So you think you know Facebook huh!!

So you think you know Facebook huh!!

So you think you know Facebook huh, that it can drive traffic, leads & customers to your business & site. But do you actually know who is using it and for what?

Let’s review some of the highlights from the kingly social media networking experience of Facebook.com and how to best optimize your engagement strategy to eventually make the most out of your efforts.

With this post, you can actually extract a lot more than you are by knowing your audience on Facebook.com and how to keep them engaged by posting contents that resonates with them.

# There are over 950 million people on Facebook.com worldwide with 223 million are from Europe alone.

# 500 million people login to FB each day, a 48% increase from 2010 to 2011. However 83 million profiles on FB are fake profiles.

# People from the age group of 25 – 34 are the most active lot on FB and 5 new profiles are made on FB every second. Of the total number of people on FB, 47% are male & 53% female.

# Traffic on FB is the highest midweek between 1 – 3 pm with 18% higher engagement on Thursdays & Fridays.

# 300 millions photos are uploaded each day on FB and the average time spent on FB is 20 minutes per visit.

# Every 60 seconds, 136000 photos are uploaded, 500100 comments are posted and 293000 statuses are uploaded.

# 50% of FB users between the age group 18 – 24 check FB when they wake up and 1 in 5 page views on FB occur in the US.

# 42% marketers agree that FB is critical or important to their business with an increase of 176% in brand engagement in the year 2011.

# 62% marketers said that social media became more important to their business in the last 6 months of 2012.

# 77% B2C customers are acquired from FB as compared with 43% B2B customers and of which retail is the top industry.

# Interestingly 8% of US companies have fired someone for what they have posted on social media.

# 80% of US social network users prefer to connect to brands through FB and 46% brands have seen an increase in user engagement with the new FB business timeline feature.

# Brands have seen an increase of 65% in user engagement of interactive content with the new timeline feature and 72% marketers handle social media in-house.

# 9:1 is the ratio of views to shares of FB comments

# 43% of people aged between 20 – 29 use FB for marketing +11 hours per week.

# Auto posting on FB decreases likes & comments by 70%.

# 53% of shoppers who clicked through from a friend’s FB page have made a purchase and spends an average of 102 USD on a retail site.

# 51% fans are more likely to purchase from a brands they have “Like” on FB.

# 67% US online consumers trusts information and advice they hear on FB.

# 56% people are more likely to “Recommend” a brand after becoming a fan on FB.

# 33% US online consumers made a purchase decision based on “Recommendations” from friends on FB.

# 70% of FB consumers follow “Links” posted by friends & family on FB

# Brands on FB extend their reach of friends of fans by 50% – 200%

# 90% of marketers plan to use FB ads in the future and 56% marketers have increased their FB ad budget for 2012

# 68% marketers say that FB ads are effective in fan & customer acquisition.

# 36% of advertisers have driven traffic from their FB ads to an external landing page.

# Average cost per click increased by 25% between Q4 2011 to Q1 2012.

# Average FB advertising costs in 2012 for CPC (Cost per Click) is $1.14 and CPM (Cost per 1000 Impression) is $.12

# 95% of all wall posts are not answered by brands & advertisers on FB.

Data Source & Content Credit:

The following extracts have been taken from the eBook “47 Facebook Handy Stats and Charts” by Amanda Sibley from the Hubspot.com paid marketing team and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.com is to bring in the key highlights of the eBook in brief.

Improving Inbox Placement in 10 Easy Steps

Get your hands on our first infographic based on the following post by http://blog.kissmetrics.com/avoid-the-spam-folder/. The credit for the content and suggestions is solely owned by KISSmetrics.com and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.Com is to share the details in short.

Avoiding the Spam Folder: http://pinterest.com/pin/80642649550020714/

Follow our Board on Email Marketing Tips: http://pinterest.com/pallabkakoti/email-marketing-tips/

Thanks to this great post from Blog.KISSmetrics.com and brought to you by Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.Com, we look at these simple foolproof steps to avoid the spam folder for mailer marketing campaigns, where the focus always has & shall always be Inbox Placement!

Improving Inbox Placement in 10 Easy Steps

1. AVOID PURCHASE LIST

Purchased lists are ticking time bombs, waiting to devastate your reputation as a sender. Riddled with dead emails and spam traps, they quickly inform mailbox providers that you break the rules by sending unsolicited emails.

2. AVOID PURCHASE LIST

Spam filters analyze your content. There are no magic keywords to enhance deliverability, but limiting the use of risky words – such as free, buy, promo, etc. – reduces the likelihood of your emails landing in the spam folder.

3. TEAM UP WITH A RELIABLE ESP

ESPs that send only solicited emails & ban spammers from their platforms have greater credibility with mailbox providers and customers experience undisturbed inbox delivery by following the steps outlined in this post

4. GET CERTIFIED

If you are on a dedicated IP, look at the certification provided by a Return Path.com. They audit your mailing practices & can get you a Sender Score Certified status guarantying that you inbox at most of the major ISPs out there.

5. AVOID DIRTY TRICKS

Avoid getting caught red-handed in any of these practices may cause permanent damage to your deliverability ratios – Hash-busting, Deceptive Subject Lines, Misleading Claims & Image Text.

6. WHITELIST ME, PLEASE

Your Email Marketing Service (EMS) asks mailbox providers, such as Gmail & Yahoo Mail, to white list your domain or IP. That’s why it’s important to send marketing emails via a reputable EMS rather from your own email server.

7. IT MATTERS WHERE YOU ARE “FROM”

Stick to a limited number of verified, recognizable From field names. Build a good reputation for those addresses by sending only engaging, solicited emails, and you’ll notice the difference

8. NO RISK, NO PROBLEM

Your email campaigns may contain risky elements that are detrimental to the deliverability of your messages and therefore make a brief checklist like subject line testing, using ALL CAPS, etc.

9. MONITOR YOUR DELIVERABILITY

Want an easy way to monitor deliverability that costs you nothing? Add a “seeded” list of email addresses using ISPs that your customers use most often, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, and Hotmail.

10. STAY IN TOUCH

Sending emails once every two or three months can be more detrimental than sending multiple emails daily. Why? Your Customers might forget all about you.

Blog Commenting 4 Leveraging SEO

Blog Commenting 4 Leveraging SEO

Website with user-generated content via the comments section greatly improves web traffic. With that notion, we refer to some quick tips that can boost your website’s search engine rankings by simply commenting correctly & effectively and rightly balancing between the fine lines of referencing & not spamming.

Entice with a simple Call to Action:

Your blog post should be able to relate the reader’s curiosity and one good way to get them into the act is by enticing them with a simple call to action towards the conclusion of your post. Ending your article with a thought that will make them feel free and leave a question, thought or feedback in the comment section of the post would do a world of good.

Start a conversation and post responses in time:

Engage with your readers & commenter in quick time to make them feel involved by responding to their opinions and feedback. Doing so also pacifies the possibility of them asking a question to you in relation to your post.

Include your primary keywords with your comment:

Ensure that you include the primary keywords of your post while responding with your comment and one good way is by doing a quick keyword research to find the right words that are being used by searchers more often.

Blogging Call to Actions

Make your comments with complete sentences:

Follow this simple exercise of completing your comments by using the right targeted keywords that also helps in making your comments seem like less of a spam attempt to increase the keyword density of your post.

Answer your commenter comments with another question:

Lastly reply to the comments by ending them with another question that opens the possibility of continuance of the conversation with your commenter and eventually making the whole exercise a genuine piece of user-generated content.

The following post has been extracted from Problogger.net that was posted on 12 February 2013 and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.com is to bring in the key highlights of the post to its reader base.

Why people unsubscribe from Permission Emails?

Why people unsubscribe from Permission Emails?

Blogs4Bytes came across this useful data on email marketing describing reasons why subscribers opt to unsubscribe from permission based email campaigns. The data was collated by ExactTarget’s “The Social Break Up” report and was published on a blog post by Ellie Mirman titled “28 Quick Tips for Customizing Your Email Preference Center”.

Email Subscription management is undoubtedly one of the most effective marketing strategies that allows marketers to retain subscriber, grow market reach, build brand loyalty & collate valuable feedback data. However a large chunk of email IDs eventually opts out from mailer campaigns. The following post reasons with the “why” factor for unsubscribe ratio from permission based mailer campaigns.

54% opts out from email campaign because they receive emails too frequently with 49% affirming that the mailer content is repetitive or uninteresting over a period of time while 47% says that they receive too many emails and therefore need to get off some companies lists.

25% says that the content they have been receiving wasn’t relevant at all from the start while 24% reports that they prefer seeking any information from the web rather than companies pushing it to them and 22% says that they have opted for a one-time offer when they signed in!

13% reports that circumstances like change of job, marriage, location etc is the reason for unsubscribing with 8% saying that they have moved to another company which is offering better information while 6% confirming that they have found out other ways of getting the relevant information from blogs, social networking pages, etc.

Based on these findings, the blog furthermore offers the follow crucial tips on email marketing aspects like #Retaining Subscribers, #Growing Reach, #Building Brand Loyalty, #Gathering Valuable Feedback & #Simplifying the Opt-Out Process and you can check out the following post “Customizing Email Subscription Preferences” at http://blogs4bytes.wordpress.com that covers the conclusive part by elaborating the tips on each of these suggestions mentioned above.

8 Filters 4 Google Analytics

8 Filters 4 Google Analytics

Reviewing Google Analytics filters and working on their integration across various websites & campaigns including mailer campaigns can really come handy. It leverages our understanding on the visitor’s behavior on any website or campaign landing pages by segmenting the filters appropriately with different call-to-actions so that the final data analysis is much more meaningful.

# Include known visitors | primarily for testing purposes | understand user behavior from know IP | helps analyze internally if the data collection is working under the mentioned profile |

# Exclude known visitors | primarily helps in removing traffic activity from known IP addresses | exclude staff & third party behavior on website to determine actual traffic reports | helps in the evaluation of key metrics like conversion rate, abandonment rate, etc |

# Include only the right website traffic | filter helps in sensitizing the traffic data without any external influences | helps decode hacking based activities on any tracking code so that the correct web stats are filtered |

Lead Generation with Google Analytics

# Force URI to lowercase | apply tracking code to score page views with different URL that includes uppercase & lowercase characters | application results to only one page view score since both URL leads to the same content |

# Combine campaign parameter to lowercase | Install lowercase filters to all campaign parameters so that unified data is collated for campaigns with lowercase & uppercase characters |

# Combine host name with uniform URI | helps in collating traffic results from one index page that is being redirected from two different domain names | helps determine the traffic source from multiple domains redirected to the same index page |

# Classify visitor campaigns, medium or referrer score | helps monitor different campaigns from different traffic sources to evaluate the results better | for example determine traffic source from PPC campaigns, email campaigns etc

# Classify the data from geographic locations | helps define traffic source from different locations to analyze visitor behavior from specific locations |

# All query parameters | helps determine traffic sources for websites that runs multiple technical queries all of which land on the similar destination pages based on users activity |

The following post has been extracted from – 8 Useful Google Analytics Filters – by Paul Koks published at http://online-metrics.com/8-useful-google-analytics-filters/  and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.Com is to bring in the key details of the story in brief to its reader base.

Email Marketing Mistakes (Part 2): Content. Mobility. Metrics

Email Marketing Mistakes (Part 2): Content. Mobility. Metrics

Continuing from our last post on Email Marketing Mistakes (Part 1): Misrepresentation, Assumption, Filters - the following post discusses the other common mistakes with mailer marketing campaigns that needs to be avoided for the roll out of a successful campaign. The post primarily discusses mailer content, mobility & metrics to measure that helps in the evaluation of the campaign.

Making your emails elaborate

Play safe and use only textual design elements in your mailer layout with lesser dependency on images to convey the message or the call-to-actions. Although images convey your message more effectively and instantaneously without much reading required from the recipient, they may pose problems across users who prefer seeing your mail on their mobile phones or via an email client that blocks images by default. However alt tags does the job in such a scenario and therefore the ideal suggestion would be to deploy various versions of your mailer layout and study the conversion ratio to determine what works better for you!

Email Marketing Mistakes

Disregarding mobile

Continuing further from our last point about optimizing your mailers to suit the smart mobile phone users today for one simple reason that suffices everything else – mobile is here to stay! Therefore mobile optimization of your mailer campaign is an essential element for marketer to get accustomed with and pay heed to, especially with the range of smart phone OS ranging from an iOS, Android, or Windows device.

Relying on open rate as an important measure

Considering only the open rate of your mailer campaigns metrics to determine its success is not an accurate measure and the focus should rather be on the actual click through rate measured via the mailer’s call-to-actions.

Disregarding customer requirements/knowledge

Target your email subscriber list based on the interest level of each subscriber and not just randomly send them mailer on each & every other thing you have to offer. Monitor your subscriber’s engagement history to determine their interest and target mailer themes according to the interest level of your subscribers.

Not modifying messages

Create different mailer layouts otherwise referred to as AB testing to determine which mailer layout, content copy and banner visual recorded the best stats and plan future campaigns based on these data. Don’t be monotonous and continue sending the same mailer layout with the same old boring content. Instead make it exciting. Think what would stimulate you as a reader if you receive such a mailer and plan accordingly!

Irregularity

Maintain visual branding consistently across your mailer campaigns so that subscriber could easily recall your branding by using one sender name for your campaigns as inconsistency in these aspects may lead to confusion in your reader’s mind leading to unsubscribe.

The following post is based on the blog titled “15 Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid” published by Position2.com and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.Com is to bring in the key highlights to its reader base.

Read more more mailer marketing campaigns & stay updated with all the latest news & updates from the mailer marketing domain by following the group on “Email Marketing Essentials“.

Email Marketing Mistakes (Part 1): Misrepresentation, Assumptions, Filters.

Email Marketing Mistakes (Part 1): Misrepresentation, Assumption, Filters.

Email marketing has always been and shall always be the most responsive marketing strategy in the digital domain with clear statistical report from recent surveys confirming an average of 61% respondents affirming that they regularly read mails from companies and another 77% respondents from a different survey stating that they prefer receiving permission based mailers.

Keeping these data into perspective, we look into some of the common email marketing mistakes that marketers must avoid in order to drive a successful mailer campaign.

Misrepresentation

Unfulfilled promises made to entice the reader that otherwise does not yield the benefits cited in the mailer leads to a loss of your reputation and degrade the impressions of customer loyalty towards your product, services or brand value. Always ensure that you stand by what you state on your mailer starting from the subject liner down to the actual CTA of the campaign.

No connection between Email and Landing Page (LP)

Ensure that your email call-at-action leads the reader to an effective landing page that corroborates what you have claimed on your mailer subject liner through the content body. If you do not follow this much advised connection, you will eventually compromise a drop out of the conversation with your customers.

Mailer Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Overdose of content

Mailer content body should always be concise and to the point with minimal call-to-actions that are highly visible so that your reader could comprehend what is expected out of them. You need to win your customers confidence and therefore your conciseness in the mailers call-to-action does the job effectively.

Using words that trigger spam filters

Be careful with the words you select on your mailer content, more specifically on the subject liner as spam filters today are way more intelligent and could easily capture some particular words that they may determine as spam triggers. Here is a list of spam words complied by Hubspot.com that you need to avoid.

Assuming that everyone on your list wants your emails

Email campaigns with the objective of reengaging subscribers who haven’t responded to your call-to-actions as they should be is an important aspect for marketers to pay heed to. The need to keep a close eye on each subscriber’s engagement history helps you build a good email subscriber list for the long run and keep cleaning subscribers who have a low engagement level regularly.

Dreading unsubscribe

Respect the reader’s choice to request the removal of their email subscription from your campaign list and an average unsubscribe rate of under 1% should not be a matter of concern for marketers. Rather eye them as potential dead subscribers who would have otherwise needed your attention in having them cleaned from your campaign list over a period of time due to their low engagement scores.

Not thinking of email as a lead generator

Email campaigns are channels of high value lead generation and not just limited to lead nurturing. In fact, they both constitute a perfect combination of lead generation & nurturing and therefore marketers must include social sharing and forward button on every email campaign so that the recipients could easily spread and share your call-to-actions across the social networking domain.

The following post is based on the blog titled “15 Common Email Marketing Mistakes to Avoid” published by Position2.com and the role of Blogs4Bytes.WordPress.Com is to bring in the key highlights to its reader base.

Read more more mailer marketing campaigns & stay updated with all the latest news & updates from the mailer marketing domain by following the group on “Email Marketing Essentials“.

Building Your Email Subscriber List

Building Your Email Subscriber List

Email marketing has been tried, tested & proven to be one of the most effective, engaging and revenue generating means of marketing campaigns from the digital domain. With that being said, the need to constantly build your email marketing subscribers list is the prima forte for all email marketers. The goal is to ideate consistently to come up with ideas & tactics that help build your audience and in turn grow your business!

If you have a sales force on the phone or a help desk to take care of customer queries, work with them to have a mandatory scripted acknowledgement seeking callers to get listed on the company’s email marketing list. Offer them the benefits of doing so by keeping them informed about best deals, products updates, new launches and more such information related to your business domain.

Promote sign ups on your company website or blog by integrating subscription forms at prominent high visibility pages and enticing users with special texts describing the value additions for the user’s association.

Best Practices Email Subscriber List

Ideate to publish your email marketing campaigns online by providing the subscriber to view the email in a web browser as well so that the mailer content could be indexed by search engines. This will furthermore boost possibilities to advocate the need to propagate inbound links to your business website. Thus offering your subscriber to view the mailer edition in a web browser can serve you both ways, get indexed and get better inbound links to your website or company blog.

Embed forwarding features on the mailer body to propagate the campaign more in lines of the most honored marketing strategy in the world – word-of-mouth! Using features like “forward-to-a friend” or “refer-a-friend”, you allow your mailer campaign to reach new geographies of digital domains across the globe and strengthen your overall marketing reach.

Venture out to other popular blogs, Facebook pages, LinkedIn.com groups, Twitter feeds etc and jump into conversations by actively commenting, liking & sharing the blog post across your social community. With such a participation that is dedicated towards honest contributions to their efforts on a consistent basis will eventually add up in increasing your website traffic and in turn helps grow your email list too.

To conclude, building your email marketing subscriber list is a slow moving process that requires your patience, determination & diligence to succeed. Your email marketing list won’t grow overnight and the key is definitely in meeting your expectations for the long run. Stay focused with your efforts by following the best practices suggested in aligning your goals for maximum attention and success will surely meet up with you!

Monitoring Email Subscriber Engagements

Monitoring Email Subscriber Engagements

Harnessing the data of your mailer marketing subscribers list to determine their behavioral pattern in relevance to your campaigns goes a long way in defining your goals and eventually help you deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. Create targeted contact list based on the deliverability of mailer campaigns by segmenting the exclusion of non-responsive contacts based on unsubscribe and hard bounces.

Ensure that you collect good data for your campaigns and one good way for the same is by thinking about the business before setting up relevant custom fields for your subscribers to fill in. Don’t just limit the fields to name & email address but target questions that help determine the subscriber’s age, gender and interest to segment your contact list generically. The key is to collect good data to know the likability factor of the subscriber and thereafter targeting relevant mailer contents & call-to-actions based on these findings.

Ensure that you keep a good eye on the statistics of your mailer marketing results by paying attention to how your recipients are interacting with your campaigns. Understand important metrics like open rate, click rate as well as forwards and share of your mailer campaigns and segment the contact list accordingly. Segmenting subscribers based on their engagement scores and contact ratings help you analyze the right content body with effective call-to-action that should go to them and thus help you adjust your marketing strategy.

Deploy a follow-up campaign based on the ratio of subscribers who have opened your mailer or who have clicked your mailer links. Open rate confirms that your mailer subject line is working for you and click rate affirms that subscribers are responding to your mailer content materials.

Subscriber profile monitoring goes a long way in the success of your mailer campaigns as each subscriber develop a history of engagement in relation to your mailer content. Therefore segmenting subscribers based on their engagement ratio & contact ratings helps determine the subscriber’s behavioral pattern and eventually gives you relevant data to consider targeting subjective mailers with varying call-to-actions.

Success with Pinterest.com for Businesses

The following post is in continuation to our story titled “Pinterest 4 Business” that primarily discusses how businesses can effectively use Pinterest.com to meet marketing goals like increased website traffic and lead generation.

Success with Pinterest.com for Businesses

For businesses, Pinterest.com will work effectively by pinning existing visual contents from web-pages, using strong visuals for blog articles, deploy interactive info-graphics & data charts, and create Pinning eBook & book covers and sharing photographs of customers as visually interactive testimonials.

Create user generated PINBOARDS allowing users to share their own images & visuals and offer a great opportunity to involve customers, fans & followers in your marketing drives. Hold a contest seeking users to share visuals of your products and why they love them so that other users could also gain insight and favour to go with your products & services.

Adding the PIN-IT button across websites will allow your web traffic to share your web page contents just like any other social network tool and help expose your brand image to a new audience. Garner an insight to evaluate & compare users buying persona by keeping an eye on their behaviour and eventually push leads for conversion by targeting a custom message.

Each PIN allows you to add links in the description to increase the likelihood of driving more traffic to your website with the additional option to RE-PIN for a combined impact. Create a PINBOARD of interesting videos related to your business and drive more engagement for fans, followers & customers.

Pinterest.com also supports the usage of HASHTAGS that allow users to make their content search-friendly by tagging a common HASHTAG that is also used on other social networks like Twitter, Facebook or Google+ to leverage an integrated cross channel campaign. Create a PINBOARD for an offline event using pictures & visual footage to create a buzz prior to the scheduled event.

Pinterest.com leverages a business personality using a PINBOARD that showcases employees and the professional life around the office by showing them work together, making a product or service and show some of the fun activities that your business participates like company outings, parties, annual events, award ceremonies etc.

To conclude, success with Pinterest.com is all about showcasing how your business products & services are highlighted to fit into the lifestyles of your target audience.

The following based on the eBook titled “How to use Pinterest for Business” by Hubspot.com. The role of Blogs4Bytes.Wordpress.com is to collate the information offered in simple words for users from all walks of life from the digital domain looking for the objective to drive website traffic & generate leads.