Turning Social User Generated Content into Sales

Like any good content marketer, you are consistently engaging your social media followers through contests, conversation-sparking posts, reader polls, and more. And while engagement is its own reward and all, you might still find yourself wondering how you can translate those interactions into sales for your business.

If you’ve mastered the art of getting your audience to engage with your brand on social media, you’re already headed in the right direction. When someone enters a photo contest, posts a video of themselves using your product, answers a poll, comments on their experience with your brand, etc., they are creating content for you. The next step is figuring out what you’re going to do about it.

According to the infographic below from SparkReel, 40% of consumers are seeking out user generated content of some kind before making a purchase. That’s where all your social engagements come in. Your job is to guide the potential customers out there to the content that your loyal followers have generated. Whether it’s creating a slideshow of entries from a photo contest, or highlighting social customer reviews in your web store, the possible uses of user generated content are endless. Get creative, and tell us what you came up with in the comments below!

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5 Development Tricks Self-Sufficient Marketers Should Master

Data Tracking

1. Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager was put into place to make our lives as non-coders much easier and limit the amount of effort needed to set up tracking and optimization tools on our websites. You're probably familiar with it, but are you really an expert?

If you haven't studied up on Google Tag Manager, it's time. It allows you to add, remove, and manage website tracking tags without editing code directly on your website. If you're completely unfamiliar with GTM start by migrating your tags and master the logic behind the data layer of GTM.

The data layer does involve editing code, but the trade off is rich data about your users' behavior.

For bonus points, familiarize yourself with the Auto-Event Variable and start tracking important actions like button clicks or error messages on forms.

Even if you don't go so far as editing the code within the data layer yourself (don't feel bad, I'd guess most marketers won't), have a good understanding of its capabilities. That knowledge alone will help you immensely as you determine what tags you want added for your site and coach developers through the process. Access to more data is only going to make you a better marketer in the end.

Coding & Design

2. HTML & CSS Coding for Basic Forms

Whether you're an HTML buff or a beginner, knowing how to create or edit HTML forms and dabble in CSS will help you get ideas to market faster. Work off of a template if necessary, but spend some time with a coder and take a few HTML courses so that you're comfortable editing forms and launching the changes without a developer's touch.

Use cheat sheets to help you create different types of fields and buttons so you can take your marketing efforts from ideation to completion with little input from a developer. Check out this article for specific coding tips if you're new to forms.

If you have a good understanding of how forms are built, not only can you build your own, but you can also identify when a form is broken and why. With practice, you may even be able to make the fix yourself.

3. Markdown

Markdown isn't new, but it's becoming an increasingly valuable resource for people who don't have a coding background. It allows you to use simple cues to integrate things like Headers, block quotes, images with references, links, and my personal favorite – tables – into text documents that need to be formatted for the web.

While some may still view it as a tool simply for bloggers, with Markdown you don't have to battle hacky edits in WYSIWYG editors to get the styles you want to appear in your content.

Tools like MarkdownPad for Windows and this browser version allow you to write in Markdown format and convert it to HTML so even if you aren't integrating content into WordPress for example, which has a Markdown plugin, you can easily input well-formatted content that is consistent time and time again.

Quality Assurance Testing

Marketers may be pros at A/B tests to determine the success of ideas or tactics, but whether you're launching new feature, updating a form or getting ready for a large online sale, you need to think like a quality assurance specialist and test work before it goes live. There are two testing scenarios that marketers should be well versed in.

4. Testing Changes in Different Browsers

Use a web-based tool like BrowserStack to create a virtual machine and simulate what a site looks like in different browsers and operating systems.

BrowserStack has almost every active browser and OS combination, which is particularly helpful if you know a particular combination is most popular among your site visitors according to Google Analytics, but you don't personally use that browser version or OS.

Testing changes and troubleshooting in different browsers may uncover something that requires a developer to fix, however it should prevent you from relying so heavily on your quality assurance team.

If you don't have a quality assurance team, definitely add this resource to your toolkit.

Be sure to remember your website's demographic when you're testing. A task that is simple to you may not be simple to someone in a much older or younger age range.

Older demographics, for example, are more likely to double click buttons than younger people are. Consider how your audience will interact with your site to ensure they receive the best experience possible and you catch issues in a testing environment, rather than hear about them from a customer.

5. Load Testing for Traffic Spikes

Load testing is particularly important if you're preparing for a large event that will lead to an unusual spike in traffic and activity on your website. Some free performance testing tools can be easily configured to simulate an estimated number of users and the length of time you think they will remain on your site. Running these tests will give you assurance that your site will withstand a surge in visitors.

Alternatively, these tests will make you aware well in advance if you need to make technical updates prior to your event to handle the increase in traffic. While changes to improve your site's capacity will require a developer, its always better to take a proactive approach when you expect a great increase in traffic to your website.

Summary

These ideas may require you to reach beyond your comfort zone, but learning new things will benefit you and may help you impress your developer counterparts.

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Dark Data and Measuring Invisible Impact in Your Facebook Community

In digital communities, good brand managers spend their time observing and interacting with the hundreds or maybe even thousands of fans who engage daily by commenting and posting. These vocal fans are incredibly important, but they represent only a part of the story. Over 80 percent of brand fans are lurkers – quiet fans that neither comment nor post.

As the largest social community, creating Facebook posts that appeal to your silent majority is as important as engaging your loyal brand advocates. The silent majority refers to fans that are being reached by your brand, but don’t take the actions to Like, comment, reply or share that we typically see from top advocates. They’re statistically some of your most informed and loyal customers, potential future Superfans, and the primary providers of the social currency needed to foster your active advocates: validation.

To appeal to these fans, brands need to gain insight into what they aren’t doing. Marketers need to start focusing on three key metrics to read the dark data that often slips through the cracks for this fan segment: clicks, churn and engagement over time.

Measuring silent fans: Clicks, churn, and engagement over time.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Even though this is dark data, measurement is still possible. Some of this information is available immediately within the data Facebook already provides, and some, like fan history and tracking engagements over time, is more readily available through 3^rdparty technology providers. There are a number of supporting metrics like your subscription rate; ratio of fan replies and Likes to fan comments; and interaction on fan shares that you can layer in to give you a more nuanced perspective, but the basic lurker landscape can be derived by looking at clicks, churn, and engagement over time. 

Clicks are a key metric provided by Facebook on a post by post basis, as well as a weekly aggregate. They refer to fans who have clicked into a News Feed post but then didn’t otherwise engaged with that post. With Facebook’s new definition of their Engagement metric that now tracks clicks, this metric can be used as a powerful proxy to determine lurkers’ dark activity.

The most effective way to monitors clicks is looking at clicks/engagements and clicks/reach. Engagement is a catch all that includes shares, Likes, comments, and clicks. Watching how clicks as a ratio of engagements and of reach perform across different post types will give you a good indication of what best hooks your lurkers, and may vary greatly from what hooks your active advocates. Be aware though, that the occasional uncropped recipe photo or hotel pool shot might still appeal to lurkers in the feed without requiring a click through.

To combat lost clicks, one way to start measuring dark data from lurkers would be to work teaser photos into your post mix. Teaser photos are visually grabbing, intentionally cropped photos that hint at a punch line or fuller story that can be reached by clicking through to an externally hosted image or page. Compelling clicks in this manner provides a positive fan experience while presenting a very low obstacle to engagement.

Churn rate, or the rate of fans leaving your page, is a key measurement to determine what silent fans like and don’t like about your brand. Measuring your churn rate regularly and tying it to specific posts or campaigns can act as quantitative analysis that will, over time, allow you to create content that appeals to your fan base as a whole. Since dark data pertains to the majority of your fan base, overall churn rate provided by Facebook serves as a useful reflection of what resonates with your silent majority.

Timing of engagement is a crucial piece of dark data when measuring individuals in your Facebook community. For active fans, use a technology provider or manual research to see how much time elapsed between when they initially Liked your page and when they first engaged. A long average time suggests you’re bringing lurkers along for an enjoyable ride until they’re ready to post, but if the vast majority of your fans engage immediately or not at all, you’re likely not appealing to your passive fans.

Measuring timing between engagements and week over week retention from active fans can also provide valuable dark data on what resonates with these fans; if they start to post more frequently or go through inactive periods, mapping that data to the types of content posted can inform brands about how to stimulate the best discussion with varying segments of their fan base.

Using Dark Data for Good

Once you’ve identified your silent fans, keep track of new engagements as a percentage of overall engagement. Pay attention to the content and initiatives that reliably bring back hardcore fans week over week, and see if it differs from the efforts that get newbies to engage or lurkers to look. This unique perspective can be informative beyond Facebook to influence underlying values of your brand marketing.

Think of dark data as a type of sonar - you’re constantly sending out signals, and now learning to pay attention to what comes back as a method of measuring the shape of your community. As such, benchmarking and reliable measurement over time is essential.

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Interactive Wireframing Comes of Age

As you most likely know, wireframes are black-and-white box drawings that describe a screen (be it a web page, a mobile app, or anything else that needs to be laid out and designed). Traditionally, wireframes are created in the design process to show the client the functionality, process flow, and general layout of the application before the designers and developers go to work implementing the idea. Wireframes are great because they are easily changeable and help the client get a "hands-on" feel for what we are building so there will be no surprises once the system is built.

The only real drawback of wireframes is their implicit static quality: they tend to exist on a sheet of paper. In this day and age in which in-page interactivity has become the norm, and when some processes happen over a series of pages/screens, simple wireframes fall short. They traditionally aren't good at letting the user "feel" the application, and only trained eyes are really good at following wireframes across multiple pages to get a feel for where the eye goes as pages refresh during a specific task.

For the last 12 years, my company has used "interactive wireframes" as part of our design process. These have traditionally been simple HTML pages that contain graphic versions of the mockups, and use image-mapped hotspots to let the users click around. Sometimes we'll create full HTML versions instead of use images if the interactivity is easier shown in HTML. While this is a time-consuming task, interactive wireframes give our clients a much better sense of what the finished application, site, or process will feel like.

Recently, an iOS app called POP (short for Prototyping on Paper) was released that is the perfect tool to help us (and you) make this interactive wireframing task that much easier. The tool is simple: snap photos of your wireframes and link them to each other using rectangular hotspots. You can then walk through your prototype and click around as if it were a real application.

Of all the rapid prototyping tools we've tried, POP is certainly the easiest. But it's not without some major drawbacks. At the moment it is really geared toward app development, and when you share the prototypes, the screen shape/size reflects that of an iOS device. The system shows prototypes via any web browser, but puts an iPhone frame around the prototype. This makes the app unrealistic to use for any professional purpose beyond iOS prototyping.

It is my hope that the makers of this app will realize that its potential uses go far beyond mobile apps and they expand this to allow for full-page prototypes for regular websites.

Until then, we'll continue making our interactive wireframes by hand. If you are still making plain old static wireframes, it's time to start adding life to them. The ROI is simple: a clearer understanding of your project's flow will save you time and money later, as there will be no surprises in the development phase. Plus, clients like to interact with the work, and letting them do this in the wireframe stage adds to your wow factor, and gives them something more tangible to understand.

(VIA)

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37 of the Best Facebook Page Apps for Brand Marketing

One of the easiest ways to use your Facebook page to its fullest potential for social media marketing is to employ third-party Facebook applications. 

Doing so makes your page significantly more appealing to your audience and improves user experience. This translates to more visitors who interact with and share your content, which then appears in their activity streams and is more virally discoverable. Facebook page customization can dramatically increase your visibility, improve your branding, and create more leads and sales.

There are thousands of social media marketing tools for Facebook that assist brands with managing and enhancing their Facebook marketing activities. Here are 37 of the top Facebook apps on the market, ranging from design and customization to creating engagement with polls to blogging and video integration. Start using some of them to take your Facebook page to the next level!

Facebook App Suites

1. Ripe Social

Ripe Social offers 10 apps that increase brand awareness, promote client interaction, drive website traffic, cultivate repeat business, generate sales leads, and ignite viral marketing. Check out the Ripe Social blog.

2. AgoraPlus

AgoraPlus is an all-in-one platform to manage your Facebook page. Its 10 Facebook page applications give you everything you need to attract fans, engage them, and offer exclusive content on your Facebook page, mobile devices, and your own website. Check out the AgoraPlus blog.

3. Heyo

Heyo’s easy-to-use editor and templates enable you to use contests, promotions, and deals to drive traffic, leads, and sales. Drag and drop widgets make it simple to create a custom campaign from scratch without writing a single line of code, giving you complete creative control. 

4. North Social

North Social offers 19 Facebook applications that allow you to create great pages and fan experiences to increase engagement and promote your brand. 

5. FanAppz

FanAppz gives you everything you need to grow, engage, learn about, and ultimately convert your social audiences into customers and turn good customers into great ones. It’s easy to turn brand assets into high-impact social experiences that leverage your fans’ “amplifier affect” and help you capture emails, likes, interests, and demographics. 

Facebook Tab Apps

6. Tabfusion

Tabfusion lets you create your own custom Tab with virtually any content. Be sure to check out their numerous apps for photos, videos, blogs, and more.

7. Static HTML

Static HTML makes it easy to create powerful custom iframe tabs.

8. Tabsite

Tabsite helps you build Facebook tabs for deals, sweepstakes, reviews, contests, and more. 

9. Contact Tab

Content Tab lets you easily add a tab to show your contact information and business location through Bing or Google Maps.

10. SocialAppsHQ

SocialAppsHQ offers 26 apps that are easy to set up, multilingual, and easy to set up. 

Facebook E-Commerce Apps

11. LunarMods

LunarMods makes it quick, easy, and secure to embed eCommerce in your Facebook Page.

12. Ecwid

Ecwid is a shopping cart app that seamlessly integrates with your page and can be mirrored on many other sites at the same time. 

Facebook Posting and Scheduling Apps

13. HootSuite

HootSuite simplifies posting and scheduling Facebook updates, adding images, monitoring feeds, and more. Teams can manage complex campaigns – including Profiles, Pages, Events, Groups, and Search.

14. Post Planner

Post Planner schedules posts, helps you find content ideas, and brand your Facebook posts across all of your pages and groups. 

15. SocialOomph

SocialOomph enables you to schedule Facebook status and wall updates, group updates, and photo uploads.

16. Status Shuffle

Status Shuffle has the largest collection of Facebook status messages to choose from when you’re stuck for inspiration.

Facebook Contests and Promotions Apps

17. ShortStack

ShortStack has many features to help you get the most from your Facebook pages, including contests, polls, data collection,  and analytics.

18. Top Tab

Top Tab makes it easy to create and implement an interactive contest on Facebook.

19. EazyContest

EazyContest creates photo and video contests, custom banners, buttons, CSS, custom menu tabs, custom entry forms, and reveal pages that pop. 

20. SnapApp

SnapApp sets up custom branded Facebook competitions that help you improve engagement, increase conversions, and drive sales. 

21. Antavo

Antavo enables you to run contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways on Facebook, the Web, and mobile devices. 

Facebook Blog Apps

22. NetworkedBlogs

NetworkedBlogs automatically publishes your blog posts to Facebook, so you get found and generate more traffic. 

23. RSS Tab

RSS Tab lets you publish up to five different blogs on your Facebook page.

24. RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti automatically publishes your blog RSS feeds on your Facebook Page. 

Facebook Video Apps

25. YouTube for Fan Pages

YouTube for Fan Pages syncs your YouTube channel directly to a custom tab on your Facebook Fan Page so your viewers can spend more time with your brand.

26. Livestream

Livestream for Facebook enables you to add an existing Livestream channel to your Facebook Page and share a live broadcast or from their on-demand library.

Facebook Page Design and Customization Apps

27. GroSocial 

GroSocial lets you start from scratch or use one of many great-looking professionally-designed templates to create Facebook tabs, timeline covers, and more. 

28. SOCI

SOCI brings your Facebook page to life with branded business pages. You can  craft custom timeline cover images with in-line editing, host micro websites on  Facebook, and more. 

29. PageModo

PageModo helps you set up a professional Facebook page for your business or organization. Customize your page with a stunning cover photo, custom welcome tab, and more in just a few minutes. 

Facebook Fan and Friend Apps

30. SelectrMe

SelectrMe manages your your Facebook fans and friend lists.

31. Fan of the Week

Fan of the Week enables fans to apply to become “fan of the week”. Other fans can then peer-to-peer vote for who should be selected — you can choose the winner manually or let the raw votes decide. 

32. LiveChat

LiveChat helps you actively engage your Facebook fans and provide them with friendly customer support. 

33. ooVoo

ooVoo facilitates video chats with up to 12 people on Facebook. You can also send video messages and record videos for your YouTube channel.

Facebook Survey and Poll Apps

34. Polldaddy

Polldaddy easily creates surveys, polls, quizzes, and rating systems.

35. Poll

Poll creates polls for your Facebook pages and improves fan engagement. 

36. Polls for Facebook

Polls for Facebook sets up polls that are multiple choice or composed of freeform questions. 

37. Cupli 

Cupli creates standard polls and surveys, and also has functionality for private interviews and different question formats . You can target by age, gender, marital status, and education, and sort respondents into groups.

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Facebook Pushes Back Unveiling of Video Ads

Facebook pushes its unveiling of video ads back again, according to a report from adage.com.

It’s been more than a year since Facebook started proposing the use of video ads to agencies and brands. With video ads, Facebook aims to get a slice of the ad budget for television. According to an eMarketer forecast, as much as 4.1 billion dollars this year and 5.7 billion dollars next year will be spent for video ads among advertisers.

However, the date of unveiling has been pushed back for the third time now. The original plan was to have this service ready by the first half of 2013, the second push is a summer unveiling, and the latest one is past the planned October release.

The main reason for the delay is how video ads affect user experience. Brands can use television advertisements on Facebook video ads, but the social media company is appealing that brands create ads that are fit for social media. In fact, Facebook has created an internal creative review process to ensure that these social media fit ads are of high quality.

The release of video ads are pushed back once again; this time. (Image: via digibuzzme.com)

How video ads work

Ads will be 15-seconds long and will be targeted to Facebook users based on their demographics. A video ad, slotted for a particular day, can appear on a Facebook user’s news feed a maximum of three times. As a user scrolls over a video ad, that video will start playing without sound. If the user wants to listen to the video ad, he or she can click it, prompting the video to restart and smear across the left and right rails of the Facebook page. This enlarged interface allows users to play two more video ads.

Advertisers are cautious

Some brands have already committed to an October video ads launch, but others are still wary about spending millions for a product that is not proven yet. But Facebook continues to assert the expensive price of its video ads, given that in theory these ads will reach out to more people than ads that are shown on television.

Some companies are waiting to see how users respond to these new ads. People have pointed out how in the past Facebook ad units have been met with criticism among users within the first month, and for that reason, companies would rather wait instead of be first in line.

In addition, making video ads could be more expensive because Facebook has a creative oversight which requires ads to be more social. However, according to Alex Jacobs, vice president social marketing for Digitas, several brands are already experts when it comes to creating cheap online ads, and that’s not as much of a problem as it is for making TV spot ads.

While it has taken a long time for Facebook to get video ads going, the social networking site has shown in the past, through the example of mobile and news feed ads, that despite all speculation regarding the effectiveness of these ads, they are currently the ones responsible for much of the company’s revenue growth.

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