How To Activate Targeting Options For Facebook Timeline Posts
Posted: May 6, 2013 Filed under: Community Management, Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Engagement | Tags: facebook, targeting, content, social media marketing, post targeting, timeline, context, how to, Facebook how to 1 Comment »
Do you have access to Facebook’s targeting options for your timeline posts on your business or brand Page?
Funnily enough, I’ve found that this feature isn’t enabled by default for many Facebook Pages, which means you may need to make a few adjustments to gain access.
If you don’t have access to Facebook’s timeline post targeting options, no worries.
You can fix this by adjusting your privacy settings. Skip to the step-by-step instructions below for how to adjust your privacy settings to be given access to this powerful feature.
Being able to target an audience for your Facebook updates can be incredibly powerful.
It allows you to create and publish content for your audience with added context, which will make your posts all the more valuable. Also, if you have messaging or content that is only relevant or valuable to a portion of your audience, you can target your updates specifically for them, so as to not spam the rest of your audience and risk dreaded ‘unlikes’.
Targeting your posts is win-win for you and your consumers.
Benefits of targeting your posts include higher engagement and interaction with your content, and your audience will see greater value in the content you provide to them, which can lead to greater brand affinity, loyalty, virality, or stronger purchase intent to list a few.
Currently Facebook allows you to target based on your audience’s gender, relationship status, educational status, interests, age, geographic location, and language.
Following are step-by-step instructions for how to gain access to Facebook’s powerful timeline post targeting options on your business or brand Page:
STEP 1: In the Admin Panel, click on the ‘Edit Page’ drop-down menu
STEP 2: Click ‘Edit Settings’
STEP 3: Ensure you’re on the ‘Manage Permissions’ tab
STEP 4: Check the ‘Post privacy gating’ check box
STEP 5: Click ‘Save Settings’
That’s it! Those few easy steps and you’ve unlocked a whole new world of possibilities for your business or brand on Facebook.
If you have just gained access to Facebook’s targeting options, how do you plan to utilize them?
If you’ve been using Facebook’s targeting options for some time, how have you effectively been using them?
It would be awesome to chat with you about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial, so please don’t be shy to share your thoughts.
Schedule Your Success By Creating A Social Media Publication Calendar
Posted: May 2, 2013 Filed under: Community Management, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing | Tags: consumer engagement, content calendar, continuous improvement, publication calendar, SEO, social media, social media marketing 2 Comments »
The reality of social media and content marketing is such that no matter what business you are in, you are also in the publication business.
Publishing meaningful content is incredibly important for businesses to cultivate, maintain, and grow their business. A strong digital and social media presence can be a deciding factor for many consumers who are increasingly looking to digital and social platforms to assist them with their purchase decisions.
To develop a strong social media and digital presence, it is critical for businesses to create and sustain regular publication calendars.
The regularity that each business publishes content is really dependent on your respective audience and what platform you are publishing on. For some businesses this could mean publishing content several times per day, and for others it could mean once per month, or longer.
Regardless of how frequently you need to publish new content, it is absolutely necessary that you do so with dependability, and that the content you publish is strategically relevant to your business. Creating a publication calendar can assist with both of these things.
Following are a few of the reasons why creating and sustaining a regular publication calendar is imperative:
Keep consumers interested and involved with your business
Think about the websites and blogs that you visit on a daily basis. It’s likely that they’re constantly being updated with interesting content that is relevant to you. If those sites weren’t updated frequently and dependably, you probably wouldn’t have the same interest in them as you do.
When establishing a publication calendar for you your business or brand, ensure that you’re going to be providing new content frequently enough to keep your audience interested, engaged, and coming back for more.
Dominate search results
Search engines index some types of content independently. Blog posts and videos are prime examples of content formats that appear this way.
If your business or brand is producing content in accordance to a regular publication calendar, your business is going to be more likely to dominate search results for your business, industry, category, and related search terms. Ultimately this will lead to greater exposure, an influx of leads, and if you are able to convert, sales.
Feed your content pipeline
This is an obvious one, but still worth mentioning. Creating a publication calendar for your brand will help to keep content creators in your organization organized and focused on producing content on a regular and ongoing basis. This will result in a steady stream of material to feed your content pipeline.
Show consumers that you’re in business!
Have you ever arrived on a business’ website, blog, or social media network to see that their last content update was 7 months ago and thought, ‘I wonder if these guys are even in business anymore’?
Even if you haven’t thought exactly this, it leaves consumers with a negative impression of a business or brand when they appear to an ill-maintained digital or social media property. It can read as a lack of enthusiasm, dedication, or commitment to your business, which are all thoughts you don’t want your consumers to have.
The simple solve is – you guessed it – to create a regular publication calendar and stick with it. If you’re going to be publishing new content relatively infrequently, it might be worthwhile communicating your schedule in a highly visible place such as your ‘About’ page so visitors will understand when they should check back in for new content.
Continuous improvement and provision of value
Another great benefit to creating and maintaining a regular publication calendar is that it will keep you thinking about your business, consumers, category, products, services, innovation, and any number of ways you can provide value to your consumers through social media.
This will force you to stay relevant, to develop and grow the way you think about all aspects of your business, and your consumers will thank you for it by seeing you as a trusted source of value and leader in your category. Results of this can include increased brand affinity, loyalty, strengthened purchase intent, and more.
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There are a huge number of benefits that publishing content on a regular and ongoing basis can afford. Creating and executing against a well-crafted publication calendar can help to keep you, your social media team, and social media contributors organized and working to maximize success.
How does a publication calendar help your organization stay organized on social media?
Have you ever had a negative experience from not employing a publication calendar?
What are the greatest benefits that you have experienced from executing against a publication calendar?
It would be great to discuss this with you further in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial
Why Putting The Intern In Charge Of Social Media Is A Recipe For Disaster
Posted: April 25, 2013 Filed under: Community Management, Social Media Marketing | Tags: achieving success, best practices, community management, intern, management, results, social media management, social media marketing 4 Comments »
When determining how to manage social media marketing efforts, many businesses – particularly smaller businesses – default to putting the intern in charge.
And why not?
They have time. They’re young and ‘into social media’. They have 1,000 Facebook friends, and 2,000 Twitter followers.
They’re perfect, right?
Well, not exactly. Putting an intern in charge of your business’ social media marketing is all but a guaranteed recipe for disappointment. Here are a few reasons why:
Do you expect them to fully understand and drive results for your business?
In order for social media marketing activity to generate real results for your business, a solid understanding of your business is required. Sure you can have others assist with developing your social media strategy, but at the end of the day, the person/people responsible for bringing it to life on a day-to-day basis, and those who will be engaging and interacting with your audience, need to know how to do these things in meaningful, impactful, and strategically relevant ways to your business.
Do you think they’ll be able to correlate all of your business’ functions and apply them to social media activity?
Activity on social media tends to yield the best results when it works in concert with other business functions such as marketing, advertising, sales, human resources, operations, customer service, and more. Simply put, for interns or junior employees to be able to draw connections between all of these functions and correlate them to appropriate efforts on social media will be all but impossible for them to pull off with any level of effectiveness.
Are you expecting them to be champions of social media for your organization?
Particularly in organizations with small social media teams, or perhaps no social media team, you need individuals involved to be real champions for your social media marketing efforts to ensure they are sustained and carried out with dedication and integrity.
Additionally, they should be able to fulfill responsibilities including the delegation of content creation, work with individuals that are resistant to contributing to your business’ social media activity, measure, analyze, interpret and make learning from analytics applicable and actionable, justify resources for social media to management, and many more. If your interns can fulfill these types of responsibilities, I’d love to know where you’re finding them.
What results do you expect to achieve in the next 4 months?
By their nature, internships are limited term employment and learning opportunities for those who fill them. Social media, on the other hand, requires long-term and consistent investment and effort. Needless to say, it’s far less than ideal to have to train someone new to fulfill your business’ needs on social media every three to four months. Also, it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve long-term goals without long-term leadership and consistency.
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These are just a few of the reasons why putting an intern in charge of your business’ social media presence is not advisable. Just like any business function, achieving real results through social media requires experience, expertise, strategy, problem solving, management, project management, and many more qualities that just aren’t characteristic of, or found, in your average intern.
In your opinion, what are some of the drawbacks of putting an intern in charge of a business’ social media efforts?
If you’ve hired or assigned an intern to manage your social media properties, how did it work for you?
If you have any thoughts on this, it would be great to chat with you more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial
It’s Time For A Little Social Media Spring-Cleaning
Posted: April 1, 2013 Filed under: Community Management, Social Media | Tags: about page, facebook, google+, linkedin, profile, social media profiles, twitter, visual assets, youtube 1 Comment »
Spring has sprung – at least it has here in Toronto – and there’s no better time to do a little spring-cleaning of your business or brand’s social media presence.
Take a few minutes out of your busy day to make sure that your social media presence is doing your business justice and ensure that no consumers stumble across anything that is out-of-date, embarrassing, or will leave them with a negative impression of your business.
Here are a few things you can do quickly to ensure that your social media presence is giving your audience and consumers an amazing first impression of your business or brand:
Delete profiles on social media properties that are inactive
Social media is an ever-changing landscape. It seems that there is a ‘new Facebook’ being introduced on a quarterly basis, and other smaller networks being launched almost every month. If you’re like me, you’re quick to register profiles to check out these new platforms to see what they’re all about. Also, sometimes it’s decided that the utilization of a certain profile is no longer strategically meaningful to your business, so you stop updating on that network.
The problem here is that these profiles frequently will outlive our interest in maintaining them. Take a few minutes to delete any profiles you’ve set up as your business or brand that are not actively being updated, and that you’re not actively engaging your audience on. The benefits of doing this are twofold: first, you’ll be able to forget about these profiles and focus your attention on the social media properties that are yielding the best results, and second, you’ll eliminate the chances of new consumers having a negative first experience with your brand by landing on one of these dead profiles.
Update profiles
When is the last time you updated the profile or ‘about’ page on your social media properties or web site? It’s probably been a while, right? Take a few minutes to review your profiles on each social media property to ensure they are giving consumers an up-to-date view on what your business is all about, what you do, and what value you’re offering your audience for sticking around to engage with your business or brand.
Also, when’s the last time you updated all of the visual assets on your social media properties? While there certainly is value in featuring a consistent profile picture to maintain instant recognition of your business or brand when it appears in news feeds or timelines, updating your header or cover images is a great way to give your profiles a fresh look, more accurately reflect your offerings, and give your consumers a more up-to-date sense of what your business stands for.
Cross-promotional links
It’s probably worth doing a double-check on all of your cross-promotional links to ensure none have broken for any reason, and also to ensure that you you’re not linking to any of your newly unregistered or inactive social media accounts. Who knows why, but for some reason, every now and then I’ll find one of my own links has broken and needs to be re-linked. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience, maybe you haven’t, but it’s worth checking out.
Transition to new social media page/channel layouts
On an ongoing basis, social media networks are updating the layouts of their pages. We saw this last year with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more. There have been several other high-profile updates made this year, so if you haven’t transitioned to the new page layouts, now might be the time.
Earlier this year, Google+ gave users the option of featuring a massive header image. Check out Tiffany Tcheng’s article for details and sources of inspiration here.
Also, YouTube is currently transitioning to a new channel layout with unified header image area that scales automatically for different devices – PC, tablet, mobile and television. Check out YouTube’s Channel Art Guidelines here.
Do you have any additional social media spring-cleaning tips to share?
How do you ensure your social media profiles and presence stay up-to-date on an ongoing basis?
It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial
Related Reading: Who Are You? The Importance Of A Complete Profile
One HUGE Social Media Opportunity That The Grammys Completely Missed
Posted: February 12, 2013 Filed under: Community Management, Social Media Strategy | Tags: grammy awards, grammys, second screen, social media integration, social television 3 Comments »
It would be remiss to not start this post by stating the obvious; that the 2013 Grammys were a social media juggernaut.
15.4 million social interactions (source: Trendrr.tv)
88% of all Grammy-related messages sent were from a mobile device, a 31% increase from last year (source: Billboard.com)
2.6 million uses of the official #GRAMMYs hashtag (source: Billboard.com)
Beyond the stats, there were many positive lessons to be learned from the Grammys social media performance. Such positives include relentlessly promoting official handles and hashtags, highlighting the value social media participants could expect by following along online, and being active on various social media networks during the event.
There was, however, one incredibly glaring missed opportunity.
Despite all of LL Cool J’s promotion, social media fan engagement failed to play a meaningful role in the Grammy Awards television broadcast.
With so much online discussion and participation, the only social media commentary that made it to the airwaves were a few shallow comments that were both lacking in substance, and resulted in the provision of virtually no added value. Why do we need to be read a tweet about how hot Taylor Swift is? We don’t.
Instead, imagine how awesome it would have been if the social media managers behind the Grammys were identifying and responding to tweets and comments on the air that would have altered the programming in an interesting, entertaining, or educational way. Tweets and comments that a response to which would generate further social media discussion and commentary, or that would give social participants a sense of being rewarded for their interesting questions, comments and discussion points.
It would have been amazing if discussions in social media resulted in an impromptu behind the scenes look at the Grammys, an interesting interview question being asked to one of the hundreds of artists in attendance, an unique perspective or prediction being shared, or something of the like.
In the end, despite the amazing number of discussions that were occurring online, the on air impact of social media turned out to be little more than LL Cool J repeatedly imploring fan participation. It would have been nice to see all of those conversations, and all of those voices, result in something more meaningful.
What is your take on the Grammys social media performance?
Do you have any killer examples of a live televised event that has used social media to positively impact or influence the broadcast?
It would be great to discuss your thoughts more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial
