It’s only a hop, skip and jump until Christmas day. End of year parties colour our calendars and employees around the country are booking their leave.

Many businesses either shut down or fall back to a skeleton crew over the holidays so it’s important to include your social media monitoring and engagement into this roster.

If your customers could have operational, service or purchasing issues over this time ensure whoever is on duty is trained up and familiar with your processes to address and answer tweets or Facebook questions.

Hopefully your key staff will be happy to answer the occasional email, tweet replies or share updates on Facebook while they’re on holiday. But if not you’ll need to have an arrangement with your contact center or other staff.

Set up a roster so there’s always someone on ‘Social Media Duty’ throughout the holidays. They might need some training on how to deal with issues, ... Continue reading]]>

It’s only a hop, skip and jump until Christmas day. End of year parties colour our calendars and employees around the country are booking their leave.

Many businesses either shut down or fall back to a skeleton crew over the holidays so it’s important to include your social media monitoring and engagement into this roster.

If your customers could have operational, service or purchasing issues over this time ensure whoever is on duty is trained up and familiar with your processes to address and answer tweets or Facebook questions.

Hopefully your key staff will be happy to answer the occasional email, tweet replies or share updates on Facebook while they’re on holiday. But if not you’ll need to have an arrangement with your contact center or other staff.

Set up a roster so there’s always someone on ‘Social Media Duty’ throughout the holidays. They might need some training on how to deal with issues, negative posts or answer certain questions.

Make sure you have email alerts set up for DM’s and @mentions on Twitter and wall posts or comments on Facebook.

Check your Google Alerts are set up for company or product mentions in news articles or blog posts.

Create a resource of potential complaints and questions you could get and contact details for people in case the monitoring team need urgent support.

Fill your content calendar with daily posts, links and photos so they can be scheduled or posted by the person on duty.

Think about what advice or content you can share to be useful or entertaining. Take pictures of the office Christmas party, before people have too much to drink.

Add some misteltoe to your Twitter avatar and some presents to your Facebook page and get into the holiday spirit. You could update these for New Years.

To do: Select your ‘on duty’ team, set up the roster, create a support resource, prepare your content calendar, artwork and emergency contact list.

Merry Christmas to you. It’s been fantastic to share my social media insights and tips with you this year. See you in 2012 and in the mean time feel free to tweet me @JustinFlitter.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

With Christmas only 30 sleeps away, many people are turning their attention to 2012 planning.  While I’ll run through some tips and advice to help you manage your social media over the holiday period next week, today I want to get you thinking about 2012.

If a social strategy is not on your agenda right now it should be high on your to do list for the new year.

Social strategies take many shapes and forms. They can be internal campaigns aimed at training staff, helping them understand how and why the business can benefit from social networking.

It could be external, using content, engagement and integrated online and offline advertising to drive traffic to a landing page, your website or Facebook.

B2B campaigns use online advertising, great content and engagement tactics to create lead generation, start discussions and encourage people to experience your brand.

Or you can develop a pure play engagement strategy, thats ... Continue reading]]>

With Christmas only 30 sleeps away, many people are turning their attention to 2012 planning.  While I’ll run through some tips and advice to help you manage your social media over the holiday period next week, today I want to get you thinking about 2012.

If a social strategy is not on your agenda right now it should be high on your to do list for the new year.

Social strategies take many shapes and forms. They can be internal campaigns aimed at training staff, helping them understand how and why the business can benefit from social networking.

It could be external, using content, engagement and integrated online and offline advertising to drive traffic to a landing page, your website or Facebook.

B2B campaigns use online advertising, great content and engagement tactics to create lead generation, start discussions and encourage people to experience your brand.

Or you can develop a pure play engagement strategy, thats soft, fun, and develops the social brand over a longer period of time.

Training your teams brings everyone up to speed quickly and can help identify people keen to be corporate stars and lead your campaigns.

Any marketing strategy needs to be well planned and carefully executed. You need to walk before you can run so before your business jumps in the deep end take some time to plan ahead and seek experienced advice.

Before Christmas if you do nothing else sign yourself up to Twitter and start getting used to the application, searching for key words and listening to conversations people are already having about your business or industry.

While you have some down time over the holidays, consider buying a social media book or read as many social media blogs and articles as you can.

The best thing you can do is ask questions, research and look to your local and global competitors for examples, insights and case studies.

And don’t forget about The Pulse. Feel free to post questions as comments below. We’re all here to help and offer as much advice as possible.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

A common challenge businesses have with Facebook and Twitter is whether each branch or franchise should have it’s own page or whether they should be promoted from a single account.

So the question is – one main Facebook page for the whole business and all it’s entities, or separate pages that are more focused and specific?

How important is it to be online the same time as your customers?  Ie, businesses are traditionally 9-5, yet customers are online outside of work times.  How important as part of a social media strategy is it to have your social media communications staff online and responding at all hours of the night/day/weekend etc rather than just being online during the traditional 9-5?

As a small to medium sized business you don’t need 24/7 coverage and you’re not expected to. Even if you did get a comment posted on your Facebook wall at 11pm at night, there won’t be many others up to see it before you get to it in the morning.

If you post content you should be online at the same time to respond and engage.

I doubt many people would expect a business to respond to a Tweet or a Facebook post late at night. But ... Continue reading]]>

How important is it to be online the same time as your customers?  Ie, businesses are traditionally 9-5, yet customers are online outside of work times.  How important as part of a social media strategy is it to have your social media communications staff online and responding at all hours of the night/day/weekend etc rather than just being online during the traditional 9-5?

As a small to medium sized business you don’t need 24/7 coverage and you’re not expected to. Even if you did get a comment posted on your Facebook wall at 11pm at night, there won’t be many others up to see it before you get to it in the morning.

First rule of thumb:

If you post content you should be online at the same time to respond and engage.

I doubt many people would expect a business to respond to a Tweet or a Facebook post late at night. But if you are sharing content in that busy 6pm-10pm time you should (at least) have someone receiving notifications and able to respond and engage.

For those Twitter accounts that receive a lot of customer service questions it may pay to have your online times displayed in your bio or on your Twitter background. You might even tweet about the times you’re available from time to time.

If you have a contact centre I’d suggest setting up systems so Facebook notifications are seen by people who can make a judgement call on relative urgency or action required. They would need Admin access, especially if posts need to be deleted for any reason.

Weekends are important especially for brands running Facebook adverts, competitions or posting content. It pays to have someone responsible for checking in every now and then plus receiving notifications. The last thing you want is a customer question about that weekends sale or opening times or a complaint to go unanswered until Monday morning.

So make sure someone is receiving notifications of Facebook page activity, Twitter Direct Messages and LinkedIn Group posts. That’s a minimum. After that someone should be at least checking your pages once a day and able to respond to Tweets and Facebook posts during the day ie. 7am to 9pm.

I hope that helps give you some guidelines to start from. Please share your experience, insights or thoughts below and of course any further questions you would like answered and discussed.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

Providing customer support through social networks is a common way to build trust and promote a company’s commitment to their customers.

If you’re active on Twitter or Facebook already you’ve probably had at least one person post a question on your wall or tweet you for help.

Almost every day we see tweets from people about their frustration with contact centre wait times or confusion with plans and services they receive from a company. Leaving those tweets unanswered makes the customer feel ignored and unloved.

Being on top of tweets for help can provide a huge boost for your business as many other people will see your response, actions and customer engagement. It’s a good look.

I’ve talked many times about setting up search feeds for relevant key words and phrases around your business, brands, products, people and these should include any phrases people might use to complain or ask questions about you.

In my experience email notifications are by ... Continue reading]]>

Providing customer support through social networks is a common way to build trust and promote a company’s commitment to their customers.

If you’re active on Twitter or Facebook already you’ve probably had at least one person post a question on your wall or tweet you for help.

Almost every day we see tweets from people about their frustration with contact centre wait times or confusion with plans and services they receive from a company. Leaving those tweets unanswered makes the customer feel ignored and unloved.

Being on top of tweets for help can provide a huge boost for your business as many other people will see your response, actions and customer engagement. It’s a good look.

I’ve talked many times about setting up search feeds for relevant key words and phrases around your business, brands, products, people and these should include any phrases people might use to complain or ask questions about you.

In my experience email notifications are by far the simplest way to receive updates and alerts for brand mentions, tweets and DM’s and of course when people post or mention you on Facebook. Listening is mission critical, even if you’re not that active on Twitter having these simple search and notification systems set up will really help you stay on top of the game.

If you have a contact centre or helpdesk you might like to look at Zendesk which is a SaaS helpdesk and customer engagement portal. Zendesk listens to Twitter and creates helpdesk tickets of those important tweets so your staff can quickly reply or move the conversation to email or the phone.

Of course you can’t be listening ALL the time so some good advice is to add your office hours to your Twitter background, your contact numbers and email addresses for support and even expected response times. If someone has a problem or an issue dealing which your business or products you need to reply as fast as possible. The last thing you want to see is a tweet from your competitor offering a faster solution, pulling the rug out from under your feet. Being quick on the draw can be the difference between keeping or losing business, I’ve seen it happen many times.

Always acknowledge a support tweet or Facebook post publicly and then decide whether to stay with @replies, move to Direct Messages or ask them to call or email you directly. The more personal you make the experience the better it will be.

Set up your searches, make sure you’re listening and paying attention. Have internal processes documented, make them apart of your staff training and incorporate tweets and Facebook posts in your SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Be committed to treating social networks like any other communication channel customers can use to talk to your business.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

Shocking right? What’s the point in having a Facebook page for your business if no one ever goes to it?

Now stop reading this article, open Facebook and think about the user experience.

Now back to me.

People don’t go to your Facebook page because the the action of ‘liking it’ usually happens from your company website, or when a friend shares your post, or someone scans your QR code. People can also like your page through a sponsored story or other Facebook ads.

Then your posts appear in their News Feed and they might share or like that content. So unless there is some other incentive people have no need to actually visit your brand page.

Realising this helps you to understand the power of the post. If your Facebook updates are not interesting, useful, funny or otherwise engaging and posted at the right time you’re seriously going to struggle to gain any traction.

In order to ... Continue reading]]>

Shocking right? What’s the point in having a Facebook page for your business if no one ever goes to it?

Now stop reading this article, open Facebook and think about the user experience.

Now back to me.

People don’t go to your Facebook page because the the action of ‘liking it’ usually happens from your company website, or when a friend shares your post, or someone scans your QR code. People can also like your page through a sponsored story or other Facebook ads.

Then your posts appear in their News Feed and they might share or like that content. So unless there is some other incentive people have no need to actually visit your brand page.

Realising this helps you to understand the power of the post. If your Facebook updates are not interesting, useful, funny or otherwise engaging and posted at the right time you’re seriously going to struggle to gain any traction.

In order to really use Facebook to market your business you should be an active user yourself. You need to understand how people use Facebook and what content and tactics generate the most engagement and interactions.

• When you open Facebook you see your news feed. To most people that’s all of Facebook they see or use.
• Your news feed doesn’t contain every post from all your friends or all the pages you’ve liked.
• You can change your news feed to show more, or everything, or the most recent from everyone, but fewer than 10 to 20 percent of people do this.
• If you have a Facebook page, all your fans do not see all your posts. The fans who have liked or comment on your page’s posts will see more of your posts.

So your task for today is to spend one hour studying Facebook. Go to as many brand pages as you can, check them out, look at all their custom tabs, think about how much work went in to them. Then look at their wall and study their updates, what are they sharing, how many likes and comments did they get etc. Look at your competitors Facebook pages and learn what they do that gets good reactions.

Next week we’ll talk about providing customer service and support through social networks. As always if you have any burning social media questions please use the comments box below.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

Writing a business blog has many benefits. But like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. it takes time, thought, strategy and great content to build an audience.

Just like with other social networks you want to get people following your blog through RSS subscriptions or email.

Business blogs are useful for:

Blogs are great for SEO too. There are another window to your business that people will see when they search for related key words and phrases. So it’s vital that you use the right language, keywords and tag your blog posts correctly for optimum search visibility.

Blogs are very easy to set up. If you already have a business website, talk to your web company for advice. ... Continue reading]]>

Writing a business blog has many benefits. But like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. it takes time, thought, strategy and great content to build an audience.

Just like with other social networks you want to get people following your blog through RSS subscriptions or email.

Business blogs are useful for:

• Building a reputation as a thought leader
• Sharing your research, insights
• Promoting your innovation or new services
• Sharing staff stories, projects and insights
• Recruitment
• Corporate news

Blogs are great for SEO too. There are another window to your business that people will see when they search for related key words and phrases. So it’s vital that you use the right language, keywords and tag your blog posts correctly for optimum search visibility.

Blogs are very easy to set up. If you already have a business website, talk to your web company for advice. It’s likely they will have a content management system you can use to publish your blog posts and will be able to set up a well branded and well designed blog that’s integrated with your website.

If you want to create a blog on the side you can use a free blogging platform like WordPress or Posterous.

Like Twitter and Facebook the hardest part of blogging is getting started and getting yourself in to a routine. Writing is not everyone’s cup of tea, some days writers block stresses you out and you don’t get anything done. So here’s some advice.

• Share the blog post writing around – find people throughout the company that are keen to be involved
• Be consistent – schedule two posts per week say on a Monday and a Thursday and try to stick to it.
• One post could be insights or updates from the CEO or another person on the Management team. Another could be an interview with a staff member or sharing some research or market/industry insights
• Keep your writing style conversational, write as if you’re speaking to a customer
• Ask questions, all blog posts should be a conversation starter. And make sure you reply to comments as quickly as possible.
• Add pictures and video if possible

You could ask customers, suppliers or industry experts to be a guest blogger for you once or twice a month. That way they get to share their knowledge with your community and you get expert commentary and content. Perhaps if you have a new product range you could highlight why they came to be and how you hope they will add value to your customers lives.

Blog posts are of course great content to share through your other social networks. But I don’t advise to auto post your blog to Twitter or Facebook. Each social network has it’s own unique experience and style so write your own updates highlighting questions, insights or other content you think is most relevant to your followers on that network.

And don’t forget to add your latest blog post to your website – Tell people about it!

Does your business already have a blog? How’s it going? What have you found to work well?

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

Two insights and observations for you this week that seem to be challenging for some businesses using social networks.

The first is restrictions on fan posts on Facebook pages

Open your Facebook and navigate to your business page. In the top right click Edit page and Manage permissions to get to this screen.

We’re interested in the Posting Ability options

What options do you have enabled here? Do you allow users to write or post content on your wall?

Many brand pages deny their fans the ability to share content or post comments and feedback on their wall. Perhaps they are scared about what people might say about them or that people might post inappropriate content. Either way it’s unsocial.

Managing your business Facebook page takes a little time each day. Someone in your team should have a smart phone or the ability to receive notifications when someone posts on your wall so if the content is unsuitable ... Continue reading]]>

Two insights and observations for you this week that seem to be challenging for some businesses using social networks.

The first is restrictions on fan posts on Facebook pages

Open your Facebook and navigate to your business page. In the top right click Edit page and Manage permissions to get to this screen.

We’re interested in the Posting Ability options

What options do you have enabled here? Do you allow users to write or post content on your wall?

Many brand pages deny their fans the ability to share content or post comments and feedback on their wall. Perhaps they are scared about what people might say about them or that people might post inappropriate content. Either way it’s unsocial.

Managing your business Facebook page takes a little time each day. Someone in your team should have a smart phone or the ability to receive notifications when someone posts on your wall so if the content is unsuitable it can be deleted or dealt with. Complaints or issues should ideally be dealt with on the wall as a comment reply unless it’s defamatory, rude or just totally inappropriate.  Most people who post on brand page walls want to share their brand experience, something funny or interesting and that’s the sort of engagement that Facebook offers, unless of course you block that.

Blocking user comments is like telling your audience “we’re not interested in what you have to say” and if the brand won’t listen to its customers why should they listen to the brand?

The more you can encourage people to engage with your business on Facebook the more people will see those posts, see their friends talking about you and perhaps like your page too.

The other issue is when businesses start a Facebook or Twitter profile and then neglect it.

I’ve probably mentioned this before but it’s critical to the image of your brand and your business online. All too often we see Twitter accounts when the last tweet was 2 months ago or a Facebook profile with customer comments that are weeks old with no replies.

If someone emails you or calls your customer service number and you ignore them, how do you think that customer will feel? They will probably talk to your competitor and you’ll lose their business.

A neglected social profile is worse for your brand than not having a profile at all. Social networking takes time, effort and a good plan. Even if you’re only posting once per day or three times per week it’s much better than nothing at all.

If your business wants to leverage social networking to connect with current and potential customers please, be social, engage, reply and be active every day, otherwise you’ll look like a closed shop.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are social communication channels. You could think of them like Radio or TV, except they are way more interactive.

Facebook is massive, in NZ there are over 2 million people with profiles.  Australia has just hit the 10 million mark.

For most businesses cutting through the noise even with great content and sharp adverts is tough. You can’t be everything to everyone so my tip this week is to ‘hyper target’ your Facebook page, make it niche, special and super relevant to those people you really want to engage.

Now this takes a bit of thought and planning so sit down with your team and pick one aspect of your business that could work really well with Facebook. Think about the demographics using Facebook, when might your desired audience be most active, what information is going to appeal to them the most.

For one recruitment company I ... Continue reading]]>

Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter are social communication channels. You could think of them like Radio or TV, except they are way more interactive.

Facebook is massive, in NZ there are over 2 million people with profiles.  Australia has just hit the 10 million mark.

For most businesses cutting through the noise even with great content and sharp adverts is tough. You can’t be everything to everyone so my tip this week is to ‘hyper target’ your Facebook page, make it niche, special and super relevant to those people you really want to engage.

Now this takes a bit of thought and planning so sit down with your team and pick one aspect of your business that could work really well with Facebook. Think about the demographics using Facebook, when might your desired audience be most active, what information is going to appeal to them the most.

For one recruitment company I ran a workshop with I found out that they wanted to attract engineers in Ireland and the UK to work in New Zealand. We spent 30 minuets doing some research on the Facebook advert builder to see how many people there were under various categories until we found the right audience to target. We looked at targeting people with certain job titles, seniority or even which company they currently work for. We found a niche of about 2,000 people, created a Facebook page and started programming our weeks content schedule.

The Facebook page is only viewable or searchable by people to live in the UK or Ireland and the adverts are only being displayed to a very specific group. This makes our ad spend more efficient, effective and means we can run longer campaigns, testing copy, images and pain points to asses which ones work the best.

As Facebook changes and opens up the social graph you’ll be able to hyper target your messages to smaller groups of people that might have visited your website before, are watching a specific movie or YouTube video for instance. But for the moment content is still king. You must know and understand your target market and then deliver relevant and sharable content to influence their opinions or behaviour in your favour. Content starts the conversation, sparks the idea in someone’s mind that perhaps New Zealand could be a great place to take the family for a few years, after all we do have plenty of engineering work.

So that’s my advice for hyper targeting (I love that phrase) your Facebook presence. You can and probably should do the same for Twitter as well. People certainly like to follow people and businesses where it’s clear what the account is about and what information they are going to receive. Social networks are only going to get noisier so refining your activity could make you a whole lot more relevant now and in the future.

Justin Flitter | Social Media Consultant – justinflitter.co.nz

A Twitter list is a list of Twitter users organized into a group. You can organize groups any way you’d like.

Each list gets it’s own page on Twitter that shows only the tweets of the people in that list.

For an example check out my list for New Zealand Businesses on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/JustinFlitter/nzbiz

Twitter lists can be either public or private. Once you have created your own public group others can follow that list.

Twitter lists are a great way to follow people without actually following them or to sort people you follow into groups based on their location, profession or interest.