the presentation today is easy truly and tactic for social media success my name is laura hill and i am with breezy hill marketing a richmond based marketing firm my husband  and i own reveal marketing and when i presented to you last year we were a small business working from home and now we are a richmond based business with an office just up the street so thank you richmond for being so welcoming when i talked to everybody last year i talked about social media and how it can be really important for small business success and i really believe that i think social media is one of the great tactics of vailable for small businesses to get out market their business this presentation in my view is really a follow up to that presentation and it's taking it a step deeper and saying ok so we've all agreed that social media has some benefits for small businesses so now let's talk about some tools that are available inexpensive tools available that you can use to help kind of increase your social media engagement get more out of social media and some tactics that you can use within social media that track can help you also improve your engagement improve your exposure for your business and then finally i wanted to leave some space to talk to you guys about any specific issue you may be encountering that you want to talk about so there's definitely an opportunity to ask questions so we can talk about specific issues at the end but as you who are those of you who are here last year might remember i love an interactive presentation i am far more interested in keeping everybody engaged so if you have a question if you want more on a particular area go ahead and ask it please just let's let's keep it lively and interesting for everyone ok so thank you so much for coming i really appreciate it it's bright in early march morning it's i check every day the ten day weather forecast looking out to see when is it turning i'm hopeful for the end of next week but it's looking a little thank you very much and i'm happy to be here ira so we talked a little bit about we're going to talk about that specifically we're going to dig in on some tools we're going to talk about some tactics we're also going to touch on the pay to play that's happening in social media and in a focus on one platform there but it's it's a trend so we should as small business owners we should be aware of it and then we're going to get into any tricky issues you have so the tools it's really cool what's happening out there  there are so many ways that you can change up what you're doing improve what you're doing and there's so many different avenues to take this and it was a little bit hard to refine the list to a short list of things that you can use and there are so many great articles out there now that share different apps and different things that you can use to really to make it cold these are the ones that i use on a regular basis and my team uses on a regular basis so that's why i went to these this select group but as i was preparing for this presentation then all these articles and you know i do it i was out there i have a list of like five you apps i need to go and download and play with because they looked so fun camera plus is one of my personal favorites camera plus is an app for your i phone or your i pad and i and a lot of what i talk about today is going to involve mobile devices and it's all because we were a digital world and mobile is very camera plus is something that really helps you up your camera game when they first launched camera plus you could take some cool pictures you could you could do some filters they have really increased this tool they've added some great features to it so you can on the fly take a picture tweak it change it change the lighting it's really cool so i encourage you to take a look at camera plus or some of the other camera apps out there so you can increase your camera ga this is a picture that i took with camera plus and the lighting is a little tough in this room to really show the depth of color but this is off of an i phone for goodness sakes i mean it's amazing what you can do so camera plus i encourage you to check out  the yes it's and you can guess you can get it at the app store the apple app store i believe it's also available for non apple devices and it's inexpensive everything i'm talking about today is either free or it's really cheap like worth  ok yes so apple trying to corner the market again for all these all these adventures who develop these great little apps and apple comes along incorporates the features in the product pic monkey ok so and add filters add text there's so many different things that you may want to do with your photos and think that that's out of reach pic monkey is ridiculously easy it's free they have an upgraded a level you can pay to go to it's web based i think it'll be really exciting when pic monkey has an app but they don't yet but they are a great solution for creating really kind of fun feature treatments to your images so you can edit a single image or you can create the collages has anybody seen collages on on on social media and it's like oh that looks really cool how do you do that pic monkey is one of the tools again the lighting in here is challenging but what's cool about this these are yet again things i took with my i phone pictures i took with my i phone i maxed out the color in this one saturated that red played with the color so it stands out more and then i created this collage and then within the collage i added a filter from pic monkey that's called i get i has a feature called bloom on it i can't i'm actually forgetting the name a specific filter but it it gives this a little almost a slow but blurred feeling to it it's really neat place with the colors op you can change the brightness you can also change the background so if you wanted to have between the lines there if you wanted to have sort of a cool pattern or a color you can apply those to pick monkeys a great way to take your pictures and just kind of turn it up a notch or add text to them you see a lot of pictures with text out there it's a great way to go to send a simple message if you're promoting for instance promoting the camps if you put up a picture of a bunch of kids you know doing an art project and new art camp easy to do with pick monkey just you know layer it on and brighten up the picture and frame it or create that collage so i love  monkey water logged is a new app to me i found it i learned about it probably a month or two ago what are hog so funny guys it's ridiculous it takes photos and it makes it look like a watercolor picture and they look so pretty i put one up there people were like oh my gosh did you pick up what it was completely computer generated in like a couple minutes and we do social media for different real estate sites and here's one of our star clients a post we did how crazy is that and so what the great thing about this and in social media some of what you're trying to do is engage people and and amuse them and entertain them and so depending on where you are what your goals are sometimes you're looking to to just make them look at something a little differently so for real estate agent what they're trying to do is share their properties to their sphere of influence to their community and give people a way of looking at properties differently you know say you you may have driven by this house a hundred times and never really noticed it but suddenly of the really pretty that's a lovely little new england house it's that ability to show something in a different light and to consistently kind of remind people let them know it's out there you know week ago i wasn't looking for a new house but maybe today i know you know that it was true and i have to tell you i this is one of my fairfax that real estate every house that we have purchased and we've done a few real estate trend this we weren't looking for real estate we were actually on the market to buy a house it was it we became aware of something that met our needs but we weren't actually looking and i think that's one of the things about real estate that's so interesting is i think often people aren't looking it's that something right for them becomes available and then it becomes right for them to make a move and so this is a great way to refresh something that could that be you know this could have been on the market for a couple months but this this now has given it new exposure so it's a really fun little tool all right i'm switching off of the visually appealing fun ways to engage and i'm going to cross over into some of the ways you can stretch things out so one of the things that i really look at in social media and try to figure out is when is the best times to be talking to people what are the best ways to to engage with people and what i've noticed in luke and in particular over the last i would say couple months there's been a shift this is  shift that's true for facebook it's probably always been true for twitter and google plus it certainly applies pinterest applies there's a frequency that you need to be doing there's a there's there's a need to be communicating on a consistent level and with a fairly high degree of frequency part of what's happening is there's so much out there now there so much going out there in front of people that your your posts or what you put out there has a life span and depending on the platform you know an hour or two of pinterest i think that's three weeks but with facebook it's two to three hours at best it's really probably more like two hours so it's a pretty short twitter twitter i think the lifespan is even shorter it's you know in the moment so you really have to look at how can i engage in social media with a degree of frequency how can i figure out how to be consistent and out there a lot and buffer is a way that you can schedule out your engagement for all your platforms so this is a view and i don't know how you can see it but this is a view i just really quickly did last night shows you you can take up all of your social media platform so i only have two of ours teed up in this particular buffer i actually have a few buffers going but and what you can do is you t have all of your social media platforms here for each platform you can create a schedule so you can say so for instance for facebook i am going to say five times a day sharing is great if you guys can get to five times a day that's fantastic i know that sounds really frequent but nobody seems so it's such a small percentage of senior staff that to get your engagement up you really need to communicate throughout the day  for twitter i go for ten plus times a day i schedule it ten times but then i'll go in and do other things throughout the day twitter you could really be tweeting that people who are powerhouses on twitter are on there all the time i don't i would expect it that anybody here would have that degree of engagement because we all have other jobs but it is you really can max out your twitter your twitter engagement so what you can do is you can load it you create your schedule and your schedule is set and then you click on the little buffer symbol which i don't here you can see up here you would load a widget onto your onto your computer to your browser and you load up your buffer schedule just by clicking on this you buffer something and it goes right into the next slot on your schedule and you can load it in for all of your social media sites or you can pick which one you want to go to i'd typically will not loaded up for all i have different messages and different types of writing for each each platform so that and that's important to think through so you definitely want to look at what you're loading it for but if you see an article that you think is really interesting send it over to buffer with a comment for twitter great does that make sense as a ready and buffer is free up until i think it's free for your first two or three sites so it lets you do quite a lot for free and then it and then it starts to know it isn't a good approach so i think that you're right i haven't i've read that in a couple places it's sort of a new new theory i think the other facebook to twitter was something that people did more often and now it seems like it's not not is as good a method i don't have a strong opinion here i agree with you i validate what i read it to i think it's a choice do you want to have your facebook sending to twitter i like that better than telling people on twitter come join me on facebook i that for some reason it just doesn't work for me that the direct you know oh you followed me on twitter so comes come join me on facebook doesn't it but i think for some people it may work so i so part of me is like well if if i'm sending it out is it a harm is it a negative to do that i'm not sure that it you know how many people really see it and if somebody if it let somebody know that i'm i'm engaging over on facebook and maybe that's a good thing and if they want to then they can because i do find i will click on the facebook once fights an interesting enough t and i will click on it and see what they are and i have on occasion followed a site based on something i found twitter but so it's i think it's a comfort level and how do you want to engage in twitter what do you want to look like  correspond and the back and forth but it does get your sort of keep you consistent so if you know for instance i'm going away for the weekend but i don't want to go silent on social media take it up but then when you get back to check because there's often you know true and i don't think it's a vermont thing i think it's a probably everywhere people people are very i mean i was like there's a reason there's a pullback on like two because they're so been some some exposure about articles about you know  facebook's you know privacy data gathering how they're promoting what you like things like that how they use that information so there's i think people have gotten a little bit like i don't you know i don't want really to like everything or you know and also this whole news feed thing where you know your likes are now showing up in my news feed you know that's that you know mary claire carroll like breezy hallmarking thank you but it's now and you know it's now in your friend's news feed and they might be like well why don't you  it's yes so you know it's facebook is definitely keeping us all on our toes as far as how they deliver information but there is a way to see what content you are delivering is working for people and likes isn't always the best it for you for all of us i mean you know the best thing that everybody here can do and we've unique and i've talked about this fairly extensively but the best thing everybody here can do is you know love the heck out of each other and like like like like share comment you know be the wind be the wind and lift each other up you know we should all have like everybody else's pages and we should be liking and commenting to help give that exposure and increase that visibility for each other's pages i mean that's a great way to go sharing it's really interesting so sharing on facebook so  our community cares puts paid post out if i had six months ago shared that post on facebook maybe five people in my news feed would see it it would be by doing it and i'm i'm saying to our community cares that i like you and i am throwing you good energy but i'm not moving the needle profoundly for you because so few people would see a share the world facebook again keeping us on our toes today they have changed the way that shared lengths look in the news feed is everybody noticed this they look much better if you share an article so i you share something from somebody else's page on your page it was a nice big picture it has the title of the article or the post it looks more lovely i mean it really looks great and it gets a few people see it it's really great so this is this is some of the trickiness of social media is the shifting sands i would have told you six months ago share something but do it do it with carefully because nobody's really going to see it to don't do it too much because nobody sees it then nobody likes it on your page and that's not really great for you so now i say go ahead and share share it looks good people see sort of extend that yeah it's slowed the flow given the love so buffer buffer lets you schedule out some of your or engagement and buffer would let you schedule it so you can once you download the widget and buffer it is actually available and in your facebook page so you can buffer so for instance if i want to share somebody else's page of posts from twenty elses page by don't want to share it right that second i can click on buffer and buffer that share for a later time which is great because facebook doesn't l if you want to share something in facebook somebody else's page in facebook is kind of a nuance thing but i'm going to say you either have to do it right then or you have to schedule it out through something like buffer because facebook has a scheduling feature which is a great feature that i want to talk to you about but it doesn't work for shares don't know why just doesn't not available so yeah ok all right so we've talked about we talked about scheduling out your post one of the things that really that that it that this whole time in social media is about is about content are you guys hearing about content marketing content content content you know it's  important and we're all reading graciously i think you know most of us have some sort of technology that we read from a lot of us are reading articles about the best way of doing things the key here is to find easy ways to get your good content to how do you get your content how do you find the latest relevant content for what your pick business page is about so what's relevant to your audience and how do you collect that information  a simple and cohesive way feedly is my new favorite tool i have lots of new favorite new does one of them feedly is a wonderful wonderful tool to set up your account around different topics and you can apply if their websites you know offer really great content for your industry you can add them as sources for content you can also add search terms as sources for content in little it'll deliver that information this is what feely this is what my healthcare these are different categories of topics that are relevant to different clients of mine so we work and we work with clients in california so we have some information there we work with east close real estate clients we work with health care technology clients  obviously marketing like crazy lots of marketing stuff i have a ton of real estate marketing information down here so i teed up according to categories that i set i choose the search terms in the sources that i want to go into my fa and then this i will tell you that it will just keep loading the latest information the latest blog posts articles from my sources and then i can go right in see what articles are there and share them i can add them to my buffer i can tweet them right out i can share them on facebook with a comment i can open the article up right within in feedly and see is it really relevant is it is it talking about what i want to talk about so it's a wonderful way for you to easily gather organization information about what you're interested in and what your market is interested in and then share it out feedly with buffer fabulous no i now all of these have upgrade prices like you get you get you know you get really awesome with your feedly and i'm right there there they're like ok it's time to go right i just switched my other personality so badly is a show is billy is is a shortened u r l so anything any article any post you find that you want to share you can decide to either share it as the long u r l or you can decide no i want to shorten it and be able to add more comments in front of it so i want to tell people why this matters and shorten the u r l so it doesn't look so crazy so you can do that through a million different sites this doesn't specifically create the shortened you are all it will give you you don't have to copy and paste the u r l you have to do anything you just click share and it'll automatically pop open the window to share with the u r l already in it the title of the post and then you can just decide what what platform you're sharing on and add any additional comments that you want to great tool to play around with and i'm still learning it and getting comfortable with it tactics oh by the way this was done with pic bunky i think and it's creature can't candlelighting it's black and white all around except for a glow of color around his head is not cool it's like with the fun stuff you can do with the tools available now are just it's just awesome thing so let's talk tactics when i talk tactics i want to start step back and say with the key tactic in this can apply be called a strategy to but it's really the first step in a strategy understand your goal what are you trying to do with social media know where you want to be so that you can then really measure your progress so some of the goals that we talk with clients about and our own goals increase sales brand awareness and customer engagement for this community i think one of the biggest goals can be customer engagement i think that our our people are our community our towns are online and they're on facebook facebook at the greatest age group growing on facebook is forty five to sixty five so we're getting we're getting a line do you pull and we're looking stuff up and we're looking often for the people right around us  it is it is all social is very local too so as you look at your goals think through what do you really want to get out of social media and then you sort of build back from that you look back and say ok so you know another goal that's really a good and popular goal is to drive traffic to your website so getting people back to your website so you can maybe collect their email address so you can market to them so that you can share more information about what you offer but your web site is really your digital home base so getting people there is a good goal increased sales great call but really if you increase sales as what you're looking for then that's definitely going to influence how you engage on social and what your social presence looks like depending on what your business is you might you might do more you might want to make sure your facebook backdrop for instance has your website  your contact information on it you might every you know few days off for a promotion on your facebook page you really want to let people know what it is you're trying to do you want to communicate clearly so it is about engagement  but it's also about really understand what you're trying to achieve and then orienting what you do around that to get figure out your goal and in advance of your program this is huge as a tactic analyzing your activity  really importing and understanding what you're doing and what's working and what's not working so looking at what you've done so far and i'm using facebook for this conversation is that's the most common tool that people are using but this is true for all platforms so whatever you're doing figure out how you can measure it whatever social media platform you choose to beyond understand how you can measure it everyone of them has a way to measure of it in some degree so really looking at that that and saying you know what it what's happening when i tweet is anybody re tweeting is anybody replying are people following me you know what's happening when i post on facebook so we talked a little bit about the fact that people see posts but they don't necessarily comment on them so that's actually one of the easiest things that you can actually address so that's the one i want to talk about look at that really quickly so when you look at facebook and you want to measure your activity on facebook there's a new relatively new it's been out for a little while but it's it's it's an area they're enhancing it's called facebook insight has everybody looked at their facebook insights facebook insights are awesome and i've become just a little bit kind of like checking weather dot com for the ten day forecast i'm a little addicted to facebook insights lately the reason i like facebook and type is that it shows you there's two different things i look at a lot there's a lot of different things you can look at and there but the two that i look at one is post level insights so you can actually go in and see a list of the posts you've done recently the type of post and you see how many people actually saw it and then you also see the level of  this is the image that went with it this is what we wrote in the post and then this is the type so this is a status update these are photos actually now these are shared sorry these are shares this is a status update with a photo and those are the just the two types there's another one would be just a photo but yes said i don't know what this is and i got it  the blue is the engagement and the red her the pink are the likes so this is what you need to be looking at so you might see that you had you know two likes on a post but you'll see that there were you know twenty people actually engaged with it means that it was clicked open and read that's huge so that's what i look at when i look at the kind of things that you know people are responding to that's what i look at i'm i'm paying attention to the blue largely because people are so reserved in their likes now i'm really looking at what it what worked for them what are they clicking on and facebook is seeing this to their algorithm is seeing it too so it's not just it's not just us that speak to it they're sharing for a reason yes yes total so probably in this you know probably one hundred people organically saw it and you know the rest were paid we target for this client their real estate client in california and they're in the palm springs area so while we're in subzero weather we're posting about you know swimming pools and golf course and it's really my client actually told me hold on a second i have to put my sunscreen on the other day before he talked to me on the phone this a little bit more in a minute too but with this particular client we target geographic regions that we know by real estate in palm springs so it's not always just people are geographically right there but they but actually who knew canada  canadians by palm springs real estate all the time there is a hot market for that area things you learn so it's targeted it's targeted to that but also so i do two different things with this account mostly what i do is  we up the page like so we our goal is to increase page likes and then we promote the post to the people who have like the page and their friends that's ninety percent of time and i have that on a future slide but you know covered it briefly here so was so when you think about what you're doing on social media look at what's working i am such a believer in this is in business to when you're when you're trying to figure out exactly where you go from here and what to do next look at what's worth going and turn  yeah yeah yeah and the other thing i want to comment i want to mention is so actually i'm going to step back a couple minutes that's a great question i want to step back and tell you guys where this is so you guys and all can find it ok so your facebook page go into your facebook page your go go into your personal account go in your personal account you on the upper right hand corner you've got your gears drop down your gears going your page that way you're going to be in your page and you can you click on your page name and they'll take your actually maybe it takes you into the admin panel right away if you're in your admin pad admin panel click on upper right hand corner it says see insights so c insights is where you want to go and it brings this up along with a lot of other really great information this is your post level insights it'll give you your most recent posts and you can click on see more and you can kind of go way back in history so there's a lot of data there you can also this this is one of the things i love so one of our goals with this particular client is driving traffic back to their website their very data oriented they measure that they can track that so you can click on i can go in after the fact i can click on that blue those blue words and it pops open the post an image of the post and i wish i had a screenshot of this but it on top of the image of the post and on the right hand side all the data on the post so was it shared how many times it shared how many likes did you get from the share how many comm you got from the share how many commas you got overall and how many clipped link clicks did you get how many picture clicks did you get i mean it's really granular data but it really helps you understand what people are doing and then do more of that yesterday thousand people it was crazy yeah and that is one of the yes so that's exactly pay to play pay to play but it's actually not that expensive yet yet dot dot dot yeah i agree that's great that's a great point so the other thing i want to show you and this is for everybody in here who has a competitive nature i'm sure nobody in here feels competitive but you know just in case you are the other thing that they show you it's competitive but it's also really helpful there's something called competitive insights inside this facebook insights and what you can do is you can identify all the pages that you want to watch so all the pages that you so if you have if there are businesses like you out there that you want to watch how they their engagement and measure your own engagement against it i learn from my competitors so i am constantly when i see somebody who can gauge numbers you can see so this is  are the top five real estate pages in the palm springs area this will tell you this is there in gage mint and then and there page likes or a here so i love looking at this because it lets me know how my measuring up how am i doing where do i stack up in the or in the different vendors in the area and how's my engagement doing and this is the this is the number that matters are people are people clicking on it are they liking it are they commenting this number matters everything it likes is great but it's great because it gets you here this means they saw you and the best way that i found yet to get life is subjective so my subjective filter is i yeah i have heard that you know over a thousand likes in it and they in a generous cell generates basically i haven't i actually want to hear more from you because i want to talk to you i want to tell you i want to engage i want to have a conversation so yes absolutely good to good to promote your page great to increase your page likes is there a benefit to more page legs i think there's a benefit in that you're growing the people who are who want to hear from you that's to me the biggest benefit whether or not i would imagine like these guys th when i first started following them they were i don't even think they were at twenty thousand and that was four months ago so yeah i think there is that that i just personally haven't experienced it yet i you know part of that is we've just slipped into this pay to play program where you really have to pay to market in facebook to a significant degree and so that's the world i live in i think but and we're still working you know we're paying to get the likes right now i've got to be quite candid i wouldn't tell you otherwise we're paying to advertise our pages so that people see them and say i want to hear more from you one of the things i do though is when i as i tracked pages like this and if you go down this list there's all these other pages and they'll have less and less likes but over here some of them will have really great and gauge me and i go and i click and i see what they're doing and i copy it same from my paid of all of the pages i work on i want to see what other people are doing what are people doing that's working and then i want to do that so this is a great way to quickly see who's doing something that works there's a face page called brut seven social she's awesome southern vermont marketer she shares such great content find her follow her she's got great engagement and she's really nice too i love nice people all right so last one we've talked a little bit about everything i'm talking about today is tools and tactics and i just really want to emphasize at this point it's a conversation so i'm telling you about how to how to promote and put things out there i in no way do i want to diminish the importance of it being a conversation talking to people asking questions responding to every single post every single post on your page every single comment respond the risk being gauged and find  out what people want to talk about and see how you can how you can have a conversation and really build on that and i think that that engagement part is one of the more challenging parts so go comment on their pages go find the people in your area that you really think would be great to have in your community and go comment on their stuff engage on their stuff that you know support them that creates that that flow with that energy that awareness i call it surreptitious marketing when you go out and you comment as your page on other people's stuff and you like their stuff like that so one of the best ways to to really do that eighty twenty social thing and then share other people's posts especially now when you know people see it and it's it helps everybody so it's that whole thing about social media being social is is ridiculously true you're at a very very big cocktail party so you know amuse amuse entertain and listen all right pay to play quickly we talked about this a little bit facebook is pay to play now we know that two step process increase your page likes so the idea here is you can promote your post to everybody enrichment if you want it or everybody who likes knitting you can do a mass promotion when you do that you're going out to people who may or may not have ever heard of you and you're putting your post in their news feed and what i've seen people say at certain times different pages your page and you get people to like your page and then you promote your posts to people who have liked your page and their friends their engagement is much higher it's a much more positive you know again they've opted in they want to hear from you so you're making sure they see it it's a much better relationship so it's a two step process and the cool thing about facebook ads and promoting your page is they can be very targeted so you can you know narrow it down to richmond huntington bolton or you could say the state of vermont people who like knitting or what what are the specific interests personal information do you age to range you can really be very targeted so so understanding who is going to make up your community who are the most likely people to make up your community online and then really defining that for yourself and then targeting your ads to those people is targeting you having my ads show up for people who are like my page because they don't see your stuff they're not facebook isn't showing your stuff to them so it reminds people you're out there so it's again sort of that sort of low level it's fairly innocuous marketing and you know it's it's not bad to let people know you're out there so it's a choice though ok and oh yes an ad ad campaigns can be as low as two dollars per day so you could do you could say for the next month i'm going to do two dollars a day and just see how many page likes i can get for sixty bucks i'm just going to crank it and see what happens and watch your traction you also get to choose you can have six different pictures loaded up and you can watch the different pictures with that right and there's a whole the at the ad manager panel has a whole measurement panel so you can see how many people saw it how many people click on it how many people clicked on it but didn't like it there's all this data about that so yeah and then you can go in and pas the pictures that are generating can or are converting which is great so that's what i usually do i tee up six pictures and i go back of a couple days later and i look and say ok what happened and then i go in and pause on the ones that are sort of lame one that's and that's the thing that's pretty cool right now is is visual you know visual is working really well so photography is working really really well and i don't see that changing and i specially where we live claire facebook promoted posts so right now less than five percent of your fancy and individual posts and i think five percent as a group is generous it's pretty small so when you just put a post out there nobody seeing it so  what they what promoted post allow you to do it is get more people to see it i encourage you to promote your posts to your people who have already like your page and for promoted posts the minimum is five dollars and it usually runs for twenty four hours although you can set the time frame so you could decide you want to run longer but i usually i think twenty four hours is is long enough for one post i want something fresh you know switch it up the one thing i would when courage to think about with a promoted post is think about what you want to have happen with this post so it don't just promote random posts think about you i am i sending traffic to my website am i trying to get exposure for some new promotion  you know am i doing a kick class that would be a perfect thing to do as a promoted you know i do i have something to that i want to make sure people are aware of and then where do i want them to go do i want them just to land on facebook it just exposure for my brand in facebook is enough or do i want to send them to my website to have something happen there like really think through what you want to have happen with your promoted post when you do it it doesn't have to be rocket science you just just know that this is you know you're paying for this so what's it going to be about and i encourage you to be very visual in your promoted posts like make sure it's something i catch yes if you have two hundred fans and you put a post out there and two hundred people saw it then that's  that's awesome that's great yes that you are and you're definitely not the norm for what's happening on line like a lot of people when they look at their they're saying you know a very small numbers and this is like you know marketing gurus are  talking about this this is a very big trend that you know pace but facebook facebook page reach and post reach has diminished dramatically but they started to bring it down they brought it down right down there it's lots of people out there blogging all the time and they're talking you know each day what happened today what's the phrase say like there are people who are on this way more than me and they're tracking it and it's been going on for awhile and facebook finally has owned up to it and been very honest and said yet it's your right  yes so is that your friends aren't going to see snaffle sweets in their news feed unless you liked it or shared it in some way and then they'll see it in their news feed in unless they themselves have liked it or you're promoting it to them laura hill likes blah blah blah so you know how many of those do you how they decide what who's likes go in your news feed i don't know but sometimes they put like said where is share is if somebody shares lauren hill share this that's way more ah you know that's way more common to see that somebody shared something it's a much stronger statement of support so i want all my friends to see this because i think this is important for some reason  we also will see sometimes news feed laura help commented on in the same way but share again i think it's the strongest of the three states although comments are great for people like commenting on people's posts is a great activity because that's reviews i see the reviews i am not aware of any way that you can remove them do anything with them i'm not aware of any way you can do that i am aware of a way you can remove the reviews  completely and it's a little bit so so you have basically either you have reviews available and you're kind of like you get the good the bad or you can go in and remove a map but say you're for your uncle's diner wouldn't work but you can i don't think it is you know i am the best thing woodridge use is to encourage people to give reviews because the more reviews you get the more you averages out but the the hard thing about reviews i'm not a really big fan of facebook reviews because it is completely blind you have no idea who gave you the review you have no idea why they might give you a poor review you have no way of responding to it it's it's actually in our opinion it's it's it's a poor feature of facebook because there is no there's no management of it it's just you know so if you have somebody who just you know that there's some there are some facebook trolls out there you know you have a fa you have no control over that so it's not it's unfortunate and i have not heard of any way to mitigate it so the best thing to do is to get as many positive reviews as you can because that then waters down any negative i'll tell you what i say i because i do i hear this from time to time as well what i say is it is my philosophy to be very generous online i believe that it is important to be generous that we help each other and so i try and like my fellow small businesses post all the time that is it's just a personal philosophy and it's what i do and i feel like the more we like the more the more of the good you're sending good out and good comes back i think that's as direct as you can get without being you know i really do if people don't if they're not hearing that the the secondary message there then you know that's my that's my feeling and it is actually my personal belief in general you give good you get good and just keep giving it and other people will come along and be like you like crazy way i look at google plus so with facebook you you know it's about relationships you draw i think i said this last year but you drop a stone in the water it ripples out that's facebook it's rippling out all your relationship that's why it matters that your personal account is connected to your facebook page f cares they're going to show snapple suites posts to people who are your friends with who've liked your page more than they are to somebody you're not friends with they care they care about relationships that's part of their algorithm google plus on the other hand is about interests so google plus i think of as more they shooting up and lateral so i'm i'm connected with people on google plus from all over the world you know i market in vermont but i have connections from all over the world and a common i comment and  you know it's a much more about people coming together around common interests than it is about who you know in your immediate world i mean you definitely can have circles that are your friends and family but you have this opportunity to connect with and actually google plus for photographers is crazy because there's just amazing photographers out there and so then there's groups tons of them so you kind of what to do is to find the groups that are the type of photography calm station you want to have join those and start talking start commenting on other people start sharing other people start liking and it builds it's a slow build but it's a good one it's a really it's and google plus helps your your website  c e o because google says i care about google plus likes that matters to me so it's you know sharing things from your website on google plus when those things then get pluses on google plus google plus likes  that that matters to them in their search algorithm so that helps everybody hard to do thumbnail sketches but that's that's sort of my take but it's a slow build in my opinion google plus and it's not there's not a tremendous number of like be i am concerned for small businesses and facebook on the long term right now advertising is affordable i do not know where we're going to go from here i do not know that facebook isn't going to price us out of playing there so yes theoretically i think that's a great idea but if they start up in the cost for for sharing post and you know the next six months or a year and it's twenty five dollars to share to your your audience every time it's going crisis out of them you know it's a lot of businesses won't be able to maintain at that so i think as far as our community for everybody who's already on facebook absolutely like and share and help each other out in common for everybody who isn't on facebook i would have to probably say they should be thoughtful about where they go it's linked in a good for you know linked in is a fantastic forum for businesses and you know every business person in the area is on linked in and they're not charging it so maybe that the time is better spent on linked in if you're if you're starting out fresh you're surfing there and i think there's a little bit of a way that needs to happen for businesses right now because we don't know where if you really want to be on facebook if you're storefront or something like that then i think you know go for it do it it's still free try it you know but you so there is a thing that you're raising a good point a lot of the so by for app is going to ask you way you know to sign up for buffer up your it's going to ask that you know they have access to your facebook or twitter and all your contacts  and you cut you have to say yes in order to use it they're not going to market on your behalf to those people but they need that i like that's part of the platform authorization so it's a little uncomfortable when you first start doing it i'm past that uncomfortable point saw so i haven't seen too much of it but what i do on i my facebook account is to step into cation and i encourage you all to do that i would encourage you to do it on your g mail your e mail your outlook and everything given so it's a great question it's not just social media it's e mails where i'm saying a lot of hacking tons of it we're all in a stone of you know hacking real it's happening to everybody there are these robots that go out and hit websites we've had you know this was probably six months or so ago but we had a night where we are a week and i think where we could see that our site was just being hammered by  it it's just the world we live in now and so any opportunity that you have to have multiple layers of security do it just do it it is worth it it will save your ba yeah yeah definitely it is a real issue but i do also the other thing is with your social me your not your so and with your on technology when upgrades come out that say security related upgrades do website to your computer keep your security settings up to date because there that's what's great is the big vendors out there are constantly watching what's happening and they're updating their software