The next evolution of Facebook marketing – Leveraging your staff
The next evolution of Facebook marketing – Leveraging your staff. On the subject of social media, with Facebook’s new algorithm change, our business pages are more worthless than ever. Our post reach is going to be zero quite soon. (Check out this USA Today article on Facebook’s censorship of post reach for business.) Sure, you can still post on Facebook but the only “people” seeing your posts are usually your staff. They’re the people trained to hit the “like” button on every post. And “bots” (fake profiles) which crawl these pages to gather analytical information. What can we do to combat this? For every technological problem there is a technological answer.
System Social could bring your online campaign out of obscurity
There is a brand new company called System Social. This will allow you to send all of your business’s posts on Facebook directly to your employees’ phones via push notification. Employees then can just hit the post button and it will automatically post to their personal profile! Profiles, by the way, are not being censored by Facebook like our bar and restaurants “pages” are. The best part? Analytics that will tell you which staff member is using the system and how often. Rewards and penalties are now easier to monitor than ever!
System Social is going to be a game-changer as far as Facebook reach. Get your message out there to new audiences and new people who may not have heard of your location yet. Your staff has their own demographic and their own little database of followers that will now see your messages. These will look like they’re organically posted by your staff member and not a mindless advertisement.
Entertainment > Advertisements.
In my opinion, this is where social media is headed, more posts by actual people and less by businesses. The value of creativity is at an all-time high right now. The days of mindless flyers or pointless advertisements are behind us. This is the real reason why the social media post reach for businesses is censored so badly like it is now. People don’t want to be advertised to, they want to be entertained. Business posts, including bars and restaurants, recently have gotten reeeeealy bad. In fact, it started to affect Facebook’s user experience in general. I welcome this new change because it is forcing people to pay to play and use their creativity instead of going through the motions. Read more about “be the show, not the commercial“ here.
When every post will cost you money, the mindless crap will stop.
And creativity will start. if Instagram is abused in the same way then their free business post reach will cease to exist as well and they will turn to an exclusive pay-to-play model also. I’ve said it a hundred times before, “Creativity is free.” Business managers and especially marketing people need to get it out of their heads that a large social media reach is expensive. It’s only expensive if creativity is not applied and we don’t learn from our mistakes.
When we keep going through the same motions without measuring failures and successes and modifying your approach from there, overall failure is a guarantee. One viral video has a better ROI than 6 months of posting happy hour flyers and cell phone pictures will ever have. I’ve seen viral videos that cost absolutely zero to produce. These can get hundreds of thousands of impressions across every social media platform you can imagine. All it took was creativity.
I get it, you’re too busy
If you are too busy to keep a close eye on your online reviews and search engine rankings, there are plenty of services out there that will do this for you. My company Bar Marketing Basics (barmarketingbasics.com) focuses on this almost exclusively. I get it that you don’t have time to monitor all four review sites every single day and respond to them. It just isn’t realistic with the workload your average restaurant or bar manager has.
The next evolution of Facebook Reach – Leveraging your staff
Whatever you do, do not ignore online review sites, leverage them to your advantage. We all hate Yelp for the most part and it has become the four-letter-word of today’s online world but love it or hate it, it’s not going anywhere. You have an account whether you like it or not. You might as well take advantage of it and attract customers instead of turning them off.