A vanity url is a memorable url that will redirect to the page where you actually want to send people.
They are easy (and inexpensive) to set-up, and can help your user easily find your brand's important content and sub-campaigns. In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we delve into what they are, how to set them up, when you should use them and more. We also cover Bit.ly links and talk about when those can and should be used in lieu of vanity urls. If you aren't using both of these tools in your digital toolkit, you're making things harder than they need to be for your audience. Tune in today and learn more. Listen to the full episode here or wherever you stream podcasts. And scroll down for a full episode transcript. FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
The other day I was watching Hulu and I saw an ad pushing treatment for men suffering from a quote Bent Carrot.
If that sounds a bit phallic… well, yeah, that’s the idea. I tend to tune out most — if not all — medical ads, but this one got my attention. I mean, they took a sensitive issue and made it, if not funny, at least memorable. But what really got my attention was their url: bent carrot dot com. I mean, that is just an epic url for a company in the business of mending, ummm, bent carrots. Here’s the thing though - there's no website at that link. Bent carrot dot com is not a website - it’s a vanity url. What’s a vanity url? Think vanity license plates, but for landing pages. It’s a memorable url that will redirect to the page where you actually want to send people. It can serve a similar purpose as a QR code, but with one memorable exception from this past Super Bowl, most people aren’t gonna capture a QR code from a commercial. Just like having a great 1-800 number used to be the industry standard for anyone who wanted you to remember their phone number, vanity urls are a great way to help ensure people remember your website. If you go to bent carrot dot com, it simply redirects you to peyronies dash disease dot xiaflex dot com slash patient. Think anyone’s gonna remember that url? Of course not. But bent carrot dot com - yeah that one will stick with you. Even though you probably wish it wouldn’t. I was once working with a client on her digital program. Throughout the course of the engagement, it came out that she had a second website. There are certainly times where that can make sense. But I asked a few questions and I got a bit queasy on her behalf. This client had paid for an entire website, developed copy, worked up graphics… all the work that went into a website — when all she really wanted was a landing page for a vanity url she had bought. She wasn’t a musician - but to keep it simple let’s pretend she was. She already had her band's website. She had a new album out and she — smartly! — bought the url matching her album’s name. But to use it, she thought she needed to build a whole new website. Why is this bad? For so many reasons! The first is that she invested a ton of time and money into a new site. But she also made her users’ journey more complicated. If I like a band, I want all info about the band, INCLUDING THEIR ALBUMS, on a single site. Not spread out over a bunch of sites. AND by doing what she did, she actually hurt her SEO (or search engine optimization). Because her two websites are now competing with each other on Google for the same keywords. What should she have done instead? She should have simply built a landing page on her primary site and redirected her vanity url to it. Want an example of that? Head to stepupyoursocial.com. I mention that url in every episode of this podcast. But here’s the thing - that website doesn’t actually exist! It’s just a landing page on my primary website. It was easy to build (well, easier), it helps with my SEO, instead of hurting it, and it keeps my users’ journey clean and simple. After all, you can easily jump from my podcast page right to my blog. Or to my services or about page. You can learn all about who I am and what I do without ever leaving my site. So was this hard to do? Was it expensive? Good news: it doesn’t cost anything (beyond the cost of the url) and it takes about 60 seconds to set up. Go to wherever you buy your urls - I personally use NameCheap. But there are loads of alternatives, including Google Domains, domain.com, buydomains.com, GoDaddy. Lots of options. Once you own the url, simply go into the backend and redirect it to wherever you want it to go. I can’t give you step by step instructions because every platform is going to be a little bit different. But Google “redirect url [insert name of where you bought your domain]” and you’ll find step by step instructions just waiting for you. Follow those instructions and you should have this done in less time that it took watch that hilarious TikTok video you were just checking out. The hosting companies say it can take up to 30 minutes or so to take effect. I find it typically works within minutes. But just wanted to flag it might not work immediately. So that’s what vanity urls are. When should you use them? Anytime you want to have a memorable url for a sub-component of your brand that’s easy to remember. That might be bent carrot dot com. Or stepupyoursocial.com. Or the name of your band’s album. Or a program or campaign your organization is running. Or a video series you have created. Anything you want to be abl e to easily send people to without all those slashes and dashes after your primary url. The cost of a non-premium url is going to be about $10 a year give or take. (A premium url - like social media master dot com for example - could run tens of thousands of dollars.) While I’m personally partial to vanity urls, I also want to share a totally free workaround for you. Bitly. Bitly is a free link shortening tool. You can take any url and drop it into bitly and it will give you a short url that will redirect to your landing page of choice. This could be a page on your site. Or an article you think is important. Or a YouTube video you love. I use a bunch of vanity urls for my brand. But I also regularly use bitly links. Want my free Facebook live checklist? Head to bit.ly/facebooklivechecklist and download it today. Want to find a blog post I wrote, rounding up stock photo sites that focus on diversity? Head to bit.ly/diverse-photos And I’m not the only one. Want to watch Madonna’s Frozen Remix video on YouTube? Head to bit.ly/frozenremixvideo. Want to do a paid internship, spending your time diving off the West coast of Vancouver Island? Head to bit.ly/DiveIntern. I think you get the idea. Not every product needs a vanity url. For everything else, bitly links can be great substitutes. But big important caveat: don’t just create a bitly link. Customize it. Meaning switch it from the random letters and numbers they’ll assign you with something easy to remember, like FacebookLiveChecklist or FrozenRemixVideo. Doing so is free, quick and easy. If you’re not customizing your bitly links, you might as well be sending them to peyronies dash disease dot xiaflex dot com slash patient. And no one wants that. So get out there and set up your redirects. And if this episode was helpful to you, do me a favor and send a few folks to stepupyoursocial.com. They’ll be redirected to a landing page on my site - it’ll be exactly what they were looking for!
If you use the internet, you’ve likely heard of WORDLE.
According to Buzzfeed, there have been nearly 2 million tweets mentioning “WORDLE” since November of 2021. But here’s the thing: this game, that so many people play and talk about, had only 90 users in November. Not 90 thousand… 90. How did this viral phenomenon happen and what can we as digital marketers learn from it? A lot! Listen to the full episode here or wherever you stream podcasts. And scroll down for a full episode transcript. Full episode transcript
If you use the internet, you’ve likely heard of WORDLE.
If not, here’s a quick primer: It’s a VERY simple word game where you have to figure out the five-letter word of the day. You start with no information. When you guess a word, each letter will turn one of 3 colors. Grey means that letters NOT in the word. Yellow(ish) means that letter is in the word, but not in the right place. Green means the letter is in the word and in the right place. You get 6 tries. That’s it. That’s what all the hubbub is about. I personally LOVE word games. I feel like WORDLE was made for me. But it was not - literally hundreds of thousands of people play WORDLE every single day. According to Buzzfeed, there have been nearly 2 million tweets mentioning “WORDLE” since November of 2021. But here’s the thing: this game, that so many people play and talk about, had only 90 users in November. Not 90 thousand… 90. The game was created by Josh Wardle (really). He’s a software engineer in Brooklyn and he created it for his partner. But it was too good not to share, so it made its way around the family. On Nov 1, it was played by 90 people. But those 90 people loved it. Enough to become ambassadors for the game. So they told their friends who told their friends and here we are. No one is getting paid to promote WORDLE (the creator has opted to not even monetize the game for himself!). People just love it so much they want to spread the word. So why are we talking about a viral word game on a podcast about social media and digital marketing? Because there is A LOT we can learn from this simple word game. So let’s dig in. First of all - it’s simple. Like silly simple. I explained how to play in about 20 seconds above. The game’s instructions are only 82 words long. If you can spell (in English), you can play WORDLE. Mr. Wardle could have based the game around 7 letter words. Even 6 letters words would have probably made some linguists feel very good about themselves (or bad I suppose). But by keeping it simple, he ensured that anyone can play, regardless of how much time they’ve spent reading the dictionary. Along with being simple, the game is also extremely limited. Had he wanted to monetize, the creator would have let you play as many words a day as you wanted… in exchange for either money or at the least watching ads. Instead, there’s one word a day. Play it… or don’t. But if you don’t, you can’t go back. Whether he meant to or not, the creator developed a game with FOMO baked right in. If you miss today’s WORDLE, you miss today’s WORDLE. You can’t get to it tomorrow. Now as a brand looking to make money, you might roll your eyes and say “great that he can afford to create free content, but I need to get paid.” Fair enough. But here’s the thing - great content creates trust. And loyalty. There’s literally a name for creating great content as a way to reach your customers. It’s called Content Marketing. And you know what - content marketing is amazing. I built my business on it. As have so many others. And should Mr. Wardle decide to sell official WORDLE merch, or launch a new game, or maybe start a newsletter about internet virality, he’s developed a massive community of people who will trust that his future content is going to be amazing. Will they all kick in or subscribe - of course not! But he’s filled his funnel immensely with people who love his content. If even 1% of daily players supported his next endeavor, we’ll let’s just say he could probably quit his day job if he wanted to. Imagine if he’d gone the other way - shoving as many ads as he could onto the page, and making you sit through an annoying popup video just to get to the game? Would folks still play? For some - yes (it really is a great game). But he’d probably lose a ton of daily average users. And you better believe folks are going to be less likely to serve as ambassadors for the game - why should someone go out of their way to tell their friends to play a game that looks spammy and is rife with ads. Maybe they’d tell their nerdiest friends. But virality isn’t about one person telling another person. It’s about one person telling lots of people. Exponentially. WORDLE is fun, but also clean and easy. Onboarding is seamless - why not help spread the word?! Now if Mr. Wardle had asked me for advice when getting started, I would have recommend giving people the option of creating an account. This would have given you the ability to back and forth between desktop and mobile while keeping your stats in order. And he could have even reminded you to come back if you had missed a few days. But here’s the thing - people don’t need a reminder to do something that they love. Which should serve as a huge lesson for your digital program. Telling people you’re doing a thing is fine. Having them waiting anxiously for you to do your thing - we’ll, let’s just say that’s way better! What kind of content could you create that your audience would be waiting around to access. I don’t know what the answer is to that question - but figure it out and this is going to be a great year for you and your brand! Now I mentioned we don’t need regular reminders to do the WORDLE because we just want to do it. BUT it’s hard to log on to any social media channel these days and not be almost inundated with reminders to play. And that’s because the creator did something truly brilliant: he made sharing your score literally as easy as possible. Like Spotify Wrapped before him, he didn’t embed a “tweet now” button on the game that brings up a complicated pop-up with awful formatting. Rather, after completing a round, you see the following: your personal statistics, a countdown clock to the next WORDLE and a big green button that simply says “Share.” When you click it, it doesn’t open anything you have to edit and deal with. It simple copies your results to your clipboard. You can now paste them anywhere you want (Twitter of course, or Facebook, but also a private text message or an ongoing email chain with old friends). They’re your results to share how you see fit. While I haven’t run focus groups, I can all but guarantee that this ease of use is a huge component of why people are constantly talking about this game online. One thing worth noting: when you share your results, Mr. Wardle was smart enough to not show the actual words you used, simply the colored boxes you got and how many chances it took you to solve today’s WORDLE. Anything more would have killed the game in its tracks early on. Because everyone hates a spoiler, but people love to show off their results. His solution was brilliant in its simplicity. So what are you doing to make your audience’s relationship with you easy to share. Do you have a hashtag on your packaging materials with a call-to-action to tag you on social? Do you have fun things up in your physical space that visitors are going to want to take pictures of and share on social? Do you provide regular content on your social channels, website, newsletter or elsewhere that doesn’t try to sell your product, but simply adds values to the lives of your intended audience? Add value - often and for free. And people will be excited to tell their friends about you. If you haven’t yet tried the WORDLE, head to powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle (you can find the link in this episode’s show notes at stepupyoursocial.com). Be sure to tag Reverbal Communications when sharing your results. We’d love to see them! And when you’re done mastering today’s WORDLE, think about what you and your brand can give to the world that will get millions of people talking about you on social media.
In Episode 13 of #StepUpYourSocial, we discussed why you should be blogging.
Today let’s talk about how you should approach writing content for your blog. In this episode, we cover a lot of best practices for blogging in 10 minutes or less including:
Full episode transcript
If you aren’t already blogging… you should be.
We did a deep dive into why in Episode 13. But the short version:
For more on all three of these reasons, head back to episode 13 and dig in. So that’s why you should be blogging. Today let’s talk about how you should approach writing content for your blog. First things first: a blog post should answer a question. It doesn’t literally have to be titled with a question, though that doesn’t hurt. The question should be specific enough that people are looking for the answer, and broad enough that you can turn it into a full-length blog post. A while back, I did a blog post on the Evolution of Instagram. That topic is potentially HUGE - but I was answering a specific question: How has Instagram changed over the years. -What was the score of last night’s game? A bit too specific. -Let’s do a full annotated history of our local sports team, along with in-depth explorations of every players’ personal journey to get there, the story of the team mascot and a recap of every game they’ve played since 1945. A bit too broad. -What can we learn about our favorite team based on their playing last night? Sweet spot! You can write pages on that topic, without ever losing the thread of why you are writing the post - or more importantly - why someone might want to read it. So answer a question. Specifically. Next up: make your post easy to skim. No matter how captivating your writing, some people are not going to be interested in pouring through every word. User headers. And subheaders. And sub-subheaders. Use bullet points and lists. Please LOVE lists. Keep your sentences short. Keep your paragraphs short. Use formatting - like bold, italics and underline - to make it easier for your reader to know what’s the most important content in the page. If you can, use images and graphics to help make your content flow. The word I like to use when it comes to content written for the internet: digestable. How easily can someone digest what you are trying to impart. If it’s not easily digestable - they will just move on. You don’t have to be a great writer to be a great blogger. You just have to break things down in a way that your audience can follow. So answer a question and keep your content easily digestable. If you want to connect with a wide audience, don’t assume they know… well anything! The goal of writing for an audience is not to make yourself sound smart. It’s to make them feel smart. Picture a real person in your head when you write (or at least when you edit) your content. You are an expert in your field (if you weren’t, you couldn’t be blogging on it!). Unless you only want to talk to other experts, don’t assume they know the lingo. Spell out acronyms for them, explain why something that seems obvious to you should matter to them. Write for them as if they don’t know what you are talking about. Because frankly, if they knew what you were talking about - they probably wouldn’t be reading your blog post! So answer a question with easily digestible content in a way that makes your audience feel smarter. Next up: write your blog post for Google. Or Facebook. Or Both. What does this mean? If you want a post to do well on Google — meaning you want people to find it when they do a search on the topic — know your keywords before you start. What’s a keyword (bearing in mind a keyword can be a phrase as well)? It’s the thing someone is going to put into Google that will hopefully help them find your post! Before I wrote my blog post on the Evolution of Instagram, I did research into which keywords people were actually searching for on the topic. Were they looking for a history of Instagram? A breakdown of how Instagram has changed? Something else altogether? They were looking for an Evolution of Instagram. So I wrote my blog post accordingly. And my blog post is now on the first page of Google when someone searches for that keyword. How did I get it on the first page of Google? I used Evolution of Instagram as my url slug (the part after the .com in my website). I used it in my title. I worked it into my copy as often as I could without sounding redundant (if your copy sounds like it’s been “stuffed” with keywords you will be penalized by Google, not to mention by your annoyed readers!). How did I know that this was a keyword worth optimizing for? I did research. There are loads of free and paid tools out there you can use. I like one called Ubersuggest. You can also just use Google directly - run a few searches and see what comes up. Did one query give you 20 hits and another 200,000? Well that’s good to know, isn’t it! Not every blog post needs to be written for Google. But if it’s not written for Google, make sure you’re writing it for Facebook! If you don’t have to worry about people searching for your content - because it’s something timely, interesting to you and your audience but not necessarily to the world, or for any other reason, then be sure the title helps it pop. Let’s say you’re writing a post about the ways that your industry has changed, and what it means for consumers. And, just so we can get specific, let’s say your industry is artisanal sourdough bread . If you’re writing for Google, you might go with: How Sourdough Baking Has Changed Over The Years, or What Do I Need To Make Sourdough? If you’re writing for Facebook, you might go with something more like: Finding the Sweet Within Your Sourdough! Or 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sourdough… But Should! No one is going to search for those latter titles - but they are fun and have the potential to do great on Facebook! In this day and age, if your content isn’t written for Google OR Facebook, it’s written for no one. So pick one - or find a way to tailor it to both - and get to writing. To recap:
One last thing: folks always want to know how long their posts should be. Google likes long form content, so if you’re writing for Google, keep that in mind. That said, I prefer the following: your content should be exactly how long it needs to be and not one word longer. You’re not doing yourself any favors adding fluff to a post. Google will see through it. So will your readers. Tell them what they need to know and let them get on with their day. Happy blogging y’all!
What do you do at the end of your customer lifecycle? Do you go above and beyond to ensure that the customer who is moving on never forgets just how much they love you?
Chewy is a pet supply company. They know their customers will have to cancel their auto-renewal products... eventually ? ? ? But Chewy doesn't just offer canceling clients full refunds. They take their "marketing generosity" to the next level. They don’t just want to get out of the way. They want to be a part of the family. In this episode of Step Up Your Social, we take a look at how Chewy creates unyielding brand loyalty from their customers, even as those customers are canceling their orders. We then give some thought to how *you* can keep your client lifecycle going, even as it seems like it might be wrapping up for the foreseeable future. FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
If you’re a pet person, you know how much joy your little furry (or scaly or feathery) friend can bring into your life.
Sure there are chores associated with having a pet: They have to be cleaned, walked, taken to the vet… did I mention the endless cleaning?! But through it all, our days are just better with a pet at our side. Unfortunately, most pets have shorter life cycles than us pet owners. You might enjoy your fish for a few months, your bird for years, or your dog or cat for decades. But eventually, that hard day will arrive when you have to say goodbye to them… for good. So now grab a tissue, wipe your eyes and take off your pet owner hat and replace it with your digital marketer hat. If you’re in the business of selling products to pet owners, this cycle can create a real challenge for you. When someone loses a pet, your customer cycle for them ends. At least for the time being. There aren’t TOO many industries where customer service reps have to field questions from the grieving as a regular part of their job. Selling pet products is DEFINITELY one of them. So you know that awful day is coming for every one of your customers. What do you do? If you’re Chewy, you use that awful day to builder deeper and more meaningful relationships with your customers. Head to Twitter and search @chewy and the word died and you will find countless stories all getting at the same thing - my pet died. I had regular packages getting delivered from Chewy. I called to cancel and not only did they refund my money, they told me to keep the food and donate it to some other pet owner who needed it. AND NOT ONLY THAT! Loads of people shared stories that they got flowers in the mail from Chewy expressing their condolences. I even saw people posting about Chewy sending them oil paintings of their passed pups! To quote just one of the many tweets you’ll find when you search: “That’s all class.” Here’s the thing - you can find these posts all over Twitter. But I first learned about this tactic from a random post in a Facebook Group. And I can pretty well guarantee you that anytime a first-time pet-owning friend asks someone on the receiving end of Chewy’s — let’s call it “marketing generosity” -- where they should buy their pet supplies, they aren’t just going to recommend Chewy — they are going to do so empathically, as if it’s a family company. Could Chewy simply offer full refunds and call it a day? Sure. You might even see tweets letting you know that Chewy customer service makes it easy to cancel orders when your pet departs. But by going from easy to compassionate, Chewy takes their relationships with their customers to another level. They don’t just want to get out of the way. They want to be a part of the family. On a P&L, this might seem bad for business. You are building deep bonds with someone who no longer needs your services. But pet owners are pet owners through and through. It might be weeks or months before they get back on the horse (or kitty or puppy or chameleon). It might even be years. But they will almost certainly get another pet! And even if they don’t, they will have friends and family members who do. Chewy sees these regular order cancellations not as an end of their relationships, but as the start of a whole new one, one deeper and with more intimacy between them and their customer. And it pays off for them big time - don’t believe me? Just head to Twitter or Google or reddit or Facebook and poke around! The stories are endless. The takeaway here: wow your customers, even if they’re no longer your customers. Host free classes teaching people how to be better at something related to whatever you sell. If you ship products, make the packaging so fun people can’t help but post a picture of it on Instagram. If you’re a nonprofit and someone sends you a gift, do you send a thank you that let’s them know you appreciate them… or do you send them a letter that knocks their socks off? The person who bought your product or donated money might never do so again. So what?! They are the people most likely to spread the word about how great you are to their networks. Make it easy for them to do so and more importantly , give them a reason to want to! At the end of the day, remember that you can’t just sell pet stuff. You have to be a pet person! I hope you have the same passion for whatever you are selling or advocating for online, as your typical pet owner has for their furry, four-legged friend!
One of my favorite podcasts, Reply All, just did a whole episode trying to track down something that wasn't showing up on Google. If they had remembered that Facebook, while first and foremost is a social media channel, is also a search engine, they could have saved themselves a whole lot of time and energy.
The Facebook search bar is more powerful than you probably realize. In this episode of Step Up Your Social we'll walk through some of the power lurking right at your fingertips. Have any search bar tricks you like that we didn’t cover? Or find any surprises utilizing any of the above? We want to hear them! Drop us a line or hit us up on social using #StepUpYourSocial. Want to listen to the recreated version of the song? Or the original one? You can hear both in Reply All episode #158 The Case of the Missing Hit. Or scroll down and listen to them both below. Full Episode Transcript
\Do you listen to Reply All? It’s an awesome podcast about living in the age of the internet. Or something like that. If you don’t listen already, you should. It’s one of my favorites for sure.
Last week, they dropped an episode called “The Case Of The Missing Hit.” In it, PJ, one of their two hosts, goes on a truly epic search — and I mean epic in its literal meaning — to find a song that was big enough to be played on the radio internationally in the 90s, but somehow had [virtually] no presence on Google. The story starts simply enough: A man named Tyler reached out to PJ for help. He could hear this song in his head, but he couldn’t find it on Google, even though he remembered many of the lyrics. It’s a weird concept in today’s age, where we can find virtually anything online. And yet the song was nowhere to be found… with one weird exception. Years ago, a guy who lives in Trinidad and Tobago had asked about it in an online message board, referencing several of the same lyrics that Tyler remembered. But of course, he too, was trying to track down the song. This proved that Tyler hadn’t made it up, but it also didn’t help PJ solve the case of the missing hit. To solve the case, PJ did what any normal person with a budget and an obsession does: he helped Tyler recreate the song in its entirety from memory. Tyler took a song he hadn’t heard in more than 20 years and he coaxed it out of a group of session musicians. PJ then took that recording and talked to… well everyone! He spoke with numerous music critics from Rolling Stone, producers, radio show hosts from the era, even the lead singer of the Bare Naked Ladies, as the song in question had a very BNL type feel too it. Google failed them, so PJ took his query to the world. And in the end, all this time, energy and effort amounted to… nothing. Everyone he spoke with had a great idea about how to try to solve the problem. Every great idea took PJ down another rabbit hole. And every rabbit hole ended as unceremoniously as it had started with, “sorry, I just don’t know.” Then something the Trinidad and Tobago guy had said in his original post sparked something in PJ and he plugged a few lines of the song into Facebook’s search bar. Immediately, not only did he find the song… he found the songwriter who had written it in the first place. So much time and energy and effort could have been avoided if PJ (or Tyler for that matter) had remembered that while Facebook is first and foremost a social media platform, like virtually every other social media platform you know and love, it’s also part-search engine. So let’s talk about a few other things the Facebook search bar — that simple little bar right at the top of your account — can do, that you might not have realized: First things first, type something — anything — into the bar on desktop, and you’ll be brought to a search page. From there, you have a slew of filtering options both on the top of the screen and on the lefthand side. On the top of the screen, you can choose to only see posts, people, photos, videos, market place, pages, groups, apps, events and links. So the next time you’re trying to find a Facebook Page and you can’t quite remember what it’s called, instead of scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, try filtering instead. On the lefthand side of the screen, you have a whole other bunch of options. You can opt to see posts from anyone, or only yourself, your friends, your groups or pages, or only content shared publicly. You can even choose a source, to see if a friend, group or page has talked about an issue you care about. Want to see all posts? Of course you can do that. But you can also limit your search to only posts you’ve already seen. Which could come in super handy if you’re looking for something you saw, but can’t remember where. You can limit your search to only show content tagged in certain locations or posted in a certain year — or even in a certain month of a certain year! So yeah, right off the bat, you can see that while Facebook might not be Google, there’s more to its search then simply keywords and scrolling. Now let’s get into some of the less obvious things you can do with Facebook search: Once upon a time there was an easy way to see which of your friends lived in which city. Then Facebook got rid of that helpful feature. But good news, they replaced it (they just forgot to tell anyone). Looking for friends in a particular city or state? Just type in “my friends in [wherever]” and Facebook will show you a list. Looking for a bar, a pizza place, or a spot to get your oil changed? Type in “pizza places near me” and Facebook will show you a list, with a map. Just like Yelp, but without ever leaving Facebook. Want to know if your friends liked the pizza place you are considering? On the top menu bar, head over to places. On the lefthand side, select “visited by friends.” You can also filter by “open now” and price! Want to know which events your friends are going to (or should we say so-called friends, since they’re apparently going out without you!)? Type in a keyword. On the top menu, go to events. On the lefthand side menu, go to “popular with friends.” You can also search for events based on location and date, to find things to do today, tomorrow, this week, this weekend or next week. While their Boolean search isn’t as powerful as Google, you can employ it to some degree. If you don’t know Boolean by name you might know it in practice. Boolean search is a method of search that lets you filter or exclude terms by using all caps AND, NOT and ORs. So type “social media” AND “Madison, WI” into Facebook (or Google) and you’ll only get content back that mentions both. Switch AND with OR and you’ll find content mentioning either. Go with NOT and you’ll find content mentioning the first term but not the second one. This can be pretty helpful when trying to narrow your search. Now it is worth mentioning that while Facebook search is powerful, it’s far less powerful than it used to be. Google “Facebook search bar tricks” and you’ll find tons of articles telling you about a bunch of features you can use. But alas, Facebook killed a lot of them off when they did away with their Graph Search. This feature let you see which of your friends liked which pages, and which posts had been liked by a specific person. Guess it was all just a bit too invasive for a company so worried about your privacy. #LOL But there’s still plenty you can do with the Facebook search bar. Have any search bar tricks you like that we didn’t cover? Or find any surprises utilizing any of the above? We want to hear them! Drop us a line at stepupyoursocial.com or hit us up on social using #StepUpYourSocial. In the meantime, don’t get stuck like Tyler and PJ. Start appreciating the power of Facebook search today! PS: want to hear the song PJ and Tyler recreated, as well as the original? I’ll have links to them both at stepupyoursocial.com. So Much Better by Evan olson (Original Version)
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