Graph Search

This is the new way of searching on Facebook. It is very easy to use and can help businesses a lot. An example of a graph search is "Friends who like Tomatoes" and then it will show you a list of friends who like tomatoes. This can help a lot say for a local business. You have to make sure your business is properly defined on Facebook as you can search the type of business you're looking for and the area e.g."rock climbing places in Dublin". This will come up with a list of all the businesses defined as that with the location in Dublin.

This means that it is very important to keep everything up to date on Facebook as it becomes an increasingly used tool for finding businesses and people. Graph search also focuses on conversation so it would have a list of friends who like the business or talked about the business or was tagged at the business etc. This means that you have to encourage people to interact with the page as much as possible. It also uses interests to personalise results a lot and will benefit small localised businesses a lot by showing up for people in close proximity and people with friends who interact with the business etc. Its still in early days and I think that there are some changes on the horizon.

Cheers :),

Dan

Facebook Offers

Facebook has recently brought out another feature that will help business in promoting themselves to the Facebook world. The feature called Facebook Offers is similar to the idea of the vouchers that you can claim on Groupon. Except the advantage of Facebook Offers to the customer over the likes of Groupon offers is that you can claim the offer without having to pay anything to the business. Facebook Offers also has a number of advantages to the likes of Groupon is that the offers is completely customisable to you and your business, it is free for the business to post an offer and it only cost you if the vouchers are claimed by your customers unlike other offer providers.
So how are they claimed?

When someone claims an offer, they'll receive an email that they can show at the Page's physical location to get the discount. They then can claim the offer in a number of different ways.




Pages can post offers that people can redeem online, in store or both online and in store.

The offers are customisable to your business, you can put a barcode on it, you can make whatever offer you like and you can set the expiry date that suits you and your offer, you can set an amount of claims available. You can also add any terms and conditions to you offer that you like.
When you have made you offer to make the most of it would be advisable that you would make it a sponsored post. This would open your offer to more potential customer for your business and help you grow your fan base of Facebook. I think that this type of offer you be a better offer provider than the likes of Groupon as you don’t have to pay Facebook for the service.

Good luck with your Facebook Offer!

Until next time,
Andrew

Advertising on Facebook

Advertising is what keeps Facebook going and free to the world. The secret behind its success is the wide variety of its users and the ads that can be targeted to very specific potential customers for your business.

Once you have a business page set up and rolling, you should start planning an advertising campaign. You should always start by identifying your audience. Put into consideration your current customers, demographic, and even trending interests of your potential audience. This will help you create ads that can attract the right people and be the most efficient in grabbing customers attention.

When you're filling in the criteria of the users you want to advertise to you can see the size of the population you are targeting which will give you an idea of how much you should be spending.

After you've chosen your audience you can choose your campaign name and budget. They will never charge you more than your budget which is great. It means you can be assured that once you spent all your money, the campaign will just stop so there's no worrying of spending over your expectations. The pricing scheme is defaulted at CPM (Cost Per Impression). This means you are charged every time your ad appears on a page. This can be changed through advanced options which I would recommend looking through before choosing which one would suit your campaign best. Facebook will automatically show your ad who they think will be more likely to react to it.

If you really want to make the best out of your future ads. I would recommend testing different ads and using Facebook's tools to keep an eye on what works and what doesn't. This is the main advantages of on-line advertising is that its easily measured. It would be crazy not to take advantage of that or any of the other great tools available to Facebook businesses.

Peace out
Dan

Hosting an event on Facebook.

So you have your page set up and now your company wants to host an event for your clients and followers. Facebook is host to millions off events a year and it is made rather user friendly by Facebook!

You can have your event like within minutes and I will walk you through it now.

Click the Events tab on your business’s Facebook Page.

If this is your first event, you may need to click the + sign to access the Events tab.

1. Click the Create Event button in the upper-right corner to display the Create an Event page.

The Create an Event page appears.

2. Click the drop down menu.

3. Fill in the details about your event.

The Create an Event page asks you to fill in information about When, What Are You Planning, Where, and More Info. Use many rich keywords in the What Are You Planning and More Info boxes because Facebook events are indexed by search engines, which could mean extra traffic for your event.

4. Click the Select Guests button.

Inviting friends to the event isn’t mandatory; you can simply publish your event and hope for the best. However, Facebook makes inviting friends to your event so easy that it’s hard not to. Plus, it’s a good idea to get the ball rolling in your event to promote your business in some way.

5. In the Select Guests dialog box that appears, invite friends in any of the ways offered.

You can select friends directly from the filter list, search for friends by using the search text box on top of the list, invite an entire Friends List you created, and invite non-Facebook members to the event by typing their e-mail addresses (separated by commas) into the Invite by E-Mail Address box.

6. Click the Add a Personal Message link.

In the Add a Personal Message text box, provide something compelling for the reader and make sure the value that invitees can derive by coming to your event is front and center in your message. You can invite your first 100 people with this invite method.

7. Click Save and Close.

You return to the Create an Event page.

8. Select or deselect the remaining two options.

The Show the Guest List on the Event Page option allows the guest list to be seen. By selecting this check box, your guest list is visible on the event’s page. The Non-Admins Can Write on the Wall option allows invitees to write on the Wall. By selecting this check box, your guests can add their own content on the Wall.

9. Click the Add Event Photo button on the left side of the Create an Event page.

The Add Event Photo dialog box opens.

10. Click the Browse button to search your computer for a graphic file, select the picture that you want to use, and click the Close button.

Add a photo that best describes your event. Logos can be boring, so take the time to find an image that visually represents your event in a way that makes people want to attend.

You’re taken to the event page where you or your fans can dress up the event even more by adding comments photos, videos, and links to the event’s status update box.

11. After you enter all the pertinent details about your event, click the Create Event button.

Ref: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-create-and-invite-people-to-your-businesss-.html

Conor.

Competitions and Promotions for your Business Page

Do you have a Facebook business Page? If you do and you are looking to improve it, running a Facebook competition is a great way to improve and grow your business page. Competitions are a great way to get people talking and interacting with your page, which is what you want to keep things on your page interesting!

Before starting, it is important that you understand Facebook’s competition rules. If you don’t adhere to these rules Facebook might shut down your page. For those of you who are unsure, the following rules may come in useful in the future:


Basic English: You must administer ALL contests on Facebook via a third-party app ON the Facebook platform and not by using Facebook’s features.

Without out going into great detail, this is a great starting point for any of you who are looking to set up promotions and competitions on your business page.

That’s it for now,
John

Promoted Posts

It’s getting harder and harder to reach all your fans on Facebook and Facebook isn’t making it easy for business to do it. However, with new features allows being added to Facebook to aid business pages on Facebook, you can always get to your fans and potential fans.

I am going to discuss Facebooks relatively new feature, promoted/sponsored posts. This means that you can page Facebook to promote your post to a much larger audience. You can choose to promote a post to you current fans or to your current fans and your fans friends, allowing you gain new people and to still stay in touch with current fans. According to Facebook, Pages organically reach about 16% of their fans on average. Which is a shockingly low reach in my view, this is only organic views, and this doesn’t included viral views that are created by your fans. This varies depending on the interaction of your fans with your post, what I mean here is that the more likes or comments your posts receives the more viral views that your post will receive as the friends of the people that interacted with your post will now get to see your post.

To promote a post:

1.    Click on the Promote Post

2.    You then get to edit you Audience, Budget and Duration

a.    As you change these it will give you an approximate reach of your promotion.

3.    Finally click on Promote Post

You can also edit your payment method.

Until next time,

Andrew

How to: Convert Personal Pages to Fan Pages

Hey blog viewers, I'm going to go through the process of converting your personal page to a fan page which is the proper page type for businesses, organisations etc.

First and foremost is why would you want to change. Well its actually against the terms and conditions of Facebook to have a personal page for businesses. But on top of that they offer many different features such as a vanity URL once you've got 25 fans. The fan pages also look more professional and 

When you make the switch, they will move over all your friends into fans. Facebook will also keep your name as the fan page name and you will keep your profile picture. Unfortunately all your timeline information will be lost BUT you can fortunately download all the information which I would recommend doing before converting. This is done by following the steps below.

1. Click  at the top right of any Facebook page and select Account Settings
2. Click General in the left-hand column
3. Click on "Download a copy of your Facebook data"
4. Click Start My Archive

You will have a business account with Facebook once you've converted which means you'll be able to advertise directly with Facebook. They do limit the information you can see on personal pages such as fans. You also cannot add friends to your page. Fans is the new friends. 

Followed is the URL which is key to making the switch, but beware, you cannot change back unless you submit a request for a reversal which would be declined if the page was in fact not for personal use.

Happy networking,

Dan