What is The Difference Between Dark Social & Dark Posts?

What Is the Difference Between Dark Social and Dark Posts?

So…what is the difference between dark social and a dark post?

In my work as a product specialist, I get this question all the time. The confusion is understandable due to the similar nomenclature, but never fear–I’m here to help!

It’s really an apples-to-oranges comparison. While dark posts (also known as unpublished posts) are ad objects, undoubtedly inside the traditional umbrella of social media, Dark Social has nothing to do with ads and doesn’t necessarily have to do with “traditional” social media at all.

Dark/Unpublished Posts

Let’s start with dark/unpublished posts. These posts are ad objects that appear in consumer timelines, but do not exist on the company’s social page. They appear as normal-looking posts, but have calls to action like “Learn More,” “Shop Now,” or “Like Page.” If you are reading this article, you have either purchased or seen these ads a million times.

But What About Dark Social?

Dark Social is an entirely different beast: it has nothing to do with ads. It refers simply to the private sharing of links via mediums that don’t pass a referrer in traditional web analytics platforms, such as email, Slack, Text, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat.

Slack

Facebook Messenger

Text

When we break down the term Dark Social, “Dark” relates to the fact that these conversions are often falsely attributed to direct traffic in your web analytics tool. The “social” component comes from the fact that this is a social interaction of two or more people. If it makes it easier, just think “private sharing.” 

Dark Social data is absolutely critical, not just for social teams, but for your marketing organization as a whole. In fact, you should be viewing Dark Social as its own marketing channel, one that contains a goldmine of data. Right now, around 80% of all sharing is dark. 80%!!! These private shares represent consumers who are typically at the bottom of the marketing funnel and/or huge fans and advocates of your brand. These are people sharing links to your products so that their friends, families, and co-workers will buy them, read your articles, and share your quizzes to help determine “Which Wildlife Excursion Should You Try In Manitoba?” (looking at you, Buzzfeed).

These interactions are occurring all the time, and you are missing the chance to optimize your content for goal completions that matter to your business. You are missing a nuanced perspective on the social activity sitting in your direct traffic bucket. Using this data, you can learn which products, content, or other web pages resonate most with your audience, so you can transform your social, email, and ad campaigns around the topics people likely to buy and engage deeply with your brand care most about.

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Online Marketing Statistics and Trends for Small Businesses You Can’t Ignore [Infographic]

Do you feel like your small business is being bombarded with marketing distractions, such as changing the design of your website or signing up for a hot new social network that reaches millennials? Do you feel like you are lost in your bid to market your small business? As a small business with limited budget, all you need is a proof that your online marketing channel and strategy is worth your time and effort. The latest online marketing statistics and trends by Invesp shades light on what works when it comes to online marketing for small business. You can use these statistics to make decisions about elements of your online marketing strategy.

Is internet marketing important?

According to Marketing Tech Blog, 75% of small business owners think that internet marketing is very effective or effective when it comes to attracting new customers. As a result 37% plan to increase their marketing budget over the next 12 months. However, 50% of SMBs spend less than $300 on internet marketing every month.

29% of small business owners say they understand internet marketing and do it alone. 28% say they are learning and would like to do it alone. Only 6% say they either don’t understand it or don’t want to do it. The rest, 37%, say they would like to do it if only they would have time and money to do it.

Clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement because 55% of small businesses spend only 20% of their marketing on online marketing while only 10% of small businesses spend 80-100% of the marketing budget on online marketing.

A responsive website is important

Most small businesses (74%) have a website but only 56% say their website is mobile responsive. According to LocalVox, 35% of website traffic is likely to come from mobile devices. This means that non-responsive websites lose on, average, 35% of traffic.

As a matter of fact, the number of mobile traffic is expected to grow in the coming days. So ensure that your website is mobile friendly.

What is the most effective channels of attracting new customers?

28% of small business owners think the Word of mouth is the most effective when it comes to attracting new leads/customers. 20% believe SEO is the most effective channel while 15% believe in online directories. Others are email marketing (10%), mobile marketing (4%) and PPC marketing (4%).

Having said that, the internet marketing industry moves quickly and it’s often demanding to keep up with the swings in technology, consumer behavior, spending and effectiveness. As a small business owner, you should stay vigilant and updated on the latest trends.

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Three Things Social Media Will NOT Do For Your Business

All of the blog posts I write are dedicated to the power of what social media CAN do for your business. And if you’ve been reading this blog for more than a couple posts, you know I love social media and the impact it can have on a business. But, despite all that, there are three things that social media will NOT do for your business.

Whether it’s talking to a business owner or reading a post somewhere, inevitably, some people think that social media will be their instant cure-all to fix all their problems. Of course, the endless posts titled “How I tripled my business in two months” or “How I gained 10,000 followers in 8 simple tricks” or other similar, misleading titles don’t help with the realities that we actually face on social media.

Yes, these businesses and bloggers often did see the “success” they claim in the titles. But their tactics may be questionable. The results may actually have no financial or actual value to their company. And most of the time, the “methods” they used are vaguely outlined with little detail on the what actually went into the process.

And yet, they leave these struggling business owners with the idea that they too can go “viral” or find the hidden gold-mine of customers just waiting to buy up all their inventory.

And so, I want to dispel the three myths that many think about social media marketing.

Social Media Will Not Turn You Into An Overnight Success

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. But you do not launch a Facebook page on Monday and see rapid growth, sales, and overnight popularity by Friday. The Today Show will not be calling you to participate in a segment on their show. You will not get book deals. Heck, you won’t even get a few hundred followers on Facebook in a week. Well, not “real” or targeted ones, at least.

Just because you’re on Twitter doesn’t mean the thousands or millions of potential customers out there are all of a sudden going to find you and immediately sing your praises.

Social media takes time. A lot of it. It takes time for you to commit to it every day. It takes time to grow and cultivate an audience around your brand. It takes time to build engagement and interactions. It takes time to figure out what your audience really wants to see on social media – and, no, it’s not endless inspirational posts.

And for those few, rare people or companies that see a video or article go “viral”, most of those are a combination of well developed content conveniently posted at the right time with the right people interested in that message. Or, you could call it luck. You don’t really “plan” for viral content. In fact, most people that have had content go viral have stated that it was the one piece they didn’t plan out like everything else they normally do.

And even then, do you know what typically goes “viral”? It’s entertainment. It’s a video of cat playing with a monkey. It’s a video of a little boy busting out the most adorable break-dancing moves at a wedding. It’s a photo of some politician making an awkward facial expression turned into a meme. Let me ask you honestly – what do any of these things have to do with your business or product? Probably not much.

So, expecting that you’ll just jump on this whole social media thing, and all of a sudden your content will spread like wildfire is a more than a little delusional.

Instead of planning on overnight success, I recommend you stop and think about what you actually want from social media. Then plan. And plan on spending real time on social media. And set realistic expectations for “success”.

I don’t mean to be the cranky-pants, run-in-the-other-direction pessimist. I love social media and think it can do a LOT for your business. I even believe you can do a lot in short amounts of time. But those expectations need to managed realistically and planned for in order to really see those results.

Social Media Will Not Guarantee Sales

Similar to not being an overnight success, social media won’t just start generating endless sales for your company. Sure, it can generate sales and sales leads for you. But this is not going to be the primary result and it certainly won’t be the sales funnel to make you a millionaire by the end of the month.

I have to point out here that social media has a key root word: “social”. That means it’s about creating a community, an environment, a conversation, and a relationship with your audience.

You cannot go onto a social media platform, open an account, and start posting “Sale!” or “Available Now!” or “Buy” or “Get it Now” or any other in-your-face sales pitch post after post. You will alienate more of your audience than you will gain using this tactic.

Instead, you’re going to need to take time sharing content of value. Share your story. Engage with your audience. Get a little bit more personal or “human”. Actually talk to your audience. Post the things they want to see/read. And then, amid all this valuable content that your audience actually connects with, you can throw in the occasional sales post to encourage them to buy something.

But understand that this may not even drive the sales.

Most people are not on social media to buy. They’re there to socialize, interact with friends and family. They’re on the go. They’re relaxing on the couch. They’re commuting to work. They’re on a lunch break. They’re distracted. So your pitch to “buy something” probably isn’t the best time.

That doesn’t mean you can’t drive sales. Your post may trigger a thought and they’ll visit your site later when they have time. Or you might find a way to collect their email address from a social media post where you can later market to them via email – when they’re more likely to buy. There are numerous ways you can grow your business and generate sales from social media. But understand that just posting to social media for the sole purpose of selling isn’t going to drive all these new sales your way.

Social Media Will Not Fix Your Bad Reputation or Product

If your reputation sucks, well that’s on you. If your product (or service) sucks, yeah, that’s on you too. And you know what’s going to fix that? Not social media!

In fact, social media will inevitably make this worse! This gives people a public platform to discuss and share the ways in which you suck.

So, if your brand reputation or your product sucks, stop and fix it! Fix the product. Take care of your customers. Offer solutions. Change the perspective people have of your company. Oh, yes, this will take a boat-load of time and probably money for you to do.

To be fair, I think social media is one of the best customer service platforms available to companies and I think it can do a lot to help businesses overcome negative feedback. But it requires a quality response plan, responsible and respectable people to respond to and resolve those issues, and a consistent message of putting your customer first. And, let’s face it, if your brand reputation is really bad, you’re probably not in a position to do these things. So if you’re not willing to invest in improving your company reputation the right way, why would social media be the answer?

It won’t be. It will be the magnifying glass that highlights your shortcomings.

Well, now that I sound like the biggest negative-Nancy out there, I hope I haven’t chased you away from social media. As I mentioned, I love social media – that’s why I’ve been blogging about it for two and half years. And I am a personal testament to the power of using social media to grow a business. But I also like to be realistic and transparent with you and I don’t want you to enter into social media marketing with delusions of grandeur or unrealistic expectations that will leave you frustrated or, worse, have you give up.

If you want to talk more about how social media CAN work for you or what you can do to see success with social media, let me know and we can get you on a clear path in the right direction!

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Small businesses step up holiday social media game

Monif Clarke plans to use social media to promote a program giving customers a $25 discount if they recommend friends who buy from Monif C.

NEW YORK — Monif Clarke didn’t have a social media strategy for her women’s clothing company until this year, when she hired a consultant to help her build one.

The holiday social media marketing plan for New York-based Monif C. Plus Sizes includes contests promoted on Facebook, with prizes like a $1,000 wardrobe. When Facebook users click on a link about a contest, they’re taken to the New York-based retailer’s website and their email addresses are recorded when they enter the contest. Those addresses are key to increasing Monif C’s business — it gets nearly 30 percent of its sales in response to emails.

Clarke will also use social media to promote a program giving customers a $25 discount if they recommend friends who buy from Monif C. The friends also get a $25 discount. And Clarke gets another customer for her email list.

Previously, Clarke relied partly on a Facebook page that 180,000 people “like,” but she’d used it only for the basics: posting pictures and promoting sales. She realized she needed to do more.

“We need to reach the customers we have in a more effective way and attract new customers,” says Clarke.

There’s more to a retailer’s holiday social media strategy than posting photos and advertising discounts. Small and independent retailers are getting more aggressive in using Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram for the important holiday sales season and beyond.

“All of this is new for small businesses. They’ve not been used to using social media actively,” says Christina Shaw, chief marketing officer at Blue Fountain Media, a marketing consulting company. Like Clarke, many are seeking help from consultants.

Rewarding customers

At Peter Kate, a women’s clothing store, owner Sissy Harris recently signed with a customer rewards program linked to social media. Customers get points for posting comments about the store on Facebook and Twitter. They also get points when they use social media to refer friends to the Greenville, Del., store.

Harris switched from a traditional rewards program with no social media link. In her first month with the new program, about 50 new customers signed up. The program also helps her track its success. She gets daily reports on how many program members are shopping, and whether they come back.

The right service

Vivian Sayward forecasts a 50 percent jump in 2014 online sales because of her new social media campaign, which includes contests, special posts and discounts timed for the weekends, when most online shopping is expected. Sayward, owner of San Diego-based Vivacity Sportswear, is focusing on selling her women’s golf and activewear to online customers this holiday season after spending the last three years marketing to retailers.

Sayward recently hired a consultant to run her campaign. She’s concentrating on Pinterest and Instagram because her customers use those services. Women make up over 80 percent of Pinterest’s users and 60 percent of Instagram’s, according to Nielsen, the market research company.

Social media creates a buzz that makes users want to visit Vivacity Sportswear’s website, Sayward says.

“Just by creating a website does not mean that the shoppers will come,” she says.

Target customers

Divas SnowGear will use Facebook to promote a “buy one, give one” program to increase sales of women’s snowmobiling wear from its website. Customers who click on a link on its Facebook page will be taken to the Divas SnowGear website; when they buy a jacket, the company will donate one to charity, says Travis Gavinski, who handles social media for the Madison, Wis.-based company.

If the company doesn’t get the results it wants, Gavinski can pay Facebook to send postings to users likely to buy from Divas SnowGear — for example, women whose profiles say they like snow sports.

“My opportunity to get out in front of our audience is much greater on Facebook than on our website,” Gavinski says.

Joyce M. Rosenberg,

The Associated Press

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THE TOP TENS

Ten ways to get your social media platforms into the holiday spirit.

Christmas trees and ornaments are already bringing festive cheer to the malls, Starbucks’ red coffee cups are everywhere and Black Friday is here.

IS YOUR COMPANY TAKING  ADVantage of the opportunity to market your products and services during the time of year when consumers typically spend the most? Are your company’s social media channels decked out to share in the season’s spirit? If your answers are ‘no,’ don’t worry – it’s not too late to join the festivities and produce unique and engaging content to drive traffic to your social media channels anD WEBSITE. 
Here are 10 simple tips to get your social media platforms into the holiday spirit:

1. Deck your halls. Before you begin sharing seasonal content, incorporate holiday-themed images into your profile pictures and backgrounds to show your business is ready for the festivities. This will signal that holiday posts, images and videos can be expected over the next few weeks.

2. Share some tips. You can share general advice, but if your business can fill a specific niche, offer up unique tips. For example, you can highlight your restaurant’s holiday menus by providing a recipe, a short video clip or photo series of how to elevate stuffing and brussel sprouts.

3. Seasonal hashtags. Be sure to include holiday-trending hashtags to be part of the larger conversation. You can also create and include a unique company-related hashtag that could be utilized by others such as #CompanyNameXmas,#CompanyNameHolidays, or #CompanyNameGifts.

4. Design a competition. Set up a holiday-themed competition on your platforms as a way to engage your audiences and share more seasonal content. For example, encourage followers to post their best themed photo, video, or meme, which will add to the content your company is already producing. Increase participation by offering an incentive such as a promotion or a prize for the winner(s). If it were a competition seeking the most likes or shares, that would encourage participants to share your social media profiles.

5. Holiday traition discussions. Similar to a competition, initiate discussions and posts about people’s favourite holiday traditions as a way to create dialogue between your company and potential customers. This could include such topics as “favourite childhood holiday memory,” “best way to cook a turkey,” “gift ideas for the person who has everything” and “most overplayed holiday song”.

6. Daily prize or promotion. A free daily prize or promo giveaway will entice people to check out (and potentially share) your social media profiles. For example, you could randomly select a winner from new likes, shares or retweets (RTs)  for each of the 12 days of Christmas or do a countdown to New Year’s to stretch out the contest.

7. Employee features. Your employees may have deep networks on multiple platforms. Add a more personal touch by featuring your employees in your content, and they will likely share with their networks something in which they are featured. Have them share their tips, pictures or reasons why they love the holidays. This offers people a peek inside your company and makes it a little easier for people to relate to your business as being made up of people as opposed to a faceless brand.

8. Virtual tour. Stores will be decked out in the most festive holiday decorations. And often employees decorate their office space as part of the holidays. Share these images on your social media channels to develop a connection with potential customers. Challenge your audiences or even other businesses to share how they have added to the holiday cheer at work.

9. Social media ads. Since you have incorporated holiday themes in your social media content, apply the same approach to the ads you may utilize on these platforms. This way, you can highlight a holiday special or promotion and attract individuals to your website or physical business.

10. Remember your audience. You may be operating a number of social media platforms. If you’re not doing it already, remember to tailor your content by platform to reflect the audience and demographics on those channels. While a potential post with a link and several hashtags may work on Twitter, it may be more effective as an infographic on LinkedIn or as copy and a picture on Facebook. While you can repurpose content, it’s much more effective if you don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year to raise awareness for your company’s brand and to inject some creative and lighthearted content into marketing campaigns.

Jennifer Osborne is a digital marketing expert. She is the president of Search Engine People Inc. (SEP), Canada’s largest digital marketing firm, which has been on the PROFIT 100 ranking of Canada’s Fastest Growing Companies for the past five consecutive years and named one of PROFIT Magazine’s 50 Fastest Growing Companies in the Greater Toronto Area. Jennifer has been named as one of Canada’s top women entrepreneurs.

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Facebook Ad Campaign Changes: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you use Facebook ads to boost your business?

Are you confused by the latest changes?

Recent changes made to Facebook’s ad campaign structure can affect how you set up and test your ads.

In this article you’ll discover how to set up a Facebook ad campaign in the new structure.

Campaign Structure Changes

The biggest change is that budget, schedule, bidding, targeting and placement of your ads are all configured at the ad set level. Only the images, copy, call-to-action button and Facebook page are configured at the ad level.

So if you are split testing your ads and changing a variety of things, you may need to set up multiple ad sets, as well as multiple campaigns.

Here are some examples of when you need a new campaign, new ad set or just a new ad for the different things you might split test.

Split testing that requires a new campaign:

• Different website landing pages
• Different types of ads (i.e., promoted post vs. website conversion)

Split testing that requires a new ad set:

• Different bidding models
• Different targeting

• Ads that you want to run automatically on a particular individual schedule (i.e., one ad runs on Sunday and one ad runs on Monday—to turn these on automatically individually, they both need their own ad set)

Split testing that only requires new ads:

• Different image
• Different copy
• Different call-to-action buttons
• Using a different Facebook page for website clicks or website conversion ads

Most of the other changes are more cosmetic in the layout. Facebook has simplified the setup so it’s more aligned with the new structure. They have broken the setup into three steps:

Step 1: Create your campaign
Step 2: Create your ad set
Step 3: Create your ad

Notice that you can name your campaign and ad set at the end of the step. Give them a meaningful name to easily see which ads are doing well in the Reports area.

To set up an ad in the new Facebook ad structure, follow these steps after you go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/.

#1: Choose the Objective

This will be the objective of the campaign. Notice the language has changed a bit on the selections here.

Notably, the Page Post Engagement selection has been changed to Boost Your Posts. This may be confusing for people who are more used to the promoted posts vs. boosted posts language.

Choosing your objective sets the objective at the campaign level.

The benefit of setting up the Boost Your Post ad here within the Ads Manager is that you can configure the ad to boost the post to only your fans, rather than boosting to People who Like your Page and their Friends when you use the Boost Post option directly on your Facebook page.

#2: Enter Objective Details

After choosing an objective, you make other selections related to your objective such as entering a website address, selecting a conversion pixel or selecting which event to promote.

Add the details to your objective.

In this example, I chose to promote conversions on my website and had to select the corresponding active website conversion pixel.

#3: Name the Campaign

Once you click Continue after entering the objective details, you can name your campaign. Facebook gives it a name by default based on the objectives, but you can change the name to something meaningful to you.

Name your campaign.

#4: Design the Ad Set

Next, you set up the targeting, bidding and budget for your ad set. While the order of the setup has changed to be more in line with the flow of the new structure, the targeting has not changed.

Remember that the ads below the ad set will all share the same bidding model and budget.

Facebook does optimize the ads below the ad sets so the better-performing ads get more of the budget. Be aware that one of your ads may be shown less often. You can manually control the ads below the ad set by turning them on and off as you require.

The targeting and pricing are set up at the ad set level.

#5: Design the Ad

The last step is to design your ad.

If you’re only going to change the ad image for split testing, you can add multiple images here and multiple ads will be created with the different images. Then Facebook will split test them and optimize the campaign to show the best-performing ad more often.

Design your ad.

If you are changing the text or the call-to-action button for split testing, you can easilycreate a similar ad after the first one has been created.

Click Create Similar Ad to use the same information from the ad you created and then edit what you need to change.

And if you need to adjust the bidding model or targeting for an ad set, you can click Change Ad Set after you’ve created the similar ad.

Change the ad set after creating a similar ad to adjust the bidding or targeting in the new ad.

You can still edit the ad after it has been created. Click Edit next to the Creative area or if you need to adjust anything in the ad set, click the wheel and then edit.

Click the wheel to see the ad set information and you can edit it from there.

Additional Tips and Pointers

Every ad account is limited to 1,000 campaigns, 1,000 ad sets and 5,000 ads. If you hit the limit, you can delete campaigns, ad sets and ads. Each ad set is limited to no more than 50 non-deleted ads.

Make sure you know when Facebook is optimizing your ads for you and when you need to watch your ad optimization.

For example, the two ads below are in the same ad set, but they were created before the migration so they have different target audiences. You can see that the ad with a worse cost per like was taking more of the budget for the day. In an instance like this, you need to manually turn off the ad that’s performing worse.

Watch your cost per conversion and turn off ads that are performing worse.

In the new ad sets, Facebook is supposed to optimize so that the ad with the better conversion gets more of the budget, but I suggest watching those stats to see if you agree. I created a Campaign with two different images in the Ad sets and one ad did not show at all while the other ad got the entire budget.

Watch the optimization between your ads.

Wrapping Up

The new setup flow for campaigns, ad sets and ads does seem to be easier to understand. As marketers, we need to embrace the change, while finding ways to keep our costs low, such as split testing and optimizing our budget to fit our goals.

If you have current ads, you can run them as they’ve been set up, but all ads will be migrated to the new structure sometime after January 2015. Any new ads you set up will use the new structure.

You can read more about the new campaign structure on the Facebook for Business site.
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