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Facebook Groups – Best Practices but FIRST
Do you have a Facebook Group that you use as part of your business?
Are you getting the engagement and results from that group that you’re looking for?
The next few posts on this page will be a series of tips and tricks on using Facebook Groups in your business
BUT FIRST – I want to tell you a bit about me, and who I am, and why I’m doing this, and why you should be reading this.
I have been in and around and involved in Facebook groups for a while. A friend that manages another group was invited to the first-ever Facebook Communities Summit and invited me along. And my life has not been the same.
Since that summit I’ve been hanging out with the most interesting people – people who have built engaged active communities – and people that know ALL THE THINGS about running Facebook communities. We are always learning from each other, and we are always teaching each other.
I’ve gotten a ride on a rocket ship, I’ve learned things, and for the next few posts I’ll invite you to come and find out what I’ve learned, and how it’s useful to you.
WATCH THIS SPACE
It’s that time of year
For me, it’s the “beginning” of a new semester (I know the semester started a while back — but the first class I’m teaching is on October 14).
I teach the same subjects – but they change ALL THE TIME
But — they don’t change at all.
The technology changes, the “how-tos,” which buttons you push change. The size of images changes frequently, but there are some basics that stay the same.
So — what are the basics? I’ll list 5 things you should be considering when you’re planning your social media activities.
- Begin with the end in mind. Whether you’re thinking about a long term strategy or thinking about a 3-minute video, know what action you want your readers/viewers to take after your post. You do not need to do this for every post everywhere – but you should have an idea where you’re leading your readers. (pssst stay tuned I’ll show a great example later.)
- Know WHO you are talking to. Figure out who your ideal client is and make sure you are directing your information to that person. Knowing your ideal client not only helps with your messaging, but it also helps you determine where your message needs to be (for instance, if you’re product is an anti-aging cream you’re not needing to spend time and effort on Tik Tok)
- Be YOU. There are “experts” out there that want to train people to do social media the “one right way.” But the great thing about people is that we’re a mixed-up bag of different personalities and styles and ideas. Let YOU shine through — people do business with people they know, like, and trust. Be yourself and your people will find you. (Okay – they won’t find you if you’re locked in a house and not posting or commenting or networking — but you get the idea).
- Stay focussed. Getting clients and referral partners on social media is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’ve done a Facebook Live once a week for a month — don’t give up if you don’t have thousands of followers. Be persistent (but if you need to, you can always check with someone you trust to see if you need to make adjustments).
- Know your limits. Make sure you are actively engaged with others on your chosen platform. If you are a business owner and you actually have, like work to do, you can’t be on every platform. So make sure you follow #2 above – find your platform – and engage with the people you want to attract.
Oh – and remember what I said above about knowing the actions you want people to take. WELL!!!!!!!!!! I will be teaching classes in October and November so if you need to know more about social media, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, Mailchimp, or Instagram, check out the following link. I’m doing 5 classes and each is $39
CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT ENTREPRENEUR TRAINING AT JOLIET JUNIOR COLLEGE
My classroom will not look like this — but the information will still be great.
How to add an Admin to your Facebook Business Page
Of all the social media platforms, Facebook has the highest traffic. While it might not be the best for every business, it is a standard.
If, however, you want to have someone else manage your Facebook business page, here’s how to do that.
Once you have your Facebook page set up, go to your business page and click on settings.
You’ll get to another page and you’ll click on Page Roles.
And from here you can add anyone to your page as long as they are a “friend” of your personal profile.
You can add an Admin, Editor, Moderator, Advertiser, or Analyst. If you go to the Facebook help center, you can see what each role is able to do.
NOW – you can sit back, relax, and outsource your Facebook page management.
Tuesday Tip – Facebook Group Posting
For some people, Facebook Group posting is somewhat fun and distracting. For other people, Facebook Group posting is essential to their business. Some businesses take advantage of Facebook Groups to keep in touch with their “tribe,” be it a networking group or a group of their ideal clients.
I’m seeing more people re-purposing content from their Facebook (personal) Profile or their Facebook (business) Page and using this content in groups they belong to. Generally speaking, re-purposing content is a good thing, and I’m all for using something multiple times in multiple places. When you share content from your Facebook (business) Page, it’s easy to share, is public, and has the added benefit of possibly driving people back to your Facebook (business) Page to see what else is there.
There’s a bit of a different twist, however, if you’re on your Facebook (personal) Profile page and want to share something to one of the groups you belong to. As you go to share the item, you may notice the following message.
“You chose a specific audience for this post. Only people in that audience will be able to see this when you share it.”
If you continue on with this posting — your audience (possibly made up of potential clients) will see …
“Attachment Unavailable
This attachment may have been removed or the person who shared it may not have permission to share it with you.”
This same issue can happen if you’re trying to share content from one group to another group. If a group is NOT a “public” group, and if you try to share information outside of the group, the share will be visible to anyone that belongs to the group, but it will not be able to be seen by someone that’s not in the group. So if you’re in a private coaching group and your coach has a spectacular program she’s mentioned that you’d like to share outside the group – it needs to be FIRST posted in a public place.
If you’re trying to share an event or a special or a meme or a photo with a Facebook group, make sure what you’re trying to share is public, otherwise things will get really boring, really quickly and all your audience will see is a rather dull box.
Struggling with social media?
Click here to arrange a social media consult.
*There are details in the Facebook Terms of Use that are incredibly boring but very significant to people that are using Facebook profiles for business use. That will likely be covered in a future blog post.
OOOPS They Did it Again
And then THIS happened.
Say WHAT??? Another major overhaul coming to Facebook Pages. Didn’t they just do that a few months ago??
And people who manage their own Facebook business pages went
Stress Meter Showing Panic Attack From Stress And Worry
And then they went 
And the people who have a social media manager went
“call me if I need to know anything.”
And the Social Media Managers went
And then called their clients and said
“RELAX – I got this”
The moral of the story — if you’re using Facebook for business – and you panic every time they make a change, RELAX and find someone who can always have your back in the social media world.
7 Steps to Starting Your List — Part 3
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing email in detail. By the end of this series, you should be able to start up a list and keep it running. Here are the items we’ll be addressing:
- Build your list — define your target email audience.
- Create Freebie Offer
- Promoting your sign-up form
- Remember CAN-Spam
- Set up your program
- Create your email
- Test and Track
We’ve already given some thought to your target audience (your clients and strategic partners) and your free offer. Today we’ll talk about your sign-up form. In the “Related Articles” section below, I’ve added instructions from MailChimp and iContact on how to add a Sign-up Form. Most email marketing platforms have fairly good instructions for how to set up. But how do you actually get people to sign your form? Here’s some ideas. Put it EVERYWHERE. If someone knows you they should EASILY be able to find out how to sign up for your email list. Some of the ideas I’ve seen used:
- Email signature file – everyone you send a email to, be it a client or a vendor or a joint venture partner or someone you met networking and you’re following up with, sees your email and your signature line. Mine has “Sign up for my newsletter and receive 3 Simple Steps for Getting Started in Social Media.” It’s one line at the bottom of my email, it doesn’t interrupt any messages; but if someone does take time to look for contact information, they do see a way to receive my email.
- LinkedIn – In my LinkedIn summary, I have the following sentence: “To get weekly insights into client communication through social media, blogs, and newsletters, sign up for her newsletter at http://bit.ly/MWuVaList.” While it doesn’t allow someone to go directly to the link, by the use of a bit.ly and a simple name, they can easily find their way.
- Website – Link to your sign-up form from your website.
- Invoices – Add a sign-up form link to your invoices.
- Trade Shows – Collect names at trade shows (make sure it is clear you’re adding someone to your list – we’ll talk more about this next week).
- Speaking engagements – Offer a drawing or incentive to people when you’re at a trade show or when you’re speaking at a networking event (again, make sure to make it clear you’re adding them to your list).
- Facebook Sign-up – If you have a Facebook Page for your business, one of the options available is to link to a sign-up form. If you look at the picture below, you’ll see where the Sign-up icon is on the Social Media Examiner page.
As you can see, there are many ways to get the word out about your mailing list. Do you have any great ideas? Leave a note in the comments. Related articles
- Add a Sign-up Form to Your Website (includes video) (mailchimp.com)
- Adding a Sign-up Form to Your Facebook Page (icontact.com)
- HTML Sign-up Forms (icontact.com)
- How to Create Marketing Offers that Don’t Fall Flat. (hubspot.com)
- 5 Tips for Running Successful Social Media Campaigns. (socialmediaexaminer.com)
(Rough week — sign and sing, form and from – I’m putting my proofreader through his paces today).
THURSDAY TIP – Give Credit Where it’s Due
Let’s say you’re starting up a business on a shoestring, because let’s face it, most start-ups are on a tight budget. You’ve heard that it’s important to have a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and that you need to have a GREAT profile picture. So you’ve found a friend that does wonderful photography and he (or SHE – KERRY LYNN) does a photo shoot for you and you find the perfect profile photo, as happened for me with Kerramel Studios when I first opened my doors two years ago.
You put this photo on Facebook and your friends say, “You look awesome!” There are two things you should now do. If your photo is drawing engagement, make sure to say, “And the photo was taken by _photographer_ making sure to tag @photographer on that platform. (I find a get more personal photo engagement on my personal Facebook profile, and not so much on my business Facebook Page.)
After that (I’m using Facebook as the example here), click on your profile photo (bottom left corner of your banner)
In this example I clicked on the picture of me, and not on my logo.
From here, we’d click on the words in blue that say “Add a description”
In this example, I typed “Thanks @Kerry Lynn at @Kerramel Studios”
Finding great people to work can be easy if we work together and give shout outs to the people with patented “awesome sauce.”
Images courtesy of:
“Tips,” Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Mary Wu, Kerry Lynn at Kerramel Studios
Logo, Suzanne Wills
And a special thanks to Deb Zelman, my bestie, for asking the question which encouraged this post.
Forming a Social Media Success Plan – Step 8
This series started by discussing the 7 steps to a successful social media plan. After a few of the posts, I realized it might be valuable to some to have an understanding of some of the tools I use to make social media less time consuming.
To review, the 7 (now 8) steps to forming a social media plan are:
- Create a Vision
- Set Strategic Goals
- Find Your Social Media Voice (Persona)
- Build Your Social Media Platform
- Create a Publishing Plan
- Build Your Tribe (Community)
- Evaluate Your Results
- (Yes, I said there are 7 steps, but I’m going to be doing 8 posts and #8 will be a summary of tools of the trade – stay tuned to find out about useful things like Buffer, and Hootsuite).
Hopefully most of the people reading this understand the basic need to have an active presence on at least some social media platforms. But if you’re a small business owner or a solopreneur, you may wonder how you’re going to find the time to add social media to an already full schedule. We’ve talked about consistent publishing and maximizing engagement. While consulting with clients, I’ve suggested that most of them put some content on their social media platforms at least 5 times each week. So, you might question how you’re going to find time to post while also running your business. Here are a few tips.
Forming a Social Media Success Plan – Step 7
There are 7 steps to building a successful social media platform. During the next few weeks, we will be going over these steps one at a time.
The steps are:
- Create a Vision
- Set Strategic Goals
- Find Your Social Media Voice (Persona)
- Build Your Social Media Platform
- Create a Publishing Plan
- Build Your Tribe (Community)
- Evaluate Your Results
- (Yes, I said there are 7 steps, but I’m going to be doing 8 posts and #8 will be a summary of tools of the trade – stay tuned to find out about useful things like Buffer, Hootsuite, and others).
This week we’ll talk about evaluating your results. We’ll have a short tour of Facebook Insights. As I promised last week, we’ll be going over simple ways to look at results for the average user. If you want to go deeper I’d be glad to work with you one-on-one, but the purpose of this blog is to help the average user with social media, productivity, and administrative tasks.