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

Merging Duplicate Facebook Pages

On Facebook there are a huge amount of business pages and lots of these are set up by mistake and are gaining likes that your page should be getting, thankfully, Facebook does allow you merge duplicate pages for the same business. However to be able to merge pages they must represent the same thing and have a similar page name. First you may need to claim one of these page and how you claim them can be seen in a previous blog by John called, “Claiming a Facebook page”. Ones you claim this extra page you can then merge it to your official page. However, you can only merge the page with fewer likes into the one with more likes. Merging pages is actually quite easy to do.

Firstly:


1. Make sure you're using Facebook as yourself and not as your business page. Go to the page with fewer likes.


2. On top of the screen, click Edit Page


3. Select Update Info.


4. From the left sidebar, select Resources.


5. Click the merge duplicate pages link.


6. Check the box next to the Page you want to merge with. If you're merging pages with a location, they must have the same address information. Others wise you may lose all your “check-ins”

Merging Pages combines all your likes and check-ins, but unfortunately all other content like the page posts of the merging pages, photos and the username will be permanently deleted from the page. Thankfully assuming your official page has more likes than the page you are merging it with, it will keep all its contents and remain unchanged, except for the addition of likes and check-ins that were merged from the Page with fewer likes.


Then the page with fewer likes will be removed from Facebook and you will not be able to unmerge it. This will allow you cut out pages that are gaining likes that your official page should be getting.


I hope this is will come in helpful when you’re merging pages.

Until next time,
Andrew

Claiming a Facebook Page

We all “like” pages on Facebook but not all of them are official pages. This can be a problem when setting up a page for your business. I hope to give you some useful pointers on how to resolve these problems! When planning to set up a fan page for your business or brand you may notice that fans have set up a number of fan pages impersonating the brand/business. This is a breach of Facebook’s terms and conditions. It happens for a variety of other reasons. For example, if someone checks into a place that doesn’t already have a page a new page is then created to represent the location.

The good news – If you are the official representative of a business, organisation or brand and someone has created a page, report it. If no one is managing the page, you can request to claim it. While you are reclaiming ownership/admin rights of the page, Facebook can also merge the fans of the other pages in one place if you ask nicely! 

You may be asking why would I want to do that… 

Think about it, if it's possible to gather fans of your target audience from the unofficial pages it already gets your official page off to a great start. Another scenario may be if you already have an official business/brand page but one of the unofficial pages has a higher number of fans that your page. This is a disadvantage to you, ranking your page at number 2 in search results. When searching people will naturally be drawn to the most popular page or page with the highest number of fans. In this situation you can again contact Facebook and ask them to merge the fans onto your official page. 

This process can be completed in a short period of time proving a number of rules and regulations that are in place. For example: 

• If the fan page has been set up as an “official page” it is possible to merge the fans as they are impersonating. If the page has a disclaimer saying it was set up by fans’ it is not possible.

• If the unofficial page is named after your business/brand’s name you have right to reclaim the fans. If the page is spelled differently or is not name exactly after your business/brand this is not possible.

I hope these pointers will come in useful to you and your business. If you have any doubts as to what you can and can’t do, the staff at Facebook will help guide you through the process!

That’s it for now,
John.

Facebook Insights

If you have a Facebook page for your Business, then you must use all the tools it provides to your marketing advantage. Facebook Insights is a excellent way to help analyse the growth of your page. You can also use it's data and details to you're advantage! Here is a handy, informative guide to understanding Facebook Insights.


The question you are asking - How does it work?


Once 30 people have “Liked” your Page, you have access to Facebook Insights, This Facebook Insights widget on the side of your page gives you a gold mine of interesting data. Facebook Insights is broken into a number of areas which I will explain:

• "Likes"

The likes page gives you information on your fans. This info consists of their gender, age, location and the languages they speak. A very usefull tool the "likes" page gives is the source of where your "Likes" came from. This is a very usefull tool for targgeting specific messages to your audience. 

• "Reach"

This shows how you reached your audience. It provides you with information on wether it was organic, paid, viral or total. This is essential as you can find out how people are finding out about your page. It also gives you an insight on what you should do in relation to promoting your page. For example, if organic and viral is not paying off you should consider using facebook ads to inrease your likes.
It also shows page views, tabs views (visits on various tabs of your page) and external referrers. This is another usefull tool as you can see if people are linking back to your page from external websites. These external websites might be you own website or blogs. You also have an idea of how many pages people viewed while visiting your fan page. This number may be low but may not be a problem. The reason being that most people who like your page may rather get news from you through their news feed/news ticker instead of actually accessing your page.

• "Talking About This"

Talking about this is publicly displayed on the left sidebar under the number of Likes. It is an excellent measure of actual engagement of your facebook page. Its includes stratistics on the following activities that happen on your page on a wekly basis:

• Liking a page

• Liking, Commenting, Sharing a page post.

• Posting to a page's wall.

• Answering a question posted.

• Attending an event.

• Mentioning the page in a post.

• Tagging a page.

• Checking in at a place (if your page is merged with it).

Big fan numbers doesn't mean your page is healthy. It is important that people are talking about and interacting with your page.
Facebook Insights has dramatically changed the way you track your page. You can see what you are doing good, bad and what you need to change in order to make improvements. It provides usefull information which helps you make adjustments to your strategy. In general, Facebook Insights helps take your page to the next level!

Untill next time,
John

Checking in

What are you doing? Who are you with? Are you having fun? Where are you? CHECK IN

With society all about staying in contact with one another and sharing what we are doing with our friends, family and everyone else in our ‘friends list’ on our Facebook page the face we can now CHECK IN at our local business or favourite spot.

So why check in? This means you can engage with your customers and grow your business. You can have check in deals which allow you to reward your loyal customers.

With each Facebook user having on average 130 friends word and mouth takes over and is brilliant for the growth of your business.

Worldwide there is 200 million mobile Facebook users who are looking for deals, give them a reason to check in to your business, give them the opportunity to make your business trendy and modern and more importantly get your business TRENDING!

Conor. 

Growing Page Likes

Increasing your Fanbase

                Make sure to invite everyone who is fans of your company/organisation or whatever by getting all your real fans to become Facebook fans. This can be done by contacting them through however you contact them usually e.g. Emailing your email subscribers. This will start up a great fan base to begin with.

                Another crucial aspect of building a fan base is to make sure your existing fans interact with your page. This is very important as it’s like free advertising.  Any time someone likes or comments on a post it is shown to practically all of his/her friends. This is why you see organisations having competitions by asking their audience to like and share to enter. If you have entertaining statuses and updates then you don’t need to have competitions every day. People will just like and share naturally.

                Make sure that your statuses aren't too long and don’t contain information overload. This can cause only very loyal fans to take notice of them and this will decrease your audience numbers. A great way to make everyone happy is to give a link to the rest of the information. This would also give them a call to action just like an average website. Pictures are also a great way to attract fans because they are eye friendly and can often be more entertaining than lines of text.

                If you have some cash then why not create an advertising campaign. This is the old fashioned way but it certainly works. Advertising on Facebook is the obvious way but you can even advertise anywhere where your target audience would be. Just always remember to have a strategy and measure the success of individual ad so that you know what works and what fails for future advertising campaigns.

               At the end of the day content and interaction is the most important thing. Looking after your current fan base is the only way to keep your audience interested and listening to their needs will not only get you the promotion your page needs, but also make your existing fan base and any future fan base want your information, entertaining pictures or competitions to appear on their newsfeed.

Feel free to comment below and let me know if there’s anything I've forgotten to mention.

I’ll be back,

Dan

Choose a page type

Different types of pages

Setting up a page can be simple and the process is made very effortless by Facebook’s simple interactive interface.

The six different options for types of pages available to you are as follows,

Local Business or Place

Choose the category.

Business name.

Address and Phone Number.

Agree to terms.

Artist, band and Public Figure

Choose a category.

Agree to terms.

Brand or Product

Choose category.

Name of product.

Agree to terms.

Cause or Community

Name of group.

Agree to terms.

Company, Organisation or Institution

Choose a category.

Name of above group.

Agree to terms.

Entertainment

Name of group.

Agree to terms.

Pick which of the above type of page suits you and proceed to the next stage. This is a very simple first process just be sure to pick the correct group for your self, product or brand!

Here is a link to the option page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Conor.

Want a fan page but not a personal page?

Unfortunately, if this is what you wanted to do, you can’t as Facebook currently don’t let you. As to set up a Facebook fan page you must have a personal private page as this personal page allows you be the administrator of the page. A page must have an administrator to work.

There are a number of ways of keeping your fan page that allows you not having a personal page. The first option is to add another administrator to the page and they can then take over the running of the fan page, allowing you to delete your profile page from Facebook. However, the problem with this is that you cannot access the Facebook page now, unless the other personal that you gave administration rights to, is willing to give you their login details that will allow you access to the fan page. Therefore, this is not an ideal situation.

The other option is that you set up your profile page and your fan page linked to that page, then change the privacy setting of you profile page. As you can see in the picture below you can edit your privacy settings. You can change who sees your information and what they see on your page. You cannot block everyone and everything but you can cut it down to a minimum and if you don’t have personal details on it and you don’t have a profile picture then people won’t know that the page owner is you. This means that your profile page is just there as a link to allow you access to you fan page. Therefore, this is probably the best option for you as it stands.

Thanks for reading, if you have a question on the topic leave a comment below.

Until next time,

Andrew

Time to make a page

Hello,

So now we have explained why it is so important to build a Facebook page for your business we are going to explain how to do this. Luckily enough Facebook make this very simple and user friendly and I will talk you through the steps.

Create a Free Facebook page.

·         Choose a page name that suits you.
 ·         Choose a category that suits your business.
 ·         Choose a logo that is associated to your business as a profile picture.
 ·         Write a short summary about your company.
 ·         Choose a memorable Facebook web address.
 ·         Showcase your product with your cover photo!
 Your page is now Live on the internet. Congratulations.
Until next time,

Conor

Why is Facebook vital to website success

Facebook is essential to your website because it acts as an intermediary between the users and your website. This has changed a lot as many users used to have to log onto the website every time they wanted information on the website. Many users now use Facebook to get a brief description on any news on a website that the Facebook admin promotes. When they “like” a page, then certain updates come up on the users’ news feed, instead of having to browse the actual website for information.  This means that your information might become part of your users’ daily information intake. Facebook is becoming a huge part of people’s lives and adaptation to this is key to any websites success.

                The world of Facebook is ever changing with Facebook attempting to revolutionize the social network experience. Their newest feature is the Facebook Graph Search. If this succeeds, people will be likely to use Facebook to find specific people, companies or even websites. The new graph search will enable a person to search for very specific criteria (e.g. computer repair company in Ireland who has an interest in Apple). Facebook seems to be moving towards effortless of available information and with this brings users who will use Facebook for information gathering.

                Word of mouth is key to your Facebook page as it suggests “likes” to you depending on your interests or your friends Facebook activity. This means that for every “like” you get, there are many others who see this and might act on it or even just register it and might influence action later from another cue to your Facebook page or website. This means that your Facebook page is being bounced around the Facebook world seeking new fans constantly, just like a snowball.

                You may be wondering why I've focused so much on your Facebook pages success rather than the website which you want to succeed. Well the answer is simple. Imagine you found this interesting or life relevant Facebook page. The posts might be helping you with work or might feature a product which would be great for the new study area. The information is great and relevant but you need more, like more detailed information or maybe a way to purchase the product. No matter what your product or service is the user will click that little blue link under the profile picture for more of what you have to offer. 

Thanks for listening,
Daniel

Why Facebook is important for your Business

Facebook is the King of all social media sites. With Facebook users spending several hours a day on Facebook, it means they have a great chance of seeing your business. Facebook is a worldwide company meaning no matter where your business is based you will have potential customers on Facebook. It is a great way to promote your business and allows you encourage your Facebook likes to go to your website.

Having a presents on Facebook is vital to your business as more and more people are now using the social media site as their primary search engine and it is gaining ground on Google every day. This means if your business isn't on Facebook you may be missing out. It also allows your business move away from the anonymous front and become more personal, by giving your Facebook page a voice and tone. This means that your customers are more likely to interact with your page and ask questions, which in turn shows that your business cares about every customer.

Also in these current economic times Facebook allows start up business have an online presents but still save money. As businesses can now just have a Facebook page until they can afford and build up their business before building a website.

Until next time,

Andrew

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Facebook for Business

tealorbit.com Facebook for Business

Over one billion people like and comment an average of 3.2 billion times every day. When you have a strong presence on Facebook, your business is part of these conversations and has access to the most powerful kind of word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are some of the pros and cons of using a Facebook Page for Business.

PROS:

Over 800 Million Users

Facebook Advertising

Accessible Information

Link your Facebook to your website

Like, Comment and Share

Custom Facebook Welcome Page Design

Facebook Applications



CONS:

Time and Resources

Slow Burn (Building a fan base)

Advertising Budget

Reputation Management (eg.if a customer is not happy with your product or service; they have the ability to post unsatisfactory comments on your Facebook page)

Having to Monitor Your Page




That's it for now,

John