On Facebook the other day a friend mentioned that they wish they knew how to block the games requests that people send. I put together a short how-to video. If you need to know how to do it, take a peek!
No Time for Games?
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Tag Archives: Facebook
Keep an Eye on Your Competition
Gone are the days of just having a “secret shopper” go to the competitors store to find out pricing. New tactics are required. After reading this article in Entrepreneur by a former CIA Officer on
How to Get Ahead of Your Competition, I thought about how you could “spy” on your competition through social media.
There are four aspects about social media that help you build or protect your business. Let’s review:
- Build Your Brand with Social Media – Using social media allows you to have your logo, ideals and business practices in multiple locations, hopefully, in the right places where your customers are looking for you. Make sure that you are sharing the same message everywhere you are.
- Build Relationships – as you are developing your clientele you are also building a rapport between you and them. Learning more about what they want or need. Social media can help you stay in touch with them and carry on conversations.
- Level the Playing Field – every business has access to the same networks and tools available on the variety of social media platforms. It is how well you use them and the available features as to how much better of an opponent you will be.
- Monitor Competitors – you can “keep an eye on your competition” by following their movements on the various platforms in which they participate. Have they offered a coupon, a pop-up sale, a new white paper? Do they have a newsletter, a blog, a photo journal? Can you modify or improve upon their idea to help your business? Are you using more platforms than they are, but your engagement is lower?
What have you discovered when you were “spying” on your competition?
Online reviews
I encourage my clients to create a place page on many of the popular “location based sites”. Yelp, Google Places, Foursquare and Bing or Yahoo Local are some of the more popular ones. Facebook allows check-ins if you have entered your business address in your profile.
By encouraging your walk-in customers to “check-in” you win. Not only is it a way to tally people that
have been here, but the people to whom you are connected see that you are at a location and could decide to check the place out.
One thing about having a profile on some of the location sites is the fact that people can write a review. A bad thing is if someone has written a review about your business on a site like Yelp and you don’t see it because Yelp isn’t in your radar. What is even worse is if you aren’t monitoring sites like Yelp and the only review out there is a negative one. How do think that will affect your business?
This article from Crain’s Chicago Business offers suggestions about handling those negative reviews. Ultimately, no one wins if you engage in an on-line “argument”. I don’t suggest trying to remove the comments, but, instead offer to resolve any concerns by phone or “off-line”. By monitoring sites regularly, you will be able to address client concerns rapidly showing potential customers that you care and are responsive. Often, your loyal customers will come to your defense without you having to say a word.
Personal Policy for Social Networking
What is your personal social media policy?
According to Joshua Waldman, who wrote the inspiration article for this post, said that he was a “Facebook prude and a LinkedIn w- – - -.” The article focused on following up with LinkedIn invitations, but it made me think about how you personally handle your day to day activities with social media.
The biggest questions are:
- To whom will you connect?
- What is your connection criteria?
- What platforms are reserved for which connections?
My personal Facebook is reserved for people that I see regularly and don’t care that I post about my dogs and golf. The other networks are more professional connections. Where will you draw the line? Will you be my business connection but not a Facebook friend? I have met people at networking events that will not connect with someone on LinkedIn until they have had a coffee meeting. Who do you invite to connect on LinkedIn? Read a previous article on invitations.
Your level and degree of connecting is your personal preference. Similarly to a business page, you may want to have a personal social media policy that includes how frequently you will post. On social media, posting too often can get your posts muted by your connections. The type of information you share might cause someone to turn off your posts OR could keep them from recommending you to a new client contact.
People in job search mode need to be especially careful of what they post and the photos in which they are tagged. You never know who knows one of your connections and what they can see. This is a good time to check your settings to allow only close friends to see specific items.
All in all, social media is meant to be social, to engage with your friends and connections. In the grand scheme of things you will ultimately decide how much of an open book you want your life to be. Remember, if you don’t want the world to know something, don’t post it on the world wide web.
Share your thoughts!
Facebook ‘Graph Search’
Facebook has just entered the search engine game with the announcement of Graph Search. Not only will it help individuals boost their career search prospects*1 by finding “friends of coworkers who are …” but it will help Business be able to perform better in-bound marketing by searching for people who…. What this means to you as the user is 1 of 2 things:
- Make sure that your “About You” Section is complete with all the keywords that can make you be found. OR
- Don’t put anything in your profile so that no one can find you! (if you pick this option why are you on social media?
Not to be outdone by Google*2, Bing*3 has embraced Facebook in it’s search results.
Want to sign up for the Beta? Link here.
Newsfeed – lets you see what your friends and pages you follow are doing, posting and saying, Timeline – allowed you to share as much about you as you wish – birth, graduations, marriages, births of children, starting a business, and now Graph Search. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Graph Search will be another “pillar” just like Newsfeed and Timeline. The tool is designed to help you find what you want to know about your friends find photos with two friends in the same image, find out all of your friends in the same city you plan to visit, search results are vastly different because of the personalization of the site. You will be able to find a dentist that your friends like, things to do, movies to see, and find people you should know with common interests like ball room dancing, running or hiking. It makes the world feel smaller. They are starting with people, photos, places, pages for businesses. They are inviting feedback to keep it growing and evolving.
- Danny Rubin: How to Use Facebook ‘Graph Search’ to Boost Your Career.
- http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/01/15/facebook-vs-google-its-on-in-search/?section=magazines_fortune&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmagazines_fortune+%28Fortune+Magazine%29
- http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2013/01/15/sof.aspx