Webenso » Social Media

Google Plus Pages for your Business

Kathy Alice — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:50:36 +0000

Create your Google+ Page

Have you created your Google+ Page yet for your business? Last week, Google finally opened the Google Plus network to Businesses and Brands, spurring what Mashable termed the “Wild West”. It’s certainly been a land grab, similar to the Facebook username frenzy a while back, brands and businesses are busy reserving their names and creating pages.

Should you create a Google+ page for your business? Well, yes, of course you should. Just like you should be staking out your business name or brand real estate on twitter and Facebook, you should be doing the same on Google+. It’s a no brainer. Now whether you should put any more effort into the page – that remains to be seen. Opinions are mixed, Slate states Google+ is dead, but yet a recent Wired article predicts Google Plus Pages will beat Facebook and Twitter. What do I think? I think you can’t ignore Google+, at least not completely. Just think about it, do you really think that the Google search algorithm will completely ignore activity on its own social network? Putting aside Google’s emphasis on favoring “trusted” content, just look at the clues. Do searches while logged in and note the “shares” and also note the new +1 stats in Analytics and draw your own conclusions.

One thing I gave some thought to was whether to create the page under a different Google account than my personal account. If you are a larger company, you shouldn’t have your page created from one of your employee’s personal accounts – there is no way to add additional admins for now. However since I was creating a page for my blog, in the end I decided the bother of administrating a separate account was not worth any benefit in keeping my personal page separate from the business page. However this is something to consider BEFORE creating your page.

So I created a page for Webenso. And I’m sure I will be posting on it. You should consider doing the same.

A Quick Tour of Google+ (Plus) – Video

Kathy Alice — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 21:24:23 +0000

Google launched it’s much discussed social network recently, Google+ (Google Plus). It has been the subject of much discussion. Some saying it will crush Facebooks, others saying Facebook has too much market lead for Google+ to be much of a factor. And still others lamenting that there is yet another “inbox” to now check. It’s been hard to get into Google+, it helps if you have an invite, but often you will get the “at capacity” message, that seems to be getting better and I got in yesterday. Here’s a video I did that is a quick tour of the Google+ network.

Circles

Circles are the key differentiators for Google+. As you add people to your network, you drag and drop them into one of your Circles: Friends, Family or any circle you create. Circles is how you segment your network and give them varying levels of access (for example who can see the details of who your employer is).

Stream

Just like the Facebook wall, but you “+1″ posts instead of “Liking” them.

Sparks

A way to add interests and topics to follow news on. Maybe this is where the “Google Business” page comes in?

Hangout

I didn’t play around with this much, this is how you get together with your circle with your web cam. Note also the gmail chat has been pulled into Google+ as well and you can filter who gets to chat with you by circle. Love to hear comments on what people think of Google+

Many options to choose from: Adding Facebook Fan Page buttons to your website

Kathy Alice — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:22:08 +0000

Now that I have a rudimentary Facebook Fan Page set up I wanted to setup a way for people to get from my site to my fan page and Like it. I thought this would be a 15 minute task, but I got mired in confusion and sidetracked. I would love it if Facebook experts would comment on this post because I still don’t feel I’ve mastered this topic at all. “Like” and “Like” I wasn’t looking to implement a way for people to Like my posts. That’s already there, although I need to make it more visible. What Like usually means is that a link to the post is posted to your wall and shared with your Facebook friends. Some websites have also made it so that clicking on Like means that you are actually “Liking” their fan page. On the one hand this is what I wanted as feature, but on the other hand I think using the Like button for this can be misleading, as you might be thinking you are Liking an article but are actually Liking the fan page which is unfortunately not straightforward to undo. So I was looking for a similar concept but wanted it to be clear to the user what was happening. Badges and Like Boxes Facebook has Badges and Like Boxes that you can install on your website. These weren’t exactly what I wanted either. I didn’t want a big box with all the Facebook activity on my site (at least not for now). I also didn’t want to put a box with my personal profile on my website either. I just wanted a simple way for people to connect with my fan page from the website. Also, some of the Facebook plugins don’t seem to work unless you have the magical 25 Likes. So this was a dead end as well. Find Us on Facebook Buttons Searching on “Facebook buttons” led me to coolbadge.org with many promising looking buttons. However the ones I tried to generate code for asked me for my personal profile id code (I guess fan pages don’t have a separate profile, do they?). So this again didn’t seem to be what I wanted, as I wanted to keep my personal profile out of this task. It’s just a link silly Finally I went and looked at some prominent blogs to see how they did it. And all it was, was an image hyper-linked to their Facebook fan page. So the user would be taken to the fan page, and they would then need to take a separate action to Like the page. Since I was over an hour into this task, I just used the socialmediabuttons.com site to generate some code for me. Maybe later I’ll look for or design a graphic to replace it. So there you have it, a story of how even the simplest of tasks can go astray. While it would be cool to have the Like built into the click, it’s apparently more work than I am willing to take on at the moment. Maybe something in the future – what are you doing on your website to connect it with your Fan page?

Add Your Blog to Facebook

Kathy Alice — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 16:57:15 +0000

Want to have your blog posts automatically show up on your Facebook page? There’s more than one way to do it but here’s a simple way that doesn’t require installation of any 3rd party application and uses the existing Notes application.

Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”.
Next click on “Apps” on the left hand side. If you haven’t figured this out by now, “Apps” should be your new best friend when it comes to enhancing and customizing your Facebook page.
Locate the Notes app on the right and click on “Go to App” (not Edit Settings!)
You should now see the Notes page, which will be blank if you haven’t written any Notes. That’s fine, as when we are done that Notes page will have all our blog posts. Look to the left and locate the “Edit Import Settings” link, it will be at the bottom of the other items.
Now you should be at “Import Blog” all that is needed here is to type in the feed URL of your blog and save your work.

Although it’s not exactly intuitive, it’s is straightforward once you know the steps. When I did this, not only did my blog posts show up on my Notes page but also on my Wall.

Another option is the app “Networked Blogs”, which is a nicer implementation, however to get that to work you’ll need to get several of your friends to “vouch” that your are the owner of the blog.

Adding an opt-in box to your Facebook page

Kathy Alice — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:44:13 +0000

UPDATED POST. A while back I wrote about adding an opt-in box to Facebook. It makes a lot of sense for most businesses. Most likely you have more activity and conversation on your Facebook fan page than on your website, so it’s a great place to have people opt into your list.

In the post I walked you step-by-step in creating a FBML page and placing the opt-in code on the page. It worked great, until Facebook did a major upgrade and deprecated FBML. You can no longer use FBML as of March 11, 2011. If you already have FBML pages they will work for “a while”. But that meant my post was out of date. So here’s the new version of the post.

So what’s the new way to do this? Let’s understand what Facebook did first. Facebook did away with FBML which you used to code directly on Facebook pages, but instead greatly expanded the ability to pull in functionality via the apps concept. Essentially you can run code that is hosted on your own servers and use Facebook to present your own tailored pages via iframes. It’s a nice concept and much more flexible than what was available before. This is a huge boon for businesses that have web development resources. They build cool stuff, deploy it on their servers and then pull it into their Facebook pages by registering it as an app.

But where does that leave the small business who struggles just to keep their basic business website updated? Kind of in the cold.

But for some common needs, such as adding a opt-in box to your Facebook page, your ESP (email service provider) has stepped into the gap. The good news is that those apps make it easier to have an opt-in box in Facebook than before.

To start out you need to have created a Facebook page and have signed up with an autoresponder system such as aweber or a email service icontact. These email marketing systems manage your list that you send your ezines and offers to by email. Both have created an app that you need to install into your Facebook account. With AWeber (and with the other ESPs) it will go smoother if you already have a list and webform set up.

I installed a AWeber form onto the Webenso Facebook page (which is not exactly ready for prime time, but is serving as a useful testbed for me). AWeber does a good job of walking you through the eight steps that are needed so I won’t replicate them here. It even gives you a link to locate the app in Step 1 (which is good because I couldn’t find it through the apps search function in Facebook). One odd thing that was not mentioned was that I had to switch back to my personal profile from my page profile to complete the installation which was strange but worked.

If everything goes well, you should see the AWeber app listed in your apps list as shown below (I also see it in my left nav on my home page).

Don’t forget to do the last step “Edit Settings” (last part of Step 8), otherwise you will not see the “tab” on your page’s left nav bar which may be disconcerting. A nice bonus is that you can name the tab anything you want.

I used existing web form that I had already created for a website, however a Facebook page has a lot more space on it, so you should consider creating a new form for your Facebook page. However you will need to create it in AWeber first before installing into Facebook as it needs to appear in the webform dropdown list in Step 7.

The iContact installation instructions are similar.

For other ESPs, just try typing in your ESP name and “Facebook” into Google or Bing. BTW, I’m finding that Chrome and Facebook don’t play nicely together (the cynic in me wonders why…). I used Firefox instead to do the installation instead.

Let me know your experiences with ESPs other than AWeber.

Using Pagemodo to Build a Facebook Page

Kathy Alice — Tue, 17 May 2011 23:37:32 +0000

You’ve probably (or maybe seen their Facebook ads) heard of pagemodo, a service to help you build your Facebook page. Today I decided to take it for a test drive.

First a clarification, a Facebook Fan page is actually a number of pages (or tabs), the most familiar being your Wall, so what pagemodo will build for you is a new “tab” for your Facebook page. For example you might want to create a landing page to welcome new fans to your Facebook page, this is a good candidate for a pagemodo created page. You will still need to create your actual page in Facebook before pagemodo installs the “page” you built, however pagemodo detects this and directs you over to Facebook to do this prior to installation.

pagemodo Webenso Welcome Page

As you might suspect, the free version of pagemodo is of limited functionality, and more features are available in various paid versions ranging from $6.25 to $33.25 a month. The free version allows you to create one page with several graphics. Video is not available in the free version and if you don’t want the pagemodo footer advertising itself you have to select one of the paid versions. I was also not able to create any links in the free version, which seems to be a severe drawback – however I have not investigated this fully to see what exactly the problem is. Unfortunately none of the versions offer the ability to embed an opt-in, which was one of my primary drivers to check out pagemodo, it is “coming soon”.

If you want a eye catching graphics rich page to feature your business wares or other photos, pagemodo could be a good fit for you. Most of the templates require several pictures which is good to know up front.

pagemodo has several graphics rich templates to choose from

The user interface is fairly intuitive although given to some glitches. I lost my work when I clicked away to check out their questions and answers on how the Facebook page creation works (as mentioned above, you have to create the page separately in Facebook). The graphic “sizer” helps you scale your pictures so that they fit into the template.

Here’s my free pagemodo Facebook welcome page. I don’t know if I will keep it long term, but it’s there now.

Pagemodo released an update, 2.0, on June, 27, 2011. There are more layouts to choose and some new features, such as coupons, facebook “Like” gates and more.

Facebook Fan Pages Changes, a Massive Update

Kathy Alice — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:14:00 +0000

Last week Facebook rolled out another major change, but this time it was to Facebook Fan Pages. It’s a massive change. What page admins noticed first, was that posts to the wall are no longer organized chronologically but by “popularity”. This change was intended to serve the interests of the page visitors by putting the most “interesting” posts first, but to me at least it gives the page a squirmy kind of feel as the posts keep jumping around and scrolling down to find a post you saw before is not always fruitful. But this is just the Tip of the Iceberg: There is a lot in this Facebook Fan Page update. Here are some of the highlights:

New look and feel that is aligned with personal pages – photos on top, and tabs converted to links on the left
Split personality – You can now interact with Facebook either as a human OR YOUR PAGE. This is pretty interesting. So when you comment on sometime else’s wall you can do it as your page, which means they get to your fan page not your personal profile when they click on the link.
Fan page “opt in” – You can set up your pages (what used to be tabs) to “reveal” themselves when a visitor likes your Fan page.
No more FBML, instead for custom pages you have to use iFrames. What happens with existing FBML, I don’t know, I guess we will find out on March 11, 2011 when all fan pages are upgraded.
Your profile picture can be bigger: 180 pixels by 540 pixels. Many Facebooks Fashionistas are using the larger space to have a more of a “branded” graphic on their fan page

With the reveal functionality (and the continued support of changing the default landing tab) I expect to see Facebook Fan Pages start looking more like landing pages. The call to action will be to “opt in” either with the like button or an via email opt-in. Want more info? Here’s the official Facebook announcement (somewhat useful). And an excellent writeup on the Facebook changes by Dose Of Digital, it’s very long but worth the read.

Cha, Cha, Changes! First Facebook now Meetup

Kathy Alice — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:06:28 +0000

Do you use Meetup? It’s a great way to connect to people locally with similar interests like yours. I belong to several meetup groups, including one that meets at live music shows and another that is a networking group. And I just joined a blogging group. Meetup just rolled out some drastic changes, particularly to the group pages. Similar to the angst over the new Facebook profile, people are not happy. It’s quite different. It seemed to have disrupted some layouts (each organizer can customize the look of their page). I’ve gotten email from an organizer apologizing for the extra email. The popups asking you to tweet your RSVP (why would I want to tweet about an Valentine event more than 2 weeks away – now?) are intrusive. Per this announcement, the changes are to encourage more participation from members. Here’s a pointer to a video that announces the changes…. however the video starts out interviewing some meetup groups in NYC so there is a lot of minutes to sit through.

Another use for Facebook fan pages

Kathy Alice — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:03:12 +0000

There are some creative uses of Facebook fan pages out there. Ann Evanston has one called BloggerMonday where 10 blogs are submitted every week and everyone comments on them. Now here’s another that is being used to create a marketplace as an alternative to eBay. It started as a whim of Bonnie, who is behind the breyerhorsecollectors Facebook fan page. “Why don’t we have a Black Friday sale here on this Facebook page? It turned into a big success, so much so that they are doing it again. Sellers upload photos in into albums of their Breyer Horse Models they want to trade and sell and then post a link to that album to the wall page. Now the question, how to monetize something like this?

Block Facebook ads?

Kathy Alice — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 02:27:07 +0000

Today on a facebook event invite page, I saw complaints about “creepy flat tummy ads” on the invite page. Another peep complained about a “holistic wellness” ad. On the same page, I saw four (yes 4) ads: 1) A business opportunity called “Own Your Own ATM”, 2) an ad offering college students as “IT interns”, 3) “Soothing music selected by Eckhart Tolle” and ummm, this is embarrassing: 4) “60% off a Brazilian Wax”. Well you now know what gender I am. And that’s the point, Facebook ads are targeted to your profile, your interests, the links you post, the stuff you like. If you haven’t already, take a look at the Facebook ad interface, you can customize it quite a bit, age ranges, geography etc. Facebook is betting that access to these sorts of demographics will make it the advertiser of choice. However the jury is still out. Some people report great success with Facebook ads, some don’t. It’s very niche dependent. And yes, you can remove / block Facebook ads. There are a number of solutions available as the blocking code has to be installed into your browser. So it depends on what browser you use. Here are a few to check out:

Safari: Facebook Neue says it works with Chrome too
Firefox: Ad block plus, also check out this post on Greasemonkey
Chrome: Chrome extension

Note with the current major Facebook update rolling out, these might not work with the “new facebook”. You might need to wait until the authors catch up. Let me know how it works out. I haven’t installed any of them yet.