Posted by Tom Krengel
on 06/30/09
Why are Fan Pages the best for businesses?
Creating a fan page is a great way to present your business on Facebook and it is the most viral of the three types of Facebook pages (Profile or personal, Group, and Fan). When someone becomes a fan of your business, that information is posted on their wall, which is a friendly introduction of your business to their friends too. Moreover, when fans interact with the Fan Page, news and events that are linked to your page are passed on to their friends via News Feed. One of the most valuable features is that businesses can send "updates" about new offerings (products and services) and content to fans and the brand becomes even more visible.
Fan Pages also engender more SEO credit because the pages are public. Logins are not required to view Fan Pages, so search engines can index the page. Your page will include your website's address so you can receive facebook.com link credit. When social networking platforms, like Facebook, are linked to a company's web page, the Fan Pages can channel more prospects throughout the network.
Lastly, Facebook Fan Pages are easy to set up and manage. Facebook Fan Pages also give you access to data that can be used to target and monitor your prospects online. This information is extremely valuable in courting potential customers.
5 Tips for Designing an Effective Fan Page:
- Be Authentic: Don't simply try to push your products and services on people. Concentrate on providing professional advice and valuable tips. Start by establishig a trusted relationship with 'fans'.
- Provide interesting content: Frequently update content so updates constantly appear on walls of members.
- Tell your story: Share how the business started, what made/makes it successful, how it is unique, what is going on now, etc.
- Special Offers: Freebies and giveawys are viral. Offering fans the chance to win a prize or giveaway, regardless of size or value, will keep them coming back and will tempt their friends to visit as well.
- Get a vanity URL: Once you have amassed 25 fans, you are eligible to register for a vanity URL ( http://www.facebook.com/YOURVANITYURL ). This helps with branding by putting your business name right in the web address.
Posted by Tom Krengel
on 06/26/09
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This is a guest posting by Nathan Egan. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of the Freesource Agency, LLC. Prior to starting Freesource Agency, Nathan worked at LinkedIn and has wonderful insight into the world of social media networking. Follow Nathan on Twitter: @nathanegan. |
Participating on the social web scene has become near-essential for companies. For a growing number of potential customers, the majority of research, referrals, and recommendations are being done virtually through social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. There is an incredible opportunity for businesses to attract both customers and/or clients through social media. Here’s why your company needs a social presence too.
1. Customer Connectivity
Social media is arguably the most powerful form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology that the business world has ever seen. Your company’s social presence will allow you to connect with your customers in new and dynamic ways, that among other things, will give you rich data and feedback to help you grow and sustain your business.
2. Communicate with Prospects
I always tell my clients: “Connect to your customers because your customers are connected to your prospects”. Social media is an extremely efficient marketing platform and a sales prospecting tool. When executed correctly, a good social media strategy will generate organic, inbound sales leads through your current customer base.
3. Competitive Intelligence and Market Research
Social media is an incredible tool for “listening” to your competition and monitoring trends in your target markets. The massive amounts of accurate and real-time information you can collect through these systems can be leveraged in many ways, perhaps most importantly, you can make real-time adjustments to your sales strategy based on what your competition is doing (or not doing).
4. Customer Service
Social media enables your company to build brand loyalty in powerful and dynamic ways that were never before possible. A well-executed program will increase customer satisfaction, give you easy access to real-time feedback on product or services issues, and drive down overall operating costs.
5. Talent Acquisition and Employee Retention
As a whole, social media has changed the game of recruiting and retaining top talent. Learn to leverage social media properly and your organization will gain significant competitive advantages in terms of available human capital.
6. Global Reach
No longer is your company restricted to regional or even national distribution and communication. Social media allows you to publicize press, advertisements and company news to the world in ways that have been traditionally cost prohibitive. For example, a public television segment airing in a small geographic region of the US can now be uploaded on to YouTube and distributed through Twitter, enabling the segment to be viewed by an international audience.
7. Social Media is a Freesource!
Generally speaking, social media is a completely free resource and all it takes is your commitment to learn how to use it! Social media is here to stay, the websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc may come and go but this style of communication will not. You owe it to your business to learn how integrate the appropriate platforms into your overall communication strategy - your ROI will be tremendous!
Share the companies you know with a great social presence on the web!
Is your company participating in Social Media and Inbound Marketing? What advice would You leave for others that are hesitating to create a social presence?
Posted by GlobalMagic
on 06/10/09
We've recently been discussing adding a blog component to our CMS360 content management system. Right away the question came up as to whether it's better to incorporate your blog as part of your site, or host it on a separate domain. I had always assumed it was better to host it separately because then you'd have another quality site linking to yours. However, on further study, I discovered that Google seems to have wised up to that, and no longer considers subdomains to be separate websites, with some exceptions for very large, highly trafficked websites. For example a search for dell will show dell.com and support.dell.com, both sites with different goals and a lot of unique content. But for the average small/medium business website, only one result per domain will be listed.
I read a number of blogs on this topic and the opinions all seem to agree - in general, a blog should be listed in a subfolder, not on a subdomain. It's better to consolidate your content on a single domain for the maximum search engine impact.
Depending on your site structure, there may be a number of other advantages to keeping your blog in a subfolder. All of your images will be in a single location and you may be able to share files between your site and your blog, making updating easier. You may also save money on hosting and have a single login to manage.
For us, this was a good discovery, because it will make our integration to CMS360 simpler. We'll still have a single site and code to set up and manage, which also makes things easier for our clients.
We plan to provide this new blog component to our clients as soon as possible. We'll start with our own site, moving our current blog from Blogger to our own installation of CMS360. Then we'll analyze our analytics to see how it impacts our traffic and search engine rankings. We'll write up another blog post to let you know how it goes, so keep an eye out.
In the future, we'll also be integrating the Blogger API with CMS360, because we know some clients may still prefer to keep their blog separate from their website, or may have multiple blogs to maintain. Either way, we want our CMS360 users to be able to update their website, blog and other content from a single location. We know it's hard to keep up with all the things on the web these days, so we want to make it as easy as possible.
Further reading:
Here are some of the articles I read about subdomains vs. subfolders, if you'd like more in-depth information on this topic:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
http://www.seohawk.com/blog/subfolders-vs-subdomains-seo-analysis/
http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/seo/which-is-best-for-blog-seo-subdomain-or-subfolder/
http://www.pointit.com/blog/subdomain-or-subfolder-seo/
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