Last month we kicked off our series on the business application of social media tools by giving a brief overview of the development of  these tools over the last decade. This month we’ll be focusing on the dominant social media tool at the moment – Facebook – and the ways in which your business can utilize it.

There are two main ways that your business can utilize Facebook as part of your overall marketing efforts: creating and maintaining a Facebook page for your business,   or advertising on Facebook.

Facebook Pages:

Facebook is predominantly made of of two types of content: profiles and pages. Profiles are the accounts that individuals set up for themselves. Usually when people say they’re “on Facebook,” they mean that they have a Facebook profile for themselves.  Pages, on the other hand, are designed for businesses and organizations to use, rather than individuals.  Whereas Facebook profiles are designed to help people get in touch and communicate with their friends and family, Facebook pages are designed around organizations connecting and communicating with their target audience.

When you set up a Facebook page for your business, it will initially appear very similar to a profile – it will have the same layout and the  content such as a Wall to write on, a Photo gallery and an Info tab.  But there are several differences between the two.  In Facebook profiles, you build a list of friends to socialize with, whereas in Facebook Pages, you build a list of fans to communicate with. In Facebook profiles, for privacy reasons you have to manually approve any friend requests that others send you, whereas on Facebook pages, anybody can become a fan of your page without any approval needed.  Facebook pages can also send mass messages to everyone who is a fan, whereas Facebook profiles are limited to sending messages to 20 people or less at one time.  But one of the most important differences is that, on Facebook pages, you can build custom page content, layout and even whole applications, whereas on Facebook profiles you cannot.  This customization opens up a whole world of marketing activities.  You can run contests on your Facebook page, where people can enter their contact information for a chance to win prizes.  You can have special “fan-only” coupons and discounts – your page visitors have to become fans of your company before they can access them. You can build custom tabs and layouts, designed to match your company’s branding, showing off your products and services.  You can run surveys to get feedback from your audience about your organization, or have a contest for user-generated content, with all your fans voting on their favorite. Companies are coming up with new ways to interact with their audiences through Facebook every day, and the sky’s the limit on what can be done.

Advertising on Facebook:

In addition to creating custom Facebook pages, the other way companies and organizations can utilize Facebook is through advertising. One of the key innovations of Facebook’s advertising platform is that it allows you to micro-target your advertising to the exact demographics that you’re looking for, based on the information that its users have listed in their profiles. For instance, a company that sells superhero action figure toys could target only boys aged 9-14 interested in cartoons or science fiction. Or a baby accessory company could target only people aged 20-35 who have children.  One of the most interesting targeting methods is to target only the friends of your Facebook Page fans; when your ad is displayed to those people, it will tell show their friends’ endorsement: “(Friend’s name) likes this.”  This level of micro-targeting and ad customization is simply not possible through other forms of internet advertising such as Google search ads or regular website banner ads, in addition to being impossible through traditional advertising mediums such as print ads or television ads.

These are just some of the ways in which you can use Facebook to connect with your business’ target audience, but hopefully these ideas have given you some good starting tips.  Remember, every company and organization is different, so the best thing to do is to set up an account, try out some different ideas, and see what works best for you and your audience.

In the following months we’ll be discussing additional social media tools that you can use for your business, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs – so stay tuned! In the meantime, if you have questions or need help on getting your company started with social media tools, feel free to contact us.

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We got quoted in an online article about business tips for web designers: Big Dreams for a Small Business — Web Designer.

Being a good designer or programmer isn’t good enough by itself. When running your own company, you also need to be a salesman, finding prospects and landing contracts. It’s basically a commission-only sales job: If you can’t land clients, you won’t earn any money.

— Chris Strom, cstrom.com

You can read the full article here: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/small-business-web-designer-advice-0671.

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Social media: this buzzword is all over the news nowadays.  Business and marketing periodicals fill their pages with articles about it, and a veritable industry of self-titled “social media consultants” has sprung up, trumpeting social media as the golden key to vast financial rewards for your business.  But what exactly is this all about? With all the ink (or pixels) being used to write about this subject, how can you separate “the wheat from the chaff,” the facts from hyperbole?

First off, a bit of history: for most of its existence, the global internet has been an “online library” of sorts: website owners produced content — usually text and pictures — and posted it on websites for other people to come see.  Then regular folks like you and me would browse the internet and read the content on these pages.  It was always a one-way street: the website owner would produce the content, and other people would read it.  They couldn’t contribute to the website in any way — they were merely passive spectators.

Then around the turn of the century (the 21st century, not the 20th century!), a new technology called blogs — short for “web-logs” —  started to appear.  Suddenly, people without computer coding skills were able to easily create and update their own websites. They could post new content as often as they wanted.  Furthermore, their site visitors could post comments on the web page in response to the page content, and the blog page was now a central hub for a community-wide conversation.

A few years later, YouTube was invented. Now people could not only post text and pictures online, but could post whole videos online.  Other people could then rate and comment on the video, embed that video into their own websites, and make their own videos in response to the original videos.  Additionally, people could “subscribe” to a person’s YouTube profile, so they would always be notified when that person had posted new video content.  Other websites such as Flickr and Last.fm took the social media innovations of YouTube and applied them to other types of media such as photography and music.

Around the same time that sites such as YouTube and Flickr were becoming a household name, the third pillar of social media was taking shape: social networking — websites with the ability for people to create their own private networks of friends to communicate with each other.  MySpace was the first social networking website to gain a large mainstream following, but it was not long before it was eclipsed by the current 800-pound gorilla of social networking: Facebook.  Two other major social networking players also emerged about this same time: Twitter, with its ability to post short messages that could be publicly sorted according to commonly used keyword tags, and LinkedIn, the social network designed primarily for business networking.

And that brings us to the world of today.  Whereas previously most communication media (newspapers, television, the first generation of websites, etc.) were one-way streets from the media producers to the passive consumers, nowadays any person can produce articles, videos or other media, and broadcast them to their networks of friends and acquaintances, or make it publicly accessible to the whole world.  This new shift in communications media is affecting business, politics and society as a whole. Stay tuned to the following articles in this series to see how your business can effectively harness these new communication tools, starting next month with the biggest social media tool of them all: Facebook.

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We’re in the third part of our series on the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — that is, the craft of building and populating your website in order to increase the likelihood of appearing prominently in the search results for search keywords that your target audience oftentimes uses in their searches.  In our first article, we looked at common SEO myths.  In our second article, we looked at the main criteria that search engine evaluate when ranking your website pages in their indexes.  Now this month, we’ll learn about some of the most important parts of your website pages’ content.

Not all parts of your web page are created equal

When search engines scan the content of your website, they actually assign different levels of importance to the different pieces of content.  For instance, headline text is given more weight than the text in your last paragraph of body text at the bottom of the page.  Now while the exact ranking algorithms that the search engines use to scan your site are secret (and constantly changing), there is general agreement that the following pieces of a web page are given high importance by the search engines:

1. The page title
2. The page URL
3. The page’s main headline

The page title

The next time you’re looking at a web page, look at the top left of your web browser window (above the website address box, and in the same bar as the minimize/maximize/close buttons).  You’ll notice that it contains a very short description of the web page that you’re on.  This is the page title.  A well-optimized web page will contain 2-3 well-chosen keyword phrases in this area.

The page URL

The word “URL” is really just a fancy term for the page’s address on the internet.  It will typically look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/webpage.  Like the page title, it is best to have a few keywords in this area as well.  For instance, if you run a real estate company, make sure your page URLs don’t look like this — http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?id=273 — but rather, look more like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/denver-real-estate.

The page’s main headline

Headlines on your web page work very similar to headlines in newspapers: there’s typically one main headline — which is usually the biggest — followed by a few smaller sub-headlines interspersed with your paragraphs of text.  Your main headline, quite understandably, carries more weight than your smaller headlines, which in turn carry more weight than your regular paragraphs of text.  So make sure your headline text contains one or two well-chosen keyword phrases, just like your page title.

Trying to work on your entire website to improve your chances of ranking well in your targeted search terms can seem like an overwhelming task.  But by focusing on the three parts of your web pages discussed here — page titles, page URLs, and on-page headlines — you can ensure that you’re working on some of the parts of your website’s pages that will have the most effectiveness in improving your site’s optimization.

We’ll be back next month with another article on search engine optimization.  In the meantime, if you have any additional questions about this subject, or any other web design topic, feel free to contact us.

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Last month we started our article series on the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) by dispelling some commonly held myths and misconceptions.  Now that we talked about what doesn’t work, let’s continue by talking about what does work.

There are two main criteria that search engine evaluate when ranking your website pages in their indexes:

1. The CONTENT of the web page (the words on the page)
2. The LINKS pointing to that web page

Content:

This part is the most straightforward.  Search engine algorithms don’t see your page’s layout, design, or pictures.  All they see is a long string of words and text.  So how do they know what a particular web page is about?  By reading the words, of course. Suppose you had a website for a bakery company.  If the site pages have lots of words like “fresh bread,” “cakes,” and “chocolate chip cookies,” then they will be more likely to show up prominently when people search for those terms.  However, if the site was filled with text talking about the company’s history, equipment, employees’ bios, and so on, but doesn’t have much text talking about their actual baked products, then of course it will never show up in searches for specific baked products.  So make sure your website content actually talks about the subjects you’d like people to find you for!

Links:

When Google or the other search engines see two web pages with similar content, how do they determine which site is ranked higher for their corresponding search queries? Simple: whichever site has the most links pointing to it.  Basically, search engines don’t only look at your site content; they also look at links between sites to determine the relative importance of different websites’ content. For instance, if many different sites have links to one of your web pages that say something like “Bread Bakeries in Denver,” then that tells the search engines that your page must be a very important page about bread bakeries in Denver, and will increase your site ranking correspondingly.

Additionally, the incoming links to your website are weighted differently according to which website they came from. The search engines rank the importance and authority of the site linking to yours by — you guessed it — how many other sites link to them.  So a link to your site from CNN.com, for instance, is much more valuable than, say, a link from “Uncle Joe’s Crab Shack,” or some other small website.

So just remember:

• Links to your website = good
• Links to your site from high-profile websites = even better

With an understanding of these two key principles of search engine indexing, you’re well on your way to understanding how to increase your chances of featuring prominently on search results to your target audience.  Next month, we’ll discuss the most important areas on your website pages to focus your attention on as you optimize your website content to be search-engine-friendly.

In the meantime, if you have any additional questions about search engine optimization, feel free to contact us.

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