Social Media Club January event

Last night the temperature in my neck of the woods was about 21 degrees.  I debated with myself about whether venturing out to  attend the January meeting of my local Social Media Club was worth it.  I’m glad I went.

Steve Haweeli, founder and president of WordHampton Public Relations, was the speaker.  He and his colleague Lindsey Myers discussed the impact that social media, particularly Facebook, has had on improving the business of their restaurant clients.

We have a client, Fishbowl, that provides email and social media marketing solutions to the restaurant industry, so this topic was of particular interest to me.

One new thing I learned is about Facebook Graph Search, now in beta.  The idea is to find “like minded” people.  According to Facebook, “With graph search you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them. Each person sees unique results.”  The examples they provide are, “find people who like cycling and live in Seattle Washington”…”photos of my friends in NY”…”restaurants in London my friends have been to”.   But as I dug a little deeper, a google search revealed a darker side to this new option.  A search of “married people who like prostitutes” and “mothers of Jews who like bacon”.  This could be amusing to some, and humiliating to others.

Just as interesting was something I learned from a fellow attendee of the event, Kevin Hageman.  Kevin recently set up a Twitter Advertising account, and ran his first ad.  For a $50 expenditure, Promoted Tweets allowed his tweets to be seen by nearly 4.5K people, driving 126 people to his website, and catching the eye of Business Insider, resulting in even more exposure.  Here is a link to Kevin’s blog post about his experience advertising on Twitter:  case study.

I love to get out and learn new things.  I walked away from this evening feeling that the venture out “into the cold” was well worth my while.

 

 

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In Industry & Networking Events