By Guest Blogger Donna DeClemente, Donna's Promo Talk
I'm on vacation this week visiting family that live in the Mrytle Beach, SC, area. Both my sisters moved down here from New York and my father is here as well. I'm staying at my sister Fran's house and she has the week off too, so we're being beach bums. Here's a photo of where we were yesterday, Surfside Beach. Not sure if we're headed back there today of a different part of the Grand Strand.
My brother-in-law Phil has his own lawn maintence and landscaping company down here. His business is doing well, but of course any business always needs new business. So yesterday morning I spent some time with him working on his Facebook page for the business, The Lawn Enforcement. He used to work for the Dutchess County Sherrif's Dept. up in New York, so that was the inspiration for the name.
He had started the page and only had 19 fans and a few posts. So I first showed him how to invite his current Facebook friends to Like the page which he has over 200. Our goal was to get to that FB magic number of 30 so that we could set a unique user name. We were just shy of 30 so I posted an invited on my page and so did my sister, and we were soon over the 30 fans. As of this monring we are now at 45.
One of his first responses he received from the friend invite was from a woman he knew that used to live up in New York near him and is now down in this area. She asked him to come by and look at their house and give her an estimate. So that was a very encouraging start.
Phil's got some really great photos of the work his crew has done for customers so he's going to be posting many of them. This should give his fans some ideas of what can be done with their property. He also just got an new iPhone which should make it much easier for him to post pictures to Facebook directly from his phone. Facebook now offers a great app for Managing your Pages from your mobile devices. I just recently downloaded it for my iPad.
Next we set up a small Facebook ad campaign. He only wants to target 5 or 6 zip codes areas, so the universe is small and affordable. We also selected Gardening as a special interest to start which will help define people who are home owners and care about their lawns. As I told him, you can change the budget at any time and just spend what you want. So we'll see how this works out for him.
My daughter, Kelsey, flew down from New York to join me for a couple of days. She had a chance to unwind yesterday, but Monday was the day from airport hell! So I'm going to rant here for a minute. She was scheduled on Delta to depart LaGuardia at 7 am and connect in Atlanta to arrive in Myrtle Beach at noon. We ended up picking her up at the airport at 8:45 pm. All in all she had been confirmed on 8 different flights to finally get here. I won't bore you with the details, but most of the problems were mechanical and Delta oversold the flights. First time in awhile any of us flew Delta and I will avoid this airline for some time now!
My other daughter, Alex, is in Peru near Iquitos with the Amazon Cares group. I met Molly Mednikow who runs the organization at a BlogPaws Conference two years ago. She organizes these trips down to remote villages in the Amazon and recruits vetinarian volunteers along with some vet nurses and students.
They perform surgeries to spade and neuter dogs and provide other medical needs. Since Alex is working as a vet assistant and planning to attend vet school next year she applied to go and was accepted. She's sent us a few messages from the jungle and is having an amazing experience so far. You can follow their adventure here at the Amazon Cares Blog. Here's a photo from the blog post of Alex, Molly and Erin when she first arrived.
So I'll be back next week. I hope I don't have any more travel nightmares to write about!
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