3 Tips to Marketing in Facebook

There's a report today from Social Media Quickstarter that reveals 10 very interesting (if not staggering statistics) about consumer behavior in Facebook. The independent study, done through CMB Consumer Pulse under the sponsorship of Constant Contact, asked 1,491 respondents who are at least 18 years old their use of social media through a 15-minute online questionnaire fielded in January 2011.

What's particularly striking among the findings was not how widespread the use of Facebook is, but just how engaged people are with the site. Of adults 18+ who are online, over half (52%) spend at least an hour every week on Facebook. For the younger segment-- that is folks between 18 and 35-- this figure was significantly higher at 70%. This one may be obvious but if you're a local business, organization, or cause that is not in Facebook today, it is imperative that you create a presence for your entity right away, and start cultivating, interacting, and engaging with your community.

The other interesting finding was that among those who use Facebook, close to half (45%) spent their time reading their news feeds, and much less time searching for people (26%); sending emails (20%); playing games (17%); and visiting fan pages (14%). The news feed is clearly where the action is (no surprise there) and this may be a function of the fact that about half of users (49%) say that they spend their time creating content and posting on walls. The implication here is that if you're a local business wanting to generate more views on your page, gain additional fans, increase conversion, or drive physical traffic to your place of business, it is critical to gain as much exposure as you can on the news feeds because that's where most everybody is.

Here are three ideas on how to do that:

1. Offer remarkable products or experiences.

This is point zero where all begins. Without something remarkable to offer customers for them to experience, any business would not be referable. This is a given. Are you "wow-ing" customers? What one or two things can you change in the customer experience that's easily talked about or shared? Oftentimes, customers service represents low-hanging fruit and handling customer complaints or negative feedback better can often lead to wonderful customer experiences worthy of sharing.

2. Make it easy for them to find your page and become a fan.

Businesses who have at least 25 fans get to specify a user name for their page, giving the page a more user-friendly URL that can easily be remembered by customers (e.g., www.facebook.com/businessname). So if you have just created a page, one of your immediate goals needs to be getting at least 25 customers to like it. The whole point of having a custom Facebook URL is so that customers can easily remember it and, hence, be able to find it when they're on Facebook. Regardless of whether you have one or not, the one thing to remember is to make it easy for customers to navigate to the page in Facebook. Do you have a link to this page on your website, for example, with an invitation to become a fan of your business? How about your email signature? Have you thought about embedding it in your sales receipts? What about other touch points?

3. Provide tools to encourage them to share their experiences and stories about your business to friends.

According to the study, 3 in 5 (or about 56%) of users say they are more likely to recommend a brand to friends after becoming fans. These recommendations can happen "offline" but to let it end at that would be a wasted opportunity to get the word out about your business, and have it spread. Indeed, relying on word-of-mouth to happen is not the same as making it happen. You ought to have some tools or mechanism in place on your page that empowers and enables fans to go from a casual like, to actually writing a posting about how great your business is that gives it additional exposure on the news feed. Done well, this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: users see friends' recommendations about your business, they try your remarkable product or service, they become fans and consequently recommend it or refer it to friends. Of course, this is overly simplistic, but you get the picture.

In short, be remarkable; link or direct customers to your page; and give them tools to recommend and refer your business to friends.

What do you think? Have ideas on your how to market better through Facebook? Let us know.

How To Make the Most Out of Your Facebook Page

So you've set up a Facebook page for your business, now what?

With the dramatic growth in popularity of social media tools like Facebook, people are increasingly sharing their opinions with friends about nearly everything-- including their experiences at local businesses like yours. Social Raves capitalizes on this trend by helping local businesses capture, crystallize, and channel customer recommendations into powerful word-of-mouth marketing.

If your business relies heavily on word-of-mouth and referrals, the number one challenge you have is not only to get the word out but to have it spread. You’ve probably tried newspaper ads, direct mail, yellow pages, online marketing, email, and maybe even radio or TV, and found that these can get expensive, and difficult to gauge for effectiveness.

Word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising: it costs nothing when customers talk you up and yet it’s effective because people value and trust friends’ recommendations. Relying on word-of-mouth to happen, however, is not the same as making it happen!

That’s why we created Social Raves … a simple and effective way to get the referrals and recommendations necessary to grow your business. Here's how it works:

1. Claim your business on Social Raves. It's FREE. Go here.

2. Add the Social Raves app to your page in Facebook as a "Recommend This" tab on the left sidebar on the page.  (Don't have a page? Don't worry. Creating one is as easy as 1-2-3.)

3. Manage your app settings by linking your Facebook page to your Social Raves account, and then configure the tab settings (you have full control over what gets pushed to your page). Go to "Recommend This" tab on the left sidebar of your page after successfully installing the app.

4. Invite customers and fans to rave, recommend, and refer your business to friends right from your Facebook page using status updates on your Facebook wall and/or Twitter, email blasts, newsletters, or any point of contact that makes sense.

5. Track recommendations and referrals, strengthen relationships with fans, and continue building your promoter network via your dashboard.

So why use Social Raves?

Drive more traffic to your business. 

When customers rave about your product or service in Facebook, your business gets additional exposure in fans' walls and their friends' news feeds. In addition, other customers who find your Facebook page will see these recommendations and like or comment on them, leading to more exposure for your brand and contaminating other users.  Since recommendations are highly trusted, these endorsements from customers result in higher conversions, more "likes" on your page, greater traffic, and naturally, more business.

Get found and discovered when people are searching.

Most people begin their search for local businesses online so it is critical that they find information about your business when they are actively looking (and ready to buy). When you add the Social Raves app to your page in Facebook, it comes with a raves page hosted on socialraves.com that will show up in Google, Bing, or Yahoo!. Since recommendations from fans in Facebook are published on this search-engine optimized page, non-Facebook users who are in the market for what you provide will find and discover all the wonderful things customers say about your business, resulting in greater traffic, more leads, and additional business.

Build a promoter network and scale.

Having a network of raving fans who are ready to spread the word about your business is the only way to scale your marketing. That's because when you engage and talk to fans about something they care about, they'll turn around and tell their friends, who'll tell their friends, and so on. Your dashboard not only allows you to monitor what's happening to your raving fan network, but also provides you with tools and analytics to help you build and grow it.

Ready to get started?

Start here and just follow the simple instructions.

Get raving!

Go ahead and give it a try, and do let us know if you have questions or suggestions.

Tips for Small Businesses on Building a Customer Referral Program

The old way of building awareness, trial, purchase, and loyalty is not working anymore. Three in four consumers today do not trust what they see, hear, or read about in traditional media. Of those consumers, the majority trust friends’ recommendations more than any other source. Indeed, more and more people are sharing information with their personal and professional social networks. The more you can get customers to talk about your product or service, the better for your business.

In a world that is increasingly becoming more and more social, it's imperative to have a customer referral program in place to capitalize on all the conversations taking place in a way that benefits your business. The one thing to remember is that any successful referral program requires a system and infrastructure that enables you to easily identify advocates, track referral activity, administer rewards, and manage relationships.

When you're implementing a customer referral program for your small business, there are four key elements you have to do well:

Promote your referral program. This is basic. If customers don't know that you have a referral program in place, then nothing will happen. So it's critical that you reach out to customers consistently and give them an incentive to tell their friends about their experience using your product or service. Research has shown that it takes the average person to see a call to action at least five times before responding. So don't be shy and keep on asking!



Utilize various channels at your disposal (i.e., email, Facebook, Twitter, newsletters, your website, etc.).  You can also use various offline methods (i.e., courtesy cards, brochures, window clings, sales receipts, etc.) to stimulate referrals and invite satisfied customers to rave about your business. This is not an either-or proposition, so a combination of any or all of the means available would work fine depending on your resources. The more channels you use, the broader and deeper your potential reach. Regardless of which one you employ, asking your customers regularly and explicitly to make a recommendation for you is key.

Motivate your customers to refer your business. What incentives should you provide? It really depends. You know your customers better than anyone else so choose rewards you think they are most likely to respond to or appreciate. These include cash, gift cards, charity donations, t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. Some businesses are conflicted about giving customers rewards but the truth of the matter is, referral incentives do work!

Enable your customers to refer your business. Make it easy and convenient for satisfied customers to recommend your business to friends. Give them the tools to make it happen. Whichever tool you end up using needs to be trackable (you cannot reward the people recommending your business if you don’t know them). These trackable tools should enable your customers to recommend your business to their social networks wherever they happen to be or on their preferred channel, be it via email, mobile (SMS), socially through Facebook, Twitter, etc. or even offline (e.g., flyers, courtesy cards).

Reward your fans. A key aspect of managing a customer referral program is tracking who’s made referrals and recommendations so that you can reward them and strengthen the relationship. As soon as someone makes a recommendation for your business, you have to connect with them directly, thank them, and administer the incentive. Having a system that  enables you to do that is critical. In addition, you need to have a system that allows you to easily cultivate relationships with raving fans and empower them to generate more referrals resulting in additional sales for your business.


Administering, managing, and optimizing a referral program can be drain on a small business owner’s resources. Turn-key solutions, however, make it affordable to build, implement, and manage a robust customer referral program without taking a significant amount of time, effort, and investment.

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What do you think? Do you have a customer referral program success story you want to share? What worked well? What didn't? What would you change?

Tips for Small Business Owners on Using Social Media

We saw this video in our Twitter stream and found some nuggets worth sharing about a few things a small business owner could do to leverage technology and social media to scale marketing.

For instance, we loved the example about offering guests to take their photo with their camera enjoying the restaurant’s food/product and service. Lots of business owners miss this. How many times have you gone to a restaurant with family and/or friends where you wanted to snap a photo for posterity, and an employee or manager stepped up and offered to take it so everyone got included in the photo?

So one lesson we took away was not let opportunities to surprise and delight customers slip you by. Be aware of what’s happening at various customer touch points and be opportunistic in connecting with customers. Create a remarkable product or, if you’re offering a service, a remarkable experience for customers that they would be happy, or be dying to share.

Another nugget we took away was to let customers know that you care and are listening to what they have to say. Actively solicit feedback and follow-through in responding to customer ideas, suggestions, or praise. Social media is open communication and the important thing to remember is to be there in order to be part of the conversation and to engage with customers. Respond to comments on your blog, “likes” and comments on your Facebook page. Have a system or mechanism in place to gather or capture customer feedback about how well you are doing and what you could be doing to improve your product or service. All this entails having the right tools for interacting and connecting with customers, and strengthening these relationships.

There are probably other nuggets but these were the ones that bubbled to the top for us. What do you think?

Add a Recommend Us Tab to Your Facebook Page

Local businesses who already have a Facebook page can easily add or integrate the Social Raves platform (www.socialraves.com) onto their pages. By doing so, local businesses can leverage the power of word-of-mouth right where their customers are and increase engagement.

A "Recommend Us" tab powered by the Social Raves platform is  easy to install and fans of a business can rave about it beyond a simple "Like". This allows local businesses to segment their fan base and identify the ones who are most vocal and passionate. Business owners end up knowing not just who their best customers are but also why they care. They can then be more focused in their efforts in which relationships to cultivate or build, who to engage with, why, and how.

Putting a finer point on "Like" by raving about the business also works well because it gets the word out about exactly what makes a product or service great. Having more information and positive feedback on the fan page can only lead to more traffic and more referrals for the business.

Small businesses can also really use customer feedback about what they're doing right -- and wrong -- so they can continue to provide products and services customers want, enhance customer service, improve operations, etc. This is not possible without going past a casual "Like".

Video Overview of Social Raves

Since we launched the full beta version of the Social Raves site early last month (www.socialraves.com), we received a ton of user feedback about how busy the home page looks like and how it's unclear at the outset what the site is supposed to do for consumers.

So we went back to the drawing board and are now in the process of redesigning the landing page that users see when they come to the site. It's going to be much simpler and less busy than what is currently there now and will consist of:

1. a clear statement of our value proposition
2. a short explanation of how it works
3. a *leaderboard* showing what's happening in the community
4. a top 5 list of why you should sign up
5. a Facebook like button and a gallery of Social Raves fans
6. a short video overview of what the service is about
7. a call to action to sign up.

Our goal in the redesign was to get to the very *core* of what Social Raves is really all about for you and me. We think that the video in particular, done in common craft style, does a terrific job of articulating our value proposition and the "reason-to-buy" for our users.

The new splash page will be ready in a few days or so, but we wanted to share the video (aka sneak preview) so here it is for your viewing pleasure:



What do you think?

The One Thing Small Businesses Should Do

As a small business, if you want to get found when consumers are searching for what you sell or provide, it is imperative that you leverage the free listings available from the major search engines. You simply have to be there. Major search engines are probably the first stop for many people when they are in the market for something, so it is absolutely necessary that your business is listed at these sites. How can you be found if you're not there when people are searching?

A useful service that lets you check in one place how your business is listed in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other local directories is the site GetListed.org. Simply enter the name of your business and zip code on the home page and the site will give you a "listing score" which is a number from 0-100 that approximates how effectively your business is taking advantage of free listings at the major search engines. The "gaming" element of getting a score tells how far you are from your goal of 100% and what you need to do to get there.

Getting there means claiming your business where you haven't "owned" it and beefing up the listing with additional information about your business such as descriptions, hours of operation, photos, etc. GetListed.org does not let business owners claim their business from the GetListed.org site. Instead, owners have to go to each individual site and go through that site's unique process of establishing ownership of the business. While the processes vary in execution, they are generally straightforward and range between days and weeks to complete.

But the actual steps to lay claim to your business at these sites only takes a few minutes (it's the verification process that takes awhile to finish). Go ahead and just do it. It'll pay dividends later on and you'll be glad you did.