Mashable recently published a list of 7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers. Are you using any of these tools in your classroom lesson plans? Check out the list below and let me know.
EDU 2.0 – Free web-based education site with comprehensive features for teachers, students and parents.
SymbalooEDU – Free for individuals. Over 50.000 teachers and students are using SymbalooEDU as a personal learning environment tool. Check out the video below:
Collaborize Classroom – Free online learning platform that allows students to engage and discuss topics and ideas inside and outside the classroom. More available here:
Edublogs – Create and manage student and teacher blogs with customized designs and uploaded videos, photos and podcasts.
Kidblog – Designed for elementary and middle school teachers who want to provide each student with their own, unique blog.
Edmodo – Free private microblogging for the classroom.
TeacherTube – Online community site for sharing instructional videos.
SchoolTube – K-12 moderated website that provides students and educators with a safe and free video sharing environment.
Depending on the goal of your advertising campaign, you may be interested in increasing CTR (and resulting click volume) generated by your Facebook ads. For my clients focused on increasing brand awareness and building communities, higher CTRs are one of the critical metrics of success. Following are 5 ideas for helping you improve your Facebook advertising efforts.
Revise your targeting based on responder demographics. Check out your “Responder Demographics” report from the Facebook Report area. If you have historical click data for your ads, you can find the highest performing demographic groups just by sorting your report based on CTR. You may find that men ages 45 – 54 are the highest performing demographic group and this will help you narrow your ad targeting to them. You’ll also find out what demographic groups are not performing well and you may want to eliminate impressions being served to these groups.
Rotate your ads more frequently. If your impression levels support it, rotate your ad creative more frequently. (Wouldn’t it be nice to see that 0.02% CTR go up to 0.04%?) Test a more frequent rotation and see what happens.
Modify your campaign structure. Check to see if you have ads with similar targeting, but are all under the same campaign. Over time Facebook’s system automatically learns to prefer the ads in your campaign that have performed the best in order to help optimize your campaign. While this is fine in most cases, it may mean that the ad that has been running the longest in the campaign (with the most impressions/clicks), could be getting “preferred” over the newer ads you are rotating in. Set up your new ad creative in a separate campaign to allow the ads to run more evenly. In the end, you will be able to better judge whether the new ads outperform the original ad creative.
Use Facebook Ads for Pages. Facebook offers a specific ad type to promote your external website, and another ad type to promote your Facebook Page (or Facebook Event). Depending on your marketing objective, you may want to test promoting your Facebook Page with Facebook Ads for Pages. Facebook Ads for Pages allow people to “Like” your Facebook Page without ever leaving the page they are viewing, and when someone does like your ad, a story is automatically created in their profile page (and possibly even their friends’ News Feeds) creating a much wider distribution for your ad.
I know it’s been said, but humor does work. Try testing a wider variety of imagery in your campaigns (against a similar copy execution) and see if the more humorous images outperform the rest. Chances are, the more amusing the image, the higher the CTR.
Enough said. Happy testing and keep me posted on what works well for you.
Ever wondered which of your other keyword ads may have contributed to that conversion in your search marketing campaign? Have you been curious about how long it took before that conversion happened? Google helps to answer these questions with the AdWords Search Funnel reporting capability added earlier this year.
What are Search Funnels?
Search Funnels are a set of reports that describe a conversion path – the sequence of ad clicks and impressions that lead up to a conversion from your search marketing campaign.
Since conversions in AdWords are attributed to the last ad click before the conversion happens, the Google Search Funnel Report can give you better insight into what impact your other ads may have had on the final conversion. These reports also help you understand how much time goes between the first time your customer clicks on one of your ads, until that final click to conversion. Armed with this data, you should be able to improve the overall conversion rate performance of your campaign.
Types of Search Funnel Reports
Google AdWords offers 7 different types of Search Funnel reports with over 20 metrics:
Path Length Report: Shows average number of clicks and/or impressions it takes for a customer to convert. When viewing this report, ask yourself the following questions:What percentage of your users do not convert after the first click? What portion convert after two or more clicks?
Keep in mind lead-generation conversions may have shorter funnels while purchase-type conversions can have longer funnels depending on products being sold. Is there anything you can do in your messaging and calls to action on your landing page to get people to convert higher up in the funnel path?
Time Lag Report: Here you can find out the average amount of time it takes for customers to convert (in daily/hourly time increments). Ask yourself, how long does it take my visitors to convert after they first click? If you are seeing a high percentage of users taking more than one day to convert, find out if this is a different conversion process than you see in other online mediums. If you sell higher-end goods, perhaps this is typical, since visitors may take more time shopping around. However there still may be some things you can do on your landing page to shorten that conversion time such as testing offers with expiration dates to engage visitors to convert more quickly.
First Click analysis: Shows number of conversions with a first click from each campaign, ad group, or keyword. Helps you answer the question, do more general keywords serve as introducers or occur first frequently on paths?
Last Click analysis: Shows number of conversions with a last click from each campaign, ad group, or keyword. Helps you answer the question, how do keywords assist conversions ending with a click on a brand keyword?
Assist Clicks, Impressions: Displays when your ads were shown but not clicked as well as clicks that assisted in generating a conversion. What keywords have a high “assistive” value (keywords that gain a user’s attention early in the buying cycle, but the user eventually converts on another keyword click)? Assist/Last ratios can help you identify keywords that might be more valuable than they appear from a last click perspective. If a keyword has an assist value relative to last click value that is proportionally higher than other keywords, it may be devalued from a last click perspective.
Assisted Conversions: Shows last-click conversions and click-assisted conversions for each campaign, ad group, and keyword.
Top Paths: Shows the most common conversion paths based on ads that were shown and/or clicked prior to conversion. Check out the sequence of keywords that were clicked by a customer prior to converting and how often this path occurred.
Keep in mind: Search Funnels data is based on cookies.
Cookies can be cleared by customers which will yield artificially shorter funnels.
Customers may use more than one device to access your ads so Search Funnels won’t capture cross device activity. This may make the conversion paths seem shorter than they really are.
What tools are you using for brand monitoring and analysis of your social media efforts? There are many options available – with some tools offered for free (or nominal charge) while other tools are more sophisticated enterprise solutions for a higher investment.
Our Favorite Social Media Monitoring and Analysis Tools
Here are some of our favorite social media analysis and brand monitoring tools. We have to admit though that we have not found just one tool that does everything we need. We use at least 3 different tools regularly to help manage our social media efforts. Let us know what you think – and what tools are you using regularly?
Ubervu: Ubervu uses keyword-based searches to do in-depth monitoring and analysis. This analytics tool includes a Geo Heat Map showing where people are talking about a specific topic or keyword. There are also detailed PDF reports, dashboard reports and data exports for up to 1,000 mentions. The social media monitoring portion allows you to assign tasks so other people in your organization can respond to a mention. As of this writing, one user license was $49.99/month while other plan levels were offered as well. You can check out the Ubervu dashboard screenshots here and review the Ubervu demo video below.
Viral Heat – Viral Heat could be a good option for starting out with their individual plan. The tools includes all the major sites such as Facebook Pages, YouTube, Twitter, etc. We especially like the influencer analytics that allow you to see which users are shaping conversations about your brand. A basic plan starts at 9.99/month and other plan options available. Check out the Viral Heat overview video below.
Postrank – We found ostrank to be a very easy to use tool that integrates with your current Google Analytics account. You can see engagement trendlines and get daily engagement reports sent out to folks in your organization. No installation is required. The tool is $9.00 /monthly and you do get the option to sign up for their Free Google Analytics Connect. Learn more in the video below.
Social Mention – We use Social Mention frequently to find out brand reach, sentiment, top users, top keywords, etc. The tool aggregates data across a large number of social media sites and best of all? It’s free.
Yahoo Pipes – Yahoo Pipes is a great way to monitor and filter RSS feeds. Requires a little bit of set up (at least for me) but works really well once your pipe is created. And it’s Free!
Bit.ly – And of course, there is Bit.ly. Much more than just a URL shortener, Bit.ly let’s us track the popularity of shortened links in a variety of places including our email newsletters, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. Free accounts available and an enterprise offering as well.
