Online Advertising - Blogs 11/13/13 & 11/17/13

Ok, we are now starting on week eleven of my Social Media for Business class, and I feel like a long distance runner who has just hit the “runner’s wall” – you know that physical and mental struggle their reported to feel when the runner needs to make it through those last few miles of the race.

It's becoming a long semester for me as I try to finish this class and others, while also preparing to try to reenter the work force. After a long hiatus from the working world, I have been buried within the world of College Academia. And I frankly have just realized I am tired of toiling with the academia - it’s time to put all this marketing management theory into some  more practical applications and start performing in a real marketing job.  

Anyway enough of my venting – I’m sorry - I know it is almost over. I will hopefully soon find some work, and then I will be complaining about how I wish I was back in school again.

So back to the Social Media Blog for this week; where we are studying about using Facebook Ads, and other online advertising options; which are now generally available at a lower cost than traditional advertising, to promote our business or other organizations online.     

As I have covered in some earlier blogs, where we had learned from the first few lessons of the social media class; we must always keep in mind our consistentbranding (online/offline) with themes, colors, text, and brand aesthetics; as well as practice the principles of using good web designs.  

It has been said that the use of Banner Ads are becoming the dinosaursof online advertising. Banner ads are advertising boxes (like an online Bill Board) used when you use a separate ad server to drive traffic and promote your products or brands/business through the use of embedded text and/or graphic images placed onto a separate webpage.  

When a consumer clicks on the advertisement (banner) it will take them to a landing webpage - usually the marketer’s business home page or their product and service pages.   Many feel this is a “content interruptive” medium - which is going to go slowly extinct over the coming decades as the use of more “native advertising methods” are becoming more popular; such as with Facebook or with Twitter advertising models.  

 “Native Advertising” is defined in our class lesson this week, as the use of photos, articles, or videos, that “blend in with the overall social platform” - they are placed strategically to fit in with the discussions (within the community), and are related with the overall social content.  

As Social Media is constantly evolving, so should you and your business with the use of more Native Advertising on all your news feeds and social media channels.  

Your ad content  as well as your user generated - native advertising – should address some actual user concerns and provide some solutions to their problems, as well as introduce and provide introductions to your products/services.  These “conversations in real time” are also made into “personal endorsements” when other users (i.e. Facebook friends) are described as using them or shown to be endorsing or recommending your brand.    

Twitter is also a good low cost way (tool) to advertise your organization or business, and can help to tie all your different Social Media Channels together; as well as drive in more (new and old) customers, or web traffic to your other social web places.      

Twitter is also becoming more popular - maybe even more popular than Facebook with the younger audiences; although Facebook is still growing and gaining popularity with many followers or users within the older demographics or from earlier generations (over 40).  

Today I will be highlighting some of the Facebook and Twitter Advertising options that are available online; as well as cover some of my past and current plans or ideas for using Twitter and Facebook Advertising Platforms for the Sabrina Keller Foundation:  

As I had discussed in an earlierblog, Twitter is a good place to do market research and promote your business or drive traffic to your website and other social content such as on Facebook, Pinterest and others.  

As I had discussed you can use Twitter to do consumer research and learn how to grow organically by listening and joining the consumer conversations that are related to your business or industry. Make friends by following others and creating your own “followers” through tweeting about your business and relevant consumer social content. Another way to grow your business/organization is through Twitter’s paid advertising platforms and creating some “Calls to Action.”   

Twitter uses a “Pay-Per-Click” model for their paid advertising programs. They offer three features for reaching out and engaging twitter users with “promoted accounts”, “promoted tweets”, and “promoted trends.”   All the advertising is marked “promoted” so twitter users can distinguish them from the regular organic social content. It is a low cost option with their pay per click billing methods as compared to other online advertising such as with Google Ad words (search listings).  It also has key target consumer features that are excellent for reaching only those twitter users who are most likely going to be interested in your products, services and brands.  

The “Promoted Accounts” option is a good way to increase your Twitter Followers (but it is a bit more costly form of advertising than just using daily organic tweets), and to promote your brand name/business, products and services, or organization.   

The promoted accounts feature displays informational widgets and will link your account name on another Twitter user’s homepage as a display with suggestions on “Who to Follow.” When you create a largertwitter following – you create a solid consumer base – and you can begin to better maximize the powers of exponential social marketing.   

“Promoted Trends” are the most expensive advertising feature on Twitter, and it allows a larger marketer to be able to display “consumer trends” or topics, which they can choose to promote and the can be seen system wide on all the Twitters users homepages/feeds.  

“Promoted Tweets” is the most prevalent advertising tools available- they will act just like regular organic tweets within the twitter news feeds, but they have some added perks with more targeting and timing capabilities and with consumer reach; which can act better to increase your possible consumer engagements or calls to action. 

The Sabrina Keller Foundation is a nonprofit and has little money to spend on paid advertising methods online or off. Most promotions in the past have been through the use of organic tweets about upcoming events and educational information (usually through Facebook posts). The following screen shot is how the Sabrina Keller Foundations has made use of twitter recently at no cost organically:   

 The following is a proposed ad I will present to the SKF”s Board and utilize if they chose to make a paid announcement – a promoted Tweet for an upcoming event in February 2014.  

With this this ad I would utilize a “Key Word” targeting strategy -  using key words such as bowling, family fun, parents, kids, and fund raiser among several others (key words) to target people who are interested in these topics and are also  located in the  San Diego or Los Angeles Metro areas.  I would propose we spend no more than twenty dollars total budget and try to reach a goal for gaining one or two user engagements each day (about $1.50 per click) during the coming weeks prior to the event. It would be a personal donation by me and an experiment to find out if the use of a paid tweets strategy could benefit the SKF Foundation in the long term.  

Facebook also has several types of no cost or low-cost - paid advertising options that the Sabrina Keller Foundation might want to experiment with over time.  

The Facebook Ad is the most obvious one to start with - which will usually be seen on the right hand side of your traditional personal Facebook profile/page and news feed.  They are straight forward ads and will usually make no attempts to be like native advertising – and will not necessarily pertain to the current discussions or social content.  It will often be linked to some external organization’s homepage or a Facebook business page.  Here is an example of a Facebook ad I could create for SKF and their upcoming Annual Bowling Fundraiser:

It would link to our Facebook events page as follows:

The second type of advertisement you can make on Facebook is called the “Sponsored Story.”  When a fan or user has engaged with one of your existing ads, it will also appear in their friend’s news feeds as an ad or brand that their friend has already liked or endorsed; thus increasing your reach and possible engagement further out into the Facebook community.  The following is an example of a sponsored story as depicted by HubspotMarketing:

 

A third form of Facebook paid advertising is the “Promoted Post” – a promoted post is when you promote an existing post, image, current event, or social comments and announcements, etc. - it can help send page visitors - people back to your older content further down on your page feed.

If you’re using any of the numerous specialty apps available by Facebook – you can promote those business or sponsored apps you have available to your fans; as well as create user-fan stories or advertisements about your users who are engaging with them – with their personal endorsements then appearing on their friends/networks news feeds or profile pages.   

Finally there are paid Event Sponsorships – where you can pay to have your events promoted to those Facebook users most likely to attend an event like yours.  

The second half of this week’s assignment – with our second blog which I have decided to combine here into one blog for this week’s assignment - was to talk about how to use these Facebook and Twitter advertising applications more organically; for when we do not have much for spending money and cannot create larger advertising budgets.  

As I had already displayed above the Sabrina Keller Foundation has created calls to action with their Facebook posts; which asked our followers to download an event flyer and pass the word on to others through more word of mouth communications.  This call to action cost us no money and was posted frequently as needed to get our followers attention over the coming weeks up to the Panda Express event. 

I have also included some screen shots (below) of some other messages I have posted and some of our other social content which was posted over the past few weeks which cost us no financial resources except for some of the minimal time I needed to create them:   

Social Content:

Calls to Action: