The Fascination with Facebook

Facebook. Everyone loves Facebook. I don't know many people who don't have an account on Facebook, even my grandparents have joined. It is the most popular social networking site today, with 1.09 billion daily active users. That equates to 1 in every 7 people in the world. That offers a lot of exposure for all of the businesses with a presence on the site. But with that kind of audience, businesses need to know what they are doing. Posting blindly can lead to negative feedback and publicity that can ultimately lead to the demise of a brand. So what are the benefits of putting your business on Facebook?

Facebook offers a place for businesses to share what they are all about. You can add your location, hours of operation, links to your website or store, a description of your products/services, and a basic sense of what your business is all about. Facebook allows users to post text, photos, videos, and links to other websites. This lets businesses interact in multiple formats with all of its followers. All of this is available for free, which is great if businesses can consistently increase their following and engage with customers. Key features of Facebook's business profiles include:

• Information on number of likes and where they come from
• Information on why people are visiting your page and how they found it
• Daily information on your posts, the different types of posts, and how much buzz they are generating through clicks, likes, comments, and shares
• Demographic information about your audience, including what time of day they are viewing your content and how they found it
• Reach data - how many people like, comment, or share your data and whether these people are your customers, their friends, or new
• Facebook's new reaction feature for posts that allows viewers to assign a like, love, haha, wow, sad, or angry emoji. This allows businesses and individuals more insight into how people feel about their post.

For those businesses that need a little extra help, Facebook offers paid advertising services that can work wonders for many businesses. This has really taken off in recent years and isn't just for big companies anymore. Facebook offers affordable advertising options for even the smallest of businesses. Facebook Ad Manager gives businesses access to:

• Performance metrics on individual ads or ad groups
• Reports and notifications about your ads
• The ability to target custom audiences, gain audience insights, and see and manage media that has been added to your campaign
• The ability to set a budget for your different ad campaigns/promotions

Another really cool feature that is really useful for small businesses is Facebook's Pages to Watch feature. This allows businesses/pages to select five other pages that they would like to watch, most likely competitors. After the other pages are selected it will show a ranking of your page and the five others by who has had the most new likes this week. This is a great way to keep tabs on competitors and if you see them getting a ton of new likes you can investigate to see what they are doing on their page and then step up your own efforts to increase your likes as well.

Facebook is one of my favorite sites to use on the go because it is mobile optimized, something that is often times missing from a business' main website. Businesses can really benefit from this if they use Facebook to do a lot of their promotional ads and general interest growing activities for their business. It is a quick easy way to find out the location and hours of many businesses and it is convenient, which is always a plus in today's fast paced society. Overall, a good way for businesses to look at Facebook is a pyramid of stepping stones. First you need to build up your customer base and following, then you need to connect with these followers. Once you see that there are connections being made then you can move on to engaging more with your followers, which ultimately helps convert them into loyal customers. Facebook provides businesses with a lot of tools to make them successful, some of which are free and others are paid, but over all it is worth it if it is used properly.

Sources:
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-page-insights-basics/
https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-reporting-ads-manager/
https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
https://www.postplanner.com/top-10-benefits-facebook-business-page/
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/facebook-understanding-business-benefits
http://www.techinsider.io/why-facebook-didnt-make-dislike-button-2016-2

Tweet, Tweet ... Should Businesses Be Using Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site that has gained a lot of traction since its introduction in 2006. It is often described as the short message service of the internet, characterized by its short 140-character messages that users can post called tweets. Non-users also have the ability to see content that is posted, but do not have the ability to post anything.

Currently there are about 310 million active monthly Twitter users according to the company's website. 79% of these users are outside of the United States and the site supports over 40 languages. Having a presence on Twitter is all about gaining followers, more followers mean that more people are seeing your tweets and allows them to retweet your tweet to their followers or respond to your tweet. Another unique feature that originated on Twitter is hashtags, these are essentially groupings of tweets. Hashtags allow people to highlight keywords in their tweets, which then makes the tweet searchable on Twitter.

Businesses can use Twitter in order to reach a younger crowd of customers with 41% of Twitter users being between the ages of 18 and 34, as of December 2014. Young people often use Twitter as a quick way to gather news and other information about companies. Because tweets are so short they are able to consume a lot of tweets with just one visit to the site. Twitter is also a way for businesses to show their brand identity and who they really are as a company. This can be done by retweeting relevant industry information or retweeting funny or interesting news stories or topics. Twitter can also be used to entice customers to visit your company website. This can be done through special Twitter only exclusives, sales, or sneak peeks at new products. The more company's post on twitter and are retweeted the more they expand their search engine optimization.

Key benefits of using Twitter include:

• Increase brand awareness and monitor brand reputation
• Promotion of other marketing and outreach efforts including blog posts and videos
• Instant feedback about your company and products
• Gather competitive information
• Gather information about your followers to better serve their needs

One way that Twitter helps businesses learn about their followers is through their Twitter analytics. The goal of Twitter analytics is to help business understand how their content is growing their business. Twitter analytics allows business to see the following information:

• View top performing tweets
• Metrics on each tweet posted including number of likes, retweets, and replies
• Follower growth information
• Follower demographic and interest information
• Track impressions, results, and cost-per-result of ad campaigns
• Online conversation tracking
• Ability to quickly promote tweets that have been posted in order to reach more people

Overall, I think that a company's best of use of Twitter is to increase brand awareness and engage with customers. I personally know that I have never purchased anything from a link in a company's tweet. As one of the individuals who falls into the young user base, I find Twitter to be a great resource for news and keeping up to date on what my favorite celebrities and companies are doing. A list of trending hashtags always shows up on your homepage and this is yet another way that business can reach new/existing customers because they can pay to be a promoted hashtag. Twitter offers a lot of different analytical and marketing services to businesses. The way a business uses them all depends on how much they are willing to spend and how much time they are willing to invest to understand their followers and provide content that is fun and exciting.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/update-a-breakdown-of-the-demographics-for-each-of-the-different-social-networks-2015-6
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
https://business.twitter.com/en.html
http://www.aismedia.com/top-10-ways-business-can-benefit-from-using-twitter-infographic/
https://www.statista.com/chart/2058/reasons-to-use-twitter-as-a-marketing-tool/

My First Blog Post About... Blogging!

As you can see, this is my first blog post ever. While I have never personally used a blog, I have been doing a lot of research on why businesses should use them as part of my MBA coursework. By definition blogs are "a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style." Blogs provide a way for individuals and organizations to informally write about topics that interest them. When blogs first became popular in the 1990's, they were mainly used as online diaries. Today, blogs have transformed and can be found for pretty much any topic, healthy cooking, first time moms, fashion, education, how-to, and the list goes on. Sure you can still find people who use their blog as an online diary, but there is so much more use for a blog now and it can reach so many more people.

Many individuals and small businesses who blog use a blog hosting website such as, Blogger, Wordpress, and Weebly. These websites provide individuals a blogging tool that doesn't require additional knowledge of web design or code. These websites are very user friendly and easy for anyone to start using. On the other hand large businesses may choose to use these blog hosting websites too, there are distinct advantages to hosting a blog on their own website:

1. More content on your website allows for increased search engine traffic.
2. More content betters your chances of showing up in search engine results for long-tail search queries.
3. Useful and interesting content helps generate more inbound links to your blog posts and ultimately more visits to your website.

While these three things can be achieved even if a business uses a blog hosting website, it creates the added benefit of readers actually being on your website and being able to then look around at your other content and gain more knowledge about your brand and products.

Whether a business chooses to use a blog hosting website or their own website, having a blog helps to humanize their brand and is an informal way to interact with customers. Benefits of business blogging include:

• Generating recurring traffic to your website
• Telling your company story
• Teaching your audience about your products and industry
• Celebrating company and industry milestones

When it comes to blogging, it is important to know who your audience is and to have a goal in mind for what you are trying to achieve with your blog. Important questions to answer include: Who are you speaking to? Are you speaking to customers, potential customers, industry experts, or people unfamiliar with your product/service? What are your goals? Are you trying to increase sales, gain new customers, increase brand awareness, or educate people? Are you writing for B2B or B2C? These are all key questions that need to be addressed in a businesses marketing plan in order to maintain and generate quality content on their blog.

A blog written for industry experts with the intent of engaging them and providing interesting and new noteworthy topics will be written very differently than a blog written for potential customers with the intent of educating them about your company and products. These is also the possibility that a company is using a blog as an internal communication method as a way of engaging employees and providing them with key updates and happenings at the company. My workplace as really started to beef up their internal blog in the last 2 years and it is a great way to know what is going on. They post about awards we've received, key initiatives being pursued, employee spotlights from around the company, and industry news.

Overall, through my research about blogs and use of Blogger, I've found that starting a blog is pretty easy. Blog hosting websites are in the business of making it easy for anyone, regardless of experience, to have a blog. I found the more difficult part of writing a blog is developing content. As a person who is usually a perfectionist, I found writing this to be somewhat overwhelming, but I just kept reminding myself that it is INFORMAL and should represent who I AM. So to whoever is reading this blog, I am going to write as me and I not going to try and pretend I'm someone I'm not.

Sources:

http://www.jennstrends.com/4-bad-reasons-youre-not-blogging/

http://www.jennstrends.com/create-an-award-winning-blog/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2015/05/28/the-top-10-benefits-of-blogging-on-your-website/#751212ea5b65

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

http://www.15minutemondays.com/2014/05/26/9-reasons-your-business-needs-a-blog/