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.
For anyone looking to expand beyond search campaigns Facebook is a must. They have the largest audience of any social media website. Facebook is even more relevant to ecommerce now as they have recently added the option of conversion codes. Another advantage is the multi-facetted marketing options Facebook offer: PPC campaigns or social media reputation through fan pages and groups.

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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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As online users are now using more different types of internet browsers than ever before, it is more important than ever that your ecommerce site performs consistently throughout all browsers.

The good news is that the vast majority of online shoppers – over 80% – use either Internet Explorer or Firefox. The bad news is that there are over 100 different browsers and countless flavors of the Internet Explorer & Firefox.

The common argument used to avoid dealing with compatibility issues is that as the percentage of people using for example Chrome is relatively low, around the 3% mark globally, it isn’t worthwhile taking those users into account. This is probably not a wise way to approach the issue, especially for an ecommerce based site. 3% can make a big difference to your bottom line, as it’s not only Internet Explorer users who buy goods and services online.

The truth is, that tailoring an ecommerce site for cross browser compatibility is a pain. But the benefits can pay off in the long run by allowing you to secure sales from a wider customer base.

The main difficulties when it comes to browsers

1. Variety of Web Browsers:

As Windows Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Opera and many more.

2. Different Web Browser Versions

The major difference between two versions of the same browser is their support for newer portions of the HTML language. Internet users though tend to upgrade their browser based on the addition of new features, like email integration and instant messaging. However, not all users switch immediately to the newest versions. A good rule of thumb is to design your pages to work for the last two versions of the major browsers.

3. Older Browsers

As web technology advances web browsers are falling behind. These lagging browsers put ecommerce businesses in something of a quandary. How do you offer customers the best possible user experience without leaving some of those customers behind?

How to become Multiple Web Browser Compatible

1. Set a Goal

The first step toward solving old browser or noncompliant browser problems is to apply the 80/20 rule also known as the Pareto principle. Basically, 80% of your online store’s business comes from 20% of potential customers. When applying this principle loosely we’ll focus on the top browsers only.

2. End User Web Experience

Ensuring that your Website looks and performs well in a multiple browser world starts with measurement and testing. The overall goal is to provide a quality Web experience for the end user and to accomplish this consistently. Cross browser testing can be divided into four main categories:

• The Visual – The easiest measure is to simply take a look. Visual verification is a straightforward process. However, verifying five or six major browser vendors and the multiple versions of each can become tedious.
• The Functional – Do your critical business functions work successfully? Or will you leave someone with a full shopping cart waiting or unable to check-out?
• The Performance – Three benchmarks can be used to assess end- user web application performance: 
         o Availability: Shows that a Web page or full end-to-end transaction requested by a user is executed successfully without errors.
         o Response Time: Shows the speed at which every end-to-end transaction, page, image or third party content downloads.
         o Consistency: shows the site’s ability to achieve a quality customer experience across multiple visits.
         o Perceived Performance: It measures how long it took for the page to appear like it finished moving and how long it took for all visible “above the fold” components to load.

3. World Wide Web Consortium

Another thing you should make a habit of is to validate your pages through the World Wide Web Consortium. Founded in 1994 the W3C has made it its obligation to guide the development of the Web and create a common basis to build upon. W3C offers free validation tolls.These useful tools are trying to ensure that your visitors will get roughly the same experience when they visit your site.

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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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Online review portals continuously grow in popularity among users. Whether someone is looking for a new camera, shoes or a doctor: More and more users consult portals before buying.

Ecommerce retailers are skeptical though, because they fear criticism of their offers and services. Despite previous fears that consumers posting honest and unfiltered material could damage sales, it has been having the opposite effect in most cases.

In fact, visitors who clicked on the highest customer-rated reviews were more likely to purchase. Therefore online retailers should strengthen their presence on such sites. Only then, they have the opportunity, to use these platforms to their advantage.

7 tips for dealing with customer reviews:

1. Don’t avoid negative feedback. Nobody is perfect – and not every single customer will be content. If a company is basically highly rated this criticism is by no means a disadvantage, since it increases the companies’ credibility.

2. Resolves an evaluation in resentment, the top priority is: a deep breath. Anger is a natural reaction to subjective or provocative contributions, but should not guide your actions.

3. Try to see your company from the perspective of the customer. This will help to decide whether the criticism from the perspective of the evaluator is justified.

4. If you receive a positive critique, write a thank you. It will please your customers.

5. If you do not share the criticism make your perspective clear. Act professionally and constructively by posting a comment or writing to the author a private message.

6. If a customer is unhappy and you know that you can do better, make him an offer which will convince him. This could be in form of a discount or a coupon.

7. An evaluation is always a snapshot. You – as well as the customer – should always keep this in mind.

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There’s an area that is often overlooked in SEO and that’s images. Just like the words on a website, images generate traffic and links, too.

In terms of aesthetics, images are an integral part of website design. They break up a copy-heavy page and give site visitors instant visual stimulation. In terms of SEO, images can be optimized and bring additional visitors to a website. Actively using images as part of your overall optimization strategy can pay dividends.

Image Search Optimization Tips

Image naming: Give image filenames a title that reflects the content and is descriptive such as “Sony Ericsson C905″ instead of “SEC905.jpg”. Make the image names of your files match what is actually represented in the file. Don’t stuff your Alt Tags full of keywords though- especially ones that don’t relate to the rest of your page as they run the risk of being seen as spam.

Image linking: Boost internal linking and traffic by linking images to relevant articles and/or blog posts on your website. If you are sending out press releases or contributing articles to other websites, provide an image link.

Image quality: Good quality pictures with high contrast tend to work better. Make necessary resolution adjustments between your full size images and your thumbnails.

Image formatting: Photos saved as JPG files and other graphic image types as GIFs are the preferred image formatting.

Image freshness: Keep images fresh. If you’re targeting high popularity keywords it’s worth re-uploading images. Image freshness is a contextual clue for the search engines and could affect relevancy.

Image appearance: Further increase relevancy by optimizing the page the image appears on. Search engines look at text surrounding an image to determine relevancy.Text within the anchor tag and next to anchor text is especially going to influence image-search rankings.

Image duplication: Avoid duplicate image content on the website. If for example, you have a thumbnail, a medium size image, and a full size image, you don’t want these to all be indexed. The best way to handle this is to use robots.txt to prevent the crawler from looking at the versions you don’t want indexed.

Image filter: Enabled image search option at Google webmaster tool.

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The frequently asked questions (FAQ) section is one of the most visited sections of each website. The users expect clearly written, well-organized, complete and actionable answers to their questions. Still only half of ecommerce retailers offer FAQs on their websites. Among those sites offering FAQ, almost one in five FAQ systems does not satisfy the client.

A FAQ section is especially helpful throughout critical stages of the buying cycle. Issues including the online ordering process focusing on payments and security can be solved through the FAQ section.

Tips about FAQs:

Effective FAQs
The FAQ section of your ecommerce site needs to be updated frequently. Keep it user-focused, and make sure that your FAQ page offers other easy, immediate ways (e-mail, phone, live chat) for the potential costumers to get answers.

Specific FAQs
Most FAQ sections are too long. Limit the general FAQ section to the handful of questions users are most likely to ask and create specialized FAQs for specific products, services, or types of users.

Dead-End FAQs
Some FAQs provide dead-end answers. The question is answered but the answer doesn’t include or link to relevant information that enables the user to take action. An excellent answer would link to an opt-out form or provide the e-mail address and phone number of a person to contact to opt out.

More FAQ facts to take into consideration:

Websites neglect FAQs and waste their potential
Ecommerce retailers are neglecting the answering of FAQs on their websites or the FAQs are lacking in quality. Yet FAQs can solve customers’ issues quickly and easily. Looked after carefully they provide customers with the information they seek faster than an e-mail.

FAQs rarely provide the right answers
FAQs frequently fail to do what they are supposed to, instead leaving behind more questions than answers. Almost one in five catalogues of questions leaves potential customers with their service queries entirely unanswered. And 70% of companies only occasionally provide the right responses.

FAQ saves time & money
An intelligent question-and-answer system which does not involve elaborate navigation can help customers to help themselves and it increases satisfaction levels because they can obtain a solution to their problems at any time of day or night. It also relieves other communication channels which involve much more staffing and cost. Furthermore, most customer queries relate to issues that can be dealt with more quickly by FAQs than by e-mail: delivery times, methods of payment and shipping costs. Powerful self-service solutions therefore offer enormous potential savings.

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