We advised Arts Umbrella on promoting the event on Facebook and Twitter, and put together a list of prominent Vancouver bloggers that could potentially blog about Indulge: The Art of Beauty. We also recommended ways to leverage an online ticket giveaway to drive awareness about the event.
About Indulge: The Art of Beauty
On May 15, this exclusive spa and fashion event will take place at Holt Renfrew with proceeds supporting programs in the Arts Umbrella community. Guests will have Holt Renfrew all to themselves, and they will receive one of five luxury spa services provided by Holts salon and spa including; a deluxe hair treatment package, a luxury mini mani, a personalized style consultation and photo shoot, a professional make-up tutorial and chocolate tasting and, for the men, a wardrobe refresher and whisky option. While guests are being pampered they will also enjoy spring fashion demonstrations, refreshments and live performances provided by Arts Umbrella’s pre-professional performing arts students. As well, all guests will receive gifts provides by Holt Renfrew, Metro Vancouver BMW Retailers and other generous supporters of the event.
Tickets are $200, and include one of the above luxury spa services. For full details on the event, visit the Arts Umbrella website.
About Arts Umbrella
Arts Umbrella’s mission is to inspire kids for life through the arts. They are a not-for-profit arts education centre for youth ages 2 to 19 and reach more than 24,000 people annually with the benefits of arts education. Arts Umbrella is committed to delivering the highest quality of arts education to young people, regardless of their socio-economic circumstances. More than 12,000 youth access their programs annually at a reduced rate or free through various bursaries and outreach programs.
We’ve really enjoyed having the opportunity to work with Arts Umbrella; they are a truly fantastic organization. We hope you have a great time at Indulge: The Art of Beauty!
Google+ recently changed around their website and we’re here to walk you through the redesign. Their new focus is on customization, photo and video, and a new hangouts interface, as well as a complete overhaul of the original look and feel of the site. Fans of Facebook will recognize many similarities between the Google+ redesign and the new Facebook timeline. Coincidence? We think not. Without further ado, we bring you the major changes to Google+:
Cover photo and profile picture. The entire header section has become more prominent with the redesign. Your profile photo is now larger and has moved to the right side of the page. Take a moment to make sure your profile photo doesn’t look grainy with the new layout, the new dimensions for the image are 250px X 250px. You also now have the choice between one large cover photo, similar to Facebook, or keeping the 5 image photo strip. If you choose to switch to the cover photo, the dimensions are 940px X 180px. To change your photos click ‘edit profile’ at the top of the page when you’re on the ‘profile’ application. Then, click ‘change photos’. From here you can edit the images that appear on your photo strip, or switch to having one cover photo by clicking on the images next to ‘choose a template’.
Emphasis on photos and videos. Similar to Facebook, Google+ has enlarged the amount of space photos and videos take up on the page. Now visual posts are ‘full bleed’ meaning they take up the whole page width from left to right. Take advantage of this increased real estate by sharing company photos and videos that really highlight your brand.
Customizable ‘navigation ribbon’. Instead of static icons at the top of the page, there’s now a dynamic ribbon on the left hand side. You can customize this ribbon by dragging applications (what Google+ is now calling the various features on their site) up or down to rearrange the order they appear, as well as hiding apps you use less often in the ‘more’ section. Google+ has also added ‘quick actions’ which, when you hover over a certain app on the ribbon, reveals a set of shortcuts such as adding photos right from the home page.
Easy access to top circles. This handy new feature allows you to place your top circles at the top of the homepage where you can easily switch back and forth between them to see what’s new in your various networks.
To edit which circles appear on this bar, go to the ‘circles’ application on the navigation ribbon. From there, drag and drop your two most important circles so that they are beside the ‘drop here to create a circle’ icon. The two circles that are first in your list of circles will also appear as the two circles on your circle tab bar. From the tab bar, you can access the rest of your circles by clicking on the ‘more’ button.
Hangout overhaul. The ‘Hangout’ application now has a prominent place on the navigation ribbon, but you can only access it when you are using Google+ as yourself and not as your business. The new hangouts page includes a constantly updating list of invitations from people in your circles, easy access to public and ‘on air’ hangouts, and a rotation of popular hangouts, tips, and other special features. Use this new feature to keep an eye on hangouts that are relevant to your business, and don’t be afraid to host hangouts regularly for your business. The more often you host hangouts as a business, the better your chances of being featured on the new hangouts page.
Easily switch between your personal profile and your business profile. When you log into Google+ you do so with your personal profile. To access your business page, click on your name or profile picture in the upper right corner. A drop down menu will appear, click on your page’s name to go to your page and begin using Google+ as your business.
Trending on Google+. Similar to Twitter, this feature allows you to see what’s being talked about most on Google+. Before the redesign, you could only find this content by doing a search on Google+, now it’s front and centre on your home page when you’re logged into Google+ as yourself, or you can find it under the ‘explore’ application on the navigation ribbon if you’re logged in as your business page.
Watch this space to see what’s trending on Google+ and, if it’s relevant to your business, share interesting content about the topic to help others notice and circle your business.
Want more information about the redesign? Check out this video from Google:
Contact us if you’re interested in setting up a Google+ page for your business. We can help you with Google+ page set-up, training, implementation and more.
Setting goals before you jump into building your online business presence is incredibly important, as is putting in place proper tools to measure your success. Below we offer some tips on goal setting and discuss our favorite monitoring tools.
Tips for Setting Social Media Goals
Start small. Nothing is more discouraging than setting an unreachable goal and then being surprised and disappointed when you don’t reach it. Not to mention, inflated social media expectations reduces your credibility and increases your risk, which we can all agree is something we don’t want.
Set a realistic time period for reevaluation. It takes time to establish a great social media presence online, similar to how ‘overnight success stories’ don’t actually happen overnight. Give yourself a year to test out your social media strategy. At the end of the year, take some time to fully assess whether you’ve been participating in the right online communities, whether or not social media has positively impacted your business, and what areas you need to tweak to perform better in the following year.
Monitor your progress regularly. Don’t wait until your one year trial period is up to take a look at how you’re doing and to tweak your strategy to better meet your goals. We recommend taking some time once a week to do an overview of what you’re doing well, and areas you could improve. Taking this time to evaluate your online presence will allow you to catch any issues quickly before they grow into bigger problems.
Measuring Your Success
There are hundreds of ways to monitor your success online. Here are a few of our favorite tools (bonus: all of them except Hootsuite are free to set-up and use):
Facebook Insights: Facebook recently revamped their analytics and the new metrics are great for tracking how well your page is doing. Key traceable metrics include; understanding and analyzing trends regarding growth and demographics, consumption and creation of content, and information regarding the engagement and viral reach of specific posts.
Google Analytics: Installing analytics on your website is a critically important step, and one that many people skip. Without having tracking code installed on your website, it’s the equivalent of putting up a billboard downtown. You’re unaware of who many have seen it, and whether or not people are visiting your business as a result of your advertising. The same can be said for your website; there’s no point building one if you don’t have tracking installed to tell you how many people are visiting your site, what pages they view, how long they stay, etc. Google Analytics can do this and much more, including the ability to link to Adwords. We also love how easy it is to compare your progress month over month, or year over year.
Google Alerts: Another great feature by Google, alerts send an email to your inbox with the latest internet content surrounding your area of interest. You choose the keywords you want to monitor, how often you want to receive the results, and what email address to send them to, and Google does the rest. Great keywords to set up Google Alerts with are your business name and your product names, that way you’ll know when people are talking about you online and can respond to them.
Social Mention: A great social media search engine that searches the internet for user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and more. The results are extensive and appear in real time.
Twitter Counter: A great Twitter monitoring tool that let tracks how well your account is performing on an hourly, weekly, monthly, 3 month, or 6 month period.
We’ve only covered a few of the hundreds of listening and monitoring tools available for businesses. If you’d like to find out about how to specifically use these and other applications for your business, we’d be happy to set up a training or coaching session with you. Contact us for more information.
A social media dashboard is an essential tool for any digital marketer. We’re partial to Hootsuite, ‘the leading social media dashboard to manage and measure your social networks’, and a local Vancouver based success story. Here’s why we’re head over heels for Hootsuite:
1. Schedule posts. This is probably right up there as one of our favorite Hootsuite features. Social media newsfeeds move quickly and what you post at 8am might not be seen by the potential client that logs into Facebook or Twitter at 2pm. Besides sitting at your computer posting constantly, how can you be sure your updates are appearing in front of important consumer eyes? You schedule your posts. Hootsuite makes this easy with their scheduler; you can schedule one post at a time, mass upload posts via CVS using the bulk message uploader, and see all your scheduled posts in the Publisher calendar.
2. Team management. If you’re more than a one man (or woman) show, you probably have multiple people managing your various social media accounts. Hootsuite is great for keeping track of who’s replied to comments, answered questions, posted to various accounts, and it also tracks what time everything was done – to better spread out your postings throughout the day or week. Another perk is that you can give multiple users access to your various social media accounts without having to reveal private information, such as passwords.
3. Analytics. Hootsuite has its own built-in metrics and analytics. We blogged about it last April when they revamped their offering. Check it out, there’s lots of analyzing power built into the dashboard.
4. No logging into multiple accounts. Having everything in one place is a huge time saver. Without Hootsuite, we’d be logging in and out of social media accounts for clients all day long. We can imagine you feel the same way trying to manage your time with social media because, let’s be honest, it can be a full time job. We can testify to that too; it’s how we make our living! From your Hootsuite dashboard you can send, schedule, track, like, comment, reply, and view photos on multiple accounts on Facebook – personal and business timelines, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
5. Hard to miss comments. This ties into number 4, sometimes things get lost in the shuffle when you’re logging in and out of multiple accounts. Using Hootsuite, you can see everything all in one place. It’s easy to see whether someone has commented on your Facebook post, or sent you a direct message on Twitter. It’s also easy to see if a team member has already replied, or whether you need to get on that right away.
6. In the cloud. There’s nothing to download with Hootsuite, it’s entirely online which is great for business owners and employees that are frequently out and about throughout the workday. You can log in, check the status of your social media accounts and post updates from anywhere with an internet connection.
7. Inexpensive. Hootsuite offers users an impressive package for the affordable price of $5.99 a month for the Pro version. For a smidge under $6, you can link unlimited social profiles, add 1 free team member, you get a free analytics report, Google Analytics and Facebook Insights integration and more. If you want to add additional team members, it’s $15 a month each – which is still an excellent deal.
8. Add RSS feeds. If you blog, you can add your feed and your posts will automatically be posted to your various social media accounts. You can add unlimited RSS feeds with the Pro version ($5.99 a month).
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, here’s an article on why you should not use Hootsuite. We’ll let you be the judge – do you think Hootsuite is a reasonable investment for your business?
We really like this breakdown from Power Formula of how the typical LinkedIn member uses the site. How do you use LinkedIn, and are you taking advantage of the benefits it offers your business? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
First of all, if you haven’t already spruced up your brand timeline and got it looking its best for the big March 30th debut, we highly suggest you do so now (or get us to do it for you!). While you’re at it, get really crazy and make it live for all to see. There’s really no reason to wait until the mandatory switch date, and adopting timeline early shows you’re proactive and adaptive with social media. Words you’d use to describe yourself, right?
Key Takeaways for Brands
Timeline is much more visual than Facebook pages. Starting with the large cover photo at the top, and continuing through the entire timeline; photos and videos taking up more real estate than in the past. This gives you huge leeway to visually tell your company’s unique story.
Experiment with ‘milestones’. This is your brand’s equivalent to ‘life events’ on your personal timeline, and will help humanize your business as well as give people a reason to stay on your page and snoop around for interesting tidbits. Create a milestone for when new employees were hired, or when you moved to a new office, etc. Share the key moments in your company’s history.
Tabs are back at the top. Remember Facebook pages from two versions ago? Tabs were at the top of the page. Facebook moved them to the left on their latest revamp of pages, and now they’re back at the top for Timeline. The changes to tabs are great for brands – now they’re bigger and more noticeable than ever. Added bonus: you can easily change the icon image whenever you like, as well as move them around and cherry pick which four are featured at the top of the page.
No more default landing tab. We’ve heard two arguments regarding the disappearance of default landing tabs:
Yes! Smart move by Facebook. No default landing tab is a good thing because it provides a more uniform experience for people that visit your page, whether they’re fans of your page or not.
No! Facebook got rid of one of the best customization features available to brands. The use of fan-gating (or like-gating) was key to enticing people to like my page.
We have to say, we take issue with the second half of point number two. The inability to fan-gate any longer should not be lamented. To summarize from this blog post on fan-gating from Social Media Examiner, fans that you have to entice in some way to ‘like’ your brand are less valuable than those that have liked your page without any incentive beyond enjoying your product or service. Not to mention, the existence of fickle fans that like your page only to receive the fan-gated information, and then unlike your page right afterwards. You see this kind of thing frequently with fan-gated contests and promotions.
But, back to the topic at hand. We sleuthed the web and found a decent workaround to the loss of the default landing tab. Dontcha love us? It’s not perfect, but if you really want to keep your welcome tab, this would be an option.
As to whether or not the default landing tab of Facebook past will be sorely missed, we want to hear from you! Share your opinions below, as well as your thoughts on the new timeline in general.
LinkedIn made many changes in 2011 including; LinkedIn Today, LinkedIn Classmates, and the ill fated social ads (which they quickly revamped after user backlash). Overall, though, LinkedIn is making all the right moves. Our favorite change of 2011 was the additions to company pages, and we highly recommend taking advantage of them and creating one for your business. Especially if you’re a B2B company. Speaking from personal experience, we’ve noticed that our B2B clients with company pages get a lot of referral traffic to their websites via LinkedIn. It’s hard to argue with the value of company pages when the Google Analytics evidence is staring you in the face!
Benefits of LinkedIn Company Pages
Increased exposure online. The more places you have a presence online, the easier it will be for people to find you. LinkedIn is especially beneficial for companies that offer professional services, such as finance, accounting, law, etc. LinkedIn is the most professional of the big social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,etc), and lends itself well to these industries, as well as to B2B companies.
Search engine marketing. Links from LinkedIn to your website, blog, and other social profiles (and vice versa) helps your company appear higher in search results. LinkedIn can also be a huge driver of referral traffic to your website, where you have the opportunity to convert visitors into paying customers. You can also take advantage of LinkedIn ads to promote your company page and generate leads.
Your company resume. LinkedIn personal profiles are essentially online resumes where people share their education, what they know, and who they know. Your company page does the same thing for your business and allows you to showcase your professionalism in a way that is sometimes harder on Facebook or Twitter.
Tips for using LinkedIn Company Pages
Complete your profile. Don’t take the time to create a company page, and then leave it half filled out. LinkedIn is a professional social network, be professional in the appearance of your page. This means uploading a logo to the overview page, filling in your company address, description, keywords, etc. Also remember to link to your blog, website and YouTube account, and fill out the company products and services page. If you have any company videos, upload these as well. People love videos (YouTube’s success is a testament to this).
Get recommendations. Similar to recommendations on your personal profile, you can get recommendations for your businesses products and services. An added bonus is that people can recommend a specific product or service they’ve used, as opposed to a generic comment about your business as a whole. Targeted recommendations provide much more value for people checking out your business and the services you offer clients.
Status updates. You’ll have to enable these on your page and designate who at your company can update the company status. Once you’ve done so you can start posting updates and links to interesting content you find online. Remember to occasionally link to your website or other social profiles, but don’t always post about yourself. Another point to remember is that LinkedIn is a more professional space than Facebook or Twitter, so tailor your updates to reflect this.
Build your following. All those status updates are pointless if no one’s following your page. People will be able to see your updates if they visit your page directly, but the only way to get your updates appearing on people LinkedIn homepages is to have them following you. So, how to start a fan base?
1. Ask your employees to link to your company page with their personal profiles. The benefits here are twofold, 1. Visitors to your employees’ profiles will be to click through to your company profile, and 2. Employees will appear on the overview tab of your company page.
2. Send an announcement via LinkedIn to key people in your network. Let them know you have a company page and encourage them to connect with you there as well.
3. Announce your new company page on your social profiles and in your company newsletter. Remember to include a link to the page so people can easily find it.
Update frequently and monitor your results. Make sure to schedule time into your week to update your company status, post new content, and reply to any comments. The last thing you want is to create a page and then never do anything with it. If you last updated your status 3 months ago, people who visit your page may question whether you’re still in business. We recommend updating your page 2-3 times a week.
Now that we’ve shared the benefits and tips of having a company page, we can help you get started on creating one for your business. Contact us to find out more.
At Out-Smarts we like to k.i.s.s – now don’t go getting any ideas, we mean keep it simple, stup!d. We like to simplify the internet and social media for our clients, and thought a post outlining how to create a simple social media strategy was in order. So, here we go:
1.Grab a hot chocolate, coffee, or your preferred caffeine stimulant. We said this was about creating a simple social media strategy, not that it wouldn’t take you some time (time well spent, might we add).
2. Identify your target market and where they are online.
This is the first thing you should do, and key to your overall marketing strategy. Really think about your ideal customer; how old are they, are they male or female, what does their family situation look like –married, divorced, single, kids?, where do they live, what do they do for fun? Once you’ve narrowed down who your target audience is, spend some time figuring out where they hang out online. There’s no point starting a company Twitter page or YouTube Channel, if your target customers are LinkedIn and Facebook kind of folks.
3. Start listening to your community.
Now that you know where your target audience hangs out, start following them on Twitter and liking their pages on Facebook. There’s already a conversation happening online about you or your industry, start tuning in to get an idea of what’s being said.
4. Create content and engage.
Now that you’ve determine where your target market hangs out online, and listened in on what’s being said, you can begin creating and sharing content. This is the bread and butter of your online presence – post interesting content, and people will share it on Facebook and LinkedIn, RT it on Twitter, and +1 it on Google+. The more people that share your content, the more people see it, and the bigger your online presence becomes. Pay attention to patterns, if people respond really well to a particular style of post, for example, asking a question on Facebook, post like that more often. You’ve got a winner, engagement-wise.
5. Online cohesiveness.
Make your website your online hub. When people visit your website, they should be able to see everywhere else you have a presence online. This means including a Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, button at the top of each page of your website (or, at the least, on your homepage). Link these buttons to your social networks, and include an RSS feed button if you have a blog. While you’re at it, use the same color scheme and profile picture (your company logo) when you customize your account on each social network. This way people that visit your Facebook page or YouTube Channel will know right away that it’s your company. The easier you make it for people to find you online, the better.
6. Set a schedule.
Ok, now that you have a simple social media strategy and your building a presence online, don’t let it fall to the wayside. The worst thing you can do is start a Facebook page or Twitter account, and then stop updating it. Potential customers who find you on these social networks may wonder whether you’re still around if you last posted 4 months ago. Social media is technically free, but it can take a lot of time. We recommend making a list of things you need to do every day to accomplish your goals online, and then stick to it.
There you have it, a simple social media strategy to get you started online. Want a more in-depth strategy? We do that too. Contact us for more information and we’ll help you hit the mark online.
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.
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:
working with Arts Umbrella to help promote their upcoming event, Indulge: The Art of Beauty hosted by Holt Renfrew.
