But when the people involved have moved on, how do you get access to your page?
]]>This looks pretty ugly if you were to include it on any material like a business card or email signature!
But once you’ve got 25 people liking your page (aka fans) you can apply for your username (also called a Facebook vanity URL).
Claiming a friendly username makes your page easier to find and looks more professional.
Try and come up with one that is appropriate for your brand name but easy to remember and read.
Once you claim your username YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT – so choose carefully! *
You have to be an administrator of a page before you can do this.
If you are using Facebook as your business page, Facebook will want you to 'switch from using Facebook as your page to using Facebook as yourself'.
If you do this, (by clicking on continue), you can still set a username for your business page in the same way as above. If you are the administrator for more than one page, you'll get a list of all the pages to select from.
You can also change your page name from your business page admin panel, via Edit Page -> Page Info. There is an option to Edit the Page Address which takes you back to step 2 above. Again you will have to switch back to the real you to do it.
*Update Sept 2013 - Looks like you can now change the name, but only once. Guess they got a lot of people wanting to 'correct' their page name!
]]>Worry no more, there is plenty of interesting and entertaining stuff you can share that isn't about telling people what you had for breakfast (which no one is interested in anyway, other than maybe your mother).
]]>'Social' comes in many flavours, each with their strengths and best use.
Primary purpose: Connect with people you know and share thoughts, personal experiences, fun content, photo's etc. Needs to be a mutually agreed 'friendship'
Works well: If you sell consumer products and services such as clothing, entertainment and leisure persuits, foot and beverage, consumer electronics, health and beauty.
We've found: It's good for sharing web marketing related content with people already in our business network, but the status updates that get the most response are those that are comical, controversial or entertaining.
Primary purpose: sharing short snippets of information and links to other content with people who have similar interests. Breaking news and current events are popular. Following doesn't need to be mutual.
Works well: if you are a knowledge based business and have information worth sharing or work in an industry where there is a lot of activity in the media.
We've found: Certain people in Essentee LOVE Twitter. It's good for maintaining or establishing contact with people that we don't do business with or talk to regularly, sharing content of value and driving traffic to our blog. But can be a HUGE time drain!
Primary purpose: professional networking and demonstrating competency in area of expertise via participantion in group discussions. Connections are mutually accepted
Works well for businesses targeting other business people and professionals looking to make connections with people in similar industries or career paths.
We've found: Good for seeking and sharing opinions on topics of interest which can be good for establishing your expertise in a particular area. However, this can take up a lot of time if responding to people who want advice. Good for maintaining links to people you know on a professional level but don't talk to or see often, and the quality of your network of connections can be helpful in establishing credibility.
Primary purpose: Video uploading. Good for sharing content that is harder to convey via the written word such as product demonstrations, software, outdoor persuits and physical demonstrations. Can be more time/resource intensive.
Works well for consumer products, entertainment or media and creative sectors.
We've found: Good for instructional video's and how to's. Can take a lot of time to produce.
Blogs are almost always based around an individual as a publisher of news or opinion but can be on behalf of an organisation or businesses. Use to publish opinions, tips, how to's and commentary on a specific topic
Works well: for just about anyone.
We've found: good way of targeting the long tail for SEO purposes, driving traffic to your site although this traffic may not have a high conversion rate.
Primary Purpose: Sharing content of a visual nature – photo's, infographics
Good for: Used by more women (68% vs 32% male), good for consumer products and creative sector
We've found: primarily we use Pinterest to share infographics we find useful, but of limited use from a service business perspective.
Primary Purpose: Sharing content with people in groups centered around your relationship with them. More men than women using this platform
Good for: early adopter industries such as IT, digital media
We've found: Ok for maintaining loose connections with early adopters and people in our industry.
Primary Purpose: save, tag and share references to websites and content
Best for: can be tool to share and promote other content. Not industry or business type specific.
We've found: Can be used to drive traffic if used to share genuinely useful content.
Primary Purpose: Share location dependant information, ie where you are.
Best for: businesses that are premise-based particularly restaurants, bars etc
We've found: It's limited in use for service based businesses and most of our clients are dubious of it's value.
Primary Purpose: get answers to questions around a particular topic
Best for: knowledge based industries – consultants, advisors etc
We've found: interesting but can be a huge time sink, similar to LinkedIn groups.
Primary purpose: Sharing content in presentation style visual formal (but not video)
Works well for knowledge based industries – consultants, advisors etc
Primary purpose: distributing verbal conversations or dialogue
Best for: businesses with 'virtual' products not easily demonstrated. Can also be used for sharing industry commentary
]]>Advertising on Facebook is pretty quick to set up and get going, but like other online advertising platforms don't forget that Facebook's goal is to get more money out of you.
Fortunately they do this by helping you create ads that get lots of clicks because you pay when someone clicks on your ad. The trick is making sure this translates into business for you.
Facebook provide step by step instructions on the nuts and bolts of setting up ads with some specific help on managing and editing ads and campaigns so you might as well get it from the horses mouth.
Beyond that, how do you avoid your fledgling Facebook advertising campaign ending up on the scrap-heap of failed initiatives?
There has been conflicting reports on how well Facebook advertising works. Like most other marketing and promotional efforts, it's going to be a case of testing it and seeing if it works for your particular target audience and type of business.
But experimentation can be costly, so consider:
You can direct people who click on your ad to an external website (preferably your own!) or keep them within the Facebook ecosystem, which can mean lower cost-per-click.
If you are taking people to an external website, direct them to a purpose built landing page. If this page is being used by more than one campaign, add url parameters so you can identify in Analytics what traffic is being referred from Facebook. You can use this real handy url builder to make this easy.
With Facebook you can select who see's your ads using variables such as interests and location, age, gender and keywords. Social Fresh reports that there are big differences in performance based on gender, so optimise your ads by segmenting by gender (target one ad to the men, another one to women).
Of course to target the right people, you'll need to know what demographics your audience has and their interests, so if you don't know this you'd better stop until you do!
You could make the mistake of many new advertisers and 'go wide' for geographic location and stated interests, but this almost always ends up with lots of clicks but few sales and therefore a poor return on your investment.
Highly targeted ads are the smart way to go. Who exactly has the problem that you can solve?
You didn't think advertising on Facebook was free did you?
Facebook ads are charged on a CPC (cost per click) or CMP (cost per 1000 impressions). CPC tend to have a slightly higher click through rate, and ads that keep people on Facebook have (reportedly) a higher click through rate and lower cost per click.
Start bidding at Facebooks suggested amount, you can always limit the duration or daily spend until you have some initial data about effectiveness.
Once you've created your ads, it takes up to 24 hours to approve – although it can be quicker, remember to build approval time into the timing of your campaign
Create ads that:
You have to be concise as you only have 25 characters for the headline and 90 for the body text.
Create multiple versions of ads so you can see which gets the best response. Refresh your ads regularly to prevent them going stale as a result of people seeing them many times.
Consider sponsored stories instead of traditional ads.
It goes without saying (or does it?) that you should look at your statistics to figure out whether your campaign has been successful.
How you do this depends on the purpose of your campaign but might include:
There are tools starting to emerge to help you manage your Facebook campaign if your budget warrants stumping up an extra few hundred bucks to get things like fast ad creation, bulk editing, and ad rotation.
These include (this is not a recommendation of any of these tools):
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If you are in business you can't afford to get it wrong - at best it will be a waste of time, effort and money. It could cost you a LOT of money if you brand takes a mega hit.
Here are some tips to keep you on track:
Social media activity needs a quality website full of fresh shareable content to share and start conversations about. Social media and search engine optimisation has become entwined so what is good for one is going to be good for the other. Without good content and a compelling offer, your tactics could be a waste of time and money.
Even if you don't plan on using it straight away, claim your Twitter account, Facebook business page, YouTube channel. Unlike domain names that are country specific, Facebook, Twitter etc are global and if someone else claims the name first you will have to resort to adding numbers or letters to your account name making it harder for people to find you.
If you know where you are going you are more likely to get there. Before you devote time and effort, work out what you are trying to acheive by having a Facebook page. Is it to gather leads? Respond to complaints? Encourage your user community to support each other?
This will provide you some steer as to which networks to use and what support material and mechanisms you'll need to make it happen.
Even if just for your personal use. Have some experience using the tools even if you don't intend doing it yourself. You will make better decisions about your strategy, use of tools and who you employ to do it if you understand the basics.
You will avoid spreading yourself too thin. Each platform has it's own set of rules - both in the 'terms of use' sense and how it's user base behave. For example, many LinkedIn users don't appreciate a connection request from someone they don't know at all whereas this is not only common on Twitter, but necessary!
This will help you understand the competitive environment you are up against. Follow them and see what they are tweeting about and which ones get re-tweeted. See how they handle complaints and if they don't respond in a timely manner, you could contact the disgruntled party yourself and offer to help!
They can help develop your plan in detail, identify the best tools and platforms, develop policies and help guide you through the early days. These tools change rapidly, so it can be hard to keep up with all the changes if you are not doing it for a job.
Work out how much time and resources you have to allocate and make sure they have the right tools to make the job as efficient as possible. The write a plan of when you will be checking your pages, updating status etc. You may want to do this at a certain time each day.
Make sure you are monitoring your feeds, mentions etc. Measuring activity and results such as retweets, likes etc and can link these results to visitors to your website, leads and ultimately sales
Give people a reason to be a fan/follower – why should they? You can offer valuable tips, funny stories, latest news etc. Would you follow someone just so they can peddle their latest wares? Unlikely, so put yourself in their shoes!
Acknowledge people who contribute to the conversation – eg blog comments and shares. It's easy to say thank you
Remember that it's not all about you. Stay polite and professional when representing your brand, a social media mishap can go viral very very fast
Don't ignore customer complaints or comments, but don't respond to negative comments by being defensive and firing back at them. Use them as an opportunity to demonstrate how much you care about the quality of your products and level of customer service
If you want to learn from other's mistakes, read about these sometimes shocking often funny social media fails:
]]>Not everyone. And the only people you should be worried about is the people who you want to talk to. Ask your current and potential customers what social networks they are on and how they use them and that will give you your answer – where they are there, you should be too.
Google also looks for social signals as part of calculating your search ranking, so that could tip the balance into you taking some action. But being on every social network around isn't going to help, especially if you don't have the resources to do it properly.
Don't make this assumption based on your own experience or prejudice. Often when business say this, they can't back up the statement with research. Find out if your customers are social media, what platform and how they use it.
Don't even think about it.
Firstly, not everyone is on or actively uses one network exclusively. But the main reason you should not put all your online marketing in one basket, let's call it Facebook is that you need to own your own digital property so you can control it. If you use Facebook exclusively, they own you.
A third party set's the rules and can change them overnight. And they can also fail - taking your customers with them.
Some business owners think social media is just for kids or for fun and a sink hole of time and energy from a marketing perspective.
It can be if poorly targeted or used for broadcasting marketing messages. Like anything it has to be done properly.
Outsourcing it to a hip young agency to do it all for you isn't the answer either. Why we won't 'do' your social media.
Social media marketing takes time. It could potentially months or even years before a fan or follower engages you and a business relationship is built.
Don't forget you can use social media for customer service support and complaint/reputation management, not just marketing
Social is something you are, not something you do. Olivier Blanchard
Just having a Twitter feed that automatically spits out inspirational quotes of the day is not being social. Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon are just tools not ends in themselves.
Being truly social means integrating collaboration and connections with your business strategy. It means involving all the stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, industry bodies) in an environment where information is shared and ideas developed together.
A lot of businesses are still trying to integrate 'digital' into their strategy so it's probably going to be a while before we see the majority extend to becoming truly 'social'.
This myth is closely associated with the one above. Numbers can be bought. It doesn't mean they'll buy from you. If you are a local flower shop in Hamilton what's the point in having fans in India or Hong Kong unless they have a connection to Hamilton?
And a Facebook page like or a Twitter follower is NOT the same as someone who has opted into your email list. You can like a page and never interact or even see their content again.
Try and get an audience of interested, motivated people who you can build a rapport with. Having three percent of 500 fans turn into a lead is better than no percent of a five thousand fans.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Signing up for a You Tube Channel might be free, but it takes time, effort and resources to build an effective presence.
This time has a value to your business in real dollar terms.
Usually the people saying this are trying to sell you social media services or they are an evangelist with a lot of time and energy to devote to it.
While it's true it's not going away, there are many digital channels – your website, email and the mobile space. None of which should be completely ignored.
Micro businesses, one man bands and sole traders are still ticking along quite nicely thank you very much without any kind of social media presence at all. I've tried to argue many times that there is sure to be opportunities for better customer communication (and therefore retention) but many of these business owners are happy sticking to what (for the present anyway) works for them.
Yes it can, but you will need to set up effective tracking methods to know where your leads and come from, then translate them through into your sales figures or customer satisfaction indicators.
There are metrics that can be assigned to a campaign or tactic such as growing your follower base, but these should link back to a specific outcome or goal, and will probably involve more than one metric.
Just having more Twitter followers or a high Klout score doesn't in itself translate back to qualified leads and on to more sales, and this is where much of the measurement of social media has fallen down – in the definition of ROI.
It is difficult to measure the monetary value of a fan, but establish a correlation between engagement and sales, or brand preference and the numbers will make more sense.
It's different, but people who working in businesses are people too. Businesses use social media to help make business decisions. It's a matter of finding out which platform is the most suitable. LinkedIn is probably going to be more effective, because people are there for business networking and sharing.
You need to take the time to understand your audience, set some goals and objectives and develop a plan to achieve them.
]]>So we've put together a list that we think provide pretty good tips for the small-medium businesses who are probably tackling this on their own (ie not outsourcing to an agency).
Facebook apps that will improve engagement - nice overview of how a custom Facebook app can be used to make your Facebook page more interesting and engaging.
And to go with it, HubSpot's How to Create Custom Tabs for Facebook Business Pages which tells you how to create a custom tab for free.
Marketing Stats about Facebook for business - in case you're skeptical, more useful stuff from HubSpot - some great stats to throw around such as "Autoposting on Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%"
5 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Fan Engagement - simple techniques to get those 'fans' more involved.
5 Ways to Create Even More Facebook Engagement - and if that wasn't enough, some more tips and getting more engagement. These ones a bit more hands-on, great practical tips.
7 ways to drive more blog traffic using LinkedIn - Social Media Examiner says don't neglect one of the best ways to grow traffic to your business blog - LinkedIn
A detailed anatomy of the new LinkedIn company page design - in early September, LinkedIn company pages got a makeover.
9 pointers for Linkedin lead generation one of our very own articles, it includes a couple of what NOT to do's!
22 Ways to get leads from LinkedIn - plenty of ideas here, although not described in detail
Turn your twitter account into a SEO magnet - One of the side-benefits to social media is search visibility. This article provides nice clear instructions on how to SEO your Twitter account.
10 reasons why I don't retweet your content - another list but this is a good one, especially the key criteria piece
Best practices to a traffic driving Twitter account - having a website is easy, driving traffic is hard and just 'having' a Twitter account is not enough
13 tools to simplify your social media marketing - we use several of these tools and they are a real time (and sanity) saver!
8 steps to a successful social media strategy - another take on explaining the key steps to developing a social media strategy
What most small businesses are doing wrong on social media- succinct and to the point
Why you're doing B2B social media all wrong – similar tips as those for B2C , but if your audience is businesses, it's even more important to have quality content that adds value
Where making money and social media meet - this article has a list of useful social media management tools/platforms and service providers
6 ways to tell if you are social media-ready Are you ready to step up? This is a great little checklist to see if you are ready to engage....
Why you can't sell with social media and 3 things to do instead The return on social media can look dismal, but you can drive sales significantly if you measure indirect impact instead of sales
Eight common blogging mistakes - gotta love someone who talks about their own blogging mistakes and calls them 'a disaster'.
8 steps for social media marketing success- with a handy social media marketing starter plan and an actual use of the phrase "rockin sockin".
Tips for integrating social media on your website - goes a bit beyond the suggestion of putting share buttons on your site, with good reminders about analytics and appropriate use of buttons
Social media reality check: 10 things to keep top of mind - and finally - some good reminders that will keep your feet on the ground.
]]>Well there are always those impressive statistics, with over a billion users a month on Facebook. There is also over 2 and a quarter million kiwi's on the biggest social networking platform on the planet.
You can use Facebook to:
What connecting and engaging people really means is having conversations – not promoting your latest product and asking people to share or comment on it.
It means:
Did you know you can't put a call to action (even 'call us') on your cover photo.Before you use Facebook for marketing your business, especially if you are going to be running competitions - Read the full guidelines
Here are some of the important ones that can trip people up:
If your business involves selling any of the following you're out of luck, because you can't promote them on facebook: weapons or explosives, software that is spy or malware, prescription pharmaceuticals, dating sites with a 'sexual emphasis', tobacco or related paraphernalia. And nothing considered 'adult'.
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