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Creating a fan page on Facebook sounds like a quick and easy way to generate traffic to your site and gain new customers for your business. With the explosion in social networking traffic over the last few years there’s a buzz around Facebook almost like the buzz surrounding the internet in 1999! But creating a successful fan page and making social media work for your business takes more than just throwing up a page and expecting new visitors to flood in.
I’m sure most people reading this will already have a profile page on Facebook – there are over 400 million users on Facebook now, it’s the largest social network in the world and one of the most used websites. Most users check their profiles at least once a week with a large number checking several times a day.
Most marketing people have a profile on Facebook and try to use that to promote their businesses and network with likeminded individuals around the world but to keep your private life a bit separate from work we’d usually suggest setting up a Fan Page for your company. It works just like a profile but allows you to provide a public page for your business without getting your personal profile mixed up.
From Facebook:
A Facebook Page is a public Profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users.
When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, stories linking to your Page can go to their friends via News Feed. As these friends interact with your Page, News Feed keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider circle of friends.
View our Best Served Cold Fan Page
Recently we’ve been involved with setting up a couple of Facebook fan pages with bespoke applications for high profile campaigns – please contact us for more information.
To get the most out of your fan page you need to remember that Facebook works best as a two-way conversation. As with all social networks the idea is that you can talk directly to your customers but they can also talk directly to you – don’t ignore them. Make sure you respond, join in and give your visitors a reason to recommend you to their friends. By giving something back you can increase your fan page visitor numbers and in turn increase your customer base.
If you’d like to know more about how Facebook and other social network sites can help improve your business please contact us. We’re always happy to talk through ideas and discuss potential benefits of social media with all types of business.
Social Media is an often used term and it covers a broad range of different websites – almost all new websites include some form of social media: in comments, embedded media or links to social tools. I like to think of Social Media as an umbrella term that as a basic rule covers three main types of website:
Sites such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Flickr are all Social Media website. Literally speaking they are used to display Media in the context of a Social community. In this sense media is used with the traditional meaning of an act of communication – via film, art, photography, music etc.
Since the arrival of MySpace and Facebook the importance of social networking sites has increased dramatically over the last 3 or 4 years. These are now the most used and most active type of website in the world. The basic function of a Social Networking site is to allow users to chat, view and interact with each other via a simple interface.
This is the most difficult type of social website to describe and understand. The idea behind Social Bookmarking sites is to easily store and distribute useful information and links to websites. Rather than storing favourite sites on your personal computer you are allowing anyone to view your links and rate the web pages based on the relevance to topic, how interesting they found it or some other criteria.
So that’s a brief overview of Social Media but how do you use it to your advantage when marketing a new website, prodcut or service? That’s where the work starts!
There are lots of blogs that will help with talking about social media and marketing and how to optimise your Facebook pages and Twitter tweets but one of the easiest to understand I’ve read recently is this:
16 Rules For Social Media Optimization Revisited
Here at Best Served Cold we can help you get started with Social Media and guide you on the best sites to register with, who your audience might be and how you can utilise the social internet to promote your brand or website.
Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that can get you links, attention and large amounts of traffic. Sometimes the work involved can be quite time intensive but it is always low cost.
The two main benefits of developing a good social media marketing strategy are:
Both of these translate directly and indirectly to a higher search engine ranking and increased traffic to
your website:
If you already have a Social Media online marketing campaign in place we can still help you further by talking you through Social Media News Releases or SMNRs. We have helped to create Pressitt.com which is a frree service that allows you to publish online press releases across your favourite Social Networking and Social Media platforms. From Pressitt:
The Pressitt SMNR template offers all of the core information found in a traditional press release, but additionally takes advantage of linking, multimedia and Web 2.0 shareable features. It allows users to host downloadable hi-res images within their releases, along with PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs – YouTube videos can also be embedded. Each brand using the service is assigned its own RSS feed, and press contacts can be reached via LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, up-to-date bookmarking and sharing icons are presented including Posterous, Yammer and Sphinn.
Once created your SMNR can be published to the Pressitt platform and shared to social networks or via an email link to your contacts and colleages.
With a Pressitt newsroom you can collate all your Social Network links in one place giving your customers an easy way to find you and your products. More importantly it gives you a high profile online presence to talk about your brand directly to your customers. If you’d like to find out more about Pressitt and Social Media News Releases why not contact one of the Pressitt team?