Archives for 2010

Simple Facebook Promotion strategies

October 3, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

Simple promotion strategies or ways to get fans to your page:

Invite Them

Inviting them through invite a friend. This works great if you have frinds that you know would like to join the page, but do not barrage all of your friends with this unless you are 100% sure that it’s something that they are interested in.

Ask Them

Ask them to invite their friends through invite a friend – same as above, can work well, but request that they invite people that they think would be interested.

Advertise

Run Facebook ads – honestly the most effective way to get your page past a “hump-. It happens on all pages your initial push gets you a bunch of fans and then everythigns slows down. Using ads is the quickest, easiest way to get things going again.

The “ninja” trick is to run ads against friends of people who are fans. The ads show with their friends names on it, most people do not realize that it’s a paod ad, they think it’s a suggestion from Facebook.

Contests

Have a contest – I’ve seen lots of great viral contests. This can explode you page, but contest people can be difficult to get engaged. They aren’t there because theya re interested in your page, they are there because they are interested in your contest. There are lots of ways to do contests that keep people engaged.

Tag em

You can tag people you know in a post about the page, do it sparingly because you don;t want to be blocked because of "tag spam"

Have a Party

Have a tagging party and tag other pages that you think your fans will like. This is something Mari Smith just started, it’s similar to a Follow Friday thing from Twitter. It will get you new fans, but they won’t be the most engaged.

Email them

Send an email to your current customer list. This assumes you have a list, but don’t just say “fan us on Facebook” give them a reason to go there. Restaurants could say check our Facebook page for our daily specials, a retail store could have Facebook only specials or even post a word or phrase of the day for discounts.

Ask Them 2

Ask your customers – assumes that you talk to them either on the phone or in your store. But give them a reason to fan your page.

Use Your Username

Add your Facebook.com/Username to your business card, your print ads and TV ads.

NEVER say Find us on Facebook without giving them your custom username. That’s like saying find us in the phonebook. I cringe every time I see someone with an ad campaign that does that. Do a Facebook search on the first 10 brand names that come to mind and look at the results. How many of those pages do you want your customers landing on? Probably not the “BrandX is cruel to animals” or I hate BrandX” pages.

Can’t find 25 fans to get your username, run ads on Facebook use one of the other examples above or if all else fails go to Fiverr.com and get 50 for $5. Don’t fool yourself the “fans” from Fiverr won’t be real people who will engage with your page, but they will get you your username.

Hand it out

Print your address on your business card – Tell people why they should check out your page

Fan Box

Add Facebook Fan Box to your website – I recommend showing the recent posts and at least two rows of faces. You will get more people who go to your website to join your fan page.

Go ahead and add your promotion ideas in the comments. In a couple of days I will dig into ways to get more engagement on your page.

Finding your writing voice

September 23, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

Today’s topic is on finding your writing style or voice. I have a confession to make. I’m a horrible writer. Not that I can’t write, it just takes me a long time to do it. It takes me hours to put together a blog post. I can write 20 page proposals in less time than it takes me to write a 500 word blog post. I think it’s because I don’t like to share who I am. I prefer to share my knowledge. But I’m working on it, i fact I’m going to do my best not to delete anything in this post and just to write it.

I think the problem started when I was in school. Our English teachers taught us to write in the third person, but that doesn’t work in the new social media and blogging world. We expect to be able to get to know the people we follow. There are some that just lead with their knowledge but most of the successful bloggers / social media consultants let us into their lives to learn who they are.

My style will probably never be as open as someone like Chris Brogan or Mari Smith. That’s just not how I”m wired. I like my solitude and my privacy. I enjoy being out in the public and sharing information, but only once have I shared much about my past while on stage. I don’t hide where I’ve been and what’s happened in my life, but I feel we all need to walk out own paths and frankly like to leave my past in the past.

Now how can you find your voice? Here are a couple of things that I’ve done and I’m going to share one of the resources that helped me. Hopefully this will help you

Just hit Publish

One of the first things I was told was to just write and hit publish. That’s what I’m doing. It’s tough to do it, but I’ve been assured that it’s gets easier as you do more of it. Just like speaking. I remember when I was just out of high school and wanted to learn how to speak in public. I took the steps necessary to learn how to speak. You can read about it here.

The more I spoke in public the easier it became, where today I can get up in front of hundreds of people and deliver a talk without thinking about it.

Talk

Talk– this is advice I first received from, Paul Myers and more recently from David Preston. They both said if you have trouble writing don’t write talk. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a great tool to use. It takes some training to get it to work for you. I tend to do a lot of my work sitting in coffee shops so I haven’t used it as much as I should, but I agree that it’s a great tool to use and it is amazing how fast you can put an article together.

Read and Emulate

Read and emulate — this one is tough because what you want to do is find your own style, not try to become someone else. But if you are really struggling, just read other blogs and get some good ideas for content.

I found Twitter helped me with my writing. You only have 140 characters, can’t do too much damage in 140 characters can you. 🙂 I guess even using chat would have helped. It’s easier to keep it conversational.

There are the things I tried and here’s the resource that I mentioned from Paul Myers. It’s free, nothing to buy, Paul’s that kind of guy. He just creates amazing content and freely shares it. Heck even when he sells stuff it’s usuallyonly $17-27. I’ve received more value and learned more about marketing reading his free newsletter than I’ve learned in $2,000 training courses. Sorry for the sales pitch. Once again there’s nothing to buy, download the guide and let me know what you think about it.

Let me know what you’ve done to help improve your writing too.

Analysis of an Award Winning Campaign

August 21, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I had worked on award winning direct mail campaigns and had someone PM me asking for the link to prove it. I figured I might as well share a video that I did a couple of years ago about a campaign I did that won a PoDi award and more importantly had a 37.07% response rate and well over a 25x return per dollar.

There are some nuggets in this video about proper list selection and the value of a unique multi-channel campaign.

Let me know what you think about the campaign in the comment section

Facebook Rant #2 — The 5,000 Facebook Friends Fallacy

August 10, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

: Image via Wikipedia

Aren’t you tired of people using at the number of friends they have on Facebook or followers they have on Twitter to justify their experience or value as a social media “expert”?

Listen, do you really want to know how easy it is to get 5,000 friends on Facebook. Here’s the “secret” that’s been used and is still being touted by some of the so called Facebook gurus:

Send blind friend requests 30-40 people a day. Why is 30 -40 the secret number you ask? It’s because Facebook realized that real people don’t friend 100+ people in a day. So they will ban your account if you send too many.
30 – 40% of them will accept your requests.
In 4-6 month’s you’ll have 5,000 friends.
Or if you’re really “smart” you’ll go to Odesk or Elance and hire someone for $2 an hour to do it for you. You figure 1-2 hours a day for 180 days $320 – $640 to make yourself an expert.

Wow wasn’t that easy.

Here’s the deal, social media is not about the number of connections it’s about the quality of those connections. Now let me explain the dos and don’ts of friend requests.

Don’t send Blind Friend Requests

A blind friend request is any friend request sent without a reason why you are want to be their friend. I have 59 friend requests waiting right. 50 of them are blind friend requests. Several of those friend requests are from people who have social media consultant, strategist or expert in their profile…really. Is this what they teach their clients? The friend request is your first impression and we never get a chance to make another first impression.

Do send real Friend Requests

When you send a friend request you should take the time to explain why you want to be connected. If you aren’t willing to take 30 seconds to say why you want to be connected then you obviously don’t care about the connection.

When I send a friend request it’s because I met someone in person or read a good comment or post of there’s. There is usually a reason, you should have a reason as well. You should tell them the reason in the friend request:

“Dave it was nice meeting you, I look forward working together in the future…”

“Becky I couldn’t agree more on your comment on Jonathan’s post today. I think you’re someone I need to follow.”

Here’s a great friend request from Nancy Bain. Nancy “gets it” She listens, she learns and she passes her knowledge on to her clients. She’s someone worth paying attention to as well.

Nancy’s request was sent after a webinar I did with my friend and business partner Jonathan Rivera, the Real-TechGuy. She had a reason to listen to me and she told me what that was. That’s how a friend request should be sent.

Facebook Rant #1 – Facebook Profiles aren’t for Businesses

May 18, 2010 by Doug Mcisaac

Facebook profiles are for people and pages are for businesses, organizations etc. Does that mean someone can’t say what they do on their profile. Of course not, but what it does mean is that you shouldn’t have several profiles for different businesses or different aspects of your business you need to have business pages set up. I’ll address dos and don’ts of using your profile to build your online presence without being spammy or breaking Facebook’s Terms of Service in another post.

I see people making the profile mistake all of the time. It’s an amateur mistake and I can understand a person who’s learning Facebook and just trying to get something started making that it. BUT when I see people who are touting themselves as marketing or social media experts building profiles for people it frankly just pisses me off. This is 101 stuff that no one who’s been doing business on Facebook should be doing.

Why is it a bad idea? Because it’s against Facebook’s Terms of Service. Right, I know, they let you build the profile with a business name. Yes, you managed to slip it through. Yes, you’ve built up a couple of hundred or maybe even a couple of thousand friends. But that still doesn’t make it a good idea. It’s kind of like speeding or driving without insurance or cheating on your taxes. Yes you haven’t been caught, but sooner or later…you will.

Here’s the info from FB:

How are Pages different from personal profiles?

Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.

In addition, Pages are managed by admins who have personal Facebook profiles. Pages are not separate Facebook accounts and do not have separate login information from your profile. They are merely different entities on our site, similar to how Groups and Events function. Once you have set up a Page within your profile, you may add other admins to help you manage this Page. People who choose to connect to your Page won’t be able to see that you are the Page admin or have any access to your personal account.
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=904

If you don’t want to have a personal profile you can set up a business account. I don’t recommend them because you can’t add any applications to the page.

What is the difference between a business account and a user profile?

Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.

Here are the terms and the pieces that you are violating if you have a bus

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php#!/terms.php?ref=pf

Section 3
1. You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications (such as spam) on Facebook.

Section 4
2. You will not create more than one personal profile.

All in all, you can do what you want, but I think it’s foolish to violate the terms of service because sooner or later Facebook will notice and they will delete the accounts that are violating their terms.

Doug