Local Foods and Specialty Crops Outreach

regularly using 3rd party posting applications (such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck) on Facebook actually decreases engagement.  

Edgerank (the algorithm Facebook uses to determine which posts will show up in your fans’ newsfeeds) doesn’t respect the wonderful convenience of 3rd party apps.  In fact, Edgerank will actually penalize you for not doing posts LIVE from the Facebook wall, and decreases the likelihood of engagement by 80%.

If you use a third party app on Facebook, your posts will be “grouped” with other posts that also come from those apps.

Facebook's algorithm for selecting which content becomes visible to Facebook users is called EdgeRank.

EdgeRank Checker decided to investigate the rumor that Facebook penalizes third-party APIs. According to its findings, "When an object is created in Facebook, it is assigned a weight. We believe that Facebook strategically reduced the weight of objects created through the API. The reason behind this strategy would be to encourage more content creation within the Facebook platform.

Our team hypothesizes that once more, the weight of content published from a third-party API is being decreased before it even has a chance to create organic weight. Regardless of whether this was Facebook's intention or not, it's hurting marketers who depend on third-party APIs.

Avoid cold call pitch letters, and introduce yourself to the influencer at least four weeks in advance of the campaign.

When you are in the process of building a relationship, inquire about the influencer’s social graph and content preferences. This will help you tailor the campaign accordingly.

Social CRMs improve workflow efficiency, data security, and the ability to scale. Platforms like Batchbook, Nimble, and CRM365 give users detailed social profiles, advanced search capabilities, cloud-based access, user permission levels, and communication logs.

That means whenever a friend posts a status update, comments on another status update, tags a photo, joins a fan page, or RSVP's to an event it generates an "Edge," and a story about that Edge might show up in the user's personal newsfeed. It'd be completely overwhelming if the newsfeed showed all of the possible stories from your friends. So Facebook created an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user. Facebook calls this algorithm "EdgeRank" because it ranks the edges. Then they filter each user's newsfeed to only show the top-ranked stories for that particular user.

Why should I care? Because most of your Facebook fans never see your status updates.

If EdgeRank predicts a particular user will find your status update boring, then your status update will never even be shown to that particular user.

Facebook defines Virality as: “The percentage of people who have created a story from your Page post out of the total number of unique people who have seen it”. Creating stories can be from Likes, Comments, and Shares of content.

Virality is basically Engagement / Reach

After the fix, the median is 1.86%. This number has returned to it’s value that we reported in March of 2012 (1.92%). Facebook’s Jason Li recently stated that Facebook suggests to strive for “1-2% Virality” for your content.

Facebook has said they made the change to prevent news feeds from clogging up with spam. To combat this problem, they changed their algorithm (as mentioned) and began to offer more regular suggested posts from brands that people hadn’t “liked.” So instead of businesses spamming fans who had voluntarily agreed to get messages in their news feed, Facebook decided spam from paying businesses that users haven’t volunteered to see would be less annoying.

The results we’ve had mimic further analysis from the GroupM Next report. They found the reach of photos dropped 40 percent; links dropped 68 percent; videos dropped 32 percent; and shares dropped 59 percent. The one thing that actually improved were plain status updates without links or media. These posts reached nearly 20 percent more fans after the algorithm change. This epiphany inspired us to modify our Facebook tactics. We still post our story updates each day (3 percent reach is still better than nothing), but we have added regular inspiring messages about love and marriage. These posts, while not driving immediate direct traffic to our site, have been responsible for a steady uptick in new fans and generally receive decent engagement.

make sure you are forming relationships with the thought leaders around you. Take a minute to identify influencers and figure out who is driving the conversation. But be wary of defining influence as a sheer function of reach. After you find these thought leaders, take the time to read them and understand their viewpoints before you ever pitch anything. Growing and nurturing these relationships is the art of any social business. Comment on their blogs, chat with them digitally, get to know them personally and professionally, and meet them in person at a conference.

At the very least, you should be tracking your company name, brand names, product names, names of key execs, competitor names, competitive product names, industry keywords, and your tagline or most recent marketing efforts

"Outbound" does not mean screaming your message at the top of your Twitter lungs. Outbound simply means that you are proactively going out there and participating in discussions around your area of expertise. For example, I actively seek out discussions on social media monitoring and Social CRM, among others. Conversely, "inbound" in the context of monitoring simply means that people are talking directly to you or about you with specific end goals in mind –- they either need help, want to give you feedback, or leave a compliment. The reason I bring up inbound vs. outbound is because both have distinct rules of engagement. When you are participating in a larger discussion, it’s not usually appropriate to throw out links to your product demo left and right. Just because someone utters a keyword doesn’t mean they want to go to your homepage. However, when it’s an inbound communication, the user is probably looking for something specific to your company, which makes it more acceptable to share relevant links.

"Be real and use your best judgment,” yet Johnson says these eleven points shouldn't stand alone. "It needs context,” explains Johnson, "It's not clear whether play nice means don't use offensive language and don't be a jerk, or if it means something else."

unlike Best Buy, Walmart's policy seems very hands-off in terms of relating to customers and doesn't provide much guidance to the actual staff.

Mari Smith, social media speaker and trainer says, "I especially appreciate 'Did you screw up?' and 'If it gives you pause, pause.' Other companies would do well to emulate these two policies."