ExactTarget Sites

Andrea Vahl (@AndreaVahl) wrote a great blog post about How Your Business Can Use the New Facebook Cover Photos. While she goes into much more depth, the two primary items to keep in mind are 1) cover photos may not include more than 20% text, and 2) cover photos are no longer disallowed to incorporate calls to action, websites, or address information.

Marketers should definitely keep #1 in mind to ensure they don’t go through official Facebook reviews like I mentioned in my last blog post. Meanwhile, #2 provides some great new opportunities in taking advantage of your Facebook presence.  Even...

Facebook has long had Page Policies in place with rules that govern page management and provide legal coverage for Facebook regarding contests and promotions. However, the social media giant is now taking stronger and more proactive steps toward enforcing these guidelines.

The process:

1. If a Page is triggered by the Facebook system, it will be put through a checkpoint until released again.
2. During the checkpoint phase, page management tokens will temporarily expire.
3. Once the Page is released, the same exact page management token will be released and everything should go back to normal.

So, what are...

What are you doing with your Facebook presence right now? While many companies are spending big dollars and lots of time on results-driven social media marketing, many others are doing nothing.

Fortunately, there are strategies you can employ to drive results regardless of the time and resources you have on hand. 

1. Good
   Passive List Growth: Create a new Facebook Tab where Facebook users can sign up to receive your email campaigns. You won’t see a hockey-stick growth curve on Day 1, but this is a super easy, cost-effective way to increase email subscriptions and improve results in the email...

The rapid changes continue for Facebook as they recently launched a new look for user timelines that began rolling out to individual users as of March 13. Facebook notes: “We’ve updated the timeline on profiles to give people a cleaner view of their content, bigger images, and a more visual way to share the things they do. It’s easier for people to discover music, movies, tv shows, and books they care about, fitness activity, as well as business Pages they like.”

All in all, it seems like the update primarily seeks to better organize content on users’ profiles by giving them specific places to...

I was recently admitted into the Facebook Graph Search beta program. And it’s pretty cool. Not sure if it’s really life-changing yet... but hey, it’s still in beta. 

I can imagine some interesting ways I might use it as it progresses, but there are three key items that I think are needed for success:

1. Data. The premise of Graph Search being able to connect you to relevant search results is very reliant on ample and open data sharing by Facebook users. The recommended “auto-completes” and ensuing results can be incredibly interesting – but sexy results are dependent on Facebook users...

While you may know that SocialPages is a leading social media marketing application for creating, designing, and publishing custom Facebook Tabs, you may not know about some of its awesome features, like easy-to-use scheduled content updates, Smart URLs, and key partner integrations that can help you expand your Facebook marketing efforts.

1. Scheduled Content Updates: Content is so essential to Facebook marketing, because without it, you aren't giving users a good reason to keep coming back and engaging with your brand.  SocialPages makes it easy to maintain limitless versions of each tab and...

Facebook recently announced the brand new Graph Search that is beginning to roll out to users around the world.  It’s an exciting new way for Facebook users to find things on Facebook and the web-–powered by relationship rather than traditional algorithms used by web-based search engines like Google or Bing. ExactTarget also recently explained some key features in a recent blog post.

While there is a whole new frontier that we’ll begin to discover with Graph Search, many of the same Facebook strategies you’ve always employed will continue to pay dividends. I’ll explain some of those as well as...

The SocialPages team has been hard at work – and we’ve just released great new features for you as we kick off 2013!

We all know that having mobile-optimized and mobile-friendly campaigns is a must.  That’s why it’s always been a major shortcoming of Facebook to not support Facebook Tabs on mobile devices. 

In response, we are now providing our brand new Smart URL feature. Smart URLs recognize what device is accessing the tab and redirect mobile users to mobile-friendly versions of your Facebook Tabs – while the desktop traffic continues to go to the regular version of the tab. With so much of...

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch published an article about Amazon rolling out “Amazon Pages” for brands. I’ve been following along ever since, trying to figure out how these can be put to use.

Amazon Pages will be home base for brands, authors, artists, merchants, and local businesses on Amazon, where they can customize the look and feel of their pages, display hand-picked products, make posts both to Amazon and Facebook, present other engaging widgets, and view analytics to measure effectiveness. You can learn more and download the PDF guide from Amazon Marketing Services here.

All in all, it seems...

Last week, more than 4,000 of the world’s best marketers gathered in Indianapolis for ExactTarget’s annual user conference: Connections.  My personal favorite part of the event is always the product keynote – where our President of Strategy and Technology, Scott McCorkle, announces all of the latest and greatest technology we have built for our customers.

This year was no different – and some of the most exciting announcements centered around ExactTarget SocialPages™.  SocialPages allows anyone to build, design, and publish Facebook tabs with ease to engage users, grow loyalty, and...

Mashable reported last week that Facebook tab engagement has dropped substantially (53%) since the introduction of timeline as the new format for Facebook fan pages. 

However, I think there is a crucial nomenclature oversight in the article – touting traffic statistics as engagement.  The two are most certainly correlated, but engagement (i.e. interacting with content on a tab – clicking play on a video, entering a sweepstakes, liking an image gallery) is much more important and pivotal to brand success than traffic (i.e. registering an impression (page view) on a tab).

Engagement – much more...

Last Wednesday in a packed house at the FMC, we learned new and exciting changes introduced to the way that brands can interact with Facebook users.  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and VP of Product Chris Cox were among some of the other top Facebook executives sharing all of the new tools becoming available -- from sponsored stories in mobile newsfeeds to display advertising upon logging out of the social network.

What struck me as most interesting was the anticipated makeover of Facebook Fan Pages -- where they now sport a style similar to the recently revamped personal profile Timeline Pages....

You’re busy, I’m busy, everyone is unbelievably busy these days. And that’s why NOBODY has time to sift through an email packed full of 5-10 news articles written straight into the message. However, you probably DO have an interested list of folks who want to hear from you. Want to increase engagement and performance right away? 

Here are a few steps you can take using ExactTarget Landing Pages to improve design and content and increase open and click-through rates, highlighted by Barbara Ryan and Church Pension Group (CPG):

1.      Scale back the content in each news article, so the email...

Looking for innovative ways to drive engagement through your Facebook Fan Page, a new way to fuel email list growth from Facebook, or maybe just looking to get started and build your page from scratch?

ExactTarget SocialPages is here to help – putting Facebook Fan Page management in YOUR hands. It’s not enough to just have a fan page – companies need an active presence to gain the attention of users, drive consumer engagement, and increase brand awareness.

ExactTarget SocialPages provides a variety of tools to help, including:
 

Landing Pages have always been an important aspect of marketing strategies – the place where you drive your traffic, gather new leads, and drive conversions from your customers and prospects. With the continued growth and emergence of more and more digital ways to interact with consumers, landing page optimization (LPO) is more critical than ever.

As the number of traffic sources grows, opportunities for lead generation and targeted conversions expand.  What’s more important is the change in consumer expectations – you may be driving registrations for one event from email, text messages, blogs,...

ExactTarget provides our customers the ability to market through email, mobile, social, and sites—but why is that combination so powerful? The answer is the data and connectivity—which provides marketers the ability to communicate in a consistent, targeted, and branded manner across channels while honoring consumer preferences.

There are many companies out there who specialize in Landing Page marketing—but ExactTarget Landing Pages are different because they are integrated with the same data and technology customers use to power the rest of the interactive marketing campaigns.

Consider taking...

I recently saw a tweet: “#ExactTarget Users: Do you use ET landing pages? if so, why instead of just creating them within your website CMS?”

And I thought to myself: there are SO many reasons to use ExactTarget Landing Pages over a Web CMS, how can I fit a response into a tweet?

Here’s how I tried to respond on Twitter: “Many reasons to use #ExactTarget Landing Pages over WebCMS. Personalize content&URLs, capture data w/forms, &more”

Now, let me explain—with a little more space—some of the top reasons to use ExactTarget Landing Pages instead of a Web CMS:

1.       Data: The data is what it’s all...

People want a discount—let’em have it! Coupons, of course, have always been a great form of enticing people into buying your product. However, the landscape of coupon convenience and effectiveness has changed dramatically.

Deals must go online. The days of cutting out coupons still exist but their time is limited and they’re never coming back. It simply doesn’t make sense in today’s world where the right information is always at our fingertips. People don’t have time to sift through magazines and newspapers to see if a deal might interest them. However, if I’m signed up to receive...

The best thing my bank has ever done for me is provide me with online banking. Sure it’s nothing new, but it is the epitome of the accessibility and visibility that I want from my bank. It endows me with the ability to be directly in touch with my financial information whenever I want and wherever I want. As the financial services industry and surrounding competition continue to evolve, any development in convenience or transparency will be deeply appreciated.

ExactTarget Sites offer a variety of ways to develop in both of these areas:

1.       Be Dynamic: You know a lot about your customers—use...