Welcome
Hi there, my name is Karim, I’m a London-based online marketing specialist. I help companies improve their online marketing to boost business. Find out more about my experience and how I can help you.
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Tuesday, 31 August 2010
IG & CMC - Why So Shy About Twitter?
Top brokers IG Index and CMC Markets both maintain Twitter profiles (CMC’s being the more developed and more active). These profiles are useful and could certainly provide a viable method for clients or prospects to find out more about these two brokers.
However neither broker provides an obvious link to its Twitter profile on their main company website. Not even in the detailed ‘Contact Us’ sections of the website do links to these Twitter profiles appear (see images below).
Of course just adding a link to your company Twitter profile isn’t gonna revolutionise your social media presence or instantly result in a flood of interest. But considering how easy it is to add a link, it seems a shame not to open up another channel for current and potential clients to get in touch, as well as potentially boosting Twitter follower numbers. It’s now more and more common for companies (financials included) to link to their social media profiles from their main websites.
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Thursday, 26 August 2010
Poor Online Ad Placement from IG and City Index
While browsing some music videos I came across some advertising for two major financial spread betting providers IG Index and City Index (see screenshot below).
It’s great to see IG/City covering their bases with some YouTube advertising, but someone looking for a music video can hardly be considered a well-targeted potential client. That’s not to say people who look at videos won’t spread bet, but if they’re actively looking for music videos they’re most likely not looking for spread betting.
Depending on how IG/City are paying for these ads, they could be wasting their budget on low quality clicks and impressions. With the industry being as competitive as it is, poor allocation of online ad spend like this is best avoided. Not to mention that it might negatively impact the brand perception.
My recommendation? Make sure who ever is handling your Google ads take a close look at where and for what types of searches your ads will be displayed.
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Friday, 18 June 2010
Twitter Advertising with 'Promoted Tweets'
Back in April, Twitter announced the introduction of a much anticipated advertising platform. It seems that since then a select group of advertisers have been testing the system.
The basic concept is that advertisers will be able to pay for a certain tweet to appear for certain search term such as ‘Toy Story 3’ in the example below.
Personally, I’ve only seen promoted tweets appear recently and still very sporadically. It’ll be interesting to see how this advertising platform develops and how soon (if ever) average users will be able to run ads against twitter search terms.
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Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Twitter - The Best Social Networking Site for Brands?
I found some interesting Twitter stats have been published recently. One point in particular caught my attention:
Twitter users are three times more likely to follow brands on Twitter than on other social networking sites
This is very interesting for companies looking to make the leap into social media. Because of the time and effort needed to develop a robust social media presence, focusing on one of the social networking sites in particular makes sense. And although these stats reflect the habits of US Twitter users, they provide a strong argument for making Twitter the social networking site of choice for business.
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Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Boost Website Conversion Rates With Social Media
I know from my own online buying habits that before purchasing a product or service, I like to do a bit of research, find out about a company’s reputation and see what its main competitors are like. I can’t imagine I’m unique in this approach and the ‘research’ stage of the buying cycle has been verified and demonstrated by countless studies exploring the buying habits of consumers. The problem is that most website expect prospects to buy there and then even though this doesn’t match how we actually shop online.
This fanatical focus on securing the sale now might explain the generally low conversion rates for many sales websites. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that driving away your potential clients by forcing them to ‘buy or leave’ doesn’t make much business sense. Even though research stage website visitors might not be ready to buy now, it’s worth developing a connection with them so when they are ready to buy, they pick you.
Social Media can be very effective in this area. By investing in a social media presence, and inviting people to visit your blog, Twitter profile or Facebook page, prospects can get a deeper feeling for what your company offers. This deeper, 3-dimensional picture of your company (presuming it’s positive!) can help build feelings of trust and confidence between you and the prospective customer. Making them more likely to buy from you.
After all, we’d all rather do business with people we know. Reading your blog or following your tweets is probably the closest thing we have to getting to ‘know’ your company. With all the skepticism surrounding the value of social media, this ability to build a connection with prospects and turn them into paying clients is very powerful.
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Monday, 19 April 2010
Learning From Nestle's Social Media Debacle
In March, Nestle’s Facebook page was the ‘victim’ of some undesirable attention. Environmental activists hijacked Nestle’s Facebook profile posting modified versions of the company logo to protest Nestle’s environmental policies. Nestle responded by having some social media illiterate PR people threaten to ban anyone that posted a modified version of their logo, pissing their fans off and drawing criticism from many social media bloggers.
By all means, this was the wrong way to handle the criticism but focusing on Nestle’s social media ineptitude merely scratches the surface. In fact this incident demonstrates some deeper implications for social media on brands, namely that social media can focus a flood-light of attention on any ugly truths associated with your services or products (regardless of your participation in social media).
Companies are understandably uncomfortable with this. Every means of communication that they have ever had with customers has been a monologue. Adverts, press releases, press conferences etc. Social media imposes a two-way conversation
While a dexterous response to the exposure of these ugly truths can help, ultimately companies need to face up to the reality that they might need to fundamentally change how they produce products and deliver services.
Instead of agonising about the right social media ‘tactics’, brands should be using social media as a gauge for public sentiment towards their industry, product/service and looking at how they an change what they do to better deal with these sentiments. This doesn’t mean that brands should always listen, but if they’re doing something they’re not proud to talk about sooner or later this will show up in the social media space. It might be better to own up to this before others call you out on it.
*Update – Nestle’s once thriving Facebook fan page has yet to make a full recovery from this incident.
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Friday, 26 March 2010
Twitter To Reveal Business Model This Month
Yes Twitter is very popular, but will it ever make any money? Well according to the CNBC interview below, Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder says the company will be announcing a comprehensive business model by the end of this month. Considering the lack of a robust biz model and tangible profits have fuelled skepticisim on the business potential of social media sites, this announcement will be highly anticipated.
In terms of the nature of this business model, Zee, Editor In Chief of The Next Web Network believes it’ll include:
“ad platform (most likely), premium business features or possibly even an official Twitter app store”.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
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