Facebook posts

The days of businesses focusing their efforts on entertaining their fans on social media are behind us… at least they should be. Today, people expect more out of businesses. They expect to be shown things that they don’t normally see from their friends and family. If they follow a business, they aren’t looking for that business to post funny cat pictures or memes. They get enough of those already. One of the most popular things we posted this week was on a car dealer’s Facebook page. It wasn’t a hot concept car or a restored muscle car. It wasn’t some local attraction or hometown hero. It was a picture…

There are too many opportunities out there in the world of social media that makes it a bad idea to ignore the medium. Businesses can make an impact if they put in the effort. Unfortunately, not everyone is ready. It’s still possible to put in minimal effort and have a decent presence. When it’s time to put in full effort, you’ll be better prepared if you have a nice string of daily content that fills your pages. Automation is a bad idea and can do damage in the long run, but there are ways to put in a little bit of effort and still do okay, at least holding down the fort until you’re ready to blast off. Diversity…

Oh, the regrets. Things happen. We start heading down the wrong direction and suddenly we find ourselves in a bad place. What am I talking about? Facebook pages. Most businesses have them. Most businesses are doing them wrong. Some have done them so wrong in the past that it’s better to start from scratch. As much pain as that may cause, the alternative is worse. The way that the EdgeRank algorithm works combined with the improved effectiveness of Facebook advertising make it necessary in some cases to dump a page and start over. Having too many low-quality Facebook fans can hurt your chances for…

The primary goal of Home, Facebook’s Android app that basically takes over your phone, was to keep people more connected on their mobile devices than they already are. They already had the most popular app, but it wasn’t enough. They wanted total domination. Now, they’re taking a step backwards from that initial goal to solve an issue. For all intents and purposes, Facebook Home has been a failure. The strategy of rolling it out slowly to only a handful of phones backfired when very few of the owners of those phones took note of the app. Besides the abysmal launch strategy, the biggest problem that…

In many ways, Facebook has lost some of its luster as a business tool. It isn’t that it’s not possible to properly market a business on the platform. It’s that the complexity of the EdgeRank algorithm mixed with the touchiness of the advertising formats has many turning autopilot onto their pages instead of investing time or money into them. They just weren’t seeing a return on investment the way that they had hoped. It seems to be an ebb and flow of sentiment. General Motors, for example, decided to dump their investment into Facebook advertising last year before returning to the platform this year….

Just when you thought Facebook couldn’t get any better when it comes to establishing an active online presence, the social networking giant also introduced a new look where, aside from a profile photo, a bigger space was created to give brands a chance to be more visible and creative—the cover photo. Companies big and small have taken advantage of the cover photo to display powerful images aimed at attracting a bigger clientele. In fact, many of them extra-glamorized their cover photos with chunks of texts in an attempt to catch their audience’s attention. And they did—sort of. The thing…

Facebook has been a challenging venue for marketers and advertisers ever since it started really getting popular in 2009. At that time, it was clear that it was the social network to beat and the company started trying to cash in with different types of advertising options. Most of them failed miserably for the same reason that many marketers continue to fail today: people go to Facebook to be entertained, not to be the recipient of ads. Today, it’s getting easier. People are more accepting of ads. A lot of it can be attributed to the way that Facebook has handled their promoted posts. They have done…

We all knew Facebook was huge. We all knew that a ton of people use Facebook on a regular basis. Now we know the true numbers from Q1 2013 and they’re probably bigger than you might have expected. According to their public results release, Facebook had 1.11 billion monthly active users as of the end of March, a number that represents the people who logged into Facebook at least once in a 30-day period. The daily active users is arguably more impressive, nearing 2/3rds of a billion people at 665 million who log in every day. That’s a lot of cheddar potential for the company with the numbers representing…

Picture this: you go to a supermarket and you’re strolling down the frozen food section. You stop and take a moment to look at the pizza. Mmm – pizza. Just as you’re about to pop your selection in your cart, someone next to you pipes up. They tell you just how terrible that brand is, urging you not to buy it, saying it’s too salty, the cheese isn’t organic, and it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Recently, it seems like Facebook Home has become the Internet equivalent of that frozen pizza supermarket debacle. Facebook Home has been attracting a lot of discussion these days. The new ‘apperating…

EdgeRank. It’s a mythical beast in many ways, not because it isn’t real but because it is very misunderstood by many. It’s one of those things that makes total sense once you get it but that can be very misleading before the light bulb ignites. The basic way to understand it in one sentence is this – when your content gets positive engagement, it can be seen by more people, but when it gets negative sentiment, it gets hidden. There is a science behind it but that’s not really necessary for success. When you post good content and the people that do get to see it interact in a positive manner, the chance that…