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HELEN HUTCHINGS: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the introduction to Social
Media webinar. My name is Helen Hutchings from the Phillips Group and I am your host
for today's webinar. In a moment I will hand you over to Alicia Marr who is our digital
strategist and today's presenter. At the end of the webinar, I will hold a questions and
answer session with Alicia and we look to receiving your questions.
This webinar is part of a series being provided by the Department of Tourism, Major Events,
Small Business and the Commonwealth Games. We hope that you find it informative and useful
for your business. Thank you and, Alicia, over to you.
ALICIA MARR: Thank you, very much, Helen. I would like to say hello and welcome to everyone.
This is the introduction to social media webinar. We have 70 people attending so far and we
have got a lot to get through. So let's get started.
My name is Alicia Marr and I am a digital strategist/producer. I work in an advertising
agency running the digital production side of the business. So that is the project management
of websites, mobile apps, email campaigns, online banner ads, Facebook campaigns and
micro sites as well.
I also take care of the digital and social media strategy for brands and campaigns and
this involves coming up with ways for brands to communicate with their customers online,
that is consistent with the brand/voice and message.
Social media monitoring and recording is also a big part of my job, especially coming up
with recommendations for clients based on information that we find in the reporting.
This can be information such as where the conversation is happening, as well as topics
of customer complaints.
Please note the questions panel, that you will see on your screen. This is for you to
use throughout the presentation, as Helen, who has spoken before, will be collating all
the questions for question time at the end of the session.
If you do use Twitter, please feel free to interact with us via #qldbis, just in case
you have any questions or any other queries.
Today, we will be looking at an introduction to social media. So this will include looking
at the social media landscape in Australia, defining your social media strategy and policy,
setting up and engaging, monitoring and measuring your results as well.
So we will take a look at the social media landscape with the focus on Australian usage
as well as small businesses and the benefits of social media. This will give you an understanding
of the current activity by Australians in social space, which is key to developing your
strategies. Essentially, we need to know who we are dealing with and what they are doing,
before we can make any decisions.
So in Australia, 62 per cent of Internet users have a presence on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
Facebook dominates this with a whopping 97 per cent of social networking users in Australia.
So what can we gather from this?
More than of half of Internet users in Australia are using one of the main social networks
and this number is only increasing. Though Facebook dominates 97 per cent of social networking
users, it is important to note that many users will not just be a member of the one social
network and may have Facebook, LinkedIn and a Twitter account as well. The same person
can and most likely will interact with you differently across the three networks.
In the past year, the proportion of small businesses with a social media presence increased
from 14 per cent to 27 per cent and Facebook is a dominant form of social media presence
for businesses. So what does this mean for us? The percentage of Australian small businesses
on social media almost doubled over 12 months. Small businesses are seeing the value in having
social media accounts to communicate with their customers.
It would also be interesting to see the percentage of these businesses that update the social
media accounts regularly. As you know, life gets in the way and sometimes these sorts
of things are neglected. It's also important to note that Facebook is the dominant form
of social media presence for businesses and this is likely due to the large potential
reach and the additional charging options that Facebook provides you.
So I just want to get an idea of who already has a Facebook page for their business. I
will just launch this poll for you. If you do have one, then please click "yes"; if you
don't, click "no"; and if you are unsure, please click "unsure".
Excellent. I got most of the votes from all of you. So thank you very much for that. So
we have 67 per cent of attendees saying "yes" they have a Facebook page; 32 per cent with
"no" and 3 per cent are "unsure". Obviously that's consistent with our results about small
businesses having a Facebook page.
So 10 per cent of Internet users access social media more than five times a day; 26 per cent
access social media every day. So I guess we can sort of classify these people as "heavy
users". Effectively, 36 per cent of Internet users in Australia are heavy users of social
media.
What does this mean for you? This might be useful for your business, if you aren't able
to post more than once a day; as the more likely people are to access the social network,
the more likely they will see your page/post. It may also mean that you can offer time relevant
offers to your heavy user followers and it will encourage people to visit your page or
account for and to interact with your post further.
46 per cent of 14 to 19 year olds access social networking sites every day. What does this
mean for you and your business? This will really heavily impact your business, and any
business that has a teenage target market. It will allow you to interact with your audience
in a less formal, more conversational way. You want them to be involved in your brand
and to encourage them to interact with you in social media.
For example, if you were a clothing brand that targeted teenagers, you could use your
Facebook page or Twitter account to showcase new lines or products; get customer feedback
or ideas or run competitions with user generated content to promote conversation around, interact
with or awareness of your brand.
For more Australian social media statistics, there's a link to the Yellow Pages social
media report in your workbook.
So excuses or concerns. While social media is bigger than many, many business owners
continue to bury their head in the sand. Excuses, concern, whatever you want to call them; a
number of businesses are hesitant to get into the social space and they are perfectly natural
responses. So let's discuss the benefits of social media to help ease a few of those concerns;
let me convince you why it's so important.
So we have got nine betterments to go through today. We will kick off: it's more traffic
to your site. You can use your social media accounts to promote or send people to your
website. You can include links on all of your posts; you can even include them to specific
products or announcements that you may have.
You can grow your online community by building a group of online followers or customers in
social media that will interact with your business, social media accounts and share
their own experiences with your brand.
It also provides the opportunity for instant customer service and feedback. So chances
are that if a customer has an issue with your product/business, they will be complaining
about it somewhere. At the moment, the place seems to be social media. So that doesn't
matter, whether or not your business is there, but if you are there they can complain to
you directly and you can address it in front of everybody else.
There's no cost, except for your time. So signing up for and having a social media presence
won't cost you anything, except for your time; and then possibly design work for some profile
or cover photos. It is a low cost and has a high potential reach for you.
It's a cost effective marketing tool. It's cost effective, targeted and reliable marketing
and allows business owners to get a message out to customers about a product, sale or
opening hours extremely quickly.
There's also the potential for a viral effect. I am sure many of you have seen some campaigns
on social media that have picked up really well. A clever, well thought out and catchy
campaign has a potential to go viral with your customers. It's best to develop the social
media community first and then to encourage them to share your campaign or competition.
Network your heart out. Connect with like minded business, clients, suppliers and interact
with each other. Be conversational, be friendly and just have fun.
Build your profile and credibility. Essentially, you want to create your social media account,
establish who you are, what you are going to do, and show people that your account say
reliable source of information; that they can depend on you for entertainment or customer
service.
Finally, the search engine optimisation benefits; so it links back to your website. It will
definitely help if you include them in your posts.
So I have got a little bit of a pros and cons list here for you and this summarises some
the benefits that we spoke about before, as well as really driving home the potential
risks/cons that we might have in social media.
So for the pros: it is cost effective to set up. As I said before, there can be costs associated
with running social media, such as your resourcing, your man hours; and it's really important
to note, though, that the actual set up won't cost your company anything. So this means
you get to create an online presence, without typically the cost associated with the website.
It also allows your brand to be social. So these social media platforms allow for your
brand to communicate differently to how you would in other channels. Your brand can be
more conversational; it can be relaxed and it can discuss topical news or recent events
with your fans. It's all about humanising your brand, so that the customers can relate
to you better.
It's quick, and there are cheap updates for customers. So social media platforms allow
for speed to market for updates. If you need to get a message out to customers quickly
about a product, a sale or opening hours, then social media will be the best and easiest
way to get that information out to them quickly.
Now for the cons. It does provide a platform for people to complain. But we need to remember
that people are going to complain about us anyway. So with or without your permission
and with or without your platform, our customers are going to complain if they have a problem.
The advantage of having a platform you control, is that you can find out when they complain
on your platform and you can reply to their complaints for everybody else to see.
There are also risks of not responding to your complaints. So if you don't respond to
your complaints on your Facebook page, other members of the community might think that
you are ignoring the problems of your customers. For this reason, it's imperative that you
respond in a timely manner to all complaints, even it it's just to say that you are looking
into the issue. People just want to know this they have been heard.
Finally, there's a big risk of sensitive information being posted. In cases where businesses use
social media for customer service, it is possible a customer may post information that is sensitive
on Facebook, to try and get their issues resolved. In these situations, it's best for you to
just remove the comment and then remind them that these posts are public and you have just
removed it for their safety. Then refer them offline for further assistance.
An example might be if I go and purchase a dress from a nearby store and I am not happy
with the quality of the dress and I go online to talk to them about it and say, "Look, this
is my phone number. Please call me immediately. I really want to discuss this problem." The
dress shop would be prudent to go online and make sure that they delete that comment that
has my phone number in it, just to protect me; especially safety wise and then in case
there are other people who want to use it for malicious reasons.
The best recipe for success is shown in our social media success wheel. So we go through strategy
and policy as well as set up, engaging, monitoring and then measuring and refining. We will kick
it off today with some strategy.
Now that we understand the benefits as well as some risks of social media, it is important
to develop a strategy for your brand in relation to objectives, target market and then starting
to think about which social network you think might be best for your business.
So objectives for your social media. You really need to think, to start with, "What do you
want to get out of your social media? This is really going to help you develop your objectives.
But to help you out here, I have listed a couple which I will go through in a second.
So you can either use it to foster product development and innovation. This can be done
through using social media to gain feedback or ideas from your followers. You can generate
awareness. You can use social media to post relevant and shareable contact so that it
can increase your fan base through word of mouth and your social media presence.
Drive preference and differentiation. You can build preference and differentiation for
your brand over competitors. People will discover your brand through referrals from their friends
and then it's up to you to drive preference by interacting with and rewarding your fans.
Increase traffic and sales. Social media turns purchasing into a social decision by enabling
people to show what they like and what they have purchased, both online and in the physical
world. Get people to share their purchases, their experiences. The combination of word
of mouth and creating more engagement with your customers at the point of purchase can
help drive traffic and sales.
You can also build loyalty and deepen relationships, which is a big one that most brands focus
on. So when people like or follow you, they are indicating they want to have a relationship
with your brand. Based on the information they provide on certain platforms about themselves,
you can create a highly customised and personalised experience to drive engagement/loyalty over
time.
Amplify recommendations and word of mouth. Everything you do on Facebook will appear
in the news feeds of fans and when they interact with your page, it appears in their news feeds
as well. It's important to incorporate sharing in all of your social media marketing and
campaigns that you do.
You can also gain insights. Social media is a great way to gain insights into your customers;
how they interact in social media and certainly how they interact with each other. Feeding
these insights back into your marketing activities will help increase the effectiveness of your
campaigns.
Finally, attracting potential employees to your company. You can post jobs on Facebook
or on LinkedIn and it's a great way for people to refer their friends to you or people that
they have business relationships with.
One really important thing to note: not all of this will be relevant or feasible for your
business. Make sure you only pick one as your main focus.
For your target market, defining your target market is essential for your business, as
this creates a custom profile that will influence how you communicate on social media. So you
will need to consider the channel you are using and perhaps the tone; when you communicate,
whether it be during or outside office hours; and how often do you communicate with these
people? Are they heavy users or are they people who are only checking Facebook once a week.
You might want to consider their age, gender, location, socio economic status, education
and work status, income, time spent online. There is a whole myriad of things to go through.
So start small to begin with, and then you will develop the profile of your social media
audience as you go on.
So selecting a social media network. Based on your objectives and your target market,
some of you may have a rough idea which network/networks you want to utilise. So here's a brief guide
to help you out.
Facebook is definitely if you want to reach the masses. Twitter is probably a little bit
more focussed on middle aged professionals or teenagers. You often find that there are
a lot of young preteen girls on Twitter as well, because they can follow their celebrities
and such. But Twitter doesn't have the age restriction that Facebook does. Pinterest
mainly has females, whereas Google Plus usually has a lot more males, and they are usually
quite die hard Google fans or android users. Of course, LinkedIn has all of your professionals.
We will go into these in a little bit more detail later but note that you can use different
networks to talk to different target markets, if you need to.
So policy parameters. As with any activity a business would carry out, that draws attention
to themselves, social media does carry risks. In order to reduce the potential risk that
social media may post for a business, it's important to define a policy. This policy
can be as simple or as detailed as you want and can cover off a number of things, from
who will have a social media account access to how often they are going to be allowed
to post.
Take a moment to answer these questions, which will help you define your social media policy.
Please note, these will be in your workbook, so you don't need to write them down right
now.
So consider: who will be allowed to post? Will it be you? Will it be certain staff?
Another company? What happens if the normal person is away?
What are these people allowed to post? Random musings, work related, photos, links? When
are they allowed to post? As often as they like, a few times a day, weekly? Should it
be at night time; should it be in the morning?
You will need to consider how they are allowed to post as well. Will they be logged into
a certain person's profile? Will they use a syndicate tool such as HootSuite or TweetDeck
which we will go through in a moment? Or as themselves?
Where can they post to? Will it just be Twitter? Will it be a Facebook page and Twitter or
will it be all of the social media networks?
Finally, probably the most important one: what is the screening process? Do their posts
need to be checked by the business owner or do they need to be checked by management before
they go up? Or are you releasing all of your social media presence to this person and trusting
their judgment?
So I just want to ask you guys: will you or do you have an employee dedicated to social
media?
44 per cent of you said "yes", you do have an employee dedicated to social media; 47
per cent said "no"; and 9 per cent are unsure.
So you will need to make sure that you incorporate this into your social media policy. So consider
that if you don't have an employee dedicated to social media, it may be more difficult
for your social media to be kept really update. You won't have someone there posting or responding,
as soon as somebody posts a complaint/praise for you on your Facebook page. It's really
important you figure out what times of days that these people will be checking your social
media; and then just the sorts of things are setting up alerts to make sure that they will
be told about when they are actually receiving any complaints or posts online.
So by now, you have a rough idea of your objectives, target market, policy and some ideas about
your preferred social network, if you haven't got one already.
Some of you who aren't too familiar with the different types of networks might not have
made this decision yet. So we will have a closer look at the networks and the types
of networks.
So types of social media. There are a number of different ways to classify social media.
There are actually probably a million, but I like to think of them under these five classifications:
social networks, content communities, blogs, collaborative projects and social gaming.
Today we will be having a look at the first two, social networks and content communities,
as these are the most relevant to small business.
So the big four. With social networks and content communities, there are four big players
in the market: Facebook, You Tube, LinkedIn and Twitter; each harbouring different types
of people and providing different functionality. Should all businesses have all four of them?
No, definitely not. Find the one that suits your business and audience and available resources,
particularly if you don't have a dedicated social media person, and make sure you stick
with that.
Facebook is a social network where users find and communicate with friends through the sharing
of posts, photos, videos and links and stories. Users will need to register before using the
site. They will have to create a personal timeline and add other users as friends or
exchange content. People can also join "comment", interest groups or like business pages.
Twitter is an information network where you have 140 characters to create messages called
tweets. It is an easy way to discover the latest news related to the subjects or people
that you are interested in. A business account is the same as a personal account. Tweets
from other accounts you follow will appear in your Twitter feed, or your home page, and
can also use hashtags in your sweet, so that your tweets are easily discoverable when people
search for certain topics.
You Tube is a video sharing service that allows users to watch videos, posted by other users,
and upload videos of their own. Videos that have been uploaded to You Tube may appear
on the site and can also be posted on other sites by links or in bed codes.
The uploader of the video can also tag the video with key words or topics to make their
videos easier for people to find. Users with Google accounts can "like" or "comment" on
the videos, providing that the uploader hasn't disabled this function on the video.
For you guys, it's probably best not to disable these functions because you really want people
to engage with your You Tube account and either "like" or "comment" on it. But, obviously,
it is a really open platform; where people don't have to use their real names, if they
don't want to. So it's advisable that you keep an eye on it; and just make sure that
there aren't any inappropriate comments.
LinkedIn is a professional network on the Internet that connects you with your trusted
contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas and opportunities with a broader range
of network of professionals. It also uses a gated access approach where contact with
any professional requires an existing relationship or the intervention of a contact of theirs.
So this is used to build trust amongst the services' users.
So growing an emerging platform. There are a million of them but we will go through a
couple of the main ones that you may have come across today.
So we have got Pinterest, which is a pinboard style social photo sharing website, that allows
users to create and manage theme based image collections, such as events, interests, hobbies
and more. So, for example, on my Pinterest account, I follow a lot of cake companies
or people who share photos of cakes or food, as well as events and interior designing.
For Instagram, it is a free photo sharing program, a social network, that was launched
in 2010. I believe last year it was bought out by Facebook. The service enables users
to take a photo and apply a digital filter to it; and then share it with other Instagram
users they are connected to as well. They can also share it on Facebook and on their
Twitter accounts as well.
Path is a social networking enabled photo sharing and messaging service for mobile devices.
The service aims to be a place where users can share with their closest friends and family.
Google Plus, a social network owned and operated by Google. It offers circles of friends and
users need to have a Google account to set it up.
And finally, MySpace; social networking service that previously was in competition with Facebook
but has recently re launched with a greater focus on music.
So one last poll. I just want to know: which social network you will be using as your primary
network you can tell me which one you are using now, if you like just to grasp an idea
of the spread of the networks.
So we have 79 per cent attendees listing Facebook; 2 per cent listed Twitter; 13 per cent with
LinkedIn; and 6 per cent with You Tube. So no one selected "the other", but it's probably
best to stick with the big four initially anyway. So thank you very much for your responses.
Tips to getting started in social media. I realise some of you already have Facebook,
but a couple of the tips might be relevant to you anyway. So just bear with me.
Step one: identify a suitable social media name. Now, this could be your business name
or your business name and a location. So if I own a coffee shop in Brisbane, I could have
"Coffee Bean" or "Coffee Bean Brisbane" as my name. You will need to keep in mind that
you can only have 11 characters in your Twitter user name and for Facebook, any periods/spaces
will need to be represented by a full stop.
Step 2: get social on your mobile. So most of the major social networks have mobile apps
for Smartphones, that you can download to access your media accounts on the go. So this
means you can update your social media business accounts in a timely manner with time relevant
content.
Step three: develop your profile or page. So you want to add your company logo, images,
details about your company, including address, trading hours, et cetera. Make sure you really
fill it up with content, so that when people visit your account, they can get all the information
that they might need.
Step four: make friends. Add your friends to your individual/personal accounts and promote
your business to them. These people should be your advocates and hopefully you can get
your friends to like your page or follow your Twitter account.
Step five: we like you to increase your social media presence. So create a Facebook business
page, a Twitter account, an Instagram account. Think about pushing the same or similar content
through all of them first; and then once you figure out what sort of content the different
audiences on the different networks prefer, you can start tailoring that accordingly.
Step six: tell your friends, colleagues, clients, tell everybody. So you might want to add your
social media account URLs to your emails, to your signatures, any bills, letterheads,
potentially business cards as well; it's totally up to you.
And then finally: make sure you leverage off others. So reach out to other businesses that
compliment yours, by liking/following their accounts. They might just have offices near
you or they could work with you; or maybe you just like how they run their social media.
Interact with them and observe how they run their social media accounts and make sure
you learn from that.
So we are going to have a quick look at a case study. Brisbane based Black Milk Clothing
Company is an excellent example of social media engagement carried out correctly for
the target market. The company sells leg ins that are made in Australia and I guess it
can be classified as alternative.
They play their strengths by using products in their posts, encouraging the community
of followers, who they deem "sharkies", to post photos of themselves in their leg ins
and even provide them with hashtags for each of their products, for them to use when they
post their products on Instagram or Twitter; making it easier for the community to find
out other fans as well.
Engagement levels are high on the Facebook page, with over 400,000 likes and just over
80,000 people talking about them on Facebook. Their posts frequently reach thousands of
"likes" and the sharkies happily share their post without being prompted as well.
Black Milk really understand the target market and have tailored their social media marketing
to them.
So now, hopefully, you will be ready to start your social media accounts, if you haven't
already. It is key that you understand the importance of monitoring. So social media
monitoring can be focussed on just your accounts, themselves, or on the wider web as well.
Monitoring is key to understanding how people are talking about you and why they are saying
those things. From there, you can approach these people about the complaints or their
feedback to fix or commend your service delivery.
So there are a number of tools that will help you monitor the activities surrounding your
brand/product. The paid tools focus on the wider web and social media, as does Google
alerts, which is a free one, through the use of keywords or topics.
The other free options such as Facebook insights, Twitter search and TweetDeck only really focus
on your individual account or on a particular topic that you have punched in within a social
network. You should at the very least set up Google alerts for your business. You can
find these just by entering Google alerts into Google; but you will need a Gmail account
to be able to set these up. That won't cost you anything. So it will be pretty easy.
We need to consider what to monitor in Google alerts, monitoring tools, Twitter search,
anything. There are a few different topics/items that you may want to monitor, but you need
to definitely start with Google alerts.
So they are: a business name, your business URL, any public facing figures you have, that
may work for your business, product names, product URLs, any industry hangouts or blogs,
consumer review sites. So if you were a restaurant, you would definitely want to make sure that
you were keeping an eye on your mentions around Urbanspoon and that sort of thing; and anything
else that is related to your industry. So making sure that you are being up to date
with your industry information all the time.
There is also employee activity or blogs, depending on how closely you want to look
into your employees; and then, of course, your competitors, so setting up alerts for
them, making sure that maybe one of the people on the Internet are complaining about a particular
competitor and you can zoom in there and say, "Well, maybe we can help you out instead."
There's lots of opportunity for monitoring.
Once you do get a few social media accounts, it can be difficult to keep track of all of
them and as well as what you are posting. So free tools like HootSuite or TweetDeck,
not only help you to monitor activities around your brand, but also help you to manage your
post. So you can set up scheduled posts in them, respond through the platform itself
and you can also post multiple accounts using the one system.
Now, we know the importance of monitoring from a customer conversation point of view.
But we need to note that it also plays a role in measuring the results of your social media
efforts.
So how to measure? Well, there are a number of different ways for you to measure how you
are going in social media. Facebook Insights is a really good one. So you can have a look
at the people talking about this or reach or virality metrics for your Facebook page
and content. We will talk about this a bit more in the Facebook events webinar on 27
February. So hopefully you can join me for that.
There's also manual gradings. So this is you looking at the number of negative/positive
posts you have received over a specific time period that is set by you, and how many complaints
there were that were resolved and perhaps in what timeframe. So you can always record
these numbers; best to use a spreadsheet; and then use them to benchmark your performance
in the next month/week.
Monitoring as well will help you measure. So you can monitor your activity as well as
your competitor activity and sort of benchmark them against each other. So the advantage
of having some of the paid monitoring tools are that they will let you punch in quite
a few competitors, so you can see what kind of levels of conversation are happening around
your particular competitors and see where you measure up against them.
There's also URL shorteners, so using services like bitly, or googles URL shortener for links,
can provide you with valuable information about how many people clicked on the link,
in your post, as well as what operating systems or browsers they were using as well.
And finally, we have got Google analytics. So this will be installed on your website
and hopefully you have got it on there; and you will be able to see how many referrals
your website has had from social media. It will tell you how many came from Facebook.com
links and how many came from Twitter, et cetera.
So to sum up: you really need to plan your entry into social media; so by spending time
defining a strategy and you make sure you know what you want to achieve. There's no
point going out somewhere without a battle plan, so that's what we really need to make
sure we figure out before we go into social media.
Ensure that you have a social media policy to guide the use of social media with your
employees. This will be really important, especially if you have parameters around what
they can say about your business, especially if you have disgruntled employees and such.
Establishing online monitoring to ensure that you are keeping on top of any conversations
about your company. You want to know who is saying things about you, where they are saying
things, because obviously if you leave a stone unturned and there is a whole mess of conversations
underneath that in a particular form or a particular Facebook page, that can have diabolical
effects for your company. So we want to make sure that you pick up everything.
And then use some of the free tools available to help measure your results. It's important,
especially for business owners, that they need to justify the use of their social media.
So making sure that you are measuring these results and ensuring that you are improving
on each month/week, in terms of engagement with your clients or responding to customer
service queries. It's really, really important, especially to justify to your boss, if you
are not actually the boss. So it's really important to make sure that we have that in
place.
So your workbook will have more information. If you need to refer to that, feel free.
We also have further information available on the Queensland Government's business and
industry portal, which contains a range of useful advice and tools to assist you with
your social media and your business. So that is at business.qld.gov.au/business.
Okay. And, Helen, if you would like to pop in for question time.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Hi, Alicia. Hello, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that presentation. We are
going to use the remaining time in the webinar to address some of your questions. So we have
had several questions come through already and if anybody would like to post any more,
we have got up to 20 minutes to answer any specific questions you have.
I think the first one is something that, Alicia, it would be probably quite easy for you to
address. One of the listeners have said that their own Facebook page, personal page, they
deactivated it. Can they still have a business page without their personal page being active?
ALICIA MARR: You definitely can. There's slight advantages and disadvantages to having it.
I know that you can definitely set up a page without having a personal account. Usually,
this happens for larger corporations and they will just use their employees work email.
That way it is not attached to anyone's personal account; that way there's no one controlling
it from the outside. So it's a little bit better as well, in case anybody leaves, and
that way you have access to their email account as well as Facebook. So there's definitely
a way of doing that.
I would say it would be a matter of going onto I think it's Facebook.com/create a page.
That way you should be able to go onto there and maybe set up just a log in account just
for that particular page.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. We are also getting a lot of inquiries around increasing the fan
base on the Facebook page. So some people have commented that they are a bit concerned
that their fans are their immediate friends and they want to do you have any tips about
how we can increase the fan base on Facebook business pages?
ALICIA MARR: Definitely. So the most important thing for any business owner, when they are
moving online into social media, is to use your existing client base. So if you are a
company, let's say a hairdresser, that has your offline business so you have clients
who come in all the time it's really important that you leverage off them and make sure that
they are all liking your Facebook page as well.
So you can offer small promotions or maybe they need to check in on Facebook, into your
business, and then maybe you will give them 10 per cent off or a $5 voucher or something
like that, just to incentivise them doing that. So they can either like your page or
if you add your address to your Facebook page as well, they can always check in.
The advantage of that is then that that check in is shared with all of their friends and
maybe that might prompt them to go, "Okay, maybe I will talk to that person about that
hairdresser that they went to, and see if they are any good." Then it's likely that
they will be able to click onto your page, have a look around and if they like you, they
might like you, which is a great advantage using those existing customers.
There is also the opportunity then to run competitions or any "like" grabbing campaigns;
which is all about making sure you use the Facebook apps or custom tabs; and you can
have "like" restrictions on those as well, that in order to see the content or in order
to enter the competition, people need to like your page first.
That can be a little bit of a disadvantage because it will often just get people who
just want free things or just want to win a competition. So they might not necessarily
be the people that you want to like your Facebook page. And you will see a drop off after the
competition ends and the people who don't find it relevant, will start unliking you.
So I think starting with your existing client base and really getting that word of mouth
through check ins and liking your page is really, really key to making sure you get
people who are nearby and people who are relevant to your business.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. We have also had quite a number of questions around posting.
I think I am going to try and draw them altogether to say: how many times a day should people
be posting to get maximum benefit; and also, so that they don't annoy the people who are
their followers? Is there anything in particular that people should be posting, so that it's
really relevant?
ALICIA MARR: So to start off, I will just answer the "how many times a day" question.
This is a bit of a "piece of string" question, but I think you should only update when you
have things that are interesting. So at least try to update maybe once a day. Particularly,
if it is Facebook, this will help with your EdgeRank, which is an algorithm, which we
will get into in the Facebook Advance webinar. But, essentially, it means the more times
you post and the more times people interact with your posts, the more likely it is for
you to end up in news feeds of your followers.
So in Facebook, particularly, it's really important to note that though you may have
100 people liking your Facebook page, it doesn't mean that you end up in the news feed of every
single one of these people. You only end up in the news feed of people who actually find
your business relevant and who will like your pages and who will go back to your page and
interact with you.
So the ones that will potentially find your post annoying or won't want to interact with
you on a daily basis are the people that are less likely to see your post anyway. So I
probably wouldn't worry about annoying people too much, as long as you stick to maybe one/two
posts a day and as long as it's relevant for people.
So in terms of what content to post to get the highest engagement, it's really important
that we understand that Facebook have let us know that posts with photos in them and
albums are the highest interacted with posts on Facebook; followed by videos as well. So,
unfortunately, those businesses are actually at this stage posting a lot of text posts,
as well as links; when it's really those photos that are driving home to consumers.
So it's important to make sure with any posts and I would recommend this myself you include
a photo for it. So forget the just pure text posts; make sure there's a photo every time;
make sure it's relevant to what you are actually posting as well. So it can be a photo of your
product, a photo of your team, a photo of the day, if you want to. So if you were a
coffee shop and you wanted to say you know, take a photo of the sky and say, "It looks
a bit cloudy or it's cold today. Wouldn't a coffee be nice to warm you up?"
Just as long as it's relevant to your post and you are not posting every 5 seconds, people
will find it useful. If they don't find it useful, they are probably going to unsubscribe
on your page or chances are, you are not even appearing in their news feed any way.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. Alicia, do you know if any research has been done to assess
Facebook users' reaction to direct marketing offers? One of our participants sort of feels
that Facebook users have a backlash against commercialisation.
ALICIA MARR: It depends what you mean by "direct marketing". I think through Facebook, businesses,
as a page, cannot actually message their page likers or that sort of thing through a private
message, unless the particular consumer initiates it first. Even then, it's probably not the
best way of communicating with them or giving them offers because you want them to offer
promotions and to talk to them, in a space where everybody can see it. So that it creates
that level of word of mouth and other people can interact with it as well.
So I guess it is really important to make sure that if you want to do direct marketing,
you need to have some sort of newsletter sign up or other option on your Facebook page or
sending people to the website to sign up, so that you can engage with them in a place
directly that they have chosen for you to do so.
So that way it gives them the option; you are not encroaching too much on them and I
definitely think it's a big concern because consumers feel like they own Facebook and
that brands are just in there, invading their space. So we have to play nicely with them,
to make sure that we don't get booted out.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. Just moving off Facebook briefly I am sure we will come back
to it is it possible to link social media accounts, so you don't need to update each
social media site separately?
ALICIA MARR: Yes, definitely. You can definitely link your Facebook and Twitter account. I
believe you can also link your You Tube as well, so that any time you update and you
add a video, it will be sent to your Twitter account. Not sure about Facebook; will have
to double check that one for you. But you can definitely link your Facebook and Twitter
and that's what people find the most useful; because obviously, sometimes, you just don't
have the time to go through and update both separately. As long as you are monitoring
Twitter at the same time, to make sure you capture any responses that people might have
for you, I would definitely encourage everyone to link their Facebook and Twitter account.
You can still post things on Twitter as well, that are specific to Twitter. So it is not
like you are locked with them together, forever, either.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Do you need special software to do that, or can you just do that through
Facebook and Twitter?
ALICIA MARR: I'm not sure of the exact link, off the top of my head, but you should be
able to "link Facebook and Twitter" or in Facebook's Help section, just type it in there.
It will all be there, the information. They send you the exact link and if you add in
different accounts as well, it will select which business you want to select with which
particular Twitter account. So it's very helpful.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Still staying away from Facebook, just for a moment we will be back one of the
questions that's come through, says, "Engaging with like minded businesses sounds like getting
into bed with the competitors. So how do we handle this?"
ALICIA MARR: So the best example probably isn't too relevant to small businesses but
particularly over when we had the Queensland floods and when we also had any storms around
Brisbane, that sort of thing, you will find that Brisbane City Council and Energex Pages,
as well as QPS, all interact with each other and share each other's posts.
I'm not telling people to necessarily start interacting with your competitors, but maybe
if you are you know, if you have a nearby business or that sort of thing, that you can
sort of bundle and offer with, and maybe promote that to your particular likers, that might
work to your advantage. I can't think of an example off the top of my head.
But it's certainly a bit of a tricky one to work with, but you have to make sure that
they are the right businesses. You can certainly link with Brisbane City Council and Energex
and QPS, and make sure if there are any disasters or emergencies, that you are getting out and
sharing those posts as well to your followers, so that you look like you are trying to help
them as well.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: So it's a bit like a complimentary business then; a bridal shop with one who
designs wedding stationery.
ALICIA MARR: Yes, that sort of thing. Definitely not your competitors. We don't want to start
sharing or anything, or not letting them know that we are doing that anyway. It's more about
those complimentary partnerships and making sure that there's something in it for you
as well.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Also, I know you touched on this a bit earlier, but can we just reiterate:
which software can people use to manage multiple social media sites and identities?
ALICIA MARR: So there's hoop sweet. You can just Google these really quickly as well so
HootSuite or TweetDeck. My reference is TweetDeck and so what it can actually do is I will use
TweetDeck as an example you have got a bunch of columns that you can set up within the
platform.
So it can be installed on your computer and it's just a program that you can sign into
your Facebook and your Twitter accounts as well and then you can have different columns
with all of your posts; you can have your direct messages from Twitter on that same
page. You can also have any searches for Twitter or just in the Twitter conversations around
anything, any particular hashtags or search words.
So it's basically a dashboard for you to plug everything into it, so that you can start
posting through that. The advantage is that you can check box, whether or not you want
to post something to your Twitter/Facebook or just your Twitter or Facebook. So it's
really streamlining the process, so that you can see everything happening at once, just
to make your job easier.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. A lot of that information is also covered in the workbook.
So if any of the participants have not received that, please post a question about it and
we will make sure we have got your email address and we can get it off to you.
We have said also been asked about demographics of each social media and when they use social
media. I know you covered a bit off on that earlier in the presentation; is in the workbook.
Did you want to say anything else about data around the demographics of the different social
media tools and when people use them?
ALICIA MARR: Yes, definitely. There are a stack of studies out there that say that people
spend so much time on this/that account. You have to make sure that you look for really,
really reputable ones. So any Nielsen reports, the Yellow Pages one is quite a detailed one;
as well as the ones that the actual sites will send out as well. So Facebook has a new
sort of area with statistics on it as well, about usage, as well as the number of people
that use it world wide and then I think you can drill down into Australia as well. But
it's important that you just have a look.
While certain demographics may use your Facebook page at different times, sometimes it's best
to just ask them. So if you use a little SurveyMonkey survey that you do up, and you ask your fellow
likers or followers to answer it I guess you can always throw in a promotional code at
the end, or a little $5 voucher that gets emailed to say "thank you for responding"
and that way you can figure out how they liked to be interacted with, how often they would
like to be interacted with; if they want more offers or more photos from you, or if they
want an opportunity to give more feedback. Sometimes it's just really useful to ask them.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thank you. We have just got a few more questions to go through. Do all
search engines index Facebook posts?
ALICIA MARR: Not necessarily. So what most search engines will index is Facebook overall
and then some Facebook pages as well. So sometimes it is easier to find a Facebook page, searching
in Google and that sort of thing, rather than Facebook; because Facebook search is well,
it's a bit of an unknown, put it that way.
In terms of indexing posts: once something is out there, public. You are always going
to be able to find it on the Internet later. So that's what they are not necessarily easy
to find through search engines. That's why monitoring tools are so important because
they will pick up if someone on Facebook, even on their personal account as long as
the post is public has said something about your business or has said they don't like
you, or that sort of thing. As long as it's public, it's always on the Internet. Even
if it's behind a privacy wall, you know, they go down with Facebook sometimes as well. So
who knows. It could be anyone's game.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Do businesses have to put anything on Facebook to say that "Facebook
doesn't endorse this business"? Is there any concern around endorsement or the way it might
look?
ALICIA MARR: No, the only way that you will need to cover yourself off is if there's any
competitions that you are running on Facebook; any terms and condition, you will have to
state that it's not in any way affiliated or endorsed with Facebook. But if you type
"Facebook page guidelines" into Google, it will send you a link to the particular Facebook
guidelines for your page. In there, under "competitions and promotions", it will tell
you exactly what you need to write in your terms and conditions.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Do you think any business/industry can benefit from a Facebook page?
ALICIA MARR: I don't think everyone can. There's a bit of a, I guess social media strategist
and digital strategist, there's a bit of a disagreement on this. So some will say, "Everybody
has to have a Facebook page." Personally, I don't think so. I don't know if I would
want to see a local funeral parlour on Facebook telling me what they are doing every day or
who they have buried. So that might be a little bit insensitive. There's certainly some businesses
who should just stay away from it, because their business isn't really a social thing,
especially those sort of sad ones.
But I think that for the majority of them, they can definitely from having a social media
presence.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Excellent. Got some fairly detailed questions, that I think we will address
as well: When you promote an event and opt to use the paid option, i.e. campaign through
Facebook, how do you know who you are reaching and is it a worthwhile option to use, to promote
an event?
ALICIA MARR: Usually when you go and promote an event or advertise through Facebook, it
will tell you who you can target. So you can target based on age, gender, who their likes
are, what their marital status, all that sort of thing. It doesn't tell you necessarily
exactly who or what profiles clicked on your advertisement, which is a a little bit of
a disadvantage. There is also different ways to pay for it as well. So sometimes different
options will allow you to target the people who are most likely to click or target the
people who it's more relevant for.
So you definitely want to go for the more relevant option. But in terms of promoting
an event, word of mouth is best, as well as using existing customer base. And make sure
that that link is on your website to the event, so that it's easier to send people to your
website or sometimes it's easier to send it straight to the Facebook page. The advantage
of the Facebook page is that if you do have an event, you can always hover over the post
within your timeline on Facebook and there should be an option to highlight/pin the particular
post. So if you pin it, that means it will stay up on your Facebook as the first post
for a week, no matter what you post. So that way, when people come to your page, they will
see it every time.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Thanks, Alicia. I think we will squeeze in one quick last question: do
you recommend merging a business page with the places page on Facebook? Are there any
advantages/disadvantages?
ALICIA MARR: Yes. The advantage now is if you put your address into your business page
anyway, it will act as a place. So we have done that with the Phillips Facebook page,
where we can add in our address, so that people can still check in here, even though it's
a business page.
The disadvantage of having just places page is that there's less functionality for it.
So I am all for merging the two, definitely.
HELEN HUTCHINGS: Great. Thank you, Alicia, and thank you everybody for attending. I'm
afraid that's all we have got time for today. But I think we have managed to cover off on
everyone's questions. I hope you enjoyed the webinar and thank you very much for your participation.
We will be sending you an evaluation survey shortly and so we very much appreciate your
feedback on today's webinar. Thank you again for attending and hope you have a lovely day.
Happy Facebooking. Thank you very much. Bye now.