It's time to mobilize your social fans

With Cyber Monday in the rear view mirror, here are some thoughts on the importance of capturing the mobile follower. Since joining Friend2Friend, we have ensured that every social branded experience is fully mobile-ready.  It's been great to put all that Loopt experience to work!

Read the recent article at Direct Marketing News:http://www.dmnews.com/its-time-to-mobilize-your-social-fans/article/273864/

Social mobile is exploding

Every key indicator worth watching shows that the mobile Internet is exploding. The market has now finally reached a point where smartphone and tablet usage, and accompanying Internet speed and application performance, are such that users actually find their phones — and tablets — legitimate and worthwhile alternatives to their desktop or laptop computer. This, combined with critical audience size, opens up an enormous untapped market for brands to engage social mobile fans.

See this post just posted to Friend2Friend's blog with some of the latest stats pointing to the explosion of social mobile. 

Are you failing your Facebook fans on mobile?

Last year, Forrester predicted that U.S. brands will spend $2.7B on their social media marketing efforts by the end of 2013, with that number growing to $5B by 2016. And with one in five of all Internet clicks in the U.S. happening on Facebook, brands are taking the cultivation and engagement of their fan base on Facebook seriously.

But unless brands wake up to their Facebook “mobile problem,” they will waste significant marketing dollars as well as audience clicks. The mobile problem I’m talking about is, surprisingly, unrelated to Facebook mobile advertising.

And it’s an issue that has yet to be widely discussed. Brands have been quietly struggling to engage with their Facebook fans who connect with them from a mobile device. We recently conducted a field review that illustrated that Facebook promotional apps on seven of the top ten most popular brand fan pages failed to successfully engage mobile fans.

See the article written for Friend2Friend and successfully placed at MediaPost on this critical subject.

How top brands are failing their fans on Facebook mobile

Not that it’s should come as any surprise, but this past Cyber Monday’s sales generated by mobile phone visitors jumped by 260% since 2010 — more than 6x the growth of sales overall. The same study by Deloitte tells us to expect that 68% of smartphone owners will be using their handheld devices for holiday shopping this year. In a separate study released in September 2012 we are told that those mobile consumers will not like visiting a poorly designed mobile experience on their smartphone.

Google tells us that mobile-friendly web experiences drive sales, and that while 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly Website, 96% say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices. So it’s clear then. You cannot ignore the mobile component of your marketing plan.

But what should you be thinking about, particularly with regard to the social component of your campaigns, when it comes to mobile? How do you approach mobile Facebook fans? Facebook users are accessing the site through their mobile devices in ever increasing numbers. In October of this year, Facebook announced they had 604 million monthly active users (MAUs) — an increase of 61% year over year. This compared to a 26% YoY for MAUs overall.

Where I work at Friend2Friend, an analysis of our clients’ branded Apps and Facebook Pages through 2012 has seen a significant increase in mobile activity. An average of 11% of all traffic to our branded mobile-enabled Facebook Apps now come from smartphones, a trend that has grown by 450% since January of 2012.

In addition, we have seen a tremendous growth in mobile likes for our clients on Facebook, with 350% more likes coming from mobile since January 2012.

Read this blog post for a study I performed of top brands and how they performed with mobile campaigns on Facebook.

Facebook Timeline for Brands - 6 month report card

Opinion article written and placed in iMedia Connection today, marking the 6 month anniversary for brands on Facebook. Sept. 1 marked six months since Facebook automatically switched brand pages from news-feed-style pages to the "Pages for Business," or Timeline view. Almost immediately, there was a flurry of panic about a reduction in engagement with brands due to the switch. Yet there's clearly plenty of debate: A brief search in Google reveals as many articles stating that engagement has increased as articles stating it has decreased since the introduction of Timeline -- with further confusion resulting from different ways of measuring engagement and competing points of view from reputable sources such as Reuters and the research firm Ipsos, as well as comScore. Read more at iMediaConnections.com

Who won the brand social Gold at the Olympics?

Article written and submitted to ADOTAS.COM, reviewing how brands did at the Olympics for their serious marketing sponsorship dollars. In the four years since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Facebook has grown from 100 million users to close to a billion —what a difference four years makes. So, how have the Olympic sponsoring brands taken advantage of this immense new global audience? In 2008, there were two ‘levels’ of brand sponsors at the Olympics — the eleven TOP Partners (Acer, Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow, GE, McDonalds, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung and Visa) who are reported to have paid an average of $100 million each to buy the world-wide marketing rights over a four-year cycle, covering a Winter and a Summer games. And, about 40 other sponsors spending from around $15M to $60M each for more limited rights. (You can view a full list of those sponsors, and their contributions, here.) Read the whole article here.

Social media lessons for travel marketers

Article written and placed for Friend2Friend in iMediaConnection today, covering social media lessons for travel marketers. While websites catering to the “wisdom of the crowds” have shaped travel decisions online for well over a decade, social media sites such as Facebook represent much more powerful opportunities for marketers to reach and engage with new travelers. In fact, today it’s often trusted recommendations from our Facebook friends (via their Facebook news feed) that make us aware of a destination in the first place. And, when it comes to sharing stories about one’s favorite vacation spot, “like” often turns to “love” (i.e., purchasing airplane tickets and booking hotel rooms). Read the whole article on iMediaConnection here.

How do you create a social loyalty loop?

Opinion piece written and placed in MarketingProfs -- how do you create a social loyalty loop? The article covered:

• The definition of Social Loyalty Loop
• Four ways to fuel a social loyalty loop
• How to use social media to engage customers and keep them loyal

Read more at MarketingProfs.

Why engagement is the key to success on Facebook

Article written and placed discussing how brands must look to engagement as the key to success on Facebook. It’s been 17 years since the first online banner ads appeared on the Internet. 15 years since the Internet Advertising Bureau was founded. Between then and now, measurement and tracking of online advertising has become increasingly predictable. Brand marketers know what to expect. Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175054/measuring-engagement-is-key-to-success-for-brand-m.html#ixzz27ouog1Ae Read the whole article on Mediapost here.

Social Super Tuesday -- how the candidates stacked up on Facebook

Another article written and placed this week. Very delighted with the result — on Techcrunch, as the first opinion piece of the day. "Every vote counted on Super Tuesday. The results coming down to the wire, with Mitt Romney narrowly beating Rick Santorum by only 0.8% in the Ohio primary. While some may argue that the issues elevated Mitt above the rest, as a social marketer I can’t help to wonder if social savvy determined the winners and losers..." Read the whole article here.

Friends don't share ads with friends

Opinion piece written and placed in Adotas today. Facebook challenges brands to market their message in an environment where people behave differently, communicate differently and find information differently. Facebook isn’t a microsite. It isn’t a brand website. It’s a social environment. So, brands have to step up and market in a way that’s contextually sensitive to that social environment, and to keep their fans engaged in that environment. You can read the entire article here.

Welcoming Facebook's redefinition of advertising

Blog post written and published about the latest updates to Facebook, announced February 2012. You can read the full post here.

How to monetize fans on Facebook

This is an excerpt from an article written and posted on iMedia Connection, February 27, 2012. For the full article, go here.

Within the last year, marketers have raced to grow their legions of Facebook fans. In fact, it has become a badge of honor, so to speak, among brands to reach the million-person-Facebook fan count. The reasoning goes, "Once I build up a sizeable fan base, I'll figure out if, and how, I can monetize them." Many see social commerce as poised to experience massive growth in the next few years. Booz & Company recently predicted that sales from social commerce will hit $30 billion worldwide and $14 billion in the U.S. by 2015. And with a majority (58 percent) of consumers now researching products online before purchasing, it's time to close the loyalty loop and try integrating true social elements into the online purchase. What does that mean? I buy something. I tell two friends. And they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on (our nod to the 80s Faberge commercials).

Read more on iMedia Connection, about ways to jump start your social commerce campaigns on Facebook and other social platfoms.

What the Super Bowl and marketers can learn from socially savvy sports fans

This article written for, and accepted by, on VentureBeat. While sports fans eagerly await who will win the 2012 Super Bowl and look forward to diving into chips and a Frito Pie or two, marketers are eager to see who the winners (and losers) are on the social media front. Clearly big brands want to make sure their (estimated) $3.5 million investment for a 30-second spot pays off, but how do they go beyond the 100 million audience to cultivate new and engaged fans via social media after February 5th?

Here are a few suggestions on what marketers can learn from the success of sports engagement on social media.

Your fans have shifted to social…Refresh your playbook

Social media is changing how fans cheer on their teams. At the time of the 2006 World Cup, Facebook was still limited only to college and high school students. But then everything changed in 2010. At the South Africa World Cup, where viewing parties, mobile app badges, continual tweets from players, and live streams on social networks inspired a growing community of fans to share with socially-inspired sports fans around the world.

Games were watched worldwide in record numbers (19.4 million people watched the US vs. Ghana game). Twitter reported that the Women’s World Cup soccer final scored a new record with 7,196 “tweets per second,” the most tweeted moment in Twitter history. And number 2? Brazil’s elimination from Copa America! Social vuvuzelas were heard all over the world (and not only on those incredibly annoying vuvuzela mobile apps). Read the full article here on VentureBeat.