Create Your Page, Profile Photo and Cover Photo

Let our knowledgeable social media team create your Facebook page. Designed with the needs and goals of your business in mind, the copy will reflect who you are and the design, including the profile and cover photos, will be unique and reflect your branding. This is a great way to begin developing a following.

Increase Your “Likes”

We’ll expertly promote your page to individuals within your target demographic. Your page “likes” will steadily grow as we engage those who are most likely to employ your services and purchase your products.

Engage Your Audience

Yabsta’s experts will post a wide range of interesting content that is related to your business on a regular schedule. This consistency keeps fans coming back for more.

Report Back

We track your Facebook analytics so you don’t have to. Real data lets you know it’s working and a full report is always available. You’ll know exactly how your page is performing.

To learn more about our social media management services, contact us today. Download a free Facebook marketing eBook here for additional information.

Image Credit: I Like Facebook by Charis Tsevis, via Flickr, no changes made, CC License

Keep Up On LinkedIn

Despite your best intentions, it’s possible you haven’t been keeping up with your company’s LinkedIn profile. This year, dedicate yourself to regular maintenance – following others, posting status updates, interacting with other users and more.

Try Something New

Get off on the right foot by trying a brand new network! If you’re already on Facebook and Twitter, check out newcomers Yo or the ad-free Ello or launch an account on a popular photo sharing site such as Instagram, SnapChat or Pinterest. Stay tuned for more in-depth posts on these new networks.

Change Your Passwords

Keep your accounts secure by changing your passwords frequently (if you don’t already, commit to changing them at least a couple of times a year – more is even better!). Opt for a combination of letters, numbers and symbols and record it somewhere safe just in case you forget. Having a different, secure password for each network is often recommended.

Engage More

Engaging and interacting with others puts the social in social media. Get on there and get active ASAP – you’ll be surprised by what you learn about yourself, your business and your potential and current customers.

Use Twitter’s Mute Function

Twitter added the ability to mute users in 2014. This means that you can follow as many users as you like, including courtesy followbacks, without having to scroll through their tweets in your feed. Win-win.

If you make one of these 5 social media New Year’s resolutions, you’re guaranteed to boost your business’s online presence in 2015. From keeping your accounts secure to trying out new functions and networks, engaging with users and keeping up on LinkedIn, you’ll want to follow through.

Image Credit: Resolving to Write More – A Worthy Thought by Carol VanHook, via Flickr, CC License, no changes made

Use Google News

Let’s say, for example, that you manage the Facebook page for a real estate agency in the Cayman Islands. Since you typically want the posts on a given page to be a mix of direct self-promotions and indirect industry-related information, it makes sense to search for recent, relevant news articles that speak to the theme of your page. This in mind, it makes sense to type in “Cayman real estate” (or related keywords) into the Google News search bar and pore through the articles that come up to find the one that best suits the tone of your business’s “voice” on Facebook.

Speak Casually

When under a time constraint, it’s easier and more effective to write under a casual posting “voice” than to confine yourself to rigidity. The nature of Social is somewhat relaxed compared to traditional media, and you can get away with making posts that are more freestyle in nature. This is not to say that you should ignore the tenets of good grammar and punctuation for the sake of appearing casual, but when you can find the magic sweet spot between “professional” and “laid back”, your posts are likely to attract more engagement.

Keep An Emergency List Of Post Ideas

Let’s be honest: some days you’re just not as sharp as others (lack of coffee etc.). For times like these, it’s a good idea to have a backup list of pre-prepared post ideas to keep your business page fresh and relevant. Though these planned posts are more likely to be non-topical, it’s better to post something useful, even if old, than nothing at all. It’s very noticeable to the public when a business page loses momentum, and looks very unprofessional when someone comes to your page and sees that you haven’t posted in months. With a little bit of research and forward planning, you can avoid the need to deal with this, and always have an extra one in the chamber.

Image Credit:  Massimo Barbieri (Flickr)

Since different platforms require different ways of thinking—Facebook posts are longer than those for Twitter, which have a different voice than LinkedIn status updates —there’s no real cut and paste. We have, however, put together this toolkit to help you create better content, faster. Bookmark this Online Marketing Toolkit for templates, tips and tools that you can use over and over again to enrich your social media accounts, your business blog and even your company website.

Building an Editorial Calendar

Where are you in your business blogging journey? Whether you’ve just started or have been blogging for years, it’s helpful to create and refer to a well-thought out editorial calendar. However, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel – check out the Blog Content Planning Guides and Editorial Calendar Templates by B2BInbound to get you started.

Creating the Title for Your Blog

Need help filling that calendar with ideas? While the content is up to you, there are many scientifically proven ways in which to effectively present your ideas. Are you going to be doing a case study this week or just covering the basics? This list, brought to you by Freelance Writing Solutions gives you great templates for possible blog titles that will catch a reader’s eye. No muss, no fuss.

Writing a Blog Post

As important as your business blog is, the more time you can save while still creating quality content, the better. B2Binbound suggests using their blog template that takes you through a checklist for creating valuable but concise articles, consistently. Creating your own template can be a great way to maintain your voice when inviting informed colleagues or guest bloggers to write a piece.

Downloading Images Quickly and Legally

We’ve talked in the past about the importance of images in breaking up wordy text and visually representing ideas. There are tons of places online such as Free Images and Google Image Search that allow you to search a single keyword and receive great quality images for free. Google Image Search now has the option to search images by usage rights and is a leading site to find free stock photos for your blog.

Resizing Images Without Photoshop

In order to maximize space, it’s important to be familiar with the image sizing guidelines pertaining to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other platforms. Socially Stacked’s The Ultimate Social Media Template Guide offers interesting tips and tricks and lays out the recommended dimensions for a wide range of social networks.

Now that you know the right sizes, upload your image into iPiccy and either resize or crop the photo. You can also apply beautiful photo effects and filters, all within seconds and completely free.

Sending Your Content to Different Channels

Now that your blog post is done, marketing it through your different channels will be a breeze with these helpful social media templates that offer effective options for building your statuses faster.

The Next Web’s templates will help grow your Facebook Page, while HubSpot is ever helpful on Twitter and all other social media sites.

Recycling Old Content

You don’t need a skilled graphic designer to recycle existing content into something exciting and new. When the time comes, Simple Booklet lets you turn your existing marketing collateral into web-based booklets that you can then post across social networks, email and embed on your website.

Checking for Spelling and Grammar

Even the work of the best copywriters and content creators requires a second look. Save time by slipping your content—whether it be a lengthy blog post or a short Facebook status—into Online-Spellcheck.com to ensure it is polished and typo-free.

Voilà!

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, visit these resources for help creating an editorial calendar outline, writing blog and social media posts, downloading and resizing images, breathing new life into old content and proofreading. Save time and enrich your content with this Professional Online Marketing Toolkit and send it to your friends!

What are your favourite tools to use? Let us know in the comments or on Facebook.

Determine Legitimacy

Determining the legitimacy of the complaint being directed at you is important to proceeding in asituation involving an upset customer. With anonymous commenters, trolling and fake reviews becoming more and more prevalent online, you must use your best judgment to figure out whether the user in question has a genuine reason to complain or is simply trying to stir things up. Always be polite and patient, even if the user becomes rude: So long as you’re offering calm, reasoned responses to the complaints, onlookers and other customers will be able to see that you’re doing everything you can to alleviate the situation. If a particularly pointed complaint is directed to your business in a public forum (eg. your Facebook wall), it’s best to reach out to the user privately and give them the name of someone they can speak to directly: As personal as social media is, nothing beats one-on-one dialogue with a real person.

Respond Quickly

In a scenario where your business makes a mistake and the upset customer deserves some form of vindication or compensation, mediums like social media make it easy to respond to the wronged party swiftly. Letting a customer know that you’re conscious of your error and are working to fix it offers peace of mind, even in situations where you can’t right the situation immediately. If the dialogue happens to take place in a comments thread (eg. on a Facebook post or someone’s Twitter feed), other users witnessing the conversation can “Like” or “Favorite” your business’s individual responses to indicate that they agree with your approach, too.

Never Lose Your Cool

While this is a fundamental rule of customer service in general, it’s doubly important for online. Internet users love a good flame war, and if you ever respond to someone in an irate manner, you lose the advantage/responsibility of professionalism that comes with speaking under your business’s name. Whether you’re in the right or not, using condescending or inciteful language in any form is likely to make onlookers side with the person making the complaint, so it’s just not worth it.

Photo Credit: The Nunez’s Group (Flickr)

Respond In A Timely Fashion

This may seem obvious, but its a best practice ignored more often than you’d think. If a client or potential customer reaches out to you with a specific inquiry or comment, they’re expecting a timely reply: Don’t leave messages sitting in your inbox, particularly if your page is public and is seen to be regularly posting. Its also important not to ignore comment threads on individual posts, which can be easy to lose track of as they’re replaced with new ones. Even if you don’t have an immediate answer to a question you’re posed, its always advisable to let the person know that you’re in the process of following up. Punctual response is always appreciated, and is simple as a few keystrokes.

Remain Calm

One arguable drawback of social media’s personal nature is that things can get publicly (and easily) combative in the event of an upset customer. When put on the spot by someone unreasonable , it’s important to keep your cool and remember that your entire base of followers are watching. Show your audience that you’re able to deal with conflict in a collected manner, and they’ll respect you for it. If all else fails and the person is antagonistic, you can always block or report them to the platform administrators. The key is to always be aware of your audience and never risk presenting yourself as unhelpful or rude.

Speak Succinctly

The reason platforms like Twitter are designed around brief messages is because they operate on the assumption that web users have short attention spans. If you can transcend your point in fewer words without losing key details, you’re in a better position for your audience to stay engaged throughout a given post. Its fine to expand on customer queries during a private message exchange, but it’s best to write your public exchanges in an uncomplicated manner, under the assumption that your answer will be useful to many people watching.

Inconsistency

Consistency is key when it comes to social media. If you’ve fallen into a rut of posting at off-times, forgetting to schedule content in advance and cycling between periods of high activity and falling off the face of the Twitter-planet, you’re going to appear unreliable and undedicated. Find your footing by crafting a plan for posting and sticking to it. You can even use one of those nifty publishing platforms, like HootSuite or Sprout Social, to make it even easier.

Cookie-Cutter Content

Standing out on social media requires innovation. Customers are much less likely to like and follow businesses that think within the box instead of outside of it. However well written and researched, blog posts, infographics and other content must offer something unique and tailored to the audience in question. Before you post, ask yourself: is this different than everything else that’s out there?

Too Much Horn Tooting

Twitter and Facebook are not simply channels for self-promotion. While the occasional tweet describing your services, advertising a sale, boasting about a completed project or linking to your website is welcome, users don’t follow companies that post only about themselves. Follow the golden “80/20 Rule” – 80% of your posts should be about generating and maintaining interest (think industry news, product releases and insightful, useful blog posts) while the remaining 20% can be used to, you guessed it, toot your own horn.

Too Little Personality

While it’s (sometimes) okay for big box brands to post generic, bland updates, start-ups and smaller businesses don’t get anywhere if they don’t let their personality shine. Instead of sticking to strictly a professional voice, which can come off as stuffy and boring, humanize your brand to generate interest and build loyalty, which in turn boosts website traffic and more. Make a goal to connect with your audience in a personal way; create an authentic voice your audience can connect with.

Lack of Conversation

Social media is one of the best ways to interact with your audience. Genuine interaction generates likes and follows and fosters a positive environment; potential and current customers feel like you’re listening, which builds trust and credibility. If you’re posting great content regularly but not conversing with others, boost your presence by replying, tweeting, sharing and commenting.

Image Credit: AdBuzz

While text status updates are undeniably quick and easy, brands need to stand out on social media. Graphics are a great way to do this and Facebook itself clearly agrees. Content is still king in 2014 and everything, from eBooks to blog posts and SM updates, must provide value. Today’s Web users are visual creatures and this means that graphics of all sorts are a win.

Link Sharing

The Facebook Newsroom article above mentions link sharing as an engaging alternative to text based statuses. Many brands opt to embed links in status updates, which makes for a lacklustre visual experience. Link-sharing, on the other hand, generates a preview of the content, providing a more compelling visual experience. Facebook rewards valuable, resourceful content with greater exposure for brands.

Images

The Facebook network is working to improve their ranking algorithms’ abilities to differentiate between posts from friends and from Pages. While there will be a “decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, [page admins] may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.” In addition to link sharing, images are a great way to boost social media reach and interactivity. To use an example from a brand known for their cheeky social media prowess, Oreo abandoned plain text in favour of attention-grabbing, occasionally humorous or emotional, images.

In these Facebook updates from May 2012, you’ll see the startling difference in engagement between the basic text status and the more stimulating “question and an image” update. The differences in likes, comments and shares is noteworthy, at 4,200, 215 and 87 compared to 16,833, 1,034 and 855. Real-life posts don’t lie – the proof is right here.

In recent months, more and more brands on Facebook (and Twitter!) have been capitalizing on the image trend and there’s no reason for you to wait. While Oreo is a great example, you can also check out Coca-Cola, Sharpie, PlayStation and Samsung Mobile to see it in action.

What About Video?

Significant value can be provided in the form of an informative, brand-relevant commercial or a heartwarming or humorous viral clip. As seen in the profiles of popular brands, videos generate more engagement than text status updates but less than image updates. Great video can be costly and it’s important for businesses of all sizes to take their budget into account. If you can afford a promotional video or a number of well-designed graphics, the latter will provide the most bang for your buck.

When considering the impact of graphics on social engagement, Facebook itself is encouraging compelling, valuable and visual content by promoting these updates and decreasing the distribution of text status updates from Business Pages. In order to stay on top of the social media game, brands and businesses must visually display their products and services in the most effective way possible – without breaking the bank. Great design is key, and graphics are one of today’s top methods for improving social reach and interaction.

Image Credits: Dashburst, Oreo’s Facebook & Oreo Twitter

While some would tell you that mixing business with personal isn’t recommended, social management is a different beast: Since your SMM is hired to speak under your company’s voice, its important for him/her to understand exactly what your business is about from an ethos/pathos perspective. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask your liaison for a casual meeting over coffee, or to add him/her personally on Facebook for the sake of building a relationship. You’ll find that as you get to know the person better, he/she will begin to understand your business through your eyes and post things that are more likely to be in tune with your own corporate ethics and beliefs.

Send Collateral On A Regular Basis

Though a competent SMM can discover and post information about your business on their own, its very important that you regularly update them with the latest information about your company that they might not be privy to without having an inside track. If you have access to internal collateral (product lists, new promotions, competition statistics etc.) that hasn’t been made public yet, forward it to them on a consistent basis either via email or through a cloud sharing service such as Dropbox. Even if you’re not sure how the content should be scheduled, send it anyway: its an SMM’s job to disseminate information about your business and disperse it to the public in a way that will drive engagement. Your SMM is essentially your internet public relations coordinator, and should be treated as such.

Specify Your Advertising Budget

Since most social media platforms have paid advertising options, many agency-proposed management plans will include an allocated ad budget within your monthly rate. If your SMM doesn’t offer this convenience, however, its recommended that you decide on a maximum monthly ad budget beforehand and take it into consideration alongside the proposed management fee. Most social ads run on what’s known as a “maximum cost-per-click” basis, meaning that you’ll only pay if and when someone actually clicks through to your website or respective social environment. SMMs are experts and maximizing the strength and reach of your budget, even if its a modest one, so don’t be afraid to play with different amounts on a month-to-month basis to see what works and what doesn’t.

Often, non web-savvy business owners will hear about how popular Facebook is, assume they need to be represented there at any cost, then whip up a quick and dirty profile with no ongoing management plan just to be able to say: “My business is on Facebook”. Needless to say, this can risk you projecting a confusing image, or worse, appearing lazy/lackluster for not committing to a regular posting schedule.

The reason I’m focusing on this topic is because it’s in every business owner’s best interest to really think hard about their business before making the jump to Facebook. Some questions you should ask yourself:

1. Do I have the ability to make my field of business come across as “interesting” to my target audience?

2. Do I have enough time and shareable content to be able commit to a regular posting schedule?

3. Is my business’s image engaging enough that I can jump right into Facebook without a significant rebranding?

If you can honestly answer “yes” to these three questions, then chances are you’re ready to start a Facebook business page. Social media users are notoriously short attention-spanned with the content they consume, so the more “interesting” your field comes across as, the more likely you’ll be able to craft a brand message that appeals to this audience. This isn’t to say that any business can’t have an engaging Facebook presence, but it really comes down to what product/service you have to offer and how dedicated your social media manager is.

So how do you decide when your business is ready to make the jump Facebook? First, consider your audience’s relation to your product. Are they excited about it or is it just something that they need, but don’t necessarily have an emotional connection to? Is it something they begrudge (a clamping/tow truck company)? Something “mundane” (a laundromat)? Or perhaps something that’s controversial (a political cause)? It’s up to you to decide on whether the public perception of your message makes it worth the time commitment and overall effort.

To conclude, one of the most engaging part about a business’s Facebook page is it’s voice. Even having just cautioned businesses in fields where upkeeping a Facebook presence might prove challenging, it still stands that a competent social media manager can write a compelling brand message regardless of business type if they’ve done their research and understand their target audience. So, to answer the question posed in the title of this post: “yes”, as long as you are fully committed to establishing a compelling voice and have the time/resources to follow through on it. Otherwise, it might be time to seek outside help.