Who is Your Social Competition? You Might Be Surprised!

By Dean DeLisle

 

Social Selling

 

When we are looking at organizations we get called into three primary areas with our Social Jack™ Training Programs, Relationship Marketing, Social Selling or Career Advancement. One common theme is that all areas are not only looking to excel in their area and hit their goals, but they have a strong desire to know their social competition, once they know they have social competition!

The first competitor is probably the most obvious, it’s them. They many times are in their own way, they either are holding back from two primary reasons, fear or they hold on to the wrong social network (of people). What we see is that they have fear. They fear of knowing their true identity, what to do or say and who should they connect with among others. So they simply play small or hold back, which means they are in their own way! The second part of this is that they have the wrong network of people, this at the core can be fatal. Even organization construct very unproductive social networks and forget the target customers and partners, so we often have to reorganize out of the gate more than not.

Social Selling

Relationship Marketing Competitors

Your competition here are all the prospect and customers out there on your social network platforms, and in your databases. Are you holding their attention over the competition? We also see the competition look like content and platforms such as websites, landing pages and micro sites.

Social Selling Competitors

This one might be the most obvious depending on the organization. These are also prospects and customers, however they might be in control of your accounts execs, relationship managers, customer service or no one. As an organization it’s your duty to provide structure and training to your sales force, set guidelines, boundaries and a solid attack plan to form an intentional social network so the competition can’t penetrate.

Career Advancement Competitors

Flat out this is where you are in competition with your peers and can be tricky depending on the culture. We see this from two angles the inside out and the outside in. So if you are on the inside, its best to network with your peers and really work together for each other. Unfortunately many cultures don’t allow this so they tend to breed a protective environment and dictate survival of the fittest wins and this can be unproductive and harmful to growth in most cases. It is so much better to approach this from a position of authenticity and relationship. From the outside, it’s great to be in this mode to penetrate the walls of a corporation and take out someone who is in competition for a position you desire. Then remember to shift once you get on the inside, be the thought leader here!

In my next blog on this I will get into how to really take out the competition and what we see as our best techniques used by our Social Jack™ students. Social Jack™ was developed by Dean DeLisle and his team at Forward Progress in response to an overwhelming demand for their social media training and development workshops, which are delivered both in person and online. With SocialJack.com, clients can select their professional destination, map out a plan, and access the coaching and training needed to support them to that destination. They will develop the skills they need to build and manage the social networks required on their journey.

Want to take your strategy to the next level? Join us  on Feb 10th – 11am CST: Social Jack™ hosts “LinkedIn – How to Knock Out Your Social Competition”

Are you wondering why some people are generating new business from LinkedIn and you're not? Or, maybe why your competition is getting in front of your current clients? Join our webinar and learn how to use 5 steps to take out your competition and create new business. Register Here

Facebook Organic Reach Decline | Next Steps

facebook organic reach declineDoes the Facebook organic reach decline have your business' marketing plan turned upside down?

Facebook Organic Reach – The What and Why

According to Facebook's VP of Ads Product Marketing Brian Boland, the organic reach enjoyed by countless small business owners on Facebook is going away, potentially down to zero.  Put in plain terms, your fans and audience on Facebook will not see your posts anymore unless you pay to “boost” them.  Wait – WHAT?!  Yes, this organic reach decline is coming as a shock to many business owners, especially those who have invested tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a massive following on Facebook.  Many Facebook business page owners are rightfully angry that they now have to pay just to get in front of their own fans.

 

The main impact of the Facebook organic reach decline:

According to the latest reports from Facebook,

your “Facebook organic reach” on fan pages is now only 5%.

 

facebook organic reach declineFacebook Organic Reach – What's The New Push Look Like

According to the latest reports from Facebook, your “organic reach” on fan pages is now only 5%.  Yes, this means that every time you post approximately just 5% of your total fans will be shown your post in their news feed.  Pretty awful, huh?  It seems like just yesterday that Facebook had no ads on it and there was no sign that it was every going to try and suck money out us.  Well times have changed, Facebook is now a publicly traded company, and it appears they are doing absolutely everything they can to track our every move and use that data as justification to business owns as to why they should pay money just to get their posts in front of their own fans.  So where do we go from here and overcome the now virtually non existent Facebook organic reach?  Read on to the next section:

With Facebook's organic reach basically gone, how do I thrive in this new model?

You can still get the absolute cheapest, targeted traffic from Facebook to your posts and/or business's website using Facebook.  You just need to pay for it now so it is crucial that you understand some general best practices for getting the cheapest clicks.  First, understand that the more you use all of the Facebook ad platform's features, the cheaper the clicks get because the more likely the audience is to like your post or ad, the better it is for everyone.  Specifically, Facebook gives you the ability to create a “tracking pixel” which is basically just a snippet of code that you can copy/paste into the “head tag” of your web site and that enables Facebook to begin building a list of your website's visitors to market to on Facebook.  Since that new “custom audience” are all past website visitors, they are most likely to click on your ad and therefore Facebook will charge you the least to get in front of your own website visitors.

Next, you can save money by testing up to 6 images with each ad and monitor which image converts the best.  You may be surprised to discover that the image you think will work best almost never does.  The images that usually work best are those that include people and specifically one with a person's face looking at you.

Finally, its smart to launch your first ads using only small amounts of money so you can test to see what gets cheap clicks, and then increase the budget for ads that are converting the best and for the cheapest amount of money.  Targeting-wise, its cheapest to have the widest audience, yet one that is still pretty targeted.  For example, one service we sell is sales coaching so we might run a Facebook ad to all Facebook users who list “LinkedIn” as one of their main interests.  You can combine multiple “interests” when targeting your audience in general Facebook ad campaigns but your conversion will nearly always be the best when you target your custom audience in the form of the past website visitors (using the tracking mechanism mentioned above).

In conclusion, yes it stinks that Facebook has become a major sell-out and is restricting the organic reach of your business page big time however there are definately cheap ways to leverage Facebook in the form of boosted posts and cheap ads.