Why? That's Simple! COZ IT WORKS!
Bellow I discuss HOW IT WORKS in more detail :)
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| Deccie's Done Deal: Social Media, Umbrella Marketing Strategy lol :) |
Lets start off with a brief history lesson
"The potential for computer networking to facilitate newly improved forms of computer-mediated social interaction was suggested early on.[9] Efforts to support social networks via computer-mediated communication were made in many early online services, including Usenet,[10] ARPANET, LISTSERV, and bulletin board services (BBS). Many prototypical features of social networking sites were also present in online services such as America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, ChatNet, and The WELL.[11] Early social networking on theWorld Wide Web began in the form of generalized online communities such as Theglobe.com (1995),[12] Geocities (1994) and Tripod.com (1995). Many of these early communities focused on bringing people together to interact with each other through chat rooms, and encouraged users to share personal information and ideas via personal webpages by providing easy-to-use publishing tools and free or inexpensive webspace. Some communities - such as Classmates.com - took a different approach by simply having people link to each other via email addresses. In the late 1990s, user profiles became a central feature of social networking sites, allowing users to compile lists of "friends" and search for other users with similar interests. New social networking methods were developed by the end of the 1990s, and many sites began to develop more advanced features for users to find and manage friends.[13] This newer generation of social networking sites began to flourish with the emergence of SixDegrees.com in 1997,[14] followed by Makeoutclub in 2000,[15][16]Hub Culture and Friendster in 2002,[17] and soon became part of the Internet mainstream. Friendster was followed by MySpace and LinkedIn a year later, and eventually Bebo. Attesting to the rapid increase in social networking sites' popularity, by 2005, it was reported that MySpace was getting more page views than Google. Facebook,[18] launched in 2004, became the largest social networking site in the world[19] in early 2009.[20]"
Continue Reading.....
Continue Reading.....
Deccie's Done Deal On Facebook
Deccie's Done Deal opened it's doors just around the same time as Facebook became the largest social media network in the world. Back then I decided to set up a facebook page for my father and to be honest I really hadn't considered the potential of social media in terms of marketing his business so I didn't really spend much time updating his profile or anything like that. His facebook page had a few hundred friends because people kept adding him must be coz he's a popular guy and everybody likes him.
But last March when we decided to move the shop to a larger premiss because the roof was leaking in the old shop, there was a bit of confusion about were we had moved. This was because it's kind of hard to find the right place to move to and some times people can let you down concerning many different issues, this led to a lot of people being confused as to where we went. We were meant to be moving to two different locations before we finally ended up renting from Jim Colbert in the Enterprise Park. (Thanks Jim you were a great help) Back to Facebook.........
Facebook had change a lot since the last time I was using it (I deleted my first personal account lol) But I first started posting again on Deccie's profile with the hopes of getting the word out about the correct location of our new shop. Then people started adding him to these buy & sell groups on facebook and I remembered that I had actually set one up for Deccie back at the end of 2008 but never did anything with it.
So I started adding all Deccie's friends to the group and posting pictures of our stock on the group wall about this time last year. What a success that turn out to be, we now have 3126+/- members in our group (give or take a few). As the numbers increased so did the amount of people trying to turn our shop customer group into a typical buy & sell group. So in the end I had to make the decision to turn off allowing all members to post on the group wall :(
This was a hard decision to make because it was so easy to communicate with the members on the wall of the group and so many of our customers were so kind as to post comments about the fantastic deals they got from my father and it really help establish our on-line credibility with our group members. But sometimes the cons out weigh the pros and the group became to hard to manage so the settings got set to Admins only for commenting on the wall.
The group grew to near the 3000 members mark very quickly but over time it stopped growing fast and slowed down in general and I noticed that as many new members that we gained we also lost just as many, kind of like having a whole in your bucket lol. This is because in the beginning I was focused on numbers and our members were so kind to help out by adding all there friends. But guess what? most of there friends were not interested in Second Hand Furniture! So they simply left the group or never visited the group and eventually Facebook knocked them out of the group because of inactivity.
New Focus
Now I'm more focused on people who actually want to be members of the group rather than looking to make it grow fast, now I'm letting it grow organically. Another thing to consider is that there is only so much furniture that anyone one house can actually hold so we are always looking for more people who do have a need for furniture but the last thing we want to do is annoy people who have no interest. We can't keep selling to the same people forever coz our products are not consumable. Although I do know some people who have children who like to eat furniture but that is a rabbit trail I'm not going to go down lol (my little fella is teething lol)
One thing that has occurred to me over the last year is that maybe I made a big mistake put so much effort into our group because of the many draw back of the group platform on Facebook and also because Facebook themselves don't want businesses running groups and may some day decide to shut the group down without ever even asking me.
Who Moved My Cheese?
If you have never read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" the I would suggest you go out and buy it right now off Amazon and read it. It's something that is also well worth reading to your children and I can guarantee they will get it right away.
This is a quick Synopsis
The Cheese Is Moving
You may have notice that a long time back I set up a proper shop page on facebook. Shop pages are much harder to grow than are groups but the thing about shop pages is that the people that actually find and like your page all on there own are actually people that are interested in your business. I did this back then because even after 6 months of promoting the Deccie's Done Deal Facebook group, I could see that the amount of cheese available from the group would eventually dry up unless I spent a lot of time and effort continually working hard to keep people adding new members to the group from there friends list even if those people have no interest in second hand furniture, in the hopes that something might catch their attention.
You also may have noticed that I've continually been adding more and more social media networks and content to our portfolio of internet marketing outlets. This is because many years ago I read the book who moved my cheese and have learned from experience that hemming and hawing never works and I decided to always shiff and scurry lol.
New Cheese
The first bit of NEW CHEESE I added to our portfolio was youtube and it is a really effective tool for getting your message out there and I plan on making more video adverts in the near future, as soon as I get my fast PC on the go again. It packed in on me just before the January , which just go's to show that having a diversified means of marketing your products or serves is very important you never know what might happen just around the next bend in the maze.
Then I added this blog on blogspot which is a very dynamic and easy to work, easy to run FREE website. It's a dynamic way to keep our customers up to date about everything that is happening with our little enterprise and to be honest it's something that I love doing. The web site is my little pet project, even thinking of what to blog about is something I find fun and interesting and the process of putting it all together and pressing publish is exciting.
The proper Facebook business page is now also starting to gather momentum with more people liking it every day. We are now at 379 likes without me even trying to push for more likes with like and share comps ect.... Facebook recently added the PAGE FEED SECTION on the left side of your Home Feed page so it is now much easier to keep watch on your favourite businesses & community pages. I find myself spending more time looking at the PAGE FEED than I do the Home Feed because the content is what I have chosen and like rather than what my friends like and post on Facebook.
On top of the slow change of focus towards the PAGE rather than the Group I have also added lots of accounts on buy & sell websites such as Gumtree.ie, Adverts.ie ect.. and I have started posting those adds to our PAGE so if you follow those like you can get the prices of the items we have for sale without having to ask "How Much" which I know some people find quite annoying, but again because of the nature of the group platform it was a necessary evil to creates activity on the group which keeps the group alive and members coming back. I'm trying to upload the best stock we get in ever before I upload anything to our group so as to give the people who like our PAGE first notice that nice new stock has arrived. So if your not after liking OUR PAGE you had better sniff us out and if you see something that looks like cheese to you then scurry over and get to it fast before someone else snaps it up.
Find us on Yelp.ie
"Yelp (NYSE: YELP) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. Yelp had a monthly average of 86 million unique visitors in Q4 2012*. By the end of Q4 2012, Yelpers had written more than 36 million rich, local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. Yelp's mobile application was used on 9.2 million unique mobile devices on a monthly average basis during Q4 2012. For more information, please visit http://www.yelp.com/ or send an email to press@yelp.com."
Deccie's Done Deal joined yelp just over a week ago and we have already received two reviews. So if you have ever been a customer of ours and would like to review our business then this is a great place to do it and it would be a great help to our business if you gave us your endorsement on yelp.
I have also listed our business on several other business directory's such as Yalwa.ie and Tuugo.info and already we have received many hits from google searches because of these listings. If your running a small local business then every little bit of free advertising you can get counts at the end of the month so I would suggest you also use these very effective free tools that are available on the internet to get your message across. In this financial climate every little helps and all it cost you is a bit of time. But once you start creating the content that describes your business it's just a case of copying and pasting that content into other platforms.
Other Social Media Outlets I'm playing with!
I have connected Deccie's Twitter account to his personal Facebook page and I connected my own Twitter account to my own personal facebook page. But as of yet we don't have two many people following us on Twitter which is why I sometimes post on Twitter which shows up on our facebook's so that anyone who is a twitter addict might decide to follow us on Twitter instead of facebook. It's all about having as many ways to communicate with as wide an audience as possible as cheep as possible. As I've said already these tools are free so why not use them :)
Printest is a new platform I'm only kind of getting my head around and I haven't figured out yet how I might take advantage of it in regards to getting our message across but I'm sure I'll come up with something interesting in the near future.
Paper.li is the newest string I've added to our bow only last night and it is an amazingly interesting and powerful marketing tool that I'm also only getting my head around and figuring out how to use properly but even with that said I still managed to publish our first weekly on-line News Paper last night that features a few of the pages from this blog as it's main articles. so if you fancy reading everything I publish on this blog alongside more professional articles about furniture related topic then you can subscribe to Deccie's Done Deal Weekly Review On-line News Paper lol ;) It wil also publish and keep track of everything that happens with our twitter accounts so it's an interesting way to keep a watch on our business if you only want to check us out once a week.
In conclusion
I do hope this little blurb of mine will be helpful to our customers in the understanding of why I've diversified our on-line presence and also why some things such as the Facebook group may change in the near future so as to keep things fresh and moving rather than letting the CHEESE GO MOULDY. Also I do hope that anyone who run's there own small local business can learn for some of the topics I've covered in this blog and effectively market their product or service better using social media. It has been our 100% source of marketing for about 12 months now and it has worked very effectively for us. As my father tells me I've more than earned my wages by just doing what I do on-line for him. Yet to be honest I don't feel like I do much work at all lol it's more like messing around on the internet creating content that is related to my eccentric and entertaining father, which isn't like work at all really lol :) Not every business has a Deccie Lucey to turn into a internet personality. But every business has something that they can make a unique selling point and thus get that point across for free on social media.
I do hope this helps.
Best Regards
Kevin @ Deccie's Done Deal
P.S. Don't forget to Join this blog or follow it via e-mail, the options or in the side bar on the right. But please if you could, share this blog on facebook from time to time it really helps us stay in business. The share button is found at the top of the right hand side-bar.
THANK YOU
Facebook had change a lot since the last time I was using it (I deleted my first personal account lol) But I first started posting again on Deccie's profile with the hopes of getting the word out about the correct location of our new shop. Then people started adding him to these buy & sell groups on facebook and I remembered that I had actually set one up for Deccie back at the end of 2008 but never did anything with it.
So I started adding all Deccie's friends to the group and posting pictures of our stock on the group wall about this time last year. What a success that turn out to be, we now have 3126+/- members in our group (give or take a few). As the numbers increased so did the amount of people trying to turn our shop customer group into a typical buy & sell group. So in the end I had to make the decision to turn off allowing all members to post on the group wall :(
This was a hard decision to make because it was so easy to communicate with the members on the wall of the group and so many of our customers were so kind as to post comments about the fantastic deals they got from my father and it really help establish our on-line credibility with our group members. But sometimes the cons out weigh the pros and the group became to hard to manage so the settings got set to Admins only for commenting on the wall.
The group grew to near the 3000 members mark very quickly but over time it stopped growing fast and slowed down in general and I noticed that as many new members that we gained we also lost just as many, kind of like having a whole in your bucket lol. This is because in the beginning I was focused on numbers and our members were so kind to help out by adding all there friends. But guess what? most of there friends were not interested in Second Hand Furniture! So they simply left the group or never visited the group and eventually Facebook knocked them out of the group because of inactivity.
New Focus
Now I'm more focused on people who actually want to be members of the group rather than looking to make it grow fast, now I'm letting it grow organically. Another thing to consider is that there is only so much furniture that anyone one house can actually hold so we are always looking for more people who do have a need for furniture but the last thing we want to do is annoy people who have no interest. We can't keep selling to the same people forever coz our products are not consumable. Although I do know some people who have children who like to eat furniture but that is a rabbit trail I'm not going to go down lol (my little fella is teething lol)
One thing that has occurred to me over the last year is that maybe I made a big mistake put so much effort into our group because of the many draw back of the group platform on Facebook and also because Facebook themselves don't want businesses running groups and may some day decide to shut the group down without ever even asking me.
Who Moved My Cheese?
If you have never read the book "Who Moved My Cheese" the I would suggest you go out and buy it right now off Amazon and read it. It's something that is also well worth reading to your children and I can guarantee they will get it right away.
This is a quick Synopsis
Allegorically, Who Moved My Cheese? features four characters: two mice, "Sniff" and "Scurry," and two littlepeople, miniature humansin essence, "Hem" and "Haw." They live in a maze, a representation of one's environment, and look for cheese, representative of happiness and success. Initially without cheese, each group, the mice and humans, paired off and traveled the lengthy corridors searching for cheese. One day both groups happen upon a cheese-filled corridor at "Cheese Station C". Content with their find, the humans establish routines around their daily intake of cheese, slowly becoming arrogant in the process.
One day Sniff and Scurry arrive at Cheese Station C to find no cheese left, but they are not surprised. Noticing the cheese supply dwindling, they have mentally prepared beforehand for the arduous but inevitable task of finding more cheese. Leaving Cheese Station C behind, they begin their hunt for new cheese together. Later that day, Hem and Haw arrive at Cheese Station C only to find the same thing, no cheese. Angered and annoyed, Hem demands, "Who moved my cheese?" The humans have counted on the cheese supply to be constant, and so are unprepared for this eventuality. After deciding that the cheese is indeed gone they get angry at the unfairness of the situation and both go home starved. Returning the next day, Hem and Haw find the same cheeseless place. Starting to realize the situation at hand, Haw thinks of a search for new cheese. But Hem is dead set in his victimized mindset and dismisses the proposal.
Meanwhile, Sniff and Scurry have found "Cheese Station N", new cheese. Back at Cheese Station C, Hem and Haw are affected by their lack of cheese and blame each other for their problem. Hoping to change, Haw again proposes a search for new cheese. However, Hem is comforted by his old routine and is frightened about the unknown. He knocks the idea again. After a while of being in denial, the humans remain without cheese. One day, having discovered his debilitating fears, Haw begins to chuckle at the situation and stops taking himself so seriously. Realizing he should simply move on, Haw enters the maze, but not before chiseling "If You Do Not Change, You Can Become Extinct" on the wall of Cheese Station C for his friend to ponder. Continue Reading OR Watch the Video!!!!
The Cheese Is Moving
You may have notice that a long time back I set up a proper shop page on facebook. Shop pages are much harder to grow than are groups but the thing about shop pages is that the people that actually find and like your page all on there own are actually people that are interested in your business. I did this back then because even after 6 months of promoting the Deccie's Done Deal Facebook group, I could see that the amount of cheese available from the group would eventually dry up unless I spent a lot of time and effort continually working hard to keep people adding new members to the group from there friends list even if those people have no interest in second hand furniture, in the hopes that something might catch their attention.
You also may have noticed that I've continually been adding more and more social media networks and content to our portfolio of internet marketing outlets. This is because many years ago I read the book who moved my cheese and have learned from experience that hemming and hawing never works and I decided to always shiff and scurry lol.
New Cheese
The first bit of NEW CHEESE I added to our portfolio was youtube and it is a really effective tool for getting your message out there and I plan on making more video adverts in the near future, as soon as I get my fast PC on the go again. It packed in on me just before the January , which just go's to show that having a diversified means of marketing your products or serves is very important you never know what might happen just around the next bend in the maze.
Then I added this blog on blogspot which is a very dynamic and easy to work, easy to run FREE website. It's a dynamic way to keep our customers up to date about everything that is happening with our little enterprise and to be honest it's something that I love doing. The web site is my little pet project, even thinking of what to blog about is something I find fun and interesting and the process of putting it all together and pressing publish is exciting.
The proper Facebook business page is now also starting to gather momentum with more people liking it every day. We are now at 379 likes without me even trying to push for more likes with like and share comps ect.... Facebook recently added the PAGE FEED SECTION on the left side of your Home Feed page so it is now much easier to keep watch on your favourite businesses & community pages. I find myself spending more time looking at the PAGE FEED than I do the Home Feed because the content is what I have chosen and like rather than what my friends like and post on Facebook.
On top of the slow change of focus towards the PAGE rather than the Group I have also added lots of accounts on buy & sell websites such as Gumtree.ie, Adverts.ie ect.. and I have started posting those adds to our PAGE so if you follow those like you can get the prices of the items we have for sale without having to ask "How Much" which I know some people find quite annoying, but again because of the nature of the group platform it was a necessary evil to creates activity on the group which keeps the group alive and members coming back. I'm trying to upload the best stock we get in ever before I upload anything to our group so as to give the people who like our PAGE first notice that nice new stock has arrived. So if your not after liking OUR PAGE you had better sniff us out and if you see something that looks like cheese to you then scurry over and get to it fast before someone else snaps it up.
Find us on Yelp.ie
"Yelp (NYSE: YELP) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp communities have taken root in major metros across the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Singapore, Poland and Turkey. Yelp had a monthly average of 86 million unique visitors in Q4 2012*. By the end of Q4 2012, Yelpers had written more than 36 million rich, local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. Yelp's mobile application was used on 9.2 million unique mobile devices on a monthly average basis during Q4 2012. For more information, please visit http://www.yelp.com/ or send an email to press@yelp.com."
Deccie's Done Deal joined yelp just over a week ago and we have already received two reviews. So if you have ever been a customer of ours and would like to review our business then this is a great place to do it and it would be a great help to our business if you gave us your endorsement on yelp.
I have also listed our business on several other business directory's such as Yalwa.ie and Tuugo.info and already we have received many hits from google searches because of these listings. If your running a small local business then every little bit of free advertising you can get counts at the end of the month so I would suggest you also use these very effective free tools that are available on the internet to get your message across. In this financial climate every little helps and all it cost you is a bit of time. But once you start creating the content that describes your business it's just a case of copying and pasting that content into other platforms.
Other Social Media Outlets I'm playing with!
I have connected Deccie's Twitter account to his personal Facebook page and I connected my own Twitter account to my own personal facebook page. But as of yet we don't have two many people following us on Twitter which is why I sometimes post on Twitter which shows up on our facebook's so that anyone who is a twitter addict might decide to follow us on Twitter instead of facebook. It's all about having as many ways to communicate with as wide an audience as possible as cheep as possible. As I've said already these tools are free so why not use them :)
Printest is a new platform I'm only kind of getting my head around and I haven't figured out yet how I might take advantage of it in regards to getting our message across but I'm sure I'll come up with something interesting in the near future.
Paper.li is the newest string I've added to our bow only last night and it is an amazingly interesting and powerful marketing tool that I'm also only getting my head around and figuring out how to use properly but even with that said I still managed to publish our first weekly on-line News Paper last night that features a few of the pages from this blog as it's main articles. so if you fancy reading everything I publish on this blog alongside more professional articles about furniture related topic then you can subscribe to Deccie's Done Deal Weekly Review On-line News Paper lol ;) It wil also publish and keep track of everything that happens with our twitter accounts so it's an interesting way to keep a watch on our business if you only want to check us out once a week.
In conclusion
I do hope this little blurb of mine will be helpful to our customers in the understanding of why I've diversified our on-line presence and also why some things such as the Facebook group may change in the near future so as to keep things fresh and moving rather than letting the CHEESE GO MOULDY. Also I do hope that anyone who run's there own small local business can learn for some of the topics I've covered in this blog and effectively market their product or service better using social media. It has been our 100% source of marketing for about 12 months now and it has worked very effectively for us. As my father tells me I've more than earned my wages by just doing what I do on-line for him. Yet to be honest I don't feel like I do much work at all lol it's more like messing around on the internet creating content that is related to my eccentric and entertaining father, which isn't like work at all really lol :) Not every business has a Deccie Lucey to turn into a internet personality. But every business has something that they can make a unique selling point and thus get that point across for free on social media.
I do hope this helps.
Best Regards
Kevin @ Deccie's Done Deal
P.S. Don't forget to Join this blog or follow it via e-mail, the options or in the side bar on the right. But please if you could, share this blog on facebook from time to time it really helps us stay in business. The share button is found at the top of the right hand side-bar.
THANK YOU
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