Opinions In Social Media

Opinions In Social Media

Posts tagged "facebook"

Notes: 1 / 1 day ago

What Makes A Good Facebook Fan Page?
“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso

I wanted to understand how to create a top fan page on Facebook and so I began investigating many of the biggest brands and their pages and searching for a commonality between them that helped turn them into pages with hundreds of thousands active fans. Since many of us do not have the brand power of the Coca-Cola’s, Linkin Park’s, Skittles and the NHL we can’t simply flick a switch and attract the fan count that these massive brands possess, instead what we can do is study and analyze what they do to create a compelling fan page.

Each one of these brands have the resources in place to hire top end developers and social media consultants and so we can learn a lot by what they have already paid others to do. While looking at these top brands I found seven things that each of them had in common and in the spirit of Picasso let’s steal their ideas to launch or improve on our own pages.
1. Customized Tabs – In order to set your Facebook page apart from the rest of them in your market look at creating a customized Tab for your page. The tab you create can use either the Static FBML application or could be a custom application. A custom Facebook application could cost you thousands but if you can code html you should be able to use the Static FBML application. In order to decide if you need to use the Static FBML application or have a custom application built you will need to decide if you need to access user data. If you don’t need to access user data use the static FBML application. For examples of customized tabs in action look at the fan pages for Pizza Hut, NHL, NFL, Lady Gaga, Coca-Cola and Oreo.
2. A Custom Landing Tab – Instead of pointing potential fans of your to the fall send them to a custom landing tab. Facebook makes this relatively easy to set up when logged in and you are the admin of the page.
  - At your Page’s Wall Tab click the “Settings” link underneath the “What’s on your mind?” box
  - Where it says “Default landing tab for everyone else:” choose the default landing tab that you want non-fans of your page to start on from the drop down menu
  By setting the default landing tab to non-fans of you page you can layout call to action for them urging them to join as a fan or sign up for your newsletter or give them unique content that gets them to sign up as a fan. For examples of custom landing tabs look at: Nascar, Linkin Park and Dominos Pizza.
3. Interactivity – If you want to keep your fans or want to make new fans make sure to include some sort of interactivity on the site besides the Wall. Try including a poll, a game or allow your fans to give virtual gifts to their friends. Look to the NHL and Coca-Cola for examples of this.
4. Special Offers – When all else fails a little bribery never hurt. Try enticing users to become fans of your page through the use of promos and special offers only available to fans. Skittles does this by offering a buy one get one offer for all of their fans.
5. Social interaction – Facebook is a social network and in order to be successful you and your brand are going to have to be social. Don’t leave your Wall go unused and don’t let users fill your wall up with unanswered questions. Try and leave at least one wall post a day and try and ensure you answer any and all questions or complaints that appear on your wall. By using your Wall more often you are also encouraging interaction between your fans. The NHL, NFL and Skittles are all brands that use their Walls on a near daily basis and this constant use also shows in the amount of comments and likes each wall post gets from their fans.
6. Default view for wall set to show only page posts – As with most things on the internet that allow user interaction spam is inevitable and that includes spam on your Facebook Wall. To prevent some of the unsightly spam links from polluting your wall and giving potential new users a bad first impression you can set the initial view of your wall to display on page posts. To accomplish this you can do the following:
  - At your Page’s Wall Tab click the “Settings” link underneath the “What’s on your mind?” box
  - Where it says “Default view for wall:” choose “Only posts by page”
  To see examples of why it might be best to initially show only posts from the page take a look at the Pizza and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen pages. At first glance there appears to be a lot of interaction on the page but upon further investigation you can see a lot of the “fans” are actually here to drop links to their own pages, websites and videos and are offering nothing back to the brand in regards to brand interaction. If you choose to hide this you will then be only displaying your approved messages while still offering a place (albeit slightly less visible) for the spammers to troll.
7. Events – Offer your fans a place or activity to meet and connect with your brand offline. Perhaps you could throw a launch party or a customer appreciation party. Starbucks is currently running a bold coffee promotion and their Facebook page lists which coffee blends will be available in which weeks, Coca-Cola is showing concert listings and Skittles ran a Valentines promotion. Events are another form of interaction that can help you get new fans and keep current ones.
Many of the items on this list could take you as little as minutes to complete while others may require a designer and coder and others yet require your daily time but by borrowing and incorporating the ideas put forth by the major brands into your own fan page your brand should be able to increase its fan count and fan interaction.

If you found this article to be of any use to you please consider sharing it with your own network of Facebook friends of Twitter followers by clicking one of the buttons below. Please leave a comment below with your list of favorite fan pages or let me know any of the things you have tried to attract new fans to your pages.

6 days ago

Location Based Services: What’s Your Take?

It’s no secret that at this years ~~SXSW~~ f8 conference Facebook will be announcing and probably launching its location service. This will potentially bring 400+ million Facebook users into the location based market. Does Facebook entering into this market legitimize what Foursquare and Gowalla have already been doing? Should Foursquare and Gowalla be worried about Facebook’s entrance into their market? Are you looking at advertising and marketing opportunities for your business or brand in the location bases services market?
- Tagged:
- Gowalla
- Foursquare
- Facebook
- Location Based Services
- Social Media

1 week ago

14 Tips To Help You, Your Brand Or Your Business Get Started In Social Media
Are you looking for a few tips to help kick start your social media/networking experience? Here are 7 Do’s and 7 Don’ts of social networks that can hopefully help guide your social media journey in the right direction and because I couldn’t stop writing there is a bonus tip at the end.

Do
1. Do go and join at least one social network right now and after creating your account sit back, monitor and discover how that social network works before posting or sharing any content. As author Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” So before you jump in and do something you may regret later you must first learn how the community interacts with each other and you must learn how to use the different features contained within that particular social network.
2. Do make sure to accurately and truthfully fill out your user profile including a real picture (or at least something that represents you) of yourself. This allows others in that social network to get to know the real you and will help them to trust you in the future.
3. Do spend plenty of time actively communicating and interacting with your community. Not only will you learn a lot from your community but you can also help your community by answering questions, sharing content and if applicable pointing them in the direction of your services/website/blog. A quote I enjoy that applies here is:
  “A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”
  -Chinese Proverb
  In other words you can learn by watching but at some point you will have to interact, engage and participate in order to truly learn how to make the most out of social media.
4. Do spend time using the search features at whichever social network you are currently on to actively seek out and discover new and interesting individuals who you should friend or follow. You can’t have a sane conversation with yourself and in order to participate in meaningful conversation and begin to build a community you are going to have to go out and find those you wish to communicate with.
5. Do take the time to remove and block any spammers that may have latched on to you like the parasites they are. By taking the time and effort to block and report spammers you are helping the social networking sites become a safer and cleaner environment for all users. If spammers find a social network increasingly aggressive towards their tactics eventually they will leave to find an easier place to spam their wares.
6. Do make sure you share quality links and content from others with your community. Sharing useful and relevant content with your followers and friends shows the community that you are there for more than just self promotion.
7. Do realize that the internet and social networks are increasingly transparent and it is very easy to be found out as a fake or imposter. The best advice I can give to those wishing to use social networks effectively is to always be yourself and to pretend to be someone you aren’t. If you like hockey, show that you do, don’t try and fake your knowledge of football because you will fail. If you are a heavy user of curse words (maybe tone that down a bit) don’t censor yourself simply to gain a larger audience.
Do Not’s
1. Do not be afraid to try new social networks. They may only currently have a couple of hundred members but they could quickly turn in to the next Facebook or Twitter. When it comes to social media and social networks it is almost always more beneficial to be an early adopter rather than a late follower. At minimum by being an early adopter you will be able to secure your chosen username to help further your branding efforts.
2. Do not be offended if you follow or friend someone and they do not reciprocate. You should only be following or friending those individuals who you find interesting and relevant anyways and those who enhance or add to the quality of the conversation. If they don’t reciprocate the follow at least you are still getting something out of the relationship because they were someone you found interesting to begin with.
3. Do not fall into the spammy cycle of follow/unfollow or friend/unfriend simply to get a notification to them in hopes they will follow you back. This can be considered a form of spam and is highly annoying to the individual who you are trying to entice to follow you. Why not engage in relevant conversation with this individual instead? Chances are they will friend or follow you a lot quicker if they know you are adding to the conversation and not just trying to inflate your numbers.
4. Do not use a fake profile picture (such as that of a scantily clad blonde) to try and entice more friends/followers into following or friending you. This is a common tactic among spammers (especially on Twitter) and after being found out as a fraud you will almost certainly be blocked and/or reported as a spammer.
5. Do not solely use the social networks to promote your own blog/product/service etc… Self-promotion is a good thing but excessive self promotion will get you unfollowed or unfriended rather quickly. Instead of only self promotion try engaging with your followers in a real conversation, try helping by answering questions, ask a few questions yourself and yes even promote your products/services or site.
6. Do not stress out over your follower/friend count. Inflated numbers matter very little, instead what really matters is the quality of users and the quality of conversation that is taking place within your community. Strive for quality and not quantity.
7. Do not expect overnight success using social media. It is very difficult and rare to see a company, individual or brand jump into social media and instantly garner hundreds or thousands of fans. Instead work daily at growing your community and increasing your brand’s online presence.
Bonus
1. Try not to limit yourself to using only the web interface for whichever social networking platform you are currently using. There are plenty of high quality and free third party tools available for Windows, Mac’s and mobile devices that integrate many great features, combine many different social networks into one centralized place and can greatly increase your productivity and efficiency when using the social networks.
Are there any tips or guidelines I am missing that you could offer up in the comments to others who may be reading this post? If you liked this post or found it useful in any way, please leave a comment below or share it with your own community using the Retweet or Facebook icons below.

1 week ago

Control Who Sees Your Facebook Content With Precision
Recently I was asked by someone how they could share an image to their Facebook profile but limit the access on who could view it. This individual wasn’t a new Facebook user asking the question either,it was a daily user who had quite a lot of experience using Facebook and was familiar with most of the settings.

Within Facebook you actually have the ability to precisely control who sees which content you share and they have made it relatively easy to do so. After showing this experienced Facebook individual on how to properly limit access to those they determined could view their posted content I figured it may be a good idea to share this information with others who may not know about this valuable feature.

This guide will be broken into two separate parts: List creation and Content sharing and privacy controls.

List Creation

Depending on the amount of Friends you have on Facebook you may find creating the lists of people to be a time consuming chore but a necessary one if you wish to precisely control who you want to view your shared content. Do you really want your boss to see the pics from your Saturday night drinking binge? Chances are you don’t and that is why the creating the lists of people is a critical step. After the initial creation of lists and the adding of friends to lists is completed any friends you make after can then be added to your created lists.
1. After signing in to Facebook click on the Account tab on the right hand side of the screen. You will be presented with a drop down menu that looks like this:
  
  Click on the “Edit Friends” link
2. You will now be in the Friends screen of Facebook. In the mid-left panel of the Facebook friends screen you will see this:
  
  Click on the Friends link. This will take you to a screen where you are presented with a list of all of your Facebook friends.
3. On the right hand side of your friends you will see a drop down arrow labeled “Add To List” that when clicked will look like this:
  
  This is the screen where you will create your new lists that will be used to group your friends into or where you will add your friends into Lists you already have created. As you can see I have Lists created for Family, Friends, Other and Social Media. SMS Subscriptions is a Facebook created group.
4. Since you will probably not have any Lists created place your cursor in the Create new list field and give a name to a new list that you would like this friend to appear in. One point to remember is that Friends can appear in multiple lists.
5. You can now go through your entire Friends list and either create new lists or add friends to existing lists. This is an important step that must be completed if you want to control who sees what you share on Facebook. Something to remember is that Friends can exist in multiple lists. For example you may work with your brother so he could theoretically be placed into a Co-Workers List as well as a Family List.
Content Sharing And Privacy Controls

Now that you have divided your friends into appropriate lists you will now be able to precisely control who is able to see the content you share on Facebook.
1. If you click on the What’s on your mind status update field or click on one of the many Facebook share icons you will see a lock icon and two buttons that look like this:
2. Click the lock icon and you will be presented with the following view:
  
  From here you will want to click on the Customize link. This is where we begin to configure our privacy sharing options.
3. A new window will pop up and from here you will click on the field beside where it says “These People:”
  
  Choose the link that is highlighted here called Specific people…
4. After selecting the link Specific people… the pop-up on your screen should look like this:
  
  In the text field labelled Enter a name or list you can start typing the name of specific friends or Lists that you wish to share this content with. Like the rest of Facebook this field is auto-complete so don’t worry if you can only remember the first letter of a friend or list you wish to share this with. Alternatively from this screen you could choose to hide this content from specific individiuals or lists.
  
  For example you may wish to share your birthday pictures with friends in your Family List so you would choose that list to share those pictures with. Perhaps you went out for your birthday and had a little to much fun but still want to share your pictures with all your friends except your co-workers. In that example you would choose to enter the List Co-Workers into the Hide this from field.
  
  A critical point to remember here is that individuals can belong to multiple lists. So you may have a friend on your Co-workers and Family list so that individual could still see the pictures posted to family.

2 weeks ago

Avoiding The Initial Social Media Mistakes
One of the mistakes that I’ve witnessed many new brands and individuals make when first entering into social media is their attempt to bring their old media way of thinking along with them. This traditional way of thinking and attempt to squeeze into a different medium will eventually lead to failure.

Instead of joining a social network, listening to the community and determining how that particular community works, quite often instead they will instead join and begin quickly aggressively pursuing the members of this social network with their look at me and buy this now message. The community whether it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or some other community will eventually turn its collective back on the brand as abuse will only be tolerated for so long.

What brands and businesses new to social networks should instead be doing is:
1. Join the social network using a real name or the business name
2. Upload a real picture of yourself or your product
3. Use the search tools to discover individuals who are already talking about you or your brand and friend or follow them
4. Listen to the conversations that are currently taking place and learn what is and what isn’t appropriate conduct on that particular social network
5. After gaining followers and have learned the rules begin to socialize with those in your network. It is after all called “social” networking.
6. Answer questions, ask questions and offer genuine help to those people who may be interested in your product/brand/business
7. Repeat
To put the above into perspective I present you with two very different scenarios:
1. You’re at a party and there is someone there who’s had far too much fun already and is harassing everyone he/she encounters with loud drunken talk and push behavior. Eventually he/she is dancing on the table and puking in the planter.
2. You’re at a party and there is an individual there who is walking around making small talk with all those in the room. He/she is asking questions, telling jokes, sharing stories and listening to what others around him are saying. This is an articulate individual who is facilitating conversation among the group and everyone seems to be drawn to him/her.
How do you want your brand/business to be remembered amongst the social networks? Do you want your reputation to be that of the loud drunk or that of the articulate well spoken individual?

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