Tag Archives: example

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How to make your Facebook Page as good as this one

Here’s an example of a fantastic Facebook Page that provides plenty of useful lessons that you can learn from, the Heavenly Homes Gift Shop Page. Study the key points below and then implement the tips to improve your own Page.

Let’s take a look at the Page:

Cover Photo and Profile pic

Key points: The attractive Cover Photo is a clear representation of the brand. The addition of the company’s strapline - “Beautiful gifts to make your home heavenly’ re-inforces the quality of the brand and the inclusion of the angel emphasises ‘heavenly. The mirror and designs neatly dovetail with the logo in the Profile Pic space. If you hover over the Cover Photo or click the photo you’ll read the following ‘Check out our website for our full range of Vintage & Shabby Chic Home Decor & Gifts with Free UK delivery www.heavenlyhomesgiftshop.co.uk Theresa xx’

Tips: Make sure you have an attractive designed image or professionally taken photo for your Cover Photo and consider adding text. You could include your strapline or use the space as an advert. Be sure to add a description to your Cover Photo so that this is displayed on your Timeline, on mouse hover and when visitors click the image. Consider adding a ‘call to action’ and be sure to add your web address.

Action Button

Key point: An action button has been added encouraging visitors to Shop Now.

Tip: With plenty of ‘calls to action’ available such as Contact Us, Shop Now and Sign Up, this is a great opportunity to direct people to your website or to a landing page.

Reviews

Key point: 25 reviews have been received with 24 five star and 1 four star rating. These provide social proof that Heavenly Homes provides great products and is a good business to deal with.

Tip: If you’re selling good to consumers, make sure that you have reviews enabled and that you encourage your customers to provide them. You could ask for reviews on receipts or even better, include a personalised note in their packaging.

Facebook Apps

Key points: Apps for Pinterest, Twitter and for newsletter signup have been added to the Page, with the first two providing social media content and the third (see image above) giving visitors the opportunity to sign up to the Heavenly Homes newsletter.

Tip: If you wish to add extra functionality to your Page, you can do this via a Facebook Apps. This is a great opportunity to make your Page more engaging and to encourage people to visit your Page. For example, you can run a competition or provide a discount voucher for download. There are a number of ways to do this but my recommended option would be ShortStack, which provides a number of templates and makes it easy for you to create and publish an app.

Posts

Key points: Lots of positives on the posts but what really shines through is the personal warm tone. You really feel that the business owner Theresa is talking to you. We know it’s Theresa due to the personal sign off in the About section. Posts are regular and every one appears to have an engaging image or a photo. It’s not all products though as there are plenty of personal posts plus quotes and giveaways. I like the way that product pictures are often photos taken by customers, like the one above.

Tip: Ensure that you have a consistent tone on your Page. An informal friendly tone works well on Facebook. The vast majority of posts should be accompanied by an image, photo or video as visual posts receive more engagement. As demonstrated on the Page, quotes can be displayed on images. You can use tools like Canva and WordSwag to do this. The former will also ensure that the image is correctly sized for your post. Handy.

Unsurprisingly, the Heavenly Homes Gift Shop Page has a good sized and growing audience of 1853 people and its posts receive plenty of Likes, Comments and Shares. This helps the business spread awareness and increase its sales of gift items.

If you have any questions on using Facebook for business, please comment below.

For social media tips every day, download Periscope and follow @intranetfuture. You can also find the shows by following #SocialToday on Twitter.

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How to obtain leads through Instagram

If you’re using social media to obtain leads you’ve probably had business from Facebook and Twitter, but have you considered Instagram for promoting your products of services?

Once company that is successfully using Instagram for business is Square One Marketing and Design whose boss Elliott Richmond can be found on Instagram @erichmond.

Elliott’s strategy is to publish a mixture of personal and business photos using the hashtags #sq1hq and #sq1md on all business Instagrams. These consist of a mixture of web development and web design projects that he’s worked on.

Instagram is a great way of showcasing his company’s web development and design expertise, which was recently noticed by Kim Ellefsen of Norwegian company WNDR. You can find Kim on Instagram at @ellefsen.

Kim wanted to find a web expert to develop a WordPress plugin and was impressed with Elliott’s Instagrams. He got in touch and now they are working together.

If you have any examples of obtaining leads via social media, please get in touch if you would like me to feature your story as an example.

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#PizzaOnATrain and #GiveGregTheHoliday

There were two excellent examples of brands taking advantage of social media to create great PR this month. They follow on nicely from my recent advice on ‘How to go viral‘ where I stressed the importance of ‘Picking your moment’.

First up was the case of Greg Heaslip @gregheaslip1, who works as a security guard at retail group Arcadia, owner of Top Shop and other high street stores, and whose boss mistakenly sent his request for a holiday to the company’s 3500 staff. Several of Greg’s colleagues supported his holiday request and pretty soon, #GiveGregTheHoliday began trending in the UK.

Tour company Trek America was quick to notice the hashtag and offered Greg a holiday in Vegas.

This was great opportunism and their offer was in context, appropriate and made with a sense of fun. Other brands began to notice and subsequently there were some tacky approaches that just didn’t work. But @TrekAmerica were rewarded with plenty of retweets, mentions and favourites.

Greg had the last word and donated his holiday along with other offered items to the Stephen Sutton Cancer Appeal.

Next up is comedian Chris Ramsey @IamChrisRamsey of Celebrity Juice who didn’t fancy the snacks from the buffet car when on a train from London to Newcastle and decided to order a pizza. Dominos Pizza @dominos_uk happily obliged.

As the delivery at Doncaster got closer, the anticipation on Twitter became feverish.

The pizza delivery firm’s enterprise and opportunisme were rewarded with massive exposure on Twitter even before the pizzas were delivered.

Dominos did indeed deliver, providing pizzas for Chris as well as for passengers and staff.

If you have any examples of brands capitalising on Twitter trends, please let me know.

 

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Florette fabulous on Facebook

A fabulous example of a Facebook Page that demonstrates best practice in many areas is Florette, who sell prepared salads and fresh fruit throughout the UK.

visit Florette Facebook Page

Here are some learning points from their Page:

Cover photo - high impact Cover Photo highlighting the competition to win an iPad. The Cover Photo is changed regularly in line with the season or a competition. For example, a Halloween recipe was posted previously.

Extensive use of apps - there are tabs linking to 2 competitions, newsletter sign-up, Pinterest, recipes, a game and information on sustainability.

Message button - The Message button is enabled for Fans and visitors to communicate privately with the Page Admins.

Image based posts - Posts are more often than not image based or accompanied by an image or a high quality photo. They promote other Pages by sharing their useful content. For example, this one below from Love My Salad.

view How to Build A Salad post

Engaging posts - Here’s a great example of an engaging and fun Facebook post which at the time of writing (Monday 25 November) had received 93 Likes and 329 Comments.

view post asking people to put salad ingredients into movie titles

Use of ‘Highlighting’ - Some posts are ‘highlighted’ so they stretch across the Page for great prominence.

Asking Fans to upload photos - Fans were encouraged to upload photos of pumpkins and 52 people did so.

view full photo

Responding to Fans  - Florette responds to Fans questions and Comments in a timely manner throughout the Page.

Will you be adopting some of these best practices on your Page? Please let me know or post in the Comments below. 

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Kelloggs’ Twitter breakfast blunder

It’s easy to find plenty of examples of best practice use of Social Media from UK brands and it’s encouraging that as Social Media becomes more established, it’s much harder to find examples of bad use.

But well known brands still get it wrong. Kelloggs’ found itself in a Twitter storm over the weekend following the tweet below which is part of their #GiveAChildABreakfast campaign.

This caused a barrage of tweets to @KelloggsUK with many questioning the wisdom of donating breakfasts to vulnerable children in return from publicity via retweets. Here’s an example from BBC Science Presenter, James Wong.

Whilst setting up breakfast clubs is a fantastic and noble idea, with Kelloggs funding breakfasts for vulnerable children throughout the UK, the Social Media strategy is not appropriate. Kelloggs should leave people to decide whether they want to retweet rather than implying they had to do so to help fund the breakfasts. This tweet from @KelloggsUK yesterday, appears to contradict the campaign implying that breakfast clubs are already funded:

 

Encouragement to share tweets like the one below on setting up breakfast clubs would have been a much better idea:

The company did apologise yesterday morning and whilst difficult to do so in 140 characters it doesn’t really go far enough.

Credit to Kelloggs for apologising but it’s not just ‘wrong use of words’ but the whole strategy behind the Social Media campaign. There’s just something not quite right about encouraging people to generate awareness around the breakfast clubs initiative.

On the Kelloggs UK Facebook Page, there is plenty of encouragement to ‘raise awareness’, although this is an improvement on past posts (since edited) including one which asked Fans to ‘help us to keep school breakfast clubs running by sharing this post.

What do you think of Kelloggs’ #GiveAChildABreakfast Social Media campaign?

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How to entertain and engage on Twitter

I repeatedly bang the drum and how important it is to engage and generate interaction on social media. One way to do this is to entertain and a great example comes from @ArenaFlowers on Twitter.

Most of their tweets are amusing jokes and entertaining quotes and observations with the vast majority being original and timely.

This refreshing alternative to the sell, sell, sell approach employed by many businesses on Twitter has been rewarded with an audience of over 16,000 followers. Their high Klout rating of 64 indicates that they are engaging well with their followers and that they have a high degree of ‘social influence’.

The account is unusual in that they’re are no promotional tweets to be seen. I did wonder whether they ever directly promote the business so I asked @ArenaFlowers and their reply was, ‘Sometimes we are forced to.’

You could argue that there is not much of a link between the humour and the selling of flowers but engagement is the key to attracting regular viewers to their profile which has all the necessary information to make a purchase and buy flowers. Check the @ArenaFlowers profile and you’ll see that they make use of both the header and background images to provide contact info and details about their business; ‘Personal service, Fantastic flowers and An experience delivered’.

But enough from me, here’s an explanation for Arena Flowers on why they went down this route and how it’s worked for them.

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Twitter competition falls at final hurdle

A great idea for a social media competition was thought up by Betfred, sponsors of the last Friday’s Cheltenham Gold Cup, but it didn’t quite generate the response that was probably anticipated. The idea was for racegoers to tweet the name of the horse they thought was the ‘best turned out’ before the big race on Friday for a chance to win a £100 free bet. However, using TweetReach it appears that less than 17 people entered as instructed - by  tweeting @BetfredRacing using #BTO.

So perhaps the implementation could have been improved in a number of ways:

1) More publicity - other than the inside of the back page of the race card I didn’t spot any other references to the competition. Promoting on the TV screens around the course would have helped raise awareness.

2) More meaningful hashtag - #BTO isn’t a known expression for ‘best turned out’ so why not #BestTurnedOut?

3) Unique hashtag - On the day of the competition #BTO was used in numerous tweets, with only a small proportion related to the Betfred competition. A unique hashtag is important so that the conversation is focussed around the competition, campaign or event you’re running.

4) Omit reference to Facebook - Given that the competition was a Twitter only competition and there is no mention of it on the Betfred Facebook Page, making a reference to it (see below) doesn’t add anything and perhaps confuses.

5) Use correct Twitter logos - Both the logos used in the advert aren’t permitted under Twitter’s Trademark and Content Display Policy plus the instruction in the policy not to ‘display the Twitter brand or trademarks larger than your own marks’ is also ignored.

What do you think of this competition? Please post your thoughts in the Comments below.

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English Cheesecake Company rocks on Facebook

A Facebook Page is a great place to show off and sell tasty looking food products and the English Cheesecake Company Page is a fantastic example.

The following are features of the Page that stand out:

  • Eye catching cover photo
  • Link to Christmas competition (select photo above)
  • Encouragement to order beneath logo including link to website
  • Use of Facebook Shop with cheesecake pics and social sharing buttons
  • Professionally taken photos of cheesecakes accompany most posts
  • Use of Polls to ask fans to vote on top flavours

In addition, posts are made regularly and responses to questions from fans are made promptly and fans are engaged with questions and requests to name special occasion cakes.

This approach combined with use of Facebook Ads has seen the number of Fans on the Page increase from 2,000 to over 25,000 in just over a year.

Facebook certainly works for The English Cheesecake Company with 30% of sales coming through their Page.

If you have a Facebook Page success story please share in the Comments section below.

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Great example of a Facebook Group

The Hucclecote Youth Football Club make great use of their Facebook Group which provides a mechanism for communications between the committee and parents of the young players. The committee can communicate team and match news and the parents can ask questions and receive answers.

This is a closed Facebook Group which means that anybody can see the Group and who’s in it but only members can view the content. As noted in the About section:

“This group is for the parents of Hucclecote Youth Football Club Under 7s. We will be endeavouring to keep you up to date with the latest news, fixtures, results and match reports. Please also feel free to ask questions or post anything you think may be of interest to anyone else within the group.”

A Facebook Group has the following advantages for a football or any other club:

  • It’s a closed group - admission is by invitation and only members can view the content.
  • Easy wall updates – no need to select a Share button;  just hit the enter key.
  • Page rendering – the latest Wall Posts rise to the top of the Page.
  • Navigation/menu – easy access to all the main actions at top of page – Posts, Photos, Videos, Questions and Docs.
  • Docs – Create notes and short docs plus upload Word docs; ideal for Club agendas and minutes.
  • Group chat – ability to chat with some or all members of the Group at the same time.
  • Update via email – send and receive updates using the Group email address.

Do you have any other examples of Facebook Groups being put to good use? If so please let me know. Thank you.

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Top tweets from Philips Support UK

Twitter is increasingly used by UK businesses to provide customer services. This can include resolving issues, obtaining feedback or answering queries. As Twitter is real time companies can react quickly to improve a customer’s experience.

Philips Support UK, the customer services account of Philips in the UK interacts and engages with its customers really well on Twitter through its @philipscare_uk account.

Here are some examples of how Andrea from the social media team interacts with customers: