Marketing Pilgrim

When you make a post on your company’s Facebook page, you’ve got about an hour and 20 minutes before the post is out of sight and out of mind.

This factoid and a few other interesting gems, comes from a study done by social media toolbar provider, Visibli.

Their study indicated that Facebook posts get 50% of their likes in that first hour and twenty. A day later, the post is off the grid and forgotten but it still beats engagement on Twitter which has an even shorter window.

AdAge quoted Visibli CEO Saif Ajani as saying,

“If you want to maximize your exposure, you should post every hour and 20 minutes.”

On the other hand,

Did you know that Bing has a rewards program? I didn’t and I belong to dozens of these things. Before now, though, I wouldn’t have bothered with Bing’s because you had to download a toolbar, but not anymore.

The Bing Rewards Preview is a program that let’s you earn credits when you visit the Bing homepage and there’s nothing to download. It uses your Windows Live ID to keep track, then it offers you point deals in a drop down box at the top of the page.

I was very surprised by the actions required in the first two credit offers that I received. The first asked me to read a page about polio and the second to check out a visual search page of Pulitzer Prize winning books.

Google is playing the classic “if you can’t buy’em, join’em” game with its new Offers service.

The service is being rolled out Portland, OR (no surprise there), Oakland / East Bay, San Francisco as well as offering NYC Uptown, Midtown and Downtown editions. It’s not a whole lot different than any other offer/coupon/deal site in that there will be daily e-mails with discounts for 24 hour periods etc, etc. You can subscribe here if you happen to be in one of those areas.

So we can keep things light let’s just watch Google’s video about the service (which is more advertising than information but who’s counting?).

Marketers love data. You hear it all the time. The more data the better. The more you know the more you sell. The less the consumer knows the better (seems to be a theme unfortunately). If we could just get this one piece of information we could make gazillions.

You know the drill. It’s played over time and time again. What is happening more and more, however, is the slow process of learning just how much information is gathered by some pretty powerful folks (in this case Apple and Google) that may or may not be given voluntarily by users. In fact, it looks more and more like the data gathering and storing methods of these two behemoths have little to do with opt-in or an end user’s permission or even awareness in collection of data. Instead it’s more like “Thanks for the data but don’t expect a phone call!”

Nearly two-thirds (64.6 percent) of daily deal buyers returned later to patronize the businesses where they used a daily deal and 60 percent spent more than the deal value while they were there the first time.

How do you like them apples? We knew there had to be a reason deal sites kept popping up. They actually work! They actually bring in business. Who knew?

These new survey results come from Lightspeed and they were based on answers given by the 3,300 respondents who are members of Lightspeed Research’s U.S. online panel.

Take a look at this:

Those are some nice numbers there. And the fact that the users were on the fence tells me that they hadn’t used the service or bought the product before, so that 60% is likely all new customers.

The free sample is a staple of marketing. Just spend an hour walking through Costco or perusing a money-saving mommy blog. Look at the number of people who will give up a Facebook “like” in order to get one or how many friend’s email addresses they’ll pimp out in return.

The trouble is, free samples aren’t free for the business who provides them. They actually cost quite a bit of money, particularly if they have to be shipped to thousands of people. Consumers don’t get this. Especially if they’re asking a business to donate an item to a local charity. Consumers think, well, you’re making cookies anyway, so what’s the big deal about making two dozen more in support of the youth soccer team? After all, it’s good advertising for your company, right?