Third in our series on social media optimization for the ecommerce industry; this blog focuses on advertising options on Twitter. As of January 2010 Twitter had 75 million users. The users are expected to peak at roughly 160 million according to businessinsider. Averaging around 40 million tweets a day and growing at a rate of around 17% a month. Highlighting the mobility of the platform about 80% of Twitter activity takes place on mobile devices.
It is important to note that according to The Guardian’s Digital Content Blog, Twitter already reached its full market share and peaked in mid 2009. A recent study by Barracuda Networks Inc. claims that only 21% of twitter users are actively using the platform.
Twitter offers advertisers the ability to promote their products and services through building followers and in the near future through Promoted tweets.
Promoted tweets will have one ad per page. The ads are based on keywords in Twitter search. Promoted tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. Companies could utilize this form of advertising in order to combat negative tweets (by placing a positive tweet at the top of the page). A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance” and it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it. Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets. Initial ad partners testing promoted tweets include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks and Bravo
Twitter will eventually allow third party Twitter clients to integrate Promoted Tweets, with the app developer receiving a cut of the revenue. Twitter also plans to eventually put ads into your Twitter stream even if a user did not perform a search and does not follow the advertiser. (For example, if someone has been writing posts about the Fourth of July, they could see a promoted post from Virgin America on holiday fare discounts).
A Private competitor of Promoted Tweets is Tweetup. This company differentiates itself from Promoted Tweets by ordering tweets based on relevance and not by chronology. Therefore the results feel more organic by not being on top of page. This is a self-service model, not just for the big brands.
Twitter is simultaneously expanding its reach into search engines licensing its stream of Tweets to Microsoft, Google and Yahoo —which are all using the data to add real-time results from Twitter to their search engines. The Microsoft and Google deals alone are believed to be worth as much as $25 million.
According to social-media-optimization.com advertisers who are interested in gathering followers to their Twitter accounts should aim at between 100 to 500 followers. Accounts of this size generated 146% more monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. Also growing a large following of thousands of followers does not appear to generate any additional leads lift Twitter followers.
Although Promoted Tweets has not yet been activated to the general public it is still possible to utilize Tweetup to promote products and services. And contrary to popular belief a huge twitter following does not necessarily generate more monthly leads. Your Twitter account’s ROI sweet spot is between 100 to 500 followers.

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Next in our series on social media optimization this blog deals with Pay-Per-Click opportunities on DirectAds, LinkedIn’s PPC advertising platform. I am looking particularly at LinkedIn in comparison to Facebook. With the possibility of targeting audiences according to job function and industry, LinkedIn seems to be the social networking site with the greatest potential for business-to-business marketing. This can be utilized for expanding your business into a particular strategic industry or targeting high-ranking decision-makers within certain companies. LinkedIn offers social media exposure to companies either through PPC advertising or company profiles.
LinkedIn claims to be the world’s largest audience of influential, affluent professionals (the average household income of LinkedIn users is $107,278) and the statistics speak for themselves. At last count LinkedIn had 69,818,383 users and is growing at a very rapid pace – according to Mashable – faster than any other social networking site. A recent survey of business.com claimed 80% of companies in the United States utilize LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
The advantage of LinkedIn lies in their rich employment profile data. The site divides advertising opportunities according to budget. Campaigns of over $25,000 include image and text ad displays, direct help from the LinkedIn team and the ability to reach targeted decision-makers. For campaigns of up to $25,000, DirectAds offers precise targeting, credit card billing and the option to setup within minutes. Currently it is only possible to target the United States and Canada.
Due to company and personal profile information it is possible to target audiences according to company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender, age and geography. In order to ensure that users are targeting audiences of a minimal size limit LinkedIn allows audience targeting of up to three parameters, whereas Facebook Advertising allows targeting of even one person! Ads are highly specialized content ads posted on the right of page. They offer the possibility to include images too.
People tend to be more honest with their profile information on LinkedIn; therefore it makes it even more accurate than Facebook. Online marketers who are very familiar with demographics have a big upper-hand here.
LinkedIn suggests a bid range of between $3.12 and $3.25, but they also restrict you by setting the minimum bid at $3.00 per click or per 100 impressions. The minimum Cost-Per-Click is $2.00. Due to the high costs, it may make more sense to pursue CPC avenues elsewhere and opt for LinkedIn’s Cost-Per-Impression advertising.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn lags behind Facebook on a number of issues. Firstly DirectAds lacks conversion tracking, something that Facebook has recently added. Their inability (surprisingly) to target ads according to companies, something that Facebook also has recently added. The images in their text ads are significantly smaller than Facebook’s, as is the amount of allotted text. Facebook Advertising is also better designed to support multiple campaigns.
In Conclusion it seems Facebook Advertising has the upper-hand on LinkedIn due to its broader functionality, but the advantages of DirectAds rich (and accurate) profile data and B2B capabilities should not be overlooked.

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There has been a lot of buzz on the web with regards to PPC campaigns on social networking sites. These sites hold a distinctive advantage over Search PPC because of the personal information the networking sites possess on their users. This can make campaign targeting extremely effective, not to mention the significant size of their audiences. I have taken it upon myself to explore the most popular of the social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn), we then uploaded campaigns and compared the results to our search engine campaigns on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. This blog will be the first in a series of five, exploring this new media.
Recently ranked as the website with the most unique visitors in the United States and second worldwide, only to Google (alexa.com), the first site I checked out was Facebook Advertising. Of all the social networking sites we explored Facebook seems to be the most relevant for Business-to-Client marketing. As the largest audience of any social network, and with more than 400 million active users, its large audience makes its draw obvious. 50% of Facebook users log onto their network daily with an average time spent on the site at 55 minutes. Another interesting fact is that Facebook is becoming increasingly mobile. More than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices and these users are twice as active as non-mobile users.
Facebooks’ largest audience segment is 18 – 34 year olds – at over 50% of its users, but the fastest growing segment in its network is females aged 55 – 65 years.
You can use the Facebook targeting tool to accurately access demographics of any country or audience you wish to target. Targeting options include targeting according to age, gender, relationship status, marital status, specific keywords, and geo-targeting and it is even possible to target people on their birthdays.
As with PPC ads on search engines the ads appear on the right of the Facebook content pages, but have the advantage of including images in their text ads. Images have been shown to positively affect click-through-rate and careful attention should be paid to which images to use. We generally do A/B testing between three images initially. On the campaigns we manage we saw a higher CTR than search engine content campaigns, but lower than search campaigns. This might seem obvious to some, but in actuality Facebook PPC ads are highly targeted content ads (and not search ads). In terms of cost-per-click, we find that in for-ex search campaigns the CPC is higher than Facebook, but in retail campaigns the CPC was generally lower in Facebook.
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Google announced a new service called Social Search which shows search results from sites owned by the searchers online friends. Currently an opt-in service but widely expected to go live over the next few months it cements the need for brands to have a Twitter account, Facebook page & a decent blog.

Data on a person’s social circle is pulled from their contacts in Gmail, the people they follow on Twitter, the blogs they read on Google Reader. Google has a help centre article explaining more about how it works.

All the information that appears as part of Google Social Search is published publicly on the web — you can find it without Social Search if you really want to. The content has been surfaced  together in one single place to make results more relevant. This is done by building a social circle of a person’s friends and contacts using the connections linked from their public Google profile, such as the people they are following on Twitter or FriendFeed. The results are specified to them, so they would need to be signed in to their Google Account to use Social Search. If you use Gmail, also included are your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader,  some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results are also included.

More to come…

At present Google is only including these results as a universal search element in the same way they embed news results. However there is little doubt that in the same way news results are giving priority for certain queries we will start to see results from our social circles being given a boost in the normal search results too.

This makes perfect sense; if I follow a brand on Twitter or are fans of a site on Facebook then they are more relevant to me than another brand that happens to have more links.

Optimizing for social search

Take a look at the data points Google is using and make sure you are making attempts to increase your followers, subscribers & friends in each of those areas. It’s not easy for brands to be social but those that manage it are likely to reap the rewards.

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In the last post, we discussed the advantages and techniques of becoming Multiple Web Browser Compatible in order to expand your business.

As if designing your site to work on the many different web browsers out there wasn’t difficult enough, modern technology has thrown yet another curveball, in the form of mobile internet.

Millions of people now use their mobile phones or PDA to surf the internet, retrieve email and even check their social networks. Some use these methods exclusively, and some use it in addition to a conventional computers. However, because of their sheer numbers, it’s no longer wise to ignore this platform.

In the past, the mobile sector has been plagued by hype and over-ambitious forecasts that rarely meet reality but there is now reason to believe that we are close to a tipping point.

Despite mobile internet still makes up a relatively small proportion of overall marketing spend; its growth displays a similar trend to the early days of online. So it’s safe to say that even though mobile internet may have not have met the highly anticipated forecasts of previous years, this channel is growing exponentially.

Remove this barrier to growth with the following tips

Many Different Devices:

Changes in the mobile device industry happen fast. Every few months there’s a new phone, PDA or gadget on the market that is capable of surfing the web. Add that to the many devices by several manufacturers already on the market and in use, and you have a design problem of momentous proportions! How to make your content visible on all of those devices?

Design for the Browsers:

While it is impossible to make sure your content will be visible on every model of every manufacturer’s device, there are a limited number of mobile browsers on the market, so instead of trying to design a site for the devices themselves, it’s better to focus on designing sites for the browsers.

Remove Images, Save on Bandwidth:

Most mobile browsers can’t display images correctly or at all. So if you are designing with the mobile market in mind, make sure that your site can work without the image or graphics element.
The other issue is that even if they can view the images you use, mobile access to the internet is generally much, much slower. Image heavy sites will take a very long time to load, as will sites loaded with other bandwidth sapping features. Keep the bandwidth to a minimum and keep mobile users happy!

Screen Size:

The last & probably the trickiest aspect of web design for mobile devices is to avoid tables at all costs and design using xhtml or CSS. Make it scalable or it won’t work! Remember, mobile device screens are tiny – much tinier than the smallest computer screen around, so design accordingly!
While it may seems like a lot of effort to make sure your site design is mobile compatible, it will earn you brownie points with your users, and this is still one area where your site might be able to stand out from the vast crowd of other sites out there!

Finally here are the top advantages that M-Commerce can provide which cannot be found in E-Commerce:

Ubiquity:
Users are able to access any m-commerce application in real time.

Accessibility:
Users are able to access m-commerce application anywhere and anytime.

Localization:
Network providers are able to localize their users by using positioning systems such as GPS, GSM or UMTS and to offer them location-dependent services such as travel, emergency calls, hotels, restaurants and amenities.

Convenience:
It is very convenient to bring a mobile device anywhere due to the size and weight if the device.

Personalization:
As mobile devices are not shared between users so it is possible to adjust the mobile devices to the user’s needs and wishes.

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Every day issues like environment and global warming are discussed. No surprise that shoppers are trying to make a contribution to the sustainability environmental movement in several ways. Consumers prefer to purchase energy-efficient products and appliances as well as locally-made items. More and more shoppers choose products in recyclable packaging or buy at farmer’s market.

Ebay recently introduced the Ebay Green Team as a result of record number of customers choosing to buy items that could be classified as “used”, “organic”, “refurbished”, “vintage”, “sustainable” or “remainder.”

The good news for online retailers: Ecommerce itself is green and in order to become a “greener” online shop all you need is to make a few environmental changes. The rewards will justify the effort.

Green Online Shopping

Online shopping is “greener” than shopping via traditional models. A study by the Carnegie Mellon University  compared the impact of buying online vs. driving to and from a store. It concluded that the online transaction reduced the environmental impact with 35% less energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

• Green effect 1. Less vehicle miles: Shopping is one of the most frequent reasons for car travels. Each time that a customer decides to buy online rather than go shopping by car CO2 emissions are saved.
• Green effect 2. Less printed materials: Online e-newsletters and brochures replace their physical equivalent therefore it saves paper and reduces distribution costs.
• Green effect 3. Less waste. Across the whole supply chain of procurement, manufacturing and distribution, the Internet can help reduce product and distribution cycles. Auction services like eBay and Amazon Marketplace even enable redistribution of second-hand items promoting recycling.
• Green effect 4. Dematerialization. Better known as digitization, this is the availability of products like software, music and video in digital forms.

Green Online Shop

• Packing Material: For mail-orders, packages are indispensable. Nevertheless avoid e.g. disposable packaging and use environmentally friendly, recycled wrapping materials instead.
• Bulk Mailing: Offer to ship several items in just one packing instead of several separate packages.
• Email instead of paper: Send invoice, newsletters etc. by email instead of paper and offer for example paperless payment.
• Whenever paper is unavoidable, use 100% post-consumer recycled paper.
• Offer to withdrawal old batteries and other electric appliances.

Green Online Retailer

In order to become an environmental Ecommerce retailer it might be worth to share your own green office efforts with your customers. Further reducing energy usage is good for the planet as well as for your business as it translates into lower operating costs.

• Use compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of incandescent bulbs in the office and warehouse.
• Setup the energy saving features on computers during the day.
• Turn off all computers, monitors, printers, scanners, etc. through a power strip at the end of the day in order to prevent “standby” energy these devices are often using.
• Use a paperless accounting system saves immense amounts of resources. A small investment up front on equipment and services (backup hard drive, scanner and online backup service) will pay for itself in costs on resources such as paper, file folders, and file cabinets.

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By eliminating the physical presence of a store, online retailers are able to offer an almost unlimited selection of products, based on their suppliers, to an unlimited group of consumers in their local market and internationally.

By applying the theory of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail economics companies will target a wide spectrum of niches along the curve. This theory makes it possible for ecommerce shops to continue to compete once a certain segment becomes saturated and also provides the foundation for bidding on keywords within an ecommerce campaign, by bidding on long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords

Long tail keywords are an extension of the specific product you are selling. Each word within the keyword is specific to product including, features, model numbers, colors etc.

Example

Product: Casio Exilim EX-Z100BE

Keywords:  Casio Exilim EX-Z100BE, Casio Exilim EX-Z100BE 10.1 Megapixel, Exilim 28 mm lens, Exilim 4x optical zoom

Why use long tail keywords?

As a consumer moves along the purchasing cycle from getting informed about the products available to the actual purchase, they will be refining their search terms. At one point the consumer was searching for a digital camera, but once they establish the features they want they will include them within the search and then narrow it down to a specific brand and product. During the final stages of the consumers search long tailed keywords can be used along with prices in the text ad to capture the consumer at their point of purchase.

How to convert from your long tailed keywords

1. Highly specific landing pages containing full product descriptions and product pictures.
2. Call to action; order online, on sale, buy now.
3. Insert the price of the product within your text ad. If your price is within the range of the consumer, who already knows the specific product they want to purchase, then the conversion rates will increase.
4. Make it easy for the user to purchase the product they want. i.e. quick and painless checkout.

To get started on long tail keywords based on your products you can create the campaigns in one of two ways. The first would be to long tail the entire company’s database and produce keywords for each and every product and the second would be start with the top 10 to 20 products and add on products as conversions come in. Each method will be cost effective and like all campaigns you need to monitor conversion rates, cost per conversions and cost per transactions.

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As the economy continues to take its shape for 2009 it is vital to focus on your margins and remain profitable.  At the same time 2009 will still provide an opportunity to grow your ecommerce business by strategically building a global ecommerce strategy.

The Global Ecommerce market 2009:

1. Global Ecommerce sales (excluding travel) will grow by 4% in 2009 – eMarketer. The growth is smaller compared to that between 2007 and 2008, but still growth none the less.
2. Europe spent $94.4 billion shopping online in 2006, a figure expected to rise by as much as 113.2% to 201.3 billion in 2009 – Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide.
3. 19% of China’s citizens have Internet access, but contains more than 253 million Internet users. An emerging market nearly the size of the total population of the USA.

Based on the issues outlined above there is still hope for 2009 and beyond.  Those who build and grow successful Ecommerce businesses in 2009 will reap the benefits in 2010 and forward.

So what should you focus on?

1. Highlight your willingness to handle overseas orders. Ex. a crawl banner welcoming visitors in multiple languages.
2. Provide local languages on your site. Add a toggle switch so customers can select their language of choice.
3. List prices in local currencies.
4. Provide clear information about anticipated shipping costs, taxes, return policies and the countries or markets that you serve.
5. Make sure to communicate estimated shipping times to your customers.

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A very interesting survey conducted by Harris Interactive reveals the variety of online and offline channels from where consumers begin their purchase cycle.  Knowing the different channels and their relative strengths will allow you to expend your current reach and gain more customers.

Survey highlights:

Online: 20% of all customers begin their purchase cycle via search engines, other relevant online channels includes: multi-brand websites, like Amazon (9%), price comparison sites (8%) and blogs/forums (4%).

Offline: 15% of all customers begin their purchase cycle path through word of mouth, 15% in retail stores and 9% look in print media first.

Differences between segments include:

• Affluent respondents are more likely to use search engines (26% vs. 13%)
• Affluent respondents are more likely to use price comparison websites (10% vs. 7%)
• Less affluent respondents tend to discuss purchases at a higher rate with family and friends
• Men are more likely to start their path to purchase with search engines compared to women (25% vs. 15%)

Consumers who end up making their final purchase online rather than in-store stated that “broad choice of products and brands and ease of search” were the top three reasons for doing so.

What can you implement from this survey?

• Expend your search engine reach to its full 20% potential by acting an all major search engines both organically and via paid search.
• Starting activity with multi-brand websites (eg. Amazon) since 9% of all customers begin their cycle there.
• Open a professional blog about your industry for reviews, consumer’s tips, etc.
• Since 15% of customers start their purchase cycle via word to mouth, make sure that your inventory includes all products which people are likely to recommend, usually this will be your industry best sellers.
• Try to present the largest choice of brands and products possible in your website.
• Give extra attention to your in-site search, customers gave it a very high priority in their decision to purchase.

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