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

#1 Way to Get Lots of Fans

This step is so simple yet often overlooked.

What you want to do is let your friends know about your page and ask
them to like it. Here is how you should do that.

Every Facebook fan page administrator has the ability to “suggest to
friends.” This suggestion option is only available to page administrators
and can be found just under the profile picture on the top left of the
fan page. The customized Facebook message is sent to the inbox of each
friend the administrator selects. The message also has a link to the fan
page you are trying to promote.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends. If you suggest your
fan page to all your friends you could easily have over 100 people
“like” your page in just a few days. This step is so simple, yet extremely
effective.

Also, if you really want to take advantage of this feature you can ask a
few of your closest or most trusted friends to become temporary
administrators for you fan page. Then ask them to suggest the page to
all their friends. If you have seven of your friends do this you could have
over 1000 fans in no time.

Take advantage of the “suggest” option and watch the fan number sky-
rocket!

I hope this helps.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Please leave some feedback on this if you have a second.

Are Social Media Your Minions?

This post is very different from everything else I have done on this
blog; but it should help drive home the point that social media platforms
should work in unison and not independantly.

Here are three of the best minions I have ever had working for me. I have
given each one some orders. They are as follow:

Minion #1: Twitter – Twitter, when someone runs a Google search there will
be 10 results on the first page. Your job is to make my name, my
reputation, and what I have to offer appear as all ten of those top search
results. By doing this we can knock all opposition off the first page of the
search results.

Minion #2: Blogs – Blogs, your objective is to continually give the world great
information. Tell them what they want to hear and give them a longing to
come back to see what you have to say next time. Then, create interest and
desire within the reader. Persuade the reader that we are awesome and that
they will do anything for us. Convince them that they need us!

Minion #3: Facebook – Facebook, your mission is to direct our fans. If we are
needing to push them to our blog and feed them information you will give
them incentives to go there. If we need people to go to Twitter, to help
increase page rankings, you will convince the fans that they need to go to
Twitter. Do whatever is necessary to guide the world in the direction we
desire.

By having my minions work together I can create an effective plan for world
domination. If they do not work together I will be left with a team of
minions who are aimlessly trying to do something but will not be able to do
so effectively.

1. Use Twitter to get your company, products, and services all over the first
page of Google.

2. Use your blog to inform your target market and to create a desire for
what you have to offer.

3. Use Facebook as a way to guide your fans to do whatever it is that needs to
be done. This could be retweeting your tweets, posting comments on your
blog, giving feedback about a product, or something else. Facebook should
be used to direct your fans.

By making your social media platforms work together you will find your
social media campaigns to be much more successful than if they are not
working together.

Use your minions and rule the world!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

A Blog App for Your Fan Page

We have talked about the importance of businesses using blogs. We have also
discussed having a Facebook fan page.  How can we incorporate the two to
work together?

A very useful app called Networkedblogs allows you to feed your
blog postings through a fan page tab.

One feature I like about this app is that it only gives a sneak peek of what
the blog is about. This leads the reader to click-through to your
blog page.

Having the click-through feature will increase the amount of traffic to
your website. You may want to have a call to action in your blog entry so
as to encourage the reader to look further into your website. [If that is
where the blog is hosted.]

Networkedblogs also provides an option that allows your fans to follow
your blog.

I have spent a lot of time searching for useful tabs. I would say that this
is one of the best I have found so far.

Check it out and I hope it helps. Here’s a link to the app.
http://www.facebook.com/networkedblogs

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua

Fan Page vs Website

Your business just made a website not too long ago. Why would you need
to have a fan page now?

From what I’ve seen a fan page is almost like another website. You can add
tabs, give promotions, say whatever you want [within reason] and you can
even insert a couple of PayPal applications.

The reason you want a fan page is because a fan page allows you to
interact with your visitors (fans). A website is generally a final
destination site that allows people to read about and purchase the products of
interest.

A website does not usually develop interest in or desire for the
products you sell. This is where a Facebook fan page comes in.

By having a fan page your company can talk about interesting
topics. Talk about the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the bed bug epidemic going
on the US and anything else that is deemed interesting. You can talk about
topics that are of interest to your target market. This shows that your
content is interesting.

Facebook vs Website

When you have a product you
really want to push you can
bring that up as a topic of
interest.

Now that people know you
speak about topics that are
interesting, and you have
developed a relationship with
your fans, you can more easily
convince your fans that your
product is both interesting
and desirable. From there you
can lead your fans to the
website or store to actually purchase the product that was pushed.

Facebook fan pages are used, unlike websites, to create targeted
relationships and to encourage product interest and desire to grow in
the minds of your audience.

You can just stick with a website, but why do that when you can use
Facebook to actually get people interested in what you have to offer?

I’m sure there are many other difference between a fan page and a
website. If you think of something that I didn’t talk about please
submit it in the comments field below. With any luck we will soon
have long list of pros and cons to a fan page.

Thanks for reading,

Joshua Lyons