5 Easy Steps to Merging Duplicate Facebook Pages

Posted on Jan 6, 2012 by DeAnna to Social Media

If your company has multiple Facebook Pages or Places, you can easily merge these pages to combine ‘likes’ and check-ins. Whether you accidentally created duplicate pages when first starting your business page, or have a separate Facebook Page and Place, you can combine these all into one page on Facebook. I recently went through Facebook’s new process for merging pages and will walk you through these 5 easy steps to merging duplicate pages.

Note: Both pages or places must have a similar name before beginning.

Step 1: Whether you are merging a Facebook Page or Place, you must have admin access to both. If you are combining a Page and Place and do not have access to the Place page for check-ins, you will need to claim your Place Page first.

Step 2: Navigate to the Facebook Page or Place with the most ‘likes’. This is the page you will KEEP and will add the fans and check-ins from the other page to the page you will keep. The page with fewer likes will be merged into the one with more likes. *The page or place with the least ‘likes’ will always be removed and merged into the larger page, this cannot be combined any other way and cannot be undone.

Step 3: Click in the top right corner ‘Edit Page’. Then from the left hand navigation under ‘Resources’ click ‘Merge duplicate page’. *The ‘Merge duplicate page’ link will only show if you are the admin of 2 Pages with the same or similar name.

Step 4: A window will pop up with a list of pages to be merged that you admin. Click on the page(s) you wish to merge and click ‘Merge Pages’. *If you’re merging a Place and a Page make sure they have the same address.

Step 5: Another window will pop up confirming that you want to merge this page. It will also state that all wall posts, photos, videos, etc, will be permanently deleted. Now don’t worry, if you have gone through this process correctly you are good to go! The content from the page you are merging will be deleted, and the page you are keeping that you began this process through will remain. All fans and check-ins from the merged page will be added to your main page.

Step 6: Navigate to your main Facebook Page. The fan count should have increased and if there are any check-ins these will be added to your page.

Tags: facebook

Why Search Engines Tie-in Social and Behavioral Factors

Posted on Jan 2, 2012 by Rick to Social Media

We talk to a lot of clients about the importance of social media marketing and it’s increasing importance as part of their search engine rankings and visibility. Today, I want to quickly illustrate why social media and user behavior are critical for a search engine’s ability to show the correct results for each users.

Watches vs Watches

Here’s a scenario: 2 individuals search for the same thing, Watches.

Without knowing anything about either searcher, Google and other search engines would struggle to return an extremely-relevant results-set. In general, each search engine would have to default to showing very general results which would likely leave each searcher in a position where a bit of browsing will be needed before products of interest are actually found. Let’s explore a scenario where both searchers actively participate on Google’s social network, Google +.

• Person A: Person A is well-to-do male business executive searching for watches. Person A is also a fan of several scuba diving and luxury brand fan pages. He has stored all of this information in his Google + profile for all to see.
  
• Person B: Person B is a partially-employed male auto mechanic searching for watches. Person B is married to a woman whose birthday is 3 weeks away and has also recently been shopping for bargain women’s watches. He has stored all of this information in his Google + profile.

If Google were able to tie each searcher’s social media information (occupation, interests, marriage/spouses information) and previous behavior (previous Google searches and social media comments, ‘likes’, etc.) to the search query at-hand, a completely different set of search results could be returned. For Person A, a likely results-set might include several higher-end watch brands (because Google knows that this individual is a fan of several luxury brands) and might possibly suggest several diving watches (since Google knows that this individual is interested in diving). For Person 2,  the previous search history (discount women’s watches) and upcoming spouses birthday (known through social media profile information) would be enough incentive for Google to return a results-set geared more toward discount women’s watches, even though this searcher is a male.

While the above scenario is theoretical, it’s also very logical. We already know that Google uses our search history to guide future results. The introduction of Google + is another significant step on the part of Google to learn more about searchers and will likely to improve the long term quality of individualized search results.

Why Does This Matter for Your Business?

Simple, the combination of search and social marketing efforts creates a synergy between the two. Creating a social fan base that regularly interacts with you and your products will likely improve your future visibility to them in the search arena in a much stronger way than it already does. In short, it will pay to get fans, keep fans, and engage fans on social networks. Since these social and behavioral cues can greatly improve search results, it only makes sense that these factors will have larger impacts on the future search results. Just another reason to seriously consider your future social media efforts in 2012 and beyond.

Tags: behavioral marketing, search and social

5 Steps to Creating Effective Facebook Ads

Posted on Nov 22, 2011 by DeAnna to Social Media

If you have ran a Facebook Ad campaign before, you know they can be touchy. One ad goes down the drain, while another sky rockets. Or perhaps you’ve had just the mediocre ads, where you gain fans, but at a Cost-Per-Fan that hardly seems worth it. Here’s some advice from my own experience:

1. Target Your Audience – If you are targeting a specific group of people with your ad make sure those targeting settings are selected. If you are a local restaurant you will most likely want to target just those in your local area, as opposed to the whole state or multiple states. Of course, you can run various ads to test. If you are targeting those interested in ‘antiques’ you may want to directly target those interested in antiques as opposed to a broad ‘shopping’ category. If you are a tour operator, you may want to specifically target travel agents, other operators, those interested in adventure travel and related fields. Of course you can always opt for the broad ‘traveling’ category.  Keep age, location, and other various demographics and interests of your target audience in mind when setting up your ad. See Examples below (click on images to enlarge):

Antique Interest Precise Targeting:

Tour Operator Precise and Broad Targeting:

2. Shock Your Audience – OK, so by ‘shock’ your audience I mean to use wording or imagery that will jump out, stand out, and yes in some occasions shock. Use a funny image, abstract, unusual, etc. Anything that can relate back to your business someway, and create an almost immediate click through from a user wanting to see/read more. EX: Groupon uses an intriguing image, perhaps you’ve seen their image of an upside down house. This image is so odd that it works, whatever their message may be “Shake things up with Groupon”, etc. Also, don’t forget a strong call to action within your ad, see the example below:

3. Relevant Landing Page – Be sure that the ad matches the landing page, this is very important in retaining users attention. If your ad is promoting certain merchandise, a contest, promotion, etc, make sure your landing page contains that information. If you make users hunt for the information they clicked on the ad for in the first place, they will move on.

4. Try CPC/CPM – Determine what works best for your ad. In my experience CPC has worked best, but every business and ad is different. If you find your ad is receiving a lot of clicks, but not conversions, try switching to CPM (cost per impression). Same is true for the opposite, if your ad is receiving a large amount of impressions but not as many clicks, try switching to CPC for a lower overall cost. Of course if your ad is not doing as well as you would like, evaluate your text, image, and landing page.

5. Run Multiple Ads -It’s best to create multiple ads to compare and contrast to see what works best. By running only one ad per campaign, you’re cutting yourself short by not finding the full potential of your ads.

Use these 5 tips and test, test, test! Testing various ads is the best ad advice I can give, and the most effective! A good way to test your ads is to set up multiple ads within a campaign, say 3 – 4, and run them for the same length of time and compare the results. This will give you an idea of the best performing ad, which you can then tweak for even more improvement. Of course, if you have an ad that is working wonderfully, keep that ad running! If it works well keep it going, you don’t want to make a change to that ad, instead create an identical ad with a slight change (text, targeting, image) to see if you can improve that ad even further.

If you have any other suggestions for effective Facebook ads and best practices please feel free to comment below.

Tags: Facebook Ads

Social Media Marketing Cheat Sheet

Posted on Nov 2, 2011 by DeAnna to Social Media

Whether or not you are new to social media marketing, having a cheat sheet always comes in handy! I have generated a list of resources I feel are useful for those who manage social media accounts, from the best social media news sites, to Twitter search operators, and social media tips and advice. Check it out below, or download the PDF for yourself or company here: The Social Media Marketing Cheat Sheet *Right click the link to download or click on images below to enlarge.

Feel free to leave a comment if this has been useful to you, or if you have any suggestions/additions. For even more social media assistance, see my previous blog post on creating a content calendar.

Tags: cheat sheet, facebook, social media marketing

Facebook Content Calendar Cheat Sheet and Template

Posted on Oct 14, 2011 by DeAnna to Social Media

In my previous post, The Secret to an Effective Facebook Page, I discuss the importance of having a content calendar to organize your social media strategy. To help you get started with this, I have put together a content calendar cheat sheet with all of the tips I feel are necessary to begin. The calendar cheat sheet covers everything you will need to get started with managing your Facebook content. Attached to the cheat sheet is a calendar template, feel free to use/edit this for your own social strategy.

Below is a one week example of a content calendar. Click on the image to enlarge.

Content Calendar Template: The following are items to be filled out in the content calendar template. You can edit these fields as you wish to better fit your needs. *See image above for example
Post Text: Your Facebook post, keep this under 420 characters.
Links: Place any links that may be inserted into the post.
Images: Where the image to be posted is located.
Notes: Keep any notes, or extra information you may need to know about this post here. You can also use this for any ideas for next month that may spark as a result of this post.

Optional Fields:
Comments: At the end of the month, go through and track how many comments your post received.
“Likes”: At the end of the month track how many “likes” your post received. Comparing the results of interaction from fans per post is a good way to see which posts fans respond to best.

You can download the ‘Cheat Sheet’ and ‘Content Calendar Template’ here. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or leave some of your own suggestions for managing your Facebook content!

Tags: content calendar, facebook

What Does Google+ Mean for Your Business?

Posted on Sep 12, 2011 by Taylor to Social Media

No one is sure yet. Google has asked that businesses hold off on participating in Google+, and in fact, they have actively been shutting down business profiles that were established before this decree. Ford is among the small number of businesses that made the cut and is part of Google’s “experiment” to see if Google+ works for business, and they appealed to the public for input. “We’re experimenting on Google+ and we’ve seen comments, both pro and con about our presence. What would you like to see from us, in order to get the most value from interacting?” It is a question that many businesses would like to know the answer to.

Google+’s open network model holds potential for businesses and marketers; Bryan Eisenberg, managing partner at Eisenberg Holdings, expects that this “project” will marry search and social to provide a more customized experience for users. One way it does this is with partnerships, like that with Bazaarvoice, which integrates customer reviews into search results. Google+ may be able to expand on that ability and build connections that can benefit marketers, and because results come from specific “Circles,” they are likely to carry more weight.

If your business is not one of the lucky few who is participating in testing for Google+, what can you do to prepare for the launch of the business version? Get a personal profile. See how it works, and experiment with it. On a personal level, see how it works with Google’s other tools and how it acts with the Android OS. Look out for changes in Google’s algorithms, which are likely to come about as social media and real-time results play a bigger role in search. Google expects to roll out a business-oriented solution sometime this year, and if you take a few preliminary steps – and see how companies like Ford handle Google+ – you can get a head start on harnessing this new tool. Or seeing if it is worth harnessing at all.

Tags: google

Social Media’s Role in the News

Posted on Sep 10, 2011 by Taylor to Social Media

Barack Obama’s administration is no stranger to social media. Even before elected, Obama was rarely without his trusted Blackberry, and he can claim the distinction of being the first president to use Twitter in office. His personal Twitter profile has over 9 million followers, and he follows over 600,000, which is an equally vital statistic. Obama recently held a “Twitter town meeting” live from the East Room, in which he spent an hour holding a “conversation” with millions of Twitter users. This brings social media into a position of prominence regarding the coverage and facilitation of events that was once entrusted only to traditional news organizations.

White House communications director, Dan Pfeiffer, says, “We’ve entered a different information age, where people get news and information in a different way than they did in the past. If you’re going to communicate with the broad public, it is no longer sufficient to simply do it through traditional mainstream media.”

Increasingly, news consumers are not content to sit and passively accept information filtered through reporters. A forum like Twitter, or Facebook (on which President Obama also held a town meeting-style conversation) may be a better indicator of what people want to know than a traditional press conference. “AskObama” was moderated by 10 Twitter users, chosen by Twitter, to avoid the image that the Obama administration was hand-picking questions or managing the news.

Michael D. Shear writes in the New York Times, “The social media companies are now firmly established as an alternative means of getting a president to respond to the big – or maybe not so big – questions of the day. Rather than being up to a journalist or blogger, the direction of questioning will be largely guided by the broader interests of the Twitter community.”

And the community was all for it: sites from Mashable and MTV to GOP Financial Services had suggestions for questions. But, as CNN points out, is Twitter “really the best way to talk to a President?” TwitSprout estimates that about 40,000 questions were posted by people hoping to get an answer from the President. Of these, 18 were actually asked. Twitter may not have taken over from traditional news organizations in terms of presidential coverage – but it is making waves.

Searcher “Verbosity”: Whose Searchers are Most Chatty?

Posted on Sep 8, 2011 by Taylor to Social Media, Web Marketing

It is no secret that different search engines appeal to different types of users. Blekko appeals to those who want to “slash the web” and get very specific details. Bing users expect rather juried results, while Google tends to be the go-to for the majority of shoppers and information-seekers. New research from Chitka, though, points out another difference: searcher verbosity. Their study looked at how wordy Google, Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Ask are. The “winner”…Ask.

On average, Ask users had the most verbose searchers, packing about 4.74 words in per query. Now, the most brief users were those of AOL, who typed in 4.17 words per search. While not a huge difference, Chitka did discover something more about those chatty Askers. AOL users typed in queries of 8 words or more only 8.38 percent of the time; Bing, Google, and Yahoo see similar numbers. Ask users, though, are almost twice as likely to use 8 words or more.

How does this affect the average SEO or business? Well, perhaps not greatly! Unless you are optimizing for Ask. Here, users are more likely to type in something like, “What is the purpose of using a fasting glucose test?” This is largely due to the traditional structure of Ask, which began life as AskJeeves. Jeeves wanted us to ask it real questions – hence the hows, whys, and whats. Google, Bing, Yahoo, and AOL users tend to cut the chitchat and enter something like “fasting glucose test” or if they have a few more seconds to kill, “why fasting glucose test.”

Most SEOs and businesses optimize for Google, and here, the take home lesson is to be brief and succinct when targeting keywords. Short phrases of 3 to 5 words will allow for the most effective results. SEOs tend to stay away from long-tail keywords or single-word keywords because it is simply not what their searchers are looking for.

Tags: search engine differences

Google Taking On Social Media with Google+

Posted on Sep 4, 2011 by Joey to Social Media

Google’s Eric Schmidt admitted that the search giant didn’t concentrate enough effort in the social arena as Facebook grew into a juggernaut of likes, friends, and fans. Schmidt is hoping that Google+ changes that and gives Facebook more competition for a piece of the social pie. Google+ is currently an invitation-only “project” but it is catching some great early buzz. What is Google+ about?

According to the official Google blog announcement for Google+, “Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

They “aim to fix it” with these core elements: Circles, Instant Upload, Huddle, Sparks, and Hangouts, each of which is designed to facilitate social interaction and networking. Circles, for instance, allows you to group friends and family to make sharing certain information easier. Hangouts allows you to let your friends know you are hanging out online and they should “stop by” and say hi.

Principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, Greg Sterling, says that there is great initial demand for the service, which is currently limited to a small number of invitees. “Some of the people using Google+ are super enthusiastic. Some of their enthusiasm is not exclusively a reaction to the Google+ product but a statement about the desire for a viable alternative.” One alternative that Google+ offers is the ability to have easier private conversations with groups. Facebook’s “group” option is rather limited and clunky at this point, so this is a boon for social media users.

Facebook isn’t sitting idly by. A spokesperson said, in response to the release of Google+, “We’re in the early days of making the Web more social.” They have launched a Skype-Facebook alliance to allow for video chat. But even this is seen as too little by many experts. Google+’s Hangout allows groups to chat, and it’s free. Facebook’s version is one-on-one for now because Skype charges for group chat. It seems Google has the leg up in that respect.

Even though Google+ has had a limited release thus far, it is clear that Google may have finally stumbled upon an effective social solution.

Tags: facebook, google

UFC Brings Social Media into the Octagon

Posted on Aug 20, 2011 by Taylor to Social Media

If there is one businessman who not only understands the importance of social media, but is able to leverage it, it is Dana White. White, the current president of the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) uses Twitter and Facebook to promote his organization but, more importantly, to interact with fans. Under his watch, the UFC has become the second strongest sports presence in social media (beat out by the NBA). What is White doing right – and what can you learn?

UFC has moved comfortably into the mainstream, and in addition to TV spots, fight fans can catch bouts on pay-per-view. To take advantage of the audience, and to build an even larger one, UFC decided to broadcast live events on Facebook. The first pro sports league to do so, this broadens the reach of an already international brand to 650 million users. Some more stats:

The UFC has 5.8 million combined Twitter and Facebook fans, not counting individual fighters’ accounts, Spanish-language accounts, or White’s 1.46 million followers. Part of this stems from their traditional fan base, but part is also due to the reach they have achieved via social media. They have taken fighting out of the Octagon and put it into mainstream America. “Everything is for tomorrow. Our Facebook page has grown unbelievably since we started putting up fights on it. And what happens is you end up turning more fans onto it, and you continue to grow your fan base and build your brand. You educate people about the sport and get more people talking about it, which is vital.”

White recently spent nearly a quarter million dollars on a social media incentive program for fighters to develop their skills in the social media world. White also points out that it provides retiring fighters with a strong presence and continued fan base that is important as they pursue other careers. Other initiatives White has employed:

• Weekly video blogs on YouTube.
• Letting Facebook fans “like” the page and then watching live fights.
• Training UFC fighters how to use Twitter effectively and creatively.
• Responding in real-time to consumer complaints. White says, “Now, as these things are happening, I have people running around fixing all the problems that are happening that I’m reading on Twitter.”

So, say you have a business that tens of millions of people do not tune in to watch. Does any of this apply to you? You can’t really stream “Live from My CPA Office” on YouTube and expect hits. But you can do other things that White does:

• Offer your audience information (or entertainment) that is relevant to them. White ups the ante by providing live fights and video recaps. This may not be applicable directly to your business, but think about how you can enhance content, whether it is by adding updated news features or by connecting with a Twitter feed.
• Set up the profiles – and use them! White regularly interacts with fans via Twitter. He keeps them updated on UFC news and events.
• Respond to your audience. Good or bad, respond to people. Social media is about interaction. Dana White may be fielding questions about who is going to coach the next Ultimate Fighter. You may be fielding questions about why your pizza is the best or if you use organic products in your business. Whatever it is, respond and contribute to the dialogue.

Tags: facebook, twitter, UFC, youtube