What You Need to Know About the New Facebook Algorithm

Facebook recently announced that it will be rolling out a new algorithm, and it has gotten brands and businesses alike abuzz with worry about what these changes mean for them. The reality is that your newsfeed will favour content from your friends, family, and groups over business pages, which really, is what Facebook was originally all about. 

Yes, unfortunately your organic reach will probably drop. The good news? These changes forces brands to up their content game. We've been preaching quality over quantity for years, and that earning engagement online is like winning the Stanley Cup of social media, and platforms are finally getting on board. 

How can your brand stand out with these changes?

·      Comments = King

The new algorithm favours authentic engagement above everything else. Not only should you be taking the time to comment on others posts, but you should focus your posts on asking thought provoking questions and encouraging engagement as well.

What not to do: Increasing engagement does not mean bugging your audience to comment on every. single. post. You wouldn’t do this in real life, so don’t do it online either.

·      Now is the time to give Facebook Live a try

The keyword here is live. According to Mark Zuckerberg “live videos often lead to discussion among viewers on Facebook – in fact, live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.”

What not to do: Of coure this isn’t a catchall; use Facebook live when appropriate but don’t overkill it with irrelevant topics. Does your breakfast really need to be shared on Facebook live? Probably not.

·      Personal branding is where it’s at

Think outside the box of your business page. Use your personal account to build relationships and reach people. If you are an entrepreneur or business owner, it’s pretty much expected that you eat, breathe, and live your business, so why not spark conversations with your network about ideas or hear their suggestions?

What not to do: There’s a fine line between promoting your biz and spamming. Building relationships does not mean talking about your biz 24/7; it’s about nurturing your current connections through a wide range of personal and professional conversations. 

·      Be a good listener

Listening skills are going to be even more important with these changes. The only way to have an accurate pulse on who your audience actually is, is to listen to them. Take the time to hear what they care about, what they’re talking about, and where they spend their time online.

What not to do: Don’t forget to listen to your competitors too. You probably share an audience, so if they aren’t talking about you, they just might be talking about them.

Facebook returning to it’s roots means that your brand should as well. Think back on the classic building blocks of relationships and communications – creating trust, two-way conversations, and transparency. 

Social media doesn't replace real relationships; it merely provides a medium to further them. The key here is to treat your online relationships the same as you would if you were face to face, and by the sounds of it, this new algorithm will reward real relationships accordingly and help cut out the fake news. 

What do you think of these changes? Do you have any concerns?

The Mystery Behind Facebook Business Manager

Benefits of Facebook Business Manager

Most businesses are active on Facebook, aiming to reach a portion of their one billion+ daily users; and many of those companies have been switching from using a personal profile as a business platform, to a Facebook Page because if not, they risk losing the page entirely. It is against Facebook Terms to use a personal account to represent something other than yourself, so they have the right to deny access to that account. If you manage one or more pages for a business, company, or organization, you have probably heard of Facebook Business Manager.

What is Facebook Business Manager?

It is a free tool, released in 2014, for agencies and organizations to manage access to their Pages and ad accounts without divulging their account passwords, and giving full access to each user. Facebook has been asking anyone who shares login information with others for their pages and ad accounts to change the way they sign in. This has become almost mandatory, unless you have a small account and have the option to choose to link your Pages and ad account to your personal profile.

The initial setup the Business Manager is actually very simple. However, it can take about an hour to figure it all out. I would caution you to make sure that the personal account you are using to get to https://business.facebook.com/ is the CEO of the business, or the main admin as they will have the highest power when managing all of the Pages and contributors on this account. What kinds of benefits are there to Business Manager? Here are a few:

Business Manager keeps you focused and efficient

You can keep your work and personal life completely separate with the use of business manager. Your Business Pages login is not the same as your personal profile login, which means that you are brought directly to the timeline of your projects, and your pages. This tool brings all of your pages and ad accounts to one centralized location, which you can easily flip through using the tabs provided. There is no more need to log into different accounts for multiple platforms, they can all be accessed through the same account.

This tool has made managing multiple Facebook Pages much easier and less daunting. It is more simple now to request access to a client’s page, and you can specify what kind of access you need, such as ad analyst, or editor. The client receives an email and can approve the request with just one click.

Assigning roles

One of the best features of business manager is that you can easily assign roles. This means that you can grant people access and tasks to different pages and ad accounts. There is a tab that allows you to easily see who is working on what page, whether it be an individual or a group. The master admin has the power to remove people easily, and grant specific access based on each project or task.

The beauty of this is that you do not have to be friends with someone to grant them access to a page. You simply need a coworker’s work email, avoiding seeing photos of their new dog on your personal timeline.

Recommended improvements

As mentioned previously, Facebook Business Manager was released in 2014. Since then, a number of bugs and technical difficulties have been erased and improved. We couldn’t help but notice a few ourselves, like the difficulty to comment or like posts from pages in business manager from a mobile device. Additionally, the steps to access a page’s newsfeed seem to change often, however Facebook does not provide this update information to its users. Please keep us in the loop, Facebook! Overall, it seems that Facebook Business Manager is a great tool for managing pages and ad accounts, but less ideal for interacting as a page.

The mandatory switch may feel harsh, but take the time to explore the benefits of Business Manager. Have you used Business Manager? How is your experience with it? Let us know in the comments below!

Team Canada: A Nation of Success

Over the past several decades, Canadians have been able to come behind individual athletes to watch them achieve greatness. Though unable to compete themselves, the loyalty and devotion shown to them as fans has been a driving force in the success known as “Team Canada”. Team Canada’s social media is an avid portrayal of their willingness to make sport accessible and to demonstrate that anyone is capable of achieving greatness if they only believe. From inspiring graphics that feature athletes young and old alike, to articles that showcase Canada’s triumphs on the playing field, Team Canada is able to perfectly capture what it means to be Canadian. 

Due to the fact that Team Canada is nearly a cult phenomenon, they have a fairly large social media presence and therefore are able to gain a lot of traction with their posts and content sharing. The Team Canada Facebook page has 756,992 page likes, with post likes ranging from 24 to 50,000 depending on the content relevance. Twitter comes in with a close second at having 561 thousand followers, and Instagram with 84.5 thousand followers. Though not reaching over a million likes/followers on either page, Team Canada  also maintains several other forums, such as the Paralympic pages, the Canadian Olympic Team Foundation, and individual sport pages (Cycling or Hockey to name a few). Surprisingly however, they are able to interact with their followers on nearly every platform; whether it’s by adding to the conversation, addressing concerns or simply stating another point. They seem to keep their commentary relatable and often times add inspiring messages to satisfy their fans. By using the “Join the Olympic Club” slogan, they are able to make the Olympic team exclusive yet also widely attainable for anyone who wishes to participate. By highlighting the word ‘Club’, Team Canada has ensured that their fan base will feel included and apart of the selection process for every Olympic Games. In some ways, they encourage you to pretend to be an Olympian without actually having to be one.

Though the message that they are sharing online is relevant to their content, the one noticeable issue with their three social media platforms is that the same content is shared across the board. Their Instagram and Twitter are fairly similar with an image and a link being shown for both; the same image and link is later shared in full on the Facebook page. By having the same content across three platforms poses the risk of losing a follower base for each one. If viewers see that the same content is being shared on all three platforms and they follow all three, they will most likely unfollow one or the other due to repetitive content – no one wants to see the same thing twice (or three times in this case). The upside to this however is that the content itself will get more views and more traction because it is being shared on multiple platforms; everyone has their chosen media source and therefore will prefer one over another. Instagram leverages graphics and images, such as one of their most recent campaigns, the 100 day countdown to Rio 2016. Everyday Team Canada showcases a moment in Olympic history achieved by a Canadian Athlete; they highlight up and coming Olympic athletes and give them an opportunity to say hello!

The use of these images on Instagram are clean and easy to understand, and basically begging to be shared and screenshotted for use on followers accounts. By having athletes as the mainstage of nearly all their posts, fans and young athletes alike can print out the images of their favourite athletes for inspiration. In some ways, this brings back a devoted follower base who rely on real time images of their favourite athletes to watch; the Team Canada page gets more hits and interaction if you have people returning for content based images and ideas. Take the #iceinourveins campaign for example; the use of new and veteran athletes has people returning to the site time after time to re-watch the magic of what enfolded in the Arctic. In fact, this video now has over 75,000 views on YouTube and thousands more across the platforms on which it has been shared. 

 The #iceinourveins campaign was an idea to demonstrate that Canadians no matter where we go, will take a piece of our northern pride with us. Even though we are travelling to Brazil, we will take the snow and ice with us to win Gold this summer. The video is a great portrayal of who we are as Canadians; individuals who can brave the cold to achieve their dreams however, it would have been interesting to see this version of what they did, shot down in Brazil. It could have been foreshadowing showing Team Canada arriving in a gust of cold air and swirling snow (embracing the stereotype) and emerging as victors in the hot summer sun. Instead of using the #iceinourveins by itself, you could introduce a second hashtag, #heatinourhearts – Team Canada is fired up for Gold!

Overall, Team Canada’s social media can be considered to be greatly successful. They help athletes find sponsors, motivation and help them realize their fan base. They do an excellent job of reaching out to their fan base and encouraging them to donate, connect and envision themselves as a part of the team; after all, the slogan “Join the Club” is used throughout every platform. Though the content that they share could be divided more equally between platforms, the message itself is for the fans and those fans seem to enjoy exactly what Team Canada is serving up.

  

 

 

How Do You Maintain Real Relationships From Behind a Screen?

In today’s day and age, most of our lives are spent behind a screen, whether it be a desktop, laptop, cellphone, tablet, or some kind of gaming device. So naturally this corresponds to our ever evolving work life. It’s almost impossible to work a job, let alone run a business, without using some type of electronic device. Therefore how do we not get lost behind the screens and lose the sense of actually talking to an individual? Here are some helpful tips that we’ve implemented to help maintain as much of a real life relationship with people through screens as possible.

1: Respond to e-mails and text messages as soon as possible
 

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how often people don’t check their e-mails regularly and lose clients over a lack of response. People like to feel valued, so make them a priority. Even if you do not have a response for them right away, shoot them a text or e-mail back letting them know that you see their questions/concerns and will get back to them as soon as you know more, or you’ll keep them updated as the details unfold. When people feel like they’re a priority in your life they’re more likely to give you more time to come back with the full answer when they know that they are not being ignored. When you show respect for their time, they’ll show you respect right back.

Challenge: Set the standard, commit to always responding to people’s emails within 24 hours and see how much of a difference this will make in their patience and attitude towards you and your business. If you want to take it one step further, turn on your read receipts and watch it keep you accountable that when you read their text message, you should respond right away, because they’ll know that you’ve seen it. 


2: Be professional, but personal

Now one of the worst things to do, especially when interacting with or looking for new clients, is to send them a message that looks like you just simply copy – pasted it and sent it out to everyone. People like to feel valued, so take the time to send them a personal message. You don't have to spill your personal life to them, but you also don't have to come across like you don’t have feelings. Find the happy medium, and read the message out loud to see how it comes across. After sending the initial message, it never hurts to observe how they respond to you. If they come back with a very professional message continue with that, but if they add some smiley faces, exclamation marks, etc. it doesn’t hurt to throw some in as well, so that you can become more of a real person to them. In the beginning it never hurts to lean more to the professional side, you can always tone it down a bit later on as the relationship grows.

Challenge:  Find a friend/colleague that can be honest with you and get their opinion on what you’re intending to send your client – at least the first few times. What could be normal to you, could come across pushy or annoying to others. A second opinion never hurts!

3: Get to know your clients

Now that all of our lives are constantly exposed online, we have all have done some social media stalking at some point in time.  "Stalking" or "creeping" might not be the best definition, but it doesn’t hurt to get to know your clients on a more personal level, especially if you plan on working with them for any long period of time. Find a way to get to know their likes, dislikes, if they have a family, if they like sports or music. Take the time to check them out on professional networks like LinkedIn, social platforms like Twitter, and even Google. People like to feel that you actually care and are taking an interest in them, they’ll be more likely to want to use your services in the future if they feel like they’ve built a relationship with you, so find a way to casually get to know them, ask about their week, and see where it goes from there.

Challenge: When adding a new contact in your phone, take some time as you get to know this person to write down a few things that you learn about them in the notes section of their contact information. Make a point to comment on last night’s hockey game, or ask about a recent concert they’ve been talking about. If they have kids, people love bragging about their kids, so ask about them and get interested. It may seem forced to you at first, but as your relationship grows you’ll become genuinely interested in how your client’s daughter’s cheer completion went and if she beat out last year’s nationals winners. 

 
4: Make time for face time.

As much as we all use our screen these days to do just about anything in our lives, it’s always good to make time for actual face to face time. Everyone’s schedules are so overloaded these days, but making time to meet over coffee, lunch or even drinks (depending on the type of meeting it is) can make all the difference. People appreciate being able to put a face to a name, and making an effort to do so can greatly increase your chance of obtaining and maintaining clients throughout your career. If you are working with clients that do not live close to you, set up a time to Facetime or Skype them. As I’ve mentioned throughout this post, people appreciate being valued and the fact that you’re willing to set aside undivided time for someone will mean a lot to them, and boost their confidence in you. 

Challenge: Make a point to meet with or plan face to face screen time with each of your clients, at least once, to show that they are a priority to you, and see your business flourish! It can be a bit nerve-wracking at first, but the more you do it, the more natural it will become.

I hope this has started your mind rolling and thinking about different ways you can create a more personal relationship with your current and future clients. With how much we all use electronic devices, there are many ways that we can easily use them to communicate more effectively. This is just the tip of the iceberg to get you thinking, please feel free to post your comments and any more ideas you use to try and keep a personal relationship with your clients. 

The Four C's of Networking for Introverts

When you picture a PR professional, the adjectives “sociable”, “outgoing”, “energetic”, “talkative”, “persuasive”, “confident”, or ”animated” might come to mind. The word "introvert" probably doesn't top the list, as introverts are often characterized as shy, quiet, meek, or guarded. Many people, however, have passionate careers in PR and Communications and describe themselves as introverts. The main difference between an introvert and extrovert is that extroverts acquire their energy through social interactions, whereas this is how introverts lose their energy. Introverts need solitude in order to recharge their batteries. These differences are important to note, as they have a huge effect on your experience networking. It is absolutely necessary to network in order to build connections, reach required audiences, learn, grow, achieve recognition, and expand your community. 

For those introverted people who are at the beginning of their career path the thought of networking can induce serious anxiety. Fortunately, there are methods for them to get the most out of networking, without compromising their personalities or missing out on valuable opportunities. These include tips on preparing for events, how to navigate large, crowded events, choosing alternative modes of networking, and recognizing the benefits of having an introverted personality when it comes to making quality connections. Let's call them the four C's of networking for introverts: compose, connect, converse, and confidence.

Compose

When you know you have a networking event coming up, it is necessary to prepare yourself mentally and physically. You know that these events can be exhausting and uncomfortable. If you research the topic or theme of the event and who is hosting it and why, you will save yourself awkward moments, getting caught off guard, and be less afraid to pipe up and add your thoughts to a conversation. Have a goal in mind, even if it is small. For example: aim to have just one five minute conversation with someone new. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by a large room full of strangers; remind yourself that the overall goal is to make connections. It is better to make a small number of valuable connections with people you look up to or want to learn from, than to make many superficial connections. 

Since social engagements are exhausting for introverts, you may want to keep the hours before and after a networking event free of other social gatherings. For many introverts, there is a specific window of time that they are able to be “on” in social settings before they become mentally drained. Take the time before an event to make sure you are physically prepared. Don’t show up on an empty stomach or dehydrated. You want to avoid any distractions, such as feeling lightheaded, mentally fuzzy, exasperated, or irritable. It may even be beneficial for some people to spend a little time mediating; anything that helps you focus and center yourself. If you are someone who fidgets when you are nervous, bring something to hold in your hands to keep them steady. Following these tips will help you be as ready as you can to go into an event.

Connect

Now you have prepared yourself as much as you could, you bit the bullet, and have signed up to attend a large networking event full of strangers. In the beginning, you may want to attend a few events as simply an observer and not pressure yourself to be outgoing, but to get comfortable and ease into it. You can also learn what types of events most suit your needs and choose to only attend those. One tactic that can help introverts is to show up to events early (before the crowds). That can make it easier to meet and link up with someone.  The window of time you have before burnout is limited and there are many people in attendance, so don’t try to form a deep connection in such a large forum. When you do meet someone noteworthy, get their contact information in order to set up a one-on one follow up (more on that later). 

While it is true that the overall goal is to make connections, it is also important to avoid burnout as much as possible, as it can turn introverts completely off networking. You cannot access your full potential when you are mentally, emotionally or physically run down. You must pace yourself and schedule rest and quiet time between meetings and events. During an event, it can help to take five or ten minute walks into a quiet side room or hallway away from others to collect your thoughts. If you want to grow your network and make connections that will help you learn, you’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone. Do it in ways that will keep you sane and not overwhelm you.

Converse

On that note, there are many ways of networking that do not include (often terrifying) large events. You can choose and manage your interactions to play to their strengths. Opt for emails over cold calls and small or one-on-one meetings over large events. After all, cold calls can come across as aggressive, and big events involve too many people, short, superficial interactions, and limited time. One-on-one meetings are easier for introverts because they generally flourish in established relationships. When you do land a meeting, keep it as lightweight as possible by taking them out for coffee, asking for advice, their opinion on an idea, etc. Search out networking opportunities within groups you are already a member of, such as alumni groups or organizations you have worked for in the past. You can reach valuable people who you already have a mutual interest with if you just get a little creative. It also makes a request for a meeting less random or reaching. As an introvert, you benefit from the current age of social media networking. Online, digital meeting places are often easier than face-to-face interactions for introverts, facilitating desired connections and dialogue. 

Confidence

Being a networking introvert, you have more working in your favour than you realize. There are many strengths to being an introvert. They are good listeners, focus well in one-on-one conversations, and put more choice and thought into their spoken words. Make a point in asking open-ended questions, and your innate listening skills will open up vast opportunities for learning and connecting with people. Think of networking as a form of research and learning, and it will become less about scary social situations and more about opportunities to use your gifts to form strong, valuable relationships. 

Introverts are inherently good at research, thoughtful writing, and personal interactions, making the networking possibilities endless. You just have to be willing to prepare, push yourself, think outside the box, and let your strengths shine. 

Do you have any tips on networking for introverts from your own personal experiences? We'd love to hear them!