Tutorials

Composer Makes It Easier for You to Share with Who You Want on Facebook

by M. Dorn on September 15, 2011 · 0 comments

Let’s say you want to share a story about a birthday dinner. Using this control, you can update your status, add a photo, tag your friends, share where you are, and decide who you want to see this post.

With this control right next to what you are sharing, you know who you are sharing with. But you can also adjust this quickly and easily, to a different group of people, before you’ve shared the story. Your selection will remain until the next time you change it. This is helpful if you like to post to the same group of people all the time. But if you like to share with different people, it’s easy to change your selection.

Why Should I Be Using Google Places?

by M. Dorn on September 14, 2011 · 0 comments

If you are actively marketing to local clients using social media, then one of the best ways to help them gain more traffic is to help them complete their Google Places information. Here’s a brief video tutorial explaining some of the benefits of using Google Places.

How to be a Great Community Manager – Part 1

by M. Dorn on July 1, 2011 · 0 comments

Being a community manager in the social space isn’t for everyone.  It takes more than just being a people person, it requires strategic thinking and a host of other skills.

In this 15 minute presentation, Amber Naslund, Director of Community at radian6 will provide an overview of the requisite skills and successful approaches of effective community managers.

See the Community Manager Presentation

How Top Brands Conduct Ecommerce on Facebook: Best Practices

by M. Dorn on July 1, 2011 · 0 comments

Facebook Marketing Bible

Brands can use ecommerce storefront apps to sell products directly from their Facebook Pages. Some apps allow customers to checkout without having to leave Facebook, while others let them complete the transaction on a brand’s website. Brands can direct users away from their Page to a dedicated Facebook canvas app hosting a full-featured store, or they can simply use a Page tab app as a landing page for their website’s store.

Here we’ll showcase how five brands using five reputable apps approach ecommerce on Facebook. We’ll also outline some best practices such as providing buttons for sharing products and Liking your Page, using a compelling landing tab to draw users into your store, and offering a variety of payment methods.

The following is an excerpt. The full length article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes analysis of four more Facebook ecommerce implementations and additional best practices.

The Miami HEAT via Milyoni

Page: The Miami HEAT NBA basketball team

Storefront App Provider: Milyoni

Tab App Name: Shop

Home Page: The Miami HEAT uses a landing page to display some of it top products and draw people to click through to its canvas app. Once the full featured app has loaded, users can search products, browse a catalog, Like the Miami HEAT’s Page, or follow the team on Twitter. The center of the app provides a promotion code for use at checkout, and several featured products, though without sharing buttons.

Product View: Clicking through to a product reveal multiple photos, options to share via email, Facebook, and Twitter, and a Like button that allows for quick sharing to the news feed, and that displays a Like count which can provide social proof for the quality of products.

Checkout: A checkout powered by Verisign lets users complete their order within Facebook using their credit card.

Negatives: The app may be too full-featured for merchants only selling a few items and who are more concerned with driving sales than follows of their social media presences. Sharing buttons on the home page could help, but might make the app even more cluttered.

Overall: Milyoni’s app provides a great shopping experience that’s entirely contained within Facebook. The Miami HEAT did well to provide a compelling landing page that can persuade users to wait for the canvas app to load. Using the home page to drive valuable Likes and follows of a brand’s social media presence while using the product pages to drive sales strikes a good balance.

Five Best Practices

1.  Sharing Options on Products – Placing Like buttons on the home page view of your products, and additional email, Twitter, and Facebook sharing options on product pages makes it easy for users to tell friends about items they find interesting, even if they don’t buy them. These shares drive referral sales, and represent the primary advantage of conducting Facebook-integrated ecommerce.

The full article, complete with more best practices and reviews of ecommerce implementations, can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing, advertising, and ecommerce on Facebook.


Source: Inside Facebook

5 Ways to Find Your B2B Company’s Online Fans

by M. Dorn on June 30, 2011 · 0 comments

If your B2B company has been diligent in its product research, sales relationship and customer service development, it has developed a core group of fans. These fans love your products and services, and would gladly recommend them to their co-workers, clients and business contacts.

In the music business, street teams have long been an invaluable group of superfans that papers cities with upcoming concert flyers, spreads the word about new albums and recruits friends as new fans. Your B2B fans can act in a similar way in the online space, retweeting brand news, suggesting your B2B company for friends’ business needs on LinkedIn or tagging your company in a Facebook page status update.

Social media allows for B2B companies to locate, empower and task those fans on a direct level, without the go-between wall of media, email marketing or advertising. But before you can reward these fans and ask them to advocate on your B2B company’s behalf, you must first figure out who they are and where they interact with others online. Here are five ways to locate your B2B brand’s biggest supporters:

1. Use services designed to tune into online conversations

Find conversations about your brand using free services such as Kurrently, which tracks keywords on both Twitter and Facebook. If your B2B social media team has already set  up an RSS feed using Twitter’s search engine or specific search term columns in applications such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, keep an eye on users who post frequently about your brand. Build an internal list of users who frequently share information around your company, individual products or management, or interact often with your social media posts. Additionally, be sure to actively check in with these followers to build relationships beyond sales and promotions.

2. Review your blog comments
Advocates and fans of your B2B company are likely to be engaged on your company blog and are the ones leaving comments. This is true with any blog that receives even just a few comments. There are people who regularly post comments because they are engaged with your company. Since most commenting functions require an email address, it is easy to contact them and start the advocate conversation. If you are not encouraging blog comments by asking a question at the end of every blog post, here’s another reminder that you should be doing that.

3. Simply ask

You never  know if you don’t ask. If you’re already engaging on social media, send out feelers to your current followers. Schedule regular tweets that let followers know you’re looking to share insider information with people who want to be the first to know your B2B company’s news and get exclusive social media-only information, discounts and announcements.

4. Gather social media information from other marketing segments

If people are engaged enough with your brand to sign up for your email list, chances are they’ll also want to follow along on social media. Incorporate optional fields such as “Twitter handle” and “LinkedIn profile URL” into the sign-up process, and ask current registrants if they would like to be part of the action.

5. Take offline fans online

Be sure to leverage “real life” fans. Use face time at meetings, conferences and networking events to identify your B2B company’s fans, and carry those connections into the online world as well. Ask your B2B public relations, customer service and sales teams for positive media, customer and client encounters that could be continued and shared online.

Just like building an effective media list is key to pitching the right media contacts, identifying your B2B company’s online fans is important and takes time. Only after you have built a list of your company’s online fans, sorted them by their specific interests and engaged with them beyond the normal sales pitch can you begin crafting strategies and tactics to leverage those real – albeit online – relationships with you company’s fans.

How do you locate your B2B company’s biggest fans?

 

Related posts:

  1. Who Owns Social Media at Your B2B Company? As more B2B companies explore social media, the question of…
  2. More Ways To Know If Your B2B Company is Social Media-Ready Last week I wrote a post about how to know…
  3. 12 Ways to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for a B2B Company LinkedIn is considered by many to be the professional social…

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Source: Social Media B2B

Tutorial: How to Filter Spam from your Facebook Page

by M. Dorn on June 28, 2011 · 0 comments

Tutorial Filter Facebook Spam
As Facebook has become popular it has increasingly become the target of spammers.  Unlike email spammers, the Facebook spammers don’t need your email address to spam you.  Heck, once they ‘like’ a page that you manage your page could quickly turn into a trap for all your fans. If you have been attacked, you know it can take a considerable amount of time to clean up your page and make nice, nice with your fans.

However, through a little publicized feature, Facebook page managers can thwart many would be spammers before they even share their dubious posts and the following tutorial demonstrates how two minutes of your time will help keep spammers at bay and your fans, happy – happy!

View the Tutorial

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