Old Dog Digital

Digital Marketing Consultants in South Florida.

Category: Social Media

Websites that enable users to create and share content, and participate in social networking.

  • How much does it cost?

    How much does it cost?

    When a client starts talking to me or any member of my team about advertising on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other social media, the first question they ask is how much does it cost? That question has a very simple answer and a very complex one. So, I always give both.

    The simple answer is that advertising on any social media costs just a few cents a dollar per view. That means that every time your ad is displayed on anybody’s screen, that platform charges you just a few cents of a dollar, around 30 cents on average.

    You want your ad to be displayed as many times as possible so many people can see it. The more the better, right? So, if you want your ad to be seen by at least 1,000 people, you should invest around 300 dollars, right? Wrong!

    What happens is that, when you are setting up an ad campaign on any social media platform, you start bidding for your ads to be displayed. Just like an auction. So the price is never the same. On average it is 30 cents, but it can be as low as 3 cents or as high as 5o cents, depending on the day of the week, the hour, as well as other factors.

    You don’t have to invest a lot of money to start advertising your company on social media. You can start small and see what happens from there. Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

    You can invest 50 dollars in one week and display your ad on over one thousand screens. It all depends on how you configure your campaign as we discussed before when we were talking about your campaign objectives.

    Advertising on social media is a lot cheaper than advertising on traditional media, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. If you want to get great results, you have to invest as much as you can. The more the better.

    You can choose if you want to be charged for every thousand views or by every single time your ad gets displayed. You have a couple more options to choose but remember that before you decide you have to know what your goal is because that changes everything.

    But let’s say that this time you want to do this the easiest way possible and get the best out of a few dollars. In that case, you should set a start date and an end date for your campaign. Then you should set a budget for the whole campaign instead of a daily budget, so you have more control over how your money is spent.

    Another thing you should do in a case like this is to choose the cost-per-click scheme, so you will only be charged when somebody clicks on your ad. That doesn’t mean that person will buy something from you, but it means you will pay only for those who interact with your ad.

    This way you can get better results for just a few dollars. Remember, if your budget is bigger, then you should do things differently, but if you are just experimenting with 50-100 dollars a week, try this and use it as a reference for later more expensive campaigns.

    It should be great to see what happens and you can learn a lot without spending too much money in one experiment. Doing this will give you a better idea of how much it cost to advertise on social media platforms and what kind of results you can get.

  • Not as easy as it looks!

    Not as easy as it looks!

    A few months ago, a friend of mine was telling me he wanted to start posting content on his social media profiles for his business. He didn’t ask for my help and he didn’t ask for any advice, he just said he was doing it and that it was an easy thing to do.

    Last week, I had dinner with this same friend. He was complaining about how hard it is to come up with something interesting enough to post. He told two other friends that posting on social media was very difficult and that it wasn’t as easy as he thought.

    He was saying he was out of ideas and that he needed help. One of the other friends looked at me and said something like “That is what you do, right?”. This guy looks at me and says “I thought you were in Marketing”. You can imagine what my answer was.

    So, yes, you can do it yourself, but you need to have a plan. You need to have a strategy. If you don’t you will run out of ideas very soon. Like my friend did. This is a very time-consuming activity. The best thing you can do is to have somebody exclusively dedicated to this.

    I know there are a lot of companies that hire a graphic designer and let them take care of their website, their e-mail campaigns, their newsletter, their logo design, their photos and videos, AND their social media content. That is the worst thing you can do, as we have discussed in previous posts.

    There is a reason why Community Managers and Social Media Managers were created. If you can’t hire a Digital Marketing team, at least have someone that will handle exclusively your social media content.

    Always have a plan, be ready to answer a lot of questions, and be prepared for all kinds of situations. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

    Many think that it is “only posting on Facebook”, and “how hard can it be?”. Well, it is a lot harder than you think and no, it is not only posting on Facebook. People don’t like to hear this, but that’s the truth. You need at least one professional Community Manager.

    In previous posts, we have already talked about the importance of a content plan. You need a tone, a style, topics for your posts, a graphic concept, and a few other things. But the most important thing is that you need someone with the necessary criteria about what to post and how to post it.

    This person needs to have some experience and some knowledge about what they are doing because they will be making a lot of fast decisions and calls about your published content and about how to respond to the interactions they will be having with the people that follow your company on social media.

    Taking some online courses is ok, but that’s not everything. Those courses will teach you the technical aspects of being a Community Manager, but they will not give you the creativity or the experience needed to perform this job, as my friend has found out.

    There is only one thing that can give you all the skills that you need to become great at this job, and that is doing it. Make a plan, stick to it, and in a few months, you will be looking at the results of your hard work. Be ready, so that when mistakes happen, you know what to do.

  • Take the ladder!

    Take the ladder!

    If you are constantly promoting your products on Instagram and/or Facebook, people might get tired of watching your ads all the time and they might lose their effectiveness. That’s why it is important to have some periods without paid ads and let some organic growth happen.

    Paid ads should be used when you have important information to share with your followers, like the launch of a new product or relevant news of any kind, but you have to be careful not abusing them because people might get used to seeing your ads and start ignoring them.

    If you are beginning and want to let people know that there’s a new face in your business sector, that’s a different story. Awareness is one of the most important steps of every strategy and you should invest as much as possible in this, but just for a few months.

    Once people know who you are and what you do, you can move on to the following stages of your campaign. You can boost some posts if you consider that the information they contain is relevant to your customers; but if you saturate people’s newsfeeds with your ads, they will unfollow you.

    Alternating periods of paid activity with periods of organic activity looks like a ladder on a graph, hence the name of this pattern of growth. Photo by Burak The Weekender on Pexels.com

    One thing that works very well for most brands is to alternate periods of paid reach with periods of organic reach – that means periods with paid ads and periods with no paid ads. That way people don’t get tired of you, and your business keeps growing.

    As long as you have fresh content every week, everything is ok. Because if your only activity on social media is having paid ads campaigns and promoting your products, that means you are having long periods of inactivity and that is not good at all. It’s boring.

    Remember, your content has to be of value to the people that follow you. Not every post should be about you selling your products like we have been discussing in previous posts. Your content should keep going independently of your ads, though they should be coherent.

    That way people will be interested in seeing what’s going on on your social media profiles all the time, and not only when there’s a campaign running. This alternation of paid reach and organic reach is known as a ladder pattern of growth, because of the way it looks on a graph, and this is one of the best ways to grow on social media.

    Even if you had the money to keep your ads running all year, you shouldn’t. That will get old fast. Try intercalating paid and organic reach and wait to see the results. In case you have something really important to share, you can always boost that post to help it get to where it needs to go.

  • Don’t be afraid to ask

    Don’t be afraid to ask

    The other day, a friend of mine was telling me about the kind of conversations he had with his social media person, and he was saying something about not understanding half of what this person said to him. He thought he knew all the terminology, but now he wasn’t so sure.

    He said something about needing more “conversions”, but I realised that what he meant was that he needed more engagement when he explained to me that he would like to have more likes and comments on his content. He was confusing these two frequently used terms.

    Engagement is the amount of time people spend interacting with your content. That includes likes, comments, shares, and all the other possible interactions anyone can have with any kind of content on the internet.

    A conversion is when people perform a predetermined action that we asked them to do, like when somebody clicks on the subscribe button of our YouTube channel, adds an article to their shopping cart, or hits the download button to get our app.

    It’s easy to be confused about these two concepts, but it’s very important to know the difference, especially when establishing the objectives of a digital marketing campaign. Do we want to get more likes on our Instagram account or do we want more subscriptions for our newsletter?

    If you don’t know what something means or you’re not sure how something works, ask your team. They are there to answer every question you mught have. Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

    Many times people pretend to understand what you’re telling them because they don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but this is the wrong thing to do because it will only lead to many misunderstandings down the road.

    If you’re not sure about what something means, don’t be afraid to ask. There’s nothing wrong with asking. It’s better to make sure that everybody is on the same page than to later find out that everybody on the team had a different idea of what was the goal.

    Even when everybody knows all the concepts and terminology, sometimes things get lost along the way like we said on a previous post, and people end up understanding something completely different than what was said. Mistakes happen all the time, and you need to be ready to make corrections.

    Is like going to the market in a foreign country, trying to buy some apples and getting oranges in return because you didn’t know the right word for them. You can imagine the frustration anyone would feel in such a situation.

    That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know something or don’t understand enough about how something works, ask your digital marketing team. They should be there for you, not only to do their jobs but to also answer all of your questions and clarify every little detail.

  • Say anything you want, but you have to listen also…

    Say anything you want, but you have to listen also…

    Communication is a hard thing to do, communication on the internet is even harder, and it becomes even more difficult to do it as a brand and not as an individual. If you have a message and want it to be heard by most people, you have to follow certain rules.

    If you are too aggressive, too loud, or too soft and not clear enough, you won’t get the kind of attention you’re looking for. You have to be careful with the kind of tone and language that you’re using because you don’t want to offend anyone and lose potential customers.

    In these times of internet scams, fake news, and disinformation, it’s not a smart business decision to get involved in political debate, or any illegal activities, so be careful to whom you give your support.

    I mean, as an individual you can do whatever you want, but just don’t drag your brand into it, unless you don’t mind losing half of your customers. Very big names in various industries have lost everything because of one wrong post on Facebook or one wrong image on Instagram.

    But not only that, if you earn a reputation for bad customer service or as a brand that doesn’t care about its customers, you’re doomed. If you have too many bad reviews on Google or any other place, people will notice and they won’t do any business with you anymore.

    In any human interaction, like any conversation, when one of the parts stops listening to the other, the exchange of information stops happening. Photo by Vera Arsic on Pexels.com

    The most important rule is that, if you want to send a message effectively, you have to go through the whole cycle of communication. First, you send a message, then you listen for a response (repeat as many times as needed). It sounds simple and silly, but I assure you it is not.

    You can say anything you want or almost anything, and repeat it as many times as you want to get your message through, but you also have to listen. Any effective conversation works this way, or else it becomes a monologue.

    An exchange of information can only occur if you follow these simple steps, and as a brand, we must do so. Everybody is already doing the first part, that’s easy, but the tricky part is to actually listen to what people are telling you like we have said so many times.

    Most of the time people just want to be heard, they don’t want to take advantage of you, they just want to get the kind of service they deserve. I agree that some people make the most ridiculous requests just to see if they can get away with it, but most are not like that.

    Basic stuff like this is frequently taken for granted, and that’s when the problems start. It may sound funny, but it is true. Keep in mind this is not a monologue and it is not a discussion, it’s a dialog, and dialogs have two parts. So, if you want your message to be heard and you want to be able to say anything you want, you also have to listen.

  • The Big Temptation

    The Big Temptation

    When a brand starts posting content to its social media profiles it is very common to make the mistake of sharing too much. They post ten times a day on every possible platform they can. This is wrong!

    Think about it as a user, a follower, and not a brand. You start following your favorite car company, or whatever you like, and suddenly they start flooding your news feed with their posts and stories. One week later, you unfollow them.

    You don’t need to post ten times a day. That will get you nothing. You are not going to get more followers and, very possibly, you will lose the ones you have. Don’t do it.

    We have already discussed the fact that you don’t need to be on every social media platform that there is, especially if you don’t have enough content or the strategy to do it. The same thing happens with your post frequency.

    You can start by posting two times a week on Facebook and Instagram and work from there depending on how many followers you have and the interactions that you get. For LinkedIn, make it once a week.

    If you are using Twitter, you can make between two and five tweets a day, but make sure to stay in topic and don’t repeat the same content too much. Try different days and times.

    It is very hard to resist temptation, but in the same way, we avoid eating too much dessert, we have to resist posting too much. Photo by Giorgia Licini on Pexels.com.

    Like we said before, it is a great idea to boost your posts when starting on social media. Once you have a reasonable audience, try paid ads. They are really helpful when you’re trying to attract more followers to your profiles.

    Remember to keep an eye on your metrics and make adjustments based on what they’re telling you. Resist the temptation of posting too much and having a profile on every social media platform. You don’t need that.

    What you need to do is to have a strategy, stick to your plan of content, and build a community. Of course, you can try new things, new formats, and new topics, but you have to make it in a planned manner.

    Your numbers will tell you when to start posting more frequently. And even then, make it gradually. You don’t want to overwhelm your followers. Remember you are an intruder on social media. They were not meant for you to advertise there. We use it that way because it works, but that’s not their main purpose.

  • Merry Christmas!

    Merry Christmas!

    Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was hired by a luxury car brand to manage their social media campaigns in Mexico City. I can’t tell you which one, but I can tell you Elvis liked it a lot.

    Well, I had been working there only for a few months when I decided it was time to have a Christmas giveaway. But I needed a prize first, so I asked my then-boss to whom I needed to talk to get one because depending on the prize the size and duration of the campaign would change.

    I explained what I wanted to do and gave him all the details about this campaign. When I finished, he was just staring at me, as if I had committed a crime. He said: “You don’t know a thing about marketing. You never never mess with Christmas“.

    Remember this happened in Mexico City, and Christmas there is something sacred, so you have to be very careful and try not to offend anybody. You can see many “Happy Holidays” campaigns, but none explicitly mention Christmas.

    I explained to him that, the year before, I had a similar giveaway for another car brand – their main competitor actually – and that it had performed really well. As a matter of fact, that campaign gave such good results that it had landed me that job.

    To keep it short, He agreed reluctantly to the campaign and I started doing what I needed to do to get it going. After a week, I showed my boss a report with all the metrics and all the results. It performed really great.

    What happened next is not relevant to what I want to tell you, which is that, in social media and digital marketing in general, there are no rules, as we’ve been saying from the beginning.

    This idea that I couldn’t have a campaign related to Christmas was so aberrant for me, that I had to show my boss that his concepts and his “recipes” on traditional marketing didn’t apply to social media. This was something new and we had to try new things.

    If you want to have a giveaway or a dynamic of any kind on your social media, do it. Be respectful of all the different traditions, and try to include everyone, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it.

    All these old concepts and formulas that traditional marketing people have, need to change. With the internet and social media, everything changed, so we have to change the way we promote our brands. We have to change the way we interact with our audience.

    So go ahead and try new things. Don’t be afraid and experiment with images, copy, platforms, and formats. Measure everything you can, so later you can learn from your results, whichever they are, but never refrain from having the campaign that you want to have.

    Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, or whatever works for you, just enjoy this season, hopefully with the company of your loved ones, and take care of yourselves.

  • Starting in YouTube

    Starting in YouTube

    When you start a new YouTube channel, you will face some new challenges. You will compete with thousands of content creators that are already there and that have the same interest that you have in becoming a success on this platform.

    When you start setting up your channel, make sure you have a great title that communicates in an effective manner the kind of content that you will be uploading. Add a well designed banner that helps you do this.

    Make sure that your phone number is verified so you can create videos longer than 15 minutes, upload custom thumbnails, live stream, and appeal Content ID claims. Add a watermark to brand your content and make it look professional. It can be your logo.

    It is important to choose a topic, and it’s even better if you find a niche. For example, if your topic is cooking, you can focus on vegan cooking or Caribbean cooking, to make it more attractive. Don’t overdo it, so you don’t end up with something just interesting for a very limited group of people.

    Once you have a topic and a niche, it’s easier to identify who will watch your videos. You need to do this because you need to know what your audience needs, what they like, and what they don’t. Content that is useful works better. Take your time and try different things.

    Every time you can, tell your audience what your content is about and what they will get for watching it. Are they going to learn a new language? Are they learning how to cook? Are you giving them traveling tips? Content of value for your audience has a better chance to be watched.

    Another good idea is to check what others are doing, specifically the ones that do the same thing that you do. Maybe they inspire you and give you new ideas. They are your competition, but maybe you could collaborate with them and make some kind of alliance that is beneficial for both sides.

    Get the right equipment. YouTube favors videos that are recorded in 4k or at least HD, so make sure you can produce content in such qualities. Photo by Terje Sollie on Pexels.com

    Remember that the most important thing is to have a plan. Don’t go crazy publishing ten videos the first week just to abandon your channel for a month. It’s better to upload content regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, whatever works better for you), so people know when to look for it.

    If one week you have a lot of ideas, write them down and schedule them, because there will be times when you don’t have any idea at all. This way you will always have something to upload and your channel will not look abandoned.

    Keep the tone, style, and quality consistent, don’t rush it. It’s better to upload something a day later than to share something that looks half-done or that doesn’t have the same level of production as your previous material.

    Get the right equipment, even if it’s basic equipment, and learn how YouTube works. Find out which keywords work best for your type of content, so you can include them in the description of your videos. YouTube offers a lot of tools for you, so use them.

    One last step would be to advertise your content. Like we said before, it doesn’t matter if you have the best content ever if nobody knows it’s there. Invest as much as you can so you get the best results possible. This way you will be monetizing your content in no time.

  • About Twitter (My opinion)

    About Twitter (My opinion)

    I hate Twitter. I just don’t get it. Negative sentiment is present in most tweets. So many people complaining about everything. I agree with those who say that in the future all the stories about the end of the world will start with “In 2006 when Twitter was founded…”.

    Yes, I have an account. I opened it in 2009 and I used it to get news for many years. I also have worked with clients that use Twitter as a CRM tool, handling all the complaints about their products, and I have to admit that it works.

    In the last few years, an increasing number of clients haven’t included Twitter in their digital marketing strategies. Some as a consequence of my advice, and some because they didn’t want to do it without me having anything to do with their decision.

    But let me tell you why I don’t recommend it. If you take a look at some of Twitter’s numbers, you will find some interesting facts. I am not saying this just because I don’t like it. But then again, if it works for you and you want to give it a try, go ahead. There’s nothing wrong with that.

    I don’t see a lot of conversation or listening happening on Twitter., just the same people talking to themselves, so there is no point in including it in a digital marketing strategy. Photo by nappy on Pexels.com

    Twitter has around 430 million active monthly users, and about half of those accounts are monetizable. It is mostly used in the United States by people in the 25-34 age category, and around 57% of them are males. So far, so good.

    500 million tweets are made every day with an average length of 34 characters, even though the limit was increased to 280 characters in 2017. Only 12% of all tweets are longer than 140 characters. Tweets get lost very easily.

    Almost 400 million Twitter accounts have no followers, and around 500 million users access this platform every day without logging in. 44% of all the accounts have been created and left without ever sending a single tweet. So there isn’t too much conversation going on.

    An average Twitter user spends less than 10 minutes a day on the platform. Only 16% of internet users have used it for brand research. This tells me that, even when 54% of all users say that they are likely to buy new products using this platform, not too many conversions are taking place there.

    Twitter spam is still on the rise, despite the platform’s measures to prevent this. About 20% of the accounts are fake, and every day they flood real users with their products and harmful links. Doesn’t sound right, does it?

    I am not going to talk about the political reasons for not using Twitter, because I think it’s entirely up to you, but if you want to know more about who the new owner is, and why that fact is important, just Google it.

    But don’t trust me, this is just my opinion. Do your research. You can find Twitter statistics very easily on many websites. The important thing to do is to have your interpretation of these numbers, which is something that you should be doing anyway.

  • Let them find you!

    Let them find you!

    Let’s say that you have the greatest business card ever. It has a beautiful design, a perfect font face, an engaging and catchy slogan, and it’s printed on a kind of paper that not only looks great but also feels wonderful to the touch. How will anybody know about this if you don’t share it?

    The same thing happens with your social media profiles and your website. You might have the perfect website and the greatest social media content ever, but you need to let people know that it exists and where to find it for it to work.

    That’s what advertising does for you. It makes it easy for your audience to find your website and your content. It also tells people how to contact you and what products or services they can buy from you.

    In a previous post, we had already said that digital marketing is a lot cheaper than traditional marketing, but it still has a cost. The best thing is that there is no minimum required, so you decide how much you want to spend on it. Obviously, the more you invest, the better the results you will get.

    What makes a digital ad different from a boosted post is that digital campaigns, which are made of ads, can have many different business objectives, while boosting a post can only be used to increase the number of people that sees it and/or to help it get more likes and comments.

    Brands invest a lot of money in advertising, just to let people know what products or services you could buy from them. Photo by Jose Francisco Fernandez Saura on Pexels.com

    Imagine that you’re just starting a new business, and as we said in the first paragraph, you already have a great website and social media content. Now, you need to tell everybody that you exist, what is it that you do, and where they can find you. But how?

    Facebook and Instagram will recommend you boost your posts, and doing that would be great, but that doesn’t help you increase the traffic to your website, where clients would learn more about you, subscribe to your new podcast, schedule an appointment, or whichever the action you want them to do.

    Google can help you with that. A digital campaign on that platform would show your ad to people that would already be looking for somebody that does the same thing that you do, and that is what you want, so Google is one option.

    Another option is to advertise on Facebook and Instagram, or whichever social media platform you choose, instead of just boosting your posts. You could start a campaign and that would do an excellent job, given that you invest a reasonable amount in it.

    Or even better, you could do both things at the same time and start a campaign on Google and social media. That would allow you to try different formats, content and even do some experimentation, to see what works better.

    Remember that there are no magic recipes, and whatever works for one brand might not do the same for another. This would make the last option the best alternative, so don’t be afraid to try new things, start small and increase the investment once you’ve found what works for you.

    Digital ads and boosted posts serve different purposes. Depending on what your objectives are and your budget, you could use one, the other, or both options to get the results you want.