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Archives for March 2013

Facebook Threaded Comments – Replies – Not Necessarily Limited to Pages with 10k Fans

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Facebook is rolling out a new feature in which people are able to “reply” to comments on your Page’s posts creating a threaded comment so that replies to other comments aren’t mixed in with this big long (hopefully) chain of comments. This is great for Facebook pages with a ton of fans and is designed to help those Page administrators manage the conversations better.

To qualify, you are supposed to have a Page with over 10,000+ fans BUT, I was able to turn it on for my blog’s Facebook page and it only has (at this point) 624 fans.

If you’re a Page administrator, you may want to go into your Admin settings and see if you can turn this feature on or not. It’s super helpful in encouraging comments and keeping track of who is responding to whom and managing, responding and engaging in these conversations.

This is how you do it:

  1. Go to your Facebook Page.
  2. Click “Admin Panel”
  3. Click “Edit Page”
  4. Click “Manage Permissions”
  5. Scroll down and you will see a checkbox that says “Replies”, check that box and click “Save”.
If the feature is turned on, you should have “Replies” enabled. Find one of your posts and comment on your own post. If replies are enabled, an additional option to the comment will be “Reply”.. Ouila! Let me know if this is working for you or if I just won some sort of Facebook lottery or they consider me a superstar and are just getting me ready for this huge influx of fans in advance. (crossing fingers).

This is what your post comments will look like if you’re able to activate this feature on your Facebook page:

Or you can watch this video (or read this article) by Christian Karasiewicz that will walk you through it.

Can You Hear the Words That Are Coming Out Of My Mouth?

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Blogging, in general, is about sharing information. There are many ways to do that in writing and it certainly depends on the type of information you share but no matter what the purpose of your writing, it should, in my opinion, accomplish a few goals.

First, it should be timely. People don’t want to read about things that happened 2 years ago unless you happened to find Jimmy Hoffa or discover evidence of a second gunman. I tend to get inspiration from social media. I don’t mean that social media alone as a subject inspires me, I mean that I use social media as a tool to find out what’s going on in the world, what people are talking about, and how those things may apply to my industry or profession.

Second, other than the fundamental goal of sharing information, I share how the current event, news article, etc. applies to social media, digital marketing or the automotive industry and what kind of takeaways or lessons can be learned from it.

Third, and sometimes most important, I try to be entertaining. Sometimes I aim for profound but that’s quite lofty unless you’re Seth Godin who could probably share his grocery list in a profound way. My ability to change lives through my writing is something that, while I would like to think I do, is probably minimal at best, delusional at worst (or vice versa). You can be the greatest thought-leader in the universe with the most intelligent and timely insight but if your message is only being heard by your goldfish, you might as well go play some video games.

I’ve read some super smart, well-crafted blog articles that are visionary and enlightening that, at the same time, make me feel like I was forced to read the ingredients of every box of cereal in the grocery store.  Dry reading (get it?) isn’t going to capture your audience and keep them paying attention. If you’re lucky, they’ll read the first paragraph, get bored, and click on the “Read Later” button that sends your wisdom into the desert of Instapaper that will, ultimately, never get read.

So, listen to your audience, no… really.. listen. Don’t write what YOU want to write, write what THEY want to hear but, at the same time, do it in a way that makes them want to keep reading.

If you don’t care what your audience thinks, why should they care what you have to say? Write for your audience, don’t write to them.

The FTC May Have Just Killed Twitter Marketing For Dealers

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Yeah, in the most absurd move ever, the FTC has determined that Twitter is not excluded from regulatory laws requiring full disclosure on products or services. The Wall Street Journal reports that any disclosures that would apply to any other advertising also apply to Twitter.

Hmm. Let’s think about that a moment. On a platform that allows only 140 character submissions, how, exactly, do you tell your followers about a great lease special, factory incentive or other promotion AND include the tiny, almost unreadable, 2 paragraph disclosure in 6 point font at the bottom of the ad? Well, you don’t.

So, what does that prohibit by default? Pretty much anything you want to promote that requires a disclosure and, for most car dealers, that’s just about everything. Heck, most factory incentives have disclosures. Contests, giveaways, or any other promotion (social media or otherwise) as well as coupons, service specials, and other customer offerings would also be excluded.

The easiest way to determine whether you can or can’t tweet something about any special, ad car, incentive, lease special, promotion, coupon, service special, parts special etc. is by following one basic rule:

If it needs a disclosure, you can’t tweet about it.

See, that was simple wasn’t it?

Now, all of the above being said, Facebook’s Terms of Service in regards to contests, promotions and such are violated, trampled over and ignored all of the time by both vendors (who know better) and by dealers (who may or may not).

That being said, Facebook can’t investigate your dealership and fine you for non-compliance with advertising regulations either.

So, has the FTC effectively killed Twitter marketing for businesses?

It depends on what you’re tweeting about.

If your tweets are informative, quality content or customer service and engagement focused then no. If your strategy is to blast your inventory and specials to Twitter on some sort of robotic RSS feed that forces everyone to not listen to you anyways, then yes.

You make the call. It’s your business but the U.S. Government has spoken.

Update 3.14.13

I spoke with Compliance expert Jim Radogna about this issue. He researched the actual FTC ruling & found the relevant passages and, in his opinion, you can still tweet specials, etc. as long as there is a clear link to the disclaimers included in the tweet. While the Wall Street Journal article seemed pretty straightforward, it’s in his opinion that they’re incorrect in their translation of the ruling and how it applies to tweets.

Business Insider reports that the FTC released more information outlining a way that businesses can continue to use Twitter to market without actually needing the disclaimer physically present within the tweet. Just use “Ad:” within the tweet

How Your Social Media Use Could Begin To Affect You (and Your Business) Financially

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Recently, there have been several cases in which employers were requiring job applicants to give them access to their social media profiles to be considered for employment. This practice has been shut down by a few states already but not all of them and, in some states, the FTC has even backed the employers. While this is certainly one way social media could affect you financially, it is not in this way that this article is about.

What if banks started looking at your social media profiles to assess your credit-worthiness?

What if lenders started using your social media accounts to assist in deciding whether to approve your car loan?

What if credit card companies started changing your interest rates based on your social media use?

Well, these aren’t “what-ifs” anymore. According to a recent article by The Economist, these practices are already happening. “There is a start-up that assesses the credit worthiness of car-loan applicants” through social media presences including LinkedIn contacts under the theory that the character of the people you are connected with are an indicator of your character and can help predict how quickly you can get another job should you become unemployed.

Lenders are recording your Facebook data which is being used to secure loans overseas. They’re analyzing usage patterns of personal mobile phones. A Hong Kong start-up is even requiring “loan-seekers to ask their Facebook friends to vouch for them.”

An online bank in the U.S. “will use Facebook data to adjust account holders credit card interest rates” and, while most banks tend to avoid social media in analyzing a loan applicant, there are many “employees of small banks [who] often search social media or the web for the names of loan applicants.”

Lenders are using the social media data to find correlations between that data and an individual’s credit worthiness. For example, ZestFinance, an American lender, says that “Applicants who type only in lower-case letters, or entirely in upper case, are less likely to repay loans, other factors being equal.” and they are continuously using increasingly advanced algorithms to find more correlations. They claim that their default percentage is 40% lower than similar lenders.

An overseas lender of small loans has found that “An applicant whose friends appear to have well-paid jobs and live in nice neighborhoods is more likely to secure a loan. An applicant with a friend who has defaulted on a Kreditech loan is more likely to be rejected.”

I expect that banks in the U.S. are paying close attention to these activities. All of the actions above (save for the web and social media searches) are done with the permission of the applicant. It’s hard to believe that a US court would prohibit an opt-in component used to extend loans to individuals but that’s up in the air since my guess is that if you opt-out, you’d have no chance at getting approved. I would think that courts would find that it’s certainly up to the bank who they decide to loan money to (excluding certain exceptions for people in protected statuses).

This is another example of how social media is increasingly affecting not only our personal lives but those of businesses that rely on banks extending loans to consumers to make sales.. like car dealerships.

 

SEO Tip of the Month: Maximize the SEO Value Of Your Video Content With YouTube’s Closed Captioning

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Even though it’s the second largest search engine in the world, most users tend to believe that YouTube’s SEO value is primarily tied to the text surrounding the video, like titles, descriptions, and tags. Each of these pieces are important, of course, but did you know that any video you create contains a wealth of relevant, keyword-rich content just waiting to be unleashed?

We’re referring to the closed-captioning function contained within YouTube. According to The Video Marketing Blog, both Google and YouTube are indexing the text contained within close-captions. There are endless combinations of keyword possibilities contained within each video you create, especially with a little strategic planning.

Imagine doing a walk-around video on a vehicle at your dealership. During that walk-around, think of all the relevant words to the vehicle’s make and model that you would normally say, like engine type, features, benefits, and safety features. Add to the end of that a short “plug” for your business including its name, address, phone number, makes sold, and areas served, and now you have a super-relevant page of natural, relevant keywords that directly tie YOUR BUSINESS to every word you spoke within the video. All of this can be accomplished without having a spammy description on your video. In fact, you don’t have to include ANY of these items within the title, description, or tags for it to be indexed (although I would advise that you keep many of them, especially your business information and website URL).

It takes a little planning and effort, but YouTube will do the heavy lifting for you. Detailed instructions can be found within YouTube’s help pages, but here’s the short version:

After you’ve uploaded your video and added an appropriate title, description and tags, you will need to create a “transcript” file to upload. This is a simple text (.TXT) file that contains the “script” of your video. Essentially, you’re just typing what was said. Once finished, you’ll upload it into YouTube via the Video Manager for the video you want to caption. YouTube will take the “script” you created and automatically sync the words to the video.

That’s it! Not only did you add VSEO value to your digital marketing, but your video is doing double-duty by helping with normal search as well. Google gives high relevance to videos, so by combining both the power of video and super-relevant text, it’s like creating a piece of content on steroids (as far as both Google and YouTube search algorithms are concerned.)

In addition to SEO benefits, Google adds translation ability to the videos, so you’ve also created a video that assists consumers who speak English as a second language.

This simple and painless addition to your existing YouTube marketing will supercharge your efforts and help you dominate searches over your competition.

(Article originally published in the November 2012 issue of the 3 Birds Marketing newsletter)

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