Tag Archives: business pages

Social Media

Getting More Eyes On Your Facebook Business Page

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I’m always reading and then trying new things. Whether or not they work, I like to share what happened with the testing. This time around I’m going to talk about Facebook business pages; some folks call them fan pages but since mine has my business name associated with it (as you can see by my business logo over there on the right) I’m calling it a business page.

Facebook Screenshot
Neeraj Kumar via Compfight

Just 2 months ago I talked about some changes in promotions of myself and my business via social media, and I declared that Facebook was a disaster. And I wasn’t lying. At that time, there wasn’t anything I could do to generate any interest whatsoever.

I was seriously thinking about dropping the page and moving on with life; I just couldn’t pull the trigger though. Instead, I read a couple of articles that happened to mention a couple of things in particular.

One talked about video and how Facebook was starting to share more of those with the masses. I have lots of videos on two channels on YouTube, and I’d been sharing some of those links. However, they really didn’t seem to be doing much for me.

Sometimes I’m slow though. I finally realized the recommendations weren’t to share links to videos, but to actually upload videos. If you look at your news stream you’ll see a lot of videos there. Many are shared from other pages, but at some point at least half of those are original videos, most very short, but still uploaded directly by the originator.

I decided to take a shot at uploading my own videos to my business page. What I noticed that instead of when I used to share videos that linked to YouTube and got less than 10 views, suddenly videos were getting upwards of 30 to 50 “reaches”. That doesn’t actually mean people watched them, but underneath the reaches you see the view figure, and those had at least doubled from what I was getting before. Not all of them but more of them.

The other article talked about more free flow thoughts on a page rather than linking to blog posts, which is what I mainly did. On that front I should have been paying attention to the few times when I actually wrote something original on the page. Those always got way more views than when I’d write a sentence or two and then pasted a link.

Thus, it was time to try a couple of new things. One involved writing brief articles, maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs. The other involved one of my newer Twitter strategies, which was posting an original quote of mine and adding an image to it. Both of those strategies started getting more reaches and views from subscribers to the page, which was uplifting.

I didn’t stop there though. I started to think about sharing some of these things with my personal stream. That came from a personal video I shared last year on this blog when talking about airport stories, which I’d posted a YouTube link onto the business page but never had shared with my personal stream. This time I wrote a brief bit about what happened, posted the video directly from my computer, and also shared the link back to the blog post.

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Les Stockton via Compfight

That bad boy took off, and my friends loved the video. A couple asked for more videos; who’d have thought that would happen? So, I started sharing videos from my business page to my personal page. Not all of them; I know there are some leadership and social media tales that most of the people in my stream could care less about.

Many people love motivational stuff though, so I started sharing those posts. While I was at it I realized that some folks might also like my quotations on my personal page, especially since each one has an image with it.

Success! Suddenly I was getting hundreds of reaches, Facebook was telling me how these posts were performing better than the norm (while trying to get me to pay to promote them further; as if!), and, with just that effort, I started getting a few more people liking that business page. I don’t have a giant number, but at this moment I’m up to 371 when just 6 weeks ago I was stuck on 352.

That’s not bad, especially since I haven’t sent out any new invites during the time. This means that people must be sharing some of my posts because even though half the people who joined already knew me (those are the only folks you can invite to a business page), the other half (I know, 19 means one person would be cut in half; just go with me lol) are people I didn’t know before they signed up to the page.

Frankly, I’ve been happy with what’s been going on. Because of that, my message is starting to reach a few more people and it’s made Facebook a much better experience. I still don’t have tons of activity, but I have some hope for it to happen now. I’ll own up that I haven’t increased traffic to either blog all that much, but because of the increased activity on the page a couple of people will actually click on a blog link now if I promote it a bit better on the page; that doesn’t depress me one bit.

That’s what I’m seeing. No promises that it will work for everyone but that’s my experience. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you.
 

Business, Social Issues

Facebook Edgerank, Et Al

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Facebook pages; how much fun are they? Truth be told, obviously some people aren’t having much fun at all because they don’t put much new content on it, if they put content on it at all. Two weeks ago I spent some time going through some of the pages I liked to see if they were doing anything, and those that weren’t I “unliked”; you know, when I was a kid that wasn’t even a word. lol

Facebook pages are an odd duck, if you will. We create them because everywhere we’ve gone to talking about them says they can help us with our business. I’m not all that sure, but I do believe that if done right they can at least help give you a presence. But who’s seeing that presence, and what can you do to increase your presence?

There was this article on Jeff Bullas’ blog titled 6 Ways to Increase the Marketing Effectiveness of your Facebook Page, which includes this very cool infographic. It talks a little bit about Edgerank, which is the name of the algorithm Facebook uses to decide just how many people who have liked your page will have the opportunity to see whatever you put on your page. It’s based on a few things; how often those people have come to your site, so they participate in any way, do they ever share, etc. Actually, they use the same algorithm in determining how many of your friends and which friends see your general posts If you’re connected with 1,000 people on Facebook, you can bet that if 100 people ever see any of it you can count yourself lucky, unless you’ve made yourself popular.

Why do they do that? They do it because people share way more long form information on Facebook than they do on Twitter. On Twitter, every person I’m following has the ability to have me see everything they post via a general column. I have the ability to select certain people and put them in segregated columns so I definitely see what certain people post as opposed to everyone, but if I decide to check the general column the skies the limit.

On Facebook people share pictures, blog posts, etc. Some folks write long form prose of some type. If Facebook showed you every single thing that everyone posted, you’d be overwhelmed. Yes, you do have the ability to segregate your audience on Facebook at all, something I’ll cover at another time, but it’s still a lot of stuff.

So now you know why you don’t see everything from all your friends and why everyone doesn’t see everything you put on your Facebook page. How can you improve the odds of getting more people to see your stuff? The link I provided above gives you 6 ways. The idea is that, at least for your business page, you want to add more content to it so people have more to see, and you want to add more images because it’s been proven that people react better to them, but what if you’re not a bit time photographer, or the images you have don’t quite fit what your business is about?

Now, you might want to know how it’s going for me, since I adopted the process I talk about in my link about 3 weeks ago. I mainly post links from my business site since, well, it’s my Facebook business page. lol I do post a link here and there from this blog, the motivational stuff, but not all that often.

For the full month period before the last 3 weeks Facebook was my 5th best source of traffic, and I only had 21 visits. In the last 3 weeks Facebook has moved up to #3 and I had 55 visits in that time. Not only that but I went from a page duration time of 1 minute and 4 seconds to a whopping 14 minutes and 39 seconds. Why anyone would stay on a page for that long I couldn’t tell you, but what could be happening is that people could be sticking around and looking at other pages. And one more thing; from Facebook it’s a lot of repeat visitors, as the rate of new visitors is only 29%, as opposed to 95% from Google and 79% from Twitter.

Not so shabby I’d say. Anyway, I’ve told you about Edgerank, shared a link to an infographic, and a link to my post about ways of finding things you can add to your Facebook business page to help raise the number of people who come by. What else would you like to know? 🙂 By the way, if you’d like to see my page look to the left and click on the link that will take you there; always happy to have more likes for that page.
 

Business

Why I Created A Facebook Fan Page

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After over a year of thinking about it, I finally created my first Facebook fan page. Actually, officially Facebook has moved away from the term “fan” and just calls is a Facebook page. I like that also because thinking about having people become “fans” of mine, rather asking them to do it, just seemed so narcissistic; definitely not normally my style. Anyway, it’s under the name of my business site, so if you’re on Facebook and would like to take a look, check out T. T. Mitchell Consulting, Inc, which is my main business name.

Why did I create this page? After all, I’ve had to think about it for so long that you’d think anything I had to basically convince myself to do that I probably would walk away from it. That’s my normal pattern, for sure.

Truthfully, it was an impulse decision. There was some research and thought over all this time, and the truth is that I’m now looking to push all aspects of my business just a bit further than I already have. After all, with my other site, I talk about helping businesses find ways to maximize their online presence. Turns out that, for SEO purposes, creating a page to link to your business is more effective than creating a group page. I don’t know why, but there’s some history out there, so it makes some sense. Kind of like some folks and Squidoo pages.

However, Squidoo just doesn’t work for me personally; can’t really say why. I wasn’t sure Facebook would work for me either, but I have more than 300 friends there, or do I believe, and that’s more than I would have on Squidoo.

I also know you’re probably remembering what I had to say about Facebook group pages, but since the focus is much different, and what I’ll be doing is much different, I don’t really need participation on that page as much as people just seeing what’s going on with me.

What do you do? You go to a page like this, where it tells you what you’ll be getting, kind of, and then there’s a link that says “create a page.” You click that, and follow the instructions, which is to answer a few questions, and you’re on your way.

Okay, that’s not quite it. I wasn’t sure what to do with my page once it was first created because unlike a group, you can’t just start writing all sorts of stuff in free form. Groups aren’t supposed to be for advertising purposes anyway, and since pages are, they’re trying to keep you in some kind of format. What did I do? I contacted one of my friends, Shirley Frazier of Solo Business Marketing, for some assistance.

Basically, what she said was to add all my business and product links to the page so people would know what to follow and look at if they came to the page. Also, you can write something on your wall, and I also wrote a message in the discussion area. I’ve told people they can write comments, ask questions in the discussion area, and I’ll answer whatever I can. I added all my business links, which consisted of three websites and 3 blogs. I have other sites, but I’m not considering any of those business related, per se, so I won’t be adding those. I added a link to my newsletter page and my books and CD, and samples of my articles.

Then, instead of doing a blast out to all my friends, which just didn’t feel right for me to do, I wrote on my status wall that I’d created it and asked people to take a look. Yeah, I know, I get tons of page suggestions all the time, but I just didn’t want to do that back to anyone. My friend Kelvin says I’m not thinking like a business marketer, since I am talking about my business, and he’s probably right, but so be it. I’m writing about it here, I put it on Twitter, and I’ll put it on LinkedIn, and I think that’ll be enough.

Anyway, I hope you check it out, if you’re on Facebook; thanks.