The holiday promotion season can be overwhelming, but it brings a lot of opportunities for retailers, as well as big dollars for marketers. There are also many lessons to be learned from the tactics marketers specifically during the holiday months, and the successes or failures of their efforts. Now that another holiday season has come to a close, it’s worth asking—what lessons can we learn from this holiday season?

Seasonal AdWords campaigns

Knowing and targeting your social media audience

Everyone hates spam (the electronic kind, not the lunch meat). If there’s one thing in this world that reminds us we are just one fish in a sea of millions of other demographically similar fishes, it’s spam, a terribly impersonal form of outreach.

Social media done right should create a personal connection between your brand and your brand users or “followers” as they are more commonly known in the world of social media. So, how do you target and reach out to your audience, a sea of unknown fish, without becoming another piece of spam they want to weed out?

Social media juggernaut, Facebook, recently announced a change to the game of company advertisements on their site. The game changer…a little something called Sponsored Stories.  These “stories” are unique offerings to companies in that they do not appear along with the usual text banner ads. Instead, these “Adverstories” appear just above the usual suspect text banner ads—in their own designated section labeled “Sponsored”. In addition to the sponsored story-ad, Facebook members will also be shown a list of any Friends they have who already “Like” the sponsored company or page.  This is great for advertisers because it now allows a company to feature their page and show audiences friends who back up their brands with trustful “Likes”.