First, follow these steps below in beginning your online reputation management:

1. Set up a Google alert on your business’s name to keep track of any mentions about your business. You can even arrange for the news alerts to be sent once a day or once a week to manage your e-mail workflow.
2. Once you encounter a negative review, start the process for addressing it. Figure out who the customer is, what the customer encountered, and how it was handled before beginning your public response to the customer.
3. In the public response, offer details as to what the customer experienced, the resolution of the matter, and offer a positive connection by offering to speak with the customer again. That way people seeing the negative review will see your response, the details of what happened, and your willingness to speak with the customer again. That way they know you are proactive, you care about your business, and you show very good customer service by responding in a positive manner.

Some business owners have responded to Yelp reviews privately for a resolution. This approach can be tricky especially if the Yelp review had an especially negative experience at your business. If done right, the Yelp reviewer can be invited to come back to your business, and if the Yelp reviewer has had a positive experience, then that reviewer will update his or her prior review.

With the right approach, a positive attitude that is shown in your response, a negative review’s impact on your business can be mitigated.

Content matters a great deal more than SEO, and here’s why: too many marketers focus on SEO at the exclusion of relevant content on websites. All the backlinking and keywords can’t replace content, and given the latest reports out of Google, content will be given a greater focus than keywords and backlinking when it comes to website rankings. Here’s the report from this spring’s SXSW in Austin, where Google’s Matt Cutt had this to say about SEO marketers:

“And the idea,” Cutts said, “Is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

Does it mean that SEO needs to stop being used? Not necessarily, but it should be a small component of social marketing. Content generation is where it’s at, and the more compelling the content is, the more clicks you will receive, and your website will receive a better ranking. Also, if you use advertising on your website, it helps you get more revenue with higher pageviews.

To think of good content strategy for your website, sit down and ask yourself these questions:

1) What is the goal of my website?
2) What are the products I’m selling that people would be interested in?
3) What is the current affinity they have with my brand?
4) Would posting content about my products and the various ways they are used help in attracting new visitors to my website?
5) What kind of content that I can post? Videos about my products? Link to articles that mention my products?
6) Fan photos and story submissions about my products/website?
7) Can I link to relevant stories about my products and services?

If you’re stumped, you can always invite your colleagues to a brainstorming session about content strategy for your website or blog. Ask for feedback, and regularly engage in conversation with your readers in the comments. No one likes a hit and run poster, and you need to give your readers a reason to come back and read more of the content you put on your website.

Cover photos have the huge potential to create branding for brand pages, and having such restrictions on cover photos for brand pages would be a major letdown. Here’s what you would see on my brand page with Facebook’s Timeline:

Custom tabs still exist as you can see from “Portfolio,” “Services,” and “Buzz It Up.” However, they cannot be set as default tab landings, which is a drawback for page owners at the moment. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed by Facebook with enough feedback from developers and brand page owners. Originally, the tabs were “Photos,” “Likes,” “Events,” and “Map” in the place of the custom tabs, with the custom tabs ranking below.

You can “pin” the tabs you like in the order you want by clicking on the numbered icon to the right, which expands the module.

When the module is expanded, and you mouseover the tab icons and click on the little pencil icon at the top right of each icon, you’ll see that it gives you the ability to swap locations of the tabs. This is sort of a workable solution, but not a fully ideal one, for custom tabs.

You also get the ability to pin certain posts you want to the top on your Timeline, to increase visibility for fans. It allows you to highlight certain posts, promotions, and contests for fans.

You can change the dates of your wall posts. Or even hide them from the page. You still have the ability to target wall posts by location and language, much like the old Facebook brand page. What does it look like when you pin the wall post to the top? You get this little orange ribbon over the wall post module.

It’s a little odd, to be sure. The question is how this would affect the news feeds of your fans. Would they see this as a top post in their news feed when they see your fan page? Would Facebook’s EdgeRank put this down ahead of newer wall posts according to their “Time Decay” aspect? It’s not clear yet at this moment.

Now let’s take a look at another part of the new Timeline for brand pages, which is the “Message” area you see below:

It gives fans the ability to send you messages. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to filter messages, otherwise you’d get a firehose of messages from fans and potential spammers if you’re a popular brand page. You can turn off that option in the admin panel in the “Manage Permissions” area where you can deselect that.

I’ve turned off the “Message” option for my brand page because it’s not clear yet how that can be feasibly managed. And going back to the admin panel, here’s what it looks like below. You can see the latest notifications, messages, Insights, and the newest “likes” you have for the page.

When you mouse over “Manage” you see “Edit Page” which takes you to your page settings such as “Your Settings,” “Manage Permissions,” “Basic Information,” “Profile Picture,” “Featured,” “Manage Admins,” “Apps,” “Mobile,” “Insights,” “Help,” and “Deals.” We’ll be going into this in much more detail in our follow up blog post to this one.

Another interesting aspect to “Build Audience” is the ability to send invitations to up to 5,000 people. You can even export people from existing mailing lists into a .csv file to invite them to your fan page. If you’ve used e-mail marketing, and used filters to separate people into social networks that they utilize, then you could possibly get more qualified fans for your fan page. This also has potential for major abuse.

While we were checking into the Admin Panel, Facebook made an interesting change to the “Help” section. As you can see above, it allows you to request a name change for the brand page. That option no longer exists as you can see now:

Huh. Very interesting. Facebook apparently decided that wasn’t a feasible option for page owners at this moment. They might’ve gotten too many requests for name changes. That would have been potentially problematic with page owners requesting new names that are possibly duplicative of other brand pages’ names.

So far, it’s looking great for brand pages. There are some minor drawbacks and major improvements to be sure. We’ll continue blogging about this today at Buzzworthy Social Media with more posts to come. Got questions for us? Feel free to ask away on our fan page right here, or send us a tweet on Twitter. ]]> http://buzzworthysocialmedia.com/timeline-brings-big-changes-to-brand-pages/feed/ 0 http://buzzworthysocialmedia.com/why-facebook-is-leaving-google-in-the-dust/ http://buzzworthysocialmedia.com/why-facebook-is-leaving-google-in-the-dust/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:09:49 +0000 Noelle http://buzzworthysocialmedia.com/?p=441 According to data collected by the Wall Street Journal, Google+ isn’t clicking with people in terms of engagement and repeat visits. As a new social network, it’s “virtually a ghost town” with very few people that are actively using the network in comparison to Facebook.

New data from research firm comScore Inc. shows that Google+ users are signing up—but then not doing much there.

Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage.

Why are visitors spending so little time on Google+ and more of their time on Facebook instead? One of the great successes behind Facebook is the sharing of information between friends, family, and colleagues. When you’re on Facebook, you know who’s on your friends list, and you’re interested in the information they share.

Let’s say that you’ve migrated over to Google+ and you’re now there. You have Circles but most of the people in those Circles are also on Facebook. They rarely post on their Google+ accounts because they’re used to posting on Facebook, and they don’t have time and the resources to cross-post similar content.

So you see very little activity from your Circles, and you’re aware that the people you want to connect with are still on Facebook, actively sharing information. So why continue spending time and resources on Google+ when Facebook’s got it, and is so much better at engagement with visitors?

That’s why Google+ is falling behind Facebook when it comes to repeat visits and engagement. There are a number of ways that Google+ can do to fix this problem. They’re running TV advertisements, and inviting celebrities and large companies to Google+. Is it enough though?

It could be that Facebook has better brand affinity, and it’s a very well-known quantity to their visitors, and that Google+ can never catch up in this aspect. Right now, it’s too early to call Google+ a failure, but the signs aren’t looking good for the social network.

McDonald’s kicked things off on Thursday with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers, in a campaign meant to draw attention to the brand’s guarantee of fresh produce.

Later in the day, however, the burger company used a dangerously vague hashtag: “When u make something w/ pride, people can taste it,” McD potato supplier #McDstories

And people began adding in their #McDstories on Twitter, with most of those tweets recounting negative experiences at McDonald’s such as food poisoning, food origin horror stories, and various reasons as to why their fast food experience at McDonald’s were not positive. Apparently the promoted tweet had been up for two hours before it was pulled due to the negative feedback from users. The problem with the use of the #McDstories hashtag as we see it, is that McDonald’s did not see the potential problems with inviting an open-ended conversation on Twitter where the brand loyalty is not as strong as it is on their Facebook fan page.

Brand affinity needs to be examined on various social networks first, with an in-depth review of the mentions, tweets, and negative/positive stories regarding the brand using social analytic programs. On Facebook, the brand affinity is much stronger because in order to be a fan of McDonald’s, you have to “like” the brand on Facebook. There is no such thing on Twitter other than “follow” to indicate a brand affinity. It is easier to invite comments for feedback on social networks like Facebook and Google +, where the brand affinity is stronger.

Even though the Director of Social Media, Rick Kwion, said that the hashtag #McDstories accounted for 2% of the overall mentions of McDonald’s on that day, that hashtag had a huge negative impact in traditional media stories about the Twitter campaign used by McDonald’s. The company certainly learned a lesson from their hashtag the hard way. With that said, in undertaking a social media outreach effort like this, there is always the risk that the conversation can be co-opted and negatively impacted. Doing due diligence before such social media efforts can mitigate that risk.

Check the brand affinity on social networks through the use of social analytic programs such as Radian6, Actionly, Unilyzer, and other available programs before launching a planned social media campaign. Structure social media campaigns differently across social networks, and use a feedback based open-ended social media campaign on social networks where brand affinity is the strongest. Always ask yourself the question, “How would this impact my brand? Would this be a campaign that has a positive ROE (return on engagement) or a negative ROE?” Being proactive in this manner and being immediately reactive goes a long way in effectively managing your brand’s online reputation.

10. Don’t Post And Run!

Your wall on your Facebook fan page shouldn’t be treated like a classified listing of your advertisements. Treat it as a way to interact with your fans of your business in getting the conversation going by being involved in the comments, and regularly monitoring the comments on your fan page.

9. Post Relevant Content

For retail businesses like your own, post content that’s relevant to your fans to keep fan engagement up. For instance, you can post a link to a magazine article about what’s popular in season, and then post a picture in addition to that post of the seasonal item you have in stock at your retail store.

8. Ask Questions

Don’t be afraid to ask your fans questions about what they like about your business such as the products you sell! The feedback they provide is invaluable to your business. You can adapt your business quickly based on their feedback. Ask questions such as, “What’s your favorite item that we sell?” and learn from the answers your fans provide.

7. Run Contests and Promotions

To create greater interaction with your fan page, regularly run contests and promotions. You can hold a quiz campaign for the day through timed wall posts, and whoever provides the right answer, will get the prize listed in a later wall post announcing the winner. That is one example of doing a contest on your fan page. Another example is running a promotion such as a discount special on a custom tab for your fan page. You can also post pictures asking people to figure out who the designer or the brand is behind that product as a part of a contest, and whoever gets the right answer will get a prize that you choose. This encourages greater interaction with the fans in the comments through likes and shares of the wall post. It gives your fan page a greater affinity with your fans, thus ensuring it is much more likely to show up in their News Feeds.

6. Be Responsive

Always be responsive to whatever you see on your fan page. If you see complaints from your fans about your business, show immediate responsiveness by asking in the comments for the fan to contact you at a specific email address so you can resolve the problem. Otherwise, if you ignore the complaints, it makes it look like your business doesn’t care about addressing the needs of your customers. And who wants to like a fan page that ignores what you’re telling them?

5. Be Timely

Show consistency in when you post to your page’s Wall. Inconsistent posting can hinder the effectiveness of your fan page. If you post at times when most of your fans aren’t going to be online, the less likely your page will show up in their News Feed, and the affinity with your page is lessened as a result. You don’t want to lose valuable content by posting at the wrong times, or sporadically. Check your Facebook Insights to see which posts got the most reach at specific times, and then modify your posting schedule accordingly.

4. Post Different Content

Don’t be just content with posting links to articles or the odd photo here and there. Post videos, photos of your team, your products, and post commentary on all of these items in the wall post! For instance, you can say, “We had a total blast at the fundraiser tonight! Check out team member [insert name] with the band!” in the wall post when you upload a photo. The reason for posting different content that is relevant to your business and fans is because you want to keep your fan page interesting and lively. You don’t want your fans to get bored from the same repetitive links and predictable posts.

3. Use Custom Tabs 

Custom tabs are applications that you can add to your Facebook fan page. You can get custom tabs designed specifically for your fan page that best highlights your products, contact information, and encourages e-mail sign-ups for your e-mail list. They are an excellent way to set your fan page for your business apart from others, and in increasing sales of your products. These custom tabs have been shown to increase fan engagement on your fan page in terms of repeat visits back to your page to see the content on these custom tabs.

2. Use Facebook Insights

Regularly check your Facebook Insights to understand how your fan page resonates with your fans. Look at the reach of your posts to understand how effective your wall post was, and how many people are talking about the wall post. You’ll find that if you post certain content, they will get a viral reach. You also can see how many people clicked on your wall post. When you regularly check your Insights on Facebook, you’re being responsive to the needs of your fan page, and you can figure out how to better market your business to your fans.

1. Spread The Word

Tell your customers that arrive at your retail store about your fan page, and the fun promotions and contests you’re running there. Put up a sticker on your store door that tell customers to find you on Facebook. This will help increase your fan numbers. If you have a website, integrate Facebook onto your site through the use of a Facebook badge or social networking buttons. You can also run online advertisements on Facebook to promote your page to a targeted demographic in order to expand your business reach.

And my last official word of advice that I give to retail businesses is for them to have fun with their fan pages, and to think of it as an unique way to market to a new customer base that highlights the best aspects of their businesses. If they don’t like managing their fan pages due to other pressing business needs, it is recommended that they find someone who can do it effectively for them so their business can be best served well.

If you have any questions about this blog post, please reply to me on my Facebook fan page or to me on Twitter right here @RUbuzzworthy. 

The amount of fans you have depends on what kind of a fan page you have. If you’re just strictly a local business such as a restaurant, professional services, or a food stand, then there’s no need to spend thousands of dollars of advertising in Facebook to get thousands of fans all over the country. That would be wasted money with a ROI that really doesn’t reflect the local goals of your business. What you should be aiming for are at least a thousand fans or more if your business is located in a mid-sized city with a population of at least half a million people. You can do that for simply just a few hundred bucks in advertising on Facebook.

However, if you’re a business with the goals of selling lots of products to a wider customer base, then it makes sense to invest in large-scale online marketing to get a wider number of fans for your fan page. So that way your brand gets a competitive advantage over other business brands with similar lines of products. The number of fans you have on your fan page also forces you to think in creative ways about your brand, and how you can best interact with your fans to get them talking about your business.

Also, you can’t simply be content with just posting occasionally to market your products and your business. Think outside the box. What will engage your fans the best? A boring wall post with a simple status update about an event, or a wall post that links to a news article or your blog with a photo about the event? Your own Facebook Insights will likely have shown that rich media such as photos, rich content (i.e. link to relevant news articles, blog posts, or video), get a higher fan engagement than just simple wall posts. It’s because Facebook’s EdgeRanker algorithm tool tends to rank wall posts that contain rich media as having a higher engagement rate than simple wall posts.

If you have under a thousand fans and you’re in a small city, creative content on your Facebook fan page will keep your fans engaged. Fan engagement is important, not just for keeping your fan numbers the way they are, but for the organic nature of what they do with your fan page. Your fans will share your wall posts, “like” your links, rich media posts, and custom tabs on their News Feeds. It means their friends, who aren’t fans of your page, will get to see the content from your page on that News Feed. It’s organic growth, and it’s the best one because it’s all based on word-of-mouth about your fan page. You don’t have to pay anything for that. It helps keep your fan base easily manageable because you’re not advertising nationally, but locally, and your fans are from your city, so there’s a natural ceiling for them to reach.

On the other hand, if you’re a business looking to do national outreach about your brand because you want to get as many clients as you can for your products, you will need help to accomplish the number of fans you want for that goal. Large-scale online advertising is recommended in this scenario. One great way to keep your advertising content interesting is to simply advertise your wall posts as “sponsored story” ads so they appear as an unique way for people to interact with your fan page. Don’t post boring ads, just as you wouldn’t post boring content on your wall. Make them stand out.

And once you start your ad run, and you’ve optimized for the best ad content, you’ll see your fans grow for your fan page. When the ad run ends, the fans still grow largely by word-of-mouth at this point. But there’s the usual drop-off in the gains of fans for your page, and that’s fine. What it just means is that you’ve reached a normal plateau in your fans for your page. Now is the time to engage with your fans, and continue that organic growth through creative content such as custom tabs, rich media, and links to relevant news articles mentioning a product of yours or your business or what’s happening in your industry.

Don’t also be afraid to reply back to your fans. They love that! There’s nothing worse than a hit-and-run wall post where the fans respond, but no one responds back to them. Why should they put the time on your fan page when you’re not putting your time in replying back to them? It all comes back to customer service, and that’s what fan scaling the right way is about. Serve your customers (fans) well through creative content, smart advertising, and you will see the benefit of that investment back.

If you have any questions about this post, please feel free to reply to me on Twitter @RUBuzzworthy or on our Facebook fan page right here.

Then you see the usual share dialog window that enables you to share the wall post by a page or one of your friends, but here’s what looks different below as a result of the new update Facebook brought to the “share” function.

You can now either share the wall post on your wall, or post it to your friend’s wall post, or to a group that you participate in. You can even send it as a private message to people. This change makes the wall post sharing function better for people on Facebook, and heightens the value of a “trusted” friend who spreads the news about a business page, celebrity, or wall posts from another friends.

It makes sharing information easier, and although there may be security concerns about control of data from one group to another group, or getting direct spam from your friends on your wall post that is unwelcome, the potential for the new “share” function is welcome, and great news for those that use Facebook primarily to share information and marketers as well.