How to Run a Successful Facebook Contest

Running a Facebook contest is one of the best ways to engage your fans and acquire news ones, who doesn’t love getting free stuff for pushing a few buttons?  The key to a successful Facebook contest is making sure you have all of the key elements that bring in new fans, get people to enter, and encourage people to share and promote your contest for you.

Follow The Facebook Contest Guidelines

First and foremost, if you’re going to run a Facebook contest, make sure that contest doesn’t break any of the official rules that Facebook has setup for business pages.  The last thing you want is to spend hours getting everything setup, promoting your new contest and finding out your page is now suspended for a TOS violation.  Can’t promote a page that doesn’t exist right?

Some of these Facebook rules include:  

• Not forcing people to complete an action to enter your Facebook contest like:  Forcing them to like your page or requiring them to take a picture using their product.


• Releasing Facebook from any involvement or liability for the contest (don’t ever say it’s sponsored by Facebook, seriously).


• Disclosing information about the information your collecting and how you’ll use it


• Don’t use Facebook features as a voting mechanism (picking a winner based on liking the page, commenting on a photo, etc)

There are a lot of rules to Facebook contests, make sure you don’t break any of them.

Pick a Prize Worth Winning

If you really want people to get excited about your contest, make sure your prize is worth winning.  A year of free sandwiches at your restaurant is a lot more exciting than 15% off your value menu.  When you’re deciding on your prize, make sure it’s something people will not only be interesting enough to get people to enter your contest, but great enough that it’s worth sharing with their friends.  The more share-worthy your Facebook contest is, the better your end result will be.

Use a Third Party Application to Manage Your Contest

The best way to make sure that you’re staying within the Facebook guidelines and providing an easy entry method is to use a third party Facebook application to manage and run your contest.  Facebook page app producers (depending on which one you choose) like North Social produce great apps that are not only eye-appealing but make running your contest incredibly easy.  One of the biggest benefits to using these applications is that they are usually set up to abide by the Facebook TOS by default, alleviating your work a bit by handling the compliance part for you.

When choosing a Facebook contest or  Facebook sweepstakes app, make sure that you work with a company that has a good reputation, not just a cheap price.  While these apps can seem expensive, spending an extra $50 to have a professional looking contest will likely generate a lot more return than going with the cheapest option available.

If you’re not sure what company to use, I would recommend taking a look at North Social.  They have been around for quite a while, offer TONS of different Facebook apps and have a reasonable price compared to some of the other options available.

 

Promote Your Contest Everywhere

If you want your contest to be a success, you can’t stop at simply setting it up.  Once you have your prize picked and your contest page up and running, it’s up to you to spread the word about it.  Start by creating and sharing your contest announcements daily on all of your various profiles.  Throw a blog post up and an announcement on your website and build a buzz.  If you’re interested in generating a bit of a bigger buzz, you might consider getting a small Facebook ad campaign going for the duration of your contest.

Have a Plan in Place for After The Contest

Hosting a contest is great, but having a plan in place for afterwards is even better.  If you get a few hundred entries and a few new likes, that’s great, but don’t let it stop there.  If you setup your contest properly, you should now have a few hundred new leads that you can reach out to.  Whether it’s contacting them via email to notify them of the contest winner, or simply offering a coupon to those who didn’t win, have a plan in place for what you’ll do after the contest has ended.

 

Have you run a Facebook contest to promote your brand or business online? Share your best Do’s and Don’ts by leaving a comment below!

How to Run a Successful Facebook Contest

How to Claim Your Custom Google+ URL

Back in October, Google revealed that they would be rolling out the opportunity to create and claim a custom Google+ URL for user profiles.  This was wonderful news to me and got me incredibly excited considering I have been working diligently to get my name to the top of search results.

If you’re like me, you jumped on this opportunity the moment it became available, and fortunately, I was able to claim my real name without any additional numbers or letters (plus.google.com/+TaylorClark).  If you’re just now finding out about this, it may be a bit late to get the exact custom Google+ URL that you want, but don’t hesitate to get it anyway!

Qualifications for a Custom Google+ URL

For an individual to qualify for a custom Google+ URL, you have to meet the following criteria:

• Have uploaded a profile photo


• Have at least 10 followers


• Account must be at least 30 days old

If you’re wanting to get a custom Google+ URL for your business page, you will have to meet a little bit of a more complicated list of requirements including:

• 
  For Local Google+ Pages:  Must be a verified business


• 
  For Non-Local Google+ Pages:  Must be linked to your website

Claiming Your Custom Google+ URL

If you meet these requirements, it will only be a matter of time before you get the opportunity to claim your custom Google+ URL.  If you’re not sure whether or not you’ve received this email, login to your Google+ account and look for a notification bar at the top of your profile page.  Unfortunately, Google is rolling this out in waves, so you may not yet be eligible.

Google will supposedly reserve a name for you based on your chosen profile name, should you be the first to attempt claiming your name or have a unique name you may be able to utilize your real name without any special characters.  You can choose the name Google reserved for you by default, or you can choose to request a different one (pending approval by Google, of course).  Should you request a different name, you may have to wait a bit for approval from Google.

Once you’ve accepted your custom URL and accepted the TOS, your URL is locked in.  For once, you will be able to link friends and fans to your vanity URL instead of the ridiculous combination of numbers and letters that we’ve been burdened with since the launch of Google+.

Have you claimed your Google+ vanity URL yet? Did you end up getting the one you wanted or were you too late to get it? Share your experience in the comments below!

How to Claim Your Custom Google+ URL

Blurred Lines for Sponsored Ads: The New Google Search Results

During a discussion with a colleague this morning about Google Adwords and general search marketing topics, we came across an interesting discovery that I haven’t seen talked about much in the past few weeks.  If you’ve performed a search on Google lately, you most likely haven’t noticed that the yellow box around sponsored results is no longer visible, what you also may or may not have noticed is a small yellow icon that says “ad” next to sponsored results.

As I looked into this new discovery a bit more, I noticed that the faint yellow background that I’m familiar with on Google’s search results pages had been replaced by an almost unnoticeable pale white background.  The yellow color that used to seperate paid listings from organic results has been replaced with a color that most people likely can’t even see on a generic monitor, a lovely shade of #FFF7ED.  Even with the ridiculously high definition monitor I use in my office, I was barely able to see the difference.  If not for Photoshop and Chrome’s inspect element feature, I never would have been able to prove to myself that I was seeing two colors.

Can you see the difference? Black line added to help you see the color difference (not actually shown on Google Results).[/caption]

Google is Apparently Doing Some Test Runs

Of course, after seeing this change happen so suddenly (who knows, it could have been this way for months and we never noticed), I was curious to see if anyone else has seen this change or anything close to it.  As we dug around, we came across an article posted a few days ago about Google’s Yellow Ads Label by Jennifer Slegg on SearchEngineWatch.com discussing a new sponsored listings notifier that is being tested.  The first thing I thought was “oh look, Google’s taking a page from Bing’s handbook.”  Little did I know, that in the 67 years since I last used Bing, they no longer have any noticeable difference between their paid and organic results aside from a small “ads related to…” line above their ads.

Jennifer’s results for “Black Friday”[/caption]

When Jennifer noticed the difference in Google’s sponsored listings, she came across a small yellow icon with the word “Ad” displayed next to each search result.  When I did the same search, I came across no yellow icons.  Between my own results and her article, I can only conclude that Google is running some behind-the-scenes tests on their sponsored results to figure out a new way to serve people ads.  She mentions in her article that it seems that the tests may be exclusive to the Chrome browser.  I ran the same searches using both Chrome and Firefox, and noticed no difference between either browser as far as the way sponsored results are displayed.

My search on Google for “Black Friday”[/caption]

Google Seems to Be Seeking Higher Profits from Paid Search Results

The more and more I look into this, I can’t help but come to one single conclusion:  Google is trying to line their pockets by producing more clicks.  As an advertiser, I both hate and love this possibility.  Personally, I have always had a tendency to follow organic results as opposed to sponsored results, simply because I trust them more for most of the searches that I do.  With organic and sponsored results looking exactly the same to the untrained eye, I can’t help but think that I would see an increase in traffic as a result of this subtle change.  That’s a major benefit to advertisers, right?

On the other hand, I can’t help but imagine a world where the consumer gets the raw end of the deal.  One of the biggest benefits to Google for consumers has long been the ability to differentiate from organic and sponsored search results.  It provided the opportunity for consumers to be fully aware that they were receiving a sales pitch at the top of the page, and if that pitch wasn’t good enough, they trusted the organic results enough to provide them with a solution to their query.  With the fine line being removed, I can’t help but worry that with the right dollar amount, the wrong products will end up in front of consumers, leading them to results that they weren’t interested in but clicked thinking it was a natural result of their search.  The display notates that you’re being shown ads, but with no visible barrier between organic and sponsored listings (and no indication of how many ads are actually being shown) there is no real way of knowing what you’re getting yourself into without clicking through.  I imagine that consumers will eventually grow tired of seeing these results, and may start to lose faith in the results their receiving.

 

I’m curious to see what the end result of this apparent trial/error will be, but for the moment I’m a bit discouraged by Google’s methods.  They have made constant changes over the years with the way they serve ads to the public.  The question that has to be asked in the end, is as advertisers and consumers, what would we like to see in our search results?

Have you noticed any changes to the way Google displays sponsored results?  Are you pleased/displeased with the new look and feel? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below!

Blurred Lines for Sponsored Ads: The New Google Search Results

The 5 Most Annoying Types of People on Facebook

I will preface this by saying that if this is your first time visiting my blog, this is not generally the type of post you’ll find from me; however, I have been on a bit of a blogging hiatus and I’ve had time to analyze some things that absolutely drive me crazy about social networking, specifically the types of people you encounter on Facebook.

We’ve all met them, the people that you keep contemplating removing from your Facebook everytime they put up a status update.  Maybe you’re too nice, maybe you don’t know how to remove them or maybe you just don’t want to hurt their feelings if they notice.  Whatever the reason, these 5 types of people have a tendency to drive us nuts on Facebook.

5. The Guy Who Posts His Disgusting Injuries

This one happens to drive me absolutely insane.  He may not be the most active person in the world, but the second he breaks a finger nail, you can bet you’re going to hear about it and most likely catch a picture of it the next time you pull up your Facebook stream.  If you’re this guy, do us all a favor and stop posting your disgusting injury pics, we’re sorry that you’re hurt, but we don’t need to see every detail of your injury.

 

4. The World is Constantly Ending Guy

I’ll admit it, I occasionally question American politicians and often find myself feeling a bit lied to by the media, but I don’t make it my entire life.  This type of Facebook user is an expert in everything that you know nothing about, he knows everything about the government and their secret plans, can quote you word for word the Illuminati strategy for world domination and has passed the bar in any state you happen to be in, and knows more than any lawyer you could hire.

Personally, I have a few dozen of these guys and I’ll admit it, I leave them on my Facebook solely to get them riled up so the trolling can commence.  If you’re looking for a good laugh, disagree with this guy, just don’t expect a formal debate unless your usual debate consists of arguing with the most intelligent brick wall in the world.

 

3.  The Health and Fitness Expert

Apparently, all it takes is finding you books from health class from High School and you can suddenly discover how to be an expert vegan chef, natural food expert and personal trainer.  While you may find the occasional selfie from this user, you’re more than likely going to see their meal of the day or workout pics at the same time everyday.

From the all natural, soy milk smoothie to the map of their most recent 1/4 mile “power walk,” this Facebook user wants to show you exactly how much better off their are physically and nutritionally.  Often times, this person is one of the least healthy people you know, who suddenly decide they’re going on a diet and after one issue of Cosmo are your local health expert, full of great advice they’ve regurgitated from other people and claimed as their own.

 

2.  The King (or Queen) of Selfies

It doesn’t seem to matter what this guy or girl is doing, all they know is it’s a great time for a selfie.  I still haven’t quite figured out what the obsession is with taking lonely, self indulgent photos of yourself at all hours of the day and night, but this Facebook user has it down to a science.

I often wonder how much time these people really have during the day, because it appears they spend most of their day prepping for their next selfie.  This type of Facebook user has a striking resemblance to my number one most annoying Facebook user, the “Can’t Hold Me Down Girl.”

1.  The “Never” Broken Hearted, Motivational Girl

The number one slot unfortunately seems to belong to the ladies, as I’ve never come across a guy doing this and I hope I never do.  We’ve all seen this girl, as she posts selfies like it’s a part time job, and makes a habit of providing motivational postings that remind you of a break up song.  While she wants to come off like shes on top of the world and can’t be held down by some douchebag, to the rest of us it’s very apparent that she’s one break up or tear drop away from writing the next Taylor Swift album.

By all means, props to keeping a positive attitude and not letting a bad relationship ruin your life, but come on girls, don’t be so obvious about your heart break.

The 5 Most Annoying Types of People on Facebook

How to Manage Your Social Media Marketing Schedule in 2 Hours a Week

In the world of a small business owner, time management can mean the difference between success and failure.  Unfortunately, when you look at your schedule and attempt to fit a social media marketing schedule into a schedule packed with staff meetings, in-office hours and promotional events, it can appear as if there simply isn’t time to manage your social media presence let alone find time for a lunch break.  While it may appear complicated, adding social media marketing to your schedule doesn’t have to difficult or time consuming.  By utilizing these tips along you can improve your brand’s social media presence and actively engage your audience without having to make major adjustments to your normal routine.

Social Media Marketing Requires Goals

In order to develop a social media marketing schedule, you first have to understand what your goals are and exactly how you’re going to achieve them.  You’ve likely developed an annual marketing schedule to plan out your workshops, monthly newsletters or client appreciation events, monthly specials and other events in an effort to achieve certain goals each month, and your social media schedule is simply an extension of the steps you need to take to reach those goals.

When you start working on your social media marketing schedule, you’ll be setting yourself up for success by scheduling content, promotions and status updates to promote your upcoming events, share useful information and engage your fans and followers.  With this social media schedule, in less than 2 hours per week, you will be able to:

• Post actively throughout the week to multiple social networks


• Share relevant information to educate your fans and followers

Schedule Two Hours Each Week for Social Media

The overall goal of utilizing this social media strategy is to maintain an active presence on social media without taking up more than two hours of your schedule each week.  In order for that to happen, you have to determine at what time each week you’ll dedicate 2 hours of your time to working on your social media.

After you’ve chosen a time each week, pull up your Google Calendar or your calendar of choice, and set up a recurring event for that day of the week and ensure that you’ll have that two hours blocked off each week.  These two hours of each week will be dedicated to:

• Finding content to share for the following week


• Scheduling posts to share on your social networks for the following week


• Writing short blog posts to educated your fans

Find Content worth Sharing

One of the most important things you can do as a small business owner is use your social media accounts as a means to educate your clients and prospects on what you do, what’s happening each week in the news and share great information that will improve your prospects lives simply by following you on social media..  To do that, you need to share content from reliable online news sources that your fans will be interested in reading.  As a small business owner, you should be keeping up with the news, so you should be able to find content worth sharing.

Schedule Your Favorite News and Blog Articles of the Week

If you’re actively following weekly news related to your business, you should have no problem finding great content to share each week.  When you come across a great article on a news website or from an email newsletter, record that article, a summary of its content and the URL on your schedule template to be used for the following week.  By the end of the week, you will have plenty of content worth sharing.

Set Up Google Alerts for Your Industry Keywords

Google offers a tool called Google Alerts, which will take a lot of the work out of finding content for you, by sending you links based on keywords that you’ve determined.  For my work schedule, you can see that I’ve setup Google Alerts to send me news articles that include the words “annuities” and “retirement.”  Anytime a news article about one of the keywords is posted online, Google Alerts will send me the links to the article so I can read through it and share it if it’s relevant to my readers.  Google Alerts is a great way to get important news information about your niche without having to do a lot of research or consuming a lot of your time.

To use Google Alerts, simply visit http://www.google.com/alerts, enter your search query, determine what type of sources you’d like to receive information from, frequency and the email you’d like these alerts sent to.  Set up an alert for your most important keywords and then create a rule using your email program so that all of your Google Alerts are stored in one location.  Be careful, if you set up your alerts to notify you as things happen, you will receive way more content then you could possibly use.

Keep Up With Your Competition

One of the easiest ways to find great content to share with your friends is to keep an eye on your competition.  You’ve likely heard talk about who’s successfully using social media to promote their business, so keep an eye on what they’re doing.  Like their Facebook pages, follow them on Twitter and pay attention to what they share.  If they share a great news article, schedule it for your own page to share with your fans.  If they wrote a great blog post about a topic you think your fans will like, check out their sources and write your own version, just don’t plagiarize their content.

When you start paying more attention to your competitors, whether their from across the country or your local area, you may start noticing techniques that they use aside from content sharing that you can use to help promote your own business.  There’s nothing wrong with utilizing ideas that you get from your competitors, they’re probably keeping a close eye on what you’re doing as well, so it should create some friendly competition.

Pre-Schedule Your Updates a Week in Advance

Once you’ve found great content worth sharing and you’ve written down the information on your social media schedule template, you will have no trouble at all getting posts scheduled for the following week.  To make this task easier, you need to utilize a social media management tool.  Social media management tools allow you to manage multiple social media profiles from one location, preschedule status updates and interact with your fans and followers.  There are dozens of SMM tool options available, but the two most impressive and cost effective options are Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

• Hootsuite:  Hootsuite is probably the most used and best known social media management tool out there.  While the interface takes a bit of getting used to, it’s cost (absolutely free) makes it the best, most affordable and functional option available for someone looking to manage their social profiles in one place.


• Sprout Social:  Sprout Social offers one of the best looking and most advance SMM platforms out their, and the monthly cost is relatively low compared to tools like Hubspot.  While there is no free option available outside of their 30 day trial, they level of control and powerful analytics and reporting tools that they offer make sure you’ll have a competitive edge over your competitors and complete control over your campaigns.

Either of the above mentioned tools will allow you schedule your content in advance.  Using your SMM tool and your social media schedule template, setup at least one posting per day to all of your social media profiles.

Conclusion

Creating and maintaining a social media marketing schedule doesn’t have to be difficult and doesn’t have to eat away at your weekly schedule.  By simply setting aside 2 hours per week to seek out great news articles, create interesting content and pre-schedule your posts a week in advance, you can maintain and active social media presence to promote your business without crowding your weekly schedule.

How do you create and manage your own social media marketing schedule?  What advice would you offer to others who are trying to create their own?  Share your thoughts and ideas by leaving a comment below!

How to Manage Your Social Media Marketing Schedule in 2 Hours a Week

Automated Twitter Messages are Spam for Your Followers

I promise, you won’t find a lot of my rants posted to this blog, but as this one is particularly relevant to Twitter and social media marketing in general, I felt it necessary to share it with you.

Over the past month, I have taken on the task of following a large number of people in my local area that I felt might be interested in networking with me on Twitter.  I connected with other marketing bloggers, web design firms, marketing companies, and everyday business owners from Baton Rouge and from the rest of the world.  I have probably followed a good 10,000 people over the course of the last month.

Automated Twitter Messages are Pure Evil

During this period of attempting to gain new followers and find great people to follow for information, I came across a service that I have come to hate, called TrueTwit Validation.

If you’re not familiar with TrueTwit, I’ll summarize quickly for you.  When someone follows you, your account will automatically send them a messaging asking them to verify that they’re a real person, if they’re not, you won’t follow them back.

TrueTwit is Getting You Unfollowed

Be honest with yourself, you’re not Ashton Kutcher, nobody is really that interested in following you unless you happen to be a celebrity.  Let’s be even more honest, there’s not one person on Twitter who actually thinks your automated response that was sent 1/2 a second after they followed you is actually being sent by you.  Sending out a automated Twitter messages isn’t going to make you look like superman, it just looks like spam.

In reality, all this is doing is showing people that all you really care about is your follower numbers, not connecting and interacting with people.

So, why are automated messages getting you unfollowed? It’s pretty simple:

• Your Spamming Your New Followers - Sorry, deny it if you want to, but automated responses are spamming people’s inbox with information that they didn’t want in the first place.  If they really wanted to follow you on Facebook, they probably would do so without you sending them an automated reminder.


• Your Exposing Yourself - I’ve yet to come across an auto-DM that wasn’t being used for self promotion.  Not once have I just simply been thanked for following, and those who did thank me actually did so manually and made a clear attempt at interacting with me.  These automated messages are doing nothing more than exposing your real desire, to obtain as many followers as possible.


• Your Asking for Too Much - Sure, I follow a lot of people that I never expect a follow back from, like Daniel Tosh for instance.  I can’t imagine what interest he might have in following me.  That being said, you just got a follower for free, and now your forcing them to leave Twitter to validate their existence just for the opportunity to interact with you.  Kind of makes you sound a bit full of yourself doesn’t it?

I am now in the practice of immediately unfollowing people who use services like these, they make it pretty obvious that they have no real intention of communicating with me in anyway.  Maybe I’ll miss out on a few celebrities who were simply trying to prevent spam in their inbox, but I think I’ll be alright.

What do you think about receiving and sending automated direct messages on Twitter?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Automated Twitter Messages are Spam for Your Followers

How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing

Twitter is one of the most popular social networks in the world, so it only makes sense that every marketing professional you’ll run in to is going to tell you that Twitter needs to be a part of your business’ online marketing strategy.  If you’ve already started using Twitter for business marketing or it’s something you’re considering, you may want to take the following tips to heart.

Use Twitter For Business and Branding Development

Twitter is a great, unique social media platform for personal use or for business.  Twitter is a communication tool where people share thoughts, articles and messages 140 characters at a time.  The platform lets you follow people who interest you, and lets others follow you to receive your Tweets.

Your tweets can be just about anything, and can include photos, videos from YouTube and links to anything you’d like to share.  Just remember, make the most of your space, because you only have 140 characters to get your message across.

Show Off Your Brand in a Professional Way

The first thing you want to do is attempt to obtain your business or brand name on Twitter when your register.  The closer you can get the better.  As you can see, Taylor Clark is a common name, so I was forced to choose @taylorclarkco instead, which works well since I use a .CO domain name.  Most of the time you shouldn’t have any issues obtaining a name, but if you aren’t able to make sure the name you pick is something relevant.

Make Your Profile Page Impressive

Boring profiles are just plain boring, this is no exception on Twitter.  You want to show off how great your brand is with great branding and messages on your profile page.  Choose a great profile images, most likely your professionally designed logo or a great close up face shot.  Avoid using a picture that will leave people confused and wondering who you are.  Remember, the key here is brand recognition.  I’m not going to engage with you if I can’t recognize you.

If you don’t have a graphic designer working for you, I would recommend checking out a gig on Fiverr to obtain a great looking profile header image and a custom Twitter background.  Make the most of your Twitter background image, and include a brand message, URLs to your other profiles and of course a contact number for your business.

Set a Goal and Define Your Purpose

Once you’ve got a great looking profile, you need to figure out exactly what purpose you’d like to serve on Twitter.  If you’re entire goal from the start was to push ads and specials and get a few sales, I would suggest trying something else or purchasing some ads on Facebook.  When defining your purpose and setting goals for using Twitter for business, it’s important to think about what type of value you could provide to potential followers.

Anyone can sign up for a Twitter account and self promote, instead, try letting your content promote you.  Will you use your Twitter business account to share articles from your blog?  What about sharing pictures and videos from your recent events?  Don’t use Twitter for business ads, promotion and discounts, that’s not what it’s for and you’ll end up wasting your time.

Share Your Profile and Start Following People

In order to gain followers and spread your message, you have to acquire some followers.  The first thing you’re going to need to do is share your Twitter business profile on any other social networks you use and get some links up to your Twitter profile on your brand’s website.  Make sure any customer who’s interested can find your Twitter profile easily.  Remember, if they can’t see it, they probably won’t know it exists.

There are tons of tools available to help you locate followers in your area, but it’s possible to do it manually as well.  Use Twitter’s search and discover functions to find topics you’re interested in, that are relevant to your business or your area and start interacting/following the users using those topics.  Your goal should be connecting with people who are interested in what you have to offer, these are the people who are most likely to share your Tweets.  To learn about some of the more popular social media tools that can help you find followers, take a look at my social media tool reviews.

 Share Great, Retweetable Content

If you really want to increase your chances of getting more followers, you need to be sharing content that’s unique, interesting and worth retweeting.  Share content from great influencers just as often as you share your own content, don’t be greedy.  Don’t spend all of your time tweeting about your business, your own content and making yourself look like a narcissist.  There’s nothing wrong with self promotion, that’s why you’re online in the first place, but don’t be so bold and consistent with it.  People will be more likely to interact with you if you’re sharing great content and thoughts, not just shameless self promoting tweets.

Are you using Twitter for business or marketing?  What have you done to improve your brand’s appearance or to increase follower interaction? Share your thoughts and leave a comment below!

How to Use Twitter for Business and Marketing