What’s New This Week?

Facebook is Easier to Control Privacy and Sharing: Facebook is rolling out a few changes in response to certain Google+  features. In addition to simplified privacy settings, you’ll also have the option to review any tag someone tries to add to your photos and posts. Here are two videos showing you all the options:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dES9_n7ou8w

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Ca9V56BY0

The Google +1 Button Enhanced to Share Content With Your Google+ Circles: Check this out, as well as the new +Snippet feature in the video below. The +Snippet allows content publishers to customize the snippets of information shared through the Google +1 buttons.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvJrfwuIRa4

The Google+ Network Lets You Ignore And Block People: You can now ignore and block people on the Google+ platform. Find out where you can find these new buttons and how they work in the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU___xbsMMQ

Twitter Adds User Galleries for Images: “User galleries on Twitter aggregate the images you’ve uploaded in your tweets into an organized page where you can view all of your most recent images.”

View your most recent images shared on Twitter in the new user gallery feature.

Facebook Reaches 1 Trillion Page Views a Month: Recent data from the ad network DoubleClick (a Google subsidiary) shows a trillion page views a month now.

Facebook is the most visited website online.

LinkedIn Helps You Find Groups You May Like: This new Groups You May Like (GYML) feature gives you personalized group recommendations powered by LinkedIn’s Recommendation Engine.

You can find the Groups You May Like link under the Groups tab on your LinkedIn account.

Here are two social media tools worth noting:

FrameBar: a free tool allowing bloggers and website owners to display a photo strip on their site.

FrameBar also has social and group sharing features.

Jamcloud: is like adding a turntable to YouTube. Jamcloud is a “free social music app that lets you play music and watch videos with your friends in real time.”

"Create listening rooms with an international audience where you can chat about what's playing and vote up or down."

And don’t miss this:

Social Media Examiner presents Facebook Success Summit 2011! (online conference)

Watch this video from Mike Stelzner (founder of Social Media Examiner).

Join 19 Facebook marketing experts at the web’s largest Facebook marketing conference. This is a special online conference designed to help you master Facebook marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner). Join Guy Kawasaki; Mari Smith; Dave Kerpen; Paul Dunay; Jesse Stay; Robert Scoble; Michael Stelzner; experts from Intuit, PETCO, Applebee’s and Intel; Jay Baer; Chris Treadaway; Amy Porterfield and Andrea Vahl—just to name a few. Go here to learn more.

What social media news caught your interest this week? Please share your comments below.

Businesses simply cannot ignore Facebook as part of their online marketing strategy.

We spoke with top marketing book authors and Facebook brand managers.

Take your Facebook marketing to a new level with these hot Facebook marketing tips direct from the top pros in Facebook marketing.

#1: Give people a reason to become fans

Richard Krueger

“A Reveal tab offers first-time visitors a clear call to action.

By encouraging the visitor to first “Like” your fan page in order to receive a free trial, coupon or even specialized information, you can significantly increase fan conversion rates, while giving real value in becoming a fan,” says Richard Krueger, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies.

TruTV's Operation Repo fan page challenged fans to get their friends to become fans for access to a never-seen-before episode.

TruTV's fan page saw a 400% increase in fan conversions during the video promotion because they gave people a reason to become fans.

#2: Stay on topic

Daniel Sundin

“People who Like your brand on Facebook expect your posts to be at least somewhat related to your brand or industry. Keeping your focus so narrow may seem limiting, especially if you’re the one crafting the posts each day. Instead, think of it as a creative challenge,” says Daniel Sundin, community manager at PETCO.

Sundin gave the following tips:

• Write about a current event and tie it to your brand or industry.
• Find and share a funny YouTube video loosely related your brand or industry.
• Ask your audience to post questions, pictures or stories about your brand to your wall.
• Repost the most interesting content back out as an update.

“Remember, Unliking a page is just as easy as Liking it. A single odd or off-topic post could get you booted from the stream,” said Sundin.

Petco continues to engage their community with updates that are always on topic.

#3: Ask the right kind of questions

Amy Porterfield

“One of the best ways to get your fans talking on Facebook is to ask interesting and entertaining questions. But did you know there’s a right way and wrong way to ask questions on Facebook? When done right, you can significantly increase your fan engagement and build some great relationships,” says Amy Porterfield, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies.

“The trick is to ask questions that are easy to answer. Questions that require just one-word responses tend to get the most engagement. Remember, people LOVE to talk about themselves, so when you make it about them, they are more likely to jump into the conversation,” added Porterfield.

For example, Zappos asked a fun, easy-to-answer question. They asked, "What was your first concert?" They even attached a great video of one of their employees answering the question too. The response from this question was fantastic!

#4: Include pictures in your Facebook updates

Guy Kawasaki

“Twitter is a link economy, whereas Facebook is a picture economy. So just about every status update should include a picture. Ideas for pictures include customers, your product or service in action, employees and events. There’s no such thing as a bad picture,” says Guy Kawasaki, author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

“And one more tip: crop your pictures. For example, no-one needs to see people’s feet. Remember that Facebook is going to present a tiny version of the picture, so you need to get up close, personal and cropped,” said Kawasaki.

Guy inserts a picture on almost all of the updates on his Facebook pages.

#5: Celebrate your milestones

Ekaterina Walter

“Did you reach a milestone? It can be one important to you or one important to your fans. Celebrate with your fans!

Even if you think it’s something small, pull them in, thank them, celebrate with them like you would with your friends,” says Ekaterina Walter, social media strategist for Intel.

Notice the high level of engagement on this Facebook update!

#6: Get creative when your Facebook readers are most happy

Mari Smith

“Facebook has a Happiness Index  that shows a spike of 10% on Fridays. As a marketer, you can take advantage of this increase in sentiment by doing something creative,” says Mari Smith, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

“About once a month, I host ‘Facebook Friday’ (similar to #followfriday on Twitter), where I invite all my fans to promote their own pages, links to their blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. In addition, I know from other studies—and from my own fan page reports from PageLever —that my fans respond best to photos.

“By giving your fans specific times to cross-promote, network and create more visibility for their own pages, they’ll be less inclined to do so outside of these windows, plus you’ll elevate your leadership and increase your news feed optimization,” said Smith.

Here's an example of a recent Facebook Friday event Mari hosted, where she shared an image that garnered 215 comments and an additional 440 wall posts by small business fan pages. Plus, her page views doubled to almost 4,000 views, and she gained 224 new fans in one day.

#7: Activate Facebook fans (don’t just collect them like baseball cards)

Jay Baer

“Your Facebook audience is a club, not just a list, and you cannot satisfy the intellectual and sociological cravings of a club through one pithy status update each day. Get creative. Get interesting. Get successful,” says Jay Baer, author of The Now Revolution.

“Recognize that the vast majority of your Facebook fans are indeed fans. Why would you Like a brand that you don’t actually like? These are your best, most enthusiastic customers who have taken the initiative to raise their hands in the Facebook environment. Don’t bore them to the point where they lose interest.

“Create a robust, ongoing calendar of engagement programs whereby your company gives Facebook fans the opportunity to receive special insider info, tell you what they think about future product and marketing plans, access unusual fan-only deals or learn more about the people behind your brand,” Baer added.

Here's Jay Baer providing fans a unique look into a place he wrote about in his book.

#8: Run a Facebook contest

Andrea Vahl

“Everyone loves a contest and a chance to win. If you need a little excitement on your Facebook page, a contest will spur your community to action. Hopefully you will also get the benefit of people sharing your contest with their friends,” says Andrea Vahl, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies.

“There are several different types of contests you can run: a photo contest, a video contest or a sweepstakes where people just enter their name and email to win.

“To run a Facebook Contest, you’ll need to use a third-party app such as Wildfire, Strutta, North Social, Easypromos or Shortstack. You can also create your own iFrame app to accept the entries, but that will require programming. Facebook has many rules about how a contest or promotion can be run that you should read here: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php. The main thing to consider is that you cannot automatically enter people who Like your page or post a comment on your wall.

“Your prize does not have to be expensive to garner a lot of entries and good buzz. Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner ran a very successful contest using the Strutta application and gave away a business launch package including one-on-one coaching. He received 80 photo entries, took his fan base to over 1,500 Likes and got fantastic publicity for his new book, Launch.

“If you give away something your audience is interested in, you will create great buzz for you and your Facebook page,” says Vahl.

Recently, the Facebook page Chocolate for Breakfast ran a contest giving away a box of truffles and had over 700 entries and over 400 new Likes in one week using the Wildfire application.

#9: Try out Sponsored Stories

Ben Pickering

“Earlier this year, Facebook introduced a new form of advertising: Sponsored Stories. These ads display activity from your friends in a fixed ad position on the page,” says Ben Pickering, CEO of Strutta.

“For example, if I Like your page, use your app or check in at your location, you can display an ad to all of my friends sharing that activity.

“Why would you pay to have something that is already in the news feed for free?

• First, because the volume of activity in the feed can easily overwhelm any one update.
• Second, and of particular importance to those running apps on their page, is the fact that stories published from an app are subject to user feedback.

“That means that if many users hide or block posts from your app, subsequent content is likely to be deemed of low quality and won’t surface in the news feed.

“Sponsored Stories ensure that activity on your page or app is still prominent. And because the ads contain actual activity from friends instead of generic advertising copy, they are a powerful consumer-to-consumer marketing tool,” said Pickering.

Here's an example of a sponsored story.

#10: Measure your Facebook marketing!

Jan Rezab

“Measure your Facebook marketing efforts as well as you can. Measure unique users, fans, conversions, clicks, activity, retention, loyalty and many other metrics.

“Only if you measure those will you be able to fully understand your fans, and next time you’ll come with an even better targeted offer,” says Jan Rezab, CEO and co-founder of Socialbakers.

You can find comprehensive brand dashboards, where you can analyze the engagement of your Facebook pages.

#11: Find the best tool to measure your Facebook marketing

Victoria Ransom

“Once you have your marketing calendar all set and you are engaging your Facebook fans daily, spend some time to find the right tool to measure your Facebook marketing,” says Victoria Ransom, founder and CEO of Wildfire Interactive.

“Over time you’ll be able to see your progress as well as your competitors’ progress and adjust your social media strategies,” she added.

In Wildfire's Monitor comparison, you can see several points of very quick growth for multiple brands. One particularly interesting data point occurs in mid-June, where Dickies' social presence on Facebook takes off like a shot. If we do some research into their Facebook fan page activity during that time, we see that this is when Dickies started a promotion for their fans, a giveaway where they chose the "Dickies American Worker of the Year."

#12: Learn to make sense of the volumes of data currently available on social media

Chris Treadaway

“Businesses that succeed will make sense of the currently unmined volumes of data that have been crowdsourced through social media. They’ll use it to get more intelligent and they’ll use data to create better, more intelligent and more targeted marketing campaigns.

“Experiment with data mining, data-driven analysis and intelligence now, because that’s where we are heading,” says Chris Treadaway, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

As you study the data that's already available, you'll be able to figure out how to target your audience on Facebook. Image: iStockPhoto.

#13: With Facebook, you now need to consider your brand as a network

Paul Dunay

“Smart brands are tapping into their Facebook audience to get instant feedback, ideas on new product design, how to market better and what topics are trending with their audience.

“Some marketers are reacting to social media, but smart marketers are proactively using social media to drive their business,” says Paul Dunay, co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies and Facebook Marketing for Dummies, second edition.

Use your Facebook marketing within your social network to drive your business. Image: Shutterstock.

Want to learn more about Facebook marketing?

Watch this video from Mike Stelzner (founder of Social Media Examiner)

If you’re not fully leveraging the power of Facebook, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most businesses still haven’t figured it out.

There’s one easy way to take your Facebook marketing to the next level. By attending the web’s largest online Facebook conference, Facebook Success Summit 2011, you’ll become empowered to use Facebook to gain more exposure, better engage customers and grow your business.

The great part is you’ll be learning from 19 Facebook experts (including the 13 mentioned in this article).

It’s the web’s largest online Facebook marketing conference. Go here for a free sample and to learn more.

Have you tried any of these hot Facebook marketing tips, or do you want to add Facebook tips of your own? Let us know! Please leave your comments in the box below.

Images from from iStockPhoto & Shutterstock.

If you’re using Facebook for business, there are some powerful tools at your disposal.  Because Facebook has over 400 million active users and is one of the most frequented websites in the world, it only makes sense to use it to your advantage. Why buy a Porsche when you’ve got a Ferrari in the garage, right?

This article will show you how to benefit from Facebook’s amazing insight and analytics.

It Starts With a Page

You do have a Facebook page for your business, right?

Not having a Facebook page today is like turning down a free full-page ad in the Yellow Pages back in the 1990s.  It just shouldn’t happen.  Click here to setup a Facebook page.

(Important Update: Facebook no longer supports FBML. Please refer to the articles on Facebook iFrame.) With the use of static FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which is very similar to HTML, you have the ability to create amazing websites on Facebook’s platform.

In other words, you can create a custom landing page using your own company branding.  It’s like a venus flytrap for the hundreds of millions of people stumbling through Facebook.

Tip #1: Take Advantage of Facebook Insights

If you have a page and aren’t checking your stats, then you’re missing out on a lot of useful information.

Facebook Insights are located in the sidebar on your Facebook Page and they can only be seen by the admins of your Facebook Pages. Click through “See All” to view the stats.

On most web properties, I’m interested in users’ time spent on the site and unique page views, but in this case I’m looking for something different.

People on Facebook move around quickly, and ordinary stats aren’t going to provide the whole picture. Initially, what we’re looking for are audience statistics, such as age, gender and country of residence.

Looking at the screenshot here you’ll see that females age 35-54 are the most prevalent users of this particular page and most visits come from the U.S.

Now, we’ll take it a step further by looking at total interactions and interactions per post.

Using these numbers, you can decide which content works best, the audience you’re reaching, and where you can improve.   What a great way to test content before it goes live elsewhere!

You can click on and off the different options you see above (like total interactions, comments, …).  There are also 7 graphs available in the drop down list seen above.

Tip #2: Target Your Messaging

As crazy as it sounds, most page owners I talk to don’t realize that you not only can message users (for free), but you can target your messaging too. It doesn’t help that Facebook hides this feature behind the ‘Edit Page’ settings, but it’s there nonetheless (find it under your avatar on your fan page wall).

Here’s the navigation process:  Facebook Home Page -> Ads and Pages -> Pages -> Edit Page -> Send Update to Fans.

If you look at the image below, you’ll see that message targeting can be very detailed.

Notice the targeted ability to send updates based on location, gender and age.

Let’s say that I own a small boutique in Tampa that sells gifts perfect for Mother’s Day. Heck, maybe I own a huge corporation that has a branch in Tampa.

I can use this feature to send a message to each target audience without bugging the people who wouldn’t benefit from my message. Men age 25-55 in and around the Tampa area would get this message. Beautiful.

This is useful in so many ways beyond just simple geographic targeting. I could send individual messages that target different age groups… the kind of messages that I know they like because I’ve paid attention to my Facebook Insights.

Are you starting to see how useful this is?

Tip #3: Use Facebook Ads

A lot of people miss the point with Facebook ads. Unlike most PPC campaigns where you’re trying to negotiate the lowest possible price per click through to your website, Facebook ads work just as well, if not better, as a branding tool.

For instance, as a blogger, I have a very small niche (when compared to other niches on Facebook). If, using my Facebook Insights, I find my most responsive audience is females, I can then target that group specifically.

By adding keywords such as social media and blogging, I can further refine that group. Add in a few more characteristics (using my Insights) such as live in the U.S., speak English and are college graduates, I wind up with a list of 11,600 Facebook users.

Now this is where it gets good. I can hit these people with 12,000 views per day (using CPM), for only $5 per day. Even if they don’t buy, like or act on the ad, by the end of this campaign, they’ll sure as heck know who I am.

There’s really nothing that can compete with this kind of potential, certainly not if it’s done well.

This Is Just the Beginning

As Facebook continues to grow, and the Like feature draws more attention, your reach and potential are only going to improve. Those who get in now will have the edge, because they’ll be pioneering the strategies that businesses will use in the next few years.

What I really like most of all about Facebook demographics is you don’t have to be a guru to use them well. It’s easy to monitor Facebook Insights, especially if you download them on a regular basis. Messaging is common sense, and ads are just a little step above that. However, nothing about this is rocket science, and that’s why I think we’re sitting on a goldmine.

Do you have a Facebook page for your business?  How are you using Facebook Insights to your advantage? Give us your comments below.

Interesting research shows just how influential Facebook has become in our daily lives. Combined with several critical adjustments to how Facebook publishes “news” and intersects with other sites, the state of Facebook is mind-blowing. And that’s a big deal for your business.

Here are 11 vital reasons your business needs to be involved with Facebook:

1. 350 Million Global Users and Counting

Facebook announced recently that they had passed 350 million members, making Facebook the third-largest country in the world, if it was a country. (Perhaps that’s their end-game, joining the UN and raising an army?)

2. 100 Million U.S. Users

Sure, Facebook is strong around the world (Canada has the highest penetration rate), but nearly 1/3 of all Facebookers are here in the U.S. You may have heard of a TV show called American Idol. On a good night, it averages 20 million viewers. Facebook has 100 million American members. Hmmm.

3. Average Facebook User Spends 55 Minutes Per Day

Nearly 1 hour per day, per user. That’s a lot of Facebook time. How can your company grab a bit of consumer attention? This data is based on Facebook’s own published stats, covered by Inside Facebook.

4. Nearly 80,000 Sites Using Facebook Connect

Connect is the Facebook initiative that has the greatest long-range impact. By integrating Facebook closely, sites are making our personal social graphs truly portable. Instead of having to go to Facebook and other sites to visit our friends, they travel with us online (and in our pockets via mobile devices), always there to provide advice or commentary. Even Yahoo! and MySpace are rolling out deep Facebook integrations.

This of course makes Facebook the central hub of not just social media, but the web as well (which is why Google is scrambling to catch up after their competing Google Connect fell flat).

5. Facebook Fan Box Becoming Pervasive

Perhaps the least powerful, but most prevalent, flavor of Facebook Connect is Facebook Fan Box, a simple tool for enabling your website visitors, YouTube video watchers, or email newsletter recipients to become a fan of your brand—without even having to go to Facebook.

6. Average Facebook User Has 130 Friends

Will Facebook users continue to add more friends at a rapid pace? It depends upon how they view their Facebook connections. 130 friends almost bumps up against Dunbar’s Number of 150—the theoretical maximum number of actual friend relationships you can sustain, according to British scientist Robin Dunbar.

If Facebook continues to revolve around relationships that you actually possess in three dimensions—people you “actually” know—then the addition of bunches of new friends may slow considerably. But, if Facebook makes the leap to tie people together more casually (like Twitter), average friend counts could rise dramatically.

7. Average Facebook User “Fans” 2 Pages per Month

If you think tons of your customers should become fans of your company’s Facebook page, you might want to recalibrate your expectations. The average Facebook user “fans” only 2 new pages per month. That’s not a lot, considering how many brands, causes, and organizations we come into contact with on a regular basis.

If you’re going to make growth of your Facebook fan base a key part of your social media strategy, you must create a clear rationale for why consumers should participate with you.

You also might consider a robust, organized approach for promoting your Facebook fan page.  (This case study from Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes has some good advice.)

8. Only 4% of Pages Have 10,000 or More Fans

If your Facebook fan page is a bit of a ghost town, you’re not alone. A fantastic study by Sysomos of 600,000 Facebook fan pages shows that only 4% of pages have 10,000 or more fans—and only .76% have 100,000 or more.

That’s why it is so critical to focus your Facebook strategy on activating the fans you have, not just collecting fans like baseball cards.

9. Wall Posts Don’t Impact Popularity

The Sysomos study also found very little correlation between how frequently the Facebook page admin posted to the Wall and total number of fans. However—and this is important—there is a strong correlation between amount of other content (notes, links, photos, videos) and number of fans.

Thus, if you want to grow your Facebook fan base, it is imperative that you move beyond simple Wall posts and add photos, videos, links and other content.

10. Customized News Feed

Facebook’s recent move to an algorithm-driven news feed means that just because someone is your fan does not mean he will see your Wall posts or status updates (true for both individuals and brands). Instead, the default news feed is now comprised of content that Facebook thinks you’ll like, based on your interactions with content from that author in the past, and interactions by your friends with that content.

This puts a tremendous premium on posting engaging content that will get comments and likes and shares. If you’re not paying attention to your content engagement scores within your Facebook analytics, start doing so now, and testing content types to see what works best for your brand.

11. Real-time Search Changes the Game

Facebook is now making most content available publicly, unless you tell them not to via your privacy settings. Twitter opened their data stream to anyone (not just big developers). Google and Bing are incorporating this data into search results, in real time.

This has tremendous implications for search engine optimization and reputation management, because a negative status update about your brand might now show up on the first page of Google search results for your company name (at least temporarily). The shakeout is still happening, but someone in your company needs to be on top of real-time search. Today.

Facebook may not be the ideal environment for every social media initiative, but its huge size forces you to at least consider participating—regardless of what type of business you run.

It’s not just fast-food chains like Souplantation that are promoting their businesses on Facebook. Everyone from the ultra-small business to the Fortune 500 corporation are placing bets on Facebook.

However, some brands are putting an awful lot of eggs in the Facebook basket, which is perhaps justifiable based on the facts above. However, I’m not so keen on building the centerpiece of a social media strategy on what amounts to rented land. What say you?

Is your business taking advantage of Facebook? How important is it to your social media efforts? What advice do you have for creating content and managing Facebook fan pages? Please comment below.