Towards the tail end of 2010, there was massive
media coverage on Facebook Likes – a signal that
Facebook Likes would spread like wildfire in 2011.
We are now in 2011 and quite rightly are witnessing
a massive awareness and clamor about Facebook Likes.
By all indications, Facebook ‘Likes’ has come to stay.

Facebook Like is just a score that friends or people can view and share – for the purpose of achieving viral
marketing of a particular service or product. Businesses are getting increasingly aware of “Likes” and how
powerful they are in building an online business.

Presently, Facebook Likes have become officially more important to Google and other search engines’ search
result pages and rankings. Also, there are whisperings that “likes” are beginning to measure up as a form of
backlink.

Every online business would be concerned on how to increase their business Facebook Likes this year.
Facebook is the social media platform with the largest number of active and passive users. Building a reputation
on Facebook means a whole lot to any online business.

Here are top tips on how to increase your Facebook Likes:

1. Send request to people via email and ask them to like your Facebook page. This is a basic but effective technique.
   Of course, most of your friends and family members would love to like your page. These people may not all be
   your target audience, but this can help to enhance the legitimacy of the whole thing.



2. Incorporate your Facebook URL anywhere possible – on your site and blog. Include a URL or an icon to your
   email signatures and business cards. Also, include links from other social media or business platforms such
   as LinkedIn. A link to any of your present or past presentations would be a great idea as well.
3. Embark on cross-promotion of your Facebook Page on your other social media accounts – Twitter,
   LinkedIn and even your personal Facebook Page.
4. Integrate a Facebook Like box on your blog, so that those that already “like” your page will be visible to others.
5. Consider putting up a Q & A on your Facebook wall. Ensure that the answers are from experts on each given
   question. If such expert is popular, a lot of people are likely to come to your page as a result. Even the Q & A
   on its own is powerful enough to draw people to your social media page.

Indeed, Facebook Like has come to stay and would give your business a leap when you generate quality ‘likes’.

Facebook has recently commenced the rollout of a new
technique that mines a user’s conversation and delivers targeted
ads based on the content of these conversations, its estimated this is currently
being employed on approx one percent of all users accounts globally.

Ads targeted to the specific likes and interests of the user
This method analyzes the chat and status updates and finds any words that
relate to a brand name or product in any way.
This method is basically created to deliver ads that are targeted
to the specific likes and interests of Facebook users.

Triggering a facebook ad type based on word associations
Let’s suppose that a person has updated his Facebook status and used the word
Holidays in some context in their update.
This word might then later trigger an ad related to an ad with offers from holiday companies.
This method is expected to be much more accurate and to-the-point for the users but the
chances that it to be misleading or inaccurate are also there. There were about 6 million users
who tested this new system and the results were amazing. Any word that they used became the “target”
for the system and it generated an ad against it.

Good news for companies who are advertising on Facebook
If you use the word “ice-cream” in any of your conversations, an ad related to any of the ice-cream
companies will be shown to you in real-time. This system is expected to generate much more visitors
for the companies who are advertising on Facebook.

Better targeted and in real-time.
It is not the first time that Facebook is delivering targeted ads, but this time,
they are even better targeted and in real-time.
In previous trials a large percentage of Facebook
users reported that they rarely notice ads because they were to heavily involve
in either online chat and other related activities.
Perhaps improvements in the relevancy of these new ads will buck this trend.

Its claimed that click through rates on facebook are as low as 0.051%, these are especially low
compared to industry averages.  Therefore it’s very possible more relevant real time ads
will improve on this performance in the future.

The best time to secure a business real estate on the number one Social platform is now. The rate at which Fan Pages for business are getting relevant for virtually all industry types is amazing. But, some people are not careful to carry out proper maintenance of their Fan Pages, thereby forfeiting valuable traffic as well as engagement with prospective customers. The two top techniques for growing your network and increasing your reputation on Fan Page, are the use of Applications and steady efforts with Updates.

As soon as a company or business creates its Fan Page, it would automatically start enjoying standard applications such as Video, Photos, Events, Notes as well as Discussion. But, these applications are simply basics – you need more than the basic applications to achieve a unique Facebook Page and social media marketing tactics as well.

Here are more enhanced Facebook applications that would help make your Fan Page exceptional:

1. Polls
   One of the top social media poll applications you can take advantage of to make your Fan page unique is the Polldaddy. This poll app is quite popular and well recognized. It is helpful for social media marketing and also serves as a strategy for engaging potential customers. Come up with a poll for your page; simply put up a question and provide answers (about four answers) for the question and post them. This is a great way to jumpstart a fresh campaign and also generate ideas for brand promotion or future sales.
2. Review App
   If you are providing a specific service or offering a particular product, the review app would be quite useful to you. In the past year, customer reviews was among the top marketing strategies that enhanced the experience of online shoppers, and boosted the customer service provided by the online business owners. A lot of online shoppers now depend largely on the reviews given to products and services to make their decision to purchase or look elsewhere. Now, it is possible for your fans to provide reviews on your business Fan Page, so take advantage of it.
3. RSS Feed
   You can find a couple of valuable RSS apps that you can take advantage of when you have news site, a blog as well as other feeds you desire to have updated on the Fan Page for your business. Social RSS is one all-in-one app that can be configured to automatically accomplish updates from different types of RSS feed intended to create a post on a business page. No doubts, a good number of fans in your network are more comfortable with genuine post from a business; but, you can as well employ this technique to achieve consistent update of your Fan Page.
4. Networked Blogs App
   If you keep a blog for your business, you can make the Networked Blogs app part of your business page as well as your profiles; this way, your fans and network will get the updates immediately they are posted. You would need to get a kind of coding installed on your business blog for this purpose, your blog developer can do the installation for you. It is also good to keep yourself informed of blogs in your niche or monitor trends in your industry – a great Facebook app for this purpose is the Facebook business app.

There are several other Facebook apps that can help your business soar through Facebook marketing and also increase your traffic tremendously.

You are missing out massively if you do not have a Facebook Fan Page for your business. With over 350,000,000 active users, Facebook can help grow your business rapidly and massively. Beside the massive potential customers you would meet on Facebook and other social media platforms, Google is now including social media sites’ contents in their search results.

Here are some of the things you can do to take the best advantage of your Facebook Fan Page:

1. Attract people to become part of your Fans
   As soon as you’ve created a Fan Page, your next effort is to get people to become part of your Fan base. The use of giveaways or freebies is one of the most effective ways of building your fan base on Facebook and other social media platforms. Any type of freebie (which should also be cost-effective) would do – something like $5 off coupon on purchases made within a specified period would be an excellent incentive.
2. Establish a personal relationship with your fans
   The type of relationship that exists among people on the internet is usually impersonal in nature. Developing a personal relationship or connection with people is more result-oriented. The best tools for establishing interpersonal relationship with people include pictures and video. You can use pictures that feature samples of your company’s work as well as events. Video works in similar manner as pictures. Don’t forget to involve your staff in your fan-base building, by asking them to submit captivating content about your business.
3. Keep rolling out valuable content
   This is a great way to give people reasons to come to your page often. Keep the content concise but rich – such that would be difficult to resist. Don’t wear a high sales tone, keep it tactful and at the same time enjoyable. If you have new line of products or service, this is a good place to point it out.
4. Keep the line of interaction open always
   Of course, the whole essence of social media is interaction; so, if you keep the line of interactive communication with your fans closed, you may lose them faster than you can imagine. Be the one to initiate the communication, don’t wait for it to happen.Organize an interactive contest that would initiate interaction between your company and your fans – you must attach a price to this contest. Also, another way to initiate interaction with your fans is to come up with a poll that requests for users’ opinions regarding an interesting as well as important subject. Also, provide puzzles and games that are relevant to your business’s theme or offerings.

   It is also a great idea to peep at your competitors’ Fan Pages to know what they are doing, especially those that are making much waves on Facebook and other social media platforms.

No doubts, you must have created a username for your Facebook page as well as a username for your personal profile. The visibility of your username is quite prominent in your URL. Therefore, a common name known as ‘vanity URL’ has been assigned to it.

Here are 5 top essentials or facts applicable to your Facebook username:

1. Applying for a Facebook Username
   The first step towards applying for your username is to log on to your Facebook account. Then go to http://www.facebook.com/username. The next step is simple – just choose the name you would prefer as the ending part of your URL. However, you need to be careful. You are only allowed to use just one username, and you are not likely to change it. Click on the ‘Set a username’ text and choose the page you desire to set your name for.
2. How to select your username
   One of the important facts you should know about your facebook username is what should constitute your Username. For a company having chains of generic words in your company or brand title, the best thing to do is to bring the entire words together. Generally, you can use any of the alphabets, or numbers (0 – 9), you can also use special character such as dot (.) – but avoid using this latter option if possible.
3. Procedure for changing a Facebook Username
   I warned earlier that it is almost impossible to change the username of your Facebook page. But, you can succeed in doing that if you can pay sufficient money to them. It is not a bad idea for any company to arrange for a sales rep from Facebook, it is quite helpful in matters like these.Well, the rule is somewhat flexible for personal profile – in other words you can change the username of your Facebook page for a personal profile. However, bear in mind that you can only do this ONCE. Also, like the company profile, you can eventually succeed in changing the username more than once if you have sufficient money to appease Facebook with.

   This is how it works with changing of username; hit the ‘Account button’ (located on top right side of the screen) with a click of the mouse. Look for the ‘Account Settings’ option. Look through the display that would pop up and locate the “Change” option for your Facebook username.  Remember, after this change, NO MORE!

4. What works when it comes to transferring Facebook username to a different page
   Just as it implies in the case of changing your Facebook username, it is almost impossible to achieve this, except when you have the extravagant amount that may be required by Facebook. Facebook username is not intended for registration on another profile – this is a security measure. However, some savvy users know how to get around this. For instance, you can file an infringement report which would be made against you. This is quite shady, so desist in doing it if you are not smart enough.
5. Using the copyright infringements form
   You can file a copyright infringement if you perceive that someone has stolen or snapped your brand name. Facebook would investigate the matter and take proper action.

Knowing what to do with Facebook Page username is one of the excellent ways to make the most valuable use of this number one social platform.

]]> http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/social-media/5-facts-you-should-know-about-your-facebook-page-username/feed/ 0 http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/social-media/ways-to-take-advantage-of-facebook%e2%80%99s-2011-updates/ http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/social-media/ways-to-take-advantage-of-facebook%e2%80%99s-2011-updates/#comments Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:31:05 +0000 admin http://www.aceinternetmarketing.ie/?p=1958

Your initial step is to have a good look at Facebook’s promotion guide and determine what you want to achieve clearly before jumping into it. Subsequently, you would develop plan on how to achieve your goal and be willing to embark on the required efforts towards achieving your goal. Ensure that you are always timely, then be as simple as possible. It also pays off well to promote on your other marketing platforms or channels.

For novices just entering Facebook platform : where should be your starting point?
This is very important for beginners on Facebook. Your first step is to create a Facebook Fan or Place Page. Ensure that you define your audience clearly to enable you structure the right content and grow an editorial library. Take advantage of content that your audience is likely to find interesting and valuable – device a simple way to share the content and ultimately engage your audience.

How does a Place Page differ from a Fan Page?
For those who have a physical location where followers can check in, you can make it a Place Page, which can be mapped with a given address. For instance, if you run a concert show, a Place Page would be more suitable – the venue will be the address featured in the map.

What is the best approach to Facebook ads?
The key is to use keywords associated with your business and add images as well – in all, ensure that you make the entire ad engaging, fun as well as creative.

Facebook Like – What way can a visitor translate to a client or customer?
The best way to engage visitors consistently and substantially is to initiate techniques to integrate events, polls and notes into your business marketing. When you embark on meaningful posting, comments, and also liking, you are working towards engaging your audience and ultimately converting them to customers. The Like Button has been made more robust to help you send traffic to your link posts and stats. Events are also helpful in driving traffic back to your blogs.

Who can I learn from?
These are known to be leveraging Facebook power substantially – Starbucks, AT&T, Dunkin’ Donuts and a few others. They are well ranked when it comes to speed and harvesting their content to those who need it.

What is the technique for making content visible on Facebook? Newsfeed of course!
You can rank high for top and recent news. Embark on publishing multiple valuable content, and come up with a means of letting users contribute by responding with question or photo posting. Embark on activities that inspire interaction as well.

Finally, it does not require any technological skills to create satisfactory welcome pages, you can take advantage of some free apps out there. Also, get familiar with Facebook Insights and how you can use it to control metrics and tracking.

Every online business, whether small or large has Facebook marketing as an effective marketing tool. Coming forth with specific and lasting excellent practices, can be extremely challenging due to changes in technology and consumer behaviors, alongside the fast pace of social web.

There has been increasing curiosity on the specific applications of social media and websites – this was further confirmed during a recent webinar which focused on social media ROI (Return On Investment).

Here are some of the questions raised in the course of a webinar, with special focus on Facebook.

Q: What are the pointers that Facebook presence adds value to our business or company?

Answer: Whether social media or other online marketing investment, making a decision on which social platform would offer the most excellent benefits as a business begins with understanding some key points listed below:

• What are the features of the conversation or customer you are pursuing?
• What hypothesis have you drawn concerning the likely application of Facebook in reaching your goal?
• What is the most sensible approach to social web when it comes to engaging communities as well as customer personas for the business outcome you desire?

To the degree that you see Facebook as the answer to the above key questions, that is the extent to which Facebook would be a valuable aspect of your social media and online marketing strategy. The questions posed above also apply when it comes to using other social media platforms (other than Facebook) as well as any online marketing tool to grow your business.

Q: Can you actually acquire new customers with Facebook, or is it just about staying in touch with old contacts?

Answer: Bear in mind that the main target when it comes to using social media strategy or embarking on online-marketing is the interaction of customers via content. In a nutshell, having insight into what medium that interests your customers regarding content discovery, sharing and consumption would reveal the answer of this question to you.

How do you find out these customer behaviors? They are usually present on Facebook pages via News Feed, Wall, Liking of content and internal/external linking. Both new and old customers engage on Facebook in various ways, which include advertising-initiated interactions.

The manner your brand conducts itself would determine if you would be able to get the attention of new customers directly via Facebook versus indirectly, or via alternative social media participation.

Q: What is Facebook’s demography?

Answer: Recently, a post was made on Facebook by an expert regarding Facebook demographic, you can search for that post and explore it. But, you can also get reasonable answer to this question in the course of setting up a Facebook ad. When you input a query to identify audience, you are likely to generate valuable information regarding the demographics of Facebook.

Q: Is it a necessary routine to embark on adding to your Facebook page in a specified number of times weekly?

Answer: You can start using Facebook, leveraging certain guidelines that are inspired by successful related efforts. However, such guidelines should be re-touched to meet the needs of your own community. Posting daily on Facebook may be result-oriented to some businesses, while a weekly posting (up to 3 times or more) can work for another business.

If you are just getting started newly to establish an online presence of your company on Facebook, you may get confused about a personal profile, a group and a page. It is common for new users to mistake personal profile for Facebook page. And some people would start a group when a page would have been better off.

Let’s take a quick look at the distinction between these three.

A personal profile refers to your personal Facebook account. In other words, a profile account represents a real individual (according to Facebook rules) and not a company or its offerings. Most Facebook users have personal profile account and this is what they use in socializing with friends on Facebook platform.

It is common to see someone creating a personal profile account to promote a business – perhaps you’ve received a friend invitation from users such as “Metroville Autos” which represents a company’s name. Facebook’s terms of service is against using personal profile for business promotion – in fact, this kind of profile would eventually be deleted. Now, you can change a personal profile to a page if you are in the category of users mentioned above, Facebook has luckily included an option to achieve this.

However, bear in mind that you must first own a personal profile account on Facebook before you can create a group or Page. If you own or represent a company, it is better to limit ‘friends’ acceptance on your personal profile to only those you truly know. Here’s the major distinction, a personal profile is intended to be a more private outlet for basically ‘sharing’ with only those who you are familiar with, while the groups and pages are intended to take care of large number of people, which can include those you do not know.

Facebook Page: This is created to cater for brands, products, public officials and celebrities promotion/marketing. Using Facebook page, large number of users can ‘like’ the page and receive news and info update from the page administrator, and also embark on interaction with others who ‘liked’ the page. As a Facebook page administrator, whatever you post on the page would be featured in people’s profiles news stream – these are people who ‘liked’ your page. In essence, if the number of your likes is up to 15,000, whatever post you make on the page would be passed across to these 15,000 people. The post is featured on their news stream – but some may not likely see the post.

Facebook Group: Facebook pages have their own functions. However, they do not provide the same level of innovative marketing options that pages offer. You can decide to make page a private thing and restrict it to only closer-knit who are possibly members of an identifiable organization such as a social organization. A standout benefit of group is that the administrator can send bulk message to group members – this is a feature you won’t find with Facebook Page. However, Facebook page is still the best for a business.

For the Internet community, this year took off with a boost to social networking by the just introduced feature of Facebook Likes; already, we started witnessing massive media coverage on Facebook likes towards the end of the previous year, and it appears that Facebook Likes are here to stay. It is necessary to concentrate on increasing your business’s Facebook Likes this year.

Facebook “Likes” are getting increasingly important to online businesses. A Facebook Like is a score, and this score can be viewed as well as shared by people and their friends – this enables viral marketing of a particular service or product.

Also, Facebook Likes have become officially vital to search engine results, and we have heard that Likes are starting to be vital as a form of backlinks and can substantially influence how a business ranks in search engine results.

In the recent past, every social media marketing workshop has one relevant question to answer : “How can we increase Facebook Likes?”.

Here are valuable tips that will help you increase your business Facebook Likes:

1. Embark on marketing in all current media platforms
   Ensure that you market your Facebook fan page and its benefit both in your online and offline marketing platforms and materials. A good way to do this is to ensure that you have a link on your website, blog, emails, as well as email signatures for your employees. Don’t forget to integrate your Facebook page always in your offline marketing tools – e.g. magazine/newspaper, POS signage, business cards, shopping bags and others.
2. Put up a contest
   If you desire to increase your Facebook likes quickly, an excellent way to achieve this is to put up a contest and accompany it with enticing giveaways. For example, people that ‘Like’ your page within the next 12 days will qualify to the drawing for free merchandize or a $100 gift card. Have a target such as acquiring up to 1,000 fans in 12 days. It’s also a great idea to remind people to recommend your page to their own friends and qualify for additional entry in the contest.
3. Make an offer that people can’t let go
   Accompanying your fan request with an enticing offer is a better way to achieve reasonable success in building your Facebook Likes. Ensure that your offer is as clear as possible. Make an offer that your customers would find difficult to let go. Just a little but needed offer will go a long way to pacify your fans and make them loyal – they will also work hard to bring you more fans.

Ensure that you build your business Facebook Likes on a massive scale in 2011, this would help you have a substantial business growth.

Facebook groups provide you with a great way to grow your network marketing. With this valuable tool, you can connect with like-minded individuals, and also create a massive warm market.

One of the outstanding features of Facebook Groups is that you can send message to the entire members of your group the same way you would do when email marketing list is involved – but you have to be the admin to do this. If you master and use the tactics that work, you can use Facebook Groups features to establish yourself as an authority and create warm market endlessly.

People pay more and frequent attention to social media Facebook Group messages when compared to regular email messages. Provided your message will add value, be sure that people will check them always and respond accordingly. You can send message in mass to your entire group members to always provide them value and keep them updated the same way an email marketing list would enable you to send mass messages.

This is how it works:

Choose Group Email Addresses When Creating Facebook Group

When creating your business Facebook Group, you are provided with option to assign the group to a unique email address. Locate the ‘Edit Group’ icon and select ‘Group Email Address’. This feature is so interesting – it enables you interact with your friends at Facebook via your email client itself, and there would not be any need to log on to Facebook to do so. Consequently, when someone posts a message or image on the Facebook Group, you will be notified via email and you can comment on the post by just replying the message.

Additional Benefits of Facebook Group

Chat with Many People at a Time.

Unlike the regular Facebook chat that is one person to one person (1:1), chat using Facebook Groups can be achieved among all the group members at the same time. This means you will get to chat with those that are not your friends, but belong to the same group. It is an excellent opportunity to reach out to so many other people beside your followers. This can mean so much to your online business.

Indeed, Facebook Groups is a valuable networking tool for marketing your online business.