Marians Honest IM Tips & Reviews

In February of 2018, Facebook announced plans to prioritize personal content and de-prioritize content from pages. That means that if you’ve got a Facebook page for your local business, your content is only being seen by a very small percentage of your followers unless you pay to promote it. Nothing to be done, right? It’s one of those things that you can’t control… or is it? It turns out there’s a super-easy (and FREE) way to connect with both existing and potential customers on Facebook without paying to promote your content. It involves creating a Facebook group to promote your brand. Here’s what you need to know. Group Content is Prioritized Ahead of Brand Content  The first thing you need to know is that Facebook has downgraded content posted by company and brand pages. However, it still prioritizes content from groups. Why? Well, the short answer is that people must voluntarily opt in to a group. You might be thinking that users have voluntarily followed your page, too ...

If you’re paying attention, you know that cybercrime is no joke. In 2015, cybercrime cost $3 trillion annually , and projections indicate that number will double by 2021. Yikes. The real question is, what are you doing to protect yourself? A lot of local business owners do the bare minimum and tell themselves it’s enough. I’ll let you in on a little secret: it’s not enough. If all you’re doing is updating your anti-virus software and filtering out spam, you’re still vulnerable. Scared? You should be. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do something to protect yourself. Cybersecurity experts are working constantly to stay ahead of hackers. Here are 8 ways you can protect your website and data. #1: Keep All Software Updated Have you ever received a notification that your software needed an update and delayed it because it wasn’t convenient? The answer is probably yes, and yet delaying updates for your website can leave you vulnerable to hackers. One of the best ways to protect your si...

As a business owner, you’ve got to wear many hats in the course of a day. You might be a salesperson one minute and a human resources manager the next. It’s a lot to do. And, when it comes to add items to your to-do list, you might do everything you can to minimize what you take on. Your time’s limited – and valuable – and there are only so many hours in a day. Website maintenance is the perfect example. It might seem unnecessary – and you might wonder if it’s something you can ignore. Hot tip: It’s not. In fact, website maintenance is essential to everything from SEO to user engagement – and those things both lead directly to your bottom line. Here’s why. Google and Website Maintenance Let’s start with something that’s a huge priority for most business owners: earning (and keeping) a high Google rank for your primary keywords. As you know, Google doesn’t make its search algorithm public. However, we do no some things about it. For example, we know that: Google prioritizes fres...