NetWeave

By now the Facebook pages for your business or organization have been converted to the new Timeline format. With this change has come some new tools designed to help page admins highlight content and engage with fans. Here are the four tools we believe you should pay attention to.

In-box Messaging — Now people can communicate with your business without having to post their comments on the public wall by sending a message, similar to the manner in which individuals have always been able to send private in-box messages to one another. With business pages, messages can only be initiated by page followers. This offers a better opportunity for grievances or personal account issues to be handled in a private manner while also benefiting from the immediacy social media offers. Page admins should get into the habit of checking the admin panel often for new messages because it won’t show up as a Facebook notification.

Pin It — Pinning seems to be trendy these days and now fan pages have the ability to “pin” a post to the top of the Timeline. The pinned post will remain at the top of the Timeline for seven days, after which time if it is still relevant you may re-pin the post to the top of the page. To “pin” the post, hover over the right-hand side of your post (after it has been posted) and select the edit tool. You’ll get a drop down menu of options and pin it is the first option. Things worth pinning include upcoming events, coupon codes or weekly specials.

Highlights — When you make a post you have two size options for displaying that post on your timeline. The default is for the post to sit on one side of the Timeline’s center line. If you click the star icon on the right-hand side of the post you can highlight it, meaning it will expand to fit the entire width of the wall. This is a fantastic way to display photo albums. Consider displaying a postcard montage of a featured real estate property as a highlighted post. Or perhaps you have a new product — why not show off the details with a highlighted post.

Milestones — Timeline literally offers your company or organization the ability to tell your story. Milestone posts allow you to back date posts to share your company’s history and organization’s key achievements. Click the milestone icon in the update status box to post when your business was founded, when you moved into a new location, or when an employee received a noteworthy honor.

Using these tools will help you have more control over how your followers experience the flow of information you have to share. If your business needs further direction in how to best utilize the new Timeline format, contact us about our training and coaching services.

How can you leverage social media to promote an event? That’s a great question to ask us right now as we just returned from covering the annual SUN ‘n FUN Fly-In and Expo in Lakeland, FL. We have several aviation clients, including SUN ‘n FUN themselves, so our week-long coverage of the event turned up on several Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and YouTube channels!

There are three basic phases to event promotion on social media, only one of which is the run-up to the event. This is obviously important if your goal is getting more people to the event, but if you have a solid social media strategy, you know you also need to account for coverage during and after the event.

In promoting an event beforehand, make sure you get an early start – the bigger and longer the event, the more advance notice people will need to make their plans. Remember, though, that just like an early-season baseball favorite, you don’t want to peak too early. There should be an intentional and well-timed buzz build-up that naturally crescendos with the event itself. Don’t let the social media promotion be an afterthought either, make sure you include social media in the total marketing plan from the very outset. In the case of SUN ‘n FUN, we start working with the client on the actual event months in advance, though the most intense coverage doesn’t start building until a few weeks ahead of time.

Coverage during the event itself is also a GREAT way to build vital page interaction and to get your content shared. No matter how many people you get to show up at your event, many of your fans on social media will not be able to make it – they will appreciate your coverage and will comment and share. It is also a great way to get fans interested in attending your next event! If it is a big or long event like SNF, it’s also a great way to include your fans by sharing their photos and videos on your social media channels. Engaged fans are advocates for your brand, and that’s press you cannot buy.

Once the last guest leaves and the mess is cleaned up, though, don’t think your social media promotion is done. There are tons of great follow-ups that can be done on social media including sharing photos and video of the event. Don’t post every picture you take on the big day at once… mete them out over time to extend the impact. The bigger the event, the longer period of time over which you can extend this follow-up. This not only maintains the engagement of the folks who were fans prior to and during the event, but becomes an opportunity for people who attended the event but weren’t previously connected to you on social media to become fans!

Over the five days of SNF, NetWeave spent almost 200 staff-hours making live posts, taking over a thousand pictures and hours of video, and connecting with fans all around the world. But we can tell you from experience, that the week is not the beginning, or the end, of that social media effort. Social media is not a short-term strategy and you need to be in it for the long-run!

If you’ve spent more than a couple of minutes on Facebook, you know how much they like to change things to keep it fresh and, hopefully, relevant to users. You also know that every once in a while, Facebook rolls out a major change which generally starts with individual user profiles and eventually encompasses business pages.

It’s that time again.

Late last year, Facebook rolled out “Timeline” which was a major overhaul of user profiles which included a large “cover photo” to express yourself, and a chronologically-ordered list of your posts and Facebook activity. On February 29th, industry experts expect that Facebook will introduce “Timelines for Business” at their inaugural marketers conference. As all such major Facebook changes have, this new format is expected to roll out first to a few major beta partners, and then eventually to all business users.

Will you be ready for the change? If you’re already a NetWeave customer, you are. We’ll handle the transition for you seamlessly and at no extra charge. If you’re not part of the NetWeave family yet, now might be a good time to join us.

In any case, you’ll need to be sure you have a good cover photo and profile picture ready to go no doubt.  And, if you make use of custom tabs, chances are good you’re going to encounter at least a width change, so be ready for that.  While no official announcements have been made yet, here is an educated guess at the new format by German social house 247Grad.  So, what do you think? Are you ready?

Tonight we got to speak to the students of ITT Tech in Bradenton about using social media as part of a job hunt. We thought we’d blog some resources here that they – and anyone else looking for a job – can use in their quest.

Situational Awareness

Employers are checking social media on applicants and interviewees, and they’re doing so in record numbers.  It’s naive not to consider these facts in your job hunt:

Rule #1 – Do No Harm

Even if you don’t want to actively use social media to aid in your job hunt, at least don’t give a potential employer a reason NOT to hire you!  Do the basic work of doing a Google search on yourself to see what comes up – if anything negative does appear, visit the site and see if the content can be removed either by you or via a respectful request.  If not, you have some work to do creating enough positive material on the web to naturally push that negative material off the front page at least.  The two main things Google searches for are how many sites link to the site in question, and how new the content is.  Creating active, healthy, positive social media profiles on several services can naturally put you at the top of the search heap since there will be lots of back links and the content will be fresh.

Also, go through your existing social media accounts and sanitize them by looking for pictures or posts they may be misinterpreted (or in some cases accurately, but negatively interpreted) and deleting them.

Leverage Your Assets

To really beat your competition, follow some advice by real employers on how to effectively use social media in a job hunt. Remember, no matter what field you trained in, the field you’re going into is sales. Unless you are in one of a very few rare professions, you are going to need other people to succeed, and that means you have to sell them on you, your ideas and your capabilities. Approach your job hunt that way and conduct it like a professional.

The flood of new Facebook “Lifestyle” apps began last week, expanding the “frictionless sharing” that Facebook has touted ever since last year’s F8 conference, and which it debuted in the limelight with notables like the Washington Post Reader and Spotify. Now is the rush of new verbs, and you can see what people are not only reading and listening to, but what their eating, watching and visiting.

If you’re not familiar with frictionless sharing, though, keep in mind:  As anyone who has ever tried to start a fire with two sticks can tell you, sometimes friction is a good thing. In the old, frictiony world fo Facebook, an application had to interrupt you every time it wanted to share something on your profile.  Interruptive, yes, but at least you knew what was going out and when.  In the teflon-coated world of frictionless sharing though, these new applications will ask you once, and only once, if you want to share.  After you say yes, anything you do with that application can and likely will be shared!

It's the gift that keeps on giving!

Been using Washington Post Reader for a while? Don’t be surprised if your friend stops you in the hall and asks why you were reading that expose on squirrel extortion rings last night. Indulging some guilty pleasures on Spotify? You are likely to be judged by a jury of your peers.  You didn’t just share the one article or song you read or listened to the first time, but every single one of them since then also.

To restrict who sees what, or to remove the apps altogether, go to the pulldown arrow in the upper right corner of your home page and select “Account Settings.”

On the subsequent screen, click “Apps.”

Finally, select “Edit” for the app in question and change your settings.

You can thank us later.