Episode 2: “How often should I post?”
Here are some principles to help you decide how often you should be posting on social media for your brand.
If you have a social media question or an idea for a future episode e-mail Jessica@machteldfaasxander.com or tweet us.
Here is the first episode of our new YouTube series to answer common social media questions. Learn about EdgeRank, the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what posts appear in user’s newsfeeds and for how long, and how to get your message to more people.
Episode 1: Facebook EdgeRank
“I posted something on my Facebook page but my friends say they didn’t see it. What happened?”
If you have a social media question or an idea for a future episode e-mail Jessica@machteldfaasxander.com or tweet us.
“We’re the 3rd Google result for our industry.”
We work with companies to help them understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Often, we hear some variation of the quote above. Many gauge their SEO success based on checking a personal computer to see where they rank in keyword searches.
This is problematic.
Google uses complex algorithms and personalized search results to determine which results appear. Google automatically takes a variety of your personal information, such as, your location, search history, browser choice and so on, to determine what results appear. When using Google search,your results are customized for you. Someone on another street, in another city or in another country is seeing different search results when searching the exact same words. A friend had recently done considerable research for an upcoming vacation. When we asked her to Google ‘Turkey’, her results were mostly about tourism options in that country. Another friend is interested in politics and world conditions. His results came up with information about politics and civil unrest in Turkey. Although they both searched for “Turkey”, the results were different.
How does this apply to businesses? Let’s say you own a business and want to improve your company’s SEO. When checking search results on your personal laptop, what will Google see? Let’s check just two variables.
Location: If you are searching from your desk, Google will notice that you are located near your business.
Search history: Likely, you have been on your company website before, probably many times. Google keeps track of this history and realizes we often want to go back to the webpages that we have visited before.
These two factors will alter where you rank in search results compared to your prospective customers searching your industry, across town.
Personalized search is useful for finding what we want fast. But do we want Google deciding what we want to see? Knowledge is power. By restricting our research results to what we have wanted to see in the past, we are often limiting what we see to what we already know. If we aren’t taking in new information, we become less capable of critically analyzing our environment. Personalized search results may be convenient, but does it help us in the long run?
Sometimes, what we want to see is not what we need to see.
What can I do? There are methods to disable personalized search, to a degree. By deleting browser cookies, your searches will temporarily be without Internet history bias.Google also offers a ‘Disable customizations based on search activity’ setting. However, there are still other factors being used to personalize your search results.
The best way to broaden our knowledge is by getting information from a variety of sources. Whether this is searching for your industry keywords on a library computer or getting information from Twitter, television, radio and online newspapers, we benefit from widening out in the sources we use.
We want to send out a big thank you to everyone who submitted a pet photograph for the May Storytelling Contest. There were so many great entries that choosing a winning photograph was difficult. The photographs were beautiful, stunning, funny and adorable.
Congratulations to Scott Rowland for having taken our winning photograph! Although the winning photograph was not the most aesthetically beautiful of the entries, at MFX we are suckers for a great story. Everyone who saw the entries laughed at Millie and loved the story behind her photograph.
Scott Rowland and Millie’s Story:
We hadn’t owned a dog in over 12 years, but in December we took the proverbial ‘plunge’ and purchased an 8-week-old Hungarian Viszla. Early on we set strict rules for our house management of the dog. Rule #2 (because everyone knows what Rule #1 is when you are housebreaking a dog), is that the dog is not to be allowed upon the furniture. Millie the Vizsla began testing this rule early and often upon her arrival but our crack team of internal trainers (6 in total) continued to be diligent in instructing Miss Millie where she was allowed and where she was not welcome. After several weeks of said training, my wife called me to the TV room to ask for my expert advice and ultimate ruling of Millie’s latest attempt to ‘find common ground’ with the discipline team. In the photos you find our Vizsla, fast asleep while standing on the floor and still resting on the couch. After several minutes of discussion, we were unable to decide whether this showed uncommon restraint for a 4-month-old pup or this was the beginning of years of pushing the envelope, normally reserved for teenagers. We ruled to let her complete her nap. You be the judge.
Because of the overwhelming amount of great entries, we had to share some of the other photographs that we particularly loved.
Jessica, our Social Media Specialist, has recently been volunteering with a few organizations to answer questions about social media. The success of these events has given us an idea. Tweet or e-mail (Jessica@machteldfaasxander.com) us your social media and online communications questions. We will be creating a series of short YouTube videos to answer the most common ones. Each video will be dedicated to answering a single question. If the question has a short answer, we will either respond with the answer or save it for a multi-question video.