How To: Send A Message To Your Facebook Fans’ Inbox

That’s right, a “message.” Not in your fans’ news feeds, but in their inbox!

This is one of the main deciding factors for people when choosing between a Facebook group page or a Fan page for their company/organization.

Some benefits of a group page include the ability to easily message all your group members at once and and the ability to send bulk invites to join the group or for upcoming events (this can now be done on a Fan page as well with a small hack). Whereas on a Fan page, some of the primary benefits include the ability to have a custom vanity URL, add custom HTML code, user analytics (known as Insights), and have better search engine presence since they are visible to unregistered people and are thus indexed.

Due to the amount of attention Facebook received on Fan pages, they are slowly working on enhancing the functionality to make them more useful for companies who are looking to promote their businesses. One of these functions is the ability to message all your fans, which is something that was  previously only possible in group pages. Not to mention, it’s sort of hidden, so most people are not even aware of it!

Send a message to your Facebook fans:

Prerequisite: Make sure you are the admin of the page you are trying to send a message out from.

Step 1. Go to your fan page and click the “Edit Page” link under your photo.

Step 2. Look in the right column and under “Promote your page” click the “Send an update” link.

Step 3. Type your subject, message, and hit Send!

Tip: The cool part about sending messages out through your Facebook fan page is that you can actually target them to a very specific audience.

Have any questions? Any tips to share? Leave them in the comments below!

Facebook Hack: Auto-Select Everyone On Your Friends List When Sending Invites

Did you ever want to send an invite to people in your friends list about an upcoming event but didn’t want to spend the time individually clicking on everyone’s name? Or you started a new group or fan page and want your friends to know about it, but you have 3,000 friends in your list and it would take you all day to invite everyone individually? Here’s a small javascript hack that will allow you to select everyone in your friends list within a second.

Go to your event/group/fan page and click “Invite People.” When the box pops up asking you to select which friend to send the invite to, go to your web browser’s address bar, paste the following code, and hit enter:

javascript:fs.select_all();

Voila! All your friends should be selected!

Build Credibility On LinkedIn By Answering Questions

As some like to say, LinkedIn is the Facebook for professionals. It’s considered the world’s largest professional network with over 70 million and growing rapidly (a new member joins LinkedIn every second). Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are members and over 90% of companies hire through LinkedIn! It has become one of the most popular social media tools along with Facebook and Twitter.

Most experts agree that the majority of LinkedIn users, similar to Facebook and Twitter users, are not leveraging it properly. On the other hand, those who are, could not be any more satisfied. Look at Oracle’s CFO, who landed his post through his LinkedIn profile. Or Goshido, an Irish Startup that raised $230,000 using only LinkedIn. Amazing, right?

Here’s a tip for how you can get out there and build credibility on LinkedIn so that hopefully one day you can share your success story:

Answer questions

LinkedIn has a question & answer community that many are not aware of. To access it, hover over to the “More” link in the navigation bar on top and you should see it.

After clicking on Answers, you should come to the page with a list of categories in the sidebar. Pick a category that you have expertise in and you should see a list of questions come up that fall under that topic. You can browse through the questions there or you can narrow them down even further by choosing one of the subcategories. What you see are questions that are asked by other LinkedIn users.

Make it a habit to browse through some questions on a daily basis and take some time out to properly answer them. The more questions you answer, the more people will see you as an expert in that industry. The person asking the question also has the ability to choose a “Best Answer,” that appears on the top of all the other answers, which certainly adds to your reputation.

If you’re big on using RSS readers, you can actually subscribe to a specific category on LinkedIn Answers. Go in to the category of your interest and look at the bottom of the sidebar on the right. There should be a “Subscribe” link with an RSS icon. I have my feed set up with Google Reader.

Do you have any other tips to share on how to better leverage LinkedIn? Leave a comment below!

Credit: LinkedIn by the Numbers [Infographic]

Dead Simple Tip For Increasing Engagement On Facebook

Use tags in your status updates!

Most Facebook users are not aware that they have the ability to tag people, events, and pages/groups in their Facebook status updates. Using tags will display your status update on the pages of those who you mention.

The text highlighted in blue are tags that I used in my status update. In the example above, I tagged an event (Islamic Finance National Tour), people(Farhad and Sameer), and fan pages (Sameer’s Eats and M100Foundation).

My post appeared on the walls of each person/page/event that I tagged. This gives my status update exposure in 6 different places rather than just on my own page. Hence, increasing the chances of others commenting/viewing my post.

To tag someone, simply use the @ symbol and type the name out. For example, if I want to tag John Doe, I would type @John Doe. Same concept applies to a fan page, group, or event.

That’s all!

Using Location Based Analytics To Make Better Business Decisions

“Metrics are people, too” – Eric Ries, Startup Lessons Learned

I love metrics! Leveraging a website’s data can assist one in making smarter business decisions. Whether it’s increasing sales, customer satisfaction, or marketing - properly analyzing your metrics can give you the competitive advantage to create and sustain superior performance.

At Sameer’s Eats, we closely track our web metrics to see who’s talking about us, linking to us, where visitors are coming from, and much more. One of the most useful metric for us is the geolocation of our visitors. Using free analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, we can track what countries, states, and even cities our audience is coming from.

Analyzing the data above tells us that we should record more Sameer’s Eats episodes in those states to better serve our audience. Since we are based out of New Jersey and have done three episodes here, the majority of our visits are coming from New Jersey itself. In the coming months, when we release episodes from states like Pennsylvania, New York, and California, we should see quite an increase in website traffic and our Facebook’s fan base from those areas.

Conclusion:

These web metrics may not be useful for every business. But they are certainly worth taking a look at from time to time as they might come in handy, like they did for us.