Tag Archives: facebook

Facebook Hashtags and Personal Posts

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A couple of days ago, I wrote an article about how dealerships (or any business, for that matter) can use hashtags in their social media posts to potentially increase exposure.

The biggest question I had was regarding hashtag visibility from personal posts so I thought I’d write a short article with that answer.

Facebook privacy settings trump everything.

What does that mean? If you put a hashtag in a post on your personal profile that is public, anyone clicking on (or searching) that hashtag has the ability to see your post. If your posts are limited to friends of friends, only those people can see those posts. If your privacy settings are “friends”, then only your friends would see your post in a hashtag search.. you get my point.

Unless your friends are hashtag-using people, hashtags have the most possibilities for businesses and Pages. That being said, it could be useful to create a hashtag for a conversation amongst friends (or a common interest or event.. say a birthday party or other group event) so that all of those involved in the conversation/event would have the ability to view all the posts, pictures and other related content easily.

So, there’s your answer. The visibility of your personal posts with hashtags rely completely on the privacy settings of THAT post so don’t freak out and think that everyone can see your hash tagged personal posts should you decide to use hashtags.

(Except maybe the NSA, but that’s a different story).

Facebook Hashtags and Dealership Page Marketing

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As you probably heard, Facebook has integrated hashtags into their system. This provides another way in which your dealership has to get exposure for their Page. The old rules still apply, though. If you have crappy content, it’s not going to help. However, if you’re posting good content, not only is it another way to get exposure but you might even pick up some new “likes”. Yeah, they’re not necessarily going to be people in your geographic area.. they could be from anywhere in the world. However, my guess is that Facebook users are more likely to click on an easily-clickable hashtag “just because” than to do a full on Facebook search for a brand name.

Obviously, it’s a brand new feature so who knows if people will use it or not. My guess is they will in the same way they do on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

My advice: start adding hashtags to your Facebook posts. Use hashtags that people would search for. Don’t worry about hash tagging your dealership’s name.. people will search for that if they want to see YOUR posts specifically. Hashtag your brands and model names (that are in the content posted, of course). Think about what people would be interested in and, if applicable, use those hashtags. Think minimal and relevant in your use of hashtags. Save the “reactionary” and “opinion” oriented hashtags for Twitter (ie. #justsaying or #noms or #FML) unless you’re going to try and hijack a hashtag a la Jello.

Hashtags (for me, at least) went live today. I decided to search #Ford and these are a few examples of what I saw. None of these are Pages that I “like” with my account. Keep these examples (of which there are MANY) in mind the next time you’re posting content to Facebook. Do you want your Page’s content in the mix?

P.S. The last one’s my favorite. :P

Are You Being Cheated By Facebook Promoted Posts?

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Cheater

Let me start by saying that I’m a fan of Facebook’s Promoted Post feature in general. If your goal is to increase your Page exposure and reach not only more of your fans but penetrate their networks as well, I’ve found that they accomplish that goal. They are especially useful for smaller pages with a fan count under 1500 where the typical cost to promote a post will be in the $5-$10 range.

In the past, on a particular Page which has 164 fans, the options available for promoting a post were $5 and $10 with an “estimated” reach of usually in the 2,000 range for the $10 option. Considering that a typical Page post will reach an estimated 16% of the Page’s fans (in this case approximately 27 people), this is a considerable difference. This Page typically gets good engagement and has a slightly large reach per post – typically between 40-100 with some posts even reaching into the 700 range without promotion (although this is rare).

Recently, Facebook decided to increase the available options to Pages with a smaller number of fans. I noticed this and decided to try testing it out to see what the results were.

Here were my options:

Facebook Promoted Post OptionsAs you can see, the potential reach increased from a maximum of 2,000 I was offered previously to 17,000. I decided to take the plunge and test out the $50 option and let the ad run its course over the 3 days (which, in case you didn’t know, is how long a single post will run in a promotion) so that I could see what the results were.

Here were the results:

Facebook Promoted Post ResultsAs you can see, this is considerably less than the estimated exposure Facebook promised me in their “estimate” of between 9,100-17,000 for $50. In fact, this should have been the results if I had chosen the $20 option.

I find it completely unacceptable (and false advertising) that Facebook would deliver the post to about 33%-50% of the estimate I was promised for my $50. I have noticed this disparity in the past but since I’m working with some Pages that have a smaller audience and the reach promised was much less, the disparity between the “estimated” reach and the final number has never been that large.

Bottom line is that, while I still think Facebook’s Promoted Post (or Boost Post as they’re now calling it) option is a good value for exposure, I will no longer have any confidence in the “estimated reach” promised.

Yo, Facebook. You owe me $30.

Facebook Threaded Comments – Replies – Not Necessarily Limited to Pages with 10k Fans

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Facebook is rolling out a new feature in which people are able to “reply” to comments on your Page’s posts creating a threaded comment so that replies to other comments aren’t mixed in with this big long (hopefully) chain of comments. This is great for Facebook pages with a ton of fans and is designed to help those Page administrators manage the conversations better.

To qualify, you are supposed to have a Page with over 10,000+ fans BUT, I was able to turn it on for my blog’s Facebook page and it only has (at this point) 624 fans.

If you’re a Page administrator, you may want to go into your Admin settings and see if you can turn this feature on or not. It’s super helpful in encouraging comments and keeping track of who is responding to whom and managing, responding and engaging in these conversations.

This is how you do it:

  1. Go to your Facebook Page.
  2. Click “Admin Panel”
  3. Click “Edit Page”
  4. Click “Manage Permissions”
  5. Scroll down and you will see a checkbox that says “Replies”, check that box and click “Save”.
If the feature is turned on, you should have “Replies” enabled. Find one of your posts and comment on your own post. If replies are enabled, an additional option to the comment will be “Reply”.. Ouila! Let me know if this is working for you or if I just won some sort of Facebook lottery or they consider me a superstar and are just getting me ready for this huge influx of fans in advance. (crossing fingers).

This is what your post comments will look like if you’re able to activate this feature on your Facebook page:

Or you can watch this video (or read this article) by Christian Karasiewicz that will walk you through it.

Social Media 201: Beyond Facebook and Twitter

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You’ve ventured into the world of social media. You have a Facebook page, promoted it in your marketing and in your store, started posting great content and the people that started liking your page are engaging with you. You created a Twitter account, have been tweeting and re-tweeting content, built a following and are starting to get re-tweeted and mentioned. Life is great! You did it!

…whoa, hold your horses.

As the title of this article indicates, Facebook and Twitter, while a great beginning, are far from a conquest of social media. If we were playing Risk, you just conquered Australia. There are a lot of territories left and some are pretty big. Let’s take a world tour and hit on some more social media sites as you take your social media efforts to the next level.

There are literally hundreds of social media sites. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about most of them, but there are a few that you should definitely have a presence on for your dealership: Google+, Yelp, and Foursquare.

Google + is the 800-pound gorilla in this mix. It has a total of about 250 million users and, while it does not have the level of engagement or activity that Facebook and Twitter has, it is essential to have a presence here. Google has migrated from a general relevance model of delivering search results to an enhanced relevance model on an individual level by integrating a searcher’s social network. G+ has the best SEO of any sites as Google, naturally, favors its own products. Google hosts 11 billion monthly searches which are mostly people looking for relevant and timely content. It is a different platform so you need to differentiate your G+ strategy from your Twitter or Facebook marketing strategies. Google searchers are looking for timely news, offers, information, articles, etc. about not only your dealership but your brand and models. This is the site where your most visible business presence will be through Google searches so it’s important not to neglect this network.

Many businesses think of Yelp strictly as a review site. While it is an important part of your reputation management and review building strategies, there are also strong social media components which exist that could be used to fully leverage your Yelp presence.  Yelp claims to have 71 million unique visitors. Yes, there are some dealers who have strong criticisms of how Yelp holds them hostage when a negative review appears. Did you know, however, that Yelp also has strong location-based components that you can leverage to make offers to people that are near your location? It can also inform them that you are there in the first place, if they didn’t already know. Make sure to explore all the capabilities of Yelp, have a complete and optimized profile and are paying attention to more than just the reviews.

Foursquare is a location-based service which is growing increasingly valuable. Foursquare has 20 million registered users which, according to the company, “check-in” over 3 million times per day and they are about to pass 750 million check-ins total. It is another free service that is also very low maintenance and can be leveraged to not only drive traffic to your store but steal traffic from your competitors. Users can leave “tips” which amount to mini reviews at your location. These are becoming increasingly important as Bing recently integrated these tips into their map search engine. You also have the ability to create “offers” that you can leverage to attract new customers. These offers appear on a user’s mobile device when they check-in at a location. The location doesn’t have to be yours, however. It only needs to be a business in the general vicinity. If your store is in an auto mall, a customer could potentially go onto Foursquare to check-in at your competition (let’s face it, every dealer is your competition when it comes to used cars). They will see a special icon that will indicate that you have an offer. Curiosity may lead them to look at it and, if it’s compelling enough, may persuade them to visit your store.

As you can see, there is more to social media than you probably ever imagined. No one expects you to master all the sites, nor should you. But you should be cognizant of which sites are available, which sites your demographic is using, and which sites are generating traffic NOW, not last month. Remember MySpace? AOL? Social networking sites come and go. The ones that are hot right now may not be in a year. Be where your consumers are engaging and know how they want to be engaged with, no matter where that is. Digital marketing, and social media marketing by extension, is an ever-dynamic field. If you pay attention, you’ll know where you need to be and what you should do when you get there. For now, these are a good start.

Article originally published in the October 2012 issue of the 3 Birds Marketing newsletter.