Written by Mhairi Petrovic, January 31st, 2012
Wondering when to Tweet for maximum effect, what time to post to your Facebook page so that the more people will see it? You’re not alone. Here is a great infographic from KISSmetrics to keep you on track.
Written by Corrie Scott, January 27th, 2012
Starting this month, Facebook is 
updating its advertising program by making changes to Sponsored Stories. Sponsored stories first appeared in 2011 as a way to turn your friend’s actions and posts into promoted content for brands. For a breakdown of how these ads used to look, check out this Mashable post that does a great job of explaining it. Today, we’re going to talk about the most recent changes that Facebook will be making to these stories.
The big change: Facebook Sponsored Stories will now appear in user’s newsfeeds. Facebook says this won’t be nearly as intrusive to their 800+ million members as it sounds. The ads will be marked as “sponsored”, they will be strictly regulated so that users will see no more than 1 ad in their newsfeed per day, and they will only contain content about friends or pages with which the user is already connected. This gives your ad better odds of being seen by those who would be interested in your business – the types of people you want to like your business page.
Also, Facebook users can’t opt out of sponsored stories, everyone’s getting them. They can, however, delete individual ads from their newsfeed, but that’s less likely to happen because the ads only show information about friends or pages they already interact with on Facebook.
Why this is so great for marketers: It allows you to get your content front and center on people’s newsfeeds, mixed in with all the organic content generated by people’s friends and page likes. Also, the ‘sponsored’ tag on the lower right hand side of the ad is unlikely to be noticed until after the user has processed the ad. If it’s even noticed at all. It’s a pretty small tag, as you can see from the screenshot below.
Another potential benefit for marketers is that this is another way to target Facebook’s 800m+ users, half of which return to the site daily. With sponsored ads appearing in newsfeeds and the right sidebar, as well as traditional Facebook ads, the amount of potential daily impressions for ads will skyrocket. This could go one of two ways for advertisers, 1. Ad prices will decrease because of increased supply, or 2. Ad prices could increase because the addition of sponsored stories could increase demand for Facebook ads. Time will tell which one ends up being true.
Either way, there’s bound to be the usual protests surrounding any change on Facebook, but we have a feeling that will die down pretty quick. Personally, I don’t mind seeing relevant ads on Facebook, and I don’t think it will make a big difference whether they appear on the right sidebar, or within my newsfeed. Highly targeted ads are nice because they inform me of deals or pages I might not have known about otherwise. However, Facebook will need to be careful about maintaining a good ad to organic content ratio. Sponsored ads would quickly get annoying if they began overtaking the newsfeed. I know I can’t be the only one that would think that way.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, January 18th, 2012
A lot has changed the five or so years that Out-Smarts has been focused on social media marketing. For a start, most people now know what Facebook is, many are even using it for more than “being social”. Studies show that 60% of all Canadians are using social media and 44% of small to medium sized business decision makers use social media, but are businesses using it the right way to build their online presence strategically? In many cases, they’re not. Here are the top 10 mistakes that companies make when using social media.
There’s over 800 million people using Facebook, and over 200 million Twitter users - not to mention, a similar number of folks on LinkedIn, and yet many businesses still dismiss social media as a flash in the pan. Your business has the potential to take advantage of this massive online hub; ignoring it is a huge folly. You don’t have to start with a presence of your own if you’re not comfortable. Using social media to listen to, and learn from, others in your industry can be a valuable research method, and it is also a great way to get a feel for how social media is used in your sector.
Back in the early nineties when I sold Internet technologies, lots of companies weren’t convinced that the Internet would take off, so they ignored it and hoped it would go away. Many were left scrambling at the last minute to catch up online and some didn’t survive. A hundred or so years ago many naysayers dismissed the phone. The same story is now replaying with regard to social media. Don’t stick your corporate head in the sand – social media isn’t going away and the sooner you accept that, the less risk to your business.
I’ve read a few articles recently that write off social media off as a tool that’s only useful for small to medium sized businesses. Many large, established businesses use this as an excuse because they have done things the traditional way for so long that they know no other way. However, pioneers like Whole Foods, Southwest Airlines and Ford are proving that social media can be a driving force for larger organisations too, if it’s done right.
Many organisations get a young intern to maintain their social networks because this person has hundreds of Twitter followers, or is on Facebook all the time. However, just because you are familiar with using these tools socially doesn’t mean you know how to use them for business. I am not saying an intern can’t do it, but you should make sure that they understand your goals, mission, audience, brand and such first, so that they can represent you appropriately online.
Point 4 leads me nicely to point 5 – not approaching social media from a strategic perspective. Only 8% of companies surveyed in a recent Forrester report are using social media in ways that tie in with their corporate objectives. Again, companies often embark on using social media for the sake of using it rather than using it from a strategic perspective. Before your company sets out on the social media path you should ask – who is your target audience, what is your message, which tools are right for your business given your brand and mission, and how can you use social media to augment your everyday activities. If you do that, your social media efforts are more likely to amount to something.
In the old business world, marketing was all about corporations; all activities centered around the product and service, and not the consumer. Every message had to be vetted – which took time and meant the the company was in control. Many organisations take this approach to social media, and then wonder why they are spending lots of resources but have few results and little return to show for it. They aren’t succeeding because they need to re-engineer their approach. These days, it is not about you, but rather, it’s about your audience and every social touchpoint should reflect that. To be effective in social media you need to focus on your target audience, be able to move faster, and to communicate in the moment before content gets outdated.
This is the biggest faux pas you can make with social media. Never use social media to blatantly sell. It is okay to promote your offering, but in your face selling is off putting. Here at Out-Smarts, we use the 80-20 rule – 80% of our posts are aimed at adding value, and only 20% are promotional.
As with any other business function, you should set goals and objectives before you start rather than haphazardly setting up your social shop (as it were). What is it that you hope to achieve? You may want to build community with your target audience, extend your reach to new communities, use social media as a conduit to extend the reach of your content, drive traffic to your website, etc. Whatever your goals are, you should document them, quantify them and make sure that they are achievable.
Many companies have no idea whether their social media presence is benefiting them or not, nor are they able to respond to what is being said about them online. Once you’ve determined your goals, you should put in place tools that allow you to measure your success and to listen effectively. These might include free tools – for example; for web traffic analysis you can use Google Analytics, to measure your Facebook following use Insights, for Twitter use counters or paid tools like Radian6 that allow you to monitor and measure engagement.
Up until recently, many businesses have looked on social media as a stand alone approach rather than considering it as a way to complement and augment their entire marketing strategy. 2012 is going to be the year when the penny drops and companies realise that the best social media projects are those that complement their real world activities.
Written by Corrie Scott, January 11th, 2012
It’s a new year, which means a deluge of posts about 
the “top this and that of 2011”, and here we are throwing another one into the mix. But, we really wanted to share with you our most read blog posts of 2011. Hopefully you’ll find some bits of wisdom, or a key takeaway, from the following list:
1. Create a Custom iframe Tab for Your Facebook Page
2. Tumblr: The Easiest Way to Blog
3. 10 Easy Ways to Get More Links to Your Website
4. Add Social Media Icons to Your Sidebar Without Using Widgets
5. What You Need to Know About Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines
6. Using Social Media for Recruitment – Part 1
7. Connecting Your Social Media Accounts
8. Steps to Change Your Twitter Handle
9. How to Protect Yourself on Facebook
10. How to Get More People to Like Your Facebook Page
There you have it, our top 10 most read blog posts of 2011. Happy reading!
Written by Corrie Scott, November 07th, 2011
We really like this blog post from our friend and business colleague, Michele Soregaroli of Transformation Catalyst, she makes some excellent points! If you’d like to see the original post, click here.
In a previous blog post, I talked about the 3 pillars of business – Visibility, Connection, Delivery.
But where does engagement fit? Aren’t connection and engagement the same thing? I get this question a lot…and it’s absolutely critical to your business that you not only understand the distinction between them, but that you also develop your strategies and actions with these distinctions in mind.
If you haven’t got a good sense of the basic 3 Pillars of Business, I would suggest that you start your reading there, and then come back here for more learning. Today’s post is dealing only with Connection and Engagement.
I’m going to use Facebook Pages as the example in this post, but keep in mind that these principles apply to all strains of your business where you are communicating with your target market, prospects and existing clients.
Let’s assume that you have a Facebook Page set up. If you don’t have one, you’ve probably ‘Liked’ one, or have seen some that you can refer to here. A Facebook Page is essentially another platform to create Visibility…people know that you are in business and that your doors are open. But it’s much more than that!
If you’re like most business owners, your main focus for your Facebook Page has been to generate LIKES…lots of Followers who are willing to read your posts and are interested in what you have to say. Sometimes they will ‘Like’ your posts. In that case, they have established a CONNECTION with you.
However, this is where it gets interesting!! Business Pages gathering ‘Likes’ believe that they have now established permission to ask for the business from their audience. If you have ‘Likes’, you have a connection, and the next step is to sign the deal and start delivering your service, right?
Not right…not even a little. I’m guessing that those ‘Likes’ on your Page are not converting to Leads. If you see yourself here, you’re probably wondering the value of social media at all. Here’s why it’s not working – you haven’t actually ‘engaged’ your followers!
A Connection is established when someone indicates, in the moment, that they are in agreement with you and identify that you share something in common. But only in that moment. They aren’t all in, by any stretch. They just think that whatever happened in that moment was worth ‘Liking’. Then they move on…NO engagement. Read more
Written by Corrie Scott, September 21st, 2011
Time and again, when discussing Facebook pages with people, we realize that there are many misconceptions about how these pages work. Below, we discuss a few common mistakes so that you don’t repeat them with your business page.
Most people only ever visit your fan page once, and after that they interact with your page via their newsfeed. Some highly interactive and engaging business pages see frequent repeat visitors, but the majority of fans interact with your page by liking and commenting on postings that appear in their newsfeeds. In order to drive more traffic to your fan page it is important to recognize this fact and post in such a way that entices fans to return to your page. For example, “we’ve posted new photos albums to our page”, or “we post daily tips every weekday, scroll down our page for lots of great advice”.
Many pages owners think that every fan of their page is seeing everything they post. This is far from true. The easiest way to think about how fans see your postings is to think about how you see content on your personal Facebook profile. What appears in your newsfeed is only a fraction of your friend’s activity, it is the information that Facebook has deemed important enough for you to see based, in part, on who you interact with most on Facebook. It is possible to change your newsfeed settings so that you see everything that has recently been posted, but fewer than 10-20% of Facebook users modify these settings.
How can you change how many fans see your postings? Engage your audience! Each time a fan comments on one of your postings it shows up on their Facebook page and in their friend’s newsfeeds. Also, the more a fan likes, comments and interacts with your page, the more often your postings show up in their newsfeed.
A successful business page involves conversations between you and your fans. If you never respond to fan comments, they won’t continue commenting for long. No one wants to talk to a brick wall (pun intended!). The more you respond to fans, the more they will comment and interact with your page. On a similar note, respond to negative comments instead of deleting them from your wall. Social media is about being transparent, and deleting negative comments is the opposite of the image you want to portray. Instead, respond promptly to negative comments and address the person’s concerns in a timely, friendly manner. Often times, even negative comments can be an opportunity for you to shine by showing you care about your customers and their opinions, and that you respond to comments and concerns quickly.
You don’t want to hog your fan’s newsfeeds with 4 or 5 posts all in row, this is a surefire way to get them to unlike your page. Instead, aim to post content 1-2 times a day, and spread your posts out a bit throughout the day. We highly recommend the 80/20 rule – 80% of the time, post interesting content from your industry and 20% of the time, post promotional content about your brand or company. The goal is to draw fans to your page and position yourself as the go-to-resource for the newest and greatest information in your industry. If you do this correctly, fans will naturally be interested in finding out more about your company – without your having to be overly promotional or salesy.
There are many customization features available to Facebook pages, why wouldn’t you take advantage of them? Start by claiming your vanity url if you have over 25 fans. This will make it easier for fans to find your page, and increase your visibility in search results. Next, create custom tabs on your Facebook page, including a custom welcome page, and set your welcome tab as the default landing tab for non-fans. Finally, link your various social media accounts to your Facebook page, including your blog, YouTube, and autoposting your Facebook updates to your Twitter account.
Facebook Ads are a great way to gain fans and awareness of your page – these ads are highly targeted and their precision is virtually unrivaled. Best of all, you set the budget! Spend as little as $1 a day or as much as you’re comfortable with, and you only pay when people click on your ad. Facebook Ads can send people either to your Facebook page or to your external website and are an integral part of building awareness of your business.
Most Facebook page admins are unaware of Facebook’s rules and regulations surrounding contests and promotions, but it’s important to know the details before you inadvertently get your Facebook page deleted for running an illegal contest. In our blog post on Facebook contests, we cut through the legalese and explain the rules and regulations in a straightforward way so you know exactly how to run a contest that follows Facebook’s guidelines.
If you avoid making these 7 mistakes with your Facebook page you will be well on your way to creating an engaging and popular business page. If you need assistance with your business page, contact us and we’d be happy to help.
Written by Corrie Scott, September 02nd, 2011
The following is a blog post written by Christine Rondeau of Bluelime Media. With her permission, we’ve reprinted it on our blog. If you’d like to see the original, click here.
Almost every week, I’m asked questions on the merit of social media. People are curious about why one would need to use facebook or twitter. My usual response is that social media works, but it only works if you make it work for you.
Of course it takes time and effort and you will need to moderate your social media accounts. Could you hire someone to do that for you? Sure, but you could also hire someone to look after your kids and raise them. Is that what you want?
In order to clearly explain what I mean by “making it work for you” I thought I would share what my process is and how I make it work for me.
Fortunately, I started early. I’ve been blogging since 2004, so blogging is part of my social media strategy. This strategy is no more than a word though. I don’t have a blogging schedule and I’m not very discipline. I write blog posts when I have something to say but I always write on topic.
If you choose to start a blog, think about what you want to blog about. Check out other blogs and see what they are doing. Would you be simply repeating what others are already saying? Do you feel like you have something important to add? Will you be gaining clients or positioning yourself as a market leader if you do?
More importantly think about your love or writing. If you dislike writing, blogging may not be for you.
I think I joined LinkedIn as early as 2002. LinkedIn was quiet for a long time but recently gained a lot of traction and criticism. I was happy enough with LinkedIn, I never paid attention to it and connected with people I knew when requested, but about 8 months ago, I started receiving many more requests from total strangers. For some reason LinkedIn became more about how many connections one has than who your connections are. I examined my LinkedIn profile and decided that it really wasn’t serving, so simply killed it. Since then, no more requests to connect with strangers.
Since then created I’ve created an about.me profile and posted my resume on Zerply. Why? They were both free and fun to put together. If either one of them follows in LinkedIn’s footsteps and becomes a nuisance, I’ll just delete them.
I joined Facebook 3 years ago (I think). You can look for me if you want but I won’t friend you, sorry. I only use facebook for family and yoga. I use it as a tool to keep informed of upcoming yoga events and look at my sister’s picture. That’s it. I don’t have a fan page and I’ve never ‘Liked’ a page. I personally am not a fan of facebook, because I find it too cluttered and messy. Some folks love it and it works for them, great, but it’s just not for me.
I was a bit late to join twitter and took a while to get it, but twitter is by far my favourite social media tool. I like it because it works for me.
Again, like facebook, I’m very particular about who I follow. 99% of the people I follow are either WordPress developers or work in the web industry. I keep the number of people I follow to about 200 and unfollow anyone who posts too many drunken tweets, sexist ones or only talks about hockey.
Because most of the people I follow are WordPress devs, I tweet a lot about WordPress and use it when I have questions. Just yesterday, I had issues with github. I tweeted my dismay and sure enough, a few minutes later, I had answers to my problem. How brilliant is that?
Sure I could have done the same on facebook, Google + or LinkedIn, but twitter is the medium I prefer.
I don’t think that there’s a definite guide on how to use social media. We all have different needs, different likes and dislikes. If you are curious about social media, I would encourage you to just sign up and open account. Any of them will do. Just try it out. Accounts can always be closed if they are not for you.
There are many dos and don’t when it comes to social media. I won’t go into all of the details here as I am no social media expert. If you’re interested in reading more about Social Media and learning a few tips and tricks, I would recommend that you subscribe to Boxcar Marketing’s Newsletter: Underwire. It’s very well written always packed full of interesting tidbits.
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, August 17th, 2011
Advertising on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is becoming more and more popular. A recent Pivot Survey showed that two thirds of marketers surveyed are using social media advertising. This will only continue to grow as more and more people join the ranks of social media users, and companies catch on to the highly targeted and effective nature of this medium.
Often called social advertising, this method (based on a very old approach) takes advantage of the growing number of people using social networks (700m on Facebook, 100m+ on LinkedIn, etc) to advertise to people in a highly targeted way – usually according to their likes, geographic demographics and other defining characteristics. It can be a really useful tool to drive traffic to your website, and especially to build your connections because each follower or connection has given you their implied permission to keep in touch, and are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.
Here at Out-Smarts we always emphasize the importance of strategy when it comes to any social media or internet marketing project, and social ads are no exception. First of all, you need to consider your audience. Who are they and which networks do they use. This will help you determine whether to use Facebook, LinkedIn or another network. Next, you need to consider your goals and how you will measure success.
We were approached recently by a client of ours who had (as an experiment) run simultaneous ads on Facebook and on LinkedIn. The ads were almost identical but whilst the Facebook ad had a phenomenal click through rate, there was not a single click through on LinkedIn. They wondered why this had happened, and how the could track whether the Facebook ads converted to actual business for them.
There are two issues here, the first being the target audience. The reason they were more successful on Facebook is that their target audience is much more likely to be on Facebook, and using it on a regular basis, than LinkedIn. When you are considering which social advertising forum to use, it is always important to consider which tools your audience uses – doing so will help you cut to the chase and will make the likelihood of success higher. If your product or service is aimed at a consumer or broader target audience, then Facebook is going to be better than LinkedIn. If your product or service is business-to-business then LinkedIn will be the way to go. If you have a large brand aimed at the mom community, Twitter might be your best bet.
The second issue is how to track the success of your ads. It is important to consider what your goals are from running the ads (do you want to build your following, drive traffic to your website, etc, and by how much?) and then put processes in place that allow you to do this effectively. If web traffic is your goal, Google Analytics allows you to track conversions from your Facebook ads (but that is a whole other blog post!). If you want to track sales, put processes in place to ask people who buy from you, or who inquire about your products or services, how they heard about you. What is important here is to set realistic goals and outline how you will track them, otherwise why bother?
Once you have determined which tools are best for your audience and how you will measure your success, the process of creating your ads is relatively simple. In the coming weeks we will be creating some how-to posts designed to help you do just that. In the meantime, if you are interested in advertising using social media but don’t have the time or wherewithal to do so, please contact us – this is what we do and we’d love to help!
Other posts about online advertising:
An Introduction to Internet Advertising
The Future of Digital Advertising – iAds and Promoted Tweets
Written by Mhairi Petrovic, May 30th, 2011
Quora, the crowdsourced question and answers community has been getting a lot of publicity lately. Purported to be more than just another questions and answers site, Quora is aimed at going beyond a simple forum for questions and answers (like Yahoo Answers) to being more of a brain trust where individuals’ knowledge on a topic is collected and made available to members of the community.
Founded in 2008 by former Facebook executives, the latest social community for business seems destined for big things. Since its inception, Quora has grown steadily and in the last year, user counts have doubled - although according to this compete.com graph, the number of visits is still erratic. Quora doesn’t make user counts available but there are an estimated 200,000 – 500,000 users - according to this Tech Crunch article.
On its website, Quora describes itself as:
” a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.”
It is easy and free to join Quora, simply 
sign up, enter a few details about yourself and you are off to the races.
Once there you can search questions (put the term you want to search for in the add question box but don’t click enter or you will end up asking a question) and review all related answers, find and connect with others in your community and share your content in other networks.
I’ve always found LinkedIn answers a useful tool for researching blog posts so I thought I would test drive Quora and at the same time do little crowdsourced research for this blog post by asking the question:
How has using Quora benefited you? 
It has been several days now and so far there are no answers. Now, this could be because I don’t have many contacts yet, because its not a stimulating enough question or because people haven’t yet decided on the benefits of using Quora. One neat feature of Quora is that it finds and suggests “related questions” that might be of interest. The one answer to the question “What are the benefits of using Quora?” has the short and sweet answer :
You get to read the answers to questions like the following: Quora: Frequently Asked Questions for New Users, Getting Started on Quora: How does the Quora search box work?
In browsing through Quora, I couldn’t fail to notice that it has some very influential users. One question about social media startups had answers from industry pioneers like Robert Scoble: with answers that were both in depth and insightful (and a good read for anyone launching a web startup). Another Quora user, Marc Bodnick lists new and interesting Quora users they have discovered every week and whilst many of these users seem to be centred in the tech community, I was also able to to find questions about such diverse topics as the Vancouver Canucks Stanley Cup chances (go Canucks!), best Croatian Islands and Scotland’s independence.
Some of the downsides to Quora seem to be question regulations, reviews and user administration. Personally, I came across a lot of comments about voting up a question but couldn’t work out how to vote up a great answer far less vote down the crappy ones.
In the longterm, the value of Quora will depend on the quality of both the user base and the answers people provide as well the ease of use and ability to connect with your community. For now, Quora will stay on my radar (join me there!) but I won’t need a daily fix for the foreseeable future.
Written by Corrie Scott, May 25th, 2011
A recent question by a fan of the Out-Smarts Facebook page regarding ‘giveaways’ prompted us to take a close look at Facebook’s rules and regulations
regarding contests, promotions and giveaways on their site. Running a promotion on Facebook is an effective way of generating buzz about your business, increasing the number of ‘likes’ your page has, increasing engagement with existing fans, and even adding to your business’ email list.
However, Facebook has some specific guidelines regarding these promotions, and most giveaways and contests on Facebook are actually in direct violation of these terms! Below, we will decode the legalese and give you the information you need to avoid being in violation of Facebook’s promotion guidelines and having your business page shut down.
First, you should ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do people enter your contest by ‘liking’ your business page?
2. Is your promotion being run on your Facebook fan pages wall? For example, do people enter your promotion by liking posts or leaving a comment?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, your promotion is illegal and you are at risk for Facebook shutting down your business page.
Basically, if you are using Facebook in any way to run or support your contest, you are in violation of their promotion guidelines. Instead, you need to run your promotion on a third party application such as Wildfire, Involver, Friend2Friend, and other similar application builders – see Facebook’s list of preferred developer consultants. You can also create your own custom application by building an iframe and running your promotion from there. See ‘create a custom iframe tab for your facebook page’ for how to make your own iframe application.
Before going further, we should clear up what exactly Facebook considers a promotion.
Directly from Facebook:
These Promotion Guidelines, along with the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, the Ad Guidelines, the Platform Policies and all other applicable Facebook policies, govern your communication about or administration of any contest, competition, sweepstakes or other similar offering (each, a “promotion”) using Facebook.
By “contest” or “competition” we mean a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill (i.e., through judging based on specific criteria).
By “sweepstakes” we mean a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner selected on the basis of chance.
Basically, any sort of promotion of Facebook in which you will be choosing a winner in some way has to follow their promotion guidelines. Furthermore, the guidelines go on to say that you cannot use any of Facebook’s features in your promotion, ie as a condition of entering your promotion you cannot have users ‘liking’ your page or posts, uploading pictures to your page, or commenting on your posts or wall. Lastly, you cannot use Facebook in any way to announce your winner, either by posting the winner’s name on your wall, posting their photo on your wall, or contacting them through Facebook chat or a message.
Note: A condition of your promotion could be that users need to be fans of your page, but that alone cannot enter them into the promotion. They need to take some further action on a third party application or iframe in order to ensure your promotion is legally within Facebook’s guidelines. Read more
