6 Facebook Marketing Tips for Managing Your Facebook Page

Wondering what works and what doesn’t for your Facebook page?

Or are you overwhelmed with all of the Facebook tactics you read about?

No matter how long you’ve had a Facebook page, it’s good to review some of the basics for creating a page for your business.

This article includes six simple tips that will make you a more effective admin and make your page more professional starting today.

#1: Check Your Wall-posting Preferences

Does your page get a lot of, ahem, critical commentary on its timeline? Or maybe just more than you have time to deal with easily? If so, it might be time to set your page’s Posting Ability tab so that only your page admins can post.

Here’s how: Choose Edit Page from your Admin panel. Then choose Edit Settings.

You can add/remove admins directly from the Admin panel.

From there, edit the Posting Ability tab and decide if you want everyone to be able to post on your page, or if you want to allow only your page admins to post.

You can adjust the posting ability to fit your page’s needs.

While I normally advocate allowing open access to a page, and even leaving negative posts up so your customers and future customers can see how you deal with criticism, for some businesses it’s just simpler to let people message you privately if they have an issue. Setting to “Posts by Page Only” also prevents Facebook users from spamming you.

You’re able to choose to allow everyone to post to your page or limit posting.

#2: Use Insights to Determine What’s Working for Your Page

There are two basic types of Facebook page admins: Those who post based on hunches as to what motivates engagement, and those who look at Facebook’s Insightsto see what actually drives engagement.

Checking Facebook Insights will help you give your fans what they want. For example, if you notice that the posts with images have better reach and engagement than those that are text only, try removing the images to see what happens.

Since Facebook is always messing with EdgeRank, it can seem like just when you have figured out the formula for engagement, something changes. Checking Insights will help you stay on track, no matter what algorithmic changes Facebook throws your way.

A few months back, Facebook did a complete overhaul of Facebook Insights and Jon Loomer wrote a nice article for Social Media Examiner that walks you through the latest features.

Facebook Insights provide valuable information about the actions of your fans that can enhance your Facebook presence.

#3: Assign Admin Roles

Facebook allows five different administrator roles: manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Each role has different capabilities—only managers have the ability to change each admin’s role. Facebook makes all admins managers by default.

Each admin level has different capabilities for a Facebook page.

You can have as many admins on a page as you want. To add an admin, go to Edit Page on your timeline and then click Admin Roles. Scroll down and select Add Another Admin.

Note: To make someone an admin of your page, the person must have liked the page.

To prevent conflict among your employees and before you assign your Facebook page’s admin roles, establish some company-wide guidelines. Some things to consider:

• Have a quarterly Facebook training session. Discuss roles and address etiquette and expectations for employees who manage the page. At the quarterly meeting, discuss new Facebook features, address concerns about previous posts and talk about new tactics that you’d like to implement.
• Define the voice of your page. Each individual has a unique voice, but when representing a business or brand on a Facebook page, the page admins should work together to form a consistent voice. Make sure that your page admins understand the established voice and that they are expected to use that voice when communicating with users and fans online.
• Keep a shareable document (e.g., a Google doc) that outlines companysocial media policies. Employees should refer to the document at any time when they need to know what to post—and what not to post. This document should also include recommendations about how to interact with your Facebook fan base.
• Keep admins to a minimum. Don’t give just anyone admin rights to the Facebook page. The fewer people managing a page, the better. Two or three admins actively updating, responding to inquiries and managing the page are plenty.
• Keep communication between admins open. “If you’re not sure, ask!” is an elementary concept, yet it’s an important one. Whether responding to a particularly difficult user comment or sharing an article on the timeline, establish a rule of thumb that if any admin is unsure about whether something is appropriate, s/he should ask another admin for an opinion. Encouraging page admins to have open communication with one another will help reduce mistakes.

Adding new admins is easy as long as the person has liked your page.

#4: Choose Your Featured Likes 

Liking other business pages helps you build connections (and when they reciprocate, gives you added exposure), but you might not want certain pages to be among the first things visitors to your page see. Luckily, you can control which of the pages you’ve liked appear on your timeline.

Five of these likes are displayed at any one time, and the five that appear randomly change each time the visitor to your page refreshes—unless you edit which pages appear.

Why would you want to do this? You might want to feature pages that are related to your business. Or perhaps you want to feature pages that you think will be relevant to your readers. (If you pick more than five, they will rotate randomly.)

To choose featured likes, go to your Admin panel, choose Edit Page, then Edit Settings. Next, click More and then select Featured. From there you can edit your featured likes.

Try choosing featured pages that are relevant to your business that you think your fans would like.

#5: Bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and Reacquaint Yourself With What’s Changed Recently

Facebook changes its terms of service…often. And unless you follow the company’s blog or frequently check their Page Guidelines, it can be difficult tokeep track of what’s allowed—or not—during a given month.

Of course reading social media blogs like Social Media Examiner will help you stay in the know, but page admins should still bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and read the document at least once a quarter.

The constant changes of Facebook’s Page Guidelines require businesses to read and reference them often.

#6: Use Facebook as a Page Instead of as Yourself

Chances are if you’re the admin of a page, you simply head over to your business page and when you comment or post, you act as the business. But did you know that you can actually change your profile so that you are on Facebook as a page and not just as a personal profile acting as an admin on the page?

Why would you want to do this? If you happen to own or work for a B2B company, it’s a good way to build alliances with other businesses that are in your same industry (but aren’t competitors).

Let’s say you own a restaurant. You’d want to interact with hotels nearby so that when people check out the hotel’s page, they see your (positive and helpful) comments and are motivated to check out your business. Of course there’s a fine line—you don’t want to post too often or be so complimentary that your posts appear insincere, spammy or otherwise annoying. But posting as a page is a great way to network with similar businesses and leverage the marketing power of Facebook.

To act as a page on Facebook, click on the Settings icon in the top right corner of your Facebook profile and you’ll see an option to “Use Facebook as” with a list of the pages for which you’re an admin. When you choose to “Use Facebook as a Page,” you are able not only to post and comment as that page, but also your news feed contains the updates from the businesses your page follows instead of your personal friends and page likes.

Using Facebook as a page offers a variety of benefits to B2B companies.

Hope you find these tips helpful as you look for new ways to invigorate your Facebook presence!

What do you think? Do you have any Facebook tips to share? Please share your comments below.

8 Facebook Apps to Enhance Your Facebook Page

Do you want to add more function and flare to your Facebook page?

Would you like to add storefront, generate leadsor promote something special on a Facebook tab within your page?

In this article I’ll reveal Facebook applications that can help you easily add functionality to yourFacebook page.

How Do Facebook Apps Work?

Before we get started, let’s review how Facebook apps (also known as custom tabs on Facebook) pages work.

Custom tabs are installed manually on your Facebook page and show up underneath the cover photo. If you’re visiting a page that has more than four tabs, you can click the down arrow on the right side of the tab cover photos to reveal them all.

Custom tabs appear under your cover photo.

There are four standard Facebook apps that come with every page—Photos, Events,Videos and Likes—and any other apps you add are created by a third-party developer (not Facebook).

Many of the apps are designed on the app website after you sign up, and then installed later onto your Facebook page when you’re ready.

Things You Should Know

There are a few important details about Facebook apps that will help with your design. The app width is 810 pixels. If you’re going to create graphics that go all the way across the tab, you’ll need to keep the graphic to that width to prevent scroll bars on your tab.

The graphic can be as long as you want it to be, but keep in mind that it should be shorter than around 500 pixels to appear “above the fold” on most computer screens.

You’ll probably also want to design a custom tab cover photo to draw attention to the tab. The dimensions of the tab cover photo are 111 pixels wide by 74 pixels tall.

Also note that some tabs will not appear on mobile devices. Some are “mobile-ready”; meaning they have a separate URL that they direct people on mobile devices to so they can see the content on that custom tab.

If you’ve been out there searching in the blogosphere, you may have come across Welcome Pages, where the content of your Facebook page could be “hidden” until the user clicks the Like button. That function no longer exists, but you can still hide the content of a Tab until someone clicks the Like button.

Hiding part of the content of your custom Tab is called “like-gating” or “fan-gating“, meaning that someone has to like your page (be your fan) before they can see the good content. This can work especially well for contests or sweepstakes on Facebook. By doing this, you can ensure that the person is a Fan before getting access to the contest entry form.

There are a lot of other apps available that provide a variety of features, like easily bringing in your Pinterest boards, running a contest or adding your blog posts.

These apps are more like a blank canvas, where you can do anything you can do on a website by either using custom templates to get you started or custom-designing something from scratch.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the top 8 apps (in alphabetical order) with some notes about each one.

#1: Heyo

Heyo is a drag-and-drop application that’s very easy to set up. You can insert a background photo or create a solid fill background and drop in videos, links, text or whatever else you can dream up for your custom tab. Plans start at $25/month with a free trial.

Social Media Examiner uses Heyo to promote its podcast.

#2: North Social

North Social is a little more expensive at $1.99/day, but you get all of the apps they offer at that price. You can use North Social as your one-stop-shop for all of your Facebook tab needs (including coupons and contests).

Get all of the apps for one price so you can have a variety of customization.

#3: Pagemodo

Pagemodo is a very affordable app that starts at $6.25/month for three tabs on each page. The Pro version ($13.25/month) doesn’t include the Pagemodo branding and you can have an unlimited number of tabs on three different pages. Pagemodo has a lot of templates to choose from, or you can do something more custom.

Pagemodo has a lot of different pre-built templates if you don't want to build your tab from scratch.

#4: ShortStack

ShortStack is a very versatile Facebook app that is built on “layers.” You can layer widgets on top of each other or use some of their pre-built templates and themes to create something that looks great. The nice thing about ShortStack is that it’s free for pages with fewer than 2000 fans—very nice as you ease into Facebook marketing.

Use some of the pre-built templates and themes to create a tab that looks professional.

#5: Static HTML – Thunderpenny

Static HTML – Thunderpenny is a free app with a few useful features. You can choose to pull a website right into the Facebook app. But be aware that most websites are larger than the 810-pixel maximum size, so you’ll have scroll bars showing.

You can also just upload a single image. This is a handy feature if you have designed a flyer or something else you want to showcase.

Code something in HTML, upload an image or import a website easily with Static HTML.

 #6: TabFoundry

TabFoundry is a very handy drag-and-drop free app. You can add background graphics or colors, add multimedia and use HTML if you prefer. If you want to unlock some of the features in the Premium plan, it’s just $9/month.

Use the editor to drag and drop the images you want into your custom tab.

#7: TabSite

TabSite is another multifaceted tab app where you can run contests, deals, bring in other social feeds and create a custom tab. There’s a free option for two tabs on one page (restrictions apply) or plans starting at an affordable $10/month.

TabSite specializes in contests and sweepstakes, but it also does more.

#8: Woobox

Woobox is a flexible Facebook app that has some free options for things like HTML Fangate, which is nice. The paid plans for contests and other features start at $1/month (yes that is correct—it’s for pages with 100 fans or fewer).

One nice function that’s available is the possibility to redirect right from an app. That way, you avoid having those scroll bars if your website is too wide.

Woobox has some free options for its HTML tab and other functions.

Conclusion

That brings us to the end of the 8 apps I would recommend. There are many others out there that may also be a good fit for your business. Just make sure youunderstand the pricing and the capabilities before signing up. Many apps have a free trial, which can help you make a more informed decision.

Ultimately, you should be using these Facebook apps to enhance the online experience of your customers or prospects. Always keep them in mind when you’re spending time (and maybe money) creating a custom app. What type of information would benefit them?

What do you think? Have you created a custom app for your Facebook page?Share your thoughts about why you picked that particular app in the comments below.

How To Get The Best Out Of Facebook For Your Business

Setting up a Facebook page is quick and easy, especially considering how beneficial one can be to your business. However, to get the most out of Facebook, your business’ page, profile and presence on the social media site needs to be correctly managed and maintained. Here are five categories you should consider when managing and maintaining your business’ Facebook presence:

1. What to Post
The Basics:
Post pictures, videos, questions and facts related to your business, or that you think will engage your audience.

Post pictures and videos that excite and amuse or that your page’s viewers will find instantly recognisable. Why not post pictures celebrating special days like Valentine’s Day or Christmas, but with your company’s own special twist? For example, biscuit manufacturers Oreo sculpt pictures emblematic of certain holidays and anniversaries out of the cream in their cookies.
If your company is running a multimedia advertising campaign, post images and videos on Facebook to coincide with your billboard, magazine and television adverts.

Be an Industry Leader:
Ask your fans questions or post facts related to you and your company’s field of expertise. Post links to articles that you think your fans, followers and customers will find interesting, with pictures that will catch the attention of those who view your Facebook page – Facebook lets you post links and pictures at the same time. Cement your position as an expert in your field and your company’s position as an industry leader with the relevant and interesting information you post.

Ask your Fans:
Ask your fans for their input in certain company decisions, like what your mascot should be called, what new flavour of ice cream your frozen goods company should sell, or what your retail company’s new range of clothes should be called. Plush soft toy company Squishable gained over 700,000 likes on their Facebook page by asking their fans to vote for which creatures should be made into cuddly companions.

Promoted Posts:

Whatever you post will show up in your fans’ News Feeds – those who have liked your page – and the better the quality of posts, the more likely it is that people will like your page. Facebook users spend an average of 40% of their time scrolling through the News Feed, so having your posts appear there ensures that your fans will see them.

If your page has more than 400 likes, you can pay to promote your posts. Promoting posts moves them higher in the News Feed so that the people you shared it with are likely to see it. According to Facebook:

You can promote any post you share from your News Feed, profile or Page, including status updates, photos, videos, questions and offers. You can also promote and share posts from friends and people you follow.Any post you promote will be labelled “Sponsored by” and then your business’ name.
Celebrate Milestones:


Milestones are special page posts that take up the entire width of the timeline rather than just one side of the timeline. Add them to your page to mark special dates in your company’s history, such as when the company was founded or when you moved to new offices.

You can post pictures alongside milestones to better illustrate their significance. When your company does something special, record it with a milestone on your Facebook page.

Conclusions:
According to Facebook’s business page, successful posts are:

Short: Posts between 100 and 250 characters get about 60% more likes, comments and shares

Visual: Photo albums, pictures and videos get 180%, 120%, and 100% more engagement respectively

Optimised: Page Insights help you learn things such as what times people engage most with your content so you can post during those hours.Post regularly, about once or twice a week, but make sure you don’t bombard your fans with information: if their News Feed is inundated with your posts they will get sick of hearing about your company and “unlike” your page.

Bear in mind that many of the users who have liked your page have done so because they are interested in the product or services you provide (unless they are friends, employees and colleagues, although they might like your company regardless) so make sure you provide enough information about your company on your page and in your posts.

2. Engaging with Fans and Followers
Responding to Comments:

You don’t need to respond to all the comments on your Facebook page, but answering questions and liking a few statements will make your fans feel like their opinions matter. If managed right, your page will act more like a forum for people to talk about your products and your posts amongst themselves.

Reward your favourite comments, not just by liking them, but by illustrating them and reposting them as a picture. This will further ingratiate your company to your fans and will help you highlight positive feedback about your company.

Unfortunately, there will be a few people who take advantage of the popularity of your page by posting back-linked comments. It is not worth the time or effort to constantly comb through comments to delete the few that are unrelated to your company, your fans are intelligent enough to work out which ones to avoid by themselves.

Promotions, Competitions and Contests:
Facebook has very strict guidelines for companies who want to run promotions on the site and, if you stray outside them, you run the risk of having your company’s Facebook page deleted.

Promotions, however, are one of the most successful ways to attract more fans onto your page. The problem is, you can’t use any of the features on your page to run the promotion.

All Facebook promotions need to be run through a third-party application, such as Google’s wildfire. You can’t use any of the features on your company’s page – the comments section, the photos, the events tab, the like button, etcetera – to run your Facebook promotions.

What you are allowed to do on your company’s Facebook page is advertise the promotion. However, make sure that at no point are you requiring users to “like” your page if they want to enter the contest or contacting winners and entrants on your page. It is advisable to include a disclaimer with any material related to promotions on your Facebook page, saying that in no way is Facebook itself involved.


Keeping Facebook’s stringent policies in mind, running a successful Facebook promotion is easy and often extremely beneficial: according to ExactTarget, 40% of Facebook users become fans to take advantage of promotions.

Here are a few ways to ensure your promotions success:

Make sure it’s free and easy to enter.
Offer prizes for the winners that are related to your company’s products or service.
Decide what sort of Facebook competition you want to run. There are four basic types: sweepstakes, essay, photo and video. The last three take a lot of time, but will potentially provide your page and followers with some quality content. Sweepstakes are an easier way to engage with fans and get their information.
Collect emails: one of the greatest benefits of running a promotion on Facebook is that you can collect all the names and email addresses of the entrants, making it a great way to reach more potential fans outside of the site.
Advertise the contest everywhere you can: your website, on Twitter, in a Facebook ad, for example.
Make sure the third-party app you use is flexible, competitively priced, has mobile capabilities and can be embedded on both Facebook and your website.Post on the Pages of Other Companies:
Businesses with smaller followings on Facebook can leverage the networks of businesses with more followers in order to increase their own fanbase.

Post on the pages of competitors and experts in your industry. Comment on their posts or the posts of their fans and followers with related information and links to your own Facebook page or website.

If you comment on the pages of other businesses, their followers who have commented in the same thread are instantly notified, drawing their attention to you.

Even if a follower hasn’t commented on a thread that you comment on, they may see it on the page. If they appreciate what you write, they may click the “like” button, which will show up in their activity for their friends to see, or they may even follow you.


Offers:

If you are a page administrator, you can pay to run offers on your page, which will reach those who have liked your page and even their friends.

Offers will appear on your page and in your fans News Feed. When your fans claim the offer, it will show up in the News Feeds of their friends, who can claim the offer in turn.

Offer something that your fans will want, like a discount on a new product or a free trial. if more people claim the offer then more people will see it.

Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the greatest tools in a business’ arsenal: according to Facebook, businesses typically receive a 3x higher return on investment when fans refer friends.

Rewards:
You could also reward your fans exclusive benefits for liking your page.

Say you are a chocolatiers releasing new flavours of one of most popular snack bars: why not give your Facebook fans the chance to taste them first.

You shouldn’t only be trying to get new fans to like your page: you should be thanking those who have liked your page already. Customer retention is the basis of growth and rewarding your customers is one of the best ways to do this.

Conclusions:
Always stay active on Facebook: posting comments, replying to your fans, constantly networking and connecting.

Make sure that the quality of your response is high and that you post information relevant to the thread – don’t be mistaken for a spammer!

Give your fans something they want, so they will keep returning to your page and also refer their friends to your business.

3. Marketing and Advertising
Creating adverts:
Creating adverts on Facebook is perhaps the best way to get people to like your page and buy your products from Facebook: according to Facebook, people who like a company’s page will spend an average on 2 times more than someone unconnected.

Facebook gives businesses three options at the start, asking whether they want to:

Get More Page Likes: Reach people who aren’t connected to your Page yet. You’ll be asked to design your advert including headline, body text and image

Promote Page Posts: Promote a specific post; giving you increased reach and increasing your chance of placement in the News Feed

Advanced Options: See all creative and bidding options in one place. You can toggle your bidding options between CPM and CPC.Creating a good advert is like creating a good post: you need to ensure that the picture and the text is just right, catching the eye of the viewer and then telling them exactly what the advert is all about.


Targeting:

Businesses are then given options on who they want to target with their adverts, with categories such as gender, age, interests, location, connections and marital status.

Make sure you target your adverts to the right audience. For example, if you are advertising a new people carrier, the ad should pop up on the pages of parents rather than the pages of single teens.

There is even an “advanced targeting” targeting option to narrow the boundaries even further.

Paying for and Scheduling Adverts:
After you’ve named your advert (make sure its something easy to remember in case you plan on making a few) you will be asked to set a budget for your advert.

You will never pay more than your budget, but you may pay less. What you’re paying for is impressions (clicks-per-minute), the more impressions, the more of your budget the advert will cost. However, impressions prove that people are seeing and clicking on your advert, increasing the chance of a sale.

You can adjust payment options, however, by clicking “advanced options” in the goals section.

Make sure you schedule your adverts for an appropriate length of time. Facebook allows businesses to schedule their adverts to start on a certain date and end on a certain date.

Schedule your adverts to be seen at the best possible time. For example, if you are advertising for the January sales, schedule your adverts to start after Christmas and end at the start of February.

Running Multiple Adverts:

If you are unsure of your best audience (and you have the money) you can run more than one advert targeted at different audiences to determine which audience is best.

If you are running more than one advert, Facebook will optimise your adverts automatically:

When multiple adverts are running in a campaign, we'll automatically allocate more of your daily budget to higher performing adverts so it's important to put your adverts in different campaigns when you're testing them.Change things subtly to fine tune your advert. Facebook make it easy with the “create a similar advert” option.

CPC and CPM:
Cost-Per-Click and Cost-Per-Impression are used to monitor Facebook advertising’s ROI. Here are the figures for the average CPC (also sometimes called PPC) and CPM (also sometimes called CPI) in the twelve most expensive countries, as measured by socialbakers.com:


As you can see, the price of Facebook advertising in the UK is relatively cheap CPC-wise, compared to Australia and the United States, but is equal to the latter for CPM. Canada and Germany are cheaper still: Canada’s CPC is $0.41 and there CPM is $0.09, while Germany’s CPC is $0.37 and ther CPM is $0.08.

Coordinate your Adverts with Third Parties:

You can coordinate with third party services to run adverts on Facebook based on traffic to your website or people who have bought your products online or in-store.

Target customers who may not have liked you on Facebook but have been in your store with offers and adverts for new products.

Sponsored Stories:
Sponsored stories are Facebook’s brilliant feature which highlights the comments of fans, allowing companies to pay for them to appear in the News Feeds of people who are friends with the commenter.

Sponsored stories are optimised to reach the highest number of people through word-of-mouth advertising, promoting businesses through the words of people that the viewer trusts.

Conclusions:
Make sure that what your advert is offering something that your targeted audience will see and will want. Drive traffic from adverts to the relevant websites. You could advertise an offer or a coupon to drive more traffic onto your main site.


Chinese restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s ran a three-week Facebook ads campaign which offered coupons to reward their customers.

The restaurant chain also used sponsored stories, it’s Facebook page, its website and other social media sites to drive traffic into their restaurants'.

The campaign reached 9.1 million people and grew P.F. Chang’s Facebook fanbase by more then 100% to 420,000.

Facebook ads and sponsored stories are costly, but effective. If you have money to spend on advertising then Facebook is an economical outlet, allowing you to promote your business to a wide but targeted audience.

For more advice on running Facebook ads, click here.

4. Monitor and Analyse
Monitor you Page:
It’s simple really: keep an eye on your number of fans by counting how many likes you have. You can count how many of these likes are coming from your adverts and sponsored stories in the “actions” section of the Adverts Manager page.

Make sure you monitor the comments on your page, deleting anything that is inappropriate or too irrelevant. As I said before, you can delete all the spam and back-linked comments if you want, but checking through them is not very time-effective.

Adverts Manager:
From the Adverts Manager page, you can view various statistics and analytics to do with your adverts. Here is Facebook’s list:

Actions: The number of Page likes, app installs, and event joins that come from your adverts.
Reports: In-depth performance and demographic information to understand how your campaigns are doing over time. Run News Feed reports to optimise adverts being shown in News Feed.
Inline Reporting: Your bid and price for each advert or sponsored story, advert previews and a summary of your targeting and performance.
Key metrics: Info on the size and engagement of your audience to help you monitor the success of your campaigns.
Audience graph: How much of your target audience your campaign is reaching compared to how much it could reach. If you find you’re not reaching enough of your target audience, try raising your bid or budget.
Response graph: Track the performance of your campaign by clicks and actions over time.With all these analytics at your fingertips, you can optimise your adverts and your page to get the most out of Facebook.

Conclusions:
Always keep abreast of how your adverts and your page is doing. Adjust and optimize your adverts according to their success. Make the most of your budget. You can spend as much or as little as you want, its up to you to make it count.

5. Manage
Manage your Posts:
As well as monitoring the comments of your fans, you should monitor the success of your own posts on your business’ Facebook page.

If a post isn’t getting any likes or comments, delete it. Posts that don’t get you any interaction are just taking up space on your page.

Manage your IFrames:


IFrames are the interactive images at the top of your page beneath the cover photo in which you can put links to your photos, old polls, apps, campaigns or even display how many likes your page has.

Your first two iframes should contain your photos and how many likes you have. The rest should be constantly updated to stay relevant to your company’s activity on Facebook at the time: what competitions you’re running, for example.

Stay Abreast of Facebook’s Updates:
Last year, Facebook introduced the new timeline view for pages, providing businesses with a new challenge and a new opportunity to make their pages original and interesting.

Since then, Facebook has already started testing a new page design, introducing it to New Zealand last month.

Facebook has also announced one of their most important features to date this year: Facebook Graph Search.

Facebook Graph Search has numerous applications that could help your business: Graph Search has a huge amount of quality data about Facebook users that could help businesses target new customers or find potential employees.

Facebook’s news feed is also getting a facelift. In the proposed redesign, more space will be taken up by a content and image-laden home page, with the stories, notications and advertising within the news feed taking prominence.

Facebook is updating its service frequently. Make sure you keep an eye on news blogs and websites like this one so you can take advantage of all the features Facebook develops.

Stay Mobile:

Mobile is the future of social media marketing. It is, of course, not the only future, so don’t spend all your time streamlining your social media for mobile users.

It is a good idea, however, to make as many of your adverts and apps as you can mobile friendly. For example, if you own a clothes shop and you are advertising a sale, you want to be able to target customers who are already shopping near your store. Customers who are already shopping will be using their phones.

In November last year, Facebook Mobile hit 488 million monthly active users. Try to ensure that every single one can access you businesses Facebook apps.

Conclusions:
Keeping your business page up-to-date, not just the content you post but the posts you delete, is of vital importance.

Your fans won’t want to come to your page unless the content is changing frequently, giving them something interesting and new to look at and potentially share.

Stay current by utilising Facebook’s frequent updates to the advantage of your business, whether on desktop or mobile devices.

How do you get the best out of your business’ Facebook page?

SEO tips for Facebook Pages

As Facebook becomes an increasingly important commerce platform, brands are starting to direct users straight to their pages on the site.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to get Facebook pages to appear in the SERPs, even for larger household names.

I thought it would be useful to take a quick look at a few Facebook Page optimisation techniques, and some of the more common SEO problems on the site...

First of all, time for a quick infodump:

In 2010 “Facebook” was the single most popular search term on Google, with almost 25bn separate search requests.

During the same period, Facebook reported that its own internal search had almost doubled, accounting for around 2.5% of US searches (and we'll look at this again later).

It's not a stretch to imagine that figure increasing significantly in the future, particularly as new generations of users become more comfortable with the idea of Facebook as a search engine.

These are massive numbers by any standard, and assuming that regular users aren’t always accessing the site through search then we can reasonably guess that the already huge social network is still growing, and fast.

Despite this a 2010 survey by Brightedge.com suggested that of 200 major Fortune 500 bands on Facebook, 70% did not appear in the top 20 Google results, even for brand specific search terms.

There are a few reasons why it can be difficult to gain decent SEO traction using Facebook, but let’s start with an obvious one:

Google and Facebook hate each other.

OK, so that’s a provocative and not-quite-entirely true statement, but for the SEO in the street, it can be a frustratingly accurate one.

Despite the professional rivalry however, optimising for external search is actually fairly straightforward. Facebook releases limited data onto the external web, so initially at least you can dispense with a lot of the more complicated under the hood tinkering you take for granted with a regular site.

Let’s look at what’s out in the open:

Likes

There’s a lot of talk in social media about influence, but on Facebook, popularity counts for a lot.

How you go about getting extra ‘likes’ is an entirely different kettle of fish, but in general the usual social buzzwords apply: Relevant, regular, engaging content please.

URLs and naming conventions

The most visible element on the web. Keep it succinct and branded. It’s also worth thinking about other channels you operate on.

If your Twitter account is @GreatDonuts, don’t call your Facebook page ‘We make Great Donuts’. That may sound obvious, but it’s often overlooked.

Privacy

Not to be patronising, but there is occasionaly confusion over privacy settings and in the past I have come across a few page owners who’ve inadvertently locked their page down.

While there are cases when you only want to display content to fans, do a quick double check to make sure anyone can find you easily.

Multimedia

Unless you're a band, that's images and videos to you. I’d hope that any serious marketer would already optimise here, but it’s easy to forget to name or tag a Facebook picture properly, especially if you’re adding it using an external CMS.

Again, consistency counts.

Info and about

These are one of the most important places to put your keywords. Get a good SEO copywriter to optimise your information page.

Most visitors won’t read the information page, but it’s a good place to park some dense, keyword-heavy copy. Similarly, you’ll also want to put your brand name (or better still, a link) in the ‘about’ box.

Everything else...

Since the reintroduction of iFrames, every landing page is a separate company microsite as far as SEO goes, so make sure you’ve put aside enough time and resources to optimise everything on them.

Don’t (just) rely on being popular to generate authority. Again, consistency and attention to detail will help.

Unfortunately there is a fairly limited lifespan for most social media.

Most posts on Facebook receive around half of their ‘Likes’ in the first 90 minutes, before slowly grinding up to around 95% a day or so later, so you have a fairly small window of opportunity.

It’s also relatively hard to build a legitimate link-building campaign around a tab unless you are doing something long running and particularly awe-inspiring there, and you will also run up against UX problems.

Usually tabs won’t have optimised navigation, so directing to older content can confuse users. In addition, fresher content is generally more likely to appear in the SERPS.

As mentioned, all of these are fairly straightforward, but unfortunately that’s not the end of your SEO efforts.

Never mind the SERPS

It’s often said that Facebook is a walled garden, and the wall holds whichever side of it you are on. Facebook is now well on its way to 700M users. Another massive number, and as any social guru will tell you, one that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

Always remember that for Facebook users, being redirected to your site to purchase is often a major turn-off.

Facebook are on Facebook –they don’t want to be on your site. This has seen a lot of companies leaping into the F-commerce arena in an attempt to lower abandonment rates.

Whether you are setting up second home or considering ignoring platform instability and throwing all your eggs into Facebook’s basket, once all those searchers have found Facebook, they like to stay there.

From an SEO standpoint, this means that concentrating entirely on SERPS might not be the best tactic, instead, you may want to focus on Facebook’s internal search.

Whenever you type a search term into Facebook’s autocomplete search bar and hit enter, Facebook takes you directly to the top-ranked page.



In many cases these are determined by sheer popularity, but there are also a number of other weighting factors that can help get you into the drop-down menu that appears.

Yes, there is a ‘search more’ option, but unless they have a very specific page in mind, most users will never bother with a second click.

Optimising for Autocomplete
Again, Facebook centres its search results around personalisation, and beefs things up a bit with a learning algorithm.

It’s far from perfect, but search for ‘Pizza Hut’ once or twice, and Pizza Hut will begin appearing in your results every time you type in ‘PI’. A feature which could be especially useful for local businesses looking for repeat visits.

Again, autocomplete factors are based around user names, your history, and your friend’s history.

These are then balanced against various features and apps, and here’s where we run into trouble.

While optimisation isn’t complicated, it’s subject to change based on Facebook’s whims and there doesn't seem to be any cohesive logic behind how things are weighted, so it's probably better to optimise across the board to be on the safe side.

Let’s look at our main targets:

Pages and posts

Keywords are what matters here. When setting up a page use best practice and keep it branded and succinct. There’s little you can do about personalisation other than targeting users with a lot of friends geographically using ads.

Questions

Facebook is currently promoting Questions. They’re weighted heavily, so get you community manager asking away as often as possible.

So far, Questions don’t seem to feature in external SERPS either, so again we’re reminded of the importance of internal search and Facebook’s desire to wall its users.

Optimisation is again pretty straightforward:

1.Keywords in title and answers
2.Links in answers: You can link directly to related pages within the 'Add options' field for Questions. So far there's no real data on how this affects authority, but it's obviously beneficial to add your own or affiliate pages in here:



Groups and Apps

Groups and apps don’t appear to be hugely important to Facebook, possibly because they may conflict with the interests of branded pages. Areas to remember include:

1.You or an immediate friend is a member/user
2.Number of total ACTIVE members.
3.Keywords in the group title and content.
Oddly enough some research has suggested that Admin name might also be a factor here, particularly if there’s a keyword in the name. In other words, if your name is Johnny Axe-deodorant, your group could do well…

All these factors are pretty walled-in, so short of PPC it can be a struggle. Keep stuffing those keywords and inviting friends/employees/family pets etc...

Events

With the advent of Places check-ins, Events have become more important for general page traction but are otherwise relatively unimportant and difficult to optimise.

Various quirks in Facebook search mean that obvious factors like location or number of attendees don’t seem to have a massive effect, but it’s safest to assume that some or all of these will be indexed, especially as Places becomes increasingly important. Cover your bases and keep it simple:

1.Frontload keywords in event titles.
2.Gather as many ‘I’m attending!’ replies as you can.
Even if there’s no SEO payoff, there is some virality to be grabbed from events so it’s a useful PR tactic.

Incidentally (and please be very, very careful here), you can also directly invite users to events by email, so this could be a good way to initially build a following.

In addition to these, you might want to consider targeting Bing! more as it's now powering the internal web results and it isn't unreasonable to assume that it will be featuring Facebook results more prominantly in the future than Google, and it's always worth putting keywords into your general wall posts as a matter of course.

For the moment, optimising Facebook pages is a fairly straightforward, albeit time-consuming process. The results and effects of your efforts may be subject to change however so overall it makes sense to cover as much as possible.

Much of the on-page optimisation might charitably be called grey hat as well, with a heavy reliance on keyword stuffing, so never underestimate the importance of good copy. In addition it appears that shorter updates and titles (Under 80 characters) are more appealingto users. Make sure you have solid, optimised copy across your page, and while there is a lot of talk about influence and relevance in social media, there’s no doubting that on Facebook, sheer popularity also counts.