Beware of Facebook’s Offer to Merge Fan and Place Pages

Facebook is now allowing, even encouraging, businesses to merge their
fan page with their place page. This can be good for some businesses but

it can also be very bad for some businesses.
Make sure you know what you are doing
before you click the unchangeable “merge”
button. (UPDATE: 1/6/11 -As of Dec. 2010
Facebook added the option to unmerge.)

Merged Fan Pages and Place Pages

Pros:
1. People who visit  your place page can see
what other friends are their. They can also
see which friends were recently there.
2. A map is provided at the top of the info tab which allows people to
see exactly where the business or event is located.

Cons:
1. The default landing page cannot be changed. The default landing page is
pretty much the same thing as the wall.
2. Custom pages cannot be seen on the place page. FBML<> are an
exception to this. (UPDATE: 12/14/2010 – I can’t speak for every app
that makes custom pages, but Pagemodo.com is now able to
make a page that works. Still, be careful if you use a custom page
that isn’t provided by Pagemodo.) FBML pages will work, but you have
to know how to do Facebook’s version of html. If you have a page using a
custom Facebook application it will not be able to display. This could be
very bad if you paid a lot of money for an expensive custom page that isn’t
in FBML.
3. The tabs that are ordinarily across the top of the fan page (i.e. wall, info,
photos, notes, etc.) are moved to the left side of the Place page and are
much smaller than the fan page tabs.
4. The only people who can view the Place page are people who use smart
phone. Desktops and laptops cannot view the place page.

There has been a growing group of people who are against the merge. You
may want to follow this link to view the Facebook group and see why they
don’t like the merge.

If your business or event relies heavily on having high volumes of
traffic you may want to consider merging your page. This is especially
true if a large number of your visitors use smart phones.

For many businesses it may be a good idea to wait to see how Facebook’s
place page evolves before merging your page and losing the ability to set
the default landing page and possibly lose your custom Facebook tab.

In most cases I would highly recommend that you do not merge your page.
There are several reasons for this. If you would like me to go into more
details as to why I think most businesses should not merge you can read
Don’t Let People See Your Wall! (For Fan Pages) or you can add a comment

to this posting.

Thanks for reading,
~Joshua Lyons

How To Make A Custom Twitter Background

There are a many websites that allow you to create a custom Twitter
background for free. The one that I am most comfortable with is
Free Tweet Designer.

It’s important to create a custom Twitter background for several
reasons. Here are some of them:

1. It shows that you take your tweeting seriously. If you don’t care about
providing quality tweets you probably won’t take the time to create a
custom Twitter background. Here is a link to a post on why you should
take Twitter very seriously for business.
2. It provides additional space in which you can include important
information. Make sure to include your company name, telephone number,
address, website, and any other relevant information you wish display.
3. It gives you the chance to showcase your services or products.

It’s not difficult to create a custom page. Here is an example of a Twitter
background I created for a Chick-fil-A unit in Pensacola, Florida.

I hope you find the website useful.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Why You Shouldn’t Let Everyone Follow You

Let’s pretend you own a high-end women’s sunglasses store. A mysterious yet magical man comes up to you and tells you he will drive some traffic to your store. You can either have a flood of traffic in one day but cannot
select the traffic demographic or you can have a custom picked list of fashionable women, but would have to wait a whole week. Which would you choose?

Obviously you would choose the second option. Why spend time selling expensive women’s glasses to a crowd of men, children, homeless and uninterested people?

This same principle is true with using Twitter.

If you are wanting to have a successful Twitter campaign you need to locate your primary target audience and find out how to effectively communicate with them.

You want to have as many followers on Twitter as possible but there are some key points to remember.

1. If you follow too many people at once you could appear as a spammer. Limit yourself to no more than 1oo followers a day.
2. You want to keep the follower/following ratio close. Not more than a 10% difference.

Takeing a little extra time to find your target market is well worth the effort.

Develop a quality following.

1. Go to Twellow and follow your target audience. Follow 50-100 people a day.
2. Know your key audience so that you can craft tweets that will be of interest to your followers and will likely be retweeted.

The benefits:

1. Get Google and Bing to index your tweets more often by having your followers retweet your keywords they like.
2. You can effectively monitor your followers (target market) and get to understand their needs and wants. [You can’t do this if your followers are not in your target market.]
3. Increase your brand awareness and get more customers.

Final tip: Lead your Twitter followers to your Facebook account. Facebook is where you can build the strongest relationship with them. Think of Twitter as a business card and Facebook as a one-on-one dinner.

Happy follower hunting!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Twitter Tips – Things You Should Know

“If excellence is an option why settle for anything less.” by Mike Gorman. If you are going to use Twitter you should use it with excellence. Here are some tips that can make the difference between mediocre Twitter use and excellent Twitter use.

• Make sure your bio includes keywords. Google looks for keywords in the bio. Because of this you should try to include as many keywords as possible in this section.

• You can create a custom Twitter landing page to prevent people from seeing a bunch of random 140 character tweets. You may have great content on your news feed, but the first impression a potential customer gets should be controlled. You are able to ensure that your first time visitors will see what you want them to see by creating a custom Twitter page. This is the same principle that can be found from the “Don’t let people see your Facebook wall!” post.

• Make every follower you get count. Don’t get followers just for the sake of getting followers. Get followers that can benefit you. This could include industry peers, customers or some other specific niche audience.

• Use a profile photo. People relate better with humans than they do with inanimate objects and logos. Do you want to relate well with your audience? Use a human face for your avatar.

• Use Twellow to find your target audience. Twellow is the “yellow pages” of Twitter.

• A word of warning, don’t become follow happy. If you follow too many people too quickly your account could become suspended. You are thought to be spamming “If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;” by Twitter.com.

• How not to get suspended – The Twitter Rules

• Putting a Twitter feed on your website can help with your website search engine optimization.

• Here’s a link to get a twitter widget

• Here’s a video about Twitter and website SEO

I hope these tips help you  as you develop your Twitter presence.

Good luck with your tweeting and on Friday I’ll explain the importance of custom selecting your social media followers and fans.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

How to Change Your Default Landing Page

So you decided it’s a good idea to have a welcome page that is not the wall. This conclusion leads you to ask yourself how. How does one change the default landing page? The answer is not too complicated. Here it is.

First, go to the fan page and click the link  Edit Page under the profile photo.

This will lead you to the next page which shows all your applications. Near the top of the list you will see an Edit link beneath the Wall Settings application. Click on that link.

Now you will see two drop down boxes. You don’t have to worry about the first drop down box, but for the second one you will want to click on the drop down menu and then select the page that you want as your default. From now on, unless you change it, your first time visitors will always go to your selected page instead of the wall.

A note – When I first tried this out I saw that I only went to the new default page once as a visitor. This is a good thing. Once people have seen your default page they already know who you are. From then on they most likely want to go to your wall first to see what’s going on with you. The default landing page is only for first time visitors.

Thanks for reading and I hope it is helpful.

Leave a comment if you have a moment. I’d love some feedback.

~Joshua Lyons

How to Customize Your Facebook Welcome Tab (For fan pages)

So it’s a good idea to lead people to your custom page on Facebook rather than to your wall for the first impression. How do you do this though?

First you should go to your fan page. Sometimes Facebook updates their site. Because of this links and tabs will be moved around. This means you may have to do a little searching if you are reading this a long time after the post.

Second you should click on the link that’s just under your profile and says “Edit Page.”

Scroll down to the bottom of the new page and you will see the option to click “More Applications – Browse More.” This is what you want to click.

Now, in the top left corner of the new page you will see a search box. In that box you should type “welcome page” and press enter.

You are now at a page that has a list of Facebook applications that you may be interested in using. I have looked at all of these and have decided that the best one to use for my business is Pagemoda. It has a blue icon and says Pagemoda in it. If you want to use Pagemoda go ahead on click on it.

On the new page in the top left corner you will see a link that says “Add to my Page.” This is under the profile picture. Click on that link.

You will then be asked which page you want that link to be applied to. Once you select the page you can close that window and navigate back to your fan page.

Click on the “Edit Page” option under your logo again.

Now you will see “Pagebuilder Welcome Tab” on your list of apps. Go to that application and click edit.

From here on out Pagemoda will tell you how to set up your page. It’s really not difficult at all. If you would like to look at the page I created for my business you can paste the provided link into your browser.

Good luck with your page and I hope this helped.

For my next posting I will tell you how to make it so that your new welcome page is automatically the default landing page for new visitors. This way they won’t see your wall first.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pensacola-FL/Pensacola-Sign/120197568946?v=app_112078882147346

Don’t Let People See Your Wall! (For fan pages)

If you were interviewing for a job would you prefer the interviewer to ask all of the people you know about you, or would you prefer that he ask you directly? Of course you want the interviewer to ask you directly. This is because you want to give him/her a positive first impression. Not that the people who know you would say bad things per se, but you don’t want to risk anything. You want to be sure that you will provide a positive first impression.

This situation is virtually the same with a Facebook fan page for a business. Why would you want potential clients looking at your muddied wall? Sure, you may have great content on the wall, but the first impression a guest gets should be controlled. It should be a perception of you that you want the visitor to have. Now, after they have seen your customized welcome page and gotten a first impression, they can certainly look at your wall. Just make sure that you create a quality welcome page that can help form a positive first impression about your business. Don’t leave that job to the wall which can be tainted by “friends.”

My next posting will talk more about how to set a custom page.

Thanks for reading,

~ Joshua Lyons

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