Archive for facebook fan pages
Mandatory Changes On Facebook
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If you are having trouble finding your way around Facebook it is because, as of April 1, Facebook made some mandatory changes. This is not a joke. What it is, at the end of the day, is more changes that will affect how you do business on Facebook.
Some of the changes don’t make sense to me, while others clearly make a huge difference for business owners. I have listed 6 of the changes here that I feel will make a difference in your business.
Change 1. Your site now has an 851 x 315 pixel banner above of your timeline. The purpose of this is so Facebook can regain control of all landing pages. You can post any photo you want – but it can not include material that asks people to like your page.
Change 2. Facebook pages have a timeline that is made up of milestones, photos and posts. Be sure to go into Facebook and include your business’ successes as part of your business timeline.
Change 3. If you have customers visit your location, you will now find under ‘page tips’ that you can have a customer like your Facebook Page while they are visiting your location.
Change 4. Facebook has a new feature called Facebook offers. This is similar to Living Social or Groupon but is for your fans to help you, the business owner, keep them as loyal customers.
Change 5. As a business owner, Facebook has made it easier for you to track who is visiting your fan-page and where are they coming from. To learn who is coming to your page go to the ‘insights’ section.
Change 6. Facebook has added a ‘reach’ feature for those in the Facebook advertising business. This provides a new tracking tool to see the depth of your ads exposure.
As in most applications on the Internet, it is important to stay current with changes that will, either positively or negatively, affect your business. Also, you should strive to be consistent with your time spent on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. services as well as efficient with your time spent posting to them.
If you have questions regarding any of the new Facebook changes contact me at Jackie@TeamInternetMarketing.com.
If you are concerned about any of the Facebook timeline changes give us a call at 404-530-9564. Team Internet Marketing is here to help you.
Facebook Fan Page Notifications With Hyper Alerts Free App!
Posted by: | CommentsOften when businesses set up a Facebook fan page they don’t necessarily have the time to monitor the page regularly for fan activity. Notifications of fan posts and comments would be ideal for so many small businesses and/or new fan page owners.
Fan page notifications have been sorely missing on Facebook. (I always figured it was a sheer volume issue. Could you imagine fan pages that frequently get anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of comments on each post receiving notifications from Facebook? Think of pages such as Vin Diesel, Ellen DeGeneres or Starbucks! That would create a mega notification logjam.)
Many Facebook users have been eagerly searching for a solution. There are certainly plenty of social media management tools and services out there – some free, some for a fee. But, how about a nice, simple, clean email alert any time a fan posts or comments on your wall?
Introducing…
Voila – a beautiful and exciting new app that sends you an email for all posts and/or comments on your Facebook fan page. The app is called “Hyper Alerts” and is currently in public beta. Hyper Alerts was created by Are Sundnes for Hyper Interaktiv in Oslo, Norway.
I must say, I love the graphic design, clean and simple layout, and super easy set up and navigation!
Step 1 – Sign up:
Go here to sign up: http://alerts.hyperinteraktiv.no/
Step 2 – Click the “+ Add new alert” button:
Step 3 – Enter the address of your Facebook fan page:
NOTE: The system does not use Facebook Connect and does not need access to your personal data. Love that!
Step 4 – Select your four settings:
Choose from four different settings: the frequency of alerts, fan posts, fan comments, and your own content. Click save.
Step 5 – Keep an eye on your email!
Even the emails are beautiful: clean and simple with the exact view of what you’d see on your Facebook wall. Plus, they are all text (not an image of the text) so, guess what? Yes, that means your fan page content can now be archived and is searchable! All links are active, too.
Pros:
- Hyper Alerts does not require access to your Facebook account.
- It’s free.
- It’s a beautiful and easy-to-use interface.
- You can easily monitor multiple Facebook fan pages. (“Add as many alerts as you like,” says Hyper Alerts!)
- You can set up multiple alerts for the same fan page – e.g. receive alerts immediately for fan activity, plus a weekly (and/or monthly) report.
- PLUS, you can archive your fan page content! By receiving emails with all your Facebook page content and activity, you now have a *searchable* archive! YES – this is reason enough for me to sign up and just filter the emails to a folder.
Cons:
- Perhaps the ability to reply to fan posts right within your email would be handy.
- Other than that, I can’t see any downsides to Hyper Alerts – try it out and let me know if you find anything not to like about this fabulous app!
Huge props to one of my Facebook community members, Erik Eskedal, for the tip about Hyper Alerts. This blog post is completely unsolicited and unpaid; it’s simply a wholehearted review of the fabulous Norwegian peeps’ great app. I hope they have tremendous success with it!
Other Facebook activity alert systems
Alternative solutions for Facebook fan activity alerts include: the Fan Page Notifier app and Page Notifier app.
Plus, the awesome Postling app which is a complete social profile management system I’ll be reviewing in a future blog post.
In addition, you’ll receive notifications right inside Facebook any time you a) like your own posts or b) @ tag your personal profile in posts. These two methods only cover fan comments though, not fan posts.
There’s also Google alerts which isn’t as reliable, though you might give it a whirl. Try this search string: ago site:http://facebook.com/yourusername. (Make sure there is no space between site:). This will pick up from the timestamp where it always says “xx minutes ago.” Use this method for any keyword alerts too – you’re basically asking Google to search your fan page for whatever you wish. I would recommend against using this method alone.
So, there you have it, a very exciting new app to try out!! Do let me know what you think and if you use Hyper Alerts how it works out for you. Anything else you’d like to see added to the app? Let me know in the comments below!
Facebook right now is like the Wild West. There are people eagerly staking claims and moving from their traditional “homes”. Some people are even striking it rich. You might even see “gurus” who are selling snake oil promising that it will keep you safe. Don’t bet on that remedy as you go across the Oregon Trail yet as they haven’t even blazed the path themselves.
How are you supposed to dominate this great new territory? You have seen articles, blog posts, and been told at different conferences that it is the “place to be”. This land of 500+ million people where over a ¼ of a billion people are active daily is supposedly a land of opportunity. This massive network, which seems to be the Google killer, surely has business for you, right?
There is business to be had on Facebook, when you know the rules. A massive flood of sales awaits the business owner who tackles Facebook with the right methods. Dive into this social network without a plan of attack and you could end up like the Donner party.
With the right methods, powerful strategies, and efficient action items you can end up like Levi Straus. You will take away more gold than the best miner. Be warned, you can’t take 5 minutes of planning and expect to dominate. Don’t be concerned that it will take weeks either.
In this article I invite you to consider putting a strategy into action that will bring you new fans, leads, and business. Whether you have a physical store or you sell online, putting the following methods into action will give you the opportunity to tap into 100′s of millions of conversations.
How is your Business Different?
Before diving on to Facebook, write down how your business is different from your competition. What would compel someone to connect with what you are offering? Whether you call this a unique selling proposition or a marketing message, having an aspect that uniquely separates your business from the millions of other businesses is essential.
You may have to alter your traditional message that you use on your sales letters. Even the messages on your other marketing pieces won’t work directly when applied to Facebook. Facebook is about conversation. When people connect with your business they are raising their hand that they want to be in a conversation with your business.
More than offering simple sales, or new product releases, consider what makes people talk about your business. What will make someone want to take an extra few moments and suggest your business to their “friends”? When you can answer these questions effectively you will be able to tap into conversations. Tap into the right conversations and you will generate business.
How Can You Flood Your Facebook Presence with Traffic Like a Los Angeles Freeway During Rush Hour?
When many business owners jump onto Facebook they feel like they are limited to how many friends they have in their personal network. Some don’t even start because they feel trapped by having just a few friends!
Facebook allows you different methods of bringing traffic. Most people focus on one source of traffic. Counting on once source leads to frustration and disappointment. To achieve massive success, I invite you to consider having at least four methods of bringing new prospects directly to you. With each method of traffic you have an opportunity to reach a different type of customer.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising lets you target prospects by geography, demographically, and even by what they are already fans of. It has limitless opportunities. The amount of people that you can bring directly to you is only limited by the amount of money you can invest on your credit card.
Facebook Ads are one of the most direct and immediate methods of bringing traffic on a daily basis. As people browse through Facebook you get the opportunity to grab their attention with a tiny ad! Put the right ads in place and watch your business grow.
Direct Fan Invites
There are a number of companies that offer the service of targeting specific groups of people. They take your desired target market and invite them to your fan page. With the right service and the right “fan” criteria you can bring a few thousand people to your business in just a couple of weeks. Be careful on the service you choose as you don’t want to get banned from Facebook.
Cross-Marketing
It is likely that you already have a powerful online presence. Leverage the power of your existing website or blog to get more people to join you on Facebook. With free tools, like Social Plugins, you can tap into the traffic that is already on your website.
Email Marketing
Email isn’t dead! Break through the maze of email and invite your existing customers to join you in the conversation that is occurring on Facebook. With a few targeted emails you can quickly jump to a few thousand raving fans that already know you and will keep the conversation going.
There are at least a dozen different methods of bringing traffic to you from within Facebook. The key is to put a minimum of four into action. Four sources of traffic will keep your business growing and eliminate your competition.
Transforming Traffic into Leads and Business
Traffic is great, but traffic that doesn’t convert into leads and sales is a waste of money. Some traffic can be quite expensive. Wasting that investment will hurt your bottom line quickly. In order to maximize your traffic, I invite you to consider two stages of conversion. Get these two elements of conversion correct and you will have powerful ways to grab the interest of your prospects.
Get People to Click “Like”
The first goal of your traffic is to get people to click “like” on your Facebook fan page. With less than 10 seconds to grab a prospects attention, your fan page needs to quickly pique interest. When you have their attention you can compel them to move their mouse and click that tiny little “like” button.
Grabbing their attention quickly requires rich graphics, possibly incorporating video, and ensuring that your marketing message is obvious. When your fan page is graphically rich, extends the brand of your existing business and compels the prospect to take action you will get people to quickly click “like”, giving you the opportunity to market to them in the news feed.
Building Your Email List
After you get people to click “like” I invite you to consider offering prospects an opportunity to optin to your email list. You can offer them your email newsletter, a special report, or create something entirely new. Just give them an opportunity to give you their name and email.
When you have their attention in their email and the news feed, you will be maximizing each traffic source.
By differentiating your business, bringing a flood of traffic, and converting that traffic into “fans” you will have a Facebook marketing strategy that would have made Levi Straus jealous.
You can like us here at Facebook.com/jackietulos. If you would like more help with some of these strategies contact me at 888-479-8540 or go to TargetedLocal.com for more info.
Facebook Experiments Phase 1: Fan Pages
Posted by: | CommentsA few months back I began experimenting with Facebook Fan Pages.
I’ll share some interesting things I’ve uncovered so far, including why you may need a Facebook Page, and the tricks to setting up a Facebook page that people want to “like”. I’ll also share how to get fans and how not to get fans.
Why you may need a Facebook Page
Anyway, here’s why I’m experimenting with fan pages now…
As a email newsletter publisher going on 4 years now, I can attest to the difficulty of getting email through to subscribers. No, I’m not going to declare email marketing dead, however it has become increasingly difficult year after year, getting email through overactive spam filters. So I figured it’s time to give my readers another option other than losing touch with me forever. (Gosh no, how could they ever live with that?)
Of all the options out there, Facebook fan pages are, in my humble opinion, the best choice. 500 million people have embraced facebook and a whopping half of those people log into their facebook account every single day. Need I say more?
A fan page has advantages over growing a facebook friend’s list, as it is not limited to 5,000 friends. That makes it a solid long term solution to keeping in touch with people. Plus, getting fans seems to be easier and more streamlined than getting friends. A simple click of a like button is all it takes to gain a fan.
So lets get started with Facebook Pages, commonly referred to as fan pages…
How to set up a Facebook page that people want to “like”
There are a few tricks to setting up a facebook fan page for quick growth. Before I get to those tricks, let me show you quickly how to get started setting up a fan page.
First, you go facebook.com/pages/create.php? and this is what you’ll see…
At that page you choose a name for your fan page and select the type of page it is, then click “Create Official Page”. Your page is then created.
Incidentally, the name you choose at that page above is simply the title of your page. It has nothing to do with the actual URL of your page. Facebook will automatically assign a LONG URL to your page, such as this…
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jackie-Tulos/127869738303?ref=ts
If you want a shorter URL such as www.facebook.com/jackietulos you have to wait until you get 25 fans.
Once you get to 25 fans you will be able to go to facebook.com/usernames and select a shorter, more personalized username.
(It took be a while to figure that out!)
Now that you have a fan page, it is time to get down to customizing it…
After all, you’re going to be sending people to your fan page by linking to it from your websites and blogs. But you do not want people just landing on your fan page wall. (That’s right, your fan page has a wall all of it’s own. And in the beginning, it’s going to be a bit barren.)
What you want to do is have non-fans land on a customized page — a page that encourages them to “Like” you by clicking a like button that shows up there automatically. Then, and only then — after they have clicked your like button to become your fan, you reward them for their loyalty by giving them an instant gift.
So, how in the heck does one customize a landing page to do something like this? Well, the first step is to install something called a “Static FBML” application. (Don’t worry, this is easier than it sounds.)
This Static FBML application allows you to make your fan page look however you want, by inserting HTML code. Installing the application itself is easy. Simply head over to the free Static FBML application then click “Add to page”. It looks like this when you get there…
That’s it. Once you’ve added this application you can now customize your fan page.
You do that by clicking Edit in your FBML settings.
Note: If you don’t see FBML listed in your account, you did not do the previous step of installing FBML. See the step highlighted in yellow above.
When you click Edit in the FBML section you’ll see a box where you can enter a title and the FBML code.
The title you enter will be what appears on the TAB at the top of you page. Keep it short.
The FMBL code you enter can simply be html code from most any html editor you use. In my case I put together a quick page in my Frontpage editor then copy/pasted the html code from my Frontpage editor into that box. I may do something fancier in the future, but you can see what it looks like here:
And here’s the next important trick you need to know about…
Remember how I mentioned that you want to show different content to non-fans in an effort to get them to like your page? Then you want to reward them with a gift after they join?
(So that you fully understand exactly what I’m talking about, take a minute and come to www.facebook.com/jackietulos — you’ll see my message asking you to “Like” me. Immediately after you click “Like” at the top of the page, you see a link where you can get immediate access your Free SWOT ANALYSIS (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
Well you need to put special html code in your FBML box, in order to set that two step process up. Here’s the code…
<div id=”wrapper”>
<fb:visible-to-connection>
CONTENT FOR FANS GOES HERE
<fb:else>
<div id=”non-fans”>CONTENT FOR NON FANS GOES HERE</div>
</fb:else>
<fb:visible-to-connection>
</div>
Simply put, the content you want to show when non-fans arrive, goes in the area that says CONTENT FOR NON FANS GOES HERE.
The content you want to show after fans like your page, goes in the area that say CONTENT FOR FANS GOES HERE.
Here’s what my code looked like after I included those tags…
<div id=”wrapper”>
<fb:visible-to-connection>
<p><b><font face=”Tahoma” size=”5″>
<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.jackietulos.com/noworries.pdf”>Thanks! Click
Here For Your Free SWOT ANALYSIS (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).…</a></font></b></p>
<fb:else>
<div id=”non-fans”><center>
<img border=”0″ src=”http://www.jackietulos.com/lgfbbanner.gif” width=”544″ height=”574″></p>
</center></div>
</fb:else>
<fb:visible-to-connection>
</div>
Note: Testing your end result is a bit tricky and is best done from another computer or browser via a different facebook account. You’ll see what I mean when you start testing.
Once you’ve customized your page with that special code, you need to take one last very important step.
Go to your Wall and click on the “settings” tab. At the dropdown menu labeled “Default Landing Tab for Everyone else”, select your new page name from the list.
Now NON-members of your Fan page will see your welcome page when arriving, and they will be urged to Like your page. Again, you don’t want them landing on your wall, you want them to “like” you before they go anywhere else.
How to start getting fans…
The first thing you need to do to start getting fans is put a like button onto your existing websites or blogs. You can use a simple like button such as the one at the bottom of this page, or you can use something more elaborate, such as the box I have at the top right of this page.
Either way, it’s easy. Just go back into your fan page admin area and click the link called add a like button.
A new box will appear that allows you to customize a “Like box” to display on your website or blog. Change the Facebook Page ID code at the very top, to the unique page URL they assigned to your Fanfare. It will look something like this…
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jackie-Tulos/127869738303?ref=ts
Then you can select the other options and generate the code. A new box will then appear with the code that you can paste into any web page or blog you have control over.
If it does not fit right, you can customize the code a bit at your page. For instance, I changed the height of the box so it could accommodate space for 15 fans. Most of it is easily customized in the html code of your page.
Adding like boxes to your sites or blogs is just one way to start growing your fan base. There are many more ways to start adding to your fan base, including announcing it to any email subscribers or friends you may have, advertising your page on facebook, etc.. I’ll cover more of these strategies in an upcoming issue.
How not to get fans…
Once strategy people use to get lots of fans quickly is to basically, buy them. That’s right, there are a growing number of sites on the web where you can find facebook users renting out status updates and even guaranteeing a specific numbers of fans. The cost is as little as $5 for hundreds and even thousands of fans.
While I was intrigued by this idea at first, I did a little digging and discovered it’s not worth even the tiny price you pay. Here’s why…
For starters, it is against Facebook’s policies. But perhaps even more importantly, the fans you’ll gain in almost every case will be junk fans. Sure, they’ll show up on your site as “12,232 people like this. And to some people that sounds like instant credibility.
But the fact is, your fan base won’t really be following what you’re doing. It’s sort of like buying 100,000 junk email addresses that will never read your emails. So why bother.
Personally, I think I’ll just try to build a solid fan base of real people who care about what I’m writing. Here’s hoping you’re one of them!
I’ll be reporting more on my fan page results and techniques in a future gazette (and posting it to my fan page) so make sure to use the “like” button below and stay in the loop!
See ya in a few weeks…
Jackie
P.S. “Like” Jackie Tulos on Facebook and get your Free SWOT ANALYSIS (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)….
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