When To Post To Your Business’ Facebook Page
24 Dec 2012 | No Comments | posted by Sam Zastrow | in Intermediate, Social Media Marketing & Management
This blog post is an excerpt from CloudTactix’s upcoming eBook, A Step-by-Step Guide to Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses, Part II: When, How and What To Post. We’ll post a link to the eBook when it’s available for download. To download part I of the eBook, click here.
Even if you have a fully optimized Facebook Page, your business isn’t going to get much marketing traction on the network if you don’t post quality content or don’t do it often enough.
The first step toward a successful Facebook posting strategy is determining how often your business can post. This may depend on your time commitment or goals for the Page. Read more..
5 Steps to Creating a Successful Geotargeted Email Offer
22 Dec 2012 | No Comments | posted by CloudTactix Team | in Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Intermediate
Over the last 48 hours, it’s snowed 19 inches and counting here in Madison. During this particularly heavy Wisconsin winter storm, the conditions were dangerous enough that businesses across the city—malls, restaurants, gyms, and even CloudTactix—decided to close doors for the day to keep employees and customers safe and off the roads.
“Draco” dropped 19+ inches of snow on Madison this week. Photo credits: Bridget Callaghan.
While many saw the snow day as a missed opportunity for securing new business, one local yoga studio took action. Dragonfly Hot Yoga, a hip yoga boutique in Madison, saw the citywide snow day as an opportunity to send their target audience an amazing offer. In this post, I’ll walk you through each part of Dragonfly’s snow day offer to demonstrate just how effective a well-planned geotargeted email campaign can be.
Step 1: Define Your Audience
For companies who depend on their brick-and-mortars for business, defining your audience is a crucial aspect of any geotargeted email offer. Read more..
How To Optimize Your Facebook Page Information For Humans And Search Engines
17 Dec 2012 | 1 Comment | posted by Sam Zastrow | in Introductory, Social Media Marketing & Management
The following is an excerpt from part I of CloudTactix’s upcoming eBook, A Step-By-Step Guide To Facebook Marketing. We’ll post a link here when the full version is available for download.
Before Facebook users can like your Page, they need to be able to find it. For this reason, it’s a good idea to optimize your Facebook Page with relevant information and keywords so folks using Facebook’s search function can find it with ease. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently revealed that Facebook processes one billion internal search queries per day, so think of optimizing your Facebook Page the same way you would optimize content on your website for the search engines.
To get started, go to your Page, click “Edit Page” and then “Update Info” in the drop-down. You’ll then see a Page with a bunch of fields to fill out. Let’s run through them one by one:
Category: This one can be tricky, as Facebook asks you to choose between “Companies & Organizations” or “Local Business.” In most cases, I’d recommend choosing “Local Business” so Facebook knows to include your Page in search results for people searching in your area. Only select “Companies & Organizations” if your business isn’t concerned with attracting local customers or if you don’t frequently serve customers at your brick-and-mortar. After choosing your main category, pick an appropriate secondary category and move on. Read more..
What Small Business Marketers Can Learn From NPR’s Local Content Facebook Experiment
10 Dec 2012 | No Comments | posted by Sam Zastrow | in Intermediate, Social Media Marketing & Management
In late November, NPR released data from an experiment it ran on its Facebook page. Instead of simply posting general content to its page, it geo-targeted local-specific content produced by NPR affiliates in five cities so only fans in those areas saw the content. Overall, they found these localized posts were more successful than normal posts for generating engagement.
But like any savvy social media marketer could tell you, their results on a post-by-post basis varied wildly, with some localized posts performing extremely well and others drawing very little engagement at all. To better understand this phenomenon, they sorted their successful local stories into nine categories.
NPR is in the news business, which means not all of the nine types of local content are applicable for local, small businesses engaged in social media marketing. That said, there’s a lot to be learned from the ones that are. I’ve sorted the categories below by their importance for these types of marketers, along with explanations of each and some examples.
Slam Dunks
1. Awe-inspiring Visuals
These types of posts “capture [local] wonderment through photos and videos.” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: photos and other visual media should be the driving force behind any Facebook marketing campaign. For small businesses, this means frequently taking photos from your place of business: of your employees, of your products and of your customers.
As we learned from this study, it’s also a good idea to mix in photos from around your community, as many of your fans are likely from your city and the surrounding area as well. If you’re not one to take these types of photos yourself, consider monitoring photo sharing sites like Flickr for images that are tagged with local keywords. Just make sure to credit the photographer when posting.
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