They could have used facebook ads to boost their numbers… which will cost them around 78p a shot… so if they have just added 1500 new fans in a very short space of time and you live in their area, you will probably see their ads pop up regularly on the right hand side of your page… if you are in the demographics they have put in to the advert.  That’s quite a budget to recoup.

I have seen a few pages that use this tactic and have delved a little deeper on to the fanpage to see very very little quality content being posted so how on earth would you get a return on this investment let alone get it back?

The key to getting a return on your fanpage is understanding what you want it to achieve and how to do that.  By listening to your fans and trying to help them you are taking steps towards establishing a relationship.  This is the best way of engaging and interacting with the people you want to work with or maybe even provide services to.

Get people in to the habit of being on your page and chatting.  When working on the Whats Next Event page the content that got the biggest reach was asking questions…  they were mostly nothing to do with what we did but could have been if you were asking for help… like the Walker’s Crisps ads when they get audience participation to create a new flavour.  Ours were business related or maybe time specific like Valentines or Mother’s Day.  People are happy to chat about things within their comfort zone and do it much more easily.  By establishing a  habit of engagement they are still likely to do the same when they are slightly out of it.  Add apps to reward engagement on your page because if nothing else… it will post and tell you that no one has been picked that week which gives you a huge kick up the bum to do something with the page and actually start posting some content.  The apps work in similar ways but essentially they can give away prizes or just kudos to those who say something.  If you plan a strategy for it you may see some competition going on for people to get to the top…  This worked well on the event page and we gave away some free tickets on the back of it.

Nothing can beat engagement and it doesn’t actually matter if some of it is from outside of your target market as it makes your page come alive and start looking like a place to be seen, thereby encouraging those you want to get involved.  So invite people from other networks where you are more engaged to come and chat.. seriously all you are doing is starting a conversation.  I am not saying do not use ppc adverts in facebook or google but I am saying give those you encourage to come over something worth staying for, otherwise your investment is worthless.

So look at the fanpages of your competition with a little more knowledge now… look at the wall and see how much genuine engagement is going on… how much has the fanbase cost them?  Were they worth the investment?  Now look at your page… how much content is being posted?  What are your insights looking like?  Are you using it to build a list?  Is it growing?  Have you had any real return on your interaction (that’s time investment rather than monetary)?  If not why not?  Ask yourself what you want the page to do, what you will be measuring, how you are going to achieve it, what you are going to talk about and how you will know when you have achieved your goals.

Posturing is all well and good, it’s like buying the flashiest soft top car and parading it on a freezing day – because you can – but it really is just for show.  Don’t be envious about facebook fanpage numbers… size doesn’t matter… it’s what you do with it that counts.

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Welcome to the overview of the online social media training course…  here we will be going through the curriculum – getting you ready for the journey and sending course notes and starter videos for you to get ready for a bite sized meal of social media…

Our intensive 2 days social media training course has been broken down in to weekly segments for you to do bits at a time.  You can race ahead if you fancy with the pre-recorded segments or just follow the natural progression.  You will get assignments and things to do and we will be checking so don’t worry if you are not confident you are doing it right – we will guide you along the way and get you up to speed…

Rather than pay the fee in one go – we are splitting it in to monthly payments of just £40 so you can pay as you learn and it makes it much easier for you.  We will set dds or paypal recurring payments to suit you – let us know what works best.  £5 will be deducted from your first month’s payment when we set it up.

Feel free to share what you need and we will put as many of your wish list requests in as we go along.

We are concentrating on facebook, twitter, linkedin and youtube and will also be using hootsuite so get your thinking caps on what you want to achieve using them…

Each session will be a minimum of 1 hour and will be recorded to don’t worry if you can’t make it or need more time to digest the content as we will be recording them and sending them to you…

Remember this is your course and no question is a silly one… unless you don’t ask it.

You will also get support in the facebook group so don’t forget to connect and join it.

We look forward to seeing you online!

Today’s UK newspapers almost didn’t have a look in as every fact or whisper was repeated on-line and on radio and television stations all over the world as the social media sites almost went in to meltdown at the news.

#DearWhitney were tributes to the troubled singer who had very public battles with drugs and had a widely publicised 14 year marriage to R&B singer Bobby Brown.

The mood on-line is not so much disbelief just sadness at the loss of this once amazing talent who has joined the ranks of those taken early by drugs, including Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson… I was somewhat surprised when I discovered this online Wiki list of lots of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drug-related_deaths and spotted another 80s singer from Big Country had also succumbed.

Given that people now share via mobiles and iPads as stories happen, the newspaper in its normal form doesn’t really stand much of a chance of breaking news these days.  Gone are the days of old of holding over stories for a weekend splash or quiet days next week.  Now they are out in the world complete with accompanying pictures and video from smartphones, then shared to the ends of the earth within hours.

Even writing an article on Love Hurts about the death of Whitney was an easy task, all research was at my fingertips and the burning questions I needed were easy to find.  Quotes from celebrities and real people alike could easily be taken from the twitter stream and added if necessary and everything required could be sourced and written in under an hour… it may have taken that just to find one person to speak to in the old days…

Twitter is a very powerful beast for social media and although many don’t understand its power yet if they just take a quick look they will find it can make the job of hooking up with local people very easy.  It is fortunate for local newspapers that people don’t understand the power of twitter – yet – as they at least have an opportunity of using it to get very relevant stories of the people in their area and get interaction which may in turn lead to people reading either the on or offline versions.  Some of the national newspapers take to feeding their rss feeds of new news stories added to their sites through their feeds which catch the eye of those listening either to hash tags or when following their feeds… but it would be good if they did iut bit by bit not 10 or 12 posts on the trot which just looks noisy.

The day of the printed newspaper is almost over… although I personally like the feel I do expect that it will end up becoming just an on-line source… social networks react far faster to things around them and the day of print is almost over…

A great track from this diminutive diva… and I think even better than when she first performed it… If, as this wicked track says…  ”It’s a Mystery” I could help… facebook is as complex or simple as you want it to be – but really it’s all about starting a conversation.. so why not pop along to the biggest and the best social media event of 2012 in Wales and get some answers?

I am really looking forward to speaking at this great event in Wales… as part of a fabulous crowd of speakers in different parts of the social media sphere I shall be delivering some great stuff to get you using facebook better for your business…

As you can see the last one was very well received and is definitely worth the small investment… we even have Hootsuite on board as a sponsor! Thanks to Mark Sinclair at Your Business Channel for this..

Get yourself booked in and join the fun! I look forward to seeing you there.. especially if facebook is a mystery to you… cos like the effervescent Toyah this baby is going nowhere…

WordPress made simple

We will take you step by step through

- domain names
- hosting
- adding wordpress
- themes
- plugins
- widgets
- creating menus - seo - posts

pages - social media icons and lots more.  

Learn how to add legal pictures to your posts, make them measure up in google, link other pages and find ways to get free publicity and drive traffic to your own wordpress website.

Join the thousands of people taking control of their own destiny and create your own hosted wordpress website you can not only be proud of but change at the drop of a hat without paying ongoing web designer fees.

Create a platform where people can engage and share your content and get involved in your own business.

Just £189 will get you a selective slot on our wordpress made simple programme with 8 (2 per week) recorded hourly wordpress training sessions that will be recorded and emailed to you for future reference; extensive course notes; homework and ongoing help and assistance.. as well as over £100 worth of freebies:

A premium genesis theme (with the platform) worth £50
£20 off your first year’s hosting fee (just £29.99 instead of £49.99) 
Assistance finding social media icons to match your theme 
A premium plugin for your site worth £30 

There are just 10 places on this selective training course and you will get real time training as well as professional assistance over and beyond the 8 live training courses..

Make 2012 your Olympic year and take control… there is an early bird discount for the first 3 people to sign up so don’t delay…

I look forward to seeing you online!

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LinkedIn Training Workshop
Tuesday 9th February 2012, 9.30am-1pm

Get ready to learn:

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It has a quotation facility as well as invoicing and a dashboard.  You can send email reminders of accounts as well as statements, add clients and do reports for tax and vat.

Great reports facility and you can keep your accounts up to date very easily… and best of all?  It’s free for tons of it…

This is a very easy to use accounts package and is very intuitive.  It will also save you time and effort as well as get your more organised and you seeing where you are at a mere glance.

At the social media cafe we try and test everything we recommend so we have and we love it.  It’s a pretty cool and easy to use package so why not try it out for yourself and see if it can help you get your business.

You might even think about getting in to the habit of regularly updating your accounts little and often.  A few minutes here and there and that hard work at the end of the month or even worse – the year and you will find it’s an absolute breeze.

Schedule regular time slots in your diary to add your invoices and payments to the site and you will find it a much easier task.. or you could outsource it to a VA if your time should be better spent elsewhere… and we’re all great at taking on far too much.. should that have been another resolution?

This is held on the cloud not your pc so you don’t need to download expensive and difficult to understand software and you can log in and update wherever you are without any hassle or fuss, you can even log in ff your iPad.

For a freebie this is pretty powerful software and can easily help you see where you are at a glance so why not take a peek.  There will be a paid for version with extra facilities but this does everything I need and can even handle my vat returns so it’s a no brainer to have a play.

I am sure there are loads of other things on the market that help you get your business organised so why not share what’s working for you and we can compare and find the very best… so what’s your favourite accounts package or freebie?

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1.  Who do you want to chat to? – just who is your target market?  Try thinking in niches rather than a blanket scatter gun approach.. it’s much easier to plan

2.  Where are they? – by that I mean what platform are they on?  facebook? Twitter? LinkedIn? Youtube? Blogs?

3.  When are they there? – use something like tweriod or buffer to get an idea of the best time when your target market are online.

4.  What do you want to say to them? – What content will be useful to help those you want to engage with?  Think like a pub.. what would you talk about there?

5.  How can you help them? – If you think about helping others you will be very surprised at what happens..

6.  What will you do with them when you have them? – Are you going to put them in a list and email market them or send a monthly news letter…?

7.  Do you have something to sell and a plan of what happens next? – Think about adding autoresponder sequences until you have something.

8.  What are you going to automate?

9.  What will you use to do that?

10. How will you measure success?

11. What will you use to measure it?

12. Who will do it?

Look forward to seeing what you are going to do in 2012… get planning and see what you can achieve… make it an olympic year for your business….

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Description

This set can be downloaded for free from The Social Media Hub – we do not hold any rights for this icon set it is the property of its creator. When using the icon set, you should agree to terms of license of this icon which is use for free but do not sell the set. Artist:  Helen Gkizi fromWebtoolkit4me, Please DO NOT link directly to these icons – please right click and download to your computer & host online on something like

  or photobucket if you fancy using them.

Description

This set can be downloaded for free from The Social Media Hub
The Social Media Cafe does not hold any rights for this icon set it is the property of its respetive creator. When using the icon set, you should agree to terms of license of this icon set. Artist: Andrea Austoni Please DO NOT link directly to these icons – please right click and download to your computer & host online on something like

  or photobucket if you fancy using them.

Download them all from here