Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

On the other hand, one thing made me a bit … active. And that is a connection of your Facebook posts to your twitter account automatically. Why that? Let’s not forget that Facebook outside of US is many times bigger than Twitter. 200 thousand active Twitter users in Germany versus almost 18 Mio Facebookers is already users to make your Facebook Fan page your social epicentrum.

For those who need exactly that, here is a small HowTo for publishing Facebook postings into Twitter:

• Go to: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/
• Click on “Link page to Twitter” and see the overview of pages you are administering (yes, that is a precondition)

• Choose a page you want to link and click “Link to Twitter”

• After authorizing the App (you are now already redirected into Twitter), you get a confirmation in the overview page

• In the end page overview you can decide what content from your fan page to be automatically posted to Twitter. Possibilities are here:

Hope the HowTo helped, it can definitely save time in case Twitter is not one of your most important channels as well as if you don’t have enough resources. Nevertheless this is rather a fallback solution, manual posting is allways better for the users! Another opinion or possibility? Feel free to share in comments

Related Posts:

• How To: Get a Facebook Fan Page ID
• Facebook Fan Page Promotion
• Facebook Questions Use and Elements

1. It’s all about…Twitter. Cannot sleep? Having a long, boring day and too much coffee cups behind? Is twitter any interesting for you? If “yes” is THE answer, here is the awesome guide how to enter (or re-enter) the world of twitter. Great not only for beginners! Source: Copyblogger’s Ultimate Twitter Guide
2. No surprise that SEOmoz made it to the best list. I love SEOmoz and am not afraid to say it! This time, I got again a closer look on Rand’s presentation Social Marketing for SEO & Links . And honestly, Social (as well as other online marketing disciplines) will never be successful alone. It’s strength is, that it is an overarching discipline. And exactly Social & Search is my favourite combination. Check out Rand Fishkin’s awesome presentation that shows it all.
3. I know, this one is not from last week, but I am coming back to it cause I had to read it again. Last week. OK, relevancy check done and now the description: This not-to-be-missed article with a video from Jeff Jarvis gives an excellent view on News, social News, thinking Local and in general, the way to survive and the business model around. In the end we do all of this to get a return. Including the video full, but really full with exciting info. Here you go, Reality check for News.
4. Hubspot’s webinars. One about social media measurement was introduced recently and again, I came back to it again and found it very valuable. It’s an open discussion with smart people that not only talk about social media, but have succesful experience behind (and more awesomeness to come!). Here is what Andy Beal, Amber Naslund, Maggie Georgieva from Hubspot and Jason Keith from SocialFresh had to say about social media measurement in a webinar. Worth it!
5. Number five goes to… Facebook’s update of marketing best practices. Because it’s a great view of possibilities businesses have on Facebook. In the end, Facebook wants businesses to be succesful there, that’s what brings them money in the end.

Do you have other great articles about social web? Bring it on and let’s exchange!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

After a year of beta testing, here is the deal: you go to your profile or a fan page that you administer and  just as you would be writing and there is this new option of not only posting a status, photo, video etc, but also share a question with your friends. If they answer, contacts of your friends or fans can see and answer as well.

One of the main use cases that the the project manager of Questions indicated is this:

“There are a lot of places you can go on the internet to ask questions of people who you don’t know, but there are very few places you can go to get responses from your friends,” said Adrian Graham, a project manager for Questions. “We thought that this is where we should focus.”

Even if I think that it is a bit extreme (yes, there was mail, phone, twitter’s tweets, Facebook’s messages and statuses), having a dedicated possibility to ask your contact and making answering a bit more playful IS a good step. Why a year of testing and rumours I don’t know, but in the end, Questions are here. To offer Facebook users more opportunities to interact and communicate. Questions are playful and keep the users busy in a very easy way.

Update:

As a business tool, Questions for fan pages can already make a difference. Until users get completely used to this new toy, it is an amazing opportunity for a:

• feedback channel or (as in the exampe below)
• content co-creation in a social way.

Here are the main elements

(1) Answer alternatives. There is also a possibility allowed by an admin to let users add possibilities, example on ReadWriteWeb question from yesterday.

(2) see how your friends are answering. You can only see the answers of your social contacts – other answers appear only as a number addition.

(3) Author. Who asked the question? For businesses this is a great opportunity to make a relevant fan page marketing.

(4) Number of those who answer and follow a question. Shows the virality of a question / poll. Remember, that ANYONE can join the poll, not only your direct contacts. This possibility is relatively new (at least done in a very easy way)

(5) Recommendation user – to – user. Allows to send the question to your friends to motivate to answer. It is a sign, that the questions need to be creative and emotional enough – content shareability rules and ideas apply!

(6) Follow the question; according to Facebook Help Center, following a question means you’re subscribing to receive notifications when the question is answered by your friends.

It would be interesting to see what would that mean to have Questions indexed in search engines for the purposes of real time results…

Seeing the possibilities and the speed of getting right question into the circulation – I need to remind that being the first one to ask a question is crucial. I would suggest to take the Question as a piece of media that also needs a right timing, right content and marketing.

Related Posts:

• HowTo: Connect your Facebook Fan Page Postings with Twitter
• How To: Get a Facebook Fan Page ID
• Facebook Fan Page Promotion

I am really not sure if this is some kind of mistake, but I noticed now, that all the Facebook Share Button official documentation is being automatically redirected to Facebook Like button documentation, without any warning or other type of  information.

The usual sources for Facebook Share Button documentation are:

• code for share button generator: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php
• documentation and description: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share/

If you click on any of the links now, you get redirected to Like button documentations. And that is just sad and in my opinion one of just another examples how Facebook “forces” the changes. Sure, having Like button have a lot of advantages in comparison with Share button, BUT if you are in Germany and using Like button is not fully legal with German law (those who know the system of data collection on a page via like button know what I am talking about) and therefore should not be used. This is not an official information, there are only companies who are not allowing Like button for the same reasons as not allowing Google Analytics (we are still in Germany, please keep that in mind)

If anyone has any information about what exactly is happening, please share. Thank you and wish you a nice day.

Update: to reach a documentation to share button, please do the following

1. Go to Google and search for “Facebook Share Button”. The results then look like this:

2. Instead of clicking on the actual first search result, click on “Cached” in the right below corner:

Now you should be able to see the good old documentation. Oh Facebook you make me so nerved. Suck up!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Considering that the topic of a social media campaign/event is already known, here comes the boring part: The Preparation & Planning.

• Setup a goal(s) before the campaign starts. You don’t have to have only one goal, but prioritize what is the most important achievement. Make the goal(s) measurable.
• Who is your target user? Set up a list of characteristics who you plan to address.
• Set up measurable KPIs. You cannot manage what you cannot measure (and this post would be otherwise called “Mess up your campaign…”)use cases What value does your campaign bring to users?
• Realize the use cases for your customers. What value does the campaign bring to them? This is a both sided communication. Wanting something from the users and not offering them value for participation is a short term thinking.
• What channels to use? According to where your targeted users are (see the 2. point), decide about channels (all across the blogosphere, Q&A, Facebook channels, Twitter, Forums…)
• What are relevant internal or external partnering sites? (internal are relevant mainly for those who already have a certain built network). External sites can be those belonging to your customers, business partners, providers, publishers, developers…Main goal of this point is to realize the networking potential to market the campaign, using external and internal site network.
• Consider also advertising channels to market your campaign.
• What is your competition? No only while planning a campaign, spying on a competition is very important in any case.
• What are the relevant keywords?
• If you work for a bigger company and a communication within a company is not so easy (let’s be honest: too many people, too much mess) – don’t forget to consider the plans of other online marketing colleagues (advertising, SEO, link building, email marketing…). Simply said: don’t underestimate the awesomeness of synergies!

A little more about the campaign content (OK, I slipped and this part is mainly about Facebook Marketing).

There is more to think about, so let me point out only those, that work and tend to be forgotten.

• Write a clear description for what is needed from the users and what can it bring – make sure that the value is clear, use call to action.
• Use rich media – videos or photos, make it attractive for the user. Make photo albums rather than links (on Facebook fan page). Post video directly rather than linking to one.
• Make your campaign easily accessible.
• Use exclusive material relevant for your users. T-Shirts, mugs, free e-book, tickets, other downloads….whatever brings a value to your users. It’s a HUNT, baby!
• Make your campaign viral - via sharing enabling, spreading…motivate your users to spread the word by offering incentives
• Create a special tab on your fan page and activate users also there. Allow user interaction there – comments, upload…Make this tab your welcome page and tease it on your Wall.
• Use well and specifically targeted ads on social platforms. Advertise mainly exclusive or free content. Use relevant media enrichment there and call to action.

Little about campaign marketing (and networking)

• Connect your campaign with relevant content: before the campaign starts, use questions, quizzes on your fan page, blog posts, interviews, top 10 lists, unknown facts and so on to increase an interest in the topic
• Connect all the channels! Those that are yours, but also relevant partners
• Include relevant links to your product page or an article, traffic is a priority goal in any case
• Make a teaser on your page for the campaign
• Check out Q&A services (e.g. Yahoo Answers or gutefrage.net for Germany) for relevant questions for your campaign. Answer these questions with a link to campaign’s landing page
• Write a blog post about something related to your campaign, again with a link
• Use your Newsletter or email marketing, make the campaign a part of it
• Check out relevant blogs and forums (internal and external) – react on them, comment

Monitoring & Next steps

• What is a before-after situation with your main KPIs?
• Were all the goals met?
• What are the lessons learnt?
• What could have been done better? What would you recommend to make differently next time?

Oh. Too. Long. Anyway, who managed to fight this text until the end , congrats! Don’t forget to leave a comment, especially if you have questions or own experience with a campaign steering in social media (it is very clear to me that this post does not mention ALL the possibilities, so HEY! YOUR HELP NEEDED!. Thank you and have a nice day

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts

Thanks to one of the commenters tzuming for the tip of even easier way to get a fan page ID.

First of all check, if your fanpage does not have any country or age restrictions, otherwise finding an ID could get MUCH more difficult. You can allways edit your fan page to no restrictions for few minutes and check the ID in this time.

Example: http://www.facebook.com/TheBigBangTheory
The only thing to do is to change “www” for “graph”, looks like this: http://graph.facebook.com/TheBigBangTheory and the ID is a first rmation:

Fan page ID

__________________________

Alternatively, use the page http://findmyfacebookid.com/ to type inyour fanpage URL and receive an ID (still, no age and country restrictions!)

***

App ID, Fan page ID, so many of them!

Why exactly do you need a Facebook Fanpage ID? You know those funny boxes, correctly known as “like box” – one of Facebook’s social plugins.

What you need is:
1. URL of a fan page
2. wait, that’s it!

Now click on a fan page you want to embed on your page (I show you an example of The Big Bang Theory fan page, just because Sheldon deserves it ):

With a cursor of your mouse, go over the profile picture of the fan page and click with a right mouse click:

Select a possibility “Open link in a new tab” or simply copy the link of a profile picture (for Mozilla):

From the URL of this page, copy everything behind “id”:

Surprise, you just became a happy owner of a fan page’s IDyou have it! ID for our example fan page is: 22934684677. And now, when you need to implement a like box to your page, it also works! A hint: next step is to add the fan page ID either to your WordPress Plugin, in case your site uses WP, or any other CMS

Good luck and let me know if it worked out well, or in case you found out a faster way to do it. Thank you

Related Posts:

• Facebook Fan Page Promotion
• HowTo: Connect your Facebook Fan Page Postings with Twitter
• Facebook Questions Use and Elements

So the situation is clear – we need to be different from those hundreds of thousands (this is my humble guess) fanpages living on the bottom of a fan page evolution chain. We need to use those smart little steps that will make our fan page more visible. I am not talking about having a unique, funny, hyper engaging or in any other way exceptional content – that is, I hope, something that is clear as a predisposition. The structure of the promotion idea list is following: I will consider two main places where to promote your fan page: offsite and onsite. By onsite I mean your own website. It can be your shop site, your content site, your blog, your base – where you sell, where you offer your type of content (and seriously, this will fit to your online vacum cleaner store as well as your kid’s diary page). Offsite promotion channels are all BUT your site.

Before I start, here is a general recommendation:

While trying to promote your fan page (or even other social presence), please remember to mention to your users why it is good for them to join you on Facebook/twitter/blog/other channel. When a future potential fan gets the reason why (to join), he/she will be more likely to do so.

Onsite: Let your current site visitors know, where to find more information about your brand / content

• Post a link to it on your site/ microsite (as a button, teaser, make a competition with the goal of getting fans on your fan page)
• Install a fanbox on your pages (warning: please check before, if the legal situation allows that – special note to our German brothers and sisters)
• Write an article about your social presence e. g. “Where can you find us” or “My business goes social”
• Make an initial competition to introduce your fan page and try to motivate your shop/portal visitors to join via teasers. Allways start on your site – unless you are Nutella or other chocolate producer, people will not initially fight to join your fan base
• In the end of your article/ product description, write a sentence “For more news and information about special prices, as well as product insights and other industry news, join us on Facebook” – with the link placed in the end of an article/product page. This does not have to be done for all product pages/articles, you can start with only selected ones (to avoid too much spam).

Offsite: What can we do outside our own portals and shops to inform our users about our fan pages and other social presence?

• Use your social presence as a part of your email signature
• Write a teaser in your newsletter (e.g. “Stay tuned for our competition and be the first one to know who is a winner. Join us on Facebook”, or “For regular updates about our top read articles, top commented articles or simply our recommendations, join us on Facebook.” )
• Inform other relevant blogs that belong to your company to mention you, if relevant. This is only for those lucky ones, that already have a site network.
• Inform responsibles for relevant fan pages within your company (if you are again one of those working for a bigger company with broader portfolio of Facebook presence) about your page and ask them to mention you in their “Favourite pages”
• Interconnect between your social presence (if your company has a blog, twitter, LinkdIn, Xing…connect there)
• Make research about relevant fan pages on Facebook channels. If you have business partners, use those contacts and ask them to connect to you via relevant posting on Facebook. It is easier for them to connect to you and propagate you via Facebook then via link exchange on your sites. In the end, it is a social network and we should at lest try to be social there – I know, crazy ideas here. Otherwise try Facebook Search to connect to those who might be relevant (pages, groups, events, individuals).
• Use a welcome page on your fan page; explain your users why they should join and include some graphics
• Ask your colleagues to become a fan and motivate them to recommend the fan page to their facebook friends: either as a mass mail, or go individually: choose those colleagues that you know that are power users and could have the biggest positive impact.
• Tag to the relevant pages for your industry: use your existing contacts with your partners / publishers so they drop some information about your fan page on their fan page (tip: use @ symbol for tagging). Participate in a conversation(s) with them.
• Send an update to Fans and ask them to become your ambassadors (direct messaging via private message is a very powerful tool, but do not misuse it. Think twice before sending a message to all of your fans – it should be really valuable if you don’t want everyone to ignore it or get irritated. Tip: Facebook allows you to send targeted updates. Think of a way you could use that feature for your business). You can offer them something if they “bring” certain amount of fans.
• Invest into targeted Facebook ads. Tip: they do not always work, the right targeting is important, but the results are not secure. Try with a smaller amount of investment.

This are those tips, that I am trying to use – let’s see if they work. Hope it is helpful.

I would also like to know what do you think, what are your tips to share: How would youpromote your fan page? Me is thankful for every tip and comment

Related Posts:

• How To: Get a Facebook Fan Page ID
• HowTo: Connect your Facebook Fan Page Postings with Twitter
• Facebook Questions Use and Elements

Plugins installation is one of those bugs that are important enough to slow down your installation plans to … absolute maximum (in other words: there is no way without it). That was a bad message. A good one is, that while being buggy, Facebook is unintentionally still offering a way around.

Not all the Facebook new plugins and functionalities need an APP ID for the installation code. Nevertheless, there are some that required it – for example adding a fb:comment to your page. To set up fb:comment to your page, you need to follow Facebook’s instructions . As you can see, APP ID is an obligatory element for a succesful installation.

I am far away from being a technical guy (girl..?), so I am thankful for HowTo’s for Dummies. In the end the installation does not look that difficult. Yeah.

It actually does not sound that difficult. If you need a Facebook app ID, visit Facebook’s Setup Page and request it.

Facebook setup page

The aggresive part comes now, when the page becomes blank and does not really want to talk to you in that moment. Looks like the picture below, looks familiar?

Facebook Creation Wizard, not that magical at all.

Solution

1.Login to Facebook

2. Go to Facebook Developers Application page

3. From all those unsuccesful trials, choose one app that you set up for a target before

4. Within the description, you will find APP ID

Facebook Application Overview

5. And now stop kicking the table, it’s done!

The only thing that left is to paste the APP ID to the installation code. Happy facebooking!

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts