But because of how Facebook works to  serve content to users, creating  compelling content isn’t the only thing you need to do. Maintaining a healthy audience that cares about your content in the first place is key to boosting page engagement.

Because of the way Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm works, it’s important to focus not only on creating great content (really—who on Earth has a strategy that focuses on creating mediocre or crappy content?), but also curating your fan base. And that means cutting out fake fans.

While having the numbers might seem appealing, not every like is worth having. That’s why cutting fake fans from your Facebook page can actually have a positive effect.

Take Evolve Communication’s Facebook page, for example. We have about 400 likes. A few months ago, however, we had almost 500. In recent weeks, we’ve gone through the people who have liked our page and cut a number of them. Don’t worry, these weren’t real fans.

What we found was, over time, our page had attracted what seemed like a large number of fake Facebook accounts. These were accounts that were overseas, in such far flung places as Pakistan or Vietnam. We don’t doubt the possibility that people in these countries to have real users; it’s just hard to imagine why they’d be interested in a company like Evolve, which focuses on serving U.S. startups and tech companies.

That’s not the only clue. We looked through many of these individuals’ pages and found that they hadn’t posted in many months (sometimes over a year), and that most of their posts were not even relevant to the type of content we are producing. While it might be a jump to consider that these people have a genuine interest in public relations and marketing for startups, none of these people had ever interacted on our page.

So, we cut them.

The result: The reach for our Facebook posts is now generally about 20 percent, and quite often more than 50 percent of our fanbase. That means that at least half of the people liking the Evolve page see our posts. And we have also seen a boost in our page engagement, with about half of our posts in recent months breaking the 10 percent mark on engaged users.

To put that in perspective, prior to these cuts, our page was only reaching about 10 percent of our fanbase and very few people were engaging.

The bottom line here is that, in order to boost your page engagement you have to have the right people liking your page. Not just Joe Schmo from down the street; or some random person from the other side of the world. It’s counter-intuitive, but cut those people out if you want to boost your page.

Evolve Communications is proud to present this live primer on honing your message so you can make the most out of the Day of Fosterly Media Match (May 4, 2013).

We’re Live! To ask questions, post them below and we’ll answer them during the Q&A.

Here’s a link to the deck:

http://www.simplyevolve.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/MediaMatchPrimer.pptx

Here’s the first video, featuring Nick Miller of Parking Panda.

In 2012, Evolve Communications helped Parking Panda launch in Washington, DC, their second market. Since then, they’ve gone on to add many more locations across the country.

Nick’s key takeaways:

• Getting coverage in local outles is as useful as national press (if not more)
• National press is great for attracting larger investors and potential partners
• There are certain times in a company’s life when you should hire a firm (like us!)

Some clients come to Evolve Communications looking for a social media strategy. They want all the big ideas and all bells and whistles, and we’re happy to work with them to develop a solid action plan. Some want to execute the strategy themselves, but they often lack the resources to properly manage them. A common part of our planning now includes resource management.

Here are a few tips and tricks we have learned through the years that can help you be more efficient in your time.

Only do what you can

There’s no need to take on more than what you can handle. You don’t necessarily have to blog (we generally recommend blogs for organizations that want to document their progress). There’s also no need to have a presence on every single social network. There are just too many to keep up with!

Instead, choose the activities that will have the most impact. This seems obvious, but you’d be surprised. Too often, organizations feel they need to be doing an activity just because their competitors are doing them. Evaluate each channel independently and determine if your audience is using those channels. For each channel, develop a rational and an independent objective (inform our audiences, engage new customers, etc.).

If you’re organization has a lot of people doing a wide variety of tasks, ask them on a regular basis to update you on what they’re working on and see if there’s anything that might be interesting. You might also take a moment to briefly highlight your coworkers on what’s been happening online. This might be on a weekly basis, or less frequent; experiment with what works and see if you can find a balance between helpful and annoying.

Once you do this, it’ll be much easier to see what’s worth your time and energy—and what isn’t.

Set up your sources

Social media is a long-term effort. Therefore, it’s essential to set up the sources for where you’ll get your content in advance. Do some Google news searches for relevant topics and set up Google alerts. Set up some preliminary Twitter lists and keyword searches and save them in your Twitter client of choice (ours is Hootsuite, by the way). Set up an RSS feed reader (Feedly is our weapon of choice here) and subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the relevant websites and blogs.

Carve out the time

There’s no way around this one. If you want to seriously use social media to advance your organization’s goals, then you need to carve out the time. Even when you have many, many other things on your to do list.

How much time? We often make the following recommendation for how to make sure you get what you need out of your time spent managing social media:

Monthly Social Media Management Implementation Schedule

Stay focused

It’s easy to lose focus when you’re doing social media. You go onto Facebook to post an update and you think, “I’ll just take a quick peak at what my friends are doing.” Next thing you know, you’ve been sucked into a vortex of likes, comments on other people’s statuses. It happens to the best of us.

Our recommendation here is a little old fashioned: Get an egg timer. Hold yourself to getting as much done in the 15, 30, 45 or 60 minute increments we mention above. You’ll be amazed at how much you will get done in these short bursts.

Of course, there are plenty of other things you can do to ensure that you keep your social media content fresh and your presences lively. If you need help thinking of things, we love to brainstorm. Feel free to reach out on our Facebook page or connect with us in any way you’d like.

What is PR??

First, it’s not advertising. A client once showed us a copy of an ad they ran in a magazine and said, “We’ve gotten great PR out of this.” (To this day, we’re still not sure what the client meant.) Instead, it’s a deep focus on building relationships, whether that’s directly through social media or, more traditionally, indirectly through media. It can also include other aspects such as government relations, investor relations, crisis management, and community relations. The common theme: Relations.

When should I launch my product?

The key thing to focus on here is to launch is when your product does exactly it promises to do. Don’t worry about all the bells and whistles. Don’t worry if some features aren’t ready to be implemented or are in the works. Focus on the one core feature and make sure it works. Then launch and build from there.

When do I need PR?

Here’s a pretty standard laundry list of times when you need to engage in public relations activities:

• Launches
• Establish/grow userbase
• Attract investment
• Earn credibility/recognition for a new technology
• Enter a new market
• Position company for purchase
• Mergers & acquisitions
• Mitigate negative perceptions

Do I need to be in TechCrunch?

500 Startups founder Dave McClure once Tweeted, “TechCrunch doesn’t pay the bills.” (Sorry, the tweet’s too old and isn’t publicly available any more.) The answer, of course, is NO! The bottom line is that you need to be in the media outlets that your audiences consume.

How do I get the media to pay attention to me? 

There are a lot of ways that a startup can get some media attention, but the first and most important one is to simply be awesome. Startups achieve that by focusing on what sets them apart, what differentiates them. That, and focusing on the problem that the company is trying to solve. Failing that, do something outrageous, like getting a pie thrown in your face.

Most importantly, always remember to answer the question: So What? If you’re not telling a journalist why what your company does matters, then you’ll never get the media attention you deserve!

The account coordinator is responsible for supporting the day-to-day execution of clients’ public relations and social media campaigns. This includes conducting media and industry research, writing and distributing press materials, developing relationships with key media, engaging media with the goal of placing stories about clients, managing social media accounts, developing content, and supporting new business initiatives.

Evolve Communications is a rapidly growing PR and marketing firm that serves the startup and small business communities with powerful public relations and marketing services. Come get your hands dirty!

Responsibilities include:

• Help manage day-to-day tactical execution of public relations and social media campaigns
• Write and distribute press materials
• Develop media lists
• Develop content for social media outlets
• Support communications/marketing projects and strategic planning as needed
• Participate in team brainstorms and develop ideas for client initiatives
• Assist in assembling client coverage reports
• Assist in-house marketing efforts
• Provide general administrative support on various activities and projects

Requirements/Qualifications:

• 0 – 2 years experience (MUST have a PR or communications degree if no experience)
• Extreme attention to detail
• Proficiency with social media and web management tools
• Proficiency with MS Office tools
• Excellent research, writing and communication skills
• Eager and willing to learn
• Proactive, “can do” entrepreneurial attitude
• Ability to juggle multiple tasks
• Experience with using WordPress preferred, but not required
• Agency experience preferred, but not required

This position is a part-time position (30 hours/week), with the potential to grow into full-time for the right person.

If you are results-oriented and ready to work in an entrepreneurial environment, send resume, two writing samples and examples of secured media placements to Daniel@simplyevolve.com

This startup is clearly planning as much as they can, and working to move forward methodically. And at some point, they’re going to need a CMO, and the CEO asked what he should look for. Here’s how we suggest he- and other early-stage startups approach it:

• Figure out when the time is truly right. You don’t necessarily need a CMO before you’ve developed a product that’s worth selling. You will DEFINITELY most need a CMO when it’s time to scale. Which means you need a solid product, not just an MVP. Hiring too soon might be a waste of precious resources, while hiring too late could be a grave misstep.

• Look for someone who understands technology. Marketing has become as much about the technology we use as it is about the strategy and the creative. CMOs need to be able to talk to your company’s CTO; they need to understand how your customers are using technology, and then find ways to use those technologies to spread your company’s message. They also need to understand reporting technology. So much is trackable today–there’s so much data available. CMOs don’t necessarily need to know every aspect of every technology, but they do need to have enough understanding to know how to pull things together in order to master all of these facets.

• Look for someone who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty. Marketing is a team sport. There’s no one person who can possibly do everything, nor are there enough hours in the day. The result is that it’s not uncommon for CMOs to be master delegators. There’s nothing wrong with that–when you’re in a larger organization and your CMO is commanding a large team. When you’re in a startup, though, everyone needs to pitch in and do their part. The CMO who knows how to get stuff done–either individually or through other people–is indeed a rare, valuable find.

NOTE: Even if you’re not ready to hire a CMO, you still need to promote your company! Check out our Rocket Packs for Startups to see how we can help.

Image above of the CMO T-shirt, available for purchase here. 

Now that the winner has been chosen, it’s a great opportunity for marketers to look back at the campaign and see what we can learn. This isn’t intended to be a partisan analysis, and we’ve tried to stay away from any particular partisan viewpoints. After all, as marketers, we need to be able to look at data and campaigns objectively in order to evaluate and learn from them. Here’s what we have taken from the election so far.

• Big Data has big consequences: Despite pre-election predictions of a very close electoral college race, Obama team’s strategy clearly led to a near blow-out (the popular vote is another story). How did they do it? Big Data. They looked deeply at their voters and how many votes they needed–district by district. This turned out to be an incredibly effective method for reaching audiences that have become almost impossibly fragmented. TV ads alone wouldn’t cut it alone. Knowing detailed information about voters, their interests and many other datapoints, allowed the Obama team to pinpoint their ground game. The result wasn’t just the win, but it was also the precision with which the Obama strategy was put together.

• Shifting brand positioning overnight can be dangerous: While it’s not unusual for political candidates to play to their base in the primaries and move more to the political center during the general election, that shift needs to make sense. It needs to tell the story of the candidate’s ascendancy. It needs to be an extension of his or her branding, not a wild swing. In the case of Romney, his shift was incredibly dramatic. Many pundits have commented that Romney felt he needed to be very far on the political right to win the primary, which didn’t give him a lot of space to move back to the center during the general. So, to many non-party voters, this seemed like a wild swing, which left them unclear about Romney’s true brand position.

• Messaging, Messaging, Messaging: If you look back at Obama’s 2008 run, you’ll see that his messaging was incredibly nuanced. While that may or may not have been true this time around, we saw the messaging coming out of the Romney campaign as incredibly sloppy. In fact, we were very, very amused by the Say Anything image that floated around. Moreover, the Obama campaign was able to capitalize on this by painting him a flip-flopper (though not nearly as effectively as Bush did to John Kerry in 2004). The point here is that your brand messaging needs to be precise and consistent. You can’t say one thing one day and something completely different another.

• When you’re in the public eye, everything you say is public: There were many times when Romney suffered from classic “foot-in-mouth” disease, but perhaps none were more apparent when he made the now infamous 47% comment. Brands, like politicians, need to remember that they are under scrutiny of the public eye 24 x 7, no matter where they are, what they’re doing, or whom they’re talking to. As such, they need to be true to their brand at all times (see our note on messaging).

• Give your brand away: Whether you’re running for office or you’re running a brand, there’s really no stopping this one. People who love will take your content and make something new out of it, praising you. At the same time, people who don’t love you (or even hate you) are going to do the same thing, only negatively. Brands have to recognize that this is, to some degree, out of their control. The best way to deal with this is to harness the power of your brand supporters and make it easy form to create awesome brand-centric content. If enough people love your brand and are willing to stick up for it, detractors will have a more difficult time tearing it down.

What insights have you gleaned from this election, and how can you apply them?

I’m simultaneously amazed at how much our business has grown and changed in just three short years. When I started the company, we were strictly focusing on digital marketing and we were strictly white-label. Today, we’re focused more than ever on public relations, content development and social media than ever before. And more and more we’re working with clients directly every day (in fact, we just signed two new clients just this past week). 

This is in part because we made the conscious decision to go after startups this year, and we did that through our Rocket Packs for Startups program. We also just released our Startup’s Guide to Public Relations, which has been getting lots of downloads. We’v been going full-force most of the year, and it’s really been paying off.

That said, this year was full of surprises. And not all of them happy (some of them were big punches in the gut). But hey, that’s what business is all about. If it were easy and predictable, everyone would be doing it. Of course, in this economy, it seems like everyone is doing it!

At any rate, I’m extremely grateful to all of our clients, and humbled by the fact that we are still going strong. A HUGE thank you to everyone over the past three years who have helped make Evolve Communications what it is today!

Sincerely,

Daniel Waldman

Whatever the stage they’re in, we find that startups are exciting to work with. They’re usually doing something new and innovative, their fresh perspective on things gives us the inspiration and room to do our best work.

That said, even with our affordable Rocket Packs, some startups are not ready to hire an agency. That doesn’t mean they don’t need PR–they’re just not in a position to hire. So, for all you startups out there, we bring you

The Startup’s Guide to Public Relations

This is our new whitepaper, filled with some essential tips and tricks for building buzz. What’s inside? Here’s a sample:

• Why Startups Need PR
• What is PR anyway?
• The PR Process: Five Steps to PR Success!
• Five things you can do TODAY to earn media coverage
• Five things you can do TODAY to boost your social media presence
• When to hire a PR Firm, and when not to

So, what are you waiting for? Go download our whitepaper!