Thursday, May 17, 2012

SOCIAL MEDIA AUDITWe tend to create the social media presence for our businesses in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right? New tools pop up we just HAVE  to try, or our network of connections asks us to join a new network in order to communicate with them.

The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused.

That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to see yourself as others might see you and judge if you are delivering the message you think you’re sending.

It’s also a good way to evaluate what networks are working for you, which aren’t and if you are using social media efficiently.

With my own coaching clients, social media audits are done quarterly as a regular part of the social media team’s outreach, but frankly most companies are doing really well if they do a social audit once a year, if at all.

What we’ve pulled together for you here is a downloadable workbook to use to do your own social media audit based on what I’ve learned coaching companies large and small about social media. I guarantee you will have a much clearer picture of how the rest of the world sees your social media outreach efforts and it’s very likely to  surprise you!

With each section in the workbook you’ll find tips to make your next audit easier, fine-tune your social media outreach to make it more efficient and do a little network spring cleaning to boot!

Ready to do your own social media audit? Get the ebook and get started! We tend to create our social media presence in an organic fashion, which is the natural way to grow relationships right?

The problem is; as you explore new tools and meet new people who invite you to join them on other networks, your messaging and your social media presence overall can easily get confused.

That’s why it’s a good idea to conduct a social media audit every so often to step back and get a 10K foot level. This allows you to see yourself as others might see you and judge if you are delivering the message you think you’re sending.

It’s also a good way to evaluate what networks are working for you, which aren’t and if you are working efficiently.

With my own clients, social media audits are done quarterly as a regular part of the social media team’s outreach, but frankly most companies are doing really well if they do a social audit once a year, if at all.

What we’ve pulled together for you here is a downloadable workbook to use to do your own social media audit based on what I’ve learned coaching companies large and small about social media. I guarantee you will have a much clearer picture of how the rest of the world sees your social media outreach efforts and it’s very likely to  surprise you!

With each section in the workbook you’ll find tips to make your next audit easier, fine-tune your social media outreach to make it more efficient and do a little network spring cleaning to boot!

Ready to do your own social media audit? Get the ebook and get started!



e-book-smaudit2



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Social media efficiency for nonprofitsI talk to nonprofits about various aspects of social media just about every day. By and large people get the value of building community around their cause. They get the relatively manageable expense of leveraging social media to raise visibility for their nonprofit, find funders, advocates, and  volunteers when compared to more traditional marketing channels. They WANT to use social media effectively. They know it works and they’ve seen the success cases.

So what’s stopping them from diving in? Two things are the biggest issues.
1. The learning curve to get up to speed on the latest techniques and networks
2. The time it takes to learn it, implement it and see the value delivered.

This is especially true for the small to mid-size nonprofit who may have a 1-2 person marketing team, some eager interns and volunteers but not quite enough direction to pull a comprehensive strategy together. Everybody is stretched thin and there just isn’t enough time in the day for “all that social media stuff”.

I want to share with you some of the ways we organize our social media teams at Tatu Digital Media when we are working with clients. Some of the tricks of the trade that help manage a social media engagement plan with a small team. How to pull together an editorial calendar, a social media schedule and decide what social networks are the best use of your bandwidth. Where to get help creating content and what you can actually automate without risking your relationships. How to set up listening tools to do a lot of the work for you.

I’m doing a free webinar on May 30,2012 at 1 PM PST. for nonprofits of all sizes, free of charge and sponsored by my friends at My Dutch Uncle, who provide business services for nonprofits.

I’ll be joined by their Social Media Czar Spencer Doyle, and we’ll talk about increasing the efficiency of your  social  outreach so you can get on with the business of your nonprofit!

Fill in the form now to register for the one-hour webinar.

 

 

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By Golly people like us!Many Facebook page owners are disappointed with the results they are getting from their Facebook pages. Why? Sometimes because they think they’ll put up a page and their fan base will flock to the site, dynamically post content on their own and discuss it with their peers, all without much effort from the community manager (if there is one).

Hooey. This just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a vibrant community and are expanding it to Facebook.

So what do you do?

  1. Quit broadcasting
    If you tell me everything I need to know through your Facebook page, and it reads like your email newsletter, then that’s all I’m going to do. Scan it, extract information and move on.
  2. Quit marketing
    If I feel like you’re streaming ads to me and calling it interaction I’m going to tune you out. I may scan the headline in my newsfeed, but unless there’s a hook to something for me, I’m not going to read further. I want to be talked TO not AT.
  3. Find out who I am
    Did you ever go look to see who someone was after they fanned your Facebook page? I’m guessing that less than 5%  of page owners, and maybe 50% of community managers would answer yes. What a missed opportunity to learn more about your market, what they like, and what value they might be able to add to your Facebook community!
  4. Like me back
    Let’s say you sell photography equipment. Wouldn’t it be useful to you to know if your fans are photographers? What if you not only liked my Facebook page but shared my work on your page? What if you made a comment on my photo about how beautiful it was? I’d be grateful. I’d tell my friends. I might even buy something.
  5. Give me something to do
    Photos and videos make us think, or laugh, encourage us to add a comment and share with our friends. Give me a poll (that isn’t a focus group question and I’ll give you my opinion.
  6. Gimme respect
    Show enough respect to your fans to say please and thank you. To ask opinions and respect the answers. To feature case studies or examples of real people who have impacted you, your product or the world.
  7. Rinse, repeat
    Doing all of the above once is not enough. You’ve got to do it over and over until it’s a part of your natural work-flow. The miracle happens when it’s no longer “work” but fun!

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A client contacted me this morning, upset because her “reach” seems to be  seriously declining on Facebook. For some reason Facebook chooses Reach to be the metric graphed on the insights page, and it’s little understood, so here’s the long and the short of it.

Facebook Reach

 Here’s how Facebook defines reach
“The reach chart shows how many people have seen any content about your Page, and where applicable, whether these people were reached through an organic, paid or viral channel. People might see your content through more than one of these channels. As a result, the sum of your organic, paid and viral reach might be larger than your total Page reach.

  • Organic reach is the number of unique people, fans or non-fans, who saw any content about your Page in their News Feed, Ticker or on your Page.
  •  Paid reach is the number of unique people who saw an ad or Sponsored Story that pointed to your Page.
  •  Viral reach is the number of unique people who saw this post from a story published by a friend.”

The problem is, the “reach” graph in your Facebook Insights combines all 3, Paid, Viral and Organic reach. So let’s say you run some “story” ads. The reach from those ads is included in your overall reach. When your ads reach your set funds limit or you quit running ads, your reach may drop significantly.

Another consideration is how the metrics of each individual fan affects the reach too
For example; if you have 10 fans who each have 100 friends then their reach is considerably lower than another page with 3 fans who each have 1,000 fans. So basically if you want to inflate your “reach” you just have to attract fans with big friends lists. Even if they don’t engage, your reach goes up. How bogus is that?

 Basically reach doesn’t have a whole lot to do with how effective you are at engaging your fans 
As you can see from the chart above, not only are they getting more engagement on this page, and the page reach (5,636,087) is increasing slightly AND the “people talking about this” is awesome, all the client sees at first glance is that downhill slump of the reach. To me it seems like a marketing ploy to put the reach as the one big graph in your “insights” tab and not the “people talking about” tab.

Why am I suspicious?
Isn’t it interesting that so many people are complaining about their reach dropping and Facebook coes out with the “Reach Generator”? This little tool is available only to “qualified accounts” who are then guaranteed that their content will be seen by 75% of their fan base. Not the paltry 16% that most pages get on a good day, but 75%!!

Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get that?

This is from the Facebook doc on the reach generator. Download it here.

Benefit of Reach generator

Unless you’re a big brand I’m guessing you can’t afford to pay to have this much showing, so you’d better think about how to really engage people.

Bottom line?
Quit worrying about reach and worry instead about engagement. I’ll be writing a post about how to get real engagement from your fan base later this week, so stay tuned for that, but really, forget about reach. It means very little.

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Managing Facebook Pages Just Got a Lot Easier

March 29, 2012

Part of what I do as a social media coach is help businesses large and small manage their facebook pages.Our social media management team is frequently asked to go to a client’s event and help live-tweet, take photos or video and post them live during the event to share with their fans. Most of us [...]

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Would you give up your passwords for a job?

March 20, 2012

A recent AP Newswire story tells the tale of one Justin Bassett who was asked by a hiring manager for his user name on Facebook. When she opened the site and saw that his profile was private, she asked him for his password. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, stating that he didn’t want to [...]

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Facebook Timeline for Pages- WAY more than a pretty cover

March 13, 2012

We’ve mostly gotten comfy with the changes to our personal pages when Facebook went to the timeline model, but trust me, that was nothing compared to the changes you’re going to see for business. Let’s face it, the tab system with Pages never really worked, and it was hard to keep those really important posts [...]

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Pinterest for Business?

February 20, 2012

I admit I’m a little behind with this post. Everybody and their cousin Sally has already written a post on Pinterest by now. Its’s the media darling of the day. Or at least it was. Then we actually read the terms of use and some people are already deleting their accounts in protest. See, it [...]

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Don’t be a Pest with “This Social Media Stuff”

February 16, 2012

I spoke recently to a group of PR and marketing professionals about how to use social media in their work. One woman told me that she was trying to get the CXO’s to use social media as part of their brand awareness. She’d send them emails with links to blogs they could comment on, tweets for [...]

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Social Media Doesn’t Make Sales – People Do

February 8, 2012

There’s a deep, dark secret that the social media marketers don’t want you to know. It doesn’t matter what your social media strategy is unless it includes what you expect the prospect to do after they find you through social media. You can have the biggest following on Twitter and Facebook and Google+, the best [...]

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