I'm working with our homeowner's association as a communications coordinator, trying to increase the quantity and quality of communication we receive. I was asked yesterday to develop a survey flyer as we try to determine how many children are in our neighborhood. (We're slated to start building a community school when we reach 300.)

We're having to ask our respondents, without including a postage paid return envelope, to either return the survey to our Clubhouse by hand or via USPS. Please forgive me, but my faith in my neighbors for this amount of self-motivation is lacking. Not that I can blame them.

So, I just developed an online survey using the same information and shortened the 63-character survey web address to 13-chracters using Tiny URL. I am going to include that web address in the letter in the hopes that it will make taking the survey even easier. The survey could also be emailed and posted to our community Facebook page - if, of course, we had a list of emails or more than 20 people on the Facebook page.

The number of resources out there for saving money and increasing the response to your marketing/communication efforts is astonishing. They key of course is to take advantage of them, and building your contact database.

"Facebook's Study of Journalist Page Engagement Reveals Page Post Best Practices" from insidefacebook.com:

"Facebook released the results of a study it conducted on what types of posts by the Facebook Pages of journalists performed the best. Among the highlights: Incorporating personal analysis in posts increased referral clicks by 20%, and including a thumbnail image when posting a link boosted Likes by 65% and comments by 50%."

Other highlights include:

• Turn off auto-posting: Cross-posting Twitter and Facebook updates can decrease your clicks because you are not able to include personal analysis. Turn off the auto-posting and include more personal comment with your post.

• Posts with thumbnail images get more feedback.

• Posts Thursday through Sunday have higher engagement rates. (However, there is fluctuation on this find by industry. As stated, this study was focused on journalists and folks tend to read news on the weekends. I have personally observed more Facebook activity during the week, early morning and late afternoon. I have also found, as a West Coaster with a majority of East Coast friends, to not bother to post anything on a Friday afternoon!)

The best thing you can do is follow your Page Insights, which will allow you craft your posting strategy based on your performance trends.

Click here for the entire article.

By HubSpot's Social Media Marketing Team:  www.hubspot.com

Monitoring your social media presence is incredibly important - but many business owners and marketers are concerned it will take too much time.

You don't need a whole team devoted to social media monitoring - with some tools and these free tips, even one single person can keep an eye on your social media presence. Cover these 5 steps over a cup of coffee and you'll build social media into a healthy daily inbound marketing routine!

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time.

2) Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms in a Google Alert and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your Company Page's Facebook Insights. This can be found under the page's main photo if you are an admin for your page. Scan your active users and interaction stats. Check out your wall posts or new discussions if you have them enabled for your page.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website or a relevant blog post that might be helpful to your audience.

5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

Want to monitor, engage, and measure your social media presence all with one tool? HubSpot's inbound marketing software makes this easy. Our Inbound Marketing Specialists can show you a demonstration of the tools with some of your very own brand and industry keywords.

Tuesday, August 23rd at 2pm ET
Presented by HubSpot's Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella

Social media effectiveness shouldn't rely on luck. Too long have superstitious, unicorns-and-rainbows myths dominated the field. The culmination of years of research, this webinar will present a framework for reliable social media success.

You’ll learn how to build your reach, engineer contagious ideas and measure your results, through data-backed, scientifically-proven best practices.

Register

Please join me and Vickie Pleus of VP Communications!

Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, is an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist. Dan studies social media behavior from a data-backed position enabling him to teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.