6 Steps for Serious Business on Facebook

Using Facebook for your business IS serious business. Business operations are managed with processes. Sometimes these processes are performed by human beings and sometimes these processes are performed using technology; but good processes are always measured and managed for effectiveness and to provide data for ongoing analysis and continuous improvement. 


In order to implement an effective social media management strategy one must think about what resources they have available to them in terms of people, processes and technology and of course the almighty dollar that pays for advertising. Advertising that helps increase your presence much more quickly than by word-of-mouth and individual one-on-one engagements. 

This blog will walk you through the process of managing Facebook like a business process. 

First off Facebook can be used as a standalone engagement, marketing, and communication platform or it can be integrated with Twitter and HootSuite or other distribution tools that help make the process easier. 

The type of technology your organization uses will likely depend upon the amount of capital you have to spend towards growing your business using virtual marketing channels. The more you can invest, the faster you can grow your community and always on audience for your advertising. 

Tools like Saepio enable the control and management of large amounts of content and allow for improved control across geographically distributed organizations. The aggregated content can then be analyzed to determine the true return on investment (ROI) of their content marketing assets. For most new online businesses, this would be overkill.

Let's assume for the purpose of this exercise you are only using Facebook as the platform for your virtual marketing. (First you should never use only Facebook, even If you don't have time to manage both Facebook and Twitter now you can use Facebook to push your messages out to Twitter so that you can begin to develop a presence in the Twitter community - it helps with search engine optimization as well.)


1.  Either daily or weekly create some sort of promotion, campaign or event for your Facebook page. Change your Facebook cover to match the promotion. Topics we use include motivation Monday, tips and tricks Tuesday, words of wisdom Wednesday, and throwback Thursday, and as a new business you should never forget the ever famous fan page Friday.











2.  Create various types of content - educational, informational, entertaining or promoting your products or services that are aligned with the topic of the day. You must provide a variety of content across multiple categories or you will lose the interest of your audience and they will likely unfriend or unlike your Page. Make sure that you are categorizing your content in a way that you can analyze the impact of the content in terms of the audience, demographics, time of day, and type of content. This allows you to continuously improve your content development and distribution strategies.
 

3.  Next, manage messages - always respond. Comments, always acknowledge through a LIKE or a comment or both. Create text only posts that ask for a response from the reader. Text only posts get higher Facebook priority and as a result are seen more often by your fans than your posts with images, videos and links. (Posts being pushed from Twitter to Facebook seem to have low priority and a much smaller reach of the same fan base.)

4.  Then take time to ENGAGE! Visit the Pages of others. Like them, let them know you stopped by, and invite them to come by your page. Give them a link or embed the name of your business into the post. Share something from their public posts if appropriate. 

5.  Content curation is a topic in and of itself but I will touch briefly on the fact that whoever is managing your content curation should have an established set of rules for reposting / sharing the content of others. Doing this will offer future "exchange" opportunities where they will share something that your business has shared with their fans, following or friends.

6.  Finally, make sure you're monitoring your results. Watch your advertisements and make sure that they are targeting the appropriate audiences. Watch the cost per click and the impressions that you're getting on your ads and also pay attention to the reach of your various categories of content. Use this information to continuously improve your strategy.

If used properly Facebook can become a powerful communication platform for your business. In order to build the platform and to grow the audience it requires a certain amount of dedication and discipline toward the development and distribution of the content. The content required to keep your audience engaged and coming back for more.

If you're serious about your business get serious about Facebook and go LIKE something!

 

4 Easy Steps to Increase SEO

Nothing is as unforgiving as SEO when it comes to “what have you done for me lately?”  In this case, what have you “done” for SEO would include any monitored online activity and the engagement and influence it creates within and outside the audience to whom it is being distributed.  That means that even if in the past a large amount of content was created and put out into cyberspace and was creating placement at the top of the search engines, if you stop generating activity with your brand you will lose placement. 

Those brands who get 1^st and 2^nd page hits with little “activity” do so because they are using paid advertisements that put them on the sidebar or at the top of search engines regardless of how active the community or brand.  

Small and mid-size businesses cannot compete with large organizations when it comes to paid advertisements and the cost per “keyword” method of reaching your target audience.  When the “cost per click” for the keywords that create 1^st page ad placement are excessive they will quickly eat up the profits on a low margin product. 

That’s why activity based SEO is so important – especially when it is supported by simultaneously developed social communities that can go dormant but be available as soon as a new morsel of content is offered for their consumption.  

I believe that everything is a process and the better the process, the better the result.  Let me walk you through 4 easy steps to increase SEO for your business so that it can be searched and survive against organizations with large advertising budgets.

Step 1.  Develop a Process

Developing an activity based process for increasing SEO whether you have only manual or automated capabilities is equally important.  The best automated processes were once manual.  From manual and consistent process, automation is born.  So as I said earlier, activity is the fuel the feeds the SEO monster. 

Create a content development and distribution process that not only creates a conversation for your community, but creates the community at the same time through using social platforms for the distribution of the content.  This allows you to develop an “audience” of fans or following that are able and ready to engage your content when it is made available. 

This “instant on” engagement will immediately catch the interest of the search engines moving you closer to the top for those who are looking for what you or your brand has to offer.  Search engines are always after what’s trending now – your process should consider that too.

Step 2.  Perform the Process

Just as there are 4 easy steps to increasing SEO – there are also 4 basic platforms that you need to perform the process.

#1 –Blog (The content – Google particularly loves Word Press)

#2 – Google+ (Because Google has an ego and loves its own pluses most)

#3 – Twitter (A good platform for sharing blogs through Tweets and Retweets)

#4 – Facebook (Because there are 165 million users of Facebook in the US)

The process goes a little something like this.  Write a blog that is relevant to the type of audience you are looking to attract.  Include within the content of the blog keywords that are in alignment with how your audience would look for you. Close with a question or a call to action.  Then post the blog, share it to Google+, Plus it – get all your friends to plus it, and ask your following to plus it too!  Then post it to Twitter and include a trackable link.  Integrate Twitter with Facebook page so that the Tweet posts to the wall at the same time.  Create a schedule to Re-share and Re-Tweet periodically on various days and at various times of the day.  Post directly to Facebook and promote the post.

Step 3.  Measure / Improve Process Impact

Review the statistics, determine where the most traffic is coming from, what type of content gets the most activity, times of day the activity increases and decreases.  Modify your process accordingly to improve impact.

Step 4.  Repeat the Process REGULARLY

SEO optimization is a continuous process – so is content development and distribution.  In order to develop an engaged following the content must be kept current, relevant, and on track with the trends.  As the trends change, so must your approach to engagement.

The Indexed Web contains at least 13.72 billion pages as of Monday, 29 April, 2013.  That makes it pretty clear that getting to the top of the search engines is no easy feat.  It either requires lots of cash through advertising OR effective, frequent, and community based engagement through blogs and social platforms.  The latter being the most trusted means of consumer research, offering the highest level of buying confidence.  My final question to you. 

What have you done for SEO lately?

5 Ways to Get Results with Digital Content Asset Management

Content, whether in a physical or digital form is an asset in the world of agile content marketing.

Over the last decade of my career I have specialized in the processes, best practices, and methodologies for managing physical and digital technology assets in the form of hardware and software for clients in the Fortune 500.

These processes and practices insured adequate tracking and control to adhere to the strict and audited requirements of a variety of regulatory agencies as well as to measure and manage the total cost of ownership and the return on the investment of their asset portfolios.

Today, I use those skills and expertise to help business owners and entrepreneurs grow and manage the digital content asset portfolios supporting their social media brand, engagement, and marketing strategies using these same methodologies employed by large global organizations.

A successful content asset management program requires a level of sophistication that includes capturing a variety of data about the content.

Below are FIVE WAYS to get results:

1.  Categorize Content

Successful social media marketing programs include content in the categories listed in the below image.

 
In order to slice and dice data for analysis – it is important to capture several elements about the content. This includes content purpose, topic, tone, colors, elements, target demographic, parent campaigns, etc. Without adequate information about the content asset itself – it will be difficult to determine what elements of the content were the drivers that created the results. Additionally, the methods used to determine the categorization variables should be documented and consistent.

2.  Track Performance by Digital Media Platform
Once you have the types of content categorized across the various digital media platforms (Text, Audio, Images, and Video) begin tracking performance. Use specific numeric indices by social media platform. The number of LIKES, SHAREs, OPT-Ins, etc. combined with specific distribution timeframe parameters to gauge impact.

3.   Perform Type and Timing Experiments
 
Never assume that the first test is best. Perform content type and distribution timing experiments to confirm, validate, and improve content impact – ultimately improving the return on the investment. Change only one variable in the test at a time and measure results for a statistically significant amount of time in order to insure a consistent and reliable result.



4.   Continuously Improve

The cost of the content development, distribution, and management must be controlled in order to reduce the total cost of ownership of the content asset itself. The performance of the content will help offset the cost of ownership when it results in conversions and revenue generation. However, what works today, may not work tomorrow, so it’s a process of continuously monitoring and improving the content asset itself, the time, media type and distribution method.


5.  Manage the Lifecycle of Content Asset Portfolio

Content must be acquired or developed, inventoried, managed, distributed, updated, and archived. Organizations should implement the processes and procedures necessary to effectively manage the lifecycle of their content assets to get best results. This allows for the development of a cost and performance baseline that can be measured so that an accurate cost of customer acquisition can be determined.

Responsible and successful businesses implement the necessary measures to deliver results to the bottom line. The content in which you are investing time, money, and resources to develop are assets.

How are you managing your content asset portfolio?

Top 3 Challenges of Social Media Content Marketing

The world gets smaller as connectivity and collaboration grow larger.

People have the ability to engage and interact with one another like never before in the history of mankind. 

'One-to-One', 'One-to-Many', 'Many to Many' in real-time. 

This always on global marketplace brings with it, its own set of challenges. 

Challenge #1.  All people are unique. 

Each one has a lock with a unique key to open their minds or their hearts or when it comes to buying, their wallets.

Any sales professional will tell you that the key to winning business is in developing an authentic relationship with the prospect and the key to keeping business is maintaining and growing a relationship with the customer.  People tend to tolerate product or service short-comings when working with a trusted "friend" much more readily than they would when working with someone to whom they felt no emotional connection.

The initial business to consumer, business to business one-way content distribution models introduced into the social media marketplace are no longer effective. As a result, social engagement and interaction models are evolving to meet the needs of this diverse audience of unique individuals.

Challenge #2.  Content reigns supreme.

The internet opens the doors of online businesses 24-hours a day to hungry consumers of content, content, and more content.

Because everyone absorbs information differently (and with a global marketplace - use varying native languages) the content is desirable in all forms: written, audio, images, video and more and more, live interaction and social engagement. 

Businesses and the individuals supporting them can quickly become a slave to content development in order to feed the insatiable appetite of their ever growing audiences. 

That's only half the problem. 

Once the content is developed - businesses must insure that the consumers of that content know that it is "hot" off the proverbial stove and implement consistent and effective processes to distribute and manage it. The content has no value unless it is consumed and all the efforts of those so diligently developing it are wasted.

Challenge #3.  Time is a finite resource.

There are only 24-hours in each day.  Time is the most valuable resource and it cannot be purchased.  Successful and profitable organizations must implement efficient processes and systems for content development, distribution and social engagement that include automation, predictive timing, reporting, analysis, management, and continuous improvement.  Those organizations that do not have the resources in house to allocate the necessary time are reaching out to experts to fill in the gaps.  The time challenge shifts to managing the various resources performing the activities on behalf of the organization and ensuring that the measurable expected results are being delivered.

What is your greatest social media content marketing challenge?