Author: Nancy McCord

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Are You Twittered Out?

Do you have Twitter fatigue yet? Personally I use Twitter more to share my quick thoughts about once a day now instead of about every 15 minutes or so. What I do like about Twitter is that I can feed my comments now to LinkedIn, by blog, and Facebook automatically.

That means when I do a Twitter update, it is broadly disseminated across all my platforms. I have found that I have earned Twitter subscribers from regular blog readers. I don’t ever Twitter spam them, I am courteous, but I will share something interesting that has happened or that I find although not with the frequency that I once did when I started with Twitter.

So if you have Twitter fatigue, just remember that it may be a bit of work for you, but it can save you time and allow you to reach broadly across many application. That alone makes the small investment of time hugely meaningful.

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Getting Clients With Facebook

This was an interesting situation, I had a prospect send me a note through Facebook to contact her about doing a custom website. When we were chatting, it turned out that the reason she called me over anyone else was that I had invited her to join Facebook.

We chatted about how much we both liked Facebook and how fun it was. The difference for this potential client was that I reached her through social networking and now she was returning the favor by giving me her business.

For some business sectors such as mine the ability to use and embrace new technologies is what sets you apart from your competition. In your business, you may find that this is key for you too – the ability to connect using Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or your own blog. I use all of these mediums but really have the most fun with Facebook.

I thought what the potential client said about using social media was important to share with you today. So, who are you going to invite today to join you on Facebook?  The person you invite may just be your next customer, as in my case.

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Social Networking No-No’s

I was watching the NBC Today show the other morning and Matt and Meredith were interview John Grisham about his new book. They asked about his Facebook page and the author dissed it.

He said that he never looks at it, he never intends to, and that it was set up and managed by his publisher. He also said that he had not even bothered to look at it.

Wow, a huge no-no in today’s world of interconnectiveness. John Grisham just dissed the site so that any readers who thought they might connect with him there clearly know that they will not. His publisher must be cringing and trying to do damage control right now in the aftermath. The author came over in the interview as sanctimonious, arrogant, and out of touch with today’s media. Clearly I will never be looking at his Facebook site as it will all be bogus done in his name for him without his interaction or blessing.

This is a public relations nightmare based on the draw that Facebook has with a wide variety of age groups and the thirst that people have to connect with other using the Web. The author should have been properly prepped and educated about Facebook and its pivotal importance in the lives of young to middle aged readers. Instead of dissing it, he would have been better served by talking up and encouraging readers to check in. He could have said that he was not doing posts, but that he was fully apprised of the activities and looked forward to reader comments.

Wow, from my viewpoint a huge gaffe. Bet the publisher will make sure that future interviews don’t take this direction.

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AdWords Trends

We’ve seen a strong downward trend in the cost per click in Google AdWords starting in January. If your account is still set up for clicks based on the cost per click increases you had to make in September and October to salvage your AdWords business, now is the time to take a careful look to see where you can start trimming back.

Google had a decrease of about 64% in income in the fourth quarter of 2008. The economic stagnation is finally hitting Google AdWords with advertisers moving out of the mix causing profits to fall for Google and impacting the cost per click in Google AdWords. With over 5 years as a professional account manager and managing accounts for businesses in a broad number of sectors, we are seeing several strong trends in activity.

  1. The opportunities to drop the cost per click and still retain excellent ad position on AdWords is happening right now. Although this is not across the board in every business, we are seeing a marked trend down in the cost per click needed to retain page position.
  2. Although impressions for many accounts still remain high, we are starting to see a drop in impressions for some accounts as a reflection of decreased searches.
  3. For our client accounts at this point we are not seeing a marked decrease in conversions. In fact for many clients due to the decreased competition online for clicks, we are actually seeing an increase in conversions.
  4. For my own business, I am seeing more clients come in to AdWords for the first time as well as more prospects wanting information or just consulting but wanting to self manage their accounts to keep expenses lean.

My biggest tip on AdWords at this time is to review your cost per click to see if you can start to drop your bid without impacting performance. For some account this means as much as a $1 per click drop and for others we are incrementally moving down at $.05 to $.10 at each review. For some accounts some keywords can go down and other hot property keywords have had to go up in cost per click, but the general marked trend is a downward drop in the cost per click.

If you haven’t read Jeremy Chatfield’s predictions on what will happen with Google AdWords for 2009 I would recommend that you click in to read his blog post on this topic.  I think as Google gets squeezed more by the economic realities of our time, we will see Google try to squeeze more dollars out of each click and work hard to stop the slide in their revenues by looking to creatively increase the cost per click for advertisers. We’ve already seen Yahoo add a minimum cost per click level on many keywords which is simply a bogus “grab for cash” and Jeremy expects Google to do likewise this next year with a big push on using broad match, minimum cost per click bidding, and “spin” on the impact of personalized search.

Jeremy’s been right before particularly on the September 2008 AdWords quality score adjustment. It will be interesting to see how Google reacts as we see an even greater decline in their profits for the first quarter of 2009.