Week 11: Social Media Advertising! CSIT 155

Social Media Advertising!

Social media is a very important advertising and customer interaction tool. The ability to measure and precisely target your efforts is supremely valuable. I think that the chapters 14 and 15 of "Likeable social media by Dave Kerpen" explain the beneficial and important advertising strategies that should be used and implemented by most companies today. The one thing that I thought was of most importance was the statement made in the book " So before yo spend lots of time and money on likeable social media, you've got to make sure you have likeable customer service, likeable salespeople, likeable products, and likeable processes." . I truly believe that too many companies concentrate more on the marketing aspect looking for new customers than they do the operation and customer service to insure the customers that they already have are satisfied. The worst thing that could happen would be to have a spectacularly successful marketing campaign to bring in new customers then provide horrendous service and sour all those new customers. It is almost always easier and less costly to keep existing customers than it is to find new ones. Also customers who have a bad experience are much more likely to share their dislike over a bad experience and this is not the type of word of mouth advertising you want.

Facebook offers a great way to advertise and a number of good ways to do it. The ability to focus your add by location, job title, interests, and friends of connections are some that I think are the best. On top of that you have the option to structure the cost based on pay per view and pay per click allowing you do judge the amount and type of exposure you think gives you the best return. Personally I think that in most cases I would use pay per click as it would give you a better idea of the effectiveness of your advertisement. I really like and would consider using the friends of connections first. this ad with its built in recommendation attribute I think would be the most effective. Maybe using this with an interest filter would be even more precisely targeted and effective.

Week:9 Using categories to organize content for your audience.

Using categories on my blog would be helpful to organize the content into areas that would fit different types of readers. The categories that I would likely use would be personal computing, enterprise systems, and leading edge technologies. Using these categories would allow me to offer a wider range of content and increase the size of the potential audience. Writing content in these categories would also offer some variety that readers could transition through or easily find similar topic content. The more organized and easy the content is to find the more likely I will be to have readers who return and enjoy the blog. I visit lots of sites that are a mess of mixed content that I have to search though endlessly to find what I want. These are site that I generally do not visit unless I have too. Categories or labels if used correctly can also help potential readers to find your article if it has been indexed for those key words or phrases. If I categorize articles it will also let me see easily what types of content are most popular and concentrate my energy in those areas.