Facebook for Business

What is Facebook Marketing? 
Facebook marketing is simple in concept, but quite difficult in execution. The idea is to use the social connections presented to you by the platform to reach out to customers and promote your company.  While at one time it might have been easy to purchase ads on the sidebar and let it do it’s thing, the atmosphere has changed. Nowadays, Facebook marketing means creating a business page, keeping in touch with your current customers and clients, connecting with other related businesses and opening up to new customers.

Facebook is an excellent tool for marketing because of how direct the connection between business and customer is. However, therein lies the risk. One wrong move, one offensive post or misstep can cost your business its reputation and consumer base. There are rules that should be followed. A business page on Facebook shouldn’t be treated like a personal page, but it still needs to have a personal connection. After all, if people didn’t care about the personal, social touch a Facebook page offers, they’d bookmark your company site or blog and read that instead.

Why use Facebook for Marketing?
 Facebook marketing opens up broad new avenues for your business, no matter what it is. Whether you’re selling a product or service, your potential customers are almost guaranteed to be on Facebook. Through the power of social networking you can encourage your customers to recommend you to their friends, and help broaden your network and influence. Done right, a Facebook page for your business can drastically increase revenues, productivity and success.

Tips for Facebook Marketing Expand your network.

• You can create a Facebook page and let it sit, but that won’t do you much good. It’s better to reach out to people and network with them. Actively seek out new potential customers and clients. Ask for likes and support. Your fans are your lifeline, so always seek out ways to entice more of them to become Facebook friends.
• Don’t forget about media. Your wall is an excellent place to post short bits of text and links, but it’s better to use Facebook’s own system for pictures and video rather than posting them on your own wall. Don’t forget to fill out all the extra info tabs either! Your profile needs to be fleshed out with keyword-rich but non-spammy information, both for search indexing and for an atmosphere of effort and competence.
• Reward your fans. Whether it’s as simple as a special landing page, or as valuable as prize offerings, giving your customers a reason to ‘like’ your page and support your site is invaluable. Many people will do nothing without incentive, so give them that incentive.
• Encourage community interaction. Ask questions, and invite your customers to share their answers.
  
• Give prizes or don’t, the important part is that you’re asking. Just don’t stray too far. Keep your posts at least somewhat related to your brand, product or service.
• Celebrate when you reach certain milestones. Again, you can offer rewards if they help, but at least acknowledge your fans when you reach a thousand, or ten thousand of them. Make them feel appreciated and they will in turn appreciate you. Even if it’s just a message thanking them for their support, it’s better than nothing.
• Don’t just rack up your fans, put them to use. Once you have your audience you need to do something with them. Encourage them to purchase products or services. Invite them to events you host. The applications are endless, once you have your fans gathered together. 

Common Mistakes in Facebook Marketing

•  The first major mistake you need to avoid is what professionals call ‘broadcasting.’ Broadcasting is when your posts tend to be more advertisement than social connection. The benefit of Facebook is the direct connection to your customers.
  
  It’s an opportunity to interact with them. If all you ever do is post impersonal advertisements and links to your products/blog/site/whatever, you’re wasting the benefit of the platform. 
• Secondly, you need to take your time. As with any project, effective use of time can make or break your success. Facebook is not a platform where you can throw up a short post once a week and forget about it. Again, it’s all about the social interaction. If you don’t spend the time interacting with your customers, you’ll find your page losing support. No one likes to feel ignored.
• Violating Facebook’s terms of service is also a quick way to get your page shut down, and your customer base ruined. Facebook has rules about tagging people, running contests, and even the type of page you use to network. Make sure you use a business page rather than a personal page, don’t tag people without  their permission, and keep an eye on the terms  of service. 

Put Facebook to Work for You
 Facebook marketing is a powerful tool when used correctly. As long as you avoid the common pitfalls, it can be an amazing asset. Just put the time into it and reap the rewards.

What’s New in Facebook?

 In March 2012, Facebook overhauled its pages, these are the pages that feature information about your company, or organization. The new look allows you to add a unique cover photograph to brand your page. This is, in effect, a banner image that lies behind your profile photograph. Although it cannot be used as an advertisement, it can be used to give a look and feel to your page that plays to your branding.
When there is a post you want to highlight, for instance when someone is saying something wonderful about your company, you can now star it, making it expand across the page. This will draw attention to it.
You can also “pin” new posts to the top of your page each week. This will allow you to highlight important things you want your “friends” to take note of.

Milestones allow you to point people to major events in the history of your company and highlight them in a similar way to starring them.
The new Facebook pages offer a great way to connect with your customers, and potential customers, check them out at  www.facebook.com/about/pages. 

SM4SB-%20Social-Media-for-Small-Business%20-Book-2.pdf

Benefits and Risks of engaging customers in a digital space

Social Media is an enormous tool used by marketers. It is able to reach millions of people and give companies a way to engage with customers almost instantly. How ever marketers may be missing a huge opportunity. Companies spend most of their time marketing of Facebook, Instagram and some of the other large social media platforms.
The following are the benefits of engaging customers in a digital space.

1. Online engagement enables more customers to have their say, at their convenience: A dedicated digital engagement space ensures everyone has a safe access to meaning contributions to issues impacting their everyday life.

 It also brings diverse groups together, including hard to reach customers, providing access to often neglected perspectives and bringing marginalised voices into the conversation.
2. Informed decision making: Making sure customers have their say and are listened to and involving the customers most affected, leads to decisions that are more likely to be legitimate, effective and sustainable.

The reach and accessibility of online engagement provides insights into the needs and priorities of customers and ensures investment is based on the expressed needs of the customers. Through improved and open communications, it aids in better policy making.
3. Community ownership: Ensuring investment is based more on the customer's expressed needs, it empowers a sense of ownership and sharing responsibilities for improving quality of services, projects and programmes.

 With the ability to engage people with more resources, information and understanding, online engagement improves community capacity to understand issues and empowers customers to become subject mater experts.
4. Better responsiveness and transparency: Online engagement allows for continuous conservation between marketers, customers and businesses which in turn builds positive relationships.

 Maintaining regular contact increases trust between customers and businesses hence bringing people together to foster better collaboration.
The following are the risks of engaging customers in a digital space.

1. Lack of credibility: Many online businesses find it challenging to prove they are legitimate, especially when they are small and just beginning to scale up.

2. Customer service challenges: Some customers simply prefer to shake a hand, speak with a person and online businesses often do not have the resources or capabilities for there. Customers are usually frustrated with the level of customer service that is provided through social media such as they never receive a response in time or never at all.

3. Market place saturation/ competition: Unlike offline businesses that may have one or two competitors in the area, online companies are pitted against dozens or hundreds of competitors accross the world. This level of saturation can make it difficult to win any marketplace penetration.

https://www.bangthetable.com/benefits-of-online-community-engagement/

https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/07/ecommerce-advantages-and-disadvantages.html

Strategies for Social Media Marketing.

A social media marketing strategy will help your brand tackle its objectives/goals with a sense of purpose. We’ve broken down our social media marketing guide into the key steps you need to identify your goals, engage audiences and optimize your results:

1. Set objectives that address your biggest challenges

First things first: you need to figure out what you want to accomplish out of social media at large. Brands should strive to set goals that are actually attainable. By tackling smaller, realistic goals, you can scale your social efforts in a way that’s both reasonable and affordable. And on a related note, your goals will influence everything from your budget to which social networks you’ll tackle.

Sample Social Media Objectives

·        Increase brand awareness. To create authentic and lasting brand awareness, avoid solely publishing promotional messages. Instead, focus on content that emphasizes your personality and puts your followers ahead of the hard sell.

·        Achieve a higher quality of sales. Digging through your social channels is nearly impossible without monitoring or listening to specific keywords, phrases or hashtags. Through more efficient social media targeting, you reach your core audience much faster.
·        Improve ROI. Positive social media ROI doesn’t happen by accident. Taking the time to audit your social channels can help keep the cost of  ads and creatives down. 

2. Gather insight into your target audience

So much of what you need to know about your audience to influence your social media marketing strategy is already out in the open. You must decide on the relevant demographic, psychographic and behavioural characteristics of your audience.

3. Establish your most important metrics

No matter what you’re selling, your social media strategy should be data-driven. That means focusing on the social media metrics that matter.

Engagement metrics are essential to building meaningful, lasting relationships with your followers. Large audiences and likable content is great.

Some of the metrics to look up for are:

• Reach. Post reach is the number of unique users who saw your post. How far is your content spreading across social? Is it actually reaching user’s feeds? In the face of ever-changing organic algorithms, tracking reach is arguably more important than ever.
• Clicks. This is the number of clicks on your content, company name or logo. Link clicks are critical toward understanding how users move through your marketing funnel. Tracking clicks per campaign is essential to understand what drives curiosity or encourages people to buy.
• Engagement. The total number of social interactions divided by the number of impressions. For engagement, it’s about seeing who interacted and if it was a good ratio out of your total reach. This sheds light on how well your audience perceives you and their willingness to interact.
• Hashtag performance. What were your most used hashtags on your own side? Which hashtags were most associated with your brand? Or what hashtags created the most engagement?
• 
• Sentiment. This is the measurement of how users reacted to your content, brand or hashtag. Did customers find your recent campaign offensive? What type of sentiment are people associating with your campaign hashtag? It’s always better to dig deeper and find what people are saying.

4. Dig into what your competitors are doing

Before you start creating content, you should have a good idea of what your competitors are up to.

Doing so involves might just require some surface-level analysis. Looking at your competition’s presence will directly inform your own social media strategy. The goal here is to determine what’s working for them and how you can adapt your own campaigns accordingly.

How to spot your social competitors

The simplest way to find competitors is through a simple Google search. Look up your most valuable keywords, phrases and industry terms to see who shows up.

5. Create and curate engaging social content

Your social media marketing strategy is obviously centred around content. You should have a pretty good idea of what to publish based on your goal and brand identity. Similarly, you probably feel confident in which networks to cover for example;

Video Content or Bust: it is among the most viewed and shared hands-down. Facebook and Instagram, in particular, are pushing video hard right now which is notable given how their respective algorithms will continue to evolve.

User-generated content: again, we can’t stress enough the importance of curating user-generated content from branded hashtags. Customers today absolutely love authentic content that doesn’t always have that sort of professional, polished touch. If nothing else, curating UGC means less work on your plate and less pressure to constantly be thinking of new ideas.

6. Make timeliness a top priority

Not only do customers expect speedier responses from brands, but also meaningful conversations on a regular basis. Through social media, you gain respect as a brand by just being present and talking to your audience. That’s why social customer care is so important to brands wanting to increase audience awareness. It’s all about engagement.

Through the right social media monitoring tools, you can find instances across all your channels to interact, respond and gauge customer service inquiries.

7. Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how you can improve by managing and measuring your outcomes.

Without continuously analysing your efforts, you’ll never know how one campaign did over another. Having a bird’s eye view of your social media activity helps put things into perspective. This means looking at your top-performing content and fine-tuning your campaigns accordingly.

There’s no denying that a lot of social media is a matter of trial-and-error. Monitoring the metrics behind your campaigns in real-time allows you to make small tweaks to your social media marketing strategy rather than sweeping, time-consuming changes. This dynamic approach to marketing makes perfect sense in a day and age where social media is constantly evolving.

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-marketing-strategy/ 

Time Management: Social Media Management Tools

One of the keys for an entrepreneur’s success is time management. Mastering this skill by developing a communication strategy is important when utilizing social media to promote your business.
 You should have established your business plan by now, which includes a vision and mission statement as well as your marketing and financial plans
 Your first step in time management is to identify what type of social media will increase your business success.

All businesses can grow when actively networking. So, by building a community, you attract an audience that becomes a link to your market. Popular community networking sites include Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.
If your business revolves around research, utilize news sites, blogs, and podcasts. If your business focuses on sales and marketing, it is all about getting your product and brand to your customer base. This can be accomplished through blogging, videos, and social networking

 The steps, discussed below, will assist you with managing your greatest commodity - your time.

1.Simplify, Automate, Consolidate (SAC)
 SAC, are the three social media management tool traits required for success when using social media as a time management tool.

Your social media partnership will require you to simplify your business practices through organization. This in turn, offers more time. Incorporating user-friendly systems into your business will allow your business to run smoother. Using automation technology will streamline your business and increase your avenues of communication with your customers as well as your team members.
Once you start partnering with several social media networks, it will be time to consolidate. When you use social media management tools for time management you are using communication to your advantage.
2. Strategy to Simplify
Establishing an organizational strategy that relates to your social media environment will assist you in staying on track for completing your daily goals. Start by designating certain time periods for business related communications. This business scheduling system will increase your productivity and clear the unnecessary.
Prioritize your communication with social media tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck as well as Radian6 and mobile device apps such as UberSocial. These will enhance your scheduling system, and allow you to determine not only who receives your communications, but also the dates and times you want your communications to be delivered. Initiate email filters to receive communications from key contacts, as well as alerts regarding pertinent content.


3. Maintenance of Automation
 As a business owner, you should have already solidified your commitment to your plan by putting both your short and long-term goals in writing. Automation technology will offer you mass resource opportunities, and managing all of these resources will consume yours and your team’s valuable time.
 With focused priorities you can maximize your productivity by considering a company like Spredfast as an organizing tool, which can be used for identifying tasks as well as assigning tasks to your team members.
Having a central location for your social media networks will ensure that you do not miss that pertinent message, customer request, or business opportunity. Since part of your time management is coordination of communication, having a social media manager will allow you to post product updates and customer reviews.

4. Consistency by Consolidating
 Once you have developed multiple social media accounts, consistency in coordinating tasks with those accounts, in a timesaving fashion, can become a full time job. However, by consolidating your communications, the outcome is a higher quality product. Utilizing social media management tools like TweetDeck, HootSuite, FriendFeed, Ping.fm, RSS, or TubeMogul will allow you to multi-task by coordinating the social media interface with the management of multiple accounts. This will ensure consistency by updating several social media sites all at once.

5. Finish by Analyzing and Tracking
 Now that you have identified your community, established your communication board, and partnered with a social media manager, your social media activities can remain at a high professional standard when you utilize analyzing and tracking tools. Consider BufferApp, Raven Tools, WhenToTweet, and Tweriod to help you track when your communities are actively online. Also comparisons in your industry are a key analytical tool. The management site, Wilfire, will help gauge your success within your industry’s community. And HowSociable will offer you a way to track the visibility of your brand.

And finally, do not be afraid to accept that something may not be working. Analyzing your business progress is a vital part of maintaining your success. Customer, community, and networking feedback is an important identifying tool that is also offered through social media sites like Seesmic, Lithium, and Google.
Identifying and implementing change will help you to achieve the three traits: Simplify, Automate, Consolidate - (SAC), which will ensure the success of your social media business partnership.

SM4SB-%20Social-Media-for-Small-Business%20-Book-2.pdf

SEO Strategies

Major SEO Strategies/ Tactics

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is the process of optimizing your website to get organic, or free traffic from the search engine results page. It involves making certain changes to your web design and content that make your site more attractive to a search engine. You do this in hopes that that the search engine will display your website as a top result on the search engine results page.

The following are the major SEO strategies:

1.     Improve user experience across your entire website

You need to think about constant desire to show the best result when you are optimizing your website for SEO because if your site isn’t high quality enough, you will most probably have a tough job ranking for your target keywords.

The following are SEO techniques you can use to improve user experience and give your existing content a boost in search engines:

a)     Make your posts easy to read by formatting the content by using tips like shorter paragraphs, mixed sentence lengths, subheadings to make scanning the article easier, white space and images, write quality content.

b)    Start by giving away the most important information at the top of the article and following it up with the less important information.

c)     Site speed is important because it plays a huge role in SEO since people would not want to wait for a long time to access the information they are looking for. 

2.     Optimize for voice search

A large percentage of searches are using a voice-assisted device to do the job for them hence you must optimize your website to answer questions

3.     Find and target the right keywords

You must consider what your users are looking for rather than coming up with different ways that users can phrase a search query. Getting your keywords right makes it easier for SEO to list your content in response to related searches. When you perform keyword search, you need to find and prioritize keywords based on their relevance, demand and competition

4.     Create great content

Google values high quality content that answers user queries effectively and meets their content guidelines. People love to engage with interesting content and often share it in their circles

5.     Build authoritative backlinks

Google lists authoritativeness and trustworthiness as the primary indicator of page quality hence you need to make sure that your audience sees you as trustworthy and authoritative. The best way to build authority and trust is through link building. Make sure that relevant, trusted and high DA websites in your niche link back to your site and this will help improve your rankings and drive referral traffic to your site. You can also remove any low-quality toxic links that can be harming to your site’s rankings

6.     Use schema markups

It is basically a code that you put on your website to help search engines provide more informative search to users. Schema markups can make your web pages appear more prominently in SERPs for all kinds of content. You can use data markup for articles, local businesses, restaurants, book review, events and products

7.     Use SEO-friendly URLs

Your page URLs should be easy to read and they should clearly tell people what content they expect when they visit your link. It is advisable to incorporate your target keywords in the URLs. You should keep your URLs short and use hyphens to separate words, not underscores.

8.     Monitor your performance

In order to optimize your website for the best results, you need to monitor your performance consistently. You can use platforms like Pro Rank Tracker and Alexa to get useful insights about your website’s performance. These platforms can help you track and monitor your site’s traffic, top performing content and competition.

Conclusion
With detailed analytics, you can further optimize your site to improve results. You can solve issues as soon as they appear to minimize errors, cut down extra costs and drive more sales.
For your site to rank higher in the SERPs, you need to implement a thoughtful approach in drafting your SEO strategy

 

https://thenextweb.com>2018/09/30 
https://www.singlegrain.com>seo>effective-seo-techniques-to-drive-organic-traffic-in-2019/

   

Online Reputation Management

Online reputation management (ORM) means taking control of the online conversation. Its techniques and strategies ensure that people find the right materials when they look for you on the Internet.

ORM creates balance, counteracts misleading trends and allows you to put your best foot forward. As more buyers rely on online research, your brand's reputation can make or break your business.

Online reputation management involves ensuring your brand has the best possible online image. The ORM services work to ensure that positive news and reviews are the first things customers (and potential customers) see when they search for your business online. 

Why should you care about your online reputation?

• Consumers increasingly rely on online research when considering a purchase - a larger percentage of buyers will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative reviews.


• Leaving brand reputation to chance can lead to a crisis - monitoring your reputation and reacting promptly will help you avoid crises and full-on disasters and prevent negative news about your business from spreading.


• Your brand's online reputation can affect your site's ranking - sites that offer poor customer experience are oftenly de-ranked 


• Monitoring your online reputation will give you valuable customer insights - what people love about your product, what they wish they could change and what they feel is missing

  Online reputation management strategies

 There are several strategies online reputation management services employ to boost a brand's online image, including the following: 

• Search engine optimization: These companies ensure that your online content is properly optimized for search engines. They ensure it has the right keywords, metadata and headlines to ensure it is being seen when people search for your business or businesses in your industry.


• Content creation: These firms will create content for you, such as articles, blog posts and business profiles.


• Review management: Online reputation management services can monitor your online reviews on sites like Google, Facebook and Yelp. This gives you the chance to quickly respond to negative reviews and promote positive ones. These services can also help with the acquisition of reviews. Some companies focus specficially on these strategies. They provide a platform where you can manage all of these tasks from a single location.


• Social media management: Online reputation management companies can manage all of your social media. This includes setting up profiles on all relevant social channels, deciding what and when to post on those outlets, and monitoring those networks for any negative reviews.


• Third-party website monitoring: In addition to monitoring your social media pages, online reputation management services monitor other sites to see if your business is being talked about. This can include review sites like Yelp and Glassdoor, as well as any other websites or blogs where your business is being discussed. This ensures that you always know when your business is being talked about online and what people are saying. 

NB: 1.  Webimax.com is the best online reputation management service for businesses

WebiMax - Online Reputation Management

Best for Businesses

WebiMax is a digital marketing agency that provides a host of online reputation management services. This includes online monitoring, review and negative management, crisis response, brand preservation, positive  and reputation management.

After conducting an initial analysis of your brand's online reoutation, WibiMax works with your company to develop a specific strategic plan to meet your brand's needs. 

Besides reputation management, WibiMax provides a wide range of other digital marketing services, including web design, serach engine optimization, search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and e-commerce solutions.

2. Gadook.com is the best online reputation management service for individuals

Gadook is a full-service inbound marketing and reputation management company. Reputation services are available for businesses as well as business leaders such as company presidents, CEOs and founders.

The company provides a variety of online reputation management services, including brand building, rebranding, brand protection, social profile optimization and crisis management.

Its firststep is conducting an analysis of the individual or brand's current online reputation. Based on what it discovers, Gadook implements a specific plan to either repair a negative online image or boost a positive one. Its strategies include creating positive, search-optimized content off the first few pages of the search result.

Other services Gadook offers include web marketing, web design and development and project management

An example of an online reputation management failure is the domino's scandal.

Domino’s YouTube scandal

A video featuring two Dominos employees doing disgusting things to pizzas they were sending out had almost one millon hits on YouTube, proving extremely damaging for the brand.

The pranksters posted five video clips - including a particularly revolting clip involving a sandwich - that quickly spread through social media channels resulting in a barrage of anti-Dominos comments

Asking YouTube to remove the video proved tricky as websites requires approval from the person who posted the video in the first place - although that person was finally identified and contracted.

Following the incident, Dominos shut the store to sanitizs the operation and the two employees were fired. However, they were critisized for not issuing an immediate statement. Dominos later claimed this was because they were worried about more people watching the clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhBmWxQpedI

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7901-best-reputation-management-services.html