Month: May 2009

Posted on

Should You Advertise on Facebook?

If you use Facebook, then you will understand my post more clearly. If you have just heard of Facebook or know that it is popular, you may want to consider advertising on Facebook. Due to its reach Facebook may be a good place to advertise your products, but only if you are interested in brand identification.

I have been using social networking for quite a while. I have quickly embraced LinkedIn and Facebook when they arrived on the scene, and I am an active user. I have never clicked a Facebook ad – ever! In fact, as I did research for a client who wants to place ads on Facebook, the web consensus was that the exposure is great but if you want sales use Google AdWords.

Facebook would be considered the content network if we were talking about Google AdWords. We know from years of professional account management that content exposure has its place but is not right for every client. The content network is excellent for introducing a new concept and helping people to know your product’s name, but if you want sales, you don’t want to invest a lot of money for this exposure in this network.

If you feel like you want to ride the popularity curve on Facebook, you may want to advertise, but keep in mind the parameters and set your expectations accordingly. You may get better bang for your buck by investing your personal capital to build your Facebook friend network, create a fan page, and then create a fan group and network for your business instead of paying by the click or thousand impression for an ad. If you do a Google Search on success of advertising on Facebook you will be able to read some real world examples of advertisers and their comments and that they found the results better with Google AdWords.

Don’t take my advice in this area, but take time to review others experience on this topic. I just know that with as many items found on a Facebook page and ad can get lost. I also know that personally as long as I have used Facebook, I have never clicked on a single advertisement, do you? Let me know by leaving your comments below.

Here are a few links to other’s problems with Facebook advertising:

Proctor and Gamble Failure

LinkedIn Answers Comments

Statistical Results from One Advertiser

Posted on

Social Networking-You’ve Got to Use It to Love It

I read in the Washington Post recently an article written by a writer who was just now trying out Facebook. She was bemoaning the amount of personal information that was requested and then spun the article into one on identity theft. I have to say that as I read the article it was clear to me that she just did not get it.

In fact I find it incredible to think that someone in the news media would now just be embracing Facebook – wow, talk about being behind the curve! My son and I chatted about the article and our joint perspective was we were mystified that a journalist could have “missed it” so badly and have taken this perspective.

To understand the value and how to use social networking for business you just have to use it. Dive in head first, immerse yourself in it, connect with others, search to find people you haven’t hooked up with for a while, exchange information, share freely – then you’ll get the power! In fact once you do this you will understand how really great and how interesting as well as how integral social networking has become to many people of all ages.

If you don’t share, if you don’t connect, you can have the perspective as the Washington Post writer did, that social networking wants to know too much or that it takes too much time.

From my perspective, I “get it”. I’m using it, and I love it. If you haven’t immersed yourself in it yet to “get it”, you are missing out on one of the biggest changes in our culture since the creation of the Internet.

Social networking is here to stay, so do you “get it”?

Posted on

New Twitter Executive Services

Don’t flame me on this, this program is not for everyone, but for the super busy executive who wants to use Twitter and wants to outsource it, this is the perfect service.

We are now providing Twitter Executive services. What this means is if you want to jump start your Twitter account, get set up, initial followers, website and other social media integration (where allowed), personalized training, research of sites to glean interesting content from, training on how to use TweetDeck and the first week of great Twitter posts, this is for you.

For executives who totally want to farm out Twittering (okay I know it is tweets here, but the “money keywords” are twittering), we will do it. We will be very selective over what we take on, but we provide the option for executives who want to pay for premium services.

Twitter is a great platform. I really like it and think that it is fun. It provides a neat way to “go viral” by interacting with others. I’ve had wonderful success with Twitter recently in promoting one of my own mini-white papers, Twitter Demystified for Business Users. So if you are ready to take on Twitter you may just want to give this  new Twitter program your consideration.

Posted on

Overriding NoFollow in Links and Comments

I had a commenter recently who brought attention to the fact that he would not comment on my blog again unless I removed the nofollow in comments and commenter links. He made a good point but created an interesting problem that I thought I would blog about today.

First, about a year ago or maybe even more, WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad inserted into their source code an automatic nofollow in the source code of all comments and links left on a blog. There was no setting in the control panels to override this option.

However I for one encourage comments and do not have problems with people linking to a legitimate site if they leave a legitimate comment on my blog. But, how to override this global setting without access to a control panel to do so. Lucia’s Linky Love WordPress plug-in takes care of this problem. You install the plugin and then configure how many times a user needs to comment to have Linky Love turn on a dofollow tag in the comments and enable dofollow in any links they post.

This is an excellent tool to encourage regular visitors to comment and for them to get something back in return for commenting as well as removing spam comments and posters.

I have enabled Lucia’s Linky Love on my blog, so I invite you to be a regular participant and receive link love as a reward!