Category: Facebook

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How Much Social Interaction Do You Really Need on Twitter or Facebook?

How much hands on fan interaction do you really need on your Twitter or Facebook business page? In my opinion, it depends on how large your fan base is. Here are some general guidelines to consider.

Twitter

under 100 followers – take time the first 30 days or more to follow people, sort them into lists, try to engage other writers and your followers. If you do not engage with people, your fan numbers will not grow. You may add one or two fans a month, but will in most cases your numbers will simple stay at a low level.

over 100 followers and up – your fan base with grow the more time you invest in interaction. I like five to ten tweets a day and then engagement with followers three times a week. For my own personal account I interact with followers on a daily basis, but if you don’t have the budget three days a week will still work out fine.

Facebook

under 100 followers – you will really need to buy ads to try to build your fan base. Try Facebook pay per click using sponsored stories. Be aware that you will add fans quickly, but may lose up to one third of your new fans when you stop advertising. I am not sure as to why, but this is what I have seen happen. If you do nothing, you may add only one fan a month. After you get 100 followers fans will grow at a steady rate, but only if your content is good. You don’t even need to spend a lot of time interacting with fans once you hit this level, it seems to be more a factor of the quality of your content.

over 100 followers and up – the frequency of posts as you get to this level appears to be important. One or two status updates a day appear to simply get lost in the noise that is now part of the Facebook timeline. I recommend five updates a day. I have not seen a huge increase of fans based on interacting with them, growth seems to be more a factor of memorable content versus engagement.

I invite you to check out our Twitter and Facebook page management services to see if we might be a good match for your business’ social media needs. You’ll find that we provide a number of service engagement levels at affordable prices.

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Facebook Business Pages – The Hidden Tabs – Can You Find Them?

Wow, it took me days to figure this out and I don’t consider myself a Facebook newbie at all. On business pages the new tabs are not tabs at all, here’s the lowdown. Underneath your cover photo are several text links that are spread out across the width of the page. Everyone gets a maximum of five links but you can change the order of some of the links. By clicking the down button on the very last image above the last link you can open an additional field that will show more apps and tab options.

Although Facebook calls these links tabs, they certainly are not. Remember when Facebook business pages first came out and you had real tabs at the top of your page? That was not so long ago and I liked the real tabs much better than this nearly hidden set up.  In fact, if you don’t have your own business page and just had a personal profile, you would never ever even think to open the list up or dig around to uncover these hidden pages.

When you do happen to click one of these five text links under the cover photo, you are taken to a mini website backend that is now a part of every business page. This hidden section is navigated by a drop down menu on the top left just to the left of the page’s name. Man, talk about hidden! All your apps and pages are stored in this drop down. This is the new place where your welcome page, promotion, notes, events, and the new like page now reside. See how long it takes you to find them when you migrate your own business page to the new timeline!

Based on what I see and how long it took me to figure this out, I would consider that these hidden pages will get very little if any real traffic. You can however link to many of these hidden pages if you create a Facebook advertising ad. It will be very interesting to see if big brands start to develop these hidden pages and how they will be using them. For now the new business page layout and Facebook page changes have simply caused serious grumbling and complaining in my industry.

I will reserve judgment on my end how I like these new changes, until I see if I get more or less interaction from fans. I like the visual appeal of the new timeline, but think that many of the changes will force business owners to move into Twitter and Google+ and abandon Facebook in the long run. Sorry Facebook, but I just don’t think that any business in reality is going to sit down and fill up the timeline from business inception to now and that fans will even care to read about that company history in the long run.

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Facebook Advertising Options

Along with the new changes that Facebook announced to the timeline for business pages on February 29th, was an announcement that advertising options would change as well allowing more pages to use advertising options that had only been open to really big advertisers. So far I have only seen a few changes in my advertising control panel.

For most business page owners, you will see the same advertising options that I see for my own business page, and this is due to fan base size. I see the option to do Facebook pay per click advertising or sponsored story advertising. The additional new option that I see in my account is that I can actually select a specific update to promote as an ad. The new created ad then allows others to like my ad or to share the ad. Liking the ad will show the ad and information on all their Facebook friends profiles as will sharing the ad. This is an important new viral way to get your message out.

I have not yet seen advertising on my personal wall or timeline, but Facebook tells us that it IS coming. At this time it appears that you can still do regular pay per click advertising and use an external URL for the landing page which is good news. New options now also allow you to select a specific tab in your Facebook business profile such as your resume, links page, notes tab, etc. as the landing page for your ad as well.

Facebook advertising is still a good value at this point, but my feeling is that you may get more value by actually advertising in the Google Display network than from Facebook at this point.

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Facebook Business Page Timeline Tips

I have migrated my two Facebook business pages early to the timeline this past weekend and wanted to share some of my tips that I have figured out while I was using the new look. Remember as you read this blog post, all business pages will all be forced into the new timeline layout as of the end of March 2012.

Here’s what I have learned:

  • Don’t try to create a complex graphic or use a screen shot of our website banner. Use one large high definition image that tries to convey visually who and what you are. In my case we are located near Washington DC and so I am using a image I took recently of the Capital building. I did try my website banner and I did try a composite image, both looked too busy.
  • Clicking the star at the top right of an update will stretch either the image or text update across your whole page. Facebook will leave the bigger post up for 7 days. You can do this in several places on your page to break up your layout. Actually what I did was to design my layout look by using images and text to give a pleasing break to the typical two columns. This means that the new timeline is a much more visual statement than the old wall. Make sure to only load high definition images as when Facebook expands the image if you highlight it, low resolution images will look bad.
  • When you are logged in as a business page entity you cannot post to anyone fan or otherwise walls as a business entity. In fact when you are logged in as a business, you cannot even see a fans wall, you will only be able to see the timeline. That means that all interaction is back on your own timeline. Business pages in fact don’t have a wall anymore, just the timeline.

As a result, our services for Facebook have been changed. We may add additional services later, but for now we have streamlined our offerings to cover what we feel will work for business during this change. My personal feeling is that the action for Facebook for businesses will now be in the advertising arena. For many business owners the cost to keep a Facebook business page updated with photos, video, favorite posts, and other apps will simply be too costly and time consuming.