Credit Facebook with a high level of usability. Any wanna-be marketer with a profile can create a Facebook page is a matter of minutes. The problem, however, comes when expectations for that page fail to deliver the intended results.

The creation of a Facebook page is not a public relations panacea. It won’t immediately draw a crowd and it won’t build a fan base just because it exists. It can build brand awareness and generate business leads, but remember:

Managing a successful Facebook community takes an investment of time and effort.

There is no “silver bullet” when it comes to creating a successful page. There are no shortcuts. Yet, a well-run page can yield results.

Here’s few helpful tips to get going:

1. Start with a plan.

There are few questions one should ask before creating a page (or launching any online initiative, for that matter): What are we trying to accomplish? What are our goals? What’s the best way of getting there? How will we measure success?

Knowing the answers to these questions keep an effort focused and on target. No one wants to start cultivating a community only to come back six months later and wonder, “What am I trying to do here?”

2. Don’t skip the small stuff.

Facebook prods new page owners to enter only basic information — name, website, and a brief description of what the page is about. Failing to fill out more of the information tab is a mistake. The Info tab allows administrators to offer a more complete picture of an entity.

Administrators can add an address, mission, awards, products, e-mail and more. All this information becomes searchable and aids in an attempt to explain who you are and what you do.

3. Appoint more than one admin.

It’s never good to set a single point of failure. If an organization has more than two people working in it, there is little reason to limit access to only one person. Even if additional administrators never post to the page, they should be there to ensure continuity should one administrator move on.

4. Set a schedule and stick to it.

It’s not easy to stay on task, stay focused and build momentum. Good content doesn’t write itself. Perhaps this is part of the plan but the easiest way to keep on track is to lay the track ahead of time. Meet Content last year wrote a great post about creating a social media calendar that’s always worth revisiting.

5. Take advantage of Insights.

It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. Insights is one of the greatest perks of administering a professional page. These statistics provide detailed information about likes, comments and shares, as well as detailed demographics segmenting people into age groups and locations. Do yourself a favor and export the stats to measure them against the goals set in step one.

6. Give it time to grow.

Successful pages don’t appear overnight. They take time. Even the most popular Fortune 500 corporate account started with one person liking it. Stay the course. If your page adds value to the audience you’re trying to reach, it will grow.

If email is sent from a corporate email address, it represents the corporation that created it. Uniform email signatures present a professional image while still providing brand consistency across departments, divisions, offices and locations.

A professional email signature isn’t the place to offer inspirational quotes or try out colorful designs with fun, new fonts. You wouldn’t scrawl a Comic Sans quote on each and every business card, so why would you include one in an email?

Ultimately, a signature exists to answer three questions: Who are you? Where are you from? How do I reach you? Here are a few guidelines to keep a signature professional while still answering the basics:

Keep it Short, Keep it Simple

An email signature need not be longer than the email itself. Let less be more. The recommended signature fits on four lines and should never go more than six. Go wider rather than longer, and use pipes to separate components.

Make sure to include your name, the name of your company, your title and the best method for getting in touch with you.

There is no need to include your email address in your signature since it’s just as easy to click “reply.” And while random quotes are fun among family and friends, they can risk offending professional colleagues who may not share the same points of inspiration.

Drop the Images

An image only increases the email’s file size and may be blocked before it’s opened. Most email clients store images as attachments or block them altogether, meaning the recipient will have to guess if it’s a real attachment or not.

Different email clients process images in different ways and there’s no way to ensure the image will correctly appear across the board, even if it’s the company logo. When compounded, images hinder delivery performance and increase storage quotas. In short, drop the images.

Forget Fun Fonts

Standard-sized fonts, black in color, are one of the only ways to ensure a signature will appear the same regardless of the client each recipient uses. Stay away from big, tiny, or rainbow-colored fonts. Simple fonts are easier to read on computer monitors and mobile devices than more complex script and cursive fonts.

Check the Rules

There are some countries with specific rules for what information needs to appear in an email signature. Most often these rules require a company name, registration number and place of registration. Check with the country where you are located to see if these rules apply.

If anything, Twitter will keep you on your toes.

The microblogging giant earlier this month announced plans to rework its interface in an effort to make the service faster and simpler. According to Twitter: “We’ve simplified the design to make it easier than ever to follow what you care about, connect with others and discover something new.”

I applaud the changes. But, with any alteration to the social media landscape, it means I have some learning to do.

Here’s my first four takeaways from the new Twitter design:

Boost the Quality of Your Content.

The new interface embeds photos, videos and conversations directly in Tweets, allowing the entire story to be seen at a glance. It’s no secret that photos and video are more engaging types of content than a simple status update. If you aren’t including them in your Twitter content strategy, now is the time to begin. A litany of links is not a content strategy.

Interaction Matters.

Twitter now bundles and serves up a handful of similar story lines for each user under the Discover tab. The stories are curated based on who they follow and the stories they’ve interacted with in the past. There’s some incredible potential here. Imagine a high school student who follows all the schools where she may be applying. Wouldn’t you want to show up in her list of discoveries when it comes time to making a choice? Engaging content is the only key to getting there.

Don’t Skip the Small Stuff.

Profile information is put front and center in the new Twitter design. All this information is searchable and key to helping new followers find you in the first place. The profile it the one place where people can learn about an account at a glance, who operates it and what it represents. There’s even room for a photo and a link back to your website.

Be Prepared.

More changes are on the way. In conjunction with the launch of the new Twitter interface, Twitter announced the creation of brand pages. Brand pages allow for a larger logo, tagline and page-promoted tweets. Only a handful of Fortune 500 companies are in the system now, but it’s only a matter of time before these pages are rolled out across the platform. It’s best to get ready now.

Klout scores mean little when it comes to real social media success.

The online measurement tool does a great job of entertaining those who care about the difference between a retweet and a mention, but it falls short in measuring true online influence.

Klout scores range from 1 to 100; with a higher score assumed to represent a greater level of influence. The score attempts to measure how many people you influence (true reach); how much you influence them (amplification); and, how influential they are (network score).

The company claims that Klout influencers “create thousands of pieces of [user-generated content] and millions of impressions for a brand’s new product, initiative or campaign.” I cannot argue this point. They do.

Yet Klout cannot take the next step. Klout does a great job of determining the number and reach of the people talking about your brand online, but it doesn’t know if any of these people are actually taking action with your brand because of it.

Actions taken that impact business are the only way to measure real influence. In higher education, the number of inquiries, applications, or online donations demonstrates this influence. Klout doesn’t take into account any of these.

In other words: Unless Klout addresses your specific goals for engaging in social media, the score it spits out is useless beyond immediate amusement.

So how can you use Klout?

Use it for fun. Use it for a benchmark the competition. Just don’t use it to demonstrate the success of your social media efforts. You’ll have to do that yourself.

The statistics are interesting in that they confirm what most marketers have known for a while — more dynamic content leads to greater levels of engagement. However, it’s not safe to assume these statistics can be applied to all pages.

The digital marketing agency reported the following engagement rates for the four types of content most commonly posted in Facebook pages:

• Photos: 0.37 percent
• Videos: 0.31 percent
• Text: 0.27 percent
• Links: 0.15 percent

These numbers represent a general reaction to content, but they’re sure to differ from page to page. The only way for an organization to measure the engagement levels of content by type is to actually go out and measure it.

Here are five simples steps to replicating the Web Liquid study with data of your own:

1. Export ‘Post Level’ Data.

The online data Facebook displays is great, but the good stuff is in the download. Export three months worth of data from the Facebook Insights tab. Be sure to specify “Post-Level Data.”

Once the Excel file is downloaded, work within the second tab across the bottom, “Lifetime Talking About This.” This is the tab that lists each post, the date it was published and the number of times it was liked, commented on, or shared.

2. Create a Column for Content Types.

The online Insights interface is great because it places an icon next to line of post data to define the content type — status update, photo, video and link. Unfortunately, the downloaded data doesn’t differentiate so an additional column needs to be added.

Simply insert a column after the Message and title it ‘Content Type.’ Code each line accordingly as one of Facebook’s four types of content. This is the most labor-intensive part of the process but even it doesn’t take much time.

3. Add Impressions.

The “Lifetime Talking About This” tab doesn’t include the total number of impressions so that information has to be copied from the Key Metrics tab and pasted into your working document. Feel free to paste over the ‘shares’ column since that doesn’t figure into the Web Liquid equation. Just make sure the impressions line up with the correct message.

4. Sort by content type and calculate sums.

Once the messages are sorted by content type it’s easy to add those selected cells to provide a sum of likes, comments and impressions for each type. It might help to break them into four separate groups just to keep the numbers straight per content type.

5. Calculate engagement.

It’s easy to calculate engagement the same way it was done in the study. Add together the likes, comments, and shares and divide by the number of impressions. The final figure roughly displays the percentage of people who took action — or were engaged — because of a post.

The study isn’t perfect but for those unsure of what content is working for them, it’s a great first step to understanding.

So how do these figures align with what you’re finding?

Google on Monday unveiled its pages feature that allows organizations — including institutions of higher learning — to create brand personas and engage with the more than 40 million people already using Google+.

It’s about time.

The Google+ platform is a slick one, blending some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter in an easy-to-use interface. I said it before and I’ll say it again: Google+ can work for higher education.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The platform features a social environment where it is easy to build connections, focus on specific interests and keep track of who sees what. The introduction of business pages only ups the ante.

Here are a few of the features colleges and universities should note:

• Hangouts: One-click video conversations have to be one of the coolest features Google+ has going. It allows brands to put people in face-to-face situations, without leaving the own environment. Imagine chats between admission counselors and prospective students, current students and advisors; or, professors and the general public.
• Multiple Administrators: I spent some time trying to figure it out but could not discover how to add multiple administrators to a page. I assume this will be remedied over time but, until it is, schools may want to make clear just who does the posting.
• Direct Connect from Google Search: Direct Connect allows people to directly connect with a brand’s Google+ page simply putting the ‘+’ sign at the start of a Google search. If Google can alter the way people search and discover our brands, marketers need to pay attention.

And some of the best advances to Google+ — specifically addressing the desire to measure meaning in all this new activity — is still yet to come:

… in the coming weeks we will be launching tools to give you access to as much data as possible about your Google+ Page and +1 activity: who’s interacting with your page and how; your users’ demographics; and info about their social activities like +1′s, shares and comments — all to help you learn how social campaigns affect your bottom line.

Sure there may be some that bemoan Google+ and compile a list of features the social network doesn’t include. I won’t be one of them. If this tool can help build better connections and expand the reach of a brand, you can bet I’ll be on board.

Care to share your thoughts on the future of Google+? Please add them below.

It’s a simple task, really, but as his kids and others are quick to point out, he’s doing it wrong.

When it comes to location-based services and how we employ them in a university setting, I think many of us may be employing the similar Jack Butler method while achieving similar results.

We’re doing it wrong.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We collect reams of data, develop digital badges and even check-in our selves. But to what end? Colleges and universities have been quick to jump on the location-based bandwagon but slow to ask where the bandwagon is going or if the bandwagon is even the right vehicle to get us there. It’s time to rethink our strategy.

Jeffrey Kirchick, a university specialist at SCVNGR, recently spoke at the 2011 HighEdWeb Conference where he clearly laid it on the line: “How we think about location-based services is wrong.”

People are adopting location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla for the sake of adopting them, Kirchick said, and comparing the tools against each other as if they are all the same.

Location-based services are not created equal and the way we think about them needs to reflect this fact. Kirchick couldn’t be more right.

As with any new media tool out there, it all comes down to value.

Facebook provides value by building stronger connections and deeper relationships. Twitter is great at breaking news and creating a channel of communication. However, neither does a blockbuster job of incorporating location.

Location-based services seem to be out there alone.

I’m not saying these services don’t provide a certain value to the user, but how much value can someone find by checking in? What’s the worth of a super swarm badge?

If location-based services are going to be ‘the next big thing’ (and I believe they can be), the trick is going to be finding ways to provide real value beyond a digital badge … otherwise we’re taking what could be a cool technology and simply doing it wrong.

Brand positioning in higher education relies upon the ability to convey a institution’s uniqueness, differentiation and verifiable value. It’s no different online.

All positioning is digital positioning.

The web often is the university’s front door for students. If they can’t find a particular school or program online, it might as well not exist. An institution might have the perfect program a student is seeking, but if they can’t find it online forget the idea of adding them to the list of those who enroll.

Search engine optimization, targeted online advertising and effective social media strategies have never been more important. And if an institution is to successfully establish its digital position in the marketplace, there are few things to remember:

Be visible.

An institution or program only exists to those students who can find it. The letters S-E-O may glass over the eyes of many an administrator, but the reality is that search engine optimization is nothing more than competitive positioning. It’s important to appear near the top of search results, but it’s just as important to consider what students are searching for in the first place.

Generate awareness.

It couldn’t be more simple — the best way to let people know an institution exists is to tell them. Online advertising allows for incredible targeting of messages. Google and Facebook both offer simple ways to get the word out. The trick is having am easy-to-navigate website behind the ads to serve the content students seek.

Engage.

Social media is great, but it’s only as good as an institution’s commitment to participating in it. Rey Junco earlier this week shared a great infographic suggesting that commenting and creating events in Facebook can positively predict student engagement. An engaged audience member is more likely to stick around.

Build trust.

People do business with those they trust and higher education is no different. As consumers become more and more technologically savvy, they can see through dishonest advertising and the marketing speak that dominates the landscape. Authentic experiences and candid conversations matter.

Develop leads.

A digital position only matters if it can deliver in the end. A website might generate awareness, engage an audience and build trust, but it also needs to deliver the goods. Online applications and the paths used to complete them must be clear and easy to follow. If a site doesn’t deliver on institutional goals, what good is it anyway?

Care to offer you own thoughts on developing a digital position? Please, share them in the comments below.

EdgeRank Checker last month conducted an analysis of 1 million updates on 50,000 pages that influence more than 1 billion fans. They result?

How you post matters.

Seth Odell and I spent an hour breaking it all down on Higher Ed Live, a weekly web show dedicated to digital development and professional empowerment. It was a great deal of fun.

The show, “What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers,” can be viewed in its entirety here:

Click here to view the embedded video.