Social Media Marketing Evaluation: Breweries

30Jul

For the rest of the summer, The Go! Agency blog will focus on the social media habits of some of our favorite industries. Every week, our first blog will explain common mistakes made by an industry; followed by a second blog that will explain how to fix them. Think of this series as What Not to Wear for social media marketers!

This week we’ll see what breweries are doing on social media that torpedo their chance of marketing success.

Hyperfocus on Beer

We get it. You make beer. You serve beer. Presumably, you enjoy beer. That’s great, but so does every other brewery in the history of fermentation. What makes your brewery different? Do you have a monthly game night? Are you pet-friendly? Do you support any charities? Is your building historic? Does your brewery double as a venue, maybe for weddings or concerts? What about art shows, open-mic nights, rap battles, or slam poetry festivals? Show users why your establishment is worth their time, money, and commute. (Brew pubs and restaurant breweries, take note: you are just as guilty of this as your hoppy brethren. If your social media posts are mostly shots of meal pairings or beer-based menu items–no matter how creative the recipe or avant-garde the presentation–your page will be boring.)

Speaking of which, the “picture of a beer bottle/beer can with the beer’s name as the only description” trope needs to go away. Even if the label art is phenomenal, even if the beer’s name is a hilarious and profound pun containing layers of allusions–these posts are boring. It is possible to have too much minimalism: people who are interested in your product would like to get information on your product.

Wall-to-Wall Promotion

On a similar note, far too many breweries focus solely on promoting their wares. By all means, post shots of seasonal menu specials, beer pairing dinners, and full dining rooms. However, your social media profile should showcase your brand as a whole: that means showing followers your corporate personality, not just your products.

POST ALL THE MEMES!

[Author’s note: runners-up for this subheading title included “All your beers are belong to us”; “ERMAHGERD! AAYELLE!”; “i can haz pilznar?”; and “Such Hops, Much Ferment.”]

Memes are, for better or worse, now part of our culture. Even the best memes, however, can get very boring very quickly–particularly when they make up 70 percent or more of your social media posts. A much more effective way to show followers that you are funny, hip, and/or edgy is to actually introduce the funny, hip, and/or edgy people who work for you. A few memes can add humor and a spark of irreverence to your social media profile, but use them sparingly.

Haphazard Posting Schedules

In the month leading up to the release of a new beer, you posted eight times a week. In the three months following that release, you posted eight times period. Be consistent with your posting schedule. At the very least, major activity promoting a new brew immediately followed by radio silence might make followers think that your new release was a flop–otherwise you’d be posting about it, right? You should always choose quality over quantity, so it’s fine to forgo posting lackluster content just for the sake of posting something. That being said, you should establish and stick to a consistent posting schedule.

Monotonous Content

You can have too many photos of sunsets from the porch. You can have too many shots of dogs wearing bandanas. You can have too many pics of your staff gathered around a keg, of bartenders pouring a pint, and patrons raising their glasses in silent toast. Mix it up a bit.

Bad Photos

This is a universal mistake that is made by every industry (yes, even some professional photographers are guilty of this on social media). You don’t necessarily need to hire a pro, but you do need to take visuals seriously. You want your images to look polished–and don’t just assume that any mistakes can be fixed by using a filter. Far too often, breweries seem to think that an Instagram filter is the answer for everything, only to end up with washed-out, over-exposed, poorly-cropped pictures.

In out next post, we’ll take a look at a hypothetical brewery that has committed all of these social media sins. We’ll explain how to remedy these issues in our next post!

Is your brand languishing in obscurity? Are you struggling with social media? The Go! Agency can help revitalize your social media marketing strategy! Contact us today for a free consultation!

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Not a Popularity Contest: Social Media Metrics that Matter

By Christopher Tompkins

25Jul

Social Media

Too many novice social media marketers focus on the wrong metrics when measuring the success of their social media campaigns. They regress to 10th grade students at a new school: desperate to be liked, seeking out the quickest way to popularity. Like those high school sophomores, they don’t consider what they really need or want and instead pursue goals that won’t actually benefit them in the long term. Don’t mistake popularity for validation when it comes to your brand’s goals–in fact, don’t mistake likes for popularity. Determine your goals and then apply strategies that will help you get to those goals. We’ll explain a few of the key metrics today.

1. Engagement

Likes are nice, but on their own will not give you a good indication of audience engagement. You should focus on active participation. For example, comments and replies are proof that your audience is invested in your content. The number of shares will help you determine what content is perceived as valuable or interesting by your audience. Review your content to see what content received the most comments and shares. Do they have anything in common, like subject matter or posting time? What are the commonalities among your less-popular, less-shared posts?

2. Awareness

You don’t want to waste time, effort, and resources on a campaign designed to increase likes when reach is more relevant to your goals. Impressions are number of times that someone sees content (tweet, update, post, ad, etc.). Reach is the number of unique individuals who see the content. If Ward sees an ad for Daughters of the Dragon Sriracha Marinade three times, that ad has three impressions and a reach of one. For some brands and under some circumstances, impressions might be paramount; for other brands and circumstances, reach matters more. Brands that want to broaden their audiences and find new consumers should focus on reach, while brands that want to strengthen their message to their existing audiences should focus on impressions.

3. Conversions

How many users were so impacted by your content or message that they took action? That is conversion in a nutshell. To determine this, you’ll need to have already determined your goals. Note that this should be more than “complete a purchase.” Do you want users to share your content? Do you want users to go to your website? Enter a contest? Fill out a survey? Measuring conversions can be as simple as tracking click rates. Take Joy’s law firm as an example. She ultimately wants prospective clients to come in for a free consultation at Meachum & Gao, but she understands that achieving this will take many steps. Therefore, her immediate conversion goal is for people to click through links from the firm’s social media profiles to the firm’s webpage. By tracking the click rate, she can see what content is most compelling to prospective clients. Armed with this information, she will be able to create enticing content that will motivate prospective clients to contact her office.

Remember that your goals will probably change over time, so it’s important to periodically reevaluate your strategies. Above all, don’t get too comfortable! Savvy social media marketers know that you must continually adapt and evolve to keep up with current trends as well as the needs of your consumers.

What metrics have you found to be most valuable for your marketing strategy? Share with us in the comments!

Are you lost when it comes to social media? We can show you the path to digital marketing success! Contact us today for your free consultation!

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Turn That Social Media Silence Into Chatter With These 4 Steps

By Dale Griffen

12Feb

Snapchat, Social Media

There are 800 million people on Instagram, nearly one billion on Twitter, and two billion on Facebook. How then is it possible that your awesome content—the writing and visuals you’d spent hours perfecting—got only one or two likes? You thought social media marketing (SMM) was supposed to be a surefire way to generate new leads and build a strong customer base. What went wrong?

The truth is that social media marketing can do all that, but no one said it was easy. If you’re experiencing problems as you try to create a strong following on social media, you’re not alone. In fact, 55% of business owners that begin social media marketing campaigns as part of their New Year resolutions become disheartened by mid-February, sending out less and less content. Soon enough, these business owners find themselves with a dead Facebook page or Twitter account—and anxiety at the mere thought of logging back in to either.

But successful social media marketing takes persistence and flexibility. Instead of giving up on your dream of a vast and engaged online audience, you need to adapt your strategy.

At The Go! Agency, we often work with clients who come to us at a loss. Their social media pages just aren’t getting any attention. After reviewing their current strategy, we often find room for improvement—and more often than not, they have very common, fixable issues.

Here are a few techniques that may breathe new life into your social media marketing:

1. Focus on content, not promotions.

When it comes to social media marketing, there is a common misconception that every piece of content is supposed to generate leads. However, the right SMM approach will be much more subtle. The point of social media is to build customer-brand relationships. The best way to do that is to offer content they will actually want. So whether you want to create an information-packed blog or share how-to videos, creating and distributing content that your customers actually want to consume will do wonders for your engagement.

2. Study your performance.

If you experienced a significant slump in numbers, you can gain valuable information from your previous attempts. It might be time to head to your old data and try and decipher what worked before. Did engagement change when you deviated from a successful formula for content? If that’s the case, then you may have to go back and incorporate some older ideas. Did your formula remain the same, but your audience drift away? That probably means that you’ve saturated (and bored) your audience, so you’ll need to shake up your strategy. Change things up at the content and audience level. See what works, and go with it.

3. Spend money to make money.

Here’s the hard truth: you get what you pay for, every time. You should budget for social media advertising, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. The good news is that you can quickly see the advertising’s impact on engagement. You may be tempted to go it alone and use “word of mouth” to spread your message organically, but you will soon see that promoted content has the potential to reach a vastly larger number of prospective customers.

4. Reassess Your Conversion Funnels.

Like any marketing professional, your ultimate goal will be getting those customers to complete transactions. But what would be the customer’s next logical step for such a wonderful thing to take place? Clicking a link, of course. But where are you sending your audience? To your home page, your blog, anywhere at all? You need to figure out where your desired traffic is going and what they’re doing when they get there. Install Facebook tracking onto your site to see if customers are moving onto the next level of engagement: liking, sharing, commenting, or focusing on your site. This will be a big help to see if the landing page (the page to which your links direct traffic) is giving you the results you want.

Social media is an amazing opportunity for brands to present themselves to a wide array of potential customers in an attractive light. However, sometimes you need a serious shake up to get results. That’s where a team like ours at The Go! Agency can help. Our team of marketers will help you every step of the way, no matter what. There’s no denying that social media marketing can be a roller coaster, but with the right team of professionals at your side, the ride isn’t quite so scary.

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The 7 Things Most Businesses Fail To Do On Social Media

By Christopher Tompkins

26Oct

Social Media

Does your business have a social media presence? Chances are, the answer is yes. (Although if the answer is no, we need to talk.) But the real question is, do you have a GOOD social media presence? Once again, you may think the answer is yes. However, most businesses out there have quite a lot of room for improvement.

Many times we are approached by business owners who hire us to specifically clean up messes that were created unknowingly. Many times social media is delegated to interns or entry-level employees when they should be given to a qualified person or agency to execute. Social media requires a professional touch. With that in mind, here are seven of the most common things businesses fail to do on social media.

1. Interact with customers. Social media is a new form of customer communication. But what happens when your business doesn’t, well, communicate? It looks horrible when comments, reviews, or even tagging goes unanswered. Although you may have missed those notifications, it just looks like you are ignoring your audience. Hey – if the huge big box brands can do it, so can you.

2. Incorporate imagery. There should never be a piece of copy on your social media platforms that isn’t accompanied by some form of imagery, whether it be a GIF, picture, video, or something in between. You need something that will entice your audience to stop and engage with your content. Visuals are engaging.

3. Pay for advertising. The biggest misconception about social media marketing? It’s free. Sure, it’s free to sign up, but if you don’t create a budget for some well-strategized advertising, you’re going to have an issue. On Facebook alone, without advertising odds are none of your social media updates will be seen.

4. Update ALL accounts. Okay, so you’ve been doing great keeping your Facebook updated. You’ve been posting on a daily basis and even remembered your pictures. What about your Twitter? It hasn’t been updated since July? That’s a problem. Make sure you update all your accounts, even if you focus more of your attention on just one. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube and Pinterest are yearning for your attention! Oh yea, and don’t forget about your blog.

5. Update information. Did your business recently change hours? Do you have a new website? Maybe you rebranded? Make sure your social media reflects the most updated version of your business. Nothing is more shameful than wondering why you are not getting any phone calls when your phone number is wrong on every social account. And yes, I see this all the time.

6. Add informative content. To be successful on social media and stay competitive, you need to make sure that you don’t just share promo after promo. It’s a sure fire way to lose followers. Instead, incorporate content that your followers want such as articles, pro tips, recipes, quotes, freebies and more.

7. Join the community. One of the biggest goals of businesses on social media is to be seen. However, your goal should really be to be seen as an industry influencer or thought leader. You do that by interacting with others in your field, talking about hot topics and much more. Cultivate a following and engage with them regularly. Pro tip: join the global conversation by joining LinkedIn groups and really hit the ground running.

It’s easy to see how having a qualified person handling your social media marketing is important. The truth is that social media needs a team of professionals to deliver quality, creative, and analytical results. It’s up to you to find a way to make it happen, just never be afraid to ask for help when you need it. Professional agencies can help you get started much faster and will help you get results, and training, that you need to stay competitive in your marketplace.

Why You Can’t Postpone Social Media Marketing Any Longer

By Dale Griffen

3Oct

Social Media

Autumn is such a great season. The air gets a tad cooler, football season has kicked off, and of course, pumpkin spice lattes have returned. (If you’re into that!) Yet for marketers, the coming of fall means Q4 is here, and the pressure is on in a big way.

You should have spent your summer ramping up and strategizing for the upcoming busy season. If you spent a little too much time at the beach and failed to prepare, don’t panic. You still have just enough to get started.

You may be asking why is it so important to act now? Social media isn’t going anywhere, right? Here are just a few reasons why you can’t postpone social media marketing any longer.

Your budget depends on it.

For many companies, the end of the year means restructuring budgets. Did your marketing team spend less than originally projected? Those leftover funds may cost you that same amount in 2019’s budget, thereby losing out on your chance to make your mark online in the future. To put it simply, if you don’t use it, you may lose it. On the other hand, if you’re planning your 2019 budget – have you included a social media budget? Do you know what that figure should be?

You might be wondering what exactly there is to pay for when it comes to social media marketing. After all, signing up and creating a page is free. Well because of social media’s effectivity and potential to reach your ideal audience, over 50 million other companies are already using these sites for marketing purposes. As you could imagine, some of those may be your competitors. Paid advertising options exist so you can have an advantage. Rising above in the sea of other companies on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites is essential to the success of your social media.

Additionally, your marketing efforts won’t get you very far without exceptional content. You will need stunning visuals, compelling copy, innovative video, and much more. As you can imagine, there is a cost for making the kind of content that stops your readers in their tracks and gets them interested in your brand. Whether you are spending money on material or outsourcing to a team of pros, your content deserves attention.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

The research is in. People flock to social media from mid-October to the end of January more than any other time of the year. Whether they are hunting for the best Black Friday deals or sending out their holiday wishes to friends and family, they are using the same location – social media platforms. This is why it is paramount that your business has a presence on these sites and your content is tailored to the right audience. Social media marketing can help you stand in the spotlight during this special season no matter if your target audience is down the road or all across the globe.

Get exactly what you asked for.

Every company makes their money in different ways. For example, some depend on website clicks while others require customers to visit their physical location. This is one of the most significant reasons as to why social media marketing works. Your strategy should be customized to meet exactly what your company needs. This is particularly helpful when the holiday season hits and you have sales your customers need to know about, or you have a new e-commerce site that is ready for things like the Cyber Monday rush, but you need to raise awareness. It’s up to you to choose how social media works.

End 2018 strong and begin 2019 with a bang!

I have talked to many business owners who say that a majority of their returning customers found them during the holiday rush. It may be thanks to a Black Friday doorbuster, a Small Business Saturday sale (yes, that exists, and social media has made it huge!), or a gift from a loved one that brought their attention to the brand, a lot of customers choose new companies to stick with for the new year. This is why raising brand awareness and online visibility cannot be overlooked during these following months.

Are you ready?

Social media marketing will help legitimize your brand and get people talking about your business online. There’s never a better time for it than the busiest season. Everyone is buzzing about, make sure your company isn’t left in the stone age!

Who Is On Your Social Media Marketing Team?

By Christopher Tompkins

Copy of Go! Blog Image Templates (900x350) (23)

25Jul

Social Media

When you are trying to market your business online, you are going to need some help. If you are reading this, you probably already know that. But in this instance, I do not necessarily mean advice on how to strategize or formulate your content. Instead, I am talking about members of your team.

A well-equipped social media marketing has a wide range of technically-minded workers and creatives that contribute to the overall goal of brand awareness, branding excellence, and online recognition. The following professionals should be members of your marketing team. You may find that some people will be able to don multiple hats and handle more than one of these responsibilities. However, I would not recommend only one employee handling all of this alone. As you will see, there’s quite a lot to do.

1. Manager. A social media manager is the heart and soul of a marketing campaign. These professionals post content at the appropriate time, watch current trends and guide creatives towards the right angle, and ensures everything is running smoothly. They optimize a company’s profiles on the separate platforms and does their best to raise engagement levels as high as possible.

2. Copywriter. The copywriters are in charge of the written portion of content creation. They write social media posts, blogs, Facebook notes, advertisement copy, and much more. These writers have a responsibility to keep the company’s voice consistent and to utilize visibility tools such as SEO, hashtags, Twitter handles, and more to ensure that they spread the word.

3. Graphic Designer. A graphic designer or visual artist is essential so all pictures, videos, GIFs, logos, cover images, and all forms of non-verbal branding is professional and consistent. You need to have a recognizable and unique look that speaks volumes about your company’s culture, message, work, and mission. A designer will be able to create original content on a regular basis and make sure it’s quality meets the expectation of your customer base.

4. Customer Service Representative. Speaking of customers, you will need a friendly, knowledgeable, and professional representative to speak to your followers. Whether they send you a message via Facebook’s Messenger app or shout at your brand through a tweet or two, they deserve a well-planned response. Customer service and communication are huge aspects of social media marketing, as more and more people are using these platform as avenues to get their queries answered.

5. Analyst. What is working and what isn’t? What content really struck a chord with your online audience? What advertisements are working? What demographics should you focus on? All of these questions and many, many more can be answered by an experienced social media analyst. This is where all-important data comes into play and can steer your other employees in the right direction.

6. Spy. Of course you don’t have an actual secret agent on your social media marketing team (although it would be pretty cool if you did). But you need someone to see what your competition is doing online. Do they have a larger following than you do? Is their content better? Or are you winning? Chances are, this essential responsibility will fall on your analyst or manager.

Who is on your social media team? Are they trained in the ways of social media and ready to take on anything the internet can throw at them?

5 Simple Steps For Attracting A Crowd On Twitter

By Christopher Tompkins

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11Apr

Copywriting, Pinterest, Snapchat, Twitter

Twitter finds itself in the news a lot thanks to its reach and popularity. It seems anyone and everyone has an account and sends out ideas, opinions, sales, and visuals. From pop star celebrities to law firms, everyone has a place on Twitter.

But what about your company? Are you reaching new customers through Twitter?

How does your business use Twitter? What content does it tweet? When does it send out content? All of these questions are essential to your marketing strategy. Are you unable to answer any of these questions? Then we have some work to do.

Twitter is both a tool for content marketing and customer communication. How can your brand use it to reach new audiences and a broader reach? Follows these simple five steps that the biggest companies are already using.

1. Offer open communication

Twitter is a great way to deliver top-notch customer service in a quick and convenient fashion. If someone sends a message or mentions your brand, you need to respond and quickly. Some businesses even have a specific Twitter account just for “support” communication, which is a great service to offer your customers.

2. Promotions

Have a BOGO deal you want to tell people about? Maybe a holiday special? Get people talking about your business with the most traditional advertising content available – the good old sale. Twitter recently explained that “discount by the percentage” is the best way to push a sale on their site. We couldn’t agree more — it’s compact, simple, and gets people to take action quickly. “25% off all Easter supplies!” gets the message across in as little characters as possible, so change your promotions strategy accordingly.

3. Start the conversation

Let’s face it — Twitter is all about people talking. Turn your Twitter page into a social gathering by giving people a reason to begin a conversation. Ask your audience what their favorite product is, ask for feedback about a new service, or even offer a Q&A.

4. Freebies

Marketers can never overestimate the power of “free.” There are multiple ways to give your followers something free. The two most effective ways are giveaways and free downloads.

To enter a giveaway, most companies ask customers to follow and retweet the post so their reach will expand in the process. A free download is usually an ebook or another form of informational media. Don’t think your industry is “ebook” worthy? Challenge accepted! Any industry can benefit from having an ebook in their marketing arsenal no matter their industry. Offering some good, free info is an excellent opportunity to gain your customers’ trust.

5. Go Live

As predicted, 2017 is turning out to be the year of live video. Twitter is no exception. But what does your brand have to show off on live video? Broadcast live feed to your followers and offer a behind-the-scenes look at your business, offer industry-related advice through a unique version of a Q&A, or even incorporate some of the above ideas like freebies and reveal the winner of a giveaway. Many businesses are already making live video a regular addition to their Twitter content.

Twitter is easy to learn, but it takes time to master. With over 320 million people flying around the platform, your ideal audience is already there, waiting for your awesome content.

Get started on Twitter today by contacting us! Our team of social media experts is here to help your business soar.

At The Drawing Board: A New Facebook Ads Campaign

By Christopher Tompkins

Copy of Go! Blog Image Templates (900x350) (20)

5Apr

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Here at The Go! Agency, we’re experts in digital marketing. But the ironic thing is, we don’t do nearly enough marketing for ourselves.

I know, shocker.

We’ve got a good reputation with our clients, so new business arrives via word of mouth. Many people love us, so much that they want to share us with their friends and business connections! So far it’s been working out perfect for us.

Yet, we know how powerful Facebook Advertising can be, so we’d be crazy not to use it ourselves. Which is what we plan to do soon.

“Okay, why exactly are you telling me this?” is probably what you’re now thinking.

Well, we thought this would be a great opportunity for us to illustrate to our customers just what we do for them. While also helping those of you out there who are just starting out in Facebook Advertising make sense of the confusing landscape.

For that reason, we’ve decided to give you a “behind the scenes” look into our Facebook Ads Campaign. Taking you from our first meeting, where we set goals for the campaign. Through brainstorming different copy and ad ideas. To finally showing how our campaigns are created and implemented.

Before we get started though, I’d first like to introduce myself. My name is Daniel, and I’m the Marketing Assistant here at The Go! Agency. I help our CEO (Christopher) to implement our marketing strategy. Something you’ll find out about in the next section.

Our Monthly Marketing Meeting

Each month, on the 15th of the month, myself (Dan, the Marketing Assistant) Christopher (our CEO and Marketing Director) and Dale (our VP and Networking Maestro) meet up to discuss our marketing goals for the next month as well as how we’ve progressed from the previous month.

The meeting is important because each of us can give input from our point of view:

Christopher, as our Head of Marketing, has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and has the expertise needed to help shape our marketing campaigns. At the same time, he is involved with most of our clients on setting up their projects, so knows what works and what doesn’t.
Dale, on the other hand, as our VP has an insight into our entire business as a whole. He can see where holes might form in our marketing processes and what might prevent them from being successful. He connects to our potential customers on a daily basis so knows what makes them tick.
Then there’s me, Dan. As the Marketing Assistant, I help to pull together all the brilliant ideas we have and try to make them a reality. I organize and create our marketing materials, working with other members of our agency to create content and ensure the content all works together.

Setting Goals

To begin our monthly marketing meeting, we go through our analytics from the previous month. This allows us to see what areas need improvement as well as giving us a chance to pat ourselves on the back for things we’ve done well.

This feeds into the next section of our meeting where we choose goals for the next month along with discussing where we’d like our marketing efforts to be focused.

If we’re not bringing in enough leads, do we need to create a campaign that will create more for us? If we’re offering a new service, should we focus on bringing in more business for that? Or do we think it’s worthwhile focusing the next month on driving specific types of business towards us?

Only through experience of the business and its direction can those questions be answered, which is why Dale and Chris’ presence at the meeting is so important. From their day to day running of the business, they already have a holistic view of everything, so have in mind what needs improvement.

Choosing a Focus

In March’s meeting, we decided we wanted to focus our attention for the next month on offering Facebook Ads as a full service. In the past, much of the focus of our agency has been on social media with Facebook Ads as an addendum to that. However many new clients are interested in what Facebook Ads can do for them.

But with Facebook Ads getting more popular, we want to build it up as another service option for clients and of course, potential clients too! (If you’re interested in finding out more about our Facebook Ads services, click here.)

With a goal decided on for the next month, we then spent the rest of the meeting discussing potential options for meeting our goal. Including how we would create a campaign around that goal using our various channels (social media, Facebook Ads, email marketing, our podcast, etc.)

This is basically a bit of a brainstorm session where I note down every idea we have, so I can later create a more coherent plan from them.

The most important thing we take away from our meeting is a goal. The meeting is just the first step for us in forming a marketing campaign.

In my next behind-the-scenes post, I’ll discuss our next step. Where Christopher and I pin down what exactly we want from our campaign and how we plan to implement it.

Yes And: The Go! Agency’s Improv Experience

By Christopher Tompkins

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5Apr

The Go! Agency

What are we doing when we aren’t creating and implementing social media marketing strategies for our clients? On March 23rd, actor Ricky Wayne and staff from The American Stage in St. Petersburg, FL came by to introduce our team to the world of improv comedy in a great teambuilding experience. Needless to say, it was a wild time – but we also learned a ton about each other as a team.

As anyone from the world of improv knows, you can discover a lot about yourself and your fellow performers quite quickly. We learned about how we approach our work at The Go! Agency and came up with great strategies to improve collaboration and teamwork.

When Ricky and the team began, we started with an ice breaker. Each Go! Agent said one true fact and two false facts, and the rest of us had to decide which was the true statement. We learned that Kaylee, our Social Media Manager Lead, used to be a lifeguard. Bill, our new Social Media Executive, explained that he ran several marathons when he lived in New York. Finally, some employees were surprised to find out that our CEO Christopher was a classically-trained pianist.

After our icebreaker activities, we dove into one of improv’s most famous exercises, “Yes And.” The classic activity helped us perform skits successfully and improve our teamwork. This emphasized positivity, arguably the most important element of improv. Instead of changing someone’s idea to conform to your own, we worked with what we were given, and the performance is all the better for the collaboration. For example, Alyssa and Jamie created a fun beach scene scenario by utilizing each other’s strengths and talking points.

In the next exercise, we experienced the impact negativity had on our improv skits. Instead of bouncing off each other’s plot points, we shot down ideas and left our partners scrambling. As a result, we had less-entertaining performances and a lot of embarrassment. It was clear to see how this lesson can be translated into our work – positivity works even in tense situations!

Another enlightening aspect of our time with Ricky Wayne and American Stage was when we went into smaller groups and saw just how far communication could go with teamwork. For example, our Marketing Assistant Dan started off a conversation about the warm weather that’s coming to Florida, and by the end, we all learned what we all like to do on our days off and even about our morning commutes to the office.

Not only was improv a gateway into interesting conversations and a tool to better know our fellow Go! Agents, but it was a way to improve work ethic and productivity.

As we are all working on social media strategies and content, we’re keeping in mind the upbeat attitude and perseverance that improv teaches!

The Worst Facebook Page In The World: Cover and Profile Pictures

By Christopher Tompkins

4Apr

Facebook, Local Marketing, Marketing, Social Media

Today I’m going to introduce you to The Worst Facebook Page In The World. If you’re sitting there right now thinking, “Uh oh, I hope it’s not my page” then don’t worry. I made this page myself just to illustrate some social media failings.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to go through The Worst Facebook Page In The World, section by section, to show you common social media mistakes and how to overcome them by using the correct practices.

This week, I’m going to focus on the profile photo and cover image.

Let’s take a look:

Now you know what they say; you only get one chance to make a first impression and straight away my first impression of the page is, “BLEURGH”.

Facebook Profile Pictures

When any new person comes to a Facebook page, the first thing that they’ll see is your cover image and profile picture. So if they stink, your whole page stinks! Immediately we can see the issue with the page.

For starters, their profile photo has nothing to do with the business. (We can’t even tell if they are a business!) It’s a blurry, out of focus shot of somebody’s face. Maybe it’s the owner? Who knows.

The quality of the photo is an issue, but even more of an issue is the content. A business can live or die based on its branding, and it seems this business has no logo. Or an owner that didn’t think to place their logo on their website.

What about some good examples, though? Well, what do you know! The Go! Agency has a perfect profile picture.

We’ve chosen to use our logo as it pops out on the page and is well connected to our brand. The great thing about using your logo as a profile picture is that it will get peppered around your page, but also on other pages when you leave a comment, or somebody shares one of your posts. A good logo will pop out from the page and be instantly recognizable.

Facebook Cover Images

Next up we have the cover image.

Having a branded, clear cover image is important just for the simple fact that it takes up 1/3rd of a visitor’s screen. Think of it as a virtual store front.

In this case, the owner has decided to put up a random photo of feet and hands, which tells us nothing. It doesn’t inform visitors of what the business is, it doesn’t stir any emotions and worst of all, the photo is blurry and bad quality. Going back to that idea of the store front – how would a customer react in real life if this was plastered over the store window? Probably with bewilderment.

By this point, I’d imagine a good amount of visitors would have left the Facebook page. Two terrible photos are all it takes sometimes. We’re often told to “Never judge a book by its cover, ” but we all do it.

In this case, most people would judge that this business doesn’t care too much about their Facebook page, which kind of leads us to assume they don’t care about their business either. It doesn’t make you believe in them as a legitimate business.

The most annoying thing about this is that this first impression relayed no information about the business at all. None. Can you tell me what the business even does? It’s impossible to tell at first glance, which is how new visitors would feel.

Now here’s a cover image used by one of our clients:

It hits the mark well because it instantly tells the visitor what this business does, where it’s located and also features a relevant photo that puts forward positive emotions. Most important of all though, it looks good. (Probably because we had our graphic designer make it…)

You’re probably thinking, “Well duh! We’re not that stupid.” But we’ve seen these basic rules broken time and again. Sometimes you just don’t know what you don’t know!

In my next post about the World’s Worst Facebook Page, I’ll be showing you why it’s important to keep your page up-to-date and some good practices for dealing with negative reviews.

Until then, you can sign up for our newsletter below!

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Facebook Profile Pictures

Facebook Cover Images