Roost Local Scorecard Helps Businesses See If Their Facebook Fans Live Nearby
August 1, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Roost, developer of a social publishing platform, today launched a new tool for local businesses on Facebook that helps them determine what percentage of their fans actually live close enough to be customers. Roost Local Scorecard breaks down where a Page’s fans list as their current city, and provides tips for gaining more local fans and engaging them.
By using Roost Local Scorecard, Page admins can determine how to revise their publishing and advertising strategies to maximize the positive impact of Facebook on their business.
San Francisco-based Roost develops free Facebook and Twitter publishing tools for professionals, small businesses, and consultants and agencies, as well as a premium tool for real estate agents. Businesses submit their zip code and industry, and Roost provides recommendations of relevant content to post from local and popular news news outlets.
The free Local Scorecard app, built on Facebook Connect, is designed to bring in new customers for Roost by alerting businesses to their publishing needs. Users grant the app extended permissions and it analyzes one or more of their Pages. The app then displays which cities and countries their fans are from, gives them a score for how local their fan base is, and provides recommendations for how to gain more local fans.
If businesses see that a high percentage of their fans are not local, they should consider changing how they market themselves. In terms of advertising, they should make sure they’re geotargeting non-fans that live nearby. They should also be sure to refine their targeting to local when advertising to existing fans to make sure they’re not promoting sales or events at their location that distant fans can’t take advantage of.
When publishing updates to Facebook, a Page with a low local fan percentage should concentrate on promotions that encourage existing local fans to invite their friends to Like the Page. This can include campaigns that drive towards a Like count milestone, such as “Help us get to 100,000 fans”, or coupons that fans will want to share with friends.
The local fan base percentage can indicate how a business should be using the untargeted publishing feature on Facebook. A low local percentage means Pages should publish links and other content to all their fans that can leverage distant customers, such as links to their web store.
While relatively simple and clearly intended to drive leads for its own business, Roost’s Local Scorecard can reveal important information to local business owners. It’s important to keep gaining more Likes, but these are only valuable if local businesses know where they’re coming from and how to engage them to drive a return on their social media investment.
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5 Ways Google+ Will Drive Social Video Growth
August 1, 2011 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as social media and technology updates.
Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. Before joining Sharethrough, Chris worked in the Global Communications and Public Affairs Department for Google, helping design and execute communications strategy for key consumer applications and social media initiatives.
The new set of features offered by Google+ represents the next chapter for the social web, helping it move from a platform that facilitates conversation and content sharing to a mechanism that can deliver much deeper social experiences. This new forum for creating connected audiences will pay off big for brands that create great video content.
In particular, Google+ is opening up a number of different opportunities for brands to get their videos seen and shared. It’s quite possible that we will look back on the Google+ launch as a landmark moment for social video advertising, because of the new possibilities it created for people to share, co-view, chat and text about entertaining videos.
Here are five ways Google+ will help the social video industry.
1. More Focused Sharing
While some have taken advantage of Facebook’s features to segment their personal friend network, many have let their friend pool remain one large network with whom they share everything. This means that when they share a video on Facebook, it goes out to a very broad audience, which includes many people who won’t be interested. Some of us may also hesitate to share a video if it means that everyone in our network — including family and even co-workers — will see it.
The Google+ “Circles” feature, which offers an intuitive way to segment your friend groups, will ease the process of sharing creative brand videos with groups that you know will appreciate them. While I would normally be a little reluctant to share a video as absurd as Skittles Moneyshot with my widely varied Facebook friends, my newly created “Social Video Junkies” Google+ circle will appreciate it.
2. Co-viewing Experiences
The Google+ Hangouts feature allows for live video chat in the same “room” as multiple friends. Hangouts’ tight integration with YouTube allows for genuinely new social video group experiences.
We all love sharing hilarious videos with friends. The only thing better than getting comments on your Facebook feed or via email is to hear people’s laughter and reactions live, “in person.” Hangouts will offer a new real-time, collaborative viewing experience for social video campaigns, which will massively amplify the benefits of these videos for the brands that create them.
3. Mobile Reach
Now imagine you have created a Hangout with friends. You’re all hysterically laughing at a video together, but one of your friends is not online to join. Google+’s “Huddle” feature now comes into play. With Huddle, you can text groups of people or individual friends via the Google+ mobile app to let them know you’re gathering to watch a video. When friends receive a new message in Huddle, Google+ sends a push notification to their phone.
Huddle stands to be a really interesting way to extend conversations that start at the desk and move into the mobile space. It’s a great way to connect a disparate audience around a good piece of content.
4. Better Data
Data is king at Google. The Google+ Business profiles already promise to include deep analytics, and while little has been announced as yet, one can imagine that powerful new types of social data insights will become available to advertisers about their YouTube campaigns.
By providing rich data capabilities, Google+ could allow advertisers to gather new insights on the quantity and quality of sharing for their campaigns. Google+’s new collaborative features could also introduce interesting new data categories for advertisers, such as average co-viewing view length (how long a group watched a brand’s video together) versus individual view length stats or engagement metrics via Huddle (mobile) versus Hangouts (desktop).
5. SEO Opportunities
While the relationship between the +1 button, Google+ and Google Search is still being sorted out (probably even by Google itself), there are clearly going to be opportunities for advertisers to boost their search results with videos that go viral. Whether content is surfaced based on the +1s of people in your circles or through broad social sentiment around search results, popular social video campaigns stand to gain more search relevance as users interact with it. And once a great video gets discovered, Hangouts and Huddles are sure to follow.