Anita Kirkbride 
Facebook contests are fun. They’re engaging. And they can garner a lot of attention for your growing small business. It’s not even difficult to host a Facebook contest on your Business Page, since Facebook changed the rules a few years ago. The question is, “Do you know what you’re allowed to do for a Facebook Contest?” Or are you simply following the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing?
Sometimes the hardest part of getting started is just getting started! Here are a few tips to alleviate any fears you might have over getting started in social media and choosing where to begin!
Facebook recently announced changes to the platform that mean you need to be paying better attention to the back end of your website if you want people to share your content. From here on out if you don’t specify the Facebook Open Graph metadata on each page of your website, you won’t be able to get Facebook to show the right image for your post and it will pull whatever info it can find. If it doesn’t look good, people may choose not to share it. Open Graph is simply a system set up by Facebook to enable communications with a website. In the absence of Open Graph tags, Facebook looks at other data.
Facebook has implemented a major change to its API that many small businesses are just discovering this week. If you came here because you can’t change the photo on a link post you’re trying to share on Facebook, it’s not a glitch…it’s permanent. Facebook announced you will no longer be able to change the metadata attached to a link post on Facebook. If you’re posting links to other people’s articles on Facebook, there’s not a whole lot you can do about this. However, if you want and expect people to be posting links from YOUR website, there are a few things you need to do.
In most marketing models, your website is the heart of your business and social media are the arteries bringing lifeblood to it. Social media spreads the word about your website and encourages people to come and read what you’ve written, or check out your products. We often think of social media as standing alone in this but really, if you want want to be efficient, you need to set up your website for social media success, too. They work in tandem, not alone.
If Hootsuite is your main social media management dashboard, you’re going to want to know how to manage Twitter lists in Hootsuite. It’s not difficult, but all of the Twitter list functions are a bit hidden. I’ve written a tutorial for creating Twitter Lists in Hootsuite and adding and removing members from the Twitter lists. No more logging into Twitter to do this!
One of the reasons I love WordPress is the flexibility it offers, through plugins, to customize your website to do anything you want. Over 25 per cent of all websites out there are built on WordPress. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading your site, here are some of the WordPress plugins you should consider installing to leverage your social media efforts.
Are you sure your children are your best source of social media information? Before you take social media advice from your children, read this.
Did you know there is more than one way to talk to customers on Facebook? Business Pages are the most common and usually the first thing we recommend you set up for your business, but there are several other ways you can communicate with potential and existing customers on the platform. Here’s a breakdown of the different Facebook venues you can take advantage of for your business.
My adventure to Social Media Marketing World 2017 in San Diego got off to a rocky start. There was ice and snow, drinks and friends. And most importantly, lots of great learning. I’ve already bought my ticket for SMMW18. Read on to see what I learned this year and why I’m already planning on attending next year.