social media marketing Archives - Frameable Faces Photography

Recently I wrote an article here on the blog comparing and contrasting live streaming platforms to help people make some informed choices on which platform to consider between Facebook Live and Periscope for different types of strategies. It’s a solid piece if I do say so myself and I enlisted 4 people in the social media / entrepreneurial game I respect to include their take. That article is still on point and relevant, but this is basically a part 2 digging into a main advantage Facebook Live has for local brands.

I’m seeing more and more jarring evidence lately that points to Facebook Live as the best opportunity for small businesses and especially brick and mortars that operate mostly on a local level like us. Now to be clear, here at Frameable Faces we are NOT planning on “switching” to Facebook Live from Periscope overall. Periscope is still our first love for live streaming and our favorite especially for our Doug & Ally Morning Show that we start most of our days with. We don’t have plans to change that. But something happened this past Saturday that cannot be ignored as an obvious example of why Facebook Live is starting to pull ahead for our strategy as a photography studio as opposed to morning show hosts.

We broadcasted parts of an amazing photo session with twin babies…

Saturday we did a photo session here in the studio for twin one month old babies. The article with sneak peeks from that session will be available here on the blog soon. We did a bit of live streaming of the session and it was just cuteness overload! We’ve had plenty of babies in the studio and plenty of twins, but never twin babies! We started with Periscope and we even mentioned to our Periscope community earlier in the morning that we might go live in the afternoon with twin babies.

Periscope Results:

We Periscoped for 13 minutes and 13 seconds. 68 people watched it live. Everyone was genuinely enjoying it. People were commenting. Since the broadcast ended 39 people have watched the replay (7 more since the screen shot below) – most replay views on Periscope happen within 24 hours of a broadcast on the app. This is all fine – it was a fun scope and over 100 people got to enjoy it – nothing wrong with that at all! Here are the analytics provided by Periscope:

One more sidenote – as you can see above the thumbnail (the representative image from the broadcast) is me with a relatively silly face. NOT the amazingly cute twin babies from the broadcast. I have pointed out how important it is to be able to choose a custom thumbnail to the Periscope team but they haven’t made this a priority.

Facebook Live Results:

We then went live on Facebook Live right after the Periscope broadcast for 8 minutes and 29 seconds. There were maybe 5 – 10 people who tuned in to watch live. There weren’t many live comments if any… Granted we don’t broadcast on Facebook Live often or at regular times which can contribute to a small live audience, plus there are delays on the comments and it’s not as fun of an experience on Facebook. BUT….. I tagged Carlos (the dad) in the post who then shared the post and tagged me and his wife Gina in the post (he only tagged me and not Ally and me him and not Gina because he and I did the FB friending exchange) and then I went back and tagged Ally in the post, and then all his friends started to see the post in their feed, and a few of them shared the post, and then more people saw the post, and more and more people liked the post, which Facebook likes, so Facebook showed it to more people, and then a few more of those people shared the post, and so more people saw the post and they liked (and loved, and haha’d, and wow’d) the post and commented on the post and Facebook liked that even more so Facebook showed it to even more people and pretty soon the video had reached 3648 people and 2129 people watched it. Oh and there’s definitely a chance some people watched it because I chose an image of Harrison and Henry surrounded by Ally and their parents to represent the broadcast as you can see below (as opposed to just my face with a weird expression which I didn’t choose).

When a Periscope broadcast ends it just sort of fades into the distance of the feed of ended broadcasts… When a Facebook broadcast ends that’s when it starts to get going if it’s worthy of watching. In the case of Harrison and Henry boy did it get going…. let’s look at a few more stats which Facebook provides in about 200 different ways, sliced and diced – more information than you would know what to do with about the demographics of who watched – age, gender and a lot more. With Periscope you have to use third party apps like Fullscope or Eggdrp (both great by the way) to get any analytics worth a darn.

Now check THIS out. Here’s a visual representation of the viral nature of a really good Facebook Live video that I described in my run on sentence above (which was done purposely for emphasis haha).

This broadcast was the only one in the time frame of this graph. Note how the views climbed on the third and fourth days… the broadcast was on Saturday May 20th, but on Tuesday May 23rd 653 people watched it! You can see it spreading and the buzz growing! But wait there’s more….

Remember the emphasis in the title of this article is on local brands right?

This graphic shows me that 70.3% of the total minutes viewed of this video were viewed in MICHIGAN. Our studio is IN Michigan. This is the core of our target market for studio portraits from a practical standpoint. That’s who we’re reaching on Facebook – lots of potential clients who are friends of Carlos & Gina and friends of friends of Carlos & Gina. We have a physical storefront where we take pictures and it’s in West Bloomfield, MICHIGAN. On Periscope our audiences are 10% from Michigan at best and that’s probably very generous, not that there’s any data anywhere that tells me this conclusively. Now once again – that’s fine – we love our international community and the friends we’ve made around the world on Periscope – that’s part of what’s amazing about Periscope. We’ve traveled to photograph people we’ve met on Periscope which has been amazing and we’re even expanding our photo restoration business to clients on Periscope which isn’t bound by geography.

But if I’m advising a new local brick and mortar store on where to start broadcasting live and build community to get more people showing up at their door and becoming clients, I’m recommending Facebook first. I’m not saying don’t do Periscope per se, but if I’m picking one it’s Facebook. If I’m recommending a platform primarily to see the world, and have an amazing time for entertainment purposes and making new friends from everywhere, I’m still recommending Periscope.

Since we started broadcasting on Facebook (which we made a part of our strategy well after Periscope) we have more people saying “Hey I saw you guys doing one of your live uh…video things – like online! Looks like fun!” And I always would ask “Oh cool! On Periscope?” and they would say “On what?” and then I would say “Oh wait maybe you saw us on Facebook (remembering that yes we go live on Facebook now too)” and then they would say “RIGHT! Yeah I saw you on Facebook!” You know why they say that? Because EVERYONE IS ON FACEBOOK. Some are on Twitter where you can also catch Periscope broadcasts but not nearly as many and fewer still are actually on the Periscope app. When we started broadcasting on Periscope on March 31st, 2015 it wasn’t long before we were sure that within a year or two everyone would be on Periscope because it’s that amazing. Well we still think it’s amazing – we were right about that. But shockingly to us most people walking around on the street – the people we want to walk into our mall and into our store – yeah those people – still don’t know what it is.

These two broadcasts of the twins were done back to back, one right after the other with the same subject. Vastly different results. Results that favor Facebook Live for small local brick and mortar businesses. It’s the most obvious example I have, and while one example doesn’t necessarily prove anything, I can tell you that the conclusions I’m drawing here are not just based on this example alone…

Food for thought. For you live streamers – what do you think? There are more layers to this topic to be sure but I’d love to hear your thoughts…

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Frameable Faces Photography

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Doug Cohen provides social media training and services and can be reached at the following:

Mobile: 248-346-4121

Twitter: https://twitter.com/dougcohen10/

Instagram: https://instagram/dougcohen10/

LinkedIn: https://linkedin/in/dougcohen10/

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Frameable Faces Photography is a small biz retail mom & pop shop of Doug&Ally Cohen located in the Orchard Mall in West Bloomfield, Michigan, United States Of America!

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Ally & Doug can be reached at the studio at tel:248-790-7317 or emailed at mailto:info@frameablefaces.com

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/frameablefaces

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Being “Frameable” is an attitude, a community, a way of life – a life you would want to celebrate and display on your walls for all to see! Tell us… ARE YOU FRAMEABLE?

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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?