Content Creation and Strategy via Digital Marketing Channels, such as Newsletters, Article Writing, Social Media Education/Support, and Blogging, Facebook Pages | Purple Phone PR & Marketing

Twelve Ideas of Christmas on Facebook

One business related thing that I enjoy at this time of year is watching how creative people are. Everywhere you look, they are coming up with unique and interesting ways to tie-in to Christmas and the holiday season.  On Facebook, I've seen the following and wanted to pass them along to inspire you to do some creative planning in 2012:

1. CTMLS: They have created a blog series called Twelve Days of Tips and Tricks.  What content could you pull together for twelve days to create something similar?
2. Pottery Barn Kids: Using the ever popular give away ploy, their custom page is quite festive.
3. The Little Beach Gallery:  As a gift shop, it seems an easy fit for the holiday season, but I like how they created a special photo album for their "Holiday Gift Guide 2011."
4. The Song Lists: Want attention when everyone else is posting about the holidays?  Try an non-holiday headline.  
5. Organized for Life: Created a holiday themed downloadable.  They probably won't make a ton of money off of the one item, but it's the type of thing people may pass around and it gets traffic to their site.
6. All Things for Sale: Showing cute and clever ideas for using your products during the holiday season.
7. Better Homes & Garden: Host a holiday themed contest.  You can't beat cookies, but it could also beat decorating, organizing tips, travel locations.  You get the idea!  Just plan early for this.  You'll need to talk it up to get entrants and then follow up by highlighting your winner!
8. Two Peas in a Bucket: Plenty of holiday How Tos available on their website.  They simply linked to their great blog posts on Facebook.  Even businesses with a serious side can tackle this: "How to Continue Saving as the Holidays Burst your Budget" or "How to Avoid Travel Headaches During the Holidays." 
9. Evernote:  Sure, the holidays are joyous, but there is also a lot to do and a lot of stress that leads up to the festivities.  Recognize your customers' holiday related pain and demonstrate how your product can alleviate that!
10. Kiva:  Be blunt.  Remind your customers that gift cards make a wonderful gift.  But, let me remind you that you can only do that if you balance it out with lots of other compelling content.
11. Modern Mom:  Help your customers by creating a list of gift suggestions.  If you are tragetting your business to small business owners, think of the "Top 10 Gifts for Small Business Owners."  Perhaps selling garden supplies, try "Top 25 Gift Ideas for Those Who Love Playing in the Dirt!"
12. Mind Over Matter Coaching:  Take it a little deeper.  Think about the values and ideas that the holidays represent and share heartfelt ideas, quotes or questions.  

There you have it, folks.  Twelve ideas to get you thinking about how you can tie-in to the holiday season with your own business.  And, don't just leave this for next year's holiday season.  The ideas work just as well come spring season, pool season, or wedding season!  What creative ideas have you seen - either on Facebook specifically or the web in general?

Make Your Own "Radio" Ads for Facebook?

Since the latest round of Facebook hubbub, I've been enjoying playing around with the timelime, Yahoo! News, and Spotify.  Of course, it's not all play.  I've also been thinking about ways that business owners might employ Facebook's new features to aid their marketing efforts.

Today, I contemplated Spotify.  If you haven't yet tried the new timeline and associated features, Spotify is an online music player that will publish the name of the song to which you are listening and a link to it directly to Facebook in real-time (assuming, of course, you give it permission to do so!).

So, what happens when business owners start creating audio content?  Will our streams become cluttered up with advertisements?

Personally, I wouldn't advise clients to take a straight advertising approach at all.  First, no one is going to bother listening to it, so why bother.  Second, your audience will get frustrated with the self-serving approach and will start blocking your account.

What may work though are short (2.5 minute or less) audio clips that are informative, like a mini-podcasts. (See related article on Cinch to get an idea.)  Imagine a playlist filled with your tips and tricks.  Once they are published to your Facebook audience, someone else may see it come through and click it.  Suddenly, your audio is on its way to becoming viral in the way everyone hopes their YouTube videos will.

Thoughts?  Would you try it?  What would be interesting enough for you to listen to?   

(Photo credit: ines saraiva)

 

Life Filtered: Good Morning, Facebook

My cousin is currently mocking me this morning, because I'm fussing on Facebook about today's latest changes, but this was a biggie in my opinion.  

I say that because there were two feeds: there was one for "news" and one for "recent changes".  Today, they have merged.  Now, Facebook determines what news is the most important since you last logged in and this is displayed at the top of your news stream.  "Other" posts follow behind these in the order in which they were posted.  

I struggle with this because I like to use Facebook to get to know others.  That means that there are people with whom I don't interact as much because I don't know them yet.  I don't want their content pushed down the page or I'll never get to know them.  But . . . .what can you do!  (If I figure it out, I'll let you know!)

That said, there are some things I do like about the new updates:

• The photo displays in the stream are more prominent.  Business owners - heed this.  Think visual.
• I do like the left side bar.  It was an earlier change, but I feel the navigation there is much easier to use, particularly if you are a page admin or part of groups.

You, like my cousin, may tell me to read the book "Who Moved My Cheese", but I'm OK with that.  I like my content unfiltered.  I like having the choice in what I see.  I want my Recent News back!

Say Hi to Your New Facebook Fans

Here's a quick post from the volume of "how'd you do that?"  If you come to the Purple Phone PR page on Facebook and like it, you'll find that I try to greet people by name and welcome them to the page.  For instance, here is the most recent welcome post:

Now, Matt realizes that I've seen him join the page and feels a little more comfortable posting to the page: he's more likely to engage with the page.  It's a quick, easy, and polite!  

Start by keeping an eye on the number of people who like your page.  When you see it increase,

1. Go to your page on Facebook.
2. Near the top of the right column, you'll see an option to "Use Facebook as your page."  Click that.
3. In the uppermost, blue menu bar next to the Facebook logo, there is an icon of a group of people. If new people have joined, it will show the number of new people on top of the icon.  Click this.
4. A list of your page's fans will pop up.  The first person on the list is the latest to join.  So, if three new people signed up, the top three names on the list are your newest fans.

That's all there is to it.  Like I said, quick and simple!

How to Post on your Facebook Business Page as Yourself

The other day, I was talking with a business owner who worked on a business page with other team members.  At one point, she wanted to post a congratulations message to one of their members from her own account, but couldn’t figure out how to do it.  Here’s how:

1. Pull up your page and click the “Edit Page” button in the upper right hand corner of the page.
2. Choose “Your Settings” at the top of the menu list on the left.
3. Next to “Posting Preferences,” deselect the line that says “Always post as page.”
4. Save changes.

Aside from wishing someone well, why might this be important to know?  A couple of the things that I can think of are:

• You want to tag someone who is your friend, but who does not like the page.
• You want to comment on something that the page has posted.

How else are you using this Facebook feature?  Why do you post on your business page as “you?”

Linking the Employer on your Facebook Profile Page to your Actual Business Page

What a pain.  You’ve gone to all this trouble to create a business page on Facebook and have it represent your business.  Suddenly, Facebook updates it’s profile pages so that your key info, such as your employer, are prominent on your page.  The problem is for many business owners who try to choose their current business page as their employer, it’s not an option and a blank, meaningless page is created instead.

The good news is that with a little monkeying around, this can be fixed.

The essence of fixing this is that every single page on Facebook, whether its a personal profile page or business page or photo, has a number that represents it – a unique identifier.  You don’t see this number too often on the site, because words are easier for people to understand, so the site shows those instead.  But, if you can dig up that number for your business page and then add that to your profile page, you can change where Facebook sends someone when they click the employer link on your profile.

Still with me?  Here are the steps that I was able to use to do this:

1. Make sure that you have either the Google Chrome or Firefox browser and the developers add-on for the one you choose. (Add-on for Google and for Firefox.  These are all free to download.)
2. Open your business page in the browser you are using.  I’ll be using Firefox here.
3. Move your cursor to hover over the “Edit Page” button.  Leave it there.  On the bottom, left corner of the page, you’ll see a URL pop up.  At the end of the URL it says “id=” followed by a number.  This is the number of your business page.  Write it down.
4. Open your profile page.  Click “Edit Profile.”  Choose “Education and Work” from the left menu bar.  It’s time to add that number to your profile.
5. Start entering the name of your business page on Facebook. Some pages will come up and if yours does, great.  You’re all done.  Many won’t though.  For those people, just choose any page.  (Don’t finish typing and Add what you’ve typed – actually choose from the dropdown list.)  Literally any page will do because we’re going to replace the page that you add with the number you wrote down above and this random page will no longer show.
6. Now you need to use the Forms option in your web browser.  If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a menu bar up top.  One option says “Forms”.  Click that and choose “Display Form Details.”  If you are using Google Chrome, you’ll find a little gear-like icon in the upper right.  Click that.  Choose “Forms” and “Display Form Details.”
7. When you click this, your page is going to look really messy with lots of weird words all over.  Don’t panic.  All you have to do is find one little piece of information: look for the line that says “employer_id=”.  Next to it, there could be a blank or a number.  This is the spot where you’ll enter the number that you wrote down in Step 3. 
8. And, the most important step of all – SAVE.  Well, click “Add Job.” Don’t forget this or you’ll have to start over again!

Of course, I make no promises that this will actually work next time Facebook makes changes to the profile page, but at least for now, it worked for me!  (Thanks to Tracey Gritz for pushing me to finally figure this out because it’s been driving me crazy for months!)  If you get super stuck or have an easier idea, please let me know! 

I Sold My Network for a Dollar. How Cheaply Can Your Network Be Bought?

Here’s the thing.  If one person likes my Facebook page, I have access to their 150 friends.  If ten people like my page, I now have access to approximately 1500 people.  At 10,000 fans, you’re looking at a reach of a million and a half people!

As much as we hate to admit it, numbers are important.  Certainly, what you do with those numbers is key to actually leveraging social media and building a business using it, but at the start, getting yourself out there is about numbers and marketers know this.

Because of this, I sold my network for a dollar this morning to Crossroads Ford Wake Forest.  Given that I drive a Toyota, I think it’s reasonable to say that I’m not a brand advocate, joining their page because I feel strongly that my friends should know about their products and services.  Rather, they were offering to donate a dollar to juvenile diabetes research for every person who liked their page.  Now, juvenile diabetes does resonate with me, so not only did I like their page, I shared their page.  For one dollar, they bought access to me and to my 376 friends.  Pretty good investment, wouldn’t you say?

It makes me wonder, what does it take for you to sell your network?  As from being an actual brand fan, what has motivated you to like a page?  What other tactics have you seen employed on Facebook?

Facebook Fun: Updating Your Profile Picture

I had seen this when Facebook first launched their new layout on profiles and thought it fun, but just don’t have the spare time to spend on my personal profile all that often.

Now, however, we’ve got the same photo layout on our business pages, I think that taking the time to try refacing your business page on Facebook could prove quite interesting.

Just think.  You’re a professional speaker and you could put clips from various talks on fun backgrounds and hit your visitor with those as soon as they arrive at your page.  Or, you’re selling gift products and those images could be instantly available.  Or, you could play with your logo.  The possibilities are endless really.

That said, I have yet to try it myself (although will make time in the near future to do so!).  But, if you’ve tried it, post a link to your page so that we can see what you’ve created with the new layout.

Facebook Pages: An Identity Crisis

Sorry – I couldn’t resist that one.  A long time back (well, all of 3 years ago or so), when Facebook began to rule the online world, businesses took up with the application by way of a profile – just like the one you and I have to interact with our families and friends.  With profiles, businesses could interact and comment, enjoying all the wonderful connecting power that Facebook offered.

Then, came the page.  Businesses were told “no – you may not have a profile and shamelessly promote yourself to every random user we have.  You must work hard and genuinely earn your audience.”

And, we arrive at today.  Now, business are still on pages, BUT you can “use your page as Facebook.”  What this means is that you can now interact with other business pages AS your page.  So, if I liked “Sally’s Jewelry Designs” at one point, her business posts can now show up in my page’s stream.  Then, I can comment and like that post AS Purple Phone PR & Marketing. 

Facebook, make up your mind!  Who am I?  Can I interact or not?

OK, OK – I’m just being melodramatic there.  After all, I don’t particularly enjoy SPAM either, so I certainly appreciate Facebook’s attempt to strike the right balance between giving businesses a solid presence while protecting the general user’s privacy.  But watching the changes unfold over time is something I find quite interesting.

The lesson here:  LISTEN.  And then, don’t be afraid to change.  Try something new.  And, change again if need be.

Your Facebook Page Profile Picture

Even my seven year old can recognize the Nike, Coca Cola, or Staples logos, but for businesses who are new to the market or are very small, contacts tend to associate you, the person, with your business more so than a logo. 

So, when it comes time to choose a profile picture for your page on Facebook, what do you choose?  Your logo?  Your image?

Try combining them.  This way, you can build awareness using your branding, but keep the personal touch that people know so well. 

Here are ways that other businesses have blended their business presence with their personalities:

• Public Personality: http://www.facebook.com/RealHeatherO
• Creative Memories Consultant: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Creative-Memories-Independent-Consultant-Amy-Malseed-Pottstown-PA/146034212015
• Facebook Consultant: http://www.facebook.com/BusinessFanPages
• Artist: http://www.facebook.com/YourDoor
• Multi-media Consultants: http://www.facebook.com/NewEnglandMultimedia

Have you got a great example of combining branding and personality?  Please share it below so others can start thinking about their profile pictures!

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