I love Buffer. It is one of my favourite apps of 2011 … and it now comes with some funky new features. Yes, I loved the addition of Facebook to Buffer, but now you can add content straight from Reeder, Zite & Flipboard.

Rather than me go on and talk you through how to do it, Michelle MacPherson (one of the internet marketing people I follow with interest), has put together a useful video showing exactly what to do and how to do it.

Enjoy the new Buffer features!

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

The only constant about Facebook is their joy of changing things. Many businesses have embraced Facebook Pages as a way to build a community around their business, but the latest round of Facebook changes seem to be having an impact on many business pages with many businesses pages commenting that engagement on their pages had dropped away recently.

Facebook’s latest change surrounded your newsfeed – where it presents to you stories that it thinks are the most important to you. You can change to see all the stories … well sort of.

Over the past few weeks I have been watching what is appearing in my newsfeed and it appears that Facebook only feeds some of the business pages people have liked into the feed – not all. The majority of posts on business pages are not appearing in the newsfeed. This has a significant potential impact on a number of my clients.

So I ran two different experiments to test the issue:

1. The “Like rampage”: I tested to see if I actively liked or commented on a page, whether or not subsequent posts would appear in my newsfeed – testing the idea that perhaps they were only showing information where I had actively engaged with the page.

“Liking” a post on a page had zero result on later page posts appearing in my newsfeed. If I made comments on a page, there was an increased chance that all the subsequent posts would appear in my feed (but no certainty).

2. The “What am I missing” test: In this test I created a List in Facebook of all the pages I had “liked”.  I checked the new List results to see what I had been missing. At least 90% of all updates were not appearing in my regular newsfeed.

All I can hypothesise is that Facebook is actively giving preference in the newsfeed to people and not business pages – which means that there is a high potential that a large proportion of the people who may have “liked” your page are not seeing any of your updates in their newsfeed.

If people can’t see your updates, they can’t engage with your business.

My personal campaign against being told what I am allowed to see …

I am not a big fan of arbitrary censorship, so I have now created a “Mega Newsfeed” List – with all of my friends and all of my pages – it is not elegant, but at least I see everything and can make choices about the information I choose to engage with.

If you want to see everything as well, here’s a quick primer in creating your own Mega Newsfeed.

1. Start by clicking on the word “List” in the left hand column of your Facebook default page
2. Click on + Create a List in the top right hand corner
3. Name it and then click “Create”
4. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends
5. Manually click on all your friends (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
6. Click on Manage List and then choose Add/Remove Friends (again)
7. This time click on the box top left that says “Friends” and then change the drop down box to Pages.
8. Manually click on all the Pages (a blue box and tick will show) – Click Done to Save it
9. Once you have your list created, hover just to the left of it and click on the pencil. Mark your list as a favourite. It will then move to the top section of your FB page.
10. Once again hover to the left of it and click on the pencil to rearrange the order. You can move it right to below the Newsfeed. When I go to Facebook, I now ignore my general Newsfeed and just go to my list. I also go through my list once a week and add in new friends and pages (did I mention the workaround is not elegant!)

I would love to hear what happens when you create your own List – how much have you been missing?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – SEO Copywriter

I was having a debate with a colleague the other day – should women take their husband’s surname when they get married? Yes, I know … it is still culturally expected in Australia for a woman to take her partner’s name, but in my book, you need to look at it from a marketing perspective and not just a social one.

Women are marrying later than in our parent’s generation, and for many women, they have built a solid reputation (brand if you would like to put it another way) around their name. If you go to any search engine and type in a person’s name, you will see LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media links back to that name.

Your name is your personal brand on the net.  So, what happens when you change your name? I many cases, you cease to exist. Potential employers or clients can’t find you, and you no longer have a body of work to back up your credibility.

To get over the cloak of invisibility, you need to build a whole new brand around your new name.

And just like any rebranding exercise, you need to ensure people can link the old brand to the new brand, meaning they need to be able to find your old name and then be referred to the new name.

At its simplest, if you have a website your About Us page should have both your old name and new name in them. If your website is under your personal name and not your company name, so www.marysmith.com for example, then you have a whole new can of worms to unravel. At the lowest level, you need to set up redirects from your old site to your new site.

To be honest, if you have any form of internet presence at all, you need to look at hiring an SEO company to help you sort out links to your new name and to get a net presence again. And just like any SEO strategy, this process takes time and money.

From my personal side of things, I did change my name when I married, and kept my ex-husband’s name when I divorced. Why? I experienced the loss of my history when I changed my name the first time and know what a hard slog it was to rebrand … I didn’t want to go through it all again.

Would I ever change my name again? Only if I wanted to disappear into obscurity on some remote tropical island.

So what about you? What do you think? Should women change their names when they get married?

Ingrid Cliff (nee Moyle)

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Freelance Copywriter

Have you noticed that good spelling seems to be going the same way as the dodo? When I was going through school, every blackboard would have the ubiquitous spelling list on it, with words that progressively became harder as you travelled through High School.

Somewhere in recent years, spelling seems to have dropped off the radar. But good spelling does matter!

Poor spelling risks lives

A few weeks ago, there was a major chemical fire in Canberra. The emergency services sent out an alert to local residents via SMS telling them to remain indoors. The problem was that the alert had a number of key spelling errors. Apparently a number of elderly people ignored the warning – after all it just looked like on of those spam emails you often get, complete with poor spelling.  Nerida Gill blogged about the problem. Luckily in this case, no one died from the spelling errors – but it was an unnecessary risk.

Poor spelling costs your business great candidates

Last week my daughter was applying online for casual employment. She is a top student, barely takes any days off, and gets straight A’s for effort & behaviour. In other words – a great candidate for a junior casual. She went to lodge her application on the Hungry Jacks website – and she called me over to look at their site. It was full of spelling mistakes (which could be overlooked at a pinch). These were compounded by simplistic and laughable “screening questions”. Her comment – “well they are obviously not a good place to work for – they don’t really care about their HR if they don’t check their careers site”. Hmnnn.

Poor spelling distracts from your message

Recently, a chain of tile stores took out a very expensive TV campaign based on their slogan “You’re not going to believe it”.  The slogan was repeatedly sung, while the words flashed up regularly on the screen … only problem was the printed words said “Your not going to believe it”.  Ok – what’s a few letters between friends. But all I could see was this typo. And the ad was repeated week after week – with no edits. So all I could think about was how many people it takes to make a TV ad. You have writers, voice over talent, graphic designers and ad agencies.  They never have anything “go live” without approval from the client. How many people in that loop saw the ad – and how many people obviously can’t spell?

When it really does matter, you need a proofreader to check over your work.  No-one can pick up all their own errors (as my blog attests).

OK – getting off my soapbox now.

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter

Australians, as a group, love technology. But some things they have been slower to adopt than others.

We have been slow to pick up on the QR Code trend – which is massive in many Asian countries and in the US. QR Codes? Those square bar code thingies that when you click with your smart phone, take you to discount coupons, websites and more information. You can’t go past a restaurant or store in many overseas countries without passing a QR Code as businesses try and entice you in their doors with menus, discounts and information about what is beyond the front door.

We have also been slow to pick up on online grocery shopping.  Which is why I love this creative idea from Tesco in Korea. The campaign took out the top prize at Cannes this year for the best marketing campaign in the world, so it is worth watching!

Why do I love the concept? For starters, people learn how to respond to new ideas by watching others. By having an extremely public display of how to order online groceries using QR codes, Tesco is killing two birds with one stone. They are teaching both online grocery shopping and how to use QR Codes.

They have tapped into the same strategy that the father of the modern shopping cart Sylvan Goldman used when teaching people how to use shopping trolleys. And once people see how fast and easy it is, they are more likely to come back for a second or third go (assuming their experience was a smooth one in the first place).

I also love how they have taken the concept of “impulse buying” to a whole new level. Most people get off their daily commute from work and head to their local store to pick up their groceries as part of a routine. By putting a virtual store in their way, Tesco is breaking their pattern.

And by putting up life size images of products in glorious colour, they are breaking down the other mental barrier to buying online – research a small photo and tiny description are not as effective as when people can see and touch your product. Life sized images bring to mind the possibility of touching the product, which hopefully should reduce the barrier (although neuro-marketing research by Antonia Rangel has raised questions about this approach).

So … what do you think? Would you try buying groceries online from your local train station if you saw loads of other people doing it?

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – Brisbane Copywriter