Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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todaymade.com
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CONTENTS
Facebook Timeline Basics The Difference Between Pages And Proles Getting To Know The Facebook Timeline Friends, Likes, Fans, and Beyond The Facebook Photo Album Dissecting The Facebook News Feed The Facebook Timeline Marketing Guide: Grow Your Fanbase The Ultimate Tool For Building Community How to Use Facebooks Insights to Track Your Fan Page and Website 10 Ways to Get More Fans to Your Facebook Page Using Exclusivity To Improve Your Facebook Following Marketing Like A Pro Put Your Business on the Map with Facebook Places Tips For Using Paid Facebook Advertising Make Your Website and Facebook Work Together for Marketing Brilliance Your Facebook Page Isnt Your Social Media Strategy
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Facebook has two key components, the page and the prole, both of which serve a very different purpose. It is important for a business to understand this difference. Setting up your Facebook Business Page is fairly simple. Facebook gives you prompts and walks you right through it. There are some best practices, though, and this video will walk you through the basics of getting your page set up with a good foundation. One of the most important Facebook rules is that individual users are allowed to have proles, and businesses are to have pages. Pages are the best option for artists, companies of any size, and brands. However, in order to create a page, we have to have our own personal prole Facebook account. It might seem confusing, so lets look at pages and proles in regards to their strengths and weaknesses.
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Proles might not be the place to: Friend a boss, a customer, a student, or anyone outside a comfortable personal sphere Heavily market products and other business opportunities Mix personal life with a business brand While we need a prole in order to create a page, the page is distinct from the prole, and not as connected to it as we might think. Unless we specically add ourselves as featured page owners, our page isnt really connected to our personal prole as far as an outside viewer is concerned. When doing a Facebook search as a person, we can nd people and brands. When doing a Facebook search as a brand, we can only nd other brands. Facebook lets personal proles connect to brands, but brands cannot friend or follow personal proles.
Pages are specically intended for business use. They contain different features and privacy options that make them optimal for this purpose. Pages allow us to post images and video and connect with our customers in a more direct way than weve ever been able to do before. Pages are best for: Sharing news and information about our business Uploading photos, videos, and images that relate to our business Allow the public to like and become a fan of our business Showing support for other local businesses Listen to and have conversations with fans and customers Unlike proles, business pages do not allow us to invite friends. Anyone who likes a page is called a fan, not a friend. Pages might not be the place to:
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Pages are still social media, so they certainly have a more personal feel to them than traditional marketing of the past. However, we want to be sure that the image we present on our page is one that wont turn people away. We want to be real, be honest, and keep our personal business for our personal proles.
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Post personal pictures, comments, or links Express negative or argumentative conversation Have a public disagreement
Facebook proles are meant to represent a single individual. Organizations of any type are not permitted to maintain an account under the name of their organization. We have created Facebook Pages to allow organizations to have a presence on Facebook. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from user proles, and optimized for an organizations needs to communicate, distribute information/content, engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans recommendations to their friendsFacebook Pages are designed to be a media rich, valuable presence for any artist, business or brand. If you create a prole for your business, your account may be disabled for violating our Terms of Use. It might seem a gray area for someone such as an artist or writer, this choice between personal prole or page, but a page is really where businesses and brands and artists and writers should be. There is no real reason to attempt to use a prole as a business presence, particularly with the changes and upgrades Facebook has implemented. The page is truly the best place for our business to exist.
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Before we can select a branded URL for our page, we have to choose a username for our personal prole. Our page must have at least 25 fans to establish a URL. This is to prevent name squatting. Usernames are not transferable, nor can they be edited or changed later. Choose a page name wisely. If our trademarked name has already been taken, we can notify Facebook. This is considered intellectual property infringement.
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(www.facebook.com/ourbusiness). We can do this by visiting https://www.facebook.com/username/ and following the steps. Remember:
Arrange our apps in an order that we prefer. This is done by clicking on the far right app, which opens up edit options in the right corner of any app we hover the mouse over. We can swap locations of apps and make sure the ones that we make visible are important to our brand. We can use third party custom apps. Facebook provides us with a good selection of Timeline apps here, though some are available for Proles only. We can nd additional apps by going to the fan page for that app. If the App is available for your page, youll see an Add To Page link in the lower lefthand column. We can set custom icons for our custom apps. This allows us to give our brand page an overall cohesive apperance.
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These apps are located directly below our Cover Photo, and so are quite visible to our fans. There are a few things we can do to make the best use of this.
From there you can choose the app youd like to change the icon for, and choose Edit Settings. You can change the icon image, as well as the name you want displayed for the App.
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In the Edit Page area, select Apps in the left side of the page.
Facebook provides businesses with options of featuring or promoting content from their own page. We can create a Milestone, we can Highlight a post, or we can Pin a post. Highlighted posts stretch across the entire timeline, giving visitors to our page plenty to look at and a quick way to Highlight content that we dont want to see lost easily in the timeline. Highlighted posts stay where they are in the timeline, shufing down as new content is added. However, they retain the huge real estate on the page. You can Highlight a post at any time simply by hovering over the post you wish to Highlight, and clicking on the star in the upper right corner.
Highlighted posts stretch across the full Timeline and are great attention grabbers. Pinning a post to our timeline means that we can feature it at the top of the timeline for seven days. At the end of that time period, it drops back to its original date on the timeline. A post can only be pinned by an administrator of the page. There can only be one post pinned at a time, and any post pinned while another is at the top will replace the previous post. You can Pin
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Milestones are different from a status or photo update. A post is designated as a Milestone and several new options, such as location and date, as well as photos, are available to us. Milestones are created in the same place a regular status or photo is added to the Timeline. Choose Milestone from the four choices (Status, Photo, Ask Question, Milestone), and follow Facebooks prompt from there.
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any post at any time by hovering over the post you wish to Pin, clicking on the pencil in the upper right corner, and selecting Pin To Top.
Business can be thankful for the real-time insights Facebook provides us. These insights, all of which are available for export, include: Overview: A broad view of how our page is performing. Likes: Detailed information on posts that are getting liked. Reach: The number of people who have seen content associated with our page. Talking About This: The number of people who have interacted with our page in any way (like, comment, tag, share). This is vital, since it is an indicator on how well our content is connecting with our community. These insights are a very good way to track our pages success, and to see what kind of content resonates with our fans. Valuable information such as this was coveted by businesses in the past, and not available so quickly or easily.
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The Facebook Timeline is not necessarily new, but it made headlines again when Facebook converted all pages to the Timeline view on March 30, 2012.
TIMELINE ADVANTAGES
Over the years, there have been many changes made to Facebook. In fact, it sometimes feels like they never stop changing. This time around, however, the changes are very positive and offer some major benets to brands. While change is often difcult, this new change was actually good for Facebook pages.
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One of the most noticeable changes to our bands page was the new cover photo at the top of the wall page. This image is the dening element of the page. This is a very exciting change for our brand, since it will add more actual brand to our page. Its better visual real estate.
The Timeline
The Timeline portion of the page will completely change how visitors see posts. With the new look, all of our posts past and present will be visible in an ongoing timeline layout. This will give visitors a better overview of our brand each time they visit. This feature makes Facebook an even better tool for telling our companys story.
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Cover Image
A great new hub of information easily at any page managers ngertips. Timelines admin panel gives you great stats.
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Facebook used to provide only 520 pixels for welcome tabs, those customized pages that welcomed rst-time visitors. Now, users have access to almost twice as much space (810 pixels). There are plenty of creative things that can be done with this new real estate. It will be exciting to see what develops. However, it should be noted that administrators will no longer be able to set a default landing tab for page visitors. So, while we have larger visual area to work with, the welcome tab technically no longer exists.
The tabs for Facebooks Timeline are more visible. There are fewer tabs, however.
Milestones
In addition to normal everyday status updates, we can now add special milestones to commemorate special events in our brands history. For example, the day we changed over to the the Timeline!
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Many people dont realize that the new Timeline page also comes with a new Messages features for all brands. Just like Facebook personal proles, brand pages will now be able to send and receive private messages from fans or customers with questions.
Hide Stories
With the new timeline view, some might worry that they wont be able to hide old posts that are no longer relevant. Generally with Facebook, once its there, its there. No more. Brands can now hide or bury stories from their timeline with ease.
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Private Messages
Friends Activity
In the top right corner of your Timeline, users will now see other friends that also like our page. In addition, this section will show any conversation that these friends are having about our brand (i.e. specic posts mentioning our page). Some might call this social proof, but it increases our risk of negative press if we arent paying attention.
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stories), this can pose a potential risk for companies that arent paying attention to negative attacks.
In the new activity log, we will be able to see every post that has ever been published on our page, as well as mentions by other Facebook users. Think of this as a summary of all the activity that has happened surrounding our Facebook page.
CHANGE IS GOOD
Overall, the Timeline is a boon for our business. With more branding real estate, and the option for highlighted information on the Timeline, there are a lot of tools at our disposal. Aside from the specic features, some the primary benets of Timeline are: Better visual exposure for design/branding elements. Improved emphasis on the local aspects of business. Huge step forward in the storytelling aspect of online networking. Additional communication avenues show promise for community building. The new Timeline gives us a great opportunity to highlight the big moments in our brands history.
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Activity Log
Facebook has its own vocabulary, and it can be confusing. What we are able to do depends on who we are when were using Facebook, and what that usage allows us to accomplish.
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We can feature pages that weve liked, and even feature page administrators if we want.
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Facebook is continually adding features to help us control what information we see in our News Feed. When using Facebook under our personal Prole, we are automatically Subscribed to anyone we have added as a Friend. Those settings can be adjusted later, allowing us to reduce the amount or kinds of content we see from Friends in our News Feed. We can also Unsubscribe from a Friend while still keeping them as a Friend. Perhaps we want to still have access, or allow them access, to our Prole, but we do not want to see their content in our News Feed. Our Friend will not know we have Unsubscribed from them.
While in our proles, we have a lot more control on how our friends show up in our newsfeed. Subscribing also allows us, when logged in as a Prole user, to get updates in our News Feed from a person we nd interesting, whether we are friends or not. We can also decide if we want others to have that kind of access to the content and status updates that we designate as public by offering a subscription option. Subscriptions are often used by well-known personalities
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When logged in as a Page administrator, we dont have quite the controls over what appears in our News Feed that we have as a personal Prole user. We can hide a specic story from our News Feed, or we can block all updates from a Page that we Liked without Unliking them. The Subscription concept works best for proles and prole users. Working with subscriptions can be easily done right in the News Feed.
Pages have fewer options on controlling content in their feed, and their fans have fewer options to work with the content.
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who cant possibly Friend everyone but still want to allow people access to their public content on their Prole.
Support Good Causes. Liking the Page of a local, regional, or national organization that promotes a good cause gives you both valuable content for your Fans, and a way to help your Fans get involved with that good cause. Your Fans want to be part of something good, and by giving them a way to do that, you build trust for your brand. Find Great Content. Liking the Page of a website that consistently provides great content that is related to your brand or area of expertise is all part of giving our Fans the best information possible. Mixing up that found content with our own content builds trust for our brand by helping our Fans avoid the information overload and learning that they can come to us for the best information out there. Facebooks News Feed makes it very easy to share this content on our Timeline. Be In Front Of Eyeballs. Staying in the News Feed on a regular basis is the best way to get our brands content shared, and to nd new fans. You might not always have the content to keep up, but by sharing the content you nd, this can be accomplished. By merely making it a regular habit to stop by Facebook and check your Pages own News Feed (assuming youve liked a wide variety of Pages, as described above), youll be able to nd plenty of content to share. And, your brands Page will be in your Fans News Feeds more often. Its Gotta Be Good. Poor content, or a ood of content all at once might make a Fan block or Unsubscribe, so be sure
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feature that page is up to you, but liking another Page is an element of good-faith and buying local. Fans appreciate that youre willing to share the spotlight and social real estate with another local brand. Fans of other local brands may nd you in this way as well.
Being social means well be active in using these different methods of working with pages and proles while on Facebook.
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to share only the best, create only the best, and to space that content out in the day. Blasting all of your content out at once annoys Fans; they dont want to see a block of their News Feed taken up by one brand, nor are they likely to differentiate between all of the content you sent out. Always respect the users News Feed. They have so many controls, and it is easy to be removed from it. Out of site, out of mind.
Each Facebook page comes with the opportunity to nd and hook Fans through great photo albums. With careful planning and a basic understanding of whats available, Facebook photo albums can be so much more than a catch-all for random images. They can tell the story of a brand. The Internet is a place where images rule. We click on photos, were attracted to images now more than ever, a picture is worth a thousand words. Using photos on Facebook in the right way can help build our brand and get our content shared. Learn the basics of working with photos on Facebook. In our Facebook page, the link to the photo album section is found directly below our cover image with the rest of the Facebook apps. The location for the photos app cannot be moved. Facebook understands the importance of photos, and has locked the location of this app. This location is prime real estate on our Facebook page, and so our photo albums have the potential to be a strong brand-building tool. Remember, the Internet is increasingly visual; our images have power.
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It goes without saying that we need good photos on our Page, but how we create our photo albums, and how we arrange them, is just as important as lling them with excellent images.
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Facebook is strongest not as a tool for push marketing and mere product updates, but to tell a story: the story of our brand. The Timeline is arranged with story in mind, and with Facebook photo albums, we are given the great opportunity to tell our story with images. Approaching our photo albums with that mindset, instead of as a collection of random images or mere documentation, will help us succeed in attracting and keeping fans. They want a story, so why shouldnt we share ours and give them what they want?
Tell where you are. Share images of your work and your ofce. These are things that have an effect on you; let your fans know about them, too. Theyll understand your brand better when they know where it comes from. Tell what you did. If your brand is involved in a special event, set up an album for the event. Tag the people in the photos. Make it about community. Give fans an excuse to share your photos as they share their involvement in the event. Hook through titles. We judge books by covers and blog posts by headlines. Give your album a title that makes readers want to look inside. Give photos captions that help the story along. Make a well-rounded library. Have albums that are informative, that are inspiring, that are humorous, and that offer useful information. Create a well-rounded visual library through the albums that you create. Avoid the huge tome. An album with several hundred photos wont get the same use as an album with a more digestible number. Keeping albums small, and creating more albums, helps people quickly look through your library and consume a cohesive story one at a time. Use word pictures. Consider creating images the feature quotes, ideas, and tips. Sure, you could put it in a status update, but images are more likely to be shared. Make a graphic version of the text instead.
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Created The Widget and show a product from the ground up.
We can arrange the order of our albums, as well as the individual photos in our albums. This is done through basic clicking and dragging. Or, within the album, we can let Facebook do the work by choosing to arrange them by date or by upload. We can also designate which photo we want to be the albums cover photo. Just like we want great album titles, we want great album covers. The arrangement of photos within an album is only a concern when we have an album in which there is a consecutive order where we are literally telling a story which has one photo leading onto the next. We might also want to consider how the album looks visually as it spreads out on a screen, and how we want our photos to work for us.
Good cover images on our albums, as well as album titles, help to tell our brands story. Unless we otherwise designate, photos uploaded to albums show up on our Timeline. Have captions and necessary tags and locations to make full use of this feature. If someone shares a photo from an album, the photo needs to be able to stand on its own, and the captions and tags help it do this. Also, remember that the Timeline will feature a photo from an album in the apps, below the Cover Photo, and that one photo will need to do the work to gather attention for all of our photo albums. Our photos have to be strong individually, and as an album.
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See the photo album as not just a random collection of photos, but as groupings of images that tell stories. This will help choose what kind of albums (collections) to create, how to name them, what photos should go in them, and the order those photos should take.
Facebook now allows users to tag photos with brands. In the past, tagging photos was reserved for people, tagging friends and the like. Now, Facebook allows everyone in on the game, even pages, giving our brand a great opportunity. Think of the movies that have prominent product placement. Everyone in the theater, whether they realize it or not, are being suggested to think the following: People use that product. Maybe I should. Maybe a photo with a can of Coca Cola doesnt need a tag, since most of us recognize it. However, a tag links back to the brands Page, so it helps the brand let others know that their product is in use. Plus, not all of us have as easily recognized products as Coca Cola. Think of the benet of having users tag photos of them using or wearing or displaying our product or service. Its a referral on our page, its a message to others that their friends use our products, and its a recommendation. Imagine our Timeline and photo albums having a collection of photos supplied by fans showing themselves using our product. Recommendations carry a lot of weight, particularly from real people. Add the visual nature of a photo, and its a strong recommendation indeed. Currently, only pages who have categorized themselves as Brands & Products or People can utilize this feature, though Facebook has promised to roll this out more extensively over time.
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We can tag photos, as can our fans. By tagging a photo, it will show up on that fans page.
1. Click the photo you wish to tag, and select Tag This Photo. 2. Type the name of the Person or Page you wish to tag. 3. Click Done Tagging in the lower left corner.
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The news feed is a powerful tool for brands. It can be used for content discovery, and, if understood and used properly, it can maximize a brands exposure on Facebook. Without a clear understanding of its potential, it can overwhelm or be wasted. The Facebook News Feed is a library, a resource, a promotional tool, and a place for community. It is our homepage, giving page and prole users different options to interact with the stories they see. When properly understood, the News Feed offers brands a great opportunity to connect with their fans. Learn abou the News Feed and features, such as the Interest List.
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Our News Feed is a uid and updating list of content. It changes constantly as posts and status updates are changed. The News Feed for a personal Prole contains everything from photo tags, friend requests, status updates, group memberships and more. The News Feed for a brands Page is a bit different. It shows the new content from the pages weve liked, but not the content of individual people or fans. Brand Pages can only connect to other brand Pages by liking, and so therefore, that is the only content we will see in our brands News Feed. The News Feed might sound secondary to our brands page, since weve put a lot of effort into making our Timeline represent our brand, but the truth is that the News Feed is probably more important. The News Feed is the presence our fans will see and share more than the Timeline. Most people dont go directly to a brands page, but are clicking through or sharing based on what they see in their News Feed. Just as we have limited time in the day, so do our fans. The News Feed is the easiest way for them to keep up with their favorite brands and friends, and not have to take the time to go directly to many different Pages and Proles. Most Facebook users spend the largest amount of time on their News Feed.
The rst page we arrive on is the newsfeed, and its where most people stay.
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It means that we are competing for attention with all the other content that is in any given News Feed, including other brands as well as personal friends. It means a fan might miss our update if he isnt online when we post it since it will quickly slide lower as other items are added to his News Feed. It means we need to post content to our Timeline regularly, and at intervals, throughout the day, to keep our brand present in our fans News Feeds. It means we need to see the News Feed as the gateway to our brand. The News Feed is where everything happens on Facebook. The News Feed is the ultimate prime real estate on Facebook. Its where we want our message to always be present.
We can reach our fans very easily through their news feed if we use best practices. Whenever we add new content to our Timeline, it will appear in their news feed. A few simple considerations of how we handle content on our Timeline will increase our chances of success on the News Feed. Be Consistent. Add content to your Timeline regularly. Remember, your content isnt going to stay at the top of a fans news feed for long, and you might miss them if you only add content once. However, dont ood the News Feed with your content. If a user sees massive amounts of just your content every time they login, they may block your page to get more control over their News Feed. Think of a steady drip instead of a ood. Be Relevant. Content shouldnt be published for publishings sake. Share content that has value, whether its
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Be Succinct. Brief updates fare better than long, wordy updates. Simple status or photos posts actually do very well in Facebook user engagement. Develop Dialogue. Ask questions, or encourage fan response. Or, use ll in the blank techniques (e.g. I like ____). Get your fans involved with your brand. Call To Action. Dont shy away from updates that encourage your fans to do something. Coupons and other offers (e.g. Get 50% off) fare well with Facebook fans. Stay Up On Trends. Consider trending topics and how to use that to keep an update on the news feed longer. You can read more here. Be Timely. Use your own Facebook insights to learn the best time to post Facebook updates. Plan a week where you update at the same interval every day with the same content (e.g. post a photo at the same time every day), and use that information to determine the best time to update. While not a foolproof method, it helps in giving you an idea of when your fans are active.
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promoting your brand or sharing outside links and images. Your Facebook page should follow the same rules as other social media platforms, and contain a good mix for your fans.
Individual Prole users have a few more options than brands do when it comes to their News Feed. They can hide a specic story, report the story as spam, subscribe to a user (all updates, most updates, or only important updates), unsubscribe from a user, unsubscribe from a users status updates only, and so on. And, of course, the can remove a user from their Friends list entirely. An individual Prole user has a great deal of control over their News Feed.
While in our proles, we have a lot more control on how our friends show up in our newsfeed. When using Facebook as the admin of a Page, however, we have fewer options. A Page can hide a specic story from their News Feed, or they can report the story as spam. A Page can also block another Page from showing up on their News Feed without having to Unlike them.
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Facebook created Interest Lists to help Prole users rene their news feeds by subscribing to topical-based feeds. It functions much like Twitter lists, Google+ saved searches, or Google Reader, allowing us to collect public feeds and content on a related subject. Creating Interest Lists is done easily through Facebooks Add List interface, which is also accessed in the bottom left our our Prole News Feed. We can choose from lists created by other Facebook users, or make our own lists and add the public content or Pages that we want associated with that list. Our lists will appear on the left-hand side of our newsfeed, with a few of the top-stories from these lists appearing in our News Feed, similar to Google+ Hot Topics.
Interest lists offer Prole users access to a lot content without having to like or subscribe and ll up their News Feed. While Pages cant have an Interest List yet, we can, through our Prole, create an Interest List and include our page in the mix. Creating relevant Interest Lists that are available for other users
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Until Facebook allows Interest Lists for pages, theres nothing stopping us from using our Proles Interest List to nd content that we can share through our brands Page.
The Ticker is shown on the right sidebar of the News Feed for personal Proles if the person uses Facebook a lot. It is not seen on a Pages News Feed. The Ticker is an actual real-time update of everything that is happening as it happens. The Ticker can be customized or even turned off. While the Ticker and the order of the News Feed are outside of our control as a brand, its a reminder that great content with a regular publishing schedule gives us the best opportunity in being seen in a News Feed.
Sponsored Stories
Facebook knows the value of the News Feed. With the recent changes to Facebook, we have also seen the
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to subscribe to are a good way to show expertise by being an aggregator of useful information. We can publicize our Interest List and encourage people to subscribe to them. Each Interest List has its own URL, easily found in the browser when the list is opened. We can post this in a status update and people can subscribe right from the post.
Sponsored Stories promote the organic interactions between people and a business.
Sponsored Stories are posts from your friends or Pages on Facebook that a business, organization or individual has paid to highlight so theres a better chance youll see them. They are regular stories that a friend or Page youre connected to has shared with you.
Sponsored Stories will only appear in a users News Feed organically. Perhaps a user liked the page of the brand sponsoring the ad. Or, someone who is on their friend list interacts with a brands page. That friends activity will naturally show up in a users News Feed, anyway, and the brand can choose to sponsor that particular story. Facebook will make the story appear more prominently in a users News Feed, but still make it appear to be very much a typical item. Advertisers cannot add any additional content to the original story posted by the friend. The only indication that the story is sponsored is a small gray link in the lower right corner indicating as much. Users do not have the option to block the Sponsored Stories from appearing in their news feed, nor can they request that their Facebook activity not be used for such ads. However, users are able to block individual ads one at a time, or limit a friends post to Only Important Posts. Most users wont realize they are looking at something that is being promoted by an outside brand.
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introduction of Sponsored Stories in News Feeds for individual users. Previously, ads appeared along the side of the News Feed. Prole users will now see a periodic Sponsored Story in a news feed and likely not realize it is happening. According to Facebook:
Understanding how the News Feed works, and what we can and cannot control, serves as useful reminder that our content, even on Facebook, matters very much. Make use of the tools that Facebook has provided us to nd relevant content to share, and then work within that structure to optimize our exposure in the News Feeds of our fans and potential fans.
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Sponsored stories are about as close as a brand can get to controlling how their content is shown in a Proles News Feed. Facebook has given much control to a Prole user as to how they interact with their News Feed.
Using Facebook in a way that would keep community from forming around your brand is foolish. Facebook is community, and community is conversation.
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Get multiple fans involved by polling them and asking them what they think.
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Blogs & Podcasts: Not only can we participate with an already existing community, but we can help bring likeminded individuals to our own content or social media pages as well as nd content to share to our users. We can nd content to share or build upon and create our own content. User Forums: User forums are part of the old guard online, but still have their place in the social media ranks. As part of the original community that developed online, they are still a place to nd and foster group conversation, and another way to generate ideas for content. Remember, audiences want to participate when we give them something to participate in. Be consistent, and nd the content, create the content, and share the content so the Facebook water cooler talk includes our brand.
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ask questions, and share concerns. LinkedIn uses internal notication and email to keep group members informed of whats going on inside the group. Its a great way to nd industry-specic content to bring back to your Facebook page.
Give your fans a chance to ll in the blank. Let them create conversation and content for you by participating.
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Part of the problem is that we marketers have gotten into the habit of waiting for the customer to come to us. We buy the ad, push it in front of our customers, and wait for them to come. Social media turns this all around, and so we need to learn how to reach out to our customers in a new way that allows them to connect directly to us. One-sided conversation, after all, doesnt build community.
Ask Them To: Start your own conversations by asking questions and sharing topics that encourage discussion. Once you have a small group of followers, you should denitely be able to get some responses if the question is positioned properly. Sometimes, no one is talking simply because they have nothing to talk about. Try some conversation starters to get things rolling. Create Content To Share: Create some helpful and useful content that your audience would like to share. If they are your customers, you should have a pretty good idea of what they like and are interested in. Create a free download or ebook and ask them to share it with people that might nd it helpful. Great, free, content is one of the driving forces online. Make a List, And Check It Twice: Develop a list or a group of inuential and interesting people and make a point to have regular conversations with them. This is called targeted mingling. Use Facebook Interest Lists through your prole, or a customer monitoring tool like TodayLaunch. Make a point to build relationships with key inuencers online. Reward Your Biggest Fans: No matter who you are, there is someone that is willing to talk to you and about you online. When they do, reward them. A simple thank you or a direct callout on you Facebook page can go a long way. People appreciate the recognition and will be more likely to do it again if you shower them with some praise. Where do we nd conversation? We nd it around anything that people nd interesting and that gives them a way to speak up or share it. If those two qualities are in play, theres conversation. And, because theres conversationtheres community.
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conversations. Get involved, and jump in. The more you do, the more the conversation will be reciprocated.
We need a great community on Facebook, because it builds our brand. A community will fade away when it isnt acknowledged or appreciated. No one wants to be ignored, and our fans and followers wont waste time participating if we dont let them know were glad to have them involved in the conversation.
A simple thank you carries a lot of social currency. Get in the habit of saying thanks to our fans and followers. Help them help us by letting them know we need and appreciate them. Let our community know were glad theyre here: Say Thank You. Saying thank you when a customer posts on your Facebook wall, or retweets your blog post can go a long way in the social economy. Being appreciative lets your fans know that they matter to you, and that you dont take what they do for granted.
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Stay Positive. Keep a smile on your face as you type. A positive tone in your Facebook posts will help set the tone for the fan interactions that take place each and every day. When you are positive, the members of your community are far more likely to be positive as well. They follow as they are led. Give Selessly. Social media is a share-driven economy. Great brands and community curators have learned that if they give away a little bit of what they do best, their community will reward them with their business. So, do more than give lip service, and say thank you to your community by giving them something to take, give, and share. Be Authentic. One of the biggest reasons consumers follow brands and companies in social media is because of the authenticity that these accounts usually provide. In todays age of the customer, corporate transparency and honesty go a long way. As brand evangelists, your community deserves true honesty and authentic information. Give them the real you each day. Follow Back. If someone has taken an interest in your brand, consider following them back. Unfortunately, most brands dont care who their followers are as long as they have some. Be different than most brands. Pay attention to what your followers say. When they celebrate, come along with them. When they ask a question, chime in. Be an honest member of your own community.
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Shower Praise. You community will never know what you think about them unless you tell them. Showering praise on other people doesnt always come naturally for everyone, but it is a very important part of building community. Always be willing to give someone praise for their successes. Sincere praise makes them feel valuable.
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The road to building our brand starts with content, leads through genuine conversation, and ultimately to our goal: a brand with a strong and genuinely loyal fan base. Facebook gives us all the tools to do this with.
Facebook Insights are the basic stats that Facebook automatically uses to track our pages activity. These are important numbers to be familiar with and can provide us with good information on our brand and its presence on Facebook. Facebook features two kinds of insights, Page Insights and Domain Insights.
You can use Page Insights to learn more about your core demographic.
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HOW TO USE FACEBOOKS INSIGHTS TO TRACK YOUR FAN PAGE AND WEBSITE
Most of the information on this page is relatively self-explanatory if we have used Facebook for any period of time. The trick to Facebook Insights isnt in the numbers, but what we do with them.
User Demographics
We can view basic demographic data about our audience in the Users Insights for our page. This will tell us the aggregate age and sex of our readership. We should denitely be aware of this data, but we need to tread carefully. It would be unwise to use this information to make major marketing decisions. One area where this data can come in really handy is in choosing demographics for our Facebook Ad campaigns.
External References
External references are also found under the User Insights of our page. This data will tells us the websites that people are using to get to our page. Ideally, the top result should be our own company website. More times than not, Google will also be on the list, making a strong case for using Facebook for SEO data. Pay attention to the sites that our fans are using to nd us, and see if we can improve how people get to our page.
Viewed Tabs
Again, under the User Insights area we can see what tabs our viewers are visiting. There are denitely some good details that we can glean from here. The main question that we want to answer with this data is what are people doing on our Facebook page, and subsequently, are they getting to the information that we need them to? Make note of what fans are spending the most time on, and adjust the app icons on our Timeline to accommodate their preferences.
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To see your Insights, log into your Facebook Prole account and go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/.
Where are your viewers coming from, and what are they doing on your page when they get there?
Media Consumption
User Insights can also tell us what type of media our viewers are consuming. Media will cover Video, Audio and Photos. With this data, we will be able to see how effective different types media have been on our page. This will help us rene our content for our audience.
Successful Messages
On the Interactions tab, we are able to view stats for each of the individual messages that we post to Facebook. This is one of the most powerful areas of Insights, because we are able to specically and clearly see the success and failure of different kinds of content. We should also be able to see is how many more impressions our messages get when they are shared. Often, each reader interaction will add a 50 percent or so increase to overall impressions. Pay attention to the types of messages that performed the best. What can we learn from them and what can we use from them to better serve our audience?
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Insights data is invaluable if we are running a marketing campaign where Facebook is involved. For example, if we are running a contest where one of the requirements is to like our Facebook page, then we should be seeing a direct correlation in the number of likes that our page is getting. Insights are probably the most powerful way to see if our Facebook page is serving its purpose and being a workhorse for our brand.
Unsubscribes
While it is disheartening to have people unlike or unsubscribe from our page, it is worth paying attention to, to some extent. If people are leaving, why, and what can we do differently to alleviate the problem? Is there a correlation between a post we created and several unsubscribe events?
Domain Insights are connected to our actual website. These have the ability to track statistics about our actual domain name. This is a very powerful feature, particularly, if we are blogging or have a lot of content on our website for users to share.
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DOMAIN INSIGHTS
Most Facebook users are unaware the Domain Insights option exists, but it is not difcult to set up. 1. To start, login to your Facebook Prole account, and visit the main insights page at https://www.facebook.com/insights/. 2. Click the green Insights for your Domain in the top right corner.
4. Once you have added this information, Facebook will provide you with a small snippet of meta code. You will need to put this in the portion of all the pages on your website. You may need your web developer to do this for you.
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3. You will be asked to provide the domain name of your website and the Facebook user account that you want to own the Domain Insights. It doesnt really matter which user you select. This option only controls the permissions of who can actually see the statistics.
This activity is coming directly from your domain. One of the best features in Domain Insights is its ability to display feedback per share. This essentially tracks the amount of feedback that shares from our website received. In the image above we can see that 95 percent of the shares directly from a website generated user feedback. This means that the share was not only shared by one person but then carried over to their friends news feed. This is pretty powerful stuff.
There are sometimes big differences between a passive audience and an engaged one.
More Demographics
Domain Insights will also provide us with some demographic information, but this information is specically related to the person that shared our content in the rst place. This is very
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track sharing activity once we have made changes to our website or started a new promotion.
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important data because it not only tells us who is paying attention to our content, but who is sharing it. These are the types of people that we want to be targeting because they are not just reading, they are also engaged with our content.
A Facebook page without fans is a pretty lonely affair, and isnt going to do much for our brand-building efforts. If theres anything a Facebook page needs, its fans. Thats easy enough to understand. The question is, how do we go about getting them? If we build it, will they come?
10 WAYS TO FANDOM
There are 10 great ways to get more fans to our Facebook page, ranging from the small and simple to the big but practical. Using these techniques can help turn that lonely page into an active social spot.
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Again, we arent forcing anyone to like our page. Were merely letting our friends and contacts know that we have a page and that it is something they might be interested in.
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need to go to our Admin Panel, select Build Audience, and choose Invite Email Contacts. If we dont see the contact list option that we want, we can also upload a le of our contacts. Facebook provides us with instructions on how to prepare this le in the Invite Email Contacts window.
available. Anytime we make things easier for people, they are more likely to click and follow through. Providing our customers with every easy opportunity to nd and like us on Facebook is good practice.
6. Post Regularly
Posting regular new content is extremely important. Just like on our blog, we need regular content, and a good mix of it. We need to be visible at least several times per week, if not every day. The more we have an update present in a fans news feed, the more likely it is our page will be shared and discovered by others. Most people start enthusiastically, but lose interest in their page after a few months. Dont let this happen! A page that seldom
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Giving our fans an incentive for staying active with our page is how loyal and engaged fans are made. Exclusive Facebook content or special deals can be a catalyst in creating new fans. We need to ask ourselves how our fans benet, and determine how they would benet. Whats in it for them? By answering this question, well come up with some great ideas and build Facebook trafc. Facebook gives us the option to create offers for our brand. This makes offering incentives for Page administrators very easy, and can easily translate into active fans and customers.
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has new content is forgotten quickly on Facebook. Remember how important it is to be in our fans news feed, and how often content cycles through we must post often.
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To create an offer, navigate to where wed create a status update. Click on Offer, Event+, and then select Offer. Here, we can add the details, terms, and date we would like the offer to last until. Offers are free to create, and as an admin, we have complete control over how long they run. Facebook provides Page admins some best practices when using this Offer feature, so be sure to check out what they have to say about this relatively new feature, which started rolling out to Pages at the end of May 2012.
Facebook has provided a number of features that can help us highlight and funnel fan attention to specic content on our page. When we share content on our page, we can select from four types: Status, Photo, Ask Question, Milestone. We also have the option of pinning a post to the top, or highlighting a post. All of these show our content in the best light in different ways
We can use Highlights or, as shown above, Milestones to draw attention to our content on our Timeline.
Pinning a post to the top keeps a post on the top of our page for a week. Highlighting a post gives it more real estate across the entire timeline. A milestone allows us to let our fans know the specics of an important event for our brand. The opportunity to ask a question, however, is a bit different. When we select Ask Question, we create a very simple and direct form of content that asks our fans to participate. Its a great way to get fans involved and get the activity to show up on
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their pages and news feeds. People like polls. Everyone wants to give their opinion, and a brand that actually asks them to do just that is one they will probably nd themselves liking.
Exclusivity and scarcity are not new tactics in marketing. Infomercials have had this gured out for ages. Call now, to take advantage of this limited time offer. Or, Call in the next ve minutes to take advantage of this exclusive offer. Quantities are limited. It seems ridiculous as we watch these infomercials how could anyone buy this product?
Lets think about that infomercial. The brand has no idea that their commercial just ran, and so it is very unlikely that they are timing our response. It is also highly unlikely that only a handful of items were manufactured and then all that money was spent on an infomercial to sell just a handful. Think of that auction people competing with each other over questionably valuable items inates the price.
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Like an auction, pressuring people to make a decision on a sale where competition with other customers is involved often forces their hand. We dont want to miss out on being included, we dont want to miss out on the deal. So, despite the value of the product, the competitive method of selling it works. If it didnt work, marketers wouldnt continue to use it. Infomercials are all about driving sales above all else. It is worth our time to understand what makes them work so well.
Being Exclusive
Somehow those infomercial ads always make us feel like we are going to become a part of an exclusive club when we make a purchase. We could be lucky enough to get in on the deal, and get one of the few products that are left! Sure. Exclusivity works because at its root, it is emotional. We are emotionally tied to our own worries. We worry about missing out on something great, or we worry about being stupid for not taking action. We worry about hearing others tell us how they got a great deal and feeling stupid that we didnt make use of the opportunity when we could. We all suffer from some sort of condence issue kind of selling speaks directly to that soft spot. When we feel as if we are going to be a part of something great, or limited, we are, emotionally, far more likely to take action.
Being Scarce
Brian Clark of Copyblogger says that opportunities of all kinds seem more valuable to us when they are less available. Scarcity drives value. Basically, the fewer we have, the more they want it. This is one that denitely doesnt come naturally.
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COMPETITIVE SELLING
58% of US Facebook users expect to gain access to exclusive content, events, or sales, and expect to receive discounts or promotions. -- HubSpot Blog
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Scarcity is not something that we normally aim for when selling products. If someone wants to buy it, then we want to sell it. We would be crazy to limit sales, right? Well, no actually. By setting limits, we add urgency and urgency drives sales. Again, this is going to the emotional essence of our purchasing decisions. This time we are worried about never having the same opportunity again.
Subscriptions and memberships are excellent examples of exclusivity. They work because they provide something that we wont get anywhere else. Our Facebook page can seem like a membership if we treat our Facebook fans as special, privileged, customers. For a great example of a Facebook membership, we can look to a local restaurant in my town. Every week there is one night dedicated to Facebook fans. If you are a member of the Facebook page, you are invited to come in for a drink special. In the restaurant, only Facebook fans are entitled to the offer. Not only did this provide a great reason to like the page, but it created an engaged community that took its discussion to the restaurant and to the Facebook page. Here, we see Facebook fans turn into dollars every single week. Treating our Facebook fans as special, whether through deals or by paying particular attention to them through conversation and interaction, will help them feel like they are a member of an exclusive community. This exclusivity can also become a catalyst for them sharing the membership with their friends.
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Facebook As A Membership
Have a big announcement? Let our Facebook fans in on it a few days early, and tell them that we are doing so. This is an excellent way to create a little buzz, get some shares, and create engaged readers. Maybe just dropping a few clever hints in the days leading up to an announcement, or posting pictures of some new, unreleased, merchandise will whet appetites. By letting our fans in on our little secrets, we create engaged and curious! readers, and those are the types of readers that tell their friends.
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an atmosphere of exclusivity. Of course, we will need to pad this invitation with some real value perhaps a free download, or something else that is tangible but it will pay off in the end.
Facebook announced Facebook Places in mid-2010, but some businesses havent taken notice. Even though this feature has been around for awhile, too many businesses who could benet from it are still dragging their feet and dont realize the importance of claiming their place on Facebook. No more dragging. Facebook users want to check in and so businesses shouldnt check out.
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as a retail store or a restaurant. The only hold-up is that use of a mobile device (smartphone or iPod) may be required.
To claim our place, we will need to complete a verication process through Facebook. The rst step is to click the Is this your business? link on the places page. Facebook will ask you to verify that you are the owner of that place and then use a phone verication process to conrm.
1. Finding places
Using an iPod Touch, we click the check in button on the Facebook mobile app. The Facebook app will then automatically nd all of the possible check ins that we am currently near.
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Once we choose a place to check into, we will be allowed to add a comment or status update.
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2. Choose a place.
When used in combination, Places and Deals offer an extremely powerful marketing tool. Once a customer checks in they can immediately be presented with a coupon. As business owners, we are able to set special deals for individuals and groups, and even control how often they can be redeemed. What a great way to say thank you to the customers that promote us across Facebook, and a great way to provide incentives to our customers to check in often. Consider allowing customers to redeem the coupon as often as they would like. The little bit of expense is probably worth the extra attention we will be drawing on Facebook. Remember, each status update counts for something!
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Facebook has an excellent paid advertising platform that we can leverage to get more trafc and more fans to our Facebook page and, most importantly, our website. Facebooks platform is relatively inexpensive and also comes with the advantage of being highly targeted. We have a lot of control over the age, demographic and even interests of the people that will see our ad. In this lesson, we will be pulling apart the ad creation process and outlining some valuable tips and strategies to maximize our success. For a more step-by-step guide see Facebooks own advertising documentation.
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The rst thing we need to determine when advertising on Facebook is what our goal will be. This goal determines each decision we make when setting up our ad. Our goal might resemble the following: Get more fans to our Facebook page. Send users to our companies website or an other outside landing page. Promote a Facebook event. Promote fan activity on our wall. These goals are fairly general. Ideally, a goal would be more specic. For example, here at Todaymade we might use the following: We would like to get more people registered for our Mastering Facebook Marketing for Business email course. To do this, we will send users to a custom landing page on our company website.
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Sponsored Stories are relatively new to Facebook and provide something very different but also very powerful. We discussed these in our lesson on the News Feed. The major goal on Facebook is getting our wall messages liked or commented on by our audience. Sponsored story ads take advantage of this sharing by giving us additional exposure when this happens. It can be easy for people to ignore these interactions in their news feed, but Sponsored Stories provides a more natural and organic way of gently keeping our content in play on a News Feed. Overall, this type of Facebook advertising is fairly advanced, but potentially very powerful if we already have good conversation happening.
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Facebook Ads are the most basic Facebook ads that show up in the right-hand column of a users page. This type of ad is probably what most businesses will want to use, and the easiest to envision.
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We want to be as focused as possible on a key demographic that we think will be likely to take action on our ad. Often times we waste considerable time and money trying to reach a demographic that is too broad. It is important to remember that this step is really what separates traditional advertising from online advertising. With online advertising, we have the ability to target very specic groups of people and track our results.
Start slowly
Facebook, again, gives us a multitude of options for pricing and running our Facebook ad. For example, we can limit the amount of advertising we do based on a daily budget, which is a great feature. The thing that we need to remember here is that we want to start slowly. If we jump in too quickly, we could potentially waste a lot of time and money. When starting, keeping our demographic focused and our budget low is the best practice, gradually expanding our reach and our budget. This way we will be more likely to understand what works, stay within budget, and maximize results.
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of traditional advertising, where the bigger the audience the better, but on Facebook, we must.
Our Facebook page needs to t into the overall strategy of our online marketing. It is likely that such a strategy includes a website for our company, organization, or product. A website is a fairly obvious and necessary part of an online plan. However, have we stopped to ask ourselves how that website reect our social media marketing? Incorporating Facebook into our website and our website into Facebook isnt difcult, but it is necessary. There are certain things that our website does better than Facebook, just like there are certain things that Facebook does better than our website. The best way to make the two work together is to leverage both of their strengths.
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HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE AND FACEBOOK WORK TOGETHER FOR MARKETING BRILLIANCE
Badges
Facebook offers several badges that link from our website back to Facebook. For a Facebook page, we can choose a like badge, or a page badge. We can customize the look of our page badge to some degree, since Facebook offers us a few different options depending on how we want to use the badge and what we want included in it. The badge offers a visual link to our Facebook page, and with the added information, provides incentive for website visitors to click through to our page. Tip: Use an icon search engine like iconnder.net to nd a more unique Facebook icon like we did. Hooray!
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Plus, we want to make it easy for our fans to share our websites content.
Any page on our website can have a button that will allow our readers to like that page. When our readers choose to click like, their comments, and a link to our page, is automatically posted on their Facebook wall. This means all of their friends will be exposed to our link. To generate these buttons, Facebook provides us with a useful tool to generate the code. This is an especially important step if we have a blog. Each and every post on our blog should allow users quick access to sharing. Making it easy to share, in one click, makes it more likely that our content will get shared.
Facebook Comments
We are aware that Facebook posts on our Facebook page have comments. Facebook also allows us to add comments to any page on our website. We will want to choose where we use this feature wisely, but the possibilities from its use are obvious: every comment will have the option of being included in our readers personal Facebook news feed. This makes Facebook comments very powerful, and also allows us to add a unique social element to our website with little development time. To get the Facebook Comments plugin, head over to the Facebook developer tools.
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Like Buttons
We can post individual links from our website on Facebook, providing some introductory copy with the link. Optimizing our website so that a link is shared properly on Facebook is crucial. We want to make sure that Facebook shares the right image with our post. We want the description to make sense. Facebook provides us with a tool that tells us about the link in question, including which image will be shared. By inputting the URL on this page, we can learn how Facebook sees our page and determine what changes we need to make on our website, if any, so that the content we share on Facebook is something our fans will want to share with their friends.
Import A Feed
Facebook used to allow users to import an RSS feed into their Facebook Notes. However, this service was discontinued. In the new Timeline, Facebook provides a location for apps, located beneath the cover photo. There are many apps to choose from for proles, but for pages, importing an RSS feed requires nding an outside provider such as Networked Blogs. Right now, Facebook isnt making it easy for pages to bring their website RSS feed into Facebook, though they do offer a Wordpress plugin to help in publishing blog content to pages.
Install Apps
While Facebook currently seems to natively limit things like RSS feeds, using outside apps allows us to include our website content in Facebook. We can nd apps that will bring in our YouTube content, Flickr, Picasa, and many of the other other social media networks we use. To nd these apps, use the search bar at the top of the Facebook screen.
Links
Making sure our website is linked from our Facebook page is the most basic thing we can do. Be sure that we are linking
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Post A Story
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to our website from our About page. The About page is easy to nd with Timeline, a link to it showing up right beneath our Prole Image. Its important that we include all the necessary information for our brand so that fans can easily contact or nd us.
Up to now, this course has focused on what Facebook is an important part of our social media strategy and how to use it. We have covered topics that address using Facebook to help maximize our brands presence. Now its time to talk about what Facebook isnt. Facebook isnt our entire social media strategy. It isnt the solution or the nal say in a complete package.Facebook is a great platform for reaching our marketing audience, but it is just one part of what should be a carefully considered social media plan.
Twitter
If were already publishing to Facebook, we should also open a Twitter account and publish the same thing there. Twitter has its pros and cons as a marketing channel, but should still be kept in the running for our social media plan.
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Great SEO Potential: Facebook can help you with SEO, and in some ways, Twitter is even better. Twitter is very well-indexed by Google and can help your ranking if you consistently connect it back to your website. Low Pressure: Facebook and Twitter are both passive reading platforms. This means that users read some of the messages, but not all. Basically, there is almost nothing negative that can come from sending out a few tweets. If you are using a social media inbox like TodayLaunch, doing this is even easier.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is still a very powerful force and should be a part of a well-rounded strategy. There are advantages to this type of marketing, and it is far from dead. In many ways, we have used our own Todaymade Facebook presence to simply drive trafc to our website and our email list. Overall, it has been an effective tool for these goals. We like this method because email is far more likely to turn into an actual sale.
Blogging
The Internet is lled with blog posts about why blogging is dead, which is a bit ironic. Blogging is not dead. Blogging is still a very important part of online marketing and one with the most long-term impact. We regularly talk about blogging on the Todaymade blog for good reason: it creates the content and the trust and expertise that we base our social media efforts on.
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Another channel: Everyone has their preference for reading and receiving information online. Some prefer Facebook and others prefer Twitter. For this reason, it is worth serving both audiences.
Engagement
Its always a mistake if we think of social media as a way to publish our marketing message. In some cases it is just that, but what we need to realize is that it works even better as a platform for engaging with others. There are so many blogs (and readers) that are lled to the brim with discussions about our industry. Why wouldnt we engage them? Participating in user forums and on other blogs is a huge part of social media success. It isnt enough to just publish; true conversation and engagement isnt one-sided. Social management tools like TodayLaunch, our own software, is meant to address this need for two-sided conversation.
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When executed properly, a good blog is the cornerstone of a social media strategy. There are nearly an unlimited number of SEO advantages to blogging.
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Todaymade
A web development and design company helping the world create and share great content. 701.595.0567
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