8 Ways to Make Your Business More ‘Human’ on Facebook

Facebook comprises the bulk of daily Internet-related activity for many of its 1.4 billion users, particularly those who access the site via mobile devices.

For some, Facebook is the Internet — functioning as a portal for news and information, not unlike AOL and Prodigy did in the early days of the World Wide Web.

More importantly, Facebook is a place where its users hold conversations with family and friends and where they routinely share stories of the happenings in their lives, both significant and trivial.

Taking into account how well Facebook has woven itself into users’ lives, businesses need to find ways to integrate their message — indeed, themselves — into conversations in a more human, people-centric fashion, maximizing the value of the “social” aspect of social media.

Here are eight recommendations for you to consider.

1. Think Customer Service, Not Just Marketing

More than likely, your marketing efforts on Facebook won’t translate into sales — at least not directly. Even when sales do occur, they typically comprise only a small percentage of your overall volume.

Instead of merely thinking of your Facebook page as a sales and marketing channel, view it as a vehicle for customer service, such as in this example from AnswerFirst Communications, a telephone answering service.

You could also use Facebook Messenger to hold personal, real-time conversations with customers. Facebook is testing a business version of the platform, for which you could sign-up.

2. Provide Information Your Customers Care About

Most people operate with a “what’s in it for me” mindset, which means the content you produce on Facebook needs to focus on customer concerns and interests rather than your own.

That is not to suggest an occasional promotional post announcing a sale, new product, or contest is out of bounds, only that, when creating content, you should put the needs of your customers first.

The article “8 Facebook Post Types for Boosting Engagement” contains tips for content that will resonate with your customers.

3. Put a Personal Face on Your Company

In social media, people relate better to other people than they do to businesses. So, on Facebook, put your people at the forefront.

Through its “People Make the Difference” initiative, Knight Oil Tools, an oilfield services company, routinely showcases employees who have reached particular milestones, such as employment anniversaries.

Stories don’t always have to relate directly to business. When feasible, share personal stories, such as activities involving you and your employees, hobbies you enjoy, birthdays, or other meaningful events. Even use an occasional “selfie” when doing so.

For example, Brendan’s Irish Pub, based in Camarillo, Calif., celebrated its HR director’s birthday with a Facebook post.

The rationale: As people get to know you on a personal level, they may become more interested in your business.

4. Feature Your Customers

There are several ways you can shine the spotlight on your customers. Ask them to share photos of themselves using your products, praise them publicly via a post, or start a “customer of the week” series. Testimonials are another good way to feature customers while building brand reputation and trust at the same time.

SmartPak, an equestrian retail company, features profiles of customers talking about their use of its products, via Facebook posts.

5. Share Your Support for Charitable Causes

If your company supports a local charitable activity, such as a fundraiser, share it in a post. Include photos of you and your employees participating in the event. Many people — Millennials in particular — appreciate companies that express social consciousness and concern for their communities.

Community Coffee, a retail coffee brand, used Facebook to promote its “Military Match” coffee donation campaign.

6. Incorporate Humor

Reading and sharing humorous stories is a big part of what draws people to Facebook. While your business needs to stay true to its corporate culture, when possible, insert some humor in the form of a funny story, anecdote, or image.

T-shirt retailer, Johnny Cupcakes, borrowed inspiration from the newly released “Mad Max” movie to create this humorous image.

7. Tell Your Company Story

Form relationships with your customers and fans by telling them why you started the business, lessons you’ve learned along the way, and plans. Also, share your company values and the passions that drive you.

The Facebook page posting interface includes a feature called “Milestones,” intended for just that purpose. It enables you to build a chronology of your company’s history that includes its founding, significant achievements, and landmark events.

8. Talk About What Inspires You

Another reason people use Facebook is to find inspiration, so share what inspires you. Post quotes and photos, stories about people who mentored you, or significant events in your life, both personal and professional.

Even though Facebook is notorious for triviality, it is the meaningful moments that occur in a person’s life that others respond to most.

Conclusion

Facebook may not be the best avenue to sell your products or services, but it is a platform where you can sell “you,” and where your business can express its individuality and unique personality.

It is a place where you can socialize with your customers, developing a more personal relationship with them over time. As people get to know you, the trust that will accrue as a result could, in turn, lead to sales.

7 Ways to Get People to Share Your Content

People who are new to content marketing sometimes say, “I want my post to go viral.” Or, “We want content guaranteed to go viral.” It’s a great goal, but even the best marketers in the business don’t go viral every time they publish.

Getting a post to go viral requires a mix of first-rate content, a responsive audience, and serious content promotion skills. It is rare for an unknown blogger or videographer to come up with even a genius idea and have it hit the mainstream.

While viral hits are unusual, practical marketers with reasonable resources can see a viral win at least a couple of times of a year. They just have to understand their audience, content promotion, and what content tends to get shared.

We’ve covered content promotion in other articles. (“The Secret to Successful Content Marketing” is a recent article.) But we have not considered what makes people share content. So let’s take a look at that now.

There are two levels of sharing content. First, there are the deep psychological forces that shape our behavior. Then there are the more tangible, quantifiable things that get people to share — like added images, colors, and features that get us to click.

Psychological Forces Behind Sharing

It appears no one, even online, likes a sour puss. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found people are far more likely to share positive content than negative. Other data supports this.

HubSpot’s Dan Zarella, for example, found negative comments suppressed audience growth.

The U. Penn researchers also found people shared content that inspired awe in them. Awe was the most powerful indicator of sharing. That’s also what Noah Kagan, the Internet entrepreneur, found after he studied 100 million articles and how they were shared.

Practical, useful content is also far more likely to get shared. You can see this all over the Internet, in “most popular posts” lists on almost any site. “How to” posts do well, especially when they are easy to understand and to apply. The New York Times discovered this in their study, The Psychology of Sharing. Ninety-four percent of the people they interviewed “carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient”.

How to Get People to Share Your Content

1. Make it easy for people to share your content. Any more than 2 to 3 clicks of a button, and it’s too much work to share your content. One simple example of making content easy to share is “tweetables”. Blogger Michelle Shaeffer recently added tweetables to her posts and got significantly more traffic.

2. Ask them to share it. Don’t make people remember that they could share your content, either. Remind them with a call to action. Pinterest pins with a call to action get 80 percent more shares. Tweets that ask people to retweet them get 51 percent more retweets than tweets that never ask.

3. Use images. Tweets with images are 94 percent more likely to be shared, and photos on Facebook get 53 percent more likes. According to media firm Social Bakers, 93 percent of the 5,000 most shared posts on Facebook last spring were photos. Only 3 percent were status updates.

It works for Twitter, too. Tweets with images are 92 percent more likely to be retweeted.

4. Create “round-ups” as blog posts or other content. Round-ups are a content format. You ask a bunch of experts one question, then round up all their answers in a blog post. Round-ups can also be SlideShares or audio recordings, but most of the time they’re blog posts.

Round-ups can get very high share counts. That’s because once the post is published you can reach out to everyone who participated in it and suggest they promote the post. Experts who get asked to do roundups typically have large audiences. So instead of just you promoting your post, you have all the experts you worked with promoting your post.

Round-ups leverage the principle of influencers. They are just one tactic of the growing popularity of “influencer marketing.” Here’s some more evidence of the power of influencers.

5. Write listicles. Listicles are articles based on lists. This post is a hybrid listicle. Some people look down on listicles as being too formulaic. But for better or worse, listicles get shared more than almost any other format. That’s why people like me keep writing them. To see an example of how widespread listicles are, check Jeff Bullas’s very popular blog. These are the most popular posts on his site.

Eleven of those twelve posts are listicles. Noah Kagan’s analysis of 100 million articles also confirmed listicles get large amounts of shares. In his study, only infographics get more shares than listicles.

6. Write strong headlines. We published an entire post on how to write better headlinesa few months back. It’s worth a read if you want to write better headlines. Your headline largely determines whether or not your article gets shared. 80 percent of people will never read beyond your headline.

One of the most important keys to writing good headlines is grab to your readers emotionally. There’s a tool that can measure the emotional power of your headlines, and even give them a score. It’s the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing ValueHeadline Analyzer.

While this tool is helpful, don’t abuse it. Don’t promise things in a headline that your content can’t deliver. Facebook recently named this “linkbaiting,” and has banned it.

7. Write long-form content. The blogger who advised us all to “write epic s*&%,” was on to something. Epic content gets shared. Three different studies support this.

Here’s what the Buffer app blog found on a recent content audit.

Here’s what Neil Patel found.

And finally, here’s Noah Kagan’s data.

There’s plenty of proof that longer posts get more shares, but less than 5 percent of bloggers write posts longer than 1,500 words. That’s according to Orbit Media’s survey of 1,000 bloggers from earlier this year.

Those are just a few ways to get people to share your content. There are dozens of tricks of content creation, content promotion and audience engagement that I haven’t mentioned here.

What’s your favorite way to get people to share your content?

6 Tips on Using LinkedIn for Business Development

IMAGE: Shutterstock

I was an early adopter of LinkedIn, using it to manage my business network, and I’ve attended LinkedIn seminars for my business school alumni. I thought I was making great use of the social network until I really started using it to grow my business.

Here are the lessons I learned that are universally applicable to anyone doingbusiness development and looking to improve their ROI:

1. Get a new profile picture.

I regularly get contacted by people through LinkedIn and the first thing you take in is the picture. If the picture you have is a selfie, a holiday snap, or your security badge picture, kindly delete it. The only thing scarier than these are those people with no profile picture. You are selling yourself first, then your company. If a person’s profile photo was taken in an airport lounge, my first thought is that I’m not buying.

I had an ex-colleague of mine write me and tell me to remove a grim selfie from my laptop’s camera. He told me I looked unconfident and it was doing me no favors. I’d used it to replace a former security badge photo I couldn’t stand. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

I recommend getting a professional photo taken in a semi-formal setting. Get a few and use them on your website and your blog, and you will justify the cost. One company I met recently whose employees all have fantastic pictures is Santa Monica’sPeloton Docs. That’s how you nail it.

2. Document how you met people.

There is a great feature on LinkedIn called “How you met” that is located under your connections’ profile details. If like me you are regularly meeting people at networking events or in meetings, this is a great tool to store the story.

What did you talk about? What are their interests? Trying to keep that level of information in your head for a lot of people is just too much for me. I also find it is personal to my relationship and doesn’t really have a place in my CRM system.

Once your connections start to increase, finding ways to retain the personal touch of a smaller network is vital.

3. Make sure you have your contact details listed.

We all struggle to keep our contacts up to date. One of the easiest ways to share your details is through LinkedIn, as you only need to share with your connections.

While many people get communication forwarded from LinkedIn to their regular email accounts, it seems many do not. So make it easier for people to find you and connect. I discovered I’d left an old dead phone number in there for a year or so. That was not the smartest move.

4. Don’t contact your competitors with your sales pitch.

One of the biggest supports to me psychologically over the past year setting up my firm is the number of unsolicited InMails I get from competitors. They clearly have a volume-based approach to selling that I’d never consider for our firm. That being said, there have been a couple of tactics people used that I liked and adopted. (No, I’m not telling you what they are.)

It helps me in positioning my business to understand how others are pitching and the types of objections I know I’m going to need to handle to win over new business.

5. If you are contacting someone, make sure you’ve done your research first.

It’s quite easy to churn out InMails (see #4 above) at volume. I am pretty certain that they deliver terrible returns without you doing your research first. I prefer to only contact people I am certain I can help. This means saying no to a lot whom we may be able to help.

I define help as either information I have that’s of value to them, or a service I know that will help them. Most of the time I lead with the first, as I intend to give it free regardless of any future commercial relationship. The discipline of this work has helped me refine and refine my LinkedIn searches and tactics to improve my ROI.

6. Publish and consume interesting and relevant content.

This seems so straightforward, but so many people miss it. You will stand out more if you publish content that has some value to your audience. This increases the likelihood of a warm inbound lead in the future.

You also need to keep reading too. I enjoy posts from a range of my contacts. This keeps me as connected with my markets and industries as when I was surrounded by hundreds of co-workers.

HOW TO USE FACEBOOK GRAPH SEARCH

Why Facebook Graph Search?

Facebook has made a series of changes to Graph Search. Now search results are indexed by Facebook (rather than Bing) and include people, posts, hashtags and locations. They include both friends and people in your extended network (i.e., friends of friends, people with similar interests and people nearby).

The important thing about Facebook Graph Search is that it’s a semantic searchengine. That means it tries to give you results related to the context of your search terms.

For example, if I search for “Orange is the New Black,” I get results that show status updates primarily from my friends and the pages I’ve liked that have mentioned or discussed the show.

The semantic part of that search is that Facebook knew I was most likely looking for the HBO series, not a citrus fruit. Facebook was able to analyze the context of the phrase and only bring me relevant results about the book and/or show.

Search results for Orange is the New Black with Facebook Graph Search.

So how does this affect you as a marketer? Facebook’s Graph Search opens up a new world of opportunities to target users. Insight, research and discovery are intuitive with the new setup—you can target and filter audiences and optimize your interactions with them.

#1: Check Out Competitors

Searching for your competitors—or even your own brand—in Graph Search will show you all of the talk throughout the network.

There’s a wealth of information to search for like company name, products or services, hashtags, comments, users, press and reviews.

Do a search on several of those options to find out how your competitor is engaging with people. Are they commenting on or liking related posts? Is that interaction done via their page profile or by personal profiles from people within the company?

Knowing how competitors interact with people to increase their brand recognition gives you access to what’s working for your competitors, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

Before investing in a paid campaign, research the advertising styles of your competitors. Check out what’s getting shared and commented on, and what’s leading fans to create content of their own.

Research successful competitor tactics with Facebook Graph Search.

If you find that users are responding to discounts, you can begin to use that tactic yourself. But it’s not enough to create discount codes. How will you get those codes in front of the right users? Look at where competitors and users are posting or sharing to figure out the right place for your message.

As you analyze your Graph Search results based on competitors, examine your data closely and look for patterns. If you see that they (and users) are engaging heavily in one area, make sure you’re there too. Target your marketing and push for your brand to be where the action is.

#2: Look for Overlapping Interests

An integral part of content marketing is figuring out what your audience likes, aside from your brand. Knowing that information gives you new paths for engagement that will deeply interest them on many fronts.

The new Facebook Graph Search helps you find those interests. For example, do a search for “posts by people who like X” (where X is your brand name) and identify the common themes among the posts. Watch for interesting or surprising topics and look for additional keywords to search for.

For example, you may find that your audience is talking about Dancing With the Stars. You may not normally associate that popular TV show with your brand (and so you wouldn’t search for it), but it’s obviously important to your customers and leads.

OK, you’ve been surprised. What can you do with that information? Try to discern how your audience is interacting with the show (or whatever topic) within Facebook.

Graph Search results for Dancing With the Stars.

Keeping with our DWtS example, you may find that the same video of dancers dressed as the Mario Brothers keeps coming up. Now you know that your audience enjoys and shares humorous videos and updates.

Armed with that knowledge, you can think of ways to integrate that kind of content in your upcoming campaigns. The main idea here is to engage with your customers on their home turf.

Do another Graph Search for people in a certain location and find out if they have more than one interest in common, which can reveal trends in small subgroups.

Take that information and work on filling holes in the market and creating shareable, engaging content. When you can identify a complete profile of people in a subgroup it’s much easier to design content suited to their needs.

Do a combination search to find interests shared by fans in a location.

By pinpointing your target audience and their interests, you’ll be able to provide content with optimal relevance and engagement potential.

When your market feels like you care about and understand them, you’ll be able to cultivate loyalty and encourage brand participation—and isn’t that why you’re here?

#3: Research Hashtags

Hashtags aren’t just for Twitter and Instagram—Facebook users include them in their updates as well. If you’re looking for a way to unite people around your brand and intrigue those who aren’t yet a part of your community, hashtags may be the thing you’re looking for.

If you’re already using hashtags, do a Graph Search to see who’s using them and how. If you’re not using hashtags, you can still glean some good information from Graph Search.

If you’re not sure which hashtags to search for, head over to Twitter and see what the trending topics are, and then come back to Facebook and plug them into Graph Search.

Find trending hashtags on Twitter to plug into Graph Search.

When you’re analyzing your audience and their behavior, the most important thing is to look for trends. If you see posts across your network using the same hashtag, even if the tone or point of view of the posts varies, you’ve stumbled upon a gold mine.

If there is already discussion surrounding the hashtag, then jump in and be part of the conversation. Work the existing engagement to your advantage and tailor your interactions to match the discussion.

Over to You

Why reinvent the wheel? Use Facebook Graph Search to see what is and isn’t working for your competitors and your shared audience. Use that knowledge as a jumping-off point for your next campaign.

Sometimes you can get so locked up in your product that you may forget your audience has outside interests. If you take the time to find those interests, you can use them to guide your marketing tactics.

The bottom line is that Facebook Graph Search is more than an improved feature. It gives you insight and access to what your fan base is looking for.

Social Media Tools That Help Optimize Your Time

Discover how to Optimize your time with social media tools.

# 1: Hire Out Social Media Signups

If you do not have social media profiles and pages set up for your business yet, hire someone or use a service to create them for you . Companies like KnowEm offering a service where clause for about $ 85, theywill create full business profiles and pages for you on 25 essential networks.

Get your profiles and pages set up on the top 25 social networks.

Your name will be reserved on various social networks, and you can build up the profiles at a later date . Once you passed the hurdle setup, it will be much Easier to maintain them.

# 2: Monitor Your Social Inbox

Stay on top of your interactions on a regular basis. Rather than Constantly checking all of your social accounts, use a platform like Sprout Social to monitor your latest notifications from Twitter and Facebook .

Set up a social inbox to make it Easier to find and reply to public and private social messages.

After you connect your social profiles to the app , just go to your social inbox to see public mentions, comment replies and private messages from Twitter and Facebook accounts . You’ll still have to visit LinkedIn and Google+ to stay on top of Those notifications .

# 3: Keep Tabs on Your Reputation Through Email

To find out When people are talking about you , your business, products or services, set up a service zoals Mention . You’ll get notified by email anytime someone mentions your business on social media using a branded keyword search.

Set it up so you’re alerted to any mentions of your business on social media.

After you receive an alert , click on the links for each mention to view it in your dashboard Mention . You can then choose to reply inside your dashboard or view the original post on social media .

# 4: Curate and Share Valuable Content

Posting valuable content from your industry is an excellent way to keep your social media accounts active. Plus, it helps position your business as an excellent source of information.

Use IFTTT (If This Then That), Feedly , Gmail and Buffer to easily share curated content to your social media accounts . IFTTT is a free service That automates actions among different platforms, while Feedly payback from you to subscribe to your favorite blogs and Buffer helps schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

If you do not already have a Gmail account, grab a free email address and continuous.

Here’s how to curate content to keep your social media accounts active.

First, connect your social media accounts to buffer and set up a schedule for each account .

Set up a schedule on Buffer for all social media accounts.

Next, select all of the accounts you want to post your curated content to the default axis . Just check the circle to the left of each chosen profile.

Check the circle next to the default social accounts you want to post to on Buffer.

Now, go to Buffer’s How to Email Guide . Leave this page open so you can grab the custom email address That Allows you to schedule updates to Buffer via email for IFTTT .

Go to Buffer’s How to Email Guide to grab your secret Buffer email.

Now, use Feedly to subscribe to the best sources of content Within your industry . Create a free account and use the search box to look for specific blogs or blogs on relevant topics .

Find the best blogs in your industry on Feedly, and then subscribe to them.

Now that you have your favorite blogs and your buffer info, use IFTTT to put it all together.

Sign up for a free account IFTTT . Then create a recipe That Allows you to post any items you save for later Feedly to the social accounts you selected as default . The recipe will start with Feedly as a trigger channel .

Create an IFTTT recipe using Feedly as the trigger channel.

Once you’ve connected your account to Feedly IFTTT, you’ll get to select articles saved for later from the Following options as a trigger.

Create a trigger to have new articles saved for later.

Next, select Gmail as the action channel .

Set up Gmail as the action channel.

Connect your Gmail account to IFTTT, so you can select Send an Email as an action .

Use Send an Email as the action.

Now, configure the email to your secret email address buffer, the Article Title field as the subject line and the Article URL into the body of the email .

Customize your email to tell Buffer what to post to your default social accounts.

Once you’ve saved your recipe, test it by going to your Feedly account and saving an article for later. Just click on the bookmark icon next to a station you like .

Save articles for later Feedly.

Now, go back to your IFTTT dashboard and click on the refresh icon to force your recipe to run .

Force your IFTTT recipe to run to test it.

After a few minutes, go to Buffer and shouldering you see the item you saved for later in Feedly in your default social accounts “queues in Buffer .

Review your saved article from Feedly in your Buffer dashboard.

This May Seem like a long setup. However, once everything is connected, all you have to do is visit Feedly on your desktop or use the Feedly app on your mobile device, and save articles for later good.

All of the social media accounts you marked as default in Buffer Those articles will share with your audience at the times you scheduled them.

# 5: Research Your Competitors’ Social Media Presence

Another Way to Assess and reconfigure your social media strategy is to see what others in your industry are doing.

Rival IQ is a powerful competitive research toolthat payback from you to quickly add your business and your competitors to a landscape . Rival IQ pulls all of Their social media data into one dashboard, so you can see how they’re performing Compared to you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and YouTube .

View the social dashboard on Rival IQ to see how your social media performance stacks up to your competitors.

You will even receive regular email updates to alert you to top content and performance on social media .

Read a simple recap of your social media audience growth, activity and engagement.

This report payback from small businesses to keep tabs On Their (and Their competitors’) social media presence without having to use multiple tools or platforms.

# 6: Publish Social Media Testimonials

In most cases it’s time-consuming to collect testimonials and recommendations. The need to format them So They Properly display on your website just adds to the challenge.

Here’s the good news. Claustrophobia offering great products and services, you likely already have people who are singing your praises on social media. Easily display positive mentions from Twitter and your Facebook page on your website, using the embed code provided by bone healing networks .

On Twitter, click the three dots under a tweet to get the embed code .

Easily embed tweets axis testimonials on your website.

On Facebook, just click on the timestamp for posts on your Facebook page . You can then click on the drop down arrow at the top right to get the option to embed the post (sometimes this is under More Options).

Find the embed code on Facebook to post testimonials from the platform on your website.

Although LinkedIn does not have an option for embedding Their Recommendations on your website, there is an easy way to do this. Start by connecting  Spec Toos  to your LinkedIn profile to import all of your Recommendations . Then, select the Recommendations you want to display .

Select LinkedIn Recommendations to display on your website.

You’ll receive an easy-to-install Embed Code That You can add Wherever You want your Recommendations to show . Get one recommendation at a time for free, or for $ 10 a month you can add the widget-which will show up to 12 at a time and slowly rotate through the rest.

Add an interactive LinkedIn Recommendations widget to your website.

Back inside the Spec Toos dashboard, you’ll get stats on the Recommendations That get the most attention for your business .

Recommendations see-which resonate best with your customers.

Use testimonials you get from your social media to raise your profile and build your business.

# 7: Routine Outsource Social Media Activities

While a social media presence is important for any business, some businesses have absolutely no time to handle Their social media. Individuals who manage a business on their Own have to focus on the products and services they deliver. Or maybe They just do not have the time to learn how to do it properly.

Fortunately, outsourcing your social media management is another option. Hire someone to keep it alive until you can devote more time and resources to it.

There are lots of great social media consultants and services Specifically designed to help small businesses run Their social media for less. For example, 99 Dollar Social will update your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts with new content once a day every day of the week (including weekends) for $ 99 per month.

If you do Decide to outsource, take the time to learn how the pros do it, so you can be a part or or take over the social media plan someday .

Conclusion

Granted, some of These tactics May take a little time to set up, but the long-term benefit is worth it.

Social media will Enhance your business presence. And it does not have to take all of your time to be effective.