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Tricky little Facebook Business Manager. Where do the invites go when you try to add someone as an admin to your Facebook Business Page or Facebook Ads Account?   Nowhere!  This trick helps you invite people, then immediately go add them.  Check it out, and happy marketing!

Every single second of time is super important to small business owners and marketers. I mean, especially with content marketers like me telling people to create multiple pieces of content per day for social media to help grow their audiences.  I love this time-saving tip that can be found within the YouTube Studio Channel Settings that allows content creators to essentially pre-load tags, descriptions and other video settings.  This way, when you're uploading you're new, awesome video to YouTube, you can change around your description and tags rather than write them from scratch each time.  Every second counts, marketers and small business owners!

As a web developer and digital strategist, I've worked with hundreds of businesses over the last 15 years, and just about every single one has either asked me about Google Ads or paid me to run a campaign for them or show them how to set up a campaign.  Up until about 2017 it was super complicated, then Google innovated and started drastically improving a product they called Google Adwords Express.  My content archive at Data Driven Design proves I am a HUGE proponent of Google Adwords Express for any kind of small business just dipping their toes into the Digital Marketing waters.

Business Owners and Marketers, are you struggling trying to find how to create a marketing friendly Facebook URL?  You should be able to get a really clean one with your business name in it and not have to use long ones with dashes and numbers and Facebook initially gives you.

When it comes to Facebook Business Manager, Instagram Business Accounts vs. Personal Accounts and more, there is a lot to know, and a lot of details “under the hood” that Business Owners and Marketers need to be aware of. At times, it can get very frustrating and overwhelming to try and hook things up correctly between the two platforms. Particularly, Facebook Business Manager being one of the more convoluted digital marketing tools I’ve ever used. Granted, it is free, so I’m not complaining, but I digress. The point is that business owners and marketers really only should care / only do care about the following things, which are EXACTLY what this video shows you how to do: – Be able to connect your Instagram Business Account To Your Facebook Business Manager Account so you can run Instagram Ads via your Facebook Ads account. – Swap your IG personal account to an Instagram Business Account so that you can advertise via the IG app AND – Connect IG and FB so that you can post from IG and have it go directly to your Facebook Business Page. This is particularly useful for IGTV video uploads that you can send directly to your Facebook Business Page. Thanks for reading, watching and listening, and have a great day! KEEP MARKETING! Paul Hickey, Founder / CEO / Lead Strategist at Data Driven Design, LLC and founder of Nashville Voice Conference, has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 15 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing, Email Marketing and most recently, Voice App Design and Development – Alexa Skills and Google Actions. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

I've used WordPress for almost 15 years now, and I've never seen the frequency of random "Sorry, That Page Doesn't Exist" errors that I've seen in the last few weeks. Clients have emailed in one-by-one, after the recent core upgrade to PHP 7.4. Well, at least that's the only correlation I can see between these errors. I could be wrong on the cause, but I know the fix! And that's the most important thing. It's definitely not as scary as the error itself. Trust me. It actually only takes a few seconds. First, go to your WordPress Admin Dashboard and confirm your page(s) weren't deleted. Then, go to Settings - Permalinks and click Save. That's right. Don't change anything, just click "Save." Your pages should reappear upon refreshing.  You're welcome. :)

Hello WordPress Content Managers, Content Marketers and yes, that means you too Business Owners! Are you frustrated by the fact that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media outlets don't always show the correct featured image when you embed/post a link from your WordPress website?  Believe me, I've seen some get really messy.  Don't worry, I've got the solution for you.  First of all, all WordPress website pages and posts have something called the Featured Image. It's located on the far right hand side of the page, as my video explains. If your theme isn't having any issues showing the OG: Image tag (open graph image tag) to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., then your website should be showing exactly what you put in this featured image spot as the embedded image with your social media post.  Also, as my video explains, it should be pulling the SEO Title and Meta Description from your Yoast SEO plug-in and showing that as the Title and Description of your post under your featured image as you make your post.  If this isn't working, don't worry, the next thing to try is called the "Social" settings in Yoast SEO. As the video above walks you through, you can toggle over to the Social tab in Yoast, and try to put in a Facebook and Twitter Title, Description and Image.  What this is trying to do is properly set the OG: image tag in the source code of your WordPress site, overriding the Featured Image setting.  However, you may be watching / reading this because you already tried these things! Don't worry. I have a fix.  Believe it or not, you need to create a Facebook App for your WordPress site. But it's super easy and quick.  Just go into your Yoast SEO Social Settings and click the Facebook Tab. Then go to Developers.Facebook.com and create an app. The video walks you through this step.  Once your website cache clears (typically 24 hours depending on which host you use, and faster if you use GoDaddy or WPEngine - each of which give you the ability to clear cache with one click from your WP Admin Dashboard), the OG:image settings should reset.  You should then use both the Facebook Sharing Debugger Tool and the LinkedIn Post Inspector Tool to preview what your posts will look like as you embed links from your WordPress website into social media.  Just like other updates to your site, it may take some time and refreshing to get the results you want, but once you've gone through this level of troubleshooting and fixed it, you shouldn't have to do it again.   Special thanks to some great resources out there that helped me along the way:  JOOBI.org and CompeteThemes.com.

The end of Q1 2020 represents a time not only when the world changed, but business forever changed. All businesses, large and small, were forced to immediately look in the mirror and make very tough business decisions.  My business, Data Driven Design, though fully remote for several years, wasn't unaffected.  In this podcast, I talk candidly about the decisions I made during March, April and May 2020, from Content Creation, to Employee Hiring/Firing/Management, taking over client projects myself, working directly with clients again, the future of the digital marketing space, and the future of Data Driven Design.

When I interviewed Julie Davis, director of instructional technology and innovation for Chattanooga Christian School, it was before the tornado damage in Nashville on March 3, 2020 and before the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic began to limit social gatherings of large groups. It was certainly before schools began to close down for the year. However, after reflecting on this interview, I feel like posting it is the right thing to do, because now, more than ever, if educators can figure out how to use Alexa to enhance learning, it will keep education going in the right direction for when we can be face-to-face with one other, and for when we can’t be. Here is the full interview with Julie Davis as I had intended to post it prior to the events of March 2020. Julie Davis is the director of instructional technology and innovation at Chattanooga Christian school. She is an educator working with teachers, students, parents and developers. She’s a former accountant so she understands business. She’s an Alexa champion and she’s been pulled in by Samsung’s Bixby to also be their version of a Bixby champion. I am so honored that she is going to present at the Nashville Voice Conference 2020. Julie is the host of Voice in Education podcast and Alexa flash briefing. I recently spoke to Julie about how she uses voice technology to support learning in schools around her area.

Updates from Spain: Episode 2  The unthinkable and unimaginable has happened all at once. As much as I love working from home and holing myself up in my office to get a ton of work ton each day, being quarantined with my family home from school is a whole other story!  In all seriousness, we're doing well. My wife is an amazing person, working on a schedule for our family to stay productive, learning, staying active, and enjoying each other in the process.  Talking about being in quarantine and actually experiencing not being able to leave your apartment in a city is a whole other thing. We're technically not even supposed to leave to go into the hallway or to the roof to get fresh air.  We are allowed to go to the grocery store to get food.  I can't run outside like I'm used to every day, so I've pivoted to jumping rope and doing burpees, push-ups and crunches in our living room.  Data Driven Design is up and running as a fully remote work team, but dealing with the new challenges of having our kids at home 100% of the time! Perspective, patience and innovation are important during this time. So far, we're all doing well though. How are you doing? We want to hear from you! Email me at paul@datadriven.design if you want to join a conversation via Zoom conference.  More updates to come!