@Spirocks

Facebook marketing

The Social Feed and Employees

Throwback_Jortsday_at_Sauce__wear_Jorts_in_tonight_and_get_a_free_handcut_fry_with_any_burger.__getsauced

 

How does your social feed embrace your employees? Does it at all?

These are the questions you should ask yourself. Are you tagging employees in pictures of the product of their labors, are you recognizing the fact that many hands are involved in creating what your business accomplishes? Do you thank, mention, and acknowledge in your social feeds?

Here are some reasons you should: 

  1. People who love doing a good job, like to know it is appreciated. And keeping great employees is the first step at keeping customers coming back. Be the leader they want to work for, one that gives them love.
  2. Social Media is public, and employees of other businesses in your area are watching. They will be more likely to want to work for you if they see you building your team up.
  3. Your employees have friends and family that want to see there work life celebrated too, these are not only sources of positive reinforcement but also potential customers who are looking to embrace those that support their loved ones.
  4. These employees are the faces of the story of your business that the community will want to embrace, a cocktail without a bartender is not the same experience. Celebrate your story, and the characters that make it unique.

There are tens of thousands of reasons to involve your Social Feed and Employees. These are just a few. Above you can see Mike, Spencer, and I having some fun at Sauce. If you wore your Jorts in that Thursday you got a free hand cut french fry… see those Jorts are worth something!

Don’t just rent your friends from Facebook

image

Too many business owners have an online strategy which relies on garnering as many likes as possible for their Facebook page. This is wrought with peril and here is why:

At any time, and they do it often, Facebook alters how you connect with these people to further their goals. Which all revolve around making money off of these connections. They want you to rent your friends, plain and simple.

So as time changes, the investment you have made in those connections is adjusted, filtered, and rearranged to become more profitable for Facebook. Recently they altered how many of your business posts people who liked your page see if you don’t pay to promote them.  Its time to focus on making connections with these friends and followers as permanent as possible.

The answer for most of you: Build your email list. Start today, make it worth their while. How much should you invest in time and money? Answer one question: What is a permanent connection to your customers worth to you?

Facebook News Feed Changes

Interpret them to Market your Business Better.

Whether you are marketing a small business like a restaurant or a professional practice like a realtor you are likely heavily invested at least time wise in Facebook. So you need to stay on top of the developments as things are always changing there, but don’t worry, that’s what I am here for.

 

The changes to Facebook’s News feed:

Basically there are two major changes that have gone live starting Tuesday night that will impact your marketing efforts as they go live for everyone over the next few days.

1) Facebook will sort your News Feed in an attempt to make sure you see all the important news that happened since the last time you logged in, in their words: “News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” Facebook says in a blog post. So for you that means one thing: Make sure your posts are deemed important by Facebook, and the way you do that is by engagement this update really just builds on what they were already doing. It is in fact another step in what is a long line of Facebook Changes that we have followed and adjusted to.

  •  You create engagement by sharing great information, asking good questions, and creating a conversation when people respond. Do it all in the comments of the post, and it will become must see news for your friends and those that like your page.
  • You create engagement by posting enough to remain top of mind but not too much to dilute your posts and create fatigue among those that may see them. For a long time the marketing company I own, GuestFeed, has used a ratio we created called the EFT ratio to manage how much to post and where. We do this to maximize the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, and you should too.
  • You create engagement by creating real relationships with your connections online, tagging those real relationships in posts and using the champions of your business to help you with the heavy lifting. A factor in social proof that can help lift the visibility of your business.
2) Facebook is giving more prominence to photos in the feed, increase both the frequency with which they are visible in your feed and their size. I have long thought that Facebook did a poor job with photos, and this seems like an attempt to improve the experience. Photos are incredible engaging and people love to look at them, they way you present them has a lot to do with how your business will be viewed.
  • Make sure you share great looking photos, well lit, and without distracting things in the background. You don’t see catalogs with horrible photos, so why should your business share them either?
  • Consider a professional photographer, and find out what it would cost to get some go to pro photos to share.
  • Get better at taking them, and make sure you value their impact on your business.

This is the beginning of Facebook’s Latest Changes

There are more coming soon, so if you like getting updates like this subscribe to them in the upper right, I would love to add you to my group of business owners and marketers. We have great conversations here.

 

The Problem with Facebook’s Zip Code Ads

Use Zip Code

A little background:

Recently Facebook implemented a new way to target ads on their network. With the enabling of zip code specific ads, Facebook promised to allow a more specific way to distribute your ads. I wrote with enthusiasm about the prospects such a new ability would give those advertising to Facebook’s mammoth user base HERE.

So What’s The Problem with Facebook Zip Code Targeting?

A feature with so much promise has a very poor implementation, I recently tried to run ads for my restaurant, Evenfall,  and wanted to select the cluster of zip codes around its location. Pretty straight forward right? Well I was unable to run the ads as this is what I got:

Screen shot 2011-09-06 at 9.07.41 PM
Basically facebook was telling me that I could not run an ad, because in the 5 zip codes I was targeting they had fewer than 20 people over 21 years old to show it to. That, of course, is complete bullshit. Whether they have a glitch or it is intentional it is wrong. I employ more than 20 people who are on facebook for gods sake.

So how did I run the ad? Well I explored the old 1o miles of a town method, but that includes areas I know customers are not coming from, and they suggested I bid $3,45 for a click which is absurd, so I decided not to run the add on Facebook.

In case you wondered here are two of the towns census numbers in 2000:

Screen shot 2011-09-06 at 9.07.06 PM

and

Screen shot 2011-09-06 at 9.06.51 PM

 

So of the 30,000+ less than 20 people are on Facebook? I don’t know, but with the Mafia wars invites, the ‘poking’, the virtual farms, the annoying club promoter invites, the horrible changes to photos, and more Facebook is really starting to feel clunky.

Have you had luck using the zip code features? If so let me know, I want to know the trick.

 

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Thanks -Spiro

Facebook Marketing to Your Zip Code

From the ‘What Took So Long’ category, Facebook has finally made it possible to show adds just to the zip code/s that you select.

Previously advertisers were only able to narrow with country, state, or province. Now with much more focused geographical targeting Facebook ads could be used to promote civic programs and political campaigns, small businesses serving particular communities can make sure their ads don’t go to a greater area than they sell to, and a myriad of other ways.

What ways do you think zip code targeted ads can be used?

Facebook Zip Code Targeted Ads

Will this make it more likely that you will use a Facebook Ads to promote your business?

 

Getting the most from your Blog?

Thoughts from the Beach…

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Whether a small business or a professional your blog is not only a part of your online marketing efforts, it should be your lynchpin that holds it all together. Now since you are creating posts that share valuable and interesting information and offers on a regular basis it is time to make sure that you are getting the most from this library of content you have created.

Have you heard of Evergreen Content?

That is a term that refers to blog posts that contain information that si not date specific and still of value to the reader months or even years after it is written. Just because it is buried thirty posts ago doesn’t mean it is done and gone forever. Google search will have them indexed and send visitors too your pages when they are relevant to search terms. That is one of the primary reasons we write blogs, to create content about the business we are marketing, and allow customers to find us via search. You may have heard of inbound marketing and this is a founding principle of that method.

But we want to Turbo Charge Inbound Marketing

Search is amazingly easy, and it currently sends upwards of 20% of the traffic to this blog, but we want more, faster. Sharing via social networks and email is the obvious answer, but how you do it will determine success or failure. At GuestFeed we pay careful attention to the frequency of messages we send out for ourselves and for our customers, I created the EFT Ratio to aid us in maintaining a helpful non-intrusive vibe with our followers. I believe it is one of the primary reasons that our clients and our own followings have increased so rapidly.

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We made a tool to Help

So we spent a lot of time creating great content, most of it evergreen, and tried to determine how to best share it. The over riding principle is that no matter what we don’t want to come across as a spammer, or annoying, or repetitive. But we want to share our evergreen posts more than once, especially on twitter. That is how Spoke Social was born, we wanted to create a tool that both our clients and us could use to help automate some of the sharing. How we do it:

  • We write a great post first.
  • Next we share it immediately on all our networks.
  • Then we schedule it to be reposted with Spoke on twitter at a specific interval, like every 15 days, for a specific timeframe, like until August 25th.
  • Then we monitor the click throughs and page views for all our pages. When one of them is clearly a STUD post with great interaction numbers we share it again on Facebook a month later with a comment along the lines of ‘In case you missed it the first time check out our most popular post of the past month.’

Isn’t automation Evil?

The answer is yes and no. Yes if your feed is a robot driven non-human inconsiderate self serving stream of boringness. No if you automate a very small percentage of what you send out, and if it is sincerely helpful things you are sharing. Check my twitter feed for an idea of what I mean: @spirocks

Keep in mind that EFT ratio idea from earlier, on twitter it is highly unlikely that a large percentage of your following will see a particular tweet. It is just the way it is with twitters real time stream of tweets pushing your last one out of view quickly. So with that understanding the second or third time that you share a post may be the first time that it is seen by a follower. That means that was their only opportunity to see what you are sharing and decide if it was of interest to them.

Take a look at this screenshot, see the spikes?  Those are re-shares on twitter. What this tells me is that there were a bunch of people who were seeing this for the first time even three months after the post was written.

Repeat Posts Traffic Graph

So why do we need a tool to help us automate the Re-Posts? Well creating content is time consuming and time is short when you are running a business. Spoke allows us to schedule posts out as long as we want with exact frequency in a matter of 10 seconds. That single feature would make it worth using for us, of course we use more of Spoke’s capabilities but scheduling recurring messages alone is the key one for us. Of course you can manually schedule posts with Hootsuite, we tried that and found that we were just not doing it as much because it was cumbersome and repetitive.

The bottom line is that you should do it, it is proven to drive more traffic to your blog, which means more potential customers are exposed to the fantastic things you are doing.

That is successful marketing defined.

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Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

Who needs Groupon?

Keep all the revenue and stir up some serious business along the way. In this post I am going to explain how with an example I just put together for Evenfall Restaurant, it’s a home grown group buying marketing campaign. It’s Mojito Time.

Mojito
Evenfall's Famous Mojito

The Hook: The more people that buy the cheaper it gets.

Evenfall is well known for having the best Mojitos in the area, with elbow grease, fresh muddled mint and lime, and some silver rum they serve them in pint glasses and they serve them often in the summer months. So for this promotion we decided to lower the price every week that at least 100 mojitos were sold. We started by reducing the price from $8 to $5 for the first ten day run. The every week until mid August the price will be reduced by 50 cents until it reaches $1 a Mojito.

I created a page on the restaurants blog dedicated to the promotion, you can see that here: (Make My Mojito Cheaper) and shared it via Twitter, Facebook, and a soon to be released email blast.

As the promotion progresses the deal gets more and more enticing, it is timed to coincide with the slowest season of the year for the restaurant and designed to drive businesses during the dog days of summer with ridiculously cheap mojitos. Read on to see the consideration I took, and why it makes sense for the restaurant…

[Read more…] about Run your own Group Buying Promotion. I am.

Must Do Facebook Marketing Tactic

There are strategies to achieve goals, and inside those strategies, there are tactics that help you accomplish them. Today lets focus on a tactic that will help you succeed in your strategy to market better on Facebook.

Clogged Facebook Stream
Don't let this Get in the Way of Marketing Success

Clean up your Facebook Stream

I have written a few times about interaction being key to marketing success on Facebook, and time is money, so don’t let the crap get in your way.

First you need to know your audience, who IS or COULD become a customer. Who are the heavy hitters that can get your information in front of more eyeballs? Work at figuring that out. Then clear your stream of all that are not in your audience. Click the little X next to posts that you don’t need to see and hide them. The offender will never know, and you won’t be sorting through crap for too much longer if you keep hiding the noise makers and start focusing on the potential money makers.

That’s a tactic. A collection of tactics makes a strategy, a well executed strategy makes a successful campaign.

Target your audience. Hide the rest.

Now If you are reluctant to do this, out of fear that you will miss something form one of those people, like your girlfriend’s aunt in Topeka, then you need to decide if you will accept less than the best results from your marketing, or if you want to spend a ton of extra time on Facebook doing both.

people you may know hottie
This hottie is sucking up your time.

If you need to get updates on your friend’s make believe farms, surf the ‘people you may know’ for some hottie to stalk and never meet, or see pictures of people who are making money go on vacation. Then by all means do not hide the crap from your stream.

If you are serious about using Facebook as the unprecedented marketing tool that it is. Turn down the noise, and focus on the audience you crave. Make the conversation happen, it is right there for the taking.

Go get it.