We are looking forward to Mike’s upcoming presentation: “Building Traffic with Social Media” at UNCW on March 1st!  This informative seminar will help business owners take their existing social media campaigns to the next level with helpful tips and strategies on building quality traffic.  Many thanks to our friends at the SBTDC (Small Business & Technology Development Center) for hosting this event. We hope you’ll join us!

Register for Sage Island’s Social Media Strategy Seminar by Feb. 23rd!

We were excited when long-time customer The North Face Breckenridge (Breck Gear) came to us for guidance in social media marketing! As you know, there are a number of Social Marketing tools one can use to reach out to potential product buyers around the United States. Our end goal for Breck Gear was to help increase qualified traffic to the company website through social media tools. By exploring this new marketing opportunity for them, we ultimately helped them reach a broader audience through the use of two simple, yet powerful social tools: WordPress Blog and Facebook.

WordPress Blog:
Breck Gear already had a blog through Blogger in which they frequently updated content, which was awesome, but it was completely hidden and not accessible from the website; it was also at a third party domain rather than the site domain. By being so hidden, this already established blog wasn’t giving Breck Gear a chance to showcase their posts. Our suggestion here was to build a link between the blog and website (as shown in the navigation on the site), reskin the blog in WordPress (to have the blog match the look and feel of the site) and build the blog under a directory in the domain (to ultimately give the site’s domain ‘credit’ for all that blog content).

Facebook:
Here, again, Breck Gear was a step ahead and already had a Facebook page, but we had a few suggestions for improvement. First and foremost, we suggested adjusting the account name from ‘Breck Gear’, to ‘The North Face Breckenridge’ to allow us to capitalize on the North Face association. We then suggested a creative landing page and efforts to get at least 25 ‘likes’ in order to create a vanity URL for the page.

Since our suggestions on the blog and Facebook page, Breck Gear has really taken off and are currently working on building out the photo gallery, adding videos and linking posts from the blog to the Facebook page. In the future, once they have a solid following/community, they can have fun creating a Facebook campaign or contest. I encourage everyone to check out their new blog and Facebook page and leave a comment!

LinkedIn, the world’s Largest Professional Network, will be one of the first Social Media sites to open their company to the public. The much anticipated Initial Public Offering (IPO) is set for May 16th and expected to bring in as much as $274 million, way up from the original $175 million.  LinkedIn is prepared to offer 7.84 million shares starting at $32, which some investors like Warren Buffet think is overpriced. The business social media site has more than 100 million users as of March 2011 compared to Facebook who has more than 500 million. The company will trade under symbol LNKD, so watch out for it as it should appear on the NYSE this month.

There is also talk of Facebook and Twitter following the same suit and going public sometime this year. It will be interesting to see how these financial developments change our sacred social media world.

Who doesn’t love a good deal? With today’s introduction of Facebook Deals, we wanted to remind everyone of the recent addition of Check-In-Deals through Facebook Places. Launched at the end of January, Check-In-Deals help consumers get special offers when checking in at a local business from a mobile device.

So the next time you are out-and-about with friends or looking for somewhere to dine, open Google Places from your Facebook mobile app. Click the check-in option, and you will be given a list of Nearby Places that are offering Check-In-Deals. Once you check-in you are able to see what offers are nearby and share those deals with your friends.

When you select a local business, you simply check-in to view and claim the deal. Simple as that! You may also notice that there are four types of Facebook Check-In-Deals:

Individual Deals: Get discounts on merchandise
Friend Deals: You and your friends can take advantage of a coupon together, you just have to tag your friends within your check-in to receive the deal
Loyalty Deals: For repeat customers that check-in frequently
Charity Deals: Local businesses will pledge to donate to a cause when you check-in

To redeem your Check-In-Deals, simply show your redemption screen to the local business offering the deal.

For more information on Check-In-Deals, visit Facebook Places. If you have any questions about Facebook Marketing, please feel free to contact our interactive marketing specialist here at Sage Island.

Facebook launched their Deals site earlier today to a small group of cities including San Francisco, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta and San Diego. The new Groupon competitor site fully utilizes all of the social features of Facebook, such as Notifications, Sponsored Stories, Likes and Shares amongst friends, email blasts and more.  Within the Facebook Deals Guide for Business they describe the Deals feature as a way to create unique social experiences for friends to enjoy together. Deals encourage people to share their excitement about your business, creating word-of-mouth for your business and can help you build long lasting relationships with your customers.

We believe this new Facebook feature is a great way to increase new customer reach, as well as increase your brand and customer loyalty. Facebook seems to be making it increasingly easier for people to recommend your business through several different sharing options within their platform. These days it is crucial to utilize the marketing features of Facebook and other social media channels because of their endless opportunities and simpler marketing tactics.

If you have any questions about Facebook Marketing, please feel free to contact us here at Sage Island.

So you recently created a Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account or branded your very own YouTube Page. Now What?

Your next step should be to track what “social customers” are saying about you and your company. Monitoring and engaging these conversations will allow you as a business owner to keep your finger on the pulse of the market, and make quick business decisions.

Facebook Insights

Facebook’s analytics tool, also known as Facebook Insights, provides you with important metrics specifically related to your company’s Facebook Fan Page. This tool allows you to view a comprehensive dashboard highlighting top level metrics around the posts and visits to your company’s Fan page. By understanding and analyzing Insight’s metrics, marketers are better prepared to respond to customer feedback and needs.

Within Facebook Insights Dashboard, you will see both User Insights and Interaction Insights. User Insights allow you to view monthly active users, total and new page Likes, Likes from referring sites, user demographics, tabs views and photo views. In addition, Interaction Insights allow you to track daily comment views, mentions within status updates, reviews, wall posts and video posts surrounding your company.

Monitoring the total number of new Fans or Likes is a valuable metric to consider. At what point did you receive the most Likes? How were you engaging these “social customers”? What content were you pushing on your Fan Page? Once you have defined the factors that contributed to this growth you will be able to cater your marketing strategy accordingly. Aside from new Fans or Likes, it is also beneficial to know the average number of comments you typically receive on any given post. Measuring this engagement metric will allow you to increase the number of posts around topics based on your fans interest. These insights gather data comparable to what you would receive from a focus group, but they are totally free.

YouTube Insights

YouTube offers a similar reporting tool known as YouTube Insights. Much like Facebook Insights, this tool allows you monitor your company’s branded YouTube Page. You can check out who is watching your videos, see what referring sites and keywords continue to drive traffic to your branded page and what videos are the most popular. You can also drill down within a specific video to see what portion particularly sparked viewer’s attention and where the interest dropped. These metrics help you understand what content your customers like, enabling you to promote related content and grow your audience.

Twitter Analytics Dashboard

With millions of tweets occurring daily, it seems only natural that you would want to monitor any conversation surrounding your brand on Twitter. While much newer than Facebook and YouTube, Twitter has several applications that allow you to monitor when people mention or follow your company. Last quarter Twitter announced a launch of a new official Twitter analytics dashboard. This dashboard highlights real-time data regarding which tweets are spreading and which Twitter users are influential in your network. The emphasis of Twitter’s analytics is focused on the fact that the data is truly real-time, allowing for branding adjustments and marketing strategy decisions to be made on the fly.

Each of these monitoring tools will provide you with a wealth of knowledge about our company. When deciding which tools are best for your brand, remember to always keep your end goal in mind. Utilizing these tools will help you better understand how people interpret your brand, and allow you to respond quickly to customer’s needs.

These days there are several different PPC options available that reach out to millions of people around the world.  Thankfully one of the largest networks in the world allows you to display your image ads on their site to all 400 million of their active users. Below are the top 5 reasons why Facebook Ads could benefit you:

1) Ad Destinations
Facebook Ads allow you to drive traffic to any destination on your fan page for an increased amount of “likes” and Facebook interaction.  You can also choose to send your traffic directly to any page on your website.  No matter what your marketing strategy is, Facebook ads are easily customizable for increased opportunity and advertising control.

2) Targeting Your Customers
Facebook allows you to target your ads to users based on their gender, age, location, birthday, relationship status, education, workplace, language, interests and more.  The more targeted your ads are, the higher your CTR will be.  You will also see a large decrease in the unprofitable clicks that you may receive in less targeted PPC campaigns.

3) Character & Image Flexibility
Facebook ads allow almost double the character limit of Google AdWords for greater ad descriptions.  They also give you the option to choose whichever thumbnail picture you would like to display above your ad copy.  These customizable options give your ads increased visual value to the consumer and allow you to say what you want to say.

4) Pricing Options
Once you’ve created your Facebook Ads you can choose to pay for impressions (CPM) or clicks (CPC).  You have total control of your daily budget and bids.  Your ads will discontinue once your budget has been met for the day. Historical data has shown that the average CPC for Facebook is dramatically lower than that of Google AdWords.

5) Reporting
Facebook has much different reporting tools than any other PPC interface we have ever seen.  They have multiple dynamic statistics that allow you to see standard PPC metrics alongside Facebook statistics such as amount of “likes”, social impressions, social CTR and more.  Another report that Facebook can generate is an Ad Demographic report that allows you to see the age, gender and location of the users that are clicking on your ads.  Lastly you can choose a Profile report that shows certain profile metrics of your clicks such as interests, favorite movies and books etc.

Here at Sage Island we have used Facebook Ads for our clients such as Warehouse Skateboards and have seen an increase of over 21,000 “likes” in 2 months.  If you have any questions about Facebook Advertising or you would like to increase your brand exposure on Facebook, please contact Sage Island to begin your social media marketing success.