How to let Fans Engage/Write on your Facebook Business Page

An easy way to increase interactivity on your Facebook page is to let your fans easily post to your Wall. The Wall is something that is enabled for both your personal Facebook page (like when friends write on your wall to say "hi" or share something), and the same now holds true for your Facebook Business Page.

Your first instict as a business may be to only allow posts from your business on your wall, to keep it professional. However, your fans (ie customers, supporters, potential customers) may want to publically chime in and let you know that they support you, or have a question that if answered, could apply to other potential customers. In fact, there may be some fans who have written on your Wall right now, but you never noticed!

To check, there is a little link that you very easily could have missed. It's at the top of your page, just below those tabs that say "Wall", "Info", "Photos", and the like. Under that is a text link that is called your business name. Next to it is called "Just Fans". It looks like this:


If you click on "Just Fans," you will see if any of your adoring fans wrote to you in a public way. Now. This public exposure is an incentive for them to write on your wall, which in turn shows up in their News Feeds as an activity that they did, which their friends can see, which then might prompt their friends to come on by and visit your page and see your business. So it may be in your best interest to allow these fan posts to be on the main portion of your Wall. If you did, your main Wall, if you selected that you want fan comments on it, would look like this:

Where you see the little yellow "katie james" squares is my business posting something to my page. Where you see other pictures of people is those people posting things to my page, and everyone else can easily see them. You can see from this picture that some fans of Katie James are asking Facebook questions. This is a great way for me to see them, and answer them back here on the blog.

To enable this to happen, follow these steps:

Click on the "Edit Page" link in the top left of your page, under your logo.

From there, you will use the little picture of the pencil to select which things you want to edit. Click the pencil near "Wall Settings". Click "Edit".

From the pulldown, select this from the setting, where it says "Default View for Wall", click "Posts by Page and Fans".

Now the fans will show up on your main Wall, with the posts from your business. To change this back, just follow these steps, and click "Only Posts by Page". In this case, "Page" means you.

Why Meta Description Tags in a Blog Can Hurt your Socialness

We just answered how to add a meta description tag to your Blogger blog template because someone asked this SEO question over at Collective-E.

However. Inserting a meta tag into your blog may not be the best idea.

Long ago, Meta Description tags stopped having any impact on how your site is ranked in Google search results (for a definition of the meta description tag with pictures, click here). This may not be the case for other search engines like Yahoo, but it is for Google (as of this post publication). However. Google may display the meta description tag in search results, and social outlets like Facebook will display them as well (as of this post publication...websites are always changing how they work). Here are Google's words stating that meta description tags won't affect your rankings. They do, however, still display them when it's a good fit.

So. Just when you thought "Great! One less thing to worry about!", you could argue: "Hey wait: Google can pick up and display a meta description tag, and so can Facebook, so I'll use it by creating some great marketing copy that reflects my overall website or blog."

This is the angle I usually take. However, this is not the case when it comes to blog posts. Recently, I "shared a link" on Facebook, which means that I posted a link to my Facebook profile, which then signaled to all of my friends there that I had posted a link. Not only does Facebook let me post a link, but it will display a photo if I so choose. The link that I wanted to share was just a silly one: I had just gotten my hair colored brown and blond, and had put it into a ponytail, and it had split itself into the two colors, and it looked interesting. I didn't color one side brown and the other side blond, as it's all blended when styled normally, but the ponytail was visually interesting, so I shared it with my friends.

Now. To be a good little SEO person, I had just recently installed the code to show a meta description tag on my blog template. Years have gone by, and I have never done this. So I did it a few weeks ago. I was in a rush, so the only thing I put in was "girly stuff", which of course has almost no use SEO-wise at all, but was a descriptive start at what you could find at my blog, FashionMista.

I have shared many links via Facebook, and always knew that Facebook automatically pulled the blog post title, the first line of my content on my blog, and a picture. The pulled content did the job, and I never had to make a "Comment" about my own post to explain what was going on.

Until now. Because I had altered my meta description tag, which said only: "girly stuff", when I went to post the link, Facebook showed everyone this:


The blue content, "FashionMista: Look at the Two Tone" is the blog post title. Since "girly stuff" is meta description tag, and hence the content that Facebook automatically displayed, it doesn't explain much about the hair. If this had been a normal article (aka not about a picture), the user would not be very inclined to click on my link, or at least let me explain the style. In fact, nobody did click on the link, which would have explained the style. They only commented based on their reactions to the picture. My mother in particular, was not pleased. She thought I colored one side brown, and the other blond, and looked like that every day. She almost went into shock and I did consider "unfriending" her to temper any social networking damage control.

Right away, I removed the meta description code from my blog template. I waited a day for this to absorb on the internets, and posted a new blog post with a new photo. This is how the new link has shown (with my boring hair style):



You see the blog post title: "FashionMista: Hair in 'Normal' Times of Styling". You see the photo, and you see the first few lines of content.

It is for this reason that I am advising not to fill in the meta description code on your blog. The overall meta description tag, for SEO uses on blogs, are not helpful and should not be used. They are too limiting. Blog posts are so specific to one topic or sliver of a topic, that you do not want that insight to be lost under a blanket statement of what your blog is.

For example: which statement is more effective for this blog post?
Content from the blog: "Who knew a ponytail gone wild could have launched a motherly protest in Facebook. There were honest to goodness revolts going on. Mom threatened to pull out of her highly anticipated trip to NYC, and dad ..."

Meta description tag for entire blog: "FashionMista is a chronicle of a designer who quit her day job to really design, and do a whole lot of other things."

Which do you resonate to? Especially if you were following my stream of link postings on Facebook? The statement that is more direct? Or the statement that is an umbrella term?

If you've noticed a trend in what makes people click on your shared links, do tell.

To Friend or Unfriend. Or Ignore. In Facebook.

What if you have too many friends in Facebook? A tough problem, right? But what if you maxed out at 5,000, and/or what if you were sad that you weren't keeping up with what your true friends are doing in their home towns? You would need to scale back in some Facebook friendships, and essentially, unfriend some people.

If you're a person with a lot of street cred online, and you were reading this article on whether or not to create a Facebook Fan Page for yourself, then the next step you should be thinking about is how to handle your current collection of friends.

Why Do We Have Friends on Facebook?
If we are in college or high school, we are really just keeping up with our actual friends on Facebook - looking at their pictures, commenting on their funny videos, throwing snowballs at them, etc. If we are making our way in the world today, it takes everything we've got, and yes, we are using Facebook to network, sell product, sell services, and more. But with the 5,000 friend limit, which does really squash your chances of using Facebook for fun because you have so many networking types in your feed, you will want to reconsider why you are accepting friends.

Reasons to Accept Friends

• You really want to know what they are doing, what events they are having, etc.
• You want them to know what you are doing. You can assume they are going to be watching every move that you make, or you can decide to put a little bit of effort into them when they post a thought-provoking status update, release a video, post a link, etc.
• They have sent you a little note with their friend request

Reasons to Ignore Friend Requests

• You look at your mutual friends, and the mutual friends are all big time Facebook users who are more interested in having high friend numbers, than in the quality of what you are saying.
• You have no idea who the person is, and you have no mutual friends. This person did not tell you why they have requested to be your friend.

How to Unfriend Current Friends to Make Room for New Friends
If you need to scale down your list, and you need to delete some friends in order to make room for new friends who you for either personal or professional reasons, you need to quietly unfriend people who are not helping your professional cause, nor are they contributing to daily doses of random happy things. There is no need to make an announcement that you are doing this, but before you do it, and if you have made a Fan Page for your business that you would like them to continue to follow, create a campaign for yourself.

How to Move Friends to be Fans
While you can't technically click a person to be a "fan" instead of a "friend", you can persuade your current friends to also become fans. Little do they know you may soon be cleaning house, and they will suddenly stop seeing your status updates, but that's ok.

• Write about your new Fan Page on your blog, and link to it.
  
• Put a "Find us on Facebook" graphic on every page of your website or blog. If you're not an "us", then make a "Find me on Facebook", but chances are, it takes some kind of community to do what you do, so consider sticking with "us".
• Update your Facebook status to let your friends know you have a Fan page, and you will be posting lots of goodies to it.
  

What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:


This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!

Are You Neglecting Your Blog for Twitter or Facebook?

I mean really!?! FashionMista.com is sorely neglected, all because I seem to spend extra energy in Twitter or Facebook. The Tweets just don't stop coming - be it the desire to create a Tweet or to read them. What will we do? The blog is so much more powerful, right? Long term links, photos, design, Comments with more links, and more conversations that just stay preserved in the Comment box.

Over at the Home Office Collectives group in Facebook, Carla of the blog RockStarLifeLessons.com pointed out that she too has been neglecting her blog for Twitter, saying: "I am LOVING twitter...to the point that I've been neglecting my blog...I suppose I'll eventually add a widget to my blog so my readers know that I'm still online ;-)"

So this is what it's come to. Widgets. A friend passed me a link once, to a video. Once again, I've sadly misplaced this link, but the guy, who you social techies out there probably know of, was discussing the then new technology to search for feelings on the web. Somehow, I think, this website conjured up lots of words from websites, and put them into one, live space. At the end of the video, he announced that the web page is dead. Not his web page, but the "web page", as in the form.

However, I still have my shopping cart, I still have this blog, people still visit it, link to it, link from it, Retweet it, etc. I still manage pages of other websites and track their traffic patterns. But I need to spend a little more time here, I believe.

Thoughts? Please chime in! ThatITGirl as a blog (not me as a person), is lonely with the neglect of its author! And FashionMista.com - don't get her started. She sees more mobile Flickr photo uploads that she knows what to do with.

Compare Vertical Response vs Constant Contact for Email Newsletters

Vertical Response is the winner if the two are compared. Using Vertical Response after using Constant Contact is like a fresh summer day. Vertical Response vs Constant Contact lets you breathe easy while doing formerly complicated emailing procedures.

To Compare: Vertical Response vs Constant Contact:

Designing a custom newsletter design
Hands down, VerticalResponse. They offer a super easy editing canvas, where you can access the code, easily create tables, and more. Last I checked, Constant Contact did not offer an editing canvas, so you needed to already have your HTML built in another content editor, and paste it into their HTML area. That, or you have to be a Super Coder and be able to visualize what your code looks like as you type it up, which is a series of letters strung together. Good luck.

Or, you can pay Vertical Response or Constant Contact to build your design. But, if you are a do-it-yourself coder, Vertical Response provides the easiest platform to work on.

Reports and Stats - tracking click throughs
Both Vertical Response and Constant Contact give you access to which links were clicked on. Vertical Response breaks it down so that you can see how many clicks happened on which images as well as text. In order to know which image is which, you'll have to be familiar with what the URL is. The report gives you the actual number of clicks, plus the overall percentage compared to the rest of the links in the email. The list of links is presented in a chronological link list. Could Vertical Response develop something more visual? Maybe they will! But right now they are busy unveiling surveys.

Newsletter Design Templates
I tend to stay away from stock Templates. Customizing templates at Constant Contact could get messy, and be possibly easy to break, or corrupt, requiring you to build it all over again. If you are using a Constant Contact template as is, with no altering, you'll be fine. Both email companies offer programming services to create a custom newsletter template for your brand, where you can submit a design to them and they will build it for a fee. If you have used Vertical Response templates, and tweaked them, please chime in below.

Opt-in Sign Up Forms
A cinch with Vertical Response to make a straightforward, not too ugly email opt-in form. However, I've custom designed my own sign up boxes. See the newsletter signup form at Katie James and at Mugi Pottery. However, the generic opt in form design is not to shabby. (Sorry Vertical Response...I need to put the link back into you on those pages!)

Because the Vertical Response code for the email sign up form is so easy to work with, I was able to copy and paste it into a Facebook Page! Here are the details: how to put an html box on your Facebook Page.

Surveys
Constant Contact has offered the ability to send surveys for a long time. Vertical Response has just released their own survey service. I have not tried it yet. Have you? If you have experience with the survey tool at either Vertical Response or Constant Contact, please chime in below in the comments.

Cost
Yes, Constant Contact beats Vertical Response for cost (maybe, unless you're a non-profit). Constant Contact offers a monthly service, where you can pay $15 for a list size of up to 500, for example. Monthly cost goes up from there. Hopefully Vertical Response will go this route (because more of my clients would go with them). Either way, I personally do pay the per email price with Vertical Response because sending a successful newsletter is that much easier and enlightening with Vertical Response. If you are a 501 (c) 3 non-profit, they have special pricing. And 501 (c) 3 non-profits can even get up to 10,000 free emails a month!

So what are you going to do now? Sign up to send campaigns with VerticalResponse. So easy.

How to Make a Fan Page in Facebook

Fan Pages in Facebook are fun and easy to make. What is a Facebook page? The Fan Page is a page in Facebook that represents your business. Unlike a Group, developers who build applications have some of them available for your Page. This means that you can elect to have an RSS feed box to show your latest blog posts on your Page, or to show a big photo of your book (aka "Big Photo" application).

A Few Things You Can Do With a Facebook Page

• People can "fan" your page. A mini version of your logo will show up on their profiles. You can't "friend" people with your page, but people can "fan" your page.
• Send "Updates" to your fans to tell them when you have a new product, special coupon codes, or anything else you think of.
• Add applications to make your page interactive and interesting to look at. Not all applications are available for pages yet. A developer for a specific application needs to make a version for a Page.
  
• And lots more.
  

Ready to make one? Ok. You'll need a little bit of time to be creative and you'll need a special logo.

• Click here, or if you are logged into Facebook, scroll to the very bottom of your screen.
• In the footer links, look for the link that says Advertising. Click it.
• You may be presented with two options. On the right, where it says "Facebook Pages," look a little beneath it and click "+ Create Facebook Page".
• It will now ask you demographic information. Fill this out, and type in the name of your Facebook Page. Choose wisely, because you can't change it.
• Proceed as prompted!
• Next steps will be adding different applications to the page to jazz it up a bit. For starters, I love Big Photo and Profile HTML.
• To activate your page, you will need to "Publish" it. There will be a link to prompt you to do this.
• In the future, to manage it, a link called "Ads and Pages" will always be on the left, as shown below. Follow these same directions to create one of those Facebook social ads. To manage, you will click this link to access both areas.
  

To get some fans, you might want to share it with your friends. On the side of your page, after you publish it, you will see a "Share with friends" link. Click it, and then you will need to type in your friends. If this link is not here, look for a + sign that is just below this list. At this moment, Facebook does not have an option where you are presented with a list of your friends that you can select. That would be much easier, of course. For now, you have to type them in. Facebook will complete the name as you type.




That should be it! You are ready to make a Page in Facebook. Good luck!

PS: If you need help making a special logo for your Facebook page, it is a new service of Katie James Pixelated! Contact us for details.

PPS: I have written several more articles on enhancing your Facebook page, such as, how to make a page more interactive with your fans. Click here to see all Facebook related posts.

PPPS: If you want to fan my page, here it is: ;) http://www.facebook.com/pages/Katie-James/15996316102