inapro.posthaven

this info is from back in february, but there's no reason to think things have improved. I would say take comfort, but it's not very comforting.

Have you looked at the “virality rate” statistic in your page insights — the percentage of fans who reshare a page’s posts and wondered why the percentage looked so low?

Take heart: 61 percent of page have a virality rate of 2.5 percent or less, according to EdgeRank Checker.

The median rate came out to 1.9 percent.

So you think you have Facebook all figured out. You have your fan page with a couple custom tabs set up, you've started an ad campaign and every one of your products on your site has the "like" button installed (which increases revenue). Easy peasy, this Facebook stuff is a cinch! Well you're right, it all is pretty easy to implement, but what else could you be doing? What other ways can you utilize Facebook (and its 500 million active users) to help market your company?

These four tactics we're talking about today aren't all new necessarily, but they're fairly new to me. Which got me thinking, if I didn't know about these (or why they were so great for inbound marketing) how many other people also don't know. I'm not trying to claim that if I don't know about it, no one does, because clearly there are people already using them. But the question is... are you? If not, could or should you be? Let's dig right in and take a look at these four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about (but now you will).

1. Facebook Insights For Your Website

Yes, you read that right. Now, I'm sure you have all seen Insights for your fan pages, but did you know that you could get Facebook Insights for your website? This is a great way to get information about content people are sharing from your site, user demographics, likes and other goodies. We recently set this up and were quite surprised at how much data you could get. Here's a quick blurb straight from Facebook:

Facebook Insights for Domains offers a consolidated view of key metrics for any website, even those that have not implemented Facebook Platform. For example, if a user links to your site in their Facebook status message, that data is included in the analytics for your domain. You can access sharing metrics and demographic information per domain and per URL so you can optimize your content for sharing and better tailor your content to your audience.

First off, it's super easy to set up. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click the green "Insights for your Website" button in the upper right hand corner. You'll get a pop up box like the one below, then you just simply add the meta tag inside the

Once you have this in place, the next time you go to the Insights page, you'll not only see your fan pages, but you'll also see your website show up as an option. Below are a couple views of the data Facebook gives you about your site.

This view shows the organic shares of our content by days

This view shows the demographics on people who have liked our content. WHOA!

Additional information:

• Official Insights page on Facebook
• How To Activate Facebook Insights for Your Website from HubSpot
• Facebook Launches “Insights For Your Domain” from All Facebook

2. Facebook Comments

I'll be honest here, I was a big skeptical about why anyone would want to use Facebook comments... that is, until I saw it in action. Let me just walk you through my reaction the first time I posted a comment on TechCrunch which now uses Facebook comments.

1. This is cool, it looks like my comment will get posted to Facebook. Hmm, I wonder what that means really?

2. Cool! It means my comment showed up on my wall.

3. But wait... what? It also showed up in my friend's feed! This is what my boss, Jamie saw in his feed:

4. Within minutes, my boss and husband replied to my comment on Facebook. But not only did their replies show up on Facebook, they also showed up in the TechCrunch post. Whoa... imagine the possibilities!

What makes Facebook comments so great:

1. Your comments get read by a lot more people.

   Neither my boss or husband would have ever read that simple comment I made on TechCrunch. But because it showed up on Facebook, they saw it and replied right then and there. TechCrunch ended up with three comments which they would have only gotten one in a different commenting system. Hello UGC!
    

2. Cuts out a lot of spam!

   Facebook does all the work of figuring out if a real person is commenting or not. The person has to be logged in to Facebook in order to comment, so you don't get anonymous users. Obviously there are some drawbacks to this since not everyone has an account (the horror!), but you could offer multiple ways to comment like TechCrunch does.
    

3. Simple comment moderation

   Facebook makes moderation pretty darn easy. You have quick access to edit, ban and subscribe yourself to certain feeds.

Additional information:

• Facebook Rolls Out Overhauled Comments System (Try Them Now On TechCrunch)
• Why and how to use Facebook Comments on your blog from Raven

3. Local Business Listings

If you're a small business owner or local business, you may have already noticed these random Facebook pages showing up for your company. These are pages automatically created by Facebook. Initially I was pretty annoyed by these, but then realized you could utilize them for your advantage. Let's take a look at an example of a bar in NYC.

Run a search for "billy marks west" and you'll see one of these pages in the SERPs

Ok so these pages can rank for your branded name, which could help you take over a SERP for your name. The crazy part though, is that Facebook lets anyone (yes... anyone) edit these pages.

Sure it's a little crazy that the edit button is open to everyone, but if you keep it on your radar and remember to check the page often, you can ensure the information doesn't get changed incorrectly.

Facebook is trying to get updated information about all types of locations, including cities. For example, when I went to the New York, New York Facebook City page, I got a pop-up asking me to edit it.

This page shows 3 of my friends have checked in at the MoMA

Which led me to the "community edit" page that asks me to add detail about New York City. Whoa... so I can add information about New York? Again, imagine the possibilities.

Of course, this could also lead to people adding incorrect information, trolling your company and many other negative things. But if you keep your local page up-to-date and keep track of the edits, you have yet another page in your marketing arsenal!

Additional Information:

Anyone have a good post about this I could link to? :)

4. Facepile

I'm going to be honest here, I sometimes just like to yell out "Facepile!" It's just a fun word to say. :) Ok, ok I'll get back on the subject at hand. You may not know the name for it, but I'm sure you've all seen something the image below before, right? Facepile is the plugin that displays photos of your friends (as long as you're logged into Facebook) who like the particular website you're on.

But have you thought about taking this one step further and adding Facepile to a conversion page? Just how much do you think your conversions could increase if users saw their friends smiling faces right before they signed up for or purchased something? Foursquare does a great job of this if you go to one of their location pages not logged in.

I went out looking for other great conversion pages that use Facepile and I ran across the MailChimp sign up page. Sadly there's a big huge "white space" area which could probably benefit from adding this feature. Here's a (horrible) mock-up of what it might look like if they added Facepile to that bare area.

Additional Information:

• Official Facebook Facepile developer page
• If you can find other great information about using Facepile, please let me know and I'll link to it

Now there you have it. Four Facebook marketing tactics you might not know about. For me it's always fun to find these "hidden" gems, especially when there right there staring you in the face. What other tactics do you use that may not be very well known?

This post was originally a presentation I did for our meetup in NYC earlier this month. Feel free to check it out on Slideshare:

4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Should be Using

View more presentations from Jennifer Lopez

Rand, Rhea Drysdale and Avi Wilensky also spoke that night and you can find their presentations here:

Rand - Exploring the New Opportunity in Google's Social Search Features
Rhea - Supplemental Hell - How to Fix "New" Indexing Issues
Avi - Google Instant – For Keyword Research, Content Generation, and Competitive Analysis

We are excited to introduce major improvements to Pages.   These new features will help you manage communication, express yourself, and increase engagement.

Better Communication

Many people have asked for better ways to keep up with activity on their Page. We are introducing a set of features to help manage your Page communication. Starting today, you can navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page. This means you can choose to receive notifications about fan activity, Like and comment on other Pages as your Page, and get your own News Feed where you can engage with the latest and most important news from other Pages you like.

 

More Opportunities for Expression

We are introducing new opportunities for Pages to share. We recently launched a new Profile design, to give users more ways to tell their stories with people they care about. Now, Pages  will benefit from many of the same enhancements. Starting today, you can feature photos of your Page’s most recent experiences at the top of your Page. You can highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.  

 

Improve Relevancy

Finally, we are very excited to announce some new features to make your Page even more engaging for users. The “Everyone” filter on the Wall provides a new way for people to see the most interesting posts first. We’ve also created a place for people to discover the friends and interests they have common with your Page.  

 

We plan to develop even more features and improvements for Pages over the course of the coming months.

 

You can upgrade your Page starting today. To begin, take a live Tour of the new features. For more details and support, please visit our Pages Guide in the Resource Center and Help Center.

Facebook has redesigned its Page creation flow to be more intuitive and user friendly. The different Page types are represented with images that when clicked reveal fields for required information and a drop-down menu of specific Page categories.

The redesign should reduce the likelihood of new admins miscategorizing their Pages — a costly mistake that confuses potential fans and can’t be undone without deleting the Page. Below we include a guide for admins with tips on selecting a category.

The old design lumped all Pages into either local business; brand product or organization; artist, band or public figure; or community. The new “Create a Page” breaks Pages up into the following types:

• Local business or place of interest: Things with a physical address
• Company, organization, or institution: Education providers, corporations, and general categories
• Brand or product: Websites and anything you can buy
• Artist, band, or public figure:: Professions
• Entertainment: Sports, media or content and the entities that organize them
• Cause or Topic: Community Pages for things no one actually owns

There is some overlap between categories. Local business includes categories from across several of the other types, but admins have to include a street address and phone number to choose this type.

The visual representations and more distinct categories should ease admins through what can be a stressful process.

Why Page Categories are Important

A Page’s category determines what fields on the Info tab users see, as well as what section of a user’s Profile it will appear in when Liked. Certain categories, such as people, sports teams, athletes, and musicians have significantly more prominent placement than categories like games and activities. Some categories, including local business, website, organization, company appear at the very bottom of the profile in the Other Pages section that require an extra click to be revealed.

To increase the chances of their Page being discovered, admins should choose the most prominent category that accurately describes them. For instance, a baseball team and its associated business departments should designate itself as a sports team rather than an organization because sports teams are more prominent in the profile.

Page categories also appear in hover cards and news feed posts to inform unfamiliar users of what a Page is. The more specific yet accurate a Page’s categorization, the easier for users to recognize it as something they want to Like.

David Hartstein is a partner at JG Visual, an Internet strategy company that works with organizations to develop and implement their online presence. You can connect with David on the JG Visual Facebook Page.

You’re a small business owner and you’ve decided to create a Facebook () Page for your company. Or you’re an employee in an organization and, since you are the only one who “gets” social media, you’ve been charged with running a Facebook Page.

You set it up and make it look nice. You put up some photos and videos that you think represent the organization well. You e-mail a bunch of your friends and the page has almost 100 “Likes.” But one day, your boss comes in and asks you the question that you have been dreading: “Is this Facebook Page helping us or just eating away most of your time?”

Enter Facebook Insights, a powerful analytical tool that can help any organization evaluate the effectiveness of its Facebook presence. But, for a small business where time is perhaps the most important (and often rarest) resource, Facebook Insights can help you evaluate whether you’re investing or wasting your time.

Read more »

Posted by Kipp Bodnar

Fri, Dec 03, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Comments

If your business is using Facebook as a part of its inbound marketing strategy, then it is likely that a goal of your marketing team is to expand your reach by attracting more people to like your Facebook page. For a long time marketers have faced a challenge in inviting new users through Facebook. While they have been encouraging people to visit their Facebook Fan Pages, it hasn't been easy to do the reverse--get email addresses into Facebook and send invitations through Facebook's messaging system.

This process has now changed. This week, Facebook has enabled business page administrators to import email addresses into Facebook to invite people to like their page. Check out the rest of this post for a walkthrough of these process!

Step 1: Go to your Facebook Business Page and click "Edit Page"

Step 2: Click on "Marketing" and then select "Tell your Fans."

Step 3: Upload your email list and invite fans.

Have you used this feature to tell more people about your Facebook page?

 my organization holds events around the country to raise awareness and money for brain tumor research and patient services. our communications group works to publicize those events in the media, including social media. here is a mini case study of the ways to use one of those channels.

putting your best face(book) forward

comm put up a  web page (mostly for online donors) and facebook group to support the event, which took place this past weekend in portland, oregon (note: comm is switching from facebook groups to pages for events). after the event, a supporter used the nbts facebook page to inquire whether pictures were up yet from the day-long walk. our social media manager promptly responded, and added a link she found to local news coverage of the event:

this is good customer service, but what else could we do to leverage the free publicity? as you can see, inserting the hyperlink into a comment provides the link but little in the way of bells and whistles. even if someone “likes” the comment (that’s my thumbs up, btw), the object of one’s affection doesn’t jump to the liker’s stream – therefore, it doesn’t broaden the exposure.

liking versus liking liking versus…what are we, in seventh grade?

facebook’s Like feature is not really a great promotional tool. Note that I am not talking about the “ liking” that used to be “becoming a fan.”  formerly-known-as-fan-page: good. because once you fan/follow/whatever it is a page, every update to that page shows up in your stream. there’s an opportunity to capture new eyeballs.

no, this liking is that little word that shows up at the tail end of everything in facebook like it wants to be the new period. getting a lot of likes is good for the ego maybe, but for broadening your audience? not so much…

over 600 people liked frank rich’s op ed piece in the times. but their liking it when the piece rolled through their stream did nothing to increase the audience for that information. liking or commenting earns the item a single text line in the other stream:

zzzzzzzzzz

sharing works better

but wait, you say. what about all that stuff on top in that frank rich piece. a-ha! my friend kevin did more to promote that news item than 600 casual clickers by sharing his affection. by clicking on “share” rather than (or in addition to) “like,” kevin created a content-promoting engine, complete with an image, a link to the original story – even a brief (and editable) synopsis!

can we do this with the portland walk news piece or other nbts content? can we ever!

I grabbed the link in the original comment above and attached it to a status update. Facebook lets me post the update to just my network or, with the normally dreaded “everyone” setting, makes it a searchable object that can turn up in a google ort yahoo search.

here’s how it looked to my friends. cool!

earlier today I did the same thing to build some buzz for an online event that launches next week, Tulips Against Tumors. I created a status update and attached a link to the info tab on its facebook page

note that the summary contains a link to the actual Tulips Against Tumors website, allowing viewers to navigate directly to it. note, too, how facebook muddies the waters by announcing that “31 people like this.” this just means the TAT facebook page has 31 fans followers adherents, not that 31 people clicked the little “like” below my original post. but I digress.

I asked co-conspirator and light of my life alice hanes to use the share link on the above tulips item, she graciously did so, and this was the result on my page:

to those in alice’s network who don’t (yet) know me, the item showed up like this:

recommendation for non profits or other businesses that want to put themselves in front of potentially vast audiences: have everyone in your organization who is on facebook use the share link to promote events and important news. the resulting barrage of rich media will seem like overkill at first if you are seeing everyone’s share. but remember that your employees/volunteers have a lot more friends who are not associated with you than who are. so while you’re seeing a post five times or ten, you will be reaching a broader audience which will see it only once or twice.

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Less than 24 hours after we first covered Facebook’s decision to limit landing tabs within Facebook Pages to “authenticated” admins, the company has appeared to revert back to the original permissions, making landing tabs available for anybody. The change was rapidly criticized by more Page administrators who use landing tabs as an easy way to convert new visitors into fans.

While we’ve reached out to the company for clarification about whether or not this change back to the original settings is permanent, we still haven’t heard back from the company regarding their policy on the new “authenticated Pages”. We’ll be sure to update if we hear more from Facebook, however there’s no doubt that many Page administrators will be grateful that Facebook has stepped back from what would otherwise be a permanently damaging change.

Facebook’s motivation behind the change wasn’t exactly clear, however we speculated that it was to reduce spam and potentially increase revenue. For Facebook to make such a significant change without any formal notice, aside from an update to the developer forum, is pretty significant. At this point Facebook appears to have gone back to the original settings, enabling anybody to set a custom tab as the landing tab, however we’ll have to wait to hear back from Facebook to confirm that this change is permanent.