Setting up your social media plan

Here are some quick tips for setting up your own social media plan. A social media plan is a to-do list that you follow to create and maintain a social media presence.

1: Review Your Tools In Your Tool Box

Is your site ready to be published? Does your site look great on mobile devices?

Are all your links working?

Are your #hashtags ready?

2: Define your social media image before you begin creating social media profiles on various channels, be sure your image is consistent across all platforms. The best way to do this is by creating a social media standard to be used on all sites, "consistency" matters. This will guide you through all the channels, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others to be the same image of your brand on each site. This is your own company rules to create a cohesive presence across all social media channels to build trust with your audience.

A social media standard is your rule book for how your brand appears on social media. It should include: Description of your business or brand Logo and approved colors Post formatting style Language and writing policies

Contact information

Personal vs professional messages

and Other items you which to put in place.

3: Complete Consistent Social Media Profiles

When you chose your social platforms be sure the information in each is consistent. Here are a few helpful tips for filling out your social media profiles: Keep your name, profile picture, and logo consistent throughout all your channels. Get to know the personality of each network so your messaging is appropriate.

4: Plan a 30-60-90 day content calendar

Sketch a rough plan of what your content will look like over the next 3 months, this can always change but have a guide to follow in place. What topics will you cover by month and how will they relate to each other? Will you offer original content or repost it from other pages?

Plan on creating and changing "tweaking" your plan each month, to ensure your message is current and accurate. Next, you’re ready to create a detailed list of what you’ll publish over the next 30, 60, 90 days: Topics Headlines Formatting Publication dates for social media content

5: Assign Tasks to Your Team or To Yourself

If you’re flying solo then this is the time to schedule your time to cover the different tasks. Here are some of the assignments you need to cover: Content writing about your services, goods, products, trends and company. Artwork, Blog publishing, (pre-publishing your social media posts with software like Hootsuite or Buffer) Social listening and customer response and changing as needed.

#6. Monitoring results and your competition

Keep an eye on your posts, all interactions be sure to respond. Monitor your competition and pick up on their activity and do's and do not's.

Don't Stop Social Media Marketing

Here are a few tips to keeping in touch with your customers during COVID19

 

People around the world are adjusting to the new normal of the impact on their business from COVID19. We are faced with social distancing, small business owners are closing their doors and large corporations as scrambling to reposition campaigns, adjust content to essential travel, first responders, PPE and anything they come up with new creative and changing day to day.  

While others are abandoning all marketing efforts during this time.  This is a mistake you can not afford to make.  If you use a social media company to run your social media marketing, yet you can't afford them during these troubled times, reach out to them and negotiate a temporary rate until business rebounds. 

Staying connected is now more important than ever, with people and businesses working from home, or remote offices, more of the population is on social media more than ever.  Frankly the population is relying on social media to stay in touch with friends, consume the news, and be entertained.  

In fact, Facebook and Instagram have seen a 48% increase in usage due to Covid-19, with views for Instagram Live and Facebook Live doubling in one week.

If your business is open but working hard to survive right now, like many retail stores, hotels and restaurants are, you’ll be wanting to share content with the goal of getting sales from social media.  But just because people are spending more time on social media doesn’t mean it’s business-as-usual.

Your followers are spending more time online than they ever have before, so it does present you with a unique opportunity to deepen your relationship with your audience and increase brand affinity.  But you also can’t just be running business-as-usual, or you risk coming across as tone-deaf to an audience with heightened anxiety and sensitivities.  And the hardest part? It feels like our world continues to change by the day (or hour).

But remember: this is brand new territory for all marketers (including us). No one is an expert in how to market your business on social media through a global pandemic.

So while we can’t offer you tried-and-tested strategies for marketing your business through this challenging time, we can give you some guiding principles to help you think through your posts and make decisions as the crisis evolves.

Ignoring Covid-19 or pretending like everything is normal can come across as inauthentic at best, and tone deaf at worst. Let your followers know that you’re listening and acknowledge our new normal.  

Even a simple “We are in this together" and "updates on your staff and business" 

can go a long way in showing your followers that you’re listening and caring.  

Let them know you also are experiencing hardships without coming off as "crying for help".  Take the approach that you are trying to stay open, operating and keeping your staff employed.  

Celebrity & business owner Kristin Cavallari did a good job of explaining why she was promoting a sale for her jewelry brand Uncommon James, by simply stating that she has 100 employees and will do everything she can to help them keep their jobs, which means promoting her sale on Instagram.

If you’re unable to market or sell your products during COVID state that and let them know your desired return to normal operations.  Focus on sharing content that aligns with your brand values instead, along the way updating your pages on staff, products, service and the latest news.  

Turn your Instagram into a valuable resource for your audience. Focus on engagement first, instead of driving traffic, by providing extra education through videos, carousel posts, or captions – instead of constantly asking to swipe up or click the link in your bio.

Adjust your hashtags during this time and stay current with trends and changes to social media platforms.  

These are un-tested times, stay safe, social distance but stay active on your pages. 

Facebook Updates You May Have Missed - Groups

Group admins will have more control over their communities.

Facebook is adding several features to help Group admins manage their members and grow their teams.

The new tools will provide admins with a better understanding of member activity and more control over Group membership and posting.

The updates include:

Group insights — Admins will be able to see real-time metrics about growth, engagement and membership, like the total number of Group posts and most popular times of member engagement.

Membership request filtering — Membership requests will be sorted into categories like gender or location, so admins can accept or decline requests by categories all at once.

Removed member clean-up — Admins will be able to remove Group members and their created content in one step.

Scheduled posts — Group admins and moderators will be able to create and schedule posts.

Group to group linking — Facebook is testing group-to-group linking, which allows admins to suggest similar groups to their members.

With their new community-oriented mission, Facebook plans to continue developing tools for supporting Group admins.

Facebook 2019 A Privacy Focused Company

On March 7, 2019 - Facebook announced that secure, private messaging services will become more popular than open platforms in 2019.

The social media giant has come under fire for a series of privacy scandals.

In 2018, it emerged that the data of about 50 million users had been harvested and passed on to a political consultancy.

The changes in place: Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data. We’ve heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are too hard to find and that we must do more to keep people informed. So in addition to Mark Zuckerberg’s announcements last week – cracking down on abuse of the Facebook platform, strengthening our policies, and making it easier for people to revoke apps’ ability to use your data – we’re taking additional steps in the coming weeks to put people more in control of their privacy. Most of these updates have been in the works for some time, but the events of the past several days underscore their importance.

Making Data Settings and Tools Easier to Find

Controls that are easier to find and use. We’ve redesigned our entire settings menu on mobile devices from top to bottom to make things easier to find. Instead of having settings spread across nearly 20 different screens, they’re now accessible from a single place. We’ve also cleaned up outdated settings so it’s clear what information can and can’t be shared with apps.

New Privacy Shortcuts menu. People have also told us that information about privacy, security, and ads should be much easier to find. The new Privacy Shortcuts is a menu where you can control your data in just a few taps, with clearer explanations of how our controls work. The experience is now clearer, more visual, and easy-to-find. From here you can:

Make your account more secure: You can add more layers of protection to your account, like two-factor authentication. If you turn this on and someone tries to log into your account from a device we don’t recognize, you’ll be asked to confirm whether it was you.

Control your personal information: You can review what you’ve shared and delete it if you want to. This includes posts you’ve shared or reacted to, friend requests you’ve sent, and things you’ve searched for on Facebook.

Control the ads you see: You can manage the information we use to show you ads. Ad preferences explains how ads work and the options you have.

Manage who sees your posts and profile information: You own what you share on Facebook, and you can manage things like who sees your posts and the information you choose to include on your profile.

Tools to find, download and delete your Facebook data. It’s one thing to have a policy explaining what data we collect and use, but it’s even more useful when people see and manage their own information. Some people want to delete things they’ve shared in the past, while others are just curious about the information Facebook has. So we’re introducing Access Your Information – a secure way for people to access and manage their information, such as posts, reactions, comments, and things you’ve searched for. You can go here to delete anything from your timeline or profile that you no longer want on Facebook.

We’re also making it easier to download the data you’ve shared with Facebook – it’s your data, after all. You can download a secure copy and even move it to another service. This includes photos you’ve uploaded, contacts you’ve added to your account, posts on your timeline, and more.

It’s also our responsibility to tell you how we collect and use your data in language that’s detailed, but also easy to understand. In the coming weeks, we’ll be proposing updates to Facebook’s terms of service that include our commitments to people. We’ll also update our data policy to better spell out what data we collect and how we use it. These updates are about transparency – not about gaining new rights to collect, use, or share data.

We’ve worked with regulators, legislators and privacy experts on these tools and updates. We’ll have more to share in the coming weeks, including updates on the measures Mark shared last week.

Find Wi-Fi around the world (and find your business too)

Find Wi-Fi around the world (and find your business too)

After being released to several countries last year, Find Wi-Fi is now available worldwide.

The tool allows users to find the closest Wi-Fi hot spots based on businesses who have shared their Wi-Fi through their Facebook Page.

To access “Find Wi-Fi,” they only need to open the Facebook app, click on the “More” tab and then “Find Wi-Fi.” They can also search through the map to find available hotspots and learn more details about the businesses providing Wi-Fi.

Do we really have to tell you all the benefit that your free Wi-Fi can give to your business?