4 Great Uses of Facebook Groups

February 25, 2012 Facebook, Social Media No comments

Facebook groups get no love. When you look at keyword search volume for “Facebook groups”, those queries looking to delete a Facebook page are far greater than those looking to create one. I participate in a couple active and valuable Facebook pages, and – believing there were others that I might get value out of – I recently posted a question on LinkedIn seeking others’ favorite Facebook groups. I didn’t get many answers that sold me on the idea that people used Groups, or saw value in using them frequently.

I get it; there are a number of benefits for companies and organizations to put resources into a growing Facebook page to market themselves, and frankly, there’s far more attention paid by media, marketers, and bloggers to the value of Facebook pages for brands. The truth is, a Facebook page and Facebook groups are two very different types of communities. Before you dismiss the idea of creating a Facebook group to reach certain goals (for your company or yourself personally), you might consider the below 4 effective uses of Facebook groups:

Sharing Industry Best Practices

Example: Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelist

You may think that this kind of Facebook group is similar to a LinkedIn group, but I’ll take the professionals at Community Manager, Advocate, and Evangelists over a LinkedIn group any day, because this group is self-policing and actually looking to help each other out with their experineces. In fact, spammers & heavy self-promoters need not apply, and if you join for that one reason and one reason only, you’ll quickly be reported & banned by administrators. I’ve turned to this group for anything from a brainstorm from impartial but knowledgable community managers, recommendations on a new app, or to get opinions on the latest “it” community (:ahem: Pinterest).

Product & Service Recommendations

Example: What Should I Spend My Money On? 

Started by a group of realtors, this Facebook Group is a community that discusses the who, what, when, why and how of spending money on marketing and technology to promote real estate businesses and client properties. It’s an incredibly targeted use of Facebook groups, where realtors seek recommendations from like-minded professionals, who can help them save money and make wise decisions based on their own experiences. Like the Community Manager group, vendors and product reps are free to educate about their products when appropriate, but any hard-selling and unprompted spammers are mostly ignored, making their attempts futile.

Moral Support

Example: The New Rules of Lifting for Women

This group is essentially a support group for women participating in the weight training program offered up through the book “The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look by a Goddess” by authors Cassandra Forsythe and Lou Schulman. For those who are interested in hearing from others about workout substitutions, nutritional advice, and stories of success, this group is effective in helping you stay safe and motivated while embarking on a pretty serious workout regimen. I could see this kind of support being employed in Facebook groups for military wives, family of those with addiction issues, or transplants to new cities.

Focus Groups

Example: Gilt City Insiders

Gilt City uses a private Facebook group to keep their top-referring and top-spending customers updated with insider information, event invites, early access to deals, and gifts in exchange for feedback and referrals. This is one of the more brand-focused applications of Facebook groups, but it is an incredibly effective way to get front & center with their loyal customers and make them feel involved and as part of the internal operations.

Are you part of any Facebook groups that you actively participate in? Which ones? Or, would you rather stick to Facebook pages to build a community around a topic or brand?

Social Media Listening Tools: 3 New Finds for Facebook & Twitter

October 23, 2011 Social Media No comments

According to InboxQ, 64% of Twitter users are more likely to make a purchase from a business account that answered their questions on Twitter.

I’m not sure we should be entirely shocked by this statistic, but it underlines the importance of listening to your customers – not just on Twitter, but on any platform. Social media is not new anymore, but the fact that 64% of Twitter users are more likely to purchase from those businesses that are listening speaks to the fact that consumers are still willing to be swept off their feet by companies that are paying attention.

We’re still trying to get companies to listen for their own brand mentions on social media – that in itself is enough of an undertaking. But, I challenge you to take it a step further: listen for industry-related opportunities to wow people, making them take notice of the person or company answering their questions. People want to do business with you, they just don’t know it yet.

For instance, if someone’s talking about going on a first date in Manchester, NH, and you own a low key martini bar with live music 6 nights a week, you should be paying attention. Set up queries of certain topics and keywords through your favorite social media listening tools for the types of discussions that potential customers could be talking about.

There are a ton of social media listening tools out there to choose from, both paid and free. These are 3 tools that I’ve come across over the last couple months that have become my go-to to ensure that no brand mention and no “keyword”-specific opportunity goes unanswered.

 

Social Media Listening Tools

IFTTT Screen Shot

Simple, but packs a big punch

IFTTT (If This, Then That)

This is by far my favorite tool because the combinations of alerts are endless. I have certain needs in terms of how and when I want to receive notifications, and with IFTTT, you can really customize the types of alerts you want to receive when you want to receive them.

Pros:

  • Real-time alerts for at least 110 possible task combinations involving Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages, Delicious, Google Reader, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, Instapaper, Tumblr, text, phone calls, and more. Much, much more.

Cons:

  •  I don’t love the integration with bit.ly. Without going into too much techy nerdy detail, the integration causes too much clutter in my bit.ly account, creating shortened URLs for every interaction/alerts/combination that I set up.

 

48ers.com

Pros:

  • Real time social search engine
  • Discover not only keywords & brand mentions, but can also capture URLs that people share even if they shorten your link and never actually mention your brand by name
  • See what people are saying (publicly) on Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, and what they’ve bookmarked on Digg and Delicious.
Cons:
  • No subscription feature (only a “share” feature, which doesn’t do much for me)
  • No alerts

 

Hyper Alerts

Pros:

  • Real time email alerts for Facebook pages
  • Receive digest activity monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, or get alerts up to the minute
  • Get emails whether or not you’re the administrator of the page (great competitive research)
Cons:
  • Alerts only for Facebook
What other social media listening tools do you use and love? Share them in the comments!

 

PodCamp NH: How to Take Better Cell Phone Photos

August 13, 2011 PCNH One comment

Proof I am awful at taking camera photos:

Bud Thorpe's Session at PodCamp NH

 Which is why I’m at Bud Thorpe’s “How to Take Better Camera Phone Images” session at PodCamp NH. Will be taking his rules to heart:

  • Set your camera to high res.
  • Use an app.
  • Turn off the stupid fake shutter sound.
  • Turn off the zoom.
  • Geotag.
  • Keep your elbows in. Steady.
  • Clean off your lens every time you take a photo. Every time.
  • Digital zoom = cropping. Stop zooming. Crop after the fact.

Camera phones in general have wide lenses. Get close to your subject. Be sneaky, even.

On lighting: When outdoors, go in the shade. It’s all about the light. Also: People shouldn’t be facing the sun. That = Squints McGee. The light will bounce off of the ground/pavement/photographer.

Who Owns Social Media for Your Company?

August 3, 2011 Community, Social Media 3 comments

Who owns social media for your company? Social media marketing is a challenge many companies are grappling with these days. Social media marketing tends to be:

  • Difficult to measure / report
  • Full of squishy human elements
  • Less predictable / harder to forecast
  • More qualitative than quantitative
  • Something that can make a company publicly vulnerable
  • A Constantly evolving community affair

One of the biggest challenges is that unlike TV, radio or print media, social media marketing is a two-way channel. While it’s great to have live feedback from customers, it also necessitates a certain “letting go of control” over your brand. Your company, now more than ever, is no longer just what you say it is, but what the community says it is. Are you reluctant to utilize social media marketing for fear of losing control? Unfortunately, hiding under a rock does not make the spiders go away. Your people are going to use social media whether you endorse it or not! Why not educate them to properly represent your brand and turn a liability into a revenue generation component? For example: those hip marketing people you hired – who also happen to have a big following on social media – why not leverage the audience of billions using social media and co-develop a message together with them that will allow them to build a community around your brand?

Create a Culture of Collaboration and Adaptation

Social media is a cultural phenomenon that is growing like wildfire. Why? Because it is a collaborative enterprise that has become intertwined with the culture. How can you leverage this to grow your business? Adopt a corporate philosophy that promotes and rewards collaboration and adaptation; one that incorporates your business into our culture. Yeah, this is a big deal, and easier said than done. It’s also do or die for companies that want to grow today. Kaboom is an example of a business that is built on collaboration and incorporated into our culture. When you collaborate on the things that matter to people, you will become a partner in their happiness and success.

Find a Good Community Manager

Some people are just better at communicating in public. That alone does not make them the ideal community manager, but possessing the right qualities is a must; someone who can balance personal expression with business acumen, who can engage your audience with poise and stimulating conversation; someone who can understand and articulate the character of your brand, teaching others to do the same.

Sign on With One Voice

If you empower personal expression but don’t complement each other you are inviting confusion and negative results. Social media has reached popularity as an answer to the isolation and boredom of a generation. They feel a need to be reconnected and share experiences, thoughts, emotions. They want to interact with each other around your brand. So it’s critical to make sure that brand is consistently and positively positioned by not just the community manager, but by anyone on the team who uses these channels.

There are No Mistakes, Only Opportunities 

Human behavior is very unpredictable, but a good contingency plan around some “what if” scenarios is just good common sense. Settle in for the long haul and learn from those mistakes. Collaborate, grow, adapt and help others to do the same.

This guest post is by Don F. Perkins, an internet marketer, writer, and entrepreneur from New Hampshire and author of the Mindmulch B2B Sales/Marketing Blog.

Check out my thoughts on Who Owns Social Media Within an Organization on Don’s blog.

Have more thoughts on collaboration, growth and adaptation around social media and marketing? Leave a comment below or contact myself or Don F Perkins. Let’s keep the discussion going!

PR Tip: Find Out Who’s Writing About Your Competitors by their Backlinks

July 31, 2011 Public Relations, SEO No comments

Want to know what journalists and bloggers are writing about your competitors?

UPDATED ON 4/10/12: Previously, I suggested you should use Yahoo’s site explorer. That utility has now been folded into Bing’s Webmaster Tools. Open Site Explorer is a great alternative from SEO Moz.

Go here - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/ 

  • Plug in a competitor’s URL.
  • When you get results, choose “Only External” from the second dropdown

Behold, all (or most, if the competitor is huge) of the links pointing back to your competitors – many will not be links from newspapers, blogs, or online magazines, but many will be. Even better, you know that these editors – or at least the publications – have no policy against linking out to the folks they’re reporting on.

*Reminder: No matter where you get coverage, always take the opportunity to request a link back to your site (or even better, one of your blog posts or whitepapers that lends more context to the topic of the article). After working with a number of PR firms in the past couple years, it’s clear to me that this small but important detail is not a common practice amongst public relations reps, so if you work with an external PR team, be sure to remind them how important links are.

This not only helps you rank higher for certain keywords (or even just get some link juice for your own name), but it also helps put some numbers against your efforts. You may not know how many people read the article, but your analytics can shed some light on how much traffic you got from the coverage, as well as how many pages those visitors looked at and how long they stayed on your site. This data can help you determine whether or not it’s worth pursuing that publication or blog again next time you have news.

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