The team from Global Giant Facebook hit the fire affected coast this week with a full day session held in Batemans Bay attended by over 89 representatives of local businesses keen to learn how they might benefit from improving their social media presence.
The Facebook Team came offering support and a swag of guides, take homes and ongoing support for those in the region affected by fires. An added bonus for attendees was a $200 Facebook marketing voucher for any business who attended the session and three free follow up phone sessions
The Facebook Business Boost training program was supported by a dozen or so Facebook experts delivering five (5) Facebook training workshops on the day to small business representative to help raise their profiles, intended to assist financial recovery following on from the loses sustained over the resent devastating fire season that affected the South Coast over the Christmas holiday period.
The sessions on the day were very well structured and were broken up into short one-hour targeted workshops including:
Managing your business on Facebook and Instagram
Getting creative with your mobile
Grow your business with Facebook
Tourism Facebook and Instagram
Building Communities with Facebook Groups and Fundraising
Between these training workshops the businesses to the opportunity to engage with the Facebook experts on site in one-on-one sessions aimed at fast tracking businesses to improve their profiles and their reach.
With many in the business community unable to attend on the day the Facebook Team recommended that they might contact local digital literacy experts at The Tec Exec.
Tricia Pye, a Tec Exec mentor for over 30 years told the Beagle "The Training sessions were an eye opener for many who attended and it was clear that every small business in the region could have benefited from such a rare and exclusive opportunity of support from a digital marketing platform such as Facebook.
"I went along to get the heads up of what was on offer in the way of learning tools and to help out where possible."
"As expected, the levels of social media marketing experience and application by our local businesses was of varied stages among those present, from start ups to some who were using Facebook marketing regularly, sometimes with success and others struggling to get their head around the full Facebook marketing apps and terminology."
Tricia said "It was clear that terminology and some of the Facebook features were new to the audience and ongoing mentoring and training will be required overtime to build local businesses confidence with the platform and all it has behind the scenes."
The crew from Facebook will be travelling over the fire-affected areas of Australia during the next six weeks and have vowed to revisit Batemans Bay and the far south coast again the in not too distant future. Next stop will be Jindabyne on Monday, March 9.
Tricia said "In preparation for Facebook's next visit, The Tec Execin Batemans Bay are now in talks to organise a follow-up session in the next few months This will take place in around May. Stay tuned for updates."
"It's time to get online and build a better future for South Coast businesses."
The Tec Exec is running weekly training events on the South Coast.
See their Facebook events page for details. @thetecexec.
