Tag Archives: Facebook

Adobe Premiere Elements 14

Adding Video Presets for Adobe Premiere Elements 14 and 15

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This tutorial will help you create new video presets by editing existing presets. It also includes some additional presets you can copy/paste and use right away.

You can find the existing presets for Adobe Premiere Elements 14 or 15 a few different ways. First, you can search for files with the extension .sqpreset which is short for SequencePresets. On Windows, you will most likely find the files under:

C: > Program Files > Adobe > Adobe Premiere Elements 14 > Settings > SequencePresets > NTSC > AVCHD

OR

C: > Program Files > Adobe > Adobe Premiere Elements 15 > Settings > SequencePresets > NTSC > AVCHD

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HTML Headers for Social Media – Meta Information

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It seems that markup is getting more and more important on the web today, especially if you want your pages to show up just right when your visitors click that magical share button. To that end, here is a quick sample of what I stick at the top of every HTML page before I ever get to the body tag.


<!DOCTYPE html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
<title>PAGE NAME | SITE NAME</title>
<meta itemprop="name" content="PAGE NAME | SITE NAME"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="PAGE NAME | SITE NAME"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="PAGE NAME | SITE NAME"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="LIST 5-8 KEYWORDS HERE" />
<meta name="description" content="THIS SHOULD BE YOUR DESCRIPTION; LESS THAN 160 CHARACTERS." />
<meta itemprop="description" content="THIS SHOULD BE YOUR DESCRIPTION; LESS THAN 160 CHARACTERS."/>
<meta property="og:description" content="THIS SHOULD BE YOUR DESCRIPTION; LESS THAN 160 CHARACTERS."/>
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.WEBSITE.com/HTMLFILENAME.htm"/>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://www.WEBSITE.com/IMAGENAME.jpg"/>
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.WEBSITE.com/IMAGENAME.jpg"/>
<meta name='viewport' content='width=930, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=1' />
<meta name="author" content="Mario Lurig - http://mariolurig.com/" />
<link rel='stylesheet' href='MYCSSFILE.css' type='text/css' />
</head>

The very first line is for IE9 compatibility, forcing it to display things properly (I believe any doctype declaration will work). The remaining lines are self-explanatory with one exception: the viewport option decides how your page will look in a mobile browser upon first load.

You can double-check what Facebook sees (or refresh the cache) using their debug tool.

Facebook Promoted Posts: A Casual Study and Review

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Facebook now offers the ability to promote a post on a Facebook page to your audience for either $5 or $10. The main idea is to pay to increase exposure to the post. This is done by making sure it shows up in the news feed of individuals who ‘Like’ your page as well as increase exposure to their friends if they interact with your post. Pay a little, get a little more exposure to your existing fan base. Here’s what happened for me.

I ran two promoted posts with the exact same content on two pages I run: NovelRank and Dice Candies. They have 900+ and 400+ Likes, respectively. The latter has a very regular amount of user engagement and thus has a much higher exposure and interaction rate for posts. That being said, here were the results.

Since promoted posts are live for up to 72 hours and this was tested starting early Saturday morning, the promoted post was able to get the attention of a weekend Facebook audience, which is typically less active than during the week.

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Comparing Facebook and Google Adwords Advertising

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The focus here is to understand when to leverage Facebook Ads vs Google Adwords for your online advertising. While both command very large audiences, and both can also command a large Cost Per Click (CPC), the way each service approaches an audience is very different.

Google Adwords

Adwords allows you to specify keywords for your searches. While you can be broad with your searches so they compete whenever those words exist within any search query, you can also specify exact matches via surrounding the keywords in double-quotations “”. This also you to hyper-target your ads to that search audience, and also allows you to get a lower CPC price. You are competing with anyone who has ads running for either those same exact matches, or loose matches that incorporate the keywords you use. If you are fishing for some long-tail advertising (maybe as research for Search Engine Optimization tweaks), Google Adwords is the way to go.

Facebook

While Facebook now offers the ability to specify a ‘category’ for your audience, the primary method of limiting the results is by specifying pages or groups that individuals may ‘Like’ or be a part of, allowing you to target a t-shirt about NPR to an audience that ‘Likes’ NPR’s fan page. Sounds fantastic, right? Sure, if you are willing to pay for it. The reason is that Facebook is driven primarily by the demographic information it makes configurable in the ads you design. When advertisers are trying to entice males into a dating site, or 18-24 year olds to play a video game, they aren’t using the ‘category’ or ‘pages/groups’ limitations, and since they are use to paying a lot of money for these highly competitive advertising areas, their bids are going to blow yours out of the water. You have to match their price just to be seen, even if you are going to be more relevant to a particular user.

I consider this a major flaw in the way Facebook prioritizes ads. It benefits their bottom line, not their audience. I actually believe that if they improved this methodology to focus on benefiting their users over advertisers, that a larger number of advertisers will come on-board to take advantage of these focused groups, spend less money overall, but the financial gains for Facebook will be made up in shear volume. Currently, I’m limited in the amount of Facebook advertising I do for these reasons.

Final Thoughts

Do you want demographics? Go to Facebook. Do you want to target very specific words or ideas? Go to Google Adwords.