I’ve been busy lately learning the ins and outs of Facebook’s Fan Page program. The more I learn about it, the more I’ve come to realize that it’s a goldmine sitting there under the noses of small business owners.
Here’s why:
With Facebook Fan Pages, you can send out updates by email to your fans. It’s not spam since they requested to hear from you. It’s through Facebook’s email system so unlike autoresponders, you don’t have to worry about getting blocked. You can also interact with your fans through the discussion board. Your fans become your evangelists. It’s the very powerful Law of Permission in full effect! The best part is, it’s inexpensive and fairly easy to build a huge fanbase on Facebook.
Here’s how to build a huge Facebook Fan network:
The first thing you will want to do is to get a blog and post to it at least once a week. Next, grab the RSS feed from your blog and link that into your Fan Page through a Facebook App. I like the RSS Graffiti Facebook Application, but there are other ways to do this. This will update your fan page regularly with your blog’s content.
Now that you have a fan page, promote it to your friends and link to it from your print ads and websites. If you have a physical store, you can also put out flyers to invite people to check out your Fan Page.
Now, it gets really fun! It’s time to get a Facebook Ad.
Take some of your marketing budget and log into Facebook’s pay per click ad center. Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook uses demographic targeting. You can target by location. You can target by interests. You can target friends of friends. You can target all of the above at the same time! Once you learn the system, you will find out that overall it’s pretty darn slick.
Say you are a restaurant and want to just target a local zip radius. That’s possible. You want to just target Corvette owners who live in or near Dayton, Ohio? That’s possible too.
You can even target by age, which really makes it a goldmine for Medicare sales reps and reverse mortgage people.
But, get this. The longer you run the ad, the less you will spend to acquire new fans. This is because your fans will tell their friends. And they will tell their friends and so on. Facebook will also ad your Fan Page to recommended lists if you have a large enough fanbase.
Pretty soon, you will have a self growing fanbase and you won’t have to run ads at all if you don’t want to. It will just grow and grow on it’s own exponentially. To me, that’s way more powerful than any other form of advertising where if you don’t spend money, you don’t make money.
But, good content is essential to making this all work. If your page sucks and your fans don’t tell anyone or worse yet unsubscribe from the Fan Page, you are wasting your time. Take your time to do it right.
Are you seeing why I’m so excited about this opportunity here? It really is so, so powerful.
I hope you learned something with this little article about Facebook Fan Pages. Go get your page today! As always, if you need help in this area, do not hesitate to contact us.
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Today, I’m going to show you how to put it all together and automate your social media. These services are not anywhere close to all of the services available for social media. However, these are the ones that I personally use and recommend. Best of all, they are all free for basic accounts.
The first service that you should know about is twitterfeed.com. With twitterfeed.com, you simply link your RSS feed one time during set up and your status update will automatically post to Twitter, Facebook and a few other services when you update your blog. It’s really slick!
Another great service I use is called Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite offers a little bookmarklet that goes in your Firefox browser window. With Hootsuite, whenever I’m doing my normal internet surfing and I find something useful that could be Tweeted, I press the Hootlet button in Firefox and Tweet out a link to the content in under a minute. With Hoot Suite, you can also schedule your status updates in the future you don’t post too many updates at one time. This is an excellent time management strategy that I highly recommend.
I also use a free service called Social Oomph (formerly known as Tweet Later). Social Oomph actually has quite a bit of services in their free package, but I only focus on one, the automatic direct message. With the automatic direct message, I will automatically send a welcome message to people who are my followers.
There is some controversy brewing as to whether using automated direct welcome messages is a good idea. People who use Twitter a lot pretty much expect that the very first message is going to be an automated one. Personally, I think it’s ok to use it as long as you are not giving a sales pitch. Even giving away something for free can come across as too salesy. Personally, I just say “thanks for following me” and cross promote my Facebook profile. Simple, non threatening messages like that are fine.
Finally, if you really want to go crazy with your social networking, I recommend that you sign up for Ping.fm. Ping.fm allows you to automatically update your status updates on 30 social networking sites all at once. This is a great way to get your links out there and is also great for Search Engine Optimization.
I hope you enjoyed this social media series of posts. If you need any help getting this set up, shoot us an email and we can discuss it.
This is the second installment of the Twitter series. As I’ve mentioned on previous posts, before embarking on a Twitter campaign, I highly recommend that you have the follwing systems in place:
If you read the first post on Twitter, you know the basics of Twitter and how to set up an account. Now, you need to get people to follow you. If you don’t have followers, you can’t make money.
However, there’s quantity of followers and there’s also quality. Having people follow you that aren’t in your target market won’t help you either.
When you first get your Twitter set up, you will need to proactively go out and get followers. Once you get to about 100 followers, people will find you and you can focus more of your attention on keeping your followers.
The first thing you should do is find out if you have any friends or family already on Twitter. As of right now, you cannot upload any kind of list. The only thing you can do is get names uploaded into a free email account like Yahoo Mail or Gmail and then have Twitter link into that account. Once that’s done, it’s quite easy to see who is and who isn’t already on Twitter. If they are there, go ahead and follow them and most likely they will follow you back.
Once that’s done, you will need to start finding people in your target market. Follow them and many will follow you as well. Think about the kinds of places your target market hangs out. For example, my target market is small business owners in the Dayton market, so the first two organizations that I followed were Dayton Business Journal and Dayton Chamber of Commerce. Then, I went into the list of people on their follower list and followed them as well. Keep doing this until you are following a couple hundred people.
Next read the tweets you are getting from the people you are following. Are they interesting? Are they spamming? If you are getting spammy tweets, then it’s time to unfollow them so you can find new people to follow.
Next, increase your Twitter visibility. There are a few places online that you can post your Twitter profile and get more followers. The most popular one that I highly recommend is a free site called Twellow, the Twitter Yellow Pages. It’s also a good idea to link to your Twitter profile from your website or blog and any other social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s a good idea to also add your Twitter address on your offline advertising like newspapers and television.
As you learn more about Twitter, you will be tempted to take shortcuts in building your follower list. There are several software packages on the market for this purpose. For the most part, these packages are junk and could even get your Twitter account banned. Don’t give in to the temptation.
You will also see these free things called “Twitter trains” that promise to get you a lot of followers in a short period of time. You could get some followers, but they are often spammers. Even worse, these programs will start sending spammy messages in your account. Again, don’t do it!
I hope you learned a lot from these simple tips and if you need more help with Twitter, send us an email and we will be happy to assist you.
Twitter is the place to be online at the moment. Many business owners know that they should be on Twitter, but sadly, very few use it correctly. They are either not using it at all or if they are using it, they are disappointed with their results.
Here are some Twitter basics:
Twitter is a simple microblogging platform. Each post or “tweet” has to be 140 characters or less. Instead of friends, Twitter has whats called “followers.” You follow someone and they can follow you. Unlike Facebook or My Space, the “friends” don’t have to be mutual. You can follow someone without getting followed back and vice versa.
Twitter has its own set of abbreviations. If you are replying to someone else’s tweet publicly, you will use @theirusername. This is very similar to the “reply all” feature that your email program has. Yes, the person you are replying to will see it, but so will all your other followers. If you want to reply privately, use the direct message feature instead.
Twitter also has something called “retweets”. This is like when you forward an interesting email to your friends. These tweets will say RT@orginalusername in the beginning of the tweet.
Now that you have a basic understanding of Twitter, here are some ideas of things you should and shouldn’t be tweeting.
A lot of people like to post simple little things like “I’m at the store”. That sort of thing is a real waste of time as a business owner. Don’t do it. Show value or keep quiet.
You should also avoid putting blatant pitches in your tweets. Your specials and coupons are ok, especially if you decide to make the special exclusive to your followers.
The real secret to Twitter is adding true value without sales pitches. This is where most business owners fail on social media. Add in tips related to your industry. If you can make people say, “wow, this person has great tips” you are on the right track.
This is easier than you think because there are several tools that you can use to automate this process. I will be going over the best ones soon. Stay tuned!
Here’s another marketing quickie to get you ranked higher in the search engines. What is your website’s title tag?
The title is that little blue bar at the top of the browser window. It also happens to be what the link says in the search engines when someone is looking for your website. It’s so easy to correct, but yet so many people miss it.
Here are some examples of bad title tags:
Some good things to put in the title are:
Don’t get too crazy with it though. You don’t want a title like “Dr Joe Smith, cosmtic dentist orthodintist in Dayton, Miamisburg, Springboro, Centerville”. That’s called keyword stuffing and it’s very bad. You want a title that is short, simple and to the point.
I hope this quick tip helps you make some good sales. If you decide to become an Easy Local SEO client, we can help you go over your title tags and make improvements if necessary.
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