Facebook Deals Coupon Simple To Launch

Although our LocalTek team has spent much time taking a look at various ways our local business customers could use Facebook Places and Deals it was not until today that we decided what promotion we would offer once we claimed our Facebook Places page.

If you are a local business owner Facebook now makes it easier to claim your Places page by adding an email associated with your domain name to your Facebook personal account, submitting your information, and then they review it and approve (or not). Once this is setup you can submit Facebook Deals for review and inclusion in your page.

As Facebook Deals usage is free it was a no brainer to offer our potential customers a special if they checked into the LocalTek office, since much of the talk with customers these days is around mobile and social we decided to offer something that combined both as a special, we offer a free mobile website with the purchase of a new small business website if the customer checks-in to our Facebook Places page on their mobile phone.

After your submit your listing you have to wait for approval, but it took less than 4 hours for us to be approved for our deal after a quick setup.

Although there are mixed opinions on merging your Facebook business page with your Places page (one of the main things you lose when doing this is any landing page you may of built separate from your business page wall) for our local business we have determined that we would like to merge our Facebook page with our Places page. We have over 660 "likes" on our page and having those combined with our Places page makes sense for us as we would like to have our Deals available to see for all of our fans.

Whether you need a company like LocalTek to help you setup your Facebook Places  and Facebook Deals or if you have someone in house to do this it only makes sense to take advantage of this free service Facebook is offering. With more than 500 million users spending an average of 55 minutes a day on the site take advantage of this marketing opportunity instead of delaying.

Go like our Facebook page now to see what deals we offer in the future, you can see our Facebook page here, feel free to Like it : Facebook.com/LocalTek

You can see our Places page here: LocalTek Places Page

As mentioned, soon they will be one and the same, the Facebook Deal we setup is on the Places page for those looking.

Social Media Is About More Than A Facebook Page

Even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for a few to several years it has really been this past year that main street small businesses have really started to take notice. As people realize more and more that their customers are not consuming information in the same way they have in the past it becomes obvious that billboards and newspapers are not the only way they have to market their business these days.

Although some business owners and consumers still look at Facebook and say, what a waste of time, why would I use that? One thing to keep in mind is that we as business owners need to realize it is not about how we used the social media and in particular Facebook, it really has everything to do with our customers. And they ARE using it, more and more everyday. 55 minutes per user average per day.

Let me make one more reference, the other thing people say is a complete waste of time is TV. Most businesses WANT to advertise on TV but cannot afford it, yet social media is a very targeted medium that is a "time waster" yet people resist because they do not understand. Once again, people need to step outside of how they use the internet and think about how their CUSTOMERS use the internet.

Social media is the ultimate "word of mouth" marketing, if you need away to think of Facebook or Twitter, look at it like this, it is a friend telling another friend what they like. Sometimes seemingly meaningless posts about what store someone just bought something in is the ultimate advertising for your business.

All that said, many people, once they understand they have to take the leap and open a free Facebook page for their business, make the mistake of not moving the page forward and thinking about a true plan of how to engage their customers.

Although a Facebook page or Facebook Places page is free, in many cases it is worth it to pay a small fee for a local company to help you get your page setup properly. Although you may not be ready to do everything that is possible on Facebook at this time it may be worth it to take the advice of someone that has taken the time to understand the possibilities of how it can be used to engage customers of your business.

In some businesses, such as a coffee shop, it may be important to send specials, events, or other things out on a daily basis but also you can use it as an educational tool to teach your customers about the various coffees and types of coffee drinks. Your customers will pay attention and spend more time on your page or website if you try to educate them rather than sell to them everyday.

Also, sometimes it takes thinking outside the box, some businesses that seem "legacy" still have a need to get a message out. Large corporations have figured this out but many of the local marketing companies that people work with daily are really just now getting their minds around social media and are having a hard time articulating a plan to their customers about how to use online marketing and social tools as a solid marketing mechanism. Once again, ask for ideas outside of just creating a Facebook page. It takes more than that.

A few examples of what your business should be prepared for is proper pay per click advertising on Facebook, understanding how to use it in a manner that is effective and targets customers in your target demographic and area is very important. Once again it is about more than just buying keywords and paying per click, if it is not targeted and driving people to your Facebook page or website that actually matter to your business the clicks are of little use. As I said before, it is about more than being able to create a Facebook business page.

Another great example of create Facebook use is creating a visually appealing landing page or tab for your Facebook page. A couple examples are:

Coca Cola

Crane Coffee

As you can see it is a page within your Facebook presence that allows for you to give people a way to interact in a way they are used to with common websites.  Although these webpage like interfaces are by no means required it is becoming more important to have a professional appearance for your business when people find you on Facebook. This is a great way to do that. The cost to have a professional create these types of pages is minimal compared to what the cost of creating marketing materials or logos costs in many cases.

Once you have your page setup you need to make sure you keep it active. What does this mean?

It can be as simple as taking 30 seconds to a minute to post a link to a specials page on your website. Or maybe ask your customers a question about what they would like to see added to your store. Little things to connect with people that have shown interest in your business in the past but may of lost top of mind awareness of what you offer.

The key though is working with someone that can see the bigger marketing picture, although you may start with just having a Facebook page, if you are taking advice from someone, make sure they have a history or working online and understand how people are engaging with businesses on the internet. If they cannot help you come up with a real plan that makes sense for how your customers are using social media tools it may be time to switch the marketing company you are working with.

Also, for further reading, here are a few Facebook How-To's and Tips.

All About Search for Facebook

On Facebooks 6th birthday they launched a new layout that will be available  possibly tonight for  80 million of their 400 million users.

You read that right they now have 400 million users, not bad for a 6 year old company, what is really interesting is that the company started with a focus on social networks for the college crowd and now the fastest growing group on the site is women above the age of 50, how is that for covering every market, I am lazy tonight and did not go dig up the exact age range group but it says alot for the service that it does attract all types of consumers.

And that is what it is all about, learning what consumers are talking about, buying, recommending, etc. Facebook is gathering data at a level only Google could imagine. Except, some would argue, the Facebook data could be even more valuable.

All that said, today Facebook also showed they are dead serious about search, by making the search box more visible and prominent in the layout users are more likely to search Facebook which will make the site even more sticky.

For an idea of how prominent search is now check out this posterous link.

This may seem subtle, but changes like this can make a huge difference in user behavior.

More and more this makes me realize how social and real time SEO will matter to those that focus on search marketing. Makes me glad I picked up SEORealtime.com...

Social Media + Mobile Search + Local Search = Success

If you have not read all the news about social networking sites being the future of how we access information instead of search engines then you must not be reading what is happening in the online world around you. I will help you with the relevant news articles in just a minute.

One thing I think people are missing sometimes is how the BLEND of mobile and local search along with the easy access to Facebook and Twitter on a mobile phone is making it an absolute must to have a plan on how to integrate all of these technologies together when you plan on promoting a product or service. The future is now and if you are not using all methods available then you are doing an injustice to your business promotion online.

For those that may be social media doubters and who do not realize that many people use search on their mobile phone before typing in a name (and I have not even mentioned visual search and verbal search) suddenly search is all that matters at times, be very careful basing everything you have on type-in traffic. Facebook has 350 million users and bypassed Google for traffic during the Christmas holiday, do you think Facebook is going somewhere? Yes they are, UP!

The people using Facebook (and even Twitter) are not typing in domain names, they are taking a friends recommendation without even looking at the site name. Sure the domain name is important for branding and I would never discount that, and for search an exact match name helps, but when all you are is a link hidden behind a URL shortening service that is not quite as important.

If you are still hiding in the dark and believing this change is not coming here are a few great articles to read:

Why Facebook PPC is Crucial

Why Is Google Afraid Of Facebook

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing - My own example of usage.

Social Media Impact

If the stories do not show you what is happening then I cannot help you. This does not mean that you should not have a website with a great name, but the people growing up with the Internet today do not use it like those of us who had it come to be during the midst of our lives.

If your only plan is to buy a great domain name and wait for the type-in traffic to come you may be surprised at your competitor coming up behind you and using the power of social media to drive more traffic that has been recommended by a trusted peer network that converts even better.

Use all the tools together and success can be yours, ignore the holistic marketing approach at your own peril.

2+2=5

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing

One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.

With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.

In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.

Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.

Here is the number of visits per day:

Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239

Jan 19th - 246

Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155

Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?

The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board.  A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

FB.me Launched By Facebook And Puts A dotME In Front Of Millions

Well Tweetmeme.com used a .ME as a URL shortener (Retwt.me) and as a dotME fan I was obviously pleased since it put dotME domains in front of the millions of visitors to Tweetmeme.com.

Then shortly thereafter WP.me launched as the Wordpress shortening service, that put .ME in front of million so of more users.

Well, it just got better for dotME fans, Facebook (with over 350 million users) has now launched their URL shortener on a dotME, FB.me was announced today. One thing to note is that two letter .ME domains are only available to those that present a plan to the registry, at this point they have not been made available through landrush auctions or general registration.

Obviously a company like Facebook, with their very large user base, using .ME helps with the acceptance of the extension and helps with user awareness. So far the reports are that it is starting to show up more frequently in Twitter links and other social media services. But with the user base of Facebook once they fully launch the penetration their URL shortening service gets will be huge.

Right now it seems that Facebook is using the FB.me service extensively for mobile applications and it also works for Facebook usernames and pages as reported at Mashable.com.

Thanks to Facebook for helping along the .ME extension. I have never had any issues with customers accepting the extension but when a brand like Facebook starts using it for a service that really helps awareness along.

Facebook Fan Page Vs Facebook Group

With more people using Facebook Fan Pages lately I also have heard people talking about Facebook Groups and how they relate to Facebook Fan Pages. For the most part people are looking for the difference between the two and when they should use one versus the other. This is a quick post just to outline some of the key points to be aware of when thinking about creating one or the other:

• Facebook Fan Page updates show in the fan news feeds which is very powerful, it takes advantage of the true value of the social network. If your fan likes it that goes along way with their friends, then their friend, etc, etc. This does not happen with Facebook Groups. This makes Facebook Fan Pages much more useful for a business to use for social marketing.
• Facebook Fan Pages are visible to users not registered with Facebook, this means that you have a chance to get your message to people that may not be Facebook users. This is important since Google indexes Facebook Fan Pages.
• Facebook Groups allow for bulk invites, one of my biggest frustrations with Facebook Fan Pages is having to manually do invites once the page is created. With a group you can do a bulk invite and so can the people that join the group. As other have pointed out, this makes them very powerful for viral networking of the group.
• Facebook Fan Pages allow for custom Facebook usernames which makes it easier to promote your page in text and offline places.

In my opinion a Facebook page is preferable for marketing messages and business promotion, a Facebook group is more for active discussions. To me the real value is the fact the Facebook page updates show in the fans news feed which is really a downfall for Groups since the group member has to proactively go to the group to see the updates, etc.

Small Business Facebook And Twitter Use Growing Fast!

Received a tidbit from a friend of mine citing a Merchant Circle survey showing some amazing numbers and something I have hit on with a few posts lately. More and more businesses are starting to understand the use of social media for use in directly connecting with their customers, here are a couple direct quotes from the survey results:

The online survey of 2,403 of MerchantCircle’s small-business members, conducted in September, found that 45% also have a presence on Facebook and Twitter with the express intent of promoting their businesses.

45 percent is a pretty amazing number in my mind, although it is pretty common for large corporations to start to take advantage of new technology (although not always in the most effective manner) it is very uncommon for smaller businesses to take advantage of it. What becomes very important to them is how they integrate this into their larger web presence, i.e. tying their website into their social media presence.

And another quote:

Internet2Go and MerchantCircle attributed this to the ease and low cost of participating in social media. Of the small businesses polled in the survey, 79% reported annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000 per year, with 44% spending less than $1,000 annually.

Now, this was a really interesting piece, the ease of use statement is interesting simply because most small businesses consider the Internet a very technical experience and that turns them away from using various marketing methods associated with it.

On another note, if you are investing in domain names in many cases they would likely look at anything web related as a marketing expense, if you think you are selling a domain name to a small business (which are the majority of potential customers) at large sums then you may want to think about their budgets a bit.

Facebook Page URL Instead Of Domains For Honda and Cranium

In a recent post concerning Facebook being used to promote offline businesses I mentioned that this will have some impact on domaining even if it is just small. Meaning, that the more people put their Facebook page URL, or Twitter URL on their business card or billboards the more it will have at least some bit of an impact.

Well, as I am sure all of you have witnessed, more and more we see large companies using their Facebook fan page URL in commercials or other advertisements instead of their website. I understand a bit of what they are trying to accomplish here, I would say we all agree having the direct interaction with customers on social networks is a great thing and a huge benefit to companies but too see it be the only URL used in a commercial is something that I am not sure I would do. I would think the smarter move would be to use your primary web presence to drive traffic to your social media pages and then once the person is a fan or follower use it in the other direction, use it to drive people to promotions, etc that may be on your primary web presence.

Now, all that said, I can see where maybe by using the Facebook page as the primary URL in their ad is being used to get them to be a "fan" so they can get continued traffic to their main site once links are posted, etc but I am still not sold that I would only promote with my Facebook URL. I am a big believer in making sure all the pieces work together and to me that starts at the website.

An example of this happening more and more is what brought this post on, last night while watching some post Trick or Treating Halloween shows I noticed two commercials in a row with Facebook URLs instead of website URLs. The first was for the game Cranium, Facebook.com/cranium and the next commercial was for Honda, and it ended with the URL Facebook.com/honda.

Now, lets be clear, neither one of these is the typical Facebook fan page we see created, these are business pages with much customization and actually pretty neat concepts but all in all it still is not their primary corporate presence. I actually find it very interesting and refreshing to see companies use social media like this but still find it a but interesting they would not direct people there from their main presence.

I think it is more than a little over the top to say that Facebook is creating a new Internet (if you understand the definition of what the Internet is you would know it just does not work that way) but I have read more than one story in the past few months that had stated just that, Facebook is creating its own web. Well, the more companies promote like this the more that maybe I still think it is way over the top but maybe just a little less so.

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