Holding a competition or giveaway on Facebook can be awfully confusing. Both large brands and small companies can be seen breaching Facebook’s rules and policies when it comes to contests.… read more →
The photo strip located at the top of the Facebook business page has been around for fan pages since the changes last winter. However, many businesses are under-utilizing this prime real estate! The default view
shows the five most recently added photos, but there is an opportunity to use this photo strip as free branding space to add compelling visual interest.
Therefore, we wanted to highlight some of the brands that are taking advantage of this photo strip. But first, we’d love to give you some tips on how you can utilize it for your own business.
How to Create a Branded Photo Strip:
- Choose images: Choose five images that work in any random order. Note: fan page photos randomize every time the page is refreshed.
- Size your images: The sizing for these images are 97px x 68px. I recommend scaling them to fit that size. Go with an image that is 970px x 680px.
- Add them to your page: I recommend creating a photo album just for the photo strip to keep them separate from other content. You can either choose to publish them to the newsfeed or not.
- Keep them clean: When you add new images to your fan page, remember the top five most recent will always appear in the photo strip. Remember to always X out the images you don’t want to include in the photo strip.
It sure seems convenient to have your 3rd party apps post your updates to Facebook, but did you realize that Facebook collapses users’ news feeds that have multiple postings from the same app? That means your updates could be ignored.
So, how do you conveniently post your blog or tweets to Facebook?
Instead of using Twitter or NetworkedBlogs to post your blog updates, I recommend sending custom updates.
This goes back to my tip – “What’s good for Twitter isn’t necessarily good for Facebook and vice versa.”
If you are like most new Twitter users, you will soon find out that Twitter has its very own language and it can be a little confusing. Every day there is a new Twi-word that appears. In fact, there are literally thousands of meaningless Twi-words to describe life on Twitter. However, while working with a new client, I created a small glossary of the most important terms you will run across on Twitter. I’ve listed them below for you in one handy location along with some of my personal notes and tips.
How to Speak Twitter:
Third-Party Applications (Tools): Twitter.com is great for managing followers and finding people to follow. It’s also great for new users. However, there are tons of third-party applications that help to simplify using Twitter. Note: I recommend TweetDeck (desktop app) or HootSuite.com (web app).
Microblog: Twitter is often referred to as a “microblog”, because it allows people to update their status using only 140 characters. Note: The sky is really the limit on what you can accomplish in 140 characters.
Tweet: A message or post made on Twitter by a user.
Follower: This is someone who is reading your tweets.
Following: These are the people whose tweets you’ve selected to read; their tweets appear in your “feed” or “stream”.
1. If you build it, they will come… right?
Get real. This obviously isn’t the case. Social media is all about communication and building relationships. Too many small businesses think that all they need to do is join Facebook and Twitter and leave the rest up to their customers. I’ve run across too many abandoned Facebook and Twitter business pages that are just wasted opportunities to engage with loyal customers. A brand needs to stay active and interact if they ever want to see results in social media. But, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It will take more than a day and a few tweets to see results. Remember not to focus on short-term wins; social media is a long-term engagement. read more →
What the heck is Foursquare? You’ve heard the buzz about Foursquare, but what is it? It’s one of the hottest new social media sites around, yet many social media newbies don’t know too much about it. How can you play? How can businesses take advantage of this hot new site? read more →