Boost with Facebook | Toronto Event Recap
Boost with Facebook is a two-day event that took place in Toronto from June 24th to June 25th. This is the largest event that Facebook has hosted in Canada for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Historically, this training event has been hosted in major cities across the United-States, such as Chicago and Washington DC.
For these training sessions, Facebook flies in their best talent to run beginner, intermediate and advanced level workshops catered to business owners wanting to up their social media game. They also bring in many experts to give attendees advice and to answer any questions they may have. These workshops cover everything you might need to grow your business’ presence on social media, from getting started on Facebook and Instagram, to creating strategies to optimize your content in order to reach customers across platforms and around the world.
The event brought in attendees of all disciplines, ages and demographics. Some owned small mom and pop businesses, others had mid to large-sized companies. One thing everyone had in common, however, was their desire to expand their reach and better connect with their audience.
For those who couldn’t attend, here are some key takeaways from the second day.
1. Come up with a strategy
You need a strategy to be successful with your social media. You won’t grow your presence by posting haphazardly, randomly and irregularly. To get the most engagement, you need to create a content calendar where you will organize and prioritize your posts, determine the best times to post your content and analyse your results. To sum it up, Those that fail to plan, plan to fail.
2. Find your voice
In order to connect with your audience, you need to find your voice and stick with it. Be authentic and true to your brand. Avoid being selly. Create a voice and brand guideline and refer back to it to make sure you are staying on brand. Other things to help you be consistent with your brand voice is using colour palette with your posts.
3. Provide good content
Don’t just post for the sake of posting. Provide value to your audience with quality content. Give your audience as much original content as possible, but if you’re going to repost something that’s not yours, do your research, make sure your content is factual and avoid posting something older than four months.
4. Engage more with your audience
In order to build trust for your business and with your audience, you need to be reliable. When someone asks you a question, whether directly on your post or in your private message, answer them in a timely manner. Don’t delete bad comments, respond to them to show your audience you care. Encourage your audience to post comments and share your content. The key is to be social, on social media, engage with your audience.
5. Understand your audience. Use Insights!
In order to really connect with your audience, you need to understand them. This means using your social media platforms’ insights to see what content was most engaging, and catering to them. You also need to understand who is looking at your stuff. Is it mainly baby boomers? Or generation Z? Understanding your insights will help in preparation for new posts, schedules and strategies for social media, as you are more aware of what type of content/posts gets the most engagement and when it gets it.
This event was a unique experience and for myself as a business owner, I learned many tips that will help move the needle to connect more with my audience. Planning and strategy was the biggest takeaway I got out of this event and being prepared will help ensure success in my social media strategy. Essentially my business goals should always be considered along with my social media strategy and how I can accomplish these goals. For those that couldn’t attend, facebook launched Facebook BluePrint, a online learning platform which contains much of the material covered at this event. Best thing is that its also FREE to learn all these tips as well.
Check it out here.
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Jason Jay
Founder & Creative Director | CONTENDER Studio
www.contender.studio
info@contender.studio
905.699.5260