Consider this: When potential customers look up your business online and see your Google Maps listing, they’re hit with a promotional ad for your services. Genius, right? Well, maybe.

This hypothetical can easily become a reality as Google Adwords recently extended their reach to include their Google Maps service. It’s time to gather your marketing team because with the right approach, there’s a lot of potential here for your business. However, while you’re doing that, you might want to gather your public relations team, too.

So, what could possibly go wrong? The short answer is: everything.

While there is nothing stopping you from running an ad, there is also nothing stopping a competitor from doing the same. Since this service runs on their auction-based ad network, the best you can do is to set your ad placement for Google Maps, add the appropriate keywords and hope for the best. Strangely enough, all Google Maps listings are fair game – including memorials.

That said, if a competitor has a higher quality score, more relevance and a high bid, they’re going to appear in the ad spot under your listing. Imagine owning a small, local bookstore and having Amazon.com advertise on your listing – this is now possible. Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be much that you can do about it (there is speculation that Google will allow you to pay them to remove unwanted ads, but nothing is in place yet). The first shots of reputation warfare are already echoing on the internet.

Blumenthals.com compiled a series of screenshots showing the new ads in action, including a completely tasteless advertisement for a tour company on the 9/11 Memorial listing.

Overall, from the small and medium-sized business owner, this service feels like a huge miss. It seems that the real winners will be Google (who will get your Adwords dollars) and large businesses that have the resources to advertise on your business listings.

What time of day should I post? How long should my status messages be? Is it okay to ask followers to like something?

These are just a few of the question that every page administrator faces daily. There are a lot of “best practices” floating around out there that helps with these inquiries, however, there isn’t a whole lot of data to back them up … until now.

The people over at Momentus Media analyzed the top 20,000 Facebook pages to find out which posting techniques really work and placed their findings online for the entire world to see. For each analysis, they dissected 10,000 – 250,000 posts to find out exactly what drives interaction, and more importantly, how to replicate it.

1. When is the best time to post something?
Weekends and off-peak hours. Most posts are made during the week with the greatest number of posts on Thursdays and the lowest number of posts on the weekends. The engagement graph looks exactly the opposite. The more posts that are out there, the lower the interaction rate is going to be. Want the best chance at being heard and engaged? Post when other people are not.

2. How many times per day should I post?
As many times as you want. Not surprisingly, the more often you post, the more interactions you can expect. Keep in mind that some people may perceive posting more than 3 times a day as being “spammy.” Unsubscription rates rise as page admins post twice or three times a day, however, these rates tend to level off at higher frequencies. Here’s the bottom line: Post as often as you like, just be sure to keep a close eye on your subscribers.

3. What type of content elicits the most interaction?
#1 Photos. #2 Statuses. Fact: Photos generate 200% more interaction than links. The most shared content type on Facebook is links (which also happens to be the most ignored content type). Photos obviously have a visual draw and connect to people on an emotional level. Starving for some quick interaction? Try posting a photo.

4. Should I ask fans to like and comment on my posts?
Yes! Asking fans to like increases interaction 216% It’s not uncommon to see posts asking for comments or likes. There’s a reason for this: it works. Simply asking your audience to like your post can significantly boost your interaction rate. Asking them to comment produces slightly higher engagement than a post without a call-to-action. The takeaway? Be shameless and ask for a like!

5. Should I ask my fans questions?
Questions don’t increase interaction rate, but they do increase commenting rate. Ask fans to answer your questions with a comment. It’s thought that being conversational and asking questions on Facebook would increase your interaction rate. Ends up that question and non-question posts have about the same interaction rate (the sum of the number of likes and comments, divided by the number of page likes at the time of publishing). If you simply post a question, you’ll have about the same interaction rate as you would if you posted a fact. However, if you post a question and ask that people comment on it, you’ll find that your number of comments will go up!

6. How long should my status messages be?
Long or short. There is no found correlation between length and interaction rate. There’s a slight uptick in interaction as Facebook posts get longer, but it’s not enough to base your strategy on. Post however much or however little as you like – people don’t seem to care.

7. How long do my posts last in the newsfeed?
50% of clicks happen within 1 hour. 90% happen within 9 hours. It’s hard to say how long posts last in the newsfeed. It depends on how many people are in your feed as well as the frequency at which they are posting. However, the data shows that the majority of the clicks that an update will receive happens within the first hour of posting. After two hours, you start to see a gradual decline in interaction. Remember that posting during off-peak times increases your chances of being seen.

by Daniel Hadaway

It really is an inevitability: At some point in the life of your business there is bound to be someone who has a bad thing or two to say about your company. Even if you always do everything right, someone isn’t going to like you, and they’ll be determined to tell the world about it.

More often than not, the first place people go when they have something negative to say about a company these days is Twitter. Of course, they do this because all of their friends are on Twitter, but they also do this because they know your company is most likely on Twitter too!

Twitter (and social media at a higher level) have become the main medium for expressing dissatisfaction with a company or brand. So you need to be prepared to deal with the negative posts when they start showing up. Here are a couple of ideas for how to do that:

Address the issue in private, and ask the poster to remove the negative post.

Finding a way to address a customer’s complaint via the medium he or she used to express that complaint can do a lot to solve negative feedback. Doing this says “We’re paying attention to you and your criticism and will meet you where you are to resolve this for you.”

Once you’ve resolved the issue, it may be appropriate to ask the person to remove the negative post. This should only be done when you perceive the original post to contain factual inaccuracies or exaggerations about your business. The idea is not to erase the incident from existence, but to ensure the truth is being told about your brand. If someone says “I came to XY Restaurant yesterday and my sandwich was horrible”, you should leave it be.

In situations like the one above where it is not appropriate to ask someone to remove a negative post, you should encourage him or her to create a second post, highlighting the positive outcome and how you addressed their complaint. In the above scenario it may be “Big thanks to XY Restaurant for contacting me and giving me 2 free lunches in the future, in order to make it up to me!”

Many times addressing the issue directly can turn a negative into an eve bigger positive!

Provide an alternative location for customers to voice complaints.

It never hurts to attempt to prevent a negative comment from being posted about your brand in the first place. Create a page on your site, and link to it from your social media profiles, that is dedicated to accepting critiques and feedback from your customers.

Many times this will be enough to encourage the customer to communicate via this direct channel as opposed to a public social media post.

Of course, once you receive the negative feedback via this page/form, make sure to address it! Customer service is still important to your customers and your business, so don’t neglect it!

One thing to never do: Get into a public argument.

The last thing you want as a brand is have your audience become polarized by a public battle with a disgruntled customer. Avoid confrontation in public like (insert scary disease here)! No one wants to see that in their social media feed and it won’t turn out good for you, no matter what!

Negative critiques of your business will eventually happen. It’s important to keep an eye on what’s being said about your brand and stay proactive! Stay on top social media platforms and communities and remember: Your reputation exists whether you choose to control it or not!

While most companies would love to show up higher in search-engines, can you imagine a situation where showing up first on Google is a bad thing?

This blog has an interesting article about a client that had this exact issue. Google was suggesting the company’s brand name + the word ’scam’ in their suggested results.

How would you feel about a company if when you typed in their name, the word ’scam’ was added to the brand name and suggested by Google?

While this function of Google is certainly useful for finding companies that truly ARE scams (and avoiding them), what happens when Google gets it wrong? Or more importantly: why is Google getting it wrong in the first place?

Let’s get this out of the way first: no one has a definitive answer about why Google gets it wrong sometimes. Google is very secretive about the algorithms and methods it employs to serve up search results, as well as suggested searches. However, there are two ideas floating about among search-intellectuals that may provide some insight:

1. There aren’t that many people searching for “brand name + scam” at first- but maybe just enough are searching for that term to make it appear low in the suggested results. Once it appears, people’s curiosity gets the better of them and they click just to see what’s out there. The user thinks “If Google is suggesting it’s a scam, I should at least check it out.”
2. Another, much-less fleshed-out hypothesis, is that Google is simply biased to serve up “scam”-related suggestions.

Neither of these seem to fully explain what’s going on, but that’s okay, because there is a simple solution.

While you can’t do much to remove any negative content on the web about your brand, you can make sure there’s plenty of positive content that is easily found by search engines. In fact, Google recommends this method for dealing with negative search results about a brand. It may not be immediate, but publishing positive content about your brand across the web, and then using SEO best-practices is a great way to push the negative search results further down the list, and keep your new positive article at the top of the list (and the top of your customers’ minds).

Consider implementing an online reputation management strategy, or at least a basic content strategy for your brand. Even if you aren’t experiencing any negative press or search-engine-woes, consistently publishing well-written, positive, and relevant content to the web is a great way to improve your off-page SEO. And if Google ever does suggest a negative term related to your brand, you’ll be ready!

While we aren’t purporting to have a magic wand that will solve all of those challenges, we did recently gain insight into an interesting study that shows not only where effective PR is taking place, but also where great marketing is taking place.

Read on to find out where…

A recent study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60 percent of Facebook users and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they are fans of or following on those networks. What does that mean?

It means you need to develop and implement a Facebook and Twitter strategy today… Like, now. Don’t wait!

It doesn’t matter if you’re a tire dealership, a day spa, or a law firm- you can benefit from actively participating in social media. Millions of companies are already doing it, and their bottom line is increasing as a direct result.

A word of warning though: Don’t just start a Twitter account and post one update, then forget about it. Social media works best as a long term strategy. Not only that, but if your social media plan (you do have a plan, right?) only includes Twitter, then you’re missing out on most of the benefits of social media.

In upcoming blogs we’ll discuss the key components to an effective social media strategy, as well as methods for developing your goals for your social media plan. Until then, why not break out the calculator and see how your business would benefit from a 79 percent increase in brand loyalty?