[8/16/2010 SteppersUSA Daily News]
Untapped Potential
By Markie Bee
National Chicago Style Steppers Day
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The saying goes "don't put all of your eggs in one basket" and guess what? That's what many Chicago style steppers are doing when it comes to promoting their events and sets. They put the event on Facebook and many aggressively promote the event on the social networking site figuring they "have it covered" but they're so off base when they think that and I'll tell you why. There are approximately 130 Million US users on Facebook of the 310 million broadband users (I'm not including other forms of connection for this example) in the United States and let's say you have the Facebook imposed maximum of 5000 Friends. Are you scratching the surface? Not hardly!
For example, the Chicago Style Stepping group on Facebook has 4,500 members. Does that mean there are 4,500 steppers on Facebook when Facebook has 130 million US members? There's lot's of potential there but it's mostly untapped potential because of the way Facebook works.
SteppersUSA only gets between 3 and 15 percent of its visitors from Facebook on a daily basis what about the remaining 97 or 85 percent of the remaining people? That's the part of the market that's left untapped both inside and outside of Facebook.
What makes things worse is when people post events to Facebook, 90 percent of the time; they post incomplete information about their own events! I've seen people forget to post the address to the venue, the time of the event (or post the wrong time of an event), the cost of the event is missing, they don't post contact information, many don't even post the flyer for the event and the list continues.
Consider this...
 

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We just completed the first National Chicago Style Steppers Day (NCSSD) event which we aggressively promoted from March till August. We promoted heavily on Facebook as well as on SteppersUSA plus we got mentions of the event on all of the major steppers websites, and media outlets, there were people on the streets in each of the participating cities passing out flyers, flyers were e-blasted and even on the last day there were many people inside the Chicago style steppers community that had never heard of the event (until I told them)!
The sad fact is we've only scratched the surface of Facebook and we're not doing a very good job at it anyway. But remember Facebook isn't really designed for promotion and they do their best to quash promotion that isn't a paid for Facebook advertisement.
The web in general is a wonderful promotion tool but it's got to be one part of an advertising and promotion strategy which goes beyond Facebook.
What would you do if Facebook went the way of MySpace (usage of that site has dropped tremendously since Facebook grabbed people's attention)? I'll address that issue very soon.

If you have photos or video from the NCSSD event in your city, please send a link!

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