Facebook Best Practices

Welcome to our series on Facebook Best Practices. Today we share a little information about Facebook with you along with the first 5 of the 20 best practices we will share with you throughout this series - so be sure to check back!

If you build it, they will come? Perhaps in baseball, but not necessarily when it comes to people (i.e. potential customers) finding your Facebook page. Those potential consumers ARE using social media…. but it’s up to YOU to make sure they can find you. Your fan page can be one of your organization’s richest sources of interaction, R&D and lead generation…. as long as you’ve done a good job of making people aware of it!

First, go to facebook.com/username and secure a custom URL for your Facebook page. Then, put that URL everywhere it’s appropriate: your website; TV, radio and print ads; signs, banners, table tents and window clings, door flyers – all marketing pieces; and your email signature.

Don’t just tell people “Find us on Facebook!” If they conduct a search for your business on Facebook, they may find many similar pages that are not yours. Make it easy for people – direct them to your URL.

The numbers associated with expertise in integrating social media into your business marketing can be mind-blowing! And with social media continuing to grow, the numbers can only get better, as businesses better understand how to effectively engage people.

A report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate reveal people feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of on Facebook. 51% of Facebook fans said they are more likely to purchase from at least a few brands they are fans of on Facebook. 60% said that being a Facebook fan of a brand would cause them to be more likely to recommend that brand to a friend.

Unless you have a built-in audience like the huge brands (think Nike, Coca-Cola), you’ll need to help drive traffic to your fan base. There are myriad creative ways to promote your Facebook page, one of the most complete lists below, put together by Justin Wise on Social Media Examiner:

#1: Put your fan page URL in your email signature: How many emails do you send per day? Now imagine each email you send is a chance for someone new to find out about your awesome fan page! This URL goes out on every email I send! Talk about free publicity!

#2: Write a blog post about your new fan page: Give your readers five compelling reasons why they should join your fan page. Don’t beg; just give reasons they’ll benefit.

#3: Tag other, well-trafficked fan pages in your updates: Their fans might see your page and you may get some cross-traffic.

#4: Ask your Twitter followers to join your fan page: Give some compelling reasons why your Twitter base should join your Facebook community. If Twitter is the new water cooler, think of your fan page as an invite to come in and chat. For example, tweet something like, “Wanting more conversation than 140 characters will allow? Join us on Facebook at http://fb.me/awesomefanpage.” A nice and simple ask that will get results.

#5: Invest in Facebook ads: They’re easier than you think and you can spend as little (or as much) as you’d like.

Source: Social Media Examiner, Justin Wise

Five Star Conference

Our Fidelity Phoenix team attended The Five Star Conference in Dallas last week. Highlights included a variety of high profile speakers, lots of informative meetings and the happy hour cigar lounge hosted by Fidelity Phoenix.

Melissa Shapiro, AVP/Director of Sales for Fidelity Phoenix attended the conference and provides a recap:

Overall general consensus of big servicers and banks is that inventory is being released now and will continuously grow over the next few months. The past 18 months has been a series of stop and go due to government involvement and regulations like HAFA and HAMP, the class action lawsuits against the banks with ROBO signings and MERS and the banks freezing all activity in order to look at their processes under a microscope to mitigate future risk. Homeowners who have stopped paying their mortgage has now had ample time to be given every opportunity to save their house with loan mod, SS, deed in lieu and government assistance programs. The sand has finally run out and the banks are filing foreclosure proceedings. Bank of America has started first and already in the Western States, including AZ has doubled in foreclosing filings.

An entire breakout session was dedicated to non traditional ways of liquidating REO’s with non profits and bulk sales. And below are some of the main takeaways from the conference:

· Asset management companies are revamping their existing preferred agent list based on expired information.

· Update your applications and resume’s regularly.

· BPO’s are extremely important. The highest isn’t necessarily the best, accuracy is what gets you the best scorecards.

· When applying to outsourcers/banks, send a recent copy of your score card to get noticed.

· Short sales are becoming more aggressive and easier to get through. The banks would rather liquidate through a SS than an REO. Better overall PR and always is a cost savings.

Part 2: What You Need To Know About Google And Google+

If you’re still looking for an invite, ask on Twitter or among your techie friends; post your request on your Facebook wall. You’ll soon be swimming in them.

Then what? First off, edit your profile page. Click the red “About” Link, click the blue “Edit Profile” button in the corner. Put in a photo. Add some information to your “introduction.” Add some links to the links area to the right, but don’t overdo it.

Probably the most important part of profile editing that people don’t know much about is to go to where it says “Employment”, and write something REALLY interesting in the “current” one. Your writing needs to let people know who you are, what you do, and where. Why is it so important? Because when someone sees your name anywhere on Google+ and they hover their mouse over that content, that’s what they see as the representation of you. That little bit of text explains who you are to them at a glance. Don’t write a novel, but don’t leave it blank or put something lame there. It’s a power move; first impressions count!

Everything else in your profile section is up to you.

Circles are how you group and organize people on Google+. The first thing most people do is rename the circles into something more useful. Name as it makes sense for you and your business and interests; everyone thinks differently. But make sure you do this step. Organizing people LATER is painful, and it is important to put people into lists that match your interests and needs. Editing circles is reasonably easy.

Now, find interesting people to connect with on Google+. You can go to FindPeopleOnPlus.com. There’s also group.as. Those are great for just striking out into the wild to look for people.

Once you add a few interesting people, go to THEIR profile page and see who they’ve added to circles. Now, you’re finding some interesting people.

To be an active participant, post interesting things. You can create 4 types of posts in Google+:

1. Link posts.

2. Video posts.

3. Photo posts.

4. Location posts.

You can write a post and offer a link to something interesting (like your latest blog post). You can upload a photo and write something to go along with it. You can point to YouTube videos or upload a video. And you can post location information, if that’s your thing.

The other thing you can do is share other people’s interesting posts. There’s a “share” button below most posts. That lets you find the good stuff and share it with your growing community. One point: If someone else has shared something, and you see it in your stream, and then you decide to share it, it’s nice form to credit the person who shared it with you via the text above the share. (So, if Chris posts a funny photo, and Dave shares it, and then Margie finds it in Dave’s stream and decides to share it, Margie clicks share, and says “found via Dave” in the text). Make sense? It’s a nice thing to do.

The advantage that Google+ has over Twitter is the comments. People are having really great time contributing to really good conversations in the comments sections. Comments on photos are just amazing, and in other forms, it depends on what you’re putting out, but people seem to really enjoy the back and forth. Try to be the #1 commenter on your account. Respond as often as you can.

Video Hangout is basically Google’s group chat feature. Instead of directly asking a friend to join a group chat, users instead click “start a hangout” and they’re instantly in a video chatroom alone. At the same time, a message goes out to their social circles, letting them know that their friend is “hanging out.” Friends can then join the hangout as long as they have been placed in a circle that was invited by the person who created the Hangout. You can do some fun things with them. Michael Dell (yes, THAT Michael Dell) does all kinds of conversations with his. It’s really a great way to see what Google+ might be able to do for you as a platform.

The reasons to love Google+ are that it’s clean, it’s fast, it’s useful, people are very engaged, and it’s got a strong boost to you being found in web searches.

Sources: Chris Brogan, chrisbrogan.com

What You Need To Know About Google And Google+

With the recent launch of Google+, there’s been considerable focus paid to debating the merits of Google+ vs. Facebook. However, beyond direct comparison of apples and oranges, there’s a bigger story at play here for Google+.

Since its start in 1998, Google has been building and amassing an entire universe of web tools. From email and calendars to Google Docs, advertising, payment processing, site analytics, mobile, and third party apps for everything in between, the ‘Google Universe’ now offers a complete hub for its users.

The missing piece in this Google Universe has always been social…until now. Google+ has the capacity to bring all these tools together with people at the center of their new social hub. One key element of Google+ is a focus on targeted sharing within subsets of your social group, which are what Google calls Circles. Circles are simply small groups of people that you can share with.

With the addition of Google+, small businesses now have a complete hub in Google that extends far beyond document sharing. Google offers a viable web-based alternative for all that’s needed to keep the wheels turning day in and day out. In short, many feel it’s becoming possible to run an entire business based on the Google ecosystem alone.

Google Apps Marketplace and Google’s Chrome Web Store are extensive marketplaces for web applications that host everything from accounting to project management applications, CRM to full blow ERP applications. Google+ Circles provides the social glue for co-workers who are using Google’s business apps.

Google+ has the potential to become the feed or conversation manager for all the apps that are managing activity inside of a business. It offers an expansive, easy to manage, easy to unite all business communications within a Google+ feed.

Small businesses are migrating, over 3 million so far, away from expensive on premise software solutions to Google Apps for their IT infrastructure in the cloud.

When we look back over the history of computing, we see a recurring trend where users migrate from individual tools to a unified platform. It’s a similar pattern with every computing platform since the mainframe.

This same pattern is set to repeat with Google, particularly in the small business segment. It’s no secret that small businesses have already been looking to replace desktop software and move toward a web-only environment. Online tools offer an ease of use, accessibility, and low cost that typical enterprise software just can’t match. And even web-based apps can be cumbersome if users are required to jump back and forth between apps and vendors to access point solutions for each bit of functionality.

For the small business, we know that simplicity is best. With Google, capital spending goes way down as users can access these tools on the web, and largely for free. Even more importantly, life is much easier for the small business as the full suite of tools is in one place, and integrated right out of the box.

Unlike Facebook, Google+ is less about a place to hang out and connect with friends. Rather, it’s a way to tie all the pieces of the Google Universe together and give easy access to the full suite of Google tools through a single toolbar. History shows that the benefit of an integrated system will draw small businesses away from point, best-of-breed solutions.

Sources: Ray Grainger, Mavenlink; Mashable

Twitter Stats That Will Get You To Tweet Your Brand

Twitter is a fairly "leveling" medium. While it is true that large corporations can put more resources behind their social media efforts than small businesses, Twitter's strength is being able to have a one-on-one conversation that just happens to be in front of tons of people.

Perhaps the best use of Twitter for brands of all sizes is to communicate with their customers and clients. They no longer send emails or call the 800 number with a complaint. They tweet. It is fast and easy. If small businesses set up a Twitter account only to be ready to engage with their customers who have something to say about their brand or services, they are ahead of the game.

Are you unsure about setting up an account on Twitter? Maybe you feel like it’s not right for your brand or your line of work, maybe you think that anything you would have to say would fall on deaf ears because your target audience don’t use twitter. Maybe you’re wrong…

The following statistics indicate that Twitter is fast and furiously becoming the social media platform used by everyone. The stats should show that it doesn’t matter if you are female, male, have kids …if you are wealthy, broke, employed or looking for work – you still have an audience on Twitter. Take a look and see for yourself – the stats also show that even if you haven’t got a presence on Twitter, people could still be talking about you….so maybe you should be listening?

Over the last 5 years -

· There are 200,000,000 registered Twitter users

· Almost 88% of people have awareness of Twitter and its existence

· There are 450,000 new Twitter accounts created everyday

· Meaning there are 5.2 accounts created every second of everyday

So we can longer claim that’s it unknown – there is a huge audience out there, right at your fingertips. That is a lot of people in a short space of time that have been convinced by its power.

· There are one billion tweets posted every week

· 180,000,000 every day

· 138,888 every minute

· Over 1,650 every second

· Just 5% of Twitter users create 75% of the content tweeted

· There are 1.6 billion search queries everyday

· Meaning that there are 18,000 search queries every second

Still worried that you’re too old to be using it or that your brand or company is the wrong sort to be using twitter? Take a look at the numbers then…

· 46% of Twitter users are female

· 54% are male – very equal demographics

· 53% don’t have children

· 47% do have children – time doesn’t seem to be an issue

· The majorty of twitter users are aged between 30 and 49 - perfect age group

· 43% of people follow a brand on Twitter for special deals/offers

· 75% of users are more likely to purchase from a brand they follow – good headstart

· 67% of users are likely to recommend a brand they follow to other users

Ok….but maybe you’re still worried about the freedom of speech that users have. The fact that anyone can write anything about you, your brand, your services or your skills…

· 1,000,000 people view tweets about customer service each week

· 80% of those tweets are negative and critical

· As much as 75% of traffic comes from sources outside Twitter

We’ll let you in on a secret – whether you have a twitter account or not people can write whatever they want, whenever they want – they will get heard and it will get commented on and it will get passed on. Surely it’s better to be listening in on those criticisms, dealing with them and changing things for the better. Let people know you’re listening.

Maybe you don’t have a brand or a company or even a job – we’ve got a stat that should get you tweeting nonetheless:

· Up to 85% of companies are using social media as part of their recruitment

Or maybe you don’t have the time to be on twitter in the middle of the day and therefore think you would miss out on most activity anyway….

· 5pm is the best time to be retweeted

So no excuses then? Looks like Twitter has an answer for everything….

With the social media monitoring tools out there, it is easy to stay on top of the relevant tweets and help your brand. Through these tools, brands can search for key words (like their brand name or products they sell) to find places where they can start or participate in a conversation. And it is through these conversations where relationships can start, consumers can turn into customers and one-time customers can turn into loyal customers. Twitter is huge, just look at the stats again. But don’t let it overwhelm you -- focus on the small part where you live.

Stats Source: Michelle Carvill, socialmediatoday