Discovering the Facebook Like Button

Harry Gold, CEO of Overdrive Interactive, gave a great guest lecture in my SMM class last week. The wide-ranging presentation was based on his Advanced Social Media Marketing seminar. I can’t do justice to the entire presentation, but there was one part that particularly struck me.

I’ve seen the Facebook Like button on web pages and thought, “Isn’t that cute?” Well it turns out that it’s a lot more than cute; it essentially makes a Facebook fan page out of every product to which it’s attached.

A recent study of brand-related Facebook behavior for Constant Contact by Chadwick Martin Bailey has stunning data. Here are some key factoids:
• 78% of people who like brands like fewer than 10, so they are engaged with those brands.
• They mostly read brands’ posts and newsfeeds.
• 51% of fans are more likely to buy the brand
• 56% are more likely to recommend the brand to a friend after becoming a fan.

As you might expect, 59% don’t interact with brands on the big social nets but 56% of people under 35 do, and it’s primarily on Facebook. Don’t ignore older demographics; they may be more loyal and more likely to purchase. Check it out for yourself.

The Facebook Like button for web pages has been around since March 2010 but some quick research says that many sites like retailers who target teens and young adults aren’t yet taking advantage of it. Levis is a brand that gets it. Here’s what you need to know.

First, you don’t put the Like button on a home page or a page with multiple product thumbnails. I suppose you could, but it would be meaningless because there are multiple items of content and the “likes” would be meaningless. Encourage viewers to like your brand; that is valuable as the CMB data shows. In the case of individual Like buttons, you want them to like a single product like the skinny jeans pictured. Now that jean product has its own fan page!



When a visitor likes the product is when the action begins. As Harry’s illustration shows, the user activity shows up on the Facebook News Feed of her friends, with detailed information about the product and a link back to the product detail page. That’s already great visibility, but there’s more! Now the marketer can easily message the likers. That goes to their News Feeds, thereby reaching their friends. That is huge! Inside Facebook says,

Millions of websites and social games have implemented Facebook’s Like button social plugin, yet relatively few are taking advantage of the capability to publish news feed stories to users that click buttons that represent real-world objects. That creates a lot of capacity to reach fans and friends of fans that marketers like Levis are beginning to use.

Surprise, surprise—there’s a privacy issue also! The tool allows Facebook to collect web browsing data for its likers; this WSJ article has a link to all the articles in their What They Know series, which is excellent. The collection of user data has come to the attention of the authorities in Germany where it has been declared illegal in one German state. Wonder who will be right about privacy concerns about Facebook in the end—Zuckerberg or Germany?

In case you were wondering, Google is following a similar path with its +1 button. That adds another tool, which shows up in a number of places including search rankings for friends identified on the user’s Google profile. Apparently if you want to it to go to one of your Google+ circles, you have to share it manually—for now at least.

Marketers may need to exercise some caution in communicating with likers. In particular, all the data seems to agree that you shouldn’t overwhelm even your best friends with posts. Make them relevant and control the frequency.

This is fascinating stuff! Many thanks to Harry Gold for bringing it to my attention!

How Social Media Changed Your Life?

We are less than two weeks from the date of the media, a global celebration of how social media has changed the way we communicate every day. Mashable is always fascinated by how social media and technology influence the lives of the people, and would like your help telling this story.

In partnership with CNN iReport, we want to know: How social media changed your life? Have you met your joined-at-the-BFF tweet on Twitter? Find your dream job through LinkedIn? Makes a big change in your life after being inspired by an update of Facebook?

Send us your pictures of the milestones in social media, or take the camera and explain the path you have taken. Share your story with us on Monday, June 27 at 12:00 ET. The best work can be discussed on CNN and Mashable.

You can upload your photos and videos using the task page, or email iReport. Instagram Picplz and users, we encourage you to post your photos too and labeled with # smday.

Is there a change in life history of social media already sticks in your mind? Brainstorm your ideas for submission in the comments below.

3 Pressing Questions Facing the Future of Social Media

Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conference, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. He is SorenG on Twitter.

The conversation about social media in our society is shifting significantly. We’re no longer asking questions like, “Will people use social media?” or “Are sites like Facebook and Twitter simply trends that will soon lose steam?” After billions of tweets and 600 million people on Facebook, it’s settled: People want to share online. And with Facebook moving toward a $100 billion valuation, there is money to be made.

The emerging conversation is not if we will be connected but is instead, “How can we effectively and productively connect?” Now that we can get constant updates on just about every aspect of our friends’ lives, how do we receive that which is relevant?

New paradigms are beginning to emerge as user habits shift toward greater relevancy. The companies that successfully address these changes will have a huge advantage over those that don’t.

1. The Distraction Question

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How do we live continually connected without being continually distracted?

A recent survey from social email software provider harmon.ie found that individual employees are burning an average of $10,375 in productivity each year. Why? “Because we don’t disconnect from an online chat quickly enough, or we get sidetracked by a bulging email inbox, or we fall into a Facebook hole of photos, updates and messages.”

In a recent blog post titled “The Twitter Trap,” Bill Keller, the executive editor (for not much longer) of The New York Times, writes about the challenges of staying focused. “The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions.” He continued, “Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from … from … wait, what was I saying?”

While the range of content we could access was once exciting, people are realizing they need to know as much about how to turn off their stream than how to turn it on. The question is no longer, “How can I know what my friends are doing or thinking at any given time?” We have solved that for the most part. Social media that finds the right balance of when and how to update us, and which gives us control over such notifications, will win in the long run.

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2. The Filter Question

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How do we filter the stream to get what is most essential?

In the early days of Twitter, your feed would show the @replies of everyone you followed. For some, it created an excess of irrelevant information. Twitter changed this functionality (to the initial chagrin of many users) to only include tweets directed at users that were mutually followed. It effectively streamlined Twitter feeds and removed information clutter. Most users have since come around to accept that this was the right move for Twitter amid its exponential growth.

Twitter’s focus on relevance is echoed in the activities of other web giants like Google and Facebook. They are attempting to do the filtering for us, such that we only see what they think most interests us.

Some people, like MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, see a danger in this. In a recent TED talk, he describes the “filter bubble” as “your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online.” More and more, we see only what companies think we want to see. For example, we might receive different Google search results than our neighbor, since the rankings are now based more and more on what Google knows about us. And even if we have the same Facebook friends as our neighbor, we will be shown very different updates, as Facebook defaults to showing us only things related to what we click on and share the most.

Three elements are important here. First, the means of filtering needs to be transparent. We need to know what the filtering is based on. Second, we need choice in that filtering to help make it relevant to us. And third, there needs to be a non-filtering (or non-personalized) option. For example, if we can see a personalized Google search, we also need the choice for a non-personalized one.

The companies that can do this will succeed in gathering user trust and engagement. The question is not if filtering is needed but rather how that filtering happens and the level of choice and transparency in the process.

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3. The Capacity Question

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How much social media can I actually consume?

Along these same lines is the third issue of capacity. As more an more media are integrated into social networks every day, we’re growing accustomed to knowing just about everything our friends are doing, thinking, watching and listening to. On one level, this is awesome. On another, it makes balancing other people’s life updates and living your own life that much more challenging.

Mark Zuckerberg argued last week that people tend to want more than they think. Recalling the implementation of Facebook’s News Feed feature, he said, “People thought that, you know, it was just too much. They wanted to share stuff on the site, but they didn’t want it to be so much in people’s face. You know now it’s just part of the site that I think most people in a way would be like, ‘What’s going on? How can there be Facebook without this?’”

At some point, though, we reach a capacity. There is only so much time in a day. Dave Morin’s company,Path, which gives users a maximum of 50 friends, is one step toward a shifting paradigm. Other efforts that build limits into the system will likely emerge to support people in search of this balance.

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Get Ready – It’s Only Going To Increase

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If you think you have a challenge now managing your tweets, emails, Facebook posts and texts, hold on to your hat. This is just the beginning. According to a recent blog post from Cisco Systems, “In 2010, there were 12.5 billion devices connected to the Internet. Looking to the future, Cisco IBSG predicts there will be 25 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2015, and 50 billion by 2020.”

Both the types of information we can share will dramatically increase, and the number of people from whom we can receive this content will also grow. Essentially, we will have many more people creating significantly more content.

Providing people more ways to share online is no longer the challenge. That was the old paradigm. A new paradigm of relevancy is emerging, which goes beyond the question of whether “to follow or not follow” or “to friend or not friend.” Companies need to see that their job is not to provide us data, or even keep us updated — it is to serve our needs.

And people have a need to not only receive a constant flow of information but also to get quality information in ways that add benefit to their lives. The social networks and web companies that remember this will stand the best chance of success in the future.

Why Leaders Must Engage with Social Media

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on social media at the Women & Power Conference Reunion at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While I'm convinced that not all C-level executives need to be Twitter junkies, I am absolutely convinced that they need to be acquainted with social media.

There are two basic reasons:

1. There may be external events that are picked up on social media and require attention.
2. There may be internal activities that are good and need to be encouraged or potentially damaging and need to be restrained or monitored.

How does the relevant C-level executive know what to do (or not do) if she does not understand social media?

W&P Reunion.pptx

View more presentations from diy-marketing

This presentation was a lot of fun to develop. I hope you have equal fun reading it.

Even more, what are your thoughts on this important, but undercovered, subject?

Stores are Popping Up on Facebook

I ran across the concept of pop-up stores not long ago while I was looking at the subject of viral events. The idea is to take a vacant retail location for a brief time and to create an immersive brand experience there. This shot is from an October event held by Proctor & Gamble in New York City as the first event in an ongoing campaign. Here’s a link to the full side show from the first one. These events are held in the real world, but they are reaching out to social media influentials like Andrea of the MommyPR blog and Patty of the NYC Girl at Heart blog for that event. Another great example of integrating social media into the marketing communications mix!

If that wasn’t interesting enough, I soon ran across the mention of pop-up stores on Facebook. E-commerce on Facebook is still quite exploratory, although if you do a search you might (or might not) be surprised at how many marketing services companies would like to help you. These articles (1, 2) from Mashable discuss some of the issues and opportunities.


Pop-up stores are only one way to explore, but since the concept implies something temporary, it might be a good one. So I went looking. Here are two shots, one from Rhino records, which makes clear that its store will be there only for awhile and another from Canadian retailer Roots, which has a Valentine theme, whatever that implies. Note that in the Rhino store you can just go in and shop; didn't try to purchase. In order to shop the Roots store, you have to Like them to shop or to access the contest--probably why they have almost 35,000 fans!

By the time you follow the links, these stores may have gone away. You should find other examples if you search ‘facebook pop up store.’ They seem to be set up using one of several apps that are available for the purpose, not Facebook functionality.

I have no insights as to the success of either venture. However, it seems to be a use of Facebook that’s worth watching!

Social Media Lines Up for Super Bowl 2011

For those of us who live our lives in the world of social media, this Super Bowl stat is astonishing: E-Trade was the only advertiser among the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowl rosters to even add a tease to its Facebook or Twitter presence at the close of the ad, according to a study by Professors Chuck Tomkovick and Rama Yelkur quoted in Ad Age. Not so this year; in that article on Monday Ad Age headlines, “From Hashtags to Newsfeeds to Online Spots, Big Game Advertisers Tap Web 2.0 to Extend Buy.” (See also the Super Bowl coverage on their sidebar.)

We all know what the marketing game is. A 30-second Super Bowl ad has hovered around $3m for the past several years. That’s a lot for even the usual suspects like Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Intel. The companies go all out to “create buzz,” with increasing intensity during this, the week before the big game. They prolong it as much as possible with post-game critiques that rival that of the sports programming itself. Getting the most mileage out of those expensive TV ads by leveraging other media made sense in years past. It still does; it’s just that social media has been added to the mix.

See the video here

According to Ad Age and this good video on CNBC, there will be more ties to social media this year. Pepsi is running its usual Doritos “Crash the SuperBowl” contest. Pepsi Max has purchased a spot, after a year off for cause-related marketing and joined in the “Crash” contest. They are joined by Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and even the Anheuser Busch Clydesdales and the ETrade baby. In reporting on this year’s advertising (with a good link to past ads), MSNBC says, “It’s a risky proposition for companies. A social media campaign has the potential to make your loyal customers even bigger fans, or draw in new customers. But companies also have to be prepared for the fact that they can’t control what people will write or tweet about them, positive or negative.” With due respect to MSNBC— big DUH!!! Any brand marketer who doesn’t already know that—and know how to deal with it—isn’t ready for the big leagues!

Coors Light is using mobile to hype its advertising using a Snap Tag on its in-store packaging. They’ve been testing this technology since spring and find it ready for the big game. It’s all about a mobile phone, a special icon, text messaging—and, of course, the ability to enter a contest and win a big prize. This article gives a good overview of how it works.

On the other hand, some brands are using the event to their advantage without actually buying an ad.

Papa John’s, who advertised last year, is taking a different approach this year. It’s giving away pizzas on game day. Of course, you have to register on their Facebook page to be eligible! But if what they told CNBC holds true and they spend about half a million dollars to put pizzas into 100,000 homes, is that a better expenditure than $3m for a TV ad? You call that one! And very important, how many fans will they add to the 1,501,026 they have now?

Bing is running a National Tailgating Championship that will culminate in Dallas this week. The first prize is “the coveted Golden Grill.” Oh, yeh? Actually, the whole thing is great fun with lots of snarky commentary like a set of contest guidelines (linked to the main contest site) full of legalese that essentially says that the judges will decide on the winner. Good for Microsoft and the Bing marketers for not taking themselves too seriously!

And most of all that master of Internet buzz The Old Spice Guy. He’s back and he’s watching the buzz about it on the web. One Super Fan will receive an early copy of the ad to be debuted the day after the Super Bowl. Oh, wow! That’s so delightfully arrogant that I’m watching for it. Stay tuned!

And I’m sure I’ve missed some other interesting or creative—or not—approaches. What else should we look for on Sunday?

Stronger Evidence that Facebook Ads Work

I’ve commented before that my post last February about Facebook advertising effectiveness, “Do Facebook Ads Work?,” is by far the most visited post on this blog and it continues to draw traffic. I followed with one on targeting that I think is important, though it hasn’t been as popular. Every time I do some research on Facebook ads I find something that I didn’t previously understand. This time it’s “social context.” I had seen it, but I didn’t really understand its source or its value.

What started me thinking about it was recent articles on the growth in Facebook advertising. Tuesday’s eMarketer newsletter pointed to huge growth in Facebook ad revenue.
Commentary in AdAge that pointed out that, “what is surprising is the majority of revenue, 60% or $1.12 billion, was earned from smaller companies in 2010, those more likely to be using self-serve tools rather than work through a media agency. That's greater than the $740 million coming from major marketers like Coke, P&G or Match.com.” In November, ComScore figures had revealed that Facebook was now the largest online display advertising publisher, with over 23% share.

Growth, of course, only implies advertising effectiveness; it does not document it. The most compelling piece of research (full document below) goes back to April, and after I read it several times, I began to understand the “social context” issue. Nielsen has identified three kinds of ads—ads with and without social content and organic impressions. Facebook doesn’t use this terminology in any of their advertising material that I can find. Facebook simply points out that all Facebook ad formats have the Like icon at the bottom to encourage social content. This page shows a homepage ad that has no social content. It also shows a homepage ad with social content; that happens if one of your friends has “liked” the brand. The final type is what Nielsen has termed an “organic impression,” a notice on the page of a friend of a user who has liked or engaged with the brand. Facebook uses the phrase “may appear on the news feed.” I couldn’t find out what “may” means here.

This chart from the same study shows that both types of ads with social content are more effective in recall, awareness and intent. Personally, that doesn’t surprise me because I tend to find myself paying attention to the names first and only secondarily to what they liked! Isn’t it human nature that when we see names of people we know, we pay attention? The study is brief, so page through it if you need more detail.

Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding The Value of a Social Media Impression

View more documents from Victor Rodrigues.

So how do you get more people to like your brand so they can appear in these ads? (Facebook’s privacy policy seems to give implicit permission for your name to be used when you like the brand. There is supposed to be a way to disable this feature, but I don’t know anyone who knows how to do it.) That makes the strategy issue for marketers getting more people to like their brand in the first place. And the best advice seems to be the simplest—just ask them! That’s what Virgin America is doing on the ads above. Going a step further, you can create something called a “reveal tab.” That allows you to make a members-only offer—to ask people to like your brand in order to get an incentive of some kind. These are two simple strategies that can add to your fan numbers.

And the point of all this is that the more fans you have, the more likely they are to show up as social context in your ads and as items on their friends news feed pages. That gives your ads the aura of being recommended by a friend of the viewer. And it has a high probability of making your ad more effective!

And so it goes in the wonderful world of Facebook!

Things to Watch for in Social Media Marketing in 2011

I’ve been watching prognostications about social media in 2011 and, since 2010 is almost over, I’m going to weigh in now. One of the best things I’ve seen is this discussion of interactive from eMarketer. It’s broader than social and well worth paging through . I’ve adapted the first three of their trends and added a perspective of my own. So here goes—and your comments and opinions are welcome!

eMarketer Webinar: Key Digital Trends for 2011

View more presentations from eMarketer.

• 2011 will be about apps everywhere—and increasingly by everyone. This is not news to anyone, but the development in this space seems to continue unabated. Apple says there are over 300,000 iPhone apps in its store. The fastest growing apps spaces currently are iPad and Android.
If you need proof of the wisespread use of apps, consider these two recent eMarketer charts. Retail shoppers (Dec. 15) use them to find bargains. B2B purchasers (Dec. 29) are using them to find information, with only the oldest group being a real hold-out. The same report says that 27% of this sample feels comfortable making a business purchase on a mobile device.

Footnote: a lot of us talked about 2010 being “the year of mobile.” In a sense it was, but that’s not because of the devices themselves. It’s because apps made them so useful to so many people in so many places.
• 2011 will be about content, not advertising. We’re coming to call it “content marketing” and its aim is to engage and entertain as well as to inform. The writer adds that we need “curation” to help customers separate the signals from the noise. Lee Rainey of the Pew Foundation says that all this content has “created a Bermuda Triangle: Markets are fractured, the marketplace is roiled, metrics haven't kept pace, and there's too much noise, so it's easier for things to get lost in the shuffle.” He has more interesting things to say about the megaphone that is the Internet in this report of a recent speech. Content curation can provide powerful assistance to customers in an era in which we’re all inundated with information.
Writing in the eMarketer newsletter Geoff Ramsey ( December 2, 2010) has 5 useful questions for those of us who create content:
• Is the content unique?
• Is the content useful?
• Is the content well executed?
• Is the content fun?
• Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?
I would add, “Can the content be repurposed for other brand channels?” There’s never enough good content! The eMarketer webinar points out that “Consumers engage seamlessly with content across multiple platforms.” That’s a huge challenge for marketers—the right content in all the places the target audience would like to find it.
• 2011 will also be about location, which I’ve recently written about (1, 2). Venture capitalist Summet Jain belives that location and social commerce will be the driving forces in the year to come and Foresquare will be the driving platform. Take a minute to understand this quote:
Part of the new evolution of mobile commerce will be new developments in near field communications, which involves the use of proximity sensors to guide mobile users through stores and malls. These proximity sensors, said Jain, will be deployed more widely among small businesses in the coming year to allow users to locate specific items down to the very aisle and shelf.
That sounds good, but I wonder if small businesses will be that quick to mimic deployment of this technology in large malls. Small businesses have a lot to cope with just keeping up with their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts!
My Perspective – Converging Trends
When two powerful trends converge, the impact changes the marketing landscape. Here are my two nominations for that powerful force.
• The Ubiquity of Mobile and Use of Social Media. That goes back to apps everywhere on all sorts of mobile devices. When marketers combine that with the growing—almost complete—reliance of younger adults on digital media it creates a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. This is a good presentation on upscale younger adults. Their use of digital, even for content like newspapers, is fascinating and predictive, I think.

L2 Gen Y Affluents: Media Survey

View more presentations from L2.

• Prominence of Younger Adults and Use of Social Media. Prof. Olivia Mitchell of UPenn is being widely quoted on the number of baby boomers turning 65 starting in 2011 (10,000 a day!). The fact that many boomers are ill-prepared for retirement may retard the rise of younger people in business and professional ranks, but they will continue to gain power there. They are the young B2B purchasers in the eMarketer chart using mobile devices to get information and even to make purchases. As the Gen Y study shows, they are the people who communicate on Facebook and get their news on the Internet. Marketers must be there to meet them.
This is only my selection of the issues I see as being most important in social media marketing in 2011. It's not comprehensive, but I hope it’s thought provoking!

Targeting Your Facebook Ads

Far and away the most popular post on this blog in recent weeks has been one written back in February, “Do Facebook Ads Work?” The answer was a strong “yes,” and research since then, including interesting findings on ad formats by Nielsen, continue to confirm that. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week recounts the interesting story of the Nike “Write the Future” ad that was huge during the World Cup and goes on to talk about the importance of Facebook friends and the “like” function to Facebook advertisers.
















To demonstrate, I wrote a hypothetical ad on Facebook; that’s Step 1. Step 2 shows the main aspects of the targeting process. The advertiser can target by location (essential; no one needs to reach all 500 million Facebook fans!) and by demographics—age and gender only. So far, not different from traditional media advertising, and it works like Google AdWords as far as the setup is concerned.

Then comes the difference! On Facebook, the advertiser can target by “Likes & Interests.” This shows Facebook’s own description of a user profile. The implication seems to be that this is all data that the user has provided on the profile page. Not exactly. Every time the user “Likes” a friend’s post new data is created. What else? It’s not entirely clear exactly what/how other data provided by users like location data is collected and used. Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law
School says Facebook is “spying for free all the time.” You can read a summary of a recent speech in which he lays out the privacy concerns, but that still begs the question of exactly where the marketing data comes from.

The richness of the data is not in question, however. Nor is the usefulness of the Estimated Reach tool. Each time the potential advertiser adjusts any one of the targeting filters, the ER changes, so the exact effect of each descriptor is known. That data alone can tell you a lot about potential market size in a given region—no cost except expenditure of your time. Farther down on the targeting page, not captured in the graphic above, is the ability to target to your page (or groups) own members and, separately to their friends. Using the ER tool on your own page can give you fascinating insights into the composition of your fan base. Do you see a new market segment representing an opportunity you were not even aware of? Or do you see that you don’t have as many people from your target segment as you wish and need to run a campaign to get more friends.

All this creates a rich stew of research and advertising opportunities. You can access all this information from the Advertising text link at the bottom of your Facebook page, whether you are an individual user or have a business page.

The final piece of good news is that you don’t even have to buy an ad to experiment with the options. Why don’t you give it a spin???

Add to Your Circle of Friends!

My friends at Overdrive Interactive have a new white paper that details ways of making connections in social media. They have 100 suggestions; I’ve picked out what I consider the Top Ten Ways to Make Friends—all free; all things even the smallest business can do. Here’s the list with some commentary and some combinations:


1.BE VAIN. Facebook now allows vanity URL’s. If you don’t have one yet, set one. It’s a lot easier to promote your page if you have a short, relevant URL that people can remember.
2.FACEBOOK TAB IT. Add an “Invite Friends” tab on your Facebook page that allows your friends to invite their own friends to become a friend of your Facebook page. Add the tab, then draw attention to it through status updates and tweets.
3.TXT 2 B FRIENDZ: Create a campaign that encourages people to join your Facebook page or Twitter profile by text messaging. If possible, respond back to messages with a coupon code or information about your company. Text “like overdriveinteractive” to 32665 to check it out. Give people an incentive to become your friend, then continue to reward them for loyalty.
4.USE CROSS-PROMOTIONS. Promote your Facebook profile on Twitter and promote your Twitter profile on your Facebook page. Tweet about your Facebook page and use status updates to talk about your Twitter page. Cross promote all your social networks, in fact! When you post something on YouTube or SlideShare, post a notice on your Facebook page and Tweet it. Be sure your company blog has chiclets or other call-outs to all your social channels!
5.SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Optimize your Facebook and Twitter pages for SEO. Make a list of high value key words to use opportunistically in your content. Yes the engines are indexing sourced content. Yes, Facebook and Twitter get indexed. It’s hard to overestimate the contribution of high value key words in all your social channels! Study your referrals data, use keyword tools, and see what words are drawing traffic to the sites of your competitors on Compete.com.
6.REACH OUT TO BLOGGERS. The blogosphere is great place to promote your Facebook and Twitter communities. Find key bloggers that talk about your brand, company, or product category and then reach out to them to become your friend. Tell them the value of your content and tell them to send things to you to tweet and post.
7.WRAP IT. If you sell packaged goods, make sure your packaging promotes your social channels. If people like you enough to buy your product, give them the chance to connect with you in the places where they want to connect. Shopping bags provide great display space. And be sure your main channels—blog, Facebook and Twitter, probably—are on your business card and your email template!
8.MORE THAN JUST DISCOUNTS. If you send [mail] out coupons, include your Facebook and Twitter addresses on them. For more encouragement, include a statement about how social connections will receive more exclusive discounts on the social channels. Do the same in your email newsletters.
9.FOR FRIENDS ONLY. Have friends-only content on your Facebook page. If users want to access the content, they need to become your friend. Give them incentives by including coupons, discounts or sweepstakes entries. List your job openings there; why should anyone apply for a job who isn’t your friend?
10.Above All: SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN. In social media, you never want to be quiet. Keep sharing information that your friends want to hear: tips, resources, contests, discounts, information, etc. The more you share content they care about, the more they will share your content and brand with their friends.

Among many other useful tips, the white paper points out that you should never waste friends. Don’t just close down a campaign-specific Facebook page. “Reskin” it. That one is likely to require professional programming assistance, but it’s worth it to recycle friends instead of having to reacquire them!

Notice that this is all about integrating your channels to get the maximum value out of your social media efforts. How are you doing on that score? There’s a new app, a Social Page Evaluator from Vitrue, discussed on Smart Blog and in more detail on Vitrue’s company blog that will put a value on your Facebook and Twitter pages.

So find out how well you’re doing in social media at the moment, think about where you need to go, and read the entire Overdrive white paper to get more valuable suggestions!

10 reasons to quit your FACEBOOK account

I was never a big fan of FACEBOOK and the only reason of having an account there was mostly scientific curiosity than anything else. I had about 20 friends (all family or colleagues) just to see how things work and my activity was limited to test how user friendly the application is and follow the pages of a few brands and organizations.
Maybe you wonder why the past tense; this because last weekend I took the decision to close my FACEBOOK account. For those who follow what is going on with FACEBOOK not a strange decision at al. The questionable practices of FACEBOOK regarding privacy, data protection etc are widely debated issues.
The idea of quitting Facebook was in my mind for some time now and often I had to reject invitations of "friends" to join them and their network.
However passive posture to FACEBOOK is not enough, I think that we deal with a serious problem here. If you look for reasons why you should quit your FACEBOOK account you should read the Business Insider and GIZMODO's Facebook's Ludicrously Complicated Privacy Settings posts. For those who want to form an even more comprehensive idea of privacy problems in the web (where applications like FACEBOOK play a major role) I recommend to read or see the video of the speech of Eben Moglen's Talk on Freedom in the Cloud  at a meeting of the Internet Society's New York branch on Feb 5, 2010.

If you decide to close your FACEBOOK account use the shortcut https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account&__a=3 This will save you maybe an hour searching how to get there!