Facebook members

[MinUph]

  It never fails to amuse me the responses I see on places like facebook by so called professionals. Some are good some are like *^%&"what"! Where do people come up with these words of wisdom?
  I know everyone has to learn, but.
  Oh well nuff said.

[byhammerandhand]

There is a wood finishing expert who spent most of his writing career trying to undo  the myths and wrong information.   He has a half-right rule: "Half of what you hear about wood finishing is true.   The problem is knowing which half."

I  think he is paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln who said, "Half of what you read on the internet is true."

[mike802]

I have two facebook pages, a personal one and a profession one.  Mostly by mistake, I only wanted a profession one but did'nt know how to make it and ended up with a personal one, from their I made the profession one.  I keep the professional one only about upholstery and woodworking, mostly what I have done, or am up to.  In all reality, I can't stand facebook!  I haven't updated my professional one lately and I try really hard to not post on my personal one, but some of the stupid sh#% I see on facebook makes it really hard not to.  But I know there are people out there who think the stuff I post is stupid sh#%!  The joy of social media, best to just stay away, unless you really like cute kitty videos!

[sofadoc]

The upholstery groups on FB have a very diverse membership, ranging from the DIY hobbyist all the way to the consummate professionals.

Personally, I enjoy that diversity more. There are only about a dozen or so keeping this forum going, and we've all asked, answered, and commented everything to death. Gene, Paul, Chris, Ed, the 2 Mikes, Steve, Keith, Darren, Doyle, and a few others whose names escape me at the moment (don't mean to leave anyone out)..........we're all just "Preachin' to the choir".

Ironically, I kinda miss the days when this forum had more than it's share of knuckleheads.

[byhammerandhand]

Knuckelheads, eh?   Why I otta...

Not sure that any of you know what I look like, except for Gene, who is within a few miles of me and we visit regularly.   I'm on the right, Gene is in the center.

[gene]

I remember having that picture taken. Keith asked me to take off my glass, suck in my cheeks so I wouldn't look so fat, and try to look intelligent.  :o

What do cigarettes and squirrels have in common? They both will kill you if you put them in your mouth and light them on fire.

gene

[kodydog]

Speaking of facebook and cigarettes, I just had a friend post that her friend said if she could get 7 comments and 15 likes she would quit smoking. Would I be out of line if I posted gene's cigarette - squirrel comment to her page?

[gene]

Would I be out of line if I posted gene's cigarette - squirrel comment to her page?

Anyone who would quit smoking for 7 comments and 15 likes on Facebook, but is unwilling to quit smoking to improve the quality and length of their own life and the lives of those around them, well, I'm not sure that they being offended by a squirrel joke would be something I would worry about.

And anyway, what could they do? Call you a knucklehead on some other forum?  :)

My brother-in-law smokes 2 packs of cigarettes a day. He told us a few months ago that if he quit smoking he would kill people. I told him that I would think that if I were out killing people I would want to smoke - I hear it calms your nerves and gives you more energy. (I was trying to show him the absurdity of his justification for smoking.)

[kodydog]

That's funny. I worked with a guy that said his grandpa smoked 2 packs a day. One day he quit cold turkey. 2 months later he died. My friend swore that because he stopped smoking his heart couldn't handle it. I figured the old man found out something was was terribly wrong and tried a last ditch effort.

[kodydog]

Started to listen to a webinar yesterday called Harness The Power Of Facebook. The host said 60% of new customers interact with a business on the internet at least once before they make a purchase decision.

62% of these people use Facebook
12% use Pinterest
11% use Twitter
9% use instagram

She also said people who use Facebook check it hourly

June 29th Facebook updated its algorithms and posts that are considered overly promotional get less exposure.
1. Posts with the sole purpose of pushing people to buy a product. Call to action words like "call now" or "last chance" are examples.
2. Posts that push people to promotions, giveaways or contests.
3. Posts that reuse the same content from ads.

She then went on to say the way to counteract this was to spend money to boost your posts.

My problem is I have never gotten a new customer from Facebook. I mostly use it to keep in touch with old customers and show them my latest project and the occasional teachable moment. I just get this feeling that money spent to boost my posts would be wasted.

Anybody have a different experience?

[mike802]

Most of my facebook fans are past customers, I have never had someone tell me they stopped in because they saw my facebook page.  But I have had plenty of people stop in, or send me jobs because of my YouTube Channel.

[Mojo]

I have a consultant that we work with on internet business strategies. Whatever she says we do. We have a twitter and facebook account but mainly for boosting our google search ranking. I do not understand it myself but basically your ranking is a combination of a lot of different things. She has run analytics on our site numerous times and found problems. She went in and fixed keywords on our website which really helped our ranking.

With that said, our business is 98 % internet driven. Without the internet we would have closed our doors a long time ago. We keep track of how customers come to us or " find us " and it is predominantly from RV forum sites such as this forum.

It seems that when word gets out, things snowball from there. I am not going to get into numbers but we are doing very well and sales have exceeded my expectations by a lot. I just ran our sales numbers for July and we doubled our revenue and JUly typically sucks for revenue. As our sales increase, so does the number of customers who go onto these forums and tout our product line. Like I said it is like a big snowball ..... once it gets rolling it really starts picking up steam.

I always was able to manage and control our growth in the past and controlling growth in our business is something you want to do in the early stages to maintain quality and reliability. But I have to admit that I can no longer manage our growth cycles like before. It is coming in waves and nearly overwhelms us at times and I do not like it one bit. I prefer being able to control growth but you learn to accept it and scramble to stay on top of things. It scares me at times as I have seen small companies like ours go under because they got busy and quality suffered and things fell through the cracks.

What is strange is this July was the busiest month we have ever had from our dealer network and we seem to be adding more service centers and dealers every month. This is a big problem if not managed right so we are being very picky on who we take on as dealers who sell our products.
We make up sample books with color codes and then teach them how to market and upsell our products.

In  the end it is all good but this internet thing is a tough one to figure out. That is why I rely on a consultant because everything is constantly changing and Google is changing their ranking system by the month.

I am sure Facebook and the internet is not a big issue for many here but for us, the internet is our lively hood. You have to remember we do less then 2 % of our business locally, 30 % inside Florida and the rest comes from all over the United States and Canada. This is why our presence on RV forums and in Google searches is so vital to our existence.

When I post on our facebook page or tweet on Twitter I know I am posting to a tiny audience and some of them are our friends and family. But, it backs the Google search engine rankings. We also have several companies ( Miami, Sattler, Recacril, Quality Thread ) who backs our tweets with re-tweets and mentions on their different different sites. Co-Op advertising really helps.

As for facebook alone, I doubt we have made one sale from anyone who has been to our page. :)

Chris

[kodydog]

Good points Chris. So even though it seems like my fb posts are not getting out there I should keep the content current? This will get my Web site page ranking higher when someone does a google search.

We updated our web page over a year ago and are always tweaking it and adding new photos and pages. About 8 months age I started claiming our business on a lot of the different business pages. Because our address changed 3 times in the last 2 years our info was wrong on many of these pages. And many of these pages make it near impossible to correct the content or they forward me to a site called Yext. Yext will correct all misinformation for a fee.

Our search ranking is slowly climbing higher. From page 3 to page 2. our biggest bump was when I claimed our Google for Business page. The bad thing about Google for Business is they will not let me show my business in other towns. Because our address is High Springs, when someone does a Google search for upholsterers in Gainesville we're not on the first page. And the upholsterers who are on the first page have sites that are not updated. One hit links you to a fb page that hasn't been updated for months. There are ways to get my ranking higher but it takes a lot of time. YP is the same. They will not let you advertise in other cities unless you upgrade for $$. All this pay for advertising could get very expensive. Sometimes it gets frustrating.

Our best internet advertising is with a site called Houzz (A page dedicated to the interior design industry.) They hit the first page every time with a tittle tag, "best upholsterers in Gainesville." And because we are the only upholsterer in Gainesville who advertises with them and we keep our Houzz page updated we are #1 on their page. We have picked up some good jobs from this page.

Like I said it takes a lot of time but about 3 months we started seeing the results of all this work. The jobs are flowing in steadily and when we ask, how did you hear about us a lot of people are saying, the internet..

[Mojo]

Kodydog:

I do not pretend to know much about the internet. I know Google is a big search engine that a lot of people use. They also frustrate the hell out of SEO experts because they are constantly changing their algorithms. These experts get it all figured out and Google then makes a change and their clients ratings go down. Google does this on purpose so people cannot game their search system.

My market is totally different from you and the rest here. To be honest, I sometimes wont post ideas because I am to afraid of leading someone astray with their own market. There is a huge difference between scaling a company locally and Nationally. I spent 30 years in marketing, advertising and public relations so it is a field I am very comfortable with. Give me a couch or chair to re-upholster and I would be lost.

I worked with a lot of Fortune 500 companies and was taught by experts. The one thing they always practiced was target marketing. In other words you identify your market, target it and then exploit it. This is how we have grown our company. I targeted our niche markets heavily and ignored a lot of what my competitors and were doing. My goal was to grow, scale and then take advantage of our competitors after we grew in size. In other words we designed our services around our customers needs and not what our competitors were doing. This practice has paid off very well for us.

I make it a practice not to advertise without first considering our ROI. The return on investment HAS to make sense. It has to be a home run for us or I wont consider it. I get constantly pestered by ad agencies and publications wanting to sell me ad's in RV publications. I refuse them all. Why ? Because believe it or not I can gain a much bigger ROI off referrals and internet forum mentions then I can off advertising. I also have been trying to operate in the shadows of our big competitors who are international and mega dollar companies.

It is no secret and I have mentioned it before on here. I targeted the influential and wealthy class of RV'ers from day one. I studied the demographics, paired that with our margins and knew it was the sector we needed to be in. This is why we use nothing but the very best fabric and thread we can get our hands on.

In some ways marketing and scaling a National company is easier then a local business. But that brings with it a whole new set of risks and headaches. If some of you have headaches competing locally with other stitchers, try competing with major corporations like Carefree, Girard, Lippert, Dometic, etc. These people could eat us for dinner and spit out our bones afterwards. We have never had a problem with any of them in the past as they considered us small potatoes. But since we are gaining market share we are now on their radar. They are paying closer attention to us which really add's considerable pressure on me. I cannot afford to make a mistake in marketing or with our business decisions because these vultures will trounce us and gobble us up.

I have days that I am very proud of what I have done with a little company that started in an enclosed trailer. But I also have days I would like to kick my own ass for ever expanding. The bigger you get, the bigger the headaches. I am at a stage where I would just as soon not grow anymore. But then it has never been my style to sit back and get comfortable and set the cruise control. :)

Chris

[Mojo]

Opp's, forgot to mention Ed, I think what your doing is smart. Target your market and find the way to reach it. Houzz is a great idea. I would look for more opportunities like that and start narrowing your focus.

I would also consider hitting some local shows. That is when business for us took off. I didn't care if I sold anything, I just wanted to get our name out there, shake hands and hand out cards.

Chris