Facebook Timeline For Fan Pages – What You Need To Know

March 1, 2012 by FXV Digital Design  |  Leave a Comment

Facebook has decided to change the playing field again with Timeline for Facebook Pages. At first you’re thinking, “Crap! Now I have to do everything all over again!” – But have no fear, your page still works. Let’s just take a look at the features and what you can do now that you couldn’t before.

So What’s New?

• Cover photo now available(851px x 315px): Great space for advertising on your page.
• Profile photo is now a square instead of the long rectangle: This is great because your profile image will be the same in news feeds as well. No more fiddling with thumbnails.
• You can now add custom thumbnails for your apps to help match your page layout: You no longer have to settle with the app creator’s choice.
• Custom tabs are now larger (749px wide): Having more real estate is always good!
• Status updates are now sticky: Keep your most important updates up top for seven days.

What Is No More.

• The default landing tab option is no more, everyone lands on the wall tab by default.
• Profile images are s small square now (124 x 124) and they sit inside the cover photo area.
• The photo strip up top is no more.
• The tabs are no longer on the left side, but up top instead.

You may or may not like the features that were removed, but in my opinion it’s all good. The fact that we are given more real estate to work with on custom tabs, as well as that nice huge cover photo makes up for it. Facebook nation will figure it out eventually, it always does.

A Few Important Notes

Facebook Timeline for Pages will be rolling out live come March 30th, 2012. This gives you a nice thirty days to figure out your new layout, preview it and publish it early if you choose to.

How Do I Preview The Page? Facebook will allow you to go ahead and make changes to you page in a live preview (only available to admins) before the official launch date. Take advantage of this and get ready. Simply visit your page and click on the ‘preview’ button up top.

How Do I Publish The Page? While you are in preview mode, you will see the option up top giving you the option to publish your page once you are ready to go.

New Administration Area

There is a new admin area for you to get acquainted with in order to make updates to your page. It’s conveniently located to the right of the cover photo above the mini-timeline.

The beauty part is that you no longer have to leave your Facebook page in order to make changes. The admin panel slides down and all of your options are right there in front of you. How great is that?!

After you’ve entered the admin area, click on the ‘Manage’ button and you will see the ‘Edit Page’ button. This will get you to the area you know and love in order to edit specific details about your page.

In case you were wondering, you can view this page here to see all the pages you admin: https://www.facebook.com/pages/status/

How To Manage Your Tabs

You can have up to four showing at one time, but you can’t move the ‘Photos’ tab. In order to view all of your tabs, just click on the small drop down arrow to the right of your last tab.

Once you’ve done that, all of your tabs are viewable and you can now edit the order. If you hover over the tabs, a small pencil will appear in the upper right hand corner. From there you will see ‘Swap position with:’ and you can select the tab to take its place. You can also edit the settings for the tab from this area as well.

Now, one of the best features added to the new page is the ability to change the app’s icon – well, thumbnail actually. Before you had to deal with the icon the developer of the app chose – not anymore.

The first thing you need to do is create an image (111px x 74px). Once you have that taken care of, click ‘Edit Settings’, then next to ‘Custom Tab Image’ click ‘Change’. From there you upload your custom image and you are good to go. No sweat!

On weird thing though – The screen where you upload a new image is in a new tab or window, so after you’ve uploaded a new image, close that window or tab to get back to your edit screen, and click ‘Okay’ to finish it up.

Posting Content To Your Facebook Timeline

You now have a few different choices when posting content to your new Facebook Timeline:

• Pin to Top: This keeps the post up top like a ‘sticky’ post in a blog.
• Highlight: This makes your post span both columns of your timeline as oppose to one.
• Change Date: This allows you to back date any posts.

This definitely makes for interesting conversation now when posting new content. Keeping certain posts pinned to the top can be used for marketing your company, services or new products. It also is a wonderful tool for engaging fans and keeping them occupied on your page, so put some thought into what you are pinning – don’t just pin for pinning’s sake. Also take note that you can either pin or highlight, not both.

In closing, make sure you take a few minutes and check out Facebook’s tutorial site on learning pages. They did a great job laying it out there and will help you understand more fully on how to get the most out of your new Facebook page.

Twitter Tips & Tricks To Help Get You Started

February 28, 2012 by Freddy X. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

I’ve noticed lately that Twitter has been given another boost. It was popular for a while, then it faded in my opinion, but now it’s back and better than ever. I think media outlets finally caught on to Twitter and are now using the little site that could for marketing their products. Watch TV lately? Notice the hashtags (#) everywhere?

Of course now you’re thinking to yourself, “How do I market my Twitter account?”. Well, have no fear – here are a few tips we’ve put together so you can get started.

Customization

• Change your profile picture. Ideally if the account is for your business, your logo would be perfect. If this is your personal account, use a picture of yourself to make it seem more personalized and inviting.
• Utilize as much of the 160-character limit the Twitter bio space allows. Making sure you include keywords your followers or potential followers may be searching for will help gain Twitter followers.
• Create your own custom background image. Try not to make the image too much like an ad or sales pitch. The background image must be less than 800k and we recommend a size of 1600×1200 for a large image or smaller if you plan on tiling the image or just having it on the left-hand side. You also have to keep in mind that smaller resolutions and monitor sizes will hide much of the background. Twitter is top left justified, so the left side is the area of importance.

Twitter Search

Take full advantage of the Twitter search tool. I search for keywords that affect my business and see what’s trending. Doing a search for one subject often opens the dors to new ones you didn’t think about. Here are a few more tips:

• Search for your website or blog URL and see if others are mentioning your page.
• Search for anything near you by adding near:”city state”. For example, typing near:”New York City” tattoo would return current tweets that have happened in New York City with the keyword tattoo in the results.
• Find people who you may enjoy following by searching for keywords that interested you. Giving them a retweet in most cases will garnish a follow.
• Any time you get excellent results click the “Save this search” button to save that search. These searches can then be found under the “Searches” tab next to your timeline on the new Twitter interface. Making it a habit to check these daily will produce results quicker and more efficiently.

Followers

• Engage followers. This helps in keeping them interested and many will retweet your updates.
• Do not follow too many people. No one is going to follow someone who is following thousands of people but only has 10 followers – trying too hard actually hurts in this case.
• Retweet only interesting posts. Not doing so will have your followers jumping ship quicker than you think.
• Retweet and participate in conversations with people with a lot of followers. Their followers will see your updates and if they’re interesting, guess who they’ll follow next?
• When first joining do not follow hundreds of people. You’ll mark yourself as a bot and that’s never good.

Create Interesting and Useful Tweets

• Try making all your tweets informative, useful, or funny. Again, if they’re boring or useless, your followers will leave.
• Do not post mundane posts, e.g. having lunch. Do you care if anyone else is eating lunch? Exactly! Give your followers something to talk about.
• Add hashtags to your tweets. For example, if your tweet is about baseball, add #baseball in the tweet.
• Tweet as often as possible. No one is going to follow someone who has not tweeted in months. Try at the very least to tweet a few times a week or daily if you can manage.
• Do not whine or complain. Do I really need to tell you why?
• Try saving your most valuable tweets during the times people will most likely see them.
• Keep some space available in your tweet in case someone retweets your post. People liks to add comments to retweets, so make their life a little easier.

Get Twitter On Your Mobile Device

iPhones, Blackberries, Android phones, and almost all of the other smart phones have Twitter applications. Take full advantage of these applications. Stuck on a train, car ride, bored? Grab your phone and give your followers something food to tweet about.

Advertise You’re On Twitter

• Mention your Twitter page as many places as you can – your business card, e-mail signatures, website, Facebook, etc.
  
• Create a tweet button like the example below.

Tweet



• Create a Twitter profile widget on your blog or website.

I know there may be a lot to process here, but you don’t have to do everything in one day. Start with the customization process first and then move on to implementing Twitter on your other social networks and sites. Once you have that completed, turn to gaining followers and creating ideas you think would best fit your subject matter on Twitter.

Remember, these tips can only help you get started on Twitter and are not an end all. Once you find your niche and flow, do some more Google searching focusing on the Twitter aspects that affect you. You’d be surprised with what you’ll find. Good Luck!

Top 4 Tips for Successful Social Media Integration on your Website

January 27, 2012 by Jill J. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

Social Media. By now, you are probably sick of hearing those words. The fact remains that social media can make or break your business.

One of the most important things to do when launching your website, or even if you have an existing website, is to make sure you are integrating social media appropriately. Here are a few tips to help you integrate successfully!

1. Make Sure Social Media Buttons are Visible

This might seem like common sense, but the truth is that many businesses miss the mark when placing their social media buttons. Media buttons should be displayed on the top, bottom or along the side of your home page.

Links or buttons that remain in your navigation as the user moves from page to page are important. Always offer them the opportunity to check out your social media! Be sure they are set to open in a new window so the user doesn’t exit your website.

This website clearly displays their Facebook, Twitter, and RSS Feed for viewers.

2. Don’t Overdo It

Don’t get engaged in social media that you aren’t interested in. You will be more successful if you focus on a few outlets and make them spectacular rather than having twenty outlets and nineteen of them are ignored. By this, I mean if you prefer Facebook over Twitter then just stick with the Facebook.

Overwhelming your viewers with icons for too many social media outlets will turn them off.. instead just focus on the main players such as Facebook and Twitter to start. Before you add buttons to your site, ask yourself, “Is there information here that people would be interested in?”

This website only uses Facebook and keeps that as their main focus

3. Integrate your Social Media Feed

One of the easiest ways to get your fans engaged is to have your social media feed directly displayed on your site. If you use Facebook often then add the code right into your sidebar! Show your fans that you are engaged.

Twitter also helps you display your tweets fairly easy by providing their own slew of widgets you can add to your site. You can add them to your website, blog and even add integration to your Facebook page. Click here to view all the goodies.

This website integrates their Facebook feed right onto their sidebar.

4. Include Share Buttons

If you sell a product or run a full-fledged eCommerce site and you haven’t added share buttons to your product pages, you are missing out on a whole host of potential social impressions. Share buttons should enable website-goers to seamlessly share or recommend a product. Let your fans do the advertising for you!

If you have a WordPress based site or blog, make sure you visit your plugins section and do a search for social media buttons. There are many to choose from and we’re sure you’ll find something to your liking. Take a look at how this website adds share buttons to the side of their posts.

Follow these steps and watch how your website and social media will work seamlessly!

How To Get The Most Out Of Your WordPress Blog

January 24, 2012 by Freddy X. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

Many of our clients have asked us to redesign their websites using the WordPress platform. It makes it easier for them to log in and make the updates they need right away as opposed to waiting for the “web guy”. Keeping websites fresh with new content keeps your Google rankings moving in the right direction and allows you to achieve better organic rankings.

So being many of my clients have asked me the same batch of questions on how to get the most out of WordPress, I figured why not write a quick little post helping you get started on the right path towards success.

Permalinks
One of the first things you should do is setup your permalinks correctly. If you’ve already went ahead and started blogging or creating pages, you’ll see the links created by WordPress look something like this:

http://www.YourAwesomeUrl.com/?page_id=35

Looking at that you can tell right away that SEO is not the main focus. In order to fix that, all you need to do is got to your Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks. Select the post name option, which should look like the following:

/%postname%/

Doing this will set your URLs to show the titles of your pages or posts, benefitting your SEO and should look like this:

http://www.YourAwesomeUrl.com/your-awesome-title

Google Sitemap Generator
This is an awesome plug-in created by Google that generates XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Just install the plug-in, activate, and a sitemap is auto-generated and updated with each blog post. The file wil be placed in the root directory of your site and called “sitemap.xml”. You can then submit this sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools. [Read More]

Is your Facebook page being seen by your fans? Probably Not.

January 19, 2012 by Jill J. Vasquez  |  Leave a Comment

You have a page for your business and also have lots of fans! What does that mean? Absolutely nothing, according to new research of Facebook pages.

The grim reality is that only 17% of your fan base is actually seeing what you are posting. Sure, they are fans but that means absolutely nothing if your posts don’t come up in their Facebook Newsfeed.

Facebook has recently began to shun low active pages by deeming them useless in a Newfeed. This means that even if your page has over 5000 fans and you post often, if you don’t get a large amount of likes and comments on your page, your fans won’t see your posts. What makes even less sense is that one user who may comment/link your posts all the time STILL won’t see your posts in the Newsfeed until other people start commenting/liking as well.

Now before you start to get angry, we would like to offer you a solution.

The fact is that without constant attention, your Facebook page is going to suffer. Here are some solutions from AllFacebook.com to help get your page back onto the Newsfeeds of your fans:

4 Tips For Solving Facebook Post Visibility Problems

- You must try to get more likes and comments with every one of your posts. Every post that doesn’t get responses lowers the value of your page. Make sure everyone who posts to your page knows this and is capable of doing the next bullet item.

- To get more likes and comments, you need to tell people why they should like and comment on your posts.

- If you aren’t reaching enough fans, you might need to use Facebook advertising either to get more, or to show your page posts as ads. Then do a better job of engaging so you can keep reaching a higher percentage of these new fans.

- If you don’t want to do a good job of engaging fans on your Facebook page, the lower visibility may increase your cost per customer to the point that you may lose your profit potential. In this case, you should just use Facebook advertising to send people to your website instead — fewer steps, lower cost per customer.

Don’t have time to devote to your page? Of course, FXV Digital is here to help. Contact us today and let us run your Social Media for you so you can be sure you are being seen!