Archive for the ‘facebook’ Category

Facebook Fan Box

Friday, April 9th, 2010

If your business has Facebook fans, that doesn’t mean they read your blog. Just because people are reading your blog doesn’t mean they know you’re on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be great if website visitors could easily be converted into Facebook fans? They can, with Facebook Fan Box.

Why would a business, organization, or public personality who already has a blog audience bother with Facebook? While I highly recommend blogs for the incredible content hubs they are, consider how they work. Blogs comprise a 1-to-1 relationship in that one reader can visit and consume the content you create. An individual reader may visit once in a while to see what’s happening and maybe comment on your content. On Facebook, however, fans can receive (content is pushed) blog-length posts and twitter-length status updates which can contain photos, links, and videos directly in their News Feed. You no longer have to rely on readers occasionally dropping by the blog. Content is pushed to them and they can easily comment on it. If they like, share or comment on it, your content ripples out across all of their Facebook friends (the average Facebook user has 130 friends!) as recent activity. This engenders conversation between people and their connections. Facebook is another great enticement for your fans to share and interact with your content.

The Fan Box widget is how you get a fan page out of Facebook and onto the web at large and in turn makes it easy for your blog readers to become page fans and tightens the bond you share with them.

The Fan Box has a few basic options you can select for how you would want it to display:

  • With/without the stream
  • With/without fans (it will display fans you know if there are any)
  • With/without the Facebook logo
Facebook Fan Box Options

A few of the Facebook Fan Box Options

Now, website visitors who are not currently Facebook fans will see a “Become a Fan” button; if you are already a fan it says “You are a Fan”. No matter which Fan Box options you go for, the important thing is that Facebook users now have the option to become a fan of your page right from your website the fan box is embedded on. If gaining fans is your goal, the Facebook Fan Box is a fantastic way to do it.

An example of a Facebook Fan Box on a website

Rock Fire Grille uses the Fan Box on their website to share specials and gather new fans in Facebook.

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Facebook Share

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Facebook Share is a great way to easily share web content into Facebook. If you have content to share, say a blog post, making it easy for others to distribute increases odds it’ll find more eyes. What better place to have people share things than across their vast community of Facebook connections?  With the average user having 130 friends and writing 25 comments on Facebook content each month it’s hard to resist; head over to http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics for more cool stats.

You’ll notice many web pages and especially blog posts now have a Facebook Share button. Share buttons currently come in the following styles with the main options being button or link and with or without the counter.

buttons_on_paper

All four flavors of the Facebook Share button.

Installing Facebook Share is a snap. Just add a few lines of code and you’re in business. To setup your share button, go to http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php and select the type of button you want then paste the code into your page.

Select live counter and it will monitor the number of times your content (the URL) has been shared on Facebook and can include other analytics for the number of shares, “likes”, the number of comments and clickbacks with a few special API calls.

Facebook Share is a marvelous way for anyone to easily share content on Facebook from anywhere on the web.

To try Facebook Share on this page, just click “share” below to pass this blog post on to others by sharing it with your Facebook friends!

For more information on Facebook Share or to setup your own Share button visit: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

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Getting Down to Business with Facebook Pages

Friday, February 19th, 2010

Facebook has some pretty awesome numbers; today they boast over 400 million active users, of which 200 million login every single day. Facebook users spend an average of 1 hour a day on Facebook and each user has an average of 130 friends. More than 60 million status updates areposted each day and 3 billion photos are uploaded to the site every month. But wait, there’s more. Enter the mobile Facebook user, or rather Facebook fanatic. Of those 400+ million users more than 100 million access Facebook via mobile devices (smart phones) like the iPhone, these uber users are twice as active on Facebook as the already impressively engaged non-mobile users.

In your Facebook

In your Facebook

No matter how you slice it, there’s a whole lot of Facebooking going on and it’s no wonder why businesses want to get in on this social network feeding frenzy.  So what is a business (brand, product, organization, public figure, artist or band) to do?

For starters, create a Facebook Page (http://ow.ly/19eM4). Having a Facebook Page lets a business exist in a fashion similar to a typical user profile and allows businesses connect and engage customers. Since your business page essentially acts like another friend to your connections, which in facebook lingo are called fans, bringing friends of those fans, that much closer to being fans of yours! Essentially this could be equated much like a giant ripple effect which keeps driving word-of-mouth to a wider and wider circle of fans, as your fans interact with your Facebook Page by commenting and linking to content on your Page (or posting on your Page depending how you have it configured) information spreads to their friends via News Feed.

If all this wasn’t enough to make you spring into action, as more than 1.5 million local businesses already have, I leave you with a few interesting figures pertaining to Facebook Pages to light the fire. More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day which averages out to 4 Pages/month/user and the average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month. Those could be fans of your Page, and comments about your products, service, brand or business which could be rippling out across each fan’s network of an average of 130 friends. That’s a lot of potential word-of-month for showing up and sharing good content with an audience that’s probably well worth the effort.

In future posts we’ll introduce other Facebook features such as Facebook Share and Facebook Connect which offer additional opportunities for increasing exposure and engaging your audiences.

*statistics used in the article available are available here: http://ow.ly/19f6t

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