’d recently created a page on my blog that consists of a dedicated list of available educational events and conferences for automotive dealers. I shared this blog page via a status update on May 23rd, prior to the launch of Promoted Posts. The post performed as expected, reaching roughly 13% of my page’s fans with a marginal viral reach (a measure of how many impressions came from non-fans who encountered the post because a fan of the page shared or interacted with the post).

Keep in mind that my Facebook page isn’t particularly active, nor do I put too much effort into engaging my fans, which limits the reach of posts. I mainly use the page to post blog articles, so I don’t expect high engagement, but these statistics are in line with the average reach reported by others.

On June 2, I decided to test out the new Promoted Posts feature. Upon creating the new post, the only option presented to me was to pay $5 to reach an estimated 300 people.
The post I promoted was essentially the same as the previous one – a status update which included an external link to the same page on my blog. I did no other social media promotion at all for this post and let it run for the full three days.

Here were the results:

As you can see, the post exceeded the estimated paid reach (with 324 rather than 300 paid impressions), and it also reached 1200% more non-fans (13 vs. 164) via viral sharing, substantially increasing exposure to my fans’ social networks. Organic displays also increased by almost double (70 vs. 132). The promoted post didn’t increase engagement but, the post itself wasn’t really designed to encourage engagement. I also didn’t see a noticeable difference in traffic to the external page on my blog, with the average number of daily visitors to that specific page remaining roughly the same.

Two interesting side notes: First, Facebook defines paid results as “the number of people who saw your page post in an Ad or Sponsored Story.” But when signing up for the service, Facebook never mentioned that my promoted post could potentially be displayed via an Ad (on the right of the newsfeed) versus as a Sponsored Story (within the newsfeed itself). In my estimation, Ads constitute weaker exposure than Sponsored Stories, but I have to assume that at least some of the paid exposure for my promoted post came via Ads.

Second, as mentioned previously, I was initially only given the option to reach 300 people for $5. However, when I looked into promoting another post following my initial trial, I was given a second option to reach 700 people for $10, as well. This tells me that Facebook underestimated the results they could deliver.

Are Promoted Posts for You?

As in any form of advertisement, you must have clearly defined goals before spending any money. Here are some questions you should ask yourself before making a decision one way or another regarding promoted posts.

1. How large is your page’s fan base? Keep in mind that the larger your fan base, the more potential reach each promoted post will have, which will result in a higher upfront cost.

2. Are these actual customers, or are they a random assortment of individuals who were collected in an effort to grow the number of fans at all costs? I consider fans to be relevant if they are potential or existing customers who could realistically do business with you—whether that’s via sales, service, or parts—and whose social networks will, in all likelihood, include more relevant people. In the case of dealerships, for example, it does you no good to increase exposure to people outside your PMA, vendors, or anyone else who doesn’t have the ability to spend money with you. Note, however, that the geo-targeting option does allow you to more efficiently reach relevant fans.

3. What is your goal for promoting a particular post? Is it to increase engagement? Increase exposure for an offer or event? Share important information with your fans? Lead people to an external website or conversion page?

In my opinion, promoting a post just for the sake of promoting it is ill-advised. If you have clear goals in mind, you should be able to accurately track whether your money was spent wisely. Did you actually increase engagement, and was that engagement by new people rather than those who already regularly engage with you? Did more people take advantage of your offer? Did you receive more traffic (via Facebook) to the external link you included in your post?

If you’ve built your fan page organically via your website, in-store signage, or via inclusion in other marketing channels, I could see a promoted post helping to jumpstart your page by potentially increasing your fans via increased exposure to THEIR networks. Keep in mind that the majority of the people you will be reaching already like your page so, in my opinion, the greatest potential of Facebook Promoted Posts is in its ability to extend your exposure beyond your fans and into their social networks.

That being said, a well-thought-out promoted post with clearly defined goals has the potential to increase reach and revenues—all at a relatively low cost.

[Article originally published in the June 2012 issue of the 3 Birds Marketing e-newsletter]

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Data, Effective, Facebook, Marketing, newsfeed, promoted posts, Social Media

Coffee Is For Closers: A Social Media Success Story

May 16, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

For many small businesses, social media is a daunting, unwieldy task with results that are typically discouraging. Many businesses either don’t see the point in doing it or they try it and quit after not seeing any interaction. How many Facebook pages have you seen abandoned after a short life-span? You go to their page and the last post was 6 months ago. In my career, I’ve seen many.

Recently, an independent coffee shop in New Hampshire came to my attention through social media. I live in Southern California and have never even stepped foot in the state of New Hampshire so a local independent coffee shop would have never been on my radar much less caused me to start paying attention to it.

A&E Roastery is a small, independent coffee shop located in Amherst, NH. I became aware of them through a social media contest they started on their Facebook page celebrating their 10th anniversary. A&E Roastery bought in to social media. You can see that they began using Facebook as a business in January 2010. They have a corporate Twitter account, a foursquare account and a blog that is regularly updated with fresh and relevant content.

The contest was brought to my attention by someone in my social media network (and industry) who is a regular customer of theirs.

The genesis of the contest was the shop’s involvement in a local baseball league consisting of 8-9 year olds. A&E Roastery and their local PR firm collaborated on ideas with which to gain exposure for the shop in conjunction with their sponsorship. The contest was simple. Customers participated in and gathered votes to be proclaimed the MVP of the shop and win free coffee for the rest of 2012.

My involvement started only as one of supporting a friend in his quest to win this contest at a business he obviously frequents and loves. Over the next 9 days, it slowly started dawning on me that A&E had accomplished what not many small businesses (or large businesses for that matter) have been able to do… engage with their fans. You see, it’s easy to GAIN fans. Many people judge social media success by quantity. The more fans or followers I have, the better job I’m doing when, in fact, a more accurate measurement of social media success is engagement. How do the fans you have, regardless of the quantity, engage with you?

A mutual friend suggested I write a blog post about this contest. My initial reaction was skeptical. To be blunt, I didn’t believe there was much there to write about.

As I began digging in and really looking, I found amazing statistics and results from a contest that is still ongoing.

These statistics begin on May 7, the date the contest started.

  • From January 2010 to January 2012, A&E had accumulated approximately 500 fans (approximately 20/month). Over the next 3 months (Feb-April), they added 107 for an average of about 35 per month. In the month of May alone, they’ve added 219 fans for an average of 14 per day.
  • On May 6th, A&E Roastery was averaging 5 new likes per week with 30 people talking about them according to Facebook Insights. Within 6 days of beginning the contest, they’ve increased their likes per week by 5,100% and the number of people talking about them has increased 660%.
  • Since the contest’s inception, the company itself has contributed 28 posts which accumulated 99 likes and 169 comments.*
  • Since the contest’s inception, the company’s fans have posted on their wall a whopping 100 posts with a total of 271 likes and 134 comments.*

In 9 days, A&E Roastery’s Facebook page has seen 128 posts that have generated 370 likes and 303 comments.*

To put this into perspective, I looked at the Facebook page of the Penske Automotive Group. For those who don’t know, the Penske Automotive Group is the second largest publicly traded automotive retailer in the United States as measured by total revenue. As of January 18, 2012, (they) owned and operated 166 franchises in the United States and 169 internationally encompassing 42 brands. They are a Fortune 500 company with 15,000 employees. [Wikipedia]

Over the same period of time, Penske posted to their Facebook wall 6 times which generated 98 likes and 76 comments. Penske’s Facebook page has almost 16,000 fans.

A&E Roastery had more than triple the engagement with 15,000 fewer fans.

A&E has hit the equivalent of a social media grand-slam home run with this contest. The passion their customers have for them is evident in not only the engagement their contest is seeing but in the exposure it is generating for them.

I spoke with Emeran, the shop’s owner, about her thoughts and goals for this contest. She felt the key to the contest’s success to this point is the social media saavy customers she has that have contributed to generating the buzz. The question she’s looking to answer is one that’s all too familiar to social media professionals and business owners – “How does that translate to growth in business?”. She went on to say that “the challenge is to assess what our new network looks like now and how to target those new people and translate that into revenue growth on both the retail and wholesale areas.” She felt it would be interesting to see not only if it did but by how much even though she shared that she knew this would be a difficult task to accomplish. Some of her new fans being from outside her local market is actually one that works in her favor as, in addition to the operation of this local shop, she has a thriving wholesale business selling the coffee beans they roast themselves. A&E currently has quite a few local businesses that serve her beans to their customers and she certainly isn’t opposed to expanding her wholesale business to other areas of the country.

The initial round of voting for the MVP nominees is scheduled to be reduced to 9 at the end of this week with a new round of voting on the remaining contestants beginning. The contest itself is scheduled to end a the end of this month.

To all my fellow automotive coffee enthusiasts, you might want to give A&E Roastery coffee a try. In the age of Starbucks, not many independent coffee shops can generate the loyalty and following from their customers that A&E has managed to do.

There’s probably a good reason for that.

*Statistics complied through May 16, 2012 at 8:30am PST.

Filed Under: Best Practices, Internet, Marketing, Sales, Social Media Tagged With: a&e roastery, amherst, coffee, Facebook, facebook page, independent, new hampshire, retail, shop, Social Media, wholesale

Facebooks Potential New Feature Could Kill Your Newsfeed

May 11, 2012 By Arnold Tijerina

Facebook has always been experimenting with ways to generate revenue. It’s mostly been focused on businesses through Facebook Ads and Sponsored Stories but now it’s contemplating a revenue stream generated through users.

TechCrunch reported last night that Facebook has began testing a feature it calls “Highlight”. The basic functionality of this feature is that a user can pay a one-time fee to have a single post shared with more of their friends. Facebook’s algorithm is designed to identify and deliver what they believe is the content most interesting to any individual. According to the TechCrunch article, only about 12% of any given person’s friends see any given post. (People that utilize EdgeRank to maximize the potential that their posts are seen probably have a slightly higher average.)

facebook-highlight-status-updates1

In my opinion, there are only a few legitimate uses for for this feature by an individual that wouldn’t annoy the heck out of their friends: “I’m moving”, “having a baby”, “someone died”, “help me raise money for a good cause” etc. would all be legitimate reasons, in my eyes. However, I don’t see too many people actually paying for increased exposure to other legitimate types of status updates even if it were available. (“Legitimate” in my eyes being a valid, non-spammy type of status update.)

More than likely, the people willing to pay for increased exposure for their posts would be people selling something.. whether that’s recruiting for a multi-level marketing “opportunity”, advertising their business or services, and, in the case of the automotive industry, delivering the many different ways of saying “come buy a car from me (or my dealership)”.

With many car dealers still stubbornly clinging to Facebook profiles versus Facebook pages, I think it’s just going to be way too tempting for them to pay the small fee to make sure more of their “friends” see their sale ad, highlighted vehicle, or “come buy a car” message. It will also be tempting for individual vendors to ply their wares on your Facebook newsfeed paying a couple of bucks for increased exposure to all the car dealerships they’ve friended.

The potential for people to newsfeed spam is way too high, in my opinion. I put up with an “occasional” plug from my Facebook friends. I mean, everyone needs to earn a living and rule #1 in sales is to make sure everyone you know is aware of what you sell. There’s nothing more frustrating than being a Toyota salesperson and having someone you know buy a Toyota from somewhere (or someone) else. That being said, I do have a line that a person can cross when the volume of those types of posts by them gets annoying to me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Facebook choosing who they think I want to see posts from. I would personally like to be able to control that option but, for the most part, it accomplishes its goal. I also think I’m probably in the group of people that actually tells Facebook who and what I want to see by hiding people, creating lists, knowing (and using) my privacy settings, etc. as the more you do this, the more accurate Facebook’s algorithm can be in delivering relevant content. It’s unclear whether “Highlight” would circumvent these settings (ie. delivering messages from people I’ve hidden or normally wouldn’t see status updates from just because they’ve paid for that increased exposure).

Bottom line is that if your newsfeed becomes littered with individual advertising-type posts rather than being filled with relevant content from people you want to interact with, people will either start hiding or unfriending more people or they’ll use Facebook less.

According to TechCrunch, the feature is currently being tested in New Zealand.

Filed Under: Internet, Marketing, News, Sales, Social Media Tagged With: Facebook, highlight, Marketing, newsfeed, revenue, spam

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