A Tour of Facebook's Local App for Events

Greetings everybody, and happy early Thanksgiving. Welcome to the Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, and we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about myself and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI Online at poweredbywsi.com. I am flying solo today. My good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins— my tongue's not working— Mr. Jeff Simpkins is unavailable, but we're gonna do an abbreviated show. And if you'd like to learn more about Jeff and all the cool stuff he does over at Community Bank Consulting, hop over to the website with the same name, communitybankconsulting.com, and hit him up. Today we're going to talk a little bit about a couple of the newer things that Facebook has introduced, and I caught wind and I've actually started playing with the app myself, Facebook's new Local app. And an interesting, I guess, an interesting play from Facebook's perspective in a variety of different areas. And if you're a business or an organization that organizes events, This is one that you're definitely going to want to know is out there and available and how you might be able to use this or maybe even think of additional ways to create events that you can use to promote. And if you're a user of Facebook, and practically everybody on the planet is these days it seems like, the Events app local gives you some pretty cool ways of exploring what's going on around you, especially if you live in an area That's got a lot of people. Sometimes if you're in a rural area, there might be not— there might not be a whole lot going on. But if you live in metropolitan areas or you're going to be taking a trip and going someplace and you want to see what events are going on, there's some really cool things that that local app now can do for us. So we'll dive in here in just a second. I've got a little screen sharing app that I have installed from my Android phone. We'll see how well this works. It has been crashing on me occasionally when I was doing some testing. So hopefully we can get it to work consistently. But we'll give you some screenshots of how things are set up in the local app and some ideas. Before we kick things off even more so than what we already have, just want to remind everybody that this episode and all episodes are being recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So if you'd like to share today's discussion with a friend or colleague or coworker or anybody else, feel free to go ahead and point them there. And if you have questions, comments, and you are attending the session live, please feel free to use the chat functionality for your GoToWebinar control panel and post your note in there, and I'll keep an eye on that. And if you want to ask a question or get clarification on something, you certainly can do that. So I'm suspecting a majority of you probably have heard or maybe even attended an event promoted through Facebook by a business or an organization. That's a pretty easy thing to do where you can go and create those, give them a date, a place, a start and end time if you want. You can upload a picture so it can show up in the header area of, of the event when you're promoting it and sending it out. But as Facebook continues to push down the organic visibility for business pages, this is one of the ways that you can maybe get around that if you've got an event that you're promoting, uh, it can show up here. And this really isn't impacted by the Facebook algorithm. Um, if you're not familiar with that, there's an algorithm that Facebook uses to control what shows up in your newsfeed when you visit it as an individual user. And a vast majority of business pages are not included in that algorithm because Facebook knows you want to see information and updates from friends and family, not necessarily business promotions or, or content from business pages, even if you may have already gone out and clicked the like button on those. So with the Events app, let me go ahead, I'm going to pull over my phone here and see how this works. Going to get a resize so you all get to meet Lily. So there's Lily the Wonder Dog. So on my phone, I've got a social media, I guess, group, quite a few little icons in there. But if I go over to the local, this is the new one that I just added. When you load it up for the first time, you're going to be— you can see down here kind of on the home screen, it identifies my location being in the Battle Creek, Michigan area. And there's the lovely little— so we'll hopefully push through that. And as the app fades on me, I'll just go ahead and relaunch it. But it's going to automatically— gosh darn it. It's going to automatically grab information for your local area. And if you're traveling someplace, you can always go in and you can change this. So if you're going to be going to Chicago, you can go ahead and push that into Chicago, and that's going to give me a whole lot more events than what I'm going to see in the Battle Creek area. And then you can roll through and you can see just different items. So you've got the restaurants, cafes, if you're looking to go out for drinks, specific events, even guides for people that are looking. So if you're looking to go For health and fitness, you can see here's some information that's kind of been tailored. But if I go into Chicago now and I go and I click on the middle button, which is kind of the explore item, you can see that this loads up a map and it has by default today. But if I'm really interested in saying, well, I wonder what's going on this weekend because maybe I'm traveling in Chicago this weekend, I'm going to be there Saturday, Sunday, it automatically sorts things. You can go ahead and zoom in. So if you're going to be you know, closer to the downtown area over by maybe Navy Pier, you can get an idea. And if you're looking for a particular time, whether it's during the day, evening, or maybe a late night, and then you can scroll through this top part right here. So you can go, if you're interested in going out for drinks or maybe some film-related or a comedy club, you can see all the different items that are going on here. And if we just take a stab and let's say there's any comedy-related events going on, and we want to be able to pick something in the evening. Now you can see that there's a couple of events, and then we can pick this one. So now there's a Dinner Detective show that's going to be going on. So I can cancel that, and I can go back in here. I can scroll back down and see what that is. So now here's an event, The Second City. And so kind of a cool little thing. And then from here, I can go in, I can join this, I can click on the little star and I can favorite that, I can forward it to a friend and maybe invite some other people. And then you can also browse through with, you know, the calendar item as well. So you can kind of see what's going on. So if I wanted to scroll down, see if there's anything happening, again, not a whole lot going on in my area and I did set some filters there so I can Turn comedy off. If I go back to my homepage and, and go back in, it's gonna redraw the map for me, hopefully. Come on, redraw the map for me. Let's go ahead and we'll go back. We'll change it. Let's see what goes on in Marshall, Michigan. There we go. So now I can go to my hometown and I can see what's going on this weekend in Marshall that's happening in the evenings or at any time. So now that certainly adds more options. If I dug in, I'd probably find the farmers market going on over the weekend, some stuff going on at the local Moose Club. So you've got a business and you're interested in promoting an event, You can go into your business page, you can create an event. Doesn't have to have a physical location, although the whole intent around this is to create local events that have a physical location. So if somebody picks Chicago or Marshall or Battle Creek or Atlanta, you'll be able to see exactly what's going on there. You've also got some other filtering capabilities where you can actually filter directly from here too. So, and do some additional searching. So might be an interesting way to promote your events. And I know a lot of organizations, for example, a lot of banks that we work with, they'll do like holiday can drives or, you know, Toys for Tots, or they'll collect, you know, coats or mittens. You could create an event that reoccurs. Maybe you're doing that for the 2 weeks leading up to Christmas. You could actually create an event that reoccurs every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at your office. And it runs from 9 o'clock to 5 o'clock in your office lobby. You've provided the address just so if somebody's going in, they'd be able to see your bank location. They'd know that there's an event going on. They might click on it to see what's happening. And then maybe learn a little bit more, and maybe they'll come into the office. Maybe they'll bring some stuff that you can use for your holiday efforts. And of course, good opportunity if you're bringing people in. And there the app stopped again. Gotta love it. So I gotta find— anybody out there has got a recommendation for a good way of sharing an Android screen on a Mac computer, go ahead and feel free to shoot me a note. I'm all ears. But this will give you the ability to promote your event and be able to be Seeing is more and more people are starting to use the service. So if you've not played with it, I suggest that you do. It's kind of cool. A couple of other things that have happened over in the world of Facebook that I just wanted to kind of drag your attention towards so that you can maybe see what's going on there is Facebook's Messenger program, which seems like every social networking platform these days has some sort of messaging capability where it wants you to talk to other people on its own network. And so Messenger tends to be one of the more popular ones just because there's so many people on Facebook. Of course, Facebook also owns WhatsApp, which is also a very popular messaging tool, but they recently announced that they are going to allow businesses— and it's in a closed beta for right now— they're going to allow businesses the capability of adding Messenger as a plugin for business websites. And so you can see an idea of, of kind of how this works, where you'll have a little Messenger icon. And many of us, uh, have probably been to websites where you've got the little chat head down here in the bottom right-hand corner, which is powered by maybe 2 or 3 of the popular chat software platforms. And if you want to have a conversation, you can click on it and it just gives you a little chat bubble that pops up. Facebook is now making this available. And a couple of the things that I think are different with this is if you're logged into Facebook on a computer, Facebook knows that it's really Eric Cook because I'm logged into my Facebook account as Eric Cook. Now when I initiate a chat request, there's no requirement for the chat person on the other end, you as the business owner, to say, you know, please give me your name, because somebody would basically start the chat. And if I started a chat They would see that it's Eric Cook because that's who I'm logged into Messenger as, that's how I would use it. It doesn't mean that you're guaranteeing identity. So, you know, again, back to my primary market area in the banking and financial services sector, this is one that I can see banks being somewhat on the fence on because one is you're using chat by a third-party service like Facebook to interact with visitors to your website. So you would want to be very clear and conspicuous that this is not an official bank channel. You don't want customers sharing account number information or sensitive personal data. But from a general questions perspective, if somebody got on and they wanted to know, are you guys going to be closing early for Thanksgiving? Or what are your holiday hours? Or I need the bank's routing and transit number. Anything that you can answer without having to worry about verifying the person's identity. If somebody says, you know, what's the balance in my checking account, you would of course direct them to the appropriate channel and say, you know, for security reasons we need you to give us a call, or that information is available through our online banking service, something along those lines. But for general just customer service marketing kind of chitchat engagement opportunities, and given the fact that again I go back to most everybody it seems these days has a Facebook profile even if they're not actively using it a lot, a lot of people have Facebook just to be able to connect with friends and read stories and see pictures. This might be a really interesting option for you to add chat to your website. We don't have any information with regards to pricing, if they're going to do this for free. I'm sure they'll, they'll publish some sort of a privacy statement, so what they're doing with the data and the conversation. And then if any of that information can maybe feed back to your business's page so that if it is somebody that's chatted with you on your website, maybe you'll have a way of, of knowing when that person actually visits your Facebook page down the road. There's certainly a lot of interesting analytical customer tracking engagement opportunities there that might be kind of cool to, to explore. So while I move on to the next one, I'm going to actually toss a question out to see If those of you that are listening live, if you visited a website and it had Facebook Messenger on as a chat option, would you be more inclined to use chat? Would you be less inclined to use it? Would you be suspicious? I'm just kind of curious as to what the, the general feel from those of you that are on today's conversation. So I don't have that as a formal question. I know within, within the GoToWebinar system I can do formal questions and polls, but we've never really done that. But I'm just kind of curious. If that's something that those of you that are listening live, if you've used chat before, that's something that, that you would be more or less likely to use, or maybe you're just not using chat and it doesn't matter. I know when I go to a website, if there's chat, I immediately go for that rather than trying to search around and find stuff. So I think this would be a pretty positive thing. I'll be just curious to see how well our banks embrace or run from this function, I guess, when the time comes. Another thing that they announced, and I'll keep an eye on the chat so those of you that would maybe want to post back if you would or wouldn't use chat, is going after the creators. And so from a creator's perspective, these are people that are out there creating videos, building content, trying to, you know, add rich media. And so they've got this Facebook for creators I believe this app used to be called Engage and they rebranded it to the Creators app. It's currently available only on iOS, so those of us that are on Android devices are somewhat at a loss, although I do have an iPad that I could go ahead and toss the app on. But they're trying to embrace creators that I think are traditionally ones that have been spending most of their time over on YouTube building videos and adding content. And sharing their stories, doing vlogs, you know, video blogging, referred to as vlogging, and trying to bring them into the Facebook world. And YouTube's gone through a few little tumultuous episodes as of the last month or so with, you know, videos being demonetized and just different, you know, YouTube Creators expressing some concern over the platform. And so if, if you are doing any sort of YouTube creation or you've got some video stories that you want to tell for your business or even for your own personal brand, facebook.com/creators is an area that you may want to go check out. You can click on Join to get into the beta and kind of play around with it. Um, And who knows, this might evolve into something kind of cool. So if I go back to questions and answers with regards to the chat functionality, there's a comment that said, real human chat or machine chat? If it's a human, then yes. Machine, maybe no. And that's a good point because a lot of the chatbots that are out there have some sort of a machine language, machine intelligence behind them. where they're trying to identify what it is that you're asking a question of, and then they go into a repository of potential answers. And so if you're asking a question like, are you going to be open on Christmas Eve? Maybe that's a common question that you know you're going to get a lot of. So in an instance like that, maybe it would be beneficial to create an automated chatbot response that would post back and say, yes, we're going to be open until 1 o'clock. All of our offices will then close to let families head out early for the Christmas holiday or something along those lines. But if you're using automated chats, it's also important that that automated chatbot has the ability to know when there's a question that falls outside of an area, because you certainly don't want— and like the person that posted the comment, you don't want somebody to hop on your site and ask a question and have the robot automatically come back. And say, please contact us for further information, or it's just a generic response and you can tell there's not a human on the other end. The other challenge is being able to extend your hours as a business outside of the hours of your customers. So maybe you are staffed between the hours of 8 and 5:30, but your customers hop on at 8 o'clock at night and they're interested in chatting with you. Are you going to be able to support that chat capability with remote staff and allow your employees to maybe operate with a little bit of flex time? Are you going to have, you know, sorry, chat's not available, please contact us tomorrow starting at 8:30 or 9 o'clock? So, understanding that, you know, if you introduce chat, the web is a 24/7, 365 entity and your business might not be. So how are you going to handle those after-hours options? And I suspect the chat functionality is going to act very similar to the chat functionality that's available on your website or on your Facebook page, where you can— you'll be able to create some autoresponders, some auto-notifications. You'll be able to generate a message that shows or automatically goes back to somebody trying to chat with you if they're trying to reach you outside of normal business hours. So my gut tells me that's going to carry across. As well, but all really good questions, so thanks for that. The last item that kind of along the lines of video and creation, and I mentioned this a couple of episodes ago here at Free Webinar Wednesdays, is the Facebook Watch platform. And in their effort to— and a lot of people these days are cutting the cord and they're tossing their cable or their satellite provider out the window. They're streaming information through third-party services like Netflix and Hulu and other sorts of platforms, maybe using a digital antenna to get their local NBC, CBS, ABC affiliates so they can get their local news and broadcasting that way. But as more and more individuals, especially in the younger generation, are cutting the cord and getting rid of their cable or their satellite connectivity, a lot of the platforms out there like YouTube, and they've got now YouTube local television in select areas, but certainly there's a lot of YouTube video content that's been created by these creators. Facebook's new Watch platform, and this is Mike Rowe, who's probably most famous for his Dirty Jobs, and I think he's even a spokesperson for one of the auto companies, and he talks about pickup trucks. But Mike Rowe has a little show that he's created here on Watch called Returning the Favor, which is really all about people write in and identify individuals within their community that have done something really cool, and he shows up and returns the favor and surprises them with something really big. And, and so they film it. I've watched a few of these episodes, and they are all Very, you know, well-done quality television style with good cinematography. So, you know, this is an area that you may very well be interested. I would like to see, and I don't know if they've changed it recently, but it would be nice if they allowed for the ability, if you're watching that on your phone, where you could maybe throw it up onto a screen like with a Chromecast or You know, an Amazon Fire Stick or an Apple TV, so you're not having to watch the content just on your computer. So, you know, being able to still push it up to the big screen, but it's coming through one of your mobile devices or internet-connected devices, but starting it through Facebook. And if you— you can just go to facebook.com/watch, or when you go here, just go to your normal page You can see up at the top you've got your Messenger app, which is, you know, we talked about that. And then you've got Watch, and then that will automatically push it up. The other, I guess the other thing that I just wanted to draw your attention to, seeing the Amazon Echo, this actually reminds me since I've got the little star here, is we've been keeping an eye on the organic visibility for pages. And if you're a business and you have a Facebook page and you're posting information on a regular basis and you're trying to grow your fan base, The unfortunate reality of having a business on Facebook is the organic visibility of your posts is being significantly throttled, and some are predicting that within the next year or so, your organic visibility is going to approach, if not reach, 0%. I think it's right in the 6% right now of any fan that has clicked the like button on your page is ever going to see anything else that you post unless they're showing hyper-engagement on your page and clicking on things and sharing information. So one of the ways that you personally can get around this, if there's businesses that you want to know about— for example, we've got an Amazon Echo, I've got a Google Home. I'm very interested in knowing what's going on because they make updates, they do releases, they share new skills. I want to make sure that I see this. I'm not afraid of having an Amazon Echo post show up in my newsfeed for fear of them trying to sell me something. I clicked on the like button because I want to hear what they have to say. But if I didn't do the see first, there's a good chance that I'd never see Amazon Echo stuff. So if you're interested in doing this for your page or for pages that you want to follow, and you can see, you know, I haven't even officially liked the Amazon Echo page, so they don't even count me as a fan. But I've gone through, and that's probably just an oversight on my part because I just focused on I want to follow what they're saying, but I can go through this little dropdown Down next to follow and you can click on see first. And see first ensures that it has the little blue star and anytime they do a post, it'll show up on your newsfeed. One of the things we're also doing for one of our other clients is actually writing a blog post to explain to their customers how their customers can click on the following and see first to make sure that when they actually make a post that their customers will have a high likelihood of being able to see that information. So this is something that you're going to want to do if you've got pages that you really want to make sure that you can follow. Now you can always go through and on the left-hand side you can always click on your pages, and then this brings up all of the pages that you've liked, and you can go through and actually see what's going on with the pages themselves. But this really doesn't give you much of a news stream per se, like if it shows up in your news feed and you have the ability to see that. So here's another one where I just refreshed it. Missouri Bankers Association is another page that I've said see first. If I didn't say see first, there's probably a good shot that I would never see the Missouri Bankers. And so just having that see first functionality is, you know, going to be important. Otherwise, you may have to look at sponsored posts, which cost you money, or Or you could certainly empower or train or encourage— can't require— your staff when you do a post, try to get them to share it on their own personal profiles so that they're the ones that are helping get some engagement and spread the word. And that will certainly help kind of gain some additional visibility for your posts so that the rest of the world has an opportunity to see those. So those are really the 3 or 4 things that I just wanted to share with everybody before we jump into the Thanksgiving holiday and gorge ourselves on turkey for those of you that are here in the United States. But I guess with that, I'll keep an eye on the chat. If there's any other questions that you guys have got, feel free to go ahead and post it up there. I'll kind of let it linger for just a little bit longer and see. But give that local a try and check that out. See what's going on in your neighborhood and in your community. I've already found a couple of events that I would have missed otherwise that are nice to know. And as more and more businesses— I know there's even the thought that, you know, once you start promoting events and activities, then that's going to maybe start taking a dent out of some of the other platforms that are also designed to help draw attention to local events and whatnot, or maybe even some of the local review sites that are out there. So maybe, who knows? We'll see. We'll see where it goes. But kind of a cool little function to know what's going on. And instead of hiding behind your computer all the time, actually get out of the house, get out of the office, and go attend an event and see what's going on. So with that, we'll bring the— we'll bring this session to a close. Again, have a wonderful holiday, those of you that are celebrating Thanksgiving, and we'll be back Back next week here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have an awesome week, everybody. Bye-bye.