Facebook Cover Photos Create A New Business Overnight
If you are on Facebook or pay attention to social media news whatsoever you have taken a look at Facebook Timeline.
One of the most visual differences between the previous Facebook profile layout compared to the new layout is the cover photo for your Timeline. As soon as I setup Timeline on my account I knew people were going to be all over this niche market. It was pretty obvious people would be able to use this visual space to create unique and creative pictures to either a) market something or b) show their true personality.
There are several different sites that have already popped up, by no means have I tested any of these so I am not vouching for any so results may very but here are just a couple that I have noticed, the top one was mentioned in a blog post on AllFacebook.com:
FirstCovers.com
Also, there have been some great posts on several blogs with several creative profiles, here is a post on Mashable to take a look at: 10 Designs That Will Blow You Away
I look at these new photos as no different than headers on a website, I really want to put some thought into how I want to use that space. Although my Facebook personal profile is for personal with only a small amount of business mixed in, at the end of the day its a great place to promote the businesses I am involved in since many people know me through those businesses, I can see the "header" area being a valuable place to promote that.
As the 800 million users on Facebook have Timeline enabled on their accounts this niche market will create a great market for those with graphic skills looking to make a quick buck on people wanting to be creative.
Do you plan on doing something creative with your Facebook Cover Photo? Post your ideas or link to your profile. I am still coming up with ideas for mine.
Facebook Change Haters I Have A Copy of Windows 95 For You
If you did not watch the Facebook F8 Keynote today you missed out on the major changes coming to Facebook, you should be able to see the recorded keynote at F8.Facebook.com if you want to get an idea of what is coming.
One thing to note, and a year ago it would of been a big announcement in and of itself, Facebook has 800 millions users now. That is an amazingly huge number that goes to tell you that as much of a waste of time some people feel Facebook is no one really cares, we use it, period.
There has been plenty of whining and complaining on Facebook changes the past couple days, simple changes like the new combined news feed and the news ticker that shows light weight activity on the right side of the screen. BTW, if you have an issue with all the change I have a copy of Windows 95 I can sell you, and if you buy today I will throw in a free Motorola RAZR:)
Well, if those changes have got you all in a tizzy just wait until you see whats coming next, if you have not heard Facebook is launching 2 major new updates to the platform that will be rolling out to the users over the next couple months. One is called Facebook Timeline the other is a new way to look at social apps, it call comes down to being able to perform a VERB on any NOUN, instead of simply hitting the like button on a book you can READ a book. This may seem simple on the face of it, but in big picture impact is exponential in terms of connecting people to things.
If you think about the ability of your friends to say they are "cooking lasagna" or "reading Bringing Down The House" enables you to discover items that you would of never thought of, the great example of using Spotify combined with Facebook to literally listen to music real time with your friends as it flows through your Facebook stream is amazing.
One concern about all this new posting of reading, writing, running activity is that it would flood the news stream. Well that is not the case, that is what the nice new ticker on the right side will do such a great job handling, all light weight activity will be put there, out of the major news feed.
Here are a couple links to details of the new features:
Facebook Deals Coupon Simple To Launch
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Local Search Optimization, Location Based Services, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, social media
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.
Facebook Launches New Profile Layout
Unless you have been asleep for the last 24 hours you have probably heard that Facebook has launched an opt-in profile layout change that focuses on the visual appeal (i.e. lots of pictures) of a profile.
Mark Zuckerberg was on 60 minutes tonight showing the layout just a few hours after Facebook announced the changes and allowed people to start switching their profile over to the new visually enhanced layout.
Along with showing 5 recently tagged photos of the persons profile at the top of the profile page they also have moved the standard options at the top of the page to the left hand menu as well as put the "Poke" link in a prime spot at the top right of the page. Poke is something that I have not used on Facebook in years but with it being in prime territory now instead of lost in mix I am sure a lot more "poking" will be going on.
CBS has a nice tour of the redesign, check out the story.
I personally like the new layout, I like the menu items being on the left and like the friends list on the left. I am sure though, as with every other time Facebook makes a change, there will be a lot of people complaining for whatever reason. If you would like to change your profile to the new layout click here.
What do you think of the new layout, do you like it or not, why not if you do not like it?
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
Filed under: Domain News, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, local search, social media
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 Is Google Afraid Of Facebook
How Social Media Helps Website Marketing - My own example of usage.
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
Filed under: Blogging, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Small Business Marketing, hyperlocal, local search, social media
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
Filed under: Facebook, Facebook Promotion, Local Search Optimization, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Print Media, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, Small Business Web Development, Tech News, geo domains, journalism, local search, local seo, newspaper closings, newspapers closing, rural advertising, social media
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
Filed under: Domain News, Facebook, Facebook Promotion, social media
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.
Speaking Today To Farmington Business Leaders
Filed under: Facebook, Low Cost Marketing, Online Advertising, Small Business Advertising, Small Business Marketing, Small Business Web Development, Small Business Websites, geo domains, rural advertising
Today is going to be booked from start to finish with the morning kicking off with a seminar speaking to the business leaders of Farmington, MO. Farmington is one of, if not the (depending who you ask) fastest growing areas in Missouri. Our partner Big River Telephone worked tirelessly in promoting the seminar and once again went offline to promote to businesses that need to start thinking about how to promote online.
I must say that spending time with medium and small business leaders in a group setting like this is about as good as it gets, I enjoy every minute and some of the questions and discussions are very insightful as they can help me (and others) understand what the people not focused on the online world are really thinking about technology.
One of the things that really amazes me is the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I always ask for a raise of hands before I start speaking to find out how many people use each of the services. Facebook always leads, Twitter is always second, and Linkedin third. No real surprise but what I do find interesting is that the crowd is typically not real tech savvy but a rough estimate would be 70 percent of most rooms have Facebook accounts.
As I type that I also realize more and more I am seeing people not even put their website in their commercials on TV, they just go straight to their Facebook page. What a coup for Facebook....
Now, I do spend a portion of the presentation talking about proper domain name selection and after seeing the acceptance of social networking there are very few people who even understand what a domain name is. I am happy to help do that education.
Farmington is a very progressive area and I expect todays presentation to be a bit different than others and since I know some of the people in the room this time it should make for good back and forth.