On Social Media
Generating revenue along with the buzz.
Founded in 2007, FotoBridge, a West Berlin, N.J., photo-scanning service, began experimenting with social media in 2009. For its co-founders, Edward O’Boyle and Julie Morris, the goal was to connect with parents, baby boomers, and what they call “family memory keepers” to promote awareness of digital archiving. After their initial experiments, Mr. O’Boyle and Ms. Morris concluded that their target market was best represented on Facebook and with a secondary focus on Twitter to connect with younger customers and follow market influencers.
Over the past two years, FotoBridge has built a strong following among people interested in preserving photos, including educators and archivists, and its corporate clients include NBC Universal, the Smithsonian, the Indianapolis Colts and USA Hockey. The company shares photos, photography news and tips, and discount offers with its 14,000 likes on Facebook and 18,000 followers on Twitter. It also uses social media to answer questions and share blog posts, testimonials, and behind-the-scenes details of selected high-profile digitizing projects. “We answer questions and support customers primarily in real-time via Facebook,” said Ms. Morris. “For us, it’s a quick, effective and efficient way to communicate with those customers adept at using Facebook, which is becoming a larger part of our customer base.”
The company uses a mix of pay-per-click and Facebook ads to build followers and drive traffic to the Web site. On a typical campaign, it spends more than $10,000 a month on Google ads that Ms. Morris believes end up more than paying for themselves. “For every dollar we spend on Google AdWords,” she said, “we earn six dollars back.”
They have found that it helps to change keywords frequently. “We review our keywords every six to eight weeks,” she said. “We look for ones that are relevant to our service and that are not highly competitive yet but have a decent amount of monthly traffic and have proven to convert well in the past.” So far, the company’s search audience has been largely baby boomers, but FotoBridge has been finding different keywords to attract younger customers. “Our younger audience use words like ‘photo scanning’ verses our older customers who will type in ‘slide conversion,’” she said.
In addition, Ms. Morris uses Twitter to focus on sharing content and hashtags that promote their crucial terms in search results. Social media, she said, is “our primary means of building our brand and engaging a broader audience in a conversation.”
Fotobridge uses Google Analytics mapping data to track sales conversions by location. The mapping data allows the company to track clusters of new customers in the same community — a retirement community in Florida, for example. Following the clusters gives them insights that help them place ads in local publications or online. “During our first full year in 2008, we found our search engine marketing efforts were being amplified by offline word-of-mouth referrals,” said Mr. O’Boyle. “We could determine this by analyzing Web site traffic and conversions by geography.”
FotoBridge receives 200 to 300 questions a week through social media. It has more than 1,200 blog subscribers who read posts about saving memories and digitizing old photos, slides, negatives, and home movies. “Often, visits from social media sources can account for up to 15 percent or more of our daily Web site traffic,” Mr. O’Boyle said.
Although FotoBridge has not fully quantified the impact of using social media on its sales growth, the company’s revenue has tripled over the last three years.
Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development firm. You can follow her on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/a-photo-scanning-service-learns-to-capture-exposure/?partner=rss&emc=rss