One of the most important lessons you can learn in Facebook marketing for your business is that you can have a much greater impact on your performance online through Facebook by focusing on what’s happening in the real world. Facebook is virtual, but that doesn’t mean it has to focus on the virtual world. Make it real.

If your business is out there doing things in the real world, you have plenty of potential Facebook content to post on your page (as well as you other social media pages and profiles). Do you participate in charities and local events? Do you sponsor a little league team? Do you have a monthly meeting at a local restaurant?

What about your employees? Do they go on trips or do amazing things like skydiving? Does your team have a bowling league? Does your service manager sing in a country western band on Saturdays?

There are plenty of things that we do in the world that aren’t necessarily associated with business. Finding the business posts is an easy task if you’re keeping your eyes, ears, imagination, and smartphone open. When you really get into it, humanizing the business by sharing things that are happening in and out of the store through your activities and employee activities is crucial. You’re business is made of people. On social media, people love other people. That’s what we really want to see on social. Take advantage of this by getting your content through your people.

This is where the people themselves can get involved. They don’t just have to be the content creators with their actions. They can be the content finders. They can brainstorm, make lists, and come up with things that they’re doing in the real world that make sense to get on social media. The content is out there. You just have to focus on people.

Here's a quick post for you (I know many of my recent posts have been pretty long).

If you have an email database of your customers and prospects and you are using Facebook advertising to promote your page or posts, there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be advertising directly to your database. While I don't recommend jumping in headfirst, you should be jumping in nonetheless.

It's easy. It's almost too easy. This is where, as I've posted in the past, you have to be measured and strategic with your advertising. If you advertise the wrong content or with the wrong message, you can actually do more damage than good. The last thing you need is a high percentage of users who are seeing your Facebook ads to block or report your posts as spam.

Remember, it doesn't have to be true spam for users to report it. People take their Facebook news feed seriously. If they don't want to see your posts, they'll block you. This prevents others from seeing your posts as well, which means that you quickly start to get a much lower effect for the same amount of money.

Facebook is an excellent venue to generate retargeting, to garner foot traffic through offers and events, and to gain exposure. Your email list is powerful, but it's simply not as effective today as it once was to use it directly for emails. They get blocked. They go unopened. You can reapply their usefulness to Facebook if you do it the right way.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

If you had to pick one brand that was really killing it at SXSW 2013, it would be Chevrolet. That's right, the automaker from the industry known for clinging to traditional advertising techniques continues to have a handful of brands - Chevy and Ford in particular - that are finding success in progressive digital techniques.

I'll go into much more detail about what Chevy is doing here, but if first impressions are anything, Chevy is making a splash in my book. You can't go outside without seeing a "Catch a Chevy" branded vehicle circling the Austin Convention Center. They have several events ongoing, but one thing in particular that has been more successful than some may have expected is their hashtag, #ChevySXSW.

Normally, companies find very little success when they try to hijack hashtags. The primary hashtags get all the action and most of the "hashtag-alongs" get mediocre action with too many negative hashtag interactions. Chevy has been able to blow it out of the water.

Here are some images so far, but I'll be giving a comprehensive report or two about the SXSW experience when I get back. Live-blogging is not my strong point.

There was a promise made when the automotive industry started embracing online marketing ahead of traditional advertising, when dealerships started hiring internet managers with marketing experience or making them pure marketing managers altogether. This was the promise of the last two years and many vendors have done their part to try to give the appropriate tools to help this new generation of dealership employees.

One of the most important things that dealership marketing employees can do to move the needle is to take advantage of their content management system (CMS). I’m not going to go too deeply into the importance of having a true CMS other than to make this one statement: if your website platform is not geared to allow you to easily create marketing pages for search and social, your competition has a huge advantage over you.

Assuming that you have a proper CMS and full access to it, it’s time to generate content. One of the myths that has been spread through the industry is that content should be designed for Google. That’s absolutely not true. In fact, Google uses social signals, inbound links, and engagement on the pages to help determine if a website should be ranked higher in their search results. Translation: if your content is designed for Google, it’s really not designed for Google at all.

Google wants content designed for people. Trust me – they can tell the difference.

Take advantage of your CMS regularly. The term is a very loose one – you can use it however best suits you. Regularly may be a couple of times per week or it could be a couple of times per month, but as long as you can stay consistent and make it happen on whatever regular basis fits your schedule and resources, you will have the upper hand on your competitors.

In future blog posts we’ll go over some content ideas that will help. It’s not just about building pages like “Milwaukee Ford Dealers” that are designed to go after specific search terms. It’s about building pages like “2014 Chevrolet SS is THE Performance Sedan” that are designed to be engaging and encourage interaction with the pages themselves.

In the meantime, try to determine how much time you can dedicate to this. It truly requires dedication. You can’t just try it and let it go. Remember, content is king.

Facebook has made an update to its Power Editor tool, a tool that is designed for bulk campaigns and ads from various pages one owns or admins. The Power Editor is to help keep track of multiple pages to help keep you organized, certainly a great tool for Social Media Specialists. The update has allotted more accuracy towards where you want ads to target which allows you more control on where you want your ad to be seen and which type of campaign you prefer.

What are the benefits of Facebook’s Power Editor?

The main benefits of using the Facebook Power Editor is to save you time by enabling the ability to mass edit ads and campaigns from one location, no matter how many pages you have, you can manage your ads, campaigns and page posts.

It allows you to optimize from within by sorting ads with key stats and performance. It is also compatible with Excel so you do not need to waste time copying and pasting your information, to keep track or submit elsewhere when off of Facebook.

How-To Install Facebook Power Editor

It is only compatible with Google Chrome Browser so to begin you must download or open Chrome. From within Chrome, login to Facebook and go to your Facebook Ads Manager, on the left-hand side you will see a tab titled “Power Editor”, once clicked you can download and install (You can choose all accounts or specific accounts).

Now with Facebook’s latest update to the Power Editor, you have more flexibility when choosing what type of ad you want to create by selecting from the following:

• Ad
• Sponsored Story
• Mobile Only Ad
• Video Ad
• Sponsored Search Results

With this latest change you are now able to choose a more accurate form of ad creation yielding clearer results.

[Facebook Ads image via digitalsocialsound]

The image above shows the last four Facebook activities by a major car dealership in a metro area. Over three months ago, they abandoned their page. This could easily be a very long post where I go into details about how this is wrong on so many levels, but I'll keep it short because if you're reading this, chances are very strong that you're a savvy dealership that would never let this happen.

For the sake of education, I'll at least put a partial list together in case you're not absolutely sure why you shouldn't do this:

• This page appears in the searches for the dealership by name on Google.
• This is the page presented to people when they search on Facebook, Bing, and other search engines as well.
• Abandoned pages can be easily spammed. If a spammer were to find this page, they could start posting links to their teeth whitening or adult-content gateway websites and have it appear at the top of the dealers' activity public activity feed. This is becoming a more common technique by spammers because they know that the business is not paying attention so the chances of them being reported to Facebook are slim.
• A feed could be setup if absolutely necessary (I'll cover this more below).
• Customers are posting on the page. Huge opportunities are being missed.

Let's cover the bottom two in a little more detail.

Last Resort: Feeds

If your dealership has no bandwidth to cover your social media and no budget to hire an automotive social media service, the absolute worst case scenario is to set up a feed to the page. This is something that I don't recommend to anyone who wants to be successful, but it's still better than abandonment.

You can use RSS Graffiti, Hootsuite, or any number of other services to pull in a feed and post on a regular basis to Facebook. This is a very poor strategy, but it's better than nothing.

Customers Can Post

This is the most disheartening part about the page above. Happy customers are talking. I've recently written five blog posts about the importance of developing brand ambassadors. This dealership has ambassadors waiting to be contacted. It's such a waste.

Here are those posts:

• Turn Social Media into a Brand Ambassador Factory
• The Importance of Brand Ambassadors
• How to Identify Potential Brand Ambassadors
• How to Approach a Potential Brand Ambassador About Social Media
• The Actions Needed to Build True Brand Ambassadors

Happy customers that take the time to promote your dealership through their own Facebook profile should not be ignored. There's no excuse for this.

Don't Delete Them

There's a good chance that you'll have a Facebook presence whether you want to or not. Just because you delete your page doesn't mean that someone else can't toss one up for you. "Fan pages" are very common and if you don't have a page of your own that is outranking the fan pages, you risk letting others control what people see when they check you out on Facebook. Bad move.

Social media is about communication, so the ideas of using RSS feeds is not a good option. Every dealership needs to be watching, even if it's in the form of having the Internet Manager, GM, or owner receive an email when someone posts on the page. For most, this isn't a problem. The industry is realizing the importance of social. If you're not one of those, at least do the bare minimum to not completely fail. It takes no time. To turn your presence into an orphan is a big mistake.

We all want to be popular, whether it is to make up for the many times we were picked last in elementary school gym class, to make up for all those embarrassing school photos or for that one glamor shot we took in the 90’s. All joking aside, we all want to be popular because it is human nature to want to be liked and accepted by our peers and this does not have an age limit. However, there comes a choice in Social Media that needs to be made, which is whether you want to simply be popular or truly connected with other like-minded people.

This can be a daunting choice for some and for many they would prefer to have their cake and eat it too but we all know that reality is much different. Of course we would all like to be popular on our social networks and in a way you can be without your numbers being the only proof of popularity.

Twitter is a perfect social network to highlight as an example as to why your following count should never be the same number as your followers as it is a site we willingly share publically. In the early days of Twitter people would pay money to inflate their follower count and some may still, but as many of us have learned this was/is the wrong way to use Twitter.

There is certainly no need to inflate your numbers since the only thing you are doing is ruining your Twitter experience, and popularity is not always number based. Unfortunately, although most Twitter users have moved past the inflation phase many are still clinging to the #followback trend.

Truth is not always in the numbers as you can learn from this example, if you have a high volume of followers that you have decided to match with your following count you are not properly using the social site. Instead you are merely using the site as a popularity contest. Your time would be better spent finding quality content that ranges from pictures, links, quotes and video and honing in on the demographic of your audience.

Since Twitter moves in a real-time fashion your choice in who you decide to follow back should matter to you, it should not be because they followed you. There needs to be more of a criterion if you actually want to begin using Twitter as it was intended instead of just having a profile exist.

Bring your account to life by being selective and choosing only to follow people back that share some sort of interest as you. Their tweets should be likable to you. Never follow anyone who doesn’t have a profile pic or a bio filled out, that is always a sign of indifference and Twitter is a social network after all.

Anyone can find a reason to follow someone else and perhaps they are in it to just be, preferably you are not one of those people. Your presence on Twitter needs not only attention to your demographic and type of content sharing but it is important to care as to who your profile chooses to follow and therefore your following count should not mimic that of your following.

Whether for business or personal use this form of using Twitter is the best way to connect, and embrace others as your reasoning behind using the site. You can become popular amongst those who are like-minded as you if you yearn for popularity, but don’t let it simply be based upon a number. Let there be depth.

[Twitter Popularity image via desdevweb]

Last year, SXSW was relatively laid back. We had a couple of executives there, but for the most part it was our search and social team that was in attendance, catching tidbits of information here or there but really we were there to meet with some people outside of our core business in the automotive industry. Then, something happened. Matt Cutts from Google and Duane Forrester of Bing dropped a bombshell on the audience. They both declared that quality was moving up in he search algorithms, that quantity was going to be a bad thing, and that spammers would be roughed up in the coming weeks.

The result a month later was the Penguin algorithm as well as Bing’s unnamed variation and search engine marketing was changed forever. Some companies shut down. Others had to make dramatic changes in order to survive. We were put into a better position than ever before thanks to the change, but it still took a lot of research and testing to get it to the point that it’s at today.

This year, we’re going in heavy – the CEO, CFO, VP of Marketing, VP of Internet Marketing Products, and  the Director of New Media of new media are heading down to Austin to pay close attention to everything from Facebook to Google to whatever new things are coming down the pipe. A recent operation will put me on the sidelines for this one, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be watching from afar.

What does Google have planned? This year, the same trio of Cutts, Forrester, and SEO genius Danny Sullivan are participating in the panel called “How to Rank Better in Google and Bing”. We anticipate that there will be another bomb dropped, possibly the prelude to the mythical Zebra algorithm. Regardless of what it is, it’s important for everyone in search and social to be paying very close attention to what’s happening down there. Both Google and Bing have had success using the more casual SXSW atmosphere to spark questions and launch changes because it’s not as “dangerous” as revealing things at SES, SMX, or any of the marketing-heavy conferences. SXSW is a party as much as it is a convention; the festival roots make it a safe venue to drop bombs.

What’s coming down the pipe for 2013? We’ll find out this coming week.

Companies tend to be solely focused on their Return on Investment (ROI) when trying out a new tool, marketing strategy, or social network, that the customers ROI (and they do have one) never even enters the picture. Just like most businesses, customers also try to find “what’s in it for them” when investing their time and money into a website, new product, or company. If a business is not customer focused and solely only thinks about what they can gain from an interaction or transaction than they are missing out on the bigger picture, customer satisfaction.

Of course, it is important that companies try to uncover their Return on Investment, but it should never be at the expense of the customer’s ROI.

What is the Customer’s ROI?

Customers want more than a product from your company, they want service too. When choosing to purchase items from a business, there are many factors they consider before investing.

-        Does the company provide great customer service?

-        Are the people who work at the company knowledgeable?

-        How do I benefit from shopping with this company?

-        Do they care about my time?

-        Are they helpful?

-        Is there a better offer out there? – This doesn’t just include prices, but the company as a whole too.

These are only a few factors, but they give you a general idea of what customers want.

For instance, the retail store, Walmart, provides a unique service called, “Price Match” where customers can purchase products that are on-sale elsewhere at Walmart, simply by having customers show the competitors flyer at the check-out with the discounted product.

Another great example of a customer focused company is Fisher Price. They not only sell age-appropriate toys, but they also give parenting advice, which helps their consumers to be a better parent.

By businesses, such as these ones, who give customers helpful tips, advice, educational tidbits, and unique services that go above and beyond just selling products, you are providing benefits to the customer’s investment, which is your business.

Providing customer satisfaction will make customers choose your business above all others and increase your customer loyalty, thus, by investing in the customer’s Return on Investment will ultimately serve the business’ ROI as well.

[Image via: Insurance Quotes]