Before we set off on our voyage of discovery today I want to give you a bit of background as to why I am writing this article. I have found myself of late being adviser to a lot of people setting up facebook pages for lots of different reasons. Rather than repeat what I have to say ten times I am going to try and summarize it. Where possible I am going to use the Go Beyond MLS page as an illustration.

Now I should also point out that I am not a guru at this sort of thing but a really enthusiastic geek. With that in mind let us look at setting up pages.

What is a page?

A page is a blog.

Don’t look at me like that a page is basically a cross between twitter and wordpress. For plugins you have applications and instead of tweets you have posts with attachments.

All the basics of blogging apply to your page. We will talk about this in a moment. First some basics to make sure we have not missed anything.

Making the page

Most of you that read this article will know how to make a page already but for those that don’t this is the quick version.

1. Go to a page (the Go Beyond MLS Page is good).

2. At the bottom of the left hand column you will see a link that says “Create a Page for My Business” (this link leads tot he same page).

3. Click it, fill out the details and there you are a page. It has no fans (not even you) and is ready for customisation.

Getting the basics in place

There are some things that a page needs before you even make yourself a fan of it. These are simple that it is easy to overlook them.

1. Upload a picture. In fact if you got as far as making the page and did not have the perfect logo then you need to stop whatever you are doing and get one. Now.

Your picture is your only branding that you get. Everything else looks exactly as facebook wants it to look.

A good image can be as tall as you like but is limited in width. Take a look at the Lord Matt fan page (and become a fan perhaps). You will see that it has a customised image that fills down the page and adds my character to the page. I also get to make the public speaker and blogger points boldly while getting two pictures of me on the one space.

If you do not have the skills to make such an image then a photograph might do. Just remember whatever you use had better be yours to use.

2. Put something short and snappy in the about box.

Treat this like the most important tweet you will ever send. I like to end with a call to action (suggest to friends).

3. Find something worthwhile to say for all the fields under the info tab.

If the fields on the info tab are very much not what you need and do not fit in the slightest then you are not to late to delete the page and try picking a better category. Make up your mind now because it’s the work of ten minutes to change things with no loss if you change them now.

Okay assuming that you stick with your current settings write that “about” section and make sure you make it good.

You have around 100 to 300 words before people have to click to see more so just like blogging you must capture people’s interest within as few lines as possible and then keep it. If it takes days to get the “about” perfect then that is what it takes.

4. Consider making the about tab the default landing page because your wall is not going to be very interesting to start with.

There are more advanced things you can do like adding new tabs that people land on but for now let us just stick with the info tab.

To make it the default landing page you are going to have to click “Edit Page” which is found just under the image you set a while back. Get in there and make some changes.

5. Consider making the default for the wall both fan and page so that it is as much like a basic facebook profile as possible.

You can do this when looking at the page proper.

Read more »

Go Beyond Facebook

What I am going to do int his first article is simply look at the Facebook fan page for this website and use it to explore Facebook pages in general and what they can do for your blog (regardless of niche).

Vlad tells me that apart from setting up the page he has not actually done very much with it least of all tell anyone about it.

This, for this article’s purposes, is fantastic! It means that we can actively measure what I am about to have said (keep on reading or you might miss it) and watch what happens as we implement the theory. Over the next few months I’ll revisit the topic of Facebook and representing your blog therein reporting on our efforts to go beyond just having a page and to actually getting traffic from it.

As I write there are 3 fans. In three months let us see if we can get over 100.

The page as it is

As the page stands there is nothing obviously “wrong” with it. The blog posts are being added to the page and there is a graphic that matches the website theme. However, as you can see, there is a lack of variety and this makes the page visually unappealing and repetitive.

In other words we have settles down to making Facebook a very expensive feed reader. That’s fine but it’s not exciting enough to get the average Facebook user to do much by way of interaction.

According to something I was reading (somewhere) the average Facebook user fans two pages a month. That means to see growth in the page’s fan base some work is going to be needed.

Then the page must add value to the user’s day and if that was not enough it must actually be interactive enough to get enough interaction to show up in the news feed of the fans who have added it.

Facebook promotion is no walk in the park. Keep reading for an insight into using pages.

Read more »

UPDATE, March 2, 2010: After experimenting with a plugin for Google Buzz, I have decided not to use on at this time. All available plugins as of now offer to ad comments to Google Reader items- this potentially can scatter the discussion all over places. Hopefully a better solution will be implemented soon.

With the arrival of Google Buzz, I began to question whether or not I should continue to concentrate on Twitter. I hope I am not the only one. Two days ago Twitter decided to intruduce even more “nofollow” attributes this time to their internal linking structure. I understood (but did not agree) when they introduced the first round of nofollow attributes to their links, I guess as young startup you needed to do what you needed to do.

So today I have replaced the Tweetmeme button (courtesy of Tweetmeme ) with new and shiny Google Buzz button (courtesy of Hameedullah Khan). The Tweetmeme button was moved to the button of each post. This is just a symbolic gesture of my personal dissatisfaction of the way Twitter is “innovating”, I have nothing but love for Tweetmeme.

Twitter has bigger issues to deal with….

For Twitter trying to manipulating the flow of the Google juice at this stage of the game is really childish, and if that is the reason for the latest change I just feel sorry for Twitter. Really guys, is this the best you’ve got? Now if the recent change was made as a further attempt to eliminate spam my question is the same, is this the best you’ve got? There are ways to eliminate spam without punishing your users.

There is also another factor, and I maybe completely wrong about it… I appears to me that many of my online are starving for a more meaningful way to keep the conversation going (which in my opinion is impossible to have on Twitter). So if you compare Twitter and Google Buzz from that perspective, Google Buzz wins hands down, and if you thought Google Buzz is no threat to Twitter you should really think again.

Now back to the new and shiny Google Buzz button- you need to use your GMail/Google Reader to interact with it. You can also follow Go Beyond MLS on Google.

Back in October of 2008, I wrote a post in which I tried to compare two services that allow your readers to share the content of your blog on variety of social bookmarking websites- AddThis and ShareThis. At the time I was experimenting with both widgets across my blogs. While AddThis may have been a little more recognizable, I thought that ShareThis offered better reporting.

Over the last few weeks, AddThis managed to win my heart and today I would like to highlight few of the changes.

Button and The Way User May Interact With it

While I am still not that thrilled about button on “hover” behaviour- I would rather it to begin interaction on “click”. But considering AddThis popularity, I think it is safe to assume that majority of visitors expect AddThis button to behave a certain way. Besides there is a reason why AddThis button responds to both “on hover” and “on click”. When you however over the button with your moths a small widow is pulled down with several essential social bookmarking websites:

However if a visitor clicks on the button, a larger window pops up which allows you to choose between about 47 different social bookmarking websites:

In the past when a visitor clicked the button, it would take him or her to a page on AddThis website.

Reporting and Statistics

Not sure it was me (highly unlikely) AddThis listened to, but they did heck of a job with improving the reporting and statistics. First thing you may notice logging into your account is that AddThis now segregates data for each domain. If you happened to have AddThis button on multiple websites, you are likely to find this feature useful.

AddThis now also provides data on where your content is submitted to. You can find that under “Top Services”.

In addition AddThis also provides information about geographical location of users sharing your content- look for it under “Top Continents”.

Over the period of last few years bloggers had found creative ways to allow their readers to easy share the content of the blog on social bookmarking websites. WordPress has several plugins allowing you to implement easy sharing of your content. Probably the most known plugin is Sociable- a plugin I often used on many of my WordPress powered websites. One of the things that I always wanted to see in Sociable plugin was the ability to report how many times and on which websites my content was shared. If they consider developing such reporting, I may use the Sociable plugin again. However for now I had to say goodbye to Sociable and for the past few weeks I was taking a closer look at AddThis and ShareThis.

AddThis

I came across AddThis before I discovered ShareThis. AddThis allows you to add a button to your website by inserting a piece of code into your website or, if you are using WordPress, you can try their plugin. One o the downsides of using the plugin is that it inserts the button below the post and is not offering flexibility to place the button anywhere you want.

Issues With AddThis “Dropdown” Button

One thing that I find annoying about “dropdown” version of the AddThis button is that behaves “unexpectedly” (example on the left). I belong to the “mindset” that if you just hover over the button with the cursor it should not talk, sing, smile, wink or otherwise interact with me. Unless, of course, I click on it!

AddThis Reporting And Related Issues

One of the things you may quickly discover that in order not to mess up your AddThis statistics. You may need to open several accounts if you would like to separate the statistics for each website.

I would love AddThis develop and offer more in depth reporting. In particular I would like to see them reporting not only how many times a particular URL was shared, but to tell me exactly on which of the social websites it was shared.

ShareThis

As you can see I have chosen ShareThis for this blog. Although I have not made the final decisions which services I will end up using, there are few things I like more about ShareThis. (UPDATE: After trying both AddThis and ShareThis I have opted to use AddThis on most of my blogs)

ShareThis Allows You To Track Multiple Domains

In your ShareThis account you can ad more than one URL. ShareThis provides separate statistics for each domain. It takes abotu 24 hours for your statistics to be shown from the time you add a domain and install the code or the WordPress plugin on your blog.

ShowThis Has More Detailed Statistics

While still short of reporting exactly which URL was submitted to what social networking websites, ShareThis offers some extra statistics that I find interesting and useful.

ShareThis Button Can Be Placed Anywhere

If you decide to use ShareThis on your wordpress, it is quite flexible as to where you can place the button on your blog. By default it places the button at the end of the article, but you can override that option or place an additional button in the beginning of your posts.

ShareThis Offers More “Sharing Options”

Besides offering your readers to share your blog’s content on top social bookmarking websites, SharThis offers other blogger to “reblog” your content. It also offers and opportunity to your visitors to share your blog’s content via e-mail, SMS or Instant Messaging.

Conclusion

I think both services can improve reporting. While certain submissions (such as when your pages are submitted to StumbleUpon or Digg) can be noticed rather easily, allowing you to interact with the submitter. Improving this side of the reporting will allow yet another way for the owner of the blog to network with his or her readers.

Final thought for the blog owners. If you have not tried either of the services, make sure to try at least one of them. The implementation is very easy, both have WordPress plugin. It will take you less than 15 minutes to implement the plugins, but you can rep the benefits for years to come. One thing you have to remember that no plugin in the world can substitute your interaction with your readers and your fans.