Simple Social Strategy: Facebook

If you have an idea in your head, it's not really worth anything unless someone else hears it, the challenge you have is, to get this message into the minds of as many people as possible, today there are a thousand ways to do this, but where do you start? Teletext, Post-It-notes, PENS! What about branded pens? No, they're all stupid ideas.

I always advise clients to set up 3 basic things to ensure they've got a good Social Strategy foundation, this week I'll take you through some very basic ideas around the 3 main Social Media sites Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, I'm going to start with Facebook, and point out some very basic reasons why you need to be represented.



Facebook Vs The World


With 600 Million users and growing, the worldwide take-over of Facebook is kind of half way over, if you're not represented as a business then you really need to drag your sorry arse into 2011. Facebook isn't a fad, it's not just used by children and it's not just somewhere to waste time (although it's really good to look at people you don't really know from the offices' photos). It's fastest growing demographic is those twenty-five years and over and it's said that in 2011 over one-quarter of all internet page views were on Facebook.com. It's a face as massive as Lovejoy's, so why should you get on it?

Let's start with The Like button, this button essentially 'Likes' your site from another profile. Currently Facebook is registering over a BILLION Likes a day. If you don't know, then this is why the Like button is so powerful;

Once a user 'Likes' your page, the status 'Ben Brown Likes Peartree Productions' appears on BB's profile, now the average user has 140 Friends, so this message is potentially exposed to 140 people, if it catches the eye of say, Karen Brown (his nosey wife), she checks it's not pornography, and finds she likes it too, then you can see this message is exposed to another group of potential customers. Very basically, you can see how the exposure of a message is exponentially growing with each contact, and the potential is endless.

Another example I like is how I've used Facebook to find a good local mechanic to service my car. Previously when looking for a garage I've searched Google, obviously it's great for finding a list of thousands of mechanics, and with a little tweaking I can localise this search, and find one close to me. That's really helpful, but what I don't know, is which of these are any good. A fact proven to me when last time I took my car to a backstreet garage. When I returned the 'child' on reception hadn't booked the car in, so I  waited an hour for the work to be done, and finally drove it away only to find it had a nail hammered into the tyre. Obviously I was too scared to take it back.

What Facebook offers by categorising it's Business Pages is a similar but much more effective version of Google and other listing services. Now I can search for a garage directly on Facebook, these results will be localised to me, and most importantly I can see which of these my friends have 'Liked' so I'll know straight away which ones are good. This directory searching of Facebook is becoming more and more commonplace as people are looking for personal recommendations and more reliable companies in these difficult economical times.

These very basic ideas give you a little insight into why presence on Facebook is pretty much essential, and something that's as important to building your Corporate web page, indeed it may be more important, and some companies are actually moving away from corporate sites and focussing their online strategy entirely towards their Facebook page.

Now excuse me someone I went to school with has just painted their front room and posted some pictures, and I really want to see if I can make out what DVD's they've got in the background.


QUICK TIP: Make sure you change your Facebook Profile URL, so you can have a nice neat address like Facebook.com/citizenstudios




Please get in touch to talk through your Social Media Strategy ask any questions and see what Citizen can do for you.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614

Head On: Dealing With Your Problems Publicly.

Earlier last week I ordered some temporary business cards as my mobile number changed to 07738 175 614, this of course meant I had to order some new cards, I decided to get some temporary cards, and looked for the cheapest option. Vista Print were offering 250 for £4, sounds like a good deal right?

...and I like any letter or email that contains this next phrase...

So imagine my surprise, when I added the cheap option of Reverse Printing, and the total came to £42. Well dear reader, I was appalled, and being Lion Hearted immediately tweeted my disgust, non-directly on Twitter, being careful not to hash-tag them in, and hurt anyone's feelings.

An hour later, the bastards got me, and guess what, they offered to rectify my complaint. As things stand I'm too embarrassed to take them up on their offer, but this is a monumentally magnificent example of using Social Media in your customer service.

Instead of burying their head and hoping I go away, they're publicly showing themselves to care about my issues, and by seeking me out through a 'Google Alert' they look like they care about what people are saying about them and they want to fix issues. Also this strategy runs the risk of giving my complaint more exposure, but worth that risk as it demonstrates their concerns.

This is a very modern approach to customer service, it's the only way to do things when everyone is so vocal these days, and, yes something we can help you with at Citizen. Give us a call to talk about setting up alerts, and Twitter Searches, and building that into part of your Social Media Strategy for 2012.

I have to admit, I'm a little bit worried about what they're going to think of this post when their alerts pick it up, maybe they'll retweet it, but for the record I'm sorry, I know some of it was VAT and postage, I may have overreacted.

--

Addition.

So the cards turned up and I wasn't happy with them, in fact I binned them immediately. I think there's a problem with these automated systems, there's nobody on the press quality checking them, they were a weird size, the artwork was aligned to the right, and the print was really washy. Some of those things might have been my fault, but I was still furious.

So again, like the big man, I took my rage to Twitter, and within 20 minutes Vista Print had responded, and issued me a full refund! You have to say that's amazing. It doesn't help the fact I've got a meeting tomorrow with no business cards though does it?

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07738 175 614

The Daily Torygraph

Today marks the official launch of the DailyTorygraph.com a site planned and built by Citizen Digital and populated by Dave Waters and Bertie Miller from The WaterMill London.

I've been aware of the Torygraph for quite some time now, it's existed previously as a Tumblr site, and has been running close to 2 years. In that time it's built up a small following of fans, but we felt that it hadn't reached it full potential, nor did it have the infrastructure to achieve this. Tumblr is a nice platform, but to push out into a bigger audience we felt it deserved a more sturdy, versatile infrastructure.

We decided to rebuild the site in Wordpress, and make full use of Facebook 'Commenting', 'Liking' and 'ADDTHIS' sharing facilities, and use data on these options to drive content from the site into key areas of the page to extend the visitors time on the site. From this data-stream we built a 'Most Shared this Week' and 'This Month' section and did the same with the tags to flush the first page with as much interesting content as possible.

Once we had the site built we then set-up the Social Media pages on Facebook and Twitter. The Twitter site was especially interesting to do, as after a a bit of research we found the account of most of the Telegraph journalists and Photographers, and painstakingly went down the list and followed all of them. We did this for all the major newspapers, and the results were amazing, they loved the site, and retweeted the link, in fact this was such a success that it knocked our first server over and we had to quickly upgrade to a more robust option.

The site launched officially today with a redirect bringing in more traffic from the old Tumblr site and the figures have been outstanding. We've done close to 5K unique visitors this week, and they're staying on the site too, with 8k page impressions as they drill down into the content.

It's a great site, but as with any site, it's only as good as it's content. We were lucky to find a content stream this rich that was laying idly in the wilderness, just waiting to be reborn. The Watermill team deserve all the credit for diligently doing this every single day, and for having the foresight to listen to our proposal, and let us get on with the building of a platform that's going to generate great rewards for them, we've got some amazing ideas to push the concept further and are in talks about developing an iPhone/iPad app amongst other things.

If you want to talk to Citizen about Social Media marketing, or web design and build give us a call, or drop us an email.

Get in touch ben@citizenstudios.co.uk

Visit www.citizenstudios.co.uk

Or call 07764 898 010