by Brian Cardinale | Mar 6, 2016 | Social Media Marketing
Facebook Live has been expanded to Android and more countries as of February 26th, 2016. As of the end of 2015, Facebook Live has been made available to verified Pages with blue badges. This is important to note because there is a lot of news this week about using Facebook Live for marketing, but the vast majority of small business will not be able to benefit directly. Facebook Live: Marketing for the Marketed Why? Because the blue badge is reserved for celebrities and public figures or global brands and businesses or government officials. Good old Sunflower WIFI, although aspiring to be a global brand, will likely fall short of the qualifications as will many other small businesses. Live Streaming for the Rest of Us There goes my dreams of small concert venues interviewing their acts prior to live shows or the lovable hostess at the local restaurant live streaming the lunch specials prior to lunch or is it? There are many other well established live streaming apps that already exist, such as Periscope, Meerkat, and MeVee that you can leverage. You can also use Facebook Live from your personal account and link it to your Facebook page just like any of these other services. Facebook likes to promote their new features, so Facebook Live will reach more users than other traditional posts. At least for now, until the subscription feature takes off in the live function. The tricky part of this is your Facebook personal account is likely private. There is no need to clean up your personal account to expose it to the world. Instead, simply set your Facebook Live post to public and share the...
by Brian Cardinale | Mar 5, 2016 | Social Media Marketing
Understanding Facebook’s EdgeRank If you are not familiar with Facebook’s EdgeRank system, you should be. EdgeRank is the difference between your business’s Facebook page posts (or stories) being viewed by your customers and/or potential customers, or not. The average user has a potential of 1,500 stories to be displayed to them when they visit Facebook. Facebook knows that a user cannot read 1500 stories, so it uses their EdgeRank algorithm to determine which ones are the most relevant or interesting to the target user. There are numerous articles written on the subject on how the EdgeRank algorithm works, but for the most part, the more likes and comments your post gets the more likely it will be displayed to the user. Affinity Score This is of course an over simplification of the EdgeRank algorithm, but comments and likes do affect what is known as the “affinity score”. The affinity score is how closely connected a user is to your story. It weighs how closely connected the users that interact with your story are to each other to determine if the story is relevant to a particular user. Your business is at a slight disadvantage here as it is likely the least connected to the target user then their friends and family are. However, if their friends and family interact with your post it will gain relevance from their interaction in the forms of likes and comments which affect the posts “edge weight” discussed next. This is why it is very important to create interesting content for your users to interact with. Edge Weight When a user performs an action they are...
by Brian Cardinale | Feb 28, 2016 | Social Media Marketing
Why Are Check Ins Important? There is no denying that Facebook check ins are an amazing way to promote your business online. When a customer checks in on Facebook at your business, it is predominately displayed to most if not all that user’s friends. The average adult Facebook user has an average of 338 friends. This makes one user’s “check in” an extremely powerful stimulant for many organic social media impressions. This is in contrast to the Facebook “like”, which, although important, is fairly static. You can only get “one” like from a customer, but you can get many “check ins”. The question remains, how do we get more people to check into our business? 1. Remind Your Customers According to Pew Research Center, 64% of Americans own a smart phone. This means the majority of your customers are already armed with the tool they need to check in to your physical location. What they may lack though is motivation. A simple sign or poster with a reminder may encourage some users to pull out their smart phone, find your location on Facebook, and then click the check in button. However, unless the user is already an avid user of “checking in” or your business is novel enough that the user wants to share it with their friends, there is little incentive for average user to go through the effort. 2. Reward Your Customers Good behavior should be rewarded and nothing talks like money or the feeling of saving money. Facebook has banned rewarding users for “likes”, however “check ins” are still fair game, so take advantage of it! Reward your customers with a...
