Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Tuesday Tip - Adjust Your Dashboard

Changing How Your Dashboard Looks

Squareberry allows you to customize and change your dashboard to display your social/mobile statistics and feedback accordingly. Every organization focuses on different aspects of marketing. Some are Facebook heavy with little Twitter use. Some organizations love to run interactive polls while others focus more on scheduled events. Every organization is different.

Squareberry's dashboard has various boxes that each show off different aspects of your marketing efforts. These boxes on your dashboard include:

  • Facebook Followers
  • Twitter Followers
  • Social Statistics
  • Facebook Demographics
  • Listen&Count Polls
  • Recent Twitter Followers
  • Most Viewed
  • Recent Sent Messages
  • Social Influence Widget
  • Recently Created Items

To adjust the Dashboard, click the "Adjust Dashboard" button at the top of the page. A pop-up appears allowing you to drag and drop the boxes into the order you want them to display. The left side of this pop-up is your active dashboard and the right side shows available boxes you are not currently using.

PDF Dashboard Report

Squareberry's Dashboard also allows you to export the Dashboard as a PDF Report. The PDF Report exports a set of boxes showing off a nice summary of your marketing stats. Simply click the "PDF Report" button at the top of the Dashboard page to export the Dashboard report.

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Facebook Hashtags Are Here - What You Need to Know

What Are Hashtags?

#This is a hashtag. You've seen them. You may or may not use them. Their popularity expanded on Twitter and are also used on services like Instagram and Tumblr. Hashtags allow people to unify topics. Clicking on a hashtags allows you to see posts by users using that same hashtag, thus seeing what everyone is posting about that specific topic.

Until now, hashtags on Facebook had no functionality. Nothing stopped you from writing "#fun" on your Facebook post, but it had no specific function. Now, hashtags will be automatically turned into links which can be clicked by people who see your posts. They will then see a a feed of all other posts shared with them that use that hashtag.

From the Facebook Blog:

Introducing Hashtags on Facebook Starting today, hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you'll see a feed of what other people and Pages are saying about that event or topic.

Read the full post from Facebook here.

Image from Facebook Blog


What This Means for Your Marketing

This is great for marketers and organizations on Facebook. It will help expand your reach and help your followers share what you are talking about in a more meaningful way.

For example, if you own a restaurant in San Antonio, you may want to send a message about watching the Spurs game at your location. You can add "#Spurs" to your message. Now, people around San Antonio will be posting the same hashtag and if someone clicks on one to view people talking about this topic, your restaurant may be present on that feed. Using hashtags helps you get your post in front of followers who are interested in the same topics at that moment.

Messaging From Squareberry

Whether you are sending an instant message or schedule messages far in advance, you can include your hashtags in the message you compose. The most interesting aspect of this is for people who publish to both Facebook and Twitter. Previously, using messages with hashtags on Facebook looked silly and offered little to no benefits.

Now, using the same message on both Twitter and Facebook is more feasible and can be more effective. The only major difference remaining between the two services is the character limit. Facebook still allows you to publish much longer messages. Because of this, you may consider still scheduling separate messages for your different social networks.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Tuesday Tip - Create Customized Calendars & Widgets

Showing off your events and promotions on your website is a key aspect of integrating your complete online presence. Squareberry allows you to create customized "views" with specified categories. This means you can have any number of calendars and widgets which display certain events/promotions based on the settings you dictate.

Create a New Event View

When you create a new Event View, you start by giving it a name. This name will be displayed on the top of the calendars. Next, you select what categories you want on this view. Events and Promotions from the categories you select here will be used on these calendars and widgets.

There are also various color settings you can alter. These colors effect the calendar views but have no effect on the widgets. You can also dictate a timezone for your view, this will adjust the time of the events to display in the specified timezone.

Lastly, you can decide to include events and/or promotions. If you do not want promotions on your view, simply uncheck the promotions setting. This allows you to control categories and event/promotions so that you can fully customize your calendars and widgets to show exactly what you want to show.

Embed Your Customized Views

Once you have created your customized view, it is easy to add it to your website. On the Calendars and Widgets list screen, there is an embed button to the far right of every listed calendar/widget. Click this button and you will get a pop-up with the embed code. There are different options for each calendar/widget which you can adjust to customize this particular embed. When ready, copy and paste the embed code into the HTML of your website.

Single Category Views

An interesting and effective strategy is to create single category views. This allows you to feature certain events and promotions on your website. Read More Here >

Samples of Calendars & Widgets

Click Here to check out samples of all the calendars and widgets currently available on the Squareberry platform.