As you can see we have updated our branding and website! 

​We have chosen the colors blue in combination with yellow to our new style a fresh and bright look. 

The color blue gives a feeling of trustworthiness, and many financial companies choose the color for their branding. Which companies do you think of when you think of the color blue?

The color yellow gives a happy feeling. It reminds us of the sun and summer! We feel that the combination of the two colors perfectly captures our identity.

For the logo we have chosen a speech bubble. It reflects our desire to help companies share their message in the best possible way through Social Media. 

We hope you like the new look and feel! 
 
Naomi

This week Facebook updated their app to include a button down at the bottom of the screen for their new Marketplace feature. Now people and small local businesses (and hopefully soon service providers too!) can sell their products through Facebook Marketplace.
To Sell: 
Simply click on the + Sell Something button and fill in the details and add image.
To Buy:
Simply search by price range, distance you are willing to travel, or use the categories to filter to the products you want to buy.

Watch this short video clip we recorded for you to show you how it works >>

No need to cue panic for this announcement. LinkedIn are telling Group Admins that they will be re-integrating group functionality back into the main fold of your LinkedIn home page. And... It's about time! For too long now LinkedIn has ruined the Group experience by locking it away and having too much control on it. Making it more difficult to find groups, difficult to grow groups and the worst thing they did was make it impossible to post in groups using 3rd party tools.
Now admins will have all sorts of new tools for engaging members of their groups. They are also planning to make it easier to discover and join groups, although what that will look like isn't yet known.
These are very welcome changes. I cannot wait to test them out and write about how to optimize them so you can be better community managers. I honestly believe the future of successful social marketing will be in how we as business owners and consumers engage with each other in communities. I am always telling the sales and product marketing managers I train, that they need to be socially selling. Not "Hi I am so and so and work at so and so and here is my product, buy it." But... really living in these communities, forming relationship, adding value to the conversations and by doing so creating opportunities to sell when the time is right.
Stay tuned... I will update again when we know more about these changes.

Facebook announced that they are making sweeping changes to the way we see content in our personal feeds this week. And I say it's about time!!
Here's why...
We are not all the same type of consumer:
There are always those that are on Facebook for the friendships, the birthday messages, the happy news, the funny life moments. There are those that are there to read an interesting article, see some trends, laugh at a video, buy a product, engage with a brand. And then there are those that will happily, and in equal measure, do both! Facebook until now has made the decisions for us on what type of person you should be, and has let the algorithm decide for you. 100% of frustration with Facebook comes from people not understanding or embracing the algorithm and working with it to optimize their own feed experience to see more and more of what you want to see.
What Good Social Media Managers and Publishers Need to Do:
Embrace the change. Work with it to find out how best to optimize it so that you are beating the rest, who are either too lazy or too busy complaining, to be able to figure out how to engage your consumers in this new way.
What good Facebook Users Need to Do:
Enjoy! Finally Facebook is going back to the fun news feeds we used to have 15 years ago. Where you could poke a friend because you wanted them to be thinking about you, or where connecting with old school friends meant more than just having one of them randomly see and like a post about something totally not related to your relationship with them. Who knows what the change will look like, but I say bring it on... for too long we have all been moaning that we don't see enough content from the people we want, while business are moaning that not enough people are seeing their content. It just doesn't make ANY sense and Facebook are right to fix it. What Facebook is doing is giving the consumer the right to choose what they want to consume and how!
What Facebook Needs to Do:
Give the user the ability to choose, on an even deeper (not AI or ML or Algorithm) level, what they are interested. Its stupid to keep feeding a user an ad for a new car based on a search they did for a new car, months after they have already bought said new car, because your algorithm has no way of knowing that about the user. Let the consumer, who wants to, choose what commercial content to be shown... Make the advertiser pay premium to target these people so that the ad revenue is based on clear targeting FACT and not some wishy washy algorithm that classifies someone by "interest" or "demographic." As both a super consumer on Facebook and the manager of over 40 brand pages for my clients. I can guarantee you that the users will appreciate it more and the advertisers, although paying more per leed, will be getting better value. It's a WIN WIN!!.
Be the Change:
Change happens - you can spend hours, days, weeks , months or years moaning about it. Or you can be like me and work on understanding it and capitalizing on it, so that you leave the moaners behind.
Bring it on Facebook! ...and thank you!
(PS: The irony is not lost on me that I am writing an article about Facebook and publishing on LinkedIn. But who knows where I will publish this in the future, that's the beauty of change)
​

This past year I’ve seen thousands of dollars being spent on Facebook advertising for various clients and companies I mentor. I’ve also seen thousands of wasted dollars and frustration behind the lack, or perceived lack of ROI, from these ads.
Unfortunately it is not the Facebook advertising platform that is flawed, at least not completely (there is plenty they could be doing to make it better, but that’s for another post), but rather the mentality of the advertisers that needs the overhaul.
Excuse me while I channel my inner Grandma for the next paragraph.
In the olden days, back when Facebook wasn’t the number 1 advertising platform in the world, if you wanted your local product or service to be seen by the local masses the options available to you included:
- local magazines and newspapers (expensive)
- local pinboards in community centers (time consuming)
- word of mouth (if you were lucky)
- repeat business (if you were good)
- if you were flush, local TV or radio stations (expensive)
- designing, printing, distributing fliers through letter boxes (expensive and time consuming)
- email marketing campaigns (if you had a database of email addresses)
- sponsoring community events and community outreach (sometimes expensive and time consuming)
ALL of the above took time and money, lots of time and money, for an oft unmeasurable ROI.
Now from the comfort of your home office or office office you can select who you want to target, what you want to say to them and click GO for mere $$ a day. Yet, all too often I hear “stop the ad it’s not working.” Or I spent $100 and didn’t see the results. We have become conditioned to seeing our advertising spend as 100 clicks, costs you $50 and 5 people bought my product which cost $10 each so I made my money back but it wasn’t worth it for me… NO you are WRONG! It was worth it… even if 0 people bought your product it was worth it, and here’s why.
HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO GET 100 PEOPLE TO CLICK THROUGH TO YOUR WEBSITE!! Stop thinking of it in terms of wasted clicks and money and start driving traffic to your website where you sell your product. THEN you need to optimize optimize optimize optimize. If 100 people click through and 0 people buy then something is WRONG! Maybe you are sending the wrong traffic to your website? Maybe it’s the price? Maybe it’s the way you display your product? Maybe it’s the way you take payments…? You obviously MUST keep optimizing and fixing until you hit that sweet spot. You have to completely SWITCH your mindset from $50 a campaign and let’s measure results — to — “I am willing to spend xxxx a month to drive traffic to my website.”
From that traffic to my website, I expect to see results and data that will help me measure what they are doing, and change my product to be more saleable. It’s called a product-market-fit and without it you are wasting your time. Seriously, for $5 a day (which is the minimum you can spend on an adset by the way) you are looking at $35 a week, which is $140 a month, which is ONLY $1,680 a year. If by the end of the year you are still not getting conversion then seek professional help! I doubt one local paper ad, or one printed and distributed flyer will get you as much traffic to your website or brand exposure for only $1,680. Once you nail that product market fit and start to see goal conversion, then you can up your budget and scale!
I will leave you with this thought!
When you stop your ads because you are not getting the click-through conversion you think you want it’s like saying you will take away the door to your shop because people come in and browse and don’t buy!Good luck and if you want training on how to set up and optimize Facebook advertising or want an agency to run your ads for you, ZoecialMedia is here for you. But please don’t come at me with small one-off budgets. They are so last year :)