Do you believe in your content? Do you want free traffic from social media? Do you want direct traffic to your website or blog?
If the answer to all of the above three questions were an astounding ‘YES’ then StumbleUpon is your best bet.
In big social media sites like Twitter & Facebook, you are competing for people’s attention. If the users see your updates they still have to click to view your content. In StumbleUpon the users are sent directly to your site. You are not competing for attention or clicks.
Beware, StumbleUpon does not boast the same user volume like the big boys but that should not discourage you from using it. With 30 million active monthly users - a small percentage of traffic is still huge. The social life of a Stumble & Pin can last for years unlike Twitter & Facebook where the attention span only lasts a mere 24 if not 48 hours.
Why Stumble?
The social network that delivers the highest traffic is (you guessed it) Facebook but did you know StumbleUpon is the 4th highest traffic driver?
Getting to the 1st page in Reddit can deliver some knockout traffic but the next day the traffic dries out. Did you know StumbleUpon can deliver 3 times more traffic than Reddit?
StumbleUpon can deliver more traffic than Google+ & LinkedIn combined. Surely, that must be something.
StumbleUpon can bring in viral traffic like any social media but the overhead here is very less, which is worth the effort. The key to success is people have to like or vote for your content.
StumbleUpon also has a paid discovery which is super targeted. You can specify gender, age, country, interest or category and device type. The best part of the paid traffic is you can get ongoing free traffic even after the paid campaign is over.
Of course, StumbleUpon may not work very well for everyone; brands and influencers who have a huge Facebook and Twitter following might not need StumbleUpon traffic.
Here is an infographic which shows how to use StumbleUpon created by YourEscapeFrom9to5.com to get the best out of this social media underdog.
Infographic Source: YourEscapeFrom9to5.com
One More Handy Tip
If you are submitting your post or page to StumbleUpon, don’t use the StumbleUpon share button as you will get a default category assigned based on the content which can be a bit of a hit and miss. For example, I had a post on SEO which was classified as Marketing although; this was not way off the mark. I could have gone to StumbleUpon and manually added the page and selected a more accurate category of ‘SEO’. Selecting the right category can make or break your post going viral.
Let’s Stumble, shall we?
StumbleUpon is like a life line especially for new bloggers and new websites – who else delivers free traffic to your door step for such little effort? You can either be a small fish in a big pond or a big fish in a small pond; StumbleUpon allows you to be a big fish admittedly in a smaller pond but there is plenty of food for the king in the pond.
When setting up a paid Facebook ad, there are a lot of boxes to be checked.
Are you targeting the right people? Are your image dimensions to scale? Are you running the right type of ad? If we're being honest, it can get a little confusing.
With more than 1.4 billion people using Facebook and over 900 million visits every day, Facebook offers up a unique opportunity for marketers to augment their organic efforts. Trouble is, with both an investment of time and money on the line, there's not much room for oversight.
To help, we've put together a checklist to help you keep all of your campaign details straight. It will help ensure that you're tapping into the right audience with the right ad at the right time.
What are you waiting for? Get to checkin'.
The Ultimate Checklist for Creating & Optimizing Facebook Ads
Facebook offers a wide variety of paid ad options and placements, but all ads can be broken down into three elements:
Campaigns. The campaign houses all of your assets.
Ad sets. If you're targeting separate audiences with different characteristics, you'll need an individual ad set for each.
Ads. Your actual ads live within your ad sets. Each ad set can hold a variety of ads that vary in color, copy, images, etc.
With that terminology out of the way, let's dive in to creating an ad.
Determine the most appropriate editor.
Facebook offers users two different tools for creating a paid ad: the Ads Manager and thePower Editor. When deciding which one is the best fit for you, you'll want to consider both your company size and the number of ads you plan to run at once.
While the Ads Manager best suits most companies, the Power Editor serves as a tool for larger advertisers who are looking for more precise control over a variety of campaigns. For the sake of this article, we're going to detail how to create an ad using the Ads Manager. (For more on how to create an ad using the Power Editor, check out this step-by-step article from Kissmetrics.)
Choose an objective.
Facebook's Ads Manager, like many social media advertising networks, is designed with your campaign objective in mind. Before getting started, Ads Manager will prompt you to choose an objective for your campaign:
There are 10 different objectives to choose from. The list includes everything from sending people to your website to getting installs of your app to raising attendance at your event.
By choosing one of these objectives, you're giving Facebook a better idea of what you'd like to do so they can present you with the best-suited ad options. Facebook's ad options include:
Page Post Engagements
Page Likes
Click to Website
Website Conversions
App Installs
App Engagement
Event Responses
Offer Claims
Video Views
Local Awareness
Let's say, for sake of this post, that you're looking to drive more traffic to your website. When you select this option, Facebook will prompt you to enter the URL you're looking to promote. If you're using marketing automation software, be sure to create a unique tracking URL with UTM parameters for this to ensure that you'll be able to keep track of traffic and conversions from this ad. For HubSpot customers, this can be done using the Tracking URL Builder.
Once selected, Facebook will then display the ad option that makes the most sense in terms of achieving this objective.
Choose your audience.
If you're just starting out with paid advertising on Facebook, it's likely that you'll have to experiment with several different targeting options until you reach an audience that fits just right.
To help you narrow your focus, Facebook's targeting criteria are accompanied by an audience definition gauge. This tool -- located to the right of the audience targeting fields -- takes all of your selected properties into consideration in order to come up with a potential reach number.
If you're wavering between choosing a specific audience over a broad one, consider your objective. If you're looking to drive traffic, you'll probably want to focus on the type of people you know will be interested in your offering. However, if you're looking to build brand awareness or promote a widely appealing offer, feel free to focus on a more general audience.
Facebook's built-in targeting is vast, including options such as:
Location
Age
Gender
Languages
Relationship
Education
Work
Financial
Home
Ethnic Affinity
Generation
Parents
Politics (U.S. only)
Life Events
Interests
Behaviors
Connections
You also have the option to select a Custom Audience -- this allows you to target people on Facebook who are in your company's contact database, visited a page on your website that has a tracking pixel, or use your app or game. To learn more about how to set up an Custom Audience on Facebook, check out these instructions. (And for more on the specifics of these criteria, visit this Facebook targeting resource.)
Once you find a group that responds well to your ads, Facebook allows you to save these audiences to be used again later -- so you may not need to dive into this step once you've been running Facebook ads for a while.
Set your budget.
Facebook offers advertisers the option to set either a daily budget or a lifetime budget. Here's how they differ from one another:
Daily budget.If you want your ad set to run continuously throughout the day, this is the option you'll want to go for. Using a daily budget means that Facebook will pace your spending per day. Keep in mind that the minimum daily budget for an ad set is $1.00 USD and must be at least 2X your CPC.
Lifetime budget. If you're looking to run your ad for a specified length of time, select lifetime budget. This means that Facebook will pace your spend over the time period you set for the ad to run.
To further specify your budgeting, turn to the advanced options. This section allows you to specify a few things:
Schedule
Choose whether or not your want your campaign to run immediately and continuously or if you want to customize the start and end dates. You can also set parameters so that your ads only run during specific hours and days of the week.
Optimization & Pricing
Choose whether or not you want to bid for your objective, clicks, or impressions. (This will alter how your ad is displayed and paid for.) By doing so, you'll pay for your ad to be shown to people within your target audience that are more likely to complete your desired action, but Facebook will control what your maximum bid is.
If you don't want Facebook to set optimal bids for you, you'll want to opt for manual bidding. This option awards you full control over how much you're willing to pay per action completed. However, Facebook will provide a suggested bid based on other advertisers' behavior to give you a sense of what you should shoot for.
Delivery
Delivery type falls under two categories: standard and accelerated. Standard delivery will show your ads throughout the day, while accelerated delivery helps you reach an audience quickly for time-sensitive ads (Note: this option requires manual bid pricing).
Create your ad.
What do you want your ad to look like? It all depends on your original objective.
If you're looking to increase the number of clicks to your website, Facebook's Ad Manager will suggest the Click to Website ad options. Makes sense, right?
This ad option is broken down into two formats: Links and Carousels. Essentially, this means that you can either display a single image ad (Links) or a multi-image ad (Carousel) with three to five scrolling images at no additional cost.
A Links ad will be displayed like this:
A Carousel ad will be displayed like this:
Once you decide between the two, you'll need to upload your creative assets. It's important to note that for each type of ad, Facebook requires users to adhere to certain design criteria.
Your image may not include more than 20% text. See how much text is on your image.
Keep in mind that these are the ad options for the "send people to your website" objective.
If you selected "boost your posts," you'd be presented with different ad options like the Page Post Engagement: Photo ad. This ad has a unique set of design recommendations. To explore all of the ad options and their design specifics, refer to this resource.
Once you select an ad type, the Ads Manager will prompt you to identify how you'd like to display your ad. The options they provide are as follows: Desktop News Feed, Mobile News Feed, and Desktop Right Column.
Here's how each ad would appear:
Desktop News Feed
Mobile News Feed
Desktop Right Column
Be aware if your ad isn't associated with a Facebook page, you'll only be able to run Desktop Right Column ads. To leverage all three display locations, you can learn how to create a Facebook Page here.
Report on the performance.
Once your ads are running, you'll want to keep an eye on how they're doing. To see their results, you'll want to look in two places: the Facebook Ad Manager and your marketing software.
Facebook's Ad Manager
Facebook's Ad Manager is a sophisticated dashboard that provides users with an overview of all their campaigns.
Upfront, the dashboard highlights an estimate of how much you're spending each day. The dashboard is organized by columns, which makes it easy to filter through your ads so you can create a custom view of your results. Key numbers like reach, frequency, and cost are readily available, making reporting on performance a no brainer.
According to Facebook, here are some of the key metrics to look for (and their definitions):
Performance. Can be customized further to include metrics like results, reach, frequency and impressions
Engagement. Can be customized further to include metrics like Page likes, Page engagement and post engagement
Videos. Can be customized further to include metrics like video views and avg. % of video viewed
Website. Can be customized further to include metrics like website actions (all), checkouts, payment details, purchases and adds to cart
Apps. Can be further customized to include metrics like app installs, app engagement, credit spends, mobile app actions and cost per app engagement
Events. Can be further customized to include metrics like event responses and cost per event response
Clicks. Can be further customized to include metrics like clicks, unique clicks, CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click)
Settings. Can be further customized to include metrics like start date, end date, ad set name, ad ID, delivery, bid and objective
Your Marketing Software
While there are certainly a lot of details to keep straight when planning a paid Facebook ad, it's important that you don't lose sight of the big picture. Reporting on clicks and conversions from Facebook is important, however, if you're using URLs with specific UTM codes, you have an opportunity to measure your ads' full-funnel effectiveness using your marketing software.
Tracking URLs will help your marketing software keep track of how many leads, or better yet, how many customers you've gained from your advertising efforts. This information is useful in determining the ROI of this source, and can also be used to inform your targeting strategy.
If you're a HubSpot customer, you can create unique tracking codes for your Facebook campaign by navigating to the Tracking URL Builder on the Reports Home page. All you'll need to do is plug in the URL, attach a campaign, and choose the source you want the URL to be attributed to in your Sources Report. Once your ad launches and you start getting traffic and conversions on your website, you'll be able to easily track how many visits, contacts, and customers you're generating.
Social media is one of those marketing channels that can be very powerful ... or very boring. You'll either have a lot of success interacting with your customers, or you'll see little results. Few do social media really well, and those who do see great things come from it. But for everyone who does social media well, there are hundreds of others seemingly spinning their social wheels with no results.
For many, social media is simply a place to post links to content they've created in hopes that thousands will see it, click through, and share with their followers. So they have profiles on every network, and every network looks exactly the same; line after line of self-promotion. This is not going to bring results.
Half-heartedly sharing your content on social media is not social media marketing. It's spamming. (tweet this)
Social marketing is a lot of work, and it takes time listening and responding. It's social, and anything social takes an investment of effort and skill.
Check out these 41 resources that will help you develop the skills needed to be effective on social media. You may want to bookmark this post so you can easily refer to it again later.
Blogs on Social Media
Social marketing is a science involving special communication skills. And the landscape changes constantly.
One of the best ways to develop your social media prowess and to stay up-to-date is to follow experts in the field. These blogs are always fresh with actionable information you can use to improve your marketing:
SME is both a strategic services agency and a blog with a bevy of social media and marketing experts. The SME blog is consistently considered one of the most insightful in the industry, and several of their authors have written popular books on several aspects of digital and social marketing.
Scott is a marketing guru who covers a ton of subjects. However, his social media articles are always eye opening. If you haven't heard of Scott yet, check out his "this week in digital" posts, these will keep you up-to-date with all the news on social, and every other aspect of digital marketing as well.
Not to be confused with Social Media Explorer, the Examiner is one of the top blogs in the world for social media. Their social media reports are filled with all the important data social marketers want. Their blog posts are filled with valuable tips as well. If I had to pick just one social media blog to follow, this is the one I would choose.
Social media is a science, and connecting with consumers is a different world than connecting with other brands. For B2B social marketing, you have to take marketing to another level. For any B2B company, this is a blog I would follow for social marketing insights.
Other Introduction ebooks by HubSpot:This step-by-step guide explains the reasons to created a LinkedIn company page, the anatomy of the perfect company page, and step-by-step instruction on how to setup a company page.
If you're building a company page for the first time, or trying to upgrade your page, this guide will show you exactly how to do everything from crafting an engaging company description to creating an eye-catching banner image.
Over 11,000 marketers have downloaded this ebook, which covers the best practices business timelines, including examples and explanations of the features you need to know.
This ebook is chock full of useful information for marketers who are just getting started with social media. it covers the basic best practices for each of the major social networks. This one is definitely worth the download.
Last, but definitely not least is this amazing guide from Moz. The 12 chapters in this book are filled with valuable information that every marketer absolutely needs to know. Bookmark this guide, you'll refer to it more than once!
Videos on Social Media
Videos are my second favorite medium to learn, behind books. Being able to glean from the brightest minds on any subject like you're face to face is powerful. These videos will give you valuable insights, just how to do social media, but you'll get insights into the why and what as well.
You can't talk about social media without talking about speaker, author, and social expert Gary Vaynerchuk. On the Gary Vee Show, he takes questions from his audience and answers them as only he can. If you have a burning question on social media marketing, send it to him.
If you aren't in love with Ted, you need to check your pulse. This is a playlist of videos from Ted Talks on social media. There may not be that much actionable advice in these videos. But if you want to become an expert on social media, these videos will give you insight into the deeper subject like, "the hidden influence of social networks."
If you're really new to social media, and you want to learn through a structured lesson experience, consider Lynda's massive library on social marketing classes.
Podcasts on Social Media
If you like to learn while you chill, work out, or commute to and from work, podcasts are one of the best ways to do it. And these podcasts will help you develop your social media expertise.
Rather than deep dives, the SME Show gives you small, bite-sized content for social media every day. This is a great podcast to get actionable quick-tips on a daily basis. It'll keep you motivated while you develop your skills.
Every episode of the Social Pros Podcast shines the light on real pros doing real work for real companies. You'll get insights from Jay Baer of Convince and Convert, and Jeff Rohrs of Salesforce.
Slideshows and Infographics on Social Media
If you're a visual learner, these slide decks and infographics is another great way to learn social media.
This slideshare walks you through the channels and tools you'll need to be most effective at B2B social media marketing. Sometimes, success is in using the right tools and channels for the right audience.
Timing is very important with social media. Posted at the wrong time, your update can go completely unnoticed because of the flood of updates in your audience's feeds. Being able to master the timing of social media is critical to effective marketing.
This slideshow is from the folks at Content Marketing Institute. This deck shows the proper methods for promoting your content over social media. This is a must-read for any social marketer who wants to use those channels to promote content.
Again, timing is everything. This infographic lays out the best and worst times to post on each major network. You should save this infographic for referencing when you schedule your social media posts.
Books on Social Media
Books are my favorite way to learn. Many experts agree that if you read a book a week, on your area of expertise, for 5 years, you will have the equivalent of a PhD on the subject. That may or may not be true, but reading books from the experts definitely doesn't make you a worse marketer. Here's some books to get you started:
You've got to read this book by the legendary former Chief Evangelist of Apple. Guy is one of the pioneers of social and content marketing, and this book is filled with expert advice from one of the best.
This book is supposed to be for busy marketers who need to get the basics of Twitter down quickly. This book shows you how to connect and start creating meaningful connections in less than two hours.
Facebook is one of the most effective advertising and PPC platforms available. You can target on a plethora of metrics, allowing you to drill down and advertise to a very specific audience. This book will show you how to optimize your Facebook ads.
Gary gives insight into how he uses a conversational, reactionary approach to engaging his audience. He gives concrete, visual examples of great social marketing, and not so great as well.
Dave claims the secret to viral social marketing is to be likable. When someone likes you, they'll recommend you. But being likable on social networks is easier said than done. This book will help you crack that code.
One of my mentors taught me to read children's books on a subject if I just couldn't grasp a concept. This principle gave birth to the "Explain It Like I'm 5," movement. Sometimes you just need it broken down like you're a dummy. If that's you, this book is valuable. Go ahead and buy it, we won't call you dummy.
The #1 Secret to Social Media Success
No matter how many social networks you set out to master, or how long you work in the social marketing field, there is one secret that will ensure you're successful: Never stop learning!
This list is massive, I know, and there's no way to consume all these resources in the next week. But if you set yourself to learning every day, every week, every month, every year, you'll eventually be the one writing the books that help others learn social marketing.
It all begins with learning.
10 Things I've Learned About Social Media:
Social marketing requires listening.
Conversations should be the goal of social marketing.
Team #Followback is a waste of time.
Social marketing isn't broadcasting, it's communicating.
Never auto-post your content to your social profiles.
Never copy/paste the same message to every social profile.
Social marketing requires time. It's relationship-building on a massive scale.
Be helpful. Period.
Social is faster support than live chat, email, or phone calls. Embrace it.
You don't have to be on every network. Go where your customers are.
What have you learned about social media marketing? Please share in the comments!
