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

Go Beyond Facebook Page

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 »

I have been member of MyBlogLog since December of 2006 (feel free to add me to your contacts). You probably recognize the widget that shows the latest visitors to this blog located in the side bar.

Through this widget I have met and connected with many outstanding bloggers, business owners, real estate agents and just your regular every day Joe and Jane. In fact it is one of the first place I check every time I work on my blog. Just to see if there was some one new today on my blog or to be absolutely humbled by the fact that some one found my blog interested enough to pay another visit. Never have I imagined I will be banning some one from appearing on that widgets. In fact I never new exactly how to do it. So I learned today…

To my surprise it was very easy. Just hover with your cursor (aka mouse) over the picture of the person you would like to ban. A small red square with a white “X” (as shown in the snapshot below) will appear in the upper left corner of the persons avatar- you have to click on the red little square:

You will be taken to a confirmation page on MyBlogLog website. On that page (see another snapshot below- click on it to see the full size) you have to click the button that says confirm:

That’s it now you know how to ban some one’s avatar or picture appearing on your website. You might have to repeat the above steps if you have several blog listed on MyBlogLog and each blog having its own widget- although I am not 100% sure.

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.

Update: Since writing this post it appears StumbleUpon will be lifting the 200 friends limit after all. It is not yet in effect, but it will probably be possible to add more than 200 friends in the days to come. I still think however it is a good idea to clean up your list once in a while.

Yes I know. The question does not sound like a nice one, but bare with me and you may discover that it is indeed a valid question.

There is one thing I used to hate about StumbleUpon- that I was limited to adding only 200 friends in my account. Today I was proven wrong or at least partially wrong.

In the last few months I have came across many great Stumblers and wanted to follow them. However I was not able to do so due to above described limitation. So I decided to do a major clean up of my contact list on StumbleUpon. I have set forth following criteria for this clean up:

1. I planned to remove contacts from my list if they were last seen on StumbleUpon before January 1, 2008. I think seven months of inactivity was plenty to let me know that a particular stumbler lost his or her interest in the community.
2. I intended to remove any one who did not befriended me back. Only leaving those who were unable to befriend me due to the above limitation.
3. Finally I was planing to remove every one with whom I hand no more than 3 interests in common.

Fortunately I did not have to follow through on #2 and #3. As soon as I began removing those who fell into my #1 criteria, I discovered that many of them had their account suspended on StumbleUpon. I also noticed that every one of those who were suspended had a default StumbleUpon avatar (image to the right) associated with their account. That of course made my job so much easier.

The end result was that although I am still limited to have only 200 friends on StumbleUpon, there is some room for new friends. I also plan to reserve these few spots for real estate bloggers. If you are one of them, feel free to add me to your friends: My StumbleUpon Profile. If you already have 200 friends in your profile, please leave the link in the comments so I can add you to my contacts anyway. Hopefully one day you will do the similar clean up and will find some room for me.