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Old Fashioned Message Boards Still Get the Job Done

posted on February 1, 2011

71% of the Inc. 500 companies surveyed said they are using Facebook for marketing, up 61% from last year. It’s the biggest bite of social media pie but according to the same survey that bite is loaded with empty calories. (That’ll teach me to write when I’m hungry.)

The survey was conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research and was presented on eMarketer earlier today. Perfect timing, since I recently put up a piece about the declining click rates of Facebook ads and the high incidence of ad burnout.

According to the survey, 85% of respondents said they had success with Facebook over a measly 54% from last year. That’s pretty good, right? But there were three other kinds of social media marketing that topped Facebook for results. Blogging squeaked ahead at 86% but is actually on the decline from last year and that feels like a trend that’s going to continue. Podcasting also dropped considerably over last year.

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Facebook Clicks Fade as CPC Rises

posted on February 1, 2011

1,500 Advertising Campaigns

11,200 Individual Ads

2.2 Million Clicks

0 Happy Marketers

“Facebook Advertising Performance Benchmarks & Insights” is the latest whitepaper from Webtrends and it brings some sobering news. In short, Facebook ads aren’t turning out to be the gift to marketing we’d hoped and maybe Eric Schmidt was right, Google has nothing to worry about.

The most telling piece of information is contained in this chart. Basically, it shows that clicks have declined and prices have risen.

A big part of the problem is ad burnout. Because Facebook serves ads based on interest, the same ad is served to the same person multiple times over a few days. The study saw that people began to ignore the ad after only a few viewings. They counter this with Google search ads which only appear when someone is searching for that information, thus reducing the number of times the ad is seen, and thus, ad burnout.

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Search Gets Center Stage With Google Claiming Bing Copies Results

posted on February 1, 2011

We live in a world where coincidences ‘appear’ to happen. Of course, there are coincidences in life that are just pure chance (depending on your worldview, of course) but in the business world that doesn’t happen much. Today may be a real good case in point.

Danny Sullivan has completed an extensive investigative look at a claim by Google that Bing is actually copying search results from the search leader. Rather than spend the time here rehashing the exhaustive job that Sullivan did I highly recommend that you read it and draw your own conclusions.

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Email Marketers See Shift to Mobile But Are They Responding?

posted on February 1, 2011

There is no denying that the move to mobile in every aspect of life is gaining momentum. That’s the easy part. That’s the part that makes headlines. Where it gets tough is when marketers have to adjust their way of doing business that they may have become comfortable in and, in many cases, put on cruise control. One of the most abrupt changes is in the e-mail marketing space.

The e-mail marketing industry has grown up and developed as the PC market has and is still primarily designed for the desktop / laptop delivery of messages. Bigger screens, more bandwidth and web based mail delivery have made it very convenient, and effective, for e-mail marketers.