We here at Hall use the ‘what if you were hit by a bus’ analogy all the time. The less morbid point we are trying to make is ensuring that anything you start, anything you touch and any project you are working on should be able to be picked up if for some reason you cannot be there (like if you got hit by a bus).

This work principle made it very unnerving for me when Google+ rolled out business pages and there could only be one administrator – yikes! What if I got hit by a bus?!? Who would pick up the task of managing our Google+ profile?!

Recently Google+ fixed this and now you can have page Owners and page Managers – phew! Each page can now only have one owner but it can have up to 50 managers (you can only invite 20 managers per day). Page owners and page managers have all of the same admin rights except page managers can NOT delete the page or transfer the ownership of the page.

To add a new manager to your Google+ page:

• Log in to Google+ and your business Google+ page
• Click on Settings (upper right hand side)
• Click on Managers (left hand side)
• Invite someone to be a manger of your page by adding their email address

You do not need to invite them with their Google+ email address. The invited party can accept with the email address you sent it to and then sign up to be a page manager with a different email address. When the person invited accepts to manage the page, the owner of the page will be notified via email.

Now, under the Managers section of your page, you will see the owner and any managers or invited managers. If an invitation is not accepted or if you want to cancel the invitation you can click on the X next to their email address. All managers can see the list of managers

To remove a manager, you can click the X by their name. When they are removed as a manager the page owner and the removed manager will receive an email.

We always recommend having more than one administrator to any business social network presence – you know, in case you get hit by a bus.

Photo credit: PoloGoomba

Amanda just wrote about how to find out what your IP address; but how do you go about excluding your traffic from your Google Analytics reports? With the old version of GA I knew how to input my IP address so it would get filtered in the reports;  but for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out how to do this in the new version. Thanks to a smart colleague (ahem, Monica) she pointed it out to me and I thought I’d “pay it forward” and show you!

Click on any of the images below for a closer view.

1. After you’re logged into your Google Analytics account and have selected your account you’ll see a little gear looking icon in the upper right hand corner. Like in the image to the right. This will take you to the settings for that GA account; this is also where you can set up assets like Custom Alerts, Goals, and Users.
2. You want to make sure that you’re looking at the “Profiles” which is the top tab in this section, then select Filters. This is where you can add, remove, and edit filters on your Google Analytics account. If you’re setting up filters for the first time, choose “+ New Filter.” Indicate whether you are creating a new filter for a profile or applying an existing filter to a profile.
3. The next steps are very easy – give your filter a name (you might want to filter home traffic and office traffic; this is a good place to note which is which), select filter type (it’s probably predefined), and then choose “Exclude,” “traffic from the IP addresses,” and “that are equal to” from the drop downs. This is where you put in your IP address! Click “Save” and voilà you have just filtered out your IP traffic from Google Analytics reports!

Pro tip!

Once you’ve filtered your traffic you should make an Annotation in Google Analytics. That way, if someone else is looking at your site metrics and they notice that traffic has dropped some in the last month, they can see that there is an annotation that reads, “Filtered out office IP traffic from reports” and be able to attribute that decline more easily. I try to get in the habit of making annotations whenever something significant may have changed on the site or that may affect the reports.

Each computer or device that communicates over the internet has a numerical label assigned to it – your IP address. This way your computer can be distinguished from everyone else. Think of it as your computer’s phone number.

You may need your IP address to set up a firewall, or sync a device or program to your computer. It is also handy to know so you can exclude your IP address from your Google Analytics results. By excluding your IP address you will block any data from your office network and get a more true picture of your website’s results.

There are lots of ways to figure out your IP address….

Jenika likes IP Chicken, but let’s be honest… she probably just likes the chicken.

Matt, on the other hand, likes the new Google feature where if you Google the phrase ‘IP address’, it will show your IP address above the search results.

Hope that helps! Got this question twice this week!

We talked a lot about mobile last year and we’re probably going to talk about it even more this year. Hopefully you’re all okay with that and hopefully you took our advice and reviewed the mobile visitors on your website and maybe even considered using a mobile site. Did you see what Google Analytics is doing with mobile analytics now? They are showing you the actual device that your site visitors used to browse your site.

Why does this matter?

There are so many devices that use different screen sizes and offer different browsing experiences. It’s a lot to keep up with! The more you understand about the types of devices people are using to visit your site, the better you can improve your mobile site to give them a good user experience. Of course there is always responsive design, which allows you to cater your website to all mobile and tablet devices. However, you may still want to give your mobile visitors a unique mobile experience when interacting with your business website. So, if you do have a mobile site, you can use the information in Google Analytics to customize their interaction. Not only will the device type help you understand how they are browsing but it also gives you some insight as to who is browsing. For example, if you have a higher number of Blackberry visits than iPhone visits, what can you learn about the people browsing your site?

Other cool mobile reporting

Not only can you see the device, you can see who their service providers are and “Mobile Input Selector” tells you if they are using a touchscreen, a click wheel, or another method to select information using their mobile device. You can also see top screen resolutions in a simple report format.

It can be intimidating to try to accommodate so many different resolutions and device types but, there are lots of tools to help you see how your website looks on different devices.

(I think) This is the third year in a row dubbed as “the year of mobile” so you should all be ready for this by now. I know I am interested to see what happens in the mobile world this year – how voice search changes mobile browsing and how that will affect mobile advertising.

I am always intrigued to learn new and creative ways that businesses/brands are using mobile marketing. Is it to nerdy to say that I’m excited to see what mobile will bring to us this year? Oh well, it’s true, bring it on 2012!

We know… it happens. Facebook is confusing. You probably set it up in a a hurry. Then you started using it, you got some friends and some traction and realized your Facebook page is actually set up as a personal/profile/timeline and not as a business page, like it is supposed to be.

You don’t want to discredit the followers you have gotten and you don’t want to have to say all that time you put into it was a waste… so what is a busy marketer or business to do?

Now you can convert your personal profile into a business profile. All your ‘friends’ will carry over to it you but they will turn into ‘likes’. For more information about converting your profile, read these FAQs from Facebook.

The only other thing that will transfer along with your friends will be your Profile Pictures album.

You can (and should) backup your information so you have it and can repopulate your page after it has been transferred. Below is info from Facebook on backing up your timeline information.

To avoid losing important content, we recommend taking these steps before you convert your profile (timeline):

1. Download your profile (timeline) information. You can download a file that contains all of your sent and received messages and all of the photos and videos you’ve uploaded to Facebook.
2. Appoint a new group admin or a new Facebook Page admin to any groups or pages that you manage. The account you’re converting will lose these admin rights during the conversion process.

To actually convert your personal page to a business page you need to go here.

Facebook takes you through some very simple steps to make the change. Follow along and when you are done, your personal page will flip to a business page.

Some things I have seen and heard that may freak you out:

• Your Friends who convert to Likes will not show up instantly. I have flipped a few pages and it took a matter of minutes but I have heard of it taking longer… even days.
• You no longer have a personal page. I know that is what you just got rid of but it freaks people out. You will need to create a new personal page.
• The ‘Use Facebook as Page’ link goes missing. That is because, as stated above, you no longer have a personal page. You currently have only the business page.
• Your search bar goes away… it comes back though.

Some things I would do before converting my profile

• If you are the admin of any other pages, make someone else an admin, your profile is going to go away… so then you won’t be able to be an admin. You can set up a new profile and add your new and improved personal profile as an admin.
• Have a stiff drink, a cup of herbal tea, a stress ball or a yoga mat nearby. There is definitely a ‘push a button and hope’ feeling that freaks me out when you do this but if you backed up your information, you should have less to worry about.

I know a change like this is stressful but if your page is set up incorrectly you will want to do it. If you carry on with your personal page as your company page, you will never be able to reach more than 5,000 ‘friends’ plus there is different functionality to a business page over a personal page.

Good luck and I hope that helps! Have any of you flipped your page? Do you have anything you want to add to these notes? Any changes that really freaked you out?

Another year is ending which means a new one is beginning. I thought it would be fun to take a look back in our Analytics and see what topics that we wrote about that you seemed to find the most interesting. It is always fun looking back at a year with some data behind it.

Below is our list of the 10 most popular blogs of 2011. See if you think it all lines up right with how the year went in the internet marketing world and take a look back on a few you may have missed!

10. How and Why to Create Google Alerts

Google Alerts are a great way to keep an ear to the pavement on your brand, your industry or even your own name. In this post, Jenika tells us why they are important and how to set them up.

9. Find What Facebook Pages Like Your Facebook Business Page

This year Facebook added the functionality to participate on Facebook as your brand or business. In this post I talked about finding what businesses and pages like your company page on Facebook.

8. Referring Sites, Search Engines, Direct Traffic – How Do You Get More?

Using Google Analytics you can see how people are getting to your website (referral, direct or search). All three are important pieces of your web marketing pie. In this post I talked about what each referral is about and how to get more of each.

7. 5 Reasons the New Facebook Pages are a Big Deal for Businesses

As previously mentioned, early this year Facebook made major changes to Facebook Business Pages. This post recaps what those changes were and how the were a blessing for many of us maintaining company pages.

6. Stock Image BINGO

One of my personal favorites of the year. Headed to a conference? Take stock (oooh I had to do it) of our Stock Image BINGO sheet and see how many familiar faces, places and icons you see!

5. Learn Something New – View Site Traffic by Hour

One of the best parts about our job is that we are constantly learning (the internet waits for no one). Jenika learned that in the new Google Analytics interface you can view your site traffic by the hour

4. What’s the deal with Groupon and other sites like it?

This year was definitley the rise of the coupon sites. Whether you buy into it or not, they were tough to miss. In this post Jenika helped learn more about what they are and what they could mean for your business.

3. What is Siri? What Does it Mean for How We Search?

Alas, no iPhone 5 this year. Instead we were teased with the iPhone 4S. Other than a better camera, the biggest addition to the new iPhone was Siri a magical personal assistant that talks to you and can perform simple tasks. In this post we talked about what Siri is and how I think it will effect searches in the future.

2. What is the Best Time of Day to Tweet?

This is a popular questions that I get a lot so I took a few minutes to talk about it.

1. What is a QR Code?

This post was actually from 2010! We are sooooo hip! QR codes popped up all over the place this year. In this post I explained what a QR code is. We also got to talk about them with Mainebiz this Fall too.

Happy New Year!
Cheers to a fantastic 2012

Photo credit: nigelhowe

One of the easiest ways to improve your content marketing/social media marketing is to share the load. Instead of being responsible for everything yourself you could share posting, tweeting and writing with other people. Not only will this help you out but it will add different voices to your messaging, which is great for your readers.

You could bring in other staff members to help you create content. You could also take a page from Guiding Stars and use your community to write for you.

If you are going to hand over the keys and use WordPress for your blog, you should set up a User for anyone that will be logging into your blog. As you set them up, you need to choose which Role they will have. This is a very important step and will determine how they can interact with the Admin section of your blog.

Here is a breakdown of the different kinds of Users and what the capability of each level is:

• Subscriber – A Subscriber to your blog does just that – they subscribe to get your content. They are able to manage their profile but they cannot post content to your blog or read draft posts. The largest benefit of being a Subscriber is if you want to leave a comment on the blog, you won’t have to add your information to the form each time.
• Contributor – A blog Contributor can log in and create a post. They cannot publish their post. Someone with a higher WordPress Clearance level has to come in, review the post and can then publish it. This is great for handing over some content to staff or your community but you want to review each piece before it goes live.
• Author – An Author is able to log in, create posts and they can publish them. An Author cannot approve a post written by anyone other than themselves.
• Editor – An Editor can log in, write and publish their own posts. They can also access other people’s posts and drafts. They also have the ability to publish anyone’s posts.
• Administrator – An Administrator has access to everything on the site, including the HTML, CSS and all plugins of the blog. They can add and edit anyone’s posts and they can edit the look and feel of your blog.

So if you are looking to lighten your load for 2012 and want some help coming up with blog entries, try using WordPress User levels to get other voices to your blog but still be in control of what is posted and by whom.