Social Media Marketing - Effective Use of Facebook

Effective Use of Facebook

I had given a set of criteria in my previous post for good use of social media, and that is what I will be using for effective use of Facebook, though with 3 new pages this time.

Dominos: A. They show off some custom pizzas people have made, as well as artistic shots of other ordered pizzas.  They keep their customers informed of current deals and frequently post new content.

Rock Band: B.  They keep their customers informed of new products, and post new content rather frequently, but they do not feature links of some of their other content on Facebook, such as an app that actually links to your Rock Band 3 and Rock Band Blitz games. As well, most of their content is simply about them, rather than what fans are doing and saying.

Subway: B. While they do not have the additional content that Rock Band did with their app, Subway is good on their Facebook page, though a bit one-sided.  Their content is fairly varied and artistic, but its all them, rather than a showcase of what fans are saying and their own content.

Comparing Facebook and Google+ from a Business/Marketing Perspective

Google+ and Facebook have grown very similar over the years, but there are still some very distinct differences between them.  

Google+ Pros:

• Easily created user groups
• Using these user groups, its very simple to target specific users with your posts, and thus only make certain posts to specific users...  For example, one post for your customer base, and another for your business partners.
• Google+ Hangouts are a very effective video chat tool integrated with the service, though only 10 at a time may be on video.  Many more may be in the chat, though.

Google+ Cons:

• Smaller user base than Facebook
• Cannot show posts to friends of friends, only to those in your selected circles or to the public
• Cannot choose which friends to show online to

Facebook Pros:

• Large customer base, with many sites already including integration
• Has a larger install base for games and 3rd party applications, users are much more likely to use these applications on Facebook
• Can select which users you wish to appear online to

Facebook Cons:

• Less specific privacy settings than Google+, and the ones they do include are less easily implemented
• Chat is text-only, rather than a group application.
• Not as easy to post specific updates to specific users

Overall, what this means is that Facebook is good as a general public front, showing off generic information. Google+ is much, much better at segregating your user base, and sharing specific updates. As well, they have much better tools for group-sharing, Google+ Hangouts allowing for easily integrated desktop sharing, video chat and document collaboration.

Social Media Marketing - Effective Blog Use

Classmate Blogs

• Ian Burleigh's Blog: http://imburleigh.wordpress.com/
  
  I've chosen Ian's post on Social Media Planning for Week 4. This is for the fairly simple reason that he goes into a great amount of depth and gives plenty of reference links to back up his information. He states his points simply, getting into enough depth to make it understandable at the same time and provides great images to illustrate his point.
• Oliver Wlodyka's Blog: http://www.oliverwlodyka.blogspot.com/
  
  I've chosen Oliver's post on Effective Social Media for many of the same reasons as above: the points are illustrated well, giving a sentence to summarize the topic while expounding on it in the following paragraph and giving more than enough information to give somebody an excellent idea on what guidelines to follow when you're doing your planning.

Blogs about Social Media Marketing

• Hubze: http://blog.hubze.com/
  
  I've chosen Hubze because it was one of the top-ten social media blogs in a list that was on top of my google search, and many of the articles seemed interesting, going over many things I hadn't really thought about before.
  
  On Hubze, the first article I've chosen to feature is 4 Ways That Instagram Can Improve Your Business.  This article talks about Instagram exclusively, and while I knew about the service, I had all but dismissed it as a platform for business use, thinking it more like an image upload service.  However, now that I've read this article, I'm a believer.  So long as you have a story to tell in photos, you can make great use of it, especially with location recording of the pictures in the service.
  
  The second article I've picked out is The Renewed Importance of Facebook Check-Ins. With the additional features built into Facebook's search, getting people to Check In at your business is even more important.  Fortunately, Facebook allows you to do many things to give people incentives for doing so.  The benefit to you is that your business is more likely to show up when people search for where their friends go for certain things, the simplest example being a restaurant.  Facebook offers a framework for offering a variety of types of coupons, or donating to a charity for instance.

Blogs used to Market

Criteria: Spelling/Grammar, Frequency of Posts, Interaction with Customers, Variety of Posts

South Park: C.  While they post often, more often than not, its just a clip of the show with a quote.  They rarely have customer created content featured.  When new episodes are airing, they do link to the site that allows you to stream their episodes for free, but its not very interactive with the customers save for some 'Where is this quote from?' posts.

Sonic the Hedgehog: A.  Maintained by Sega, Sonic's page is a mass of content of all different types.  They not only post updates on the latest Sonic-related products, but also share a mass of fan-made pictures and videos, as well as posting links to their giveaways on Twitter.

Halfbrick: A. They pass all the same criteria in the same fashion that Sega did: By posting relevant news about their products in combination of fan-made productions and various giveaways.