It’s About Engaging Conversations not Counting Facebook Fans

Business leaders using Facebook as part of their overall marketing strategy should be aware of significant behind the scene changes made last month when the Social Media giant rolled its first major redesign in quite some time. In the past companies have frequently used the number of fans or “likes” as a gauge of social media success but the fact of the matter is Facebook doesn’t care about how many fans you have. It’s now all about the effectiveness of your interactions.

If you are looking to have your posts appear as a “Top Story”, which is similar to vying for the Headlines on the front page on a newspaper or top listing in Google, it’s not the number of fans you have and it’s now all about how you engagement with those fans and how faithfully your fans respond back to you. According to a recent article on Hubspot, “What matters are three things: the popularity of your post (affinity), its relevancy (weight) and its timeliness (time decay). These three factors are the “edges” that Facebook’s algorithm “ranks” to determine what content is likely to be most interesting to your audience.”

Let’s take a closer look at these factors that make up your EdgeRank:

• Affinity is the measurement of interaction between the reader and the content creator.  It scores the frequency and level of interaction.
• Weight is the value given to the comments and actions any given post receives from your overall Facebook community. As Facebook fans and others “like”,  comment, share or tag your post it gains in relevance and overall importance to the community at large.
• Time Decay is the natural understanding and weight given to posts as they age. As time passes the post you wrote slowly turns into yesterday’s news and ultimately is not relevant to others.

So to recap, gaining a high EdgeRank is dependent how you can create interesting and relevant content that consistently moves a substantial number of your fans to take action by clicking, sharing or linking your posts and links.   Here are a few easy ways to create favorable mouse-movement after reading your content.

1. Create Dialog – Instead of using your posts to update fans on your activities write posts that encourage fan interaction. Posts that ask a question or end with ‘what do you think?’ or ‘do you agree?’ are better than simple status posts. If you are seeking interaction remember to check your page to respond to posts, and when appropriate, feed the discussion with comments of your own.

2. Videos – Posts with short videos are 30% more likely to increase post effectiveness. The simple beauty of putting a video as a post is that it begs for people to click on it to hear your message. Most Facebook users are willing to watch a short video to its end, but unless it’s riveting, they will stop watching after a couple of minutes so… keep your message short!

3. Photographs – Since many people are visual learners, an interesting photo is more likely to catch an emotion and almost always gets a reaction. Add a funny caption or adds to the story captured in the photo and Facebook readers will be more likely to add a comment of their own.

4. Call-to-Action – Encouraging your fan to click on a link, read an article or read an e-book and post your feedback are all positive interactions on the new Facebook ranking system.   Remember to share why the link or article is personally important to you!  Remember we are interacting with Facebook users not just posting on a bulletin board.

5. Know your Audience.  Take time out to listen to your audience to find out what they are interested in.  Only 20% of your posts should have a “sales focus”.   Spend the rest of the time producing value and sharing content most important to your clients.  If your posts are a never-ending sales pitch they will ultimately cause your fans to disengage from your page. 

If you are having trouble writing effective and engaging content contact Casajulie Visual Marketing. We have affordable plans to assist you in creating engaging content and developing social media strategies to increase your reach on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Jim Quick is the Social Media Strategist at Casajulie.  After years of using social media to enhance the sales efforts in the retail industry he now is focused on helping clients develop strategies to place their message on the right social media platform.

Destination/Place Branding: Creating, Defending & Protecting Your Reputation

Iamsterdam. Wonderful Greece. Concord NC: High Performance Living. Incredible India!
Different destinations have different personalities. These personalities are sometimes evident, for example, countries like Norway are known for their high GDP and quality of life. Other times, (especially with developing nations) they are dubious distinctions. e.g. the high corruption levels associated with parts of sub-saharan Africa, or AIDS epidemics with southern African nations.

Place branding is a difficult (if not near impossible) process. There’s no on-size-fits-all approach to it. What is evident is that before one proceeds with the process, one needs to consider several factors, the most important of which are cultural nuances, policy challenges and leadership buy-in.

Reputations are valuable assets that need to be guarded, nurtured and managed. Building and maintaining an organizational reputation is a much simpler task than building national reputations. A successful place brand not only makes promises, but matches them with consistent delivery. It is imperative that leadership engages the entire community to attempt to answer the following questions:  “who are we?”, “where are we?”, “where are we going” and “what can we change”.

A few other things to consider when embarking on a branding campaign are:
- Ensure that the process is a team effort.
- Successful branding starts with leadership whose role is to inspire, direct and champion change. Leaders lead by example.
- Internal buy-in is critical. Engage your stakeholders from the very beginning
- Unify around the distinct purpose.
- Find ways to begin to deliver on your promises. Innovate. Be different.
- Ensure that you always go back to your stakeholders for validation.                       – Solidify the brand identity and brand image by making sure that the new brand is communicated consistently.                                                                                                        – Create communication guidelines

Dimeji Onafuwa is president/creative director at Casajulie, Inc. For a free consultation, please contact him via the website: Http://www.casajulie.com

References:

http://www.brandchannel.com/features_effect.asp?pf_id=377

Incredible India: http://www.incredibleindia.org

PLACES by Simon Anholt

‘Obvious’ Branding Secrets

What comes to mind when we think about Apple, Nike, or Fedex?

I am not sure about you, but the first thing that comes to my mind is “successful brand”. These are lasting brands that have successfully etched their position in our long-term memory. How then does a business or practice get to be highly successful? Well, its easier than you think.

Lets start by understanding what we mean by a brand. A brand can be defined as a unique combination of promises (on the company’s side) and expectations that reside in the mind of stakeholders (on the client/employee’s side) about a product, service or company. Its very easy for any company to make promises (quality product, on-time delivery, streamlined process etc). The challenge is with ensuring that those promises match expectations. Successful brands have very little disparity between their promises and expectations for delivery.

Simple Steps to Getting A Brand on the Success Track

1. Understand the Base of your brand:

 What are your mission, vision and values? Do they represent you well? What kind of corporate/company culture do you have? Is that culture reflected in your product and delivery? When we consider Disney as an example, we see their corporate culture written all over their product and its delivery – their intense focus and optimism (sticktoitivity as coined by Walt Disney himself), commitment to family entertainment and passion for what they do. What about your processes for delivery and management styles? Make sure you ask yourself these questions in order to better understand the base of your brand. Projecting a false image is unethical and the best way to project the right image is to better understand it.

2. Fix any communication gaps.

Why doesn’t your brand promise match expectations? what can we do to ensure that it does? A communication gap is the disparity between leadership’s perspectives and those of its employees & customers. Understanding and fixing communication gaps is a very important component of successful brand building. The table below shows the difference between internal and external communications.

Understanding communication gaps is imperative to revitalizing a brand

3. Create, maintain, and continuously improve your brand’s face.

 A brand identity (logo and slogan) should be revisited every 5 years. You should always ensure that your organization builds consistency in the presentation of its face (brand identity, advertising (print/web/mobile), website, packaging, public relations, promotions, direct mail design and delivery etc). Consistency builds recognition.

Dimeji Onafuwa is the owner and creative director of Casajulie, Inc. He’s also a visual artist.

Casajulie Joins Mooresville Chamber

In addition to Charlotte & Winston-Salem, Casajulie has expanded its presence to the Mooresville NC market with a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Baristabobs Coffee shop.

With this new presence, Casajulie seeks to share its experience in brand strategy, print design, web development, multimedia design and environmental applications with small to mid-sized businesses in the area.

Our philosophy is simple – providing and implementing BIG IDEAS to help businesses better communicate their brand’s value to their stakeholders.  This is done through an inside-out approach to marketing communications and a focus on on-time delivery. Our ideas help clients achieve their branding and marketing goals by conveying who they are to the people that matter most.  

Our goal is to always achieve unparalleled positive experience for all our partners (employees, customers and vendors alike) while enabling them to reach their performance goals. We would like to extend this mantra to our new clients in the Mooresville area.

Casajulie – Passionate people. Exceptional service.

Casajulie Helps HAWS Launch New Brand

The Housing Authority of Winston-Salem (HAWS) is moving forward in a different direction and becoming SO MUCH MORE.  By offering MORE services and being MORE responsive to the community’s housing needs, the Authority has decided to move beyond status quo and position itself to be more prepared to meet the housing challenges in Winston-Salem. Casajulie was hired to help re-build and re-position the HAWS brand.  We started with an initial brand audit (an assessment of the current communication of the Authority’s mission vision and values). We also worked with focus groups of staff members to better understand communication gaps (gaps between the internal component of the previous brand and its external communication). After a series of ideas, we suggested that the three most important divisions (and hence the new direction) for the Authority are Property Management, Community Partnerships and Real Estate Development. We believe that these three divisions should be represented on all the communication going forward. We also settled on a new slogan ‘so much more’ which refers to the new professional direction for the agency, and created corporate communication collateral, apparel and van decal ideas with the new identity.

On April 16, 2009, HAWS launched its new brand internally.  Over 100 HAWS employees were present to witness the unveiling of the new brand and new direction. The event featured giveaways and was effective in motivating the staff to buy in to the new direction.

Afterwards, HAWS publicly launched its new brand to partners in the community of Winston-Salem on April 21, 2009. Casajulie hired The Main Event (Winston-Salem office) to provide event management expertise. The event featured a live jazz band, heavy hors d’oeuvres and presentations from key members of the Winston-Salem community. It was capped by an unveiling of the brand to the general public. The new brand will be managed by Black Business Media through a series of TV and Radio advertising spots. The campaign is themed “The Faces of HAWS.” Please enjoy some pictures from a successful launch.