Hair and Beauty isn’t like every other business in the retail sector.

If you are in this industry your customers are, for the most part, coming to you to indulge themselves and spend money on something they see as a luxury that they have to fit in to their weekly or monthly budget.

Hair and beauty businesses also tend to have a lot of overheads and running costs, so marketing can be pushed down the list of stuff to do until it’s possibly too late.

But marketing and promoting a hair and beauty business doesn’t need to cost a bomb and in this list of the 31 ways to promote your business, I want to show you what I would do in the online and social marketing space if I owned a hair and beauty business.

1. Start a blog.

This is a great way to personalise your brand on the one hand, but also get your some great Google love on the other. Google loves dynamic content and, more importantly, so do the punters! Make sure your website changes regularly and provides up to date content as well as giving the readers some idea of who is behind the brand and the business. A blog does this so well.

2. Create a second  blog.

I would then create a second blog and also create a persona to be the author of it. The persona would be a pseudo staff member at the store like Little Vivo Lady from Vivo Cafe and Lily Stemms from Tynte Flowers. Being able to hide behind anonymity can provide a great opportunity to be a bit irreverent, a bit naughty and make the readers laugh and be interested in what’s going on in the store.

3. Create a Facebook Page.

It seems like a no-brainer these days but I mean create a Facebook Page that actually works! Work hard to get enough fans to get your custom web address for the page and then update, update, update! Build a committed and interested fan base on Facebook and you will keep those fans forever.

4. Create an engaging and effective landing tab on the Facebook Page.

When a punter comes to your page for the first time, make sure two things happen. Firstly, make sure they click on ‘Like’. This can be done using a ‘fan gate’ where they don’t see some of the content unless they become a fan first. This works well to provide an air of exclusivity as well as growing the numbers of likers on the page. Secondly, make sure they are engaged! There is no point simply getting a whole big number of likers if they are not engaged with your marketing on Facebook and therefore not spending money with you!

5. Make the Facebook Page look great.

While Facebook restricts the look and feel of all the Facebook Pages to some degree (thank God), there are still a few little things you can do to make your page not only look great to the user, but also look a bit different.

Firstly, the image you can have in the top left hand corner of the page can be up to 200 pixels wide and 600 pixels high. The majority of pages still have an image that is only 200 pixels wide by 150 pixels high. A taller, more dramatic image really makes the page pop in the readers’ eye and also frames the rest of the content on the page really nicely.

Secondly, make some smart use of the filmstrip of 5 images across the top of the page. Make sure all of them are optimised and sized correctly to look great and deliver some branding message too.

Thirdly, think about rotating that 200 x 600 image in the top left hand corner of the page to promote a new product or service, or an upcoming event, or even offer it to one of your key suppliers to promote one of their new products on it (to your likers) – for a price of course!

6. Do something great with the Photos tab on the Facebook Page.

The photos tab on most business’ Facebook Page is terribly under-utilised. This is despite the fact that more than 2 million photos are shared on the Facebook platform each month – what an opportunity lost! Make sure the actual tab and the photo albums are all neatly organised, labelled (with attention given to what people might be searching for) and not including any images that might detract from your branding or overall marketing effort.

7. Use the photos to introduce your staff.

I would have a photo on the Facebook Page of every current (and past if they are still OK with it) staff members with a full description of what sort of work they do or specialise in, what sort of work they enjoy doing, something about what they enjoy doing away from the business, where they have worked before and so on. All of this content is really searchable and engaging for people who might be shopping around to find a new stylist.

Think about getting some professional photography done for this so that every photo is uniform in look (black and white can look really classy too like on PRDnationwide Newcastle and Lake Macquarie’s Facebook Page). Either that, or do something quirky like using photos of the staff members when they were babies or even running a competition where people have to match up the baby photos with the staff members photos now.

8. Before and after photos.

I would include LOTS of before and after photos of your work on the Facebook Page whether it be hair or make up or cosmetic treatments. This can be such an engaging and powerful tool to promote the quality of your work but also to convince people who are thinking about getting a similar treatment or style that it will look great on them.

9. Show off your digs.

Does your salon look amazing? Does it create a really great user experience that people would only know if they actually came in to the store? Then take some photos and upload them to the Facebook Page too. They can present an extra dimension to your business that might be the deciding factor on whether someone is going to switch salons and become your client or not. This works particularly well if you have some equipment or perform some techniques that most salons in your area don’t.

10. Include photos of your products on the Facebook Page.

Lastly on photos, why not upload photos of all of your products – or at least the ones that you make the greatest margin on. Again you can also include comments and full descriptions of the products, their prices and so on, maybe even a special offer if the customer quotes a special code that is only found in the description of that product on your Facebook Page. Make sure you get some quality images of the products from the suppliers who should be more than happy to help you promote their range online. The best part about that is when you can encourage users to talk about or simply ‘like’ the product’s image on your Facebook Page, you know they are a pre-qualified fan of that product the next time they come in to the salon.

11. Feature events related either directly or indirectly to your business on your Facebook Page.

Facebook Events is another really under-used tool on the platform. The great thing about them is that they can become very interactive and very well promoted even before they are even talked about offline. You can use a tall 200 x 600 image for your event as above and also let the punters RSVP to the event, add their own photos or videos to the event (either before, during or after it) and of course comment on and ‘like’ the event as well. All of this appears in their own news feed also which can in turn be commented on and spread around even further – let the punters market your events for you!

12. Create a Facebook Event where existing customers bring their partner in.

This can be a great way to in effect double your customer base. If you have a woman who is a fan of your business – and a ‘liker’ on your Facebook Page – she can bring her partner or husband in on a particular day or at a particular time for a special offer or discounted style or treatment. Then it’s up to you of course to do a great job and make sure he comes back of his own volition in the future!

13. Create a Facebook Event for when your new stylist is starting in the salon.

A new stylist or technician in a hair and beauty business can be a really big deal. Particularly if the new staff member is likely to bring a whole new database of customers through the door! So build some momentum and anticipation of the day they are starting work by creating an event on your Facebook Page. This can also act as a great way to let that stylist’s current client list know that they are moving.

14. Include a shopping cart on your Facebook Page.

You can also include a shopping cart on the Facebook Page to sell not only appointments and your services but also your products or the products of your suppliers. Again, make sure you get the best product shots from your suppliers for this. We can even embed your website (including your shopping cart) right there on your Facebook Page to create a seamless buying experience within your own branding.

15. Run a Facebook Only Promotion.

You should run a promotion that is featured only on Facebook and only available to enter if you are a fan of the Facebook Page. Remember these have to be done within Facebook’s Terms and Conditions which can be a bit tricky too. The competition could revolve around a free makeover of some sort and to an agreed value. The fans have to upload either a photo or video of themselves for example with a short sentence as to why they think they should win the makeover or something like that. Could be some interesting entries…

16. Run some Facebook Ads.

I’ve banged on a lot about Facebook Ads on this blog and I would definitely be running some if I was in the hair and beauty industry. They are great for local marketing and great for targeting new business as well as existing fans. You can target users by their age, location, relationship status, things they like, things they are interested in, music they like or whatever. This will give you a very accurate snapshot of who you are targeting and who might be interested in your brand and special offers on Facebook and so on.

17. Write an e-book.

I know that might sound a bit daunting but it doesn’t have to be a massive hard copy epic or anything like that. I would write an e-book – probably around 15 to 20 pages only – and titled something like, “How to get the most out of your new hairdo” (or something much more creative) and then give the e-book away as a free download in exchange for someone ‘liking’ the Facebook Page or signing up to your database. It’s also a great way for you to establish your credibility and expertise in your market.

18. Get yourself on Twitter.

You will be surprised how many of your existing customers will already be using Twitter and will be more than happy to spread your word around for you if they are. Twitter is also a great way to get new business AND establish your credibility and expertise in the hair and beauty industry. You can create a following that is really loyal to your brand and your ideas on Twitter.

19. Run time-sensitive offers for your Twitter followers.

You can then reward that following with special ‘Twitter-only’ offers that are only available for a certain amount of time AFTER they appear in your Twitter feed. For instance, “TWITTER ONLY SPECIAL: Receive a free treatment with any style booked in today. Only available for next 60 minutes. Must quote code FRTRT11″ … or something.

20. Run a Twitter Re-Tweet Promotion.

Each short message you put out on Twitter is called a ‘tweet’. Your following can then ‘re-tweet’ your message out to their following which can be a great example of your fans doing your marketing for you. Every time one of your following does that, you can know about it and track it. I would run a promotion where you reward your following for re-tweeting your messages by giving them one entry in the competition.

21. Create an alternate Twitter Account.

Back in number 2, I mentioned creating a blog for a pseudo staff member. This is along the same lines. That same persona could have their own Twitter account and say things that are a little unconventional in comparison to the rest of your marketing. You might even find that this account has a greater following than your more corporate one!

22. Build a free YouTube channel.

A YouTube channel for your business is free. It is basically a page within the giant YouTube platform where all of the videos that you upload are featured and listed in an organised way. You can also have comments, updates and subscriptions to your channel which is an often under-utilised marketing device as well. Remember to brand and customise your channel with your own colours and logos too.

23. Create new styling or technique videos.

Now to think about what sort of content you want to include in your videos. I would definitely do some videos that focus on new techniques or new styles that your salon could specialise in or that your stylists are particularly good at or well known for. If you can feature some ‘before and after’ about them, that would also work really well.

24. Introduce new and existing staff members in videos.

Video is a great way to introduce your salon but also to introduce individual staff members to the community as well. Whether they are existing staff or when new staff members come into the business, video is a great tool to showcase them and their particular specialties or skills.

25. Create a really engaging About Us video.

Nothing tells a story like that story being told in video. Forget the boring old text ‘About Us’ page on your website – create an About Us video that lets you tell the story of your business, where it’s come from, who’s involved in the business, what the premises look like and so on. When you optimise and tag this video really well you also get the added bonus of some serious Google love as well.

26. Answer your FAQs in videos.

One of the biggest reservations that salon owners have when I tell them they have to create some online video is that they have nothing to make videos about. I couldn’t disagree more. Every time the phone rings and someone asks a question, every time that someone asks you in a social situation what you or your salon do, they are videos! Instead of having boring old text pages of your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), create a series of short but well optimised and tagged videos answering them for your online community.

27. Create a weekly ‘expert’ video for others in the hair and beauty industry.

Video also allows you to position yourself really well as an expert in your field. There’s something about video that just lends great credibility to your story. I would take advantage of that by producing some videos specifically for other businesses in the hair and beauty industry, not necessarily for clients. This lets you show off what you do really well, what you specialise in and what you want to be known for. It might also help in recruiting other great stylists from other salons into your business.

28. Place QR codes in decals on your shopfront.

Quick Response or QR Codes act as that elusive bridge between the offline marketing and online marketing of your business. They are 2-D barcodes essentially. But when they are scanned with a smartphone the scanner is then directed to whatever website or online presence you want to send them to. This can be a website, a Facebook Page, it can populate an automatic email or SMS being sent and so on. I would direct them to a video on YouTube because this is guaranteed to look uniform and great on almost any smartphone – some websites and even Facebook Pages don’t look very good on smartphones so you don’t want to do all the hard work of getting people to scan and be engaged only to send them somewhere that doesn’t work on their mobile!

The decals on the shopfront can encourage people to have a look at and follow your different social media channels as well as go to a video detailing your salon opening hours (if it appears on your door when the salon is closed) and even on each work station’s mirror in the salon that can engage people while they are having their hair done and so on.

29. Print QR codes on DL flyers.

I would also use a QR code on a DL flyer or other offline hard copy promotional material. These can be left instore or given out in the local area by promotional staff you can hire for the day or by your own salon staff to drum up new business.

They can also be an entry into a competition or giveaway promotion of some sort to get new business through your door.

30. Record a podcast.

Podcasts are just audio recordings that you can host either on your own website or Facebook Page or on iTunes so that people everywhere can download them and listen to them. These are a great way to again establish your credibility and expertise in your market and can be aimed completely at other people in your industry for the same reasons as in point 27 above. Another way to use these is to interview industry people or even just your regular clientele and record it for others to listen to.

31. Host a webinar.

Like a seminar only online and without having to hire a venue and pay for nibblies! Webinars are a great way for you to show the rest of the industry, your local market AND potential new business that you know what you are doing and have some pretty specific expertise to impart. This can also be a great way to establish an alternate revenue stream as you can sell tickets to your webinars also.

Have you had any success with any of the above suggestions in your hair and beauty business? Which ideas do you think I have missed?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

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SPECIAL BONUS: Are you in the hair and beauty industry?

Download our FREE 67 page ebook, “Social Marketing Strategy for Hair and Beauty Businesses” by clicking HERE.

Marketing, whether you are employing wholly online or social marketing or a more traditional offline marketing approach can still be an expensive exercise.

Which is fine as long as you see a return on that investment.

Perhaps the greatest cost to any marketing campaign is the time that it takes for the small or medium sized business to implement it, particularly if that business is a sole trader and having to do it all themselves.

But what your customers? Your pre-qualified fans and brand champions? They are an amazingly valuable resource to you because they already love you! All you have to do is put them to work – get them to do your marketing for you!

And here are 5 easy ways to make that happen.

1. Facebook Profile Images.

There are more than 750 million people using Facebook – that’s a pretty big direct salesforce, just waiting to work for you. What if 100, 1000, even 10,000 of them changed the image on their Facebook Profile from the photo of them holding their own smartphone 2 feet away from themselves for the classic ‘self-portrait’ to an image that you have provided them? That image, of course, is something containing either directly or indirectly, your branding.

Better yet, how about get them to be creative and use your logo or product in an image that they take themselves – the most creative of which wins a prize.

Remember, you don’t need to promise these people a car or anything huge like that. They are already your fans, you just have to provide some recognition and an excuse for them to show something to their own network – most of which may not have been exposed to your brand yet.

2. FourSquare Check-Ins.

If you are a Twitter user, you know the kind of people who check-in to places on FourSquare (or Facebook Places) and tell the whole world about it every single time (OK, I’m sorta one of those people sometimes).

While some people might be annoyed by that – and there is a simple solution if they are – it’s also a fantastic opportunity for the market to do your marketing for you. The great majority of people who use both FourSquare and Twitter use them in conjunction: they check in to a place, and share that check-in with their network on Twitter, with or without some comment about why they are there, who they are there with or whatever.

You need to make the most of that. Imagine this check-in at your cafe, “The Eggs Benedict at this place is SOOO good and only $8! (@ABC Cafe) http://4sq.com/abcdef“. Whether you lead them along and ask them to comment a particular way or on a particular product, or you just leave it up to chance, either way this kind of marketing is invaluable because it’s FREE!

3. Twitter Hashtags

Still on Twitter, one of the simplest ways to harness the power of word of mouth marketing is to get Twitter users to spread around a particular hashtag that promotes a product, service or special offer you have running.

Hashtags are one word tags used in tweets that make it easy for other Twitter users to follow a particular conversation or topic.

So, if you want the world to know that ABC Cafe has the best Eggs Benedict in the world, you could encourage your fans to use the hashtag, #besteggsbenny, when talking about you on Twitter.

Better still, get them to use that hashtag when they check in on FourSquare too: ”The Eggs Benedict at this place is SOOO good and only $8! (@ABC Cafe) http://4sq.com/abcdef #besteggsbenny”.

4. An Engaging Facebook Page.

This one might seem really obvious but so many people are still getting it wrong.

If you make your Facebook Page engaging, attractive and interesting, people are going to want to interact with it. Simple huh? But every time someone interacts with your Facebook Page, they are also potentially telling their hundreds, or in some cases now, thousands of Facebook ‘friends’ about your business.

That’s the true viral potential of a platform like Facebook. Just put something out there – in this case a great Facebook Page – and let your brand fans chat to each other on it, all the while alerting others in their own network about your business or product and how great it is. So simple.

5. Guerilla Marketing.

We have used this technique with varying degrees of success. The potential problem with it is that people are over-exposed to your brand or not exposed to it in the best light or best way.

The premise is that you encourage a select few of your biggest fans to spread your marketing message in the community somehow.

One of our most successful examples of this was when stickers were made up pretty cheaply that included a very succinct marketing message in a sentence and then a QR code that sent people to an introductory video of a local surf and skate business.

These stickers were placed all over the place in the local area (on power poles, park benches and so on) and they lead to quite a good conversion to the video and a definitive increase in foot traffic over the month they were around.

The hardest part was having to go around to everywhere they were placed after the event and removing them again!

Have you had any success with any of the above suggestions? Which easy ways to get your customers to do your marketing for you have I missed?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

This is a guest blog post by Bridget Holland.

If you would like to have a post published on this blog, please email enquiries@thebowditchgroup.com.

“Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold – social media services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world.”

It wasn’t a social media believer like me who said that.  And it wasn’t recent either.

It’s from the Wall Street Journal, in 2009. Many of the comments on the article disagreed, but I wonder if that would be the same in 2011. Maybe they were right after all and the death of email is getting ever closer.

At first glance it’s hard to believe. It’s a safe bet that just about everyone you know between the age of 10 and 80 (plus a great many others older and younger!) has at least one email address. Nearly 300 billion emails are sent every single day. Email service providers, companies like ExactTarget, MailChimp and Responsys which provide email services to business, generate US$50 million a year in revenues.

So why would anyone think that email is dying?

The short answer is the growth of rich media content, social media, smartphones and the mobile internet.

Let’s start with rich content.

A picture may speak a thousand words, but a two minute video can mean more than a million. A few paragraphs of text say what your friends did on holiday, but a photo album shows your friends on holiday, and a couple of videos on social networking sites like YouTube or Facebook show them actually doing whatever they did.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t really designed for rich content.

You can get away with a few photos in your html, but as soon as you want to include video or audio, you have to use attachments. It’s clunky, it’s slow, it gets trapped in spam filters and company firewalls, and even when it does make it through, half the time there’s no pretty picture encouraging people to open it up.

Modern smartphones (and over 1/3 of Australians already have one) mean every mum or dad can record their kids at the school concert and share, every friend can take mini-videos of the night out, every business can film a personal message from the owner or footage of the local tourist attraction.

Creating and uploading is easy, quick and inexpensive, so everyone’s doing it.

68,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook every minute. 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s right, every minute .

It’s not just sitting there, either. Facebook users watch more than 2 billion videos every month. Over a third of Australians access rich content online regularly every week.

And then there’s mobile…

You can see that social media and smartphones have already come into the picture, but there’s more to say about mobile.

Smartphones come with Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pre-installed. (Twitter of course was designed for mobile and the SMS-length message in the same way YouTube is designed for rich media.) LinkedIn, like every other major site, has a mobile app which installs with a couple of clicks.

But if you want to access your email on your mobile, you need to set it up, which can be clunky or impossible. No surprise that mobile usage of social media is growing faster than mobile email usage – to the point that 98% of smartphone owners use Facebook mobile, a third of them using it every day.

As we move from landlines and desktops to smartphones and tablets, what’s on the mobile and what’s first choice on the mobile gets more and more important. Email is losing this battle.

It’s the first battle in a long war, but it’s a turning point. Take a random survey of your friends and family now. Who has a smartphone? Who has email on it? Who’s on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or YouTube? Who uses these sites on their mobile? Who uses email on their mobile?

And the killer question – if you couldn’t have email and Facebook, but had to choose just one, which would it be?

If your experience is like mine, older people and business users will opt for email over Facebook, but ask the twentysomethings. They’re the future.

And did you notice some of the older, current user base had to stop and think about their answer? Would they have done that two years ago?

Did they even use social media two years ago?

Things move fast in the digital world – the question is not whether email will die but when.

Then again…

To sign up for Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter, you need an email account. Is this the fatal flaw in my argument?  Or will the social media sites simply find another way (your mobile phone number) to identify you?

Do you agree with Bridget’s points? Is the end nigh for email?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

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Professional polyglot and globetrotter, Bridget has lived and worked in North America, Japan and Australia as well as her native UK. She’s committed to quality content, quality communication and the all-too-rare combination of new-fangled technology and old-fashioned common sense. Contact her on Linkedin.

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For a while now, Facebook Advertisers (like us) have known the real value of Facebook Ads was the fact that you could target Facebook users by what they like doing, what their relationship status is, their age, their gender, what they studied, where they studied it and so on.

You could also target users by where they live, but only by country, state or in some cases cities and towns.

Now, with the latest change to the advertising platform released this week, advertisers can target users with their ads by the post codes where they live.

The new targeting is only available in the USA at the moment but there is no reason why Facebook wouldn’t roll it out worldwide very soon.

Do you think this is exciting and useful for both advertisers and users? Or is it another example of Facebook going too far in potentially giving away our right to privacy?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

We have just released a new White Paper written by Nick Bowditch entitled, “55 Ways You Can Use QR Codes To Link Offline Marketing With Online Marketing”.

This 21 page White Paper can be downloaded for FREE by clicking here.

The document contains lots of great ideas and tips for getting the most out of these great little codes that provide that elusive link between your offline marketing effort and your online one.

Each one of them has been tried and tested and works really well.

If you are interested in using QR codes in your own marketing effort or if you are interested in us putting together a very cost-effective and unique marketing campaign using QR codes and other online and social media marketing tools, please contact us at enquiries@thebowditchgroup.com or call the office on (02) 8919 4191 and speak to one of our Account Executives.

Are you following Nick on Twitter?

Follow @nickbowditch

This is how we helped an Australian small business who works in Fast Moving Consumable Goods (FMCG) to grow their fan base online as well as rewarding their existing brand fans using Facebook, QR Codes and good old-fashioned service.

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BACKGROUND:

Bondi Chai – Australia’s own Gold Medal Winning Chai Latte wanted to maximise the marketing opportunity they have every time they exhibit their great product at trade displays and good food expos. In one day at these expos, they can serve up to 20,000 servings of their chai latte and the response to their product is overwhelmingly positive.

This has lead to the building up of a very passionate group of brand advocates and the Bondi Chai guys really wanted to reward them for their support as well as utilise the social space to get these brand champions to create new fans of their product as well.

We decided to harness the satisfaction factor of their tasters right there and then at the time of the tasting by running a promotion in conjunction with their Facebook Page at the Aroma Festival at The Rocks in Sydney in July 2011.

PLAN:

Since we have had such great success with promotions run in conjunction with the Bondi Chai Facebook Page already, we wanted to build the numbers of likers on the page, without just having a whole lot of people who weren’t really interested in the product sign up just for the sake of numbers.

To get this group of new (very targeted and pre-qualified) likers to the page, we wanted to encourage engagement right there at the tasting table during the one-day festival.

Our plan was to boost the numbers of the Facebook Page by at least 300 during the week following the festival.

METHOD:

We recorded a video by the brand’s human face, Di Chai from Bondi Chai, explaining to people who attended the festival and tasted the product that in order to win a prize – in this case, a whole year’s supply of Bondi Chai – all they had to do was be one of the likers on the Facebook Page by the end of the next week.

In order to view the video, the tasters had to scan a QR Code (pictured left) which was on display at the booth as well as printed on the back of the flyers handed out by the tasting staff on the day.

The tasters scanned this code using a QR Code Reader app on their smartphone and then were taken straight to the video of Di Chai explaining the promotion. You can view that video by clicking here.

RESULT:

The result was that we added 402 fans to the page over the week following the festival with more than 50 people liking the page on that same day.

Importantly, the new likers weren’t just random people but pre-qualified likers of the product (in more ways than one). It stands to reason that if somebody tasted the product and didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have wanted to enter a competition in which the prize was a year’s supply of that product, so we were confident that everyone who liked the page after that day was, in fact, someone who ‘liked’ Bondi Chai.

You can check out a video summary of the day by clicking here.

Have you used QR codes in your marketing before? Have you had a similar positive result?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

Are you following Nick on Twitter?

Follow @nickbowditch
I get asked a lot about by my clients and readers on my blogs about the settings behind Facebook Pages and how to have them set so that you are getting the most benefit from the page and not missing out on any of the great new features that Facebook has introduced.   And so, rather than writing a fairly dry blog post about it which wouldn’t really tell the story properly, I decided to do a video to explain it better.   Here is the video:

Was this post helpful? Have I missed any important features of the Facebook Page settings?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

Are you following Nick on Twitter?

Follow @nickbowditch
It’s pretty fair to say that I used to know absolutely nothing about Search Engine Optimisation. I knew what Google was, obviously, and I also knew that I wanted my business to be on the first page when people sat down to search for something, but I had really no idea how to get my business in front of the right people at the right time.

I didn’t know what my keywords were, what phrases I should be optimising for, what people were actually searching for, or how Google looked at all of the content on the internet and somehow indexed it usefully for people to find what they are looking for.

This period also, coincidentally, was when my business was going nowhere and we were going broke. Fast.

Then, I found an e-book which literally saved my business. I now have three successful businesses and I have that e-book, and its author, to thank for that.

The name of that e-book?

SEO Secrets. The DIY Guide to Topping Google.

The book is written by Glenn Murray, an Australian guy who owns copywriting business, Divine Write.

Glenn’s a pretty clever fella but he manages to keep the content of the e-book simple, clear and concise, despite it being 194 pages long.

This thing is value-packed. And you don’t have to be a web designer or SEO expert to be able to follow Glenn’s clear instructions and very quickly make a significant impact on your Google ranking.

And that’s what I was able to.

Before I read this book, my travel business, Nick Bowditch Travel – Australia’s Family Travel Expert, was floundering on Google. What I really wanted was for people to search for “family travel” and my website come up on (at least) the first page.

When I did a search of “family travel” myself, the best I could do was see something of mine on the 9th page of Google – which might have well been the 9,000th page.

Who looks past even the first page of Google??

Then I stumbled across this book, I followed Glenn’s advice and instructions TO THE LETTER and then everything changed.

Suddenly, Google knew who I was!

The next 2 blog posts I wrote – using all of Glenn’s advice and tips from the book got me more hits on the blog in 3 hours than for the rest of that week.

After just a few months, I was suddenly on Page 1 of Google when people searched for “family travel”.

Amazing.

And the best thing is, because Glenn’s advice was sustainable and was about putting systems and tools in place for the future, I have never left that first page of Google since.

In fact, at the time of writing this, I am currently the 5th search result on that first page, although from time to time I have been in the top 3.

(It’s also worth noting that the 4 ahead of me: Holidays with Kids, Kids Holidays Online, BYO Kids and KidSpot are all much bigger operations than mine and have been around a lot longer as well.)

It’s also at this time that my business really started to take off. We were suddenly getting a LOT of traffic, a LOT of enquiries, and (thankfully) converting a lot of those enquiries to sales.

I was stoked.

Not really secrets…

The thing is, there are no real secrets contained in Glenn’s book. It’s not like he is telling you something you couldn’t probably work out for yourself if you put enough time and effort into doing all of the research.

But why would you?

It’s all right there in the book.

It includes sections on:

* understanding what SEO really means
* how to choose your keywords
* how to develop your website the right way for search
* how to optimise your web content
* what link baiting is
* a whole lot of other link building methods
* how to monitor your progress
* the future of SEO

PLUS more than 207 references in the bibliography which are links to loads of other great content all included.

Have a look for free…

Glenn is pretty confident you will be happy with the book.

So confident, I guess, that he even gives some of it away for free.

That’s right, free.

If you want to check out a sample chapter of the book for yourself, you can just click here.

And I’m not the only fan of the book. Check out what some other people have said. Darren Rowse, from the blogging authority website, ProBlogger, said this:

And Daniel Benton, who is actually a Senior SEO Consultant himself, working at The Found Agency, said:

But it’s not just the SEO experts who love it. Bronwen O’Brien, owner of The Virtual Assistant, agrees more with me:

So, if you are interested in getting your Google ranking higher and don’t necessarily want to pay a consultant thousands of dollars to get you there – check out the book.

I have no hesitation in personally recommending it.

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Have you had a look at SEO Secrets? What did you think?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

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Often when I speak or present a seminar, the person introducing me will use either ‘Social Media Expert’ or ‘Social Media Guru’ in the introduction.

I am neither of those and I want to tell you why you should be wary of anyone who calls themselves one.

Firstly, how can anyone tout being an ‘expert’ in something that is still in its infancy. Secondly, a lot of Social Media Gurus (SMG’s) I have met know a lot less about social media than you and I.

I AM an expert in how I was able to use social media to build three successful businesses from scratch – using social media and online marketing – but that’s where my expertise really ends.

When I consult with small and medium-sized businesses on their social marketing, I use a lot of the same principles and lessons I learnt through stuffing things up along the way, but I would never claim to be an expert in how you or anyone else should do it.

Before engaging a social media consultant to help your marketing effort – including engaging my services – ask yourself a few really key questions:

1. Do they have a strategy?

This is by far the most important consideration for you to ask a consultant before you engage them.

There are a lot of SMG’s – A LOT – who will tell you that what you need is a Facebook Page. Let them build you a Facebook Page, pay them $500 for it and it will have a great welcome tab with a great image and all of your online marketing problems will be solved.

What happens is, you get your new Facebook Page and then realise that’s actually ALL you have. No idea of how to use it, no idea of how to get the most out of it, and no idea why you even have it in the first place.

Sound familiar?

No social marketing tools – Facebook Pages, Twitter Accounts, YouTube Videos, Linkedin Profiles and so on – should be used in isolation. In fact, if you do that, you could be actually harming your brand rather than building it.

You must have an online or social strategy (or both). What assets you are going to use, how long you have to invest in the running of them each week, how much it’s going to cost, who’s going to make the updates, and why the hell you are bothering to do it in the first place!

“If your SMG can’t tell you this stuff, turn and walk away.”
 

2. Don’t get caught up in the numbers.

With social media, it’s very easy to get carried away with how many followers/fans you have (or don’t have).

Some SMG’s will feed this hysteria by telling you that the optimal number of followers/fans is a million!

I have said before on this blog that I would rather have 100 followers on my Twitter account and 100 likers (fans for the purists) on the main Facebook Page that were actually likely to buy something and engage and interact with me, than a million people on either of them that were never going to actually buy anything or engage my services in any way.

Having said that, if your SMG has 29 likers on their Facebook Page and 12 followers on Twitter, then that might ring alarm bells for you too.

Likewise, if they are telling you that you just HAVE to have a blog, but they don’t have one …?.

3. Are they listening?

You know what I mean here:

You are sitting across the desk from a SMG explaining what you want to achieve with your newly drafted social marketing strategy.

You go into great depth about how you don’t think that Facebook is going to give you the greatest mileage and that a concerted effort on Linkedin and some smart online videos on YouTube is the way you want to go.

They nod with a blank expression looking at the clock and then when you are finished explaining YOUR strategy, they tell you that what you need is a great looking Facebook Page. Not only that, you need 145,896 fans on that Facebook Page, and yes we will get you on to Twitter as well.

Huh?

“If your SMG doesn’t listen to you and isn’t interested in what you believe is important to YOUR business, why the hell would you engage their services???”

It’s our job to fit in with YOUR strategy, ideas and business practices – not the other way around.

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What did I miss? Have you engaged a SMG and experienced any of these things?

Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.

I have spoken to a lot of real estate agents lately. The last few times I have spoken at events, real estate agents have come up to me and asked questions about how they can do a better job of marketing their properties – and themselves – using social media and online marketing.

I should tell you that I have never tried to sell my own home before, either online or offline.

However, I have worked with a few real estate agents and brokers now, and the following suggestions have all been successful to varying degrees in their businesses once we implemented them.

So here is what every real estate agent should be doing with social media:

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1. Ride The Facebook Wave.

With around 550 million users in the world – and around 10 million in Australia – to ignore Facebook when designing an online marketing strategy would be pretty silly.

But to engage in Facebook without a plan or to engage in Facebook without any other complimentary ideas would be just as silly.

The Facebook strategy for real estate should comprise of 4 applications: Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook Ads and Facebook Places.

Facebook Page

This one is a no-brainer. They are free to set up, have great functionality and usability features, and more than 20 million people connect with one of them every day.

A Facebook Page can be set up for an agency, an agent, or even individual properties that agents are trying to sell.

It’s important that a Facebook Page includes the following features:

* exclusive content for fans and non-fans
* engaging content that encourages comments, likes and interactions
* uniform branding with your other online content and
* lots of great images and videos.

Facebook Groups

By that, I mean the NEW Facebook Groups.

You can now create small, exclusive groups around a real estate business, group of developers or buyers or sellers, even around people who are interested in an individual property.

One of the best features of the new Facebook Groups is the chat facility where you can host an online chat session between yourself and people in your group in real time. The individuals in the chat don’t need to be ‘friends’ on Facebook which means you can use the chat for negotiations, promoting new listings, or promoting events and upcoming open houses and so on.

Facebook Ads

A big part of what we do online is designing, implementing, testing and reporting on Facebook Ad Campaigns. And some of what we do has become promoting property sales (and rentals) for real estate agencies.

If you want to know the REAL secret to designing Facebook Ads that actually make money, you can fill in the form in the right sidebar of this page.

The beauty of this kind of advertising – as opposed to traditionally advertising property sales and rentals in local print or even on radio – is that you can target the ads very specifically to the users you want to reach.

Using Facebook Ads has been the single most positive change to the online marketing efforts or real estate agencies’ we work with that we have made in the last few months.

With research showing that nearly 90% of people move within a 7km radius of where they currently live, this makes geographic targeting pretty easy in most cases. But it doesn’t end there. You can target your ads using demographic filters as well – age, gender, education, likes and interests and so on.

Facebook Places and FourSquare

Both of these applications, one inside the Facebook platform and one outside of it, are based on the geographic location of the users.

For instance, if a user has a smartphone and one of the apps on that phone, they can have local specials, discounts, or – in the case of real estate, open houses or new listings, promoted to them directly on their phones. And it’s not invasive or spammy because the users have already opted in to the service.

2. Back That Up With Twitter.

Some real estate agents we have worked with had little success previously with Twitter, but mostly because they weren’t using it correctly or they didn’t have a strategy around it either.

There are 3 really good ways to use Twitter in real estate: having a corporate account for an agency, having individual (but corporate branded) accounts for individual agents, and having an account exclusively for new listings.

Agency Corporate Account

This is the most obvious use of Twitter and is probably the most dry and boring one as well.

Still important though, particularly from a branding perspective, the corporate account of an agency is a great way to let people know that you are at least engaging in modern and progressive ways to sell homes, and also a good portal to list general information, tips and other information about the agency and its services.

Individual Agents’ Accounts

A lot of agents may already have their own Twitter account, but for an agency, it’s important that the agents retain some of the corporate branding in their Twitter presence as well.

For instance, John Smith from ABC Real Estate might have already been tweeting as @JohnSmith for a couple of years, but he should also have an account that includes the agency, for example, @JohnSmithatABC.

This adds an extra dimension, though, and you should have some monitoring in place to ensure that your branding isn’t being compromised by any of the agents using it to promote themselves exclusively.

New Listings Account

When someone is looking to purchase a house, one problem for them is usually that there are not enough listings or not enough of the right listings around.

They will know about every single property being sold in their target area and price range and will be hungry for news of new listings that perhaps other buyers don’t know about yet.

This is where your ‘New Listings’ Twitter account comes in. They follow the account on Twitter and when a new listing comes up, they can be one of the first to know about it. Actually, they can be the first to know about it, if you promote the fact that listings will appear there for a set time before being publicised elsewhere – a great way to build follower numbers as well.

3. Get Linked In.

A lot of real estate agents will already be a member of Linkedin, but not a lot of them are doing a great job of using the full features of the platform.

Linkedin is a great way to sell properties (indirectly) but more importantly, it’s a great way to promote yourself online.

And on Linkedin, real estate agents should be doing that by using two different approaches: the Linkedin Profile and Linkedin Groups.

Linkedin Profile

This is the ordinary account that every Linkedin user has. But there are ways to really pimp it and make it so much more effective. See my blog post on the 15 things you should be doing with Linkedin but probably aren’t for more information on that.

Linkedin Groups

Similar in some ways to the Facebook Groups, the Linkedin Groups include features like an automatic email distribution of new content and a way for you to promote listings, news and other information about your agency to other members of the group on Linkedin.

You can start your own group about real estate news, upcoming events, or new listings in a particular geographic area. You can also invite some of your VIP clients to be part of a special group where you give exclusive content to them as way of reward for their support of you in the past.

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Did you know… that The Bowditch Group currently works with several real estate agents and brokers to improve their online marketing and social media marketing efforts. If you would like to see how we can help your real estate business, please email us at nick@thebowditchgroup.com for more details or to set up a consultation.

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4. The Most Important – Embrace Video Marketing.

If you are a regular on this blog, you will know that I love YouTube.

The world’s second largest search engine, YouTube is also a darling of Google who own it, which means that any video you upload to this video-sharing juggernaut is treated very favourably by Google when potential buyers sit down to research new properties.

Nothing tells a story like someone telling a story in video.

You can do a walk-through of the property, interview the sellers, interview the neighbours, showcase unique features of the property, even get video testimonials from potential buyers at open houses – the potential of online video is almost limitless.

But you have to do it properly. And by that, I don’t mean get a professional TV-quality film crew to do it, but you don’t want it looking too ‘rustic’ either.

We have a lot of experience making video for clients (as well as thousands of YouTube users tested) in all kinds of industries including real estate and property sales, so if you would like us to take care of your video production, editing, captioning and uploading to YouTube, please let us know.

5. Get Organised.

You should be utilising some sort of cloud application like Tungle.Me or even Google Calendar so that you can easily organise viewings, open houses, client meetings and so on and not have to rely on administration staff to do it for you, as well as avoiding the likelihood of double booking yourself and generally looking unprofessional to potential buyers or sellers.

By syncing your existing calendar with Tungle.Me you can:

* Eliminate double-bookings, time zone mishaps and the back-and-forth of finding a time to meet
* Easily schedule meetings, inside or outside your organisation
* Invite others to schedule with you, without having to sign up

6. Get Famous.

Podcasts and webinars now give you the opportunity to reach a large number of people without those people ever having to leave their desk or home.

Podcasts are audio recordings which can be listened to online or downloaded to listen to later from audio-sharing applications like iTunes.

Webinars are virtual meetings where you can present on a particular topic using a webcam on your own computer and people can watch the webinar in their office or home on their own computers.

A lot of webinar applications don’t even require the participants to sign up or download anything, just click on the link that you provide prior to the webinar.

These can be a great way to establish your credibility as an expert in real estate, while also allowing you to target potential buyers and sellers in any given market.

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What did I miss? Are you an agent who has used other online marketing or social media marketing applications with success?

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Please let us know in the comments below. When you leave a comment on this site, it appears straight away – no signing up, no waiting for the comment to be moderated – it will appear below straight after you have posted it.