The Worst Facebook Page In The World: Responding to Positive and Negative Reviews

18Apr

Facebook, Local Marketing, Marketing, Social Media, Social networking

In my last post in our series about The Worst Facebook Page In The World, we discussed the importance of customer reviews on a Facebook page, along with reminding you that details on your page should be accurate and up-to-date.

This time, I’m going to talk about how a business should interact with users on Facebook whether the customer has something positive or negative to say.

Should You Respond to Facebook Page Reviews?

The golden rule when it comes to comments and reviews is that with a few exceptions: you should respond to everybody.

First, think of it this way. If somebody has taken the time out of their day to write you something, it’s just basic good manners to respond to them. The only thing it will cost you is a moment of your time.

Not responding could give off the impression that you don’t care. Not just to the person that left the comment, but anybody that sees the review on your Facebook page.

Responding to Positive Facebook Page Reviews

A brewery near our agency shows the power of replying because they reply to every. Single. Review.

It does help that they have a lot of positive reviews. But they also understand that this is:

A chance to interact again with previous customers to leave a good impression.
An opportunity to show potential customers how nice they are.

While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that responding to reviews will increase a business’s revenue, I would say that it leaves a good impression which is never a bad thing.As I mentioned in my last post, many business owners forget that the customer experience doesn’t start when somebody enters the physical location. It starts online when someone looks at your website or Facebook page. So you need to make your Facebook page show that the actual customer experience will be a good one.

But more than that, by creating a social media presence that people want to engage with, you’ll keep your business in the mind of old customers to build their loyalty.

Even the best businesses can’t keep everybody happy all of the time though. Eventually, everybody gets something everybody fears: The Negative Review!

Responding to Negative Facebook Page Reviews

Getting a negative review, especially one where your business wasn’t at fault, can be infuriating. It can make you feel angry and annoyed. You may even be tempted to set the customer straight.

A word of advice: No matter how bad a review makes you feel, NEVER TAKE THE BAIT!

By responding to a negative review with anger, you’ll only hurt your business.

The best case scenario is that a potential customer sees you responding negatively to a customer and decides they’d rather go elsewhere.

The worst case scenario is your negative review could snowball into a full on social media witch-hunt leading to a boycott of your business. (It happens!)

Now, as I mentioned earlier in this post, you should always respond to your reviews, even the negative ones. So how do you respond to a negative review?

First put on your best customer service hat. You need to act professional, empathize with the customer and also apologize. Here’s a perfect example from a nearby hotel:

Disagreeing with the customer isn’t needed. Simply an apology and being open to the customer to let them (and everybody else) knows that their negative experience is something important.

The original Hooters in Clearwater also offers a good example of replying to negative reviews on its Yelp page.

Again, it’s a simple apology followed by an offer to open up a dialogue with the customer.

In both cases the business wants to bring the dialogue off the public Facebook page and into a more private setting, so no more damage can be done on social media, but also so that they can make it up to the customer in a private setting.

By replying to negative reviews, potential customers will see that your business cares. Although you can do little about the black mark on your social media, you can play it to your advantage in how you respond to it.

Of course, the best way to tackle negative reviews has nothing to do with social media. It’s to ensure your customers all have a positive experience when they visit you, so they don’t feel the need to leave negative reviews in the first place.

However, you can use your social media reviews to take a note of where your business can improve and what needs to change in future. While also giving yourself some credit for what you customers tell you you’re doing right.

What Can $5 of Facebook Engagement Get You?

By Christopher Tompkins

18Apr

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

One of the key lessons we took from our improv session a few weeks ago was that we should roll with other people’s ideas.

We shouldn’t just tell them, “Good job.” We should join in. Add to their idea. Collaborate.

The Battle of the Beards was one of those ideas:

“Our Copywriter, Mike has a beard. Hey, so does our Social Media Executive, Bill. Why don’t we have them face off on social media in a beard battle!”

That was it, the whole idea. A beard battle. Just a silly update on social media. But as tends to happen in a creative environment, the idea soon snowballed.

The Idea Grows

Mike and Bill loved the idea. Maybe a little too much. They’d possibly been waiting for the day when they could one-up another man’s beard. Glancing at each other across the office thinking, “My beard is so much better than his. If only I had an opportunity to prove it.”

Luckily for them, they now had the chance.

Soon the silly suggestion was becoming a ridiculous reality. Mike and Bill both agreed to pose for some photos. But not before they each hired an entourage of beard stylists to ensure they looked delightful.

We had them face-off in the conference room, and soon the smack-talk started. “You call that a beard? I’ve got more hair than that on my big toe!”

To sort out the argument once and for all, we decided a post on Facebook where people could vote for the best beard through reactions would work.

But we feared that nobody would see the post. Facebook has started to change its algorithm so that it’s getting ever harder to get something onto other people’s feeds.

We tried to get Don King in to promote our post, but for some reason, he wouldn’t return our calls. Instead, we promoted the post through Facebook instead. We didn’t want to spend too much so decided $5 would do.

How we promoted our post with $5

Although our beard battle was a bit of fun, it’s still an excellent case study on how to run a Facebook Ad. We had a goal, a set budget ($5) and something fun to promote, now we just needed to create our ad.Since our goal was to increase the engagement on our ad, it seemed to be a no-brainer to use the Engagement ad type on Facebook.

The Engagement ad type allows you to optimize your ad campaign to gain more post engagement (reactions or comments), page likes or responses to your events.

Choosing a Facebook Audience

The first thing you do when creating an ad is to select an audience. In this case, since our post was about beards, we decided to hit an audience that was interested in beards.Fortunately, Facebook Ads tracks the interests of its users, and we were surprised to learn that there were plenty of groups for beards:

We further narrowed the audience down to 18 to 30-year-olds as we felt they’d be more open to the silliness of the post and voting in it.

This gave us an audience size of 88,000 which was more than enough for what we needed.

Budgeting and Scheduling our Facebook Ad

For the rest of our ad, we mostly stuck to Facebook’s default settings. We only wanted the beard battle to run for a day, so we set a lifetime budget for the ad of $5 and set it to run for 24 hours.We had the ad show up on Facebook (excluding Instagram) on mobile to keep costs down but also to ensure that anybody that saw the ad was in the position to react to it.

Creating the Post

Last up we needed to create our Battle of the Beards post. Thankfully our bearded men were happy to pose for photos. The post itself was based on an NFL Instagram post we’d stumbled upon:

Here’s our version:

Ad Results

After a week of excitement, the post (and ad) finally went up and almost immediately we started to get some reactions, although it seemed most of them were from Mike’s family.

Soon people not related to the contestants began to react. Our ads were working. In the end, we got great results both from our ads and organically. There was plenty of engagement:

Our ad results weren’t too bad either.

We reached 317 people with our ad, 44 of which reacted to the post. Just over 1/6 of people that the post reached engaged with it which was a good result and each engagement cost 9 cents.

What does this show or prove? Well first of all that our audience – people that like beards, were happy to engage in a post about beards! (Actually, after looking at the profiles of most of the voters, I could see that almost all of them had their own beards!)

But deeper than that, it proves that you don’t need to spend a lot of money on Facebook to get somebody to engage with your business. You simply need to find something that your target audience is interested in and go from there.

If our business sold cosmetics products for beards, this would have been a perfect opportunity to get potential customers interested in our business and our $5 of ads could have easily brought in a good return on our investment.

Especially because, as I mentioned, much of the engagement came from men with beards.

As it is, we don’t sell anything related to facial hair. But we succeeded in our own goal: to have some fun. Not just for us, but for the people that engaged with our post.Since the win, we’re happy to report that Mike hasn’t retired to the Bahamas. But he has been strutting around the office and stroking his beard more than usual.

Bill, on the other hand, has vowed to grow his beard twice as long for a rematch.

15 Tips to Bring Your Facebook Page to Life: Part 1

By Christopher Tompkins

5Sep

Facebook, Social Media, Uncategorized

When we ask our audience at both The Go! Agency and The Social Marketing Academy (our daily radio show), the overriding theme tends to be that many of you have created a social media profile/page/group….and nothing is happening. One of the largest sites that respondents focused on was Facebook, and in particular the Facebook Page for your company.

This issue is one that many of us are faced with. We log-in to Facebook, knock out a quick page and start placing updates or, more worryingly, sync it to Twitter and let the Twitter feed populate the page.

Here, I want to present a few things that you should do – focusing more on a strategy than a whole list of tactics that are supposed to be instant winners. Without a successful base strategy, all the tactics in the world can’t help.

So, here we go:

1. Look at Your Facebook Page as a Marketing Channel

While this may seem a bit obvious, many businesses don’t think this way. The thought of Facebook for marketing is a relatively new concept in the world of marketing when you compare it to advertising, public relations and even email blasts. So incorporate it into your brand marketing. When you roll out your marketing plan and decide where your promotional hubs are – make sure your Facebook Page is in that list. Just think, when you made your last major announcement, or spoke at a conference, or held a charity event…did you post any of the coverage on your Facebook Page? This is the sort of opportunity that many of us miss and can promote engagement with your target audience.

2. There is a Second Promotional Life Outside of Facebook.com

You don’t just market your Facebook page to the active community who are on Facebook, you need to promote it offsite as well. Facebook “Likes” can be a bit tough to come by, but imagine if your ‘face to face’ clients knew about your page? Have you ever mentioned to these clients that you had a Page on Facebook? This can be a huge missed opportunity. How visible is your Facebook Page in your marketing materials: business cards, website, email signature, commercials, brochures, print ads, direct mail…I can go on. Successful Facebook Pages are not built 100% on Facebook.

3. Have You Asked Your Supporters for a Like?

Every business already has a built-in fan base: your supporters, your clients, your friends, your family, your employees and their network…well you get the idea. The number one reason many of us don’t ask is that we don’t think we should “sell” to our friends and clients. That’s a big misconception – you won’t be selling to them all the time, which brings us to…

4. What is Your Message Strategy?

Why do people continue to interact with your Facebook Page? Well, you need to enchant them to get them to stay. I always tell my clients that in order to get traction on their Facebook Page they need to make sure their message strategy will educate, entertain and/or engage their Facebook Fans. You need to think about what you post. If you are a recruitment firm, don’t just post your latest positions – post articles about how to master the job interview. If you are a nonprofit, don’t just ask for donations – post or write articles educating your audience about your cause overall. If you are a social media guy (ahem) don’t just talk about your services – share useful content.

5. Pictures and Video – Where Are They?

One of the biggest problems with Facebook Pages is that sometimes there isn’t a lot of variety with the postings. Mix it up by using pictures and video. See an interesting video on YouTube? Copy the link and share it on your page. See an interesting infographic that your target market would enjoy and benefit from? Post it! Of course pictures of your events, meetings, conferences and the like are wonderful – if you can’t create it yourself, support someone else and share. It is “social” media anyways, isn’t it?

And there are many more to come! Make sure to check out Parts 2 and 3 to see the rest of 10 tips on bringing your Facebook Page to life!

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