10 Tips To Be Successful On Facebook:

written by Socialminded Media Group intern, Claire Belizidsky

Everybody thinks that being successful with Facebook is easy, but this social media platform takes more than just posts to conquer. Below are 10 rules to be a true Facebook Guru: 

1.     Define your goal with Facebook. Even if you can’t measure your ROI in dollars, you will build relationships and remain top-of-mind with your existing followers.

2.     Plan a commitment, like 3 posts/week.... and stick to it! Having an editorial calendar can help keep you organized and on track. Also, tools like Hootsuite let you schedule your posts in advance and more than one at once!

3.     Decide what image of your brand you want to portray, and be sure that your posts are always connected with this image.  

4.     Share pictures and videos as much as possible, they have a better engagement with users than just text. And make them REAL photos of you when possible - not stock images (like below!). People can connect with you more when they see into your world. 

5.     Like and comment on the posts of your community. But when you comment on a post, be sure to add value, so people reading it will want to follow your page. 

6. Be Familiar With The Facebook Terms of Service (TOS)

If you are going to giveaways or contests on your page - be sure to review the Facebook TOS first. You can find your page shut down without notice if you violate a rule. Yikes! Also, terms are always changing, such as cover photos dos and don'ts. Visit Facebook to learn more https://www.facebook.com/policies.

7.    42% of Facebook users, the first reason why they decide to unlike a page is irrelevant content, so be relevant ! And for that, understand your audience well: Think about what your followers will want to share, and analyze what they like the most in your posts. Using the Facebook Insights for this can be a valuable tool. 

8.     Respond quickly to the comments on your posts, questions, or private messages.

9.     It’s normal to share with your community blog posts, news articles, pictures.. but always give credit where credit is due! If you use someone's photo, be sure to credit them, and as always NEVER use photos just googled from the internet. (read up on copyright infringement rules here). 

10. Tell people where you are! It sounds basic, but are your social media links in your email signature? Newsletters? Website? Business card? Make sure to be available for your audience.

Blogging 101: Getting Started

Blogging. It’s now a requirement more than option. It not only helps your brand by offering quality content for your customers and viewers, it boosts your SEO (search engine optimization) and chances of gaining NEW viewers online!

So, where do you start?

Blogging 101 – Getting Started

 1. You have to purchase and own your own blog/website. 

If you’re serious about it – you need to buy your blog. WordPress and Blogger are free to start, and they make it’s super easy to move/upgrade and buy your URL to your own website/blog. (Make sure to use wordpress.ORG not wordpress.COM so you can install plugins down the road!) You can also use GoDaddy.com to see what's available to purchase, and buy from them. This usually costs $8-20 per year.

- Templates and hosting. If you’re serious about blogging, it’s worth the investment of a one-time template purchase. I have used Elegantthemes.com (Wordpress compatible), which is about $40 to have access to all of their WordPress friendly designs. Another great site to use is Wix.com. They let you build cool, simple websites from scratch for free, and you can upgrade to publish/host for as little as $6 per month. They also have apps to pull in your Blogger or Tumblr blog accounts as well. (So if you already have a blog, you can easily pull the feed in!)

**Remember you have to HOST your blog as well. Wix hosts for free with your package to publish, and Elegant Themes (and other theme sites usually offer) hosting packages with a partner - such as HostGator (who is the BEST as customer service).

 2. Setting Up and Understanding SEO

I think the word SEO (search engine optimization) is scary and confusing to a lot of people, but it doesn’t have to be!  Once you own your WordPress site, you can set up SEO by Yoast! (plugin), which will help get your blog in-front of eyes for free! There is nothing like sending traffic from Google and Bing just by optimizing one key word in each of your blog posts.

- Take advantage of Google. Google is a powerful force, and if you’re blogging using Blogger - everything is already set up and built in for you. It even pulls in your Google+ account and sets up your Google Authorship for you automatically! AMAZE!

***Consider setting up your Google+ account and linking up Google Authorship to connect your name with your blog and show up in the search results! Click here to read a really-great how-to on setting up Google Authorship by Host Gator.

3. Start a social media plan.

Social media is overwhelming, even for us who live it everyday! So I figured I would throw together a quick set-up plan for you to get going on your blog!

1. pick one or two social media sites and hit them hard. It’s impossible to be everywhere at once, so pick the ones you’re most familiar with and stick to them.

- Make them personable. people want to follow you because they can relate to you – so give them little peeks into your life. Real photos engage MUCH better than fake ones. Plus, you can’t get in trouble with copyrights for using your own shots!

- Recommendations? Facebook is always a given. Twitter is great for networking and sharing the word if you can commit the time (using scheduling platforms like HootSuite can help!). Google+ is a must for SEO, and Pinterest is GREAT for driving traffic (BUT – you have to pin a really catchy image!)

My traffic? #1 Pinterest. #2 Facebook #3 Google Search Results. (Don't underestimate the power to go viral on Pinterest!)

- Overall best time to post? research shows it’s between 1-5 pm. Photos get the best engagement, so add one to with your link. And don’t forget #hastags! A post should look like this:

BEST PRACTICES ON SOCIAL MEDIA:

FACEBOOK- make a page and invite your friends. (how to).

- schedule to post is advance. (how to)

- post at least 3 x a week.

- photos get the most engagement.

-search for and join local facebook groups or mom/blogger groups. (mom it forward)

-the more ‘likes’ and engagement from them = more exposure.

TWITTER- is great if you can stick with it. you can connect with ANYONE – especially other bloggers and moms.

- tweet to other bloggers personally.

- build lists

- join community twitter parties (@SITSGIRLS are great!)

- tweet 10x a day at least. Retweet other tweets that you like, it will engage that person to tweet you as well.

- set up hootsuite for free to scheudle out tweets of other blog posts. weekly. no one sees all your orignal tweets.

GOOGLE+

-for the techies of the world, but think less ppl = more exposure!

-google ranks your posts in their real time search results with #hashtags!

-the more circles you are in, the  more your info shows up in their google searches.

- join local and mom/blogger communities (help a mom out!)

- plan a hangout for moms!

-get really creative and set up google authorship. on advanced techniwues, contact me.

PINTEREST

- recommend just using your personal account unless you’re already killing it with a brand.

- ‘pin’ your articles.

- create boards of kids stuff that can link back to your blog.

4. Set up an Editorial Calendar. It’s best to write only when you’re feeling creative, forcing posts just because won’t be worthwhile to read. but knowing that you will post once a week, gives you plenty of opportunities to find something to write about in your daily life.

- Then schedule to post on Facebook 3 x a week, and schedule out your tweets. (recommend tweeting about a new post 2x a day for at least two weeks, using new titles of course) Takes 2 hours to do a full weeks work of posting and marketing!

5. Affiliate programs - make $$$!

When you write blogs about certain items (see top 10 baby registry items), link those photos and images to yourAmazon Associate Account. Then, if anyone clicks through to buy them, you get a percentage of the sale! Set up your affiliates account here.

- Amazon/Kindle  also lets you link up your blog posts for Kindle! So anytime a user downloads it to read, you get a percentage of that as well!

- Sponosored tweets. They will contact you to tweet for advertisers, and depending on how many followers you have, you get paid more!

- Google adsense. Setting up ads on your site is a controversial topic, but it can generate some dollars for you – you can also choose what can and cannot advertise on your site.

6. Promotion!

Blogging isn’t just about writing quality content, you have to post it all over the Internet and SIEZE YOUR DESTINY! Bookmarking sites are GREAT for this. Every time you write a new post, be sure to include it on these sites:

- Stumble Upon

-Digg

- Reddit.com

- Delicious

-Technorati.com

7. After you have promoted your posts - consider Syndication.


Syndication means letting others spread your information for you - sort of like a press release site for businesses. Hey - you want people to actually READ your awesome posts right? Then it requires some heavy lifting at the beginning - start here:


- IFITT - you can syndicate to over 50 sites at once.
- Doing Reviews? Use Scribnia.com - this is THE place for reader reviews of bloggers and columnists.
- NetworkedBlogs.com - a great place to start for generating traffic to your site.

Is your anxiety starting to flare up yet? haha – it’s okay – really once you get into a groove, it’s smooth sailing! Set-ups are always the hard work. If you need some help, or someone to hold your hand through it all, feel free to contact me @ stephanie[at]socialmindedmediagroup.com.

Drilling Down: Small Businesses and Location -Based Marketing

Great article in the New York Times featuring my past intern, Brian Honigman. We have come so far!

In this week’s Dashboard roundup of small-business news, we quoted from a blog post in which Brian Honigman, a digital marketing manager for Marc Ecko Enterprises, offers advice on using location-based networks. We went back to Mr. Honigman to dig deeper into how small businesses can use these services. A condensed version of the conversation follows.

Q.

Please explain what a location-based network does.

A.

A location-based network is a social media platform that allows you to share your location with your friends and the public in a variety of ways. Facebook and Twitter allow you to share your location associated with a status or a tweet, while a more heavily location-focused platform like Foursquare or Scvngr allows users to perform a few different tasks with their location, like earn rewards for check-ins or leave tips about their location.

Read the full article here...

Simplify Your Life: first step to social media – one email address

I was on vacation in Central America this past week (try not to be too jealous and yes I do have a point…) While working on the beach frivolously tweeting and emailing and cursing my iPad, iPod, and iPhone for not being more adaptable to my needs, I had an epiphany—It wasn’t my technology that needed upgraded, it was me.

I have gotten so accustomed to Google docs that when I needed my cheat sheet of client log ins, I was lost trying to toggle between everything and logging in. As I became more mad with the Google docs app (I prefer and actually highly recommend iMailG), I realized it could all be fixed efficiently with TaDa! Simplicity.

So I’ve come to Rule #1: When Starting a Social Media Campaign: Keep it Simple!

Designate one specific email address for all your logins.

(tip: make sure your email is a legit website and not a google email, such as marketing@socialmindedmediagroup.com because some sites such as LinkedIn require this for verification). This way you can also designate this email to anyone else monitoring your marketing accounts so it is not a cluster of google docs and logins.

(NOTE: I am not saying to use the same passwords! Make sure these are still encrypted. I like to coin a phrase, such as “IloveGoogleDocstoomuch” and use ILGD2M as my password.)

This is also nice because social media loves to overload your inbox with notifications of new friend requests, retweets, comments and more. Having one designated email will allocate all of these to one lonely place, and keep your regular inbox clean and tidy.