Comments on your Facebook posts are more valuable than Likes

According to a November 2011 analysis from EdgeRank Checker that examined a random sampling of more than 5,500 Facebook pages and over 80,000 posts with links during October 2011, a comment on a Facebook post containing a link results in almost 5 times the amount of clicks of that link than a Like of a comparable post. For every Like a post gets, the link receives on average 3.1 clicks but for every comment a post gets, it receives on average 14.7 clicks. Overall clicks per impression were found to be 0.5%.

Wednesday and Tuesday is best for engagement, Saturday and Friday is worst
When sorting the average clicks and shares by day of the week, Wednesday's had the best share ratio (link shares compared to the number of fans per page) at 0.11%. Wednesday's also had the highest click ratio (link clicks compared to the number of fans per page) at 0.49%. Tuesday followed with a 0.1% share ratio and 0.47% click ratio.

Saturday fared worst for shares ratio (0.8%), while Friday saw the smallest clicks ratio (0.35%).

Smaller pages have more devoted followers
There is a distinct correlation between Facebook page size and fan engagement. Pages with less than 1,000 fans had by far the highest shares and clicks ratios (over 1.1% share ratio and 0.3% click ratio). Following distantly were pages with 1-5,000 fans, with a share ratio of less than 0.4% and a click ratio of less than 0.1%.

In contrast, pages with more than 100,000 fans experienced the lowest share and click ratios. The data suggests that smaller pages are able to create more relevant content for their fans, which may be an indication that large brands should make multiple pages to narrow down their audience.

Social context ads increase conversions
According to November 2011 analysis from TBG Digital, Facebook Likes do have a place in driving conversions. Advertisements that leverage the social interactions that users are comfortable seeing in their Facebook news feeds perform better than those that do not.

The analysis was based on a single client (a popular entertainment brand that spent $60,000 across a 14-day period and accumulated 436 million impressions) that had a 32% improvement in purchasing intent when using social context ads as opposed to non-social context ads.

According to the analysis, social context ads are built with a text and image box with the addition of visible endorsements beneath the ad. The endorsements note the number of friends associated with a user who like the page, group, event, or application.

The cost-per-click remained constant between non-social context and social context ads, but in this study non-social context ads took 132 clicks to achieve a conversion compared to only 99 clicks for social context ads. When factoring in the cost per click, the difference in cost per acquisition equated to $44 when using social context ads. TBG Digital said there are limitations to the social context ad campaigns that are primarily due to the URL structure in the Ads API.

If you have any questions about social media marketing in the roofing industry or would like help improving sales from social media, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

What skills are needed to be good at social media?

If you, one of your employees or even someone you hire is going to manage your social media accounts or blog for your roofing company, what skills should they have beyond knowing the in's and out's of Twitter, Facebook and search engine optimization (SEO) to generate the results you are looking for? Here is a short list of skills I recommend looking for. They are basics before the basics of digital marketing and social media:

Is the person a good writer?

Writing is the foundation of most content creation. Even things like audio or video often rely on a written script in order to deliver the maximum impact to your audience. Can you communicate ideas clearly? Can you create language that is persuasive? If you can write well, you can apply that skill to nearly every form of content generation.

Is the person a good analyst?

Given a set of information or data, can they extract something of value (insight) from it? They don’t have to be a statistics expert, but they should be able to look at a pile of data and make a chart from it or at least see if there’s some kind of trend because that is the foundation of web and social media metrics.

Is the person a good researcher?

When posed with a question, can they come up with a solution by any legal means necessary? Can they use Google intelligently? Can they put together discrete information sources and find an answer? Can they learn independently without much guidance or hand holding? The ability to find the right answer and the persistence and willingness to get one is also a foundation skill.

The truth is that there really isn’t a lot that is needed to be good at social media content creation (have a command of the English language, be decent at math, and have the ability to perform basic research online), but you do need to be able to use the tools you have with excellence and consistency.

In our constant pursuit of the newest shiny objects we often lose sight of the prerequisite fundamentals that can make us great. While it’s great to have the newest, shiniest, most buzzworthy tools and services at our fingertips, it’s ultimately meaningless if we don’t have mastery of the basic skills to use them properly.

If you have any questions about this blog post or would like assistance with establishing or managing your roofing company's social media accounts, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Commercial and residential roofing contractors have success from different online lead generation avenues

What makes the biggest impact on your online potential customer lead generation goals if you are a commercial roofing contractor? What about if you are a residential roofing contractor?

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According to the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, business-to-business (B2B) companies like commercial roofing contractors get the most online lead generation from search engine optimization (57%), followed by pay-per-click (25%), and finally social media (18%).

Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies like residential roofing contractors get lead generation in the same order, but with slightly different weighting (41% from SEO, 34% from PPC, and 25% from social media).

B2B companies like commercial roofing contractors are most active in Facebook (35%), Twitter (26%), and LinkedIn (25%). B2C companies like residential roofing contractors are by far primarily active in Facebook (75%), with Twitter (9%) and LinkedIn (6%) being significantly less important when it comes to generating online customer leads.

Of the companies in the study, 55% of companies have actually cosed deals from a social media lead. 41% closed deals from fans or friends on Facebook, 21% closed deals from connections on LinkedIn, and 20%  closed deals from followers on Twitter. There is no guarantee that this reflects the success of roofing contractors, but I would imagine it is directionally accurate.

In terms of digital marketing budgets, B2B companies like commercial roofing contractors spend 33% on SEO, 28% on PPC, 10% on social media, and 29% on other avenues. In contrast, B2C companies like residential roofing contractors spend most of their budgets on PPC (43%), 22% on SEO, 15% on social media, and 20% on other avenues.

2012 digital marketing budgets appear to be planned to increase or at least stay the same from 2011:

• For search engine optimization, 53% said they would increase their budget, 43% said their budget would stay the same, and only 4% said it would decrease.
• For pay-per-click, 40% said they would increase their budget, 51% said their budget would stay the same, and only 9% said it would decrease.
• For social media, 60% said they would increase their budget, 36% said their budget would stay the same, and only 4% said it would decrease.

Finally, the topics that digital marketers said they would most like to learn about include overall cross-promotional digital strategy (62%), followed by social media marketing (46%), then search engine optimization (38%), and finally pay-per-click (29%).

The take-away is that most companies (i.e., your competitors) are spending real money in digital marketing. What did you spend in 2011? What are you planning to spend in 2012? Do you feel you have the right strategy?

If you would like to discuss your digital marketing budget or needs for 2012, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

If your roofing website is not mobile-optimized, help is on the way!

Good news, roofing contractors - Google is launching a new service called GOMO to make your website optimized for mobile phone devices on-demand! Currently, access to this site is password restricted, but the header image shows a smartphone with the caption "Mobilize your site now." This is definitely a new initiative (on September 1, 2011 Google registered the domains howtogomo.com, howtogomo.net and howtogomo.org).

Mobile advertisements are a big revenue stream for Google, who offers a wide range of free tools to help you mobilize your website. Google has found that businesses are lagging behind on mobile content compared to consumers, and GOMO seems to be directed at solving that problem.  Google currently offers a limited service called Google Mobile Optimizer for crudely converting Web pages to stripped-down, temporary mobile views, but they have a vested interest in building a more impressive, durable mobile site converter which I suspect is GOMO. Google also offers a free mobile website builder for building mobile sites from scratch using a range of templates.

In addition to these free services for mobilizing sites, Google is incentivizing good mobile content with its ad programs and punishing sites that aren't mobile-friendly. Google is rearranging its AdWords program to reward mobile-optimized sites and adding +1 buttons to mobile ads.

The take-away message here is... get a mobile-friendly version of your website up-and-running ASAP if you want to be found online.

If you would like to discuss mobile websites or would like help getting your website mobile-friendly, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.

Idea: Start a Social Media Recap Newsletter

According to a recent report by Sysomos, the average length of a tweet’s effectiveness is about 3 hours, with 92% of re-tweet's happening in the first hour or not at all. What this means is that if those you are connected to on social media don't see what you post soon after you post it, they likely won't. We are simply connected to too many people on social media. So how do you get more value out of all the hard work you put in to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, blogging, etc.? An email newsletter recapping the best of what you've shared over the past week!

First of all, make sure that you are creating and sharing content of value to your audience. Next, use whatever methods you have available to you to aggregate your social media activities. Once you have a selection of content that’s worth sharing again, set up an email newsletter that is devoted solely to sharing this content. And of course you can use a small amount of space in that newsletter for promotion of your other marketing efforts as well.

Weekly may or may not be the right frequency for you. Depending on how much you share valuable content, try daily, weekly, or even monthly — whatever makes sense. The point is that social media attention span is short and continues to diminish. There are days that no matter how valuable your content is, your audience simply isn’t able to pay attention because they are on vacation, busy doing other things, everyone else is over-posting, etc. But using email to close the loop and get them your content in another way is a simple, easy way to maximize the value of the time you are putting in to social media.

If you have any question about this blog post or would like help creating an email newsletter campaign, please email Chris@RoofPal.com.