We live in an age where social media networks have significantly matured, with key networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Google drive traffic to your businesses. We know for a fact, that by keeping our customers in the loop, we get to increase our overall revenues with them. We at the AppAddictive have seen this happen with hundreds of thousands of fan pages installing our apps, brands leveraging our custom engagement apps as well as managing social advertising campaigns geared towards optimization.

And yet, it’s still a challenge for us marketers to really get the heartbeat of our social media assets. There are way too many platforms to worry about. While we’re happy with improvements pushed by Facebook and Twitter with their respective analytics support, we feel that there’s a need for us to put all of our data in one place. This way,we have the ability to stay consistent across multiple networks and adjust our marketing campaigns if necessary.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to keep tabs on the competition.

We are pleased to announce the newest member of our small-business suite, AppAddictive Analytics. This product is a result of countless amounts of customer-feedback based on years of making social media work for small-business.

With AppAddictive Analytics you can:

• Easily connect your Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,Instagram, Yelp, Alexa and Google Analytics accounts for data tracking.
  A powerful RSS broadcasting tool which allows you to automatically and seamlessly publish content from ANY RSS feed to multiple social media accounts at the same time.
  Have a unified dashboard where you can have top-level overview of your social media assets.
  Answer the Whos, Whys and Whens – get a deeper understanding of your fans.
  Leverage on actionable insights you can use for posting updates.
  Track competitor’s social media performance and establish an industry index to add more context to your own data. Are your competitors outspending/outmarketing you?
  Set custom alerts on competitive activity.

On top of our core analytics offering, we also provide an easy and efficient way to post and multi-broadcast your messages on Facebook and Twitter. You can schedule your posts, consolidate your library of images that you use and see post performance in real-time. You can
easily access this via the Broadcast tab.

This is just the beginning. We’ll eventually introduce new features as the social media landscape evolves.

You can immediately start using AppAddictive Analytics by clicking here. No credit card required!

Facebook continues its “War on Fluff” with yet another development, this time targeting the often abused practice of Click-baiting. 

It all boils down to quality at this point in Facebook’s history. With thousands of Facebook pages being created as well as content publishers taking advantage of these “hacks”, our newsfeed has never felt so crowded, full of tempting links that often bring us to underwhelming content. Sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed got this right and have built high traffic websites (not to mention profitable businesses) around it. Just like its predecessors, in the form of content farms, the Internet does find ways to correct itself and make our lives a better. This was inevitable.

We can’t really blame Facebook on this one, click-bait content has been perfected as a science so much so that almost anyone can do it. In fact, you can even generate your own here. Facebook, in its post, is pretty transparent on how it determines if an article linked out constitutes link-bait

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook. If people click on an article and spend time reading it, it suggests they clicked through to something valuable. If they click through to a link and then come straight back to Facebook, it suggests that they didn’t find something that they wanted. With this update we will start taking into account whether people tend to spend time away from Facebook after clicking a link, or whether they tend to come straight back to News Feed when we rank stories with links in them.

Another factor we will use to try and show fewer of these types of stories is to look at the ratio of people clicking on the content compared to people discussing and sharing it with their friends. If a lot of people click on the link, but relatively few people click Like, or comment on the story when they return to Facebook, this also suggests that people didn’t click through to something that was valuable to them.

So there you have it. I think most of our readers are generally safe from this practice. If you feel that you’re going to lose a lot of traffic here then it means that you’ve been relying too much on your headlines rather than the actual content. There are a lot ways to get that elusive click from your users, but it all boils down by being remarkable.

The bottom line is, content creators and page managers should put more sincerity in their content. While a lot of us need ways to generate content faster by following best practices and formulaic techniques, we should really focus on delivering value and teach our audiences a thing or two. You can still generate click-baiting-esque headlines, as long as there’s enough substance to back it up.

(Photo via Waag Society/Flickr)

Builtwith reports that over 71.1% of Quantcast’s Top 10k websites use Google Analytics. And with that, a strong community of users have shared nifty solutions that you can  add to your Google Analytics account.

If this is your first time to hear about Google Analytics’ solutions gallery, you’re not alone. We only found out about this when we decided to get a certified (for fun). And it’s been out since 2013!

Via the solutions gallery, you’ll have access to an expanding gallery of dashboards, reports, useful segments, goals and other toys to satisfy your inner analytics geek. With GA experts and thought-leaders sharing their dashboard configurations, you’ll be an analytics guru in no time.

Of course this assumes that you have an existing Google Analytics account. If you’re new to this analytics platform and want to poke your way around, we highly recommend that you complete their free training courses found here.

But wait, why are we talking about Google Analytics? Aren’t Facebook Insights enough to measure Social Media performance? If you’re a social media manager, you’d still want to synchronize with your digital marketing team and make sure that you’re making a measurable contribution to your site traffic and related goals. After all, conversion happens on your website.

Now that 4th of July weekend is upon us, let’s get cracking. These tools only take a few minutes to install. Revel in the data once when you get back from your holiday.

Here’s a list of our 3 favorite Social Media related Analytics tools.

Social Media Dashboard – Analytics evangelist Justin Cutroni’s dashboard is a must install for Social Media managers. In fact, if you only have time to install one, this is it.

This dashboard gives you a top-level view of how your Social Media campaigns are doing, sorted by network. As a rule of thumb, you should assign a dollar value to each visitor based on your past data. If you have goals setup on your analytics account, you’ll see each network’s performance as well.

Twitter Dashboard – Designed by Erik Wagner, this gives you deeper insights on your Twitter campaigns. We love how it reinforces the fact that Twitter is indeed a mobile heavy platform. As such, this should give you some input on the content you post and consequently, how your responsive site is performing.

Social Media Network Analysis – Advanced Traffic Segmentation – Prepared by the Teknicks team, this solution is a pretty helpful and time-saving segmentation bundle that allows you to quickly isolate traffic from each social network.

So those are just 3 solutions that we love of the lot. Feel free to install more!

Announced by Facebook in March this year, we upgraded our page a couple of weeks ago and we’ve gathered enough thoughts to actually have a fair assessment of the new layout.

The verdict is…we like it!

At the onset, you’ll see major differences on the way your page is administered. The old page manager overview page is gone and replaced by a page management bar on top of your page. There’s a special emphasis on managing notifications and messaging while ad management and settings are generally the same.

In terms of the look and feel, the new layout is much streamlined as compared to its predecessor, making it slimmer since we’re just dealing with one column for your timeline.

But the meat of this change really lies with the left sidebar. Originally confined to the top-page of the page, you now have to contend with a prominent sidebar that displays helpful information to the visitor.

Still wary? Unfortunately, Facebook will automatically upgrade your page to the new version on June 20 so it would be good to know what to expect from these changes. You have 8 days so let’s get cracking!

Revisit Your Header Image

If you haven’t fixed your header image yet, now’s the time to do it. One major difference seen with the new layout is the page name is now part of the header image area.

Take a look at this:

While it certainly looks nicer, it definitely not working with the original background image that we had. We need more oomph, more contrast.

What we did was come up with a new image (851×315 pixels) with this in mind and here’s the result….

Isn’t that Better? Of course this was made possible with help from Jon Loomer’s helpful guide on Facebook Image Dimensions.

Your Visual Content Marketing Needs to Step Up

Let’s just keep things simple. Try to minimize (if not avoid) all status updates and just shift to a either photo or link posts.

Now that we’re just down to one column for our fan pages, it’s imperative that we shift all attention to content that converts. Are you a bit concerned on where you’ll get your images? We recommend tools like Canva to get the job done fast and cheap. We really don’t have any excuses anymore!

Choose your Subcategories Well

We’re only saying this because it gets top billing on your site category. But yes, it does help with the overall search performance of your page.

If you’re a local business providing services like home repairs then you’re fine. As for the rest of us, we really have to do a little bit of soul-searching and make sure that assign subcategories applicable to your what you guys really do.

But don’t go overboard! Try limiting it to three at most.

How Should I Manage my Sidebar?

One thing you have to realize is that you can actually REORDER the placements of all these widgets to the left. The catch here is that you CANNOT rearrange the first two widgets on top which would be PEOPLE (the ones that contain reviews) and ABOUT.

It goes without saying that you need to fill-up all items on your ABOUT settings. If you haven’t done that, now’s your chance to update it.

It really depends on the kind of page you have. If you’re a local business, you can display other pages in your immediate community (the LIKED BY THIS PAGE widget) and bump it up. You can do the same with reviews and photos. In our case, we’d like to showcase our apps so that goes right under about.

Do I Have to Shift My Attention to Reviews?

Reviews – a feature that was originally confined to the right sidebar figures more prominently on the new layout. So the answer is YES.

If you haven’t gathered enough reviews on your site, try to come up with programs to encourage people to write reviews on your site. You can promote your page on your mailing list, on your website. But if you have a kickass product or service and you make your customers happy, then reviews are the least of your problems.

Are page apps being downplayed here?

Some people are saying that page tab apps are now taking a backseat with the new layout. We beg to differ. Apps, done right should still be an effective tool in your Facebook marketing arsenal. The core dimensions of Facebook pages remain that same and you can still like-gate them, specially if you’re running sweepstakes. Or our favorite app for conversion…the postcard app!

The same rules apply here, make sure your 111x74px images are optimized and it should grab the attention of your users.

So there you have it! Take these concepts in mind and you’ll be alright by June 20. Good luck!

Your organic traffic has dropped. Based on some computations from EdgeRank Checker, it continues to go on a downward spiral. But hey, we worked hard to get these likes. What now? Will all these fans that I acquired through paid Facebook ad campaigns go to waste?

In the good old days, engagement from Facebook was a formidable part of our conversion funnel.

And it still is. We finally found a sensible solution to put our paid media to good use and provide an amazing engine for earned media.

Developing Facebook applications have allowed us to collaborate with our clients. In the past two years, we think that we’ve finally found a winner in the form of postcard apps.

What exactly is a postcard app?

Postcard apps refer to Facebook Page tabs where fans fill up a form that posts an image on their timelines. Since Facebook sees this as an image posted by the user, then there’s also a chance that this gets published on the newsfeed*.

To illustrate, you can come up with a thank you card generator with text generated by the user. Likewise, postcard apps are also good for messages like sharing your personal goals to the public (i.e. I want to lose 10lbs. by the end of the month, read 18 books this year, etc.).

Now that we’ve gotten the definition out of the way, let’s get down and dirty!

How does it work?

First, you have to come up with ideas on what your postcard app should talk about. It can be a holiday promotion, a challenge or if you like, generate an actual postcard!

Of course you would like to add certain branding elements on the postcard itself, so don’t forget to add your brand logo or a hashtag!

In designing your form, don’t forget to capture user’s email addresses. You can auto-populate this by connecting your Facebook app to a user’s session (although this is optional). We recommend that you add other pieces of complementary content on your postcard tab app.

Don’t forget to build a measurement strategy (via Google Analytics)!

We provide an administration panel to manage entries and delete ones with offensive content. You can export all the data via .csv and bulk photo downloads.

How do I get people to post photos?

Given the challenges faced by declining newsfeed reach, this is a good time to invest in a paid campaign. All you have to do is have a post that contains a link to the tab where you installed your postcard app and promote it on Facebook. That’s money well spent, given all the potential benefits coming from this strategy. You should target existing and potential fans.

Distribute Engagement

Since these are photos, users who see these postcards can comment, like and share. Get thousands of entries and you’ve got a good engagement engine going throughout your campaign.

It’s Also a Content Farm

We’ve seen brands harvest over thousands of photos generated by their campaigns. What can we do with these? Postcard apps provide you with the ability to store and repurpose this content. Share this on Pinterest boards, Twitter (think #cardoftheday), Instagram photos and even a blog entry.

Grow Your Mailing List

You’re getting email addresses from your fans. Grow your mailing list by adding this on your current list. You can also use this information for future paid campaigns using custom and lookalike audiences.

Have you released a similar campaign on Facebook? How did it go?

(Update: Facebook now has a policy of limiting auto shares on Facebook. This might reduce the value derived from this strategy but the benefits are still worth it).

We tested these 2 variants. Result: The bottom landing page consistently outperformed the top one, by almost 90%. The bottom one generated almost twice as many leads as the top one.

The results are somewhat counterintuitive because we initially had a theory that the appearance of top brand logos and testimonials will generate more sign-ups. It turns out that most probably, the clutter actually got visitors distracted from actually filling the form!

Every online business should have a discipline of testing their landing pages because no matter what experts advise, there just might be something with your visitors, your product or your design that leads to results contrary to expectations.

Since everyone knows Google, let us use the Google Search Engine Marketing budget as an example to illustrate.

Suppose you have a really cool online retail clothing website, call it JaneJackets.  JaneJackets buys $25000 worth of Google Adwords clicks every month.  The $25000 results in 30000 Visits to the different product pages of your web site.  For simplicity, each product page will have a different design, but will have a “Add to Cart” Button.  Suppose that out of these 30000 visitors,  a total of 7500  added a product to your shopping cart.  Now suppose that only 3250 of these people who added to the Shopping Cart proceeded to the Checkout Page.  Now suppose out of these 3250 people who went to the Checkout page , only 1950 continued to pay with their credit card (i.e. 1300 abandoned their shopping cart).   Suppose that the average order size is $200 dollars.

Let us do a simple math and compute the Conversion Rate of JaneJackets.

Total Sales = $200 * 1950 = $390,000

Conversion Rate = (# who Added to Cart/# of Visits to the site) *(# who went to the Checkout page/# who Added to Cart)* (# who successfully Checked out/# who reached the Check out page)

Conversion Rate = (7500/30000) * (3250/7500) * (1950/3250)
= 25% * 50% * 60%
= 7.5%

Now suppose that we use Conversion Rate Optimization techniques to  tweak JaneJacket’s Landing Page, tweak the Google Search Keyword Campaigns and the overall conversion rate improves to 9%,  the resulting Total Sales will become (9% of 30000) * 200 = $540,000 or an increase of $150,000 in revenues!

Now, this may surprise you but here is the little truth:  Facebook may actually perform better than Google and increase your Conversion Rate.   We  deal with Facebook ad campaigns everyday and we have live internal data to show that Facebook is outperforming Google in terms of conversion rate with some clients. In fact, Google Analytics’s latest product, “Customer Journey to Online Purchase”, confirms that Facebook is a good conversion channel for some industries.  Read this post to find out how Facebook fares against other online advertising channels among various industries.

There are some industries – entertainment, media, online retail – where Facebook is really good at conversions. Additionally, because Facebook has the native ad units and their cost per click tends to be lower than Google, the overall conversion rate is much better with Facebook than with Google.  It is our prediction that as the world becomes more and more comfortable in the future with social media, Facebook will perform even better as a conversion channel.

AppAddictive helps organizations and clients do Facebook conversion rate optimization by using analytical Facebook Ad Optimization and Facebook Page Optimization. In short, we use Facebook to help clients acquire customers and conversions for businesses – whether it is customers, Facebook likes, Facebook Engagement as measured by People Talking About This (PTAT), or mobile and Facebook app installs, leads, surveys or contests or coupons.

One of my favorite passions in Facebook ad optimization is using my love for numbers to come up with correlations and relationships ahead of our competitors.  As Facebook has more than 1 billion users, they have a very comprehensive database of targeting and running these tests require a lot of number crunching.    This is very much akin to when I was testing quantitative finance algorithms on my Silicon Graphics Irix box back in the 1990's to try to extract opportunities for profit in the stock market.

At AppAddictive in our NYC headquarters, our team uses massive Excel sheets, collect data from all sources,  make conclusions that allow us to achieve return on investment goals of our client.

This machine learning process discovers some insightful jewels that human guessing will never be able to find.

In one of our exercises, we discovered that Rihanna's fans are mostly political Democrats.

So, what can you do with this?

Suppose you are fund-raising for a Democratic candidate, you can create ads in Facebook Ad Manager and target Rihanna Fans.  You can set #Rihanna under Precise Interests.  And if you are targeting only people from your state you can add all the other geographic target.   See screenshot below.

Now, combine this trusted permission and the power of Facebook and you get the picture.   Enter Facebook’s “Custom Audience” Product.

Here is how “Custom Audience” works.  Custom Audiences allows businesses to upload their email list to Facebook and communicate with the email list without being interruptive. Instead of emailing (often unwanted) to an existing customer,  ”Custom Audiences” enables a business to communicate to an audience without interrupting the experience. It’s a subtle conversation between the marketer and the customer.

At AppAddictive, we recently ran a custom audience Facebook “Custom Audience” campaign with a B2B customer, and the results were dramatically amazing.  Ask us about Custom Audience.

Here is why.

When a person is searching for “something”, that activity is super valuable to marketers. Why? Because marketers know exactly that the person has demonstrated an intent to purchase something.  The online marketing term for this is “search intent”.

Google versus Facebook

Google figured out the value of “search intent” and built a $50 billion business by selling advertising spots to businesses who want to target people who are “looking for your product or brand”.   Before the announcement of “Graph Search”,  businesses have always claimed that advertising on Facebook generated much lower return on investment because visitors on Facebook are not “on the search” for their product. However, “Graph Search” is going to allow businesses to reach users who are searching for their product on Facebook.

This is how “Graph Search” works:

When you enter a “search term”, Facebook's Graph Search examines a your friends and your connections  to find content they have ‘liked’ that matches the search term. It also considers second-degree connections or friends of friends, as well as content which has been shared either directly with the searcher or publicly on Facebook. It uses natural language processing technology both to suggest other related search terms and identify connections. (Facebook's strategy to use natural language processing is in itself a ver y interesting technological read and the reasons can be found here)

Preview of “Graph Search”

You can go to Microsoft's Bing (Microsoft is an investor in Facebook and has first access to Facebook's Graph Search)  and search for “Geico”.  If you are logged onto “Facebook” in another tab, you will see a box of your Facebook friends' comments that matched “Geico”.  (see Screenshot below)

What does this mean to brand marketers?  Huge!  In a few years from now, all the brands will claim their “branded” terms on Facebook's Graph Search just like brands claim their brand names on Google now.

I predict that Graph Search will be huge and will make Facebook equalize Google.  Graph Search can become a $10 billion market over time.

Brands who want to get a head start on Facebook's Graph Search can contact a Facebook Ads API developer like AppAddictive.