Your business Facebook page is a big part of your online brand identity. It is one of the first places where new potential customers can find you, and where your existing customers can contact you with questions or problems.  Naturally, letting someone have access to your Facebook page requires trust. However, most business owners don’t have time to manage their Facebook posting and marketing campaigns.  Even if you hire a professional social media management company, you’ll still probably want to have an employee with access to your page to handle customer questions. Facebook offers a way to help you balance this need for access and security by offering different types of administrator roles. Here is a quick breakdown of the different roles to help you make your choice.

 

 

When you start a Facebook page for your business, you log into your personal account to create the page.  Your personal account, along with any others you designate, then become “administrators” of the page with the ability to post to the page, view insights data and interact with other Facebook pages under the businesses name.  This is, naturally, a set up that requires trust, and one that makes some organizations nervous.  Every now and then, I hear questions like, “Why does my personal account have to be ‘connected’ to my page?  Isn’t that risky/unprofessional/etc? How can I separate them?”  There are a few different reasons behind these questions.  Some are worried about accidentally posting as the page, rather than themselves, or vice versa.  For some, it is a matter of principle; they want to keep their personal and professional lives as separate as possible. 

Although Disney has an occasional hit, it's a sad truth that they have a long history of misses when it comes to sequels, even with the help of Pixar. So when I started seeing previews for Monsters University, I was both excited and very worried.  I LOVED Monsters, Inc, and the concept of watching those characters learn their trade in college did sound amusing, but with past examples like Little Mermaid 2, there is a high risk of what I would consider disaster.  This is one of a few sequels/prequels that Pixar has coming up, and much of the public seems to share my wary indecision.

 

While as a viewer I may have concerns, as an internet marketer I am impressed.  The advertising campaign for Monsters University is clever, thorough and fun.  So how are they doing it?

 

For those new to our ToolsDay series, these posts offer our advice on free or low cost tools for businesses.  Some of them help with specific things like managing your social media, and others are more general.  Today’s tool review covers Jing, a free screen capture tool that we recommend to all of our clients.  I use Jing almost every day, and it comes in handy more often than you might think.  Here are the basics.

 

 

 

About a month ago, I wrote about a creative internet and traditional marketing campaign where Target and Neiman Marcus combined forces to create a holiday collection.  The companies got very creative, drafting a mini episode of the ABC television show Revenge to draw attention to their collection.  The campaign drew a lot of attention from the marketing and advertising industries.  The videos continued to draw views, social media buzz and other engagement, but naturally the most important question was how this would translate into sales when the collection was released on December 1st.  Both stores hoped that the collection would improve visitor traffic during a traditional slump between Black Friday and Christmas. 

 

 

 

For consumers, online review sites like Yelp offer a clear benefit. Researching other customers’ experiences with a specific product or company can be much more insightful than a carefully worded website, list of product features, or even a recorded demonstration.  People have always turned to their friends and family for advice on making decisions. Thanks to sites like Yelp, instead of hearing about one person’s experience with a product, consumers can see dozens of reviews and get a bigger picture. 

For companies, the benefits of Yelp come with risks. Word of mouth advertising, good or bad, is the strongest type there is.  Even if a potential customer understands that one bad review might be a fluke, unfairly biased, or even a flat out lie written by a competitor, that review is still going to give them concern.  And if bad reviews start stacking up…you can find yourself with a costly PR situation to deal with. 

 

No matter what industry you’re in, any small update to Facebook’s company pages seems to get a lot of attention, and rightly so.  You have to look a bit more closely to learn what LinkedIn has been doing to update their company page, but if you’ve been paying attention you know that they have gotten pretty darn cool.   While you may never have as many people following your LinkedIn page or interacting with your content as you have fans for your Facebook page, some companies may find the ones that do have a lot more potential to turn into sales leads.  Particularly if you’re developing a business to business social media strategy, it is well worth it to spend some time exploring LinkedIn.  

 

As part of my recent decision to focus on blogging more frequently, I’ve been looking around for things to help me find inspiration for topics.  Of course, I’m subscribed to several marketing and tech news sites, and those are great sources of ideas, but they are not always inspiring or the most relevant to what we do.  Because I’m generally an Analytics geek, I decided today to look at our Google Analytics account, and as usual I found some great information. There are a few places you can look in Analytics to learn more about your blog.  Two of the most useful areas are your content report, and your keyword report.

 

 

 

 

 

One of the most critical first steps when using Facebook for business marketing is to carefully define your target audience and create your posting strategy based on their interests. That’s great, but what if you have multiple target demographics that don’t speak the same language or live in the same country, let alone have the same interests?  Creating different posts for each audience runs the risk of overwhelming your fans with posts that aren’t relevant to them.  That’s where Facebook’s targeting features come in.  Facebook offers two features that allow you to control who sees your posts so that you can create a more targeted strategy for each: limiting your posts’ audience and targeting your posts.