Urgency Flow

Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social media marketing according to new research from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business.

The study surveyed customers of Dessert Gallery, a popular Houston-based café chain, who were Facebook Fans, with customers who weren’t. Based on surveys of more than 1,700 respondents over a three-month period, the study found that the company’s Facebook fans were made more visits to Dessert Gallery each month, spent more of their eating out dollars there, and had greater emotional attachment and psychological loyalty to Dessert Gallery. Read more about the study here.

Now the authors of the study, Utpal M. Dholakia and Emily Durham, caution that “our results suggest intriguing possible correlations rather than definitive causalities” (One Café Chain’s Facebook Experiment, Harvard Business Review). It may be, for instance, that other targeted marketing strategies would have similar results.

The authors also point out that Facebook fan pages have “a narrow appeal”. Dessert Gallery did not have a Facebook fan page before the study and over the three month period, only 283 (or 2.1%) of the customers on DG’s mailing list became fans.

They conclude that “Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

In other words, your results may vary. But it’s still great to see research being done on social media as an effective marketing tool. There’s been an awful lot of hype about social media marketing and not a lot of attention paid to if and how social media marketing affects the bottom line of business that use it.

This article was originally published on about.com

Recently we wrote about the importance of social media, and showed a video about the fast growing importance of it. The website sitepoint published an interesting article about using your facebook for business, with examples and graphs. You can find it here. Do you already have a Facebook site, and if not, why? Is it a strategic choice, or is it lack of time? Studies showed that most people using social networks don’t do it effectively, by either not frequently using it, or putting the wrong content online. Urgency Flow can help you out, social media is the key, but we know how to open the door. Contact us for more information.

I don’t like Facebook. Personally, I find it way too time-consuming and way too user-unfriendly. And I’m not particularly interested in having a personal Facebook account.

But I will also be one of the first to tell you that Facebook can be a great tool for businesses who want to use social media.

And Facebook has come a long way and is now courting business users with special business accounts. In 3 Ways for Businesses to Take Full Advantage of Facebook, John Jantsch (Duct Tape Marketing) explains the differences between Facebook Business Only accounts, Personal Accounts and Fan Pages and how small businesses can best utilize them.

Obviously as soon as I get a chance, I have some Facebook work to do!

On a related note, if you use Twitter, AJ Vaynerchuk has wrriten a very clear tutorial onHow to link Twitter to Facebook.

This article was originally published on about.com

A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.

“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”

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For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon. Read more

This article was originally published on nytimes.com

Lisa Barone reports that a Citibank and Gfk Roper study found that 76 percent of small business owners don’t find social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn helpful in generating leads and business (Can SMB Owners Make Social Media Useful?, Small Business Trends).

Lisa’s take on this is that it’s not that social media isn’t or can’t be useful; it’s just that it takes so much time. The solution? Time management. You need to know why you’re using social media and plan in advance where and how you’re going to engage.

Lisa’s post is full of tips for focusing your time and energy. Planning and scheduling are key, she says, and there are many tools that can help you avoid overload and stay organized such as “Tweetdeck, HootSuite or Seesmic to help you manage conversation and schedule tweets ahead of time” and “Google Alerts via either email or RSS to keep track of social media mentions.” Read more

This article was originally published on sbinfocanada.about.com and written by Susan Ward

New social tools and online trends appear every day. As Facebook is just integrated into our lives, there is Twitter. And I bet that as soon as Twitter is fully integrated, there will be another social tool to tell people what you are doing, why, when, where and with whom. Visibility is the key, or googleable, if you like. That is, your company is not only found when the exact term ‘Johnsson Food Company’ is typed, but also as the term food, fish, supplier or whatever your company is dealing with, is typed into a search engine. Or is updated on a social network site. The utility of sites like Facebook and Twitter may well be underestimated, but they can be very useful to companies. Together with blogs, they ensure returning visitors of your sites (if well written and up to date) and may result in additional customers. Blogs describe the issues that concern the business and attract potential customers to contact the firm. The importance of being visible everywhere and write up to date content is something which is not properly implemented at many firms. Urgency Flow will help you with this step, feel free to contact us.