Social media marketing Archives - Stay N Alive

How to Find the Fans of Your Facebook Page

I had a client ask me the other day if they could identify their 10,000th fan for a giveaway. The truth is on Facebook, they don’t make it easy to know who your fans are. In the Facebook API it limits you up to only a few hundred fans that you can retrieve (and that only works on occasion). You can use Graph Search and a combination of a couple Google Chrome extensions to download up to about 5,000 fans (I’ve never been able to get more). But to get the entire list hasn’t been possible until I discovered this one cool hack, and it sorts it by most recent person who liked your page! Here’s how you do it:

The secret is in a little-used feature that allows you to easily block fans, and find fans you have banned from any Facebook page you manage. To get your list of fans, do the following:

  1. Go in as an admin of your page to your Facebook’s “Settings” tab at the top. This is where you can configure your page and modify how you want to administer your page.
  2. Select the “Banned Users” option on the left. This section allows you to configure who has been banned and who hasn’t.
  3. In the drop-down that appears at the top, click on it and select “People who like this”. This is the list of all people who have liked your page!
In the ensuing list, if you scroll through it all you will have a list of every single person who has ever liked your page, sorted by who liked it most recently! So if you want to discover who your 10,000th fan is, wait until shortly after you reach 10,000 fans, go to this page, and count down the number of fans over 10,000 it was when you looked at the page, and the fan you end up at will be your 10,000th fan!
Unfortunately, you can’t use this trick to enable a Chrome extension like AnyAudience to download the list yet, so you’ll have to scroll through all users to see the entire list. This does enable that possibility though, and I anticipate app developers (maybe I’ll do it) will build out a Chrome extension that works with this so you can use your list to build lookalike audiences, or to analyze with Facebook ads.
However, this does provide, since it is a sorted list, a way to identify who your latest fans are, and do promotions around that. What other tricks have you seen allowing you to learn more about a Facebook Page’s audience?

Your Constantly Evolving, Constantly Changing Social Media Plan

When I was younger things were simpler. TV, Print News, and when the internet, even websites would remain pretty static. My, how things have changed! In a world of “Generation Me”, with Millenials being raised on the internet and using technology and social media for most of their lives, marketing, and technology is so much different! As a marketer, your audience expects change, and they expect it fast.

It’s for this reason that social networks evolve so quickly. I remember numerous companies rising up on the backbone of Facebook, only to find out Facebook’s rules for their platform changing and completely going out of business as a result. I learned this the hard way with my service, SocialToo, which, based wholely on the premise of a user’s social graph on Twitter alone, and the ability to auto-follow, was quickly overrun by changes in Twitter’s API policies which rendered my business model obsolete.

Am I bitter? Maybe a little, but the fact is I’ve learned my lesson. In this ever-changing world of social media, marketers and business owners need to be willing to adapt very quickly, and look to the future, expecting these technologies to change fast, and the rules that go with them. What works today will likely not work tomorrow.

Facebook is already making this evident in their changes in News Feed policy, suggesting they will begin punishing “memes” and “calls-to-action” in posts on Facebook Pages. In the past, this is what performed best because it produced the greatest engagement, and in fact still does! Marketers are looking towards a sore wake-up call if they are not preparing for these changes.

In every presentation I make, even in my recent course on Facebook Ads (you can download it here!), I always tell people not to believe me. Always test, test, test. What works for me may not work for you, and most of all, Facebook is in a state of constant flux and change due to the ever-changing attention spans of its users. Marketers need to study these early, and study them often, and continually test the strategies they employ on social networks or their social strategies will not work.

The strategies and techniques I share in my courses and consulting and speaking work – I’ve tested them, and they have produced results for me. But a Social Media Marketer needs to be on their toes. What works for me may not work for them. A good Social Strategy needs to be constantly evolving, constantly changing, and forever in flux. There should be no end in technique and growth of that technique. That is where you will see your greatest success – constant change.

Emailvision Acquires Social Media Marketing Company ObjectiveMarketer

I’m always giddy to report on people I know whose companies have been acquired.  Amita Paul’s ObjectiveMarketer announced today it has been acquired by Emailvision, a leading Software as a Service Email marketing company providing solutions to enable marketers to communicate more effectively.  No details were disclosed as to the amount of the transaction.

ObjectiveMarketer is just one of dozens of companies in Guy Kawasaki’s very successful Advisorship portfolio (“Guy’s Golden Touch”), currently and previously containing several Twitter and Facebook marketing companies.  One of the most recent successes in that portfolio you may be familiar with was CoTweet, which was acquired by the Marketing firm ExactTarget.  I’ve had the chance to meet Amita Paul, ObjectiveMarketer’s founder at BlogWorld a couple years ago, and I must say the acquisition is well deserved.  The acquisition is also near and dear to my heart, as my company, SocialToo, is also in Guy Kawasaki’s Advisorship portfolio in similar fields – it’s exciting when someone else in your field gets acquired!

The acquisition comes on the heels of many other similar acquisitions by more typical marketing companies hiring social media businesses to get a leg up on Social Media and stay competitive in their industry.  The first, more famous acquisition was the CoTweet acquisition by ExactTarget, which I mentioned earlier.  You may also be familiar with the acquisition of Nutshell Mail, the Social Media notification and summary email service, by Constant Contact.

This acquisition is exciting, as all of these acquisitions cross boundaries somewhat with some of the services my company, SocialToo provides.  To me it just gives even more credibility that there is value in Social Media Marketing tools and customers are willing to pay big money to manage their presence on Social Networks.  I’m excited for what the future holds.

Congratulations to who I’m happy to call my peer in the Guy Kawasaki “Golden Touch”, Amita Paul.  This is an exciting day for her and an exciting day for Social Media Marketing tools as a whole.