All Entries Tagged With: "facebook"

FaceBook SEO

Is your FaceBook Company page doing all it can for you? Some of you may not even have a company page yet. If not, you’re missing another opportunity to rank well in search engines and another way to reach your target audience. If you don’t know anyone who uses FaceBook, you live in a cave. Your customers use it. So you need to have a presence there.

It’s easy to create a company page. Once you have done so there are even FaceBook Templates you can use to spice it up a little. Just do a search for FaceBook Templates in your favorite search engine.

OK, I have a FaceBook Company Page and found a template I like. What’s next?

Once you get a few likes you can get a custom URL. So instead of a set of numbers like facebook.com/394857687, it will be facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere. You can also add a keyphrase in your custom URL. Once you create your custom URL, you are stuck with it, so think about what you want there.

Next you need to add content to your wall. There are tools like TwitterFeed.com that will help automatically update FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter whenever you make a new blog post. But that is not enough. You need to go to your FaceBook page and share videos you uploaded to YouTube, articles that you have online somewhere and other things that will interest your targeted audience.

That doesn’t mean you have to put all of the content there. You can do a summary, then link to the content wherever it is on the web. part of Internet Marketing is the ability to get people to click links and follow where you guide them.

Once there, you need to make sure they are finding something truly of interest to them. Do not mislead people into following your recommendations. There are a ton of so-called marketers that think if they can trick someone into doing something or buying something that they are somehow a great marketer.

Great marketers tell you the truth and still make the sale. They don’t need tricks. So make sure you create quality content and recommend it to your FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn followers.

Adding content to your wall is easy. If you are writing a short summary you can just add it. If you want to write more, use the link that says NOTES in your sidebar.

Next make sure you use the INFO tab to add more information about you and your company.

That’s just some basic tips on how to SEO your FaceBook Page. There is a lot more you can do. But if you haven’t even done the things I mentioned here, you’re not ready for more yet. Call me at 512-322-9566 if you need help or you are ready to do more with your FaceBook Company Page.

3 Social Services That Are A Must For Your Blog

If you blog for your business then I’d recommend the following three social media services at a very minimum:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• StumbleUpon

With Facebook, you can have your blog posts automatically filtered through your Facebook profile so that your fans can read each post from Facebook. Your fans that are avid Facebook users are more likely to visit your blog through Facebook than any other service, even an RSS feed. Using Facebook in conjunction with Twitter is a very valuable combination. Install Twitter Tools plugin into WordPress so that your blog posts automatically post to Twitter. And you can create your Facebook settings to sync with Twitter so that every time either your Facebook status or Twitter status changes then they are both updated. So that blog post you just made that suddenly updates your Twitter status also updates your Facebook status. Powerful! Instant promotion to all of your fans on both services.

StumbleUpon should be used for its traffic possibilities. There is no automation for SU, but you can submit your content to StumbleUpon and share it with a handful of friends. If it is content worth reading then they will vote on it and share it with their friends. For many bloggers, StumbleUpon is the highest or second highest source of traffic.

Get bookmarked.

Why I’m Killing My Facebook Friends

I’ve been deleting my Facebook friends. The reason is pretty simple. I’ve discovered that the best way to go about social networking online is the same way you’d go about it off line. I call it the segmented approach.

Let’s say that you have a day job where you make specialty marketing products, you have a networking marketing business on the side where you sell herbal health products, and your hobbies include bicycling and gardening. Obviously, these are very different interests and many of the people currently in your networks within those three areas won’t have any interest whatsoever in your other interests. That is, your marketing customers won’t all enjoy bicycling or gardening, nor will they all be interested in your herbal health line of products. Why waste their time trying to talk about things in which they have no interest.

When you go to your motivation meeting for your herbal health products, you don’t stand around talking about biking up your favorite mountain range, do you? That is, unless you meet another bicycling enthusiast there. And you don’t stand around discussing gardening with your marketing specialty customers who have no interest in gardening. So why would you do that online?

I’ve decided that, in order to manage all of my interests better, to focus my networking efforts at each social media site that I use on specific goals related to my areas of interest. And that’s why I’ve been deleting Facebook friends. I’m about to completely delete my MySpace profile (because I’ve started another one that is specifically geared toward one of my interests).

I virtually have two interests that I manage online. Naturally, Internet marketing is one of those. The other is poetry. For those of you who don’t know, I write poetry and have done so for 20 years. I’ve decided to use Facebook and MySpace completely to network with other poets and people interested in literary topics. I’m using both of those networks to market my poetry and connect with others with that interest. If I decide to start networking with others interested in Internet marketing through either of those sites, I’ll set up another profile geared specifically toward Internet marketing.

But I think I can network with other Internet marketers in other ways. Sphinn, for instance, is a great networking site for Internet marketers. So are a few other places that I like to hang out. But because of the content nature of Blog Content Provider, we are a service provider to a variety of types of businesses, some of which may not be Internet marketing specialists, I have other ways of connecting with potential prospects.

There are a ton of social media sites that are useful. The trick to using them most effectively is to find the ones that can benefit you the most and through which you can meet the type of people you want to meet. I’m a big user of StumbleUpon and I’ve figured out that it’s a great place to show my versatility of interests. I can network with poets and other literary types, Internet marketers, other small business people, and persons interested in politics – all through StumbleUpon. Otherwise, I’m segregating my social networks.

Who is Blog Content Provider?

Contrarian Blog Marketing Advice From One Remarkable Blogger

I like Michael Martine. He’s a competitor, but he’s earned my respect.

Recently, Michael posted a video on YouTube in which he tells his audience NOT to use social media to market their blogs. It seems like bad advice on the surface, but I’ll have to agree with him. The nuance that might go missed by some is that social media is a good tool for marketing, but that using it as a tool to harp on your blog is not a good idea. You’ll have to see Michael’s video to catch the full drift, but do pay attention to what he’s saying because it makes a lot of sense:

If I wasn’t having a bad hair day and wasn’t pressed for time this morning, I’d offer a video response. I would like to address one thing about what Michael says in the video, namely, that he got no benefit out of marketing on Facebook. Frankly, I’m not surprised. Facebook is not a good venue for Michael’s services and it likely wouldn’t be for ours either. LinkedIn, however, is a much better social media choice for Michael, and for us at Blog Content Provider.

Like Michael, I get annoyed with the silly vampire bites, what’s your favorite color questions, super duper walls, and other crap on Facebook. I think a part of that has to do with your choice of friends. But even if you choose good friends, you can still get poked by retards. It can be quite annoying.

LinkedIn is set up differently. There’s no poking, no gargoyles, no silly little high school dating questionnaires or virtual college frat parties. It’s a professional organization that caters to traditional professionals who just want to do business with other mature and professional people online. Much more conservative. That’s why I don’t like it.

Why Social Networks Are NOT One-Size-Fits-All Prom Dresses
Now, wait a minute, Allen. You just said LinkedIn would be a good place to network for BCP.

Yes, I did. And it would. If I had the time to actually get in there and rub elbows with people. But I don’t.

I could make the time. It would probably benefit me if I did it right. But I don’t have the inclination – right now. That could change in the future. But right now, LinkedIn is not the social network of choice for me. I am working on other things.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m totally dedicated to BCP. But I also have my own websites. I’ve been writing poetry for over 20 years and I have a poetry website with almost 100 pages and a blog with 150 blog posts. My poetry blog is on page 1 of Yahoo! and moving up in the other search engines. I have pages on my website that are on page 1 of Google, page 1 of Yahoo, and ranking well at MSN and Ask also. I have discovered that I can bookmark a blog post or web page at StumbleUpon and get massive traffic. I can bookmark the same blog post at Digg and get nothing. On the other hand, I can bookmark a BCP blog post at StumbleUpon and get only meager results, even less at Digg, but if I bookmark it at Propeller or a bookmarking site designed specifically for Internet marketers then I’ll get much more traffic.

The reason why I think that happens is because of the personalities of the different social media sites. People on StumbleUpon are a lot more free wheeling and artsy than people on Digg. There is a type of informational blog that will get a lot of votes on Digg if the information is valuable and those pages don’t do real well at StumbleUpon. When we apply this principle to the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, it becomes evident that you have to use the networking tool that is most appropriate for your audience.

Which Social Network Is Right For You?
Poets like to hang out at Facebook. When I browse the Facebook profiles, there are so many groups and applications that appeal to people who write poetry, fiction, and other types of literature. There aren’t so many on LinkedIn.

That doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is a bad place to network. It’s just a bad place to network for people promoting themselves as a poet. On the other hand, if you are trying to hire yourself out as a business writer then LinkedIn is the perfect place to network. Facebook may or may not be based on who your target market is.

Since I only have so many hours a day that I can devote to social networking activities, I’ve decided to spend my time on Facebook instead of LinkedIn. I’m not worried that my blogging business is going to suffer if I don’t network. On the contrary, BCPs blogging business is steadily growing. But if I don’t spend a little bit of time each day promoting my poetry then it won’t get promoted. That’s why I make the point to do a little bit of networking and content creation each day, usually in the evening.

The Right Way To Use Social Networks
Now that you understand where I’m coming from, what’s the best way to use a social networking site? I believe that Michael Martine has hit it on the head. Instead of promoting your blog or your website, which people don’t really care about, promote yourself. People join the social networks to make friends, not to find material that they can read. They have plenty of that. What they don’t have plenty of are friends who take a genuine interest in them and what they have going on in their lives.

When I was an active user at MySpace, I got frustrated at all the comment spam that came across my profile. I, like a lot of other users, would accept any and every friend request without considering whether or not that person would truly be of benefit, or whether I could benefit them. I was going about it all wrong. I ended up abandoning my MySpace profile because of it.

Social networks are not friend collection receptacles. They are places where you can find people interested in the same things that you are interested in. If you do it right, you’ll make friends and those friends will eventually turn into business partners, customers, or other people who can benefit your business (and your business theirs). Do it wrong and you’ll end up frustrated, on the outs, and wondering why no one likes you. I hope this improves your social karma.