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No matter what it is, a local business closing, a natural disaster, or a man-made disaster, one thing is for certain: bad news travels faster than good news on social media. Somebody shares, Likes, or comments on some tragic story and suddenly it’s all over your newsfeeds because it seems like everyone is doing it.

The speed of bad news online is just the time it takes to make one click.

Meanwhile, good news gets a very small portion of shareable activity. It’s the same click – and opportunity to add your own pithy comments – as bad news but few seem to take advantage of that ability.

We see this a lot with local business closing announcements, be it a restaurant, a retail store, or anything else ‘mom & pop-ish.’ When the small business posts on Facebook they are soon to be closing there will be hundreds of comments and other interactions stating “Oh, that’s too bad!”or You’re my favorite place, I am going to miss you!” or “L”

What were these hundreds of bad news commenters doing when they were supposedly enjoying the store’s products or the diner’s French fries? Were they sharing the content of the business, checking in when they were there, or posting filtered pics of the plates of pancakes? Probably not.

What more consumers need to do is what we call Share Then Like. Share the good news then Like the content. Sharing is a much more powerful tool, whether it is a Share on Facebook, a Retweet on Twitter, a combination of both on YouTube, or similar action across the other platforms, than simply clicking a Like button.

It took all the thought for me to hit the * while typing this as it does for me to Like something. If I Share something it allows me to add my opinions and thoughts to the content thereby further influencing my friends and followers. TWEET THIS

This is how audiences of audiences are reached – which is always the goal of social media – and its how things go viral.

It’s also the responsibility of the business to create a shareable environment with your content and through your IRL business. Here are some things you can do:

1. Post real world calls to action for customers to post photos, check-in, and interact with your business in your store, in your personal conversations, and even on your receipts. TWEET THIS

2. Make it easy for the audience to find you online by publishing the full addresses of your web and social locations. Putting F and T logos in your ads is useless. TWEET THIS

3. Pay attention to who is interacting with you on social – good or bad news – and interact with them as your brand page or account. TWEET THIS

4. Say ‘Thank You’ to your fans and followers more than you think you should. Gratitude goes a very long way. TWEET THIS

Thank you (see?) for the time today and let us know any time if we can do anything to help you reach more of your customers and prospects than you currently are!

UPDATE to #ShareThenLike

See Also:

Quit Liking Things on Facebook

Share Then Like: The Manti Te’o Story

“What happened to my reach on Facebook?” is a common questions we get here at The Rocket Group. Whether it is emailed or spoken directly to us there are usually a few more exclamation points than question marks in it. The broad answer is, “Facebook happened to your reach.”

The honest answer is, “Quit worrying about your reach on Facebook.” More about this in a moment. TWEET THIS

Research has shown that Facebook started making adjustments to its algorithm in December, 2013 which dramatically impacted organic reach of Facebook posts. In the months since then we have seen some accounts with organic (non-paid, non-shared, non-interactive) reach other their content as low as 1{1ccf3f7051f621f207bf0b5abe66fecd9fcbebd6ccca57cd81eaf6422f6a0a70} of their fan base. Facebook did all of this with the goal of creating a richer user experience for its 1.2 billion account holders.

And to make money for itself and its investors.

Even the big boys of Facebook marketing are having trouble. Walmart and Disney, with a combined 80 million Likes , are having trouble breaking 1{1ccf3f7051f621f207bf0b5abe66fecd9fcbebd6ccca57cd81eaf6422f6a0a70} engagement rates of their content. Their troubles lead us to a couple of conclusions.

Content Matters

Your content should be engaging, inviting, and informative to your audience. With large audiences like the two mentioned above or smaller audiences, which is what you probably have if you are reading this, you can’t be selling all the time. Look at the content on the two Facebook pages of Walmart and Disney. The majority of the posts are about deals, products, or special offers. Selling all the time on social media does not lead to audience interaction. TWEET THIS

Monitor Your Audience

Facebook gives you almost all of the tools you will need, unless your audience is in the millions, to monitor your audience and your content in their Insights tool. With this tool you can see who your Facebook audience actually is in age, gender, and location as well as know what time they are on the platform, what types of your content they interact with the most, and how many times your content has been hidden or reported to Facebook. If you aren’t reviewing Insights at least once a week, you are doing Facebook wrong.

Prepare to Pay

If you want to truly reach your audience of Likers, or folks similar to them, you will need to pay to do so. The Facebook advertising tool is one of the most powerful applications in marketing. For very affordable rates, you can reach more of your audience, Facebook users who match the demographics of your audience or customer profile, or anyone in the world if you know enough about them. We have run successful client ad projects on Facebook which have grown sales, audience numbers, and brand recognition for dozens of dollars a month. The self-serve ad tool is powerful and effective but there are deeper tools available like Power Editor which are more robust and useful.

So why shouldn’t you care about reach? Because, despite popular belief, no page ever reached all of its fans with any one post. Not even Facebook’s own page posts reach all 1.2 billion users. Many factors make this so: fans not being online, the limited shelf life of a Facebook post, and your content not being interesting.

What you should focus on is creating relevant content which the members of your audience who do see it when posted will interact with it. Your interaction numbers are the ones you should be looking at: Shares, comments, even Likes. The more of these you earn the better the reach of your content.

As always, feel free to reach out to us anytime if you would like to have a deeper conversation about this topic or anything else regarding the marketing of your business, organization, or campaign.

See Also:

2 Facebook Page Changes You Should Be Aware Of

Quit Liking Things on Facebook

Beating the Facebook Algorithm At Its Own Game

With the ongoing drop in Facebook organic reach, many business page owners are jumping to the Boost button to achieve their goals. This video example, using the Jefferson City Concert Association page, shows the extra steps you need to take to save time, money, and frustration.

Twitter is one of the more popular and powerful platforms of social media. If you have tried it out for your company, campaign, association or other professional effort and thought it wasn’t for you then you might be missing out on critical information about current events, your industry, and your competitors. Let’s look at a couple of ways to get better at Twitter.

1. Admit It Is Overwhelming

There are more than a hundred thousand tweets sent every second around the world and there is no way humanly possible for you to read and understand all of them. The first step to success on Twitter is admitting you will miss a few things.

When you signed up for Twitter, you were probably prompted to follow celebrity or big brand accounts like Oprah and CNN. We are sure you skipped over that step. If not, you are following a lot of accounts who aren’t doing anything for you professionally.

Clean up your follow list by eliminating the accounts which don’t make you money or don’t influence your line of thinking. The cleaner you make the lists of accounts the better you will be professionally. If you want to follow all the fun and games, get a second personal account. In fact, here is a list of fun accounts we recommend you follow.

TWEET THIS

2. Listen Then Tweet

Twitter is a much of a listening tool as it is a talking tool. You should be listening and learning from twitterers in your industry, your local community, or your influencers as much as you are blasting out tweets about your bake sales.

Listening will also to help you determine when your target and actual audiences are on Twitter. If your audiences are not seeing your tweets in real time, then the odds are they are not going to ever see them.

Average shelf life of a Tweet=12 min,Facebook post=80 min,Blog post= 1/2 day. Social media takes time and work. via @SeanMoffitt #SMCV11

— Terri Davies (@TerriDavies) June 3, 2011

Research shows average tweets will last mere minutes and popular tweets last around 48 hours.

3. Keep Your In-And-Out Balanced

When you begin on Twitter, it is easy to want to go out and follow 1000 accounts before you have even a few followers. Don’t do this.

Being a new account, with your profile filled out properly, you are setting expectations and outside perceptions to potential followers with every action you take. When people see you are following 1000 accounts and have 3 followers of your own, it makes you look like a spammer.

You don’t want to look like a spammer.

4. Hashtag Your Way to Success

As we have discussed before, hashtags are one of the most powerful tools on social media. They serve as a sorting tool for those hundreds of thousands of conversations taking place every second across multiple platforms.

If you want to be a part of, lead, or participate in conversations related to keywords and topics in your industry then you need to follow and use hashtags related to that industry.

By putting the # in front of keywords in your message, your tweet (or post) is now part of the conversation related to that keyword. Test it out by going to the Twitter search page and enter #hamburger or any other hashtagged keyword. We’ll wait.

Bacon is better than a plain hamburger.

The search engine just brought up real time and relevant conversation about your keyword. See any potential customers or competitors in the stream?

TWEET THIS

So there you have it. Four easy things to do to help you succeed at Twitter. There are many, many more ways to succeed so the secret fifth tip is to follow us @RocketGroup for the dozens of tips, advice, and interesting information we tweet every week.

Thanks for the time!

A recent addition to Facebook is the hashtag. While it is still underused by some and abused by more, the hashtag is one of the most important tools in social media and its evolution to Facebook is critical.

As is your understanding of its proper use.

First, let’s talk about how it works. Simply, if you put a hashtag (or a pound sign if you are resistant to change) in front of a word in a post that word now becomes a hot link and you can open up a stream of communication about that word in Facebook – and Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and other platforms – of which your message will now be included.

If you decided hamburger is the keyword in your Facebook post, then simply write #Hamburger in the post or as a trailing hashtag and you will be on the way to joining the conversation about hamburgers. You can also search for hashtagged keywords in the search functions of all the popular platforms and search engines.

The hashtag is in effect a sorting tool for all of the communications across social media. By having the ability to collate all the conversations on a particular keyword brings news, conversation, and fun topics to the surface of the millions of messages posted every minute online.

Some tips for success:

Don’t abuse the #.

Especially on Facebook, not everyone is used to the hashtag system yet so making posts with many #Keywords in them will drive people away from your content and brand. Try your hardest to limit yourself to three hashtagged words per post.

Wrong isn’t right.

Formatting the words is very important as well. Two rules of thumb are to capitalize each new word in your phrase if you are tagging more than one word (ex: #HamburgerAndFries) so it easier for the audience to comprehend. Also, do not use punctuation marks. Only letters and numbers can be included in a hashtag. #Hamburger2014 works while #Hamburger&Fries and #Hamburger’s do not.

Funny is serious

Finally, if you are using the hashtag to emphasize the punch-lines of your jokes you are using a tactic which is sure to frustrate your audience. As your Mom probably told you, “If you have to explain it, it isn’t funny.”

Just remember, using hashtags on Facebook – and the other platforms – is meant to be a helpful tool. If you want your business to be a part of the conversation then you need to be using them.

See also: How to Identify Relevant Hashtags for Your Business from our friends at Convince & Convert.

This is a post which covers an answer to a question we hear a lot: What can you and social media do for me/my business/my organization/the world?

The basic answer to this very broad question is below but first we need to address a critical point.

If you are looking for hundreds, thousands, millions of Likes or Follows, you are approaching social media from an incorrect understanding and you will either fail or get frustrated.

If you are looking for sexy, yet unimportant, audience numbers then we are not the marketing company you are looking to work with.

We work to build effective and strategic audiences who actually respond to our client’s content. These audiences match up with the client desired topic, geography, or other targeted demographics. We build these legitimate audiences through being consistent, truthful and transparent in all online conversations and content we share.

Then we work to navigate the social audiences to the client website, to the client email list signup form, or to the client’s storefront with their wallet in hand.

All of this is done through content which is actually educating, informing or entertaining the target audience. These are same principles we use in our own social media outreach.

We build content for social media posts, blog content and other communications tools which people actually want to listen to. This is the way you build a loyal audience. Contests, funny photos with silly captions, and other tricks might have short term success and huge numbers of Likes and Shares but if those Liker’s and Retweeters can’t actually do business with you what good has it done for you?

We also work to keep the sales pitches to a minimum. Industry rules of thumb suggest an ‘80/20’ rule of 80{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} informational content and 20{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} promotional content. We look at it as 80{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} educational, 15{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} informational and 5{628954cb2bad821921117287c23504a7919be1893c483613421612ad8712cddb} sales based content. Anything more is actually either going to turn your audience off or build an audience of people who are only looking for a discount.

Those discounters have a negative impact on your bottom line. TWEET THIS

When the content strategy, audience outreach and posting calendar are in place then we are constantly monitoring to see what forms of content, times of day for posting, and audience demographics are working for the client. Then we begin an almost daily effort of tweaking to make sure the most effective efforts are being put forth. Then we repeat all of the above.

These efforts have a positive impact on your bottom line.

That is a basic answer to the broad question above. Individual clients get specific individual answers relevant to their audiences.

If you want to learn more about how modern marketing tools can help you then please follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, sign up for our email newsletters and, most importantly, hit the contact button above!