Facebook for business

New Facebook Feature Lets Users Promote Friend’s Posts

Feb 25, 2013 By Tea Leave a Comment

When it comes to inventing revenue raising strategies, one thing is for sure, Facebook is the leading social media platform. Last week they announced that they are rolling out yet another new feature, where you can pay to promote your friends’ posts.

From October last year you are able to promote your own posts for as little as $5, which in turn makes your posts appear higher in friends’ newsfeeds. This feature has become a great marketing tool, and is used by many pages to expand their reach and get access to their target audience.

So what’s the idea of promoting your friends’ posts on Facebook?

A Facebook spokesperson described the new feature: “If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends. Or if your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it.”

It is important to note that even if you promote a friend’s you won’t be able to change the privacy settings on the post. This means if the post is set to just show in that person’s friends news feeds, then only mutual friends will be able to see it if you promote it.

Facebook envisions that promoted posts will be used to draw attention to:

Charity donations, events and raising awareness to various causes
Personal announcements and congratulations (weddings, babies, new puppies, new jobs, cars, apartments etc
Selling and renting offers, e.g. houses, cars and other goods
Publicizing events to increase attendance

This feature is being rolled out gradually but will only be available to users with less than $5,000 friends or subscribers, presumably due to technical challenges.

How can you benefit from this feature if you are a business?

We are yet to see how Facebook pages can benefit from this feature.

One thing is for sure if you create engaging valuable content for your followers there is a greater chance that your posts will get promoted. And if someone is willing to spend $7 to promote your posts, then they are highly likely to also become your clients. So, have your eyes open and keep up the good work, be relevant and engaging.
Have you ever promoted your post?

Feeling Frustrated? Use Social Media to Vent – Or Better Not?

Jan 18, 2013 By Tea Leave a Comment

Sometimes it feels that social media is just another platform for people to complain, grunt and be negative. While we all sometimes have a good reason for it and feel like it’s a good idea to use social media to vent and express our opinions, it’s important to note that what you write on your posts can be used as evidence in a court. Did I just lost you interest?

I urge you read this further as it might help you protect yourself against others or open your awareness about your own conduct. I promise I will not bore you with too many legal details. Agreed?

Ok, my marketer’s hat off, and my lawyer’s hat on.

Recently, Australian Federal Court made a decision that serves us as a reminder that individuals and businesses should exercise caution when making comments on social media and that same standards apply to social media as to other forms of advertising and marketing.

So what happened?

We all know Seafolly for their stunning beach wear collections. Recently they sued, a designer from White Sands Swimwear for engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct by posting number of statements on Facebook and in emails to several outlets indicating that Seafolly ripped off almost her entire line. To cut the long story short, the court found in favour of Seafolly and found that Ms Madden falsely represented that Seafolly had copied her designs and that Seafolly was not the creator of their designs. She also falsely represented that Seafolly used underhanded means to obtain photographs of the White Sands garments in order to copy them.

Although Ms Madden did not explicitly accuse Seafolly of copying, the statements made on her Facebook page and the emails to media representatives were understood by her audience to be assertions that Seafolly had engaged in unethical practices. That understanding was evidenced by the tones of the early media articles and comments on the issue.

So why should that worry you?

Even though these statements were made on Ms Madden’s personal Facebook profile and could be seen as expression of her opinions, the Court found that she was reckless in forming them. She took none of the steps that she should have taken to ascertain the truthfulness of her suspicions. Her intention of making these statements was not relevant – what counts is the understanding of audience to whom these statement were directed. Ms Madden was awarded to pay $25,000 for damages to Seafolly’s reputation, which the Court labelled as a ‘serious assault on Seafolly’s business integrity’, and also their costs of the proceeding.

Lessons learned

Social media is a valuable marketing and social tool. We have to remember that even though it appears informal, the unethical conduct can results in serious consequences for individuals and businesses, including payment of damages and legal costs and adverse media attention. Before you post anything on Facebook and other social media platforms, check your facts and check them again. Even thought the statements are instant and can be deleted, they can be retrieved and damaging for your business.

If you ever think that someone is violating your rights, refrain from resolving this matter on social media. Check the facts; engage with offending party off-line and/or engage lawyers if necessary.

Most of all, don’t post anything you would not say to that person or brand directly; and consider how you would feel if you were on the other side.

Have something to share? Use comments below

How Can Facebook Gifts Benefit Your Business?

Jan 9, 2013 By Tea 2 Comments

In December 2012 Facebook launched in US a new tool called Facebook Gifts. It’s been rolling it out to the rest of the World as we speak. It’s a great new exciting feature for users and more so for businesses. While Facebook collects percentage of sales made through Gifts, it rewards participating businesses with wider exposure.

What are Facebook Gifts?

Users can purchase actual, physical gifts from retailers, which then get shipped to their friends for their birthdays and other special occasions.

Why should you sign-up?

Apart from making a sale, you will achieve impressive reach, which will promote your business beyond your current fans.

How?

When a user purchases a gift a receiver is notified about the gift with a post to her or his Timeline. This post contains a massive photo of the product and the store it came from and who bought it. This means that your business gets exposed to a person who bought the gift, a person who got the gift and the whole network of friends from both of them.

Taking into account that both purchaser and receiver are not yet your fans, you just got your business exposed to a whole new network of people. And even if they are, exposure of your brand to friends of your fans can extend your reach for up 34 times more than if you market to your fans alone.

Worth giving it a go?
Even though this tool is not yet active in most countries outside US you can contact Facebook and get ready for the roll out.

Why You Are Not Turning Facebook Fans Into Customers

Dec 4, 2012 By Tea Leave a Comment

When Facebook introduced new Timeline in March this year, the Facebook business page owners and marketers worried about the loss of the profile banners which have been widely used to promote businesses and display calls to action. While many are now using cover photo for such purposes it is against Facebook guidelines to display calls to action, contact details, price or purchase information or any Facebook features, such as “Like us” on you cove r photo.

If you are one of these people, you are risking your Facebook business page to be shut down. Imaging what would it mean for you to lose all you worked so hard for?

I know it’s frustrating that such prominent place, as the cover photo is, cannot be used as advertising space. But if you think about the purpose of Facebook, you will soon see why Facebook banned such use.

Having said that, there are ways how you can utilise cover photo to your benefits. You can either use it for your identification, promotion and direction of your visitors.

Identification

Cover photo is ideal to present your brand’s story or even products. Think about how you want visitors of your Facebook business page to recognise you, what do you want to be known by.

The key is to build up recognition of your brand. Once visitors become familiar and comfortable with your brand and your products, they will become your fans, customers and even brand advocates.

Promotions

Remember, calls to action are strictly forbidden but that doesn’t stop you from promoting your products, events, sale or discounts. Think of cover photo as a billboard, your prime advertising space, just without explicit mentioning prices or calls to action. You can still be creative, catchy and entertaining.

Direction

This strategy is useful if you want to draw your visitors’ attention to your custom tabs. While you cannot directly direct them using call to action phrases such as ‘enter competition’, ‘click on tab’, ‘sign-up’ or similar, you can direct them with a clever design of your cover photo that will draw visitors’ eyes to that section of your Facebook business page.

Whatever strategy you are currently using make sure you try others as well. Then test them to see which one engaged better with your audience. In marketing, testing is the most important part. Make sure you set up measurable objectives of your strategies, so that you will be able to objectively measure your results. If you don’t test, you will never know what works and want doesn’t. This might result in investing your energy, money and time doing wrong strategies.

So what’s not allowed in a cover photo:

Calls to action;
your contract information; e.g. phone number, website, email address…
price or purchase information;
reference to any Facebook features / actions e.g. “Like our page”

Facebook Cover photo should not:

infringe any 3rd party intellectual property,
be false, misleading or deceptive.

What is allowed is it that you use a space of 851x351pixels for promotion of your brand, your story, you product for engagement with your clients, brand recognition and sometimes just pure entertainment.

And if this article opened up your creativity or if you are using some other Facebook cover photo strategies, why not share them with others in comments below.

My Top 4 Social Media Tips to Skyrocket Your Business

Nov 27, 2012 By Tea Leave a Comment

Recently, I was approached by Biz.Yourself, an awesome website, a hub for all things biz, to share my top social media tips with their readers. There are heaps of tips I could share, however I wanted to pick the ones that will make a real difference to any small business.

Here they are:

4 Top Social Media Tips to Skyrocket Your Business

One of the biggest challenges of starting a new business is how to get your word out and get customers. You can have the best business idea, the best product or service yet if you are unable to spread the word, your potential customers will not even know you exist. The chances are that you will give up on your business well before the customers will have an opportunity to get to know you.

Luckily with social media and other internet marketing tools, this task has become less daunting. If you don’t have a massive marketing budget, using social media to market your business is the way to get your word out to the masses, reach your target market and collect quality leads to turn them into customers.

While it sounds so easy, there are some ‘DOs and DON’Ts’ of social media marketing. To help you get on the right track, I prepared 4 most common mistakes people do with social media with a solution how to fix them.

#1 No Strategy

Like with anything else in business you need to think before you act. Not having a social media strategy will result in un-resourceful use of tools. This means wasting time using the wrong social media platform and not achieving any results.

How to fix this?

Think about your target market; who are your customers? Where and when do they ‘hang’; is it Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc? What is their behaviour? Once you getter information, create a strategy of your social media use.

#2 Too Many Social Media Accounts

I’ve seen it too many times; businesses trying to manage too many social media accounts yet they are nowhere truly present. This results in spending too much time with too little results and lots of frustration.

How to fix this?

If you’ve done your social media strategy you know where you customers are. Use one or two social media platforms regularly. This means your customers will get a chance to know you better, which will result in better relationship and a higher level of trust. And you want that because the quality of the relationship is what determines the sale.

On the other hand, using less social media platforms will free up heaps of your time that you can use to run your business to success.

#3 Ignoring Statistics

Yes, I know stats are boring. But unless you measure, analyse and test your marketing efforts, you will never know what works and what doesn’t. You might be wasting your energy and money on things that don’t work. Imagine how much more you could achieve, if you put more in to things that work. And unless you look at the stats you will never know.

How to fix this?

Make a weekly commitment in your diary to follow the stats of your social media. It’s actually rewarding when you see positive results and when you find out the formula that works for you.

#4 Not Collecting Leads

While collecting fans and followers is fun and it gets the word about your business out, the real value to your business are leads, which you can turn into customers. You need to figure out how to turn your fans and followers into customers. Otherwise, you are wasting your time.

How to fix this?

You need to get your fans/followers to subscribe to your emailing list. Once they are on your list, you have better chances to turn them into customers during your email marketing campaign.

To collect leads you will need to get an account with emailing service provider such as Aweber or Mail Chimp and then incorporate a sign-up form to social media account (where possible) or drive traffic to your website.

Connecting social media with email marketing is the key to your success online. A subscriber is a warm lead. While they might not be ready to buy from you as yet, they’ve expressed an interest in you and in what you are doing. Now is your turn to show them why they should become your customer.

Always post information that is relevant to your target market and be regular with your postings. A simple search online will give you heaps of common tips about how to use social media. These 4 tips are my top tips if you are serious about doing business with social media. If you follow them, you will have success and you will grow your client base.