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Opportunity to be a Hero

A friend of mine is an aspiring musician and quite good. He has built up a great following back where we attended college and hopefully soon will break out. As I was catching up on what he has been up to (surprise, surprise, all on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube), I noticed something under a #1 ranked comment for one of his YouTube videos.

I cried inside for a second. The video has roughly 55,000 views – so I think it’s safe it say thousands of people have seen this video. How many saw this comment exactly? Who knows. But as the YouTube top comment, it could potentially be seen by again, thousands, and Nick had yet to respond.

I immediately texted Nick and asked him if he had seen this comment. He said he saw it and that he had even gone into the classroom to visit!

Obviously he went into visit the class without the intention of doing any PR from it. It’s not like he posted it on his Facebook or Twitter – it was just him being a good guy. However, the only people who know about him being a good guy that day are the ones that were there. I’m not saying go blast it all over social media with an attitude of, “come see how good I look,” but a simple reply in the above case can do Social PR wonders. Why? Because you’re winning more fans over by acknowledging a fan in an open forum. These comments are typically seen by more people than anyone can ever perform in front of.

Responding on Social Media

Anyone with a decent-sized and engaged following should really take advantage of responding to their fans on Social Media. One of the best ways to talk with fans is on Twitter. Do you know how many days could be made by simple responses? Obviously those with a following cannot go into a fan’s classroom everyday, but tweeting is completely scalable. These responses will undoubtedly elicit strengthened relationships with fans and retweets. There is a great potential to leverage a following into marketing machines by responding.

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Nonprofit organizations are in primo position for utilizing social media. Why? There is no better way to feasibly get the word out. If you’re a nonprofit, I highly suggest throwing up a Facebook page. But it doesn’t stop there. Don’t think that just because you put up a Facebook page people will like your page and you’ll start getting the word out.

The trick for nonprofits and social media lies in finding affiliates that are willing to share or help your cause. This means going and targeting big brands, local businesses, or just pages with a large Facebook following you believe would support your nonprofit’s cause.

Ask for a share or affiliate partnership

Try sending the page a Facebook message asking if they would be willing to share your cause. Not responding? Find out who actually runs the Facebook by using LinkedIn and searching for Social Media Manager at XYZ Company. Better yet, see if you can set up some affiliate Facebook promotion to have their followers come like your Facebook page (as seen in the example above). I’m going to be honest, it’s pretty difficult to say no to someone who is supporting a good cause that asks for a share. It’s also a numbers game. Not everyone will see your messages, nor will everyone respond. However, this is an incredibly cheap and feasible way to get the word out about your nonprofit – all it takes is a few E-Mails.

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Facebook Promoted Posts allow for your post to be seen by a larger percentage of the people who have liked your page. If you make a Facebook post, Facebook automatically limits the number of people who see it based upon their news feed algorithm. In order for it to be seen by everyone who has liked your page, you must use a promoted post.

These promoted posts range anywhere from $5-20. The more you pay, the more you will reach with your post. Note that you will not see the option to promote a post until you reach 400 likes.

How to Promote a Facebook Post

To promote a post head over to your business Facebook page. Next, find a post that you are interested in promoting. At the bottom right of that post there will be a little button that says promote. Click that button. After that, choose how much you want to spend and who you want to target. Finally, click the Promote Post button.

Personal Experience

I have really liked using promoted posts. I think you should sprinkle in 1-2 each week so people don’t forget about you. Also, if you have quality content you will definitely want to use this feature as $5-10 is totally worth it to be able to get the word out to people who have liked your page.

You should note that your reach for promoted posts will grow larger as you grow your page. If you only have 1800 likes, Facebook estimates that promoting a post for $5 will reach 250-300 more people. In my experience though, this has not been the case. Each time we paid $5 the post reached far more people than the 300-500 people Facebook said it would reach. It was more like 2,000 people!

Don’t promote a post right away. Wait a couple days. See which of your posts have the best natural engagement (likes, shares, and comments), then pick the best post out of the three to promote. This way, you know those people who you promote to should engage with as well. This will even further extend your reach as engagement is on a post is probably the most important factor in determining what appears on people’s news feeds.

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New Likes

Right on! You got some people who are liking your Facebook page. People I work with are often jazzed when they start seeing new likes – whether it be 10 or 1,000. A lot of these business owners start to see the potential $$$ piling up from these prospective customers. Thus, I often get asked by clients, is it worthwhile to contact each person who has liked my page? I think the answer really depends on your situation.

If you’re a new page, you should undoubtedly attempt to talk with anyone who has liked your page. If you have been chugging for a while, you may need to assess your current situation to see if it’s worthwhile.

Define

There are a couple things you should define as to whether to would be worthwhile to reach out:

Can I Feasibly Contact These People?

If you’re growing organically, it’s probably worthwhile to reach out to people who have liked your Facebook page because it’s in most cases, feasible. On the other hand, if you ran an ad and obtained 5,000 new likes, it’s pretty unreasonable to expect you to individually reach out and contact all 5,000 people. You would need a dedicated person on your team for that!

Am I B2B or B2C?

If you’re B2B you should without a doubt keep an eye and reach out to those who like your Facebook page. Why? The upsell is typically much larger on B2B transactions than B2C. Who is making more money? The guy who sells 1 social media package or the guy who sells 1 bagel? If you’re a B2C, you typically need to be selling a lot. This means acquiring lots of customers. So as great as it is that little Billy from Oklahoma liked your page. If you’re only going to make $1.50 off of each sale, it probably isn’t worth it to put the manpower into contacting each person.

Strategies For Reaching Out:

It’s not as easy to reach out to the people who have liked your page as you may think. As a business, you are not able to send messages from your Facebook page to people, unless the person messages you first. Facebook made it this way so businesses wouldn’t be able to spam people’s inboxes. Of course, our team at Modernize Marketing has come up with a few ways to connect and reach out to new likes.

Promoted Posts

Here’s a strategy we’ve recently been using to reach out to newly acquired likes… Let’s say we blasted an ad that got 1,000 likes in 2 days. It’s a little unlikely that we are going to run through all 1,000 people and reach out to them individually. Therefore, we like to use a promoted post after running ad campaigns. The $5 promoted post allows us to make a post so it is seen by almost everyone who has liked our page.

Create a Facebook Personal Account

You can create a fake personal Facebook account that represents your business. You are able to send messages to people barring that they have not adjusted their privacy settings.

Contact Through Alternative Sites

Run the person’s name through a Google search. Do they have a Twitter? Perhaps a LinkedIn? These are great places and actually, much more appropriate platforms to reach out to your customers on. Twitter and LinkedIn are not near as personal as Facebook.

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Today is a guest post from Ashley Verrill, a market analyst with Software Advice.

Social Media and Customer Service

Earlier this month I interviewed a candidate for one of our social media roles. In talking about his last internship with a huge technology developer, this driven college grad explained how he tried to approach their social media strategy.

“They were just pushing out messages from public relations and marketing, but they didn’t really listen to what their followers were saying,” I remember him saying, “I told them they really need to respond to these people; this is what social media is all about.”

He hit the head on the nail with this comment. Customers don’t go to social media to be marketed to. They go to interact with their friends and fans.

The Experiment

Late last year, I concluded a research project at Software Advice meant to assess whether 14 of the nation’s top brands have responded to such expectations on social media. The experiment dubbed, The Great Social Customer Service Race, involved tweeting brands such as Coca-Cola and Walmart every weekday for a month. We measured the percent of total tweets they responded to, and the speed of their response for messages that did receive a response.

We sent these messages from four different personal Twitter accounts. Questions were designed specifically to prompt a response. These ranged from “urgent” queries – or messages sent at the point of purchase decision – to negative feedback either addressed directly to the brand, or just with the brand name and no @ symbol.

The infographic here shows the results of the race. Additionally, we picked up a few best practices companies can use to improve their social response.

Social Media Customer Service Best Practices

Listen for Brand Name With or Without the @. Less than eight percent of responses came during the weeks when an @ was not used. The failure of brands to respond to negative, positive or other important tweets leaves a bad impression on the customer and anyone who follows them. Listening for these conversations also presents unique opportunities to surprise and delight the customer.

Important Keyword Triggers are Your Friend. When we designed questions for the race, we specifically included questions with important intent, sentiment or risk of switching brands. Social listening software can be programmed to send service messages to the front of the line if they contain keywords such as “help,” “mad,” “thank you.” These rules are imperative for brands that need to automate tweet prioritization.

Keep the Customer Informed. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s committed huge errors when two of their replies came several days after the questions were sent. For the instant-gratification customer, this is the same as not responding at all. One way your company can streamline social customer service is by integrating listening software with help desk ticketing programs. This enables users to automatically convert a tweet into a ticket, then mark it as open, resolved or waiting a response.

Capitalize on Customer Service for Marketing. Social should not be separated exclusively in marketing, or community management or customer service. You need to look at the bigger picture. In our credit card group, MasterCard earned special recognition by capitalizing on an opportunity to market a customer service interaction. When one of our participants asked whether the credit card is accepted globally, the MasterCard team responded and re-tweeted her message. In another instance, MasterCard used the customer service opportunity to pitch our Twitter participant a new product.

About Ashley Verrill


Ashley Verrill is a market analyst with Software Advice. She has spent the last six years reporting and writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in myriad publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice in 2012, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

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Can you unfriend people on Facebook?

Yes you can unfriend your “friends” on Facebook. Fact is, majority of people don’t even know how to unfriend someone. Facebook has made it difficult to find.

How to remove a friend on Facebook

1) Go to the person’s page that you want to unfriend.

2) At the top of their timeline, hover your mouse over the check-marked box that says friends.

3) Unfriend.

How to mass delete friends on Facebook

1) Head over to your Facebook page by clicking your name on the top right hand side.

2) Underneath your cover photo, where those little boxes are, you will see one of the boxes labeled friends, click that.

3) You will now see everyone you are friends with. If you’d like to delete them, hover your mouse over the check-marked box and simply unfriend them.

*This version is much faster if you are looking to delete lots of friends at once.

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Can you find out who is searching for you on Facebook?

Unfortunately you are not able to see who is searching for you on Facebook through any application or website. This means you need to make sure that you never click a link that says you can find out who is searching for or looking at your profile. Clicking these links will result in your Facebook account being hacked, so you need to be careful.

There may be a couple of ways to know who is looking at your Facebook profile by paying attention to Facebook’s algorithm.

Facebook’s Suggested Friends

Suggested friends seems to stay pretty similar if you’re not constantly sending our friends requests. Meaning you see the same people over and over in this part of Facebook. However, let’s say you meet someone new in person (not Facebook) so you guys are not Facebook friends. Your new friend looks you up 10 times but doesn’t send you a friends request. All of a sudden, he or she now appearing as a suggested friend.

In the end, if you Facebook creep on someone you aren’t friends with, there’s an OK chance they will start seeing you as a suggested friend. It all depends on how much Facebook activity that user has.

Friend’s Content

So you’re friends with someone and they have suddenly developed a crush on you – oh la la. Now they have been clicking your profile non stop. Out of nowhere, you start seeing more of their edges (also known as Facebook interactions) on your news feed.

Why is this? Maybe because they have creeping on your profile? Or maybe their statuses have a lot of engagement? Who knows – there are a lot of variables. But some people at times have blown up my news feed with meaningless edges like, name has become friends with so and so. So it leads me to believe they must have interacted with me or my profile a lot.

So What’s the Deal?

You can never know for sure, but I have definitely noticed some correlation between people viewing your profile and the two scenarios above. I’ve even confronted people before who have admitted to clicking my profile multiple times prior to sending a friends request (it’s a pretty normal thing guys).

Pushing the above scenarios make sense. If someone is constantly looking someone up, they probably know each other in real life and if they know each other in real life, they should be friends on Facebook! Yay Facebook! Great logic…Can you sense the sarcasm? Facebook’s algorithms are pretty nuts, so I never put anything past them.

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Facebook Ad Specs

The dimension size for a Facebook ad image is 100 x 72 pixels. Facebook recommends uploading an image that is at least that size. If it’s bigger, your image will automatically be resized. However, this doesn’t always work out so favorably. Animated or flash files are not allowed.

Experience

You will want to make sure your ad image fits these dimensions. If it is smaller than these dimensions, the image will look goofy and not fit properly. Most of the time if you upload something bigger than these dimensions it still won’t look that great.

It’s important though to resize it to the proper dimensions because if you had a 250×250 image, Facebook will shrink it to 72 x 72 or set it to 100 x 72. Doing so will make your image appear too small or stretched.

An image can make or break a social advertising campaign. That’s why it’s also a good idea to run multiple ads with different images and text. As you’ll see there are always a fair number of people who have yet to set their dimension size correctly. We’ll take a look in the video below.

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Twitter: Should I Auto Direct Message New Followers?

The logic behind Twitter auto direct messaging (DM) is to hopefully use it to get your new followers to act on some sort of deal by blasting them a private message with a tracked link to your website/deal. Some say it’s annoying – others are all about maximizing any strategy to blast their crap. Which leads me to believe that businesses wont stop using this anytime soon.

Experience

From personal experience we received little to no clicks. I have constructed my messages as helpful as possible. Even had a very traditional blast with a call to action. Still, barely any responses.

For experimental purposes, I ran this with 5 Twitter accounts, all different markets and sending out a good number of follows a day. Accounts had between 500-7,000 followers. Receiving anywhere from 30-300 followers a day.

Results: We’re talking 1/response click total every 2 or so days for the 5 accounts.

A few days I was able to meet the 250 daily DM limit, but wasn’t able to for the full 3 months this was ran. Even if I were able to, the numbers still don’t add up for me.

The Great Debate

Some people will argue that those clicks could be of high value because they are at a targeted market (B2B). To me, the auto DMs set up far more people to unfollow you, but more importantly never listen to anything you have to say on Twitter. Which is ultimately, the most important thing.

If you have 300 followers and every single one of them reads your tweets, it’s a lot better than 5,000 followers with only 100 people reading your tweets. This is a concept people struggle to understand.

Can Auto DMs still be relevant?

Maybe. It very well could still work in your favor. For instance, let’s say you’re in a position of power; loads of people wanna follow you. You could use the 250 direct messages a day as actual exclusive rewards. Granted this is all on the basis of them loving you so much it is like the coming of a new world if you were to reach out to them. Ex: Celeb, Music artist, unreal burger place, could DM some exclusive deal to all of their new followers each day because they receive over 250 follows a day without sending any follows out. You are able to reward them right off the bat.

It’s safe to say a good number of people are falling for the, “lol is this you? http://www.haxzrUS.com” hacking auto DM otherwise we wouldn’t see as many. So I guess people are still clicking on links in DMs. But I know a lot of Twitterers who will not click any links in DMs because of the possibility of being hacked (I’m one of them).

For the most part, I feel that people on Twitter are over with auto DMs. With the self promotion and viruses, there isn’t much there. Who takes the time to read ads anymore? It’s 2012…