2009 October | shesgotclients.com

4 Ways Facebook Fan Pages are Better Than Personal Profiles

October 31, 2009 By Christine 11 Comments

You may have heard of Facebook Fan Pages–they are also referred to as “business pages” or “public pages.”

To give you some explanation of what these are, a Fan Page is just a public profile that allows you to share information about your services or products with other Facebook users. Facebook has two different kinds of profiles—personal profiles and public, aka Fan Page profiles.

So, why are there two different kinds of profiles? Well, Facebook states pretty clearly in their terms of service that a person is only allowed to have one personal profile and that it must be in a person’s first and last name only. For example, “Christine Gallagher.” Facebook has actually been known to disable people’s accounts if they’re named anything other than your full name or if you are using it to represent your business. So instead of using your personal profile for business, you can just use a Fan Page.

Let’s talk a bit about the benefits of using a Fan Page for your business over a personal profile.

First and foremost, Fan Pages are public. What this means is that in order for people to see your Page, they don’t have to login to Facebook or be your “friend” to have access to it—there’s no barrier there to keep from drawing people in. Pages are actually the only part of Facebook that are totally public. This is also great because the search engines are able to see and index Fan Pages.

This is important because Facebook is currently the #2 site on the entire Internet, so you can benefit from that high search engine ranking by having a Page. In other words, because Facebook ranks so highly, your business has a good chance of ranking highly.

Second, personal profiles have a limit of 5000 friends—although Facebook has said several times they are going to raise that limit, they haven’t yet. Now, that might seem like a really high number to you right now, but if you think about continuing to build your business on Facebook, reaching that number is actually not all that unrealistic. In comparison, Fan Pages allow you to have an unlimited number of Fans.

Third, you’re able to send a message—or as they’re called, “Updates”–to all of your Fans at one time, no matter how many you have. With personal profiles, Facebook only lets you message a small number of friends at a time–last I checked it was somewhere around 30 or 40 at once.

Lastly, there are a lot of people who use Facebook personal profiles for just that—personal. They might be using it for staying in touch with friends and family and may have NO interest in ever buying from you—plus, not everyone friends people they don’t know on Facebook. With Fan Pages, people who become a “fan” of your Page are expressly saying they want to find out more about your business, not just you the individual. They have shown their interest by “opting in” as it were.

Do you have a Fan Page for your business yet? I would love to see yours if you do, so let me know in the comments. Feel free to visit my Page and “fan” it as well too!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Facebook

Do You Learn Via Live Events?

October 25, 2009 By Christine 9 Comments

I just recently made a decision to fly out to a live event, which occurs this week. It was pretty much a last minute decision, but an opportunity came up for me to get a great deal on a ticket so I went for it. I’ll be doing other traveling right before that and leaving my husband (and our 2 crazy cats ) for 6 days so there was a bit of going back and forth about it.

However, the more I thought about the potential benefits involved, the more I knew I wanted to do it. It’s a seminar teaching both business-building strategies as well as personal discovery principles, and the timing is ideal for me to experience something like this.

There are three main upsides I see to investing the time, money and energy on a live learning event such as this one:

1) It is the perfect excuse for me to get out from behind my computer and meet people face to face. My business is mainly an online one, and I love that about it. But there is something to be said for networking in person that just takes relationships to a whole new level. I’ve “met” lots of great contacts via social media, but many of them will be at this event and it will be really beneficial to solidify those relationships even more. I expect some exciting joint venture possibilities to take shape!

2) It will be total immersion into learning. Home study courses, calls and webinars are great, but being able to absorb valuable information live over three days will be pretty powerful. This particular event is not going to be a “pitch-a-thon” with multiple speakers selling their products. It will be content-rich and taught by one person for almost the entire event. I fully intend to learn a ton of strategies that I can take home and begin implementing right away.

3) Inspiration! This doesn’t require much explanation–once you get out among new people and new ideas, it’s like breathing fresh air into your business. It’s all but guaranteed that you will walk away with renewed excitement and clarity around what it is you do–and what’s possible for your business going forward.

So, although there was some hand wringing before I came to my decision, I’m confident I made the right one. I’ve attended several live events in the past (albeit mostly local ones) that have really made an impact in my business.

I enjoy learning this way–do you? If you’ve never been to a live event, I highly recommend you try it–and if it’s been a while since your last one, be sure to get out there and go for it!

What is RSS and How Can it Help Your Marketing?

October 18, 2009 By Christine 5 Comments

You’ve most likely heard of RSS feeds, but you might still be wondering exactly what they are. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” RSS itself is just the format for delivering regularly updated web content. Blog feeds allow readers to keep up with the newest info posted on different sites, and people “subscribe” to the feeds of their choice.

Enter the “Feedreader”

For example, there are 25+ blogs out there that I enjoy reading on a regular basis. I want to keep up with them because they help keep me up date with all of the latest information in my niche. However, I don’t want to have to go out to the web and pull up each blog individually every day just to see whether they have been updated. The solution to this is to use a “feedreader” to see all of my favorite blogs’ latest content all in one place. Feedreaders allow you to access new content in two main ways: through the actual reader itself or via email updates. One of the most popular feedreaders and the one that I use is Google Reader.

The Business Use

Why is this important for marketing? Two reasons: 1—It’s a great way to stay current and educated on the things going on in your niche or market through blogs; and 2—It provides a simple way for people who are interested in you and what you have to offer to stay informed. You want to remain on people’s radars consistently so that even if they are not ready to buy from you now, you are able to stay top of mind for them when they are ready to. Just like an email newsletter helps to build and strengthen a relationship with its subscribers, a blog does the same with those who subscribe to its RSS feed.

By its very nature, social media allows content to be shared and spread far and wide across the internet, resulting in more exposure for you and your business. Therefore, it’s crucial to be able to share your blog’s content through multiple channels. For example, many social media platforms and services such as Facebook require you to provide an RSS feed address in order to syndicate (publish) your content.

Managing Your Own Feed

Blog platforms such as WordPress come with feeds already built in and it’s pretty easy to find the RSS feed of your own blog. Just type your site’s address into a browser and add /feed right after it. I use a service called Feedburner through Google to manage my feed and give me detailed statistics on my site’s subscribers and traffic. I suggest you “burn” your feed as well to keep track of your subscribers at http://feedburner.google.com.

Now you know a bit more about RSS feeds and why they are such an integral part of having your own blog—or keeping up with the ones you like to read the most. I’d like to know—do you use a Feedreader? How many blogs do you read on a regular basis? Let me know your thoughts in th comments.

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Tagged With: Blogging, RSS

4 Must-Use Productivity Tools for Social Media

October 4, 2009 By Christine 10 Comments

It’s a given–we all want to do more in less time with social media. The good news is that there are lots of tools to help automate your social networking activities.

Although I don’t encourage automating your whole experience (that would be missing the point), there are some useful productivity-boosters worth checking out.

1) Ping.fm: Want to update your Twitter status as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites all at the same time from one place? Ping is great for this. Tools like Ping are one of the top “secret weapons” of the most successful social media marketers. (Finally, a way to be in multiple places at one time! )

So, if you have something to say to your Twitter followers but that you would also like to share with your Facebook fans and friends and your connections on LinkedIn, you can—without going to each site and logging in separately. Ping has the ability to update over 40 different social networks. This is a major time saver!

Plus, you can even create groups, so that if you only want to update LinkedIn and Twitter but not Facebook, for example, you can do that. It’s definitely worth exploring. (It’s also worth mentioning that HelloTxt is another service that has very similar capabilities. I just happened to have started and stuck with Ping.)

Ping also has a toolbar you can install for your browser, making it simple to update your social networks with a link to and description of any web page you are on.

2) Hootsuite: I consider this to be the ultimate Twitter tool—and its ability to automate so much of your Twitter experience is truly incredible. It’s definitely another top “secret weapon.” Hootsuite is free and web-based and here are just some of its most useful features:

• Pre-schedule tweets to go out ahead of time (great for “set it and forget it” marketing)

• View multiple columns to see @ replies, direct messages, keyword tracking and more

• Manage multiple Twitter profiles

• Have multiple administrators for your Hootsuite account

• Monitor keywords of your choice

• Integrate with Ping.fm to update many social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn

• Track statistics of how many people have clicked on the links in your tweets

• Automatically feed RSS to your Twitter stream

• Create groups of friends by simply dragging and dropping them into columns

I also love the “Hootlet” bookmarklet, which you simply drag to your browser toolbar so that you can quickly tweet out any web page you are viewing.

3) Selective Twitter Status: If you use both Twitter and Facebook, you’ll want to take advantage of integrating the two in order to reach even more people without any extra effort.

Selective Twitter Status is an application you can add to your personal Facebook profile and/or Fan Page in order to update your Facebook status with your tweets. Once you have this application installed, you simply add #fb to the specific tweets you want to make your Facebook status as well.

4) Facebook Fan Page to Twitter tool: If you want to do the reverse and send your Fan Page status updates to Twitter, you can do that by using Facebook’s Twitter tool. This is really great because you are allowed to use over 140 characters for status updates on Facebook, so when you update Twitter (which has a 140 character limit) with a longer message, it inserts “…” along with a link back to your Fan Page so people can finish reading your update. This means more people are driven to your Fan Page from Twitter.

Those are four of my favorites, and ones I use on a daily basis. Any other tools you would add to list? How do you manage your time with social media?

And if you’re ready to take your business to the next level with web 2.0 (and beyond!) tools and strategies, sign up to be on the priority list to be the first to hear all about my new 6 Steps to Kick Start Your Social Media Success System™!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: Social Media, Time Management