Cary, NC – In 2011, most businesses, organizations, non-profits and civic groups have Facebook Pages. Now, there’s a unique, branded way to control the link you share with your audience.

What’s in a Link?

Links are among the most important components of digital communication. Using proper links is a subject we frequently cover on Goodtree & Co: Blog.

On Facebook, links have always been problematic, especially on Business Pages. For example, our old link was a combination of letters and numbers and looked like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/CaryCitizen/124390674088

Not very memorable.

Unique URLs for Pages

Months ago, Facebook rolled out unique URLs (web addresses) for Profiles. Now, that same option is available for Business Pages.

Here’s our new Facebook URL:

http://www.facebook.com/carycitizen

That’s better!

Why It’s Important

Unique URLs for Facebook Pages are a giant step forward for business on the world’s most popular social platform.

• Easy to remember
• Simple to tell

This makes it so much easier for your audience to find you on Facebook. Easy for the customer is good when it comes to communication.

Now you can easily associate your brand in a direct way with Facebook and control how you appear in your web address.

How to Change Your Facebook URL

If you have a Facebook Page, follow these steps to change your web address.

1. Go to your Facebook Business Page
2. Click on “Edit Page” (upper right)
3. From the admin area, click on “Basic Information” (menu on left)
4. Click on “Username” (second item from the top of the form)

Be warned: you can only do this once. Make sure before you make the change.

Update Your Other Info

Don’t forget to update your website, business cards, LinkedIn profile and everything else with your new Facebook Page web address.

Of course, feel free to friend us on Facebook at facebook.com/carycitizen.

IF YOU HAVE A FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE

If you already have a Facebook Page for your business, you need to go have a look at what the changes have wrought on your previous design.

Many people had previously used a work-around called Extended Info to add more content to FB Pages. That info is now assigned to the sidebar, leaving the new page mostly blank.

Visit your FB Page, update the content and send a blast to your fans.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE A FACEBOOK PAGE

If you have resisted getting a FB Page for your business, now is the time. With all the new functionality, there is sure to be a rush of new Pages.

Join the fray now. On your FB Home, click on Ads and Pages (on the right, under Applications). If you don’t have Ads and Pages, search under the Applications link and add it.

http://tinyurl.com/bzaxen

Facebook’s conundrum about monetizing its marketing potential was a topic of conversation on the most recent installment of BeanCast featuring me, Ben Kunz and Peter Kim.

The term “social marketing” dates from the 1970′s and originally defined a concept of using marketing for social good. Today, social marketing means employing user-generated channels on the internet to achieve business goals like reaching a broader audience and motivating action.

Social Marketing Channels

Here’s a quick run down of some popular social networks and how businesses are using them as marketing channels:

Facebook – Businesses can create pages, groups and ads. The FB platform is 5 years old and boasts 1 in 5 internet users worldwide.

Twitter – Sometimes called “microblogging,” messages are no more than 140 characters in length and often contain links to more content. Great tool for a real-time interaction with your audience.

LinkedIn – This portal is all about business and networking. Its social tools are still pretty basic, but users can start groups, republish blogs, post status and employ several other useful features.

ActiveRain – A huge community of real estate professionals. Vibrant blogging community.

Flickr – Popular site for serious photographers (amateur and professional). Millions of users. Flickr is both a utility (a convenient way to serve pictures elsewhere on the web) and a social community.

Ning – Build your own social portal. Works well for niche categories.

YouTube – like, Flickr, YouTube is both a utility and a community. YouTube videos can have a profound effect on search results, catapulting your business to the top of page one.

Delicious – Social bookmarking is a way to share collections of links. See an example of how we use this for Julie Roland Realtor.

Blogs – A huge audience gets news and information from blogs, often without knowing it. Blogs provide businesses with a low-cost personal publishing platform that can accomodate text, pictures, video, links and comments. Blogs are easily shared and republished, making them a powerful social marketing platform.

Viral for the Masses

One of the key attributes of the new social media landscape is the opportunity to launch viral marketing initiatives. “Viral” simply means that you are relying upon your audience to circulate your message.

Where viral happened in the past, it was either carefully engineered or largely by accident. Viral marketing remained a small business.

But social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all contain built-in features that allow anyone, anytime to start something viral. Example:

• “Share a link” on Facebook
• Retweets on Twitter
• Status messages on LinkedIn

What’s better than getting your audience to circulate your message?

Promote Engagement

Social media, which include blogs, promote engagement between marketers and the audience. It’s important to open up all the potential avenues (while protecting yourself from spam, of course). Make it easy for people to comment, share or email your content.

When people take the opportunity to interact with your brand, they are more likely to return, remember and purchase.

The keys to promoting social engagement:

• Real people, real names – audiences respond best to real people using their real names. “info@…” doesn’t cut it in social media.
• Many channels – it’s easy to share your content across many social marketing channels. Enter it once, it appears everywhere. In social marketing, you have to go where your audience congregates, not expect them find you on your outpost in cyberspace.

Those are just a few of the most popular ways businesses are using social marketing. We’d love to hear how you use social marketing to advance your message. Comment here or drop us a note.

Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable – just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts

Facebook lets you create pages to promote your business. But the functionality is still pretty limited. Here’s a synopsis of our experience with FB Business Pages.

PAGE OWNERSHIP – A DIFFERENT MODEL

Facebook specifically advises that business pages are to be a subset of profiles. That is, they frown upon creating two (or more) profiles (one for a biz and one for an individual). This runs against the model of other social networks including MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.

But FB has a pretty good reason for their approach: the Facebook franchise is based on real people with real email addresses (unlike MySpace where everyone has a slew of profiles).

PAGE DESIGN – WEAK

The options for page design are pretty limited. Most of the Apps you can add to a profile cannot be added to a Business page. FB only offers one generic choice for color and style (white page, black type, blue accents).

FUNCTIONALITY – LIMITED

Pages don’t offer much opportunity to push content out to an audience. I’m a fan of a dozen pages, but never get an update. So, in effect, I forget about a page after the initial contact.

The New York Times has created an App which streams the most-emailed stories to your profile. But creating a custom FB application is totally beyond the means of small advertisers.

FB PAGES – ANALYSIS

Facebook pages have a long way to go before they provide any meaningful value for business. Better to run an ad on FB and direct the traffic to your website or a landing page.

FB is the hot ticket today, but they’d better improve the show before the next circus rolls into town.

Active Rain, of course, is the largest portal for real estate professionals in the U.S. with over 100,000 users.

I re-published my own content from this blog to my blog on Active Rain. Guess what? Lot more people saw it as evidenced by the comments.

Over the weekend, Mike Jaquish alerted me that the post had be re-blogged by someone in Florida. Is this legal? Heck, yeah! You can choose whether or not to allow your content to be re-blogged, but generally it is considered a means to a larger audience. What’s good for SNL and David Pogue is good for you and me too.

Result: a few hundred more people have seen my content (Pogue hates that word), some have commented, and maybe a couple will take the time to search our Goodtree & Company.

THE FIRST STEP

The first thing to do if you want to advertise on Facebook is get yourself a profile. It’s free. Ads are used to promote Facebook Pages. Pages are associated with your profile.

You can build an unlimited number of pages on Facebook. But you can only have ONE profile. The rules and regs are very specific. You cannot create a second identity for your business.

MAKING AN AD

Once you have a profile and have created a page for your business, you’re ready to advertise. Select Ads & Pages from the menu of the right side of your Home.

On the top right, select Create an Ad.

The process involves four simple steps (and is a wonder of user-friendly design):

• Select a target (where do you want the ad to link)
• Create the ad (text and picture)
• Choose a target demographic
• Set a budget (how much per day, how much per click)

STEP 1 – TARGET

When viewers click on your ad, they are taken somewhere on the web. In step one, you selected where you want to send your traffic.

You can send your audience to an external web page, a Facebook Page (as we’ve selected) or you can copy an existing ad.

STEP 2 – CREATE AN AD

Creating an ad is as easy as writing a headline and a little body copy, then uploading a picture.

Help is always available on the right side of the page.

STEP 3 – DEMOGRAPHIC

Here’s where it gets interesting. Choose the region or city you want to reach. Add keywords that target your audience. Watch the audience size change as you alter the variables.

STEP 4 – BUDGET

Advertising is a relatively new thing on Facebook. Rates are pretty cheap and the site is not yet over-run with competing promotional messages. $25 gets you started.

Once you create a campaign, you can edit the budget and schedule. It’s a little counter-intuitive, but works ok in practice.

REVIEW YOUR CAMPAIGN

You get one last chance to review the campaign.

Change the ad or place the order.

WHY FACEBOOK IS A GOOD PLACE TO ADVERTISE

Lots of people want you to advertise with them online. What’s different about Facebook is that it’s like being invited to advertise in someone’s home.

The process is easy. The rates are cheap. The channel is relatively uncluttered. Why not give it a try?

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/2008/10/14/advertising-on-facebook/feed/ 0 http://goodtreecompany.com/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/ http://goodtreecompany.com/2008/08/29/social-networking-the-big-three-for-business/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:10:28 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=226 There are thousands of social portals on the internet, from massively mainstream to fantastically fringe. But lately, three social networks have emerged as must-haves for business people in a Web 2.0 world.

From start-ups to superstars in five years, social networking on the internet has swept across the planet, embracing the youngest users (teens) and washing upward like a tide. The tide has finally reached the baby boomers.

Last year, adults started watching YouTube in large numbers. This year, Facebook has surged since it opened it’s ranks to everyone. And Linked In, which was always about business, has added some significant new features that will advance it strongly into the future.

Every business has a story to tell and web video is the most powerful, persuasive way to tell it. YouTube is far and away the preeminent channel for serving and sharing video online.

It started as a network for students. It’s had its share of controversy. But in 2008, adults have been joining Facebook in a stampede. Reasons why FB is a must-have for business:

1. More wholesome than MySpace – FB feels like a giant picnic for family and friends. MySpace feels like a bar.
2. Real Names, Real Friends – With its emphasis on real names, FB lets you re-connect with your real-world friends, relatives and colleagues. These are people who already know you and trust you.

While not as mature as the first two, Linked In has become a very popular network for renewing business connections. It’s skewed toward people with longer careers – they tend to have more connections, recommendations and better resumes than younger workers. Today, LI rolled out some huge new enhancements to Linked In Groups. More about LI’s new features next week.

Participating in social networks increases the reach of your personal and professional message. It raises your rankings in search. But it’s also a time consuming process.

That’s why it’s good to see the dust settle a little, and three networks emerge as clear winners for business. Other portals have their charms, but people in business need to be on The Big Three In to stay relevant in a Web 2.0 world.