Sunday 11 November 2012

Bangalow Business Women’s Social Media Q&A


Welcome to the blog created from the fabulously successful Bangalow Business Women’s Social Media Q&A. Below you will find a summary of the questions and the answers from the panel (to the best of our recollection).

Q: What's the best time to post to increase engagement and reach?
The first answer is: when you know that your ideal customer is listening! So, you need to experiment and look at every insight/stat you can, to arrive at this important piece of data.
If you are starting out, below are some general tips BUT they can run counter to what your real customer is doing online - which you need to understand through observation, testing and if possible customer research!
However, general research tells us the the best time to post is Wednesday's at 3pm, and daily between the hours of 1pm to 4pm! 

Q: What works?
Here’s some recent general research from Zenworkz Authentic Marketing:
92% of pages have acquired a customer or sale through Facebook.
Posts with images get interaction rates 39% higher than average.
Short posts (less than 80 characters) get 23% higher interaction rates.
Using emoticons leads to 33% higher sharing, 33% higher comments, and 57% higher likes!
Pictures with “Caption that?” increases comments by 5.5 times than ave.
25% of fans expect a response to a question or complaint within 1 hour., 6% within 6 minutes!
For every fan there is the potential to reach 34 of their friends newsfeed.
Best words to post: win, new, winner and giveaway.
Worst words to post: $ off, % off, and clearance.
Best ideas to increase engagement:
  1. Run a photo contest
  2. Ask fans to share tips.
  3. Collect fans favourite quotes, (with an offer of a prize for the highest number of likes).
  4. Be involved in a group giveaway or competition (i.e. rafflecopter)
Caveat: Very general, and may run counter to your pages purpose and your ideal customers needs!

Engagement Tip from Nic-Nac: Visit the pages that like you or the pages of fans that like you, and leave a nice comment about anything they are doing - and never, never leave a comment saying like my page in return! Doing one and not the other, is guaranteed to improve your engagement.

Tip from Miche Bags - Expect to post regularly but not always get a sale from each post, the posts are about creating interest, if you can drive them to your website (but not in every post) then that will help with sales. 

Q: How do you continually find content for your page?
Zenworkz Marketing: Most important first step is to define what the purpose of your page is, that will help you with content decisions, the second tip is to have a content schedule plan, to schedule days and times for a mix of content: questions, quotes, tips, research findings, event promotions, giveaways and contests etc. Teresa's personal tip is to subscribe to email newsletters that provide information and ideas to stimulate your imagination and help you stay current.

Tips from Nic-Nac: Pin images from Pinterest, share pics from other pages, find quotes etc on the internet, if you’re looking for something in particular – try google images.  Always say “thanks for sharing (e.g. Zenworkz Marketing)!” to acknowledge whose post you’ve liked and are sharing on your page.

Tip from The Office Collective: Don’t have all your eggs (social media) in the one basket!  You need to be looking at other ways to market and engage your clients and audience.  Being on Facebook alone won’t cut the mustard.  Use resources like youtube - it’s quickly becoming the ‘go to’ place for searches and dramatically improves your search ranking.  Also, know your voice.  Your business should have a personality and everything you do online needs to be consistent and reflective of that.  Also, even if you don’t plan to be very active on Facebook it does pay to have a page.  I’ll often buy something that I think is really great and want to share that info with my Facebook friends and family.  If your business isn’t there I can’t tag it and you’ve missed an opportunity for word of mouth advertising (the best kind).

Comment from Zenworkz Marketing: Good Social Media is Integrated Marketing, which includes public relations, email campaigns, advertise on other platforms and even printed advertising.

Comment from Nic-Nac: make sure that you’re not always posting about your products … that can become boring for your likers.  If you walk into a shop, the ideal sales person will be friendly, interested, helpful, make suggestions but not bombard you with the hard sell.  I think Facebook is the same … intrigue people, make them want to see/know more, encourage them over to your website, engage with them, ask their opinions, and above all – THANK THEM for their involvement.  

General Tip: Think outside the box and know the Social Media rules and etiquette.

Last Tip: Test everything out to see if it works for you!

Please comment below if you are seeing very different results for your specific target customer? 
It will help all of us to know how to do it better!

Happy Social Networking!













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