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.

Understanding Facebook For Your Brand

You may be asking yourself, “My business already has a regular website, so why does it matter if I have or don’t have a Facebook fan page?” The answer is reach. You want your message to reach as many people as possible. To be able to maximize this reach, you need to have a presence where most people are hanging out – and increasingly, they’re hanging out on Facebook.

Take Burger King as an example. They have made headlines over and over again with their innovative and viral social marketing campaigns, most  recently with the “Whopper Sacrifice.” Burger King offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would “unfriend” 10 of their social network connections. It was a weird, but clever campaign.

There are three parts to the lifecycle of a Facebook fan page:

1) Acquisition

This is the concept that a brand needs to build their audience first, before they can make any use of it. Facebook requires a certain amount of ongoing attention to achieve maximum value, as users expect to see fresh content. Before you go ahead and start suggesting to your friends to become a fan, populate your page with content related to you or you industry. This can be photos, videos, articles, testimonials, press releases, etc. Users will not be interested in your page if they see a blank screen.

2) Engagement

Now that you have the audience that you want, you need to “activate” them somehow – a dead audience is the same as having no audience. The key to success here is communication. You should plan to have someone in your company accountable for updating and continuously participating in the conversations. This shows that you care and acknowledge them. How would you like it if you were trying talking to someone and they were completely ignoring you?

Here are some ways that will help you create a level of activity and loyalty:

• Ask questions that don’t have a “yes” or “no” answer. Doing this will help spark discussions.
• Set up polls. For example, if you own an Ice Cream business, you can set up a poll on Facebook asking your fans what flavor they love the most.
• Syndicate your Twitter and/or Blog feed. Don’t expect your users to leave Facebook and visit your website, Twitter, or some other page. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them. A good way to do is this by using a Facebook application like RSS Graffiti to automatically syndicate your RSS feed to your Facebook page.

3) Monetization

This is the most difficult part of the Facebook lifecycle. By now, you have hopefully built an active and engaged audience. Even then, do not expect them to automatically become loyal customers. It takes time for your audience to trust you with their money, which is why it is important to constantly stay engaged with them (as we mentioned in point #2).

To be able to effectively monetize really depends on your own business. Here are some ways that have worked for our clients:

• Post videos. Show your fans the “behind-the-scenes.” Record your workplace, employees, customers/clients, etc. Perhaps even give a short background on who you are and how you got started. This forms an instant and trusting connection between you and your audience.
• Offer special deals/discounts. Make promotions that are exclusive to your Facebook fans. If you came out with a new product, post a discount code and thank them for being your supporters. Doing this will also encourage others to become fans of your page as well.
• Facebook Ads. Facebook allows businesses to advertise their pages (or any other web page) within Facebook. These ads are shown to specific Facebook users in various parts of the site. The Facebook ad tool allows you to specify demographics such as age and gender – which is a great way to get a rough sense of how many Facebook users fit your target market.

Conclusion

Sites like Facebook are large enough and growing very quickly. Certainly, they should not be ignored. The social media sites are, in a sense, an extension of a traditional website. Facebook’s viral nature and large user base makes it an ideal marketing platform for many different types of organizations.

Photo Credit: B.J. Morgan / Museum of Making Music
Concept of Facebook Lifecycle: Rahim Fazal, CEO and Co-Founder of Involver