Facebook Online Ads Versus Facebook Flyers

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In this article, I am going to go over the different between Facebook Ads and its predecessor Facebook Flyers. They are both great services that have really changed how people are advertising on the Internet. Let’s look in depth the changes since flyers.
Facebook Ads, formally Facebook Fliers are getting a lot of attention around the Internet. Since Facebook started offering advertising solutions, it seems their way of providing value to the marketer has improved with every update. At first, they had a program called Facebook Fliers. The basic concept of Facebook Fliers was you paid for per thousand impressions. While this was a good concept, it didn’t work as well as it way supposed to. The current program being used is called Facebook Ads, which has the option of paying per click or per impression. The targeting, pricing, and setup seemed to improve with Facebooks newest creation. The general consensus found with everyone I have spoke to is they are experiencing much better results using CPC versus CPM. If you think about it, if your visitor actually takes the time to read your ad, and then click it, they have to be interested.
Let’s look at the difference between Flyers and Ads:
With Facebook Flyers, this is what the user would view, with no impressions. Facebook first offered these as a way for students to get the word out about clubs, jobs, and other campus activities. After Facebook opened up Fliers to any marketer they realized they were going to have to switch it over to “Facebook Ads.” Notice on our 2nd image the ad says “Sponsored” at the bottom; this signifies that Facebook is being paid per click through the promoter.
Let’s think, what is really better, Ads or Flyers? Would you as a marketer and promoter rather pay per thousand impressions or pay per qualified click you receive? Well, lets look at the pros and cons of paying per click vs per thousand impressions.
First, an impression is just that, an impression. What are the chances that someone looking at their messages, groups, and comments is going to glance over and look at your advertisement? Probably not that good, out of 1000 impressions you could probably expect a 0.5%-1% click-through-rate or about 7.5 clicks. Now, let’s look at the other side of things. With Ads, you are only charged per click every time someone actually wants to visit your webpage. This means the user is qualified as being a real and prime lead for your offer.
In my opinion, being charged per click versus per thousand impressions is definitely the way to go. I would feel much more comfortable in paying for advertising knowing that I was only charged when a user actually wanted to see my ad. Sure, you are going to have the users that click the ad because they are bored or really just want to play around, but that is with any advertising.
Facebook Ads is great and really changing the way people advertise today on the Internet.

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Login, Facebook Online, Facebook Proxy, Facebook Used, Unblock Facebook

10 Ways to Use Facebook for Increasing Web Traffic to Your Site

More than 115 million people login to Facebook every month. It is the largest social networking tool and a great place in the web for building your brand and driving traffic to your site. However, if you are not familiar with the viral techniques that work in the Facebook platform, soon you will find your brand tarnished. You can gain quick exposure to your businesses using the techniques discussed in this article. 1. Build a Facebook network. Before you start implementing any of the techniques discussed here, you need to develop a network of Facebook friends. To do that, join a few groups that are related to your business and a few groups that you are passionate about.Ask people in the groups to add you as their friend. Facebook also has nifty tool that suggest people you would like to know. Send request to these people to add you as their friend. Send a short note explaining why you want to be their friend. If send 20 requests a day, you will have a network of more than 1,000 friends in two months. 2. Update your status every day. Login every day and update your status. Don’t use status messages like “I am sleeping now”, “Just came from work”. These types of status messages are not interesting. Use quotes from famous people about a specific niche, for example love, dedication, work ethics, peace, war, etc. You can also use jokes. Your aim is to draw people’s attention to your messages so that they would click on your profile to know more about you.3. Wish birthday wishes everyday. Facebook also shows upcoming birthdays of all friends in your network. Every day send birthday wishes to friends whose birthdays are due. Read their profiles to know more about them and write a nice personal message on their walls. Don’t use canned birthday messages for everybody. When you write on a friend’s wall in Facebook, everybody in the network gets updated news feed. You need to write something that get attention. You may craft a 10 to 20 attention grabbing birthday messages and than personalize them slightly for each friend. 4. Create a business page. Besides your personal page, you should also create a business page. Creating a business page is similar to creating a personal page in Facebook. Design a nice logo and use it for your business page picture.Next, become a fan of your business page. You can use your business page to launch targeted Facebook ad campaign. Promote your Facebook business page using blogs, blog comments, etc. and ask people to become a fan of your business. Use some promotional materials, like free t-shirts, free eBooks etc as incentives for becoming a fan.5. Tag promotional photos using friends’ names. Upload all promotional photos to your business page. Some people tag these photos with the names of their most influential friends in the network. Your promotional photos will show up in your friends’ news feeds. Once you setup a network of friends, make a list of friends with high number of friends, preferably more than 1000. Setup your mini network to tag each others names in promotional photos. 6. Change your relationship status regularly if it is possible. One of the least frequent activity in Facebook is changing the relationship. Because people don’t change their relationship frequently, Facebook places a great deal of importance to relationship change and send the news feeds to everybody in your network whenever there is a change in your relationship status.People have explored this loop hole to attract attention to their profiles. They change their relationship almost weekly and try to attract visitors to their profiles. It is up to you to adopt this technique because it may not reflect your true relationship status. If you do adopt this technique, don’t forget to publish some promotional materials in  your personal feed.7. Attend Multiple Events. True to its college root, Facebook is all about friends gathering at some place for an event. Facebook gives high priority to events in the news feed. Your goal is to RSVP all the events in your network even if you miss a few of them. When your friends see you as a frequent event attendee, they consider you as an event resource. The trick  is to show your name in all the places you can. As your friends see your name multiple times, some will be curious to check your profile.8. Import your blog post. If you have a blog, import your blog’s RSS feed into Facebook. Facebook will publish the articles in the feed as Facebook notes automatically. Encourage your friends to comments on your articles in Facebook notes. You can also tag friends in the articles but don’t overdo it.9. Post comments on popular groups. Visit popular Facebook groups that you have joined regularly and post comments. Just like blog comments or forum posting, Facebook   comments on popular groups will attract attention to your name and profile. Add something valuable or post a link that adds value to the topic under discussions.10. Start your own events. Events are very popular in Facebook and if you can promote it properly, it will have viral effects and thousands will register for the event. Send invitation to your network friends who have thousands of friends in their networks and also to attractive female friends in your network who may not have a large number of friends.

Tags: Facebook, Website Traffic

Why Facebook Is Worth Over $10 Billion

Yahoo! have been in talks with Facebook for over a year now and apparently recently got shy at Facebook’s $1 billion asking price but as I will explain here Yahoo! have missed out on an absolute bargain.
Facebook have 18 million users, plenty. However MySpace has 100 million + and sold for a mere $580 million to News Corp’s in 2005. YouTube sold to Google for a reported $1.65 billion in 2006 but it serves over 100 million video’s a day and has over 25 million visitors a month. So what makes Facebook so valuable? It gets relatively huge traffic levels but not on par with YouTube or MySpace. Despite now being available to anyone it began life as an exclusive network for students (you needed an educational email to register) and this is still its primary user group.
So where’s the money?
Currently Facebook displays conventional banner advertising on users’ homepages and selected pages through the site. Adverts are unobtrusive and random in so much as they’re not targeted at any particular user- they’re just served to the entire site on a random basis. Facebook are doing ok out of this arrangement on the basis of the number of page impressions they receive, although in reality they’re keeping advertising at a minimum in order to build up the value of the site for its eventual sale which will almost certainly happen in 2007/8. Smart guys!
The power of information
Register with Facebook and quickly you can find yourself giving away huge volumes of valuable personal information. Think about it… Facebook know your name, they know how old you are (actually your D.O.B which is infinitely more valuable as I’ll go on to explain), they know if you’re male or female, they know your hometown, your postcode if you choose to give it away (although I doubt many users choose this), they know if you’re single, in a relationship (and who with), married, divorced etc, they know your sexual orientation. Ok so you can answer all these questions as honestly, dishonestly or vaguely as you like but from what I’ve seen people happily give accurate information about themselves as it’s their friends and potential friends who are going to see it- and no one else right?
But what else do Facebook know? Well they know where you went to school, where you work, more sinisterly your religious and political views. From this we can start to build up a pretty valuable market profile. As I’m telling Facebook I may as well tell you I’m Male, 22 (born in August), Straight, in a relationship, conservative, atheist from Brighton, England. Went to school at Blatchington Mill Secondary, college at a place called BHASVIC, University at Bournemouth. From this information we can draw further assumptions- I live in Brighton and based on the location of my schools catchment area we could pretty accurately map places in Brighton I know about, visit, and live in (think Google maps API). I’m a straight; conservative from a reasonably wealthy area in full time employment therefore I’m probably white, middle class with a decent disposable income.
So what else? Facebook know what you look like, they probably know what you used to look like a few years ago as well. Probably most significantly they know who your friends are, they know how you know them, they know when you talk to them, what they look like and ultimately they know exactly the same information about them as they know about you- you’re interests, likes and dislikes and your friends tastes as well.
They know your email address, so they know if you use Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail etc. They know your phone number so they could pretty easily work out your phone provider. They have your IP address so they could work out your ISP. They know where you’ve arrived at the site from so they know what search engine you use (enter Yahoo! And Google to the bidding war), what browser you’re on, they know if you’re visually impaired or have learning disabilities from the settings on your browser.
Facebook know when I’m logging in and from where so they know the hours I work, if I’m using the internet at work, the pages I leave Facebook to go to or the pages I come from so they know what other sites I look at. I can set my current status and tell Facebook exactly what I’m doing or feeling right this second.
Ok so you get the picture by now, one last thing though, is your Facebook password the same as your email account password, your internet and telephone banking password, every other password you use in your daily life (because until I wrote this post mine was!) how much more information do you want to give away?
What’s the risk here?
Realistically it’s pretty slim. Facebook are a nice bunch of guys and a great site, I love using it and despite knowing what I know about information security and the like I choose to give away a big chunk of the information I’ve talked about here.
Yahoo! And Facebook
So if Yahoo!, Google or god forbid Microsoft successfully purchase Facebook (as I say I’m reasonably confident this will happen this year) the Orwellian lucid dream proposed by this post becomes a perpetual nightmare. Imagine a company who have made billions and dominated the fastest growing market in the world by developing algorithms which crawl hundreds of millions of pages of random information (the internet) and categorize that information with the ultimate goal of matching it to businesses and selling advertising.
The search algorithm let loose on Facebook
Imagine the search engines let loose on Facebook. An algorithm tuned to pick out profile information (John, born 13.08.84). Map it to keywords in personal interests i.e. football, Manchester United. Plot your location on a map i.e. Brighton, England. Follow links to your closest friends with similar interests i.e. Bob and Dave who live round the corner and serve me an advert something like:
Happy birthday for next week John.
Did you know its Dave’s birthday the week after?
Why not book tickets for Brighton and Hove Albion vs. Manchester united on 12.08.07
Click here to book now and get 3 tickets for the price of 2 (why not ask bob to come along- he supports Brighton and you haven’t spoken in a while).
Book today and we’ll give you a half price limo from your house to the game with trashy-limo’s.com.
Now that’s powerful advertising and it’s just around the corner. If Facebook has 25 million registered users by the time it’s sold, half of whom visit every day that’s a minimum 12.5 million page impressions a day. Serve the advert above at $1 a click (which is far less than its worth based on the current AdWords CPC model) expect a click through rate of up to 10% based on the precise nature of the advertising and that’s $1.2 million minimum a day- almost $½ a billion a year. Grow that user group to 50 million (realistic if Google or Yahoo! can tap into their existing user database) and sell ad space on an affiliate basis say the football tickets at $300 with a 10% affiliate kickback and a 10% conversion rate =$3 per user x 25 million users =$75 million a day or $2737500000 in year 1! OK lets not get carried away people aren’t going to spend $300 every other day but the logics there and so the cash.
Will the audience except it?
Better quality advertising means less advertising- less websites rammed with banners so you can’t find what you’re looking for, less popups, less low quality products. This is the main driving force behind the success of search marketing programs and profile based advertising is already in place with Google’s personalized search returning more targeted AdWords ads than previously possible. If it falls into the hands of Microsoft then people may be more wary but with the image of Google or Yahoo! and Facebook profile information is seen as soft information as the company doesn’t sell you products directly and he service is free. It’s the way the internet is going and I believe it’s where we’ll be in 5 years.
Identity theft
The point I’ve been making tediously through this post is that we should be more careful about what information we give up and to whom. If the internet was a county it would be Nazi Germany and Facebook would be the Gestapo! Social utilities like Facebook are afforded the sort of privileged information fascist governments the world over would and have killed for. We moan about identity cards being introduced in the UK (ironically there’s several Facebook groups dedicated to the cause) but we happily give up personal details to a bunch of college geeks in the states who are ultimately planning on selling our details to the highest bidder (the value of any site is based on the volume, quality and amount of information they have about their traffic- but best of luck to them) possibly to the company who already control the majority of world business systems through the windows platform.
This post is not meant to scare- it’s simply a recognition of the power of new internet technologies, their possibly applications and to pose the question- if your Facebook friends are your real friends shouldn’t they know your birthday? Are Facebook really going to buy you a present?!

Tags: Facebook, Online Advertising, search marketing

Facebook Has Surpassed MySpace Thanks To The Smart Kids

MySpace leads Facebook in revenue earned form advertisements. But recently, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in unique visitors. This is an astounding accomplishment being that MySpace had a three year lead and enjoys immense popularity. Users are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves and it is speculated that this transition may be a result of class rather than trend.
Following the creation of Friendstar, a number of eUniverse employees saw its potential and used its more popular features to create a social networking website with a wider base. MySpace was launched in August 2003 and with resources including technicians, bandwidth and server capacity already in place users increased at an astounding rate.
MySpace operates from advertising revenue alone. There is absolutely no cost to the end user. MySpace is capable of using behavioral targeting to customize the ads that each user sees. Only Yahoo! has been able to collect more data about it’s users in order to customize advertising. The success of MySpace has trickled down to many young entrepreneurs who provide widgets or accessories that add to the functionality of the networking powerhouse.
MySpace encourages users to customize their profile pages by entering HTML. In addition musicians are allowed to upload and share up to 6 MP3 songs provided it is their own work or they have permission to use the songs. Over eight million artists owe their discovery to MySpace so far! Political organizations and politicians themselves have created MySpace pages to expand their membership and to get more young viewers involved in campaigning. MySpace offers many engaging features including Bulletins, Groups, MySpace IM, MySpace TV, Applications, MySpace Mobile, MySpace News, MySpace Classifieds, MySpace Karaoke and MySpace polls.
MySpace networking has many positive aspects, unfortunately, they are matched in number by negative aspects. MySpace does not have a customer service number readily available. Most problems are solved via networking with other MySpace users. HTML code is rarely met because those using the code are not experienced. This can lead to accessibility problems and freeze up web browsers.
Security is another major problem. Advertisements are abundant and some provide links to fake login screens that trick a user into entering their MySpace user name and password. Spam bulletins and infections are prime examples of security breaches. Social issues arise such as teens inadvertently inviting a large number of people to parties. People are also more likely to present themselves in ways that they would not in person which undercuts the purposeful design of MySpace which is to bring people together. Stalkers also are able to gather a large amount of information about an individual via MySpace.
Facebook is also a social networking website. Unlike MySpace its origin is not corporate but academic! Membership was initially offered to only Harvard College students. Shortly after in March of 2004 membership was expanded to include Stanford, Columbia and Yale. In September of 2005 Facebook welcomed high school students by invitation only then employees of Apple Inc. and Microsoft. Finally, Facebook expanded its membership to include everyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address in September 2006. Facebook members join networks which are organized by city, school, workplace and region.
Facebook remains privately owned by Facebook Inc. but has investors who are major players including PayPal co-founder Peter Theil, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Microsoft.
Facebook offers many of the same features as MySpace like banner ads, creating customized profiles, and the viewing of the profile data being restricted to users from the network or confirmed friends. Facebook’s features include the Wall, Pokes, Photos, News Feed, Facebook Notes, Chat and Gifts.
The most significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization. Facebook only allows plain text as opposed to HTML and Cascading Style Sheets. But despite its 3 year head start in the general public, MySpace fell behind Facebook in May of 2008 with a total of 123.9 million unique Facebook visitors. According to Alexa, Facebook’s ranking among all websites went from 60th to 7th from September 2006 to September 2007. It is currently 5th.
Currently young people are leaving MySpace in droves for Facebook. Some speculate that it is typical teens moving on from one trend to the next. Others speculate that Facebook attracts more affluent users. Facebook originated with Ivy League students who then attracted high school kids who were eager to become part of the culture in their upcoming college experience. Danah Boyd, a researcher for the University of California, Berkley, claims that the “goody-two-shoes, jocks, athletes, and other ‘good’ kids” are going to Facebook. These ‘good’ kids are attracted first to the Facebook’s origin and they are also eager to stay away from the controversy that surrounds MySpace. Therefore there is evidence of a class divide rather than a change in trend for all young users. It will be interesting to see if Facebook becomes similarly polluted.
MySpace leads Facebook in revenue earned form advertisements. But recently, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in unique visitors. This is an astounding accomplishment being that MySpace had a three year lead and enjoys immense popularity. Users are leaving MySpace for Facebook in droves and it is speculated that this transition may be a result of class rather than trend.

Tags: Facebook, Facebook Inc., Myspace, Myspace Vs. Facebook, Online Social Network

How to Use Twitter for Marketing

Tags: Facebook, social media, squidoo, Tweetmyblog, twitter

The Power of Social Media Marketing

The internet has changed the way we do business-indeed, our whole society–in ways unthinkable even ten short years ago. The sheer connectedness of the World Wide Web is what wowed people then, and still does today. But the “web” is no longer just a collection of servers talking to each other, with all the content controlled by a handful of people who understand how to create HTML pages. Now everybody can connect to the entire world all by themselves, using any number of social networking sites that have the power to create overnight sensations.Social media marketing capitalizes on the popularity and reach of sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, and dozens of others to build communities of common interest. Blogs, chat forums, collaborative sites like Wikipedia, opinion or review sites like ZDnet, educational or tutorial sites like WebMonkey, or gaming and other entertainment sites have the capacity to draw huge audiences all wanting specific things. Companies who create sub-communities within existing communities such as MySpace, or create a new “destination” offering useful information, can lift their brand awareness without overtly marketing their products.Daily or weekly blogs offer useful information and provide a reason for visitors to come back often. Many times, a product’s users, like Harley Davidson enthusiasts or skiers who like a particular manufacturer’s skis, like to come together to discuss the pros and cons, the ways they have customized their products, or new ways to use them. These communities are self-sustaining; the manufacturer merely needs to provide the forum and keep order, while providing new content as needed.Targeted advertising on established sites can return high value for the marketing dollar with little to no additional effort by a company to establish the forum in the first place. However, taking a proactive role in creating a community gives a company more control over its look and feel and content, reducing the chances of illegal uses of the company’s logo or product images degrading the brand.If you thought that MySpace was just for chatty teenagers, think again. Smart companies once embraced the web itself as progressive; now they must continue to think outside the box to capitalize on the full power of social media marketing, or miss out on some golden opportunities.

Tags: Facebook, internet marketing, Myspace, social media, Social Media Marketing

Using Social Networking Sites Such as Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, and Others. What are They and How are They Used?

Learn about using social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and others. What are they and how are they used?

A small but rapidly growing percentage of employers are using social networking sites as part of their recruiting process as well as part of their business processes.

Social networking sites can be dangerous when used as part of a background checking process but present tremendous opportunities when used as part of the sourcing process.

MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster are amongst the most popular sites, especially amongst high school and college students. Unlike most sites where even regular visitors spend at most minutes a week and look at a handful of pages, visitors to social networking sites often invest hours a day at the sites, viewing, and disclose a tremendous amount of information about themselves and their friends.

On-line recruiting expert Steven Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com career site has tried to demystify social networking sites and demonstrate the tremendous risks and opportunities they present to employers in articles he has written. The articles are recommended for people who want to find out more about these sites and their scopes and opportunities, both positive and negative sides.

We realize that more and more companies use Facebook for a reference check amongst new hires candidates. Whether this is positive or not, whether it is ethical or not is not the discussion here, but we should ask ourselves. Has our private sphere become to public, and do we have a responsibility ourselves as individuals to protect our private information if we do not want some elements of society to use them against us? My personal answer is that we should be careful with information publicized in sites like Facebook. Both legal as well as illegal companies and individuals can use the information on Facebook if it serves their purpose. Therefore the trap for us as individuals could be that we open up for big brother syndrome ourselves, without thinking of the consequences of this.

Serena Software uses Facebook as part of their intranet. 800 employees in 18 countries. Facebook is the frontend of their intranet with links to a cheap CMS system that is beind their firewall. It all started with Facebook Friday. The management in Serena Software encouraged their workers to use one hour every Friday to update their profile on Faceboook and create relations to collegues, customers and partners, friends and family. So Facebook acts as a front end with a CMS in the back end where links to confidential documents behind the firewall is performed. The process of change in Serena Software was focused on web 2.0. 35% of their 800 coworkers 800 does virtual work together. The management wanted that these coworkers should know each other better and get to the same understanding, make relations and feel engagement in the company’s activities. Facebook is free and a good web 2.0 sofware, so it fell natural for Serena to use this application as part of their intranet. They made privat groups for the employees on Faceboook and developed some simple programs for the intranet. Then they made links to relevant documents inside the firewall and therefore secure.The make press releases on Facebook and the human relationship department makes links to relevant information sources. This way the employees learns not only about the documents, but also about their coworkers behind the documents.

Some customers communicates today with Serena Software through Facebook. These customers does not use e-mail anymore. The relations between the customers and the coworkers in Serena Software has become stronger, since they know each other very well on a personal level Both employees in Serena Software as well as the customers updates their profiles on a regular basis and tell each others what they do, so it creates a stronger bond through Facebook.

Serena also use Facebook to recruit employees to the company. Potential coworkers knows about Serenas cooperation tools and therefore easy can get in touch with the environment and potential decision makers easier, Serena will know about the candidates since they also updates their Facebook on a regular basis and therefore latest news around this person is known.

Ernst & Young hires more than 5,500 college students and recent graduates pr year for internships and entry level career opportunities, only in North America alone. In addition to the traditional on-campus recruiting efforts, employee referrals, and advertising on job boards and other media, Ernst&Young now has a page on Facebook, which is one of the most popular social networking sites amongst college students.

Ernst &Young’s sponsored Facebook page contains information and discussion boards aimed at college students. Although students and other individuals use Facebook for free, Ernst&Young’s paid an undisclosed fee to Facebook as their page is more like advertising than it is to a traditional Facebook profile page. The risk of this is of course that there could be negative comments posted to their page by students and other individuals who use Facebook and even enabling people who don’t like Ernst &Young to connect more easily and perhaps allow their negative views to be more widely disseminated.

The price paid for the presence on Facebook is only part of the true cost, since Ernst & Young will have to take the costs related to the tremendous amount of staff time required to properly maintain a Facebook page. If they are not responsive to students who contact them through the page, they will look out-of-touch and do more harm to their brand than good.

Ernst & Young’s page is the first sponsored page on Facebook that is used exclusively for recruitment purposes. Other organizations such as Microsoft have pages that include information about their hiring efforts, but this is the first time that an organization’s Facebook page has been only about their efforts to hire college students who are searching for internships and recent graduates who are hunting for entry level jobs and other career opportunities.

So far about over 5000 Facebook users have linked to the Ernst & Young page as members. Once you have a Facebook profile, you can search for people or organizations which are of interest to you. You can find the Ernst & Young page by typing in Ernst and Young (without the quotation marks) into the Facebook search engine. Facebook then gives you the option of becoming a member of the Ernst & Young page and you can accept this. That’s all it takes. Now Ernst & Young’s recruiters will be able to review your profile. If you are a college junior or senior with a high GPA in a program such as business, finance, or accounting, the phone would probably be ringing right now.

This is probably a brilliant move by Ernst & Young. This is a big step towards Ernst & Young becoming more transparent. It also sends a powerful message to students that Ernst & Young is listening to their needs, wants, and desires. Recruiters who tell highly qualified candidates that they must apply through traditional channels will lose those candidates if those candidates want to connect through newer channels such as Facebook because those candidates have options and they know it.

Other companies such as Opera software has also adopted Facebook as a part of their business and uses it actively for various purposes.

Tags: Cms, College, Ernst & Young, Facebook, Friendster, High School, Intranet, Kristoffersen, Microsoft, Myspcae, Network, Networking, New Hires, Online Recruiting, Stig, Stig Kristoffersen, Stig-arne Kristoffersen, Web2

How to Build an Impressive Social Networking Presence, Beginning With Facebook

Tags: Facebook, linkedin, Myspace, social media, Social Media Optimization, Social Networking, squidoo, Web 2.0

Social Media Marketing For Beginners

In the recent past years Social Media Marketing and Social Media have dominated and defined Internet marketing. The popularity of social sites like MySpace and social bookmarking sites like Digg has caused this push. Social media has two main components, user generated content and the networking capability allowing you to form groups of friends and others that you can share content with.
Sites like MySpace, Zubby, and Facebook allow users to create profiles using text, videos and pictures to design their pages. These can then be shared with a selected group of other people in a special “friends” network and if the user wishes these pages can be shared over the whole social network.
Sites like Digg, Flickr, Associated Content and YouTube allow users to submit links to their favorite news articles online, pictures, articles, and videos then vote on the content that others have submitted. The most popular content is displayed on the front page of the site and the other pages are available to the general public to browse through. These drive traffic to the site and to the pages that are bookmarked.
There are many different ways to use these types of sites, either together or alone.
The use of these types of sites to promote your products and services is what is known as social media marketing. The types of traffic you get once your content is discovered and becomes well known in social media are primary traffic and secondary traffic.
Primary traffic is the direct traffic from the site that you used to make your site popular. If you are using a site that has fairly heavy traffic like Digg to promote your site you could get a large amount of traffic in a short amount of time so you need to make sure your site can handle the traffic, otherwise it may crash.
Once a site becomes popular on a social media site it gets talked about. When people talk about these sites they post links to the site which draws more traffic to the content. This indirect traffic is the secondary traffic. It is the secondary traffic that continues to flow to your site after the initial surge of direct traffic slows.
The benefits of primary and secondary traffic coming from social media sites include exposure to your site initially. Once your site is known by the general public then organic traffic will begin and repeat visitors start to show up, as long as you have something to entice them to come back.
Natural links to your site are beneficial because they are given by people or companies who have nothing to gain from your business venture. These are generally from relevant sites increasing the likelihood that visitors are going to be genuinely interested in your products and services. These links improve your search engine rankings and improve organic traffic.
Social media marketing allows your site to get exposure in a larger site and to a larger group of people. If your traffic levels off you can use social media marketing to jump start your traffic and work on taking your search engine traffic to the next level.
The alternative for increasing your search engine traffic is using pay per click advertisement. Using pay per click campaigns can help you to sustain increased traffic from the search engines but this traffic comes with a price tag.
Using social media marketing is free and can increase your traffic and your ratings in the search engines. Getting your site notices a couple times a year in the social media arena can make your site popular enough to bring in traffic throughout the year.

Tags: Business Success, Digg, Facebook, internet marketing, Marketing, Myspace, social media, Zubby

Facebook Business Applications and Marketing Tools – Even Create Your Own

The idea behind using a social networking site as Facebook as a venue for doing business is building a user base in the form of a community who respond to you as a person or to your product. If you just turn your page into one big advertisement, you are not going to get much in the way of a response. You need to educate people about the product without coming across as a hard sell.
You want to create the impression that you are here for socializing, not business. People will come to trust you and be more likely to buy your product or service if you can do this.
Facebook has built in tools which can be used to build your business. These include:
- Social Ads
- Pages
- Beacon
- Insights
- Platform
- Polls
These tools can help you to build awareness of your brand through this social networking site and bring in potential clients. Needless to say, you are going to have to learn to use them effectively. Read on to find out how to harness these tools to build your business using social networking sites.
You can learn how to take further advantage of these features by visiting the facebook website business section.
SOCIAL ADS
Social ads have a lot of promise for building your business since they can go directly to the news feeds of your Facebook friends. Anyone who is on your friends list will be able to get the word about your business right on their profile page.
This is also a very easy way of target marketing. You can control exactly who sees your ads – and target marketing is the way to get sales.
FACEBOOK PAGES
You can make a Face book page for a business, just as you would for yourself. This allows people to interact with and even become friends with your business. It is a great way to make a lot of people aware of your product and your brand who would not otherwise.
You know when someone becomes friends with your business on Facebook that you have a potential client; at the very least, they have shown some interest. People can interact with your business as they would with any of their other social networking site friends – they can leave comments and generally enhance the experience of a visit to your page.
You can use this social networking site to your best advantage by adding features that will appeal to your target market and fit in with the brand image you are aiming to create. Quizzes, games, a Facebook group and so on.
FACEBOOK BEACON
Like social ads, Facebook Beacon gives you the ability to build your business by promoting yourself via your Facebook friends news feeds. You can set Beacon to notify all of your Facebook friends whenever you have a new product available, or any other sort of news or information you would like to disseminate amongst your Facebook friends. All you need to do is to add a little code to your Facebook page (this can be done by copy and paste, so no need to panic).
This encourages more interaction with your page, the website of your business and your company in general. This also helps get the word out about your businesses product or service.
Do not fret that you will be mercilessly spamming your Facebook friends and invading their privacy – they can opt out of these updates at any time they choose. You of course have the same ability for Facebook Beacon updates from others.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
If you are using facebook as a method of promoting your business you will of course want to know just who is checking out your Facebook page, clicking on your ads and joining your friends list. Facebook Insights is a tool which can give you a lot more detail on these sorts of statistics, which can help you to evaluate the efficacy of your campaign.
Armed with this information you can make the call as to whether viral marketing is working in your favor. Word of mouth is one of the best means of advertising and Facebook can facilitate it on a large scale. Facebook Insights lets you figure out what parts of your campaign are working and which are not as well as giving you valuable demographic information which will help you refine your campaign further.
FACEBOOK PLATFORM
Facebook Platform is an exciting tool for business indeed. Programmers can use this tool to build programs which will work with Facebook and add to the usefulness and fun of your Facebook page. If people like what you have on your page, they will spread the word and this build your client base.
You can add all manner of different applications to your site using this platform. Many opt for games, quizzes and other interactive features. You can have a look at the Applications page on the Facebook site to get an idea what sort of things others are using the platform for. These kinds of features can really help you build your brand image; take advantage of them.
FACEBOOK POLLS
Facebook polls can be a great way to gather demographic information from people using the site. Since you can make the poll interactive and fun to use, you’ll have no trouble gathering data. Best of all, you can target your polling.
You can make sure your polls are targeted just where you want them to be since you already have access to some data such as marital status and age of your Facebook friends. This helps you keep your polling relevant.
Do not forget about these valuable tools – they can really help out your business.
Anyone who is willing to put in just a little bit of effort can make their own applications for Facebook. You just need to learn Facebook Markup Language – there are plenty of tutorials online which can help you learn the ropes of this quickly.
Remember to have a look through what is already out there in terms of Facebook applications before you develop your own. If everyone is already using a very similar application, not too many of your fellow facebook users will be enticed by it. Do something a little different if you want to grab the attentionof people.
CREATING APPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS
With just a little bit of programming know how, anybody can make and distribute their own applications. You’ll be doing this to build your business and it can make a big difference. Applications can really draw in people and keep them on your site. Games are especially popular and can build your brand while keeping users engaged and entertained.
You would be unwise to neglect the use of these applications available to you through Facebook. They can help get the word out about your business – and that is why you made a Facebook page for your business in the first place, no?
You will also be building a sense of community amongst all of these potential customers which will help you get sales.
Here are a few tips for getting the best results from your applications:
1) Make it relevant
In marketing, relevancy is everything. If your potential customers can not get into it, or if it is unclear how the application ties into your product or service, rethink your application.
2) Privacy policy
Even if they are on facebook to socialize, people still want their privacy to be respected. This is why there are friend lists and groups, to which one must be invited. Privacy is a natural human desire and Facebook facilitates this while still allowing for socialization. Remember to respect the privacy of users and retain that trust you have worked so hard to build with them.
3) Free distribution
Once your application is finished and ready to go, you will distribute it. You can do this by listing it on the site along with all of the other Facebook applications and then invite others to install it. If your facebook friends like your application, they will spread the word.

Tags: Facebook, internet marketing, Marketing, Promotion. Small Business