Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

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Our Top 11 Web Marketing Articles of 2012

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

11 Web Marketing Articles That Will Help You Build Your Business in 2013.

Why not 12 articles you ask? Because apparently Rich decided to take the month of June off…Slacker! [Ed. Um...guilty?]

Anywho, here are 11 months of articles from the flyte log. If you haven’t signed up for our monthly email newsletter yet, here’s a glimpse of what you’ve missed out on!

Hopefully you have already signed up for the flyte log email newsletter, but if you haven’t, there’s no time like the present. When you do,  you get the following articles only available to subscribers:

  • 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Website
  • The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make
  • 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Facebook Business Page
  • The 11 Commandments of Writing Web Copy for the Non-Copywriter

Wishing you a prosperous 2013!

Flyte New Media

Photo Credit: by comedy_no

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Posted in flyte news, Web Marketing | 1 Comment »


Get Notifications: The Free Way to Reach More Facebook Fans

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

Now your fans can get all of your business page updates with the new Get Notifications button. Here’s how.

Ever since Timeline was introduced it seems as though the only way we can get in front of our Facebook Business page fans is to pay to do so. Well, let your heart not be discouraged, Facebook recently introduced a new FREE way to stay in front of your fans. Enter ‘Get Notifications.’

By checking off ‘Get Notifications’ you are telling Facebook what you are interested in and what you want to see in your news feed, rather than Facebook guessing. Once checked you will see all updates from that particular page in your news feed.

If you’ve been updating your news feed 5 or more times a day in order to improve your Edgerank, you may want to rethink that. Otherwise you’ll hijack the news feeds of those followers who get everything.

At this point we aren’t sure if Facebook will give you the information on how many of your fans have opted to get notifications. However, you may have noticed that some pages are already marketing this function.

Here are the steps we recommend to get your current fans to sign up for your notifications.

  1. Create an update asking your fans to click the ‘Get Notifications’ button. Let them know that you will not be burdening them with an obscene number of posts.
  2. Instruct them on how to they can get notifications. It can be found one of two ways. 
    1. You can hover over the ‘liked’ button on the Facebook page that you want to receive the notifications from (see image above) 
    2. You can hover over the liked button in the newsfeed to click off ‘Get Notifications.’
  3. Create a Promoted post, so that more of your fans can see the update.

You may not have this on your page yet. Facebook is slowly rolling it out. It will be interesting to see if the reach percentage on posts goes up or not. 

Is “Get Notifications” available on your page yet? Which brands would you subscribe to on Facebook?

Joan Crocker
Facebook Marketer

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Posted in Social Media, Web Marketing | 1 Comment »


Can I Rename My Facebook Page?

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Is it possible to change the name of your Facebook page?

Dear flyte,

I have a page that I want to rename. How do I do this? Also, if I can’t rename the page, is there a way that I can create a new page and merge my fans over to it? (See blog post: How to Merge a Facebook Page)

I currently have over 1,000 fans on my page and I don’t want to lose them.

Please let me know if this is possible!

- Facebook fan

Dear Facebook Fan,

I know how frustrating it can be when you decide your Facebook page name doesn’t truly represent your page or brand and you can’t change it. I also don’t blame you for not wanting to lose all those fans you worked so hard for.

Unfortunately, you can not change the name of your page if you have more than 100 fans, at least not on your own. You can however request Facebook change the name for you. If you decide to request a Facebook page name change here are the steps to follow:

1. Edit Page
2. Go to the “Basic Information” Section
3. Where it says Name, you’ll see a blue link that says “Request Change”
4. Click on the link and fill out the form


Once you’ve followed the steps and sent your request it could take a few days, sometimes longer for Facebook to get back to you.

So, what should you do? You really only have a couple options.

1. Request a Facebook Page Name Change. (Then wait, hope and pray that it happens.) Or…
2. Create your new page, with the new name and ask your fans via updates and promoted posts to “Like” your new page.

While these options may not be as simple or as immediate as one would hope, currently this is the only way to go about the change.

Has anyone had luck with requesting a name change for their page? We’d love hear about it!

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Facebook’s Name Changer

Photo Credit: by i heart him

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Posted in Social Media, Web Marketing | 2 Comments »


How Do I Determine Which Facebook Posts Perform the Best?

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

Improve your Facebook Engagement with Better Updates.

Recently I read a fantastic post over at Hubspot on How to Analyze Facebook Insights to Improve your Content Strategy. Here are some key takeaways.

As business owners we are all short on time. It’s important for us to use our time wisely, and that means finding shortcuts, analyzing processes and creating a strategy that produces the most fruit from our labor.

Many times when it comes to social media strategies we are all over the place, wasting time trying everything because we aren’t quite sure what is or isn’t working.

So, what are the best ways to discover which posts are benefiting our business most?

We need to start by analyzing our Facebook Insights data. However, the reports available to us through export on Facebook are riddled with columns of useless data making it difficult to discover what data we should actually pay attention to.

Enter Hubspot’s awesome post from yesterday which provided us with great tips on how to weed through the data leaving only what’s important to creating better content on your Facebook page.

So, yesterday, using the methods outlined in the post above, we took a peek at out efforts on Facebook to find what was working for us and what is really a waste of time.

Once you’ve cleaned up your data leaving only the columns that are important you can create a couple of stacked line charts that will allow you to gain insight with a quick glance. Next step is to pull up your Facebook insights page so that you can compare the chart with the posts and analyze the dips and spikes. So, in other words, which posts created the most interaction.


In the chart above (which I’ve minimized for purposes of fitting into this post) I matched up the date of the spikes with the posts on Facebook. To do this, simply visit your page, click view Insights, and then from the overview tab scroll down to page posts. You can click on a particular post and it will give you a preview of what the post was. (see example below)

Here’s what we found…

Things that work!

  1. Photos are the most engaging content that we post to our Facebook page. This can be something as silly as a photo of George as the new flyte guard dog or a picture of some not so well hidden Easter eggs. It also includes photos that are part of an update asking a question, such as “iPhone or Droid: Which are you?” or “Iced Coffee or Iced tea?”, which leads me into number 2.
  2. General, easy-to-answer questions are the second most engaging content on our Facebook page. These questions can be silly like the above examples or a little more business relevant like, “Are you currently using Pinterest for business?” or “Is your small business prepared for the end of Facebook?” Some of the formats that work well for us are Pick One:, Multiple Choice, Thumbs Up If, True or False, fill in the blank, in 5 words or less… and Open ended questions.
  3. Facebook related content – Many of our posts that have something to do with Facebook, whether it’s a blog post, image, link or question, tend to perform well. We believe this to be true of course because chances are if you follow our page, you are looking for more information on how to use Facebook for your business. These tips and highlighted stories about Facebook on Facebook make sense.

Things that don’t work so well

  1. Automated posts, in particular our blog posts that are syndicated using NetworkedBlogs. While there is some engagement with these posts, and they are something we will continue as the information is valuable to our customers, and the blogs themselves are great for SEO. We cannot rely on these posts to draw engagement on our Facebook page. Meaning we need to still post other content several times a day even if the blog is being posted to our page. [We may stop automating them and see if this improves engagement.]
  2. Not Posting At ALL – As you can imagine our engagement hit rock bottom if we missed posting on a particular day, which means we need to be posting every day.
  3. Dry Posts- Meaning they lacked flyte’s usual snarky, humorous, irreverent, fun personality. These posts were possibly too safe and lacking a controversial vibe that generates conversation.
  4. Salesy posts. Here at flyte we very rarely get salesy or promotional on our Facebook page and this is exactly why. While these posts may get a few sign ups for an event, they usually don’t receive many shares, likes comments etc. Meaning: use this sparingly as these posts are not going to increase your engagement on Facebook. However, although they don’t get high engagement per se, they can be useful for that extra registration or sale.

What type of posts work best for your business? Please let us know in the comments below!

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” – Winston Churchill

 

Photo Credit: By stoneysteiner

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Posted in Social Media, Web Marketing | 2 Comments »


How to Prepare for the End of Facebook

Sunday, June 10th, 2012

Facebook GraveIs your small business prepared for a post-Facebook world? Here’s how to make the transition.

With a recent study showing that 50% of Americans feel that Facebook is a fad, fallout from Facebook’s less-than-spectatular IPO, and recent news stories about ads on the popular social network failing to sway users, it may be time to prepare your small business for a future without Facebook.

Start turning fans into prospects and customers.

You don’t own your business page at Facebook…you’re just working someone else’s land.

You’ve never had access to their emails or contact information, and your ability to reach out to them is filtered through EdgeRank and limited by Facebook’s policies. 

You should have had a strategy in place all along to turn fans into customers, to incentivize them to provide you with their contact information.

If you didn’t, it’s not to late to start now.

Start capturing emails.

You need to migrate your fans to a platform you control, and the easiest way to do this is to capture their email addresses. 

The best way to start capturing emails is by creating custom tabs.

While Facebook no longer allows businesses to redirect “non-fans” to a custom tab page, they have increased the visibility of the custom tabs to help us entice both fans and non-fans to visit.

Custom Tabs

With the right offer–”win a free pass” in this case–you can entice visitors to click through to a custom tab. 

And, by using one of the approved custom tab creation tools, such as ShortStack, Lujure or Constant Contact, for example, you can run a sweepstakes, giving people a compelling reason to complete a lead generation form…moving from “fan” to “prospect”.

Here’s an example  of how to do it from our upcoming conference, Agents of Change, on Facebook: 

First, create a landing page that you’ll send people to when they click on your custom tab icon:

Custom Landing Tab

This is your landing tab. Note: only non-fans will see it, fans will skip it to the “reveal” tab. 

Make sure your offer is clear and compelling.

In this case the “carrot” is a chance to win a free pass to the conference. Important note! You can only run a giveaway/sweepstakes if you’re using an approved vendor, like the one mentioned above. If you’re trying to run one on your own you are probably running afoul of the Facebook TOS.

Once someone becomes a fan the sweepstakes entry form is revealed:

Custom Reveal Tab

By following this model you can both increase your fan base on Facebook and  build an email subscriber base.

While you’re at it, why don’t you go over to Facebook and enter to win your own free pass to the Agents of Change conference.

Don’t worry, that link opens up in a new window and we’ll still be here when you get back. Promise. :)

Rethink Your Facebook Advertising

OK, so it turns out people on Facebook are more interested in chatting with their friends than buying your stuff, or even clicking on your ads (based on the aforementioned study.)

Well, deal with it.

No one ever clicked on a print ad and yet they are still successful in building awareness and even generating foot traffic and sales.

If no one is clicking on your ad, it doesn’t mean that no one is seeing it. Maybe you should try ads that are more about increasing your visibility than getting clicks. 

Years ago I spent money on a big hanging sign outside our office. I knew it wasn’t going to get anyone to stop in for a quick website, and that it was mostly for ego.

But what I discovered is that people saw it all the time and it legitimized my business in their eyes. Flyte became a bigger company just because people saw our sign.

The same could be true for your Facebook ads. Familiarity may breed awareness, rather than contempt. 

Another advertising approach that you can take is to target your current audience. This is something that Amy Porterfield was promoting when I saw her present at BlogWorld last week. This is especially effective when fans haven’t engaged with you in a while and are less likely to see your updates.

By showing ads to your fans, you are getting back in front of an audience that has already shown interest in you or your business in the past. Just make sure you choose “Only people connected to [Business Page Name]” when drafting your ad.

Targeting Fans in Facebook Ads

One last recommendation is to make sure your advertisements are leading fans and non-fans to your custom tabs for lead capture, rather than to your main business page. In this way, you can increase the chances people will like you and sign up for your email newsletter (or other opt-in form.)

In this case you’ll want to target both fans and appropriate non-fans alike.

Don’t take all your eggs out of the basket.

Whether you agree that Facebook will soon be the next MySpace or Friendster, you shouldn’t abandon the platform if it’s been working for you up until now.

For the time being Facebook will continue to be a powerful force in social media marketing and it won’t go down without a fight.

Keep doing what’s been working for you…just make sure that you have a strategy in place to turn fans into subscribers.

What do you think? 

Will we soon live in a post-Facebook world? What are you doing to prepare for it?

Rich Brooks
Building My List

P.S. All illustrations in this post courtesy of Josh Fisher!

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Posted in Email Marketing, Entrepreneur & Small Business, Social Media, Web Marketing | 10 Comments »


Post to Your Facebook Business Page As You [Update]

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

A while back we wrote a blog about How to post to your Facebook Business Page as You. Ever since this post was created it’s been one of the most highly visited on the site. Now with the new Facebook changes I just wanted to make sure that you still knew how to post on a page as yourself.  So here are the new instructions of how to post on your Facebook business page as you with the new Timeline for Facebook Pages design.

Step 1. Go to the page that you admin.

Step 2. Click on the Manage Button and go to the edit page drop down.

Step 3. Go to “Your Settings”

Step 4. Make sure the check box next to “Always comment and post on your page as “Your Page Name“, even when using Facebook as “Yourself.” is UNCHECKED.

 

 

Step 5. Now you have the ability to switch back and forth on when posting on your page as yourself and the page.

Note: Now when you are signed into Facebook the default is for you to post as yourself. So, when you want to post an update on your page as your page you need to make sure that you switch users. See the steps below.

Step 6. Go to your page to make the update.

Step 7. From the admin panel go to the Manage Drop Down and Click on “Use page as ‘Your Page’”.


And, it’s as easy as that! To switch back to yourself all you have to do is follow step 5 through 7 and choose “Use Facebook as ‘Yourself’”.

Tip: To get conversation started on your page it’s always a good idea to post a question first as your page and then answer it as yourself. People are more likely to comment on an update/post that already has other responses.

 

Joan Woodbrey Crocker

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media | 4 Comments »


Facebook Announces Timeline for Pages and 4 More Marketing Tools

Thursday, March 1st, 2012

So, yesterday Facebook announced that they are rolling out Timeline for Facebook pages. If you haven’t switched your page over already you’ll have until March 30th to do so, before Facebook automatically changes pages over. But, that’s not all they announced. Yesterday was the first ever FMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) which was an invite only event, however they did stream it live so I was able to listen in.

Mike Hoefflinger, the Director of Global Business Marketing at Facebook introduced us to a few new products, some of which Facebook rolled out yesterday and others that won’t be out til April.

Hoefflinger told the story of how we are “going back to the future”, relating new ways of doing business with mom and pop stores of the past. He stated, “People prefer narration. Ads come from anywhere, stories come from people that you are connected to and have a relationship with. We’ve been doing ads because we couldn’t build enough connections to tell stories and have relationships at the scale of business today.” Social is changing that.

He went on to talk about how Facebook is leading that change making is to you can build enough connections and here are some of the products that they are rolling out that will hopefully help to accelerate that change.

1. Timeline for Pages: Mission control for you business – launch pad for your stories

Not only do you get the new cleaner look and bigger cover image new pages offer a greater experience to know what your friends are doing and how they are interacting with a particular brand or page which in turn builds stronger connections for you.

You can now also include how you got started and many other milestones for your company that have happened in the past, creating a greater story for your company.

Now people can message you directly on your page. You can give a personal one on one reply that they deserve.

2. Brand new story type: Offers

These are simple offers that will show up in the news feed and all you have to do to collect on them is click the add. You will then immediately have the offer emailed to your email account that’s attached to your Facebook account.

Check out Mari Smith’s blog post “Facebook Launches ‘Facebook Offers’ for Businesses” for more info.

3. Reach Generator:
This is a new premium advertising solution for large clients seeking to reach a higher percentage of fans via sponsored activity. While this is probably not going to be used my small and mid sized businesses, it is a new product that Facebook is offering.

Currently pages reach 16% of fans/friends every month, what if you could reach 50 – 75%? With Reach Generator you can now double your engagement. This is a package you purchase from Facebook where every day they sponsor a post and guarantee a 75% reach to your fanbase over a month long period. Some numbers that Hoefflinger gave as an example:

Using Reach Generator the following companies accomplished…

-  Ben & Jerry’s reached 98% of all their fans and increased sales at a 3-1 ROI
-  Dr. Pepper had a 140% increase in people talking about this
-  Butterfinger had a 6 point increase in brand favorability

This is definitely a product worth using if you are a larger company with the money to afford it.

4. Premium on Facebook: the most impactful way for you to distribute your content on Facebook (you create, Facebook takes care of placement)

With Premium on Facebook your ads will no longer be the small ad to the right of the page but instead it will be seamlessly integrated throughout the site as if it were a regular update that had a lot of reach. As Hoefflinger says, “Marketing on Facebook will now feel like the rest of Facebook.”

Top placements for these ads? You the advertiser would start with a page post, then it would be placed on the right hand side of Facebook, then it would be put in the newsfeed.

There will also be a 4th placement option with Premium that will allow businesses to display ads on the log-out page of Facebook after users have logged out. This can include video, photos etc.

Not only will your ad now be in the newsfeed and possibly the logout, but it will also be on mobile, something Facebook has not done in the past.

According to Hoefflinger, using Premium on Facebook you should see 5 – 10x improvement in your ads success.
What are your thoughts on the new products Facebook is offering it’s advertisers?

 

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Check out Flyte’s New Timeline


 

 

 

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media | 2 Comments »


Can I Convert My Facebook Profile Into a Facebook Page?

Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

If you’ve made the mistake of setting up your business on Facebook as a Facebook profile rather than a Facebook business page you are not alone.

Many of us have just jumped right off the social media cliff and are building our wings on the way down… which isn’t too too bad, because Facebook recognizes that we ALL do this. So, they have created a way to convert your Facebook profile into a Facebook page.

*Note: It is technically a violation of Facebook guidelines to set up a business as a personal profile so if you have created a personal profile as your business page, you will want to convert it.

However, this isn’t the only reason you’d want to convert it. Facebook Business pages offer better features that are created to help market your brand and connect with your audience on Facebook.

So, here is how you convert your Facebook business profile into a Facebook Business page:

1.  Sign into the profile that you want to convert to a page.
2.  Then go to this link https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate
3.  At the top of the page you will see your profile image and a note that says “Profile To Business Page Migration”, below you will notice a selection of page types.
4.  Select what type of page that you are going to create. For example, you can choose Local Business or Place, Company, Brand or product, Artist, Band or Public Figure, Entertainment or Cause or Community.
5.  Once you’ve selected the page you would like to create you will go ahead through the steps and set the page up as normal.
6.  Your profile photo and your friends will be moved to your new page. All of your friends will be converted to fans of the page.
7.  You will still be able to login from your original email address and password.
8.  No other content from the profile will be transferred, so if you have certain important updates, or other photos you’ll have to update the page with those items on your own.
9. Your Facebook username if you had already selected one will be transferred and used as your page url.

*Note: If you are an admin of any other Facebook Groups you will want to appoint another admin before you start the conversion process as you will lose your admin rights during conversion. This does NOT apply to Admin for Facebook pages, you will still remain admin of pages you manage.

To learn more about converting your Facebook profile into a Facebook Business page visit Facebook Help.

Joan Woodbrey Crocker
Facebook Fan Page Fan

 

photo credit: By Krismartis

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Posted in Facebook, Social Media | 5 Comments »


What Do You Do When Social Media Doesn’t Work?

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Wet FloorWhat do you do if you’re active in social media but it’s not helping your small business?

Dear Rich,

I run a commercial cleaning business and I’ve been using social media for almost a year. I have been blogging three times a week, creating videos, and tweeting several times a day. We have a Facebook page that gets updated multiple times a day but has very few fans and only my employees and family members engage with it, and only when I threaten them! Even when we ran a contest with an iPad 2 as a prize we only got a handful of new likers.

We set up a Google+ page for our business, but almost no one has circled us, despite the fact that we’re putting out fresh content daily.

Most importantly, in looking at our traffic reports, almost no traffic comes from our social media activity, and none of our new clients mention social media when we ask how they found us.

What are we doing wrong? I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall.

–Confounded in Cornish

(more…)

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Posted in Entrepreneur & Small Business, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media | 5 Comments »


12 Web Marketing Articles to Build Your Business

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

flyte crew - 2011The best web marketing articles of 2011…that appeared on our website.

Which is still pretty good. Because you know, we don’t just publish any old crap.

Here’s the last 12 months of articles that appeared in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber to the flyte log, our award winning web marketing email newsletter.

Well, that’s that!

Have you signed up for the flyte log email newsletter yet? When you do, you get the following articles only available to subscribers:

  • 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Website
  • The 11 Biggest Mistakes Small Business Bloggers Make
  • 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Facebook Business Page
  • The 11 Commandments of Writing Web Copy for the Non-Copywriter

 May 2012 be your most prosperous year yet!

Rich Brooks
Internet Marketer

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Posted in Business Blogs and Blog Marketing, Web Design & Development, Web Marketing | 3 Comments »

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