Tag: Facebook
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The 5 Mistakes Marketers Continue To Make On Facebook
In this highly touted Information Age, it’s just a tragedy when a business or brand goes amateur with its Facebook Page. Yet many respectable business entitles continue to consider social networking as a hobby, completely ignoring tried and true approaches that can result in open and honest communication with customers and fans alike. In order…
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What Facebook’s Page Post Targeting Means to Your Business
Facebook added new meaning to the term “target audience” last week with the unveiling of a powerful new tool that enables small business owners with Facebook Pages to fine-tune their marketing message in order to fit the interests of each of their followers. It’s called Page Post Targeting and this new feature appears to be…
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With Local Currency, Subscriptions, Time to Test Selling on Facebook?
Selling on Facebook could be getting a lot more attractive. Facebook is doing away with its Credits currency and allowing businesses and app developers to offer subscription billing instead of just one-time payments. Credits have always been confusing for the average Facebook user. Now that they’re gone and subscription billing is available, more nongaming companies…
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Think It’s OK to Ask for Employees’ Facebook Logins? Think Again
Proponents of free speech say no employer should have the right to ask job applicants or employees for their private social utility passwords, any more than they have the right to ask to inspect personal diaries or someone’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Such demands by employers could set a precedent for personal and online privacy, a…
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Facebook May Have Finally Nailed Local Offers
In the past, Facebook has been timid about instituting new ad formats, especially anything that inappropriately disrupted the flow of user-generated content in a News Feed. But the world’s most popular social network recently opened the floodgates for businesses by beta testing Facebook Offers, a new ad format tailored for merchants and small enterprises. When it finally…
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Facebook Timeline and Business Pages, Perfect Together
Facebook told marketers that its new Timeline interface would improve consumer interaction with brands. Timeline is living up to that promise, according to a new study. The study, by Seattle-based social engagement analytics firm Simply Measured, focuses on 15 large brands, including Toyota, Ben & Jerry’s, and The Humane Society. It compares each brand’s engagement rate with its fans…
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Is the End Near for Traditional Advertising?
The demise of in-your-face marketing and advertising is close at hand, to be replaced by what Facebook’s Paul Adams terms a form of advertising that depends on “many lightweight interactions over time.” Adams is Facebook’s Global Brand Experience Manager, a job that allows him to spend the balance of his day researching and designing better…
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How Facebook’s ‘Offers’ and ‘Reach Generator’ Can Deliver More for Less
All anyone seems to be talking about these days is how much they dislike Timeline, Facebook’s new user interface for business and brand Pages. Fortunately, the social networking giant also offered a couple of new advertising options that might just ease the tension surrounding the new look and feel. During Facebook’s Marketing Conference in New York…
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How to Engage Fans on Facebook
Tips for sparking conversions and dialogue on your Facebook Business or Brand Page (this video was created for Entrepreneur magazine’s “60 Second Solutions” series): http://youtu.be/AaL4z2RIic8
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What You Need to Know About Facebook’s Business Page Facelift
Beginning this week, businesses and brands will start to notice significant changes and enhancements when using Facebook Pages. Among other things, you’ll be able to assign up to five different degrees of access for Page administrators and gain access to real-time analytics surrounding popular activity metrics. You’ll also see an entirely new user interface —…
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Is Your Facebook Business Page Ready for 31,170 Visitors?
We all know that Facebook users tend to pass along what interests them to their friends. But a new survey suggests that more than 30,000 other Facebook members may wind up seeing it, too. The average Facebook user in the survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has 245 friends, and…
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Zuckerberg’s $1 Salary and More: Parsing the Facebook IPO Filing
Facebook turns eight years old this Saturday and the world’s largest social-networking utility gave itself an early birthday present: An initial public offering that could potentially raise $5 billion this spring. Apparently everybody wants to attend the birthday bash because response to Wednesday’s IPO filing crashed the Securities & Exchange Commission’s website. But the most…
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Understanding the Value of a Facebook Fan
If you’re like most of the marketers or business owners I talk with these days, you’re wondering what exactly are the benefits of Facebook fans (i.e., “Likes”) to your brand. Also, how much more likely are they to do business with you than those who don’t “like” you on Facebook? Those who profess to be…
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Why Google+ Pages Isn’t Good for Business
When Google launched its latest social networking utility, Google+, in June, and then announced in July that the service had already enrolled 10 million users, I reported that Google+ wasn’t ready for business. Now, four months later, Google has announced the release of Google+ Pages — a way for businesses, brands and organizations to officially use Google+ to…
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Employees’ Facebook Pages Are Private, Until They’re Not
Even businesses that have an air-tight social media policy can run afoul of the law when employees post on Facebook and other social media platforms. Last week, an appeals court in New York determined that there are limits to how much proof of employee shenanigans a business can legally gather from social media utilities such as…
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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, 2nd Edition
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, 2nd Edition — Published October 4, 2011 In the days B.C. (Before Computers), losing touch with friends and family was a part of life. You’d graduate and all your school chums would wander off in different directions. You’d leave your job and lose valuable contacts. Aunts, uncles, and cousins…
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Social Marketing Is Best Served on a Combo Plate
If you’re accountable for the dollars your company spends on social media-related marketing and you’re looking for evidence that socially engineered content and engagement marketing lifts sales, here’s some good news. A just-released study shows that consumers — patrons of five fast-food franchises in this case — are much more likely to pull out their wallets and…
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What Time Is Your Facebook Sweet Spot?
You’ve just added a status update to your Facebook business page, and, so far, you’ve received 57 Likes and about dozen comments on both the blog post it focuses on and the Facebook status update itself. The question is, how long is this online euphoria going to last? Will your update continue to attract comments…
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Employees’ Facebook Posts Give Businesses Heartburn
Ever since social networking took root in U.S. offices, disgruntled employees have lodged more than 100 complaints with the National Labor Relations Board claiming their bosses have stifled their online freedom of expression. What was once contained to gossip and gripes around the office water cooler has evolved into punitive postings by employees on their…
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How Facebook’s Facelift Affects Your Business
With all the hoopla over Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week that change is coming to Facebook, you’d think the sky was falling. A slew of new features have caused consumers and brands alike to once again proclaim that Facebook can’t leave well enough alone. While modifications to its interface have always caused some level of…
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A Profile of the Active Social Networker
This isn’t an episode of Criminal Minds, but if you were conducting an indepth investigative analysis where you were asked to present a profile of the “suspect” most likely to visit social networking sites and blogs, here’s what you’d come up with: Our most active social networker/reader of blogs is a woman between the ages…
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Are Facebook Posts Penalized by Using Third-Party Tools?
If your goal is to boost engagement on your Facebook Page, you might not want to invite a third-party API (application programming interface) to your online get together. Using third-party tools like Hootsuite, Sendible, Shoutlet and Postling to schedule and post content to your Facebook Page can actually decrease your likes and comments by 80…
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Labor Ruling Is a Reminder to Revisit Social Media Policies
Providing guidelines on how employees should refer to work on social media sites is smart. But firing staffers for what they post about your company is a big no-no. Employees who openly participate in a Facebook conversation about the terms and conditions of their employment — including defending their job performance — are protected under…
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Who Checks Your Company’s Social Media Profile?
Social Media isn’t just for teenagers and techies anymore. Adults have long used social media sties like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But the number of adult Internet users who now claim they use those and other social networking sites has more than doubled since 2008, according to a new report released late last week. For…
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What Facebook’s Latest Changes Mean for Businesses
Facebook recently made a number of product and platform changes that affect companies and brands that market using the world’s most popular social utility. Here are five of the latest changes you need to be aware of: 1. Privacy settings for sharing: Privacy has long headed the list of concerns expressed by users of Facebook.…
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The Fallacy Behind ‘Facebook Fatigue’
You can call it “Facebook Apathy” or “Facebook Funk,” but “Facebook Fatigue” it isn’t. The term “Facebook Fatigue” has wriggled its way into the business lexicon — most recently, in a pair of reports claiming there is flagging support for social media sites among users. The notion is that people are bored with Facebook and…
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Facebook Posting Techniques that Really Work
There’s a fine line between a scientific approach to marketing on Facebook and a haphazard shotgun approach. For those of you who prefer not to “point and shoot,” a new study from a San Francisco-based social media strategy firm offers an in-depth analysis of the top 20,000 Facebook Pages and up to a quarter million…
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How To Smooth a Rejected Job Applicant’s Feathers
To follow-up on my recent article about do’s and don’ts of using social media to screen new hires, when your company uses social media channels to both source and screen new talent, you must consider that your applicants can turn right around and use those same channels to your disadvantage. In other words, if you…
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Do’s and Don’ts of Using Social Media to Screen New Hires
Using social media to find new employees is one thing, but making a prospect fork over their Facebook credentials as part of a background check is something else entirely. More than one half of employers use social media sites to recruit potential candidates, up from just over a third in 2008, according to a June…
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Why and How to Build Customer Relationships with Website Comments
Facebook and Twitter have lulled many businesses into thinking that blogging and posting content on social venues are the only means of stimulating dialogue on the web. But many businesses have substantial amounts of content on static web pages–from product and service descriptions to “about the staff” pages and photographs–that can be turned into customer…
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Five Lies About Social Media Marketing
When you think back on it, the advent of social media hit the marketing world like hot sauce on an empty stomach. All of a sudden businesses with an appetite for “what’s next” rushed to set up Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts and blogs to connect with as many customers as possible. Waylaid somewhere along the…
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Report: Facebook Users are a Trusting Bunch
Conventional wisdom alleges that if your company’s target customer is highly engaging, community oriented and relationship-minded, then marketing over Facebook makes sense for your product or service. But why is that? The answer might be in a just-released report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project that delves into how people’s trust issues, personal…
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Advertise on Facebook? AmEx Has the Credit Card for You
Forget miles and cash back, American Express is rewarding cardholders with Facebook Ads. In what is being touted as a means for small businesses to attract new customers, AmEx announced this week that its Membership Rewards points can now be used to purchase advertisements on Facebook. And Facebook execs are all onboard, saying the program…
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New Facebook Ad Unit Ask Users to Chime In
Facebook has a new ad platform that will really get users talking. The social network with more than 620 million users today launched a new Sponsored Stories ad unit — aptly named “Comment” — which urges members to do more than just look at, “Like,” or share a brand’s display advertisement. Formatted like a conversation…
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Climbing on the Social Media IPO Bandwagon
In recent weeks, we’ve seen the likes of LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), Pandora Media (NYSE: P) and Groupon file to sell shares to the public. And while at least two of these stocks were flying high at the outset, they’ve since sunk — along with fellow entrepreneurs’ hopes for a similarly frothy showing. For its part,…
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The Secrets to Mastering Facebook
Interview by Forbes Magazine Contributor, Dan Schwabel (from June 2011) With over 700 million users now, Facebook is growing rapidly and becoming more entrenched in our society. In order to learn more about Facebook, and how we should and shouldn’t be using it, I caught up with Mikal E. Belicove, who is a business strategist, author, and…
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Taking the ‘I’ Out of Business Posts on Facebook
For as far back as I can remember, I’ve always advised companies with blogs and Facebook and Twitter accounts that there is no “I” in business. When speaking on behalf of a business, brand, product or service over a Facebook status update, tweet or blog post, I advise them to always use “we” (or some…
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5 Facebook Developments for Businesses
The engineers at Facebook have been busy fine-tuning and adding new features lately, prompting the following primer on what’s new and — more important — what these developments mean for your business. Included among the additions and changes: There’s now a “Send” button for websites. “Deals” on Facebook launched this week, and its “Questions” function…
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Facebook and AmEx Offering Business Makeovers
Everybody deserves a break, but American Express OPEN is now offering small business owners the ultimate Big Break. The credit-card issuer this week launched a national contest that will culminate with five winners each winging their way to Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., for a two-day, all-expenses-paid social media marketing “makeover” and $20,000 to…
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Brands Failing to Leverage Facebook to Boost Search Results
Nearly every single one of the world’s 200 leading consumer brands does a great job of maintaining a top or near-top ranking in search results for their brand’s name. But a study released this week shows that those same brands slack off considerably when it comes to having their Facebook Page represented in the top…
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How to Look Like a Pro on Facebook: Facebook Expands Preferred Developer Consultant Program
There’s a lot more to creating an enticing Business Page or application on Facebook than just slapping your logo on it, adding a fewcoupons and hoping customers and potential clients will stumble across it. Justlike your company website requires a dedicated programmer or designer, entrepreneursconsidering a Facebook storefront should also retain qualified professionalhelp. Brands, corporations…
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Why Customers Unsubscribe, Unlike and Unfollow You
There you are, busily marketing your business or brand through social networking and suddenly you’re experiencing a rash of unsubscribes, unfans, unlikes or unfollows on your email, Facebook or Twitter accounts. What’s going on here? It’s like that old Righteous Brothers hit, “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Only this time around it’s not a mid-60s…
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A Review of Facebook’s Latest Page Features for Businesses
In case you’ve missed it, Facebook is in the process of unveiling a major update to its Pages platform, striking what should be a happy chord for businesses and brands that use the world’s largest membership-based social networking site to engage with consumers online. Feature changes and enhancements go into effect for all Pages on…
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Settlement Reached in Employee Firing Over Facebook Commentary
There’s been a settlement in the case of an ambulance service employee who was fired last year for posting some pretty caustic comments about her supervisor on her Facebook page (read Can Complaining About Your Boss on Facebook Get You Fired?). The regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Hartford, Conn., announced…
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Benchmarking Facebook Ads
If you’ve been sinking a portion of your marketing dollars into Facebook advertising the past year or so, you might be wondering how that online advertising is paying off for you. And with Facebook ads expected to pull in more than $2 billion from U.S. advertisers and $4 billion worldwide this year, you shouldn’t feel…
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How to Build Business with Facebook Deals
There’s an independent theater near my house that offers customers a cheesy looking discount card. Show it to the disinterested teen-ager behind the glass when you buy a ticket and he’ll take your money and punch a hole in the card. After five punches, the next film is free. Of course, if it’s a “new”…
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Can Complaining About Your Boss on Facebook Get You Fired?
Here’s a question for the water cooler crowd: Can complaining about your supervisor on Facebook get you fired? Can a status update change the status of your employment? I’ve opined in the past about the dangers and drama of authoring and then posting job-related commentary on Facebook or other socially engaging online properties (see Pitfalls…
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What’s in a Word? Plenty When It Comes to Facebook Status Updates
Words are powerful things and Facebook status updates can prove to be equally powerful tools for those of us who use social media to promote our businesses. Because a major focus of social media-related marketing is on creating content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share with their own networks, our choice of words…
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Create a Business-aligned Communication Strategy
When I worked in the corporate world (think global corporation with 30,000 employees and a Board of Directors complete with an audit committee), this was the time of year when everyone in the enterprise received their final financial targets for the following fiscal quarter, as well as numbers for all of the next fiscal year.…
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Social Networking Picks Up Steam on a Global Level
It should come as no surprise that social networking has rocketed in the United States — the country where it all began (thanks, eBay). What is surprising to some, however, is how widespread the use of social networking sites and platforms has become on a global scale. Did you know, for instance, that of Facebook’s…
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Book Review: Facebook Advertising For Dummies
There’s a lot of buzz these days about the amount of traction Facebook has gained as an advertising platform. According to Hitwise, nearly one in four page views, excluding mobile-generated traffic, in the U.S. now occurs on Facebook.com, and comScore recently reported that 23.1 percent of all online display ad impressions in the month of…
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How The Fortune 500 Uses Social Media
Just out from the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth is a study targeting the use of social media by America’s largest companies — the Fortune 500. In particular, the research examines what the big boys are doing when it comes to using blogs, Twitter and Facebook. And the results show…
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Facebook Moves to Eliminate Spam on Business Pages
Back in the fall of 2008, Facebook sued Montreal-based spammer Atlantis Blue Capital, and its owner Adam Guerbuez, for repeatedly spamming Facebook members. In what many view as a landmark CAN-SPAM-related judgment, US federal judge Jeremy Fogel awarded Facebook an astonishing $873 million dollars in punitive damages. Now, just days after a Canadian court upheld…
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Thoughts on Twitter Versus Facebook for Business
I’m of the opinion there are two camps when it comes to online marketing and the use of social media to drive business messaging and customer action: Those who mostly use Facebook Those who mostly use Twitter Sure, many businesses display the blue-based badges for both Facebook and Twitter on their homepage, which suggests that…
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New Report Uncovers the Anatomy of a Facebook Post
Many businesses are directing their marketing departments to find ways to attract and retain customers by engaging them on Facebook and other social media networks. Their logic is that by using internet-based services to connect with their demographic, these companies can breathe new life into their brand, product or service. Enter Vitrue (not Virtue), an…
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Claim Your ‘Place’
After months of speculation, Facebook made it official: It’s in the location game. The company released its retort to Foursquare in August, a location-based check-in tool called Facebook Places that enables customers to see a map on their iPhone or other mobile device that includes your business (the Place) and a list of their Facebook…
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Looking for Entrepreneurial Tips in ‘The Social Network’
The Social Network opens in theaters nationwide on Friday amidst a deafening buzz about Facebook’s co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg. If people aren’t questioning the veracity of the film’s storyline, they’re speculating about it. Is it fact, fiction or just a dramatic, narrative account pumped up with a little extra Hollywood juice? Controversy erupted months in advance…
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How to Avoid Facebook Business Page Recategorization
The e-mail message was alarming and ominous: Thinking the above message must be spam, the folks at The Inn at Mount Snow in West Dover, VT, immediately logged onto their Facebook account, where they were promptly confronted by the following message at the top of their Page: Definitely not spam, and according a statement provided by…
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How to Avoid Facebook Business Page Recategorization
The e-mail message was alarming and ominous: Thinking the above message must be spam, the folks at The Inn at Mount Snow in West Dover, VT, immediately logged onto their Facebook account, where they were promptly confronted by the following message at the top of their Page: Definitely not spam, and according a statement provided…
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Use Facebook Places to Boost Business and Lift Sales
After the initial buzz dies down, most of the chatter surrounding Facebook Places — the just-now-released location-based check-in tool — will likely focus on how it might affect similar social networking tools like Foursquare,Loopt, Gowalla and Whrrl. Oh, there will be some discussion of privacy concerns to be sure, but what will be left out of the equation is…
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How to Conduct a Tweet Chat for Your Business or Brand
To promote our recent book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, my co-author, Joe Kraynak, and I participated in a ‘Tweet Chat’ (also called a Tweetchat) about Facebook. If you have never heard of Tweet Chats and have no idea of what they are, just think of them as online, real-time conversations broadcast via Twitter.…
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Social Care: Managing Customer Service via a Facebook Page
If your company or brand has a Facebook page, whether you like it or not, you now have a new customer service platform. Customers will flock to your Facebook page not only to become faithful fans, but also to access support, ask questions and (unfortunately) post complaints. According to the 2009 Cone Consumer New Media…
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The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook
Facebook leaves many people and businesses scratching their heads over even the most fundamental features, such as the difference between their Wall and their News Feed. My latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide® to Facebook, gets you registered and touring Facebook in the first chapter and reveals the features that have made Facebook the number one…
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Will Facebook Start Charging Members?
Rumor has it that later this year, Facebook will start charging its members to use the service. Although this may sound like an April Fool’s joke, the rumor’s more malicious than that. Using this ruse, pranksters and malicious hackers have stirred up angry tirades against the social media giant and convinced thousands of Facebook members…
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Facebook Etiquette for Businesses and Brands
When your business establishes a presence on Facebook, you make a commitment to be a good neighbor, a trusted Facebook friend. The emphasis is on being a friend, not a store, a business, or even a customer service help desk (although these days, your customers are just as likely to ask you a product support-related…
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Your Weekly Facebook Page Update… What’s That About?
Has your business received a “Your Weekly Facebook Page Update” message via e-mail? If so you’re not alone. Every business with a Facebook Fan Page has started receiving those. Are they spam? Absolutely not, furthermore: The Weekly Facebook Page Update is legitimate. These update notices contain valuable information. You should be putting this information to…
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A Community of One’s Own: Why Social CRM may make more sense than Facebook
While the herd mentality drives many entrepreneurs to stake their claims in the Facebook community, it is important to consider whether it makes sense to build your own customer community–independent of Facebook and integrated with your company’s website and customer relationship management system. Yes, Facebook represents a huge potential market and offers several free community-building…
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SMB Adoption of Social Media Has Doubled
When Dr. Alan Glazier, CEO and founder of Shady Grove Eye and Vision Care decided in January of 2009 it was time to grow his business, one of the first things he did was launch a social media marketing campaign. One year later, Glazer’s Rockville, Md., optometry office is a blogging and tweeting pro, and the…
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5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Abandon Your Blog for Facebook
In the rush to create a Facebook Fan Page to promote their business or brand, many companies are neglecting their existing blogs. As a result, thousands of business blogs have been left to rot, leading potential customers and business partners alike to draw their own conclusions as to why a company’s blog hasn’t been updated…
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Boosting Business With a Facebook Fan Page
Some of your business’s most valuable assets are its fans–the brand evangelists who sing the praises of your products and services–with or without you knowing about it. On Facebook, you have access to a choir of more than 350 million potential fans. Enlist a tiny percentage of the most vocal members to be your loyal…
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Conflicting Reports on Social Networking for Business
Time to muddy the waters a bit. Three new reports surfaced this week, each offering a different point of view on how business owners and executives value social networking for business. If you’re considering adding social media to your marketing mix, you may find this interesting. If you’re already sold–or feel like you were sold…
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The Twittering Class: How social media can elevate your company’s online cred
Social networking sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have followed the same path to the business world that blogs did only a couple years ago: They’re all online hangouts that evolved into sophisticated branding, lead generation and sales tools for business. And with the right approach, they are an ideal way to…
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Facebook’s New Username Feature Raises Trademark Issues
If you’ve logged into your Facebook account within the last 48 hours or so, chances are you’ve already seen and read the following message: Starting on Friday, June 12th [sic:2009], at 9:01pm in your time zone, you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account to easily direct friends, family, and coworkers to…