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Sharing content through social networks is not a new concept (infact nothing is really a ‘new’ concept anymore!). You will have seen blogs with lots of sharing options to bookmark the blog, to retweet the blog & to share links on Facebook – something that is used a lot on this blog too in order for our readers to easily share this content.
Until recently, sharing a blogpost on Facebook has been slightly clunky in that you had to use Facebook Connect to share the content as a status update.
Last week, Facebook users will have noticed a few changes recently to some features, most obviously the change that got rid of the ‘Become a Fan’ on Pages and replaced it with ‘Like’. The ‘Like’ feature is now pretty much uniform across Facebook – incorporated into status updates, wall posts, individual pictures, photo albums etc..and now Pages.
Those of you who have WordPress.org blogs setup can now install one plugin which puts a ‘Like’ button into your blog posts so that your readers can ‘Like’ your post and it will publish the fact that they like your post on THEIR newsfeed. This instantly gives the blog post viral & sharing possibility through facebook unlike before where sharing on facebook was always a little clunky (clunky being a technical term, of course). It is now on par with the TweetMeMe button and others on blogs to share on Twitter etc. You can see this in action on this blogpost. Why not click on the Like button so you can see how it works.
Here are two places you can get this plugin - here or here (two versions, essentially the same thing though). You can choose to put it at the top or bottom (or both) of your blog posts & pages.
Advertising on Facebook is one of the bandwagons that many business owners will jump on this year to promote their products & services online, however it was actually launched back in November 2007 so it’s been around for a while. I’ve been using Facebook’s pay-per-click platform for about 12-months now and can now say, with experience, that I actually prefer it over Google’s Adwords platform for a number of reasons.
Before I get into that, I just want to frame this up properly and share some common stats about Facebook that you may already have heard about, but are worth being repeated:
- Founded in February 2004 with a $500,000 investment (followed by 2 further rounds of private investment injecting $12.7million in 2005 and $27.5million in 2006 into the company). Microsoft also took a $240million equity stake in 2007.
- 400million (400,000,000) active users reached in February 2010 (6 years since launch)
- 200million users log-in every single day
- Facebook stock is valued at $10billion (May 2009)
- There are 1.5 million business Pages created by business owners
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There are a number of differences between a Facebook group and a Facebook page that many people do not know about, or that are not very obvious to the uninitiated.
If you are thinking of starting a group or a page on Facebook, here are some things that you should know and consider when deciding which to go for to promote your business/cause/hobby etc:
So you’ve got a website or a blog…great. You are already one step ahead of millions of others who don’t even get to that stage (i’m not even kidding).
The biggest misconception out there is that by simply putting up a new blog or website that you will suddenly get bucket loads of traffic and visits quickly. I won’t beat around the bush on this point – that’s not how it works.
Having a blog is a great way to improve your online presence for both business and also personal reasons. You can build a blog for free using tools such as WordPress, Blogger and Typepad and begin posting content right away. However, if nobody is reading that content that you spent ages creating, then what’s the point of it all?
I hear people saying things like “blogging doesn’t work” all the time. It turns out that they tried blogging for a few weeks, published a few random blog posts and then expected the traffic to pile in. No wonder blogging didn’t work for them! My advice, which is hardly rocket science, is that you must treat your blog/website almost as a business in itself: you need to put the time and effort in and treat it seriously to make a success of it.
Here are ten things you need to be aware of when blogging for business or personal reaons:
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The iPhone…officially the greatest gadget of the 21st century to date.
If somebody ten years before the iPhone had said that one day you would be able to run your entire business from a device that fits into your pocket…and is also a phone, most if not everyone would have laughed it off or just ignored the prediction.
The iPhone is not just a phone. It’s a mini-computer that allows you to maintain productivity for your business whilst on-the-go.
Below are the apps that I use on my iPhone to run my business. You will see that if I didn’t have an actual desktop computer, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world and I could still carry on my business as normal.
One of my favourite tools that I use to update my Twitter and Facebook accounts easily is TweetDeck.
TweetDeck is no secret software and it is used by thousands (maybe millions) of Twitter users but I really think it is a fantastically easy way to boost your social networking productivity.
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Something that i’ve picked up on through all the networking that I do (online and offline) is that people treat an online community massively different to an offline community, yet both are made up of the same people. It’s strange how human behaviour changes just because the engagement and contact is through a screen as opposed to being face-to-face.
An example used in a book I recently read by MD of the world’s largest joined-up networking organisation, 4Networking, makes this point perfectly:
You wouldn’t walk into a pub or a party (or any social scenario), find the first person that looks like a potential client and start hard-selling to them. It just wouldn’t happen….and if it did, you’d not have many friends at that event because you would be avoided like the plague. Nobody would buy from you and by the end of the event you would be disillusioned and probably conclude that the event wasn’t any good.
Yet so many people who wouldn’t do the above in ‘real life’ do it all the time online – in forums, blogs and on social networks (especially on Twitter), and then they complain that “social networking doesn’t work”. I wonder why!
My advice is to treat the online community the same as you would a group of people at a party or at the pub. Build a relationship, build trust, offer value, offer advice and have a laugh too. Some of the best business relationships can be formed at a party, purely because there is a good level of rapport and a mixture of business and social chit-chat. Nobody likes boring business talk all the time, mix it up a bit.
