Succcess With Facebook For Business

You will notice from my blog posts that I have until now shied away from Facebook related topics.  Sure I've been on Facebook for a number of years and find it effective for communicating with friends and colleagues.  But I've always struggled using Facebook effectively for business.  Until recently that is.   More importantly I have found that the type of business you are in determines your success with Facebook.
Previously I was always dealing with small start-ups with no customer or supplier networks.  Recently I was working behind the scenes with an event catering company which operates in multiple locations throughout Ireland.   The first hundred LIKEs seems to come out of nowhere.  Offline measures are being taken to support online success even.  This started with management buy-in with support for the project and the need to increased brand visibility on the ground.  Absolutely nothing to do with the technical aspects of Facebook.  Yet this unexpected and  time consuming aspect of the project is now seen as the first vital step for online B2C success.   Encouraging staff members along with supplier and customers to provide content for posting will also make the task of communicating via Facebook easier.  Everyone seems to want to be seen or heard on the fan page, it just removes that fear of being short on content.  Thirdly training of the company's social media manager in relation to generating maximum engagement is import.

Success with Facebook for your business requires

1. Management buy-in
2. On the ground brand visibility
3. Encouraging your network to join in
4. Training to create maximum engagement.

Many companies will tell you that it is becoming harder and harder to create interaction/engagement on Facebook.  Engagement is vital so that Facebook's Edgerank algorithm ensures that your posts are seen by as many as possible. There are however a number of things that can be done.  These include:

1. Make sure you have a clear clickable link back to your website in your Facebook page's "About" section.
2. Tagging of staff and customers in any photographs. This will ensure that your Facebook content arrives in their newsfeeds.
3. Posting your news and photographs on your business network's fan pages, so that you can cross-promote one another.  And by all means, formally decide who you will partner with and co-promote.  Your suppliers and associates are an obviously first port of call here. 
4. Remember social media isn't about products, services or brands but the people behind these.
5. Brand the most important of your fan page photographs using your company name and logo with PicMonkey. 
6. Encourage employees to put "Visit our fan page at xxxx" in their "Work and Education - Employers" section on their on Facebook page.  This drives traffic and creates more business.
7. If you work at multiple locations, mention the specific location for clarity and be descriptive as this is all good for raking in Google. 
8. Brand your emails using Wisestamp
9. Create engagement using questions, comments and call-to-action.  Craft these so that a reply can be as short as possible. 
10. Watch your posting times, afternoons and evening are best, this is proven.
11. Try to post twice a day.  Some would recommend even four times a day.  But whatever you do be consistent.   Don't dump a whole pile of posts on one go and then maintain "radio silence" for a number of days.
12. Use competitions to reward customer participation on your Facebook page.
13. Failing all of the above you can always pay for advertising on Facebook.

I'm sure there's more.  If I have left out anything import or anything that you feel needs a mention please comment below.

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7 Reasons To Blog For Business

 We all know blogging is becoming more and more popular so why should we get involved?  I know everyone will have their own reasons in their own order of importance but here are a few you should consider.

1. Express Your Thoughts - Blogging is a perfect medium for this.  Typing out your thoughts at the time, will bring structure and clarify to your ideas.  There is plenty of scope to flesh them out. 
2. Share Your Thoughts - Having written a blog post it is easy to share it though the use of social media be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Reddit. 
3. Get FeedBack - By allowing others to comment on your blog or website you connect with the wider community and invite feedback on your ideas. 

By sticking to a common theme you can share your passion, interest and expertise in a particular subject matter.  This is often referred to as niche blogging.  Niche blogging has many business advantages.  It allows you to

1. Raise Your Personal Profile - Blogging is definitely a way of standing out from the crowd, gathering a crowd around you and delivery your personal message to that crowd.  While more and more people are doing this, it is not for everyone.  Its worth mentioning that the marketing guru Seth Godin started off by blogging.  His first book was a collection of his first blog posts. 
2. Raise Your Brand - Be it your personal brand or your comany brand, it will be elevated through association with a blog.  Even if you are blogging just to be heard your blog will become your brand.  All the more reason to keep your blog consistant or to a theme. 
3. Show That You Are Human - A blog allows the writer and his followers to express their opinions and will bring across the humanity of those involved rather than just a corporate image.  Emotion is convincing and builds long term loyalty.
4. Show Your Expertise - Again by sticking to a niche area you can demonstrate the depth of your knowledge on the subject matter.  The first question you will have to answer is "how much expertise should I share"?  You may want to test the water.  Many argue that in today's world where you can google anything, that information has no real value but its implimentation does.  This means that you give information  away freely but charge for the strategizing and application of your intellectual propertery.  Depending on your business model you may have varying views on this.  Either way sharing your expertise will establish you as an authority in your field.  In many cases demonstrating your expertise will automatically raise your personal and/or band profile. 
5. Position Yourself - Your blog will show both your point of view and your strengths within a given niche.  This will automatically position you, show how you are different, relative to others in your field.
6. Influence Others - Having established that you are a credible expert and that you have a position or point of view on why things in your industry are the way they are or where they are going, it becomes easy to influence your followers. 
7. Drive Traffic - My recent experence is that blogging literally forces you to drive traffic to your site.  After all you want to be heard, don't you?

If you have any comments on the above please leave a comment below.

Powerful Uses For Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool that is easy to overlook. Think of it as a monitoring station, where you can track news, blogs, video, discussion and books on your keyword subject matter.  You can set the frequency of the alert and have it delivered by email or RSS feed. 

1. Monitor Your Brand
One of the first uses of Google Alerts I came across was to monitor for customer chatter on your own brand, goods or service.  Find a conversation relevant to your company, product or service gives you the chance to jump in and engage with potential customers.  In the worst case of someone damning your brand or service you can jump in and intervene.

2. Monitor Your Competitors
Google Alerts is an ideal way of keeping abreast of your competitors' latest product launches or news.  It makes sense to know what your competition is doing.

3. Monitor For Customers
Keywords covering your product offering that your potential customers would be using can be monitored.  Just select "discussions", "as it happens" and select the frequency of update.
If someone is looking for your product you have a chance to get in front of the customer.  This is the core of inbound marketing, a social media strategy that drives lead generation.

4. Monitor Industry News
Google Alerts can be used to aggregate the best of the news in your industry sector.  You have the option of hand picking bits of news or feeding the highlights to your Facebook page or Twitter.  This can be done using the RSS feed selection.  The trick here would be to interweave this newsfeed with more personalised posts.  Blog aggregation can also be done with Google Alerts rather than Google Reader.  Again this is a handy way of compiling all relevant information for a blog of your own or an industry related company newsletter.

 Google Alerts