Quick Tip: Facebook Page - Pin to Top

Sometimes you may want to "re-use" an older Facebook Page update that's now moved down your Page's timeline. Perhaps it was initially for an upcoming Waiheke event and now, closer to the date, you want to be sure that visitors to your Facebook Page notice this event. An easy way to do this is to use the Pin to Top functionality. To find this option hover your mouse over the post you want to promote until you see these icons appear in the top-right of the post:

Clicking on the right 'pencil' icon will reveal a drop-down menu. From this menu select Pin to Top:

This will shift the post to the top and add an orange bookmark icon to the post:

This post will now stay at the top, causing even new posts to display below it. To remove this post and put it back into the normal timeline flow of your page just hover over the orange bookmark and 'unpin'.

Note: I've just added an email subscription to this blog so if you'd like to be updated on when I make new posts to Waiheke Social Media please subscribe using the Follow by Email option on the top right. Thanks, Brent.

Setting up a Social Media Calendar

So you're a small business and you're going to take social media seriously, you've got all your accounts lined up, URLs pointing towards your main website, logos in place, etc .. but now what? A good thing to do is to start work on a Social Media Calendar. A social media calendar can help create a cohesive layer to an overall content strategy.

To create the calendar use a spreadsheet - I personally like Google Docs because the spreadsheet is there wherever I am and can be easily shared or viewed by others that you may be working with - but even an old school paper calendar will do. Set aside one hour at minimum to brainstorm and plan the content you aim to highlight in the upcoming days, weeks, or even months. Take into account any significant events that may be taking place over the period you decide to plan for, ie. holidays, special business events, local events, conferences, product releases, and other occurrences that might have a significant social buzz. By including all of the information and links to relevant sites in your calendar, you will have developed a single resource that you can refer to when deciding what to post. For Facebook you should be aiming to post at least once per week and probably not much more than 3 times per week, and for Twitter I try for at least one tweet per day.

If you're using a tool like Hootsuite to manage your social media you even have a calendaring tool built right in where you can schedule tweets or facebook posts ahead of time.

Using Facebook Promoted Posts

Last year Facebook shared a statistic saying that a brand pages' content is only seen by 16% of it's fans. Not long after this announcement Facebook released it's Promoted Posts functionality where a brand can now pay $5, $10, $15 or $20 to increase the amount of fans that will see a post on their wall. Facebook users see promoted posts labeled with “Sponsored” directly in the news feed rather than in the right column where Facebook ads are placed. Promoted posts appear both on desktop and mobile and have the same targeting ability that regular posts do, meaning you can geo-target for your companies customers - a helpful feature for businesses like those on Waiheke that might use such functionality to target likely visitor groups (like Aucklanders), or even locals.

For more information on Promoted Posts, see: https://www.facebook.com/help/promote or get in touch with us if you need help.

Wordpress

Wordpress just keeps getting better and better as a small Content Management System for businesses and organisations. I am almost solely using it to help set up sites and it is also fairly easy for newcomers to get their heads around how to  modify existing content or add new content. For example take a look at the new gallery options that have become available. A great improvement over their previous system. If you want a Wordpress site setup for you business or oganisation get in touch.