As a business owner, your Facebook page and other social media presences make up your owned media assets, that which is controlled by your and your business’s brand. It is important to maximize the potential for new and repeat business opportunities by making your Facebook truly reflect what you are all about. This is especially true of the images you select and portray online as representative of your company. Here are 5 tips to consider that can help make your Facebook cover photo count.

Tip #1: Make Your Photo Relevant

Making your Facebook cover photo relevant is an important consideration when choosing what to put on the cover. Your cover photo is a way to communicate who you are and what you are about to those who following you. If you are in the business of making widgets, your cover photo should reflect this. Your mission is to keep the idea of your company first and foremost in the mind of any visitor; maintaining relevancy helps you keep that idea before them as customers seek to interact with you.

Tip #2: Make Your Photo a Call-To-Action (CTA)

Your Facebook cover photo provides you with a way to direct traffic to your website. Simply provide a link in the description that appears when a user clicks on the cover photo and you have created another way to bring additional traffic to your website(s). Changes in Facebook’s cover photo policy gives you the flexibility to add more descriptors and create specific CTAs that can

Tip #3: Link Your Cover Photo to Your Profile Pic

Think for a moment how the cover and profile photos look on your current Facebook page. Are they in any way related and do they provide a consistent look and message to someone viewing your page? Use photos on your Facebook cover that provides consistency in terms of message, look, branding or relate to a campaign you may be promoting for your business. If you owned a chicken farm and your company’s logo were an egg, maybe a cover photo featuring a group of chickens in the yard with information about the business would be a good way to link your company brand with what it is you are selling.

Tip #4: Stay on Message

Keep your cover photos topical and relative to your brand and messaging. If you are running sales and specials reflective of a particular season or featuring a product or service, it is certainly advisable to upload a cover photo that highlights this. However, advertising your Black Friday specials or alerting visitors of a huge 20% off sale loses relevancy when the period for such a special has past. Manage your images carefully and be sure to remove those images that may cause confusion or be otherwise false and misleading relative to what is happening to your business.

Tip #5: Let Your Cover Photo Speak to Your Brand and Image

There are many good examples on Facebook of companies who link the messaging in the Facebook cover photos to their brand. Some of these examples are as simple as placing a logo or other recognizable image of the company somewhere in the cover photo. Be sure that any inclusion of your brand image is an organic one and not something that seems inappropriate or out of place, in context with what is being communicated in the image.

Contact Blast Creative today for all of your Social Media Marketing needs!

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So while we do Social Media Marketing for a living at BLaST Creative, we don’t use Pinterest because of all the SPAM! I heard a rumor last week that Pinterest had dealt with the issue. Sadly, I am here to tell you that it is not true.

I created a BLaST Creative account last week and started adding a few boards and pins, within 1 hour I had over 50 spam emails and continue to receive between 50 to 100 spam emails a day. It is absolutely ridiculous! Is Pinterest selling our email addresses?

We use Facebook and Twitter and don’t have anywhere near the spamming problem. Pinterest is a nightmare and yet it is a good marketing tool! So what do you do?

1. Don’t use Pinterest!
2. Set up a second email address that you use only for Pinterest so that the spam emails go there and you don’t have to deal with them.
3. Block the spam emails as they roll in-which is what I did.
4. Continue to complain to Pinterest, but that doesn’t seem to be doing much good.

Because of the popularity of the site, Pinterest seems to be attacked by spammers and doesn’t have the appropriate safeguards in place. So enter at your own risk, for the moment, spammers control Pinterest!

If you are a business owner in any of these genres, financial, photographers, dentists, hotels, restaurants, construction, HVAC, hardware stores, real estate, or any business owner and want more information on Social Media Marketing, please contact Blast Creative today!

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I’ve been thrown under the bus so many times in my lifetime by business partners, associates and friends that the tread marks have left excruciating scars and I sit here wondering if honesty, integrity and loyalty exists in 2013! I hate not trusting people, but time and time again I get slapped in the face by reality. I recently read an article on Katie Couric’s website:

Want to know how to spot a liar? Here’s how!

From Janine Driver, body language expert and author of “You Can’t Lie to Me.”

Read more here…

Basically you can never be too sure if someone in your life is being dishonest. But you’d think with the age of the Internet and Social Media, people would try to be more honest, because their reputation is on the line-literally! Edward Snowden is a prime example, his life is ruined and he can’t go anywhere in the world without people knowing him and what he did. Kids in high school and college know all too well how one bad decision can end up online and destroy their lives and yet, here we are in 2013 and people continue to be dishonest, show lack of integrity and loyalty. So color me stupid, people just don’t care and that scares me, what is the world going to be like 10 years from now?

According to Webster Integrity is:

Definition of INTEGRITY

1 : firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility

2 : an unimpaired condition : soundness

3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided : completeness

And this is Webster’s definition of Integrity for kids:

Main Entry: in·teg·ri·ty
Pronunciation: in-teg-rt-
Function: noun
1 : the condition of being free from damage or defect
2 : total honesty and sincerity
3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided

So you be the judge, is there integrity in the world in 2013? Especially when it comes to business! Has the oil boom and the almighty dollar turned us into a society with no morals, no integrity and no loyalty? In a world where everyone claims to be a Christian, where is God? In Luke 6:31 it says do unto others, as you would have them do unto you! So does that mean I should treat business partners, associates and friends the way that they have treated me. Or how about Exodus 21:24 where it says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? The biggest lesson that I’ve learned in life is that if someone claims to be a Christian or talks about their faith in God and God has led them to this or that, RUN, RUN for your life! I once believed that Christianity, honesty, integrity and loyalty all worked hand in hand, but I am here to tell you that I was wrong.

Loyalty is something I am finding is almost extinct. Does loyalty exist among brands? Is there customer loyalty? What about loyalty among friends? Coworkers? Do we live in a society where everyone is ready to jump ship and no one is loyal to anyone or anything? Personally, I do not believe that loyalty exists in our world in 2013. Loyalty is important to me and I am loyal to others, but sadly it is not a two-way street. So here I am at a crossroads wondering what I should do. Do I change my morals and values? Do I forget about them altogether? How do we live and survive in a world where the existence of honesty, integrity and loyalty are on the verge of distinction?

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