Facebook recently passed 500 million users and now is adding an important new feature to its platform. Today, the social networking platform released Facebook Questions. This new feature allows users to ask questions to the “entire” Facebook community. As companies like Yahoo and LinkedIn have used a Questions feature for years, this is not an unprecedented addition, but it highlights the possibility for individuals to communicate in a new way with people outside of their direct Facebook network.
According to
Mashable, Facebook Questions will allow users to do a few things:
- Photo questions: Users can post pictures of objects that they have questions about or have problems identifying and then can receive answers from other users.
- Simple Polling: This is a big one for marketers. Now that a Facebook user can quickly create a poll to answer a question, the amount of available data to mine for industry and business insight will increase.
- Tagging: Tagging is the method Facebook uses for organizing questions. The point of tagging is to allow users to easily discover new questions and answer the ones relevant to them.
- Following: Users who want to keep track of certain answers can "follow" a question to see responses as they get added.
Facebook Questions is public and will be open to everyone. The feature is currently in beta and only available to a portion of Facebook users prior to its release to all users. Brands that have Facebook pages will be allowed to answer questions.
Marketing Takeaway
Today, Facebook made its platform more valuable to marketers. Marketing on Facebook has been challenging because of privacy and a clear separation of profile and business pages. Facebook Questions provides a new way for businesses and prospects to communicate and discover one another in a relevant way. LinkedIn Questions has long been a valuable tool for B2B marketers and it is likely that Facebook will be used in similar ways but on a larger scale.
As a marketer, it is critical you understand that Facebook Questions or any other questions platform is not a place for advertisement. Instead, this new feature provides an environment for contributing value and relevance to potential customers and establishing trust between them and your business. As people start using this feature, look for questions and tags relevant to your business and provide answers to questions that you have the experience and expertise to answer.
Do you plan on adding Facebook Questions into you social media marketing plan?
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When businesses give away something for free, they often get a lot in return from their fans or customers. One of the benefits of business blogging is that it establishes trust and thought-leadership. For example, even though HubSpot is an Internet Marketing software company, we share lots of free advice on our Internet Marketing Blog.
Contributing a post to a blog other than yours is another way of giving away something small for free, but getting more in return. In this post, I'll share some practical tips on how to approach guest blogging, and how to get the most out of it.
Benefits of Guest Blogging
Reach New Audiences
A post on your company blog will go out to all your subscribers. They might share it with their friends through social media, and you might gain some more interest or even subscribers. However, publishing on someone else's blog lets you reach out to a whole new audience. A guest post is an opportunity to let a new group of people find out about your expertise and blog.
Public Relations & Branding
Guest blogging should be a win-win situation. It should benefit both you and blog to which you are contributing. This is how public relations works, and guest blogging is yet another offering to help establish these connections. It also puts these connections on public display, which can build your brand's authority.
By giving to and connecting with your industry's blogging community, you can also get people to help fill your blog with content. The rule of reciprocity says that if you do something for someone, they are more likely to do something for you.
Gain Inbound Links
Gaining external links from relevant and authoritative websites is a powerful way to improve search engine rankings. With your guest posts, you should have your bio with a link back to your website or blog. If appropriate, you can also put links to other blog posts or resources your company offers in a guest blog post.
While inbound links are a benefit, don't look at this as the only benefit. Being a guest on someone else's blog is like being a guest at their home, and you should respect that they have their own goals, which are not to promote your company.
How to Guest Blog
Approaching a blog for a guest post is not difficult. Most blogs have a contact form, and some even have an 'invitation to blog for us' form. You can also join My Blog Guest, an online community that helps you find guest blogging opportunities.
Before approaching a blog for a guest post, make sure the blog satisfies the following criteria:
Relevance
If you're blogging already you should know your own audience. You can also get a feel for the audience of other blogs by reading a few of their articles. Your guest post should not compromise your own goals. Try to target blogs in which there is an overlap between your audience and theirs.
Blog Quality
You will gain more in terms of all the factors mentioned above if you do a guest post on a more influential blog. This can be a mainstream blog, or a prominant niche blog in your industry. Either way, you can run a blog through Blog Grader and better understand its influence.
Make Guest Blogging a Part of Your Marketing Strategy
Guest blogging is an opportunity that many bloggers neglect. Of course, you should not lose your focus on regularly producing great content on your own blog. At the same time, if you follow the guidelines above, you can make guest blogging an effective way to improve your brand, search engine optimization, and audience.
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Are you taking advantage of best practices when it comes to promoting news about your business on Facebook? Now you can check with Facebook's new Facebook + Media page, which launched Monday. The new page -- geared toward journalists but with implications for all businesses on Facebook -- includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook.
To determine the best practices compiled on the page, Facebook analyzed 100 top media sites that use Facebook's social plugins.
Okay -- so you may not be a media company. But if you publish news about your company on Facebook, Facebook's new page should be very applicable to you. While the Media Page offers advice to journalists for driving traffic on Facebook, it also includes tips for driving engagement and interaction. If you're a marketer, these tips can be especially helpful as you try to increase interaction on your business' Facebook page.
Social News Best Practices for Marketers
Check out our marketers' guide to Facebook social plugins if you're unfamiliar with them. Then review some of the most applicable best practices for marketers we pulled from Facebook's new Media Page. Here they are!
To drive audience and interaction:
- Implement the Like Button social plugin on your website. Implement the version that includes thumbnails of friends, enables comments, and place it at the top and bottom of articles and near visual content like videos/graphics. According to Facebook, websites that followed these best practices experienced 3-5x greater click-through rates on the Like Button.
- Publish to users through Pages and Like button connections. (Click here to find out how.) Status updates asking simple questions or encouraging a user to Like the story have 2-3x the activity. In addition, stories that are published in the early morning or just before bed have higher engagement.
- Run promotions on your Page using FBML tabs.
To increase engagement:
- Implement the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins. Place these plugins above the fold of your website and on multiple pages to generate more engagement. Sites that placed the Activity Feed on the front page as well as other content pages received 2-10x more clicks per user than sites with plugins only on the front page.
- Planning a live event, webinar or webcast? Use the Live Stream box to capture real-time engagement.
- Keep your pages timely and regularly updated with fresh content to keep people engaged. Update the status on your page often.
Don't forget Insights!
- Facebook offers basic insights into your Facebook page's growth, fans and interactivity via Facebook Insights. Your page's Insights Dashboard will provide metrics to help you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content. Keep track of your business page's performance to determine what works, what doesn't and learn how best to engage your fans.
Free Download: 2010 Facebook Marketing Guide
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The next time you are bombarded with popup ads and spam, Team Inbound will come to your rescue! With the help of Greta Get Found, Chris Convert, Annie Analyze and of course, Captain Inbound, the marketing world will be a better place!
Watch marketing hero Captain Inbound defeat the Sultan of Spam to save the day in HubSpot's new animated cartoon web series.
The Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One
Character Voices:
Captain Inbound:@jlopin
Greta Get Found: @repcor
Chris Convert: @OneAndOnlyCJ
Annie Analyze: @Cortenberg
Sultan of Spam: @vleckas
Narrator: @andrewtquinn
David Meerman Scott: @dmscott (as himself)
Animated by Eric Guerin (@EricGuerin)
Did you enjoy the animation? What other marketing animations have you liked?
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Join Bill Walton, Brian Halligan and David Meerman Scott as they discuss effective marketing strategies from the Grateful Dead.
Date and time: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 12pm ET
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A recent study shows that Americans are not willing to pay for online services such as Twitter. The study was conducted by the University of Southern California at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.
From the research:
"Although nearly half of those polled in a new USC survey said they have used free micro-blogging sites like Twitter, 0% said that they would be willing to pay for such a service. "Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for Digital Future at USC's Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
"Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users." The survey of 1,981 Internet users also found that half "never" click on web advertising, with 70% saying they find it "annoying." However, 55% said they would rather see web advertising than pay for content."
The USC survey also examined how United States residents accessed and used the Internet. Major usage findings include:
- Percentage of U.S. on the Internet -- For the first time, the Internet is used by more than 80 percent of Americans -- now 82 percent.
- Weekly hours online -- The average time online has now reached 19 hours per week. Although more than two-thirds of Americans have gone online for a decade, the largest year-to-year increases in weekly online use has been reported in the two most recent Digital Future studies.
- Gaps in Internet use in age groups -- Not surprisingly, Internet use continues to increase as age decreases, with 100 percent of those under age 24 going online. However, a surprisingly high percentage of Americans between 36 and 55 are not Internet users: among respondents age 46 to 55, 19 percent are non-users; among those 36 to 45, 15 percent are non-users.
- Low adoption of new media -- Although new media is used by large percentages of Internet users age 24 and under, overall large percentages of Internet users never go online to do instant messaging (50 percent), work on a blog (79 percent), participate in chat rooms (80 percent), or make or receive phone calls (85 percent).
Marketing Takeaway
Expectations and usage on the Internet are different than with other forms of communication. Online, people expect a balance of free and paid information and services. As a marketer, is it important to understand how you can provide free content to drive business transactions. Additionally, as Internet usage continues to increase across all demographics, it is important to adjust your strategy and resources to improve your online marketing efforts.
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HubSpot has compiled over 50 original marketing charts and graphs on topics including Lead Generation, Blogging and Social Media, Marketing Budgets, Twitter and Facebook
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