Advertisers Can Now Reach Facebook Users by Their Most Recent Activities

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Facebook just gave advertisers another benefit. Advertisers Can Now Reach Facebook Users by Their Most Recent Activities

Here is how it works. Up until this week, advertisers can target Facebook users
who took “Open Graph” actions no earlier than within 2 weeks. With today’s announcement, advertisers can now specify a shorter period.

For example, a site selling concert tickets can reach users who “listened” to a particular song within the last “3 days” instead of settling for the previous limit of “2 weeks”.

Why did Facebook introduce this feature? Simple. Recent memory increases chances of a visitor making a purchase. People have a higher propensity to purchase something that is fresh in their memories.

If you are a business that wants to take advantage of this new benefit offered by Facebook, please consult with a Facebook Ads API provider. AppAddictive is one of the approved Facebook Ads API providers. This benefit is available only with with the “target specifications” feature of Facebook, that only Facebook Ads API developers have access to.

We at AppAddictive, are very much keen to use this benefit with our existing clients. We are also constantly looking for new clients to add to our portfolio.

In fact, we are giving a client in the Retail Industry space an incentive to try this new feature. Just fill out the form on the right and we will contact you.

Mobile iOS App Developers: Here’s Why You Must Use Facebook’s Native Share Dialog!

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iOS app developers looking to maximize their referral channels can take advantage of Facebook's “Native Share Dialog” that makes it as easy as inserting a single line of code to their existing apps to take advantage of this viral sharing channel.

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Introduced early this week, Facebook announced the availability of this feature (which you can read about here). The AppAddictive team caught a glimpse of this technology during Facebook's invite-only event for mobile app developers held last April.

What exactly is this “Native Share Dialog” and what does it mean for developers and their users? If a user is logged on in their native Facebook App, in this case the iOS version (Android to come soon), other apps (and websites) that would like to share items on their respective users' timelines will no longer be required to log-in. This more or less mimics the ubiquity of the Like button embedded on other websites, making your Facebook experience seamless. The same applies for native mobile apps through the introduction of the “Native Share Dialog”

Facebook reported last May that they currently have over 751 million Active mobile users, and it's quite natural for the company to introduce new innovations like these.

According to Facebook, “The Share Dialog offers a lightweight and consistent way to enable sharing from your apps. People now have the option to share activity from apps through this dialog without needing to login to Facebook first. This eliminates 1 – 3 extra steps required for login when sharing via the feed dialog.

The Share Dialog further improves upon the iOS6 share sheet by adding support for publishing Open Graph actions to make it easier for people to tell their stories on mobile. In addition, people can now tag friends and share where they are enabling them to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, while helping even more people connect with your app.”

Pretty neat isn't it?

When we started AppAddictive, building tools for brand marketers as early as 2007, we took advantage of all these new features right after Facebook rolls them out. We've been fairly eager to try these things, and one of our apps eventually had a monthly active user base of 10 million users. And this was before AppAddictive became a “formal startup” – we were just doing this on weekends as a hobbyist!

If we were to do it again as a developer, we'd certainly build a mobile app and take advantage of Facebook's mobile users.

Google Analytics’ New Tool, “Customer-journey-to-online-purchase”

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Attribution remains to be a subject of interest in the world of Search and Social Marketing. Having discussed this topic with our partners, the verdict is still out on which framework the industry should adapt when faced with this question.

Recently, the fine folks from the Google Analytics team introduced a new report called “The Customer Journey to Online Purchase”. You can find out more about their findings here.

Marketing professionals and marketing students are well aware of the marketing funnel to purchase, most usually called AIDA. AIDA is an acronym used in marketing and advertising that describes a common list of events that may occur when a consumer engages with an advertisement. A stands for Awareness (attract the customer’s attention of the product), I stands for Interest (raise consumer interest of the product) , D stands for Desire (convince the customer that they want the product) and A stands for Action (e.g. lead consumers to purchase the product). AIDA was invented by American marketer and advertiser E. St. Elmo Lewis back in 1898.

Google uses the same marketing funnel, but they call it ACID. A stands for Awareness, C stands for Consideration, I stands for Intent and D stands for Decision. The “Customer Journey to Online Purchase” attempts to match the common list of events that may occur when a consumer engages with a specific online advertisement identified by seven different sources (Display, Social, Email, Paid Search or SEM, Organic Search or SEO, Referral, Direct or Other Paid)

The Google report presents a pretty clear perspective on how a series of interactions with your brand can  lead to an online purchase. We all know for a fact that it’s out there – we just need the right lens.

Google Search ads disproportianately benefit from “last click” attribution. In a typical setting, advertisers give full credit to customer purchases from Google Search and PPC Ads. While this situation gives the most obvious (if not lazy) answer to attribution, even Google acknowledges that the actual purchase is actually a byproduct of a unique “Customer Journey”. Traditional marketing describes “Customer Journey” as a series of interactions people have with a campaign through different mediums like telemarketing, Internet, branch and other forms of marketing communication. By seeing this as more of a journey, it takes into consideration the context of the customer’s feelings in each and every interaction.

In online marketing, channels (such as email, display ads, paid search ads, social, and direct visits to your website) influence the customer at different points in the path to purchase. Now this is where it gets interesting,  Google Analytics’ new “Customer Journey”  tool allows a company to assign fractional attribution to each of these channels.

We’re working with two major channel types here: ASSISTING channels build awareness, consideration, and intent earlier in the customer journey or “purchase funnel. LAST INTERACTION channels act as the last point of contact prior to a purchase.

Since it’s the NBA playoff season, think of these interactions as a series of steps (from the inbound pass) culminating in an objective (scoring a basket). When Chris Bosh rebounds and passes the ball to Shane Battier who passes to Lebron James who passes to Dwayne Wade for a layup-dunk,  Lebron James gets the full assist in regular statistics.  If there were fractional attribution,  Shane Battier might get credit for a fractional assist.

I played around with this new tool for a few minutes and I was quite impressed.  For example, in the CPG industry, I found out that Social Channels are closer to the actual purchase than an Email channel. Another surprise is that in the Auto industry, Display Channels are closer to the actual purchase than Email or Social channels. It’s not really a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s up to you, as marketer or advertiser to decipher your ideal mix.

Banners_and_Alerts_and_The_Customer_Journey_to_Online_Purchase_–_Google

Here are the main Google findings on 11 industry groups. Every media buyer should print this and hang on their office wall.

Displayed in order from Awareness (on the left) to Decision (on the right)
1.  Auto – Social, Email, Referral, Paid Search, Display, Organic Search, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase
2.  Biz – Display, Email, Social, Referral, Paid, Organic, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase
3.  Classified/Local – Social, Display, Email, Paid Search, Referral, Organic, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase
4.  CPG – Display, Email, Social, Paid Search, Organic Search, Referral, Direct, Other Paid -> Purchase
5.  Edu/Gov – Social, Display, Email, Paid Search, Referral, Other Paid, Organic Search, Direct -> Purchase
6.  Finance – Email, Social, Paid Search, Organic Search, Referral, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase
7.  Health – Social, Other Paid, Email, Referral, Paid Search, Display, Organic Search, Direct -> Purchase
8.  Media – Display, Email, Social, Other Paid, Paid Search, Referral, Organic Search, Direct -> Purchase
9.  Retail – Display, Social, Email, Referral, Other Paid, Paid Search, Organic Search, Direct -> Purchase
10.  Tech – Display, Social, Email, Paid Search, Referral, Organic Search, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase
11.  Travel – Social, Email, Paid Search, Organic Search, Display, Referral, Other Paid, Direct -> Purchase

If you want to chat about how Google Analytics’ new tool of “Customer-jouney-to-online-purchase” can help in conversion rate optimization for your organization or your clients,  fill out the contact form on the right.

10 Interesting Tidbits About Banks on Facebook This Holiday Season

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By Mike Onghai, CFA

One of my pastimes is analyzing banks on Facebook. I analyzed banks when I ran a hedge fund in an earlier life. So why not apply that to social?

Hedge fund pros love Wells Fargo’s business model. They don’t engage in proprietary trading and they’re good at consumer cross-selling. How about on Facebook?

Let’s compare December 1-15th against November 1-15th of 2012. Chase’s engagement (using People Talking About as the proxy) number grew nine fold from 12,418 (0.32%) to 137,084 (3.5%). (See the green rectangle in Figure 1).

Figure 2 below shows how Chase did it—they’re simply giving away money to charities.

People talk about what they’re passionate about, not about what you want to talk about. Oh, and the money part doesn’t hurt either—especially since the more you talk about it, the more your favorite charity moves up in the rankings.

What’s the ROI of this? Hard to say, but there’s certainly power in getting people to mention your brand name in a positive light multiple times per day. Free checking and automatic overdraft protection might be pretty cool, but are you telling your friends about it?

Chase promoted the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy. Big hit in engagement—a one-two punch of celebrity content and charity power. The only thing better would be to somehow work in bacon, kittens, and babies.

We’re not saying that blindly increasing engagement is best, nor that a business should take advantage of sensitive situations to promote themselves. We are saying that you need to connect what your fans are passionate about in a way that still aligns with your brand message.

Figure 2: Posts on Chase’s Community Giving Facebook Page

But what about Wells Fargo? They’re posting finance tips and saving advice for small business owners and consumers. See Figure 3 below.

Looking at the stats in terms of engagement, Chase’s achieved a 3.5% engagement rate on a fan base of 3.8 million whereas Wells achieved a less than 2% rate of engagement on a fan base of 470,000.

Generally, engagement is lower on larger bases but in this case, Chase’s achieved a higher engagement on a larger base.

Figure 3: Posts on Wells Fargo’s Facebook Page

Key takeaways:

1. Your charitable causes activate passion, key to sharing. What are your fans passionate about?

2. Mixing celebrities and charitable causes can multiply your power. Do you sponsor a stadium or are active in the community? Amplify these connections. First Bank’s page (https://www.facebook.com/efirstbank) has a few good examples of such amplification of content.

What do you think? Who is your favorite bank? Would you like to have a dashboard analysis drawn up for your bank? Tell us in the comments below.

Should Brands Outsource Their Community Management? Think No Further. YES and Here’s Why

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Although this question may be debatable, here are three reasons why Community Management of your social media channels in the marketing mix would be better off  if managed by experts outside of your organization.  In the long run, it would be more effective and efficient to outsource your community management.

1. Community managers (and their agencies) live and breathe social media

If your job is not living and breathing social media 24/7,  chances are you are not able to keep up with what’s happening on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.  While adding the odd tweet and keeping an eye on Facebook comments might be manageable, you might not have time to do a great deal more.

Creating content calendars that ensure that every post is optimized to create the maximum impact and ensuring that your Twitter account follows all the key influentials in your market may be enough to fill your day.

Also ask yourself if you are keeping up with the latest Facebook competition rules? Or working out how the Twitter API changes could impact your brand’s output? And what about other platforms – should you be focusing on Google+ this year or Pinterest?

Community managers will be up-to-date on all platforms, what they can offer and how they can potentially work best for your brand. It is their job after all. Why not let the experts worry about the finer details?

2. Community managers can offer a fresh perspective

Sometimes working on one specific thing or brand can make things jaded after a while. Outsourcing your social media efforts will invite a fresh perspective to the table and stimulate discussion around the brand and how to make it stand out in the fast-changing social media sphere.

Your community manager will have worked on or read about other branded online campaigns. They know what has worked in the past, what could work in the future, and what could potentially be a social media disaster.

They will also be able to advise on and devise the social media strategy that is essential to ensure your brand flourishes online and offline.

3. Community managers are enthusiastic about what they do and will be backed up by a team

If you divide the community management duties between individuals in your company, chances are the actual management of the online entities end up falling through the cracks as other tasks take precedence.

Also, unless proper guidelines are set, your brand’s social voice and tone could end up being fragmented across the social media entities.

An agency can provide the important neutrality good community management requires and will have a team set to ensure your community management is kept consistent regardless of summer holidays or staff turnover. They have also actively pursued this career, so will be eager to do it well.

Finally let’s not forget one very important thing. If you outsource your community management then you can be assured that your Facebook pages will always be updated and that someone is responding to questions on Twitter and other social networks in a timely and coordinated manner.

Your brand won’t be joining the thousands of others whose Facebook and Twitter accounts lay dormant and are an embarrassment to the company and the staff that were supposed to populate them.

Elevator Pitch Episode: AppAddictive and TwoChop

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Two Chop founder Mo Lam and AppAddictive CEO Mike Onghai were featured on an episode of Elevator Pitch, hosted by Alan Meckler, pitching their gamification venture, Two Chop. If you run a blog or other content oriented website containing text, music or images, Two Chop can take that content and turn it into a game in minutes.

The Value of Word-of-Mouth in Consumer Buying Behavior

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Word-of-Mouth (WOM) is the primary factor behind 20% to 50% of all purchasing decisions. Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive (factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions, and deliberate longer than they otherwise would).  And its influence will probably grow because the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis:  that is, product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands.

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Very interrelated to WOM is customer loyalty.  Although the need to provide an after-sales experience that inspires loyalty and therefore repeat purchases isn’t new, not all loyalty is equal in today’s increasingly competitive, complex world. There are 2 types of loyalty:  Active loyalists, who not only stick with it but also recommend it; Passive loyalists, who choose to stick to the brand either because of complacency or confusion caused by too many choices,  and stay with a brand without being committed to it.  Despite their claims of loyalty, passive consumers are open to messages from competitors who give them a reason to switch.    

Some key concepts related to WOM

3 Main Classifications:

Experiential

WOM is the most common and powerful form, typically accounting for 50% to 80% of word-of-mouth activity in any given product category. It results from a consumer’s direct experience with a product or service, largely when that experience deviates from what’s expected. (Consumers rarely complain about or praise a company when they receive what they expect.) Complaints when airlines lose luggage are a classic example of experiential WOM, which adversely affects brand sentiment and, ultimately, equity, reducing both receptiveness to traditional marketing and the effect of positive WOM from other sources. Positive WOM, on the other hand, can generate a tailwind for a product or service.

Consequential

Marketing activities also can trigger WOM. The most common is what we call consequential WOM, which occurs when consumers directly exposed to traditional marketing campaigns pass on messages about them or brands they publicize. The impact of those messages on consumers is often stronger than the direct effect of advertisements, because marketing campaigns that trigger positive WOM have comparatively higher campaign reach and influence. Marketers need to consider both the direct and the pass-on effects of WOM when determining the message and media mix that maximizes the return on their investments.

Intentional

A less common form of WOM is intentional—for example, when marketers use celebrity endorsements to trigger positive buzz for product launches. Few companies invest in generating intentional WOM, partly because its effects are difficult to measure and because many marketers are unsure if they can successfully execute intentional WOM campaigns.

Measuring Word-of-Mouth Equity

A starting point has been to count the number of recommendations and dissuasions for a given product. There’s an appealing power and simplicity to this approach, but also a challenge: it’s difficult for marketers to account for variability in the power of different kinds of WOM messages. After all, a consumer is significantly more likely to buy a product as a result of a recommendation made by a family member than by a stranger. These two kinds of recommendations constitute a single message, yet the difference in their impact on the receiver’s behavior is immense. In fact, our research shows that a high-impact recommendation, from a trusted friend conveying a relevant message, for example, is up to 50X more likely to trigger a purchase than is a low-impact recommendation.

Loyalty Platforms and Social Loyalty Platforms

The growth of online social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube has made online word of mouth a channel for businesses to acquire customers.  Offering your customers membership to loyalty rewards club can incentivize your customers to spread positive reviews and experiences about your product.    For the first time ever, merchants can have their loyal customers share their activity on Facebook to bring in new customers. The cloud based loyalty platform saves merchants IT costs versus existing desktop server solutions.  Sign up today to learn how Social Loyalty can save you 88% on new customer acquisition cost. Visit SocialLoyaltyApps.com to learn more.

 

 

Basic Tips For A Successful Lead Follow-up

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For companies looking to drive business online, lots of time and money is invested in lead generation. But what do you do when the leads start flowing in?

Though leads follow up may sometimes look daunting, successfully following up on a lead and starting the process that will take it to a sale doesn't have to be a trying and disappointing process.

Here are seven tips for following up on leads effectively.

1. Strike while the iron is hot.

In many cases, a lead is an asset that depreciates in value very, very quickly. Thus, it's worth trying to respond to qualified leads as soon as humanly possible.  This is because your response time will often determine whether you close a sale or lose a sale you could have easily closed.

2. Read the lead.

COMMON SENSE: it's important to read a lead so that you know who you're dealing with and what your opportunity may be.  But the FACT: this doesn't always happen.

To avoid looking unprepared or taking things for granted, it is a tremendous help to create a checklist that your inbound marketers should use as part of the lead follow-up process.

3. Have the right (and preferably same) person respond and follow through from the get go to establish rapport.

To make the most of a lead, ensure that the person best capable of following up on it is the same person who responds. While new prospects may necessarily have to deal with several people throughout the sales cycle, it is often desirable to ensure that their first point of contact is someone they can start to build a rapport, if not a relationship, with.

4. Don't be afraid to pick up the phone

Thanks to technology, phone calls are more and more infrequent for many individuals, especially to younger members of the workforce. However, the phone is still a powerful sales tool and,  if your lead contains a phone number, make a habit of picking up the phone and dialing it.

5. Get on the same page

When speaking with a prospect, walk before you run. Even if your lead came with a lot of detail, it's important to confirm that you have a good understanding of what the prospect needs and haven't made any assumptions that could unnecessarily limit your opportunity, or ruin it altogether.

6. Set expectations and timeframes

In every aspect of sales and business cycles, expectations are everything and it's never too early to set them. If an initial conversation with a lead confirms that there's an opportunity, take control. Once you're on the same page with the customer and understand his/her needs, you should at a minimum lay out what you think the sales cycle will look like. This includes proposing dates for key milestones.

7. Always respond

Not all leads are created equal. Some, unfortunately, are less-than-desirable for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, assuming that the individual who submitted the lead is a real person, a response should always be provided no matter what. Not only can this help maintain your reputation in the marketplace, it also ensures that you will be remembered  for future opportunities that may be a better fit.

12 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tips Based on Human Psychology and Behavioral Economics

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First a disclaimer:  Especially in social media, there are no such things as rules in conversion rate optimization.  What works in one situation may not be the same for another.

Nevertheless, there are a number of hardwired human traits and behavioral patterns understood by psychologists, behavioral economists and other social scientists that we can use to increase our conversions. Our experience working with conversion rate optimization has given us some interesting insights as well. Contact us about conversion rate optimization for your web site or your organization!

Here are 12 brands identified by Econsultancy that used such principles and have worked.  You might want to test them out yourself for your own brand and explore.

Social Proof

One of the most effective things you can bring to your site to increase the confidence of buyers is ‘social proof’. Social proof is the phenomena where people tend to believe that the decision and actions of others reflect the correct behavior in a specific situation.  So, we have to create an experience which convinces our visitors they’re not the only person making this decision.

Conversion Rate Optimization and Basecamp

Basecamp Social Proof Techniques

Basecamp

In this design we see a prominent mention of the sheer number of other people who have made the same purchasing decision that the visitor is considering.

Internet_Marketing_Software__SEO__PPC__Social_-_Raven

Raven SEO Tools

One of the most common ways to integrate social proof into your site is by including testimonials into your site, especially if you can include a picture of the person providing the social proof. Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are the kings of this. But it’s a sensible addition to most B2B sites and can also work well in B2C environments.

Wish_Experience_Days___Gift_Experiences___Lowest_Price_Guaranteed_at_Wish_co_uk

Wish.co.uk

There’s a huge number of clever CRO techniques in place on this page but we want to highlight one of the easiest ways to implement social proof into your site, using the off-the-shelf Facebook Like button/widget. It really simply shows you the profile pictures of other people who’ve liked that page on Facebook, also prioritizing those who are connected the to the visitor of the site.

It is not just social proof, but personalised social proof. Actually it’s even better than that.  It’s automated personalised social proof.

Krystal_Cancun_Deal_of_the_Day___Groupon

Groupon

Yes Groupon. It might have been getting a lot of stick recently but it, more than nearly every other major internet business, has a deep understanding of human behavior. Here it illustrates how they’ve built social proof into the very DNA of its business.

By showing how many other people have bought the same offer,  Groupon hopes to persuade the visitor to do the same, and place an order.

Loss Aversion

The disutility of giving up an object is greater than the utility associated with acquiring it.  This  is known an Loss Aversion. ‘Disutility’ simply means that human tendency prefers not to lose  something more than we love to gain something. Sometimes this is about a subtle re-framing of your copy to concentrate on loss rather than gain. We need to ask ourselves ‘How can we make visitors think they’d be losing something if they don’t buy?’.

The_Wyndham_New_Yorker_Hotel_New_York__NY___United_States__Agoda_com

Agoda

Many travel websites are particularly good at communicating loss aversion.  A good example is Agoda. It makes it clear what you would lose if you don’t book now. This serves to instantly increase urgency.

Qwertee___Limited_Edition_Cheap_Daily_T_Shirts___Gone_in_24_Hours___T-shirt_Only_£8_€10__12___Cool_Graphic_Funny_Tee_Shirts

Qwertee

Qwertee has built an understanding of human behavior right into its business model. Its t-shirts are only available for 48 hours and after the first 24 the price increases. Every time you visit the site  there’s a huge ticking clock showing exactly what you’re going to miss out on if you don’t purchase soon.

The_Cocktail_Club__A_Year_of_Recipes_and_Tips_for_Spirited_Tasting_Parties__Maureen_Christian-Petrosky__9781617690266__Amazon_com__Books

Amazon

Amazon is the king of using cognitive biases to increase conversion rates. One particular example where it uses loss aversion is for its ‘Prime’ customers. Prime users are a subset of their most frequent customers who have paid upfront fees to have access to next day delivery by default. If you’re a signed-in Prime customer, every product you visit that has next day delivery reminds you how long you’ve got before that day’s cut-off point.

Trolley

Argos

It’s not just online giants like Amazon making use of our innate loss aversion to increase purchases. High street retailer Argos taps into our aversion to loss to drive footfall to its shops using this clever lightbox.

Anchoring

One of my favourite cognitive biases that influences the way behave, is known as anchoring. It is the tendency to rely too heavily – or ‘anchor’ – on a past reference or on one trait or piece of information when making decisions. These anchors can often be numerical. Our challenge is to ask ‘How can I reference an ‘anchor’ that influences visitors to my site?’.

Same_Day_Hotel_Deals_-Check_our_Deal_of_Day__Book___Save_-_Hotels_com

Hotels.com

One of the oldest anchoring tricks in the book is what the price was reduced from. Cross-hatched higher prices showing the available discount is a simple way to anchor the price of an item and make it seem better value.

Mailchimp

SaaS companies like MailChimp often make use of a clever anchoring technique that more businesses should be wise to try and use. You’ll notice they have one high price that’s much higher than all the other price points. This maybe be because it’s a popular option.  However many anchoring experiments have found introducing one higher price point can lead to people spending more in total even if nobody chooses that option.

This concept is worth repeating because it is a bit counter-intuitive: Adding an extra expensive option to your page can increase the average order value of the page even if nobody selects that option.  This is because it makes your other expensive options seem less expensive. This is one that’s well worth testing.

Broadband.co.uk

There’s also a case of possible anchoring taking place on the homepage of Broadband.co.uk, where the BT offer is significantly more expensive than the other options. That’s because the package is very different to the others. If we believe in the principle of anchoring, this may be increasing the value of the traffic to this page by encouraging them to assess the relative value of the other options differently.

Wiggle

Adding related products to a page can be a great way to increase the number of items people add to a basket. There’s also a possibility that the selection of these products might also have an anchoring influence. We don’t expect too many retailers bear price anchoring in mind with their related product algorithm, but it’s something you would expect some retailers to have tested.

As we noted at the beginning of this article, we don’t always know in every case that these changes have been implemented to increase conversion rates.  However,  if we understand human behavior and some of our cognitive biases, they would certainly seem worthy efforts to try.