Cassie Witt

About Cassie Witt

Hiya, I'm Cassie and I've been doing social media since 2008. I've managed, consulted, and built social media programs in both corporate and freelance settings. I enjoy helping business owners and managers learn to get better results out of their social media, without wasting a lot of time. I'm also a very geeky bookworm, who loves to read and watch fantasy and sci-fi shows, and play board games with my family.

The Basic System to Rock Any Social Media Platform Part 1: The 3 Phases of Social Media Success

By Cassie Witt on October 26, 2015 1

Anyone worth their salt as a consultant will tell you that you need a plan to get the most out of social media. This is absolutely crucial to your success. What’s missing from most social media plans, though, is a system. A set of rules, if you will that governs how effective a plan can be. It’s a way to implement the goals that you have and an order to do them in.

I’ve seen and built a lot of social media plans. Some were successful, and some were not. The ones that were successful had one thing in common: they setup their plan with a systemized approach. In other words, everything in the plan is built to fulfill a specific purpose. Nothing in the plan deviates from that purpose.

There is a better word than purpose, though. Some people like to call them “goals”. I like to call them “phases”, because you can have multiple goals within a phase and still be working towards that one purpose.

There’s really only three major phases that you can shoot for in social media. They are:

Building an Audience
Building Engagement
Converting Followers

Want to know what the most successful social media plans had going for them? They tackled these phases one a time and in order.

Phase 1: Build Your Audience

When I first started in social media, the company I was working for didn’t have a social media presence. Since this was my first social media job, I had to learn how to set them up and make them work. I had read a lot of stuff about how social media was so powerful. About how it could increase your sales and popularity far beyond what you could achieve normally. So, I had hope that it would work.

When we first started with Facebook, it was still pretty early for businesses to be jumping on. It was easier to build an audience then. But that’s not what I was focused on. Instead, I was doing all kinds of things. And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting the engagement that I had heard about. Or why I wasn’t getting people to bring in the coupons we would post, or respond to our online sales.

It wasn’t until we ran a big “Like Us” contest that I really started to see engagement and conversions on our Page. In fact, our audience grew so much from that contest, that the engagement and conversions had also skyrocketed. It was then, that I understood how social media works.

See, the simple truth is, you have to have an audience that will support the engagement and conversions. If you don’t, it won’t happen. No amount of pie in the sky thinking will deliver that for you.

No matter what platform you’re on, you have to build an audience first. Unfortunately, building an audience is actually one of the hardest parts of the whole process because it’s a step that consists of three separate objectives.

The first objective is to get people to show up. The second is to get them to pay attention. The third is to get them to want to come back and read more. We’ll tackle how to get all of these to work together in a later post. For now, let’s just look at the basic activities you need to do to get started.

Post content consistently.
Use the basic tools of the platform (e.g. Twitter = hashtags, Facebook = shares and likes).
Ask questions.
Be funny.
Be real.
Use what’s working on the platform now (e.g. Facebook = video)
Look outside of the platform for followers (e.g. Facebook Like Button)
Run a Contest or Promotion to generate excitement.
Find your voice.

Phase 2: Build Engagement

The next phase to tackle once you’ve built your audience is to get them engaged. If they’re already engaged, then that just means you have an advantage. But if they’re not, you may have a hard road ahead of you.

My first success had really taught me that you could be achieve your goals with social media if you focused on the right phase at the right time. But, later, I struggled with building engagement on other platforms and social media accounts.

A couple of years after I started doing social media, I started to take on other clients on a freelance basis. I thought I knew what I was doing by that point. After a few months, though, it became clear that I really didn’t.

I used what I knew worked: I focused on building an audience before building engagement. But I wasn’t getting the same results. I didn’t understand why it seemed to only work once. I thought, that must have been a fluke. But I questioned that assumption, because I had read so many articles telling me different. So, I decided to dig deeper and figure out why it had worked so well the first time. I did this by trying a ton of different things to build engagement (including running more contests).

My conclusion was this: in those early days we had grown our audience so fast by harnessing the excitement that a contest produces. This meant that our audience was already engaged. It gave us a leg up when it was time to move to this next phase. Because we were also posting consistently to Facebook, and we understood what was working on the platform, we were able to keep that engagement going.

Once I understood that, I knew that the key to getting more engagement was to give it a kick-start. Contests work well for this purpose, but they’re not the only answer. Sometimes, they’re not even the right answer for the client.

There are lots of activities that build engagement. Most of these same activities you’ll notice are also ones that are used to build an audience. That’s because the same characteristics of social media that build connections, also help spread those connections farther than they would normally go.

Below are a list of activities that you can use to build engagement.

Post content consistently.
Run a Contest or Promotion to generate excitement. In fact, run these multiple times throughout the year to get the most benefit out of them.
Ask questions.
Be funny.
Be real.
Find your voice.
Connect with your audience.
Use tools outside of the platform (e.g. share buttons on your blog)
Use the basic tools of the platform (e.g. Twitter = hashtags, Facebook = shares and likes).
Use what’s working on the platform now (e.g. Facebook = video, Twitter = Twitter chats)
Bring them into your sales funnel.

Step 3: Convert

Conversions matter in social media. It’s the return part of “Return on Investment” that we’ve been hoping for. That doesn’t mean that we don’t enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling and the connections we make with our community. Those are important, too, and can keep us going when the conversions aren’t happening like they should. But most of us want to get something more out of it. Most of us want to be able to justify the time we’re spending talking with people, researching content, posting, spending money on ads, and the hundreds of other things you need to do to keep up with your social media accounts.

Conversions are tough to achieve, especially on social media. That’s mostly to do with a glaring difference between a business’ motivation and a person’s motivation on social media. People get on social media to connect, or to find out what’s going on, or even just to unwind. Businesses on the other hand want to connect with their customers, but they also want to make the sale. Those motivations just don’t line up. Often times, this means that social media posts by businesses can be seen as an intrusion. Or at the very least, they can seem out of place.

So if conversions are our goal, then how do we go about getting them?

Some of the same things you do to build an audience and build engagement also work for making conversions on social media. Again, this is because of the way social media works. The main thing that companies who make conversions on social media do, though, is they connect with their followers. They learn what their audience likes to hear, and what they like to talk about. Then they take that information and they apply it to how they sell their product. That’s why these same activities can work for conversions, just as well as building an audience and engagement.

Here’s the list of activities that will help convert your followers into customers:

Post Consistently (tired of seeing that yet?)
Post a sale or a promotion
Run a contest (yep, contests can even be used for conversions!)
Ask questions.
Be funny.
Be real.
Find your voice.
Connect with your audience.
Use the basic tools of the platform (e.g. Twitter = hashtags, Facebook = shares and likes).
Use what’s working on the platform now (e.g. Facebook = video, Twitter = Twitter chats)
Ask for the sale
Run ads or use other promotional tools.
Bring them into your sales funnel.

As you can see, the main difference in most of these phases isn’t the activities, it’s the intention and execution. It’s the focus of the conversation.

I have been successful and have seen others be successful in social media from following other systems. But I’ve achieved the most success when I followed this system step-by-step.

Your turn. Have you found a system that works for you? Are you having trouble building an audience, your engagement, or your conversions? Have you seen success when you focused on one goal at a time? Let me know in the comments below.

I’m leaving on a jet plane…

By Cassie Witt on August 4, 2015 0

Actually, I’m leaving in a Cadillac, but sometimes it feels like a jet plane when I’m driving down the road.

What the heck am I talking about?

Well, some of you may know that I’ve been talking about moving for a while. We were going to move three years ago, so my husband (Jess) could attend a school in Florida, but the plans fell through. Luckily, he was able to do online courses from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I think this ended up working in our favor, but we’ll never know where that other path may have lead.

Now, we’re about to embark on a completely new path. On Friday, Jess got the job offer he had been promised for a couple of months. The job is in L.A. which we had anticipated. What we had not anticipated (due to some timing issues) was the fact that we would need to pick up and move in less than a week!

It has been a crazy couple of days, filled with visits, packing, planning, and all the other things that go into a big sudden move. Thank goodness we had the sense to pack a lot of the stuff right after he graduated. Otherwise, this week would have been more hectic than it already is!

So, this means that I will be postponing any blog posts, emails, projects, etc. that I was planning and working on.

I may write on the trip. I am going to be stuck in a car for several hours, after all! But I’m going to make a commitment to not post anything until after we get settled. I don’t know how long that will take, so I can’t give a time frame here. Hopefully not too long, though.

I want to take some time and enjoy this trip with my family. It’s actually the first long car drive we’ve all been on together.

We may end up hating each other by the end of the trip, or we may get closer. Either way, it’s an opportunity I don’t want to miss!

So, until next time, bon voyage! I’ll be writing next time from sunny California. 🙂

UPDATED: Tutorial Infographic: How to Add An Admin to a Facebook Page

By Cassie Witt on June 10, 2015 0

This post was updated on 9/23/2020 to reflect the new look of the desktop Facebook Page interface.

One of the most common questions I hear about Facebook, is how someone can add an admin to a Facebook Page. I put together a tutorial I use to send to my own clients and thought I would share it. This has been updated for the latest changes to the Facebook Page admin area. It’s setup as a one-page downloadable image. You are welcome to save it to your desktop, pin it, or share it with your own audience. As always, if this was helpful to you, drop me a line in the comments below.

Download PDF Version

Want to Know How Often You Should Post to Facebook?

By Cassie Witt on May 26, 2015 0

So you want to know how often to post to your Facebook Page… So, does everyone else.
In fact, this is the number one question I get asked about business Facebook Pages.

Before we dig into the answer (and why it’s not so cut and dried) let’s look at why this is such a big question.

Why the Heck Does it Matter How Many Times I Post Per Day on my business Facebook Page?!

Did you know the number of times you post per day could be limiting the number of people who see those posts? It’s true.

The reason?

Facebook is ruled by this super-complicated algorithm. Now, no one really knows (except for the people at Facebook) how exactly this algorithm works. But we do know a few things. We know that Facebook calculates the importance, popularity, share-ability, spaminess, etc. of each post that is published. These numbers get modified the longer a post lives.

Now for each of these posts, there’s also another calculation going on. That calculation is based on each user’s preferences. It is highly based on whether a person has liked your page or whether their friend has. Whether they have interacted with any of your content and how often, or the same for their friends. It also depends on how many Facebook Pages they’ve liked, how many friends they have, what else they’ve interacted with in their news feed, how often they interact with the people and/or pages who posted those other stories, and a ton of other factors.

This other calculation is the most important, because it determines which posts show up in a person’s news feed.

As you can see, it gets very complicated very fast.

So what does this have to do with how many times you should be posting to Facebook?

The number of times you post per day is also included in that other calculation.

If you post too little, your posts will eventually be shown less. So, you’d think the opposite would cause your posts to show up more, right? Unfortunately, that is not always true. In fact, you can post too much to Facebook, sending them the signal that you’re “spamming” your followers even if that was never your intention.

So how often should you be posting to your business Facebook Page?

A Case Study: How Often Should You Post to Your Facebook Page?

Ready for a definitive answer? A real solid number you can point to and say “I did that, now what are my results?”. I thought so.

Buffer, an amazing social media scheduling app, has put together some research and a great blog post on how often you should post to social media.

There’s even a great infographic from SumAll (shown below) that lays it out for you.

Infographic via: https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-often-post-social-media

Remember, Your Number May be Different

Now, this isn’t a truly definitive answer. The number of times you should post to get the maximum amount of interaction (what’s called the “sweet spot”) may be different than the number above.

What this is, however, is a starting place. Give it a try, you’ll never know if it works for you unless you do.

Tutorial: Get More Facebook Likes by Adding a Facebook Like Button to Your Website

By Cassie Witt on March 3, 2015

One of the easiest ways to get more Facebook Likes for your Facebook Page, is to add the Facebook Like button (targeted at your Facebook Page) to your website.

This is a simple and often overlooked tactic which could result in more Likes for your Page. Why does it work?

Consider these two scenarios.

In the first one, a visitor to your website sees the Facebook icon and is enticed to click it. Once they click it, though, they have to actually go to your Facebook Page in order to “Like” it.

In the second one, a visitor to your website sees the Like button and is, also, enticed to click it. Once they do, that Like is immediately translated to your Facebook Page.

It’s so much easier for a person if they only have to click once. Anytime you can make a conversion easier on the consumer, the more likely they are to do it.

How Do You Get the “Magic” Facebook Like Button?

First of all, how does it work like magic? The Facebook Like button works auto-magically with one click as long as that person is logged into Facebook. These days, who isn’t? Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I logged out of Facebook. And I would bet my right arm that you can’t either.

Facebook makes it easy for you to get this code to install on your website. To get started go to: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/like-button

As you can see from the screenshot below, there are some options that you can choose to enhance the Like button. But they need to be weighed against how much space the button takes up. For example the first set of options makes the button (and all its attributes) really big. The space you want to put it in may not be big enough to hold everything, and it will cut part of it off. All of the attributes are optional, except for your Facebook Page URL.

A Quick Note: The “Width” option will not increase the size of the Facebook Like button (which is quite small). Instead the width controls the overall width of the Like button element. For instance, in the example above, the Like button element area covers the Facebook Like Button, the Facebook Share button, and the words describing the number of likes. So, increasing the width would only increase the space around the entire button set.

The screenshot below shows my Facebook Page address (or URL) in the text box below “URL to Like”. To find your Facebook Page URL, go to your Facebook Page and copy and paste what’s in the address bar into the top-left box (as shown below). That’s step one.

The next step is to decide what you want the overall button to look like. I’ve already talked about how the default set of options gives users a lot more information, but makes the button much bigger in size. I’ll explain that extra information, and go through the rest of the options, with screenshots below.

The first set shows the like button in the “Standard Layout” which adds the additional information of the person’s friends (the name here has been covered up for privacy reasons) who Like the Page. This is great for showing “social proof”, which can help your Page seem more Likeable, especially if you have a lot of Likes already. If you have a smaller number of likes though, I’d suggest going with one of the other options. You can also see below that there is an extra button (the share button) and that there are faces shown in the screenshot below. Most of these have been covered up to protect the privacy of people, but I left my own mugshot there, so you can see an example of what they will look like.

If you uncheck the “Show Friends’ Faces” option, it makes the button are look cleaner. This option works well for those who don’t want the added space the “faces” take up and for those who don’t necessarily care about social proof.

You can, of course, disable the share button. Since you’re trying to get people to Like your Facebook Page, adding a Share button only confuses the issue.

The next layout type is the “box_count”. This displays the Like button with a Like count over it, and everything is stacked on top of each other in a, you guessed it, “box” configuration. This layout, and in fact, the rest of the layouts do not show faces. So, if social proof is important to you, go with the standard layout or the Like Box (which I’ll cover later). This option works for those site designs where a more square or vertical section is available to place the button in. It’s also good for those who want to still show off the number of likes they have.

Since the box count does not come with the option to show faces (even if you check it), the only other option here is to take away the Share button. This makes the button into a nice compact design that could fit almost anywhere.

The next layout type is the Button Count. This layout is much like the box count layout, except that the number of likes is on the side instead of on top. This makes this button much more suited to a horizontal space.

Of course, once you take the Share button away it will fit into an even smaller space. Again, this type of layout with the number of Likes showing appeals to those who want to use social proof to encourage more Likes.

The last layout type is the simplest. That’s probably why it’s called the Simple Button layout. It is not only the smallest, but it’s also a great option for those Pages which have a smaller number of Likes, and don’t want to advertise that fact. This button, too, can be combined with the Share button, if you like.

The version without the Share button is tiny, minuscule even. This means you don’t have to worry about where the button will fit.

Warning: Code Ahead!

A quick warning: this next section involves some html no-how. If you don’t know what you’re doing, forward this article on to your web developer or admin and have that person complete these steps.

Now that you know which button types are available, take a moment to choose which is right for your site. Then, click on “Get Code”. You should see a box like the one below pop up. As you can see, there are 4 options for the code. I bet you thought you were done with options! We are almost done, I promise. 😉

The first three options require a little bit more work to install them and give you some more options for how much information you get when someone presses the Facebook Like button from your website. However, they are not necessary, in most cases.

The easiest code type to use, and the one that will not bog down your site is the “URL” type. Which is just as it sounds, it installs a URL, which points directly to your Facebook Page, but has the added benefit of allowing someone to Like your Page with one click! Woot! Your next step here is to copy and paste the code into the html of your website where you want the button to appear. Again, if you don’t know what you’re doing get someone knowledgeable to handle it for you.

Alternatives to the Facebook Code

There are some alternatives to just grabbing the code off Facebook. If your website is on WordPress, then there’s several options in the form of “plugins” you can install with no programming knowledge. I won’t detail all the options here. Just make sure to check out the number of stars each of these plugins has, check out some of the reviews, and make sure it’s compatible with your version of wordpress before you install.

There are also plugins for drupal, joomla, wixia, and other website builders or (content management systems). Just use Google to search for them.

Whether you choose to grab the code from Facebook, or use a plugin, installing the Facebook Like button is just one way that you can increase your Facebook Page Likes.

Likes Are Just the Beginning

Remember, though, that Facebook Likes are only the first step in the journey. It’s great to say that you have 1,000, 10,000, or whatever number of Likes, but it’s not your end game. Those Likes represent real people who (hopefully) want to buy from you. Even if they don’t want to buy from you, they have indicated that they’re interested in your business in some way. Now it’s your turn to give something back to them. Give them a reason to read your posts, and keep them coming back for more. This is the way that you start cultivating relationships online that lead to sales.

Consistency in Social Media is Queen

By Cassie Witt on January 25, 2015

This week’s social media tip… be consistent.

If content is king, consistency is queen. Consistently posting to your social media accounts is incredibly important for several reasons.

It trains your audience that you always have something to say, so they come back for more.
It helps keep your engagement steady during those times that you’re not heavily promoting something.
It gets you in the habit of publishing content, which may be the best reason of all.

But what does consistency look like? It’s not just about posting a certain number of times a day. Though this is important. Consistent content is also about what you post. Remember that your brand voice is important. If you’re going to post something make sure it aligns with what people expect you to say.

Here’s 3 Rules for Posting Consistency

1. Pay Attention to Voice

Your voice matters. I can’t say that enough. Your audience doesn’t just recognize you from your profile photo online, they recognize you from your voice. If you suddenly switch up your voice, your followers may not recognize that it’s you. In extreme cases, they may even take offense to something you say or get confused. Remember the goal of social media is to get followers and keep them engaged. Voice is particularly important to this goal. Without it, people won’t have something to identify with. That connection with your followers is one of the real powers of social media. It’s part of what gets businesses the results they do on this marketing medium.

2. Post roughly the same number of times per day.

There’s a rule that most of us in the industry follow. That’s to pick the number of times you’re going to post each day and stick with it. Again the reason this is important is largely based on what your followers have come to expect from you. If you start posting more often or less often, you might see unfavorable results. The one place you can see this rule in action is on Facebook. It is here that you might see people unlike you or (even worse) hide your posts if you suddenly start spamming them. It is also here that you will start to see less engagement than you did before if you are posting less. The same is true for other platforms, but Facebook is the biggest offender when it comes to violating this rule.

That’s not to say that you can’t experiment with the number of times you post. Experimenting can actually be very important to figuring out what gives you the most engagement. If you’re going to experiment, though, do it slowly. Increase or decrease your posting by 1 post at a time and keep at that for a while. This will give you the best data on whether something works or not.

3. Post Around the Same Time Each Day.

This is another industry rule that works for a lot of different businesses. Posting at about the same time every day is another way that people can expect to read your content. It’s also important when you’re first starting out to establish a “baseline” that you can experiment against later. If you’ve been posting at the same time for the last couple of months, but feel you could get better results by changing it up, then you already have some data to compare it to. Just remember to keep any experimenting to a minimum.

Remember also, the time you post depends on your audience. For some businesses, posting just after people get off work gives them the best results. For others, it could be later in the evening. Again, posting at the same time each day will help you determine whether it’s the right time for you to be posting.

If you remember and practice these three keys to consistency, your results should also become more consistent. Which, is a good thing. 🙂