Comparing the Performance of Linked In and Twitter Ads

I want to say from the start that I'm no SEO specialist or Social Media Guru. I'm a business consultant specialising in supporting High Growth Businesses. I am a bit of a pioneer, joined Twitter in Dec 2008 and Linked In even earlier I cant remember exactly but it seems like I've been on it forever. So I do like to try out new ideas to see how they might help me develop my business by getting more leads or by helping improve my service to my clients. 

The Test

I have just started with a new piece of coach management software from Adeptio and whilst talking with them we decided to set up a campaign to get new inbound leads. I already had some content on sales and business forecasting and we decided to use the idea of promoting a free e-book or report as a way of identifying potentially interested parties, you can click on the link to see the landing page. Initially we set up a single campaign with Linked In. Unfortunately that bombed, so I dusted myself down and decided to take it a bit more seriously and create two more targeted ads for Linked In and an advert  in Twitter. They were both essentially the same advert they both went to identical landing pages although they were separate URL's so we could identify the source of conversions.

Creating a Linked In Advert

You have space for an image and and advert with 25 character headline and a 75 character body. So it looks like this

I undertook two campaigns one for Accountants and one for IT community. For each campaign we produced a number of ad variants to try to find which was the most successful. We had at least 5 variants in each campaign. There are a wide variety of criteria you can use to target you ads including age, geography, job title, industry, individual company name and Linked In Group Name to mention a few. 

Creating a Twitter Advert

The twitter interface is much different with a 140 characters for a tweet, an image, a URL and a limited selection of calls to action. You can chose by location as they call it , language, category, device and gender. The twitter advert looks like this.

What I Have Learned

LinkedIn have a great deal more variables to play with which gives you a lot of options but makes it much more time consuming to create an advert. The ability to target groups is helpful but you need to have a good knowledge of which groups are appropriate to your marketing. This means spending a deal of time researching potentially relevant groups. Just using keywords to find them hasn't, for me, delivered the desired results. Also I've found the limitations of 75 characters in the descriptor section as very restrictive and in many cases I was 2-5 characters over. I struggled to communicate what I wanted in such a small space.

Your advert needs to perform immediately. LinkedIn serves up your advert a lot initially but if it fails to make an impact it will serve it up less and less so you get less response creating a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see below how Linked In reduces the amount of impressions pretty rapidly making it difficult if not impossible for a slow burn to succeed because its simply not shown. 

Twitter by contrast takes a different view and will persist with impressions allowing your Ad to build momentum. 

And engagements have risen accordingly.

To create or maintain a campaigns success in LI there is a lot of tinkering about with the variables to try to improve performance. For businesses without a dedicated marketing person it is a significant issue. As LinkedIn effectively kills off slow campaigns and rather than keep tinkering it's better to cancel the original campaign and start a new one. This creates even more of an overhead. The value in having more than 1 advert is you can quickly see which are the most effective and shut down those that aren't so you don't waste valuable impressions.

Twitter has a much simpler user interface but if you're outside the USA then effectively you've only got a country based selection since other than London it didn't recognise any other UK city. The image was also a bit of a problem  as it needs to be 800 x 320 minimum which is pretty big most of my pictures weren't the right size. It's also one reason why I ended up with only 1 Twitter advert.

Results

In a nutshell, LinkedIn has not been a success both in terms of click throughs' themselves and the amount of effort required to keep adjusting components to a campaign going. At this point it's in danger of being put into the "too hard" basket.

Twitter, well  I'm much happier with the results. After a shaky start the advert has started to perform, this won't happen with LI as anything that does have immediate impact gets killed off through an ever decreasing daily impression count. The click through rate isn't fantastic by any means but it's certainly good enough for me to continue with it. In addition I get a number of side benefits from the Twitter campaign like retweets, and building engaged followers. Engagements is a much broader category and doesn't just refer to campaign click throughs' to my landing page to quote Twitter it includes  " ...  clicks to links, the Website Card, favorites, hashtags, embedded media, your profile and other Tweet details in your ad. This includes clicks you are not billed for."

I do recognise that this is not a scientific comparison but I do reflect a typical smaller business who may want to use paid promotion to create leads for their business. I think therefore that my findings may offer useful pointers to others who are looking to do the same.

So I'm definitely going to continue with Twitter. As for linked In I'll continue to persevere to see if I can find a better way of creating ads.

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Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Death by Social Media?

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Help I'm going round in circles! I cant stand it. Every week there is a new must have social media platform which claims to: increase my lead generation or destroy the opposition or dominate my niche or explode my sales. (I like this one as in my mind its a bomb going off in my sales sending bit of sales shrapnel everywhere). I'm on so many platforms now that I don't have time to sleep and I'm reduced to a dribbling wreck, so i've had to stop uploading selfies on Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram...... see what I mean. I just want some LEADS!!! I'm a failure, whats wrong with me?!

Different Ways To Engage Social Media

Not content with the new must haves, there is the recycling of the existing must haves. This month its blogging. A recent Hubspot e-book indicated the following, but it doesn't make sense; they say I can get 67 % more leads to my website if I blog than if I don't. But I don't get any and 67% of nothing is still pathetic. Even better they say if I blog 16-20 times a month I'll get twice the amount of traffic to my website than if  I blog 4 times a month or less. Am I bonkers or are they really recommending that I increase my output by 4 times to get 2 times the reward. (Sorry Hubspot I couldn't resist that, but then I'm just jealous that you got over $65 million in VC funding and I cant get 65 quid)

Before that it was LinkedIn "the business network". I've joined 50 groups started my own, involved myself in hundreds of discussions and I still haven't got a descent lead or even the offer of a cup of coffee. Am I the new elephant man? I hope not I've had nice comments about my picture but mostly from women with strange names and even stranger addresses.

Then before that..... you get the picture...

I feel another panic attack coming on I've missed 30 minutes of my twitter stream.

Time to calm down, take some deep breathes and apply a bit on common sense to this.

After all to most of us over 35 social networking is a parallel universe, like I cant understand why my sons text one another or their girl friends whilst they're in he same room. Why cant they just say it?  Why would you want to make public intimate details of your  life I'm embarrassed just thinking about it let alone sharing it with my followers.

More seriously social media is in danger of taking over our lives, and in parallels with the dot com boom of the 2000's we seem to be failing to apply basic business principles to our activities. As a business user its a marketing channel and has to deliver results. All that "it improves your profile and helps you compete" is just baloney if it doesn't deliver results. Nothing is still nothing how ever fashionable the route.

At its core social media is a conversation it is also a slow burn, just because you have a lot of followers doesn't mean people are reading what you put out. A recent survey on twitter suggested that only 4% of your followers are likely to see a tweet at any one time. So if you have 1000 followers only 40 will read it. This suggests that you need to repeat and vary the same message a number of times across a day to expose it to a significant proportion of your community.

From a marketing perspective you should only use what you are comfortable with. I struggle with Facebook so I don't use it much. I'm happier blogging but I limit myself to 1 to 2 posts a month. More importantly I realise that you don't get instant results. There are always anecdotal stories of people who "won the lottery" and got that big deal almost as soon as they started but for the vast bulk of us it requires persistence and diligence to get results. But lets be sensible if other routes to market are more successful for you, then use them.

So don't be a victim of death by social media. Take control and do what delivers the best results for you. If you don't know what that is just contact me and I'll help you find the best way for you to market your company to the outside world.

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services to the Small and Medium Business including Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Exploiting Your IP For Commercial Advantage

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There were a couple times over the last week when I have bumped into Intellectual Property (IP), the first was that there are tax breaks if you exploit it and second IP is still hugely valuable even if you cant patent it. Both occasions incidentally were through group discussions on LinkedIn.

Graph showing European patent applications filed and patents granted from 1997 to 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My first instance was a post in my own Linked In group about the "Patent Box" which was a UK tax incentive come concession which over the next 5 years will enable businesses to claim corporation tax of 10% for that portion of the business based on patents. I'm a little fuzzy on the detail but true to form there was virtually no publicity around this change in tax breaks which is clearly designed to start to change the culture of British enterprises to recognise the commercial value of IP.  If you are a manufacturing, engineering or high tech business, what are you doing to protect your IP? Could you protect your business assets by patenting your new ideas?

Now there is often a basic misunderstanding of what is patentable. It doesn't have to be new, but a idea of a product has to demonstrate that the components have been put together in a novel way to provide a unique solution to a and existing problem or using known components in a way that solves a completely different problem to that originally envisaged.

Image via CrunchBase

Many of you will recall that Apple recently went to court over their patent on the slide control for the iPad and iPhone. Making that control isn't new other than the idea to use it for power up and power off, yet it is patentable.

The importance for a company is that IP offers some protection for their ideas and will stop competitors freely stripping down your product and blatantly copying it. In the longer term having patents will add value to your business enabling you to get a better price on exit that you would without them. The degree of additional value obviously depends on the patents you hold.

Lots of ideas and development of existing products could be protected by patents but the engineering and RandD functions seldom tend to connect the idea with commercial value as innovation is just what they do. As a business owner it is up to you exploit the commercial advantage of holding patents. Yes, there is a cost but a simple ROI analysis will tell if its worth it. Additionally good internal practices can significantly reduce the cost of getting a patent by doing a lot of the basic work before it ever gets to a patent lawyer. 

The other area of IP is that which is not patentable but still delivers great commercial advantage. This IP is typically about how we go about performing our business. Its more about ideas and business processes which enables you to be seen to be offering an advantage over your competition.

Going back to my time with Admiral Computing we had IP in our estimating process which enabled us to use metrics to accurately estimate projects and importantly as part of the sales process we would give a detailed copy to the prospect which explained how we had reached our price. We would always say "if you can find a mistake in our estimates we will certainly change them but we consider that this detail will demonstrate why our estimate is what it is". 

We were very seldom the cheapest but we were nearly always the only one who could quantify our estimate.  This led the customer to understand that our price and certainly our effort was an accurate measure of what was required. 

As they had more confidence in our numbers we were selected as a low risk option and in the vast majority of cases they were proved right as we came in on time and to budget.  

My experience is that a high proportion of high growth businesses have this kind of IP and find a way to exploit it to their commercial advantage. 

If you are the business owner do you know what ideas and processes you have that might give you a competitive advantage and what are you doing about?

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services to the Small and Medium Business including Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Finding Your Vision? Why Is It So Difficult?

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I was doing some research for a book I am writing, part of which is about the importance of having a vision. What has become clear, especially in the UK, is how little understanding there is about this topic. This was brought more into focus whilst watching the documentary series "The Men Who Built America", what made them stand out was not only the strength of their Vision but the fact that they had one at all.

My experience in the UK with owner businessmen, is that it is quite challenging getting them to understand how important having a vision is to the long term prosperity of their business. When I give training courses about leadership of high growth businesses, the section on Vision is one of the most challenging. This is because I can count on the fingers of one hand how many business owners actually have thought out what their vision is, whilst the majority just dismiss it as some sort of consultant "mumbo jumbo".  They simply don't get it.

English: DOE Departemental Enterprise Vision (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wonder if it’s something about the British and their cynicism that prevents them from grasping the value of understanding the purpose of their business. I don't mean from a personal perspective ie to make money, retire in 5 years, those statements are just measurements. I mean having a real business Vision:  something that describes what it is about the way you do what you do, that will have customers flocking to buy your product or service. To paraphrase a comment about George Bush senior and his struggles with the vision thing "If you don't know where you want to go why would you expect others to put themselves out to help you get there?"

That’s essentially the simple great benefit of having a vision. It is something that you can use to bind your employees and your customers to you as they will see, understand and share your Vision and as a result will want to continue to be your customers or employees, to help you get there.

Most of us haven’t found that vision or purpose and so it is much easier to find a substitute and embrace someone else’s, rather than to try to uncover your own. By finding your vision you become one of the few and really separate yourself from your competition. Once found, it immediately makes decisions easier by simply asking does doing this move me towards my vision? You will instantly discard those actions to which the answer is “No”, allowing you to concentrate on those things that will. This immediately makes your business more effective, as you have a clear simple process on which to test effort and separate yourself from those who don’t know where they are going, so, do everything “just in case”

Let’s be honest, uncovering your vision is difficult and getting it down to a succinct phrase takes a lot of effort. Do you really think that the famous Disney vision "to make people happy" came together in a blinding flash? It was developed and honed over time to something that encapsulated the Vision in a simple sound bite. 

Just because we don't generally think at this level or in these terms doesn't mean we can’t if we don't put our minds to it. The first stage is to just put something down and work on it over time until you think it reflects your purpose.

Here are some examples of small business visions, but not small, business visions. I asked the members of the LinkedIn group that I run “managing high growth” if they had a vision and if so what it was. These were the results. I think these examples are more relevant than those famous Visions of the large corporates.

In case you’re asking mine is "To enable high growth businesses to grow faster for longer and with less stress" Others are “To help clients increase sales and reduce time and cost” and “To create an environment where people feel valued”

So uncover your vision and get yourself clarity in your business, separate yourself from your competition and start being more successful. If you think you'd like some more help in extracting your vision contact me here

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for Managing High Growth, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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Social Media Stop Fighting it and Start Using it

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English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Social Media is going to become increasingly important in everyone's lives whether we like it or not. As a business person that means you have to get to grips with it as a means of generating leads.

The reason I say this is not the usual 1 billion users on Facebook or 500 million on Twitter or the growth of LinkedIn or any of the other very many social networks. It's simply a question of demographics. That is the generation that was brought up on this stuff are now entering the workforce and will steadily occupy more senior decision making positions and they will use what they are familiar with to search for and validate suppliers. What immediately comes to mind to them is social media. 

This was brought into sharp focus by a story I heard recently. It's about three partners who each run their own retail outlets. One for men one for women and one for kids. They all bear the same family name although the stores are really separate. A local blogger had been to the children's store and had been unimpressed with the service they had received, and posted a blog about the experience. Other members of the community had posted comments agreeing with the sentiment. 

One of the younger members of staff in another shop had seen the posting and immediately made it known to their boss. His answer was well we run a different shop so its nothing to to with us and we work hard to give a personal service to all our customers. It wasn't until it was pointed out that whilst they the partners new how the shops were organised the public at large didn't. Since they all bore the family name in their title, people would naturally connect the three shops together, and that could lead to potential customers avoiding the other two shops because of bad reviews in the shop for children.

The next problem for the shop owner was that they had no social media foot print at all so it was not obvious how they could counter act these adverse comments. The solution to this problem, as I understand it, has not yet been found.

The issue that this raises is that the younger mums were much more connected to social media than the owner and it also illustrates the problem many older people face; that is because they were not on social media they had no idea that these comment were being made and so could do nothing about them. It also demonstrates that as our customers will get younger this type of interaction will become more common.

Google 貼牌冰箱（Google Refrigerator） (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

Also for the first time the likes of Google will come under pressure as the enormous amounts of information collected by the social media giants will be used to provide more relevant search results than a general search engine  like Google. That in turn means that these new customers will NOT be using Google to search for what they want. This isn't going to happen over night but it has already started. LinkedIn users can already search for skill sets companies and individuals within their site and recruitment companies are using it to great effect to validate potential candidates. Whilst they might search Google for other information their primary search is through LinkedIn.  It Wont be long before the other networks find a way to exploit their data. This means that having a web site that can be found using Google will no longer be enough, to get yourself found, you will have to be present on some or other social network.

More worryingly perhaps for the older generation is figuring out just how we interact with social media, what do we say how do we say it and which socials media platforms do we use to communicate. The rate of change in this market is still rapid but we learn to get to grips with it otherwise we are going to end up using marketing channels which just don't deliver.

In short we need to get our feet wet. Once you are in then you can educate yourself by watching others and learn how to exploit these channels. It's likely to involve some investment in training but that's a small price to pay to keep your business growing.       

Exigent Consulting provides specialist services for High Growth Businesses, Business Turnaround, and Mentoring to the Small and Medium Business. We help business owners improve the profit performance of their business. 

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