Category: Facebook

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How Will You Build Your Social Community?

Here are a few of my tips to help build a social community whether it be at Facebook or Twitter.

1. Offer something of value. When all you talk about is yourself, others get bored fast! Make sure your status updates or tweets are informative and not redux of what others are saying for the day. Look for the unusual, try to offer insight, look for cool things to share.

2. Take time to be real. People want to know there is a real person behind the message. Although they do not want to be bored with personal details, finding common ground is crucial to connecting and building a community.

3. Make sure to give credit to others when it is due. If you retweet something, make sure you credit the original author by putting RT username. Like RT McCordWeb…..

4. If someone retweets your information of shares your video or pictures on Facebook, connect and say thanks. It just takes a moment, but allows you to say thanks for the other person sharing their wall or followers with your message.

5. In your updates take polls, ask questions, and solicit advice. Try hard to engage your readers. When you find out what it is that engages them whether it be a funny video, insightful commentary, or photos, make a mental note and build on that known. Continue to seek new ways to engage and connect until you clearly identify what your readers want and then work to deliver it.

6. I have found that with Twitter you will typically be connecting with others in your industry and sometimes consumers, while on Facebook you will be mostly connecting with consumers or prospective clients. Cater your message to what you personally find out about your own social community as you develop it.

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So You Are Updating Facebook But How Can You Get More Fans?

So you are doing everything right, you are updating Facebook regularly and trying to interact with clients and customers there. You are sharing photos and occasional videos, but are concerned that your fan base is just not growing. What can you do?

First, your social community grows by a combined online and offline effort. Yes, it is important to make sure that you have something valuable for fans and potential fans to read when they hit your Facebook Business Page, but your fan base will not grow all by itself. To grow a Facebook fan base you need to be doing the following to drive traffic and create your own “buzz”.

1. Make sure you have a Facebook icon on your website and blog. You would be amazed at how many people forget this important step.

2. If you are blogging and you really should be, make sure you are blogging about what you are doing on Facebook and link in your posts as well.

3. In your newsletter, which you should be doing also, you need to link to Facebook and also talk about the valuable tips and tricks you are listing there or the other things you are routinely sharing on Facebook.

4. On Twitter, which you should be doing as well, you should be driving traffic to your Facebook page. Again talk about value and link to the videos or pictures you are sharing.

5. In your email signature you should be linking to all your online properties: website, blog, Facebook, and Twitter. Let everyone of your emails be an advertisement of how people can connect with you online.

6. If your fan base is still stagnant after aggressively pursing these avenues, now’s the time to consider a Facebook contest, giveaway, or even Facebook pay per click ads.

There is great value in building your Facebook fan base. Doing so allows you to market using the Facebook encapsulated email client directly to your fans’ inbox bypassing spam filters. You want to consider this access as a special trust. Don’t spam your users and really try to have your notes provide value as well as highlight service offerings.

The more you work your network, the more it will grow, but remember it does not grow over night, it does take time. If you need help getting started on Facebook, I invite you to check out our services.

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How to Tag People in Facebook

nancy-2011If you want to tag a status update in Facebook how do you do it? First it is different than tagging photos. For photos, you simply put a square around the person’s face using the tag tool from the photo page sidebar and select your friend’s name from a drop down. With the wall, it is different. First it is important to know that tagging in this manner does not seem to work on the iPhone and for Macs. Firefox may have some trouble too, but using Facebook with the Internet Explorer browser does seem to work.

To tag someone in a wall update just put @ then a space and start typing a few characters of that person’s name. Leave proper spacing if you need to enter in the first and last name. Facebook will usually provide a drop down list as you type and you can select a name right from the menu. When you click the name the @ sign disappears and the person’s name appears hyperlinked to their Facebook profile. Cool huh? I am not seeing that this is working in comments to wall posts but does work for new wall posts that you create.

The is a great tool to point people to your business page or to another Facebook page or person that you like. As search engines are watching social media interactions and wall updates to point to your business page and try to drive traffic is an excellent idea and may generate more traffic for your page and get you more fans. Try it out today, just point to our Facebook page @ mccordweb or @ McCord Web Services – we have two.

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Facebook Reviews Are Now Being Picked Up by Google Places

info-puzzlesThis past week I saw something really wild and wanted to share it with you. I saw that in a Google Places site reviews had been picked up from Facebook of all places. Wow that is big news!

We are going to put the pieces of this puzzle together for you and need your help to do it!

Now, what I am not sure of is if you create a FBML page and add your website reviews there will the reviews be picked up or is Google only picking up reviews from people using the Facebook Business Page reviews app. If I had to guess I would say from the application.

As I do additional testing this week on how reviews from Facebook are picked up; meaning if I can ascertain whether you can simply add your own website reviews or if other Facebook users have to review you while they are logged in to their own accounts, I will make sure to let you know at Facebook. In the mean time, this is exactly what we are going to do to test and I sure would appreciate it if you can help us out on this one.

  1. I am going to create a tab in one of my Facebook Business Page accounts and load a sampling of my website reviews to the new FBML page I will create. I will even try to have the reviews coded using Google’s hReview tags. You can visit my page here. While you are there make sure to like this business page that I am testing on as I will only send out a note of success or failure through Facebook to fans. This is not my main Facebook page but one I have created to make sure I hold onto my business name.
  2. I am going to turn on the application for Facebook reviews in my main Facebook Business page account and solicit reviews from clients on that page. If you are not already a fan, make sure to like this page as I will also only be sending out the results to fans of this page. You need only fan one page to get the actual results.

So check out the two pages, look in the left nav bar for the reviews link, like the page, and if you want leave a friendly review. Then when I can see what is going on I will send the results out via Facebook to all of our fans at both pages.

Thanks for your help in advance, this could be a great mini whitepaper!