Social Media Trends with Hubze Founder Dave Foster. Orginal post can be found here.

David Foster is the CEO and Founder of the Fan Page Engine, which provides business owners an easy to use tool to help them in the custom creation of Facebook Fan Pages along with tracking social media trends.  The Fan Page Engine also specializes in fan page design and the build out of some highly customized fan pages.  So you can either do it yourself or higher them to build it for you.  Dave is also the co-founder of the Social Media Engine which teaches the small business owner how to use Social Media effectively.  Dave is also the Co-Founder of the Hubze which is an informative site for business owners on providing them with the most up to date social media and online marketing services.

Male:   Preparing Business for Business is on the air.  Join hosts Marcia Hawkins, President of the New York Shop Exchange and Kyle Clouse, Vice President for insightful and creative strategies to prepare your business for business.  Listen in for great guests and great offers from our guests and sponsors, as well as thought-provoking dialogue.  Preparing Business for Business offers usable content, insightful ideas and resources to jumpstart your business in an effective, economical manner and to prepare your business for growth and challenges. And now, your hosts for Preparing Business for Business, Marcia Hawkins and Kyle Clouse.

Marcia Hawkins:  Good evening, everybody. Welcome, welcome aboard to this Business Preparing For Business radio program on the Preparedness Radio Network. I’m Marcia Hawkins along with my cohost Kyle Clouse. Today is Wednesday, January 11, 2012. That just sounds like just crazy. Seeing like we were just on the Internet this Christmas. But here we are in — smack dab in the center of the week, second week of January. Wow, I just don’t understand where time goes. So we do welcome you to the Business Preparing For Business radio program. The theme of our show is to provide you with the tools, contacts, products and services to best prepare your business for more business. Or if we can assist you in what we all know how really challenging times right now.

Periodically, we have guests on our program that through experience, problem-solving, different methodologies that they’ve developed and implemented into their own business some ideas, strategies that have really worked for them and if you can take that information and use it and apply them either to your own business or business that you’re going to be starting, well, then our job has been completed. Many of the preparedness listeners tune in to hear helpful tips or information and find out resources for preparedness products. So we essentially do the exact same thing except we apply ours to business and today we will be covering Social Media Trends.

Now whether you’re going to be starting business in 2012 or you’re trying to expand your business, grow your business or again if you just need some resources to help you overcome some challenges that you may encounter, then again, that’s where we come in.

So Kyle and I welcome you to our program and we invite you to e-mail us at info@newyorkshopexchange.com. That’s what we do for our business. We do video marketing. If you have any questions, if there’s any – if you’re listening and you think you’ d make a great guest for us, by all means, please make sure to e-mail us at info@newyorkshopexchange.com. Any questions, comments or if you’d like to be in the show. Now let’s bring Kyle in. Kyle, how are you?

Kyle Clouse:  Hey, I’m doing very well, Marcia. I’m looking forward to to talking about social media trends.  How are you doing?

Marcia Hawkins:  I’m good. I’m really excited. Last time we had our guest on we had quite an entertaining show. I enjoyed David so I would like you to introduce our guest tonight for us.

Kyle Clouse:  Absolutely. Well, David Foster, he’s the CEO and founder of the Fan Page Engine and what the Fan Page Engine is is they provide business owners an easy-to-use tool that helps them in the custom creation of Facebook fan pages. And the Fan Page Engine also specializes themselves in fan page, Facebook fan page creation and the buildout of some highly customized customizable fan pages and so the site serves as dual purpose, you can either do it yourself or hire them to do it for you.

David also is the Co-Founder of the Social Media Engine, which teaches a small business owner how to effectively market their business using mediums like social media and tracking your companies social media trends.  David Foster is also the Co-Founder of The Hubs, which is an informative site for business owners that provides them with the most up-to-date social media and online marketing services, so David is a very busy guy. He’s just been recently brought on by the Ron Paul campaign to help them with their social media or whatever they got involved with them. He’s been recently brought with them so very sought-after expert with social media, Facebook fan pages and so on so on. So we’re really excited to have him on our show tonight talking about Facebook, Twitter and Social Media Trends.

Marcia Hawkins:  Yeah. Welcome, Dave.

David Foster:  Thank you for that awesome introduction. Wow.

Marcia Hawkins:  Some of those – when I was being introduced on another radio show, I think, do they have the right guest? Everything we said about you is the truth so you were …

David Foster:  Well, thank you. And yes, I remember the last time I was on, I was sitting in my car. I believe Thanksgiving,wasn’t it?

Kyle Clouse:  Yeah.

Marcia Hawkins:  Well, welcome back, yeah, we really we have so much to go over. We clearly did not cover everything that we wanted to cover so we absolutely had to bring you back. And I’m just going to jump right in here. And we’ve got so much going on this year given the fact that it’s an election year. And you told us right before we went on the air how you had been tapped to help with the Ron Paul campaign. So how exciting is that?

David Foster:  Well, that is so exciting. I mean when we first got involved, I reached out to the campaign because I noticed some things they were not doing on Twitter and not doing on Facebook and just bugged them and bugged them until I actually got a meeting with one of the – Matt Collins, the social guy for the campaign. And then they contacted me and asked me about their pages, so I more or less first went in and worked on the coalition pages and then I had them contacting me personally and asking me to more or lock out and logging into all their personal profiles to lock them down so people couldn’t find them when doing searches when they’re doing press releases and stuff. So it was interesting being logged in to their personal Facebook accounts and making them private for them because they have no idea what they were doing there. So it’s been a very successful social campaign. I mean we had an article on all Facebook showing that Ron Paul’s social campaign is actually performing better than any of the others’ so that’s pretty cool.  It’s also cool tracking the Social Media Trends within Ron Pauls campaign.

Marcia Hawkins:  Good for you. I love that. You noticed that they were doing something wrong and you were like “I can fix this.” Got to love that. Got to love that.

David Foster:  Yup, exactly. Well, and I was relentless. I did not stop until somebody contacted me because I know how this is a crucial election year. I mean I think this is the most important election of our lifetime and so I just feel like I wanted to do my part and this is what I do so I want – and now I’m doing it.

Marcia Hawkins:  Good for you. I love that. I think the theme there is the persistence factor.

David Foster:  Yup, exactly.

Marcia Hawkins:  Yup, absolutely. It definitely is. This year, I mean the fact that we are really – we are kicking into high gear of the 2012 election. So with that said, do you see or what do you forecast is really going to dominate the political arena in terms of social media?

Social Media Trends

David Foster:  Well, I was – I just feel that it’s a completely different game from 2008 when the election happened last and – but if you look at Obama, how he more or less one because of social media and because of the younger voters he was actually able to bring out and Ron is closing out universities when you goes to speak because there’s people reaching out. I mean we have grown by about 400 and some thousand fans on his fan page since we really started engaging. And so I think that it’s going to play a part. But unfortunately, the most money wins it seems, so we’re giving it all we’ve got but unfortunately I just don’t – you know what I mean? That it’s like the person with the most money is who they look at the most. And that’s sad.

Marcia Hawkins:  Exactly. Yeah.

Kyle Clouse:  One of the things you mentioned, Dave, and the way I see it, social media, it doesn’t matter if you’re running a campaign or if you’re running a business. There’s a lot of universals involved and everything is basically –can be transferred from one niche or a company or your just to another and they can use the same processes and procedures. And one of the things that you mentioned was you noticed some things that the Ron Paul campaign was not doing on Facebook and Twitter and I don’t want to say what they’re not doing or what they were not doing, we don’t want to give any insider secrets out, but what should they have been doing that you stepped in and help them to do? And maybe we can apply that into someone’s business, what they could be doing as well?

David Foster:  Well, first of all, spending a little bit more money or spending money, period, on Facebook ads instead of that TV ads is much. I mean you’re looking at – most of the time, I mean people still think old school. They want to run – they want to rent billboards, they want to get magazine ads, they want to do radio and TV, which is effective but in social media right now, I got to say it’s a completely different animal than it was in 2008 because you’ve got many, many active users logging on every day and when they’re on that website you’ve got their attention. They’re not – I mean I know sometimes some people are doing other things but for the most part, they’re there, they’re engaged, they’re out looking for things so you got them on they’re really open to click stuff.

So running some ads on there and also just engaging the page a lot more, sharing photos when he was going to be on Jay Leno, sharing photos of Joe Rogan with a picture of him and a picture with Vince Vaughn and just different things to get people “Oh, this is cool!” and then commenting so just more or less showing – like I told you guys last time, to just be more personal. Yeah, you’re a politician but reach out and show personal pictures, show pictures – we have pictures of him with his iPad showing like how the fundraising was going and people just love that stuff because they feel so personally connected to him that way.

Marcia Hawkins:  That’s interesting because you’re right. I mean the radio, the TV, the print ads, they are effective, obviously. And they need that. But to drop the ball in social media would, in my opinion, cause them the election, and I’m sure you can agree with that.

David Foster:  Oh, I agree.

Marcia Hawkins:  Absolutely. And that’s true because it’s really funny when they get into like a town hall debate or they’re doing one of the debates with the other candidates or they’re in a – they’re stumping in a particular city right before a caucus or a primary, they really – everything is very, very scripted. And I really believe that seeing the personal side of the candidate is really I believe what sways the voter. And segueing that into a business owner, they really have to have the ability to kind of show their fun side as well. And I really — I completely understand, how can somebody, in addition to some of the social media – is there another angle that they can at onto social media pages that will allow them to kind of expand upon that?

Videos in Social Media Trends

David Foster:  Well, I mean one thing that we have always had a lot of success with is videos. I mean people just love videos. They like to take the time, sit down and do those. And another thing that we – we had no idea, we just started doing –we were doing the blog talk radio and we decided you know, we’re trying to get on a schedule and be in somewhere at 3 o’clock, every single day was just hard for me because I’m so – I mean I got so many things going on. So Scott ended up doing the shows by himself.

So I started doing a podcast. And we must’ve just landed on a niche of some kind because our subscriber rate has just skyrocketed. And so the podcast, something that you can actually – they can hear you, they can see you, like images, like pictures, something that they can see that there’s a personal side to your business. Because like I was saying the last time, if you’re just all stiff and just promoting and just talking in business language, people don’t talk like that. It’s like talking to a robot. And you don’t want to come across as a robot so video, I mean video is awesome. If you own a restaurant, put a video of your menu. You should go back and show your chef cooking your special for the night and say “Come and get this,” “Does it not look good?” or something like that. Just little things like that, the people are like “Oh, Wow! Look at this video of what they are making here. This looks really good. We should go try this place out.”

And so we actually just merged with another company that does social media management and tracks social media trends and is full service. And so we’ve been seeing different things that they’re doing for local businesses that’s really helping them with their fan page like the things that they’re engaging, like how they’re asking questions, how they’re promoting their specials, how they’re running little deals, and it makes all the difference. I mean weve got a local restaurant here, and we are in Tallahassee, it’s not a very big place, it is the state capital but when the college kids are here, I think I want to say 150,000 or something. So they got 5,000 fans on this restaurant page and they are engaged. I mean you got people sharing their deals, sharing images and it’s to see that much action going on just because they’re involved, just because they’re making videos, just because they’re sharing images of their menu, just because they’re giving to college kids because we all know college kids are broke and love to eat. So if you can tap into that, your home free.

Marcia Hawkins:  Exactly.

Kyle Clouse:  Right.

Marcia Hawkins:  And the fact that you mentioned video and using it in your social media trends, Dave, is it too premature to tell you that I love you?

David Foster:  Oh, no, that’s fine.

Marcia Hawkins:  Go ahead, go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle Clouse:  I was just going to say it’s interesting that Dave brought up video and also that you brought on a social media marketing company that manages campaigns, because as you know, we do video marketing and we do video promotion. We use video as a means of promotion. And we also do the management end of that as far as the video creation. We see that a lot of businesses, they want to be able to focus on what they do best, which is running the business and have someone else take over the marketing end of that, so very interesting. One of the thoughts that I had, Dave, was as we’re talking about that – social media and how social social media is becoming a means of communication, one thing that I thought about was even with television and with the news, breaking news will hit social media before it hits the TV, as you can really see where this trend is moving as far as engagement with social media and it really being able to stay in front of your customers and clients and being engaged with them and creating that relationship with them.

David Foster:  Well, you know why that is. That’s because most of these news people are getting their news from tweets and this is what we are seeing in social media trends. So the tweets are just ahead of the news because they’re like “OK, where’s the big stories? Well, let’s go to Twitter.

Marcia Hawkins:  Well, you always hear people talking within the social media saying “Oh, I thought on Facebook,” or  “Someone tweeted me on that.” That’s very true.

David Foster:  Yup.

Kyle Clouse:  Yup, absolutely. One thing that I saw when we were talking about trends, where trends are moving, I’m – if I look back, as we’re talking about the elections, kind of get back in 2008, I see President Obama when he won the election, I think it was I mean largely due the fact that he was utilizing social media. And so as we see this trend coming now with 2012, we see that businesses, politicians, everyone are taking social media more seriously, they’re really looking at it and looking at ways in which they can engage their customers and their client and their client bases. As you guys have brought on this social media company that manages these different accounts, tell us a little bit about that service and what benefits that has for a business owner?

Social Media Trends in Politics

David Foster:  Well, one thing that has really helped, and I’ll just use the Ron Paul campaign for an example because we’ve been working closely with that, is we can target keywords, we can target Ron Paul or whatever, and find out anything good or bad that anybody’s saying and then actually if its bad, it  flags it and lets us know that it’s bad. And I don’t know if it picks up keywords, how it does it, but there‘s some kind of algorithm in the program that they use so we can go out and nab those faster and talk to people and try to figure out what issues they have and then always ends up being about foreign policy or whatever.

So it’s just what they can basically do is brand awareness and then going out and doing like brand repair, reputation management. Reputation management and social media is huge because if you start out and you do a couple of things wrong and you end up getting a bad reputation, sometimes it’s hard to repair because it can go so viral so fast. So you really want to be careful with your reputation and you want to know if people are out there talking about you, good or bad. So what they do is they put you in the system, they look at the keywords and put in your company name and all that and then they can see like alle these sites, Yelp, Citysearch, all these different places that people have done reviews on urban spoon of you, it all comes back and then they can go and they can reply to those comments and they guaranty to do it within 24 hours so that people, even if they have a bad experience, and they leave it all public if they had a bad experience, if you deal with the right way and people see that publicly that you dealt with that issue, They’re like “Oh, these people, I went and got ice cream and it was melted by the time I got it. Okay, well they reached out to me, they gave me a free ice cream and guaranteed that it wouldn’t happen again.” So the customer, even though they may have had one bad experience, ends up – the total experience ends up being good. So that to me is one of the most important things they do.

And then also as just knowing the industry enough to know what – if a restaurant needs to run kind of promotion, a hormone therapist needs to run this kind of promotion, a lawyer or attorney needs to run this kind of promotion so they’re really understand how to get the likes and fan engagement for your niche and not just any fan, because quality is so much better than quantity on social media as well. Everybody seems to think well, the more fans you have, the better, the more successful you’ll look to people. But if you go to a page that has 10,000 fans and nobody’s liking comments, nobody’s posting anything, nobody’s sharing anything, that really to me speaks bigger volumes because that tells me that that page is not engaging the correct way.

And so if you go to any page they manage, they’re engaging you the right way, they’re engaging at the right times like there are certain restaurants that close at 5 o’clock so they’re not posting a deal at 4 o’clock for that company. They’re doing it the day before when they close early and then they know that the people for this company are more – they have more conversations in the evening so somebody manages that page in the evening where one page might be people are going to eat breakfast at this place because that’s what they’re famous for, so there’s more people engaging in the morning so they are there in the morning.

So they really get to know the brand on a personal level, even the menu and all that so – because knowledge is power, if somebody’s asking a question about a crêpe or something, they need to know what’s in, which one or whatever for a restaurant. So it’s just about they understand how to engage, they understand how to get likes for that specific kind of niche and how to keep your reputation under control.

Kyle Clouse:  Right. One thing that you mentioned that I think is very personal, I’ve actually spoken to business owners who they get mad about it but they shy away from it, they don’t know how to overcome it or how to attack with that, and that is negative comments. A lot of business attacks just they get it a negative comment on Google places or Yelp for any of the other platforms, they’re almost – a,  they want to figure out first “How do I delete that?” which they can delete that but they’re afraid to reply to that or a combat that in anyway and they almost want to ignore it, which I think is a huge no no.

David Foster:  Yeah, no, that is huge. Because if you – the thing that I learned on social media is the bad news travels much faster than the good news. So if you really make it a point to handle those things, to go out there and just it could be very, very – it could be the worst review you’ve ever read, it could make you sick to your stomach, but if you at least deal with it and just do what you have to do to make that customer happy – I mean there’s a reason most of us get in business and that’s because we have a service that we want people to enjoy enough to not only tell other people but to just have a good overall experience. So if you really care about that overall experience, that carries through good or bad. Because you can always take something bad and make something good of it if you do it the right way.

So I never judge anybody by their mistakes. I judge them by a how they deal with that mistake. So most people in social media, if you reach out and you handle the mistake in a good way, then they’re still going to be spreading a positive message. “Yeah, I went to this place and their food was horrible but they reached out, they asked me exactly what was wrong, why I had that bad experience and this was my reason and so they took this thing off the menu and then they gave me a coupon to come in. I went back in and it was a great experience.” And so they just publicly turned that around. So that two-star review could be changed into – because the consumer can change the review. So they could say “I reviewed this two stars before but now it’s five because of the way they handled my problem.”

Kyle Clouse:  Interest, interesting. What are some – I know there’s a lot of talk with tracking social media or tracking the return on investment with social media. What are some things that business owners can do to track their efforts, see if what they’re doing is actually working for them?

David Foster:  Well, I’d like to call it return on relationships rather than return on investment because with – the deeper the relationship you get with your customers, the more you’re going to get out of it as far as return and as return sharing as turn them out a happy customer praising you out in public, that’s a bigger return to me than the investment anyway because I find that – I mean I have not advertised on Facebook or anywhere for six months. And I have no ad budget, period. And that’s because when you have so many happy customers and you’re putting out a good service, people are talking about it and they’re just coming based on that, that’s a return on a relationship for me for having such good relationships with our customers that they want to go out and talk about us obviously because that’s the only way we are making sales.

Marcia Hawkins:  You can’t put a price on that either.

David Foster:  No, you can’t. And it took us a year and a half to get there. I mean I ran – I was running $300, $400 a day in Facebook ads and I just started phasing them out. And for a couple weeks I’m like I’m just going to try not running them. And our sales stayed steady and I’m like oh my gosh, I was probably not even getting many sales from the ads anyway. So six months of no ads and sales still coming in, that’s obvious to me that it’s just our social media, just being on the blog, just engaging our fans, just helping people create their pages and going out of our way – I mean our support team, if somebody has an issue they can’t get through, our support team actually makes a custom video for them walking them through their back-office showing them exactly what they have to do to fix it. I mean we go out a way to make sure people are happy. That’s basically all you have to do.

Kyle Clouse:  Yeah, I can actually attest to that because I’ve used your fan page engine. I think I became a member of it a year and a half ago when it first began or has been longer than that? I know it’s been a while. But whenever I’ve had an issue, it’s been resolved.

Right now we have to take a quick break and run through our sponsors but we’ll come right back and again, we have David Foster, CEO and Co-Founder of the fan page engine.

Marcia Hawkins:  All right, everybody. Welcome back. This is Marcia Hawkins along with Kyle Clouse with NewYorkShopExchange.com on the Business Preparing For Business radio program. Our guest this evening is David Foster. He is the CEO and Founder of the Fan Page Engine and he’s just an awesome guess. I’m sure you guys have been enjoying the show. We went to break, had to pay a few bills and we were talking a little bit about – not a little bit, a lot about online management of your reputation.

And I’m curious if you have any insight. I just find this fascinating that in the line of work but Kyle and I do, we’re – I’m always direct line and I know when I leave an appointment, I call Kyle and say “Jeez, I can’t believe this guy said this.” Why do you think people are so reluctant to really recognize? I even sometimes when I go into an appointment, 99% of the time I’m very well-received but once in a while you just get this real ordinary businessperson and they’ll just “I’ve been doing my form of advertising the way I’ve been doing it,” and just really not wanting to just be receptive to possibly doing advertising or marketing or even conducting business in a different manner and trying to keep up with the trends. I mean I don’t know how old you are, David, but in my generation, growing up, things that used to take 30 days now literally take 30 seconds with the Internet. And so I’m really struck by the fact that there are so many people that are so reluctant to A, manage their online reputation, even utilize the Internet for what it is, and more importantly, they don’t see the importance of it. Do you have any insight as to why that is? Because I got to tell you, that’s something that really puzzles me.

David Foster:  Well, and it puzzles me too, and I’m actually – I’m 41 so I remember those days as well, and I think it’s – there’s some people whose business model has worked so well for them and they’re so – like me, myself, three, four years ago, I swore I would never be on Facebook. I swore I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I was doing web design and stuff and I was getting enough clients for MySpace that I thought I’d never need it. And then as soon as MySpace just completely went into the pot with all the spam and everything, I mean I just got so sick to even go on that website, that I had some friends say, “Oh, you need to go and check out Facebook.” So I reluctantly started an account, then my high school buddies started finding me and then got into the business side of it.

And so I think people just have a fear of the unknown and the thing is it’s hard to show. It’s like me walking into their office and saying, “Hey, I have this pen. It’s a really nice pen and it writes yellow ink but believe it or not, you can see it on white paper,” and they’re like “Well, let me see.” “Well, I can’t show you, you’re just going to have to trust me because I don’t have it with me.” It’s like they’re so reluctant because they’ve never seen it work for them. They’ve never seen it happen but how they don’t see how it’s happening for other people, I don’t get. But I think it’s just they get so comfortable, just like anything else it’s like people become so complacent and so comfortable with where they’ve been and where they are, they’re almost scared to jump into something that they don’t understand because with social media, it’s really hard to show a return. I mean you have to at least be in the game for a few months before you start to see a considerable return in my opinion.

I mean there are some people who if you have something that’s specialized enough, like we have an ice cream shop here in town called Lofty Pursuits and they also sell like discs, crispy discs and tops and arcade – well, not arcade but the puzzle games and stuff and they have a really fifties-type atmosphere so you go in there and they’ve got the soda jerks and they dress with the old bowties and stuff so it’s very specialized. And they do very well on Facebook. But if you have an attorney, they’ve got all these regulations, they’re like “Well, we can’t say this,” they try to make every post about the legalities and you know and so it’s like it almost doesn’t fit for them.

But I still think that there’s a way where they could utilize it but in most cases, they’re just not open to it and that kind of baffles me too. But I think that what – if there’s enough people as you build your portfolio that you can say “Well, here I have another attorney that’s doing this and he’s had a lot of success,” and then maybe even have a video testimony or something of that attorney talking about that success, which is something we’re doing, we’re reaching out to the local restaurants that we’ve been working on and getting video tests, really nicely done video testimonial, so that we can show clients locally and say “Hey, this is what we’ve done, this is what they’re saying,” like when we run a deal, their place is just packed all day and it’s awesome. They love it. So other customers are like “Well, I want some of that, and you guys doing mobile marketing?” “Yeah.” “Oh, I want some of that.” So as soon as they start to see the success of their friends or their competitors, then they’ll listen little bit more. But if you don’t have that going in, you’d probably be on deaf ears. Plus I think it’s the older generation that have the biggest issue where you can get young guys who will just jump on it, they’ll drop whatever. I need to be on – yeah, I will do it.

Marcia Hawkins:  Well, it is a little bit frustrating though I do, I find that when I’m talking with a client that – and like I said, Kyle will tell you we’ve really – have started to really make some headway with our message and people are really starting to resonate with people. But I’m still struck by the fact that people say you know – I mean you can sell them the numbers and you can sell them everything and they still – they just – I think it goes back to what you said. People become so comfortable being uncomfortable. That’s what they know. They know – “I’m so uncomfortable I’m spending so much money with no return but this is what I know and this is what I’m going to do and I don’t know, that it’s foreign to me. It really is. It’s just completely – I don’t get it.” When I’m uncomfortable, the only thing to get comfortable…

David Foster:  As I’m saying I find myself doing that with like my iPhone. Like I was thinking about getting a droid because I wanted to try the Google market and everything but then I started thinking about not having my iPhone and I seriously started getting sick to my stomach because I could run my entire business from this phone so it’s like it’s my business partner. So it would be like turning in my business partner. So I can understand where they’re coming from but…

Marcia Hawkins:  Yup. When I refer to phonedesk I always find it funny when you see people in bars and restaurants by themselves and their phone is like their date.

David Foster:  Yeah. Well, mine’s been my date many a night.

Marcia Hawkins:  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I just – I really – it’s frustrating but – I – that eventually, they do come around. But it’s kind of funny, it’s like you said when you get people that are really, really excited about what you’re offering them and they jump on, you get the video testimonials, the written testimonials and then you’re able to show like returns for other clients and that’s where it really starts to go. And then of course people , and I guess this is going to segue into my next question – is don’t you find that mentality with social media that even if the resistance like you were like I was in the beginning with Facebook and whatnot, that the eventuality is they do it even like almost subconsciously, because they want to belong? Like you didn’t want to tell someone right now “What’s Facebook?” or “I don’t have – I’m not on Facebook.” “What do you mean you’re not on Facebook? Everyone’s on Facebook.” So do you see that that mentality is what ends up winning out?

David Foster:  Well, I think so. And just a comment on a strategy that you could use to contact or to maybe get them a little bit more interested is go in there with case studies from one of their biggest competitors if you haven’t, one of their biggest competitors or somebody that competes in the exact same market they view and say “This is what they’re doing. So if you want to have – see this kind of success, this is what you need to be doing.” Because – like if somebody came in to me and they’re saying, “Well, this 50s diner is doing this but I’m a guy in a college as well. I can’t – you know…” I mean that’s going to be completely different. So I’ve another guy in the colleges that I work with and this is what he did and this is his results, so you could show that, you know what I mean? Having kind of the same – which that’s a bad example because that’s kind of – that’s one of those you’re going to have a have a big name in an area pretty much to have a kind of a local fan base anyway to build something like that. But because uniqueness does – I mean that does pretty much matter.

But I do think that what you’re saying about eventually feeling like you’re not fitting in, it makes sense. I mean people, it’s almost as like getting on the Internet. I mean people fought it for a while, they’re still sending mail, still sending invoices by mail and still not online in their business. But it’s like they had to bite the bullet because they just started to fall farther and farther behind. And social media is that next medium where they’ll just start to fall farther and farther behind if they’re not on there because I mean I – there’s – I don’t buy anything off-line anymore. I mean I’ll go to Best Buy if I need something like right now or Home Depot or something but most of the time, I’m on Amazon. That is my store. If they sell groceries on there, I’d be buying my groceries.

Marcia Hawkins:  Oh, I hear you. I just found out a local groceries store now will let you just pull up – you put your order online and you just pull up and they’ll bring your groceries out to you, it doesn’t get any easier than that.

David Foster:  Well, when I lived in Portland, Oregon, we had an organic food – nature market or something, I can’t remember the exact name and I would just get online, fill my cart and then a truck would bring my food right into my home.

Marcia Hawkins:  Got to love that. I really do believe that what we’re talking about earlier and I think that the common denominator with all of this is the fact that people resist change at all cost even if it’s going to save them money, and I don’t understand it. I’m not like that. I would not consider myself in that category. I embrace it. I always find if there is an easier, cheaper, more fun, more dynamic way to do things, I’m all about that. But I just – I think business owners, I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s the fact that we’re dealing with the egos. Sometimes people really want to believe that the way that they mapped it out in their mind and I just find that if you can just accept the fact that what you’ve envisioned in your mind may not be the way it translates out but if you figure it out and it works, who cares?

David Foster:  Exactly.

Marcia Hawkins:  Who cares? What do you think about that, Kyle?

Kyle Clouse:  Oh, absolutely. I was thinking, as we’ve been talking about – and I’ll use your term, Dave, return on relationship, one of the things you mentioned earlier was taking three to four months to see a return on a relationship and I think there’s two – there can be two problems with that is A, the business owner isn’t seeing a return where we live in a microwave society and they’re not seeing a return within the first day of the first week and I think other social media stuff doesn’t work and then they quit. And secondly, why do you think it does take three to four months to see that return on a relationship? Is that because we’ve been so innovated with advertisements that we’re – as a people, we are more cautious before we purchase something? And we want to see kind of the relationship build before we make that step?

David Foster:  That’s almost like trying to figure out how I can walk a mile in one step. It’s like you can’t – like if I came up to you and you didn’t know me – I mean this is the way people need to think. People need to think of the old school face-to-face, meet and greet, I come up to Kyle Clouse, I shake your hand and I get to know you. I’m not going to say “Hey Kyle, come on over here and like my fan page because I have all these specials and everything.” I’m going to want to build – “Hi, how you doing? Nice to meet you. So what do you do, where are you from?” It’s kind of like you have to build that little relationship. Will some people move faster? Yes. Some people just – it’s like the difference between dragging a stubborn donkey to water or guiding it to water, letting it to go to water on its own. If you try to drag, you are going to drag and it’s going to fight you the whole way.

But if you just set your expectations to just get to know people and build relationships the way that we used to, then that’s a more realistic expectation. But if – we’re so spoiled with the fast-food mentality that everything has to happen so quick because we can go online and order something and have it delivered the next day. We can go to McDonald’s and have food ready in a minute and a half, not that I don’t eat there so that anybody that listen to this, please – anybody that I know, I don’t eat McDonald’s. But you know what I mean? We just had that mentality, and people need to understand that social media is about being social. And you just don’t go blast an ad in somebody’s face and expect to build a relationship off that because the relationship starts off on the wrong foot right from the beginning.

Kyle Clouse:  Right, right. Yeah, yeah. I don’t know, just a segue from what you said, I don’t know very many people from Oregon who order their groceries online through an organic store that eats in McDonald’s.

David Foster:  Yes. And biodiesel crops delivered by the way.

Kyle Clouse:  I would think that I want to get into, Dave, as well is kind of we’ve been talking for about 45 minutes about why a business needs social media and why the need to engage? Let’s talk a little bit about what the Fan Page Engine and the Social Media Engine, what can they do for a business in helping the business? Like if I’m the business owner, I’m listening and saying to myself, “OK, I’ve already got a fan page. I have a fan page on Facebook. So why do I need the Fan Page Engine? What would be your response to that?

David Foster:  Well, to me, it’s important to be taken seriously from the beginning. If you went to – like if I went to your page, to the New York Shop Exchange, and it went directly to your wall, OK, and there’s nothing there that shows me who you are, there’s no branding, I don’t see – even though you might have your logo over on the left-hand side but it looks like you just uploaded your logo and you didn’t take any time to use that real estate, you don’t have any images at the top – because branding, branding is important. It’s very important. And it’s not superficial because when you look at branding, that’s how people get to know you right. So that’s like their first impression and you get one chance to make a really good first impression. So branding at that moment for that very first visit is crucial to the whole rest of that relationship.

So if you impressed them from the beginning because you’ve got a custom-designed fan page that shows your brand, shows what you’re about, it’s easy to maneuver, easy for them to click through to get information, they can look over on the left-hand side and see like ours, we put no monthly fees on there so that people know right from the beginning no matter where they are that that’s our thing. And so they get to know us in that little bit of time where we’ve got that time to either have them stay and like it or walk away. And you’ll still get people to walk away but more people are going to walk away if it goes to my info page in my wall, which I’ve seen a lot of people do.

And then what we really focus on is OK, now we’ve got their attention, they like our branding, they’ve liked our page, now they decide that they’re going to use our builder to customize their page so they do that. Now what do I do? Well, answer’s Social Media Engine? Social Media Engine goes through and we’ll show them how to use that page after it’s branded because it’s important. And one thing that I did, this is how I learned and what was pretty much what created the Social Media Engine is I just went to the top social media marketers’ pages and look what they were doing and emulated it. Because if they’re having success, well then this is what they’re doing, so this is what I need to do.  This is also part of tracking social media trends and how people interact on Facebook and other social media platforms.

So if you want to know how to engage a page, come to our page. Look what we’re doing. Go to somebody like Mario Smith’s page who’s in social media, look what she’s doing and emulate it. Look at how she’s engaging. Look at what she’s posting to get shared. She’s doing training information. If you’re – and it varies by niche but it still is the same concept. I mean if you have a lot of local people and they like your restaurants and are putting pictures of your food and – or you’re sharing pictures of your customers and they know somebody, they’re going to share that because they want their family to see that they were at that restaurant or that their picture is actually on the Internet.

So that’s basically – we not only help you brand yourself very well and track your progress in social media trends, we help you know what to do with it afterwards because it’s very important that you understand that it takes a commitment. It’s not something you can do willy-nilly like “I’m going to post this every other day and I might get on Saturday and kind of look and see if anybody has commented and follow up with them.” “And here’s the picture that I took like six months ago. Let me see what that will do and upload that and just be like lackadaisical about it.” You can’t do that. You have to be consistent. You have to be there when people are commenting because it’s almost like they’re walking in your store. So you don’t want to be out walking around trying to get new customers in your store when you got somebody at the register. So…

Kyle Clouse:  I like how you put that, it’s as if someone is walking into your store when they visit your fan page. One thing, let me come across as someone that knows absolutely nothing. And one of the things that you mentioned was when someone got to your fan page, if they go in straight to your wall or straight to your info page. And if I’m someone that knows nothing, my – I guess response would be you mean I have a choice, where I can have them land. Explain what that choice is and how the Fan Page Engine helps the part – we’ve already talked about utilizing that but what is that choice? And also we can talk about a reveal and how someone uses a reveal and what those are because you hear a lot of buzz about that.

David Foster:  Yeah. Well, basically on Facebook, you can set your default landing tab so – in your admin section under edit page in your settings, you can set that when somebody comes to your page that has not liked it, this is the tab that they will see. So when you set that tab what you would do is you’d customize your page with the Fan Page Engine, and one thing I want to mention is you don’t need to know any code, you don’t need to know anything, you don’t have to be a web person, you just have to get some images, build your page the way you want to publish it. It goes right your Facebook page. You don’t have to do anything. Then you just go in, you rename the tab to “Welcome Home” or whatever you want and then you set that as your default page so that if somebody is coming from – they see a post on somebody’s newsfeed that they had posted on your wall and they click it and go to your page then they’re going to see your branded page that could be and what Kyle mentioned the reveal tab, people call it a light gate or you know, there’s other terminology but what that is it’s what somebody sees before they like your page. So I could say like this page and save 35% right now so then they like the page and then all of a sudden that image goes away and boom, there’s a coupon under there.

So it’s basically – a light gate means you now have something they see before they click Like and then something that they see after they click Like. And a lot of people use it for like click Like and watch this video and they have the video like there but it’s kind of blurred out and then they click Like and then the videos are there for them to watch. So there’s all kinds of uses you can to do that. But – and a lot of people use that and some people don’t. You don’t have to. But the point is you can set your default landing tab and just brand your business, more or less have your website inside Facebook.

Kyle Clouse:  Yeah, like there was a lot of talk about 1-800-FLOWERS. They really used that reveal tab with that reveal function to their benefit where  on this fan page they have their branded page and then there was the box that would blink built with a coupon code it was supposed to be  in and when you click like, it takes you to the second page and then that coupon code was revealed to use when ordering flowers. And so there was a lot of buzz that I remember seeing across the Internet about how they were using that to really grow their fan base.

David Foster:  Yeah and I’ll tell you, when we started to review the reveal tab, back when the reveal tab was really hot, our fan base just exploded. I mean it increased by – we weren’t using it before and then we started using it and tracking our social media trends, it increased by about 80%.

Kyle Clouse:   Right. And when you’re offering an incentive for someone to become a fan of your fan page and that’s all – I mean people want something in return. And so if I’m a business owner and I’d come to the Fan Page Engine, I’d create my custom fan page, I came to do it myself, hire you to do it for me, if my branding changes down the road or if I decide to change down the road, am I still able to – can I do that? Can I go back to the Fan Page Engine and do that? And is there an additional charge for doing that?

David Foster:  No, we have – we pride ourselves on being a one-time fee and the reason I do that is because I, too, am a small business. And I understand to try to come out with monthly fees, everybody charges monthly fees, and I looked at our server costs, I looked at our hosting site, like how much space we have and how many users we have and where we were percentagewise. And like get this, we don’t have to charge a monthly fee. So that – I think that’s why we’ve become one of the biggest ones out there is because we are the go to for the people who are just getting started and they can come get their fan page one-time fee and then you can go back and edit at any time. If you happen to get a new logo design then you want to change it, you just log in to your back office, you add your logo, you hit publish and you’re done.  From that point on you can track your social media trends and how your Facebook fans are interacting on your website.

And we do have extra training where we will charge a monthly fee but for the Fan Page Engine product, it is just a one-time fee, and that has been what helped us reach such a large fan base over some of our competition. If you look, they have smaller fan bases. And some people come just for that alone.

Marcia Hawkins:  Oh, I’m sure you heard that tone. We are unfortunately out of time, Dave, and I can’t thank you enough for coming back and joining us on our program. You are just an absolute fabulous guest. And everytime you answer a question, it segues into about five or six more questions, I haven’t asked but we’re out of time. So we’ll have to have you back again for sure. So Kyle…

David Foster:  Well, I have a question for you next time.

Marcia Hawkins:  Oh absolutely, absolutely. I look forward to it. So Kyle and I of course want to thank our guest, David Foster, of FanPageEngine.com and our sponsors of course and of course, our listeners. Please visit us at NewYorkShopExchange.com and grab your video business channel to advertise your product or service. We would love to host your business video but more importantly, we want to promote your product or service. We will see you next Wednesday evening here, 7:00 p.m. on the Preparedness Radio Network. But until then, you have a great evening.

Male:   You’ve been listening to Preparing Business for Business with your hosts Marcia Hawkins and Kyle Clouse.  Questions or comments?  Email the show at info@newyorkshopexchange.com.  Also, find them on the web at NewYorkShopExchange.com.  Until next time for the best tips on how to manage and grow your business, tune in again for Preparing Business for Business with your hosts Marcia Hawkins and Kyle Clouse.