5 Facebook Strategies to Prepare Your Business for the Holidays

It’s October and my company already has a couple months of planning for the holiday season under our belt. Sounds a bit zealous, right? Well, as it turns out, not really. For big corporate companies like Walmart and BestBuy, planning six or more months in advance for the holidays is normal. Why isn’t the case the same for small businesses?

While it’s true big brands need more time to prep for the holidays because they’re operating at a large scale, there are still lots of reasons small businesses should start preparing for the season early, too. It’s like warming up before a big game. If you don’t do it, you won’t be able to play at your best. What business doesn’t want to be at playing at their best when Christmas rolls around?

If you haven’t started strategizing for the holiday season yet, time is still on your side! Here are five Facebook strategies you can start implementing now:

1. Promote Shopping Holidays Your Fans Already Love

Believe it not, in the United States, there are nine other holidays recognized by brands and consumers other than Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. My team described them all last year in a blog post titled, “9 Shopping Days Businesses Must Know About This Holiday Season.”

One of the most popular shopping holidays for brands and consumers to celebrate is Free Shipping Day (FSD). It lands on December 15th this year and, as you might have already guessed, it’s a day when businesses offer free shipping with the guarantee that all orders made on that day will be delivered by Christmas Eve.

For last-minute holiday shoppers perusing their news feeds, an update from your business with a free-shipping offer could be the perfect incentive to help them decide to purchase from you, rather than another brand.

If your brand has never participated in FSD, here are some things to consider:

• Don’t let high shipping costs jeopardize your holiday sales: Forty four percent of online shoppers abandon their carts because of high shipping costs, according to a Forrester Study.

• Offering free shipping is Amazon’s most successful recruiting incentive — it could be yours, too: So far, in 2014, 63 percent of Amazon customers have joined the service because of free shipping.

2. Use Posts and Forms to Get Valuable Insight from Your Fans

There are two really simple ways to start gathering valuable insight from your Facebook fans today.

1. Make attention-grabbing visuals for insight-seeking status updates: Last year, the company Everpurse received valuable product feedback from their fans when they shared this status update:

If you’re wondering which product to feature in your upcoming holiday promotions, you can use these types of Facebook posts to quickly gather sentiment data.

2. Reward fans with extra giveaway points when they share their insight: If you’re not a product company, you can still benefit from gathering insight from your fans before the holiday season gets underway.

My company, for example, started collecting information about our fans’ expected holiday behavior this month. When a user visited our September“Facebook Monthly Giveaway” app, they were given the chance to double their chances of winning our prize by responding to our holiday-themed question.

The results of this question will help us decide the direction of our blog and Facebook post content as we go into the holiday season.

3. Host Facebook Giveaways to Quickly Build Your Email List

Did you know that 55 percent of brands use email as their number one holiday marketing channel (Accenture) and a massive 74 percent of holiday retailers use email to get customers to cash in on deals (Shop.org)?

There’s no doubt email marketing is powerful during the holiday season, but what if the size of your list doesn’t support your ambitious holiday email marketing plans? Hosting an action-gated giveaway is one surefire way to quickly grow your list before December.

What’s an action-gated giveaway? Action-gated giveaways are hosted on your Facebook page via a third-party app instead of as a stand-alone update. These campaigns aren’t for collecting general comments under a status update; they’re for collecting specific demographic or contact information, like email addresses.

Here’s an example of a simple action-gated giveaway hosted by the clothing retailer Lulu’s. For the chance to win a $50 gift card to their online store, Lulu’s Facebook fans must first share their email address.

4. Collect User Generated Content to Stretch Holiday Marketing Bucks

If your marketing budget is already a little tight, consider collecting user generated content as a means for stretching your holiday dollars.

Last year, Yosemite’s Scenic Wonders, a vacation rental company, hosted a photo contest on Facebook and received 247 photo submissions. Those 247 pieces of user generated content (UGC), as they see it, is $741 dollars worth of unique photos from their fans. They came to this conclusion by assigning a value of $3 per photo if they would have had to download the photo from somewhere else.

Making an effort to collect user generated content early not only helps supply your brand with key marketing content, it helps drive healthy engagement with your fans before the holiday madness begins.

5. Allocate Money for Facebook Ads

If leading into October the reach of your Facebook posts is low, you need to find a solution for the issue pronto. There’s nothing that can kill the success of your holiday Facebook marketing efforts faster than consistently low post organic reach.

If you aren’t able to find a solution for your low post reach by November, start investing in Facebook advertising to boost your most important marketing messages. Although I wish it weren’t so, ads are the only guaranteed way to ensure your fans are exposed to your brand this holiday season.

Conclusion

Through promoting popular shopping holidays, collecting insights from fans, building lists with giveaways, gathering user generated content and, finally, investing in advertising, businesses can prepare themselves for success this holiday season.

Harol Verano Corredor

 

 

 

By: Unknown On 12:58 PM

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Anticipating the Future of Search: Towards Socially Designed Digital Properties

 

Search Engines have experienced some tremendous changes in the last 15 years. From what used to be gigantic directories, where users had to enter very complex queries to access the most relevant documents, we’re now in an era in which search engines are more suggestion engines. Based on where we are now, Google is suggesting what the most relevant assets are, supposedly. 

Users as the new live queries

Search engines tend to learn more and more from us; as smartphones are always on, and interacting more and more with our homes, tech companies now own gigantic databases based on consumers’ habits.

The genius of search engines is then to be able to match 2 sets of data which are not directly related, but because the algorithms regroup clusters of people through very specific affinities, the 2 sets become related. Concrete trends can then be forecast (from criminality to raw material shortages). Scenarios that are beginning to build offer a new sort of design: search engines aren’t made to provide the best content when we actively look for it; instead search engines are now made to imagine potential scenarios.

Search engines are influencing and shaping new user journeys: the key battlefield is to make sure that Google understands on which stage the user actually is; is the guy really going to the airport if he’s far from home and in a moving car? Shall we suggest a good free wifi café near the airport for him? Or maybe a 2h dry cleaner, if he has already looked for this kind of service during his last trip?

Consequences for brands: forgetting landing platforms

In this ecosystem, content created by brands can’t be thought of as pieces of content, which will be consumed on a gorgeous landing page, with nice logos everywhere; most of the future content will be absorbed on other services. After all, when you have an Uber app on your smartphone and you’re looking for an address, Google pre-suggests you to book an Uber taxi. But why not imagine a line where Pepsi will suggest that you should pick up a cold soda if you’re going to walk long distance during summer? Or maybe tips and tricks for a healthy life written by Kellogg’s, thereby solidifying the fact that breakfast is now becoming one of the most important moments in your life – especially when you’re waking early to commute to a new job 50 miles away!

It’s a fantasy to think that we’ll go to a brand site in the next 10 years, except if the reward is highly valuable. In this all-in-all world, brand content should become liquid and infusible within tech services.

From consumer goods to tech social services

Yes, there will always be the best ribs in your local restaurant in DC. Yes, you will always reward an artisan who knows his job. Excellence has a price and it’s paid with fantastic word-of-mouth.

But for the rest of the industry (aka: businesses that try to sell goods or services that are not the number 1 in the world, which is the case for 99,9% of what you find on the market), there’s a dramatic need to flip-flop the way products and services are thought and designed.

In a traditional value chain, input (materials, genius, assets…) generates output (a phone, a chair etc.). But actually, the real output of Apple when they sell an iPhone is not really the device itself (who cares, as it’s obsolete in 2 or 3 years?) but it’s actually what it enables you to do.

This new Unique Selling Proposition is now generalized: what does buying a product enable me to do? There’s something very emotional (maybe belonging to a community, finding a purpose in life, having fun…) and also very rational (thanks to this device, user can access a platform in which the benefits are perceived as very high).

From a Search Engine perspective, it also means that the most sought after content (or more precisely: the highest rated items) will probably be the ones that help us become more producers than consumers. 3D printers are already here; DIY culture is fairly rooted.

Here’s an idea which is deeply understood by Facebook, which has just revamped Atlas. Cookies are starting to become obsolete, it’s now time to get deeper and more intimate connections to the real actions of consumers.

Will privacy resist to this new world of search?

Harol Verano

By: Unknown On 12:36 PM

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Apple Watch, Wearable Tech, and the Social Media Future

 

Apple recently introduced Apple Watch to the world during their live September 2014 Special Event, but it won’t hit stores until early 2015. This gives you plenty of time to check out the keynote, see what all the hype is about, recover from any potential “the future is now” moments you encounter along the way, and ponder how things could change in the next few months for wearable tech, social media, and life as we know it. How will Apple Watch impact the wearable tech industry, and what does that mean for the future of social media? Apple Watch: First Impressions In an attempt to answer this question, I tuned to the buzz on my trusty News Feed immediately following the Apple Watch announcement to listen in on what people were saying. The conversations included a variety of topics, such as: General tech geek excitement Apple Watch release date anticipation Discussions on the starting price tag at $349 Favorite style options Typical Apple vs. Google, “love it” or “hate it” debates I joined in on the conversation and solicited both friends and colleagues for their first impressions on Apple Watch – and after speaking with a few folks, I noticed an interesting trend begin to emerge from their feedback. The first take on the new smartwatch was either that it exceeded whatever expectations they had for the device, or that it wasn’t cool enough or as innovative as they had hoped. Perhaps you encountered similar responses amongst your peers on the topic. Either way, I believe it is safe to say the overall expectations and “cool factor” for wearable technology set by consumers is at an all-time high. It’s tough to say whether that is a blessing in disguise or a curse as we look ahead to future technology innovation. Apple Watch vs. Wearable Tech So what’s in store for the wearable tech industry as a whole when the Apple Watch arrives next year? For starters, we’ll have a better idea once Apple releases details and specs for the Apple Watch outside of what we learned at the launch. In the meantime, there is probably more speculation and questions than answers until more information is known. Let’s take a closer look at some of these questions between the Apple Watch and other wearable tech gadgets in the coming months. Smartwatches:How well does the Apple Watch match up against smartwatch competitors? Check out this graphic by Bloomberg Businessweek to see an excellent side-by-side visual and feature breakdown for the Apple Watch, Moto 360, Samsung Gear S, LG G Watch R, and Sony SmartWatch. The Apple Watch definitely passes the eye test, but comes with a steeper cost than most smartwatches in addition to the downside of limited app access for non-iPhone users. Google Glass: Is the Apple Watch a Google Glass killer? Can the two get along? It is still up in the air if and when Glass will go mainstream in the coming years. My best guess is that in 2016 there will be a million people wearing Glass and it will cost them anywhere between $300 to $700 to own. Having said that, I believe as wearable tech continues to grow in popularity, there will be several reasons why people will opt to wear both devices instead of one or the other. It really boils down to how each individual uses the devices and what functionality they want to get out of each. For example, one could record a video, take a picture, get GPS directions, listen to music, and/or have an email read back to them with Glass while responding to a text or Liking a Facebook post on the Apple Watch. At the end of the day, when people try Glass on for the first time, there is a 99.9% chance it completely blows them away. I just don't envision people having the same response with the Apple Watch upon seeing it light up for the first time on their wrist. Wristbands: How about the Jawbone UPs and Fitbits of the world? Will the Apple Watch do to wristbands what the iPhone did to MP3 players? I think this is an area to definitely keep an eye on as Apple focuses its products, apps, and iOS releases towards health and fitness. Sure, wristbands are a different category of wearable tech, but it won't surprise me if people give up valuable real estate on their wrist to make room for a shiny new Apple Watch. Wearable Cameras/Camcorders: Does GoPro have anything to worry about? I don’t think so. GoPro wasn’t worried about competition from Google Glass last fall and I imagine the same goes for Apple Watch. Again, the usability and functionality of these wearables is ultimately up to the individual user. If I plan on swimming or participating in a mud run obstacle course, then I am taking the GoPro with me and leaving Google Glass and Apple Watch at home. VR Headsets: What impact could Apple Watch have on virtual reality headgear such as Oculus Rift and/or other players in the Virtual Reality wearable tech arena? To answer this question, I reached out to Reverend Kyle, Host of the Rev VR Podcast, for enlightenment on the topic. Here’s what he had to say: "Nobody wears watches anymore. Once Virtual Reality systems like the Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR become mainstream, folks won't want to look like Dick Tracy, they'll want to look like Johnny Mnemonic." Smart Jewelry: How can wearable tech companies that offer style as a benefit, e.g. Cuff, further differentiate themselves from Apple Watch? Both devices offer stylish activity tracking and notification capabilities. Why buy one or the other if I only care about those features? Price is one. Cuff jewelry packages start at $29 and go up to $199. A second idea is coming up with a “cool factor” or way to convince that guy or girl who hates wearing jewelry, watches, wristbands, etc., to change behavior and wear the product. Apple Watch and Social Media One of the benefits of the Apple Watch is the ability to connect with others through feeling notifications pushed over to the device. This will be great for fast interactions or if you want to instantly find out when someone performs one of the following actions on your social media pages: Likes your Facebook posts Retweets/Favorites one of your Tweets Gives you a +1 on Google+ Anything more complicated than that, such as posting a status update, will require switching gears to your mobile device.

By: Unknown On 12:28 PM

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