Facebook has become an important part of most brand’s marketing efforts. As it is now the most visited site on the Internet (more visits than Google even), businesses can’t afford to ignore it. More and more people are logging on to Facebook first thing and checking in all day on their laptops, phones and iPads. So all our clients have strong, robust Facebook pages with good followings.

Facebook is awesome because it’s permission marketing at its most pure. Your customers “like” your page, which gives you permission to push updates to them. So when they log in to see what their friends are up to, they also see what YOU’RE up to. You can push specials, promotions, contests, random trivia, brand messages, timely updates – whatever. There are guidelines and formulas we create for each of our clients (don’t “sell” too much, for instance, and don’t update too often or people will de-friend you). The idea with marketing on Facebook is that it’s a social medium, so we encourage our clients to engage with their customers. Have a conversation. Ask a question (Facebook allows you to use polls). Comment on topical items that might be interesting to your customer.

To date, Facebook had a feature that allowed you to add tabs to your page. These appeared in the left hand column. I’m not going to bother showing you a screen shot because they’re going away. One of the great features was that you could force new fans to a landing page (one of the tabs). Brands used this as a welcome screen (we call them “fan gates” in the biz). So a new customer is forced to your fan gate and asked to “like” your page. Not forced to like your page, but right there, in their face, a request. Sometimes, we tie that request to an offer, like a coupon. . . “Like us for a free coupon.”

SAMPLE FAN GATE FOR OUR CLIENT, UNCLE MADDIOS:

And this is where the new Timeline for Facebook SUCKS. No more tabs. No more forcing new fans to a landing page/fan gate. All new fans will go to your “wall” – now called “timeline.” <sigh> No more check-in deals, either, but there will be a “deals” app.

You can still have apps that people can click on for further info . . . store locations, for instance, or contests, or to “like” you for a coupon. But we can no longer force people to that page. The apps will  live beneath a large cover photo and honestly, it’s going to be tricky to get people to find them until they’re trained to look there.

So that’s the problem. We’re working on solutions for our clients and will post some ideas here. Stay tuned. There are some great new features with Timeline, too. We’ll cover it all!

Every now and then a site comes along and just explodes into the social media stratosphere. Pinterest is one such site. Just look at its growth. In June, it didn’t even have half a million visits. By December, it had over 11 million! And this is still an invitation-only site. (Email me if you want an invite!)

So what is the site exactly? It’s an online inspiration board, a place to “pin” images and group them together. Say you’re redoing your kitchen and searching online for ideas. Before Pinterest, it wasn’t easy to grab those images and put them all together on one easy-to-view (and share) inspiration board. (You could do it with Evernote but Evernote’s boards don’t render so simply and elegantly.) We built a house a few years ago and I bookmarked and tagged stuff in Evernote and nothing was as easy or fun to use as Pinterest.

If you are a product company, add a “pin it” button to your products, just like you have a Facebook “like it” button. Pinterest doesn’t seem to play well with Java, so check to make sure your images are pin-able.  Do this now. I wish I’d told you to do this last week because a lot of folks will be cruising around on their shiny new ipads this weekend, daydreaming on Pinterest.

Pinterest is the world’s largest idea board. Images are placed onto boards that are categorized. Looking for a craft project to do with the kids during the winter break? Search the DIY/Crafts boards.

Or a fun recipe for a holiday gathering? Check out this idea I pinned.

Planning a wedding? Make a board for flowers, one for food, one for dresses, one for decor . . . and share with your groom or wedding planner or mother.

The very social nature of this site is part of the reason for its adoption. It’s also insanely fun and useful. Friends tell me it’s addictive. And that, my friends, is marketing gold. Alas, they aren’t accepting ads (yet) but you can integrate the Pin It app into your site, as I mentioned. I’ve also seen brands create inspiration boards (Whole Foods has some great ones) that link back to their products. It’s a wonderful way to engage with your customers where they are already online and dreaming.

Let the shopping begin! According to Gallup, Americans are planning to spend more on Christmas gifts this year than last (and much more than they planned to spend in 2008-2009). I don’t care how much I’m spending, I like to get a deal. Great deals abound online; Amazon’s been running Black Friday deals all week. I’ll be tweeting out deals as I see them and posting links on my Facebook page so check in with me at either place for up-to-the-minute specials.

For those of you braving the mall traffic, or standing in line at Best Buy, first of all, my lazy hat’s off to you. I prefer to click my way to great savings. But while you’re mentally debating whether or not that ginormous flat screen TV is really a good deal, whip out your phone, scan the barcode and find out if it’s being sold for less somewhere else.

You’ll need an app, of course. There are dozens, but here are the ones I use most often:

1) ShopSavvy - scan the item’s bar code and it will return prices for both local stores and online

2)  Amazon’s App - this app has a feature that allows you to scan a barcode and it will tell you the price on Amazon. You can add the product to your wish list, or buy it from your phone. And if you can’t find the barcode, or the store has it covered with their own price sticker (which happens more often than I like!), you can take a photo of the product and Amazon will use an image search to match the product. It’s pretty slick. Android version here.

And before you head out, you might want to plan your trip usingBlackFriday by DealNews. The app is chock full of ads (including some “leaked” ads) and has comparison shopping tools. (You can also visit the DealNews website which is a great resource for the best deals, by product or store.)

All right, so while you’re out and about, I’ll be chasing my toddler and some good deals from my laptop. Or my iPad. Or my phone. DO NOT LET ME BUY A KINDLE FIRE or anything else that connects to the Internet. Happy Shopping!

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook for up-to-the-minute sales. Follow me on Pinterest for unique gift ideas.

If you answered “Google,” you are . . . wrong. It’s Facebook and has been for a while now. Facebook is becoming the digital on ramp: Not only is it a place to see what your friends and colleagues are doing, it’s often the entry point to interact with your favorite brands or stores. I know if I’m looking to see if there’s a sale at any of my favorite stores, I check out their Facebook page first. Facebook is likely to have the most recent, topical promotions, contests and sales. Plus, a lot of businesses run Facebook-only specials.

For those of us old enough to remember AOL and its original “walled off” web model, it’s uncanny how much Facebook is sort of succeeding at that. You don’t have to go through Facebook to access content (the way AOL tried to force you) but you certainly can and because businesses are making their Facebook pages so engaging, Facebook itself IS becoming that digital gateway. Fascinating stuff!

Here are the top ten sites as ranked by Experian Hitwise for the week ending 11/12/2011.

Want more quick stats and useful info? Follow us on Facebook here.

More and more, it looks like social media is here to stay. In fact, more than 50% of all adults use some form of social networking DAILY (and 65% of all Internet users). Twitter’s usage alone grew from 8% of Internet users to 13% from November 2010 to May 2011. It’s not just teenagers using social media, and hasn’t been for a while: fully 83% of Facebook users are between the ages of 18-54 (and increasingly more women than men, which isn’t a huge surprise given that women tend to be slightly more social in real life, too).

Once in a great while, I send out an update. And by “once in a great while,” I mean something like “once a year.” A long time ago, I published an e-newsletter. Now I post tips here on the blog. (You can subscribe to it like a newsletter over on the right.)

It’s been a busy year at New Thought Marketing. Some highlights:

Mobile Apps

We’ve added mobile app development to our suite of services. Our first app (NameBuddy) is in the Apple app store and got a GREAT review on cnet. We’re currently in the early stages of development for a few more apps. As you’ve probably heard, more people are searching the Internet on their phones than on their computers now. Smartphone ownership and data usage have skyrocketed. There are so many opportunities for businesses to use mobile to increase their sales. We’re even testing out Facebook check-in deals for a physician practice client.

Mobile is probably the hottest and fastest-growing aspect of our business right now. We have a great development team, and our usual awesome designers and smart thinkers to help you develop a mobile strategy that works for you.

Social Media

We’re creating Facebook pages for clients (like this one) and running targeted contests and Facebook ads to drive engagement. We’ve seen strong results with Facebook ads. They’re inexpensive and offer endless targeting abilities. In a campaign we did last year for a major business association, Facebook was one of our best performing online ad outlets.

Online Reputation Management

If you haven’t claimed your business on Google Places yet, then quit reading this and go do it right now; it’ll only take you a few minutes. It will help you come up better on search results. Write a good description for Google Places and use that same description on other directory and review sites, like Yelp and Kudzu. (Make sure to claim your businesses on those sites, too.)

Then Google yourself and monitor your reviews on a regular basis (weekly for most of you). If you need help getting this all set up, let me know. We can do it for you or help you with it. We’ve had clients bring their laptops over and we divided up the list and got them set up in a few hours.

It’s a simple thing that many people put off but it’s really important you claim your pages and begin to ask your customers to write reviews. Word-of-mouth is still the top way to grow your business; increasingly, though, word-of-mouth is happening online. These are basic, easy tactics that every business should be doing.

Twitter

We’re still doing the occasional “Tweetorial,” helping business get set up on Twitter and learn the ins and outs of using it. Even if you don’t think you need Twitter, please go ahead and register for an account and grab your Twitter name (like www.twitter.com/sherean which is my personal one or www.twitter.com/newthoughtmktg) so that nobody else claims it. Same thing goes for Facebook. You want to set up your page and claim your vanity URL. (One minor hiccup with Facebook: you have to have 25 followers to your page before you can claim your company name/URL, assuming it’s available. You can probably ask your friends to follow you so you hit that platform quickly.)

Google+

The short answer is: wait. They haven’t rolled out their business offering yet. I do have lots of invites if you want to try it out and see what all the cool kids are doing.

YouTube

Video is a great way to allow prospects to get to know you. Did you know you can set up a branded channel on YouTube (like we’ve done here)? You can then embed videos on your website. The videos don’t have to be fancy. Just try not to say “um” or “you know” too many times and you’ll be fine! (I have a tendency to scratch my nose and play with my hair too much. So irritating!)

How to Keep Up with All This

There are a lot of inexpensive, effective marketing opportunities out there but it is daunting to keep up with them all and figure out which ones will give you a good R.O.I. We try to post links to smart how-to articles on our Facebook page, so follow us there if Facebook is your thing; we also opine on our blog. You can subscribe to our blog like a newsletter or it’s even available now in the Kindle store if you want to read it there!

Take good care,

Sherean and the team at New Thought Marketing

Even though I love my Droid, we create apps for iPhones before we create them for Android because there’s more money to be made in the Apple market than the Android market. Similarly, the iPhone is crushing all competitors in what matters most: profits. And forget about Blackberry.

Of course, the Android operating system is now on more phones than the iPhone so this could change, but for now, iPhone’s app market reigns supreme.

It’s easy to buy your own ads on Google and they’ve just made it easier with a product called AdWords Express. For those of you unfamiliar with how AdWords works, in its simplest form, you create a text ad that shows up in Google search results. It’s those sponsored links you see above the regular results or in a column to the right.

This type of advertising is called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) because you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. It’s a performance-driven model rather than a branding vehicle (although it does have branding benefits – just having your brand show up on the page in search results has intrinsic worth). The trick is motivating the right people to click. Let’s say you run a text ad that’s for a contest. You will get a lot of clicks (assuming it’s a good contest) and drive a lot of traffic to your site. But will those be qualified prospects or just people who want something free?

Whenever we design a contest, we are well aware that we are using a time-honored traffic-driving tool, but we are judicious about our use of that tool. There are times when it makes sense to drive a ton of people to a site (particularly if you have a general, broadly used product like – oh, let’s say soap) or when you can limit the type of people who see the ad in the first place. And that’s part of the genius of Google: Google has more advanced targeting devices that allow you to determine WHO can see your ad. So if you want to make sure you only get local prospects, for example, you can target your ad so that it only shows up if someone searches certain key phrases AND lives in your city.

Using their targeting tools, you can narrow the list of who sees your ad in the first place, thereby reducing your risk of getting a lot of meaningless clicks.

So it’s important to think about your targeting and your message.  And then – run several campaigns at the same time where you change the targeting or the copy and see which ads and which target sets perform best for you. Pull the least-performing ads out of rotation.

Use some common sense when you write your copy. Words that are proven to increase response in print probably work well online too:

• Attention
• Introducing
• Finally
• New
• Free

Let’s say you develop accounting software and are launching a new web-based version of it. Your ad might read: “Finally! Accounting software for the cloud with its feet firmly planted on the earth.” Or: “Introducing ________, web-based accounting software for _______(industry you’re targeting).” Sometimes, simple and straightforward is all you need.

How many of you have tried AdWords on your own? How’s it worked for you? Have any of you tried AdWords Express yet? Feel free to call on us if you ever want us to take a look at a campaign you’ve tried and make suggestions on how you might improve its performance.

E-commerce sales are growing by about 19% per year globally (10% per in the States). Amazon is the top e-retailer, followed by Staples (who knew?), then Apple. That, and a whole bunch more in the infographic below: