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Why Do Social Media, from 2019 to 2020

From awareness to sales in 2020.

As we approach 2020 we look at why we do social media.

In the past social media hasn’t been something measured with a direct return-on-investment (ROI). It’s been mainly used for brand awareness and customer / potential customer engagement.

The shift to get an ROI on social is here. Social media performance marketing consists of using ads to reach a certain traditional goal like clicks, lead generation, or a sale as opposed to traditional engagement such as follows and likes.

This is still a long game of brand awareness and customer satisfaction. It’s still vital to do brand awareness to make customers cognizant of your brand identity and why to choose you. But it’s also important to couple that with conversions.

Social Media How-To Videos

One type of content that is powerful for both SEO and Social Media is “how to” content. “How to change a tire”, “How to tie a necktie”, “How to test for mold toxicity”, “How to find an independent insurance agent”, or “how to bake cookies” are examples.

Recently I lost my power steering pulling into a client’s parking lot. I recalled that my car’s main belt can come off and that is a fairly simple fix (until you get to a mechanic) but I forgot exactly how the car’s belt attaches.

Fortunately I looked up how to fix it on YouTube and it included a diagram on how the belt fits and the correct pathway.

Creating good “How-to” content is a great way to build SEO and social media credibility at the same time.

Joining and Posting to Groups

Joining other groups can be beneficial.

One underused Social Media strategy is joining and posting to groups.  Facebook has a few basic structures:

Personal Pages

Business / Public Figure Pages

Groups (open / closed / public / private)

We at Alley Cat Social sponsor “We are the Working Homeless“, an online community of people (now non-profit) who, despite being homeless, are working. They can be hidden in plain sight but the community creates a safe place to share, encourage, and grow.

The person who runs it, Kimberly Gonzalez, constantly joins other groups. There is some caution here to consider:

It can be considered spammy to post the same things in multiple groups. Be original and thoughtful. Add value to your posts,

Be careful and know the group’s individual specific rules. One group we belong to only allows advertising posts on Fridays.

Posting events in other groups should be done thoughtfully with the target audience in mind and sparingly. Don’t post a Dog meetup in a Cat’s only group.

Joining groups can be a great way to expand your brand and exposure. Give it a try today!

Joining groups can expand your reach and brand.

Maximize Facebook Live with a Facebook Watch Party

If you pre-plan a Facebook Live there are several ways to maximize it.

• Post paper flyers
• Send out emails via mailchimp / constant contact
• Do lead up videos to post and promote the event

But how do you promote outside your base and attract new viewers who aren’t familiar with your brand?

It actually involves stepping away from common sense and corporate branding to go to the grass roots: ask your people to host individual ‘watch parties’. What is a Watch Party?

A watch party is where individuals share the video they are watching, in this case, FB Live, so that their friends are notified and can join in. It’s not done on the corporate level, it’s done on the individual level. Groups can watch, comment together, and build more engagement. The benefit is that individual sharing is much more credible than regular business sharing. It also creates a shared viewing experience.

You can either have a viewer / employee create a post that starts a ‘watch party’ or for a FB Live event you can simply have an employee login, view, and ‘share as watch party’. The person posting can also invite individual people to join them but the real power is in the notification to their friends that watch party has begun.

What that does is it transfers credibility from them to you. We are careful with social media credibility and how we lend it out as individuals. Being signed in as an individual over a business lends greater credibility as a whole when sharing content of the business.

So on your next FB Live, start a watch party and watch interest in your brand grow.

Make a Baby Yoda Meme Online

Last week we brought you the Screaming Woman / Cat Meme maker. With Social Media tends come and go. The Screaming woman / cat has been replaced by Disney+’s surprise breakout, Baby Yoda.

Check out the Baby Yoda Meme Generator at ImgFlip and make your own for your own social media!

Social Media Tools

CoSchedule allows you to organize your online marketing efforts.

In the past few years we’ve used a few social media tools.

One we’d like to hi-light today is CoSchedule, a plug in for WordPress. CoSchedule acts as a marketing calendar, content organizer, social organizer, work organizer, and asset organizer. While being incredibly robust, there’s one feature we want to hi-light today: the Calendar.

CoSchedule allows you to schedule posts in advance for WordPress and share them on schedule to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. What we do is start with a content strategy of what we are going to post outlined elsewhere and then CoSchedule becomes a data entry exercise.

We are able to begin by scheduling a new WordPress post and editing the post in WordPress itself, then switching back over to the CoSchedule calendar to create the message for the rest of the platforms. It’s that easy.

For videos it’s even easier. We simply create a social message and share it on the other platforms.

CoSchedule also allows you to stagger your shares, set your dates in intervals, and other neat cool tricks.

At the end of the day, for WordPress sites, CoSchedule is a great go-to tool for your social media marketing

Using Social Media for Customer Service

Know the ways a angry customer is trying to reach you!

Customers are learning how to use social media for customer service. Your ability to monitor and respond to this is crucial.  How are they using it? Some ways are less obvious and more damaging than others!

Facebook

A customer can post straight on your Facebook page but in general it’s not very visible, send you a message but only you see it, or for maximum impact for all to see they can post a comment on an ad or a regular post. The ad can be the most vulnerable since it’s something you are paying for. It’s important you respond fully to the concern as the post will have a wide distribution.

Twitter

While Facebook comments can be deleted by your company, Twitter Tweets can’t. They are much more visible to the general public. They simply follow and ‘Tweet’ to your page with a message limited to 280 characters. The public posts will appear to people who follow your company and the customer. What you want to do here is ask the customer to reach out to you via direct message where the public can’t see and where there isn’t a character limit and you can authenticate them and their claims. Keep in mind a customer can also amp up their complaint by posting their complaint and tagging your company. Then it appears to all your company’s followers. It’s much more visible to you and the public while also much more damaging to your brand.  Responding by taking it to private direct message is crucial but also addressing it with an apology is crucial to help all who see it know you address customer concerns / complaints.

More information

You can find more information from the customer perspective at Consumer Reports, “How to Solve a Customer Service Problem Using Facebook or Twitter“.

Make Your Own Woman Yelling at Cat Meme

It’s taken over Social Media. It’s the “Woman Yelling at a Cat” Meme. And now you can make your own!

It’s great for branding, satire, and humor on your social media feed!

ImageFlip has a great creator here: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/187112276/woman-yelling-at-cat

How to Maximize a Facebook Live

Tips to Maximize Your Facebook Live

Are you looking to maximize your next long form scheduled Facebook Live event? We are referring to events 15-45 minutes long that are pre-planned to foster engagement. (This is for planned events not spontaneous ones)

A few ideas:

• Distribute flyers to local places prior to the event referring to the subject, speaker (if there is one), time, and Facebook page.
• Use Mailchimp / Constant Contact / other email software to email your list twice before the event, once the week-of and once the morning-of.
• Post a 5 days out daily about the event with short snippets to preview the event’s topic via video.
• Have an influencer do a ‘watch party’ so their followers are made aware of the event
• Engage during the event and repeat the basic subject of the FB Live every 5 minutes to catch new viewers.
• Have someone else monitor the comments for potential engagement.

Take your FB Live to the next level!