Why write a newsletter?

Sometimes there isn't much motivation to write newsletters, social media is much quicker and easier!
But there are many benefits to writing a newsletter over social media posts.

You may have many followers on social media, but they won't always see your posts
On any social media platform most people are following a lot of others, covering people they know and businesses. To be seen and have an impact your followers need to absolutely love you and make sure they see all your posts, otherwise your posts can get lost in the noise of other posts, or in the case of Facebook, may not be seen by many of your fans because of the tweaking Facebook often do to newsfeeds.
Sending a newsletter gives you permission to access your subscribers directly. They've signed up and want to hear from you, your email is always available to them, even if they can't pay attention to it for a few hours or a day. It's sitting in their inbox for when they have time to read it.

You know you have real fans
Signing up to your newsletter is a conscious decision, subscribers want to hear what you have to say. Social media is a mixed bag, some of your fans will love you, others may like you because they like some of your tips and photos or they've entered a competition you've run. Not all your followers like you because they are interested in your products or services.
I've always found I get more response when I send out a newsletter. Not necessarily with clickthroughs, but with phone calls and direct email replies (I believe his is because I'm a service based business not a product based business).

Subscribers are always available to you
Yes, there's always that chance that social media platforms will close down, a new platform will come out that people swap over to (meaning you need to work to get fans back on the new platform) and the one we all hate to think about, Facebook can block or ban us for not following a rule when posting or running a competition (always re-read the rules when running a competition!).
Your subscribers on the other hand are always available to you. You own your subscriber list, and even if the platform you use to send out your newsletters closes down you can easily export your list and import it into another platform and continue on.

You can mix it up a bit
Social media platforms are fairly static in what you can do. Twitter only allow short posts, YouTube is video only, Facebook is more adaptable but has a lot of rules that are always changing.
Your newsletters allow you to contact people and share what you want how you want. You can utilise your layout to benefit your branding, you can share long or short articles, competition details, blog post links, large or small photos, personalise them with subscriber names, or even segment them into products/services that your subscribers like.


If you would like to subscribe to the FeralArt newsletter, where you can get information that I don't post on social media or on my blog, plus links to useful websites, fill out the signup form below.
I send out a newsletter every three weeks and never share your email address with any other person or business.

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Make an easy url for your facebook page

If you've just set up a Facebook page for your business or product you will find that the link to your page (the url people have to type in to the internet browser) is quite long and not at all memorable. It will be something like www.facebook.com/pages/yourpagename/1234567891234567 but you are able to change this to something easier like www.facebook.com/yourpagename

Make sure you are logged in to Facebook then visit www.facebook.com/username
Here you can set a username for your personal page (the one you see all your friends posts), and your facebook business page.

First, choose your business page from the drop down menu.
Type the name you would like your page to be found as.



Press the Check Availability button, this will check if anyone else already has the url you would like to be found for. As there are millions of profiles and business pages you may find you don't get your ideal username (I couldn't get FeralArt for example as someone already has it), so you may have to brainstorm a bit to find something appropriate and memorable.

Once you've found a name available you will get a popup window, this lets you know you can't take someone elses trademark, you can't sell usernames etc. But it's also worth noting if you choose to change the username/url of your page in the future you can only do this once.

Once confirmed your username is set up.

Find out how many visitors clicked on your link.

This is a short simple visual guide to looking at promotion traffic from social media to your website in Google Analytics.

Your statistics can tell you useful (and interesting) information like where people have come to your website from, then you can drill down and see which promotions are working for you.
For example, if you post on Facebook about a new product available on your website on Wednesday and link to it, you can jump into your statistics a few days later (giving people time to see/act and your statistics time to catch up) and see how many people viewed the product on and a few days after Wednesday coming from Facebook.

Log into your Google Analytics account.
In the left menu go to: Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic

Change the date range the graph is showing to the days you would like to see results from.

In the main graph area
Click on facebook.com/referral in the list of referring sites

Inbetween the graph and referring sites (which should now only show Facebook) there's a little dropdown menu that says 'Other' (next to Primary Dimension: Source/Medium), click on that and choose: Traffic Sources > Landing Page

This will show a list of pages under the graph. The list shows which link visitors from Facebook clicked on.
Find the link to the product you promoted and you will see the amount of visits it has had in your chosen date range from Facebook.