 I've got a good little turn out here. Thank you, we're right to go. All right, so welcome to Advanced Facebook. A little bit about me, I'm Ryan Vanderhorst. I'm a volunteer at Upway Fire Brigade in the Dandenong's. I run my own social media marketing business and also work part-time at CFA headquarters doing social media. So let's get started. You are not going to reach 100% of your fans. No matter how many likes you get and you want to get, you're not going to reach all of them. So all we can do is try and offer up the best content we can while understanding the habits of our online network. Now that's a lot of posts. So when you think about that, your average Facebook user is going to be served 1,500 posts in one day. Facebook is going to decide 300 of those will go to each individual person. So you are competing against a lot of people and pages and businesses to get your message across. So I've broken down today's session into four key areas of focus, relevance, imagery, consistency, and insights and analytics. So ask yourself this question, is it relevant to the brigade and or is it relevant to the community? Don't think like a firefighter or an SES worker. Think like a community member that doesn't know anything about your unit or brigade. Now these memes can be funny to us. We get them, but the community isn't necessarily going to understand them or care. So why should the community follow us and engage with our page? What do we provide? We provide a community service, yes, but try and be the go-to page for your community. Fire safety information can be boring because everybody sees themselves as safe. We need to keep our community engaged all year round, not just during fire season. So don't use firefighter language. When I hear the word appliance, I think of a dishwasher, not a truck. So social media is not about publishing long content. It is about punchy, fast to the point content that captures attention immediately from a heading or an image. Ideally, it conveys a message in a matter of seconds. So sometimes you have a lot of information to distribute, but try and keep it as short and snappy as possible. Add punctuation, divide into paragraphs, and please watch your spelling. Use spell check, all computers have them. So first off, whether it be your phone camera or the camera you keep in your truck, make sure you have it set to the highest setting. That way your photos will always be of the highest quality. The CFA has guidelines and policies in place in regards to images, videos, and mobile phones on the fireground. They are loaded into the USBs with this presentation that you will get at the end of the forum. In a nutshell, get permission from your OIC first and make sure that you have permission to use those images if people are identifiable, red zone numbers, minors, school groups, things like that. Basically, apply common sense. Discuss with your BMT that someone will be allowed to take photos on the fireground when safe to do so. Remind your BMT that you will apply common sense and not post things that are incriminating. So keep in mind what you are taking photos of. Is there something incriminating? Location details, children, registration plates and anything identifiable. If you do use your phone camera, which let's be honest, we all generally do, try and focus and think about the photo. What is in the frame? Will this image capture the scene perfectly? If I stand a little bit this way, will I get that police car over there? If I stand a little bit this way, will I get more of the group in? This picture you see up there is from a particular training session we had a number of brigades. And I just wanted to try and capture the huge amount of people that were there training that night. So I quickly ran up the hill and took this photo. Now, you can edit images utilizing online services like PickMonkey, which is an entry-level graphic design website. You can do small things like crop and image, ad text or logos over the top. Canva.com is next level. You can do some really cool stuff with Canva. And both services, PickMonkey and Canva, are free, but they do have extra pay services for you to do a little bit more, but I've never needed to do that. Canva's also really good to help you make brochures for fundraisers, flyers, things like annual dinners and things of the sort. Now, I've included this link, which is a guide of every single image size requirement for Facebook, whether it be a profile and cover photo, posts, events, ads, everything in between. This guide gives you every piece of image-sizing detail and it's a fantastic resource. Now, if you're going to share videos, only have one tip. Please, please film horizontally. So before I start going through different ideas for content and where to find them, I want to show you just a couple of posting tricks. Now, I've taken an interesting article from the CFA News and Media website and pasted the link into Facebook and it's given me this little low res logo as a preview, which is a bit of a bummer. Now, I can flick through. You'll see that arrow just there. I can flick through a couple of different options, but for this and generally from the News and Media website, they're all low res logos. Another little thing is when you share links from the Bureau of Meteorology, it'll give you a default map of Australia with New South Wales highlighted. You can flick through, pick Victoria, please. Now, what I can also do here is upload my own image, which you'll see just there. So I can upload any image I want. I can use one of my own or I can utilise cfapix.com.au, which is a CFA website full of great images. So I've used my own image. It's relevant to the story because it's got a truck in it. And you'll notice I can also now edit the headline and the intro first sentence. So I've gone into the article and I've taken a couple of paragraphs that help sum up that story to give it context rather than just posting the article and hoping people understand what it's about. You'll also notice the little publish button here, that little arrow to the right, allows you to schedule a post. So if you click that, it brings you here. Now I can pick any time and date up to six months in the future with only a couple of clicks and it will post it for me. It really couldn't be any more convenient. So find content from your comrades. This is the easy stuff because you're just sharing and it's relevant to your local community. So you've got Victoria Police, ambulance Victoria, Vic Rhodes, SES, CFA, the TAC, Bureau of Meteorology, you've got your supporting brigades, local sporting groups, community banks and community groups, and local media. Now this slide is pretty messy, so bear with me. But if you see something that you think might be relevant but you don't have time to post it right now because you're on the go, there's a save function to read later. Imagine this as storage for your content. So there's that little arrow next to every single post on Facebook. Click that, save it. So when you're playing on Facebook late one night and you see something worth sharing and generally you would normally just post it then because that's when you've got the time but your audience is in bed and you could waste that content. You really don't want to do that. So what to, I've lost my spot. Yeah, so you might only have an hour or so every other night. Use the save function and schedule those posts at an appropriate time. Ask yourself, what do I have in the content bank? Think about what you have coming up. If you have a meeting or training then you know you have content later on in the week. So build up your bank. Sit down at your computer and spread those good things out over the next week. Use Facebook Insights to give you an idea of the best times of the day and what days to post that content but we'll get to that at the end. So some brigades get about 10 calls a day. Some brigades get about 10 calls a year. Those brigades should show how active they are to the community. So the basin here have shared a traffic update from local media and taken the most important part and added it to the post for more context. Main rows into their community were affected. It's an important update for everybody in that community. Noble Park are working the gate at the local footy and getting into the team spirit saying go Bulls. I really, really love that. It would have been perfect if they could have tagged the football club in that post but I don't want to take anything away because it shows really, really good community spirit. Now Kyneton have done a great job with a couple of images and a quote from the captain thanking the local bowling club for a donation. They've even tagged the bowling club in the post which is a great touch. Mount Evelyn have shared an article about one of their incidents but rather than just share it they've added information and given more insight to the fire. It's, so you will see says Kyneton bowling club which each post has that function to tag whatever group or place that you're at but we'll get to the questions at the end. So the with Mount Evelyn's post it's really informative and it reinforces our smoke alarm safety messaging and it gives credit to the new source. Is there anyone here from those brigades? Nope? Oh well there you go. You can claim it by default. So then if you're looking at ways to make your own content break down the work that you do and the people and tasks that are common in your brigade and give your community a behind the scenes look. Golden Square have given context to PPC in a clear format. It looks great, it's really informative and they've also added that it's her birthday which is a great touch. Anyone here from Golden Square? Yes? Yay, well done. Doreen CFA and I really love this. It's an important road safety message about foggy roads but it's executed in a really fun way. A dragon's breath of fog. Don't know if it's a big dragon or a small dragon and if you see a dragon then let us know. It's lots of fun and I keep meaning to steal or borrow the idea. Anyone from Doreen? Hey, good work. So show them what you're up to. Meetings, training, truck maintenance, open days, fire safe kids, give context on turnout gear, equipment and trucks, fundraisers, junior brigades, running teams and state championships. Local sporting events, storm warnings, school fates, community markets, road closures, power outages, fire danger ratings and of course turnouts. There's a lot of stuff that we do that is relevant to your community. At Upway, there's two things that have gone really well for us, faces of Upway and throwback Thursday. We profile a member each week with the same basic questions, age, occupation, role, hobbies, how long you've been in the fire brigade. The community love it because they're getting to know their local firefighters and some people even get recognized in the community once they've been profiled on Facebook. You could say that's a good thing or a bad thing. Now next week we'll mark 12 months that we've been running these posts each Monday night without fail and many other brigades have had success in profiling members. Throwback Thursday, I try and do weekly. Our brigade has a great history. There are many brigades and units that have excellent history and a lot of great content just sitting there waiting to be shared. The community really connect with old photos of the town and seeing how it's changed over the years. If you follow an initiative like these, plan well ahead and try and get a few done at once while at the station and schedule them to take the pressure off you so you're not trying to create a fresh post each week. Get your members on board before you start so you know that you won't fall short of content only a couple of weeks through. So now we dig a little deeper. I said earlier, you should get off your phone. You put it away and you jump on your PC for a few reasons. Posts originated from mobile do a few things. They don't allow you to see a pretty preview image when you share an article and they also have a tendency to share mobile versions of that article which can be frustrating. There's also the likelihood of text talk. So when you're typing out an update it is likely to use your most common spelling of the word whether it is correct or not. So use a PC with spell check and grammar check and more. But more importantly, insights. So after you've taken the time to create engaging content it pays to look at how your posts perform. This is where Facebook Insights feature comes into play. The Insights section allows you to analyze your engagement in detail. Here you can see how your overall page is tracking and what posts are the most engaging. The Insights section allows you to gain a general understanding of what kinds of posts work for your particular page and therefore helps you plan your future content. So here is the main insights page with an overview of pretty much everything. Page likes and how they are trending post reach. I can see that for the week we were reaching just over 8,700 people and about 20% down on the week prior. I can also see my engagement rate and if it's going up or down. So here I've clicked on posts within Insights. What I can see here is the time when my audience is on Facebook. I can view each individual day or the average over the whole week. I can see that more and more people go online after 8 a.m. then after 12 p.m. it starts to drop and then rises again after 2 p.m. You can monitor this and find the best times to post. Keep checking this and monitor the habits of your audience as it does continually change. Below that I can see my most recent posts and how they performed with reach, engagement and click-through. This is an interesting metric because a post of yours might have low engagement but high click-through which means that a lot of people read the content but didn't feel compelled to like or comment. Now I can scroll through each and every post. It just keeps on going. I can then also click on more content and find out a lot more information. So I can see a trend of reach likes, comments and shares over the last few weeks. I can even see a demographic breakdown. I can see where my audience lives, their gender, age group and pretty much everything else. You can spend hours looking at insights and seeing what worked, what didn't work and how your audience interacted with each post. Now I know I said get off your phone but if you haven't already you download the Facebook page manager app. So you can manage all the great posts that you've already scheduled. Then when someone posts on your page messages with a question you can quickly interact and engage with them. When it comes to effectively engaging with followers on Facebook great content only gets you so far. Apart from providing engaging and relevant content the second crucial responsibility of an administrator is monitoring content and responding to interaction as it comes. Always try and respond to people. It's what they expect and you can't expect them to engage with you if you aren't going to return the favor and engage back. Have a laugh with them, have some personality but keep things professional speaking of which. We decided to throw caution to the wind and have a laugh on April Fool's Day. If you didn't see it we made an elaborate story that CFA were trialling world first siren technology designed to instantly grab the attention of road users. The video then plays Mr Whippy. We made it on Buzzfeed, we made it all over the radio and Twitter blew up. People loved seeing us have some harmless fun and genuinely fooling them on the funnest day of the year. There were hundreds of comments enjoying the fact that a serious organization could have a little bit of fun. The best part for us in the digital media team were the comments for people who honestly thought we were changing our siren to sound like Mr Whippy. You can't help some people, they were outraged. So now I'm starting to finish up. This shows how Facebook rates certain posts. Videos number one and a photo on its own is rated alone number four. Now if you post a YouTube video that's actually considered a link so you'll see that sitting at number three. But if you work through these things you can imagine that a photo with some text being status and a link will do very well. So before I get to the questions I recommend anyone who is managing social media and we touched on this in the last session to join this group. We have over 600 members, all of them doing social media and community engagement for brigades. People share ideas, problems, questions, policies, content ideas and just about everything. It's a great resource because it's full of people just like you and me who have questions and like to answer questions. So you could almost treat this as a 24 seven CFA social media helpline. Questions? When you were showing about borrowing content from other pages, if I'm looking at my own personal Facebook page and I see something I like, I think that it'd be valuable as a person, I'm on the CFA group. So I see something there, I lie and then if I'm able to get a Facebook page for myself, for my crew, can I transfer it from something I see over to that page? Yeah, so if the content was an article, then you would open up that article and copy that link and then you'd start again on your page and you'd paste that link but you could also then give credit to where you found it from. So if you found it from another emergency services website or something like that, you could tag them in that post and say thanks for the interesting content at the bottom after giving context. Yep. What I noticed Dan said in his presentation, the CFA does it. We, it's a really good thing to do. We do it at CFA HQ when we comment. So if we post an update, we generally don't sign off our name but if you look at the last few posts, when people comment with their questions, we will respond and they'll be tagged Martin, Somme or Ryan. Yeah, yeah. We do something a bit different at Warrantyte where we do, like what we're doing or how we're feeling. So for when we did the biggest morning tea, we put up that we were drinking tea on the day and that seems to get a lot of blacks because you get a little emoji, like an emoji face there with girl and that seems to get a lot more people as well. Yeah, definitely. It's those little things like tagging businesses, locations or using that feeling or doing or watching emoji. They're really good little things to add to any post. Can you define the difference between share and like what actually happens? Well, if someone likes the posts, that's, it's as simple as that. They've hit like and they've put their little thumb on it. If they share it, then they are showing their online network that article or post. If you like me and then I post again, you see me again. Oh, sorry, you've lost me. So you'll... If you like an article, I'll just post it. Yep. And it's the first time you've done it, like on a mind. Will you automatically get my posts from there on it? No. You have to go into his page and the line. It's very, you know, I touched at the start that each Facebook user gets about 1,500 posts a day and Facebook decides about 300 of those to show. So I had a slide ranking different types of posts and video being number one. It takes those little things in its algorithm and decides, yep, you want to see this or you don't want to see that. And little things like particular words that you use, if you ask someone to like, comment and share, it thinks, Facebook thinks that you're pushing it too hard and they will drop you down the bottom, which is a bit unfair. But there's lots of these little things in their algorithm that can hurt you. We've noticed at CFA that even just different topics, whether it be cultural diversity or a particular fundraiser, it will decide whether your online audience is interested in those topics and skew it to show them or not show them. So if I share your article, then my network will see it and it will think next time that I'm interested in your comment or in your content, but that will only last so long. You mentioned video being the number one. Is there a premium length, about 20 to 30 seconds? Short, yeah. The shorter the better because Facebook has autoplay videos. If you can capture an entire message in five seconds to 20 seconds, then that's going to be really good. Now, we've posted videos that were short and they do really well. We posted a video that was over 20 minutes long and it didn't do so well. So that was a long video. That's a really good question. I was actually thinking about that. I think Stefan would be the right person to talk to and get something started because it's a great resource for CFA volunteers. I know that people get a lot out of it. So definitely if you could even champion it or talk to Stefan about creating something, yeah, it's worthwhile. How much time do you spend with the other administrators on your page, talking about managing the content? So sometimes with the stuff we've talked about at this conference, for instance, there's going to be lots of different opinions within the brigade and the community and sometimes you can get some pretty negative stuff but often you can get some pretty negative stuff. Yeah, that's a tough one. Personally, with the Upway page, I do everything myself. But if I'm trying to start a new initiative, say Faces of Upway, for instance, I run that past the BMT. If I was to bring that up at a meeting with 40 or 50 people there, then you've got a lot of opinions and a lot of people don't understand social media so they don't understand that that would be worthwhile. So run things like that past your BMT and always try and get some empowerment and say, look, this is what I want to achieve. We want to make this community go-to page. So rather than me ask you, every time I think I see something that's worth sharing and coming to you with it, let's just decide what's good and what's bad and then just run with it. Tagging, is that just another way of saying that knowledge is something of the author or is it a physical process? It's a physical process of tagging. And, you know, I spoke, well, it's... I get a message to come and say, you've been tagged in the photograph. Now, that's you personally. But as a page, you can tag a business. If you were using a Facebook page, you'd understand how easy it is and I can go through that later with you. But before I mentioned about Facebook's algorithm and what it thinks you want to see and what you don't want to see, if you tagged... I spoke about Noble Park earlier and they were at the footy. If they had have tagged the football club, then everybody who doesn't like Noble Park Fire Brigade but likes Noble Park Football Club is generally going to see that post. So you're reaching the right people because they go, hey, yeah, the foot is on. Let's go to the footy and put a couple of coins in the tin and then also potentially getting some more likes and some people to your fire brigade because of what you've done in the community. So that's why tagging is a really good thing. That it? We're done. All right, well, look, yeah, join the group.