This is one of the main deciding factors for people when choosing between a Facebook group page or a Fan page for their company/organization.

Some benefits of a group page include the ability to easily message all your group members at once and and the ability to send bulk invites to join the group or for upcoming events (this can now be done on a Fan page as well with a small hack). Whereas on a Fan page, some of the primary benefits include the ability to have a custom vanity URL, add custom HTML code, user analytics (known as Insights), and have better search engine presence since they are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed.

Due to the amount of attention Facebook received on Fan pages, they are slowly working on enhancing the functionality to make them more useful for companies who are looking to promote their businesses. One of these functions is the ability to message all your fans, which is something that was  previously only possible in group pages. Not to mention, it’s sort of hidden, so most people are not even aware of it!

Send a message to your Facebook fans:

Prerequisite: Make sure you are the admin of the page you are trying to send a message out from.

Step 1. Go to your fan page and click the “Edit Page” link under your photo.

Step 2. Look in the right column and under “Promote your page” click the “Send an update” link.

Step 3. Type your subject, message, and hit Send!

Tip: The cool part about sending messages out through your Facebook fan page is that you can actually target them to a very specific audience.

Have any questions? Any tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!

Go to your event/group/fan page and click “Invite People.” When the box pops up asking you to select which friend to send the invite to, go to your web browser’s address bar, paste the following code, and hit enter:

javascript:fs.select_all();

Voila! All your friends should be selected!

Most experts agree that the majority of LinkedIn users, similar to Facebook and Twitter users, are not leveraging it properly. On the other hand, those who are, could not be any more satisfied. Look at Oracle’s CFO, who landed his post through his LinkedIn profile. Or Goshido, an Irish Startup that raised $230,000 using only LinkedIn. Amazing, right?

Here’s a tip for how you can get out there and build credibility on LinkedIn so that hopefully one day you can share your success story:

Answer questions

LinkedIn has a question & answer community that many are not aware of. To access it, hover over to the “More” link in the navigation bar on top and you should see it.

After clicking on Answers, you should come to the page with a list of categories in the sidebar. Pick a category that you have expertise in and you should see a list of questions come up that fall under that topic. You can browse through the questions there or you can narrow them down even further by choosing one of the subcategories. What you see are questions that are asked by other LinkedIn users.

Make it a habit to browse through some questions on a daily basis and take some time out to properly answer them. The more questions you answer, the more people will see you as an expert in that industry. The person asking the question also has the ability to choose a “Best Answer,” that appears on the top of all the other answers, which certainly adds to your reputation.

If you’re big on using RSS readers, you can actually subscribe to a specific category on LinkedIn Answers. Go in to the category of your interest and look at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. There should be a “Subscribe” link with an RSS icon. I have my feed set up with Google Reader.

Do you have any other tips to share on how to better leverage LinkedIn? Leave a comment below!

Credit: LinkedIn by the Numbers [Infographic]

Most Facebook users are not aware that they have the ability to tag people, events, and pages/groups in their Facebook status updates. Using tags will display your status update on the pages of those who you mention.

The text highlighted in blue are tags that I used in my status update. In the example above, I tagged an event (Islamic Finance National Tour), people(Farhad and Sameer), and fan pages (Sameer’s Eats and M100Foundation).

My post appeared on the walls of each person/page/event that I tagged. This gives my status update exposure in 6 different places rather than just on my own page. Hence, increasing the chances of others commenting/viewing my post.

To tag someone, simply use the @ symbol and type the name out. For example, if I want to tag John Doe, I would type @John Doe. Same concept applies to a fan page, group, or event.

That’s all!

I love metrics! Leveraging a website’s data can assist one in making smarter business decisions. Whether it’s increasing sales, customer satisfaction, or marketing - properly analyzing your metrics can give you the competitive advantage to create and sustain superior performance.

At Sameer’s Eats, we closely track our web metrics to see who’s talking about us, linking to us, where visitors are coming from, and much more. One of the most useful metric for us is the geolocation of our visitors. Using free analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, we can track what countries, states, and even cities our audience is coming from.

Analyzing the data above tells us that we should record more Sameer’s Eats episodes in those states to better serve our audience. Since we are based out of New Jersey and have done three episodes here, the majority of our visits are coming from New Jersey itself. In the coming months, when we release episodes from states like Pennsylvania, New York, and California, we should see quite an increase in website traffic and our Facebook’s fan base from those areas.

Conclusion:

These web metrics may not be useful for every business. But they are certainly worth taking a look at from time to time as they might come in handy, like they did for us.

You may be asking yourself, “My business already has a regular website, so why does it matter if I have or don’t have a Facebook fan page?” The answer is reach. You want your message to reach as many people as possible. To be able to maximize this reach, you need to have a presence where most people are hanging out – and increasingly, they’re hanging out on Facebook.

Take Burger King as an example. They have made headlines over and over again with their innovative and viral social marketing campaigns, most  recently with the “Whopper Sacrifice.” Burger King offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would “unfriend” 10 of their social network connections. It was a weird, but clever campaign.

There are three parts to the lifecycle of a Facebook fan page:

1) Acquisition

This is the concept that a brand needs to build their audience first, before they can make any use of it. Facebook requires a certain amount of ongoing attention to achieve maximum value, as users expect to see fresh content. Before you go ahead and start suggesting to your friends to become a fan, populate your page with content related to you or you industry. This can be photos, videos, articles, testimonials, press releases, etc. Users will not be interested in your page if they see a blank screen.

2) Engagement

Now that you have the audience that you want, you need to “activate” them somehow – a dead audience is the same as having no audience. The key to success here is communication. You should plan to have someone in your company accountable for updating and continuously participating in the conversations. This shows that you care and acknowledge them. How would you like it if you were trying talking to someone and they were completely ignoring you?

Here are some ways that will help you create a level of activity and loyalty:

• Ask questions that don’t have a “yes” or “no” answer. Doing this will help spark discussions.
• Set up polls. For example, if you own an Ice Cream business, you can set up a poll on Facebook asking your fans what flavor they love the most.
• Syndicate your Twitter and/or Blog feed. Don’t expect your users to leave Facebook and visit your website, Twitter, or some other page. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them. A good way to do is this by using a Facebook application like RSS Graffiti to automatically syndicate your RSS feed to your Facebook page.

3) Monetization

This is the most difficult part of the Facebook lifecycle. By now, you have hopefully built an active and engaged audience. Even then, do not expect them to automatically become loyal customers. It takes time for your audience to trust you with their money, which is why it is important to constantly stay engaged with them (as we mentioned in point #2).

To be able to effectively monetize really depends on your own business. Here are some ways that have worked for our clients:

• Post videos. Show your fans the “behind-the-scenes.” Record your workplace, employees, customers/clients, etc. Perhaps even give a short background on who you are and how you got started. This forms an instant and trusting connection between you and your audience.
• Offer special deals/discounts. Make promotions that are exclusive to your Facebook fans. If you came out with a new product, post a discount code and thank them for being your supporters. Doing this will also encourage others to become fans of your page as well.
• Facebook Ads. Facebook allows businesses to advertise their pages (or any other web page) within Facebook. These ads are shown to specific Facebook users in various parts of the site. The Facebook ad tool allows you to specify demographics such as age and gender – which is a great way to get a rough sense of how many Facebook users fit your target market.

Conclusion

Sites like Facebook are large enough and growing very quickly. Certainly, they should not be ignored. The social media sites are, in a sense, an extension of a traditional website. Facebook’s viral nature and large user base makes it an ideal marketing platform for many different types of organizations.

Photo Credit: B.J. Morgan / Museum of Making Music
Concept of Facebook Lifecycle: Rahim Fazal, CEO and Co-Founder of Involver