Social Media: A sales pitch and a photo?

Posted on 22 September 2022 - 11:15 by Arsenis Paschopoulos

Although over the years social media has proven its value as a promotion and sales tool, there are still entrepreneurs who treat it as a tool, a process and a practice that can be done “on the leg” by anyone. .

The classic we hear is “I’ll have the girl in the secretariat handle them” or “come on kid, social media is a joke and a photo, don’t pay for advertising”.

I heard the second particular saying 6-7 years ago from a client, but unfortunately it still exists as a mentality.

But is that the case?

What more than a tagline and a photo does the proper use of social media require to bring business results?

Hold on, here we go!

The first step, since we are in the field of business, is to enter goals

When starting social media you need to know what goals you want to achieve: sales, site traffic, more awareness, customer support are some goals that a business may want to achieve.

The second step is that you will have to choose how you will measure these goals, success, KPIs (key performance indicators), and in general the performance so that every month you know after all what these social media give you and how close they bring you in achieving the goals.

The third step is to anticipate some difficulties, such as: will you be able to create material? will it be easy to make it yourself? should you find an external partner? This, believe me, is the number one problem that most small businesses face: how will I create material, who will make it for me, what material will it be… And of course you have to The third step is to anticipate some difficulties, such as: will you be able to create material? will it be easy to make it yourself? should you find an external partner? This, believe me, is the number one problem that most small businesses face: how will I create material, who will make it for me, what material will it be… And of course you have to find a solution to these problems by making the corresponding decisions .

The fourth step is to see what the competition is doing: is it strong on social? how often does he post? what do people like? what does it advertise and how often?

The fifth and most important step is to find your own strengths and weaknesses: what will make you stand out? how do you want the consumer who sees you on social media to remember you? how will you impress him? with which identity.

The sixth step is to gather the material with which you will create content. This material should create an image that will “transfer” your strong points that we mentioned above.

It is all these elements that will make you create your own voice and do the infamous branding to be able to stand out from the competition, to be the green apple among all the red apples.

The seventh step is to choose which social media to use. I hear from various people saying “so we won’t use Tik Tok”? Not sure why, one company might have to use it and be late to use it, while another company shouldn’t. It has to do with where your audience is, what image you want to convey and what material you can create…

Are you wondering, “And how will I know who my audience is?” what is this I have to do?’

Your audience, if you are a company that has been around for some time, you define it based on the marketing plan it has made and you say I sell this product or this service and I target this audience.

But you can also find it from mechanisms that exist and give you the searches that people make on social media or the interests they have, or who frequents and interacts with your competitor’s social media, and so you can find / limit who is your audience

Because many times we think our audience is women 15 to 25 and we find out our audience is also women 35 to 40.

The above process – the eighth step – is called creating buyer personas: groups of your potential customers that have some specific and distinct characteristics.

And here the difficulties begin. The material for each buyer persona should be different and you may need to use different media. For example, to reach a younger audience you will use Tik Tok and Instagram. In order to reach a larger audience, you will use YouTube and Facebook (well, YouTube is an exception because it is a medium that is consistently and permanently addressed to all ages – I close the parenthesis) and accordingly adjust the posts you make for each medium .

Have I convinced you that social media is far from just a joke and a picture?

I’m not done yet!

The ninth step is advertising these posts and advertising in general.

The tenth step is to monitor the reactions of the public: what the public likes on our social media, what they like, comment on, but also responses to the comments (and not only the negative ones but also the positive ones), and the monitoring and performance of the advertisements.

And of course we will tie all this up at the end of each month with a nice report – the eleventh step – to say what actions were taken, what goals we achieved or how far we are from achieving them.

You must do all of the above for each of the social media where your company is present.

In order not to get lost, you need a program.

Let’s not forget that social is not just posts, it’s also advertising and community management is also influencers management, it’s also crisis management, competition monitoring, new tools and the removal of some, which we haven’t mentioned even in our conversation (it’s the steps, 12, 13, ….).

So you definitely want programming, and the program comes out based on the audience you want to reach and the content you want to provide and – all this – under the light of the goals you have set.

So either you will do it with an external partner or you will do it in-house depending on your needs and the amount of data and the number of social media you want to use.

But what is certain is that if you stick to posting a joke and a photo you will wonder why social media doesn’t work… for you!

If you don’t want to fall into this category, ask us to show you what we can do for your business.

20 reasons why Boost Post isn’t enough for all your advertising goals

Posted on 16 September 2022 - 11:31 by Αρσένης Πασχόπουλος

In this article we explain how the Boost Post mechanism works and why it is not enough to cover all the advertising goals of a business. We also mention what tools are missing from the mechanism, which we find in the Facebook advertising platform, which we need to use in order to make the most of the advertising potential of the medium and create effective and efficient campaigns.

Listen to the article also on Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0bNCfZMGeVNjmuYc0H5r5o?si=872d364e0447482b

Those of you who are administrators of Facebook pages will surely have seen the Boost Post button “accompanying” every post you make on the page you manage. And quite a few of you have definitely used it.

This mechanism is a relatively easy and fast way to set up an advertising campaign on Facebook with specific goals: to promote the specific post to a lot of people at a low cost, to increase the likes of your page (indirect goal) and to increase engagement of the target audience.

But this is where the advantages stop and the limitations of what you can do with the boost post mechanism begin.

The options and tools that you “lose” if you don’t use the advertising platform (ads manager) of Facebook are too many.

With the boost post mechanism you can choose:

the goal of the campaign (here there are limitations in relation to what goals the Facebook advertising tool offers you)
what the prompt button will say (read more, go to app, buy it, etc.)
the audience you want to reach
where your ad will appear (but again with many restrictions)
the duration of the campaign and the money you want to invest

In all these steps I mentioned, however, the options that the ads manager, the Facebook advertising platform, gives you are much more, giving you the possibility to set up a campaign that will be much more effective and efficient.

For example, the audience you want to reach. The audience that you can choose in the boost post is the audience that you will choose and create at that time, based on age, based on gender, based on interests, based on geographic area, but you are not allowed to you create custom audiences – rather than just using the ones you’ve already created in the past – whenever you miss a large part of the audience you can target.

You can’t choose the target you want but you have to choose between the targets Facebook will give you based on the type of post you want to advertise.

In terms of placement, that is, where the ads will appear, there are three options with the boost post mechanism: Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. But using the advertising platform, each of these options has about 10 sub-options, which you can use for better targeting.

Also, on the advertising platform you can choose the type of device, an option that plays a very important role because you may want to advertise only on mobiles or only on android mobiles or even on a specific device, while in boost post these options do not exist.

You cannot, in the same campaign, create different ad sets to target different audiences.

With the boost post mechanism you cannot create multiple ads to compare their performance (simply because the ad is the post itself).

You also cannot use the split test tool that allows you to compare two different audiences and see which of the two “reacts” better to your ad.

You can’t buy reach and frequency – another option in the advertising platform when you start by setting the campaign goal.

You don’t have the option of the multiple text option, that is, to put different headings and different text to see which combination has a better result.

You can’t use dynamic creative, that is, give Facebook a series of texts and images so that it can make its own mix and see which visual and more verbal ones do better.

You can’t adjust the creative every time your ad appears (Facebook does it automatically but the result may not be what you want

You can’t just advertise without posting the post, while on the advertising platform you can either promote a post or create an advertisement that won’t be posted on your page as a post.

You cannot create shopping campaigns, the ultimate tool for eshop sales, you can simply make a prompt to visit your eshop.

As far as optimization is concerned, you cannot choose optimization for clicks in general on the advertisement or for clicks specifically to the page of the service or product you are advertising.

You cannot do day-parting, i.e. choose the days and times you want your ad to appear.

All this plays a very important role when you have a specific goal, you want to target a specific audience, you want to do some tests to see what works best and you want to have good measurables, because let’s not forget that measuring the performance of advertising is the third of success.

Because based on the measurables you decide how to optimize, change or even reset the ad. The measurables that the boost post gives you have nothing to do with the measurables that the Facebook advertising platform gives you. Let me say the only simple thing, that if someone clicks because they saw the advertisement of this post or if they click because they saw it as an organic Post, it is not separated.

So the convenience that this little blue boost post button gives you is 1-2-3 easy and quick steps, but it deprives you of all the extras that the Facebook advertising platform gives you to set up campaigns with greater flexibility in goals, targeting, optimization and tracking.

If we are talking about an ad with a very small budget, e.g. of 50 euros (in total, not per day) and we want something easy and quick which has awareness as its main goal then yes we can use the boost post.

But if we want to do another type of advertising, we want shopping ads, remarketing, we want to create custom audiences, we want our measurables to be many and detailed, we want flexibility in creative and budget control, then the boost post simply does not work for us.

Why Businesses Fail With Social Media?

Posted on 16 September 2022 - 11:16 by Αρσένης Πασχόπουλος

But there are many entrepreneurs who treat Social Media as something “not worth their effort and time”. “They don’t work”, “I didn’t see anything despite all the Likes”, “with brochures or emails I achieve more” are some opinions that are heard. This article aims to describe the misconceptions and actions of companies that use social media for their promotion, while examining the goals that a business can achieve through them, so that the entrepreneur has realistic expectations from the use of Social Media.

Social Media is NOT free

“Social Media is a full-time job”

Gone are the days when Social Media was just Facebook, where you could create a group, a profile and post text and images. The platforms, but also the tools of each platform (pages, groups, contests, advertising, channels, albums, …) increase, change, remove, improve, at such rates that a trained full-time person is now required to monitor them, while at the same time creating the company’s strategy and implementing it (without the technical part of course).

Conclusion: the nephew who graduated from some school and “knows about computers” and “also does social media” will probably do more harm than good. No disrespect to any nephew, but handling social media isn’t all about posting. It’s communication, talking to the public, handling problems and crises, monitoring competition, advertising, AND quality, intelligent and original posts, which help build and strengthen the brand.

Businesses are slow to get into the game

“The early bird gets the worm”

The easiest way to convince an entrepreneur to use a new tool is to show them that their competitors are already using it. But it is wrong as a reasoning. As with anything new, in Social Media most businesses (and not just SMBs) get into the “game” late: when their competitors have built a decent presence, made mistakes and learned from them, and built a “voice” to the audience they want to attract.

Thus, those who look “from the outside” must “run” to establish their presence and voice. The good thing about Social Media is that if a business combines originality with strategy, useful content and dialogue (along with some reasonable budget), the time it takes to be “heard” and gain an audience and voice is not long. But how many software companies or how many travel agencies or bookstores will the prospect Like, Share, Follow, Repin and Retweet? And why let the competition become that benchmark for your customer and constantly compare you to them?

They want results here and now without much “investment”

“Content, Content, Content”

Especially skeptical entrepreneurs who, due to temperament and habits, “will not be convinced even if you convince them”, want to see results (that is, sales, sales and sales) here and now. Their mistake is twofold: on the one hand, they consider Social Media as a (direct) sales channel, and on the other hand, they believe that, because the number of users is large, any results must come quickly for the medium to prove its value.

The answer to why one should not expect immediate results is given by the definition of Social Media: they are “meeting places” on the internet where people – consumers share experiences (mainly personal and less consumer) with other people.

Following the example of salespeople in the ancient forums, companies have “entered” Social Media because their audience is there too. However, the public enters Social Media mainly for “socializing”, sharing, chatting, to put it simply, some to search for information (on specific platforms), and some also for shopping.

This means that the main objective of a business on Social Media should be to increase awareness and build its brand. And fortunately, social media gives enough tools and space for a company to make its brand known and convince the prospective customer of its value. Both, however, require time and effort (content) if done on the “terms” of social media (useful, original – and therefore shareable – content) and not just with advertising.

They are using Social Media the wrong way

“It’s not possible without preliminary”

The most common mistake made by businesses on Social Media is that they use it as a means of advertising and not as a means of influencing the opinion of their potential customers. The magic of social media is that they offer you plenty of space for texts, photos, videos, infographics, with which you can show who your company is, show your product and service in use, help the buyer understand , install, use your product, build your image by telling “stories” through the eyes of happy customers and generally convince of the value you offer.

Yes, you will advertise, contest, offer coupons, you will enable booking and purchase through all platforms, you will connect the photos of your products to your website. But with the “preliminaries” we mentioned above, you’ll not only get more people to jump in and buy, but – more importantly – you’ll create followers who will talk about you.

They copy the competition

«Other thing is copyright and other thing is clopyright»

If one had to pick ONE “tool” to “make it” in Social Media, it would be original content production. On the other hand, the hardest step in exploiting Social Media is producing original content! Why; Because, like reputation, it is not bought but must be created.

So the easy solution is to copy the competition, not only in the content it uploads but also in the actions it takes: advertising the competitor, advertising us too, photo contest the competitor, photo contest us too, supporting those who have been bullied o competitor, support us too.

The result; Lots of Likers and Followers who “follow” the brand on Social Media only for offers and giveaways, no engagement, comments, content retweets (unless they earn points in a contest).

What can I expect from Social Media?

“Recognizability and increased traffic to the site or eshop should be the main goals”

Social Media is great and you should use it to increase awareness and build your business brand by providing original content that helps the reader because it solves their problems, gives them useful information or is just plain fun.

Through appropriate posts on Social Media you can increase traffic to your site.

You can also build a database of names and e-mails through contests, sweepstakes and general promotions that ask for this information from the user in order to participate.

Also, with the creation of applications for the distribution of coupons, reservations or the creation of a store / product posting within your social media presence, you can also expect direct sales or partnerships if you use LinkedIn correctly.

Finally, social media has risen in consumer preference as a means of communication and support from businesses because they consider it more immediate (and they also expect immediate responses to their queries).

If you are taking your first steps with social media, I believe that the above article will help you avoid important mistakes that will cost you time and money. If you already use them, do a social media audit to improve your practices.

If you still want help, either for a social media audit or for a collaboration on a monthly basis, contact us