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A Facebook Success Story

This week I enjoyed client visits in Orange County. And on the heels of my visit with Center Club, I wanted to share a Facebook success story with you.

As you may remember from my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, Facebook changed it’s algorithms. That means that the chances of our Page posts landing in the news feed of the people who like your page has changed. And what’s worse is that those chances have decreased. Facebook wants you to share content from big sources like Time Magazine or ESPN. Facebook wants you to share photos. And Facebook wants you to pay to get your content into the newsfeed of the people who like your page.

I worked with the Center Club team to determine how we could work around this. And here’s what we tested:

Increase the number of posts per day

Before the algorithm change, the Club was posting about 2 times per day. We increased that to 5-7 times per day. It is nearly impossible that any one of the people who like the Center Club page will see every post. That would be a nice problem to have!

Focus on the content

What’s the incentive for people to like, comment or share? While it’s nice to post more often throughout the day, it’s absolutely essential to make sure it’s quality content. For Center Club, the goal is to continually share content which helps Members take advantage of and enjoy their membership. Every post is Member-centric. And that also means that every department has a voice, so you see content from Membership, Private Events, Food & Beverage, Member Relations and spontaneous moments that are fun to capture.

Behind the Scenes

Members love interacting with the staff, and so the BTS type posts often perform very well. We geared up to share more BTS-type posts.

Center Club BTS

Contests

Simple trivia and photo contests are popular among Members. And it gives incentive to share the post on their own profiles. Our test period fell during Valentine’s week, and so the “Cutest Couple” contest was a big hit and certainly played a role in increased engagement. Center Club will post a simple contest each week.

Our team schedules their posts directly in Facebook (FB likes this more than third party apps like Hootsuite) and after two weeks of consistent posting, the results were in. We were delighted to see green arrows pointing up in all categories on our Facebook Insights

Page Likes increased 5.6%

New Page Likes increased 580%

Total Reach increased 172%

Post Reach increased 335%

Engagement increased 143%

The team is encouraged and excited to keep up their efforts. They now feel a positive challenge to reach out to the Members more frequently through the day and they are continually thinking about what they can share via social media. They are determined to “beat Facebook.”

My challenge to you is to give this a try and see if you enjoy similar results. Give it a week for your efforts to kick in for measurable outcome. Leave a comment to let us know if this worked for you. If you’ve found another way to work around Facebook’s algorithm change, please leave a comment below so that we may all learn. I’m sure there are plenty of you who want to avoid paying for your content to be seen and feel that we should have to pay for our content to be seen by people who have liked our Page. Especially when most of those folks are Members and who have a genuine interest (and need) to stay connected.

I’ll make sure to update this post in another couple of weeks and share if this method of more frequent posts continues to positively effect levels of engagement and reach.

Facebook Likes and Reputation Management

image building

When I have the opportunity to speak with college students – student-athletes, Greeks or graduate students – I am always curious which point of the presentation will resonate most. Of course, college students believe they already know everything they need to know about social media and assume they are “doing it right.” So when I use examples from their own profiles, posts which are embarrassingly bad, they do tend to perk up and realize they have room to improve their communication skills.

This week, I was so pleased to speak with student-athletes at Cal State San Marcos. Athletic and Club Sport athletes joined me to learn how they can use social media and communication to achieve their goals.

During the presentation, I pointed out that one’s reputation also stands upon the types of posts and things you like and the people you associate yourself with online. Some of the students have liked more than 1000 Facebook Pages. I cannot even fathom what these Pages are, but with a quick glance over many profiles, they are not Pages which work to build a good reputation.

We also discussed the accounts they were retweeting. When Twitter handles like @ReallyStonedPanda and @WeedReport pop up in someone’s news feed, it’s a clear indication that they enjoy the content these accounts produce. Retweeting them is associating yourself with them and their content. And as you can gather from these two examples, this type of association does not work to build a good reputation.

Wouldn’t we love to believe that it’s just college students who do not take care with what they like and who they retweet? Many seasoned professionals have room to improve their skills, as well. So in this week’s video, I mention a few social networks and what you need to take care of to maintain a positive profile and manage your reputation.

 

A quick breakdown:

Facebook – Be mindful of the Pages you like and the posts you like, comment on, and share. Make sure your “friends” are people you actually know.

Twitter – Take care with who you follow AND who follows you. You are associated with both. Double check the Twitter handle and content of the accounts you retweet.

Pinterest – Follow people and businesses who have good content and who are reputable. Repinning pictures which are linked to “spammy” sites is not a good practice.

LinkedIn – Accept invitations from people you know, have done business with and who add value to your contact base. Remember my advice from my networking video – You want to be able to connect the people in your network. Help them in their business so they will help you with yours. (You can also check out the blog post on networking, too.)

YouTube and Blog Comments – Often overlooked, your comments on blogs and videos says a lot about you. What videos are you watching? What types of blogs do you interact with? If they are controversial on any level, your interaction with them paints you in a negative light. Your comments are discoverable online.

Finally, please remember that NOTHING online is private. It doesn’t take much to learn about a person with a simple Google search and a bit of browsing through social sites. When the recruiter or admissions officer, the media or your colleagues take a tour of your online profile, what will they find? And what will the things you like and the people you associate with say about you?

 

Tell me in the comments if you are a person who is diligent about managing your reputation. Do you already take care with what you like and who you follow? What other things do you do to protect your brand? Share your advice in the comments! Thank you!

 

New Facebook Insights

As you may have noticed in the last week or so, Facebook has launched some new features within Insights, as well as dressed up our view of the data. I’m really pleased with this upgrade. One of my favorite new features is the “When Your Fans are Online” tool. This tells you when you should be posting to your page. Couple that with the “Best Post Types” data and you should start to see some increases in engagement.

Here’s an example of what it look like. The main page (Page>Insights>Posts>When Your Fans Are Online) gives you the average time of day your fans are online, weekly view:

Facebook's new Insights tell you when your fans are online.

Facebook’s new Insights tell you when your fans are online.

 

But if you hover over any day of the week, it will give you the specific data for that day:

Facebook Insights When Fans Online by Day

 

This is a super helpful tool for those who manage pages and are trying to figure out when to post and what types of posts their fans like the best. This would be an awesome tool for Twitter, should they ever decide to add analytics to the mix.

It’s Also What You Like

Like_1

Last night I spoke with another group of undergrads, this time at UCLA. I was, again, surprised with the small numbers of students who have LinkedIn accounts, especially students who are graduating. We have got to get these young adults up to speed on better use of social media!

When I conduct these seminars, I provide students with both the good and the bad of social media. It’s important to show them how easy it is to make a major mistake, but also give them some good examples to follow. They need inspiration as much as they do a wake up call.

One of the things that stuck with my group last night, was the lesson that it’s not just about what you say, but also what you like. Facebook’s search has become much more powerful with the release of Open Graph. You can search for things like “My friends who like dogs,” or “People who live in San Diego who go to SDSU and like surfing.”  These searches will produce results with a list of profiles. At UCLA, I targeted the search for members of the group who like “partying”and “Drinking” and such.

Luckily enough, one of the audience members popped up in my search results. He was amazed, as well as all of his friends. But it is terrific when this happens in real time. This young man ‘Liked’ almost 300 pages on Facebook. He admitted that he could not remember everything he liked and had no idea that he could be found by non-friends via the search function.

As I’ve said many times, Beaming Bohemian exists to infuse communication with positivity and purpose. In the case of these students, I enjoy to helping them find their positive purpose and new approach for using social media. If they begin to see how the professional world is using tools like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram to conduct business, market, communicate and recruit employees, they begin to look at how they can take advantage of these platforms, versus just socializing. Students easily pick up how they need to fix and build their image and manage their reputation.

 

Drug Deals, Twerking and Sorority Girls

What a week for news in San Diego! There were three news stories which affected teens and university students this week, where social media played a heavy hand in getting “caught.”

Don’t set up meetings on Facebook.

Students at Abraxas, Mission Hills, Poway and Ramona high schools, and were able to buy narcotics, according to sheriff’s officials. The variety of drugs purchased included heroin, cocaine, marijuana, oxycodone and hydrocodone.  Wow. That’s some pretty serious stuff for high school!  Are you wondering how the authorities track some of these sales? You guessed it. Social Media. The students arranged many of the drug deals over social media.

Scripps-Ranch-Twerking-Vide

I now know what Twerking is!

Before I saw this new report, I had no idea what “twerking” was. I’m not sure what to do with this knowledge, but I now know what this suggestive butt-shaking is all about. And this twerking story also revolves around social media. Scripps Ranch High School students found themselves in very hot water after one student decided to share a student-produced twerking video on YouTube. A few problems with that? The video was made on campus and with school equipment.

I say many, many, many times in my social media sessions, “Nothing is private.”  That speaks to things you choose to record or allow others to record (and even things you didn’t know are being recorded).  It certainly applies to the things you post online.

A series of bad decisions led to this video getting made and posted to YouTube. This is not only a “think before you tweet” lesson, but a “think before you do.” What purpose does any of this serve? How will college admissions officers judge this video, and the decision to be in the video? This is another example of a misguided use of social media, and decisions which will only hurt these students in the long run.

Train students to use social media responsibly.

Even at the college level, students made a poor choice this week when it came to posting photos on Instagram. Members of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority at CSU San Marcos posted photos of themselves dressed like Latina gang members. Apparently the photos were taken during a retreat.

A few things are disturbing, in addition to the blatant cultural disrespect. A friend of one of the Alpha Chi Omega members said, “We can’t nit-pick every little thing, because there’s a lot more worse things that could happen.” This tells me that many students might think this is “no big deal.” The other problem is that the news report ends with,

A spokesperson for CSU San Marcos told 10News no disciplinary action will be taken against the sorority, but that extra diversity training will soon be offered to all students, especially incoming freshmen.

Where is the social media training? These students will continue to do “stupid stuff” on social media if they are not taught the impact their actions have online. Yes, they need to be more culturally sensitive, however, they need to be more responsible with their communication via social media. I’ve spoken with fraternities and sororities who made similar mistakes on social networks and were disciplined by the university. Part of their requirement to lift sanctions? Learn how to use social media more positively and for better purposes.

 

These three news reports differ drastically in what actions occurred, however, what they all have in common is that our San Diego high school and university students have a grave misunderstanding of how social media can work against you when you do not behave responsibly online. I’m sure all of these students thought that they wouldn’t get caught, either. And that’s a behavior that’s even more disturbing. Our young adults need to understand that what they do online is just as serious and just as REAL as what they do offline. Behaving badly online is not something you can get away with. Your actions in both realities will catch up to you. I’d like to see more of our students truly understand that.

Social Spring Cleaning

SPRING-CLEANING
It’s that time of year! The flowers are blooming, the sun is shining and yet all of the magazines have feature articles telling you what products you need to use to thoroughly clean every dusty, little corner of your home. There are a zillion suggestions for organizing your clothes, the kids’ toys, the dog’s house and the tools in the garage. Before you grab the scrub brush and gloves, you might want to pick up your computer. One area you should definitely clean up – your social media accounts. Your laptop can go with you out onto the patio, so this task doesn’t require you to miss out on all the lovely, spring sunshine!
Your data and connections, just like those bookcases, need a bit of dusting.  Let’s start with your login information. When was the last time you updated your passwords? Several social sites have had security breaches in this past year, including LinkedIn. Take a moment to change your passwords and better protect your accounts. While it is ill-advised by most digital gurus, I do actually keep a file hidden within my computer which lists my passwords, as I do not have the same one for each account (and my memory isn’t that stellar). This is a good first item to cross off on your social spring cleaning list.
I will also suggest that you review your accounts’ security/privacy settings. Social media sites are continually evolving and often release new features. When they do, it’s possible that some settings revert to default. This is more often the case with Facebook. Go through your account and privacy settings and make sure that you understand how the site functions. Refresh your profile data and make sure it reflects you accurately. Coordinate your bio/about me/profile sections so that you are branded across each channel where you are active.
Now it’s time to do a little gardening within your contacts. Follow this 3-step spring cleaning program to improve the health of your networks:
1. Weed
If you don’t actually know the folks you are friends with on Facebook, not sure why you follow some of the Tweeps you do, or cannot find value in your LinkedIn connections, this is a time to unfriend, unfollow and disconnect. Be certain about who you are interacting with on any of the social sites. It is significant to recognize that you and your personal brand are associated with the people in your digital networks. You would not allow unsightly plants grow wild in your manicured garden. Don’t allow inappropriate contacts to influence your network and image. Remove the weeds.
2. Organize
Both Facebook and Twitter offer a list function which is amazingly helpful in organizing your contacts. I have created lists on Facebook around how I know people. So, I have a high school list, one from UCSB and then the places I lived where I met a large number of people. On Twitter, I organize Tweeps by category/profession or topics they tweet about. A fabulous tip for the Twitter lists – you don’t have to follow people to put them on a list. My “News” list, for example is filled with all the major news sources, but I follow less that a handful. I can still reply and retweet with the accounts. Public lists can also be subscribed to, so don’t forget to Tweet out the link of your well-curated lists so that others can see how awesome and organized you are!
3. Grow
Have a look through the “People you may know” section on your social media accounts. Friend, follow and connect with those who will add value to your news feed and your network. Take some time on LinkedIn to endorse your connections for their skills. It’s a nice way to let them know you’ve remembered them and might spark a beneficial reconnection. They will likely return the endorsements and help you build your profile. Tweet to someone you haven’t conversed with in awhile or send a private message to an old friend on Facebook. Social media is designed to help you stay connected to family, friends and professional contacts. Take advantage of these features to allow your garden of networks to bloom.
Lastly, take out your calendar and schedule 30 minutes each month to go through your social media settings. This will allow you to stay on top of new features, keep those weeds at bay and enjoy social networks which are active, vibrant and productive.  Now you can pick up that dust cloth and tackle those other cleaning duties. Happy spring cleaning!

Facebook’s New News Feed

Facebook offers new newsfeed.

Facebook offers new newsfeed.

Just yesterday, Facebook announced major changes to it’s news feed. The new design is slowly rolling out to users. I have not yet converted to the new design, but wanted to give you the heads up and let you know that I will provide more information once the news feed is activated on my account. I can’t wait to play around with the new features.
Facebook’s new News Feed is designed to provide users with a “personalized newspaper” experience. You’ll have more control over what you view in your feed and a better menu to select from friends, pages, etc. Photos will be larger, and post images expanded, too.  In the meantime, I encourage you to take a look at Facebook’s post, just so that you are prepared. It’s a pretty big update! More information here:https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed

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