So here are ten things that you can do to turn your Facebook page into a dynamic and engaging destination for your Facebook fans.

1. Be unique

There’s nothing worse than a bland Facebook page. Think long and hard about how your page can be different. Remember, your page is one of at least 60 things that an average Facebook user is giving attention to. It’s insanely important that your page is unique and stands out from the rest.

Design is a major part of being unique on Facebook. Check out these excellent examples of creative Facebook fan pages for inspiration. You can never go wrong investing time and resources into a great design for your Facebook page.

Think creatively about how you can add value to Facebook users. Can you give them something? Can you provide them with help, or resources? These are the things that will get people joining your Facebook page and keep them coming back.

2. Don’t use a generic landing page

Facebook allows you to customize what page different types of users land on. You can show people who have never been to your page before a completely different message than people who are already fans on your page. It’s a great idea to show potential users a page specifically tailored for them. It might give a little background about your company or site, and would give them a great reason for joining.

Never let new users land on your Wall. The Wall doesn’t really tell anything about your brand, and it won’t have much impact on new visitors.

3. Give something away quickly

Your die-hard followers won’t need any reason for joining your fan page. But if you’re trying to really grow your Facebook presence, consider giving resources back to your community and niche. This allows you to reach other potential fans within your niche that might not have known about your Facebook page.

4. Use a large profile picture

People on Facebook want to see photos. After all, Facebook is far and away the biggest photo sharing site on the web. So make sure your page has a large photo of your company or brand as the profile picture. This helps with branding and adds trust to your profile.

5. Tag fans in photos

This is a great tip if you’re a brick and mortar business. If you’re somehow able to take pictures of your customers, tag them within the picture. Many people have Facebook notifications that alert them when they’ve been tagged in photos, and this will bring them back to your page.

Your fans also have the ability to upload photos as well. (This might require some moderation on your part. As with anything user generated, you might get some spam, etc.) Allowing fans to upload and tag themselves and friends in your pages automatically adds a nice social “hook” to your page.

Not only are you giving back by adding photos, you’re also keeping your brand planted firmly in the fan’s mind.

6. Use contests

Contests are a great way to make your fan page more engaging, and they also give incentive for potential fans to join. Contests that include giveaways can be excellent marketing tools if they’re done properly.

7. Integrate multiple social networks

You can use multiple Facebook applications to pull in your other already existing accounts from other social networking sites. With the help of some nifty applications, you can pull in Twitter, Flickr, and many others fairly quickly.

8. Thank people for becoming your fans

When someone becomes a fan on Facebook, immediately thank them! Give them something in return, like an ebook or coupon, or at the very least send them a quick “thanks!” message.

This small gesture can be huge in spreading goodwill about your page and brand. It might even give users more incentive to share your contests and resources on your fan page.

9. Don’t treat your fans like kids

In case you haven’t noticed, Facebook has grown up a lot in the past few years. What used to be a place for college students and younger is now a place for everyone. According to this report from istrategy labs, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook in 2009 was adults aged 55 and over. The largest overall demographic on Facebook is ages 35-54, which makes up 29% of all Facebook users.

So don’t write for an audience of teenagers. Everyone is now on Facebook. Sure, your brand might dictate the writing style for your target audience. (Seventeen magazine sounds quite different than AARP.) But don’t make the mistake that the only people visiting and joining Facebook Fan pages are teenagers and college kids.

10. Keep at it

Oftentimes people will create their pages and leave them. Facebook pages are breeding grounds for excellent feedback and engagement. Many people are starting to find that Facebook pages have excellent discussions and high interaction rates, oftentimes higher than Twitter and other social networks. Photos and contests are great interaction tools, and posting stories and articles also add lots of value to the community.

There are plenty of ways to stay involved with Facebook fan pages. Growing a fan base on Facebook for your page requires work, but engaging with your community on Facebook pays huge dividends. For more Facebook Fan page tips, check out this post.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
10 Ways to Create a More Engaging Facebook Page |
6 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

Joel Book from Exact Target introduced the case study:  Creating brand advocates is as important as creating brand awareness. [I would say more important. An advocate proactively shares the brand experience]. Funny, Google “brand tattoos” to see some serious brand advocate activity.

How are marketers using digital media to engage?

• email + crm
• email + social

Email and CRM help to automate interaction. Automation is the key because marketing staff and budgets are not increasing. In order to continue deliver personal and timely messages to customers, you need to automate.

Social participation brings customers together and provides an opportunity to include a call to action to join a newsletter.

Brands are aligning themselves with a specific cause, to add to their brand image.

Genworth Financial case study:

Genworth sells their insurance products through brokers, not directly to consumers.

Reduced marketing resources along with the expectation to have successful marketing campaigns let them to realize that more is not always better. It’s more important to send the right message to the right customer at the right time. Genworth understood the need to personalize communications and to offer in multiple mediums.

They started their email efforts with a business unit and have now expanded to 20 businesses. In 2006 100k emails were being sent and now 3.79 million emails are delivered as part of their program.

Personalized messages are critical to their email marketing. Email newsletters are personalized for the customer and according to the Genworth sales person. Open rates are 7-10% higher when the email comes from the sales person.

Email has realized cost savings as an alternative to print direct mail. Most new product introductions are launched only via email.  Emails were highly personalized and customized, which is very expensive to do in print. $3 million in print and direct mail cost savings were realized in 2009 for one of their marketing efforts.

Increased productivity is attributed to email and Genworth is able to use dynamic content and salesforce.com integration to create 700 highly customized emails every Friday.

Email – high ROI. Example: A co-branded campaign delivered highly personalized emails with Genworth customer logo, contact info and was distributed on behalf of Genworth customers (insurance brokers) resulting in a 12% increase in sales ($ millions) with only a $420 spend.

Efficiency of data integration and dynamic content. Customers used to receive 1-5 emails for each product. Now they only receive 1 with all info consolidated. Genworth used to have 4 FT employees and now only need one to manage email. This is as result of integration with salesforce.com and using exacttarget.com.

Timeframe to get completely setup including installation and testing: 1-2 months.

Creating self serve email templates for sales teams helps them become more efficient.

Enhanced reporting and metrics are available with data integration based on salesforce.com custom objects. Ex: what type of customers open and click the most. What’s working and what’s not.

Email Integration with Social Media has been tentative because of working in a regulated industry. However, the need to better engage with customers motivated them to move forward, albeit, tentatively.

One example is an email newsletter and blog. The blog is hosted on Active Rain (a real estate community). The newsletter gives a snippet of information and then links to a longer form of content on the writer’s blog. On the blog, readers can make comments and ask questions.  A loop is created by including a call to action on the blog to subscribe to the e-newsletter for people that get to the blog via other means.

A Facebook fan page was used as a destination for a national brand advertising campaign designed to recognize caregivers.  Genworth used online advertising, PPC, SEO, social advertising and Genworth producer and consumer web sites to promote. They now have over 7,000 fans. Most successful was Facebook advertising.

Email was used to drive traffic to Facbook and inspire participation and engagement. More awareness and education for products are expected to increase sales.

It’s essential to deliver content in the formats and mediums that your customers want. Integrating data with dynamic content in a combined Email, CRM and Social Media effort can help marketers become more efficient, effective and profitable.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
MarketingProfs B2B: Case Study on Email, CRM & Social Media |
4 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

A lot has changed since we first interviewed Charlene Li about the Groundswell, including her move to begin the Altimeter Group. Other changes include blogging having met its match as a popular social technology with the exploding popularity of tools like Facebook and Twitter.

Charlene’s new book, “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead”, is essentially about how leaders can tap into the power of the social technology revolution and how to be “open” while still maintaining control.

That sounds a bit contradictory, “being open while still maintaining control”, but in truth it’s very practical. Li’s new book provides a much needed framework for organizations that are probably experimenting with the social web or might even have tried to implement a social strategy but without success.

The timeliness of this book cannot be overstated. Just about every company I speak with has dipped their to in the waters of the social web and for some, it’s a natural progression to be open. However, being open while maintaining control is new territory for executives managed by objectives vs by empowering staff and customers in an open environment. Social media isn’t a marketing tactic, it’s a platform for communication and can touch every aspect of an organization from the mail room to the board room.

“Open Leadership” is structured into 3 sections starting with an argument for why giving up control is inevitable and ten characteristics of being open. Section two dives into how you can create your open strategy starting with deciding how open to be, followed by understanding benefits and measuring the value of being open. A new term, “Sandbox Covenants” is introduced (at least its new to me) for structuring openness and tips on deveoping an open strategy.

Basically, Sandbox Covenants is a metaphor for a defined space to be open that allows companies to manage risk and provide some structure in an effort to be more open. There are boundaries and some guidelines, but there is also freedom to do what you need/want to do.

“Being open should be not a mantra or philosophy, but a considered, rigorous approach to strategy and leadership that yields real results.”

One of my favorites of the book is Chapter 6: Orchestrating Your Open Strategy.  Starting with objectives and creating a socialgraphics profile, to developing workflow, identifying stakeholder impact and understanding the difference in organizational models for openness will give readers specific actions they can take to implement an open strategy.

Part three focuses on the skills leaders need to develop openness within their organizations, how to nurture openness, guidelines for failing successfully and case studies on how openness has transformed organizations like Proctor & Gamble and Dell.

Open Leadership is full of examples and case studies from companies and organizations including: U.S. Navy, Walmart, United Airlines, Cisco, Kodak, Microsoft, Best Buy, Humana HP, Wells Fargo and many others, Most chapters include a checklist or action plan, so this book is rooted in strategy but is very actionable.  While there are many examples from the Fortune 500, the principles of being open, with structure are applicable to companies and organizations of any size.

If you’re a manager, leader or owner of an organization that really wants a framework for transforming your understanding of the social web and how being open can transform your company, then this book is a recommended read. Then read it again.

There is a compliment web site to the book with a number of useful resources at Open Leadership. The book is available May 24th but you can pre-order here. There’s also a good video interview with Charlene Li about Open Leadership at DachisGroup.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead |
6 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

When assessing B2B client resources for optimization, most marketers focus on web pages and increasingly, digital assets and social media content.  Web pages are more often directly linked to by other sites vs images or video, so it makes sense to start optimizing a B2B site’s web pages.  The operative word in that last sentence is “start”.

Asking the right questions when sourcing content for search engine and social media optimization can reveal substantial assets that many marketers didn’t even think of using. Here are a few of the most important questions to ask (and get answers to:)

• How many web pages are published on the corporate domain name?
• How many pages are actually getting indexed and included in SERPs by search engines? (reconcile the difference and fix)
• How many and what type of images are being published ON the corporate domain name? How many off site?
• How many and what type of videos are being published on the corporate site? How many off site? How many off site?
• How many and what type of audio are being published on the corporate site? How many off site?

It’s also important to look at other file types that could be potential entry points for search:

• How many blogs published on the corporate domain name? Sub domain? Different domain name? Third party domain?
• How many and what topics of PDF files are published on the corporate domain name? How many off site?
• How many and what topics of Microsoft Office files are published on the corporate domain name? How many off site?

Identifying topics related to these different types of content and media for optimization will give you a better picture of what you have to work with. It’s helpful to know what types of documents or information is published as you build out your content strategy and optimization plan.

• Case studies
• White papers
• Product or service specifications
• Testimonials
• Newsletters
• Press releases
• Product demos
• Frequently asked questions, knowledegebase
• PowerPoint presentations
• eBooks
• Rich media apps, games or interactive tools
• User generated content, either raw or aggregated according to topic
• Blog content, blog comments, other corporate social participation on the web (Ex: Twitter) – again, either raw or aggregated by topic

Of course there are many others for B2B marketers that have made any kind of commitment to content. Once there’s a clearer picture of what content and media assets there are to work with, they can be mapped by keyword topic.

Some content types deserve focused keyword optimization and link building attention. Others really only need the benefit of process driven or template level SEO .  By process driven, I mean training content producers within the company on using keyword glossaries to guide their word choices when creating web pages or other types of content.  By template level SEO, I mean modifications to the web site templates that are used with the content management system to dynamically populate keywords in title tags, image alt text, breadcrumb navigation and similar locations. Automating such SEO tasks can propagate to most or all of an entire website, whether it’s 100 or 10,000 pages.

While most B2B Search Engine Optimization efforts are focused on marketing activities that drive leads and sales, working holistically with SEO can deliver benefits that increase value or reduce costs in other areas of the company as well. Optimizing FAQ’s and product support information can provide answers to customers before they call support.  Optimizing news related content such as press releases and images can attract journalists to use the company in a story.  Optimizing blog content that humanizes the company and gives insight into the culture as well as optimized job listings can make it easier for qualified candidates to find open positions.

I’ll be talking about these topics and more at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston tomorrow at 1:45-3pm in a session called, Content SEO: Best Practices and What to Avoid.  TopRank SEO client, Jiyan Wei from Vocus will present a case study of how they’ve  used and advanced their SEO efforts with the 500,000 press releases hosted on PRWeb. There will also be a special handout (small book) provided of the presentation with additional SEO resources available to the first 50 attendees. We hope to see you there!

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
B2B SEO: Content Sourcing & Optimization |
15 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com

MarketingProfs B2B Forum is coming up quickly next week and I will be presenting about an hour of essential search engine optimization tips and insight specifically for B2B web sites along with Vocus Product Manager of PRWeb, Jiyan Wei.

There’s a tremendous opportunity for B2B marketers to leverage SEO to increase prospect acquisition and to facilitate after the sale support and upgrades.  Most B2B marketers create a substantial amount of content to guide prospects through sales cycles that are much longer than companies selling consumer products/services.

While much of that content is published online, most of it isn’t optimized for search and digital assets are often ignored as potential traffic drivers via search.  In this session, we’ll focus on core SEO to help make a website’s content search engine friendly and talk about best and worst B2B SEO practices for processes to optimize content for better search results. The PRWeb case study will show how they worked to refine their content management system overall so it would be technically search engine friendly. Other topics include: large website issues, duplicate content and what to consider when planning a website redesign.

Specific topics we’ll be discussing include:

B2B Content Optimization Strategy & Core SEO

• Optimized Content Strategy
• Core SEO (Keywords, Content, Technical & Links)
• B2B SEO Best & Worst Practices Examples

Large B2B Website and Publisher SEO

• Challenges you may run into if you have a large website
• Duplicate content issues
• Planning a redesign of your existing website (Migration Plan)

PRWeb as a Case study

• PRWeb experience with SEO during site design, CMS updates
• Technical SEO tips, sitemaps, site architecture

Focus on B2B SEO Best Practices

• Best Practices Content SEO for B2B
• Best Practices with Content Management Systems
• Best Practices B2B SEO Measurement & Analytics

Then we’ll wind things up with about 1/2 hour of Q and A. If you’re a B2B marketer with a small or enterprise level web site, this is a must attend session and definitely an important conference to attend. We hope you can make it.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. |
B2B Search Engine Optimization: Focus on Content SEO |
10 comments | http://www.toprankblog.com