Does Social Media affect your Food Choices?

Social Media…. Hmmmmmm…. Hope you had enough with it!!! But, STOP. Have you ever wondered that social media has an effect on your day-to-day food choices??? Well, if you’re interested, just read along.

Social media has become bread and butter for our lives. So why not on your food choices? There’re thousands of pages in Facebook dedicated to food all over the world. (Food in terms of restaurants, cafes, bars, coffee shops, bakeries, food retailers and many more food brands). 

Can you remember the last time you craved for a food that was on a Facebook page or an Ad? For me, it’s Nutella. They were very good at posting yummilicious pictures of Nutella foodstuff. Following are some, that made me crazy. (Taken from the official Facebook fan page of Nutella Sri Lanka)

Social media could change your views on food by seconds. If somebody has gone to a particular restaurant and posted a photo of what she/he has eaten, if it looks nice and comments are good, we also crave to have that as soon as possible. Even though, I don’t know the person who posted that, we still didn't care as long as the food looked good. According to a survey (Taste of the Nation) conducted by Deloitte, a business advisory firm by using 3,000 consumers from across the UK reveals 61% of 18 - 34 year olds consult social media when deciding on their eating or drinking out destination. Well, that’s how it goes. And even if you want to find out the nearest restaurant to have your dinner, it’s just a one click away.

Basically, through social media, you could get all these things done by seconds.

• Search for a place to eat
• Their menu or best selling items recommended by others
• Share your pictures of enjoying what you ordered
• Search for a recipe + cooking tips of what you've enjoyed most
• Reviews of others….. Simply anything.

But there’s a downside as well. If somebody is unhappy or had a horrible experience with a certain food brand, they might post it on Facebook fan page or tweeted it on public and obviously people who thought of going to that place to eat would hesitate a bit or consider choosing another place.

Well, there’s no doubt that social media and digital technologies have altered our food choices a lot. And even our food choices could be influenced by the people we've never met or even seen thanks to social media. Well, that's it for today's post. Hope you enjoyed it. Love to hear your views too :)

How FMCG Brands can reach to the right Target Markets using Google Display Network?

Hi everyone, I’m back with some interesting information about Google Display Network (GDN). You may be visiting hundreds of websites regularly to get your things done. When you’re visiting those, you are coming across thousands of banner ads by various organizations. There are many methods to target an ad to the existing consumers and to potential consumers. Displaying ads in websites is a growing trend to reach the target audience effectively.

If you’re interested in knowing about Display Ads, today’s post would be great for you. In brief, Google Display Ads allows you to place your Ad online in order to be seen by the right consumers. Simply, it places your ad at the right time, right place and to the right consumer. As Google has indicated 3 main purposes of Display ads would be,

• Generate Awareness
• Increase Sales
• Drive Loyalty

Let’s see how a FMCG brand could reach the right target audience using GDN

GDN allows you various targeting options such as;

Contextual targeting

Actually, this is the most common method of targeting. This allows you to target the ad based on the content consumed by the target audience. All we have to do is create some Key words and GDN would identify the “theme” of your keywords. So whenever a page carries your theme, GDN could place your ad effectively. For an example, just think for a while that you want to advertise your freshly baked batch of chocolate cupcakes. Therefore, GDN places your ad on the sites that carries similar themes such as websites on baked chocolate goods, discussion groups of baking communities as well as newsletters containing chocolate desserts. Well, it’s all depending on your theme.

Topics targeting (Contextual targeting by topics)

Here you don’t need to indentify keywords or even themes. You could select the relevant topics to your ad by ticking off the topics that are already available. Let’s take the above example again. If you want to advertise chocolate cupcakes, you could choose the topics as; Food and Drink, Cooking and Recipes and Baked Goods or Desserts. One major disadvantage for FMCG brand using this targeting option is that the topics could be too broad sometimes for the purpose of targeting. But if you want to reach a broad audience at once, this would not be a disadvantage.

Audience targeting tools

This targeting method is totally different from the above method. This allows you to display your ad to the people who are most likely to be interested to what you are selling not the content of the websites. “Interest category targeting” and “Remarketing” falls into this category.

Interest category targeting

Here, the list of categories is same as topics targeting, but the targeting method is different since the visitors are targeted based on their interests of browsing pages across the GDN. When someone visits an AdSense partner website, GDN investigates the content of the page. GDN also use these page topics to identify interests with something called “visitor’s anonymous cookie ID”, taking into account how often people visit sites of those categories. This allows creating awareness about your brand and ultimately generating traffic to your brand.

Remarketing

If you want to target the people who’ve already visited your website, this targeting option is ideal for you. This automatically links your ad with the people who showed an interest towards your brand. Even they didn’t buy anything after visiting your website, GDN would be able to track the other websites that they’re visiting and placing your ads there. All you have to do is add a “remarketing tag” to all the pages in your site. What they do is, when people visit your site, they’ll be added automatically to the “remarketing list” and you could reach them anytime you want.

Placement Targeting

If you know well the websites that your target market searches frequently, you could use this tool. You just simply have to give out the names of websites your ad should appear. This gives great control over the places your ad is appearing. If you want to concentrate on some particular websites, this could be very useful.

Geographic targeting

If you own a small business which serves only for a limited geographical area, advertising globally would not be necessary. In that case, geographic targeting is extremely beneficial. As a result, you could increase the ROI (Return on Investment) of your campaign by limiting your ads to a specific set of people who are in a definite geographical area.

Bit of History :)

When you see the word “Social Media”, you would have mentally gone to your Facebook profile or your Twitter account for an instance. Well, that’s how social media has taken control over our lives. In my previous blog posts, I talked about various social networking sites and how to advertise on them along with the benefits. So now I thought of giving you some interesting historical information on your favorite social networking site, Facebook. 

History of Facebook

As we all know, Facebook is the biggest social network in the world today connecting billions of people around the globe. Anyone who has a valid email address could be a member or register into Facebook. From the very first moment you logged in, you could create a profile and share everything with your desired friends. Well, I know you don't need further information  on Facebook but, do you know how it first started? Let’s go down the memory lane of Facebook. 

Theoretically, it was started by Mark Zuckerberg and 3 of his colleagues (Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, Andrew McCollum and Chris Hughes) on 23rd October 2003 and the website was limited to Harvard students only. Then it was expanded to the students of other colleges in Boston as well. It was originally named as “facemash.com” and allowed to compare two student pictures side-by-side to let them choose who was "hot" and who was "not" hot. He collected the photos from hacking into the database of Harvard. However, it was shut down due to several legal reasons.

On the 11th of January 2004, Zuckerberg registered the domain as "thefacebook.com". He has publicly revealed that he got inspired from the previous site, facemash.com to create such a social networking site. After creating this site, they opened it to registrations. Surprisingly, between 1200 to 1500 people got registered within 24 hours proving the fact that they love to interact with their friends. From that day onwards, Facebook started to grow rapidly with the help of many investors including PayPal. Well, that's the history of Facebook in a nut shell.

Hope you liked it :)

You could search for more detailed version of the history in the internet.

Source: Wikipedia

How to target a niche audience with Facebook Advertising

Facebook has become a way of life for almost all of us. Some people can't even live without logging into Facebook, chatting with friends, share some gossips or even commenting on posts and photos. Well, that’s how Facebook has become a very close buddy for each and everyone. Wise marketers found a way to advertise through Facebook where they made billions of people to talk about their brand. Relatively, Facebook ds are cost effective compared with other media such as TV or Radio or even Press. If you're new to Facebook Ads, this blog post would be helpful.

Facebook Ads are usually placed in the right sidebar of the homepage, or on Facebook profile pages and even fan pages, under a “Sponsored” header. Following are some Ads I came across when I was browsing through my favourite page, "Nutella".

Anyway, now you know what a Facebook Ad is. As you could see, there are 3 main parts of a Facebook Ad. They are namely; the image (100px * 72px), headline (maximum 25 characters) and text or the body (maximum 90 characters). To make your Facebook Ad more appealing, you should pay more attention to the image you’re uploading. It should be attractive enough to be clicked immediately when someone sees the Ad. At the same time it should be relevant for the content of Ad as well. When choosing your heading, you should be more careful too. It should not be too generalized.

For an example, if you’re advertising for a Boutique selling dresses for plus-sized women, rather than putting the name of the shop as the title, putting something like, “Being FAT is SEXY” will be more appealing and creative. Further when, creating the body, keep it simple and short. Just give out the basic information avoiding any complications. Below the Body of the Ad, you could see a Like button that will help in making the Ad more compelling when one of your friends clicks on it.

Well, that’s it about the physical layout of the Ad. But there’s much to do when targeting your Ad to the right audience. We could target the Ad according to the Location, Age, Gender, Precise Interests, Relationship status, Language, Education, Workplace and Connections. These targeting options make it possible to focus on or target the people most likely to be interested in the product, among the billions of worldwide Facebook users. Figure.1 shows the basic targeting options while Figure.2 shows the advanced targeting options.

Figure 1

Figure 2

As soon as we tick/select a particular targeting option, Facebook automatically calculates how many people could see the Ad at right hand side. The audience will get narrowed each and every time you select a targeting option, but hopefully your Ad will be more effective. Once you select which targeting options you’d like, Facebook will deliver your Ads directly to users meeting your criteria.

When it comes to payment options, you can choose between CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per thousand impressions). If you are mainly interested in users who’re actually clicking through to your site or page, you’ll probably want to go with CPC. Even this option allows you to indicate the maximum amount you'll pay for each click. On the other hand, if you're interested in getting your brand out there and just having your Ad seen by as many people as possible, CPM would be a good choice. This option allows you to indicate how much you're willing to pay for 1000 people viewing your Ad.

Well, that's how actually marketers target their Ads to the relevant audience. Remember, when you're liking something, you're obviously giving marketers some clues about your interests which they'll use to target the Ads. That's it for today's post. Hope you'll find it useful :)

Social Media Marketing and Brand Health Check

Hi everyone, I’m back with this week’s post. Today, I’m going to make you aware about Social Media Marketing and also I would like to explain how to do a Social Media Brand Health Check for a selected brand.

So, let’s get started. When you hear the word social media, you would probably think of Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr or even Pinterest and even you would be a member of more than one of them. Well, social media includes all of them and all provide us with platforms to communicate with each other 24/7. All of them allow us to create, share and exchange information in virtual communities and networks.

By taking it into another level, marketers advertised their products on them with the intention of creating conversations about their brands. That is how Social Media Marketing (SMM) becomes a way of life for us. The goal of SMM is to produce content that users will share with their social network to help a company increase brand exposure and broaden customer reach. 

Facebook has the highest penetration among the top social media entities, measured by the number of people having profiles on a social media site. It’s common to see that almost all businesses in the world is having a Facebook fan page to build one to one conversations with the customers regarding their products and services.

Social Media Brand Health Check is a very good method to evaluate the social media presence of a particular brand among the competitors. Even though it takes a bit of time, the information we are getting are totally worth for it. By doing a Brand Health Check for your brand, you could identify the strengths and weaknesses of the existing competitors, potential competitors and finally you could decide how to balance out the social media platforms. For an example, (in Sri Lankan context) if your brand is targeting more towards high end customers, it’s worth to interact through Twitter rather than Facebook because, majority of Twitter users are belong to that category.

Anyway, to demonstrate a Brand Health Check, I chose my brand as Keells Super and the competing brand as Cargills Food City. Now we have to analyse the social presence of these two based on following criteria.

• Reach: How many people you could reach through various social media platforms?
• Quality of Audience: Are the people you reached, belong to the relevant target audience?
• Engagement: How intensely people engage with your brand?
• Share of Voice: How often people talk about your brand?
• Sentiment: Both positive and negative things people talk about your brand

Well, to work this out, I have to indicate the level of agreement based on the results I've found. The agreement levels are as follows:

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

So, following table shows the criteria and the level of satisfaction I came across after surfing through the net.

Well, you might wonder how to interpret the score that calculated at the bottom right corner of the table. So here are the guidelines to do that.

If Your Score is Below 25

You are seriously in 'Social Media Trouble'. You need to speed up your adaptation to the new media landscapes. You need to prioritize your social media goals, and start strengthening at least a few areas from the criterion used in above health check

If Your Score is from 26 to 50

There can be a few areas where you are really strong on Social Media. Find out those few areas and make them stronger and maintain. Find out the areas where you are weak, and address the issues

If Your Score is from 51 to 80

You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. However, there can be few areas where you can strengthen your presence.

If your Score is Above 81

Your brand rocks on Social Media! Keep it up, and continue monitoring new developments

As you can see, the score for Keells Super is 79.54% according to my level of satisfaction for the above criteria. That means, Keells Super is comparatively a successful brand when it comes to social presence, but have to improve in certain areas. Keells Super's Facebook and Twitter fan count is way better than Cargills. They are constantly updating posts, statuses and even various competitions compared to Cargills. One thing that they should develop is the numbers of followers in Twitter. In Sri Lanka, majority of Twitter account holders belong to high end tier. Since, Keells is also targeting them, it would be more appropriate. Other than the Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, Keells is active only on Foursquare and LinkedIn. I think that they should expand the ways of reaching customers in other possible social media platforms as well. Number of local fans are bit less for Keells compared with Cargills. But this can be justified because Keells is having an online supermarket (First online supermarket in Sri Lanka), and all products are open to be purchased by anyone across the globe. Even negative comments are less compared to Cargills. So basically, I think Keells is doing great compared to Cargills. Hope you'd agree with me as well. Just select one organization and identify competitors to do a brand health check. Just try and see :)

How to do a keyword research?

How an organization make use of a keyword research

In my previous blog post, I talked about SEO and how to make your website appear in top of organic search results. Well, that is only a part of SEO. The other part is PPC (Pay Per Click) or Paid Advertising. It simply means that the advertiser or the client should pay an agreed amount to the publisher (mainly a website owner) based on the clicks/views of the advertisement. Basically, the advertiser should be able to create an effective advertisement to be appeared on webpages based on the keyword research. Google Adwords is one such tool that allows you to do an effective keyword research plus create advertisements. Search marketing is now has a growing trend in developing countries and many business organizations could get the benefit out of it.

So let’s see how an online clothing shop, “Kelly Felder - online store” could be benefited by running a keyword search. As I mentioned above, this could be easily done through Google Adwords.

·

• First, in order to find Keywords, you should create a Google account.

• Then you have to create an Adword account by clicking the following link http://www.google.com/adwords/.

• In “word or Phrase” tab, type your desired keyword. In my case, since I'm conducting a keyword research for Kelly Felder Online Store, I typed “online clothing shops Sri Lanka”. Basically I needed to find out how what are words or phrases used by majority when searching for online clothing shops.

• Then the following results appeared. Since we don’t need all the keywords, I only selected 12. Then we could copy it to a excel spreadsheet for your convenience. Trust me, it’ll be really helpful when creating Advertisements.

• Then go to “Campaigns” and click “New Campaign” to create the PPC advertisements to appear in Search feeds. You could select any option according to your need.

• After that, you could add a campaign name, locations, budget etc and click on “Save and continue” at the end.

• Now, it’s time to create the content of the advertisement. You could see 5 separate lines to insert headline of the ad, descriptions and URLs. I added following details for Kelly Felder.

• You could also add keywords from the excel spreadsheet you prepared before. Then after filling the required information, click to bill the amount.

Well, that’s how you could create an ad by doing a keyword research. Actually online business owners could get a lot out PPC advertisements. One of the major advantages of pay per click advertising is that you don’t have to make any changes in your web pages just to rank high on the search engines. Kelly Felder online store is popular in overseas as well. Therefore, having ads in Google would be very helpful.

Another advantage of pay per click advertising is that the process you will have to go through is so simple. As I mentioned the important steps above, any organization could reap the harvest soon from their businesses. And you will just have to pay a fee and instantly your advertisements are up and running. Yes, it’s that simple. And further, you’re only paying for “Actual Visitors”. This could even control the cost of advertising since you’re only paying for the visitors who’re actually interested in products and services.

Well, PPC is truly a good strategy to reach your genuine customers but it takes experience and time to be successful. So, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you find this helpful. Please feel free to leave a comment.

A memorable lecture on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Here goes my 3^rd blog post on “Anu’s Online Journal”. Specially, I would like to dedicate this blog post to Mr. Amitha who made the first move to carry out a web based lecture and to Mr. Suranga who conducted the lecture through web, from Sydney, Australia. Same as my colleagues in the Department, that was my first experience in a web based lecture. I’m glad that I was a part of it and I’m sure all my colleagues would agree with me. Anyway, on my very first web based lecture, I learnt about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Now I’m going to brief you what I’ve learnt.

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results”

Well, that is how Wikipedia has defined SEO. But I’m quite sure that no one would ever digest that by reading that definition. That’s why I thought of briefing SEO from the things I’ve learnt in my first web based lecture.

In simple, SEO can be seen as a process of getting traffic for a particular website from the “organic” or “natural” ways on search engines. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing have such results, where web pages are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users. This is totally free even though people could advertise their own website by paying a certain amount to a search engine. Remember, it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results.

For an example: I typed “web pages” in Google search engine and below screen shot shows how the search results appeared. The area highlighted by the red colour rectangle shows the paid search results (pay per click - PPC) and the area highlighted by blue colour rectangle shows the organic or natural search results based on the number of visitors.

Well, I hope you would be interested to rank your website on the top of the search results without paying a single penny to anyone. Therefore, I would be telling you 5 easy ways to do that. Okay, let’s start.

1. Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the possiblility of a web site or its contents to be crawled or “indexed” by a search engine. Crawlability is also known as Spiderability and Indexability. A Crawler is a special type of program that visits web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "spider" or a "bot." In order to make your website crawlable, you should make more meaningful URLs to all the pages in our website otherwise your web site would be ranked way below the first page of search results making it difficult to the users to visit.

2. Key Words

A keyword is any word or short phrase that describes a website or a page. Keywords aren't just keywords; every keyword, phrase and variation has its own audience. There may be a bigger audience for ‘black dresses’ rather than ‘black dress.’ If you want to attract more visitors to your website obviously you should use strong keywords in your website titles and website text. Therefore, you have to do a research to identify the key words that the visitors had used. You can use various types of tools available in World Wide Web to identify the main keywords used. “Google AdWords” a keyword finder that can be used to increase your website’s SEO.

3. Content Building

Content building can be considered as the heart of Digital Marketing. If the content of your website is irrelevant, nobody will ever visit again. In order to compete with other the websites which are having same content, you should find a way to make your website unique and outstanding. Your website’s home page which is also known as a landing page is the first thing that your potential customer sees after clicking on a link. Because you don’t have much time to convince them this is the right place, ensure there is an easy way to purchase your product or sign up for something as soon as possible. Make sure the design is clean, insightful and easy to navigate so that they can take action right away.

4. Add social media links

Almost all business now owns a social media account to keep in touch with customers and

potential customers. If your business has a Facebook page or other social media accounts, find out how many users are visiting your website through these social networks. Available in Google Analytics, the Network Referral report shows you how many people have visited your website through a social network. Is your Facebook audience visiting your website? If so, you are more likely to turn social network visitors into customers. An audience of loyal readers will link to and share your content naturally spreading positive word of mouth about your business or products. Building a social media presence would be only appropriate if the target audience of your business matches with those of social media communities.

5. Viral Content (Videos and Images)

Having viral videos or images with appropriate ALT tags will automatically boost the SEO of your website. ALT tags are very important because crawlers read only those and include them

in the search results. Most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap which is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It can be submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools. You should make sure to optimize your video with important key phrases or keywords. Don't use complicated words or terminology that may not be common to the average person. Get on your social networks, look through your email contacts, write on your blogs, and get the hype going. Share your video with everyone, because if you have content worth sharing, it will continue to be shared to grow an expanding audience, and in turn develop more exposure for your brand or service.

There are numerous best practices for optimizing your website and be ranked in the top of search results. Feel free to share your tips on SEO in terms of comments. Well, that’s it for today’s post. Hope you’ll find this information useful :)