September 2013 - Page 2 of 2

Month: September 2013 (page 2 of 2)

How do you set up your Facebook Page for your family farm?

So why in the world do you need a Facebook page for your farm? You probably already have a website. Isn’t that good enough?

Well, a website is still very important. The most important thing in my book because it’s your home on the internet but a Facebook page for your farm is an easy way to get in front of people who might not even know your farm exists.

Millions of people are logging into Facebook all the time – just to see what is going on – and if your farm is there then they have a better chance to see it, maybe even pass along your great photos and videos of farm life (which they probably don’t know much about).

But if you’ve never set up a Facebook page before you might be worried that it’s a lot more complicated than setting up a profile. Actually, it’s not. If you’ve got your own profile page, then you’ll be very familiar with setting up a page.

So let’s begin.

1. Log into Facebook with your profile

Go to any Facebook Page in Search

I don’t recommend setting up a Facebook page without having a profile. You can do it, but I’m not a fan. I don’t think you’ll use it if you don’t have a profile, too. Plus you are probably going to need more than one administrator so you’ll need Facebook “friends” (wife, kids, husband, etc…) to control it.

Search for any Page on Facebook and then in the top right hand corner you’ll see, “Create A Page“. Click it.

Select either Local Business (regional) or Company.

2. Choose “Farming/Agriculture” from the drop down

Select Farming/Agriculture from the dropdown

You need to make sure you do this, because it will help with Graph Search. Then put in the company name – Schindler Farms – for me.

3. Add Your About Information

Fill in the description and add your website. Then select your easy to remember URL.

The About Page allows you to add great information about your farm. This description is crucial for their graph search and will help the page rank in search. Use keywords that will help your farm be found like “dairy farm producing milk from dairy cows”. Seems silly but these keywords are what people type into search to find you. Make sure you add your farm website. The Facebook web address is very important and it will be what you putting on all your flyers and business cards so choose wisely. Once it is set, it can’t be changed. If you don’t have the name you want, really review the different options.

After you set your name, they will ask you questions about your farm being a real organization, school or government? You can say “Yes” and then it will ask you about being authorized and official representation of this organization, school or government on Facebook? This is legally binding statement regarding the authenticity and representation of this Page. Click “Yes” on this as well.

4. Add a profile picture

Add your profile pic – this doesn’t have to be your logo but it will show up very small in everyone else’s newsfeed

Images help people to see what the business is that they are visiting. Having good photos helps a ton but you don’t need to wait until you have only perfect photos. What people are looking for with farms is authenticity and scenery. Remember that their lives are probably well removed from the farming lifestyle so animals and landscapes are normal for you but not for them. Good photos get shared a lot and you’ll be wanting to add and change them out all the time.

Also this photo is going to be very, very small on many other people’s feeds. It can get as small as 25 x 25 so if it’s your logo – be prepared that people might not even see it. It might be better to use cows or faces.

5. Add your Farm Page to your Favorites

Add to your favorite’s so you don’t have to hunt for the page later

This way it’s easy to access via the Facebook navigation. You don’t want to have to be constantly scrolling down the page and looking under the Pages tab to find your farm page.

6. Don’t add a Payment Method

You don’t need to do this right now – maybe down the road – but you can “Skip” this for now.

7. This is your Farm Page

It looks a little scary with the Admin Panel showing right now but you don’t need to concern yourself here. The main thing is understanding what you are looking at.

Facebook page with Admin Panel Open

Notifications on top left – this is what you’ll be paying attention to once the page is running and you are getting shares, comments and likes.
Messages is top right – these are from people reaching out to the farm via Facebook. Other people will not be able to see these messages – just you and the people on the message.
Get More likes in the bottom left – just advertising. No worries there right now.
Insights in the center – these are your analytics for how the page is performing. How many people are seeing what you are posting and the demographics of the people who “liked” your page.
Invite Friends in the bottom right – this is to get you to invite the people you are already connected to on Facebook to “like” your page.

With all this open, it’s kinda hard to see what is going on, so let’s close this panel by click the “Hide” button on the top right.

8. Add a cover photo

Add a large photo. You can also have text here.

Again, like I said before, photos are very important in Facebook. Over half of all posts are photos. So let’s change out the cover photo with a large horizontal photo of the farm – get some cows in there or something along those lines.

9. Edit Page – Update Page Info

Add in as much information as you can as this will help you in search.

This will get all of your pertinent farm information on the page. Even though it’s a long page, you’ve already gotten a lot of information filled out.

10. Change the Settings

You can change your settings and notifications.

If you want to unpublished the page until you are ready to display, you can do that here. Things that I would bring to your attention are the Profanity Filter (you should turn that on to at least medium) and you turn off other people’s posts but that would limit your reach if people can’t talk on your page.

11. Add one more than admin

Add another admin besides yourself.

While it’s great that you are committing to doing this, you’ll want a back-up. The only people you can add are people you are friends with and make sure you trust them – this is a highly visible communication vehicle.

12. Now you can start adding content!

I would keep the page unpublished until you have a couple of posts in and are really ready to add this page to your daily marketing. In a future post, I’ll talk about the different things you’ll want to be posting on and then how to handle comments from fans and others. Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.

How do you set up a goal in Google Analytics? – Simple SEO

September 10, 2013 / Don Schindler / 3 Comments

So what’s the best way to set up and use Google Analytics to get more out of your website? Answer one important question and you can be well on your way to understanding more about how your website is working for you and how to adjust it for the future.

Why does your website exist?

If you say, “because people need to find us on the web.” Well, they can do that if you use Facebook, or Twitter or Linkedin.

No, I think your website was meant for more. I consider a website my home base on the web or my “death star.” I have full control (and it is always under construction) and no social network founder can change how it functions for me for the betterment of users.

If I have full control, then I should be able to put up a “Call To Action” on the website, and be able to measure if it is being successful for me. Whether the call to action is getting their email or selling a product.

Now that I know what my goal of the website is – getting their email or getting them to buy my product – then I can set up a goal inside of Google Analytics to be able to track the success of my goal.

How do you set up a goal in Google Analytics?

First, go into GA and select your website.

First make sure you have added Google Analytics to your website. If you have, then it will appear in the list here when you log in. If you haven’t added Google Analytics to your website, here’s a post on how to add GA to your website.

Select your website and then select the button at the top called Admin.

Select Admin at the top right – then you should see Goals on the bottom right hand list.

Then on the bottom right hand list (there should be three columns), you will see “Goals”. Click on this.

Click on “Create A Goal”.

Once you are on the Goals page, you can create up to 4 goal sets with up to 5 goals per set for a total of 20. – You can’t delete a goal so don’t just create them willie-nillie. You can adjust goals as well.

You’ll want a mix of both your macro goals (large goals – capture email, buy stuff) and micro goals (smaller calls to action – watch a video, download an info graphic, share on social media).

You can set up for a destination – specific web page.
You can set up for duration – a time on site.
You can set up for pages/screens per visit.
You can set up for a specific event to happen – watch a video or download an ebook or share on social media.

This is a destination goal – I want to track after people sign up for email.

Once you have some goals set up – if you can put a money value to these goals all the better but that takes knowing what an email is worth acquiring – then you can actually start measuring how your website is performing. We’ll go over the Google Analytics dashboard and which reports are worth watching and making adjustments for in upcoming posts.

Do you have any favorite goals for your website?

How do you run a great meeting? 9 simple steps to successful meeting management

September 6, 2013 / Don Schindler / 11 Comments

Starting on time is most important

For many of us, meetings are both the burden and badge of honor. I hear it all the time that I can’t get any “real” work done because I’m back to back to back.

Running from one meeting to the next, I can barely keep up with email (another burden/bragging point – I’ve got over 1,000,000 emails in my inbox).

I think the reason that we are in so many meetings is that there are a few false assumptions about meetings. Also, before I start, a lot of the advice I’ve gotten on meetings is from Manager Tools (ran by Mark Horstman and Mike Auzenne). One of my favorite podcasts that I recommend you listen to. I’ve been a faithful listener for at least four years now.

Simple Meeting Cost Calculator on App Store – FREE!

First, I believe that people see meetings as “free”. They are not – they are actually one of the most expensive things that can happen on a project. If you do the ROI of a meeting and think about the cost of the people in the meeting tied to their salaries – a meeting can rack up an amazing amount of cost quickly. Here’s an app that can help you calculate it.

Second, people see meetings as where decisions get made. But I rarely see this happen because many meetings don’t have well-defined agendas and many are used for discussions not decisions. They get sidetracked and people run out of time before a decision can be made.

So how to do you make your meetings more efficient and effective?

Before you agree to go to a meeting – make sure you absolutely without a doubt have to be in the meeting. If the decision can be made without you then don’t go. You have too much work (digging out of email hell – I’ll have a post on that as well) to do and another meeting isn’t going to help it get done.

Schedule work in your calendar before people can grab it for meetings. I used to schedule work blocks (half hour blocks of time to focus on real work, email, etc…). I would recommend less than three meetings a day if you can do that. I know, haha.

If you’ve decided that you need a decision on something and the project can’t move forward without it, then schedule the meeting. But before you do schedule it, there are several characteristics of a really good effective meetings to consider.

Best Run Meetings Characteristics:

Set Meetings to 45 minutes or shorter

Put together a solid agenda
- Here’s an example

Welcome and Meeting Purpose
Item One
Decision To Be Made
Item Two
Decision To Be Made
Follow-Up and Next Steps
Adjourn

Without an agenda and an idea of the decision that needs to be made, a meeting is just a meaningless discussion. There’s no execution and you’ve just spent a lot of company resources to decide nothing.

Prioritize agenda items starting with the most important
- Don’t lead with small items because you think those will be the easiest to discuss and solve. In fact, if it’s small maybe it shouldn’t make the agenda.

Set a time limit to every agenda item
- So if we look at our agenda again

Welcome and Purpose – 10:00
Item One – 10:05
Decision To Be Made – 10:25
Item Two – 10:30
Decision To Be Made – 10:35
Follow-Up and Next Steps – 10:40
Adjourn – 10:45

Then you need to be diligent about following the clock and stopping anything that looks to deride the schedule. It’s not that you need to be crazy but many meetings without clock watching wander around and fall into disarray.

Must end with solution per item (next step)
- There is always a solution to every item. If there wasn’t then why did we subject ourselves to another meeting? 🙂 If people can’t agree on the solution, then maybe it was too early to be having a meeting about the subject. Meetings are there for solutions not discussions. Brainstorming and discussions are not meetings and should be tried differently.

Parking lot anything that goes off agenda
- If you have a time limit on your items then you will quickly realize when things are going off-track. The meeting facilitator needs to be weary of anything that can take away from the meeting and should parking lot those discussions for a future time.

Start on time ALWAYS
- When meetings are back to back to back, people sometimes give a grace period. This sets a horrible precedent and shows the people in the room that have made the effort to be there, that their time is not as important. BTW, leaving a meeting early does the same time.
- If you start on time, people will start showing up on time.

Always have a scribe
- I am a proponent of everyone taking good notes – I, myself, do my own notes in Evernote (love that software)
- But for people that can’t do notes and be engaged in the conversation, you should have a scribe that will share the notes with everyone after. With as many meetings as we have every day and week, it’s wonder anyone can remember anything.

Give your full attention
- If you are distracted by your technology, then turn it off or put it away.
- If you use it to take notes, that’s great but just make sure you are taking notes. Shut off your notifications. I believe that we get distracted by our technology because we are back to back to back.

Sit upright and face the speaker
- Posture means everything in a meeting and if you are slouching, or looking around aimlessly or disengaged, the rest of the room notices and causes them to disengage.

What are your favorite tips and tricks for running effective meetings? I would love to add them.

Don Schindler

Executive Reputation Coach & Digital Marketer