by Kimberly | Jan 1, 2017 | Blog, Facebook
With the decline of organic reach and visibility of Facebook page posts, many businesses and brands are seeking other ways to reach their target audience, to engage with their customers and to create interactive communities with the loyal fans who love them. It’s time to go beyond the Facebook page! In this article, we’ll take a look a three creative ways you can create an engaged community on Facebook that will help you reach more of your target audience. 1. Facebook Groups Facebook groups have been quietly growing over the past few years and have several advantages over a Facebook page. Facebook groups are usually focused on a specific interest or goal but they are also used by brands to give customers or clients “special access” to information, content and feedback that isn’t readily available on their public page. What’s appealing about a Facebook group is the level of control over who can access the content or see what’s being shared within the group. Groups can be both private and public (also known as Open or Closed.) For brands or businesses, the best way to use groups as a marketing tool is to create a group of your own rather than joining other groups. Unfortunately, you cannot create a group as a brand or business. You can only create a group using your personal Facebook profile. For some businesses and brands, this can be problematic if they prefer to keep their business personality separate from their personal. There are some key differences between Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages. Facebook Groups are not set up for promotional purposes like Pages....
by Kimberly | Jun 8, 2012 | Blog, Social Media
Facebook promoted posts for pages is the latest addition to Facebook’s advertising options. With this feature, Facebook Page admins can choose to pay for a specific post to receive additional exposure for their post in the News Feed of their fans. Facebook says that in addition to a greater number of your fans seeing the post, it will be seen by a greater percentage of the friends of your fans who interact with the post. What are Promoted Posts? A Promoted posts is a status update on your Facebook page where you pay an additional amount for increased exposure of your post in the News Feed of the people who have “Liked” your page. If your page has more than 400 fans, then you will have a few different pay options for promoting your post (starting a $5.00). Facebook will provide you with an estimated amount of people who will be exposed to the post based on how much you pay and how many fans you have. The amount you choose for a promoted post is the lifetime budget amount and not a daily budgeted amount. You are able to promote posts that have been posted within the last 3 days as Facebook prefers that the News Feed only include current and most recent content. A Promoted Post will show in the News Feed for up to 3 day from the day it was created. You can paused a promoted post but at this time you are not able to change a post or the date it was created. You can also changed the amount of promoted post anytime...
by Kimberly | Aug 10, 2010 | Blog, Featured, How to, Social Media, social media marketing, Twitter
There are several different options available to help you manage multiple social media accounts at once. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs and desire for access, then you might consider each one of these for different reasons. All of them have a web version and apps for iPhone. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have downloadable desktop versions. For everyday non-mobile use, I have found Hootsuite to be my preferred social media management tool. Hootsuite provides you with a comprehensive social media dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms all in once place. First built as a Twitter management tool, Hootsuite has grown to include the ability to post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and importing RSS feeds. With Hootsuite, you can pull in multiple Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook profiles, multiple LinkedIn accounts, etc. For Twitter accounts, you can quickly and easily view your Home Feed, your @ mentions, your sent tweets, your direct messages, plus add columns for any of your Twitter lists, columns to monitor keywords or key phrases, and a pending tweets column for any scheduled tweets. You can have up to 10 columns for each twitter account showing at one time. I typically add a few columns for monitoring keywords and a few more columns for lists of specific twitterers for different purposes. For example, I might like to keep up on the tweets of my colleagues, social media people and local friends. Hootsuite makes it easy to reply, re-tweet, send a direct message, add a tweet as a favorite, reply all (for tweets...
by Kimberly | Apr 19, 2010 | Blog, Facebook, Featured, Social Media
So Facebook is making some pretty big (and complicated) changes that will impact significantly how users use, navigate and perceive the platform. Among the biggest change is that users no longer “Become a Fan” of a fan page. Instead they will now “Like” a page and people will no longer be listed as fans, but will be “People who Like This.” Facebook explains the change here: Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”? To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested. They also explain here what it means to “Like” a page: What does it mean to “Like” a Page? When you click “Like” on a Page, you are making a connection to that Page. The Page will be displayed in your profile, and in turn, you will be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed. So far I’ve found this page in Facebook’s Help Center to be the most comprehensive explanation of how all the changes work and tie together. Along with the “Like” for fan pages, they are launching Community Pages which will link to your profile info so that your interests become links to community pages that reflect these interests. You also have the option of linking your interests to specific fan pages. This, of course, means increased public visibility for your...
by Kimberly | Feb 25, 2010 | Blog, Facebook, Featured, Social Media
Google announced today via their Twitter account that Facebook Fan Page status updates will now become part of the real time search. This is huge for people who seriously consider Facebook as marketing avenue and want to use it as a tool to further get found by search engines. This means that updates from Facebook Fan Pages are currently being indexed and included in Google’s real time search feature. This includes links, photos, videos and status updates but not comments by fans. While updates from personal profiles can also be posted publicly by users, it doesn’t appear that those updates are being indexed as part of the real time search. What is Real Time Search? If you’re not familiar with real time search, here’s an example. Currently trending on Twitter is “Canadian Joannie Rochette” from Olympic events. If you go to Google and type in “Canadian Joannie Rochette,” you will get quite few results, but if you scroll down about mid-page, this is what you will see. As you can see, there is a scrolling box which shows real time results as they are happening. The addition of Facebook page updates to real time search joins Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and others. Mostly what I’ve seen so far in real time search are updates from these networks about trending topics. This probably means that big brands on Facebook with large fan bases will likely get the most of amount of love from real time search right now. However, it does become yet another reason why businesses, organizations, non-profits and others need to seriously considering creating a solid presence on Facebook...
