Facebook page management guide for businesses

Posted by Hayden Allen-Vercoe on April 19 2012
Filed in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

When managed correctly, your facebook brand page could be your most useful marketing tool; it can be the first port of call for your potential customer. Your facebook brand page can build a loyal fan base for your products and help people understand exactly what you are doing as a company.

When managed incorrectly, your facebook brand page could have a negative impact on your business; it could lead to a loss in confidence and / or sales. On any social media platform, when things go wrong it can be devastating.

Here is our facebook page management guide for businesses, so you can make sure your brand stands out.

1) Choose your admins wisely. Trusted, knowledgeable members of the team need to be in place. Essentially spokespersons for your brand, it is important you can rely on these team members. A good understanding of both the brand’s industry as well as social media and having the ability to use correct tone of voice are essentials.

2) Set a rhythm for your posts. This may vary from brand to brand, but there is a fine line between too many / too few. Too many updates may see your followers leave your page as they feel they are being ‘hounded’. Too few and these updates will get lost within their facebook feed. Measure how many impressions your post gets, hour on hour. By recording this over 2 – 3 weeks, you will have a good idea of when your last post stopped being effective. 1 – 2 posts every 24 hours should be your benchmark, you can increase or decrease as you see fit. Mashable have some more advice on this. 

3) Find the most effective time to post. This will vary depending on your brand. To determine, simply experiment – post before 08.00, post after 20.00 and lunchtime. Over a period of time, you will see which time gets the most engagement (likes / comments / shares).

4) Compose updates as a team. We have found best practise to be having one admin member originally compose updates and then pass them on for further ideas, proofreading, punctuation and to check they are factually correct (Important!).

5) Make your updates engaging. This is a social network, you need to try and keep things ‘social’. You wouldn’t go to a friend’s house and sell them a product. Try to apply the same on your facebook brand page, no hard sell. Making a topical statement relevant to your industry followed by a leading question works well. An image caption post can be popular on the right pages too. Relevant video links and jokes may also be a good area to pursue. Occasionally throw in new product news or links to your brand website, but do not go overboard on this.

6) Respond to all your posts comments. Good or (especially) bad, you have to participate in the conversation. Try to answer negative comments rather than just deleting, as this may further incite whoever posted originally. This is a sweeping statement, but in my experience, the majority of facebook users are a sensible bunch. However, you will always come across negativity in some way. It is how you deal with this that will make your facebook brand page stand out. Sometimes, just ‘Liking’ a comment will suffice.

7) Respond in a timely fashion. Point 1 stated ‘choose your admins wisely’, notice this was admins plural. Facebook is not 9 – 5, so it is important to have a number of staff who are willing and able to jump onto facebook whenever possible. If you can respond to a query / comment quickly, it demonstrates good customer service (see next point too).

8) Be a resource. At the start of this guide, I stated your facebook brand page ‘can be the first port of call for your potential customer’. I also said your admins should be savvy to your brands products / services. If a request for information on your brand comes in and isn’t answered or responded to poorly, the chances are that person will not want anything more from you. One of our client’s pages had a recent query from someone who had relocated to Canada. The follower was lamenting that they now could not purchase our client’s product. A quick search on the internet revealed some local stores that did retail the item. We quickly responded with links to the stores.

9) Give something back. There’s nothing like a facebook competition or a freebie to get your fans attention! This is a great way to build your audience and stir up some excitement on your brand page. Make sure you comply with facebook’s strict guidelines on competitions and use a 3rd party app like Easypromos or NorthSocial. We have found that a value of £300 and upwards can attract in a huge response.

10) Measure your achievements. Social media is free. No it is not, your time will play a key factor to the success of the page. With this effort in mind, it is worth measuring how you are doing. Facebook insights can give you vital information to where you are going right and where you are going wrong. Socialable wrote a really useful guide to insights, which is recommended. . Marketing Land also offer advice on insights.

A guide to Pinterest for brands

Posted by Hayden Allen-Vercoe on April 13 2012
Filed in Online Marketing Tips and Advice, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

Pinterest has soared this year, In the US Pinterest is now the 3rd most visited social network, beating G+ and Linkedin. People are clearly interested in Pinning. How can brands take advantage of Pinterest? Read our guide to Pinterest for brands.

A simple guide to Pinterest for brands

1. This is a simple one….request an invite. Go to Pinterest.com and enter your email. You will then have access to Pinterest via a return email, normally around 24 hours later. That’s it. For Pinterest, ease of use stays pretty much at this level.

2. When you receive your email invite, register as your company name. If you have divisions in other countries register accordingly, i.e. Orbital Media Network UK. This will form your Pinterest URL – http://www.pinterest.com/orbitalmedianetworkuk.

3. Add a ‘Pin It’ button to your brands website / blog. This is an easy process, just go to the Pinterest goodies section and select the buttons you need. Add Pinterest to your social sharing bar at the foot of each blog post, if you have this on your blog for other social networks. Pinterest supply the HTML code that needs to be inserted into your site.

4. Let followers on your other social networks know about your Pinterest page. If they like you enough, they may just follow you on Pinterest too.

5. On your brands facebook page, you can add a handy app called Pinvolve, which automatically allows users to re pin your images from your facebook brand page to their Pinterest boards. You can find out a little more and install the app here.

6. On your brands Pinterest page, create boards by, for instance, product category / services offered and pin all the images from your website / blog into relevant boards. This makes it a lot easier for your images to be shared through Pinterest.

7. Be keyword savvy with your image descriptions. Good descriptive long tail key phrases are required here. This is really important (see next point), do not be tempted to pin an image called ‘image1’. These long tail key phrases will have a better chance of being found and re pinned.

8. Pinterest generates links! When someone pins something from your site, Pinterest takes in the image and more importantly, a link.  The possibility of that pin being re-pinned will soon see a healthy amount of backlinks and higher Edgerank. See Search Engine Land for more on this.

9. Follow, Re pin and Like others. Mix it up with the big influencers on Pinterest. Find the major pinners (and ones who have a lot of re pins from their boards) and re pin their images. Like every other social network, make friends and these Pinteresters (?) may follow you back.

So that’s a quick guide on how Brands should start with Pinterest. What next?

How can Brands get the very best out of Pinterest?

1. Price it up. If you retail product, this is really good. Add a ‘£’ (or ‘$’) to your Pin description and Pinterest will automatically create a price banner (see image) for your photo. In the Pin description also add a link back to where this can be purchased (along with that descriptive long tail key phrase!!!). Your board has just become a secondary store front.

2. Hold a Contest. We know social network success can come from competitions and Pinterest is no different. A ‘Pin it to win it’, a ‘best board’ or ‘most re pins’ have already become popular. This level of pinning should generate a good level of following. As with all competitions, make sure you are within the social network’s terms of use.

3. Showcase a follower. Many brands use ‘fan of the month’ on facebook and the same can be applied to Pinterest. If a follower re pins your images, use it to your advantage. Appeal to their ego, big them up – they will be telling all! Great for increasing your following, but also great for ‘giving something back’.

4. Ask questions. Are you re launching a brand or service? Why not ask your followers to comment on your designs. This image led network is ideal for featuring new designs and for obtaining feedback.

5. This same method could work for an individual client. You can add more contributors to your Pinterest boards -that could be other team members / customers. Present your ideas and have some fresh ones presented right back. This would work well for a personal stylist for instance. One board from the stylist, one from the customer of various chosen clothes, giving a clear understanding of how to proceed. This creative engagement could be applied to a multitude of industries – not just fashion.

Social Media & SEO Summary January 2012

Posted by Hayden Allen-Vercoe on February 02 2012
Filed in Blog Network News, Online Marketing Tips and Advice, Online PR, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Analytics, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Research, Social Networking

What a month! Dominated by the launch of Google ‘Search plus your world’ (and the other Social Network’s discontent of this Google – centric search), and the SOPA Blackout, with the big guns in full support.

Here’s what happened in January 2012 in the world of Social Media and SEO.

SEO Summary January 2012

* Google’s social search, incorporating G+ in its search results, are discussed by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.

* Mashable’s Sarah Kessler comments it is too much, too soon – I agree.

* Erin Everhart, also from Mashable, comments on the SEO perspective of this new Social based search

This could all kick off - The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), has called for the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to investigate the recent search changes. There are concerns that the new features favour Google’s own services over those of competitors.

CNN Money even reported that Google may be sued for the new ‘Search plus your world’.

We need to remember that, according to Google, facebook & Twitter did not want Google to crawl their content, if this had been agreed search plus your world would have been so much more relevant.

And as far as SEO goes, I think it is important to highlight these personalised results are only visible if you are logged into Google. With G+ gaining more ground daily (see below!), more people are likely to be logged in to Google – which may become an SEO issue for the future.

But….Google said facebook and Twitter did not allow access to their social graphs and that’s why Search plus your world results are steered towards purely Google listings.

By the looks of it, not true. Engineers at Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have got together and produced a tool that shows clearly that Google’s new search could have been more driven to the user and not to Google. The new bookmarklet tool, ‘Don’t Be Evil’ goes beyond G+ search results. Search Engine Land have a full write up and install instructions.

Social Search as it should have been?

Meanwhile….

* WebProNews led with Google’s stunning announcement Larry Page claimed whilst discussing their results for the 2011 fiscal year; “Google had a really strong quarter ending a great year. Full year revenue was up 29%, and our quarterly revenue blew past the $10 billion mark for the first time. I am super excited about the growth of Android, Gmail, and Google+, which now has 90 million users globally – well over double what I announced just three months ago.”

This was posted by WebProNews on 19th Jan. To really see how fast this Social Network is growing, the same site also revealed that G+ users have now reached an estimated 100 million users. That’s an extra 10% growth in less than 2 weeks. Is Mr Zuckerberg concerned? I know I would be, G+ now looks to be a really viable contender to facebook.

* It’s not all good for Google though. Concerns over the new privacy settings may seem searchers adopt a new approach. Microsoft capitalized on this with a blog post ‘Google doesn’t put people first’. Google responded to these claims in their own blog post.

* The huge internet campaign led by the big players saw sites blacking out sections of their pages (or even complete sites) in support of anti SOPA. Examples of Google, Wikipedia and others during the ‘SOPA Blackout’ can be found here.

Not sure what all the fuss is about? You need to know – it affects each and every one of us. Mashable cover why SOPA is dangerous very effectively. Scary reading.

But, the blackouts seem to have worked! (For now). Mashable report on Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, pulling the bill. SOPA is dead.

Social Media Summary January 2012

* Social Media Examiner mentions Google’s new social integration, as well as highlighting Twitters new embeddable tweets and a really interesting, useful and free email tool for Gmail users – Brand My Mail, where you can add blog posts, Twitter or facebook updates and much more to your emails.

* Hubspot’s Pamela Vaughan also talks about Google’s “biggest social search update yet”.

* Bharati Ahuja discusses Google+ “as a complete blogging platform” at WebPro Tech.

* Brian Solis shares 10 social media strategies for defining a successful 2012 at his blog.

* Pinterest continues to grow, with Etsy being the latest to add a pin it button.

* More social growth? Danny Goodwin of Search Engine Watch  reports that YouTube is now serving 4 billion videos a day. If you are a stat freak, click the link, there are some more YouTube related stats there!

* Pen.io continues to grow as the fastest online content publisher. Although basic, it is also very effective at publishing a web page online quickly. We like.

* Too many Social Networks to handle?!! Macworld report that Twitter have acquired social media feed condenser Summify. Summify summarizes Social content in people’s Google, Facebook and Twitter social media feeds and delivers a daily summarized version via email, a website or an iPhone.

* Google were not the only ones to reveal good financial results for 2011. Facebook has just filed its IPO for 2011 with a figure of $3.71 Billion.

So in the first month of 2012, although Google has reported huge success, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft have all expressed some negative views. This year is going to be interesting, with a few more scraps to come.

I cannot wait!

Orbital Media brings thousands to Sudocrem Ireland

Posted by Hayden Allen-Vercoe on January 16 2012
Filed in Online PR, Orbital Media Press Coverage, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

Last October, we launched a campaign on behalf of Sudocrem Ireland, with the intention of increasing their presence on social media outlets and to celebrate Sudocrem’s 80th anniversary.

Read more…

What can 4G do? To 4G, or not to 4G, that is the question

Posted by Hayden Allen-Vercoe on January 06 2012
Filed in Online Marketing Tips and Advice, Social Networking

If you’re reading this on your mobile then you are either hooked up to a wi-fi hotspot or using a 3G connection. I hope you are sitting snugly and enjoying a coffee from a multi-national coffee house as you read this – it wouldn’t seem right otherwise, would it?

So 4G is coming in the near(ish) future, 2013 to be precise. What can 4G do? We will get to that, but firstly, what is 3G?

In simple terms 3G is the third generation of mobile internet technology. 3G currently sits at a maximum of 14Mbps downstream and up to 5.8 Mbps upstream. But is 3G currently sufficient – the answer is yes. Current smart phones and other mobile web facilities are built around the current 3G system. That is not to say that they will not be able to cope with 4G, because many of them will, but it means that it is currently sufficient for the majority of users who utilise 3G for their mobiles.

If 3G is currently sufficient for most mobile users, then what can 4G do?

Two issues plague mobile technology: one speed and the other coverage. 4G technology seems to offer an emphatic challenge to the latter of those problems. New 4G technology promises speeds of up to 100Mbps when mobile and 1Gbps for a stationary user. Quite a leap from the current 3G format! 4G offers countless possibilities for the mobile internet user; they can stream video content in finer detail, download musically at a greater rate and improve general browsing speeds.

The other key area for mobile technology, coverage, is however, not so empathically solved. One of the key areas of debate surrounding the move to 4G is the current lack of accessible 3G signal. Therefore, without full 3rd generation coverage, is it too much too soon for 4G?

Read more…