Alison Zarella, AlisonZarella.com, Moderator – and wear-er of awesome shoes……

First up is Kevin Scholl, who is the Social Media Manager at Red Roof Inns

How to turn your community ….. Something I totally missed the first slide, it went by at light speed.  You need to determine if you’re building the right audience.  Building a community isn’t just digital.

Build community for your brand advocates.  Needed to figure out how to get folks into the community before you focused on converting them.  They promoted, partnered and participated.  Content engages your audience.

Look at the quality of your community and engagement, don’t measure the quantity and size.  Focus on engagement as a measure of success.  Try to measure HOW your community is engaged.  A lab42 study had great info.  I didn’t get it, but here’s a graphic from the study:

Conversations are good, pushing discounts, sales, products all the time is very one-sided and doesn’t promote engagement.  Talk about your brand, first and foremost, focus on your brand, but talk about subjects that surround your brand.  Ask your community what kind of promotions you should run, will get greater buy-in once it launches.  Vet in-house ideas with the community before investing time and money in developing the promotion.

Keep contests simple, they use wildfire to set up and create contests on Facebook (I like ShortStack, less expensive and for smaller enterprises.)

Use your page as an opportunity for transparent conversation, don’t delete bad content unless it violates your G-rating or is incendiary.

Next up is Kate Buck, CEO of Social Media Manager, KBJOnline.com.  She’s going to talk a bit about EdgeRank and optimizing and converting on Facebook.

Edgerank 90% of users don’t return to the fan page after clicking the like button.  1 of every 500 stories appear in NF, according to 1 Facebook engineer.  A LIKE is a terrible measure of success on Facebook.

Edgerank is made up of 3 factors:

First factor is affinity – or engagement and the strength of relationships to content and connections.  Facebook looks at EVERYTHING to determine affinity, its really not possible to game this – most talk about likes, comments, shares – but video plays, image clicks, link click-throughs are also tracked and measured.

2nd factor is weight.  I didnt quite understand this, but I think it’s related to how authoritative your content is to the user, more relevant/authoritative = higher in news feed.

3rd factor is time decay – how recent is your post, new posts replace old posts.

Be sure to track & measure what kind of content your audience is responding to.  What works best, funny, serious, celebrity, informational, etc.  Figure out what works best and TRACK that.  Post often but dont overpost, test what works best for your brand.  Dont spam people but post often enough that people remember who you are and engage with your content.  Test this.

There is no magic time to post, different for every page, track & test test test.

Ranking what type of content works best – Dan Zarella of Hubspot study says Photos, Text, Video, then Links – in that order.

Go Visual – Focus on Photos & Graphics, Create an image strategy that tells your brand’s story, look for relevant memes, write image descriptions and include a URL, identify the social butterflies on your team that can help.

Can you create an engaged community that identifies with you?  Can you create a badge of honor that they’d proudly display on their fb page?  Write your own caption image once a week.  Caption contests are technically against the TOS, use a 3rd party app.

Video killed the status update – doodle videos are popular, try one.  VideScribe,Sell-a-mations – PowToon are in this space.  Pricing varies.  Using the hand in the sketch increases engagement. Very simple videos that are illustrated.  Replaces a text status update.