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Nowadays everything is becoming social. Everybody use social media networks to communicate, share stuffs, make friends and even to make money!

You should know that marketers always look for one thing: Masses. They analyze a market and study its potential depending how many people they can target and how many people could be willing to buy.

In the matter of marketing, there are many, but many factors you need to study before stepping forward. In this post I just want to talk about how you can use the traffic from social networks, specifically on Facebook to make money online.

Facebook’s Traffic is Huge

Do you know how many people visit facebook a day? According to Compete.com, Facebook receive over 100 millions of visits a month, which makes it an incredible place to run ads.

So now, I’m gonna step you ahead Facebook Ads, giving you my personal tips and thoughts about the system:

Creating and Ad

social media advertising

I don’t remember if you need to register or something like, but you can create an ad by going to the next link -> facebook.com/ads. Once there, you could see case studies and a step by step guide for creating an ad.

[tip 1] Selecting a Title is key for your ad. You have only 25 characters to write something to attract people’s attention, so do it well. This is something like Google Adwords, if you have created advertising before you know that you need to call to action within the title. Using verbs such as “buy, learn, get, celebrate… etc” (a.k.a. active verbs) is key to succeed.

About the content, this is the ad itself. You have only 135 characters so you need to think well how to write an interesting ad. Describing and complementing what you wrote on the title is the purpose of this field.

The other factor you need to consider is the photo. This is a 110×80 pixels image that will be shown in your ad. [tip 2] I highly recommend you to put a image with these dimensions; avoiding putting images such 80×80 or whatever. This is because facebook don’t center the image, so if you don’t use 110×80, your image will be aligned to the left, which leaves a white space at the right – which sucks!

Targeting

This is the most important step and the reason why many people fail with advertising. It is very important to target the right crowd for certain product or event. People tend to target large audiences, but that not always works.

Study demographics and psychographics of your market (i.e. real state, gaming, acai berry etc) so you will be able to configure the different  filters such as: location, age, sex, relationship status among others.

[tip 3] The more accurate your targeting is, the better. Don’t try to be flexible with the filters in order the display your ad to more people. That “extra” people you get by doing it, will not convert!

Campaign and Pricing

The next section deals with choosing a campaign to attach your ad to, and also, for setting your budget. You can choose between running your ad since it is approved or running it in certain dates, perfect for holidays such as Halloween or Christmas!

[tip 4] Choose Pay for Clicks in your ad (paying for impressions sucks, I’ll talk about it later). Facebook is gonna suggest you an interval for max bid. Do not care about it!! My experience says that setting a max bid lower than the minimum according to facebook works well. I’m used to set my max bid 20 cents lower than the min suggested by facebook.

Extra Considerations

Despite the great traffic of facebook, the clicks through ratio (CTR) sucks, so your goal is to improve it as much as you can!  That’s why I recommended you before to choose PPC as method of payment.

Also, they probably will reject your ad many times. The first time I used facebook advertising I got rejected like 5 times or even more, no kidding! But why? I have no idea, I was following their policies and rules so I think they didn’t like my ad.

[tip 5] I suggest you to create a couple of variations of your ads. In fact, once you get approved, continue creating variations of them. Then, see which one provides the greatest CTR, discard the others and keep the testing by doing other variations of the selected one. Then, the cycle repeats over and over until you get “the best” ad. Variations also include different pictures for the same texts!

I recommend reviewing: Suggested Best Practices and Common Reasons for Rejection, both sources of help provided by facebook.

Did I miss something? If so, leave a comment to let me know!

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Using Facebook to Make Money Online

oneforty is a great way to find, rate, collect and share Twitter apps or services which improve its functionality. Over there you can find tons of resources: from desktop to smartphone clients, there are plenty of apps which you should check out. Currently they are tracking 1611 apps that make Twitter even better!

How To Join

Do you remember ping.fm? Well, oneforty works the same way ping.fm did once. Being beta at the present time, you need an invitation and a twitter account in order to surf/use this website. If you don’t have an special  invitation, you can sign up to make your request. After a day or two, you will receive a special link directly in your inbox which you can use to create your account and start finding apps to improve twitter!

What I Think

Twitter is a great service which many people use everyday. In fact, I’ve been waiting something like this since a long time ago , and I’m sure either you.

Yesterday I was looking for a new client for my smartphone and I found exactly what I wanted. I get surprised when I saw how many apps they have listed there, I mean they have a lot! So if you don’t use Twitter so much because you think is boring or something, I definitively recommend you to request an invitation for this site to check out what they’ve listed for you. Surely, you will find something that fits your necessities.

Are you an oneforty user? If so, what do you think about it?

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Improve The Way You Use Twitter

The simplicity of micro-blogging has caused an impact on many internet users, increasing the use of websites which provide this service. Let’s check the main services and how they have increased in the latest months:

There is a graph of Unique Visitors of five of the main micro-blogging services: Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, Pownce and Tumblr. As you can see, Twitter has devoured the other competitors with its service, reaching almost 2.500.000 unique visitors monthly, and that number continues increasing.

Besides twitter, Tumblr is the other commonly used service, reaching almost 1.000.000 unique visitors monthly. About the other services: plurk, identica and pownce, they are in the same point, with few ups and downs but at the end, they could be represented by the same line, reaching  an average of 185K unique visitors monthly.

This graph made me think about what is happening here, specially with Twitter. I’m a twitter user, and daily I receive hundreds, may be thousands of messages of people notifying their latest blog posts, the latest news, sharing their photos etc etc… And daily that’s becoming a viral thing, and even more now because of the apps for blackberries, iphones and now because of TweetSMS, a service which you can send and receive twitter statuses through sms.

But how important is to use this kind of services?

Analyzing the graph provided by Compete, you can noticed it could be a good strategy to use twitter to promote your products or services due to the number of people using it, but it’s a must or not? Well, it depends of your business model. If you use them to promote your stuff; twitter, tumblr and others are perfect for that kind of businesses which are constantly changing, e.g. blogs or pinging services… Those models of business are the most common you can find on twitter, besides the random stuff, links, pictures or anything else without any relation with a business.

Now, let’s analyze the case of a landing page, for example. Let’s say you have a landing page and you want to drive traffic to it besides advertising, should you use twitter to promote it? or even better asked, what impact do you think it could cause on the users? I think it would be a waste of time trying to promote that kind of things through twitter because basically, a landing page is something static and it won’t ever change. The users could visited once, may be twice and then they won’t visit your landing page again because they will not find anything new there.

So when you deal with services for micro-blogging, you should think well about what you would like to share on them. Not every business model is designed to be promoted by this methods, and also there are other business perfect to be promoted through them but for some reasons, it doesn’t work for us. You need to study if micro-blogging is for you, make your tests and stick to that things which work for you.

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Is Micro-Blogging A Fundamental Aspect Of Blogging?