Paid content on the WSJ Main Site, and Facebook Content on the Social site?
I’m not so sure about the Wall Street Journal going social on Facebook . . . Really, if you read the WSJ, you know where to get it, you know how to get it. It is sort of offputting for me that the Wall Street Journal is developing a Facebook page of articles that are chosen by facebook users who like articles . . . WSJ Social
Facebook users say it leaves a lot to be desiredAccording to the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index, Facebook is the least beloved of the major social networks,. Only two-thirds of users said they are happy with Facebook, giving the network the lowest rating in its category.
Analyst Scott Ellison
Social is deceivingly fluid and Google+ is proving that.”
Death & Taxes? Well, death anyway, has come to Facebook in Funeral Home business64% of funeral homes who responded to a survey by Expressing Sympathy Advisory Council said they’d gotten business through contact on their Facebook pages.
The ESAC also published that
Anthony Kaniuk, ESAC member & associate publisher at Kates-Boylston Publications
More and more funeral homes are recognizing the importance of building an online presence for themselves. When you lose a loved one, you are at your most vulnerable, and many people are using the Internet (Facebook) to research their options. It absolutely makes sense for funeral directors to get online and let people know they are there for them.
Would you research Facebook or YouTube to plan a funeral?
Lets look at two things: Why Facebook even has free pages, and What Facebook people do with them.
If you haven’t read The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick, and you are doing business on Facebook, I recommend you read it, just to understand the philosophy you have embraced. If you don’t have a copy handy, I’m going to quote a paragraph or two to get your attention. The boy billionaire did not get where he is today giving away goodies. Not really. He has been generating income for some time, and his investors (in the hundreds of millions of dollars) are interested in income too.
Facebook heresyI’m going to commit Facebook heresy here and opine that the only people making money on Facebook (or off Facebook, if you want to take a more jaded view) are
I have a lot of clients who want to be on Facebook, because they see Facebook statistics like this:
And they want to be in front of those 500,000,000 Facebook users.
What they don’t understand is that those 500,000,000 users have posts that are getting ahead of the message my clients are putting out! Facebook is designed to be a moving, roiling, living thing, where updates are instant and whatever was posted five minutes ago has scrolled off-screen. And if that weren’t enough, the Facebook gods have adjusted the display algorithms so that custom Facebook page messages are at the bottom of the heap. Literally.
You’ve really got to have something to compete with 30,000,000,000 other posts. Whattya got??
And, half the users on Facebook are on mobile devices:
You’re kidding yourself if you think these people are reading your posts. They are POSTING to their facebook profiles, uploading photos and responding to messages they get from people the Facebook gods have deigned to place in their stream. Comments on their posts, direct messages, when their posts are liked . . . IF they have that notification set up. In reality, they may only be Posting to Facebook, not reading it.
No Way. I’m going to suggest that you use Facebook for what it is and leverage the strength of all those numbers up there to your advantage by making some changes to your website.
I’m talking about OpenGraph and the like button technology that Facebook introduced with Social Plugins. You can add these to websites, WordPress Blogs, even .mobi sites. And they will bring you traffic.
Next up: Facebook to Page Creators: If You Can’t Run with the Big Dogs, Stay on the Porch!
Custom Facebook Pages with Easy FanPage Engine WordPress PluginSince Facebook took away FBML for static custom Facebook pages, we’ve all been looking for the fastest, best method for creating fanpages. One that wouldn’t cost hundreds every month, be branded by someone else’s name and wouldn’t be hard to implement.
Far and away the slickest tool I’ve seen for the money is the Easy FanPage Engine WordPress Plugin which you can install on any wordpress site. It adds a section called FanPage to Posts and Pages. It includes a template that allows all the tabs you want, and has reveal code and comments built in.
There is plenty of training – lots of graphics – Easy Fanpage Engine makes sophisticated usable Facebook pages a snap. Give it a try! Click Here!
If you’re on a mobile device, use this to go to Easy FanPage Design and start making custom facebook pages today:
If you are in any way connected to the internet, involved in social media and doing Facebook pages, you’re aware of the frenzy surrounding Zuck’s annuncement that the static FBML pages are gone …
Gone like a freight-train, gone like yesterday
Gone like a soldier in the civil war, bang bang
Gone like a ’59 Cadillac
Like all the good things that ain’t never coming backGone, circa 2004, Montgomery Gentry
People are scrambling all over the world to find a decent replacement to the ease of putting together a good FBML page in the iframe world, and there just isn’t one. Advice abounds from all directions, including the developers data at Facebook. Getting it out of FB, though, is a strenuous job, and everyone doesn’t want to do it, or goes brain dead trying to read how to string the stuff together so that it works like you want it to.
Fixes, Cures, TemplatesEven I wrote a tutorial for a private audience that was a pretty big hit. Sold about 1,000 copies in under 12 days. I guess that’s a hit. And, the only complaint I got was that it was too hard. People couldn’t follow the screenshots, and work through the maze the fb gods have given us with iframes.
Add to that the constant changes going on at fb, and pages are currently a real headache.
Don’t think I’m complaining about the service level from fb. I’m not. I’m sure there are a lot of people over there who wish the static FBML still worked because this iframes thing has created problems NO ONE thought of.
In addition to writing my own tutorial, I’ve bought most of the ‘templates’ packages and promotions that other people began selling after mine hit the racks. I’ll be reviewing them over the next week or so, and posting pages I’ve made with their products so you can see for yourself how they work out.
A tool I’m really pumped about is the Easy FanPage WordPress PlugIn, which you can read about in this post.
I’d have to say, I Love this PlugIn!
You can buy a users license, or a developer’s license if you do Custom Facebook Pages for clients. Check it out here
If you’re on a mobile device, use this to go to Easy FanPage Design and start making custom facebook pages today:
Facebook made a major redesign of Pages for businesses, etc. The Page layout mirrors the new user profile, including the left side nav menu and doing away with tabs above the wall.
Like the Profile for people, the Page has a photostrip top and center. Downside is they rearrange every time the page is loaded, so nothing you can do will secure the photos like a banner. (There was some Facebook thought behind this, I’m sure.) The profile picture that I wrote about in How to Facebook: Profile Photo is now 180 x 540, reduced from the 200 x 600 it was previously.
You can use longer names, and you’ll probably need them because the left nav bar is nowhere near as obvious as the tabs were.
There is an option for ‘everyone’ or page-only posts to be shown on the wall. And once again, we’re being given that which the Facebook gods deem relevant to our readers . . . I understand they will stream recent posts by friends and other users as long as the language and country are the same, and of course, posts that have received likes and comments will find their way to the top.
There is no option for Pages to publicly display the stream as we are used to seeing it. Admins can look at it via the ‘admin view’, and they can see posts hidden by themselves or the perpetual FB spam filters that remove things from normal view. There is the ability to reveal posts from this feed, but I’d rather be taking off posts than putting them back up.
When Pages change permanently, through your choice or the big switch coming in March, the landing tab will be reset. Make sure you fix it where you want it!
This isn’t as good as it sounds . . . You can’t post on people’s profiles, because as a Page, you can’t have friends . . . You can ‘like’ other pages, but you can’t pop around facebook as if your Page suddenly got a personality! You will see a feed of updates from the pages you like, so when your page is liked, those admins will be re-exposed to you.
And, they say in response to repeated requests, Facebook now allows admins to receive email alerting them of activity on their Page. (Get to this thru “Your Settings” tab on the Edit Page of the admin interface).
The Facebook gods got involved again, smaller pages with less friends have the default set to on; large pages with Large numbers of fans have a default of OFF. Decisions, decisions . . . we just can’t make them fast enough, can we? Oh, yeah, we don’t get to make them.
These changes don’t interfere with the Page APIs, so applications shouldn’t break. While applications shouldn’t break, the FBML code is being deprecated, so there are things that aren’t working and things will continue to go away as Facebook moves to I-frames that were due in 2010, but them moved to March 2011. The FBML application will not be available after March 2011. Get them while you can. Facebook tells us they will continue to work, but we won’t get any new ones after that date. The I-frame is a more powerful method of getting a unique page up, but much more difficult for the normal small business user to figure out. (More on that in a later post.)
The thoughts behind the changes are that
If you have a Facebook Page for yourself, your brand, or your company, and you are still using a standard sized photograph for your profile picture, you’re losing a lot of advertising space that you can claim as your own.
Think about what you can do in that space!
Here are some of the profile pictures I’ve done for clients so you can see the possibilities:
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traci@tracigregory.com
