Facebook for Business

Using Facebook as a business can be an interesting exercise in anger management. Facebook is a powerful tool, especially for individuals, but it can drive an intern batty as she tries to set up new pages or migrate Groups to Pages. (Yes, Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has spent a lot of time with our friend Facebook.) Let me share our experience.

Earlier this year Facebook changed the way that businesses can network in this social space. They upgraded the Pages functionality to better house business profiles. Pages are not identical to Personal Profiles, but they do give a business more leverage than a Group.

With a Page, people interested in following your organization can become fans of your Page. On your Page, you can host photos, videos, RSS feeds, and custom applications.

Creating a Page
A Page needs to be administered by a person so start by creating a Personal Profile (for a real person because fake accounts are removed by Facebook). The Personal Profile should be of someone in your company who is going to stick around for awhile. Then follow the links to create a Page. You can change and add administrators to your Page after it is set up.

You will be asked to select what type of Page. Choose wisely because you can not change it afterward. By choosing the type of Page, you are choosing a default set of fields to complete. For example, choosing Band gives you opportunities to bring in a playlist. Choosing Public Figure - Government Official asks for your date in office.

Adding Stuff to Your Page
A Page can have all sorts of tabs, including Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions, Events, YouTube, Notes, Boxes.

Wall is where your status feed aggregates. Info is what you want to tell the world about your organization. Photos are, well, photos. Discussions are discussion forums where you can start a topic and have fans discuss it. Events is an aggregated listing of events you are hosting. YouTube is your YouTube channel. You enter your YouTube details and your videos are automatically pulled into Facebook, which is nice because it eliminates the redundancies of uploading videos to two places. Notes is for mini-blog posts or links to things you like. And Boxes is a crazy place where all sorts of things can be pulled into one spot, like videos, RSS feeds, photos, etc.

Editing Stuff on Your Page
Here is another opportunity to lose your mind. To edit most applications (Discussions, YouTube, Notes), you go to the Wall of your Personal Profile and click the “Edit Page” link on the top left. From here, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the application box to edit and change its settings.

You can move application boxes to your Wall or to your Boxes tab by clicking on the pencil icon next to the Application name. Applications can be either on your Wall or in your Boxes tab, but cannot be in both places at once.

To move applications around in the Boxes tab, just drag them. That is the easiest part of this whole admin experience.

Claim Your Facebook Username
Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to claim a shortcut name to your Page. Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation was temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 that have more than 100 fans can now claim a username.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

Help Us Get 100 Fans so we can learn how to do more things on Facebook.
Please Become a Fan of Boxcar Marketing.

Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Underwire Newsletter • Online Marketing Tips
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EE Roadshow Seattle 2009

Interested in speaking at this year’s EE Roadshow in Seattle?

The ExpressionEngine Roadshow 2009 will be held in Seattle, WA, on October 2nd.

The EE Roadshow brings ExpressionEngine users and developers together in real life to share what they know about this incredible web publishing system.

We’re looking for volunteers to speak on panels, moderate sessions or give presentations. If you’re an ExpressionEngine developer with some great insights to share with the community about building sites with EE, add-on development, dev approaches, or anything else you think other EE developers would love to learn or hear about, we want you to speak at the Roadshow.

The topic submission form is here:
http://www.eeroadshow.com/2009/submit/

EE Roadshow is organized by Boxcar Marketing, Hop Studios, Factory Interactive
http://www.eeroadshow.com

Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Guest Speaking
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How to Use Online Video for Inbound Marketing

HubSpot recently held a webinar on how to use video for your online marketing campaigns. Here are some of their tips.

Content

There’s a content tradeoff. You can either make an informative video with lots of information for the viewer or an entertaining video that catches viewers’ attention and has the potential to go viral.

Short is sweet. Focus on the first ten seconds of your video and try to do something shocking or entertaining to rope people in.

Use an outline, not a full script. You’ll be much more engaging.

Test your video on friends and coworkers and edit it according to their responses. If they don’t find your joke funny, chances are your online audience won’t either.

Optimization

Publish and promote everywhere. You want your video found!

If you upload your video to either Visible Measures or Tubemogul , they’ll upload it to all of the different video sharing sites for you and provide you with analytics, too.

You need to decide if are you going to optimize your video for SEO (by using straight-forward keywords) or for viral (by using enticing keywords). Tip: start with a viral title to make the video popular and then change it to a more keyword-rich title to make use of its long tail potential.

Post your video on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and your blog. Encourage co-workers and friends to post it on their blogs too.

SEO

YouTube

* Use keywords in your title and description. Include a link to your website in the first couple of lines of the description so that viewers see it when the description is collapsed.

* Tags are important. Although they’re not visible on the public video page, they govern what videos your video shows up.

* Encourage people to rate and comment on your video. Controversial content is one way to spark discussion.

iTunes

* Make sure that the title, artist and description are keyword-rich.

* Use an appealing image to stand out on the search page.

* Ask viewers to review your video to increase its popularity.

Analyze

Analytics are crucial! Why make a video if you don’t measure and track its success?

Use YouTube Insights or Blip.tv Stats to see who’s watching your video and what they’re finding engaging about it. You can also use Visible Measures or Tubemogul, to see your analytics across multiple video sites.

For more information watch the full webinar and download the slides.

Looking for related information? Check out Steven Witten’s article Six Degrees of YouTube, a case study of online competitive video dynamics, which looks at how YouTube’s ‘related videos’ list gets built and the effect this list has on a video’s popularity.

Posted by Crissy | Email to a Friend

Filed under: • Services • Web Marketing • Underwire Newsletter • Online Marketing Tips
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