Welcome to a fresh year and welcome back to my Social Media Round Up January 2018. It's been a busy month altogether considering this is normally one of my quietest. It's also been a very sad end to it too. On the 19th of January my friend Marie Collins sadly passed away. We had been in the throes of arranging numerous training sessions in Dublin, Mullingar and even talked about Cork. We have partnered together numerous times since being introduced by Samantha Kelly (Tweetinggoddess) in 2016. She was an amazingly bubbly and bright individual, with a broad Cork accent and her catchy phrases. I am going to miss my "event-room-buddy" a lot.
Alongside arranging my course with Marie I was arranging further courses with other friends like Marie-Clare Byard of Now Media and Michelle Duffy Rudden of Breffni Digital and others at least once a month in Mullingar and then others in Dublin. Please keep an eye out on my events page and social media platforms to hear about them. If you are signed up as an email subscriber and in my Facebook Group Social Media STOMP'ies you will hear about it first and get the advantage on getting the Early Bird tickets!
I have been speaking to several people recently about this either at events I have run or attended and I must say its not as well known as I would like. This is a fundamental change for all business owners no matter what size their business is. It is an update on the existing Data Protection Directive of 1995 and there is no get out clause you must adhere to this. Please let your friends and colleagues know about this new directive which is scheduled to come out on the 25th May 2018. Please read more about here and here.
Mark Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook is going to be shaking up Facebook this year. Already there have been 3 updates in Facebook and if you update your apps as often as I do then you may have seen them. Sadly Facebook never goes into detail in the app description what they are doing - which is a bit of a pain but we do feel the glitches in the machine every now and then when they do them. Mid January "Zuck" broke it us (Marketers) that we were using the Facebook account all wrong. He wanted to bring it back to the community again and ensure that the mental wellbeing of people where being watched considerably better. He is fully aware of how addictive this platform can be and how reliant its users can be on the "reactions". Have a read of the full post here.
I suppose it is good to make these changes. It means that your friends and family get to see your posts first. However for me and other businesses online on Facebook we are going to have to change up how we reach our audience. Not just with Facebook Ads but now to generate better conversation by creating Live and Viral content. One of THE best ways to do this is to do more Facebook Lives where you talk and more importantly respond to your audience in quick time. How many of you are prepared to go Live to save yourself a few bob of Facebook Ads?? Time will tell how many people will adopt these new measures but some marketers have referred to this as Facebook Zero (Organic Reach). I see this as a challenge myself and I say slam the gauntlet down and let's see our audience Live!
I will be honest with you here, I have never before heard of Facebook Ads Certified but if you are one those serial "edu-macationers" then you will probably get a great deal of enjoyment out of getting Facebook Blueprint certified. Adespresso shared this in the last months newsletter and it sounds affordable and achievable. If you want to be badged and certified, please follow this link.
If you blog (like me) then you know you need to get as much reach as possible in order to make it pay and be more effective overall. I personally don't get fabulous reach in fairness but what I do get is a loyal reach and active support! Over the last two years especially (bless you Irish tech News!) I have definitely got more clients from blogging. Peg Fitzpatrick is worth her weight in gold when it comes to this subject matter (though I think she is pretty slim..).
Her blog post (which has been shared over 438 times at the time of this blog) entitled How to Create 10 Social Shares for One Blog Post, unsurprisingly notes out 10 ways to do this. They may seem simple and basic but how many do YOU actually do? (I don't do GIF's Ooops!). True to form, we need to keep resharing our blog posts - no point just blasting out the once. Some of these posts can take days - or even weeks!
How much do you rely on being found on Google? I know I need it quite a bit for my business as my target market don't know how to use Social Media to its fullest extent! It's most especially important if you don't have a bricks and mortar address. You can't just accidentally be found when you are only providing a product or service online. That is why its essential you keep up to speed with the changes in Google search to keep on track with your audience. If you're as neurotic as me about SEO then this post is for you.
Read more about the updates over the last year from a post and infographic that Michael Brenner posted on Marketing Insider Group last month.
I have to be honest with you here - I am only sharing this app here as I know some of these flippin' apps want you to change your "Home Page". They want you to upload some weird thing to your programme and generally mess with your computer. However, this little godsend doesn't want to do any of that and its pretty quick to do it too.So if your want to convert a PDF to JPEG, then please do feel free to try the link.
Please do regularly check my Events Section on my website and see if there are events you would like to attend for Networking and Training coming up.
Title: How to create quality content on the fly with just your smartphone
Course overview:
Tickets from: €35 Early Bird and then up to €45 StandardDate: 27th February 2018 Venue: TBC
Useful Blogs
I got busy at the beginning of the month! Have a read and do please share and comment :)
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
