Social Media FTW Takeaways


FTW Organizers: Chrystie Corns (speaking),
Jacia Kinsman and Rich Brooks (texting/checking in)

The Hall Web Services marketing team headed over to Social Media FTW this week. A full day conference here in Portland, Maine on all things social media. It was great to mix and mingle with experts, designers, marketers and business owners as we all try to figure out how to leverage social media for our businesses.

During each time slot there were three different presentations being held in different rooms. With 6 of us in attendance, we covered a lot of ground and wanted to share with you the biggest takeaways we had from the event.

Jaica Kinsman’s session: Facebook 201 – Take Your Facebook Marketing to the Next Level

A lot of us attended Jaica’s session and found it one of the best of the day. Alex said his biggest takeaway of the day was when Jaica spoke about optimizing your news feed content. She highlighted that it was best to send out content at different times of the day versus posting three updates at the same time. She also recommended sharing different kinds of content like text updates, video updates and sharing links. Everyone should be more strategic about how, when and what they are updating their Facebook page with.

Jenika also liked Jaica’s piece about optimizing your news feed. She got some great ideas for optimizing landing tabs on Facebook pages – one tab for people who are not yet fans and another for people who are a fan. Great way to tailor your message to the audience.

Jenika also said that the whole conference was a good reminder about getting back to basics and fundamentals of business, just using new tools to do it – you’re still human, you still need to have trust and build relationships.

Kasi ALSO said Jaica’s presentation had the most takeaways for her. She said “SMO (Social Media Optimization) may be the new SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SMO is about driving traffic to websites through engagement on social networks, rather than from search engines. Although I don’t think that SMO will replace SEO, it can certainly have a place in a well-rounded internet marketing strategy”.

Chris Cavallari’s session: Creating, Publishing and Marketing Online Video

Kyle was excited to check out Chris’ presentation and the content did not disappoint. Kyle’s biggest takeaway of the day was that if businesses are looking to make more video content, they should really focus more on valuable content and less on trying to make a video go viral.

Alex Steed’s session: Social Media for Non-Profits

Alayna really enjoyed Alex’s session. Her biggest takeaway of the day was that each non-profit (and business!) is unique and no solution is one size fits all. It is important to be aware of what others are doing, but know that something that works for one non-profit/business will not always work for another. Stay connected to share tips and to help, try new things, but if it is not working let it go.

Derek Rice’s session: Building Online Communities

I really enjoyed Derek Rice’s presentation. He had a lot of information and if you were not paying attention, you may have missed some gems. I liked how he focuses on finding industry specific influencers to partner with. Too many times we focus on celebrities or famous tweeters when really we may get more value from a popular blogger in a specific niche.

Amanda O'Brien speaking at Social Media FTW

Is Any of This Social Media Stuff Working

I had the pleasure of being a part of the day’s lineup and did a presentation on Social Media ROI and measuring your efforts. In my session we talked about creating a plan, strategy, choosing the right social media sites and how you can measure if your efforts are moving your bottom line, and not just moving your social media stats. The slides are below.

We had a nice turnout and got some really great questions during and after the presentation. It seemed that a lot of people were looking for services that could help them keep their social media efforts organized; I just saw this blog post today and wanted to share it with you: 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools.

Thanks again to Rich, Jaica and Chrystie for organizing this event. For more information about Social Media FTW please visit their website.

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