Are you aware of the Facebook Friday expert sessions Social Media Examiner has been doing?

Here’s how they work.  We bring an expert to our Facebook wall for an hour to answer questions.  The expert gets great exposure and the fans get their questions answered.

These sessions  are a great way for fans to quickly get the information they need. And you can model this for your business. These open Q&A sessions with industry experts are a great way to encourage engagement with your fans and get your updates to show up more in your fans’ news feeds.

A recent Facebook Friday session on our Facebook page starred Jeff Widman, CEO of BrandGlue . He gave our fans some great advice. Jeff helps businesses make their Facebook marketing sizzle, and of course many of our fans had questions to ask him. And he shared some great nuggets of advice.

This article will show you how we do them by highlighting a recent session.

Find the Right Questions to Ask Fans

It’s so much easier to create a strong Facebook marketing plan when you ask the right questions. Jeff helped Angie Swartz do just that to get more interaction on her page.

Identify Your Needs

If you’ve been on Facebook for any length of time, you know that things change. Facebook can get overwhelming. But a clear understanding of what you need and why you need it will help you to get the most out of Facebook as it continues to evolve.

Jeff helped Mindy get a clear understanding of why she may or may not want to learn FBML, given that Facebook is moving to iFrames in January.

Get a Deeper Understanding

What goes on behind the scenes on Facebook affects how often our updates are seen by our fans. It’s hard to stay up-to-date on everything and it’s always great to hear from the experts on what works best today.

Andy had a question about how often you should post on your Facebook page. It’s interesting to learn how the Facebook algorithm impacts your reach on Facebook.

Get Help in Setting Up Your Social Media Marketing

When you start to set up your social media marketing, you’ll have lots of questions. The Q&A session with Jeff helped Paula get on track to figuring out the best number of pages her company should have.

Get Easy-to-Follow Guidelines

Information overload hits all of us. The Q&A format on Facebook makes it easy to get simple guidelines from social media experts who do this for a living. Naimah got solid advice from Jeff to help her get started on her own.

Get Useful Tips for Your Business

It’s not always obvious to businesses how they can connect with their particular audience on Facebook. Having access to someone with experience across a variety of businesses is useful.

Jeff gave Sheri and Rachel a great way to start promoting their cause on Facebook.

Get Feedback on Things That Appear Complicated

Facebook seems to be the social media platform where people have the most questions on how to set up their profiles and pages and how to use them. And it’s not always easy to find answers to basic questions.

Jeff explained to Lisa the “yes and no” answer to whether she could change the name of her fan page.

Ask All Sorts of Questions

An open Q&A session with a social media expert is a great place to ask all sorts of questions, even the ones that may appear to be too simple.

Jeff explained to Natasha how to change a personal profile page to a fan page.

Get Expert Advice for Your Social Media Tactics

It’s great to seize the opportunity to ask an expert for advice. These questions and answers are useful to everyone.

Here’s one such question from Cathy about dealing with attrition rates on Facebook. Jeff’s answer is useful to all businesses with Facebook pages.

Increase Your Facebook Engagement

Did you notice the stats for the number of impressions in other people’s newsfeeds and feedback percentage in all of the screenshots of the questions shown above?

These statistics are only visible when logged in as an admin for your Facebook page.

They are an indication of your reach and how much engagement you have on Facebook. It’s an easy way to see which updates got the best results on your page.

Now, your updates may not get as many impressions in the newsfeeds of your fans. Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page has been a tremendous success. In only a few months, we’ve reached over 15,000 fans and this shows in the number of impressions and the feedback percentages.

Showing recognition is another way to increase fan engagement.

But you can ask questions and follow the advice shared with the social media experts in our Facebook Friday sessions to improve your social media marketing. So remember to “Like” the Social Media Examiner Facebook page and keep an eye out for the Facebook Friday sessions.

Now it’s your turn. What do you like about these expert sessions on Facebook? How could they help your business? Please leave your comments in the box below.

On Monday October 12th, 2009, Social Media Examiner is sponsoring four hours of live video chats with leading social media superstars Mari Smith, Jason Falls, Chris Garrett and Denise Wakeman.

Here’s how to participate: Simply click here to enter the live video broadcast room (login with your Twitter ID or as a guest).

Here’s the line up:

• 7am Pacific (10am Eastern): Join Chris Garrett (co-author of ProBlogger) and Michael Stelzner
• 9am Pacific (Noon Eastern): Denise Wakeman (The Blog Squad) and Michael Stelzner
• 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern): Mari Smith (Facebook for business guru) and Michael Stelzner
• 1pm Pacific (4pm Eastern): Jason Falls (Social media strategist) and Michael Stelzner

When you visit the live video broadcast room you will be able to ask questions by simply typing them in.  The experts will address you live over video. Each live segment will last about an hour.

Please help spread the word by clicking the retweet button.

What do you think about this technology?

UPDATE: We’ve posted one of the recordings here (subscribe for others to come).