Best Practices for Social Media Marketing Class May 21st

Have you ever hired a social media marketing company, spent a ton of money and wondered what it got you? Would you like to be more effective at doing your marketing yourself, or plan to hire a marketing company but don't know how to tell who's good at what they do? This class is the culmination of our years of experience condensed down to help you learn to do it yourself or quickly identify the best out there who can help you! We'll share our best practices for marketing in general, plus specifics for online reviews/reputation management, Google My Business, SEO, MyMountainTown.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and what you should look for in a marketing firm.

You'll leave with a packet that includes:

• Our presentation
• Our Top 10 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing
• Our Top 10 Pet Peeves
• Questions Every Business Should Ask a Prospective Social Media Marketing Company Before Hiring
• Terminology You Need to Know to Talk to a Social Media Marketing Firm
• Advice for How To Deal with Negative Reviews and Public Comments
• and a Bonus: How to Block Specific Words on Your Business Facebook Page

Three hours, three small business marketing experts at your disposal - don't miss out on this opportunity! Breakfast snacks and coffee included. Cost is $150/person and we ask that you please register and pay in advance so we can plan ahead for enough materials. Thank you!

About the presenters:
Heather Galaska owns and operates Social Media Maiden specializing in the creation and implementation of social media marketing programs for small businesses and solopreneurs.

In a nutshell, we help the people you’re looking for

• Find you quickly
• Engage with you, and
• Become your biggest fans (and best customers!)

Like “word-of-mouth” advertising on steroids.

Do what you do best. And let Social Media Maiden ensure that your customers and prospects know all about you.

Michelle Hoglan owner of Top Hat Creative Marketing specializes in online reputation management, Google reviews, and SEO.

Michelle guides our clients through the process of creating successful business listings and collecting reviews through our system to make sure that our clients are receiving the most up to date and accurate feedback and reviews from their clients, Reputation Management is crucial in today’s online world.

Michelle enjoys that one on one experience with the client in reaching their goal of being successful and bringing in more business. Her background in office management, marketing and sales has helped establish our company and its success. A graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington with a degree in Sociology, she has the experience and passion to work with our clients and guide them through the creative process!

Michelle is a member of several organizations including the Experience Pros Membership Network, eWomen Network, Colorado Women in Social Media as well as several National Organizations within the Healthcare Industry.

On the professional side, Michelle has been a guest on The Business Power Hour Podcast with Deb Krier, a Guest Host on The Experience Pros Radio Show and a Guest Presenter in Marketing at The Business School at The University of Colorado Denver.

Sharon Trilk owns and operates My Mountain Town, the social media site for mountain Jeffco and Park County, providing a platform for community members, businesses and nonprofits to connect, share information, and help one another thrive!

A former research scientist, Sharon left her career studying ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) to raise her two kids and ended up finding a new passion in serving the community through owning and operating MyMountainTown.com, an online community for sharing news, emergencies, weather, events, classifieds and more.
She volunteers her time serving as:
• Vice President, Friends of Staunton State Park Board of Directors
• Leadership Evergreen Advisory Board of Directors
• Member, Conifer Area Chamber of Commerce’s 285 Tourism and Marketing
Committees

You'll have access to over a combined 20 years of successful, online marketing skills between us three in website SEO, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google in order to help you learn the skills you need to better market your own small business or nonprofit. Guided by a passion to educate, support, and serve our fellow business owners, nonprofit directors, and communities, we operate with the utmost integrity and honesty, keeping customer care our priority so we can all succeed!

If you have any questions about this class or marketing in general, please reach out to any of us anytime!

To share a little of My Mountain Town's success so you can see that our approach to social media use has yielded significant results, this screen shot is our Page engagement over the past week compared to other similar businesses and governmental organizations (names shaded out because I don't wish to say they are doing a bad job, I simply want to highlight that your marketing strategy and knowledge of Facebook's algorithms goes a long way, and reviewing your analytics is critical). If you'll notice, all of these Pages have many more Likes than we do, and though that is usually the criteria that most people judge a "successful" Page on, it's not the most important. Also note the number of times that the Pages have posted over the past week and compare that to the Engagement. It's a little hard here to analyze this without knowing what Pages you're looking at, and we'll go over these without them being hidden in the class.

Despite having the fewest Page Likes, our Engagement beats out many other Pages and it's your Engagement that tells Facebook that you have a post of interest that they should show in more Newsfeeds than usual (thus boosting your Reach to more people). You don't have to have tens of thousands of Likes to reach tens of thousands of people, and if you learn to use your Page effectively, you can reach many more than are in the Closed community Facebook groups. I want to emphasize that these are all "organic" results - no paid ad boosts are included in these analytics (I very rarely pay to boost posts and never to get new Likes).

If you'd like to find out how we've done this, and the recommendations we have for how you can do this with your page, sign up for the class!