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 + 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!

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.

How To Create A Facebook Fan Page For Your Website

If you are developing your domain business then you will need to be creative and use several different ways to create awareness of your site and promote various things you may be doing with your site, this helps to drive traffic and a sense of connection with the users.

One of the ways I have been able to get free advertising for our geo properties and our customers is by creating a Facebook fan page for Missouri.me. This has been a great way to put information out about our latest sponsors and also keep people updated with events we are attending as well.

Based on the success we have had with that Facebook fan page I decided it would be valuable to create a page for some of my other developed sites. Since many are not aware they can create a fan page to allow a more social connection with their users I wanted to give a quick how to.

The first step you will want to make is to visit the Create A Page site on Facebook

Once there you will want to select the type of fan page you are wanting to create, in this case I need to select the button for" Brand, Product or Organization" and then select the "Website" option since I am building a fan page for a news aggregation site.

After doing this I then need to input the name of the website, in this case iFones.com into the form entry for "Name Of Website".

At this point , if you are authorized, you will need to check the box confirming you are authorized  and type your legal name into the Electronic Signature box and then click Create Page.

After doing this I am directed to a page confirming that the page is setup and I can start uploading pictures or link the page to my Twitter account which then tweets all fan page posts directly to the associated Twitter account. I recommend linking it to your twitter account so you can take advantage of your complete social network. To this you select the link to connect your two accounts and put in your Twitter login information and submit.

At this point you will be redirected back to a list of your pages with their configuration, in this case I will click on the ifones.com Facebook page link.

The first thing you will see is that your page has not been published and in red lettering to click to publish the page. Click this and then you will have the option to become a fan of your page, might be a good idea to click that one:)

At this point its time to start setting up your page. The first thing I would do is click the "Write something about iFones.com" or in your case about your site.

There are many other options you can setup at this point but at this point your page is created and its time to add the first post to the page Wall. To do this click on the Wall tab at the top of the page. This would be a great time to put a link up to the main page of the site and introduce what its about.

Also, if you highlight over the logo box you will see a popup that allows you to click and upload a logo. I would recommend uploading some sort of picture or logo, most people will not become a fan of a page that does not show at least a little customization. I uploaded a logo I had created for iFones.com sometime ago to show some customization.

Now, one of the frustrations that I have is that Facebook by default creates a very long string as the fan page URL for this site, in this case it was: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ifonescom/149771601945?v=wall&ref=nf

You can change the name, you will see the Missouri.me fan page is at Facebook.com/missourime (be a fan:) But if you have just launched a fan page you cannot modify the fan page username until you have at least 25 followers.

To help get that moving on the left hand side of the fan page select the "Suggest to Friends" button. Once you hit 25 followers you can then go to: Facebook Username

One there you can follow the instructions on how to set the name, its a really easy process that allows you to shorten the name to something memorable and easy to promote.

If you are looking to promote a new site or product then I highly recommend setting up a fan page on Facebook. We have had great success driving traffic and have actually been able to win new customers with it.

Online Ad Revenue Drops As A Whole But Search Ad Revenue Up

I was just reading an interesting report at Adage.com concerning online advertising revenue results (based on an IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers report) for the first half of the year and how the economic downturn had affected advertiser spend. I found a few of the numbers interesting in the report, numbers talk so here are a few things to point out:

• Overall Internet advertising spend dropped 5.3 percent to 10.9 billion compared to last years comparable period.
• Search advertising revenue grew by 2 percent.
• Last year search revenue accounted for 44 percent of the overall spend, this year it was 47 percent.
• Digital video ad spend was UP 38 percent.

One thing that really stuck out to me since I just left the telecommunications industry is that telecom ad spending was up 1 percent.

Now, although overall spending was down it was still positive compared to other advertising mediums such as newspaper and radio which have faced even steeper declines in advertising revenue.

Social networking sites have seen a large growth surge in time spent on the site over the first half of the year and revenue has also grown (doubled). Personally I think social media will be of concern to some as people begin to rely on their social network for references to other sites and products and as such SEO consultants and search marketing in general really have to think about what that means for their business. If online revenues doubled for search networks that tells me people are content to stay on Facebook, Twitter, or others and not head to the search engines and suddenly normal Google or Bing search becomes a bit less valuable (don't worry Google is not going anywhere but Facebook and Twitter matter more for search than people may realize).