Facebook Ad Mistakes To Avoid

It is important for marketers to set up and use Facebook advertising correctly.

As organic reach on Facebook continues to rapidly decline and ad impressions continue to increase , the competition is steep for marketers to keep up by ensuring ads are engaging and relevant. 

Unless you have a virtually unlimited advertising budget, your Facebook ad dollars shouldn’t be spent on qualitative goals like brand awareness or vanity metrics such as Facebook likes. Instead, your primary aim should be conversions. Ideally, your Facebook ad would catch the attention of just the right person, ready to buy, who immediately clicks through to your site and purchases your product. 

Your target audience scrolls through their Facebook feed rapidly. You must capture their attention, and you only have a fraction of a second to do so. Disrupt their feed with eye-catching creative so you can share your message. Keep a pulse on what ad styles are trending on Facebook and monitor competitor ads as well as ads outside of your industry for inspiration. However, beware, saturation is real. Fashion trends fade, and so do creative styles, so continue to try new things. Avoid turning off your potential customers with the same old same old.  

The genius of Facebook advertising is the ability to be highly targeted in reaching your ideal customer. Don’t miss the mark when it comes to the design of your ad creative. Target too broad of an audience and your message may fall flat. If you have multiple markets you’re targeting, consider segmenting your audience and creating separate creative for each.

Also keep in mind that what works best on Instagram, for instance, likely won’t be what’s best for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google. Your audience uses each of these platforms in very different ways and you cannot approach them, in the same way, expecting to get the same results.

Don’t be afraid to step outside of the norm. Your body of creative work can vary wildly without diluting your brand identity. You can maintain certain constants between ads such as your brand color or logo while still experimenting with tone, motion and design. Just remember to tie everything back to your testable, quantifiable goal and optimize for conversions. The only rule: never run a Facebook ads campaign without an active test, if at all possible. While tracking these variations can quickly become overwhelming, working with an agency or utilizing marketing automation software can simplify the process and achieve accurate results more efficiently than any one person.

The world has gone mobile! - Social Live

How do consumers seek information via the web today using mobile devices?
According to Online Publishers Association / Frank N. Magid Associates:

99.5 percent access content/information
63.1 access the Internet
62.1 percent check email
49.2 percent listen to music
46 percent play games
41.7 percent download and use apps
15 percent make purchases
15 percent read a book

Shift to Mobile Impacts B2B Significantly

 If you imagine that the mobile usage is merely a reflection of consumers logging onto social media, checking email or conducting search, or shopping, think again.

Executives lead the way in mobile adoption, validating the theory that digital assets for a business or brand must serve target audiences 24/7, and not just during business hours.

Meeting your customers wherever they work is no longer a luxury – it is a necessity. If you wish to convert interaction to action you must compel the decision-maker.

B2B Decision-Makers Rely on Mobile Devices

Mobile is preferred over the PC for executives conducting research during and after office hours, according to the IDG Global Mobile Survey 2014.

92 percent of executives own a smartphone used for business.
77 percent of executives use their smartphone to research a product or service for their business.
93 percent of executives will purchase that product via the Internet using a laptop or desktop.
86 percent use their tablet and 72 percent of executives use their smartphone to conduct research for products or services for their business.
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Instagram might not be worth the effort for every business - Social Live

It’s important to remember that Instagram might not be worth the effort for every business.

For instance, it’s only the 6th largest social media site, trailing far behind networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. If you have limited time to devote to social media marketing, you’ll have access to more users with the Big Three of social media, and Tumblr.

Instagram is also a largely mobile-based social media network, with most users perusing through photos via a smartphone app.

This means the demographic tends to skew young, making Instagram the perfect choice for a custom skateboard shop but perhaps less useful for a medical supply retailer.

You’ll have to consider your own customer demographic in order to figure out if Instagram is worth the effort.

However, effort can be reduced by linking your online store’s Instagram account to Facebook and Twitter so that any images you post are automatically posted to your other social media accounts. With this in mind, one could make the argument that Instagram is very little effort for the exposure it offers.
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HASHTAGS FOR BUSINESS AND BRAND - Social Live

Why create your own hashtag for brand, product and use it on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.

Businesses can use hashtags for a variety of reasons.

If the hashtag is already in use by a community, it’s can be a great tool for networking, lead generation and more. But businesses may choose to create their hashtag for a number of reasons, including:

Encouraging event participants to live tweet
Hosting a Twitter chat
Hosting an online Q&A
To promote a product launch
To show support for a charity or cause
The list is as long as there are reasons for using Twitter itself.

Be sure that you understand what purpose your hashtag will serve before your create it.

4 steps to creating your own hashtag

Ready to jump in and create your own branded hashtag? It’s not overly complicated. Here’s how:

Brainstorm. You want this hashtag to represent your brand and the way you will be using it – but you also want it to be short and sweet.

Come up with a list of several potential hashtags that could be used based on your business name, event, etc.

Including the year works for hashtags that will be reused yearly (for annual events, for instance), and including “chat” somewhere in the hashtag is common for weekly or monthly Twitter chats.

Research. Next, check to see that your ideal hashtag isn’t already in use. Since you’re looking to create a community around your hashtag, you want to start fresh – you don’t want to encroach on another community’s space.

Use Twitter’s search to see if and when your hashtag has ever been used, and go down the list you created in the brainstorm until you find a suitable, quiet hashtag.

Promote. Your hashtag is going to be pretty quiet if no one knows about it! Tell your ideal community – your followers, your business connections – that the hashtag exists, and let them know how you will be using it. You can send an email blast, write a blog post, put up signage in your store… use whatever promotional tools are available to you to get the word out.

Monitor. Once people know about your hashtag, it’s time to use it!

Make sure you monitor the chatter, and chime in whenever it makes sense. If you’re hosting a weekly chat, monitor and use the hashtag during that hour or so each week. If it’s an event hashtag, be sure to monitor it in the days and hours leading up to the event, during the event itself, and post-event for photos and feedback.

  ‪#‎hastagtips‬ ‪#‎socialmedia‬ ‪#‎sociallive‬ ‪#‎sociallivellc‬ ‪#‎ferndalewa‬

Should my business be on Instagram?

Last few posts we did a series on hashtags and we hope your using the tips. This next few days we will cover ‪#‎instagram‬

What Is Instagram?
...

Instagram is a social media network focused on visual images.
60 Million Photos shared every day.

There are no status updates or 140 character limits, and instead the entire update is one square image (and an optional caption).

Users ‘follow’ other users that they are interested in, and can then scroll through image after image on their newsfeed.

Ideally, you should caption the images that you post on Instagram to give your followers context, such as ‘New product ready to roll out in Autumn 2014! ‪#‎fashion‬ ‪#‎handmade‬’.

The caption helps users understand what they’re looking at, while the hashtags make your post searchable for anyone who is interested in that category.

For example, users interested in ‪#‎PlusSizeFashion‬ can look at only images that contain this hashtag -- if you use it, you’ll show up with thousands of other plus-sized designers and fashion bloggers.
While it was launched in just 2010, Instagram now has around 200 million monthly active users. Today there are over 1 billion on Instagram.

Using Instagram can allow you to show a more casual side of your business -- your products in use, the process of manufacturing them, the pile of boxes to be shipped out during Christmas shopping rush -- and build your brand through a visual story.
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