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 :)