Do You Have a Facebook Marketing Strategy?
Now that I am offering social network marketing services for my clients, I've been doing a great deal of research on the topic to help refine my marketing strategies. One of the articles that was most interesting to me was research conducted by Buddy Media. Buddy Media is a big player in the social network marketing arena. And because of this, they are using their customer data to find the best trends on how to construct marketing posts as well as the ideal days and times to post them.
One failure of most business doing social network marketing is that the marketers will typically post messages on Facebook and Twitter during the usual Monday-Friday 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM hours. But research from Buddy Media shows that many marketers are missing out on the prime hours between 9:00 PM and 11:00 PM.
Additionally, research showed that posts with 80 characters or fewer receive more user engagement in the form of clicks, "likes" or responses. Keeping posts short and sweet is key, otherwise people will skip right over it. Also, try to avoid sales words such as "buy" or "shop" and instead use words like "event" or "free". Always remember, people love the word free!
There are other recommendations from Buddy Media such as recommended postings on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Additionally, people tend to shy away from links that use URL shorteners. Instead, try to use the full length URL.
Buddy Media's research certainly is interesting. But it also should be taken with a grain of salt. Keep in mind that this company's clients are massive, globally recognized organizations (Johnson & Johnson, Sony, Ford, Tivo, etc) and therefore, the research data is skewed towards a very different target customer. If you are performing social network marketing for small and medium sized businesses, your target market will be vastly different and therefore you must learn to understand their specific social networking habits.
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