FRIENDS with BENEFITS FRIENDS with BENEFITS
KYLIE BARTLETT CONTENTS
THE AUTHOR’S STORY
1. WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY THE ‘FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS’ PHILOSOPHY MEET YOUR COMPETITION – FOOD, PHOTOS AND FRIENDS INTRODUCING THE 5-STEP FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS FORMULA
2. PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND BECOMING A SOCIAL BUSINESS STEP 1: PLAN – STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA VISION? CHOOSING YOUR TACTICS CRAFTING MEASURABLE GOALS AND KPIS DEFINING YOUR METRICS CREATING FACEBOOK POLICIES AND GUIDELINES
3. PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR FACEBOOK FACEBOOK GRAPH SEARCH FACEBOOK HASHTAGS SOCIAL INFLUENCERS
4. PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT YOUR BRAND STORY COMMUNICATION STRATEGY A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSANDS WORDS APPOINTING YOUR PIMP (BUSINESS BRAND AMBASSADOR) IDENTIFYING YOUR CHAMPIONS TRICKS OF THE TRADE PIMPING YOURSELF OUT: A RECAP
5. PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH CREATING QUALITY CONTENT YOU NEED TO START ACTING MORE LIKE A NEW MEDIA BUSINESS HOW TO FIND FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
6. PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE FLIRT AND CONVERT WITH FACEBOOK ADVERTISING WHAT TO ADVERTISE? CUTTING THROUGH THE JARGON STANDARD FACEBOOK ADS CHOOSING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE AD BUDGET
7. CONCLUSION
LET’S CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION! ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABOUT KYLIE
CONTACT KYLIE THE AUTHOR’S STORY
Life’s too short when you stop and think about how long you’re dead for. Do what you love!
– KYLIE BARTLETT
I still vividly remember my first Facebook status update. It was on December 6 2007, and it took me eight hours to write. “Where do I put the comma”, I started asking myself. “Have I written too much? And will anyone want to read what I have to say?” For many years I was convinced that Facebook was a place where teenagers hung out to chat about what they’d gotten up to on the weekend (without their parents finding out). I told myself that I was way too ‘high brow’ and professional – that I’d never stoop so low as to jump on Facebook and start commenting on what people had for lunch. “Get a life”, I would say to my friends who were wasting their time on this childish platform. Then a business colleague who I respected told me to get over myself. “Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it”, he advised. So I gave in. And here’s what I wrote as my first status update: “Hello, I’m a Facebook virgin, please go easy on me!” I was blown away by what happened next; I started receiving responses from total strangers welcoming me to Facebook, and I began being sent ‘friend requests’ from people I hadn’t had any contact with for over a decade. I couldn’t believe how much conversation was taking place over my trivial little status update. With my training in human behaviour, I started analysing how this new way of communicating made me feel. Half of me was a bit scared of this newfound beast, while the other half was curious and
1 THE AUTHOR’S STORY excited about its potential. Once I got over my fear of technology, I realised it was just another form of communication, like sending smoke signals and carving stories into rocks were many thousands of years ago. Geez, back in my day, my Facebook was called a ‘pen pal’, where I’d hand-write a letter to a girl in Poland and then wait patiently by my letterbox for weeks for her response. It’s funny how having a pen pal 30 years ago was encouraged by our parents and yet today’s equivalent, Facebook, is frowned upon. Once I came to terms with the fact that Facebook was just an evolution in the way we communicate, I was off and racing. Within 12 months I’d become friends with over 3,000 people on Facebook from around the globe – and get this: I probably only knew 300 of them ‘in real life’. What I found staggering was when I launched my Facebook business page, (12 months after launching my personal profile), I managed to attract 2,000 fans within 24 hours. I know the only reason why so many people ‘liked’ my new business page was because I’d built a one-on-one relationship with them first on my personal profile, (you’ll come to understand the importance of this as you read further through the book). Before long, business colleagues were asking me to share my Facebook success secrets with them. Given I’d owned a training company for over 15 years, it seemed like a very natural progression for me to evolve my training courses into offering Facebook Fundamentals for Business. To date, I’ve presented to, trained and coached over 1,000 people globally on social media and Facebook, and I’ve loved every minute of it. Why? Because I know my training is making a huge difference to the bottom line of the small businesses I get to work with.
• • •
It really does break my heart to see so many businesses suffering, not because they’re not good at what they do, but because no one knows they exist. Here’s a test for you: go and ‘Google’ your name.
2 FRIENDS with BENEFITS What shows up? No matter what you’re doing in ‘the real world’, in many ways you are, who Google says you are. Let me give you an example. I was in the market for a new dining set earlier this year. I’d heard a number of my friends talk about a great homewares store just up the road from where I lived and I thought I’d check it out. So I did what 80% of consumers today do: I Googled it … and I got tumbleweeds. Nothing showed up; no website, no social media presence whatsoever. Most consumers would just stop there and instead choose to search for someone else, but I thought I’d give them one last opportunity to sell to me. I jumped in my car and drove to the store itself, but I was out of luck again – they weren’t open on a Sunday. Suffice to say, by this stage I was a tad annoyed and decided to move on. I ended up buying a $5,000 dining set that day from a retailer who had raving online testimonials from happy customers, and who had a dining range for me to look at on both their website and their Facebook page. I wonder how many other businesses are losing out because they don’t have a digital footprint? The world has changed and so must you! Here’s another little test for you. How far away is your mobile phone from you right now? I bet it’s within arm’s reach. Our phones have become an extension of us – they are with us 24/7. Knowing this, are you sure you’re doing enough, within your business, to get into your target market’s back pocket or hand-bag? I hope as you read my book, the penny drops for you as it did for me. I want you to see that Facebook is not as scary (or even as superficial) as you might think, and if used with the right intent and a well mapped out plan of attack, it can be a very beneficial, pleasurable and lucrative communication tool for your business. Are you ready? Let’s start on the road to seducing some ‘friends with benefits’!
3 Chapter 1 WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY
If you don’t change direction, you might end up where you are heading.
– LAO TZU
We’re living in a very different world today than we did as little as a decade ago. Back then, to start a business you’d have needed a sizeable amount of cash in the bank or an expensive over-draft. You’d have to take out a long-term lease on a bricks and mortar premises (potentially paying exorbitant rent), $10,000 for one Yellow Pages advertisement and make enough profit to pay your ongoing overheads such as IT, bookkeeping, administration, stock, staff, rent, utilities – the list goes on. You’d have to spend a fortune on sales, marketing and business development and hope like crazy that word-of-mouth spread fast enough for you to keep your head above water, while you also competed with big businesses who’d be constantly trying to undercut you on price and monopolise the market. I remember witnessing many boutique strip shops closing down left, right and centre in my local town because they couldn’t compete (either on price or on stock) with the big franchised brands such as Woolworths, Bunnings, Harvey Norman and Myer. If you were very lucky, you may have got some traditional media attention, but more often than not you’d have to hire a PR agent to scout for media opportunities for you. In 2008 I paid my PR agent $60,000 for 12 months for this kind of service.
4 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Today’s landscape looks very different. There are over two billion connected computers and over six billion connected mobile phones operating around the world. Every 60 seconds 13,000 mobile apps are downloaded, 695,000 searches are made on Google and 510,000 comments are made on Facebook. Think about this. You could pick up your smart phone right now, shoot a video, upload it to YouTube in less than 60 seconds and potentially reach 85% of the global population. Don’t believe me? Singer Psy from Korea created his Gangnam Style song, launched it on YouTube and it has now been seen by over one billion people! Distribution and influence have been democratised. This is exciting news for people like you and me who have an expertise or talent that can help others. Now, anyone can broadcast a message; you no longer need to get through the media gatekeepers. Your smart phone or tablet is like having your own personal video recording studio, and your blog can now be more valuable than getting an article written up in your local newspaper. Combine this with the ability to produce and distribute products, services and messages easily and quickly via open source technology and social media, and there really is no barrier to entry. Thanks to technology and social media networks like Facebook, there has never been a better time in history to position yourself as the trusted expert and authority in your industry. The little guy now has the ability to connect and interact with communities and influencers from around the globe, without having to pay a cent in advertising or leave the comfort of their own office or home. Small is now, big business. The top-end-of-town corporates, who in the past monopolised the market and dominated the media, are being outmanoeuvred and out-innovated by small, bespoke outfits that are nimble and forward thinking. Those boutique strip shops that once were run out of town by the big franchises, are opening up again, as trendy ‘pop up’ businesses.
• • •
5 WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY Consumer buying habits have changed too. People now want to buy from businesses that stand for something more than just making money. They are attracted to brands that are making a positive impact on the world – businesses that have a social conscience and that operate with integrity. Customers want to interact with original, bespoke brands they feel they have a personal relationship with. They want uniqueness and authenticity rather than mass-production and assembly lines. If you’re a service professional, educator, teacher, trainer, speaker, coach or consultant, the news gets even better. The corporate training and e-learning industry generates $33 billion per year, while the e-book and publishing industry is worth $27 billion, the personal development market nets $10 billion and the coaching market $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, sales of digital information products have more than doubled in the past five years. There is just so much opportunity - right at this very moment in time – to teach, share and sell your expertise and know-how, and to profit from your passion. I know that this book has the potential to completely revolutionise the way you market and grow your business. I’m proof this is possible. I didn’t even know what the internet or the new economy was six short years ago, and yet today 100% of my income is derived via the exact same business model I’m about to share with you – one based around connectivity, social media and the power of the individual.
THE ‘FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS’ PHILOSOPHY
Businesses don’t do business with businesses. Businesses do business with people! I want you to stop thinking that you’re in either a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) niche. You’re actually in a connection-to-connection (C2C) niche. People
6 FRIENDS with BENEFITS do business with people they know, like and trust, and that relationship is taken to an entirely new level when you can refer to each other as ‘mates’ and ‘friends’. Did you know that 95% of all Facebook business pages have less than 20 fans? ‘Build it and they will come’ only happens in the movies. The reason why most businesses are failing on Facebook is because they’re coming across like an 18-year old dude at a nightclub. They’re trawling the news feed; looking for a gullible stranger they can have their way with. Your business will only benefit on Facebook when it stops selling and starts serving first.
Disclaimer: the method I’m going to share with you is unconventional and may even be viewed by my more sophisticated peers as unprofessional. However I get a sneaking suspicion that you’re happy to take a walk on the wild side (or you wouldn’t have purchased a book with such a provocative title in the first place).
So here goes … I recommend you use both your personal profile and your business page on Facebook to market your business, and here’s why. If Richard Branson sent you a friend request inviting you to connect with him personally on Facebook, and at the same time Virgin Airlines sent you a generic message to ‘like’ their business page, which one would grab your attention? Yep, just as I thought, Richard Branson! It’s called ‘social media’ for a reason. People on Facebook want to interact, connect, communicate and contribute. They want conversations, not catalogues. I know if you’re willing to keep an open mind and read the remainder of this book, your Facebook success will go through the roof. And don’t panic if you’re a newbie - you’re in an even better position because you have no bad habits to undo and as a result, you can launch into Facebook with a clean, blank canvas and an arsenal of great tools.
7 WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY • • •
Facebook friends, fans and followers are your new marketers; empower them! Earlier in the year, I ran out of business cards, so I popped a post on my Facebook personal profile asking my friends where I should go to get my new cards printed. 24 hours later I had received 64 responses to my post, all recommending printers. Guess how many were from printing suppliers? A big fat zero! 64 of my friends wanted to help solve my problem, with no hidden agenda other than to help me as a person and fellow business owner. How excited (and rich!) would you be if your friends on Facebook were constantly recommending your products and services to their friends on your behalf? What do you need to do to make this happen for you? Be beneficial to them! Social media and Facebook have become such a crowded marketplace because of their low barrier to entry. Most marketers will tell you that in order to stand out and gain cut-through, you need a ‘unique selling proposition’ – you need to be different and you need to be the best in the business. I disagree. I believe in order to succeed with Facebook, you need to be beneficial and solve problems that aren’t always associated with what you do in your business. Ok, so I can hear you saying “Kylie, I hardly have time to solve my own problems, let alone other people’s – and for free too!” But before you go and throw my book in the bin, please allow me to explain. When those 64 Facebook friends went out of their way to recommend a business card supplier to me, a chain reaction occurred. I naturally felt compelled to return the favour when any one of those 64 friends wrote an ‘I require assistance’ post on Facebook. The print supplier who was given the job felt the same way about the person who recommended his/her services - and so the chain reaction continues. Your goal is to have as many of your friends as possible recommending your products and services to solve their friends’ problems. It’s called reciprocity, or in layman’s terms, ‘I’ll scratch your back
8 FRIENDS with BENEFITS if you scratch mine’. I guarantee that if you spend as much time and energy being beneficial, serving and solving problems as you do in flogging your business on Facebook, your sales will skyrocket. It may not happen overnight, but it will happen. You’ve got to stop looking for instant gratification (sales) and start looking to build long- term, mutually beneficial relationships. Customer (friend) evangelists who rave about your business on your behalf are the new currency in the new economy.
MEET YOUR COMPETITION – FOOD, PHOTOS AND FRIENDS
Can you take some tough love? People don’t care about your business! I know that sounds harsh, but it’s a reality. People don’t lay awake in bed at night worrying about whether you’ve made enough sales or whether you’re going to survive. All people are interested in is reducing their pain and increasing their pleasure. Here’s a question for you. What do you think were the highest- selling commodities in the great depression? Lipstick and tickets to the circus! Here’s why. When women put on their lippy, they automatically feel sexier - their entire mood changes. When people go to the circus and watch clowns making fools of themselves and animals jumping through hoops, it puts a smile on their face and allows them to leave their own worries outside the big tent for a while. Facebook has become today’s lipstick and circuses. People turn to it to escape their day-to-day worries; they turn to it to be flattered, to be entertained and they turn to it as white noise. They don’t turn to it to be sold to.
• • •
9 WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY On Facebook, you’re not competing with your competitors, you’re competing with food, photos and friends (remember the circus). While your competitors are trying to flog their wares on Facebook, you have the perfect opportunity to start ‘clowning around’. For those of you already on Facebook, go check out what’s filling up your news feed right now. I bet its mostly made up of photos of kids, cute pets and scrumptious food.
INTRODUCING THE 5-STEP FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS FORMULA
Whether you’re launching into Facebook for the first time or you’ve been on the platform for a while, this 5-Step process will quickly help improve your reputation, your positioning in the marketplace – and yes, it will also improve your bottom line. I want to assure you that no matter what stage your Facebook journey is at, the cheeky but clever tactics and techniques I reveal from here on in, will help transform the way you use Facebook in your business, forever! How can I make such a bold statement? Because I’m living proof that this process works. Six years ago, I went from being a complete Facebook virgin to now being recognised as one of Australia’s leading authorities on how to leverage Facebook in your business, using the same techniques I’m about to share with you. Put simply, the 5-Step process teaches you how to become ‘beneficial’ to your Facebook community, at no cost to them. Instead of teaching you how to overtly promote and sell your wares, you’ll instead learn how to serve others and solve problems, which in turn drives engagement. Engagement drives advocacy, and advocacy correlates directly with increased sales.
10 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Warning: this process is not for those of you looking for a ‘quickie’ in return for your kind gestures. This is about building long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with your Facebook community. Solve enough problems over a long enough period of time, and I guarantee you, your cash register will start ringing. At the end of the day, people are ultimately time poor (and/or lazy). The more you give people things for free (advice, tips, secrets), the more they want you to do it for them.
The personal training industry is a perfect example of this. We all know how to go for a walk or jog around the block, so why do we then pay a personal trainer to come with us? Because we want accountability and we want to outsource the responsibility to someone other than ourselves. The ultimate outcome you want to achieve from networking on Facebook is that people think of you as their Facebook ‘friend with benefits’. You want to be known as the go-to person that the community turns to when they need advice. When you go out of your way to help a ‘friend’ in need, it leaves an indelible imprint on their mind. As a result, when they or one of their friends requires whatever you sell, they’ll automatically think of you. Now you might be thinking, “How am I ever going to make a sale if all my time is spent running around solving people’s problems that have nothing to do with my business’s products or services?” But look at it this way: hunting for prospects, leads and sales is also a time-consuming process, and there is no guarantee that people will choose you over your competitor, regardless of how much time, effort and money you sink into it.
• • •
For as long as I can remember, we’ve been bombarded with ‘buy my stuff’ advertising and marketing; so much so that we’ve learned to tune it out. You know this yourself – you put the kettle on when an ad comes on TV; you put a bar on receiving ‘cold calls’ on your
11 WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY phone; you put up a ‘no junk mail’ sticker on your letterbox. If you know this to be true, then don’t do this in your business. Choose a different way of standing out – become helpful and beneficial instead! Before we dive deep into the 5-Step process, here’s a sneak peak of what’s involved to get you all juiced up:
1. Plan: start with the end in mind. What are you ultimately hoping to achieve from your Facebook efforts? What is your Facebook vision, what are your goals and targets and what’s your plan of attack for achieving your ideal results?
2. Profile: who is your ideal date and who is currently seducing them? Who is your target market, what problems do they have and how can you solve them? It’s important to also know who else on Facebook is currently grabbing your target market’s attention.
3. Presentation: pimping out your profiles. People are attracted to bright shiny objects and we need to make sure yours is the shiniest of them all. Once we have your profile and business page looking sexy, we then need to work out what you’re going to say. What is your communication strategy, your brand story and your personality style?
4. Publish: give and you shall receive. Here’s a hint with this step: content + community = currency. Publishing great content is going to be at the core of your Facebook strategy. Content comes in many forms: how-to articles, blogs, audio interviews, video tips, book reviews, case studies and so on. You’ll learn how to share valuable and beneficial content with your community to create currency.
5. Promote: making sure you score. We can’t have you putting in all this extra effort, sharing your love around and not actually scoring at the end of the day. You’ll learn how to incorporate what I call ‘my weapons of mass seduction’ – ads, offers and
12 FRIENDS with BENEFITS competitions - into your marketing mix. Everybody loves to get something for free; I’m going to share with you what really hits the sweet spot when it comes to giveaways.
Ok, now that I’ve got you primed, it’s time to get into the good stuff!
13 Chapter 2 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND
Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.
– KENICHI OHMAE
Have you ever seen the movie Alice in Wonderland? There’s a scene where Alice comes to a crossroads and sees the Cheshire Cat perched up in a tree. She asks him which path she should take, to which the Cat replies: “Well that depends a great deal on where you want to end up”. Alice says: “Well, I don’t quite mind where I end up”. “Well then it doesn’t matter which road you take!” responds the Cat. Unless you’re Alice and are happy to randomly roam around Facebook with no real idea about where you’re hoping to end up or what you’re hoping to achieve, then you need a plan – a strategic road map that outlines what you want to achieve. It’s worth pointing out that although this book is focused predominantly on Facebook strategies and techniques, most of it can also be applied across the other social media networks. I’ve chosen to only teach you about Facebook for two reasons:
1. It’s the largest and most popular social media platform of them all. This means there’s a good chance your target market is on it – a great reason why your business should be on it too.
2. It’s one of the easiest networks to master, so once you’ve got
14 FRIENDS with BENEFITS a good handle on Facebook, you can then use a similar strategy to branch out utilising the other networks.
To get you warmed up, here’s a list of outcomes you might want to achieve from your Facebook efforts:
To build brand awareness As a customer service value-add To keep an eye on your competitors To drive traffic to your website To attract leads and sales To create and build a community To position yourself as the thought-leader and expert in your industry To attract top talent and become an employer of choice
I’m sure you’ve heard many people tell you that social media is a waste of time and has no real business benefits. This can definitely be true if you don’t have a social media vision and a solid plan of attack on how you intend to achieve your goals. What I’ve discovered from working with hundreds of businesses (both large and small) is that more often than not, social media isn’t a waste of time; it’s the strategy being executed that is. Now I’m going to stretch your ideas about social media one step further; I want to get you thinking about what it would mean for you to become a ’social business’.
BECOMING A SOCIAL BUSINESS
More and more people are turning their ventures into ‘social businesses’, and there are good reasons for this. The advantages of adopting social media as a business are many and varied. For one thing, it gives you the opportunity to get more people involved in
15 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND communicating on behalf of your business. Not just Marketing, but Customer Service, Sales, HR and even your Research and Development teams can share interesting news and developments online. More important to consider is that your customers and prospects actually expect to be able to connect with your brand for things other than just marketing efforts. Failing to properly utilise social media for all aspects of your business is not just a missed opportunity; it can also leave you at a real disadvantage. However, if your business embraces this idea of real connectivity with customers and potential supporters, you’ll find more and more people coming to you for help, advice – and to buy your product.
WHAT IS A SOCIAL BUSINESS? Open Knowledge defines a social business as: “An organisation that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem, (employees, customers, partners, suppliers), to maximise the co-created value.”
In a nutshell, a social business is like an organism that adapts to its environment. It is thus able to consciously and frequently recalibrate itself and the experience it provides to its community, based on intercepted online data. To become a social business requires a fundamental shift in your businesses’ culture. Everyone within your workplace (from the top down), needs to change their thinking. They need to embrace new technologies and shift their focus away from push marketing and towards building relationships and friendships. Instead of pushing products, you want to pull your community in. A social business needs to be open, transparent, genuine, congruent, authentic and willing to look beyond organisational silos. It
16 FRIENDS with BENEFITS takes advantage of advancements in technology to communicate more effectively, more regularly and more openly.
HOW TO GET STARTED To be a truly social business, you must genuinely care about your community, and not just pay lip service to them. You need to really want to meet the demands of your social customer – and not only for the sake of increasing sales. Why? Because consumers are voicing their opinions across social media platforms such as Facebook about the products and services they are buying every day. And these customers want not just a good product, but an authentic experience from a business they can trust. Business models are changing based on the intel collected from community feedback; when your customers talk, everyone listens. So, before you publicly announce to the world, “we’re a social business”, you need to ensure you have your home in order. Prior to inviting your community over to ‘play’, you need to implement the 5- Step Facebook Formula summarised in the previous chapter.
WE’LL START WITH STEP 1: PLAN – STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND
Think of those goals we talked about earlier. Do you want to attract sales and leads, or draw people to your website? Maybe you’re looking to employ the cream of the crop in your field. Whatever your preferred outcome, the first thing you need to do in your journey towards becoming a social business is to look at who needs to be involved, and what role they should play.
17 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND OBTAINING KEY STAKEHOLDER BUY-IN Before launching a social media strategy within your business, you must first ascertain who will be participating in it. Will you involve all departments and key stakeholders? These could include:
Sales Marketing Finance IT HR Customer Service Administration Executive Management
My advice is that all departments should play a key role in social media, but of course, this is ultimately your choice. Prior to commencing your social media journey, it’s best to ascertain in advance what both management and your department/divisional leaders currently think about the idea and what they hope to achieve when and if the business does ‘go social’. A great way of obtaining key stakeholder buy-in, is to ask them:
What is your department’s social media wish list? What concerns and/or objections do you have about integrating social media into your department and across the business as a whole?
Outlined below is a series of ‘wish list’ examples to assist your key stakeholders in coming up with their own.
CUSTOMER SERVICE The customer service wish list may be:
To enhance our super-friendly customer service (better
18 FRIENDS with BENEFITS image)To reduce the same questions being asked multiple times (leveraged responses to general questions) To make it easier to sell ongoing services to existing clients
SALES The sales wish list could include:
To communicate our perceived value in the marketplaceTo create customer evangelists who promote our products and services on our behalf To generate more leads and sales and reduce the time from prospect to closing the sale
HUMAN RESOURCES The HR wish list could be:
Being an employer of choice because of our positive social presence Attracting top talent in order to increase internal employee engagement To use social media as an internal form of communication
WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA VISION?
The next thing to ask yourself is: where do you want to go? A vision is what hooks everything together. You need to create a vision statement – a simple sentence that helps keep you motivated and focused during times of uncertainty. It’s a clear picture you can see;
19 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND one that guides your every business decision. Establishing a vision statement is important because it helps ensure you keep your business headed in the right social media direction. The difference between your social media vision and your plan is: the vision is the goal, where you want to get to; and the plan is composed of the tactical actions required to get you there. To be successful in social media, you need to have business vision solely for social media. Such vision should form the foundation on which your social media strategy is based. When done well, this could be the catalyst to transform your business into being the leader of your industry. You can start your social media vision statement simply by asking yourself this question: “What do I ultimately want to achieve from social media?”
A GOOD SOCIAL MEDIA VISION SHOULD DO THE FOLLOWING:
State a clear social media standard of excellence Clarify the direction and purpose of the business’s social media Be clear and easy to understand by everyone, both in and outside the business Inspire enthusiasm and commitment to social media within the business Bridge the gap between traditional media and marketing, and social media Be ambitious and declare the best possible outcome
• • •
Here is an example to help you craft your own social media vision. “Kitty Cat and Co.’s vision is to leverage social media to become Australia’s most recognised and trusted cat food
20 FRIENDS with BENEFITS brand on the market, while also offering the highest level of customer satisfaction.” Once you have a strong vision, make sure you test it with your trusted peers. Make further adjustments as needed. Then, ‘sign off’ on the vision. Print it out! Paste it on the wall and make sure you look at it, daily.
CHOOSING YOUR TACTICS
So you have your social media goals and you’ve got a vision for how to achieve them. The next task on your list is to think about how you want to engage with your customers. Most people think only of sites like Facebook and Twitter, but social media should begin with your own blog and newsletter. These are the next building blocks you need once you have your website in place. Think of it like this: when you’re flirting and courting people on Facebook, you really are only ‘renting a crowd’. You don’t own the community – Mark Zuckerberg and his shareholders do! Your ultimate aim is to romance your Facebook friends enough that they feel comfortable (even excited), about coming back to your home (which is your website), for a nightcap. Once you get people back to your website, you need to make sure your house is in order and that there isn’t any dirty laundry lying around. When you’re on your home turf, you have the perfect opportunity to wow them with gifts and show off your achievements. We’ll discuss how to go about this in more detail in later chapters. So let’s take a look at newsletters, blogs, and a few more of the top ways you can start to seduce your target market.
NEWSLETTERS
21 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND These are usually written once a month and are for your prospects, (in your sales pipeline) and current customers to read. These people already know you and your business and have signed up for your newsletter. It’s ok to write quite informally in your newsletter, and you can share more personal things before talking about the latest happenings within your business. A newsletter is a great place to highlight staff achievements, share promotions, or give special offers for your subscribers.
BLOG Weblogs (blogs) have burst onto the content scene because the technology is such an easy and efficient way to get personal and business viewpoints out into the marketplace. Blogs are written at least once a week. A blog is an online article that once posted, can be found by anyone in the world. Blogs are often used to raise awareness of a specific business, industry or niche. Blogging provides experts and wannabe ‘web celebs’ with an easy way to make their voices heard and attract attention in the web- based marketplace of ideas. It’s remarkable what smart people with a passion can do with a blog! People have blogged their way to dream jobs, books deals, and recording contracts, all through the ideas they expressed. The readers of your blog can share your posts onto social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Blogs are found in search engines by the keywords that have been tagged by the author. Keywords are the primary words your blog post is discussing.
SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS Although we’re focusing on Facebook in this book, it would be very biased of me to not talk a little bit about the other social media channels that you may like to consider integrating into your overall
22 FRIENDS with BENEFITS social media plan. A few words of advice: I know you may be all ‘eager beaver’ to include as many social media channels as possible into your plan, but before you go diving in head-first, take a moment to consider whether you have the necessary resources (time, money and personnel) available to manage and maintain them all. I’d rather see you master Facebook first, (given it’s the largest and most popular of all the social media channels) than try to do them all with less thought and with a potentially sub-standard strategy. That being said, here’s a short snapshot on other social media channels and how best to use them within your business once you’ve mastered Facebook.
TWITTER The word ‘Twitter’ comes from the frequent chirping noises birds make (hence the bird in the logo). Twitter users exchange frequent, bite-size posts, known as ‘tweets’. Each tweet can be no longer than 140 characters in length. Your tweets become visible to those that are following you. You follow users (Tweeters) you are interested in, and their tweets are aggregated on your Twitter homepage. Users share tweets (known as re-tweets) with their followers, in the form of photos, video, links, quotes and more. Each tweet can receive replies from other people, creating real-time conversations around trending topics, breaking news and interesting new content. Your can use Twitter to update people about the day-to-day goings on of your business, special events such as sales, or to share interesting bits and pieces with your followers. As Twitter is in real- time, you do need to be tweeting frequently (around every 30 to 60 minutes) to gain any kind of real cut-through. Think of Twitter as being like listening to the news updates on your radio every 30- minutes. It’s short, bite size pieces of information, broadcasted to the world.
23 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND YOUTUBE YouTube is the most popular video-sharing site on the web and it’s also owned by Google, making it the second largest search engine in the world.
Here are some valuable statistics for you to consider:
More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube – that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. 80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US. YouTube is localised in 61 countries and across 61 languages.
You can find videos on YouTube in one of many ways. You can search by keyword; you can browse by topic; or you can scan the list of the most popular videos. If you find a video producer you enjoy, you can subscribe to that user’s videos. One of the reasons YouTube has become so popular is because it fosters a sense of community. You can not only view videos, but you can also rate and comment on them. Some users even respond with video commentary. Posting videos on YouTube is a great, immediate way for your business to connect with people, whether it’s an interview with a staff member, a series of tips from an expert in your field, or an instructional segment for customers.
LINKEDIN LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 240 million members – and it’s growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas and opportunities with a broader network of professionals. It is predominantly used as a ‘business-to-business’ networking platform
24 FRIENDS with BENEFITS rather than ‘business-to-consumer’. It’s a great tool for establishing affiliate and joint venture partnerships. I don’t actually consider LinkedIn to be a social networking platform (there ain’t much socialising going on over there); it’s more of a utility (like a Rolodex).
PINTEREST Users of Pinterest curate themed boards, populating them with media found online using the ‘Pin It’ button, or uploading from their computers. Each such item of media is known as a ‘pin’, and can be a picture, a video, a discussion, or a product. Pins can be grouped into ‘boards’, which are sets of pins focused on a specific topic. Pinterest can be accessed by adding the ‘pin it’ button to the desktop bookmark bar, using ‘follow me’ and ‘pin it’ buttons incorporated into personal website or blog pages, and the Pinterest smartphone application available through the App Store. Pinterest is a valuable social media network for businesses whose target market is female (97% of Pinterest users are female) and who specialise in niches such as health and wellbeing, food, fashion, design – basically anything that’s highly visual.
INSTAGRAM Instagram is a free mobile app that you can download onto your iPhone or Android phone. It allows you to share photos or videos with your target market. There are a number of filters that you can have a lot of fun with through changing the look and feel of your photos. Instagram is great for businesses and brands to tell a story via videos and photos. Like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, you can use hashtags that ensure your content shows up in search results when people type in a specific term you’ve used. From a business perspective, when an image grabs someone’s attention, they can choose to click into the account and see if they
25 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND want to follow the person. Once you start to follow an account, it will show up in your feed. Images of sunrises, the great outdoors and beaches get a lot of likes because they are visually pleasing. In the B2B world, it’s not necessarily all about the products you sell; it’s about visual moods.
CRAFTING MEASURABLE GOALS AND KPIS
Once you’ve got a handle on your vision and the different ways your business can engage with people, you need to set some goals. Goals are necessary for you to be able to measure your success. You must define what the end result will look like, both for each department/key stakeholder, and the business as a whole. Many businesses are aiming to increase sales by acquiring and retaining customers, or improving brand awareness. Others look at reducing costs by making their marketing more efficient, streamlining customer service, or improving their customer satisfaction scores. These are the types of business goals that you should aspire to when developing your social media goals. So with some of these higher- level business outcomes in mind, what do social media goals look like?
Here is a list of possibilities that could form part of your strategy:
Build brand awareness Generate additional leads Close more sales Strengthen relationships with customers, prospects and influencers Better understand your buyers’ needs
26 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Increase traffic to your website Improve customer service Improve search engine rankings Drive traffic into your bricks and mortar store
As you can see above, one business goal can be to increase the number of leads, and ultimately sales, that come through social media. This can be a big long-term aim, but it is the holy grail of many businesses. Tactical activities such as getting more people to ‘like’ your Facebook page are not in themselves useful social media goals. Yes, these audience and reach-building efforts are important and should be tracked, but they should not be the sole focus of your Facebook activities.
ESTABLISHING KPIS FOR YOUR GOALS Once you’ve established key goals for each department/key stakeholder, you must also then establish KPIs for each goal so you’re able to measure your success. As you are most probably starting at zero, it is easy to show progress. Be sure to set realistic KPIs, both in timeframe and results, so you’re not disappointed, and so analysis may be initiated and acted on proactively.
Here’s a list of KPIs that you could use to measure your goal outcomes:
Number of times your business and brand is mentioned on Facebook Number of Facebook interactions Number of conversions driven via Facebook Number of ‘likes’, comments and shares Percentage of money saved or generated as a result of Facebook community feedback Number of customer inquiries resolved
27 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND Number of candidates derived from Facebook
DEFINING YOUR METRICS HOW WILL YOU MANAGE YOUR TACTICS’ SUCCESS? The objective here is to measure KPIs to determine if your Facebook activities are yielding the expected results, as the information obtained will be important in steering present and future decisions about your Facebook plan. In order to properly measure the results of your activities being performed, you’ve got to put a system in place. There are various ways of approaching this, and how you measure your success depends on which goals you’re trying to achieve. The main thing to remember is that the measuring activities have to be tied to your key objectives. Here are four examples of how you can measure your Facebook success:
1. Revenue growth 2. Cost reduction 3. Improved customer advocacy 4. Increased brand awareness
There are a number of great tools that enable you to track and measure your success. Here is a list of the most popular of them:
www.sproutsocial.com www.hootsuite.com www.viralheat.com www.pagelever.com www.socialbakers.com www.simplymeasured.com
28 FRIENDS with BENEFITS www.wildfire.com
Once you’ve completed all the steps above, you’re then ready to map out your strategic Facebook plan onto a one-page visual document so everyone within the key stakeholder group has a clear and concise copy of the plan.
Here’s an example of how it could look once you’ve mapped it out:
An actual electronic Facebook plan template is included as part of my Facebook Business Boot Camp e-Learning Program. Go to www.kyliebartlett.com/shop to find out more.
CREATING FACEBOOK POLICIES AND GUIDELINES
Now before you allow all your staff to go ‘open slather’ on
29 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND Facebook, let’s first make sure you have a set of Facebook policies and guidelines in place for employees to abide by. It really is critical that your business puts policies in place guiding Facebook use. Even the best written and most strictly monitored policy won’t protect you from every potential risk, but it will at the very least ensure your employees stay mindful of their Facebook use. If they’re kept properly informed, most employees will do their best to be compliant (especially when they are reminded of the consequences of breaching the guidelines). Apart from legal guidance, employees need to know how the business intends to use Facebook to achieve its business goals if they are to play an active role in helping achieve these outcomes. From a business perspective, as well as from a legal perspective, there are risks and consequences, as well as opportunities. Accordingly, your policies need to broadly outline your business’s Facebook strategy. This will include statements about when it’s appropriate to use Facebook on behalf of the business and also the negative consequences to the employee if unauthorised Facebook activity does occur. Outlined below is a list of ‘must-haves’ to include in your Facebook policy guidelines:
Information. Not all your staff will be users of – or even familiar with – Facebook; trust me, there are still some people hiding under rocks! Therefore I recommend running an information session with all your staff, outlining why you’ve decided to integrate Facebook into your business and give a brief overview of your Facebook strategy.
Rationale: Your staff need to understand why this policy exists, so they treat it with due respect and understand, your business’s approach. Also, as referenced above, it is important for the business to cover its backside if challenged by regulators or litigation adversaries.
30 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Authorisation: Your business must decide when authorisation is required to make postings on Facebook on the business’s behalf. Where Facebook is used as part of a business strategy, your business should define the degree of discretion an employee needs in order to post, without first receiving further authorisation from the Brand Ambassador (the Brand Ambassador role is outlined in further chapters).
Business representation: Many staff don’t give tagging (another term for joining) their personal profile with their employer’s Facebook business page a second thought. The problem with this is that their Facebook friends may assume their postings represent the position of the business. For example, a staff member may post that they are a member of a particular political party on their personal Facebook profile, which could cause the public to think the business that employs them is also affiliated to that party. This example is especially true with staff in executive positions; the public may automatically assume that anything they say represents the business’s viewpoint. My recommendation is that you get your staff to either post a disclaimer divorcing their personal views from the business’s or don’t allow them to tag where they work (if you feel you can’t enforce the former).
Consequences: You need to remind your staff that apart from the risk their personal Facebook activities could pose to the business and the internal compliance discipline they could face, they may have personal legal liability for actions that have created liability exposure through Facebook.
Privacy: Debate about privacy concerns associated with social media has dominated the media lately. You need to remind your staff about the privacy sensitivities of co-workers, clients and others. I don’t know about you, but my parents
31 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND taught me from a very young age that there were three things you should never speak about: money, politics and religion. It is advisable to stay away from these topics – they are hot buttons that can quickly ignite a firestorm.
These are just a list of the must-haves to include in your Facebook policy and guidelines. I have no doubt you’ll come up with your own additional lists that are applicable to your business and industry. I can’t reiterate enough that you should think about implementing Facebook policies and guidelines from the outset. You won’t have a leg to stand on if you reprimand and take action against one of your staff for inappropriate Facebook activity, if they weren’t made aware that this kind of behaviour would be deemed inappropriate in the first place. Let me share an example of ‘Facebook gone bad’ with you to really hammer home the case for having set Facebook policies and guidelines:
Ben Polis, the founder and former CEO of the energy broker Energy Watch, had his reputation come crashing down and his business go into liquidation with debts of over $8.6 million on May 18, 2012. This was predominately due to a number of ‘personal’ opinions he’d posted to Facebook which were uncovered by a snooping journalist. Ben had posted a series of demeaning, derogatory, racist comments on his personal Facebook profile (not on Energy Watch’s business page). You can read a snippet of them below.
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When the public became aware of these comments, they left Energy Watch in droves, including the Melbourne Football Club, which sacked the business as their sponsors. Now some may argue, “What have Ben Polis’ personal views got to do with his business?” In today’s more transparent and connected world, the lines have blurred between business and pleasure; between a personal brand and a business brand. You need to be managing both with the same amount of care and attention. I’m not saying that Energy Watch would have survived had it not been for Ben Polis’ personal Facebook comments being shared with the world, (it sounds like he was already in a bit of trouble behind the scenes prior to this being revealed) but what I am saying is, it certainly didn’t do his business any favours. If this type of example can happen with an owner of a business (who should have cared and known better), then have a think about how much trouble your business could get into if one of your less senior staff started acting in a similar manner to Ben? The moral of the story is that you need a set of policies and guidelines in place to protect your business’s reputation.
33 PLAN: STARTING WITH THE END IN MIND IN THIS CHAPTER YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT:
Step 1: Plan, starting with the end in mind The importance of having a Facebook plan and vision The notion of becoming a social business Obtaining key stakeholder buy-in Choosing your tactics Crafting measurable goals and KPIs Metrics and measuring your Facebook success Creating a set of Facebook policies and guidelines and what could happen if you don’t
ACTION STEPS
I’m all about taking your newfound learning and applying it into your business. I recommend you create a Facebook strategic plan document in something like Microsoft Word or Evernote, so you can start to capture your thoughts and ideas. Go back over this chapter and complete each stage – you’ll be well on your way to creating a Facebook plan for your business.
34 FRIENDS with BENEFITS NOTES
35 Chapter 3 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM?
Dating should be like buying a car, you should get to talk to the previous owners.
- UNKNOWN
Are you old enough to remember the reality TV Show Perfect Match? The format went something like this: a single guy or girl was behind a screen, and on the other side were three eligible dates. None of the contestants could see or knew anything about each other prior to coming on the show. After asking the contestants a series of questions, the single guy or girl could choose one of the three to go away on a dirty weekend with. The couples would come back from their weekend away and share their experiences on the show the following week. Some dates were disasters but some couples did go on to get married. I want you to think of Facebook as being a bit like this TV show, but instead of being behind a screen on TV, you’re behind your computer screen. Neither you nor your ideal ‘dates’ have the ability to see each other. You can only go on what you see and read in the news feed. The clearer you are about who you want to date, the better chance you have of meeting your ‘perfect match.’ This brings us to Step 2 of our process: knowing who your ideal
36 FRIENDS with BENEFITS date is. This is absolutely mission critical if you’re going to succeed using Facebook. I call it getting to know your ‘Bob and Betty’ – your target market. There is no use spending valuable time and resources engaging with every Tom, Dick and Harry if they have no intention of purchasing from you, or have no influence over those that already do. One of the best ways of establishing who your ‘Bob and Betty’ are, is by asking yourself these questions:
What type of clients give us the least grief and allow us to make the most profit? Who gets the most benefit and value from our products and services? Who are the clients that rave the most about us? Who are our products and services most suitable for?
Hopefully, as you answer these questions, you’ll start to see a trend emerge that will give you an insight into who your ‘Bob and Betty’ might be. Many business people struggle to identify who their target market is, instead preferring to be generalists who sell to everyone that’s prepared to spend some money. While this approach may provide you with small, quick wins, but without a doubt, targeting one specific market, will take your business to the next level.
• • •
Here’s another activity for you to complete to help you profile your perfect match. If you, (your business), were to pick one customer to date, what would their profile look like?
Male or female? Age and demographic? Married, single, divorced? Children? Occupation?
37 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? Located – local, national, global? Income range? What industry do they work in? What do they do on weekends? What car do they drive? Where do they currently shop? What websites do they visit on a regular basis and why? Do they subscribe to any blogs? If yes, which ones and why? What magazines (on or offline) do they read? What communities (both on and offline) do they belong and contribute to? What TV shows do they watch and why? What radio stations do they listen to and why? What social media platforms do they use and why? What are their special interests, hobbies and activities?
MEET MATT – HE’S WHO I LIKE DATING!
42 year old Married to Tiffany 10 year old daughter Lucy who goes to Melbourne Grammar MD of a chain of restaurants around Melbourne
38 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Lives in Port Melbourne Earns $250,000 pa plus bonuses Dines in Melbourne CBD and has breakfast in Albert Park on the weekends Holidays in Noosa Reads The Age and Herald Sun on his iPad each morning Subscribes to BRW and Epicure On linkedIn but doesn’t really know how to use it Member the Albert Park Golf Club Goes to the gym and loves running the Tan 2 days per week Geelong Cats fan
What I’m essentially getting you to create is a customer character (also known as a customer avatar) for your business. A customer character is a fictitious person you’ve made up, that represents every trait, demographic and quality you’d like to attract into your business. Knowing who your customer character is will play a very important role when we look at creating your business persona and personality in the next chapter. Another strategy for getting to know your ‘Bob and Betty’ is to survey your current customers. It’s assumed you’re currently doing business with your target customer and there’s no better way of getting to know them more than to ask them about themselves. What you’re looking for is a trend in their interests, so it can be used to find and attract more people like them. Remember this is about learning about your customers’ ‘social’ habits more than their business habits. Your target audience and your current customers should be at the heart of everything you do and should always be considered when publishing on Facebook. What value are they getting out of your initiatives? What messages resonate best with them? There are many great survey tools that you can use to survey your current customers. Two of my favourites are:
www.jotform.com www.surveymonkey.com
39 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? Another more complex way of getting to know your ‘Bob and Betty’ is to conduct a focus group where you interview a cross-section of your current customers in person and you also invite prospects to participate. This process can get complicated though – my recommendation is that if you choose to go down this path, partner up with a firm that specialises in offering this service.
KEYWORD RESEARCH FOR FACEBOOK
The foundation of social media marketing is built on keywords. Conducting continuous keyword research and keyword analysis is critical to achieving success with social media. Whether Bob and Betty are sharing content on YouTube or Pinterest or they’re status updating on Facebook, your social media marketing efforts should start with determining which keywords they are using. To be more specific, conducting keyword research on social media enables you to discover the needs and wants of social communities by:
Tracking popular and trending topics Determining search/query frequency Gauging market interest for products or services Identifying demand for keywords Better understanding your target market’s intent Discovering relevant points of engagement
By researching and identifying social media keywords, you gain a much clearer picture of how to construct and communicate your message effectively. Applying this level of keyword insight to your Facebook campaign will provide you with the maximum ROI from your efforts.
40 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Many believe that keyword research is a one-size-fits-all process. They assume that the same keyword data they apply to their pay- per-click advertising or search engine optimisation efforts will be just as effective for their Facebook strategy. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There are some major differences between search and social, which include:
Behaviours across platforms: There are dramatic differences in behaviour from one social platform to another. The way people use Facebook is often very different from how micro-bloggers use Twitter.
Query vs. conversation: Social engagement is more than just punching a query into a search engine. Searchers are looking for an answer to a question or an unmet need, while social media users want to engage in conversation, share ideas and interact with the community. Because of this, thinking just in terms of query keywords is limited and can lead to completely misunderstanding user intent and expectations.
FACEBOOK GRAPH SEARCH
In January 2013, Facebook introduced Graph Search, a search engine that is integrated into the platform. This super-social search engine processes language queries to return information from across the platform. Here’s a series of Graph Search examples:
Cafes that my friends like in Sydney People who work at Westpac Bank who like yoga Single women in Melbourne who were formerly from Geelong Married women who live in Brisbane who like Kids Spot Facebook business page
41 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? Are you excited yet? You should be! Once you know who your ‘Bob and Betty’ is, you now have the ability to go searching for that ideal date, right here on Facebook.
FACEBOOK HASHTAGS
Recently, Facebook introduced the hashtag feature into its platform (which originated from Twitter). So what is a hashtag? A hashtag is a short link of phrases or words, preceded by a pound sign (#). When written this way, the hashtag turns any word or groups of words into a searchable link. This allows you to organise content and track discussion topics based on the words or phrases being used. Let’s say, for example, I was writing a status update on social media. If I ended my post with #socialmedia and #thewebceleb, my status update would form part of all discussion topics using the same hashtag. You can search hashtags in Facebook as part of Facebook’s Graph Search, outlined above. You should use hashtags in two ways in your business:
Listening tool: to learn what conversations are occurring, based on the hashtags being used and by whom (both your target market and those that are influencing them). You can then use the same hashtags, so your content shows up in search results.
Organising tool: to organise your content into discussion topics, making it easier for the reader to find you and read your updates.
SOCIAL INFLUENCERS
42 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Research is of critical importance to your Facebook strategy. Research provides the clue to where the conversations are and who is partaking in them. This will then help you to engage and influence those conversations. Good analysis of your target audiences and understanding your position in the marketplace will let you build a good social media presence, which will put you in a position to sell to that market. You also need to find out more about your competitors. You can learn a great deal from the social media strategies and tactics your competition is using to market their products. If your competitors are not yet using Facebook or are using it poorly, this might provide you the opportunity to be the leader in your niche by being the best and biggest player on that platform. Eventually, your research will lead you to the social influencers in your field. Social influencers are people or businesses in your industry whose opinions have weight on Facebook. People trust their name and tend to go to them for industry-related questions and research. These influencers are important to you, because striking up and maintaining a meaningful relationship with them can drastically improve your credibility, as well as give your business high-quality publicity. It’s basically free advertising for your business, and it increases your own ‘seductiveness’ on Facebook. Why are these social influencers so special in the first place? There are a couple of reasons. When a person or brand is a big seducer, they tend to be particularly smart about their specific industry; they’ve got an early jump on Facebook, or have collected a large group of loyal friends, fans and followers. Having a strong sway over a lot of followers is what makes social influencers … influential! Influencers are also members of the social media realm who participate actively and add good content to the online community. Facebookers rely on influencers for reliable information about the industry they are in, so having good relationships with them can give you insider knowledge and much needed exposure. In order to maximise your Facebook ROI, it’s important to interact with those in your industry who have the greatest influence
43 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? and reach. Remember, a smaller network of effective influencers can be more powerful than a large number of followers who add little social media value. Ok, let me provide you with an example of how this works. I’ve just launched a new brand and online community on behalf of a client called www.livelively.com.au. We’ve established who our target market is. Her name is Olivia, she’s a married, stay-at-home 35 year old mum who has a three-year-old daughter. Her days are spent entertaining her very active child and running around after her ageing parents. She’s very interested in health and wellbeing and follows bloggers who write about tips for raising healthy children and how to best care for your parents as they get older. We’ve done our research and have established that the blogs and online communities Olivia subscribes to, interacts with and is influenced by are: www.mamamia.com.au, www.sarahwilson.com.au, www.kidspot.com.au and www.thewellnesswarrior.com.au. Why did we choose these four websites? Because all of them have a huge, loyal, active community base. What they blog about is exactly what Olivia is interested in, and when they recommend a product or service, the community trusts them and purchases accordingly. We now make sure that every week, we’re commenting on all four of these blogs; joining in on their discussions and sharing their content on our Facebook page. What we’re hoping to achieve from this strategy is twofold; we know if we contribute often enough and add genuine value, the tribe members following these four communities may also like what we have to say and in turn jump across and become part of our community too. If we grab the right attention from the community owners or managers themselves, (and if they like our approach) they may promote our content, products and services to their communities on our behalf, thus expanding our business reach and distribution channels. So you can see that when you create your ‘ideal date’, you’re doing more than just constructing a dream customer. You’re actually taking a first step towards gaining valuable insight into your real-life
44 FRIENDS with BENEFITS buyers and supporters – what they like, who influences them, and how you can begin to draw them in. By now you should start to feel like your Facebook plan is coming together. Let’s recap on what’s been covered in this chapter.
IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT:
Step 2: Profile and knowing who your ideal date is How to go about profiling your ideal date Conducting market research Keyword research Facebook’s new Graph Search functionality Hashtags and how to use them in your business What a social influencer is and how to leverage their influence How I went about implementing Step 2 with my client, Live Lively What actions you need to take before moving onto the next chapter
ACTION STEPS
Hopefully you will have already completed the action steps I outlined in the previous chapter. If you have, it would be beneficial to now add your target market responses into the same planning document. Here’s a summary of what you need to complete before moving onto the following chapter:
Complete the ‘who would our business like to date’ series of
45 PROFILE: WHO IS YOUR IDEAL DATE AND WHO IS CURRENTLY SEDUCING THEM? questions to establish a customer character for your business. Survey your existing customers (if applicable) to gain a better insight into their demographics. Use Facebook’s Graph Search functionality to gain a deeper insight into your target market’s demographics. Use Facebook’s Graph Search functionality to search hashtags being used by both your target market and influencers. Create a list of hashtags you’ll use to organise your content. This should of course include your business name, your business niche, and the hashtags your target market is regularly using. Conduct research and make a list of the top five influencers your target market is currently following.
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47 Chapter 4 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT
I appreciate this whole seduction thing you’ve got going on here, but let me give you a tip: I’m a sure thing.
- VIVIENNE FROM THE MOVIE PRETTY W OMAN
Have you ever been addicted to TV soapies? I vividly remember how obsessed my girlfriends and I became with Melrose Place back in the early 90’s. Every Thursday night for five years (without fail), four of my best friends from high school would come over to my place. We’d sit in front of the TV with our Bacardi Breezers and cigarettes, glued to the set for an entire hour, gushing over Dr. Michael Mancini and Jake Hanson, the labourer. We all longed for a life like Melrose Place. What is it about TV Show soapies that has us gagging for more, week after week? The reason we get hooked is because we’re watching the show from an associated state; meaning unconsciously we feel connected and a part of the show. We can personally relate to the characters and the plot. Some of us even fantasise about what it would be like to be living ‘that’ life. I’d like you to start thinking of the Facebook news feed in the same vein: as a TV show. Each show has its own unique characters (friends and fans) and we get to either actively participate, or sit back as a spectator (voyeur) and enjoy the show. The more attractive the characters and the more seductive and compelling the plot, the more people will tune in and participate.
48 FRIENDS with BENEFITS So let’s get started pimping out your characters and show!
• • •
Ok, so you’ve worked out what you want to achieve (vision and goals) and who you want to achieve this with (Bob and Betty) and now it’s time to look at how you’re going to go about attracting your ideal dates. This starts with creating a persona, brand and personality. A persona, in its simplest form, is a fictitious character; an avatar that resonates with your target audience. The main premise is that by developing a very specific character, you become more strategic in terms of catering to your demographic. Think about how this plays out in real life. We tend to dress and act how we want to be perceived. Like attracts like, after all. If I was wanting to impress Matt (my ideal customer from the previous chapter), turning up to our date in ripped jeans, swearing like a trooper and suggesting we dine at McDonald’s, would not go down well at all. It wouldn’t resonate with his personality or image. However, if I wore a Boss suit and suggested we dine at The Albert Park Hotel (where I know Matt has dined before), I’d have a much better chance of impressing him, because we share similar interests and style. Do you get the picture? Creating your business persona can be tricky and may not be something you’ve ever considered before. When establishing their business persona, most business owners create it (unconsciously) based on what they’re personally attracted to rather than what their target customers are attracted to. Now there is nothing wrong with this if you are your target customer. But if you’re hoping to attract a completely different type of customer or if you’re intending to outsource your social media to someone else (either within your business or an outside agency), then formally establishing a business persona is imperative.
• • •
49 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT Here’s a series of questions to help you with creating your business persona:
What are your business values? What is your brand personality? How do you communicate your brand? What is your business tone? What famous person/brand do you most relate to? If you were a car, what make and model would you be?
To help you, I’ve outlined below the business persona I’d create to gain Matt’s attention:
Business values: honesty, reliability, relationships Personality: relaxed, friendly, approachable Communication: educational, methodical, no ‘geek speak’ Tone: conversational, professional, articulate Famous celebrity: Hugh Jackman (all round nice guy and versatile) Brand of car: BMW (affordable but not cheap, looks great, excellent reputation)
YOUR BRAND STORY
Storytelling in its simplest form is telling a narrative, metaphor or analogy in such a way that it allows the listener to create their own meanings and connections to your message for themselves. Storytelling helps us make sense of the world we live in. Have a think about your recent conversations; I bet there was some form of gossip or story in each one. Would you believe that approximately 65% of our conversations are made up of stories? Go figure! All the most inspirational and influential leaders of our time had the ability to move our emotions through their storytelling. The most
50 FRIENDS with BENEFITS memorable story is the one told by Martin Luther King – I had a dream! Brand storytelling isn’t new; companies have used it as part of their advertising for many, many years. However, the power of this tool is unfortunately overlooked by many businesses when they go about marketing themselves and their products. Studies show that when information is communicated in the form of a story, people relate to it and remember it more. A great example of business storytelling in Australia right now is the AAMI insurance TV advertisement. In the ad, an average Aussie lady (Rhonda), saves so much money from insuring her car with AAMI that she can afford to go on a holiday to Bali, where she has a romantic fling with Ketut, a local waiter. This ad campaign has become so popular that it has turned into a mini soap opera where we, ‘the viewers’ are asked to get involved and vote on who Rhonda should end up with – Ketut (her Balinese fling) or Trent Toogood (a jock from her high school years) who has come on the scene in later ads. Stories have the ability to trigger emotions - happiness, anger, trust, empathy, and so on. When we listen to them, the experiential part of our brain comes alive. Now, thanks to the digital revolution, we need to also learn how to tell stories online if we want to gain cut- through and have our message resonate with our target market. Outlined below are a series of tips to help you to craft your business’s story.
WHAT’S YOUR STORY? Now before you go saying, “I don’t have a story to tell” – STOP. Everyone has a story! It can come from the things you do in your day-to-day life that you most probably take for granted – things like great customer service examples, amazing events you’ve attended, exciting projects you’re working on, a new staff member joining your team. Stories can be found everywhere. By drawing on real-life
51 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT examples and telling stories through characters, your audience will be drawn in and want to hear more. I guarantee you it will be your stories that gain more attention on Facebook than you banging on at people to “buy my stuff”. The stories that provide my business with the most attention are the ones where I’m out and about drinking French champagne. If you were to go and look up my personal Facebook profile now and click on my photos, you’ll see that 80% of my photos are non-business related and these are the ones people are engaging with. Everyone is a stickybeak and they love peeking into people’s personal lives, so take advantage of this, pull back your virtual curtains and let people in.
WHAT EMOTIONS DOES YOUR BRAND SELL? When people engage with your business, what emotions accompany these touchpoints? People buy brands that make them feel a particular way. What’s that feeling in your business? Do your customers feel progressive, safe, secure, confident, sexy, empowered, organised, inspired, rich, proud? The list is endless.
WHAT DOES YOUR BUSINESS VALUE? Referring back to the previous activity where you looked at creating a brand persona, what are your business values? Do you pride yourself on delivering exceptional customer service? Are you innovative and pioneering in your approach? Or do you like to have fun and involve your customers and community? You need to define what makes your business remarkable and why you are least like your competitors – that’s the story you need to tell. What value does your brand add to your audience’s lives?
52 FRIENDS with BENEFITS HOW CAN PEOPLE SHARE THE LOVE? How you share your stories on Facebook is very different to how you communicate on your website or in your brochures. You need to make your content consumable and digestible online. Sharing a long- winded case study about how you helped solve a client’s problem is not going to get shared on Facebook. Less is more. Think about how you can capture your stories in eye-catching photos, images and videos that people feel compelled to share with their community. People on Facebook won’t share your product spec sheet but they will share a two-minute video of you showing a clever little shortcut trick that makes someone’s day easier or more enjoyable.
ARE YOU LEAVING THEM GAGGING FOR MORE? Your stories need to give people a reason to come back, just like our favourite soapie on TV has us counting down the days until the next episode. Consider using teaser text like, “watch this space – all will be revealed” or, “here’s a sneak peek”. For example, you may be out wining and dining with a client at Bondi Beach in Sydney. You could take a happy snap of the two of you, pop it up on Facebook and ask your community to guess where you are, based on the surroundings.
In summary: in today’s multi-media world, stories have become an essential component of creating valuable engagement with your customers. Remember my anecdote about the circus – people come to Facebook to be entertained, and you can do this with your stories.
COMMUNICATION STRATEGY
53 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT Tied very closely to your brand story, your communication strategy looks at the entire audience and customer experience and takes your customer on a journey, helping them get to where your business would like them to arrive. So for example, if the emotion you want your target customer to feel when working with you is ‘liberated’, then it’s important to initially determine what that target market finds liberating. How can your business provide Bob and Betty with things that make them feel more free? Let me take this example one step further. One of my clients is a financial planning firm and we established that they wanted to have their customers feel liberated when working with them. We articulated this on Facebook by posting a series of images of wealthy people living out their bucket list: travelling the world, buying a beach house, driving a sports car, and so on. This is their way of showcasing a ‘liberating lifestyle’. Now had they just posted story after story about why setting up a self-managed super fund is a great way to create wealth, I know they wouldn’t have got anywhere near the same level of engagement as they receive now. By posting bucket list images, they achieve that feeling of liberation in a much more emotive way. Using the above example, think about how you can tie your brand story to your communication strategy and create a connection between your emotive words and your business.
A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSANDS WORDS
If you want people on Facebook to perceive you as a professional, then you need to look the part. This starts with the images you use to represent your business and brand. Remember, you don’t get a second chance to make a positive first impression. On both your Facebook personal profile and your business page,
54 FRIENDS with BENEFITS you have the opportunity to brand up what is called a ‘timeline cover’ – the big image that sits at the top of your homepage. I want you to think of this like your front-of-house, your reception counter, or your storefront. I can’t tell you how much I cringe when I look at how unprofessional most people’s timeline cover images are. Are you guilty of having a picture of your kids, you with your mates, you at the pub, or a picture of Bart Simpson as your timeline cover image? If you look like a work-in-progress, you’re going to be treated that way.
• • •
Spend the necessary time and money getting both your personal profile and your business page timeline cover images professionally designed. You can find examples of professional cover images as part of my Facebook Business Boot Camp e-learning program: www.kyliebartlett.com/shop. My advice is to invest in getting a series of professional photos taken of you and your team which can also be used on Facebook. Warning: please do not go so overboard on the photo-shopping and air-brushing that you start to look like Michael Jackson! If you look vastly different on Facebook than you do ‘in real life’, people will start to wonder what else you’re covering up. You can take ‘pimping out your profiles’ to another level by also integrating things like a shopping cart, downloadable digital products, and subscription forms for your business page (these are known as tabs). We will go into this in more detail in later chapters, but again, for a more in-depth look into how to do this, check out my e-learning program.
APPOINTING YOUR PIMP (BUSINESS BRAND AMBASSADOR)
55 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT It’s a common debate in many businesses. “Just who should be responsible for managing my business’s Facebook profiles? Sales? Marketing? Customer Service? IT?” I believe the answer is “all of the above.” In most businesses I’ve worked with, Facebook is managed by marketing or IT, but there is a huge list of social advantages to be gained from involving Customer Service, Sales, Human Resources and even Finance. I bet your sales team would love to know if their prospects and customers were asking questions about your business on Facebook. And we know customers are forever flocking to Facebook to complain or seek help with products and services. In fact, according to a study from Booz and Company, 75% of marketers using social media identify customer service as a primary use of their social media platform. That being said, only 26% of respondents in the same study describe customer service as the department responsible for contributing leadership to social media strategies. With Facebook, ‘too many pimps and not enough pros’ doesn’t need to apply. Pretty much any department within your business can contribute to your Facebook plan. The key is to get properly organised so it doesn’t end up becoming a big ‘meat market’ with too many pimps out there, all flogging the same message. I’ll be outlining in future chapters exactly how to do that by creating a content/editorial calendar framework. Next up, we’ll look at a number of ways you can get all the departments within your business involved playing an active role on Facebook - and profit from the experience.
IDENTIFYING YOUR CHAMPIONS
Just because you shouldn’t limit Facebook contribution to only one department, that doesn’t mean you should have a million fingers in your accounts. You have to get organised and be selective, and part
56 FRIENDS with BENEFITS of this involves designating a few key ‘Champions’. Ideally, you’d have one or a select few people (depending on the size of your organisation) from each department who are responsible for helping to manage your Facebook presence. You should also assign and appoint a ‘Brand Ambassador’ (Head Pimp) to manage your business’s overall presence on Facebook. Because marketing through Facebook requires a lot of content creation, sharing and frequent updating of your profiles and pages, you’ll probably want the Brand Ambassador to be from your marketing department. The Brand Ambassador should oversee the day-today operation of your Facebook accounts, as well as implementing and carrying out any Facebook marketing promotions. Essentially, the Brand Ambassador’s role is to become the ‘gatekeeper’, fielding any queries that pop up in Facebook and outsourcing them to the designated department Champions.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
For Facebook collaboration to work smoothly, you’ll also need to implement the right tools, otherwise the ’too many pimps …’ adage will start to apply. There are plenty of tools available that enable you to manage Facebook collaboration among multiple Champions. When you’re evaluating Facebook management tools, you’ll want to look for ones that give you the ability to do the following:
Schedule updates for the future Set up filters to monitor your business and keywords Monitor multiple social networks (although this book only covers Facebook) Support multiple Champions Assign specific Facebook updates to your champions for follow-up
57 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT
I recommend you go and check out www.sproutsocial.com as a way to manage your Facebook accounts and social media in general. There are zillions of social media management tools on the market but from my research, none have the level of functionality as Sprout Social. This tool is not cheap (it’ll cost you approximately $100 per month) but you’ll make this back, and then some, in terms of your effectiveness and efficiency. Another tool you might want to look into is www.zendesk.com. Zendesk treats Facebook posts and Twitter tweets as support tickets and enables your customer service team to reply to tweets and posts without needing to log into those two social networks individually. This next one (www.zopim.com) is a little off topic, but I thought it was worth mentioning as another effective sales and service tool. Zopim allows you to have real conversations with visitors to your website, in the form of a pop up live chat function. Ok, let’s get back on track and look at each of your social media champions and the Facebook management roles they should play.
MARKETING INVOLVEMENT
As I mentioned, your marketing department is likely to have the most proactive Facebook involvement, as its main uses for Facebook are promoting and marketing content and offers, and engaging with friends, fans and followers. It should also be Marketing’s role to work with other department Champions to ensure everyone has the opportunity to share the messages and updates that are important to those teams. For example, the customer service team might want to share news of an upcoming event or announce the launch of a new customer-only
58 FRIENDS with BENEFITS loyalty program that customers can sign up to. This type of news should be given to marketing to schedule into the Facebook plan.
CUSTOMER SERVICE INVOLVEMENT
According to eMarketer, 46% of customers want to solve a problem when they’re engaging with a brand on social media, and 39% are looking to give feedback about a product or service. So it makes total sense for Customer Service to have significant involvement in your business’s Facebook plan. That being said, using Facebook for customer service communication isn’t without its challenges. We’ve all heard horror stories about cyber trolls who have nothing better to do with their time than to leave nasty comments on businesses’ Facebook pages. This shouldn’t deter your Customer Service team from getting involved though. After all, who is better trained and capable of handling a disgruntled customer or answering a nitty gritty product question than they are! I know many of my clients have been reluctant to jump into Facebook because of their fear that someone will say something negative about their business and the world will be able to read about it on their Facebook page. Here’s the reality: people who are angry and dissatisfied with your business aren’t going to keep that anger to themselves just because you’re not on Facebook. In fact, the opposite happens; when they know you’re not on Facebook to defend yourself, they tend to embellish the story even more to their online community because you’re not there to set the record straight. If, within your business, Customer Service is responsible for managing clients and answering customer queries via email and phone, then it also makes sense that they manage these same functions on Facebook. I want you to think of Facebook as being like a new customer touchpoint within your business. Your Facebook
59 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT approach should form part of your business’s overall customer service plan; it shouldn’t sit in isolation.
SALES INVOLVEMENT
Your Sales team is talking with potential customers all the time, and Facebook can be a very valuable tool to help them make their sales process more effective. Your Sales team should be proactively using Facebook to prospect as well as to prepare for sales calls, conduct follow ups, and nurture their assigned leads. If Facebook is new to your Sales team, train them (give them a copy of this book!). Teach them how to locate leads in Facebook, and how to conduct research in preparation for sales calls. Does the lead have a Facebook profile or page? What can you learn about them from what they’re posting on Facebook? Once the sales rep has identified a lead, have them scan the potential customer’s information and updates on Facebook. Encourage your Sales staff to learn about the lead’s interests and pain points, and strategise about how they can leverage these insights on their sales calls. After they’ve been in touch, Sales can even use Facebook as another way to keep in contact with their prospects by sending them links to helpful content and looking for opportunities to answer their questions. In this way, your business will stay at the front of your new customer’s mind.
HUMAN RESOURCE’S INVOLVEMENT
I hear it time and time again from my clients: “It’s getting tougher than
60 FRIENDS with BENEFITS ever to find top talent to employ that are loyal and want to hang around for more than five minutes!” Back in my day (I can’t believe I just said that – I must be getting old), being happy at work was a bonus. Just being employed within a stable and secure business and earning an average income was the top priority. For job seekers today, the environment they work in and the people they get to work with have become just as important as the role they’re given and the pay packet they receive. Job seekers are now able to do their homework on a potential employer via Facebook to gain an insight into the business’s culture before even agreeing to an interview. And the same goes for employers researching potential employees. I know for a fact that when little Johnny applies for a job at McDonald’s, the first thing the store manager does is look up Johnny’s Facebook profile to see what he gets up to on the weekends. So if you’re looking to attract top-quality employees, why not involve HR in coming up with clever ways of showcasing your businesses culture to the outside world via your Facebook page? I bet you celebrate a lot of things internally like winning business awards, donating products and services to a local fundraising cause, promoting a member of the team, and so on. These are all events that could be shared on Facebook to show off your business culture not just to potential customers, but also to potential employees. Once you have an established brand and reputation on Facebook, you could even go as far as to post a vacant position within your business on Facebook. HR should also be involved in writing your business’s social media policies and guidelines (which we covered in detail in Chapter 3). There certainly needs to be rules set and guidelines in place around what your staff can and cannot say on your business’s Facebook page.
61 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT IT’S INVOLVEMENT
Poor old IT often get overlooked when it comes to contributing to a business’s Facebook strategy (most of the time by their own choice!). However, it is possible to get this department on board. I once worked with a website development business and we came up with a great way of involving IT in their Facebook plan. Every time the coders came up with some kind of website functionality improvement or enhancement, we’d share that on their Facebook page. Their fans and followers on Facebook (many of them being current customers) loved it, as it gave them great peace of mind that the business they were working with or taking advice from was innovative, progressive and on the cutting edge. There’s something less ‘salesey’ about a geek being excited about an enhanced website function vs. someone in business development talking about the same thing, where the perception is that they just want to ‘sell more stuff.’
FINANCE’S INVOLVEMENT
Now you’re probably thinking I’m really pushing the envelope by suggesting Finance become involved in your business’s Facebook strategy. Before you dismiss the idea, however, allow me to share a real story of one of my clients who got Finance on board and the staggering outcomes they achieved as a result:
I was working with a transport and logistics company and we decided Finance should play a role in the business’s Facebook presence. Here’s what they did. Every time one of their customers paid their invoice early or on time, someone from Finance would post a private message on that customer’s Facebook page, thanking them. With customers they had a
62 FRIENDS with BENEFITS great relationship with, they’d even include an image of a virtual box of chocolates or a virtual bunch of flowers with the note as a sign of their appreciation. Within six months, we were able to reduce their outstanding debtors by 20% due to this very simple, yet powerful Facebook strategy. The customer no longer viewed the transport and logistics business as ‘creditor account number 12345’, but instead as a valuable supplier who deserved to be paid on time.
I trust the above examples have provided you with some great ideas around how you can involve all the departments within your business in contributing to your Facebook strategy.
PIMPING YOURSELF OUT: A RECAP
See, pimping out your profiles wasn’t too painful was it? Let’s recap on what’s been covered in this chapter. In this chapter, you’ve learned about:
Step 3: Presentation and pimping out your profiles The importance of creating a business persona What my business persona would be if I was wanting to seduce Matt What a brand story is How to create a communication strategy Why you need to get professional photos taken in order to truly pimp yourself out Appointing a pimp (Brand Ambassador) How to identify your businesses brand Champions The tricks of the trade How to involve all your teams in your Facebook strategy
63 PRESENTATION: PIMPING YOURSELF OUT ACTION STEPS
Hopefully you will have already completed the action steps I outlined in the previous chapter. If you have, you should now add your responses to the questions below into the same planning document. Here’s a summary of what you need to complete before moving onto the following chapter and Step:
Answer each ‘business persona’ question. Brainstorm what your brand story might consist of. Brainstorm ways in which you can tie your brand story to your communication strategy and create an emotional connection between the two for your customers. If you haven’t already, go and look at getting professional photos taken of yourself, your team and your business. Discuss with your executive team who should ultimately be responsible for managing your Facebook page. This person would become your businesses Brand Ambassador. Identify who your Champions are within your business and who could assist the Brand Ambassador and contribute content. Go and check out www.sproutsocial.com (social media management tool), www.zendesk.com (customer service tool) and www.zopim.com (instant website chat tool). Use the examples provided in this chapter to work out how to best involve all your businesses team in your Facebook strategy.
64 FRIENDS with BENEFITS NOTES
65 Chapter 5 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
- WINSTON CHURCHILL
It’s time to stop being stingy with your knowledge. Don’t just share your prized expertise with those that are prepared to pay a premium for it; yesterday’s premium is today’s ‘freemium’ after all! Thanks to the internet and social media, people have the ability to research the products and services you sell so thoroughly that they could quite possibly end up knowing more about them than you do. Geez, even KFC’s secret herbs and spices are no longer a secret. So if your ‘unique value proposition’ (your secret sauce) is no longer unique or valuable, how do you establish a point of difference and compete in the marketplace? By making your expertise readily available and accessible, in a variety of forms (blogs, videos, images, podcasts), across the Internet and in this case on Facebook. Before social media, we built loyalty with our customers by building personal relationships with them (inviting them to attend the football in a corporate box, showering them with gifts, sending them a card on their birthday). Now we must build loyalty with information and content.
66 FRIENDS with BENEFITS THE ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH
In March 2011, Google wrote an e-book called Winning the Zero Moment of Truth which proposed that the ability to persuade was moving from promotion to information. Let me explain the philosophy behind the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Firstly, let’s look at the plain old ‘moment of truth’. This is when a potential customer decides to either purchase your product or service, or seek out other alternatives – for instance, when McDonald’s asks you if you’d like fries with your meal and you make a decision, ‘yes’ or ‘no’. A ZMOT is when the purchase is being researched before the potential customer even enters the sales funnel. It’s investigating whether McDonalds uses canola oil or vegetable oil to cook its fries in, or asking your friends on Facebook if McDonalds’ McValue Meal is actually better value than the Hungry Jack’s equivalent. I did this exact behaviour last week when I decided to buy a new lounge suite. I Googled furniture stores in my local area and when I couldn’t find one that stocked my style, I jumped on Facebook and asked my friends where I should shop. If your business is not trying to win the ZMOT, you’re losing customers you didn’t even know you had the potential of getting. In its research, Google found that 84% of shoppers said ZMOT shaped their buying decisions. I found Google’s ZMOT study absolutely fascinating, but what stuck in my mind the most was that on average, shoppers needed 10.4 sources of information (content) before making a buying decision. The reason why customers look for more information before making a buying decision, is that there is more content readily available than ever before. Did you know that one edition of today’s Herald Sun newspaper contains more information in it than someone in the 16th century would come across in their entire lifetime? We now all literally have the entire world’s knowledge in our back pocket (called a smart phone), so why wouldn’t we research before we buy?
67 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE • • •
Before we move onto how to actually create and curate remarkable content that will help potential customers make the decision to buy from your business, I want to share a true story with you (that I learned about via Jay Baer’s latest book, Youtility).
There’s a taxi driver in Banff Canada called Mike. Now, Mike used to just be your run-of-the-mill taxi driver, picking people up and dropping them off at all sorts of locations around Banff. Mike found himself constantly being asked for information by his passengers: where was the best place to dine, where was the closest information centre, or who brewed the best coffee in town. Mike’s passengers also loved sharing what they liked and disliked about their time in Banff with him (most were tourists). So Mike decided to do something different to any other taxi driver in Banff – he created a flyer and website called Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide: Where to Eat in Banff. Taxi Mike updates his flyer four times a year with the latest recommendations of what to do in Banff. He’s referred to as a one-man Trip Advisor, but he’s not a social network; he’s just a regular guy who understands the value of giving. And he puts the flyer together for next to nix – he inserts a couple of ads in each edition to cover his costs. The ‘Where to Eat Guide’ is such a hit that Taxi Mike even has groupies and signs autographs for his passengers. All this giving has been good for Mike too. At the end of a night out in Banff when you’ve gone to half a dozen of the places Mike has recommended, are you going to walk out on the corner just raise your hand to hail a cab? No. You’re going to reach into your pocket, pull out Mike’s flyer and call him instead. And what do you think passengers will be saying on Facebook? “Be sure to look up Taxi Mike when you’re next in Banff!” This is a great example of sharing valuable
68 FRIENDS with BENEFITS content and reaping the rewards.
I can’t reiterate enough that the more you give of your knowledge, of your experience, and of yourself, the more people will be attracted to you, your brand and your business. Remember though, you have to commit to more than superficial giving. You need to provide truly valuable content that is going to take away people’s pain and/or provide them with more pleasure. Sharing a picture of you and your cute cat on Facebook might strike up superficial conversations but it’s not considered giving. Sure, people love seeing that kind of stuff, but after awhile, if that’s all you post, people will move onto hanging out with someone else that has a tad more substance in their interactions. So, let’s jump into what quality content looks like and how you can easily create it for yourself.
CREATING QUALITY CONTENT
As previously stated, we love to hop on Facebook to discover new ideas and to solve our problems. Quality, free content, designed to provide your community with exactly what they’re searching for, is highly desirable to people. Regardless of what format your content takes, it must always be relevant, educational, easy to read, visually appealing and evoke conversation – and have no tacky, over-the-top marketing message in it. In fact, I’m going to make a bold statement (which will probably see me receive a heap of notso-friendly comments on my Facebook page): salespeople ruin everything!
• • •
Are you old enough to remember when email was first invented? I remember it vividly; it was 1993. I was so excited that I no longer had to hand write letters, and better still, that it didn’t cost anything to
69 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE send an email (except for the dial-up internet used to send it). Even better, it was instant. I remember sending as many emails as I could, thinking that eventually there would be a catch and we’d end up having to pay for this amazing new piece of technology. I couldn’t wait to turn my computer on each day to see if I’d received any new emails. Hey, they even named a movie after it: You’ve Got Mail. Let’s fast-forward to today. How many of you still get excited about sifting through the hundreds of emails you receive each week? I bet none of you do! What’s changed from 1993 until now? I tell you what’s changed: salespeople spamming our inbox! I was super excited when I discovered Facebook – it meant I could hang out with my friends in peace and not have to deal with my news feed being clogged with the same spam as I receive in my email inbox. But I was wrong: the same salespeople who I ran away from in my inbox have now started littering my Facebook page … arrrgghhhh! Gary Vaynerchuk, (one of my social media idols) paraphrased these Sales jerks beautifully when he referred to them as testosterone-fuelled, 18 year old dudes, going up to a girl in a bar, buying her a drink and then expecting her to sleep with him that night. You need to ease off on the hard sell and instead build trust and rapport with your content. Trust me, when you make publishing quality content the core of your Facebook efforts, you’ll stand head and shoulders above your competitors. Not only will you develop a Facebook boudoir, you’ll also attract a raving fan base that will help you grow your business. Quality content has the power to influence opinions, change lives and compel people to take action.
YOU NEED TO START ACTING MORE LIKE A NEW MEDIA BUSINESS
70 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Do you watch the nightly news? If you do, you’ll notice a few things: it airs every night at the same time, with a consistent, set format; it has an anchor or presenter who crosses to specialists throughout the show, and for 30 minutes, this is what we watch:
Breaking stories Local stories National stories International stories Finance stories Sport stories Weather stories
They’re able to monetize the show by selling ad space to businesses and brands based on the number and type of ‘eyeballs’ (target market demographic) who watch the show each night. The more eyeballs, the more expensive the ads become. We certainly wouldn’t tune in each night if all the news contained was a series of ads, asking us to buy their stuff. All traditional media companies use this format (with different types of stories), from radio, to print, to digital.
• • •
You need to start thinking of your business (irrespective of your industry) in the same light as a media business. Another one of my favourite social media gurus is Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer at Marketing Profs). She’s recently coauthored a great book on this very subject called Content Rules. In her book she defines a media company as “any business that publishes useful material to attract and build a certain audience”. In the new economy, there is no longer a gatekeeper deciding whether your story and content is newsworthy or not. The media no longer controls the message! Or to put it another way – you are the media. Thanks to Facebook and social media in general, for the first time ever, advertisers and marketers have to get used to the idea that, that they no longer own the medium. Today, your right to be
71 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE heard is decided collectively by your audience and community. There has never been a better time to start sharing your thought leadership with the world! The ultimate objectives for creating remarkable content are to convert readers/viewers into buyers, and customers into raving evangelists who share your content with their community. If you produce quality, eye-catching content (not just something you’ve quickly slapped together for the sake of it), you will position your business as not just ‘sellers of stuff’, but as the go-to-gurus for valuable and reliable information. Honestly, content is the gift that keeps on giving, as it has no expiry date. What you create and upload online will leave a digital footprint indefinitely (unlike a traditional ad). Once you’ve created awesome content, you can then leverage it as the foundation for creating meaningful conversations with your target market and existing customer evangelists. From here on in, I want you to treat your content as an extension of your brand. Write and design your content so that it inspires people to want, need and love you more. Compelling content should become the heartbeat of your brand on Facebook. Unlike the TV show analogy I outlined earlier (i.e. a monologue ‘sit and watch’ conversation), becoming a new media business allows your viewers to get involved in active, open dialogue - to comment, share and engage. Content drives conversation. Conversation engages your customers and communities. And engagement is how your business will survive and thrive in the new economy. Ok, hopefully I’ve painted a compelling enough picture to persuade you that quality content is the most effective way of showcasing your expertise and thought leadership – and as a result, growing your business. Let’s now take a closer a look at the five types of content you could produce (or reproduce) as part of your Facebook publishing plan. The five types of content are:
72 FRIENDS with BENEFITS Blogs and FAQs/SAQs Videos Images/photos/infographics Podcasts Repurposed content created by others
BLOGS As previously outlined in Chapter 3, a blog is like an online article that, once published, can be found by anyone in the world. Without going too off topic, I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that your blog is not published directly into Facebook. It’s published either on your website or on your blog-site. I feel you scratching your head and asking “what the?” Stay with me, it’ll all start to make more sense as you read on! Some websites are built for, and have a tab dedicated to, blog posts, while others are built for the sole purpose of publishing blogs – they have none of the traditional website tabs such as ‘about us’, ‘shop’, and ‘contact us’, integrated into them. My advice is not to have a separate blog, but to have it integrated into your main website so people don’t have to flick between two sites to gain an overall understanding of what you do. Treat your website like your home; it’s where you live and it houses all your collateral. Treat Facebook like a communal ‘virtual’ office space that you rent (from Mark Zuckerberg!). I’m not going to go into detail about how to write a blog; you can find out all this out by reading my blog How to Write a Blog for Business. I will, however, cover how often you should write a blog and how to share this on Facebook in the next section, when we go through how to create a content/ editorial calendar framework.
FAQS AND SAQS
73 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE I’m amazed at how many websites don’t have a tab for FAQs (frequently asked questions) and SAQs (should have asked questions). FAQs are a clever way of showcasing your unique value propositions, without looking like you’re overtly bragging about your business. Again, like a blog tab, it should form part of your main website navigation structure. It functions a bit like an online customer service centre for you, cutting down on repetitive inquiries by anticipating the questions your prospects might have. SAQs are answers to questions you wish your prospects asked you, giving you the opportunity to show off even more about how amazing you are! Make sure your web developer/supplier has installed some kind of analytics into your website (like Google analytics) so you can see how many hits (web visitors) you’re getting to your FAQs/SAQs page and how long they’re hanging around for (yes, you can track this!). This will give you an insight into how valuable the page is. Done right, the FAQs/SAQs page helps to build trust, educate your prospects and further deepen your relationships with your community. Under the next section, ‘Videos’, I’m going to share with you a little ninja tactic that I use for taking FAQs/SAQs to the next level.
VIDEOS Again, I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of how to produce videos (that’s not what this book is about). What I will say though is that you MUST produce videos for two reasons:
1. The majority of the population (including your competitors) are too chicken to make videos. Taking the plunge into video gives you massive cut-through and could be your differentiator in a ‘same-same’ competitive marketplace.
2. Google loves video! Google has adopted a blended search approach, which means that in their search results, they not
74 FRIENDS with BENEFITS only display standard web pages but also videos, images, maps and tweets from Twitter. According to a Forrester Research report, if you produce videos as part of your publishing strategy, they are 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google than your standard text-based content. According to a study conducted by the Online Publishing Association, 52% of people take some form of action (checking out a website, searching for more information, going into a store or making a purchase) as a result of watching a video that has a call-to-action in it.
Ok, so here’s my ninja tactic I promised to share with you! Imagine if you took your FAQs/SAQs and turned them all into two-minute videos, instead of written text. How much more engaging do you think they’d be? This is a great way of really positioning yourself as a leader in your industry. My recommendation is to get a 10 second jingle (with some creative imagery) made, that you can then attach to the start and end of the video. It will function as an intro and a sign- off, with a call-to-action in it such as “if you liked this video and you want to learn more, visit us at www.yourwebaddress.com.” I taught this exact technique at one of my Facebook Business Boot(y) Camp workshops recently and one of the attendees (Sarah Logan Hunstead from CPR for KiDS) implemented it immediately. She was blown away by the results. Her Facebook ’likes’ went through the roof and her engagement almost quadrupled. You can check out Sarah’s videos by visiting her Facebook page: www.facebook.com/CPRKiDS. If you want to take your video content to the next level, you could also launch your own web TV show, just like I have with The Web Celeb TV. You can check out this approach and get some inspiration at my website: www.kyliebartlett.com and on my YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/thewebcelebtv. There is nothing standing in the way of you doing this! 20 years ago, the only way you could get video footage of you and your business in front of thousands of people was either via a paid ad, or
75 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE an interview on the traditional TV networks. I appeared on the Channel 10 Morning Show for 15 minutes back in 2008. Had I had to pay for that TV slot, it would have cost me in excess of $100,000. And to play a 30-second ad at the American Super Bowl would set you back $4 million dollars! When YouTube burst onto the scene in February of 2005, the game changed forever. Anyone can now get video out to a virtually unlimited audience, for free. You’ve only got to look at what happened when Psy produced his video clip for Gangnam Style and launched it on YouTube; it has now been viewed by over 1.8 billion people globally – a world record. And anyway, it would be very unappreciative of us not to exploit YouTube, given Google paid $1.65 billion for it in 2006 and they still allow us to use it for nothing! So if you’re sold on the idea of getting some footage out there and want to learn how to shoot really cool videos for next to nix, then I recommend checking out Jules Watkins’ www.ivideohero.com online course. For $97 you’ll learn how to shoot great quality videos, using nothing more than your smartphone.
PHOTOS/IMAGES/INFOGRAPHICS I’m sure that just like mine, your Facebook news feed is full of photos, memes, inspirational quotes and new-on-the-scene infographics. Have you noticed how many ‘likes’, comments and shares, photos get? People are attracted to bright shiny objects; they also love being stickybeaks, hoping to grab a glimpse into your personal life. I can’t believe how many people notice the incidental things in the background of my photos (like a book on my bookshelf or a jacket hanging over a chair). So knowing how much people love photos, you really do need to consider incorporating them into your Facebook publishing plan. Photos humanise your brand and business. You should start capturing moments in and around your business ‘in real time’. Take photos of a brainstorming meeting, Friday night drinks or even a new
76 FRIENDS with BENEFITS product range. Pull back the curtain and show the world a behind- the-scenes perspective of your business. Some people freak out at the sheer thought of showing a less-than-professional side to their business. I worked with a web design company for five minutes (well it was 12 months, but I wish it was five minutes!), and they just about went into conniptions every time I went to upload a photo of the team goofing around onto our Facebook page, that hadn’t been analysed within an inch of its life by management first (suffice to say, I’m not in business with them anymore!). In the new economy, spin, control and contrived perceptions don’t work. People don’t want to do business with your logo; people want to do business with people. Now I don’t recommend just publishing casual (non business related) photos all the time – let’s get strategic here. One of my clients, Jen Dugard from www.bodybeyondbaby.com does this incredibly well. Jen runs style bootcamps for groups of mums who want to get back into shape after having kids. Jen takes photos of herself and her mums exercising and then inserts inspirational messages over the photos, along with her website address. She then posts these photos to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. You can check out Jen’s photos by going to www.facebook.com/bodybeyondbaby. Another one of my clients, Anneka Manning from www.bakeclub.com.au is also really great at using photos on Facebook. Anneka takes pictures of delicious looking freshly baked products and overlays baking tips onto the photos. You can check out Anneka’s images by going to: www.facebook.com/bakeclub.australia.
INFOGRAPHICS One of the big trends appearing across the web at the moment is infographics. An infographic is a clever way of taking boring statistics, data, insights or results and turning them into a visually
77 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE engaging masterpiece. As we know, most busy people these days have the attention span of an (including myself), so creating an infographic around your products and services can be a great way of grabbing your target market’s attention. Here’s a link to a great infographic on how to create contagious content: http://bit.ly/1g22XcZ.
Here’s a bonus tip: if you want to create your own creative infographics (without forking out a fortune for a graphic designer), here’s a website that allows you to create them for yourself – and it’s designed for non-designers: http://piktochart.com.
Once you have a series of infographics created, you can then drip- feed them regularly onto your Facebook page (and other social media networks you have a presence on).
PODCASTS The technical definition for a podcast is an audio program delivered over the internet to subscribers, designed to be played back on computers or portable devices like a smartphone or iPod. You can even create an account with Apple and upload your podcasts to their store, so people can search for and subscribe to them. Although video is probably a bit sexier than audio (because of the visual appeal), I still believe podcasting, if done strategically, can be just as beneficial as video when it comes to producing valuable content. Here’s why:
It doesn’t take as much effort (you don’t have to worry about setting up lighting and backdrops and getting all dressed up like you have to for video); therefore you’re more inclined to stick with it.
78 FRIENDS with BENEFITS People can consume your content more easily than a video. For example, they could listen to your podcast while driving, walking on the treadmill, catching a plane, or sitting on a bus or train.
Audio is much cheaper than video to produce.
Essentially, you could quite easily establish your own radio show, just like my close friend and much-respected colleague Tim Reid has. Tim Reid (also known as Timbo) is the host of Australia’s number 1 marketing podcast, the Small Business Big Marketing Show. Timbo has been interviewing savvy marketers and sharing their insights with his fans globally for over four years now. You can check Timbo’s show out at www.smallbusinessbigmarketing.com or by subscribing to the podcast via the iTunes store. Don’t panic if you don’t think you have a good enough voice for radio (that’s what most podcasters think when they first start out). It’s like anything – the more you practice, the better you’ll get. You can always dress it up by adding an intro, an outro and some good background music. Before you know it, you’ll be podcasting like a pro! If you’re still not convinced, go and check out my great friend Ludwina Dautovic’s online course called Podcast Like a Pro: www.howtopodcastlikeapro.com.
REPURPOSING OTHER PEOPLE’S CONTENT Now this is going to sound very counterintuitive, but go with me on this. The content you share with your Facebook friends and community doesn’t always have to be your own. In fact, I’m going to encourage you to share content that you didn’t create at least once a week. Think of it like this: the nightly news would be very boring to watch if the anchor was the only one covering all the stories, presenting on everything from weather, to finance, to sport. It actually waters down your position in the marketplace if you are a Jack of all
79 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE trades and a master of none. Plus, by sharing other industry leaders’ content, you can potentially pick up additional friends and followers that belong to that content owner’s community. How? Because what you’ll do before you share their content is make a valuable and professional comment, either on their blog, on their YouTube channel, or on their Facebook status update, outlining why you support and agree with their perspective. By doing this, their friends, followers and subscribers will see your comments and hopefully click on your name to check you out. If they like what they see when they land on your Facebook page, they’ll most probably start following your content too. What sharing other people’s content does is expand your business reach. Instead of trying to organically attract new Facebook friends and followers one by one via your content, hanging out with other industry influencers and competitors on Facebook and commenting on their content provides you with direct access to their (hopefully large) community (which is also your target market). Think of it as being like when you’re invited to be a guest speaker at a networking event where you know the attendees are your target market. Hopefully, after hearing your speech and presentation, they’ll choose to join your networking group too, as it complements what they’re interested in. I’m sure you’ll agree I’ve provided you with a heap of content creation options for you to explore. Now it’s time to map out how we are going share it with your Facebook friends and the wider Facebook community.
CREATING A CONTENT AND EDITORIAL CALENDAR Here comes the fun part: mapping out how you’re going to share your content with the world. At the moment you may feel like you can’t see the forest for the trees, with so many ideas and options for creating and sharing content swirling around in your head. That’s normal and natural at this stage; this next section is designed to put
80 FRIENDS with BENEFITS some structure and routine into your publishing plan. I’m going to teach you how to create a publishing schedule, known as a content and editorial calendar. This calendar is critical as it will give your content consistency and make it so much easier for you to manage in amongst everything else you need to do in your business day-to-day. We’re going to use a very similar formula to the example I outlined when I was explaining the ‘nightly news’ (traditional media) format. Here’s the format in a high-level form, (to give you a bird’seye view) which we will then dive deeper into in the following paragraphs:
What is the core question you constantly want to answer for your viewers (your target market)? For example, mine is: how can I make learning and implementing social media as easy and effective as possible for time-poor small-to-medium-sized businesses?
What is going to be the theme/style of your content calendar (based on your business persona and communication strategy)? For example, mine is: short, punchy, often provocative social media advice on how to become ‘Celebs on the Web’, for small businesses.
What five things do you want to be famous for and that you also know people are searching for (from conducting your keyword research)? This is where you need to come up with the top five topics/ categories you want to dominate and own. These will be topics you can talk about regularly as the expert in your niche and industry. For example, mine are: Facebook for business, social media strategy, digital leadership and entrepreneurship, ‘brand you 2.0’ (how to build a personal brand on the social web), and small business tech tips.
Who are the top five players (some could be your competitors), in your niche and industry, who are currently
81 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE influencing the actions and buying decisions of your target market? For example, mine are: business associations and their conventions/ conferences, Chamber of Commerce and Victoria Employers’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry, online publications such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Women in Focus, Business Review Weekly, Start Up Smart, Smart Company and Anthill, small business thought leaders such as Tim Reid and Andrew Griffiths, Facebook and social media specialists such as Social Media Examiner and Blue Wire Media, entrepreneurship education such as Key Person of Influence and The Entourage (as you can see you don’t have to limit yourself to five!).
Who are your five best customers (or suppliers if you don’t have enough great customers)? For example, mine are: attendees of my workshops who have implemented their learnings and are now achieving improved results, clients who have executed a social media strategy with me, a client who has launched into Facebook for the first time, and my web designer who has built one of my clients a new website.
What are five products and/or services you’d love to promote for the week? For example, mine are: promote a Facebook workshop I’m running next month, subscribe to my Web Celeb TV show, buy my Friends with Benefits book, buy my Facebook Business Boot(y) Camp online learning program, and book in for an hour-long one-on-one consultation with me.
What kinds of content (ideally across different mediums like visual, audio and written, to make it interesting) do you want to repurpose, create and publish to drip-feed daily onto Facebook? For example, mine is: weekly quote photos/infographics, weekly vlog, which is a blog that contains a video (The Web Celeb TV), an article or blog that one of
82 FRIENDS with BENEFITS my top five influencers has written/recorded, and a client of the week (including a brief case study on how I’ve helped them).
Ok, now let’s take your responses to the above format questions and paste them into a 25-day content calendar for Facebook. You can give yourself a break from creating content over the weekend, unless of course that’s when your target market are mostly on Facebook.
FACEBOOK MONTHLY CONTENT CALENDAR
Every Monday share your weekly blog/vlog or FAQ/ SAQ video or podcast (which will have been written/ recorded on one of the five topics you want to be famous for) on your Facebook page. Every Tuesday give one of your products and/or services a plug on your Facebook page. Every Wednesday write a comment on one of your influencers’ or competitors’ blogs or articles, and then share that same blog on your Facebook page. Every Thursday do a shout-out or showcase one of your customers and/or suppliers (write a brief status update about them) on your Facebook page. Every Friday share a quote you’ve written or an infographic
83 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE you’ve designed on your Facebook page (as a lead-in to the weekend).
How easy was that? You now have every working day covered, each month! Hmm I know, you’re thinking: “Easier said than done”, right? I know what it’s like as a small business owner – you’re trying to keep on top of all the day-to-day tasks within your business, and now I’m throwing another time-consuming task at you. But you don’t have to do it alone; this is where your Brand Ambassador and department Champions can help. You could delegate blogging to one Champion, customer shout-outs to another, and so on. If you’re a one-(wo)man-band, then you’re going to have to learn how to eat the elephant – that is, break down the tasks into bite size pieces so it’s easier to digest. As a solo-preneur myself, I tend to put aside a couple of days per month to write all my blogs, shoot my videos, and create my infographics/inspirational photos so I have content a month ahead, already in stock. This then just leaves me with repurposing influencers’ content and customer shout-outs to do in real time. Can you now see the similarities between traditional media (TV, radio, print) and what you’re creating as your own media business? You’re mixing up your content to keep it dynamic and interesting for your community. In an ideal world, you should be working on next month’s content two to three weeks before it’s due to go live on your Facebook page so you’re not rushing, you’re staying strategic and you’re producing your best work.
HOW TO FIND FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS
Now if you remember, I did include a disclaimer in Chapter 2 about teaching you unconventional tactics like using your personal profile, in
84 FRIENDS with BENEFITS conjunction with a business page, to grow you business. This next section explains this unconventional approach in more detail. If you’re already on Facebook, you’ve probably already noticed that when you post something random and personal (like a photo of you at the park with your dog and kids), you get far more engagement and interaction (comments, ‘likes’ and shares) than you do when you post something business-related on your Facebook business page. The reason this happens is because we’re far more interested in people’s real lives than we are in their business lives. Remember the circus example I shared with you; we need to ensure we make Facebook fun.
• • •
I’m going to make the assumption that you want to use Facebook to grow your business and you’re less emotionally attached to using it as a recreational, personal tool. Before you go and implement everything I’ve outlined in this chapter, I do recommend you first go and spring-clean your personal profile (if you have one) before opening it up for the world to see. Your spring-cleaning may involve:
Deleting certain family and personal photos Hiding your personal contact details (home address and phone number) Deleting family and friends who you know are going to embarrass you with what they post on your personal timelineSetting up a secret group on Facebook where you can still hang out with your family and friends, knowing that what you share (photos, videos, posts) won’t be shared with anyone outside that group
If what I’ve just written sounds like gobbledygook, then I highly recommend you invest in purchasing my Friends with Benefits Business Boot Camp e-learning program, where I step you through
85 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE how to clean up your personal profile before incorporating it into your business plan. Once you’ve cleaned up your personal page and you’ve updated your profile image and cover image (as outlined in Chapter 5), you’re now ready to start ‘flirting and converting!’ If you remember back to Chapter 4 where I explained Facebook’s graph search functionality, this is the time that this tool becomes very handy. You can quite literally type in the sort of people you’d like to date (your Bobs and Bettys) and Facebook will provide you with a list of names of people who meet these search criteria. You now have the opportunity to send them a personal friend request (to become friends with you). This is one of the huge benefits of using your personal profile as part of your Facebook strategy – you can send friend requests to your target market and interact with them on a personal level. Before I reveal the best way to actually send a ‘friend request’, let me share with you a great success story of one of my friends on Facebook who has grown his business by using his personal profile. Please allow me to introduce you to Avak Bedikian. Avak owns a jewellery store called Madison Jewellery in Melbourne, Australia. Avak and I have been friends on Facebook since 2007. Although I’ve only met him ‘in real life’ on a couple of occasions, I still feel like I know him well from all the wonderful and interesting posts he shares on Facebook. Avak has a beautiful wife and two gorgeous kids, who he loves dearly. His youngest son Nicholas has autism. Avak has made it his life’s purpose to share the beautiful gifts an autistic child brings to a family and the world. He doesn’t view autism as a disability, but rather as a special and rare gift. Avak has set up a charity foundation and Facebook group called Loving Autism, and through this he has become a leader, a role model and an inspiration to all those that are friends with him on Facebook, from all around the world. We love reading Avak’s posts each day. Sometimes they’re about Nicholas’s autistic journey; at other times they’re about walks on the beach, but one thing remains the same: they’re real, heartfelt and engaging.
86 FRIENDS with BENEFITS “So what’s this got to do with growing my business”, I hear you ask! Although Avak’s posts may seem very friendly and casual (and not very business focused), it’s because of this that his sales have increased. You see, people no longer just buy a piece of jewellery from Madison Jewellery; they buy a ring from the man who is educating and inspiring the world about autism. As outlined in Chapter 5, this forms part of Avak’s brand story. When I look up Avak’s Facebook business page, www.facebook.com/madisonjewellery, I see him promote a new ring he’s just designed and he may get five comments and ten ‘likes’. However when he posts the same ring on his personal profile, he often gets up to 30 comments and 100 ‘likes’. Avak is forever popping up pictures of rings he’s just finished designing for one of his 3,000-odd Facebook friends. The reason Avak is getting so many comments, ‘likes’ and sales is because he’s let us, his Facebook friends, into his private world. We feel like we know him, which has led to us liking and trusting him. We’ve gotten to know the man, and the jeweller, behind the business. I hope this has helped you gain a better insight into how to grow your business by incorporating your personal profile into your Facebook strategy. Please be sure to look Avak up on Facebook, he can be found at: www.facebook.com/avakalan. bedikian and be sure to let him know I said “hi!” So, let’s now take a look at how to go about building a personal relationship with friends on Facebook. Once you’ve completed a Facebook graph search and you’ve found an ideal Bob or Betty you’d like to become friends with, you then need to work out how you’re going to grab their attention and make a positive first impression. I’m not going to go into too much detail about Facebook functionality, but I will explain the best way to send a friend request, as I believe it’s one of the most important relationship building techniques you can use. Once you’ve found a ‘potential friend’, my recommendation is to look up their profile so you can start to learn a little bit more about them. Sometimes you may not be able to do this because the person
87 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE may have tight privacy settings. But if you can, go take a look at what their interests are, where they live, what books they like to read, what they do for a living, and so on. What you’re looking for when you’re checking out their profile is something you have in common with them. This might be that you both grew up in the same town, you both like yoga, or you have 20 mutual friends. If you’ve only ever used Facebook in the past to hang out with people you know ‘in real life’ this technique may seem foreign and odd to you. I often have people ask me: “Do people on Facebook really accept friend requests from strangers? I thought you had to know them for real before friending them up?” Even though you may never have considered being friends with strangers, millions of people do and are. My profile is a great example: I have over 3,000 friends, of which I probably only know around 300 ‘in real life’, and yet I interact and have fun with them as if I’d known them all for years. So, once you’ve found a Bob or Betty and established a common connection, you then need to send them a friend request. Tip: I always send a private message first, before hitting the ‘friend request’ button. This way they receive the message before the friend request, so they know why I sent it. Here’s what I encourage you to write in your introductory, private message to your new potential friend:
“Hello Betty, I see you too grew up in Geelong and love to travel to Bali, like me. We also share 20 mutual friends on Facebook. I’d be delighted if you’d accept my friend request. I look forward to getting to know you and all that you do. Best regards, Kylie Bartlett.”
What you’ll notice with my introductory message is that I mentioned nothing about how we may be able to do business together. Remember, this is about flirting first, and converting second. Humans are nosy by nature, so don’t worry; if they accept your friend request, the next thing they’ll probably do is go check out your profile, where you’ll have a paragraph or two on your business, plus
88 FRIENDS with BENEFITS a link to your Facebook business page. The best way to start making new friends is to start engaging with them on their turf. Let me explain. When I first leaped into Facebook, I decided the quickest way to become friends with strangers was to get out from behind my Facebook profile and start visiting my new friends’ profiles instead. I could have quite easily sat on Facebook all day long, talking about me, me, me: what I’d had for lunch, what holiday I’d been on, what new clothes I’d purchased, blah blah blah. Instead, I decided to spend the majority of my time commenting on what my friends had had for lunch, how wonderful their holiday pictures looked and how amazing their new pair of shoes were. I made it all about them. Of course, you know what happened next: when the same people saw a post from me, they tended to comment, ’like’, and share, because they’d remembered how nice I was to them. And that, my friends, is how you flirt and convert on Facebook!
• • •
Wowser, this is one large chapter! However I’m sure you’re getting a sense by now that it’s also the core of your Facebook strategy. Without implementing the steps covered in this chapter, your Facebook lights will be on but no one will be home – and we can’t have that! In this chapter you’ve learned about:
Step 4: Publish – give and you shall receive About the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) Creating quality content The importance of acting like a new media business The five different types of content: blogs and FAQs/ SAQs, videos, images/photos/infographics, podcasts and repurposed content created by others Creating a content and editorial calendar How to flirt on Facebook
89 PUBLISH: GIVE AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE ACTION STEPS
Before moving onto the next chapter, you should do your best to complete the following:
Brainstorm the different types of content you could produce and give away to your Facebook community. Speak with your web developer about integrating a blog into your website (if you don’t already have one). Complete all questions associated with mapping out your content and editorial calendar. Create and complete a content and editorial calendar for your business. Using Facebook’s graph search, send out five friend requests, with personal notes, to strangers (but who are your target market).
90 FRIENDS with BENEFITS NOTES
91 Chapter 6 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE
Sex appeal is 50% what you’ve got, and 50% what people think you’ve got
–SOPHIA LOREN
Have you ever tried to gatecrash a party you really wanted to attend, or tried to get into the roped off VIP section at a nightclub because that’s where all the cool people hung out (or is it just me who used to do this)? This scenario is not too dissimilar to how Facebook works. Facebook has a sophisticated algorithm running through it (like a gatekeeper at a nightclub) that decides whether or not your content is worthy of being visible in the news feed. If, in the past, your content hasn’t been ‘liked’, shared or commented on by many people, then Facebook will deem it ‘un-newsworthy’ and relegate it to the back of the content (general admission) queue in favour of content that’s popular with the masses. I can hear you asking: “Well how do I become popular if no one even knows I exist?” The answer is: “you’ve gotta pay to play!” Let’s get one thing straight: Facebook is all about making money. There are only two ways Facebook makes its cash: firstly, by dishing up popular, relevant and ‘real time’ content that keeps new and existing users coming back for more, and secondly, by selling ad space. If at first you don’t fit into the former, then the latter is your only option (for now!). Don’t be disheartened – it’s not that expensive to advertise on Facebook (especially when I outline the
92 FRIENDS with BENEFITS potential return-on-investment) and once you start to get a decent following/ fan base you can then pull back on your ad spend.
FLIRT AND CONVERT WITH FACEBOOK ADVERTISING
I’m not going to delve too deeply into all the ins and outs of Facebook advertising (there is more detail included in my Facebook for Business Boot(y) Camp e-learning program) because this book’s objective is to stay strategic. Having said that, I will go through a summary of all the different options available to you, so you can at least consider advertising as part of your overall Facebook strategy.
WHAT TO ADVERTISE?
Advertising can be a tricky thing. As such, I highly recommend you hire a pro to help you create and manage your Facebook advertising campaign (someone like me … shameless self promotion moment). This is because if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could chew through a heap of coin and achieve diddly squat. But either way, it would be remiss of me not to provide you with a D.I.Y. option, and the more informed you are about these things the better. Firstly, before you start spending money on advertising, you first need to decide what it is you’re going to advertise. Do you want the ad to drive traffic to your Facebook page or to your website? Facebook are all about keeping users on their platform for as long as possible (because the more time you spend on it, the more likely you are to click on an ad that Facebook makes money from). With that in mind, if you choose to drive Facebook ad traffic to your website,
93 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE you will pay a hell of a lot more for your ads (because you’re directing traffic away from their network). So of course, I’m going to recommend you point your advertising traffic to your Facebook business page instead.
CUTTING THROUGH THE JARGON
Before I get stuck into explaining all the different types of ads, let’s look at the lingo Facebook uses and what it means:
CTR –click through rate: This is the ratio of how many times your ads are clicked to how many times they are seen by a prospect. For example, if your ad is seen 1,000 times (called impressions), and the ad gets clicked 10 times, that’s a 1% CTR. This is a very good result on Facebook, as most ad CTR average 0.3 - 0.6% CTR. The higher your CTR, the cheaper your ads will be. Ad clicks can cost you anything from 10 cents to as high as $1.50, depending on how competitive the keywords you’re using are, what country you’re advertising in and how high your CTR is. CPC – cost per click: You pay every time someone clicks on your ad. CPM – cost per impression: You pay for every 1,000 impressions (1,000 times the ad appears on Facebook), regardless of whether anyone clicks on your ad. CPA – cost per action: This is how much it costs you for one person to take the required action. In other words, 10 people may click on your ad (CPC) but how many people, once they clicked, took action (‘liked’ your page)?
94 FRIENDS with BENEFITS STANDARD FACEBOOK ADS
Firstly, in order to run any kind of ad on Facebook, you have to first set up an Ads account. You can do this by going to www.facebook.com/ads. Now let’s take a look at standard Facebook ads. There are two types: firstly, a right-hand sidebar ad that comprises a thumbnail image (100 × 72 pixels), a 25-character headline and a 90-character text body; and secondly, a news feed ad which comprises the same elements as a right-hand sidebar ad, but with a larger image (400 × 150 pixels). My recommendation is to create 10 different variations of the same advertisement (including both right hand side bar and news feed ads), so you can test and measure which combination is providing you with the best CTR. Always include a call-to-action in your ad, such as: “Click ‘like’ below for free tips.” Facebook ads, unlike any other online ads, don’t charge you when a customer clicks the ‘like’ option below the advertisement. This is opposed to physically clicking on the ad itself, which then redirects you to the business page, where you then ‘like’ the page. This means, for example, you could get 10 bangs for your buck, where nine people click ‘like’ below the ad and only one person physically clicks on the ad itself.
CHOOSING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
LOCATION You can choose who sees your ad by location (country, state, city, even postcode). If you’re a local bricks-and-mortar business I would recommend you only run ads to people within 50 kilometres of your physical business. Research suggests that people are creatures of
95 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE habit and tend to shop within 15 kilometres of where they live. If you sell products online to customers within your country only, then of course you’d select Australia (or the country where you’re located). If your online business has no geographical boundaries, then you’d choose a number of specific countries based on their potential to produce valuable customers. Note: the cost of your ads will vary dramatically depending on what countries you advertise to. Check this out before hitting the ‘go live’ button.
AGE Facebook allows you to advertise to people aged 13 and up, but my advice is to not advertise to anyone younger than 25 as they generally don’t have the income to purchase your products. Very biased of me, I know, but it works for my business! Of course, if you’re selling tickets to a One Direction concert, then that may be different. I also wouldn’t advertise to an age group older than 65 (sorry grandma and pa!) because they’re very unlikely to purchase online (they tend to only use Facebook to view photos of their family).
GENDER You can choose to advertise to only men, only women or both. My recommendation is to write and create two different ads for the two genders. Ads specifically designed for one particular gender tend to achieve a higher CTR than those that are gender general.
PRECISE INTEREST This is the section of your ad that separates the men from the boys. Facebook is the only advertising platform in the world that allows you to target an ad to people’s specific interests and hobbies.
96 FRIENDS with BENEFITS When people set up their personal profile on Facebook, they also tend to fill out the personal interests section, which includes everything from where they live, to what their favourite movies are, the books they’re reading and what their hobbies are. What this means for you, the advertiser, is that you can create an ad that specifically meets your target market’s personal preferences. For example, let’s say you own a yoga studio. You could advertise just to women aged between 25 and 45, who live in Melbourne, who love yoga. People are more likely to click on an ad that’s talking directly to them.
BROAD CATEGORIES As the name suggests, broad categories are general interests, grouped together. For example you might want to target people who are interested in technology. Facebook deems the broad category of technology as software as well as hardware (yep, it’s that broad). Personally I don’t use broad categories when advertising as I don’t believe the results it returns are as good as those for precise categories.
CONNECTIONS Facebook allows you to advertise to people based on them already being a fan of your business page or a friend on your personal profile. The benefit of this is that you may run an ad campaign that is designed to reward existing connections.
FRIENDS OF CONNECTIONS This type of ad allows you to advertise to people who are not yet friends or fans of your profile or business page, but instead are
97 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE friends with, or fans of, the people who are. When you use this function as part of your ad, it includes a statement like “Joe Bloggs (their friend) ‘likes’ this”, which creates social proof that you’re worth connecting with.
AD BUDGET
It’s entirely up to you what kind of budget you allocate to your Facebook advertising campaign, but obviously the more you spend, the more people will see your ad (and hopefully more positive clicks will occur). My rule of thumb when advising my clients on their ad spend is this: “If you can’t afford to spend $50 per day, for a minimum of 14 days, then don’t advertise”. Not every person who sees your ad will click on it, and not everyone who clicks on your ad will then take the required action you’re looking for. It’s a numbers game; the more people that see your ads, the better your chance is that someone will click on it. Most Facebook advertising specialists (including me) will tell you that if you achieve 0.3% to 0.5% CTR, your ad campaign can be considered a success. But having said that, I ran an ad campaign for one of my businesses in July 2013 and achieved a CTR of 2.482%. The more targeted your ad is, the better your chance of getting clicks. I don’t want to give you ‘brain strain’, but there is one more stat you need to include when evaluating the success or failure of your ad campaign, and that is CPA (cost-per-action). The easiest way to explain this to you is by using a real example from one of my own ad campaigns:
98 FRIENDS with BENEFITS So let me explain what this all means:
I advertised for 30 days and I spent $184.43 over this period (only $6.15 per day!) 25,335 of my target market saw the ad 1.17 times 736 of these 25,335 people clicked on the ad, giving me a CTR of 2.91% Every time someone clicked on the ad, it cost me 25 cents When the 736 people clicked on the ad, 293 took the action of ‘liking’ the page The ad ended up costing me 63 cents for each ‘like’ (action)
Can you now see why you need to throw a few dollars and days at the campaign in order to get good outcomes? Due to my ad being very popular, Facebook reduced the cost-per-click (CPC) down as low as 25 cents per click (which is why it only ended up costing me $6 per day to advertise). Note: please don’t assume you’ll get the same cost reduction that I did!
POTENTIAL REACH Once you type in all the criteria for your ad (location, gender, age, precise interest, and so on), Facebook will then calculate how many potential people you could reach who meet those criteria. Rule of thumb: I recommend only running an ad if the potential audience reach is a minimum of 10,000 people. If the audience is smaller, there are not enough people to expose your ad to, that will then choose to click (remembering the 0.3 – 0.5% CTR average).
SPONSORED STORIES Facebook has another type of advertising approach called “Sponsored Stories”. These appear on the right-hand sidebar, just like a normal ad, but the stories link to one of your status updates on
99 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE your business page. I’m not a big fan of these and very rarely use them (unless I’m working with a famous brand that’s already very popular). The reason for this is that they cost a lot more than a promoted post (I’ll explain next what this is) and they get far less engagement.
PROMOTED POSTS Promoting a post can be a very valuable way of gaining a heap of extra traffic for one of your personal or business page status updates (posts). Remember when I said earlier that “you gotta pay to play”? Well this is a great example. Basically, you’re getting guaranteed entry to the sold-out party that is the Facebook news feed. A Promoted Post will be seen by many more of your friends and fans. You can tell when a post is promoted; it says ‘sponsored’ at the bottom. You can set up a promoted post by clicking ‘Promote’ underneath your posted status update. The only bad news is that you can only promote a post if you have over 500 ‘likes’. The great thing about Promoted Posts is that you can see how many views the post that you paid for received, and how many views it got organically (had you not paid for it). I don’t recommend the Promoted Post option for status updates or content that doesn’t have the potential to go viral. I’d promote a post for things like: offering a discount, running an event, or launching a free report or e-book.
WEAPONS OF MASS SEDUCTION: OFFERS AND COMPETITIONS People love receiving ‘mates rates’, discounts and deals for valuable goods and services. You’ve only got to look at how huge the deals market (Groupon, Scoopon, Daily Deals, etc.) has become. Facebook have created their own version called ‘Offers’. A Facebook Offer is essentially like a coupon people can ‘opt in’ for.
100 FRIENDS with BENEFITS When Facebook users accept an offer, they get an email from Facebook that contains a link to your website or Facebook business page that contains further information about the deal. You may own a coffee shop where you run a ‘buy one get one free’ offer. Or you may have an online kids’ wear store where the offer is 10% off all online purchases. You’re really only limited by your imagination when it comes to creating offers. Everybody loves themselves a good competition – the chance to win something for nothing is very alluring and seductive. Facebook competitions are a great way of grabbing the attention of your target market. I always recommend to my clients that they launch their Facebook business page with a competition. Why? Because it’s an effective way of growing your fan base very quickly. Once you have a foundation of fans, it’s much easier to get your content into their news feeds. I launched a business page for a particular client with a competition, and we ended up growing our page from zero ‘likes’ to 6,000 in under 30 days! The best way of running a competition is to use a third-party application (app). Using an app allows you to be far more creative and strategic with your competitions. For example, you can use apps that allow you to integrate a beautifully designed tab (they look like a website) into your Facebook business page. You may have seen them before; they sit underneath your Facebook business page’s timeline cover image. Note: you can’t use competition tabs on your personal profile, only on your business page. The competition tab can include an ‘opt in’ form where the entrant has to also provide their name and email address as a competition condition of entry. In this way you’re also building a database outside of Facebook. You can set up your competition so a visitor has to ‘like’ your page before they can enter the competition (this is how you get your ‘likes’ up very quickly). Let me share a couple of examples with you of Facebook competition campaigns I managed that produced great results for my clients.
101 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE TRUFFLEDUCK CHRISTMAS PARTY COMPETITION
One of my favourite Facebook clients is Truffleduck (you can check them out at www.facebook.com/truffleduck). They specialise in catering, weddings, special occasions and corporate events. Their Facebook business page had 500 ‘likes’ but had been coasting along for some time, only growing by a couple of new ‘likes’ per week and getting very little engagement (in the form of ‘likes’, comments and shares). I explained to them that to increase engagement, they needed to increase their ‘likes’ and create some additional buzz around their brand. Think of Facebook ‘likes’ as similar to dining in a new restaurant. Have you ever walked past a restaurant and decided to not eat there because there was nobody inside? You thought there must be something wrong with the place, right? The same kind of thinking happens on Facebook. When you don’t have many ‘likes’, strangers passing by your page assume you don’t have anything valuable to offer, so they move on without ‘liking’ it either. Before creating the competition for Truffleduck, we strategised about what they wanted to achieve from the campaign. We agreed the three top goals were to:
Increase brand awareness that would lead to a rise in catering jobs Increase ‘likes’ to boost conversations and engagement Increase email subscribers with a view to sending out email marketing campaigns in the future
I see so many business’s running Facebook competitions and giving away items such as iPads that have nothing to do with their business or the products they sell. Yeah sure, the ‘likes’ may increase, but most people will ‘unlike’ the page once the competition is complete. Get really strategic with your competitions. Make sure they get you
102 FRIENDS with BENEFITS closer to achieving your goals as outlined in your social media plan. Ok, so back to what we did with Truffleduck. We ran a 21-day competition where each person who ‘liked’ the Truffleduck business page (increasing brand awareness and ‘likes’) and provided their contact details (building an email list) went into the draw to win a Christmas party for their workplace with 20 of their friends and colleagues, valued at $1,000. We also ran Facebook ads daily for three weeks, spending $50 per day promoting the competition. The ads only targeted people who hadn’t already ‘liked’ the Truffleduck business page and who worked within 50 kilometres of where Truffleduck was located. The competition was a great success; we increased the ‘likes’ from 500 to 2,000 within three weeks. Because more people are now seeing Truffleduck in their news feeds (because they’ve ‘liked’ the page), the engagement has increased by 200%. Within a month of the competition closing, Truffleduck were already getting orders for catering from new businesses who had recently ‘liked’ their page. There are a few extra tips that I know contributed to Truffleduck’s competition success, that I believe are also worth sharing,:
They didn’t sit back and expect the ads to do all the work. Every time they got a new ‘like’ from a business, they’d acknowledge the ‘like’ by ‘liking’ the business’s Facebook business page and they’d also write a welcoming comment on their Facebook timeline and ‘tag’ the business in the comment, so it didn’t just show up on their timeline, but on the other business’s timeline too.
They promoted the competition on their timeline too, with clever images and statements counting down the days until the competition was going to be drawn. This created great buzz and anticipation.
They made a big song and dance when they drew out the winning entry. They recorded the entry being drawn on video
103 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE and uploaded it onto their Facebook page, which gave the competition a personal touch.
SCRAPBOOKING TV CHANNEL LAUNCH
I know many of you reading this book may have online businesses, as opposed to traditional bricks-and-mortar ones, so I thought you’d benefit from hearing about how an online business can also benefit from running a Facebook competition. When Scrapbooking TV came to me asking for assistance with their Facebook business page and product range, they were a blank canvas. It was a new business and they hadn’t even launched their Facebook business page yet. Scrapbooking TV allows viewers to purchase episodes of Scrapbooking Memories (a scrapbooking TV show, broadcasting in the USA on cable), via Facebook. In other words, instead of having to watch the show on cable TV (which only broadcasts to limited states in the USA), you can now watch the same episodes on Facebook. I completed the same exercise with Scrapbooking TV as I did with Truffleduck: we set their goals, and then decided on what kind of competition we were going to run. Here’s a list of their top three goals:
Establish a valuable brand within the scrapbooking community Build a fan base of 2,000 within 30 days Have 50% of the new ‘likes’ view a preview video
The competition we ran with was also a sweepstakes, where each person who ‘liked’ the Scrapbooking TV page and provided their email address would go in the draw to win a full box set of 16 series (208 episodes of Scrapbooking Memories) on DVD, valued at
104 FRIENDS with BENEFITS $800. As with Truffleduck, we ran this competition in conjunction with daily Facebook ads, spending $50 per day for 30 days. As their target market was women who lived in the USA and enjoyed scrapbooking, that is who we advertised to (it was a very targeted campaign). The results were incredible. They managed to get 6,000 ‘likes’ within 30 days, which definitely surpassed the goal of 2,000. So how did they manage to get so many ‘likes’ in such a short amount of time? They did the same as Truffleduck: they worked the page themselves at the same time as the ads were running. I thought it was worth showing you the kinds of posts they were sharing while the ads were running – and the incredible engagement some of these posts received:
Example 1 received 273 ‘likes’, 23 comments and 156 shares Example 2 received 182 ‘likes’, 11 comments and 157 shares Example 3 received 247 ‘likes’, 3 comments and 231 shares
The reason these photos and captions got so much engagement is because they were telling a story (as explained in detail in Chapter 5). They weren’t flogging a product or promoting the sweepstake competition, they were appealing to scrapbookers’ sense of humour. This campaign was a huge success. Not only did Scrapbooking TV attract a whopping 6,000 fans, it also sold enough episodes to pay for the campaign.
105 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE • • •
As I’ve outlined, there are so many things you can do with competitions that you’re really only limited by your imagination. For some great competition ideas, I recommend checking out the following apps:
www.northsocial.com www.woobox.com www.shortstack.com
And as an aside, apps aren’t used just for competitions. You can use apps to integrate other social media networks into Facebook, set up a shopping cart, download digital products, offer discounts and more. Go check them out! Ok, so now you’ve got all the ammunition you need to score with your target market on Facebook. Don’t be intimidated – if you do your homework, prepare properly and fully commit to these strategies you’ll be gaining ‘friends with benefits’ in no time!
• • •
In this chapter you’ve learned about:
Step 5: Promote – making sure you score Flirt and convert with Facebook advertising What to advertise? Cutting through the jargon Standard Facebook adsChoosing your target audience Ad budget Potential reach Sponsored stories Promoted posts Weapons of mass seduction – offers and competitions Truffleduck and Scrapbooking TV competition examples
106 FRIENDS with BENEFITS ACTION STEPS
Before moving onto the conclusion, I highly recommend you complete the following:
Go and set up a Facebook advertising account Using your target market information gathered from previous action steps, have a play around with creating an advertisement for your business. Before spending money on advertising, make sure there is a big enough reach on Facebook to warrant the ad spend. Go and check out the North Social, Woo Box and Short Stack apps and then jot down a list of creative ways you could use these them to run an offer or competition within your business.
107 PROMOTE: MAKING SURE YOU SCORE NOTES
108 Chapter 7 CONCLUSION
I hope after reading this book, you now feel more informed about what’s really required to grow your business using Facebook. I also hope you feel excited about your pending Facebook journey. It’s one thing to feel like you’re ‘in-the-know’, but being motivated to implement and actually do something with your new knowledge is the key. I’m not going to lie to you; building a loyal and engaged friend and fan base on Facebook is not easy and it won’t happen overnight. You’re going to need to really commit to the goal, and to nurture and caress it every single day. However, I promise the investment you make in familiarising yourself on all the ins and outs of Facebook, combined with taking the appropriate action, will pay off in bucket loads in the future. Trust me when I say that implementing what you’ve learned from this book will provide your business with a real advantage in the marketplace. Yes, social media marketing is hard, and guess what – it’s only going to get harder as new social media platforms come onto the market that you then have to learn to integrate into your business. But you have two choices: you can have yourself your very own little pity party and mourn over how it used to be ‘back in your day’, or you can get on with it and adjust to the realities of the new economy. I read a really interesting statistic recently that reported that as of 2014, 25% of the Australian population is under 30. You can’t ignore this and go about running your business the way you’ve always run it if you want to thrive in the new economy. I know I sound like I’m getting on my high horse – and I am! I’m really passionate about helping small businesses prosper in today’s
109 FRIENDS with BENEFITS marketplace. But I need your help: I need you to lean in and be prepared to do things differently. I want to share one last story with you to reiterate the need to change and embrace social media. The role of Mayor was up for grabs in my hometown of Geelong in November 2013. All up, there were 16 candidates with varying backgrounds and levels of experience, all vying for the top job. Geelong is only the second city in Australia that has decided to allow the community to vote for who they want as their Mayor, rather than leaving this up to the Councillors. A man by the name of Mr. Darryn Lyons decided to throw his hat in the ring for the top job. You may have even heard of him – he’s known as Mr Paparazzi and at one stage he owned the world’s most successful paparazzi businesses, taking photos of the stars. He recently moved back to his hometown of Geelong after spending most of his working career overseas. Darryn Lyons is what you’d call a colourful, larger-than-life larrikin. Go Google him and you’ll see what I mean. He has a multi- coloured Mohawk, wears suits Liberace would die for and owns a series of nightclubs and bars. He also appeared Australia’s reality TV Show: Excess Baggage and bragged about getting fake abs inserted into his (slightly overweight) tummy … He’s not your typical, traditional Mayoral candidate but guess what, he won the election, with over 49% of the primary votes, in a town that’s known for it’s conservative and ‘old school’ culture. WHY? Because Darryn told and sold a great story! He’s showed and shared his passion and unwavering commitment to roll up his sleeves and do whatever it takes to put Geelong on the global map and make it, a smart, 21st Century city. Whether he can or does achieve this, is beside the point, people bought his thought-leadership and heart-felt intention.
• • •
Darryn Lyons, going into the Mayoral campaign, had over 500,000
110 CONCLUSION thousand followers on Twitter and he now has 30,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook. He used both these communications platforms incredibly well throughout his campaign to tell his story, share his vision for Geelong and to answer constituents’ questions. He met the people where they were already congregating – on social media. He wasn’t scared of what the anti-Darryn Lyons contingent were going to say about him on social media because he was there to react and respond accordingly. I’m sharing this example with you to demonstrate the power of social media to build your brand and business if you approach it from the right angle: not as something you feel you’re being forced to do (like my Mayoral candidate client), but because you see the tremendous benefits social media can bring. People in general, (and not just the people of Geelong!), are over hype and spin. They’re yearning for leaders – and business leaders in particular - to pull back the curtain and show us their less-than- perfect underbellies. Remember when President Bill Clinton finally admitted he’d had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky? His ratings went through the roof. And a bit closer to home, when former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd admitted to going to a strip club in New York, his popularity ratings increased too. Probably the best example of a leader using social media to influence voters would be President Barack Obama; he had 30 million ‘likes’ on Facebook going into the 2012 elections. Even traditional media were referring to it as the ‘Social Media Election’. Not only did Mr Obama manage to win the black and Hispanic vote, he also won the youth vote (59% of youth between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for him). Irrespective of their political persuasion, what Kevin Rudd, Darryn Lyons and Barack Obama all did incredibly well was to touch, connect and engage with their fans and followers on social media, not just leading up to election campaigns, but as a part of their day-to-day routines. Ooh I’ve got all emotional and worked up from writing this last story. You can do this! You’ll thank me when you reap the benefits both in your business, and in your personal life. At the end of the day,
111 FRIENDS with BENEFITS that’s what everybody wants: to feel connected, and ‘liked’, by those around them.
LET’S CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION!
This isn’t the end of our relationship; it’s only the beginning! Facebook is constantly evolving and upgrading its platform. I’m sure there will have already been some changes since publishing my book. To ensure you’re not left behind and are receiving cutting-edge information and super ninja Facebook tactics, be sure to subscribe to my blog and The Web Celeb TV at www.kyliebartlett.com, where I’ll be sharing small business success stories and best practices with my community. Of course feel free to also ‘like’ my business page: www.facebook.com/thewebceleb so we can stay in touch.
FREE GIFT: FACEBOOK COMPATIBILITY CALCULATOR I’ve created a free, downloadable 10-point questionnaire that will calculate your readiness to (re) launch into Facebook. The calculator is an invaluable tool I’ve developed over the past two years. It will provide you with an accurate assessment of which of your current collateral and assets can be repurposed and leveraged on Facebook immediately, and what needs to be developed before, during and after your Facebook (re) launch. To grab your free copy go to www.kyliebartlett.com, where it’s located on the homepage.
FACEBOOK BUSINESS BOOT CAMP E-LEARNING
112 CONCLUSION PROGRAM As mentioned in previous chapters, I’ve also produced a three-hour e-learning program called Facebook Business Boot Camp that will walk you through, from go-to-woah, my 5-Step strategy in more detail. This e-learning program takes all the theory from this book and shows you, via a series of Facebook video screen captures, how to actually use Facebook, click by click. The beauty of this e-learning program is that you can work at your own pace and review the videos as many times as you need to. It also comes with a series of downloadable workbooks, templates and bonus resources to help you gain an even deeper understanding of how to grow your business with Facebook.
HAVE I GOT A DEAL FOR YOU! Now it’s my turn to hit you with a weapon of mass seduction! If you take a photo of yourself reading my book and upload it to my Facebook page: www.facebook.com/thewebceleb, using the hashtag #friendswithbenefitsbook, I’ll send you a coupon code to receive 50% off my Facebook Business Boot Camp e-learning program – that’s a whopping $98.50 saving!
BUSINESS CONSULTING If you’re interested in learning more about social media and Facebook in your business, I regularly conduct in-house audits and strategy sessions. You can find out more about my consulting services by visiting www.kyliebartlett.com/work-with-kylie and downloading the .pdf brochure.
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION
113 FRIENDS with BENEFITS And lastly, if you think your business and/or customers would be inspired by the ‘Friends with Benefits’ message, please be sure to let me know. I’m regularly on the road facilitating my famous Facebook Business Master-classes and I would be only too happy to speak at your next conference on how businesses can benefit from being ‘friendly’ on Facebook. I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed reading my 5 Step guide, and just as importantly I hope you’ve found it ‘beneficial’! I truly would love to stay connected and answer any questions you may have. You can email me at: [email protected] or of course, look me up on Facebook. Until next time … be of benefit!
114 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to dedicate this book to my 13-year old son Lachlan, who has taught me so much about how the ‘young’ digital brain works, thinks and feels. Although this book has primarily been written for the busy small business owner, it has also been written as a legacy for Lachlan, so one day he can look back and be proud of what his mother has achieved, and know that he too can achieve similar accomplishments if he puts his mind to it. I’d also like to thank my biggest supporter and fan, my husband Trevor. Writing this book has been a very long, and at times difficult process (two years in the making). There were many days when I was going to give up and shelve the idea of becoming a published author, but it was Trevor who believed in me and motivated me to keep writing. He has had to ride the highs and lows of this journey with me, and this book would not be in your hands, had it not been for him. Acknowledgment must also go out to two of my wonderful friends, Andrew Griffiths and Sam Elam – my business mastermind buddies known as The 3 ASKeteers! How lucky am I to have Andrew, Australia’s number one small business author and Sam, the head of Australia’s largest media training company Media Manoeuvres, in my book-writing camp. I definitely would not have been able to put this book together without the valuable input and assistance I received from Andrew (on how to even write a book) and Sam (on coming up with great media hooks and angles). These two have been my solid rocks and I can’t thank them enough for their love and generosity throughout this writing process. What makes this book so real, practical and valuable is all the great case studies and best practice examples, I’ve included, from clients I’ve worked with over the years. I can’t thank my clients
115 FRIENDS with BENEFITS enough for being so inspirational and allowing me to share their success with the world. A big thank you also needs to go out to Melissa Deerson (my writing editor) and Julie Renouf from OpenBook Creative, for producing my book, including cover design and typesetting. Both of these ladies took my rough manuscript and vague book design ideas and turned them into the masterpiece you read today. And lastly, I want to acknowledge and thank you, the reader, for taking the time to read my book. I know if you implement all that I have outlined, you too will gain both personal satisfaction and business success from having Facebook ‘friends with benefits’!
116 ABOUT KYLIE
Kylie Bartlett, a self-driven businesswoman, international public speaker and author thrives on demystifying social media and the web for those new to the online world. Kylie has trained, coached and inspired more than 1,000 businesses globally to become socially savvy. These days, Kylie is also known as the ‘Web Celeb’. She teaches SMEs (small to medium enterprises), startups and corporates how to become ‘Web Famous’ in their industry by leveraging the power of the social web. Kylie’s message on ‘why social media?’ is simple: “It’s the new telephone and you need to answer the call or run the risk of your competitors answering it for you!” She is convinced that thanks to the web, social media and technology, size no longer matters. Small is now big business. With a powerful online presence, there’s never been a better time in history for budget-conscious SMEs to compete with cashed-up corporates. The serial entrepreneur’s journey into the social media space is an inspirational story in itself. Despite being a high school dropout and a homeless teen, by the age of 21 Kylie owned her first business (a café), by 24 her first home and by 30, she made her first million – not bad for a girl who never finished high school. A string of ventures followed including Pinnacle Training Solutions, one of Australia’s leading corporate training companies, and Quantum Leap Corporation, a consultancy for personal and professional performance. In 2009, hugely successful but burnt out from working 100 hours a week, Kylie decided it was time for a career change. She stumbled upon the worldwide web with its allure of being able to “make money while you sleep, work from home in your pyjamas and turn your
117 FRIENDS with BENEFITS passion into products”. Her new business niche was born. Since then, Kylie has studied with several of the world’s leading experts in personal branding and internet marketing. Her success goes well beyond understanding the dos and don’ts of social media. She draws on her own challenging life experiences and her qualification in organisational psychology and corporate training to drill into the essence of social media’s success: the impulse for humans to create connections and community. Kylie has accreditations in various science and psychometric profiling tools, including the Myer Briggs Personality Typology, Enneagram Personality Typology, DiSC personality assessment and Human Synergistics’ products. She is a Master Practitioner and Trainer in Neuro Linguistic Programming. Kylie is also a mentor in the highly successful ‘Key Person of Influence’ business incubator program where entrepreneurs are mentored by top Australian thought leaders on how to build their personal brand. Kylie is no stranger to traditional media either. She’s appeared on numerous Australian television and radio broadcasts including the Today Show, 9AM Show, 3MP and 2UB. She has also featured in many Australian newspapers and magazines such as The Sunday Herald Sun, Dynamic Business Magazine, Australian Banking and Finance Magazine. pro on the public speaking circuit, Kylie combines substance with humour to inspire, motivate and serve as a catalyst for others to achieve outstanding success and celebrity results in business by leveraging the power of the social web.
CONTACT KYLIE
Website: www.kyliebartlett.com Email: [email protected]
118 ABOUT KYLIE Phone: 1300 137 437 +61 419 392 602 Social media handles: @thewebceleb
119 Published in 2014 in Australia by Kylie Bartlett [email protected] www.kyliebartlett.com
Text copyright © Kylie Bartlett 2014
Book Production: OpenBook Creative Cover Design & Typesetting: OpenBook Creative Editor: Melissa Deerson Cover photo by dotshock/Shutterstock.com
Kylie Bartlett asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise is without the prior written consent of the publisher. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Author: Bartlett, Kylie Friends With Benefits : a cheeky 5 step strategy Title: for growing your business on Facebook (paperback) Business--Computer network resources. Subjects: Business enterprises--Computer networks. Online social networks. Dewey 658.056754 Number:
Disclaimer: The material in this publication is of the nature of general comment only, and does not represent professional advice. It is not intended to provide specific guidance for
120 particular circumstances and it should not be relied on as the basis for any decision to take action on any matter which it covers. Readers should obtain professional advice where appropriate, before making any such decision. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the author and publisher disclaim all responsibility and liability to any person, arising directly or indirectly from any person taking or not taking action based upon the information in this publication. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written consent of the publisher.
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