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How to Use Facebook Fan Page to Generate Positive Discussion About Your Brand

Having a Facebook fan page can be a little bit more challenging then maintaining a personal profile because the features are very different. However, it’s still possible to generate a lively discussion on your Facebook fan page if you use the features creatively. 

One of the most creative things we’ve seen lately was how the British Consulate of Jerusalem opened dialogue with the public by setting up a Q & A with the Foreign Office spokesman and invited fans of the consulate to ask questions. The conversation was scheduled in advance and fans were invited to post their questions for the spokesman to respond. By making this a semi-live virtual press conference, a relationship developed between the fans and the spokesperson and he was not only able to respond to their questions, but to create relationship with real people. 

In addition, unlike a video press conference, posting on the wall allows each person to consider their questions and the spokesperson to consider their answer carefully. Each answer also becomes a record of the conversation that other people can view, making it public relations tool that can be used in the future for people who have similar questions. 

For a corporation or a individual who is looking to improve their online image, scheduling a virtual question and answer session could be extremely beneficial in building relationships with consumers and customers. While you should be ready to answer tough questions, if you really stand behind your company or brand, their shouldn’t be any question you can’t answer. Lastly, if a question posed is inappropriate you always have the freedom to remove it, since it’s your Facebook page after all. 

Using Social Media Effectively

It’s important for any successful business or brand to use social media, by now that’s clear. But how you use social media and when you use social media, these are the questions for the most effective companies and individuals. Social media can be like a black whole that you’ll spend all of your days engulfed in, so it’s important to have a clear plan about how you’re going to Facebook, Tweet and connect with your LinkedIn contacts.

Know Your Audience

The first step to focusing your social media actions is to know your audience -- know who you’re trying to reach and who you’re already reaching. Today it seems as if everyone you know is probably on to Facebook -- there are over 500 million users now. For most people, this means that your contacts are mixed between people for work, family and friends. Luckily, the Facebook privacy settings and a number of social media tools are now sophisticated enough to let you segment your list. Take the time to define at least three different groups and to identify how those groups should see your profile. This will help you know who is your audience and conquer the next step, defining your content.

Define your content

After you’ve segmented your list and become clear about your audience, take the time to define what type of content you think would be valuable both for your brand and for your audience. It’s important to be clear about this before you start tweeting and posting because your content is essentially what defines you on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook you have far more freedom to determine what type of content you display and a few more words, on Twitter you have 140 characters to articulate the modern press release -- so do it wisely. 

Use the Wealth of Social Network Tools

There are a wealth of social network tools available online to help you manage your online presence. One such example is HootSuite. HootSuite allows you to pre-program what messages you want sent to which social network all from one place. This allows you to schedule a time to program your social media to be posted over time without having to literally be on your computer at the time of posting. This also helps when you’re trying to manage your own time, since social media can be very distracting and time consuming. 

Using Google Trends to Manage Your Brand

 

One of the most important things that you can do for your brand is keep a close eye on it and monitor it over several different platforms. While we’ve written about several ways to monitor your brand over time, we haven’t yet covered Google Trends and this can be one of the most effective tools that you can use to monitor your personal or business brand.

Google Trends was created by Google Labs and can be used to monitor your peronsal and business brand easily online for free. Google Trends can show you not only how often a set of keywords, either your name or your company’s name, appears on the web, but how frequently people search for it. Using a tool called “Hot Searches” you can see how often people search for your company over time. Google Trends spans back several years so if you’ve recently launched a new brand or a campaign to improve your brands reputation, you’ll be able to see how effective your efforts have been using this simple tool.

Google Trends also has as nifty feature called “Hot Topics” that lets you see not only the content you’ve published, but what other people are saying about your brand. Want to know how your brand matches up against others? You can search up to five different keywords and compare them in an easy to view graph that charts the change in discourse over time. If you want to focus on a specific period of time, the Google Trends allows you to focus in on a series of dates and narrow down your search so you can see how effective a specific campaign has been or a change in your brand strategy.

You can also use Google Trends to track negative publicity and search for a series of negative keywords that have been associated with your brand to see if the trend in using them is changing. Since bad publicity typically comes in waves, this tool can help you as you try to combat the negative publicity. Simply compare the positive keywords that you are trying to associate with your brand to the negative keywords to see whose winning the public relations battle -- that’s how easy it is to track your progress and to win the PR war online.

How to Use Your Facebook Profile to Make Your Personal Brand Sparkle

Today facebook reached over 500 million users -- that means half a billion people are now on facebook posting, sharing and profiling. Even though individuals can only have up to 3,000 friends before they are forced to open a fan page, facebook profiles are still is one of the most effective places to establish your personal brand -- if you know how to use it effectively.

Setting Up Your Facebook Profile Pro Style

By this time, most everyone (500 million people to be precise) knows how to set up a facebook profile, put up their picture and basic information. However, one of the most important features people often miss is the little box under your picture that you can put links in. This little box is one of the first thing that visitors to your facebook page will see so it’s important to put the most important information there -- for example your website address, twitter contact or maybe just your title.

Segmenting Your Friends To Created Targeted Groups

Another way to make sure that your facebook profile is optimized for professional use is to segment your friends into related groups. For example, you might have one group of family contacts, another of clients and a third group of co-workers. Keeping these groups of people separated will not only help you remember your connection to people, but will help you determine what type of content to share with them based on your privacy settings.

Picking Your Content Carefully

There is so much content on facebook that sometimes friends can be overloaded. It’s important to pick your content carefully and to post it at the right time. In the morning, most people check facebook as well as around 4pm when the boredom sets in at work. If you want your friends to respond to what you post, make sure you know what type of content they like to consume and when is the best time to post it. Keep in mind that people can only consume so much content, so inundating them with more than two or three posts a day can cause people to either tune you out or hide you in their news feed.

Get Your News to the Top of the News Feed

If you want your items to get to the top of people’s news feeds, one of the best ways is to respond to comments and engage other people in discussion. The more comments you have, the more likely your content is to get to the top of the news feed. Luckily, unlike blogs, facebook comments are more likely to be tame because they are connected to people’s real identities.
However, if their are comments that you think are out of line, you can easily delete them or respond to them in an effective way. For the most part, since this is your community, you’re likely to have other friends that will side with you and support you in confronting people who comment out of line and in the worst case, you can hire a reputation management professional to help you get your message across.

Virtual Press Conferences

One of the best ways to get your message out to your target audience is to hold a virtual press conference. Virtual press conferences give businesses the opportunity to communicate with their virtual community in real time. The live broadcast gives followers the opportunity to feel that they are, or can be, a part of something real.

Take the virtual press conference held by Tiger Woods, for example. Woods' online press conference drew over 683,000 viewers who tuned into see and hear Tiger Woods speak about his latest reputation management scandal, back in November. Or, more recently, the live trial of Lindsay Lohan, which aired last week drawing a record 2.3 million viewers. The trial gave fans and foes alike the opportunity to see Lohan in action and make up their own mind about the starlet and her sentence.

Virtual press conferences can also give viewers the opportunity to interact with you and your company in a moderated space. For example, viewers of the recent Lohan conference were able to participate in a poll which drew over 800,000 responses. Since the poll was organized by Lohan's representatives, the questions were written in a way that garnered support for Lohan and created a participatory experience for her fans. In addition to polls, virtual press conferences also can provide online viewers and online journalists the chance to ask media spokespeople questions -- making it more like old fashioned press conferences, just with a much broader reach. 

Even if not a lot of people attend your virtual press conference, the footage can be posted to YouTube, Vimeo or other online networks for viewers to watch afterwards. They can also be sent out in newsletters and posted to your company's blog or website -- making them a long time part of your company's media campaign and reputation management strategy.

Who Needs Reputation Management? Justin Bieber Knows

Justin Bieber has once again reached the top of the charts, but this time not for his pop-music wonders or heart-throb looks. Over the past few weeks Bieber has become the subject of one of the internet's hottest cyberbullying campaigns by the notorious cyberbullying group, 4chan.

According to Mashable.com, yesterday 4chan hacked YouTube sending pop-up messages across the site and redirecting Bieber's video pages to sites hosting pornography and malware.

This is the latest in a series of attacks on the pop singer which started several months ago when the internet became obsessed with Bieiber and Bieber haters started fighting back. For months, Beiber and his unmistakable sixteen year old baby-face brand dominated Twitter's trending topics (with the World Cup breaking it only a few times), and sparked the creation of a Bieber elimination program which excludes all mentions of the pop star from your Twitter feed.

The drama continued when Bieber launched a "Justin Bieber My World Tour" contest inviting fans to vote what country to send him to. Taking advantage of this all too tempting opportunity, the notorious internet haters hacking group (or cyberbullying group as we've come accustomed to calling them), 4chan, started organizing to send Bieber to North Korea. While Israel was leading the way for several days, now, in the last day of the competition, North Korea has overtaken Israel as the first choice for where to send Bieber next.

According to The Independent, Bieber will never be sent to North Korea for several reasons. The first being the fact that 4chan's website explicitly tells viewers how to hack the contest system. Secondly, western music is banned in North Korea and finally, most people in North Korea don't have access to the internet and don't even know who Justin Bieber is. 

What should Bieber do?

Bieber has a very skilled PR team that should bring the situation out into the open. So far, there hasn't been a public response from Bieber, his website doesn't mention the scandal and internet lovers and hater have been left to gossip and speculate about what Bieber will do. However, tomorrow when the contest ends, Bieber's team should respond with some kind of public statement about the contest results and the recent cyberbullying.

Since news of the cyber scandal has been all over the internet for weeks, it's important that Bieber's team not try to sweep it under the rug. Instead, Bieber's team should use their reputation management skills to issue a public response to fans and assure them that cyberwars will not stop Bieber from bringing his music to the most deserving fans, and that Israel will get to hear him sing because they are the true lovers of his music, not a group of internet cyberbullies.