Social Media Roundup: December 22, 2015

Target the Right Customers for Your Brand on Facebook: 5 Tips

With more than 900 million daily visitors, Facebook is a place where many of your customers are active, no matter what business you're in. Facebook advertising can be a great (and cost-effective!) way to reach them. The big question is, How do you find them? Fortunately, the Facebook Ad platform includes powerful tools to help you out. Michael Bird, a social media blogger writing on Social Media Revolver, provides 5 tips on how to find the people you're looking for on Facebook. Here are two:

1. Target your competitor's customers. This works well for brands with popular competitors, whose Facebook fans can be targeted.
2. Target your customers by the kind of jobs they have. This is particularly interesting for B2B brands, who are looking for individuals with job functions that make them good prospects for their products.

With Ad Blocking on the Rise, Consider Blog Advertising

With the rise of ad blocking, advertisers need channels to reach their audiences. One of the most effective strategies is to avoid ads altogether and look to build relationships with popular bloggers, especially in the lifestyle area. Bloggers always need content, and lifestyle bloggers welcome the opportunity to highlight products and services that will be of interest to their readers. Blog audiences are still growing, and reach millions of people every day. "Blog advertising offers a scalable and viable solution for advertisers," writes Evan Asano, CEO and founder of Mediakix, blogging on Convince & Convert, where he provides a rundown on this attractive channel for brand marketers.

Want To Know Who's Near Your Stores? Facebook Can Tell You

In early November, Facebook gave marketers access to valuable information about people near their stores. Once a day, aggregated, anonymized information about foot traffic is updated. A new section within Facebook's Page Insights tool gives marketers access to that information, although only Facebook advertisers will be able to see what percentage of passersby have seen ads from the store's brand within the past 28 days. The data includes breakdowns by age and gender, time of day, day of the week, and where people in the vicinity of the business come from. (Facebook users can opt out of having this type of information gathered about them, but they probably won't.) "To push more of that foot traffic into stores, the company is giving brands new ways to tailor their ads when people are nearby," writes Tim Peterson in Advertising Age.

Diversify Your Twitter Stream: Post Fewer Links

Posting links is an important and valuable activity on Twitter. It serves as an excellent source for the discovery of new content and information for many Twitter users. For marketers, posting links can be a reputation-enhancing means of providing genuinely interesting and useful content to their followers. But it can be overdone, and in any case, other kinds of tweets have a place in the brand marketer's Twitter toolbox. Instead of tweeting links, consider posting more visual material, including photos, videos, and statistics, suggests Jason Keath, CEO and founder of Social Fresh. "Your content does not have to include a link to succeed," he writes. Tweets with visual content far outperform text-only ones, so try replacing some of the links you post with visuals.

Focus, Yahoo, Focus!

Yahoo lists about 60 products and services in the United States, but continues to struggle to stay relevant in the age of social media and the massive dominance of Google in search. "CEO Marissa Mayer knows this sprawl is now Yahoo's biggest problem and has pledged to bring more 'focus' to stave off irrelevancy," reports Richard Nieva, a staff writer for CNET News. While many of Yahoo's products still offer opportunities for marketers to connect with people, Nieva takes a look and what the online pioneer should ditch as it works to stay relevant as the digital word changes around it, and in many cases has raced past. Some examples of Yahoo offerings he thinks may be on the chopping block include:

• "Community," a money-losing cult TV show Yahoo bought last year in an attempt to break into Hollywood.
• News Digest and Yahoo News itself.
• The venerable Yahoo Answers, which has been unable to keep up with newer, more focused services like Quora.
• Ditto for Yahoo Real Estate, which competes with Zillow.

Botnet Fakes Customers for Digital Ads, Steals Billions in Real Money

A sophisticated ad fraud scheme called Xindi (Star Trek villains) found a way to get paid billions of dollars from advertisers by infecting up to 8 million computers in more than 5,000 networks and using them to generate bogus impressions without the knowledge of the computer owners. Advertisers were fooled into thinking their ads were getting impressions from particularly valuable users in Fortune 500 companies and university and government networks. "Because the advertisers thought that they were reaching such a valuable audience, they were willing to pay much more," writes Aaron Miles, moderator and content hacker for Social Media Today. Given the burden of removing the virus from all the infected systems, it is believed that the defrauded advertisers will be affected well into 2016.

Daniel Lieberman is the founder of Daniel Lieberman Digital ("I speak Geek - You don't need to"). Based in Shelburne Falls, Mass., he helps companies, organizations, and individuals learn to use the Internet to communicate, market, and brand themselves using the most up-to-date tools and techniques. Contact him at 413-489-1818 or daniel@daniellieberman.org.