7 Steps to a Successful Facebook Content marketing Strategy

            So you have a local business and everyone said you just have to have a Facebook page! Now you have one but the only likes you have are from friends and family and maybe a few loyal customers… What did you do wrong? Isn’t it supposed to be automatic? Should likes, followers and leads just be pouring in by now? Having a facebook (or any social media page) is a marketing campaign all by itself and so it requires a specific marketing strategy like any other campaign. You need to know who your looking to reach, how to reach and engage them and just as importantly-A COURSE OF ACTION! This blog will give you the general strategy that will guide you from setup to upkeep and everything in between!

7 Steps to a Successful Facebook Content marketing Strategy

1.                   

                  Determine your image and or message and stick with it! You will have to generate content on a regular basis to keep your followers (once you find them) interested, reading and sharing your content. DO NOT JUST POST PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL! Your readers do not want to see one coupon or ploy after another which is the most direct route to get dropped! 2:5 should be the formula you follow, for every 2 posts of promo you do 5 more of other content you think your readers would fancy. Use humor and wit if appropriate, but keep it in some way related to what you want your businesses image to resemble. 2:5 should also be followed when determining how often you should post, you need to constantly add content to remain relevant so be sure to post around 2 times every 5 days.

2.       

                   Design your Facebook page! DO NOT ALLOW YOUR PAGE TO BE GENERIC! People aren’t interested in boring pages, it makes you look phony! Put the time, energy and money into the page and it will return the favor. Make it look professional and follow a specific color scheme with your cover image and your profile image. Choose a template that is intriguing and KEEP ON TOP OF YOUR CONTENT!

3.      

                   Integrate your Facebook page! Integrate your Facebook page (and campaigns) into ABSOLLUTELY EVERYTHING! Put FB posters up in the storefront with the Facebook page prominently displayed, use QR codes to make it easy for them to find you, incorporate links on your homepage, digital ads, add the FB Page to your business cards and promotional material (if you have old promo material without the FB page-it would make great kindle for the fire!), initiate marketing campaigns to encourage followers with promotions.

4.       

                    Use the Facebook ad tool! The Facebook Ad tool is so incredibly easy to use but TAKE YOUR TIME WHEN SETTING IT UP! You do it wrong and not only will it be an expensive mistake but most of the money you just spent will be wasted (not to mention you won’t know where you made the mistake and will most likely chock it up to the tool itself and not the tool that set it up!) Facebook has by far the most information on each of its users than any other ad or marketing firm so use it to your advantage! You can set the demographic by interest, location, age, gender, relationship status, employment, etc. Go thru the campaign with a fine tooth comb and be sure to set up your key audience carefully. You can also set up your ads to show at specific times, so if your key demographic is for school children for example you obviously don’t want to run the ad before 3:00 pm or after 9:00 pm. It provides apps for contests, giveaways and other incentives to build your following-use them! Be smart about it and you will love this tool!

5.       

                   Utilize the Promoted Posts! Once you have generated a decent following (a few hundred followers/likes) start to use the promoted posts on both the promo posts and the “puff” material. Facebook uses an “Edge Rank Algorithm” which will automatically limit the views of your posts by itself so of the 2-3 posts you generate a week most of your followers will probably only see one of them and you won’t know which one so the promoted posts is a good tool to use once in a while to be sure the message is received.

6.       

                 Add Media to your page! It is a proven fact the media (images or video) will be shared and commented on the most so whenever possible add short videos of you and your staff or professionally produced marketing material, images of your products or services and also like I mentioned earlier other media that is NOT promo material. Use “puff” media as well to engage your following, people aren’t going to share everything you post-they may not share any of it, but if you post something worth sharing make sure there is a link back to your facebook page with it!

7.     

                                    KEEP UP ON YOUR PAGE! Use analytics to see what works and what doesn’t. Reinvent your page every few months, regenerate new ads every few weeks, and add new content every week! Keep referring back to this list and consistently keep your FB image fresh! Change your profile pics/cover photo once in a while and try new things! You will most likely not nail the campaign off the bat, it will need to be fine-tuned constantly but if you follow these tips you will see the growth!

NOTHING GOOD COMES EASY! You can do this if you are smart about it! Who knows… once you see the power behind FB, sharing and social media with a good return you may just be ready to hire the big boys! Check out my last blog post on Empowering your product with Blogger Outreach for another efficient and cost effect way to engage your prospective clients! 

Augmented Reality: the future of Education FOR EVERYONE!

               Remember in the late nineties how we were all so convinced that Virtual Reality would eventually take over how we interface with people, the internet and the online community? Movies like the Lawnmower Man, Tron and the Matrix made us salivate at the possibility of exploring a new frontier of wonder and endless possibilities without even leaving the comfort of our own home. Almost 2013 and most people know they aren't getting any bulky headsets or full body suits anytime soon, and they are certainly not lining up to try Secondlife.com (a virtual world developed by Linden Lab) but there still is something on the tip of any tech savvy person's mind today; daydreaming and imagining the endless possibilities of Augmented Reality! 

               You can imagine A.R (augmented reality) if you can conceive that if Virtual Reality was the complete immersion of your senses into a digital world then augmented reality is less complete immersion and simply a virtual overlay onto the real world. It enables endless possibilities by providing limitless digital data pertaining to whatever you are interacting with through a monitor or a pair of augmented optical lenses, the most well known is the Google Glasses expected to be released sometime in 2013. The Google Glasses utilize smartglass to unify the virtual world of smartphones, computers and the web with the real world of people, places and information. They were an instant hit at Google's I/O developers conference in June/2012 and continue to be online ever since. This is the promotional video released by Google and has accrued more than 18.5 Million views since April '12!  And the buzz will increase steadily as the release date nears, if the can get the expected cost to be closer to the cost of an expensive smart phone (Aprox $450-500) and further from the cost of an expensive 3D TV ($1,500) then I would imagine to turn to much more of a craze! 
  
                A novel idea and all but are the masses really going to race to but the first smart phone you wear on your face? What are the potential uses beyond the capabilities of any typical smartphone? Once the public truly realizes the potential of augmented reality, the Google Glasses will only be the first of a long line of A.R Glasses! At least in the US, you will find them on the face of every student and teacher,  every tech, every engineer, and then virtually everyone else (pun intended!). If you look at this video of the capabilities of Augmented Reality linking a simple child's schoolbook with an interface it isn't very hard to imagine the possibilities for educating our youth! Imagine fusing a young child's will to learn with his/her will to discover in a way no teacher ever could before! 

                 What about the workplace? You think corporations won't jump at a way to quickly, efficiently and economically improve the capabilities and evolution of their workforce? There isn't a single industry in the world that wouldn't benefit from a more efficient and more savvy labor force. Imagine you can optimize all of your employees from day one with step by step individual tutorials with hands on practice without paying a single instructor for a single hour of mentor-ship! BMW has been working on a augmented reality training program utilizing their "datagoggles" a technology similar to Smartglass since 2007! Take a look at this brief tutorial to replace a cooling fan in a BMW 325i. 

                  Absolutely capable of reinventing education it's not hard to theorize that it will also revolutionize reeducation;  it will  be simpler, more efficient and ever expanding. No more will human beings be outmoded to younger, less experienced but more knowledgeable labor. With this new tech the evolution of man will grow in as many leaps and bounds  in the next 5 years as it has in the last 25! This is the retooling that will finally get us out from behind our desks and out in the real world working, blogging, learning, interacting, and interfacing with people, instead of keyboards! 

Is Evolving Media ≤ MediaEvolving?

               Ever heard the terms “Global village” or “Cyberspace”, perhaps the phrase the “medium is the message”? They all obviously refer the medium that we have all come to know and understand as the internet, right? Wrong- on both counts, all three quotes are nearly 65 years old, predating the internet as think we know and understand it by nearly 50 years, so how could they have anything to do with the internet? And as much as it pains me to say 99% of us do not truly understand the internet. Many believe that media and the internet are two separate concepts when in actuality Internet is media, an incredible over simplification it may seem but no, the internet is simply the most contemporary medium of communication, a complicated medium-but of media nonetheless. To truly understand the internet you must realize its foundation, not just from a series of networked 8 bit supercomputers in the desert somewhere you would begin at the inception of all media 100,000 years ago with the beginnings of verbal and symbolic communication, through the innovation of the automated printing press into the revolution from analog into the digital age of iPad and everything in between. Communication is media and media is evolving.

             
The Oracle of the Electronic Age
               Marshall McLuhan is considered by many as “the oracle of the electronic age” coined the term “Global Village” in the 1950’s, 40 years before it is used again to describe the internet so why is it such an incredible designation when discussing it more than 60 years later? McLuhan understood the power of media better than anyone in his time, realizing early on that media was evolving he was coined a prophet instead on someone who understood the power of communication as well as history’s penchant for repeating itself. When he initially coined the term “Global Village” he was initially referring to television, as that was simply the most contemporary and effective form of communication and media. McLuhan recognized the value of the medium simply in terms of the communication and sharing of information- such blasphemy led him to be ostracized by many in the academic community because they did not consider it to have any value as an “appropriate object of scholarly or pedagogical attention” (Strate, p. 175). Just as it was true 100,000 years ago, it was true in McLuhan’s time and it is true today, communication is the binding force of community; whether it be symbolic communication, cave drawings, language, or email the mediums or means we use to communicate influence how we view the world (Sapir-Whorf Principle of Linguistic Relativity) therefore the ease of communication thru technological means has created this “Global Village” removing the hindrance of physical distance. The early evidence of communities known as the “Creative Explosion” begins c. 30-20,000 years BCE with the first known appearance of communication; cave paintings demonstrated to later generations hunting tactics and farming methods, tally systems (notches in rope or sticks) demonstrated the first recordings of numerical data physical information. This provided the civilizations of the time to transverse time itself by communicating knowledge through the generations evolving the hunter/gather systems into the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago. That major revolution took 10-20,000 years, the next took approximately 4,500 years in Mesopotamia (8,000 BCE) between the Sumerian writing originally consisting of pictographs and made up of hundreds of characters was incredibly hard to learn therefore only a few scribes were apprenticed to learn to record for administration, religious, literary, and scientific purposes, it wasn’t until a bilingual society was created between the Sumerians and Akkadia that cuneiform was invented c. 3,500. The bilingual nature of the society was the vehicle of inception of cuneiform, the ease of communication between one civilization to the next resulted in one of the greatest literary revolutions in history; the evolution from Old Assyrian cuneiform into the much simpler Semitic alphabet of only 22 characters occurred c. 1,500 BCE taking only approximately 2,000 years. It is also worth noting that the Semitic alphabet also included the concept of positional notation as well as the concept of 0 (zero) invented in India c. 3,000 BCE.

Communication: Sociocultural Evolution Stimulant

You surely noticed that as the boundaries of communication dwindle so do the time spans between the innovations, which is and will be the case for any medium in any century. The Semitic alphabet became the basis of Greek then Latin within another 1,500 years leading to the next great revolution, The Renaissance Era. The Renaissance which spanned a little more than 300 years from the 14^th to the 17^th centuries highlighted education, art and innovation- one of which was the mechanical clock invented by monks to keep track of prayer time for their disciples started the automated and mechanical revolution and another equally astonishing historically unparalleled innovation- the precursor for virtually every one that followed; metal movable type. Metal movable type as you would imagine accelerated the time tables of communication even more, no longer do books need to be hand written on parchment (made of the prepared skin of an animal) which made them much more affordable to the masses, education then changes the archetype of government leading to countless revolutions that never could have taken place otherwise and closing the poverty gap more with every passing generation.  Guttenberg’s automated type printing press came less than 200 years later, the steam engine and the industrial revolution less than 150 years after that.

The Industrial Revolution from 1750 to 1850 led to where changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times. The discovery of electricity by Benjamin Franklin in 1750 was virtually useless at first, only true use was the telegraph which wasn’t invented for almost 50 years and until the revelations of Thomas Edison of the light bulb was the “power of electricity” (pun intended) truly realized. Samuel Morse invents Morse Code, the true precursor to mass communication and the first appearance of the code that is the foundation for every computer device known to man, Binary. Binary code is a series of offs and ons separated by short lengths of time communicated via a current of electricity from one point to the next. Soon after, thanks to Reginald Fesseden, Gugliemo Marconi and Edwin Armstrong radio broadcasting begins the era of mass communication. No longer are stories told one to one, one to many is now the means of communication, McLuhan once said “It is the device that creates the revolution, not the medium,” “mass society” is coined to define how man is now connected at a level never once realized in human history. Factories begin popping up around large cities and decentralization begins; mass production leads to mass consumption, mass transportation is developed to transport the workforce. High voltage power lines sprung up connecting coast to coast and it wasn’t too long after that Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone and the telephone lines followed. The next great innovation that truly completed this vision on the “Mass Man” and “Mass Culture” was the television, in 80% of all households within 20 years of its demonstration at the World’s Fair in 1939. This is the inception of Mass Media, information is now shared through multiple platforms of media; books, newspaper, telegraph, radio, television and the natural evolution of the next great medium is simple, if  the natural progression from one to one communication is one to many then the next obvious progression is from many to many.

“New Media” is another term coined by our prophet Marshall McLuhan, defined as different from mass media because it is not interpersonal such as the telephone or handwritten letter while still interactive and somewhat participatory. Some scholars would argue that “break point” came much later with the invention of the computer and the internet, Professor of Communications and Media Studies Lance Strate of Fordham University would disagree, he argues “they are secondary developments, an that, more ofthen than not, the characteristics of the new media environment are derived from the characteristics of electricity, electric technology, and the electronic media in general.”