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facebook

Oct 07
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Should We Use LinkedIn or Facebook to Promote our Business?

By Communications

Social media is pretty useful when it comes to getting the word out about your business. Too often, businesses try to spread themselves too thin, however, trying to manage a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, a Pinterest profile, all on top of a website! It can be pretty overwhelming.

We really encourage organizations to take a look at what they can really invest time in keeping active. If it’s ONE TOOL, that’s fine. And if, truly, all they can manage is keeping content on a website fresh, then DO THAT, above all.

From there, it depends on the kind of business you have, and the audience you attract.

If your customer base is other business people, please focus your efforts on LinkedIn. You’re going to attract many more of the right audience members than you will with the shotgun approach of trying to pull in people from Facebook who are largely there for personal, not professional reasons.

If you have a consumer facing business, by all means, please keep your Facebook page active by being helpful to your audience. Be warm and interesting. Share information. Celebrate your community.

From there, the tools differ based on the kind of product or service you offer. But above all, stay focused on fewer tools and do a better job with the ones you use, first and foremost the platform your business owns: your website.

 

Oct 29
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Four Ways to Use Social Platforms to Drive E-commerce Sales

By Communications, Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Social Media

With all the blogging, sharing, news articles and conferences that tout and exploit the uses of social media, you’d think the idea of using it to drive e-commerce sales would be a no-brainer. I mean everyone’s doing that, right? Anyone with an online storefront MUST be using their Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and Pinterest boards to drive traffic to product landing pages, right?

Turns out, not everyone understands that, especially in B2C. I was at a training session yesterday with one of our favorite retail clients, teaching them the amazing benefits of Sprout Social. This is a pretty great social media dashboard tool that allows you to manage all your social media presences from one location. As I was helping them hook it all up, I was also asking how these platforms were being used so far. Were they promoting items in the store? Sharing design ideas from their own people? Promoting designers and products outside of the store? Driving traffic to their online web store?

Turns out they were really only using their social platforms to promote things outside their store–designers, other Pinterest boards, other blogs. They weren’t really using the social tools to drive everyone back to their OWN store, either online or bricks and mortar.

I was very surprised, to say the least. But it made me think that maybe they weren’t alone, especially if they were a small business with limited time and resources. So here are some things you can do right now to help drive more sales using social tools.

  1. Set up a Facebook page and update it regularly. MOST people who buy things online have a Facebook presence of some sort. 67 percent of B2C companies and 42 percent of B2B companies have acquired a customer through Facebook (Hubspot, 2011). Use it to drive traffic to your blog, your Pinterest page, or better yet, specific product landing pages on your site. Facebook is a great way to stay in front of customers generally.
  2. Set up a Pinterest page to showcase your products. According to a recent BizRate Insights study, “sixty-nine percent of consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase.” In some studies, it’s even outpacing Facebook as a product purchase influencer. While both sites are used to connect with people who share common interests, “Pinterest is more of a product finder and decision influencer.”
  3. Set up a Twitter account for sharing thought leadership. Post content from your blog, and ideas from others, along with deals and ides on your OWN site. Twitter is less effective as a sales tool for consumer products, but it’s great for business solutions and products.
  4. YouTube is still one of the largest search engines, so you have to have a channel. This can really enhance SEO as well. Post weekly video tours of section of the store, specials, or events you might be hosting in your brick and mortar store, but link to corresponding product or category pages in the online store!
  5. Make sure to set up Google Analytics on your web store so you can see what links drive the best results. It’s pretty easy and Google already tracks the major social platforms. You’ll quickly get an idea of what each platform brings to the table in terms of traffic and sales. The key here is to be everywhere, targeting each platform to do what it’s good at. But don’t be afraid to drive traffic to your store, rather than just your blog.

Need help? Call us!

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Sep 26
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Three Ways The New MySpace Could Challenge Facebook

By Communications, Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Social Media

Here is a demo of the new MySpace, which was tweeted about by Justin Timberlake a few days ago. It’s pretty compelling. According to Chris and Tim Vanderhook, who bought the company in July 2011, MySpace’s new design now focuses on emerging artists who hope to be discovered. The Vanderhooks bought MySpace from News Corp. for just $35 million, after News Corp. paid more than ten times that for it in 2005.

I think it has the potential to do an end-run around Facebook for a few big reasons:

It’s clear that the designers and developers have been paying very close attention to what social networks are good at and what people use them for–sharing their life in pictures, connections and music.

First thing you notice is the prominent role music plays in the site. The musician in me loves this. It’s like you can create a soundtrack of events that can be tied to the images and posts you create. Very cool. The timeline is horizontal and everything in is a visual mash that ties posts, video, audio, connections and photos together around those events. It’s loose, slick, and sexy, and seems to borrow a lot from Path and Pinterest. If nothing else, it mimics how we act as expressive people and provides a refreshing antidote to the stodgy Facebook vanilla. It even lets you log in using competing network profiles.

It Appears to Be Anti-Grownup.

This demo looks like my daughter acts. She will sit in her room with music going while she texts friends, adds photos, connects music to pages, teases her Facebook friends, and does homework. The new Myspace seems designed to be immersive for teens. Good call, since their parents (and grandparents) have taken over Facebook. According to Will Oremus over at Slate.com,  “it’s going to focus more narrowly on becoming a social home for musicians, artists, celebrities—and their fans.”

Privacy Will be Paramount

Myspace got in a lot of hot water for their privacy violations a few years back and as a result they are on a pretty tight leash. That actually plays to their advantage right now, as Facebook users start to rebel against the shameless exploitation of their data by Zuck’s public company needs. It also maps closely to teens’ desire to get away from their parents in the digital spaces they are forced to share.

I have yet to see any mobile demo or vision, which they absolutely MUST deliver to have a chance to really succeed. But they are presenting a pretty impressive alternative to a suddenly tired Facebook, especially for the younger and more artistic set.

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Apr 19
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Sure I Like You…But That’s About It.

By Communications, Corporate Strategy, Social Media

“Forget about the number of fans or “likes” your organization’s Facebook page has. It’s what the organization is doing to keep those fans engaged that is important, especially if those fans comprise the “Millennials” – individuals who are 18 to 29 years old.”

That’s a quote from a great new piece of research from Dr. Tina McCorkindale, an assistant professor in Appalachian State University’s Department of Communication, who has been doing a bunch of poking around into the habits of Millenial Facebook and social media consumers. You can link to the article here, but the key paragraph is right here:

“With so many companies spending so much time and money on social media, we need to understand not only social media tools but the strategies of how to use it,” McCorkindale said. They found that while 75 percent said they had “liked” a profit or non-profit organization on Facebook, 69 percent said that once they “liked” the organization, they rarely or never returned to the fan page. Only 15 percent of the respondents said they visited organizations’ fan pages weekly. Most respondents (44 percent) spent less than 30 minutes a day on Facebook…Only 28 percent said they had actively searched for an organization’s page.”

Wow. Shocking! Not really. Getting someone to like your Facebook page is actually pretty easy. Getting them to like what you have to say and absorb the value you claim to be providing enough to come back more than once is an entirely different proposition. First, you actually have to PROVIDE that value, whether it’s superior quality of service, workmanship, price/benefit, design, humor–whatever it is you do–it has to be done well, and with commitment.  Think about it. How many Facebook brand pages provide so much value to you that you HAVE to come back regularly? I can’t really think of more than about three, and they are all musician pages. Now I might be different than you, but I go back because I’m a fan and there is usually something new to consume–a video, more tracks, a question, some tour photos.

Are you providing that to your current or potential customers? If not, how can you expect that they are going to take time out of their amazingly interesting day, search for your page, go look at it, and consume what they have already seen? Guess what, they aren’t. At all. And why should they?

These are TOOLS, people. Like picks and shovels and databases and chainsaws and mobile apps. They only do something if you pick them up and get to work. In the social space, that means connecting, responding, engaging, rewarding, asking questions, providing answers in ways your customers can actually extract some VALUE from.

But you knew this, right?

Mar 15
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You Can Pry My Facebook Password From My Cold, Dead Hands

By Media, Social Media

There was an amazing article posted last week that reported a new and highly disturbing trend. Here is a recap. Apparently, more and more employers, college admissions offices, and even sports coaches are under the mistaken impression that they have the right to request or even demand login and password information to potential employees or applicants’ Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube accounts so they can browse them for potentially damaging information contained in posts.

I’m sorry, but I think that’s completely, totally, heinously inappropriate. Not only is it a serious invasion of privacy, highly presumptuous, rude, obnoxious, patronizing and potentially illegal, but it probably won’t work. Any player, student, or applicant worth having will probably run away from these opportunities because they will see this amazing privacy breach for what it is, a serious overreach. In other cases, they will simply conceal their true identity with dummy accounts designed to retain the privacy we all know is our right. Others will simply close their accounts, if the job is serious enough.

My problem is that I don’t think anyone should have to choose between employment, education, sports, and privacy. Last time I checked, it was an inalienable right. I can see certain industries, like national security or defense, requesting accounts to be closed or suspended, but I cannot advocate requiring actual access to personal account information as a condition of anything valid or legitimate, ever, nor can I condone forced friendship for “monitoring purposes.” What happens in the public area is fair game. Scrutinize all you want any thing I post for public consumption. But my friends, my data, my private time outside of areas I agree to share are just that–MINE. You can pry them from my cold dead hands. If you dare.

Thoughts?