Tag Archives: facebook

It seems that you should care about Google Plus and now the new “Google My Business” after all, especially if you are a small business owner.

Google’s social media network (they prefer to call it a “layer”) has been around since June of 2011. Google Plus is not as popular as Facebook but it’s still Google and it’s not going anywhere. Does this mean you have to participate and get immersed in yet another social media platform? Not quite.

However, here is where you should pay attention. A while back I “claimed” Frameable Faces on Google. I just went on Google and verified that I am an owner so I could fill in the information that is there about our business. That is an important step because Google is obviously the most popular way to search the Internet. Regardless of how much or how little you bother with search engine optimization or social media, people are using Google to find you and they will continue to do so.

What I didn’t know is that at some point by claiming my “place” (my business) on Google, that prompted Google to create a verified Google Plus Page for Frameable Faces – I had no idea it existed. Kind of like a Facebook Business Page that they were calling “Google Places For Business” and now they have announced they have changed the name to “Google My Business”. If you’re a little confused it’s okay – Google has done a good job of confusing the marketplace with how they’ve rolled out their products.

The good news is that the new “Google My Business” does represent an opportunity. One thing I noticed when I went to the Frameable Faces page they created is that Google had been collecting data for me all along. It told me how many people had viewed the page (presumably from Google search results), how many people had asked for driving directions to the studio and where they asked for them from, what key words they used to find my listing – lots of good data!

Are you going to lose business by not using Google My Business? I can’t say that for a fact, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to ignore it. From just what I see locally very few brands know about this so don’t feel like you’ve missed the boat so far. The question is are you going to use this to your advantage going forward?

Here are a few benefits to setting up your page in my mind:

It just generally looks good – when someone does a search for your business on Google it looks better when the results represent a thriving and welcoming business – one that appears to actually be in the game.
Familiarizing yourself with this page and managing it can give you potentially valuable Google data and anaylytics about traffic and clients finding your brand via Google search.
Getting a slight edge on your competition since not many brands are taking advantage of this.
An opportunity to post and share fresh content in a spot where potential new customers might see it (as opposed to only a portion of your Facebook following for example). Look at the screenshot below. By doing a Google search for Frameable Faces this is what comes up on the right hand side of the screen. Notice the “follow” buttons along with a link to an article from our blog that I posted to the Frameable Faces Google page. It’s a way to capture fans directly from Google search results.

Don’t just take my word for it, check out this article about the benefits of this new tool. Listen, I am not predicting that Google Plus will become a pervasively popular social media site with the masses like Facebook. It is definitely growing now but it might not ever reach that tipping point where “everyone” is on it….and then again it might. Either way we already know the search engine is dominant, so at least set up your brand properly for now with Google My Business.

Doug’s Rant – Don’t Make These 5 Marketing Mistakes Online

April 18, 2014

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

People make mistakes online when trying to advance their interests all the time. Some of the miscues are flat out awful, but some come from someone just trying to make a dollar and not being aware of the etiquette on social media sites. I figured I would try to come to the rescue with 5 tips that can apply to you personally or your brand. So please, don’t make these 5 marketing mistakes online. Here we go…

Ugh – CLEARLY an online marketing mistake…!

Do NOT send requests to strangers on LinkedIn without a professional (or any) headshot in your profile. Why would I accept a request from a stranger with no picture for me to see if I know them? I’ve posted about this before regarding Facebook too but I feel it is much worse on LinkedIn. Some people venture on to Facebook without knowing much about it and are just getting their feet wet. Fine. But LinkedIn is a different story – people are literally there trying to network this way. Like going to a networking event with a bag over your head.
Don’t forget to be social on social media. I wrote an entire article about this on another blog. If you are posting things but not engaging with people it is like going to a party and talking at people, and then walking away when they open their mouths to reply. Make sure your content isn’t all about you, and even if your content is fantastic be sure to reply to people who take the time to comment on it. This applies to every social media site. Go to their page and see what they are up to as well. Be genuine about it because people can spot a fake. Comment back and build those relationships.
Don’t set up your new business on Facebook as a personal profile. This can be an honest mistake but it is a big one. So your brand is a female born in Detroit? Tell me is your brand single or in a relationship? Not only does this look silly and signal to people that you don’t quite have a grasp on what you’re doing, but you lose out on many tools for monitoring your progress with the data Facebook provides to business pages. If you have already made this mistake you should correct it – make an announcement on your personal page that you are launching a proper Facebook business page for your brand and invite people to like it.
Dont mispel werds ore yooz inkorect grammer. It reely duz hert you’re kredibillity. Enuff sed. Hear iz ann inphografic too hellp yoo whith grammmr.
Don’t bore us (or offend us) with your politics. While I think it is never a great idea to espouse your politics online, it is even more important that you not do this with your brand. Find a way to inject your personality into your brand because that’s important, but you have to be able to do it without being too personal. This is another one I wrote about a while back on this blog.

There are certainly plenty of others (like not posting more than one Instagram per day for example). I am willing to admit I have made plenty of mistakes myself but I see these out there a lot and they have been on my mind lately. So make sure you don’t make these 5 marketing mistakes online! What other mistakes have you made or see others making on a daily basis?

Doug’s Rant – Show Yourself! Embrace YOU! December 20, 2013

December 20, 2013

by Doug Cohen

1 Comment

Yep – time to rant.

You cannot be actively social on social media with NO pictures of yourself. Your photo doesn’t have to be your profile picture, but if you send me a friend request and I’m not totally sure who you are and you have no pictures for me to see of you then why would I accept your request? It’s like knocking on my door with a bag over your head. I’m not going to judge how you look – you look fine – I just want to see who you are. If you are comfortable enough to reach out then I will likely accept you especially if I know you. But if you are not a friend offline – close enough for me to recognize you instantly by name – then you have to show yourself to be my friend. I can’t be friends with a sunset or a landscape or you based on all the other people you have pictures of in your profile instead of you. If you want to be on Facebook to connect with your close circle, remain private to everyone else and not be found by the public then you can choose to have no pictures of yourself and that’s fine – really. I’m talking specifically here about people who send me a friend request and expect to be social online.

Embrace You

Okay – got that off my chest.

Now let’s talk a little. Listen I don’t know exactly why you are reluctant to put yourself out there. We have clients who think they “photograph terribly” and “have never taken a good picture” and on and on and on… I see both sides of the coin here. On one hand the camera doesn’t completely lie in the sense that yes – that picture is you so it’s for the most part what you do indeed look like, but on the other hand there are plenty of factors that can contribute to a good picture. I could go into all those factors that a professional photographer brings to the table (there is obviously a huge difference and maybe that is what you need for your profile picture), but instead I want to focus on YOU first. This may sound cheesy (okay significantly cheesy) but the fact is that everyone is unique and beautiful. It is as true as the Earth is round. You are the only one of you – perfectly unique and the perfect version of you. Sure maybe I look at a picture of myself once in a while and think “ugh” for a second but you just gotta let that go – it’s that simple. If you can do that, if you can accept yourself, then you won’t “photograph terribly” regardless of whether you are in front of a friend’s iPhone or a pro’s Canon 5D and anything in between. If you are scrambling to figure out what your resolution will be for 2014 then first resolve right now to forgive yourself of any of your self-perceived flaws and shine! Embrace you! You absolutely deserve it.

Doug’s Rant – Facebook Comment Photos, Events! and Glipho – July 20, 2013

July 20, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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It’s that time again…. 🙂

Several topics to discuss this time out – please share and give feedback in the comments!

Facebook Makes a Cool Change

I discovered this little tidbit on allfacebook.com and I think it could have some pretty big implications for how brands interact with their followers on facebook. I think the fact that people can join in conversations on a facebook page with photo attachments is very cool. As you can tell in the above photo by my little avatar I’m logged in as Doug Cohen, I’ve clicked on a photo on Leaf & Berry’s page that we took, and I can include a photo with my comment if I want. We embrace the popularity of photography at all levels and this could bring new opportunities for our peeps to participate in fun and creative ways by attaching their photos. Our wheels are turning… stay tuned and let us know how you have seen this used and what ideas you have.

An About Face… To Event Photography!

As you may know in the past if you asked us if we photograph events our answer would be “no” with a few exceptions. Well that has changed… Ally and I are still not personally looking to be event photographers – we have our obligations as parents on the weekends for starters. However, our fantastic second photographer Angela Bell has proven to be fabulous with events! We tested her out on some informal affairs such as out-of-towner dinners and engagement parties and she did really well. Then she stepped up to a couple bar/bat mitzvahs and she really blew us away! More on this to come but suffice it to say Frameable Faces is indeed now in the event business and we are excited!

Glipho – Another Cool Social Network

I signed up for a Glipho account and you can follow me here. What is Glipho you ask? It’s a social blogging site – a cool way to pull content in from multiple platforms (instagram, twitter, blogger, WordPress etc.) into a very simple blog interface. You can blog on Glipho, make friends, follow and like other blogs and interact with people. I’ve chosen to use it as an outlet for myself as me – Doug, as opposed to another branded Frameable Faces page. Yes I will be posting some FF blog posts there and hopefully bringing more attention and readers back to this blog, but I like to dabble in other topics like music, food, and football and I guest blog elsewhere so I like the idea of this being an outlet for my “personal brand” so to speak. Do you “Gliph”? Let me know if you do!

Quick Hits

A photo definitely made huge news this week with Rolling Stone putting a photo of the surviving Boston Marathon bomber on the cover. Let’s just say this sparked a LOT of controversy and debate as you probably know….
Detroit made huge news this week with the bankruptcy announcement – I wrote a love letter to “The D” a while back that warrants a repeat link here….
Scott Bourne has written another buying guide – this time for camera lenses. Anytime he shares this type of info it’s worth bookmarking.

Doug’s Photography and Social Media Rant – May 31, 2013

May 31, 2013

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

It’s been an interesting week or so in photography and social media – from a certain Internet-based company CEO’s assault on professional photographers, to facebook’s announcement (finally) of verified accounts. A couple of interesting nuggets happened here at Frameable Faces as well, so while I’m not sure if this is something I’ll do weekly or monthly (or ever again haha), I thought a little column about various current events as they relate to our business, the photography industry, and social media might be a good idea.

Not feeling so “yahoo” about Yahoo.

We haven’t used Tumblr or Flickr before so while Yahoo acquiring Tumblr and making changes to Flickr didn’t affect us, the comments Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made during the announcement that “there’s no such thing, really, as professional photographers…” caught our attention a little. I watched the news conference and while I don’t like the stuffy overly “professional” suit and tie approach in corporate America, I also think your CEO should sound slightly more articulate than this person. I was not impressed. Scott Bourne has shredded her and she is treating him like some random troll to be ignored. Scott Bourne is a very influential professional photographer (maybe that’s why she hasn’t heard of him) and I believe her comments and her subsequent non-apology will come back to bite her.

Facebookus Promotionus Interruptus

We pride ourselves on being pretty savvy when it comes to social media – we try to do it the right way and follow the written rules and (more importantly) the unwritten rules, but we still make mistakes and we are still learning. Heck, there is something new to learn every day if not every hour. For example we got tripped up last week in some changes to facebook terms that we were unaware of.

I must say I find this “no more than 20% text” policy a little arbitrary and bizarre. We spent 5 dollars to promote a fundraiser for Relay For Life West Bloomfield. We created it as an “event” on facebook, and there is an option to add an event cover photo. The dimensions for this cover photo are 714×264 while the standard timeline photo is 851×315. Not sure why the slight difference here other than to encourage users to create unique content for your event different from your timeline photo? Fine – makes sense I guess. Logically I figured I’d keep it simple and include the three logos of the participating entities with a simple phrase “Let’s Help Defeat Cancer!”. When we created the graphic we didn’t think it represented a call to action with phone numbers, websites etc. which we thought must have been the issue when we received the email. However it turns out that facebook “quietly” updated their terms on March 6th to allow for calls to action so that wouldn’t have been a problem. The problem is this new 20% text policy, which I’m fine with when it comes to a timeline cover for your brand, but isn’t an event by nature a call to action which requires a little bit of text to announce the event? They let me keep the cover photo up, they just wouldn’t let me promote the event. I didn’t think my promoted post was going to include the cover photo in it anyway so I’m still a little confused. Weird… No biggie – I suppose this year (our first year at the Relay For Life) we can take some photos and next year include those as a collage for the cover photo for any fundraiser events we are doing. That will look better anyway than this quickie we put together this year… While I’m at it, here is the link to our team page if you want to donate to help us fight cancer.

Relay For Life Fundraiser - Facebook photo

Our event cover photo which violated the new 20% text rule....

Yes This Is The Real Doug Cohen

I must admit that there have been times when I’ve had to do a double take on fake facebook profiles of famous people – wondering if it’s really them. Some of the fakes are obvious and some can fool you even if it’s just for a second. With twitter you always knew because of the little “verified” check next to the profile. This is finally coming to facebook and facebook will determine who gets the verified label. First will be celebrities and public figures but eventually it will come to highly followed people and pages. I’m wondering since the limit for personal friends is 5000 for everybody what the threshold will be for personal verification. Pick me!!! Pick me!!! I wanna BE somebody!!! 😉

Other quick hits…

Really want Vine to be released for Droid! Hurry up Vine developers!!! Thinking this could be a cool platform for Frameable Faces and this seems to be taking forever…
I’m becoming more active on Yelp (yes this is a link directly to my profile) as a way to connect with people – spend some time there – you’ll see what I mean.
Had a really nice genuine interaction on twitter (I know right?) with a charming Australian tweeter I met named Susan Israel. Reflecto was a little snarky to her of course (remember he tweets) but she took it in stride. You should follow her at @bondi_izzy.

Social Media Stream of Consciousness Pt. 1 – Facebook and Google+

February 28, 2013

by Doug Cohen

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Okay so this is a little change of pace… Usually when I blog about social media it’s the standard “5 ways to….” or “7 tips for….” or “the 6 best….” – some type of informative lesson with the perfect title designed to explode our SEO to Jupiter and make our blog the envy of every photography studio East (and West) of the Mississippi. Okay well maybe that hasn’t quite happened (yet) but one can dream…..right?

This time it’s a little different…

This is part 1 of what could be a series of streams of consciousness about social media as it relates to Frameable Faces, being a small business owner in general, or whatever else I feel like ranting about. It is a stream of consciousness after all, so who knows what I’ll say right? And just because there’s a part 1 doesn’t mean there will be a part 2 – that could depend on the response, so be sure to comment and share this post or lose this potential opportunity forever (see – when all else fails just scare them into sharing – that should work).

Facebook Fail?

I am a facebook power user. Have been for 5 years. Facebook has changed and I’ve blogged at length about how to navigate the changes. I practice the techniques I’ve preached when it comes to staying the course, but I will admit that I’m not perfect (HA) and yes occasionally I get a little annoyed at how facebook manipulates the user experience to generate money (this usually happens after I post something boring that no one shares). While you’ll normally find me preaching to stop whining about the facebook changes and create better content, I’m just being honest here – I do whine once in a while. Observe:

Text-only posts are getting the most reach right now by a mile for business pages. I had a text-only post on Friday get a 450 reach with no likes or comments. It was a dud and yet it still went out to almost half of our following. The following day I posted a link to a blog post I thought was a good one – no one agreed with me since no one commented and it only reached 93 – only slightly more than one fifth the reach of the text-only post. Then there’s the recent status of ours that contained a link to a blog post which got 25 likes and 9 comments and only reached 306. Oh yeah facebook – that’s really hilarious. Hahaha. Ugh. BUT – the other way of looking at this is that I’m okay with 306 people seeing a great post and a good percentage of them clicking on it and appreciating it. That’s a more successful post than a post that went to 450 that no one cared about. And if my other post that only went to 93 would have been more interesting then more than 93 people would have seen it. Remember to take accountability for your content. So you see how that goes? I have my moment of weakness, but then I right myself and get back on course creating the best content I can. That’s what happens in my head.

That said, I notice as an end user that my “most recent” items in my newsfeed aren’t recent at all. Sometimes the most recent is two days old – I can see how facebook is holding back the content I want to see, so I have to go find the info manually. Annoying.

Facebook Future?

This all makes me wonder about the future of facebook – it’s not as cool of a place as it used to be. Too much garbage, spam, memes, chains, links, etc. I just wish people would post a little bit less of that stuff and more of their own thoughts, and I wish brands would stop littering with salesy posts, crappy ads and specials begging for business. Sigh. Now I’m in no way thinking about jumping off the facebook bandwagon, but I’ve always been careful to make sure our eggs are never only in the facebook basket either….

Looking on the “plus” side of life….

I’ve actually been thinking about revisiting Google+. I’ve always thought it was a ghost town, but a very interesting thing happened on Scott Stratten’s blog recently where he ripped G+ for inflating their numbers based on total Google usage across all of their products and a lot of people ripped him in the comments… he defended himself for a while but eventually he posted an updated retraction when he was proven to have had a slightly incorrect reading of the numbers. Keep in mind that Scott Stratten is one of the baddest dudes in marketing in my opinion (he calls what he does UnMarketing) and whether it was just a technicality that prompted his retraction or if he is really softening his stance on G+, it was the visceral reaction by so many on his blog defending Google coupled with the changes on facebook that is making me look at adding G+ as a regular spot for us. I’ve referenced Scott here not to point out that he was wrong, but to point out that I think he is almost never wrong and this got my attention. The question now is how we might use G+. We mostly use social media platforms for one of two reasons:

1) The “age old” (at least a few years) social media criteria of be where your peeps are

2) We use the platform for a specific purpose – either for a certain kind of content (like Instagram is our behind-the-scenes platform) or maybe it’s a good place to get info (still our favorite use for twitter – not the only use, just our favorite). I don’t like to simply duplicate content and behavior on two different platforms (part of the reason we don’t automate from one platform to another).

So that leads me back to G+ where I suspect that there is some exploration to be done specific to photography – seems that some photogs/bloggers/hangout-ers are getting a lot out of it. It might be a good time to make some connections there if it’s really still growing. Disclaimer here – we actually have a G+ page for Frameable Faces and yes I have been posting links to new blog posts there, violating my own rule of not simply duplicating content. I only do it because it takes two seconds and early on people were saying to post there to help with SEO. Google is the #1 search engine after all. Is it helping? Who knows… But I do know that G+ is not likely to be going anywhere. We just got Google computers for our kids…. Google is a monster. Do you use G+? Personally? For your brand? What do you like about it? I really would like to know.

So there you have it…. a little bit of my mind in words…. fascinating right? Stay tuned…. 🙂

When Should You Promote A Facebook Post? Part 2 – Results

February 9, 2013

by Doug Cohen

2 Comments

Last month we wrote a piece about when to promote a facebook post which included a case study, and we mentioned that we would post a follow up with the results.

For starters let’s just say the results were….. successful to a degree but also a little mixed and confusing. We spent $15 and it did seem to reach a lot of people. From that standpoint we feel like we got what we paid for, but there are plenty of discrepancies in the numbers. Sure there is a chance I’m just not understanding them completely but I think I’m a bright guy and if I can’t figure them out then I’m guessing I’m not the only one. The engagement level was not quite what I’d expected either but I think there is a learning opportunity there.

Total Reach

First let’s look purely at the number of people the post reached. Above is the graph that breaks it down into three categories. When we selected the $15 dollar (highest) option it indicated that the reach we were paying for would be in the 2.5k – 3.5k range. When I hover my cursor over each category the organic (people who like the page and either clicked on it themselves or had it appear in their news feed before I started the promotion) shows 372, the paid shows 1637, and the viral (people who saw it as a result of a friend liking, commenting on, or sharing the post) shows 76. By my math that adds up to 2085 – not 1894 and still way short of the estimate I was given. However….

They also provide a promotion summary where I’m told that the paid reach of the post is 3215. Uh…. okay…. so which is it? 1637 or 3215? If 3215 is the number then I’m pleased with the reach. We had about 940 people following our page at the time and we promoted this to our followers and their friends so if $15 bought me 3215 people seeing this post I’m good with that. Side note: I have since found out from a friend who manages a page with a much larger following than ours that it would cost them much more to promote a post – facebook charges considerably more to a page with 100,000 followers than they do to a page with 1000 – like hundreds of dollars instead of $15.

Engagement

So far we’ve looked at the pure mass numbers of people reached. Now let’s dig into how the people who saw the post responded to it. First we’ll look at engaged users:

There were 33 engaged users (number of unique people who clicked on the post), 50 other clicks, so there were people in that group of 33 who came back to the post and clicked on it more than once. There were 10 link clicks – this was a little disappointing since I thought that the thumbnail of the damaged photo of the tent in Vietnam would compel people to check out the link. 14 stories were generated (likes, comments, shares) and only 3 out of thousands hid the link (negative feedback) which is nice – it didn’t turn people off. Overall not huge numbers of engagement. This also doesn’t tell me what kind of collective impact the post had by showing up in thousands of news feeds, but I suspect that there was some impact that I can’t measure immediately. We don’t typically advertise and I’m not an expert in open / click through rates etc. but I do know that when I promoted this our engagement level was over 1.5% and it ended up at .63% When I promoted the post it had met the criteria for Jay Baer’s STIR strategy for when to promote a post which includes waiting 6 hours to promote and only if the post has over 1% engagement. I may raise that to 3% going forward especially if it proves to be true that there will be a natural drop off in the percentage engagement once you send it out to people who may not be familiar with your brand. The last graph of data they give you is the break down of the “stories generated” or people “talking about this”:

11 likes (even though the earlier summary says 14), 2 comments, and 1 share. I think it’s great when someone shares a post because the post then reaches a whole new audience. One share isn’t much, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Conclusions

So as I mentioned before I would say the results on this one were mixed. The confusing numbers are a little troubling – even if it’s only $15 dollars I at least want accurate numbers. Facebook is a public company now and these tools are part of the ways they are trying to generate revenue to show Wall Street they can be profitable, but they should clean up the data if this is so critical to their future. As for whether we would promote again? I would say yes but still very selectively. This one while not a complete flop was not a home run but that’s okay – they aren’t all going to be home runs. That’s on us to make sure we learn what content has the most value and appeal for our followers.

Have you paid to sponsor or promote a facebook post? What kind of results have you seen?

When Should You Promote A Facebook Post? A Case Study

January 18, 2013

by Doug Cohen

3 Comments

This is really a follow up post to “Restoring History” which focused on photo restoration. Here is a little social media strategy discussion – as of this writing the strategy for the “Restoring History” post is in a test mode as we speak, and hopefully we can get some results we can learn from as we go along….

The Option To Promote A Facebook Post

For those who may not know, Facebook rolled out a new tool a few months ago where you can pay to promote your status updates so that they will reach more users. They also changed their algorithms so that posts don’t automatically reach as many folks as they used to without paying. If you post something that people love, comment and share then you can still get good results but it’s not a gimme like it was before. Many people became very upset about this when they saw their reach suddenly dwindle unannounced. I’ve written in the past about staying the course and not freaking out about it – in a way it’s a good thing because now boring lame content doesn’t get the free ride it used to get and good content that is useful and interesting still gets rewarded. Meanwhile if you want to give your content a boost you can pay to have it promoted.

Identifying A Guru For Some Guidance

Jay Baer is a social media strategist and author whom I follow and he posted a great article with the criteria he uses for determining How To Know When To Promote A Facebook Post back on 10/27/12. If you manage a facebook business page it’s worth reading and bookmarking. In short he discusses a 4 part “STIR” criteria that includes a waiting period to figure out first if your post is engagement worthy on its own, and the suggestion to promote a post that has a link to click on or some call to action.

Other Factors To Consider

Before yesterday we only promoted twice. Each time we did the minimum level and we only promoted to people who already like our page. There is also the option of promoting to people who like your page and their friends. Depending on your product, your overall Facebook strategy, and the post you are promoting there are a few factors to consider in addition to “STIR” when promoting:

Organic vs. paid approach. We’ve been fiercely committed to earning Facebook likes one at a time without gimmicks to inflate our numbers. We want our content to be entertaining and useful. Being “salesy” is spammy and boring. We want people to like our page because it’s likeable – not because we beg for it or flood their news feeds (they’ll shut us off if we do that anyway). Too many promoted posts can threaten that aesthetic which is why we had only done it twice before.
First impression if you go outside your likes. If you promote a post to your likes and their friends keep in mind that this post may be for many their first exposure to your brand. Is this post focused on a topic that is more tightly focused on current clients? Make sure the post serves as a good first impression and consider whether it has broad appeal.
Geography and goal of the post. Make sure you are going to get the proper bang for your buck. If you are a local business that can only serve local clients then you may want to be careful about promoting to your likes and their friends. You may spend money reaching too many folks who are out of state and may never be your client. Then again word of mouth can travel out of state and then back into your neighborhood from afar so it’s not that black and white, but just be sure to consider what are you trying to accomplish with the additional exposure you are paying for.

The Case Study

So we’ll let you in on the strategy we used yesterday when we promoted the post “Restoring History”. We did the maximum amount with the option of promoting to our likes and their friends for a three day period. First off the post met all 4 of Jay Baer’s STIR criteria before we promoted it. We also considered the 3 additional factors outlined above:

Even though it’s a promoted post which by definition isn’t exactly an organic approach, we feel it is interesting and useful content which keeps with the spirit of how we attract folks to our page. I’m not promoting a BIG SALE! or running a cheesy contest to just gain empty likes. If people follow us as a result they’ll likely do it because they appreciate the content – it will expose them to our blog and maybe they’ll see there is real value here. Like we mentioned before, we do NOT promote often and that won’t change.
Even though photo restoration is NOT our core business by any means, I don’t mind this post creating a first impression of our studio to people who don’t know us. It’s a thoughtful post that will show we have something worthwhile to say and we think it has broad appeal. Not a bad way to discover Frameable Faces.
This is one service and maybe the ONLY service that we offer that we can offer to people out of state without them ever visiting our studio. While I don’t anticipate a ton of out of state photo restoration business, in theory as long as someone can scan the damaged photo and send it to us we can do the rest – have it restored, print it, ship it. Therefore if going outside of our likes takes us out of our local geography here and there in the process that’s okay.

We will post an update to share the results good and bad. Let us know if you’ve had experiences with promoted posts and if you have anything to add!

Facebook First Aid For Brands – How To Survive The New Changes

November 7, 2012

by Doug Cohen

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I wrote a guest post back in May for The Collective where I echoed the predominant thinking about how your blog (and website) should be the center of your online universe since you own them, as opposed to your pages on Facebook and Twitter that you don’t own. You don’t know what might happen with those sites and you can’t control it. Well something indeed happened to Facebook…

Money changes everything.

The short version is Facebook went public, it didn’t go well, and now they are scrambling to make more money – fast. They have Wall Street investors to answer to now and everything has changed. I get it – they are a business. The problem is how they went about this. Now stay with me here… They encouraged brands to build a following by engaging with their fans, and then once the brands acquired the fans Facebook took away the ability to reach the fans unless the brand pays to “promote” posts to the fans who were already following the posts. A major bait and switch.

The dilemma…

Keep in mind that our philosophy at Frameable Faces like many others has been to grow our likes and our reach on Facebook in a totally organic way – steadily building relationships fan by fan without contests and cheesy promotions. This suddenly has become more difficult and it raises a two part dilemma:

I’m not in love with the idea of my peeps seeing my posts because I paid for them to see them. I want them to see our content because they like it and the posts are worthy of being seen. Facebook used to ensure your posts would show up in the news feed of people who regularly interacted with your brand. Your reach was largely a result of successful engaging posts. Not sure if that’s happening at all anymore…
Even though we’ve had some success with diversifying on sites like Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter to name a few, we haven’t been able to ween ourselves completely from Facebook for reaching our peeps or driving traffic to this blog for example.

So what next? First what NOT to do…

I read a great article by Ken Mueller on 10/22 that stated in part to “stop trying to game Facebook’s Edgerank” – in other words don’t try to cheat the system because shortcuts are not the answer. People are trying to find ways to do this like moving brand content to their personal pages for example. While I have used my personal page to promote our studio from time to time I’ve done it in a very limited fashion, and with a couple exceptions it’s usually when I’ve written a blog post that is more universal like tips on social media that I know everyone can use. If you start doubling up your content on both your business and personal pages your message can start to get lost. Think of it as making a social call on your personal friends to market your studio to them – this isn’t the exact same thing but it’s similar – in real life it’s a little awkward, in online life it’s a little spammy. The people who subscribe to our page (personal friends or not) subscribe there to follow our studio, the people who friend me want to be my friend – not necessarily my prospect.

So What Next? What TO Do…

The best bet seems to stay the course and focus on creating great content, and make sure all your eggs are never in one basket – especially a basket you don’t own like Facebook. However Facebook isn’t going anywhere and it’s critical to be able to adapt to these changes. One way to adapt unfortunately is to yes, spend a little money to promote a post here or there to make sure you continue to reach your audience. Which leads me to the following tip.

A Specific Tip I Learned From Trial and Error

I paid my first 5 dollars to sponsor a status update to see what kind of result I would get. The number of people it reached was a little disappointing, but here’s the tip – this was a post that no one commented on or liked (pretty pathetic I know). But misfires happen once in a while to the best of us, and these posts are NOT the ones you want to promote. Afterwards I came across an article by Jay Baer about when to sponsor posts and one of the things he mentioned was to only promote a post if after waiting 6 hours it’s exceeded a 1% engagement rate. Then give it a boost. Don’t try to boost a dog that no one is responding to in the first place. Promote a status update that is already proving to be engagement worthy.

Hope this helps! Please comment with any feedback or helpful tips on this topic!

5 Ways to Use Social Media to Your Advantage…… as a Person!

April 10, 2012

by Doug Cohen

4 Comments

At Frameable Faces we spend a lot of time on social media and facebook in particular. Sure it’s primarily how we market our business and I personally spend a ton of time on the various platforms because I consult on on the side, but it also dominates much of the conversation with our clients in general because we post sneak peaks and/or video clips from the sessions on facebook, this blog, YouTube, even Google + a little, and we tweet as well so it’s just naturally a popular topic. We also pin, use LinkedIn (although frankly we have a ways to go on LinkedIn as a brand) and a few of the others. Based on my own observations I’m not sure the typical casual end user knows where to go for help to get more out of social media for themselves. The social media “gurus” focus much of their content on how brands can build and engage with their peeps, but who is helping the customers to get the most out of social media? People still seem to get frustrated with facebook or don’t quite get twitter for example. So while this is by no means a comprehensive list I thought I’d provide a few of my own tips to help you manage and benefit from the information available on social media platforms.

1. “Like” and more importantly interact with your favorite brands on facebook. More and more companies are dedicating resources to maintaining a presence on facebook and interacting with their customers there. The company website will have information sure, but you can usually interact with your favorite store, restaurant or TV show in daily discussions if you like on facebook. Keep in mind that hitting the “like” button, adding a comment to the conversation or even sharing something you find really worthwhile with your facebook friends will help ensure that future posts from that brand continue to show up prominently in your news feed. This is why the interact part is so key. Plus by liking, commenting and sharing you are putting your own stamp of approval on things that are important to you for others to see (which is one of the social aspects of social media). So as you can see you can essentially craft your own personal flow of the information you care about on facebook.

2. The “unsubscribe” button is your friend. If that annoying acquaintance from high school finds you and insists on telling the world that it’s cold outside every time it’s, uh….well…. cold outside, or that they didn’t sleep well, or who you should vote for, you can just hover over their status update and unsubscribe from their updates. This goes for all of your settings when it comes to customizing your content and your privacy. I still hear a lot of people say they don’t want to be on facebook or don’t like facebook because they don’t want people to know a bunch of information about them, they don’t want to be in contact with a bunch of people from high school they don’t care about, or they don’t care what people ate for breakfast. Facebook has evolved a lot over the last couple of years and you don’t have to share anything you don’t want to share, you can select who sees what, and you can unsubscribe from annoying status updates without potentially hurting someone’s feelings by de-friending them. These are all easy and intuitive tools and if you don’t understand them then ask someone who does. It’s very easy to tailor facebook to your interests so that it becomes a valuable source of information while still filtering all the noise.

3. Follow your favorite brands, news outlets, blogs and teams on twitter. If facebook can function as a good flow of information and interaction with friends and brands, twitter can positively be your personal AP wire. I remember when the first smartphones came out and were shortly followed by sports scores apps where you could pick the teams you cared about to get updated scores. Cool right? Except they never worked, you had to launch the app to get the updates and then they were barely ever updated. Now many sports teams will tweet frequent updates during a game beyond just the score, including stats and even brief mentions about how rowdy the crowd is or if the momentum has shifted. If you want to follow the Detroit News you’ll get breaking news throughout the day. If you follow local blogs you can get updates on what’s happening around town. If you follow your favorite brands you can get updates on their products and content related to those products. You can tweet and retweet as well and build relationships but you don’t necessarily have to to get a lot out of twitter.

4. Make use of lists on twitter. If you start to really dig twitter and find that it’s a great way to stay up to speed on the things you like you may start to find that following too many tweets becomes a little overwhelming. Unlike facebook where your interaction and/or unsubscribing can help shape your news feed, on twitter you are either following or unfollowing a tweeter and that’s pretty much it. You might miss some tweets you may have cared more about because they quickly made their way down the wire behind a slew of other tweets from all the tweeters you are following. That’s where the use of lists can come in handy. You can create lists within twitter and name them by category, slot all the different feeds into the categories and then view the feed for each category. Some of our lists (most of which I’ve left as publicly viewable if you’re interested – you can even subscribe to them) are “Social Media focused”, “Local Detroit / Michigan”, “Photography” and “Bloggers”.

5. Have fun and be smart about it. This is general advice but people often talk about how each new platform is just a new “time suck” – a way to keep themselves from being less productive. Pinterest for example can certainly be that way, but if you think about it as the virtual pinboard that it was designed to be then it can be useful – as if you were pinning things up on a board in your kitchen for use later. YouTube? Subscribe to the official channels of brands, people, teams, things that are of interest to you instead of just aimlessly searching for the new fun popular videos.

What are your favorite tips? Now it’s your turn to interact – remember?