Facebook 101 Not just for Assisted Living Communities
Peter Brissette • October 4, 2017
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All right. Welcome, everybody. I’m Peter Brissette, the owner of the brand, Assisted Living Marketing & Assisted Living Marketing.com. We work with a number of assisted living communities all over the country, helping them market their communities. Today we’re talking about Facebook basics– the Facebook basics for assisted living communities. Some of this will cover lots of businesses but we want to focus on that particular industry here today. The first question, really, is like– why? Why should I care about what I’m doing here? With stupid Facebook anyway! Well OK, so there’s only like a gazillion billion users on Facebook, which is fine. But the real question is: do the family members of your residents use Facebook? And the answer to that question is “yes”. By and large, the vast majority of them are using Facebook, whether that’s the children or extended family members, grandchildren and so on.
So we want to be able to, first of all, to reach those family members of our current residents. How do we communicate with them about what’s going on in the community? What are the events that we’re having? And we’ll get into some of the content things related to that. But first and foremost, we’d love to see this used as a tool for just communicating with your current resident families and extended family members. So to do that, one of the first things you should do when somebody becomes a part of your community, when you get a new resident; is send them a link to your Facebook page and ask them to like the page, because this is one of the ways that you provide communication to them, and ask them to share that with their family members as well.
The second main thing is, how do we use this to do community outreach and to actually do some lead generation? How can we get a lead from the activities we’re doing on Facebook? So that’s something that we’ll talk about in terms of how you do community outreach with your Facebook page and how you can reach a broader audience that’s really targeted to your specific audience. If your communities are in Littleton you do not need to do outreach in Longmont? Those are two vastly different areas. They are a long ways apart. You’re probably not going to get many leads from Longmont. Most of your leads are going to come from a close vicinity to your specific communities. So we’ll talk about some ways on how you do that.
So what I want to try to do, and we’ll answer that, is look at the most common questions that I get, and try to address those. So, common questions are: What kind of content should I be posting, and when should I post it? Some of that is: Is my page set up correctly? And really, how do I increase engagement, how do I get people to interact with content? Some of the different types of content. And then what about paid posts. if I want to do any kind of paid advertising? That’s really going to be the core of the questions we’re going to try to answer here today.
So let’s talk about content. What do I post to when should I post it? Anything and everything! Anything is content for your community, whether that’s just a message that you’re posting on the page or if that’s a picture of some activities, or a video, or links to your website, or links to other content and information.
There are a lot of different options for content that you can share on your Facebook page. If you have a blog post on your website and you’re blogging new content, then the link to that page is something that you want to share on your Facebook page. I kind of address it now, but we have the question of the different types of content. What I’m really encouraging folks to do right now is do more video. Video is really kind of taking over Facebook. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it is very heavily used on Facebook. In particular, doing live video. You can do this if you’re the administrator of your Facebook page, you can do live video from the page itself and do that on your phone. That’s where typically it’s done. They’ve made it available so you can do it from a computer. But that’s really not where people are doing live videos, it’s all being done on your phone. So let me just show you that.
So this is just a screenshot of my phone.
If I want to post and do a live video from my phone, I just hit the ‘Post’ option and then you can see there you’ve got the ‘Go Live’ option here, when I press that it’s going to let me describe my video and then I can hit the ‘Go Live’ button and it goes live. So what Facebook does when you do that is…that’s kind of cool view.
What Facebook does when you do that is actually try to build you a live audience and it notifies everybody what you’re doing and wants to try to build a live audience. Now honestly, for the most part, I don’t care if you have a live audience of live viewers or it’s just a video that people watch later. It’s just video content that you’re doing, you’re covering a live event, you’re singing happy birthday to some residents, whatever it is. It’s a quick little video that you make. It can be one to two minutes long, and then you post that and it’s extra content on the page. That content will then get shared out more. The live video feeds are getting shared more than any other content in terms of how Facebook pushes out that content. So one of the things that comes up is: “Hey, I posted something on my page but only three people saw it.”
That’s one of the things that Facebook has done with the pages in particular. Even though I have a page like this one that’s got 212 followers. Then how do I make sure all 212 see my content. It’s not a one to one ratio, just because I posted doesn’t mean Facebook is going to push it out to everybody. So you have to do something else. One is, it has to be more engaging content. That’s where the video comes in. The more engaging the content is, the better it’s going to get pushed out to your audience. And as people like, comment, and share, then Facebook says “OK well I’ll share it with more people now.” So the more organically you can do that, the better. The ultimate way to make sure all 212 see it, is to do a paid post and we’ll talk about that in a little bit, on how you can do that.
But that’s the only way to make sure that everybody sees it. What I want to talk about now, is a little bit about how you set up certain things on the page and making sure certain things are in place. So one of the questions we had is about the page name. So right here we’ve got @ Lighthouse Assisted Living as the page name. How do I change that, or set that, was the question. Well, there’s a couple different ways to do it. Sometimes you can just click right there on that, if it’s not been changed, and it will let you change it. You can always go and actually hover over this, it tells you where to change the username in the ‘Page Info’ section.
Go to ‘Settings’. And let’s go to this page, these are your tabs. I want to edit this. Lets go to ‘About’. Here we go. So in here is where you would edit the page name. You have your categories, the name of the page and then the actual page name that you name here. So Facebook likes you to not change this very often so you really want to try to do the best you can with naming it. I’ve been able to get pages renamed but they don’t like to do it. This is just under the ‘About’ section where you can edit that. This is one of the main areas that you want to make sure all the information is correct. In particular the category, a little bit about your story, your vision, mission, your hours.
Any other business details you want to have. You definitely want to have a phone number. This is the Messenger link. You can add e-mail, website address, you want to make sure all of that information is up to date and correct in terms of the basic page information. Now you’ve got different tabs here that show up. So how do you adjust those? We’ll go back, we were just looking at that. These are all your General Settings. You know there’s a million options here. For the most part, you don’t need to change a whole bunch of these. The one that is a good idea to do, and this is kind of problematic for some reason with Facebook, but you can also verify the page. The benefit of verifying the page is that Facebook gives your page a little more priority because it’s verified. And you get a little checkmark badge on the page that says it’s authentic.
And typically, what you have to do is put in your phone number and Facebook calls you and gives you a code. That you can then put it in and verify the page. And for some reason, we’ve done this before on pages, and then a month or two later for some reason it’s not verified now, it’s like– what happened? We verified it once. So it’s a little bit problematic. But if you can verify it, I would definitely recommend that you do.
All right, let’s go to ‘Edit Page’. These are the different tabs that we were talking about there so if you wanted to have a tab for services, I think that was one of the questions: What are the different services? And a lot of times it’s the different tabs, you can use default tabs or you can add additional tabs, things like services.It just gives you an extra space for content that you can then add additional information to.
So you can add a picture and a description of those services. Again that’s under ‘Edit Page’. And under tabs. So why would you do that? It’s really just up to you. If its there or not there, if you want to use it or not. I tend to try to narrow down how many tabs because sometimes you wind up over time with tons and tons of tabs but you’re not really using them. So you know it’s not a necessity to have it I guess. But if you do have some services that you want to list out there it’s not bad way to do it. That’s really the two main setting areas that kind of cover the highlights of it. But really this ‘About’ section is kind of the most important where you’ve got all the critical information so you want to make sure that’s up to date.
Obviously, you want to have your images branded. And you know, looking nice. So here’s another example of a good nice image as a cover, you get the logo and the cover image.
That’s a picture of the facility but it’s also got a web address and phone number and it looks really nice on the cover image. OK.
Oh, we got another question: “What is the difference between a story and an impressium?” So there are different areas where you can add additional information. This is 2000 characters that you can add in here. Impressium seems to be some European-ish type of thing so I don’t think that’s required as long as you’ve got the main content over here. But again if you want to have more information then go for it.
So how do we build followers, get more followers and actually do a little more of the community outreach? So, if I’ve got a community in, let’s say Aurora. There’s a lot of stuff in Aurora Colorado. So what I can do is do a search on Aurora Colorado and see what all is out there.
So this is the City of Aurora. One of the things that I can do here in instead of liking as myself, I can click on the little dots over here on the right and I can like this as my page. So when I click on that it’s going to say ‘Pick one of your pages’ or whatever page it is you want to do.
So I think you get the idea. What are some of the things in your area close by you that you can follow as your page? So this is kind of the first step to begin to do that.
A great thing to do with the Chambers of Commerce, you can see them interacting with a lot of the businesses in the area and that can give you other ideas of other Facebook pages that you can follow.
I go through and I do all that. Now what do I do with that? What you do is, when you go to your page over here on the right, it’s kind of obscure but it gives you this information. It says here’s your response rate. Someone messages your page, this is how often, how quick you respond. This is how many followers. And then there’s the option here for ‘See Pages Feed’. These are posts from pages that you’ve liked as your page. So when I click on that it’s then going to show me just that content and it shows me all the pages that I’ve liked. And what I can now do is actually interact with these pages as my page, as my community page so I can like this page and go…
This is what happens, other people are seeing this that have nothing to do with my page or that are just part of the local community, probably close by where this location is and they’re going to go “Oh who is Lighthouse Assisted Living?”, and they may be able to just go to my page right from here and like my page because they saw my comments on Gigi’s Cupcakes. So this is a way to do outreach. Here’s something from Senior Planet. If this is some good information that you like, you want to share it and you can share it back to your page to share with your own followers or you can just put a comment. So this is less local, I might not do much with that. You know here’s the Melting Pot. “We love this place!”
Now you’re commenting and being able to share and get your page out there to a much broader audience. So what you do to do this is just set aside X number of time per week. For one hour a week, I’m going to go comment, like and share on my Facebook page, on all the pages that I follow. And I’m going to search and find other pages that I can follow. And build up that audience. And then you can really see over time that the number of followers you have will grow. So we’re growing our followers by sending to every resident that we have and their family members and asking them to share it out with the rest of their extended family as well. Because we want to get all of those folks following the page.
And then we do this organic reach, which is trying to organically extend our Facebook page into the community by liking, commenting, and sharing on other items that are going on, other activities, events, posts, content that is happening within our community on other Facebook pages.
Then the next thing is how do we boost this? So if I were to invest $50 a month or $100 a month on some paid advertising, where do I spend it and how do I spend that money? So the thing that we want to look at is our ‘Insights’. So when you click on ‘Insights’ this gives me some stats on the Facebook page. For instance, let’s go last 28 days. This will tell me how many actions on the page, how many page views, how many page likes, the total reach…we can see this page only has 212 followers.
But its reach was 1659 people. So even though you have a small following you can still reach a pretty broad audience. There were 660 post engagements. A post engagement is a click, a like, share, a comment. How many people watch videos and how many new page followers. And this kind of gives you a quick highlight of some of the paid campaigns.
So how do I decide what to share? Well as you’re adding content, you can click down here where it says ‘Post’ and this will show you all of your posts to your page. What it tells you is how much ‘Reach’ has that page had, either organic or paid. What you want to change here in this view, is this right drop down here. And this is called ‘Engagement Rate’. That’s really the thing you want to look at. Which page has the most ‘Engagement Rate’. So this one here has 20 percent engagement rate. Now it doesn’t have a big reach but it’s got really good engagement. Here’s one is 16 percent with a good reach. Here’s one 13 percent with a really good reach. When you hover over this it tells you: Was it organic? Meaning it was naturally pushed out by Facebook. Or was there paid advertising done for that particular post? So something like this, it’s got good organic reach, and it’s got fairly good post engagement.
That to me would be a good post to boost. Even if it was just five or ten dollars. And typically what we do is people who like your page and their friends. So extending it out from the people that like your page and beyond that. Then you just set your budget. Let’s say I want to do ten dollars over the next seven days. So it’s going to spend a $1.42 per day to push that out. Now what you can do is drill down a little bit more. So this right now is the entire state of Colorado.
But you could say, “Let’s keep this in Littleton” because I really don’t care about anything outside of that. So it will still be people who like your page and their friends but they have to live within this specified area. That way we’re getting the maximum reach in our targeted area for who we’re trying to reach. And then you boost it. And then you see how it does. That’s a pretty simple way just to get content that’s already got some engagement, has had a little bit of basic reach, organic reach already and that’s how you decide what you should post out there. Some of the other content that we share too, which is something that we do for most of our clients, if you have a daily calendar of events, daily activities, will we post all those to your Facebook page as well. Some people are concerned it’s like “Oh well I posted three times this week on my Facebook page, is three times too many or is three times not enough?”
I can tell you, you could probably post three to four times per day and that’s still won’t be too many. Because again, your organic reach, as you can see, even though I have 200 followers for that page doesn’t mean 200 people are going to see that post. So being concerned about “Oh well, I posted once every day, it’s clogging up my feed and people are getting confused.” That’s actually a common thing people say, “Oh it’s clogging my feed.” I don’t know what ‘clogging a feed’ means. You can clog a pipe but you can’t clog your Facebook feed, it’s completely different, completely different. Ok I’m cracking myself up here.
Let’s see. So one other thing I want to show you, I’ve got to test this, but there’s the option of making your cover image a video. If anybody is interested in this we could probably do this for you for a small fee, but I haven’t tested it yet. But I want to see if there’s a good example here, that’s just the picture…
So you see that’s a Facebook cover image that they made into a video. It has to be a very specific size for it to work.
And I’ve got a couple ideas I think that would be pretty cool for the Facebook cover image actually done as videos.
So if anybody is interested in that let me know and we will see what we can do with that. Ok, those are the main things I want to cover. Let me make sure I answer my questions here:
What do I post and when should I post it? So in terms of time of day when you can post, it really doesn’t make too much difference. Kind of post as you want to. The other thing I will show you about that is, “Well hey, do I have to go physically on there every day and post?”. When you’re posting content you can actually choose when you want to publish it, you can even backdate it. You can save it as a draft or you can choose to schedule it. So if you wanted to you know schedule content for an entire month you could sit down maybe for an hour or two and just schedule the dates and the times that you want that content to be scheduled. So that can be a big timesaver. In terms of, “Oh I got to do this every day? What a time suck!” Nope, you do it one hour a month and schedule your content now. So that way you can be a little more efficient with your own time.
We talked about paid settings, talked about increasing engagement, talked about different content and paid posts.
You’ll see all the pages on the left. But do they automatically show on your homepage as well? No, It’s only here. It doesn’t pull any content to your actual page. It just gives you this way of being able to go in here and view it, then decide how you want to interact with this. If you want to share it back to your page then yeah, you can share it back to your page if you want to. But no, it doesn’t automatically show up. You’re the only one that can see this particular feed.
This is definitely different than like a personal feed…Right? Yes, this is only from your page. Because the main thing you can see is this: when I write that comment it’s got that image there, on my personal page. Let me go to my personal profile here. This is another way that you can do this, but you can see when I like, comment or share on something there is a little drop down that has got my picture. But if I’m just in my news feed and I see something that’s like “woah! whats that dude?” You don’t know what you’re going to see in my news feed! That’s why I don’t share. Here we go, here’s a good one Tuesday Tip. If I want to share this to a different page I can drop down here and it will let me like, comment and share as different things. Right now this just because it’s my page.
Let me see about something else that’s more….it’s going to vary I mean it depends on how the person posted it too. Sometimes I can change who I am when I’m looking at this. But any time you see the dropdown, then I can pick the different page if It’s in my own news feed.
But yeah that’s why you go around and you like all the other pages, the other content that you want to follow. And then this is kind of the simplest way. Now I got a quick easy news feed I can just scroll through. I’m doing everything on my page at that point. I hope that wasn’t too confusing.
I got it.
Good deal. We’ll send you guys out some ideas on the Facebook cover videos that we’ll share with you so we can see what you guys think of that. Might be a service that we do, I have a couple ideas for that. But that’s really it. That’s what I wanted to cover today and kind of get you guys on the right track, kind of know what are really the most important things for you to be doing for outreach. If you have other questions, we’re kind of like #askteamdude. Just ask us whatever questions you have. Shoot us an e-mail, if you haven’t liked our page yet, let’s send our page out to everybody Megan! Make sure that everybody likes our page. I post regular content, different tips that kind of cover all different industries and types from time to time so you can catch those tips and ideas, as well as our monthly marketing message which we send out every month. So if you’re not on that list and you’d like to be, let us know and we can add you to that.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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