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What Content Should I Post on My Facebook Business Page

Where most businesses get hung up and fail on Facebook is they come into it with the old marketing mentality and most of their posts are about marketing their services, announcing sales and asking people to check out their site. That mentality will kill your efforts quickly. Remember that Facebook is a social media platform. Therefore, you want to remain social. The popular rule of thumb is to keep at least 80% of your posts social, 10% marketing and information about your business and 10% announcing sales or other promotions.

One way to look at how to create content for your Facebook Timeline page is to think about going to a social networking party. If all you did was walk around and talk about your products and services, few people would ask you for your business card. Or, if you showed up, but just sat in the corner not talking to anyone, no one would learn about your products and services. The truly successful networking will be schmoozing, making small talk, bringing up compelling and interesting information and everyone will want his or her business card. Facebook is the same way, only you have to be successful at creating that personality by using words, images and videos.

So while you know the 80-10-10 rule, you also want to be very active in posting content. Three to four posts spread out throughout each day would be ideal, one a day would be minimally successful, and too many would irritate people. When people get irritated, they will “Un-Like” your page fast and possibly even complain about your business which is the last thing you want to have happen. Even with three to four a day, spread out throughout the day, if they are not thoroughly interesting, compelling and/or entertaining risk causing people to “Un-Like” your page. It would be best to just stick to one a day to avoid irritating your followers.

Knowing what to post everyday can be challenging when you know that your business needs to stay 80% social. The best thing to do is consider what your target market would be most interested in hearing about. If your business caters to moms, posting recipes or ideas for the home and garden are always well received. For further engagement, you can ask them to share their favorite recipes, or ask them questions about what their favorite meals are for the weekdays or weekend. If you are a service oriented industry, it may be trickier to know what to post every day, but there is sure to be some relative information that your target market would find interesting. Avoid trite and cliché posts such as “Happy Monday Everyone”, while a few Facebook users may enjoy that, the majority of them will see it as a pathetic attempt of your business to get their attention.

You can post comments with links to blog posts you create at your business blog, or other news or information that your target market would enjoy hearing about without coming across as “marketing” if you are conversational about it. Mentioning personal tidbits about yourself or your staff members will help followers know you better. Obviously, you do not want to go overboard on personal information, but comments such as “Mary won Employee of the Month and gets to leave early on Friday” with a picture of Mary grinning ear to ear with a thumbs up sign is whimsical and people will feel good about congratulating her which will bring some great interaction on your business’s Facebook page.

Videos are popular and choosing fun, yet appropriate, videos to post and share with your followers is always content that is well received. Quotes and sayings are popular too, but go lightly with those because they are overdone and people get tired of seeing them unless they are truly unique and captivating. When you find a great one, you will be amazed at how many of your followers will share it with their friends.
Any time your content is shared by your followers at your business Facebook page, a link will show up on their page, back to your page. You will be able to get additional exposure and followers to your page. People will also be more likely to comment on your content when it is posted if it is interesting to them. That will bring more popularity for your business Facebook page as well. Keeping this in mind, go for content that you think will be thrilling for your followers.
Along with consistent posting of content, responding to other’s comments of your posts, or posts on your business Facebook page by followers is critical. People want to know they are worth your time and responding quickly will allow them to feel that way. It will also help keep the conversation going, and show up on their page as well as your business Facebook page.

You can organize content in the admin panel to show up in your Timeline. Many posts you may want to hide after they have run their course, so six to eight weeks. Other posts you might want to change the posting date on to include them in more relevant parts of the Timeline history, and others you will want to highlight and keep up for a long time even if they are not directly relevant to your business history. For example, if a Follower posts a glowing testimony, mouse over the upper right hand area of the post. You will see a star. Click on that star and it will highlight the post, making it bigger, so it becomes more noticeable.

When you post consistently using the 80-10-10 rule, followers will get used to seeing your brand on their page. When they share it with their friends, their friends will get used to seeing your brand on their page as well. Your conversion rates will begin to improve and your business reputation will start to sky rocket.

Posted in: Facebook Marketing

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Creating a Successful Facebook Timeline Page for Your Business

The first thing you need to do in order to create a successful Facebook Timeline page for your business is to have a personal Facebook account. If you do not have a personal Facebook account, it is easy to set one up by going to Facebook.com and following the easily understood directions. Once your personal page is set up, you can to go http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. From this point, you will be able to choose what you sort of page you are setting up and begin to add the preliminary information. You will also be able to add additional page admins to help manage the page if you have employees that will be assisting with the Facebook campaigns.

Make sure you choose a Facebook Business Page name that is going to be beneficial to your businesses overall search engine optimization strategy. While some businesses will just use their business name, you can do that, or also include a descriptive word that you know is an important keyword for your search engine optimization strategies. Many times Facebook pages will show up before your business website URL will show up, so this will allow one more way for people searching for your products and services on sites like Google, Bing or Yahoo Search to be able to find you.

You will need to have 25 “Likes” before you are able to set the name you chose for your business Facebook Timeline page to the permanent URL. Getting those 25 “Likes” as soon as possible will assure that you get the name you want. Make sure all staff members and other supporters of your business “Like” the page as soon as possible after you have it set up.

Choose a Great Cover Photo

The cover photo on the Facebook Timeline page for your business is the first thing people will see when they come to your page. This makes it crucial to create a stunning image. There are guidelines you have to abide by and the photo needs to be 851 x 180 pixels. If you or no one else in your business is confident to create an excellent high resolution image for this cover photo, you can find low cost services that will create one for you.

The 851 x 180 pixel cover photo can be of anything you like. Some businesses use a map to pinpoint where their business is. Others will add an image of their building, employees, or a collection of photos in a collage. This collage can be a mix of products, services, or other elements of your business. Restaurants do well to place an image of their favorite menu item and spas do great with photos showing how indulging their services are. Whatever you use, make sure it is the first impression you want to portray for your business. You can also change the cover photo at anytime, but coming up with the first one is always the most challenging.

The restrictions Facebook has placed on the Cover Photo do not allow for any pricing or purchase information. You can also not include any contact information including email, address, website address or phone number. No calls to action are allowed either and that includes asking people to “Like” your Facebook Page, sign up for a contest or any other call to action. To stay safe, just have a really great photo that doesn’t have text included that will be frowned on by Facebook.

 

Use a Profile Picture People Will Relate To

The profile picture on your business Facebook Timeline page will show up in the lower left hand of the cover photo. It will also show up on every post and response you create, message you send, and when you post to other Facebook pages. With this in mind, you want to use a great image. It can be any size and then you will be able to crop it once you have uploaded it. Many businesses will use their logo for this profile picture in order to help gain additional branding purposes and to better familiarize Facebook users to their brand.

Views and Apps Bar

Directly underneath the cover photo is the Views and Apps Bar. To the far left of the bar will be an “About” link which will allow users to click through to a page to learn more about your business. Adding a compelling description of your products or services with a call to action is permissible for your business’s “About” description. Use keyword rich content in your “About Us” page to further enhance your business’s search engine optimization strategies.

To the right of the “About” link on the Views and Apps bar, there is room to highlight three apps. Choose these apps carefully. They could direct users to a photo album, a video collection, map, product pages or a host of other pages that can be added to your business Facebook page.

Once you have these set up, you are ready to start adding posts and arranging them into a Timeline of history and milestones for your business. You can go back to the 1800s. The more image rich and compelling you make these posts, the more exciting it will be for potential new customers to learn more about your business.

While you are working on adding content, you will also want to integrate your business Facebook Timeline page with your own business website. Adding buttons beside your products and services, on your homepage, and every other page of your website will encourage people to “Like” that page, product or service. When the “Like” it, it shows up on their wall for all their friends and family to see what they like. You would be amazed at how much traffic you can attract from just a handful of Facebook users “Liking” a page on your own business website.

Posted in: Facebook Marketing, Online Marketing Articles

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Why Facebook Timeline is Important to Your Business

With over 850 million Facebook users, and a projection of having a billion users by the end of this summer, it just makes sense that your business would want to gain exposure by having a Facebook Page. Your business Facebook page is the perfect accompaniment to your business website and is the number one social media networking website that you should focus your social media marketing on.

Going where customers and potential customers go is another important reason why your business should have a Facebook Timeline page. Showing your target market that you are a progressive business, worthy of their patronage is to show them that your business is innovative and can keep up with the times. When customers and potential customers see that you have a Facebook Timeline Page, your business will become immediately viewed as an established business and more viable resource than it would be without one.
The majority of Facebook users check their Facebook accounts everyday and stay logged in to their Facebook account at a minimum of twenty minutes a day, with an impressive number of users that check Facebook consistently throughout the day into the evening. There is simply no better place to establish your brand that will get the same level of attention from the most users than on Facebook.

Facebook users are also all ages and with a broad variety of socio-economic backgrounds. Whether your business targets youth and teens, young adults, middle aged adults, or even senior citizens, you are sure to find millions of potential customers in your target market that use Facebook. With the mix of personal Facebook users, media, other businesses, and even government entities, your business has the gamut of staying engaged with the largest varieties of the population available.

Because of Facebook and other social media sites, people are becoming conditioned to expecting to have a social relationship with businesses they patron. If you are not socially connected, you will not be considered by the majority of social users because they will not feel like they know the personalities behind the business. That “personality behind the business” is becoming much more important to portray in order to win the trust and patronage of new customers. As all marketers know, people prefer to do business with people they know, Facebook is a powerful medium in allowing those important introductions.

With all these important reasons for having a Facebook Timeline page for your business, including increased exposure and advanced engagement opportunities, it just makes sense to put the time and effort forth into creating a Facebook Timeline page for your business.

Posted in: Facebook Marketing, Online Marketing Articles

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Introduction to Facebook Business Timeline

Facebook rolled out the Facebook Timeline pages for businesses at the end of February, 2012. Facebook likes to refer to this new page as “Mission Control for your Business Facebook Page”.  It’s the core page to interact with new and potential clients and customers and includes a host of features never included on Facebook before this latest update.

New to Facebook Business Pages is the large cover Photo

One major change is the addition of a cover photo to the Timeline Page. This image can be used to highlight anything you like about your business and will be the first noticeable thing that visitors to your page will see. While the profile picture is still published, as before, it is smaller and featured in the bottom left hand corner of the cover photo.

Underneath the images is a bar that features views and apps and a link to your “About Us” page. To the left is the link that allows people to click through to your “About Us” page. To the right on this bar, you can choose which apps show up, such as a map of your location, product pages or any other pages that are included in your Facebook business page. Beneath the views and apps bar, to the left, is a composer bar that you can upload photos, post comments or upload videos that will show up on that page, and on follower’s news feeds. The left hand side also includes pinned posts, allowing you to highlight what you or others post on your wall. This highlighted post will show up on top for about seven days at the top of your page.

To the right, underneath the views and apps bar, is a friend activity box that shows a particular number of profiles that follow your Facebook business page. Below that are other posts you have made. If you have a Pinterest account linked, that will show up there and other activity from your wall will also show up in this area. The Timeline page gives you options of making posts larger or smaller, you can star posts to further highlight them and create milestones.

The great part about the Timeline page is you can create a story of the history of your business.

The great part about the Timeline page is you can create a story of the history of your business. You can choose which posts show up on this Timeline page and which posts will only show up in your news feeds. The Timeline has options of going all the way back to 1800, so including a rich history of your business is possible back to that point.

For businesses, the Timeline Page is like a quick view of your products, services, branding and company culture. Adding visually rich images will captivate visitor’s attention and encourage them to “Like” your Facebook page so you can further engage with them.

The new Admin Panel that is included with the Facebook Timeline page for businesses will appear at the top of the page, but only admins will see this area. This allows for easier management of the page including notifications of activity that allow for quick responses. Insights can be reviewed at a glance to see page performance information for marketing and analytics purposes. Messages also show up in the Admin Panel so they can be responded to easily and conveniently.

There are other management tools included in the Facebook Timeline pages for business that allow you to manage the content and marketing for the page. An activity log management tool allows you to view all activity, even hidden posts. This allows you to arrange them according to how you want them to appear on your Timeline. You are able to change the date of the posts, star, hide, or delete posts, and filter by type of posts.

While there is a bit more of a learning curve to using Facebook Timeline Pages for your business, the opportunities are much larger to effectively market to and track customers and potential new customers. You can use your Facebook Timeline Page for a variety of business and marketing operations including lead generation and customer service. Overall, your business will become more successful as it gets more acclimated to the new Timeline page and how to utilize it to its full potential.

Posted in: Facebook Marketing

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What Is Link Building?

Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. This can be done by reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories, search engines, etc. Link building is one of the best ways to make your site popular. There are few types of linking one of which is reciprocal links.

Reciprocal links or link exchanges is the process where two webmasters agree to show the other’s link on their website. After link building when the number of sites which link to a particular site is known as link popularity which helps in the search engine ranking of a website.

There are many advantages of link building.

  1. Link building helps in getting quality traffic from relevant sites which increases sales.
  2. Also when there will be high quality incoming links the site will also be seen as a valuable resource.
  3. Link building helps in creating awarness, visibility and credibility of your site.
  4. The site also obtains wider search engine exposure.
  5. It also helps the website get indexed by search engines.

Today links have become important for all websites and they are worth the money. In fact, there are several companies dedicated to selling links (as opposed to companies that you can pay to do link building for you).

 

2014 Update:

With many of the changes to Google’s Search Engine Algorithms, Link Building if done wrong can actually hurt your website’s rankings.  Make sure you read our upcoming article on this topic for more details.

Posted in: Online Marketing Articles

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