Facebook is hoping to raise $5 billion by selling shares this spring (some reports are saying $10 billion—not sure who’s right but $5 billion is cited more often). This is larger than Google’s 2004 IPO that raised $1.9 billion at a valuation of $23 billion. Speculation is that Facebook’s valuation could be as high as $75-100 billion.
Buyers got a look at the financials yesterday, which showed the company made $1 billion in profit last year. 85% of its $3.71 billion in revenue is from advertising.
Other big stats:
845 million members, and more than half (483 million) return to the site daily
Collectively, we have produced an average of 2.7 billion “Likes” and comments a day in the last 3 months of 2011 (Oct, Nov, Dec)
I suspect your company is not getting this much attention today so here’s a 1 Minute Marketing tip on increasing the visibility of your Facebook Page by linking it to your profile.
As a note, my wolf in sheep’s clothing metaphor is more to do with mistakenly trusting that your Facebook content is private, not in regards to the IPO or Facebook’s valuation.
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Google+ Business Page set up is just like Facebook set up. It’s a place to connect with fans and colleagues and to discuss industry news and information with them.
Google+ Business Pages are also very important for search. Google is using information from Google+ profiles and pages to affect personalized search results, so using Google+ can help your visibility in some cases.
Ready? Here’s how to set up a Google+ Business Page:
Note: Similar to Facebook, you cannot create a profile for a non-human entity like a business, you must create a page. In addition, Google+ pages require that a personal profile be the owner of the page.
Add Managers To Your Google+ Business Page
Once your page is set up, you can add managers. Each page can have 1 owner and up to 50 managers. The difference between owners and managers is that owners have the ability to transfer ownership and delete the page.
Fill Out Your Google+ About Page
As we mentioned above, Google+ plays (and will increasingly play) an important role in search. This means that it is crucial to completely fill out your About page using keyword-optimized content:
Add a short profile description under the name of your page. Use 3-4 keywords that best describe what your business does.
Fill out the Introduction using keywords your business wants to rank for in search results.
Completely fill out the Contact info and Website sections, making sure this content is accurate.
Add Custom Links to your various online platforms—this can include your website, Facebook page, Twitter profile and LinkedIn page.
Promote Your Google+ Business Page
Pages can’t add individuals to circles, instead, individuals must find and add you to their circles. This makes it difficult to promote your Google+ Business Page. Despite this, here are some ways to build up the number of people in your circles.
Spread the Word
When you’re logged into your Google+ Business Page, click on the Spread the word button. This shares your page with people in your personal Google+ circles. Note: this post will come from your personal profile, not from the Google+ Page. In addition, you should promote your Google+ Business Page on your other social networks and encourage your fans and followers to join you on Google.
Add the Google+ Badge to Your Website
Once you’ve linked your website to your Google+ Business Page (under custom links), then link your website to your Google+ Page. Here’s how Google suggests doing that.
Add The +1 Button To Your Site
The +1 button is a way for customers and fans to recommend your blog posts, which makes your listing standout more in search results. You can add the button to your website using AddThis (where you can also add other social sharing buttons, such as Facebook and Twitter) or through a script generated by Google.
Post Content
Post often on your stream and make sure these posts are public. People are more likely to notice you and add you to their circles if you have an active page.
UPDATE
Still not convinced that you should set up a Google+ Business page? Watch this 1 Minute Marketing video with Monique Sherrett on why now is the time to get on Google+:
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
In October, Facebook launched a new version of Facebook Page Insights and they continue to make changes to Page features and available metrics. If you haven’t visited your Facebook Page for awhile here are some things to keep in mind.
1. “Notes” no longer pulls in your blog feed. This feature was disabled as of Nov 22 so if you set up a bunch of automated functions, you’ll need to consider manually posting to Notes or using a third-party app.
2. New metrics are available in Insights. In particular, instead of “impressions” you’ll now see “virality”. Instead of the number of times your story was viewed (impressions), the metric is now the number of times your story was viewed and talked about (virality).
What is considered “talking about” a story?
“People Talking About This” is a number publicly displayed on your Page for all fans and potential fans to see. It is the number of people who engage with your Page by:
Liking your Page
Liking content
Commenting on or sharing a post from your Page
Answering a Question using the Questions feature
Tagging your Page in an update or in a photo, and
Responding to an event on your Page.
Virality is a conversion rate. It is the percent of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it”.
(Think about this as your Facebook garden: # seeds that sprouted divided by # seeds planted.)
Tip for Virality
Posts between 100 and 200 characters (less than 3 lines of text) receive about 60% more likes, comments and shares than posts greater than 250 characters.
What’s the difference between Engaged Users and People Talking About This?
All People Talking About This are engaged, but not all Engaged Users are talking about your story. Not everyone takes one of the actions noted above. Engaged Users will be a number greater than People Talking About This.
In addition to Talking About and Virality, Facebook metrics include:
Friends of Fans - Total number of friends all your fans have (potential reach for your story).
Reach - The actual number of people who have seen stories associated with your Page.
One thing to note: The subset of data for Likes, Reach and Talking About This also provides info on demographics and total reach.
There are 3 ways to reach people:
Organic: fans of your page who see content
Paid: people who see your sponsored ads, and
Viral: friends of fans who see your content because a friend shares it or you target them via sponsored ads
Total Reach does not add up to the number of organic, paid and viral reach numbers.
Total Reach is the number of unique people who see your content since 1 person can be reached in multiple ways (i.e., see a sponsored ad and see an organic post).
Tip on Reach
Localize your posts using the geo-targeting feature to make sure that only the people who find your story valuable will see it. For example, if you are announcing an event in Vancouver, target your fans who live in Vancouver. Geo-targeting is found in the Public dropdown menu of the “Write Something” field.
Facebook has a 20-minute interactive course that outlines all the features. Yes, Insights is complicated enough that watching the 20-minutes is worthwhile. If the intro is boring for you, just skip to section #3 Dashboard Features. The rest moves quickly from there.
Good luck with The Facebook.
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
If you’ve already created a personal Google+ account, Google is working on a migration tool that’s expected to come out in a few weeks. With the tool, all of your connections and circles will automatically be connected to your new App profile. Google says that you can start your Apps account now and merge the connections when the tool is released.
How To Use Google+ For Business
Project Management and Collaboration
Google+ lets you organize and group your contacts in Circles. You can organize your circles by your relationships to people and when you share things with them, it’s not shared with your other connections. Apps organizations will automatically be organized in their own circle. But businesses can also create circles for people working on different projects within a company or circles for clients, contractors and various other people that need to stay in touch while working together on a job.
In addition to circles, Hangouts are a great way to collaborate. Hangouts let you video chat and share your screen with up to 9 people. You can also share notes within a Hangout and collaborate on Google Docs. Hangouts could be extremely useful for remote business meetings and collaborating on projects long distance.
Content Marketing
The Google+ Stream is your newsfeed where you see your connections’ updates and where you can post and share information. When you set your update as Public, Google indexes it and your post becomes searchable in Google.com. You can post text, video, photos and links in your updates, which allows for more engagement than just text. Note that you can’t post a video and a photo, but you can post a video and text, for example. Chris Brogan has a helpful post on using Google+ as a storytelling platform.
To see the ROI on your content marketing on Google+, Ripples gives you a funnel visualization of public posts, showing you who has shared your post and how it gets shared by others.
Search and SEO
As mentioned above, your public Google+ posts are indexed by Google. When Google+ users are searching Google while logged in, they will start to see search results from their Google+ connections. In other words, your content will start to show up in your connections’ searches. In addition, Google puts greater weight on posts with more shares.
All of this means that businesses can improve their search rankings on Google.com by building up their Google+ connections and posting valuable content on Google+ that users share.
Now that you’ve built your profile and company page on LinkedIn, you’re ready to start using LinkedIn for business. Unlike social networks like Twitter and Facebook, LinkedIn is a social platform built specifically for business, so it’s ideal for networking and building business connections.
1. Develop Your Network
To start building your network, import your contacts from your email account. LinkedIn allows you to important contacts from Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail and other email clients.
Since you want to encourage connections, we recommend having your email address clearly visible on your profile under your contact information. You can simply state your email address or you can make it more personal by providing details on the types of projects or opportunities you wish to be contacted about.
While on Facebook people tend connect only with people they know, LinkedIn is about building your professional network, so we recommend accepting everyone as a contact. You never know who’ll be a valuable business connection.
Show that you’re active on LinkedIn by updating your status. Make sure that your status is professional by posting about business news, industry events and helpful business advice.
Start chatting. The key to building your network is to talk to your connections. Did someone you haven’t talked to in years accept your request? Send them a message asking what they’ve been up to career-wise and update them on what you’re working on. Offer to give recommendations to people you like who you’ve done work with in the past.
2. Position Yourself As a Leader
LinkedIn is a place to show off your expertise and demonstrate how you can help others.
Using the Answers feature to ask and answer questions is a great way to bring your name around to people outside of your circle and thus gives you more opportunities to find people to connect with. Answering questions is also a way to demonstration your expertise and increases the likelihood that someone will recognize your authority and contact you for something further.
Another networking tool to get your name and profile out to people is LinkedIn’s Groups. Joining groups gives you the opportunity to network, participate in discussions and receive business advice. An added bonus of joining groups is that—while a basic LinkedIn account normally only allows you to send messages to connections—you can send messages to group members.
(Find more information on LinkedIn’s subscription plans here.)
Here are a few tools that will help promote your business:
LinkedIn Events. Adding your events to LinkedIn’s Events section helps to promote your events. You can share the events you create with your connections as well as your second and third degree contacts. Events are also searchable on LinkedIn by keyword and location, which gives your events greater reach.
LinkedIn’s Slideshare app. If you are a speaker and use Slideshare to upload your slides, the Slideshare app is a great way to show off your presentations and expertise on your LinkedIn profile.
Having a company page on LinkedIn provides another place for clients and customers to find you. It’s also a place to post job openings and to highlight your products and services. People using LinkedIn can find your company page through LinkedIn’s company search, LinkedIn’s job search (if you have jobs posted) or through employees’ profile pages.
How To Add A New LinkedIn Company Page
If your company doesn’t have a page set up yet, you need to make sure you meet the requirements. In order to set up a page, your company email address needs to be a confirmed email address on your LinkedIn account and your company’s email domain needs to be unique to the company. For example, it can’t be a gmail.com or hotmail.com address.
You can create a company page here.
Once your company page is set up, LinkedIn will pull in data about your company from around the site - such as job listings, links to profiles of employees and former employees.
How To Edit A LinkedIn Company Page
Once your company page is set up, your LinkedIn profile needs to be associated with the company. To do this, go in to Edit Profile and next to Current Position click Edit. Here, click Change Company next to Company. Enter the name of your company and choose the company page from the dropdown menu. Click Update. This will link your profile to the company.
Note: Pages can be set up by giving all employees with a valid company email admin access or choose to designate specific users. If a company page is set up to give admin access to designated users only, employees need to request admin access from the page admin.
There are 3 tabs on your company page where you can add and edit content:
Overview: This section includes an introduction to your company, links to employees’ profiles, and your blog feed. Similar to what we recommend when creating a LinkedIn profile, you should fill in all the fields in these section. You shoull also use keywords, particularly in your company description and specialties. This will help your company appear in related searches.
Careers: If you’re hiring, this is where you can post job openings, what you’re looking for in an employee and who candidates should contact.
Products & Services: Here you can highlight specific products or services you offer. You can post an image and description of your product and service, key features and even a YouTube video. You can also encourage clients and customers to recommend your products and services.
There is also an Analytics tab. Only available to page admins, the Analytics tab gives you insight in to page views of your company profile, unique visitors, and clicks on your products and services.
There have been a lot of changes to social networks recently. To help you keep on top of what’s been happening, below are two changes that you should be aware of this week.
Changes to Facebook Fan Page Posting Permissions
Earlier this week, Facebook made changes to fan pages and now anyone can post or comment on a page. Previously, only people who “Liked” a page could contribute content to the wall.
You can prevent everyone from being able to post on your wall by going to Edit info > Manage Permissions and unchecking the 4 boxes under Posting Ability:
If you still want to allow users to post content to your page, you can retain some control by adding keywords to your Moderation Blacklist. Here you can enter keywords related to profanity or keywords that have negative connotations with your brand. For example, if you’re a restaurant, you may want to block keywords such as rats, dirty or unappetizing.
If someone posts content using a blacklisted keyword, it will be marked as spam and you can go in and approve or delete it. You’ll find content marked as spam in your sidebar under Wall > Hidden Posts.
Another way to monitor the content that gets posted to your fan page is to make sure you’ve set up your page to notify you when people post to it. You can do this under Edit Info > Your Settings:
Changes to LinkedIn’s Privacy Settings
LinkedIn now uses personal information to distribute advertising that’s relevant to you and your networks.
This means that when you recommend people and services or follow companies your name and photo may show up in related ads to other LinkedIn members. LinkedIn says that this is to provide “social context” to the ads.
Using your name and photo in social advertising is LinkedIn’s default setting. To keep LinkedIn from using your name and photo in ads, manage your social advertising permissions and unclick the box at the bottom.
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In October, Facebook launched a new version of Facebook Page Insights and they continue to make changes to Page features and available metrics. If you haven’t visited your Facebook Page for awhile here are some things to keep in mind. 
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