Is Instagram Facebook's Savior?

When Facebook paid a billion dollars for Instagram last April, the company knew exactly what it was doing. But did it envision the acquisition potentially saving its $75+ billion dollar empire?

Yes, that Instagram, now with more daily active users than Twitter. It's the best move Facebook has made since George W. Bush was in the White House. (2008.)

There is a method to the madness that was Facebook’s many changes over the last 24 months. Madness brought forth a revenue model that actually works, endless amounts of user data, and shareholders to answer to. The madness has also tarnished -- perhaps permanently -- the 'cool' factor that was its principle upon launch in 2004. What's lacking now, nine years later, is a true identity, especially when compared to its direct competition.  Twitter has become television’s ‘second screen,’ Pinterest works seamlessly with online retail, YouTube has changed the way we consume video and ditto for Instagram with photography.

By the sheer numbers, Facebook is still VERY healthy, reaching more than a billion unique active userseach month. Companies are also lining up to purchase coveted 'sponsored posts,' placing themselves next to friends, family, Taylor Swift and the Detroit Red Wings on a more consistent basis. But dig a little deeper, and one wonders if those users are actually there anymore, or if they've moved elsewhere...like to Instagram. 

For example:

• Olympic gynmast Aly Raisman has 399,000 followers on Instagram. Her Facebook page has only 130,000 'Likes.'
• McKayla "#notimpressed" Maroney has almost 560,000 followers on Instagram. Her Facebook page only has 206,457 'Likes.' She also has 110,700 followers on Keek, a video platform that's in competition with Twitter's new Vine player. 
• Kendall Jenner has 5.1 million followers on Twitter, 4.8 million followers on Instagram and just 1.5 million ‘Likes’ on Facebook. She also has 1.2 million followers on Keek.

Throw in those coveted 'user engagement' statistics and the numbers are even more skewed against Facebook.

• Maroney posted a selfie on St. Patrick’s Day that received 36,375 ‘Likes’ on Instagram. Her Facebook fan page only received 7,700 total engagements for the week. 
• Victoria’s Secret PINK posted a picture of a shamrock themed thong to its social networks on St. Patrick’s Day. On Facebook, where the brand has 13 million followers, the post received nearly 24,000 ‘Likes’ and 330 comments. On Instagram, where PINK only has 622,000 followers? 33,200 ‘Likes’ and 528 comments.
• Getting out of the tween trend, the San Francisco Giants have 195,000 followers on Instagram compared to 1.667 million on Facebook. Yet, from an interaction standpoint, the smaller site consistently outperforms the much-larger father-company.
• And when the New York Jets signed David Garrard to compete with Mark Sanchez and Tim Tebow for the quarterback position, the announcement yieled 3,493 ‘Likes’ on Facebook … and 3,358 on Instagram. The Jets have 1.5 million fans on Facebook and only 56,000 on Facebook's billion dollar investment. 

Why is this happening?

• In the case of the Giants, EdgeRank has driven the team’s Facebook impressions (Up to 16 percent of its total audience) to be on-par with its much smaller Instagram account.
• Then there is Facebook mobile layout, which has been unfriendly to a rapidly growing consumer base. This is one of the key reasons why the company introduced a fresh look to the News Feed earlier this month.  
• The biggest concern may be the demographics. Facebook used to be an exclusive, college-only site that you felt cool to be on. Now the cool kids, the McKayla Maroney's, Aly Raisman's and Kendall Jenner's of the world are elsewhere ... and they've taken their fans with them.

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The Secret Benefit of LinkedIn Endorsements

A little while ago, LinkedIn began allowing members to endorse each other. Unlike recommendations, endorsements were simply a way for one member to confirm that another member has a particular skill. Because LinkedIn made it extremely easy to quickly endorse people for multiple skills, and because there is no verification required at all, many observers questioned the validity or use of the feature, myself among them.

Of course, it's nice to have a great list of skills on your profile, and having tons of endorsements for your skills is certainly more impressive than none at all. Furthermore, each time you endorse a potential partner or prospect, that person gets a nice email telling them that you thought they deserved to be endorsed for some skill.

If you thought that was all there was to LinkedIn Endorsements, then you might not have noticed the Skills & Expertise section.

Skills & Expertise

Like the old LinkedIn Answers, Skills & Expertise is hidden within the More drop down. If you can find it, you'll be rewarded with a great-looking landing page that announces that Skills & Expertise is there to help you "Discover the skills you need to succeed. Learn what you need to know from the thousands of hot, up-and-coming skills we're tracking." According to LinkedIn, this feature is still in beta.

The top of the page features a search bar where you can begin typing in a skill. It can be for someone you wish to hire, or something you want to learn about and are looking for someone whose blogs you might want to read. Or, more interesting, do a search on one of your own skills to see where you stack up.

Below is a summary of a couple of specific skills. For me, iPhone was the first "skill" listed, and the summary included cities, related skills, and featured professionals.

Skill Details

If you search on a skill and select it, you'll see the full Skill Details page. The left side lets you search for a different skill or take a look at related skills. We'll get back to the importance of related skills in a moment.

In the middle, you'll see your selected skill and a nice box that details the industry the skill is typically associated with, whether or not you current list that skill, and a button to see suggested skills. You'll also see a percentage followed by y/y, which stands for year over year. We'll talk about the importance of this metric as well in a moment.

Below the info box will be a list of professionals who list that skill. You might think that these professionals are ranked according to the number of times they've been endorsed for that skill, but that isn't the case. The top ranked professional for "Social MediaMarketing" only has 33 endorsements for that skill, while the #2 individual had 99+. So getting ranked isn't solely based on the sheer number of endorsements.

At the bottom is a list of LinkedIn Groups that are associated with that skill.

Along the right side you'll find buttons to share the skill, charts for relative growth, size and age, related companies, related jobs, and related locations.

Using Skills & Expertise

First of all, getting yourself listed as a Featured Professional within a specific skill could potentially result in a significant number of new leads. If LinkedIn members begin using this feature to contact and hire professionals, you're definitely going to want to be listed.

Or, on the other hand, if you're looking for an expert in a particular field or industry, this might be a great place to start looking!

One of the suggestions I've given people in the past is to seek out leaders and mentors in their field and learn from them. What better way to find an industry leader than to check on LinkedIn's Skills & Expertise? You can identify one or more individuals you might be interested in learning from and take a look at their profile, follow their updates, and subscribe to their blog.

Those are all fun, but there's one more use for Skills & Expertise that could be a game changer for you.

Social SEO

I'm sure you know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making your website as attractive to search engines and their users as possible. You identify keywords that your potential customers are using in searches and find ways to increase the frequency and prominence of those keywords in your site code and text. But what about social media? How do we help social network users find our profiles? That is where Social SEO comes in.

All of the major social networks include internal search capability, and that's a feature that is continuing to be refined and improved (like with Facebook's Graph Search). And while targeting keywords like we do in traditional SEO plays a role, optimizing your social media profile for social search has some differences.

On LinkedIn, for instance, your profile lists your previous jobs and job titles, and includes a summary. Many people fail to take advantage of those fields. LinkedIn allows you to be as descriptive as you want, so power users take advantage of that and go into detail about where they've worked and what they've accomplished.

Now, thanks to Skills & Expertise (and Endorsements), we have a great way to monitor, adjust and improve our Social SEO for LinkedIn. Here's how it works.

Go back to Skills & Expertise and look up one of the skills you already have on your profile. Take note of its Relative Growth, Size and Age. Also make sure that the skill is growing compared to last year, and how much. Now, check out some of the related skills. What you're looking for are potential skills that will be even better for you to list on your profile.

You're limited to 50 total skills, so add any that apply to your profession until you reach your max. At that point, it's time to prioritize. You will want to look for skills that are growing, but aren't used by absolutely everyone. Like a long-tail keyword, a more specialized and less-common skill will make you more competitive.

Once you've refined your skill list and you're happy with them, it's time to fill up your endorsements! I am not a big fan of emailing LinkedIn users and asking for endorsements. Instead, sift through your own connections and start endorsing the people you know. They will get a notification and many will reciprocate.

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How to Fix Your Basic Pay Per Click Advertising Troubles

There is really nothing more frustrating than having trouble with your PPC campaigns. SEO forces you to wait a while until you see results, and then you see a few, and then you make long-term changes, and then you wait some more, and so on. The process is slow. When it comes to PPC, everything is moving much faster and you should see results much faster. When you don’t, it can get frustrating and exhausting. Fortunately, there are certain tactics and methods you can use specifically for times likes these. If you’re ready to throw your PPC advertising out the window, take a deep breath and read on.

Top 5 Ways You Can Help Revive Your PPC Advertising Campaigns

The very first thing you want to do when faced with this situation is determine exactly where the problem lies. It might sound obvious, but too many people are looking at month-to-month changes when sometimes it’s best to use more data and look from year to year. Compare your profits, orders, and clicks to see if you can determine an area that needs help. Once you do this, there are a few steps you can take:

1. Quality Score – I think this is one of the most important aspects of PPC advertising campaigns and a great indication of how you’re doing. For this reason, it is important to monitor your quality score so that you always know exactly when you have a problem. If you find that your score needs help, you should regroup your keywords to make them more relevant, improve your landing page to incorporate your keywords, and try out completely new ads.
2. Bidding Strategy – Although bidding may seem fairly simple, it’s very difficult to get it exactly right. If your campaign keeps failing, run an analysis on the keywords where you spend the most and determine if they are profitable. If this is the case, there are two different ways you can change what you’re doing:

Automated. It’s sometimes necessary to use automated bidding if you have a very large company and lots of keywords to target. If it isn’t working well, consider a different type. For example, you may want to use either target or max CPA bidding to help you adjust different factors that keep you under a certain number.  Simply make sure that your conversion rates aren’t declining and you aren’t changing your bids too frequently (the longer you keep them there the better your results).

Manual. If you have a small company that isn’t targeting many keywords, it might be best to ditch your automated bidding and do everything manually. This allows more control for you and could be the root of your problem.

3. Competition – A sudden change in your results could be as simple as an increase in competition. You will know if this is the case if you track your competition’s display ads as well as text ads. If it seems like they are ramping up their bidding and efforts, you could have yourself a battle to the top.

4. Placements and Ad-Group Setup – If your placements aren’t working, you might want to consider moving those that are “automatic” to give yourself a better chance. You’ll also want to review your ad group setup to make sure all of your ads are even running in the first place! It might sound obvious, but most often the most basic mistakes are the ones that kill you.

5. Campaign Settings and Negative Keywords – You definitely want to check and see if you have any negative keywords that are limiting your chances of success. On that same note, check to see if your campaign settings have a good budget cap ready to go. It’s all about double-checking that will help you get out of a slump.

PPC ad campaigns are ultimately about trial and error. If you’re getting tired of not seeing results, it is most likely an indication that you need to focus your energy on either a different keyword or on a different aspect of your campaign.

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Who Should Handle Your Social Media: 8 Key Considerations

Social media is important: through it, you present an image of your company or brand, with the goal of positively influencing brand perception in order to attract and convert. The image you present in social media should therefore be just as well thought out as the image you present in any of your other marketing activities.

Would you invest resources into a major trade show and turn up with a trestle table and some flyers? Would you place a press advert without including a call to action, your web address or your company logo?

It might sound crazy, but an awful lot of businesses get on the social bandwagon simply because their competitors are doing it or because they think they should, with little or no regard at all to what they want to achieve from it, let alone anything resembling a clear strategy.

When it comes to social media you can't afford to get it wrong and increasingly, you can't afford to simply choose not do it at all. As with any job, if you plan to appoint someone internally, you need to find the person or people with the relevant skills and experience. Don't trust your social media activities to a junior member of staff simply because they have time on their hands, and don't choose the employee who declares an interest because they use Facebook a lot.

An employee using social media for personal purposes is entirely different from that same employee speaking for your brand and using social for business purposes. Having more than a passing familiarity with social doesn't mean they are the right person for the job.

The most capable candidate to handle your social media will often come from within the marketing department.  If you have an existing community manager then they are also a good bet. My advice is to steer away from allocating social to members of the sales team and whomever you do choose, make sure they understand your goals, have good people skills (being friendly and approachable is a must in social media, as is having a passion for customer service), and make sure that they have creativity with regards to coming up with ideas on how to engage followers.

Effective social media takes creativity, great interpersonal skills plus a strong grasp of business objectives.

It's common, especially in SMEs, for social media to be handled by a number of different employees. Whilst this can help spread the load and can help to keep content fresh, it can also mean that your communications suffer from a lack of coherence. My personal preference is to give responsibility to no more than a couple of individuals, though it will depend on the number of social media platforms you are active on and the scope of activities you plan to carry out.

For many SMEs, handling social media activity internally isn't an option as they don't have either the time or expertise to do it themselves, in which case calling in the services of an experienced agency or freelancer is the way to go. The following list details all of the main considerations you will need to make before deciding on who to appoint to look after your social media activities.

Who should handle your social media?

1. Handling social media in-house is still an investment.

If you appoint someone internally, ensure that you are realistic in both what you expect them to achieve and in how long it will take; monitoring social daily takes time and even more time to do it effectively. If you are only investing an hour or two a week into social, then the results you get will reflect that.

2. Don't be afraid to outsource social.

Good digital agencies will have extensive experience of working with clients across multiple sectors and will be able to use tried and tested techniques that will work for you. Arm them with additional insight into who your target audience is and what it is you want to achieve and outsourcing social to the experts will pay off.

3. Limit potential social fallout.

Limit access to the corporate social media accounts and ensure that login information is centrally held by a senior manager; as in the case of the recent HMV rogue Tweeter, you need a fail-safe.

4. It's social media, not a sales channel.

Don't make your activities all about selling. Of course people love a great sales promotion or competition and will equally be keen to hear news from you, but don't bombard them. Do not use social like a sales channel because if you do you'll turn people off and lose them.

5. Be flexible to aid creativity.

Maintain flexibility, don't be too regimented in tone and frequency; this stifles creativity and will do exactly the opposite of what you want it to achieve.

6. Set social guidelines.

Consider implementing a social policy or provide guidelines for employees to follow so they understand all communications need to fit your brand and work to achieve business objectives.

7. Keep it consistent.

If you use Bitly to shorten your URLs then use it all the time. Using different tools and styles of communication leads to your activities appearing haphazard and should be avoided.

8. Be realistic.

Carrying out even small-scale social marketing activities takes a considerable time investment; don't leap into it until you understand the extent of the investment you'll need to make.

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