News for y’all!

Tomorrow is Friday. And our offices are closed. Guess you could call it a pretty Good Friday for us.

Anyway, the reason we’re telling you this is that there won’t be any Daily Carnage tomorrow. Sorry! We’ll miss you, but we’ll be back better than ever on Monday.

– The Carnage Crew

We can’t say enough about Facebook Groups. They’re a really easy way to build a community around your brand, your industry, your product, or whatever you want.

But, there’s surprisingly a ton to learn about building and managing a Facebook Group. That’s where Josh Stanton fits in. He runs a number of Facebook Groups. He even makes people pay for access to some of them! That’s a wild idea.

Anyway, if you’re interested in building a group for your company, take a listen to today’s podcast. Or just read our transcript:

• (06:30) Josh has talked to a number of popular Facebook Group owners.
• (07:08) There are two ways to run a Facebook Group—as a branding play or as a place for engagement. For engagement, Group owners should remove people who don’t regularly participate in the Group.
• (09:53) Numbers are important but engagement is more important for the success of your Group.
• (11:36) Anyone who enters your Group should be viewed as a potential customer.
• (12:01) The growth of your Group is very highly dependent on the engagement of your Group.
• (12:35) If you want people to find your Group through Facebook search, make sure your Group’s title and description has relevant keywords in it.
• (15:39) Remember to welcome new members in a post and tag them in it. It’s an easy way to start getting people engaged.
• (16:30) Josh makes people answer 3 questions before joining the group. The first is, “Do you agree to our rules?” (with a link to their rules)
• (16:47) The second questions asks where they live in the world.
• (17:12) The third asks how interested they are in learning more about a product that Josh’s company sells.
• (17:28) These questions help Josh determine if people are going to engage and if they’re potential customers.
• (19:55) Surprisingly, Josh found that Facebook Live doesn’t work well for his group.

Take the jump for all of Josh’s insight →

P.S. We have a Facebook Group. Ask to join!

Well, are ya?! Social media monitoring, AKA social listening, is crazy crucial to your brand or business. If/when your customers (and potential customers) are talking about you on social media, then you can engage with them. You can provide customer support, measure social media reach, and understand social media trends. 

You could do this all manually via notifications and search. But that’s tedious and, quite frankly, you’re better than that. It’s 2018, y’all. Instead, strap some social media monitoring tools in your toolbelt!

Today’s Read has a whole slew of some super great ones.

Let’s get crackin’:

• Buffer Reply organizes your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram engagement into threaded conversations in one team inbox. You’ll have the info you need to know about each customer to provide personalized responses.
  
• Zoho Social is a social media management dashboard where you can publish and schedule posts, monitor social activities, analyze your social media performance. Get real-time updates of how people are interacting with your brand.
• Mention monitors more than social media but also mentions of your brand across the web, such as on Yelp, Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and Amazon.
• Social Mention is a free social media search engine for user-generated content across the web. You can find and measure what people are saying about your brand and products on places such as Twitter, YouTube, and blogs.
• Keyhole provides trends, insights, and analysis of your preferred hashtags, keywords, or accounts, instead of finding individual mentions of your brand. This makes it better for gathering data and reporting results than replying your social media mentions.
• TweetDeck is the official Twitter management dashboard, where you can manage multiple
• Iconosquare is one of the most popular Instagram analytics and management platforms. Along with robust analytics and management features, it offers custom feeds so you can monitor specific Instagram content.
• Tailwind is specifically for Pinterest and Instagram. Apart from its scheduling and analytics features, it allows you to monitor your content and your competitors. It also provides info about emerging trends so that you can tap into them.

A bunch more inside →

Remember when science projects involved tri-fold poster board? Papier-mâché volcanos? Experiments about long it takes bread to mold or a tooth to rot in soda? This writer remembers.

Seems like kids these days are taking it up a notch. Or, at least in Apple’s world they are.

In their latest ad promoting the iPad, Apple is focusing on education. Specifically, how a diverse group of young students uses their iPads (presumably the school’s), to complete their science presentation.

They exuberantly embark on a weekend-long experiment about gravity. You can imagine all the things they drop from the sky. They film jumps, splatters, and bounces, measure trajectory, and doodle, all on the iPads. Countless laughs included. It’s a real bonding experience for the kids.

Little do they know, that once they get to college, group projects are the freakin’ worst.