Facebook recently announced that they are starting to group related news items on user’s feeds by topic as shown in this example below.

It seems that, as usual, a percentage of people are unhappy with the change. I think it’s a good thing, with more and more information being pumped through our news feeds it only seems sensible and also user friendly to group relevant topics. Facebook has been doing this for a while by grouping Twitter posts that are fed through to a user’s Facebook profile. Although it tends to group Twitter posts from any friend as a posed to Twitter posts from that one user which doesn’t seem intuitive.

A weird thing happened to me today that gave me a bit of a shock. I referred to paid search marketing as “traditional”! When we think of traditional forms of advertising in today’s market we think of things like television and printing advertising. I know that they say things evolve much faster in the 21^st century but I thought it would be a long time before I started calling pay per click marketing traditional!

It came to me when I was writing some content for www.thedigitalconsultant.co.uk on social media marketing. I recall first writing about social media optimisation, as it was referred to back in 2005, during an update for my search engine optimisation training course. We now know it better as social media marketing, a more generic term to reaching your target audience through social media networks. Whilst the battle continues online about how brands can master and measure the ROI from social media by accumulating likes, fans and followers there is more direct and quicker approach to reaching your audience though social media advertising.

Social media advertising as a term has started to trend recently despite being able to advertise on social media networks like Facebook for around two years. Social networks have been figuring ways to monetise their traffic; the simplest way has been to sell advertising space. Facebook has been doing it for a while but it’s only recent developments to their interface which has mean it’s been easier for advertisers to control their ad spends and pull decent data to monitor performance. Whilst they are light years behind traditional paid search systems such as Google Adwords or Microsoft Adcenter they are way ahead of other social media networks such as Linkedin and Twitter which are just opening up their offerings.

Social media advertising offers more targeting options which is particular useful for small and medium sized businesses that might have a smaller marketing budget. Facebook now gives advertisers the ability to drill down to very specific demographics meaning campaigns can be targeted specifically, increasing the chance of conversion.

We’ll be talking lots more about social media marketing on our blog and how you as a business can take their first steps into this new and exciting form of advertising. If you’d like to know more about how The Digital Consultant can help you, please get in touch.

Now that Facebook has reached over 500m users it would be foolish for your business not to have a presence. Increased exposure and building a network of devoted fans should be good enough reason. There are many benefits but the purpose of this blog post is not to preach to the converted. I have seen countless times people/groups/businesses getting a fundamental step of setting up on Facebook completely wrong, which type of profile to select.

The main Facebook faux-pas seems to be businesses and groups setting up as a personal profile intended for individuals. It’s like trying to open a can of beans with a spoon, it’s the wrong tool for the job. Let’s have a look at what options you have.

When setting up a presence on Facebook you have 4 options:

• User Profile
• Facebook Page
• Community Page
• Facebook Group

When you first come to Facebook you will see the following page:

It’s not uncommon for people to go ahead and assume there is only one type of profile and set up a user profile for their business. The option you need is hidden at the bottom of the page. If you already have a Facebook profile you can also set up a page for your business or a group/community page by visiting an already existing Facebook Page/Group and selecting the link on the left hand side of the page called “Create a Page for My Business”:

Types of Profiles

User Profile

These are intended for use by individual human beings and not for a collective group or cause. This was the original foundation of Facebook and should only be used for this purpose.

There’s actually a serious privacy concern here. If you have your privacy settings set so that only “friends of friends” can see your information, as many people do, you could be exposing your private information. We have seen it happen, a person you don’t want to see you information will be able to access it by becoming a “friend” of a business you are friends with. There is now a link, which is easily obtainable, and that person can now see all your information.

If you are setting up for a business or group DO NOT USE THIS TYPE OF PROFILE if only for this reason.

Facebook Pages

This is the type of profile you want if you are a business, product, brand or public figure such a s celebrity, band or artist.

These profiles must be attached to a Facebook User Profile and you will be given the option to create one or login into your existing profile to complete the set up. You can also find a link on the left hand side of an existing Facebook Page when you are logged in saying “Create a Page for My Business”.

Facebook Pages are a way of communicating with your customers and fans. Any status update from these profiles will appear in fans news feed like a normal status update. Using this can be a powerful way to inform your fans of news, offers or updates such as new pictures and videos.

Anyone can become a Fan of a Facebook Page but users will not be given the option to post anything to the Page’s wall, unlike a Facebook Group which by default gives all users this option. This is an important feature of Pages as you often will not want people posting things to your wall, you will want to be in control of this. Users will be able to post comments to your updates which can create controversial conversations between fans, especially if someone posts something negative. You should not be fearful of this as there are ways and means of dealing with this. Something we’ll explore in a later blog post

Facebook Groups

Groups were created by Facebook to let users with a similar interest on hobby to communicate with one another. This might be a local book club or a paranormal investigation group.

Groups have members and like Facebook Pages anyone can join. Groups will give you much more control over administration of users meaning users have to gain permission to join. You can also make Groups available only to certain networks or make it a closed group.

You must be careful with Groups to ensure they are set up correctly as by default any member can post to the wall. This leaves it open to spam and can leave the group open to criticism. Although restricting this can be thought to go against the nature of a Facebook Group.

Community Pages

Community Pages were set up in 2010 as a way for people to share “the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic”. These were brought about because users were using Facebook Pages to bring users with similar interests on a topic together, not its intended purpose.

Community Pages have a similar feel to Groups by bringing groups of people with an interest around a similar topic but on a wider scale. At the moment there is little you can do with these pages other than add content once you have joined. You will see information pulled in from Wikipedia and also any posts posted by users around that topic.

These pages are not much use to businesses, at least not at the moment. As Facebook develops these we might start to seeing them being useful.

So remember

Make sure you pick the right type of Facebook profile when getting set up. Businesses, band, celebs and public figures should be using Facebook Pages!

Rant Over!

]]> http://www.thedigitalconsultant.com/blog/2010/08/11/setting-up-facebook-for-your-business/feed/ 0 http://www.thedigitalconsultant.com/blog/2009/06/16/search-and-social-media-how-it-can-help-your-business/ http://www.thedigitalconsultant.com/blog/2009/06/16/search-and-social-media-how-it-can-help-your-business/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:58:31 +0000 Jeremy http://www.thedigitalconsultant.co.uk/blog/?p=66

When people suddenly, years after it became mainstream, realised that search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) strategies could be joined together, these was a big fuss. Then everyone realised that it wasn’t anything significant, you just needed to ensure that your SEO team and PPC team were working together. Of course this becomes difficult if you run it across two different agencies or if the internal structure of that agency isn’t set up to do so.

Our belief will always be that there should be one “search strategy”. That person leading the strategy should know PPC and SEO inside out. But perhaps that’s a pipe dream at the moment, given the shortage of experience SEO/PPC people in the industry.

So, before we have even managed to get to grips with that, everyone is suggesting that we now focus on search and social, eeek!

So what do we do? What with Facebook Vanity URLs coming out, there has been a flurry of blog articles coming out advising to optimise your Facebook pages and twitter profiles. Great if you are a business to optimise you brand name. Chances are that you are already number 1.

So how can SEO and social media be used to help your business?

You don’t have to be an expert at both to do the basics:

• Set up social profiles – sign up to Facebook and Twitter. Both are free and are easy to set up.
  • Optimise Facebook – get fans, build interest, get your facebook vanity URL, link from your profile page to your website.
  • Optimise Twitter – get your twitter account and get it optimised for your business name .
• Blog - blogging is a great way of building interest around your business. Write articles around the latest industry news and optimise them well for key search terms and link out to other areas of your site.
• Create valuable content – this one is very important. Making interesting and relevant content for your audience will set you apart form the competition.
• Make your content portable – make any content you produce for your site shareable. Videos, whitepapers, gadgets, images, etc. are a great way to get people to link to your site. Getting inbound links is great for improving your rankings.
• Learn about SEO – the basics of social media are easy, it’s about being social online. But learning about how SEO works can help improve your basic knowledge.
• Get engaged – spend time with your customers, get to know them online. They will naturally want to tell others about you online. More links, better rankings.
• Get involved – get involved with other blogs and networks. Submit stories other than your own and be an active participant.
• Let everyone know – get yourself out there doing the following:
  • Submit your stories to Digg ,Reddit and Propeller
  • Get fans and share your stories on Facebook
  • Tweeter about your latest article
  • Get blogged about

There’s no golden rules here. You need to understand SEO and social media to pull it off. But word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and if you create deep engagement with your customers/users then this will pay off. Once you have that it’s understanding how to harness the power of this through SEO, something you may want to consider using an search agency for.

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

The launch of Facebook vanity URLs has had the social media industry alive with buzz. Find out what all the fuss is about.

For those who don’t know, Facebook has given users the opportunity to register a “vanity URL”. Up until now there’s been no easy way to share your Facebook page with anyone. With vanity URLs, once you have registered, people can find you by going to www.facebook.com/YourUsername. Fear not, your privacy settings will remain the same, so for those who are a little concerned with protecting their identities, you’re OK!

The idea is that it makes your Facebook profile shareable with other people. This means you can start sending it to all your friends, posting it on twitter and so on. It will also make your Facebook profile indexable by the search engines. Not that they haven’t been before, but it will mean that your profile will be more likely to rank highly for your username.

Companies/famous people etc. with over 1,000 fans will be able to register their user names, something that is more significant than Joe Bloggs being able to register www.facebook.com/joebloggs. This has given rise to the rather unfortunate phrase “face squatting”. A term that was bounded around twitter a lot yesterday in an attempt to get CNN to use the phrase in their news reports. Not sure if that was successful!

I digress, so with the fear that brands will not be able to register their trademark names, Facebook set up a “pre-register”. It did state that this was no guarantee and that no response would be given to your pre-registering. It clearly shows that Facebook are preparing themselves for some legal battles much like Google had when they removed trademark bidding in the UK. We’ll have to wait and see what happens there!

This post was written by Jeremy Jacobs, owner of The Digital Consultant

• Get your Facebook vanity URL (FYI, you must be logged in to Facebook).
• Read about The Digital Consultant’s online marketing services.