Best Time to Post on Facebook: Use Insights

At long last! Fan page administrators and marketers can now post content to their fan pages at optimal times without a lot of guesswork. The best time to post on Facebook has been revealed by Facebook itself, thanks to the newest upgrade of Insights. If you don’t have them yet, be patient. It’s coming!

But is this a game changer? Yes! Generally most social media statistics concerning the best times and days to post to the fan page are based on what the EAST coast is doing. Considering most of the US population lives there that’s understandable, but what if the population of your fan page doesn’t live on the east coast? You just had to figure it out on our own or purchase sometimes costly analytical tools.
And now that’s changed! In comes Facebook with new and improved Insights or analytics. They’ve obviously heard our cries, or more realistically those of advertisers and marketers. But I won’t complain because the upgrade benefits us all. Now we can now see week by week the best time to post on Facebook according to our individual fan pages and audiences, not on broad stats based on one coast.
Watch the tutorial below to learn just how easy it is to see key analytical data about your fan page. No more downloading that exhaustive Facebook Excel spreadsheet of fan page data unless you want to. Truly, the interface is so much more user-friendly than what we had before. After watching the video, share with me in the comments below how knowing when the best time to post on Facebook impacts your content strategy or posting schedule.

• Original article

Keywords: Best Practices, Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Metrics, Engagement, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, facebook insights

Read More

The Holy Trinity of Digital Travel Marketing

Let’s start off this post with a question: Which digital marketing tactic do you think is most important?

1. Having an optimized website (SEO) with identified keywords also used as part of search engine campaigns (SEM), i.e AdWords?
2. Having an email marketing strategy in place, with newsletters sent out to a database of ongoing clients and/or prospects?
3. Having a social media strategy in place, with a presence building communities on a variety of identified social networks?

If you answered “all of the above”, bravo! In fact, when EyeforTravel and Digital Visitor conducted a survey earlier in 2012 with travel marketers across Europe and North America, these three tactics proved to be the most popular channels for travel brands.

Source: EyeforTravel & Digital Report, april 2012.

I am often approached by clients, or potential clients, asking if I can help with their social media marketing, to make some sense of their ongoing tactics and/or to devise a longer-term strategy. As important as social media may be, in most cases I have to re-frame their question and ask them what they are doing in other aspects of their digital marketing to begin with. That’s when I sometimes have to be blunt: if you aren’t optimizing your site for search with a solid content strategy and you aren’t collecting emails or doing very little with your databases, then social media should perhaps not be your priority! But I am jumping ahead of myself, here. Let’s look at the holy trinity of digital marketing, in particular within the travel vertical, in order to better understand how all three should in fact work together, rather than compete with each other in an “either-or” scenario.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

A study by Google and Ipsos MediaCT showed that 65% of leisure travelers start their vacation search online… with no idea of the destination, nor mode of transportation! Thus, online search plays a pivotal role in the decision-making process. It used to be that if your property, destination or attraction showed up on the first page of results, this was considered a good thing. More recent studies found that 55% of people actually click on the very first natural result. And if you combine with the second and third results, this represents 77% of user clicks. Thus, making it to the first page is no longer enough, you must make it within the first three results to stand a chance of getting the much-coveted click to your site.
Ensuring your site gets found by potential travelers searching online is no easy task, so beware of snake oil salesmen who will tell you it can be done with black hat SEO tricks, stuffing hidden pages full of keywords so that search spiders will find your site. These tactics are penalized by ongoing updates to Google Penguin and Panda, which also takes a closer look at incoming links to your site, making sure they are natural and authentic. A strong content strategy is rather where savvy-marketers are focusing to build a site that will cater to customer needs by answering the questions they seek. Among the key tools one will consider: a quality blog and/or FAQ section hosted on the main web site, newsletters archived online, whitepapers and case studies, etc.
For more on this, read: Search Engine Marketing Basics for Hospitality

EMAIL MARKETING

A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece called Email is dead… NOT! Somehow, it seems that debate won’t go away and there are many who still believe email is no longer relevant in a brand’s overall digital strategy. Yet we tend to forget email remains an extremely powerful marketing tool, with the following key benefits worthy of mention:

• It’s a permission-based communication between the brand and the customer. Those who use it well will interact with the customer in a meaningful way, sending useful information and details prior to arrival or check-in, or sending out exclusive offers to keep the interest (and open rates) alive and well.
• There is intimacy in the relationship – the conversation takes place in your inbox, not on social networks. Sharing is therefore optional.
• Brands own the database and its content, which cannot be said about your followers or fans on social networks.
• Messages have longer shelf-life. It’s not uncommon to have people open their newsletter 48-72 hours after receiving it, sometimes more.
• Open rates and click-through rates may seem low, depending on industries. In the travel vertical, the global open rate average nears 20%. But how does that compare with Facebook posts, tweets or other messages sent on Google+, Instagram or Pinterest, for example?

View Original on Prezi

I presented the above keynote in June 2012 at EyeforTravel’s Online Marketing Strategies for Travel conference and focused on why email marketing remains powerful and why it must be used with social media. Not instead of. Nor as an alternative to.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

I love this quote from social media expert and acclaimed author Jay Baer: content is the fire, social media the gasoline! Having a social media presence without the prior strategic thinking and content creation runs counter to successful digital marketing. In other words, yes, absolutely, social media is a required element of an effective digital marketing approach for travel and hospitality brands nowadays, but there must be content to begin with. This content should ideally be hosted on owned platforms, such as a brand website, corporate blog and newsletters, from which it can then spread through the various social networks.
Thankfully (as can be seen in the above infographic), most hospitality brands have understood the potential for building thriving communities on social networks, addressing customer service issues, promoting exclusive offers, researching and surveying clients and managing their e-reputation. Beyond the obvious top 6 social media giants – Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram – brands must also manage their presence on user-generated content sites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp or Google Reviews, where comments are having a growing influence on travelers around the world.

LET’S NOT FORGET MOBILE…

While mobile is not a marketing channel per se, it should be the backbone behind this holy trinity of digital travel marketing tactics. Any quality search engine optimization efforts and marketing campaigns must take mobile into consideration, just like newsletters must be mobile optimized or fade into oblivion. As for social media, one must remember these few stats:

• 60% of Facebook users access their account via a mobile device. This represents 751 million users!
• 1 in 6 Facebook users (or 16%) accesses his account only via a mobile device
• Traditional Facebook ads don’t show up on the mobile version, nor do the tabs on a Facebook brand page
• 74% of Twitter users access their account via a mobile device

Of course, there are more than these three tactics to consider for an effective digital travel marketing strategy. One thing is for sure, though: if you are not securing these basics right, perhaps you should not even bother with other tactics and should focus on getting this right to begin with.

• Original article

Keywords: Best Practices, Social Media Marketing, Content, Branding, Strategy, Analytics, Metrics, Advertising, Engagement, Marketing, Public Relations, Sales, Search, SEO, Social Media, Social Networks, #Social Media, travel industry, travel marketing 

Read More

Heat Map: Study of Facebook Fans Online

Ever wonder when Facebook users are online? Facebook has offered a new glimpse into when fans are actually logged onto Facebook. We decided to take a look at the data and see how it varied from brand to brand.


Above is a heat map of Facebook fans seeing posts in the news feed. The more red the graph, the more likely this time period aligned with other Page's data. The more blue (red → yellow → green → blue) the graph, the more likely this time period was unique.
As you can see, a majority of brands experienced their audience online between about 9am to 9pm CT. In general, this is when Americans are awake and active. The graph does not display much variance, which means that most brands have a similar looking graph.
The early morning experienced the most variation between brands. After further analysis, we discovered that this appeared to be due to the "locality" of the brand's fans.

The more global the audience, the less variation between time periods. The more local the audience, the steeper curve between night and day. In layman terms, due to fans around the world, brands with large global audiences don't have much of a change hour to hour. Brands with smaller, local audiences, need to post when people are awake in their time zone.


In the graph above, red illustrates when Pages had the most overlap of activity. When you see colors progressing to blue, there is a higher variance in that time period. Wednesday for example has a significant amount of blue, which represents that very few Pages also experienced that increase in activity on Wednesday. However, if you compare the red from Tuesday to Wednesday, you'll notice that most Pages did experience an increase in activity on Wednesday, just not to the degree the blue line illustrates.
Examining each day of the week's overall activity revealed a fairly similar audience profile daily. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday had roughly the same level of traffic. While Sunday dipped a bit, Monday and Tuesday had fairly lower Reach levels. Traffic patterns for each individual day typically matched the Page's overall average graph, with the total quantity of Reach changing (depending on the day of week).

Best Days of the Week

A majority of Pages experienced their best day of the week (in terms of Reach) on Thursday. Not a single Page had their best day of the week on Monday or Tuesday. The best day of the week had a higher variance than worst day of the week, meaning a Page's Best Day tends to fluctuate a bit, whereas the Worst Day is more consistent.
In our analysis, we found that Thursday & Friday were the best days of the week for Reach (although Saturday was a close second).

Worst Days of the Week

Every single Page had their worst day of the week (in terms of Reach) on either a Monday or Tuesday. It seems as though the earlier part of the week provides less free time either at work or in life, which restricts usage of Facebook. Mid to late week starts to pick up activity, and the weekend seems to be a bit of a wild card.

How did we gather this data?

This data is not publicly available through the API. Through the generosity of Page Admins, we were granted access to this data via their Insights. We manually analyzed the data of over 20 widely ranging Facebook Pages. We focused our analysis on Pages that had a predominantly American audience to give a sense of normalization across the Pages.

Keywords: Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Metrics, Social Media 

Read More

Top 3 Alternatives to Google's Keyword Research Tool

Unfortunately for everyone doing keyword research, Google is taking down their Adwords Keyword Tool, which many of us have been using and loving for quite a while. It’s unclear exactly when this is happening, but as of this writing it will be “in the coming months.”
Arguably one of the biggest downfalls of losing Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool is that the tool is currently the best available free tool for keyword research out there. We’ll have to mourn the loss momentarily but our keyword research must continue!
Thankfully, there are more fish in the sea. Keep reading and I’ll show you some viable free alternatives to our beloved Google Adwords Keyword Tool, along with pros and cons of each.

SERP Checker – Whatsmyserp.com

If you’re interested in how your competition is ranking, then this tool is for you. Here you can enter your domain and up to three competitors along with a slew of keywords.

Main Use
The best way to utilize SERP Checker is to see how your main competitors rank on keywords compared to your website. You’re not going to be very successful trying to see what keywords you should try to rank for without other research prior to using this tool. Alternatives are not shown so you will need to know variations on your keywords ahead of time if you want some comparative data to look at.
SERP Checker is great if you and your team have brainstormed a bunch of potential keywords that need some research to gauge their viability. Compared to other free tools, this one allows you to enter in the most keywords at the same time. What’s even better is that you can export your results to Excel for easier interpretation and presentation to others.
Pros

• Allows research to be done on your domain and up to three competitor domains
• Multiple keywords can be researched at the same time
• Results are easily exportable to an Excel document
• Shows your historical rank/trends 

Cons

• Only shows data for “exact searches”
• Does not show alternative keyword suggestions
• No indication for competitiveness on keywords

Search Position Finder  – Googlesearchpositionfinder.com 

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Search Position Finder does look a little childish and your co-workers might think you’re on a kid’s website if they see it on your screen. This isn’t going to be your comprehensive tool by any means, but it should still be mentioned. Simply put, this tool will give you the fastest results for a keyword on your website.

Main Use
You shouldn’t be using Search Position Finder for your main keyword research; you should just have it bookmarked in your internet browser and use it for those moments when a new keyword pops into your head and you want to know where your website or a competitor’s ranks for it on Google.
If you’re just getting into keyword research, Search Position Finder may be the simplest way to get your feet wet since you won’t have screens full of data to interpret. That being said, there isn’t much in the way of metrics here but this tool never tries to fool you into thinking it’s more than a basic starting point.
Pros

• Allows you to search on multiple search engines besides Google
• Appears to show “natural” search position instead of exact, phrase, general
• Simple interface with few buttons and options 

Cons

• Can only search for one term at a time
• Results only available for one website at a time
• No indication for competitiveness on keywords
• No alternate keyword suggestions available
• Results can’t be exported

Keyword Spy – Keywordspy.com

Here’s a nice online tool that gives you a large amount of data free. Luckily, it’s also rather easy to use but information can be overwhelming at times. A paid option is available if you need even more data.

Main Use
Out of all of the tools listed here, Keyword Spy one is by far the most comprehensive. This is your ticket if you don’t have the budget to spend on a full-fledged SEO tool, nor the time to fool around with multiple tools. The main drawback to this tool is the fact that it only displays 10 results and that you will manually have to pull data for further analysis – no exporting here.
There is a tendency with Keyword Spy to focus on PPC at times, so you’ll need to look past that occasionally and interpret the results for organic search. If you do want to spend a little money on PPC, though, just use Google’s other Adwords tools for that since they’re free and easy to use.
Pros

• Lots of additional information available – not just keywords
• Suggestions to similar keywords and misspellings are provided
• Competition is listed and gauged (PPC & organic)
• Integrates aspects of other tools into a single tool 

Cons

• Can’t export the large amounts of data that are shown
• Doesn’t list which search engine is being used
• Can’t specify exact URLs
• Tends to focus on PPC in some areas
• Only displays 10 results at a time – unless you go with the paid version

There are a multitude of other free tools out there for you to sample and use but these three give you a great start. In my opinion, using SERP Checker and Keyword Spy in conjunction will give you enough data to make some keyword decisions. Don’t be surprised, though, if more and more free tools start gravitating towards paid services since Google’s tools are evaporating around us.

Original article

 Keywords: Monitoring Tools, Research, Social Media Marketing, Metrics, Google, Marketing, Search, Tools & Apps, Googlesearchpositionfinder.com, Keywordspy.com, Whatsmyserp.com

Read More