Tuesday Tips: Is Your Facebook Page Up-To-Date

We’ve talked about auditing your Facebook page in the past, but it’s probably time to talk about that again.

Have you recently checked, say in the last three to six months, to see if all the information on your Facebook page is current and accurate? If you haven’t, here are some areas to check:

1. Review About box and about page

The about box on the main page of your website tells your fans and potential fans about you. It includes a brief description as well as a link to your website. Make sure all of the information is current and the link points where you want it to go.

The about page contains a lot more detailed information, as seen below.  Verify and update all of the information or remove information you don’t want to appear there.

2.  Add your call to action

The call to action feature was added, if I remember correctly, in the last six months. If you haven’t taken time to set this up, now is a great time to do it.

3. Review scheduled posts or schedule posts for the upcoming months.

If you have posts scheduled, make sure they are still aligned with the direction you are going with your social media plan. It’s also a good time to schedule future posts, especially holiday well wishes, notifications of hour changes, sales or other information that may come up during the next few months.

4.  Update Milestones

Milestones are a great way to show achievements. It can be something as simple as a number of likes achieved, 5-year anniversary, 10-year anniversary, $1,000,000 in sales or anything you come up with. People like seeing the milestones made by companies they follow.

Optional:

5. Set a featured video

If you chose to set a featured video, it will appear at the top of your About box on your main page.  Adding a featured video is pretty easy. Simply select a video from your uploaded video, or upload a video, then you have an option to add it as a featured video.

Be sure to add a description to your Featured video that way people know what it's about when they go to watch it.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your social media presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: If you do Direct Sales, Consider a Facebook Group

While the title may sound counter-intuitive to my normal posts talking about Facebook Pages and such, Facebook groups are a great way to market and insure a lot higher rate of viewing than many pages do. If you are an author or a direct sales person (like Avon, Scentsy, Jewelry in Candles, etc.) groups may be of benefit to you.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying to go solely with a group - a page will help as well, but having a group will also help spread the word and increase interaction.

Facebook Group have a distinct advantage in that members can chose to receive direct notifications about updates to the group. They may receive daily updates or updates only from specific members, such as you. You can also limit the group to where only you can create posts and your clients can respond to them.

Facebook groups are great for games and contests as well as special sales.  If you haven't considered a group, check some of them out - you might be surprised how useful they can be.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Why Spell Check is Important

As we mentioned in our first post almost a little more than a year ago - Tuesday Tips: Spell Check Before You Post - nothing is more embarrassing than to quickly type up a Facebook post, Twitter post or create a graphical image and post it, just to see a few minutes to an hour later that you made a huge spelling mistake and the spelling and grammar police are out to get you.

There are other reasons, besides avoiding embarrassment, that make spell checking important.  Some of those reasons include:

• It makes you, and subsequently your brand, look intelligent.
• It makes you appear to be careful and conscientious of your posts.
• By correct spelling and using the right words, it helps your followers to easily understand you (because yes, using the wrong homophones can create confusion at times).
• It's good for feedback - because let's be honest, you don't want to end up with negative feedback just because of a spelling mistake.

There are many other reasons as well. Check out these articles on why spelling correctly on social media sites is important:

• 7 Reasons Why Spelling and Grammar are Important on Facebook, Twitter and other Social Media Sites
• Ruining Social Media Credibility with Bad Spelling & Grammar
• Spell Check your Business Tweets

Are you looking for a spell checker or grammar checker for your browser? Check this one out from Grammarly - available as a Chrome Extension.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Optimize for Mobile

While Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. are all styled and optimized for mobile, is the website your posts are directing them to optimized for mobile? If the answer is "I don't know" or "I'm not sure" then chances are the ultimate answer is no and you may not be seeing conversions and traffic because of this.

If you were waiting for mobile to arrive before tweaking your site, you've waited too long. Mobile is here to stay with smart phones, tablets, netbooks, laptops and more. Studies have shown that mobile engagement is often higher from mobile devices than traditional desktops and laptops - something to think about.

If your website isn't optimized for mobile - now's the time to fix that. If you can't fix the entire site, perhaps design a mobile friendly site that you can direct your Facebook page to or a landing page that will detect if they are using mobile then send them to the mobile site.

Keeping your site mobile friendly will help you gain and retain users.

With every step you take – think about mobile.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Recycle Old Content

A regular piece of advice is to post content several times a day to your social media networks in an attempt to gain more viewers - or so that those that miss your first post catch a later one. This is good advice but many people think that this means having several new pieces of content on their site to promote every day - which isn't necessarily true.

While new content is helpful, creating several pieces of new content daily, especially if you are a small brand or small blog, is damn near impossible. If I was perfectly honest, I'd say that creating a post a day six days a week is quite trying and I barely manage it some weeks. I manage it poorly on other weeks when my posts aren't scheduled out in advance. Yet, even scheduling in advance, it can be hard to have more than one post available to share daily.

This is where today's tip comes into play: recycling old content.

When I want to drive more content to my site, I will often share old posts via Twitter and Facebook. I'll take a look at what was most popular that week or what was most popular in the last year and retweet those posts with a different post than before.

A lot of recycling content is presenting it with a different wrapping. Instead of just linking it how it appears in Twitter - create a different statement, like "Why is spell check important? Check these tips out?" or "Have you seen the most popular blog post on my site? Check this one out on spell checking." There are many ways to re-present old content.

Alternatively, there are also many ways to rewrite old content. Keep in mind, you definitely do not want to repost the same content over and over again as new content - that kills SEO and unique article rankings in Google and most search engines - but finding new ways to say what you said before is always a great way to drive more traffic to your site.

What are ways that you have recycled content?  Leave your answers below!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Share useful tips

Today's tip came from a post that was made to Constant Contact's Facebook Page.

“Try to be informative and share some useful tips.”

Robert Connell-- *Posted on Constant Contact Facebook Page

Some of the most successful website and business fanpages are successful because their social media managers post tips to the pages and not just what the company is up to, what you can buy, etc. Useful tips, especially those in graphical form, get shared more often than non-graphical posts.

So if you sell books, maybe post a few tips on how you published your book or edited it, decided on the title etc. If you sell jewelry, provide tips on how to maintain the shine and natural good look of jewelry so it doesn't tarnish. If you run a construction business, post tips on how people can maintain the work they just had done on their home.

It's not hard to be informative and share useful tips with your users - it just takes a little planning and thought.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Advertise to Current Fans

This advice may sound silly, but with the drastic decrease in the amount of content fans see from your page, if you have a marketing budget, you should promote some of your posts to your current fans.  Doing this will increase your reach (especially if they like or share the posts) and potentially get you more fans from their likes and shares.

According to Facebook, advertising to current fans will increase you reach by 3-to-5 times what your fanbase is. I'm not sure if this stat is still accurate, but it would definitely be interesting to see.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Experiment With Promotions/Discounts

As is true with any form of marketing, sometimes you have to experiment to see what works.  A good piece of advice to experiment with promotions or discounts that are only available to your Facebook fans.

There are a number of ways to do this, from contests that they are only able to enter after liking your page, to a special app that gives them a coupon code after they like the page.  There are several options available and a little research via Facebook support or Google should turn up a plethora of apps advice and suggestions.

I'm steering away from recommending any apps because 1) I don't use any of them myself as my pages don't have anything to sell to offer promotions 2) I'm trying to remain unbiased and by recommending an app makes me biased.

All of that said, consider some offerings for your followers and try it out. It might bring you more fans and more sales.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Start small

When everything is big and out there and encouraging you to jump in and do it all, sometimes it's hard to remember that the best thing you can do is to start small or you'll be overwhelmed.

Starting small can mean launching only a couple of social media sites at a time.  Or it can mean focusing on existing social media sites, responding to posts, engaging users and learning what works and what doesn't work with your followers.

Every brand has to start somewhere and sometimes starting out small makes it easier than looking at a huge plan and being overwhelmed by it.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Audit Your Facebook Page

Today's tip is probably something we haven't really thought about, especially if your page has been established for several years.  However, things often change over the years, whether it be place of address, updated contact information or other information.

Thus, today's tip is to audit your Facebook page.

Set a date to review your Facebook page once or twice a year.  Make sure all the information is up to date.  Update your cover image if you haven't done so in a few months.

Some things to check for:

• Update images for logo/cover photo if something has changed recently in the logo
• Make sure you have a customized URL for your page - if your page was set up a long time ago, you may have forgotten to claim your customized URL.  Do so now!
• Verify the data in the about section is current and up-to-date. This includes:
• Email Address if you want to be able to be contacted via email
• Website address
• Official page, if you are a fanpage of a brand and not the official page of the brand
• Awards your company has won,
• Etc.
• It's also a good idea to double check your category.  Facebook may change your categories if it feels you aren't in the right category. If you feel you were changed in error, change it back.

We will discuss how to verify some of this information and how to update it in this week's Thursday Tutorial.

It's also good to remember that Facebook changes every so often, so auditing your page to add new features - such as the "Call to Action" button, is a good idea.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Watch and learn

Today's tip comes from a quote from Twitter:

“Be a lurker in social media before diving in to learn the ropes and create a strategy that will work for your biz.”
--Alyssa Gregory, The Small Business Bonfire
@AlyssaGregory

Or, to summarize: Watch and learn.

This is actually pretty solid advice if you stop to think about it. You can learn a lot about social media by watching brands similar to yours to see what they do, what they do successfully and learn from it, then adapt it to what you want to do with your brand.

When I first started out in social media, I did a lot of watching. Then I attended a few small conferences here and there to learn more.  These conferences offered some of the same advice - look at what your competitors are doing, then mimic it.  But when you mimic, don't make the mistake and do exactly what they are doing.  Customize it and make it your own.

Making something your own is what makes you unique in the world of social media. Take what you see working for someone else and turn it into something that works for you.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Don't Give Up

There will be days - and not just a few - where you will feel that it is pointless to participate in social media.  No one is liking or sharing your posts. No one cares. And it only gets worse when you realize how low your reach and views are. You're ready to give up on social media and throw in the towel.

Don't. Give. Up.

If you are a relatively new, unknown brand, building your customers and followers and getting them to see your posts, much less like them and share them, is difficult. But if you give up now, you will never see where those likes and shares take you once you do start acquiring them.

Let's be honest, it takes time to build a reputation on social media. It takes time for people to see what you are posting and to engage in that.  You must consistently publish useful and meaningful content - whether it be questions, promotional posts, inspirational images, or videos - so your fanbase can find value in visiting your page and supporting your brand.

Many social media posters will tell you it took them months to get interaction on their pages - even up to half a year. I run several pages and some of my smallest following groups have the highest interaction rate, while the ones with thousands of followers have the smallest interaction rates.  It just depends on finding the sweet spot and getting those interactions going.

Pay attention to your stats and which posts draw the most interaction then post similar posts in the future to encourage further interaction.

Just don't give up on it.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Articles Explaining Facebook's Changes

Last week I mentioned that for this week's tips, I would provide links to articles outside of my blog which explain, in detail, what the changes mean - or at least their interpretations of them.  Normally I avoid linking to outside sites during my weekly posts unless it's for Friday Facts or Saturday Shares, but as I am uncertain on the changes and other social media experts seem pretty certain, I'll leave them to do the explaining.

The first article "5 Trends That Will Change How You Use Social Media in 2015" is from Hootsuite and talks about shopping coming to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook as well as how changes in followship are affecting choices.  It also discusses the changes in Facebook's Privacy Policy and things related to it.

The next article is "Facebook Changes You Need to Know for 2015" on Business 2 Community.  This article provides changes to pages, including the fact Facebook no longer wants "Promotional (Sales-y) Updates/Posts" as well as getting rid of the "Like Gate".  The article also covers a new "call to action" button that will be available to pages this year.

Kim Komando's site also offers an article titled "3 big Facebook changes coming in 2015" which covers the fact (similar to above) that promotion posts won't show up in fan's feeds, the updated Facebook SEO as well as the "Like Gate" removal covered in the above article.

Finally, one of my favorite sites, Social Media Examiner, has a few articles to look at, including "New Facebook Terms: What Marketers Need to Know" and "New Facebook Terms: What Marketers Need to Know". Both of these articles are extremely insightful to the new changes coming (or already here) on Facebook.

If I see any other articles before next Tuesday, or down the road, I will use Tuesday Tips to link to them to help social media marketers read as much as they can about the upcoming changes.

If you know of any articles that may be useful, feel free to send them to me via private message on Facebook on our Facebook page or leave them as a reply in the comment section.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: How to Learn More About Facebook Changes

Today's post is going to be short and sweet and full of links.

I've seen many questions on pages and in groups about the changes to Facebook pages and such and how it will affect them.  There's also been a lot of questions about privacy and copyright etc. (Pro-tip, copying and pasting the Copyright statement I've seen so many people doing is pointless.  It doesn't protect you, doesn't protect your images, doesn't copyright your stuff you post to you. You agreed to Facebook's Terms of Service when you signed up for the service so that statement means absolutely nothing).

A lot of things being posted on Facebook are partial truths, based in part off of Facebook's posts, but not the literal interpretation of them.  So, for people who are looking to read and interpret on their own what Facebook is doing, I am providing the following links:

Key websites for all Facebook policies:

• Updated Facebook Terms of Service: https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms/update
• Updated Facebook Cookie Policy: https://www.facebook.com/help/cookies/update
• Updated Facebook Privacy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update
• Terms of Service and Policies: https://www.facebook.com/policies/
• Platform Policy (updated November 5, 2014): https://developers.facebook.com/policy/
• Facebook Ad Terms (updated June 4, 2014): https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
• Page Terms (updated July 14, 2014): https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php
• Facebook Community Standards: https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards

As part of next week's tips, I will be providing links to articles outside of my blog which explains in detail what all of the changes mean - or at least their interpretations of them.  Normally I avoid doing this, but as I am uncertain on the changes and other social media experts seem pretty certain, I'll leave them to do the explaining.

Enjoy!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Pin an Important, Relevant Post Once a Week

Today's tip is simple and applies to both Facebook and Twitter - I'm not positive if you can pin posts on Google+ or not, if you can, I'll mention it in a future post - Once a week pin an important and relevant post on your Twitter Account and Facebook page.  

Pinning an interesting or relevant post on a weekly basis increases visibility and distribution of your post to your views. Translation: if you want a post to be seen more often and by more users, pin it to your page/Twitter account.

Pinning is very easy and in upcoming tutorials we'll walk you through how to pin an article to your Facebook page and how to pin a tweet to your Twitter wall.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better. You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Optimize Ads

If you are going to pay for ads - especially for Facebook - you need to make sure that your ads are going to be doing what you want it to do for you.

However, if you don't tell Facebook what you want, it will go with whatever the last setting you used was or what the default setting is (sorry, I don't recall the default setting.  This is why it's important to know what you're wanting to get out of your ad - and each ad you run may have different goals.

Decide what the goals for your ad are before you purchase it.  If you want to promote the page as a whole, promote the page itself, not an article.

If you're wanting to get more visibility on a post, boost that post.

And, more importantly, know your budget.  Don't overspend or underspend if you're looking to reach specific goals.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Pay Attention to Trending Topics

Trending topics can be your best friend when trying to draw attention to your Facebook/Google page or Twitter account without having to pay for advertising.  With all three of the previously mentioned social networks, trending topics is a way for people to click on a topic and see all the posts about that topic in a quick, easy to navigate way.

I have seen the power of trending topics.  One of the pages I admin struggles to get more than 100 views per post even though it has more than 35k followers.  As the site is related to gaming, I happened to see a video from SDCC come out that was video game related and shared it immediately on our Facebook page.

Not even 24 hours later we had more than 100 shares, more than 85,000 views and 50+ likes and a handful of comments on the post.  At the time I had posted it, it wasn't trending, but not even an hour later, it was.  We also gained a handful of new likes from this share.

So if there's something trending and you can post something related to it that relates to your business as well, I strongly encourage you to go for it.  You never know what it might do for views to your page and subsequently website.

It is important to note, while often times trending topics are the same on all networks, occasionally, they are different.  It is something to keep in mind depending on what network you are targeting for more views from.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Managing Followers Should be a Daily Routine

One of the best pieces of advice I have seen regarding managing followers and social media is to not only encourage your friends, family and clients to like your page and follow you on other forms of social media, but you should also spend some time each day liking and following social media accounts with similar interests to what your business is posting about.

Managing your followers and who you follow should be a daily routine.  If you have a number of folks follow you on Twitter, check them out, see if their interests are similar to yours and if they are, return the favor and follow them.  Same is true on Google+.  You can add people to your page's circle, just like they can add your page to their circles.

You can also like other businesses as your Facebook page.  This is an important way to get your name out there.

Finally, you can also follow folks on Pinterest and Instagram.

Yes, it takes a little bit of time, but if you spend 10-15 minutes each day keeping up with it, it will help out a lot.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Page, Not Profile

Today's tip is something I've mentioned repeatedly, but this time I'm going to source an expert in social media management on it.

“If you’re using Facebook, make sure you've got a Facebook PAGE and not a profile!” -- Kim Walker, Leader of Social Media Management, 5 Stones Media, LLC @5stonesmedia

Too often I see people creating and using (for years) facebook profiles for their business.  A couple of my local shops are the most guilty of this and have yet to realize that when Facebook goes through it's cleansing and sees it, they may lose their profile and their followers (or really friends in this case) and have to start all over from scratch.

To put it simply.  A Facebook profile is about you as a person and your connections to your friends, co-workers, family and acquaintances.  A Facebook page is for fans of a book/author/brand, or for a brand to market and sell things, for a business or restaurant.  Profiles should NEVER be used for these things as it muddies the water and makes things confusing.

For those new to social media who may have friends they follow that are using profiles for their business, this is an important lesson for them.  They may think that since this company is doing it, they can do it too.  Do not be lulled by that idea.  Do it right.

Facebook pages offer more insight into what people want, what they engage with and like better than a profile will ever give you.  Let's be honest, profiles don't offer any stats or insight as to who likes what and when and what generates engagement - these are all things you need to know when you're managing social media.

So today's advice is this: Even if it sounds like a good idea or you've seen other people doing it, don't create a profile for your brand or business.  Take the time to do it right and create a page.

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.

Tuesday Tips: Remember, Company Page is Not The Same as Your Personal Page

Even though it seems pretty obvious that a page should be treated differently than a personal profile, it isn't surprising that many people don't think to treat them differently when they really should.

The Dinner Daily reminded folks of that simple fact when they posted the following on the Constant Contact Facebook page:  “Get professional advice on how to use it. It’s not the same as your personal page.”

While I think getting professional advice is a little far to go,  you should be reading social media experts blogs and twitter posts and learn more about how to use social media if you are using your Facebook page as you would your personal profile.  Follow by example.  Like and pay attention to similar brands Facebook pages and learn from them.

One mistake I've seen before is the "pity me" posts from a page where the owner is down on their luck and sharing their bad experiences either in their life, in their relationship with a customer or another business.  This is something you should never do as it reflects poorly on your business and on you.  Try to keep your personal life off of your business page - this will help you achieve more of your goals.

Good luck!

Tuesday Tips are a series of tips released on Tuesday each week regarding a hint or tip to help you manage and market your Facebook presence better.  You can find all the Tuesday Tips by clicking on the Tuesday Tips tag below.