There are three Facebook account types:

1. Profiles are for individual people. You’ll need a profile in order to establish the other account types.
2. Pages are in effect a profile for a non-person, tied to an entity. Pages act somewhat like a blog, where the admins have control over content. Sometimes refered to as Fan Pages.
3. Groups are topic areas for people to gather and discuss. Groups act like a forum where the members can interact.

A key advantage of Pages over Groups is that Pages are indexed by external search engines.  You can read about other differences here. Every business should have a Page.

Create Your Page

To establish a Page, first you need to start from your personal account. Creating a Page makes you an administer of the Page, but only other admins can see who is an admin. You can invite any of your facebook friends to be an admin, or invite anyone via email. Anyone can be an admin on numerous Pages.

After you login to your personal account, click on the Pages link under your picture, or go to http://www.facebook.com/pages, and then click the + Create Page button.

Now you need to choose a category and Facebook gives you three options:

1. Local
2. Brand, Product or Organization
3. Artist, Band, or Public Figure.

Most businesses that are regionally focused should choose Local and then a sub-category that is close to their industry. If your business has a national scope, choose Brand, Product or Organization.

Name Your Page

Put some thought and research into choosing a name for your Page. Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities says that they won’t allow you to “infringe other people’s intellectual property rights,” so trademark rights are in play.

You should consider using your business name, especially if it is an established brand. But also consider using keywords, or a combination of both. You have a limit of 75 characters including spaces, and you do want to use full words and spaces. You will not be able to change this later so be careful! You might want to consult a professional (like me!) to help you do some keyword research and pick an ideal name, it is that important.

Edit Your Page

After you click the Create Page button, you’ll be presented with your new Page. First, upload your logo by holding your mouse over the profile picture and clicking “Change Picture.”

You can edit your Page’s settings by clicking on the “Edit Page” link underneath the profile picture. A significant setting to consider is under Wall Settings, Fan Permissions. Here you can choose to allow Fans to post content to your wall and comment on your postings, which I highly recommend allowing. Admins can remove any content that they deem inappropriate.

Now what? Well, this has been the easy part. The hard part is attracting fans, posting great content on a regular basis, and leveraging your new social asset. These are topics for posts to come.

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WordCamp MSP will be on Saturday November 13, 2010 at the Eagan Community Center. Registration starts on March 1st, and the limited spots typically fill fast. Minneapolis is a very active online marketing community, and WordPress is a favorite tool in this crowd, so I predict a full house.

The organizers are looking for program ideas, speakers, volunteers and sponsors. For anyone looking to market to a highly targeted and enthusiastic online marketing and technology audience, this will be a great opportunity. Find out more at the WordCamp Minneapolis St. Paul website.

• Follow @wordcampmsp on twitter
• Become a fan on Facebook

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Many businesses are taking a wait and see approach to social media. Decision makers want to see case studies and ROI, which is fine and good. There are plenty of examples of social media success, but truthfully many are relatively shallow this early in the game. Getting in the game and figuring out what works for your customer, for your audience and for your business is a process of trial and error. Laggards will have an uphill fight because lessons learned will not be easily applicable across businesses. And earning an audience is a long-term process, so getting started now will only help you when you do have formulas that are effective.

What is clear at this point is that social media is here, its a big online movement, and any serious online marketing campaign should be incorporating social elements.

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Google allows e-commerce companies to upload their product databases for free using Google Merchant Services. Google serves up these products in their organic listings, including product descriptions, images, prices, shipping rates and local store results. To get products listed in Bing, merchants need to participate in Microsoft’s Bing Cashback program, which gives shoppers rebates that merchant’s fund through PPC ads. Yahoo! recently announced that they are partnering with PriceGrabber.com to power their popular Yahoo! Shopping site. This seems strange since Bing will soon power regular search for most of Yahoo! content properties.

Marketers are happy to see Bing’s emergence with rich features pushing Google to increase the pace of innovation. Having two strong companies dueling for marketer’s and shopper’s attention can only help those of us who focus energy on attracting business through search. The remaining shopping comparison sites, most of which require PPC funds to get products listed, have suffered as a result of consumers moving more and more of their product and local searches to the big guys.

Shopping sites losing share to search engines

(number of unique visitors in thousands)

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Free Keyword Tools

All the major search engines make suggestions as you type in their search boxes. Start typing in your main keywords to see what other related keywords the engines are suggesting. This is a good place to start.

Clusty is an niche engine that provides a nice cluster of related keyword. Soolve aggregates the suggest features of numerous engines, so it is a one-stop shop. And Quintura shows a fun tag-cloud type result.

Both KeywordDiscovery and WordTracker have long been important keyword tools. They have free versions, but the paid versions are the real thing. WordStream recently released a free tool as well.

Google Insight for Search is a newer tool where you can compare keyword search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. and Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast does much the same.

You don’t need an Adwords account to use the Google Adwords External Keyword Tool or the Google Traffic Estimator to find great suggestions and data on keyword performance.

And don’t forget to leverage your analytics package to understand past keyword performance.

Paid For Keyword Tools

While not directly a keyword tool, running Google Adwords PPC campaigns may be the best long term tool for understanding which keywords are going to work for you. Adwords can be used for amazing market research with relatively little investment.

• Rank Tracker has some nice rank tracking features and reporting.
• Market Samurai includes a number of SEO tools. I really like the SEO Competition and Keyword Research modules.
• Web CEO has a lot of features, but I haven’t tried it yet.
• Internet Business Promoter (IBP) is well regarded if a bit complex. Its link building tools are very good.

Subscription SEO Websites

The subscription websites offer tools, guides, forums, videos and other helpful materials

• Rand Fishkin’s SEOMoz includes a suite of tools, some of which are free. Pro memberships start at $80 per month.
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is well known for a great forum and training and lots of tools, many of which are free. Membership is $300 per month.
• Raven SEO has a sweet of hosted tools, including a Social Media Monitor, starting at $80 per month.

This is not an exhaustive list of tools or providers. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment.

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1. Video killed the SEO star?

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I was throwing around tips and tricks with some SEO pros the other day when the conversation lulled. One of the old hands, a self described reformed black-hat search engine optimizer, remarked wistfully, “When it comes down to it the only thing that matters over the long haul is content and links.” After some smiles and nods from his audience he continued, “You can try all the tricks and schemes, but Google eventually catches on and changes the game and then you’re back to what works anyway.”

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Not likely, thanks to Google. Very soon, online video is going to be an even bigger tool for marketing your company, brand, product or service.

Online video has been great if someone stumbles upon your site or YouTube posting. If you went viral, you could make a lot of noise. However, search engine marketing (SEM) is where the real power of online marketing is right now, and video is largely on the sidelines because no one can search for the content in videos. You can put tags on the videos, but the keyword richness of a video is lost in today’s search indexing.

Google is working hard to change this. First they bought YouTube, a fantastic move that will pay off massively considering the next move. Google is going to transcribe and index the words spoken in online videos.

Now you can publish your video ads, customer testimonials, product demos, ect. on YouTube (or anywhere) and Google will index the content, whether its spoken or displayed as text. Consider how many keywords are in a two minute overview of your product. This is SEM gold.

The biggest challenge to SEM is producing fresh, relevant content for the search engines to index. Once you get over the technical and production hurdles, video may become the easiest method to produce tons of relevant content.

UPDATE

Here is a nice technique that works today. Transcribe your own videos and upload them using YouTube’s Captioning capability (aka subtitles). The text of the speaker’s words will appear over the video. The best part? This text is indexed by Google.

BIG UPDATE November 2009

Google has formally announced that they will be auto-captioning YouTube videos! This is big news that will make videos an essential tool for all online marketers. Video after the break.

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1. What’s the big deal about social media?
2. Google Product Search tips
3. Keyword research and tracking tools for SEO

The truth is most companies already have great content in their business; it’s just buried where a typical marketing or public relations person can’t access it. These stories are in sales people’s heads, in manager’s notes, in product manager’s meetings, in customer service rep’s trouble tickets. The challenge is in finding, editing and publishing the content in a way that is usable, especially online.

Here’s an idea: hire an internal journalist. A trained journalist knows how to dig for the good stories. They know how to interview people and how to ask probing questions. Put them on a deadline and get them publishing on a schedule. An good internal journalist that is focused on your company, its products and services, its people, customers and industry will find and produce more content than you could ever use.

This recession has been hard for marketers, but even worse for journalists. There are plenty of experienced writers willing to work. Bringing a trained journalist into your organization is a great way to get high-quality, publishable content for newsletters, e-mail campaigns, blogs, social media, case studies, white papers and more. And this content is great for public relations as well. The media is always pining for good stories, and what better way to feed the beast than to have your own journalist pumping out fully-formed story ideas.

Content is king for online and search marketing. “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” who can write.

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Your website is the one place on the Internet that you have control. People can do and say crazy things out there, but on your site what you say goes. You pay for it, you put effort into, and you get to decide what visitors see and read,  right? Wrong. Google’s SideWiki provides visitors a mechanism to contribute content and comments to your site that are completely out of your control.

As a recent blog post points out, Seth Godin purposely does not allow comments on his blog. Now Google has forced comments on him. Other famous bloggers like Jason Kottke and Andrew Sullivan purposely and by design do not allow commenting on their posts as well. Now they all have comments and its out of their hands.

There are some SideWiki defeats techniques already available, but I really don’t want to bother with a work-around. Google should make SideWiki opt-in for site owners. It should only work on sites that give an explicit approval.

Now, please comment using MY commenting system below.

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