Many businesses up to date with social media have themselves a fancy business page. Your business page may consist of a cool cover photo with a logo for a profile picture and albums with photos, work samples, employees, contact info and the like. But is all this information really getting through to your target market?

Facebook uses a fairly simple algorithm to determine what gets through onto the news feed or Edgerank as Facebook likes to call it. The news feed is called Edgerank because every piece of content is known as an “edge”. So pictures, videos and links are all an “edge” and all rank high compared to other edge content. But that’s not the only thing. A status with lots of likes or comments gets noticed for its “edge” and thus gets ranked appropriately.

The news feed algorithm is based on these three things: Affinity, Edge weight and Recency.

Affinity is basically interaction. The more you interact with someone, the more you see him or her pop up in your news feed. This is the same for a business. However, this is only one way. If you as a business creep on users that have liked your page it does not mean they will see your business posts more in their news feed.

Edge weight. This is essentially looking at all Facebook content and favoring certain items that are typically more interesting, cool, interactive etc. These items as listed previously are pictures, videos and links. BUT, every Facebook users edge weights are different so don’t just stick to those three or you may never reach a potential customer.

Recency is the third part of the equation. If it’s old it has a smaller chance of being seen in your target markets news feed. The newest content at the moment that the user is on Facebook is more likely to be viewed.

How does knowing this information help you be a more social media savy business?

Make sure to post relevant, target market appropriate content that will get your users to interact with you. That way you’ll start showing up in his or her feed more. Words like Where, When, Why and Would are all great for getting likes and comments.

Mix up your posts. Post videos, links, photos, status updates and anything your target market would find interesting. The more varied your posts are the more reach you have as a business.

Finally, post content at times when you think your target market is most likely to be online. That way your recently added content is smack in the middle of their news feed.

Staying on top of your social media marketing can be quite the feat, and Mystique would be happy to help!


Carolyn Jobse
Production Coordinator
Mystique Creative

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Frank Beecham
Mystique Creative

What is a LinkedIn Company Page?

It’s a centralized location where millions of LinkedIn members can go to stay in the loop on company news, products and services, business opportunities and job openings.

For a business, it’s the opportunity to:
• Tell your company’s story
• Highlight your products and services
• Engage with followers
• Share career opportunities
• Drive word of mouth at scale

For millions of professionals, a Company Page is a place to:
• Explore companies of interest
• Get the latest company updates and industry news
• Research products & services
• Learn about job opportunities

Here's a step-by-step on how to set one up:

1. Log into LinkedIn and click on Companies.

2. Check to make sure that your company does not already have a profile by searching for your company in the search box.

3. Click the Add a Company link.

4. Fill in your company name and your email address at the company. The email address must be at your company's domain name.

5. Click the box that verifies you as an official representative of the company and click Continue.

6. LinkedIn will send you a verification email to the email address you input in step 4. Find this email in your email inbox and click on the verification link in the email.

7. The link should lead you to a screen on LinkedIn.com asking you to confirm your email address. Click Confirm.

8. LinkedIn will ask you to sign in again under your primary LinkedIn email address (which is the email address you use to log into LinkedIn – it does not necessarily have to match the company email that you entered in step 4). Fill in your log in information and click Sign In.

9. Once you've signed in, LinkedIn will redirect you to an editable version of your new company profile. Here, you can edit information about your company. We recommend the following settings:
a. Set Company Page Admins to Designated users only. Otherwise, anyone with an email address at your company would be allowed to edit your company profile, and you do not necessarily want that. Make sure you add at least one designated user (type your own name into the box) or else LinkedIn will throw an error.
b. Upload both a standard and square logo. When you create the square version of your logo, make sure that you find a way to crop a nice part of your logo out that will work well as a 50 by 50 image. Don't just resize your current logo to 50 by 50 if it ends up squishing any part of the logo.
c. Write a company description that is keyword-rich. The unpublished character limit for a LinkedIn company description is 1500 characters. You want to write a description that is as close as possible to this character limit without going over. Make the best use of the space that you have.
d. List your company specialties. This is a great place to use keywords that are important to your business that you know potential customers will search for.
e. Fill in your company's Twitter ID.
f. Fill in your company's blog RSS feed URL. This will enable your company's blog posts to appear on your LinkedIn Company Page.
g. Under News Module settings, keep "Show news about my company" selected.
h. In the right column, fill out Company Type, Company Size, Company Website URL, Main Company Industry, Company Operating Status, Year Founded, and Company Locations.
i. Click Publish when you are done.

10. Note If you get the error "We're sorry, but there was an unexpected error. Please try your request again." and clicking Publish again does not work, open a new tab in your browser, navigate to the Companies page on LinkedIn, search for your company, click edit, and re-input all of the information by copying the info from your original browser tab.

11. Once you've set up your LinkedIn Company Page, you can add Careers and Services. We highly recommend adding a list of your products and/or services. Adding just one product or service will add a new tab to your company page called "Services" that will allow LinkedIn users to see a list of your products and services. To add a new product or service, go to the Services tab and click the "Add product or service" button and fill in all relevant information.



Frank Beecham
Mystique Creative

A lot of tools have been created to fix holes in Twitter's functionality – here’s some to try out...

Slipstre.am
Slipstre.am is a plug-in for Chrome that allows you to hide certain status updates on Twitter.

For example, if like me you think Foursquare-based tweets are irrelevant, then simply add ‘Foursquare’ and / or ‘4sq.com’ as a term. You can also mute specific users.

Mute.ly
If you’re just looking for a simple tool that mutes a Twitter user then here it is.

Buffer
A scheduling tool for Twitter. Rather than sharing lots of content in a short space of time, you can click the Buffer bookmarklet to add it to your tweeting schedule. Tweets will then be staggered. You can plug in your Bit.ly account to use a custom domain and monitor analytics. Try Buffer.

PostPost
A tool that helps you to discover interesting tweets that might otherwise have been buried. PostPost identifies standout content from the people you follow, and aggregates it on one page (embedding watchable videos and full size images, as opposed to links).

Tweetwally
A tool for creating a ‘tweetwall’. Choose hashtags, keywords or users and Tweetwally will display them on a dedicated web page. You can embed tweetwall onto your own website.

econsultancy.com



Frank Beecham
Mystique Creative

A study by Backbaud indicates that despite limited budgets, nonprofits are able to find value using social media networks.

Findings include:
• 98% have a Facebook page with an average community size of over 8k fans.
• Average Facebook and Twitter communities grew by 30% and 81%, respectively.
• Average value of a Facebook Like is $214.81 over 12 months following acquisition.
• 73% allocate half of a full time employee to managing social networking activities.
• 43% budget $0 for their social networking activities.
• The top 3 factors for success are: strategy, prioritization, dedicated staff.




Frank Beecham
Mystique Creative