Category: Facebook Page

Searching posts and status updates with Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search is a powerful way to collect valuable data about your friends and fans.

When Facebook Graph Search first launched, you were limited to searching for information about your friends. For example, friends who live in Washington DC.

You could also use Facebook Graph Search on a Facebook Page to learn more about your fans and customers as well.

Today, Facebook has enhanced Facebook Graph Search even more and now gives you the ability to search posts and status updates.

This is great news because not only can you find friends who share a common interest with you, but it is even easier search your post history with Facebook Graph Search.

To use Facebook Graph Search to search posts and status updates, follow the instructions listed below.

Using Facebook Graph Search to search posts and status updates

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Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions [Template]

With Facebook releasing new Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions, it’s time to learn how to update your images within your blog post or website. This way whenever someone shares your links on Facebook, the images look great within the Facebook news feed. To do that, we have created a free Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions template for you to use.

This collection of templates is available for the desktop, mobile, and sidebar images on Facebook.

To use these templates, you can download the recommended template. This requires having larger images to work with.

If you don’t have larger images, we recommend using the mobile template so that your images are optimized for Facebook.

By using this Facebook link thumbnail image template, you can quickly create images that scale perfectly across Facebook.

To use the Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions template, just follow these instructions.

Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions

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How do you stack up? Measuring Facebook Page performance

How well is your Facebook Page performing? When asked this question, most businesses can probably only provide basic stats such as page likes and reach to use when determining their Facebook Page performance.

While this will provide some meaningful data, it doesn’t necessarily provide enough information to tell you how well your Facebook Page is doing.

For that, you’ll want to dig into your Facebook Insights to get a better understanding of what your fans are most interested in seeing you share on Facebook.

If you’re not yet ready to jump into using Facebook Insights to track your Facebook Page performance, you’re in luck.

Social Media analytics company, Quintly, compiled a collection of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on Facebook Pages of varying sizes that you can use to give you a better idea on where your Facebook Page should be performing.

Here are some of the areas that are covered in this infographic on Facebook Page performance.

  • Average number of Facebook fans
  • Like, comment and sharing distribution on Facebook posts
  • How to calculate the interaction rate on Facebook
  • How to calculate the people talking about this ratio

Of note, one of the most interesting performance metrics that is talked about is interaction distribution on Facebook Pages.

For those of you unfamiliar with interaction distribution, this is whether fans prefer to like, comment, or share Facebook Page posts. Let me know if the performance metrics that are mentioned measure-up to what you are seeing on your own Facebook Page.

Remember, when using these Facebook Page performance tips, your results may vary slightly.

Measuring Facebook Page performance

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Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions

Facebook recently increased the sizes of link thumbnail images in the news feed. This means whenever you share content from your blog or website, you’ll now start to see larger images from your posts in the news feed. To help you out, we’ve compiled a handy reference chart showing you all of the different Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions that you’ll need to know.

This way when you’re uploading images to your blog posts, you’ll be able to optimize your images for Facebook so that when fans share them, they look great in the news feed regardless of where they are shared.

So what are the recommended dimensions for Facebook link thumbnail images? Here’s a breakdown on everything you need to know.

Facebook link thumbnail image dimensions

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3 Facebook Recommendations Box alternatives

Have you consider Facebook recommendations box alternatives?

While the Facebook recommendations box can be a valuable tool for businesses, it’s not perfect. It’s also not always available.

In fact, it was down for a little over a few weeks in late June. This meant that businesses who were using it on their Facebook Page had to find an alternative.

What was odd was that while it didn’t work on laptops, businesses could access the Facebook recommendations box on mobile devices and direct customers to leave a recommendation there. While this was a work-around, it meant complicating the experience for fans and customers and making it more difficult to collect feedback from them.

To me, this is an unsatisfactory solution and when a tool that businesses rely on daily to collect feedback from customers doesn’t work, it’s not something that I recommend keeping around.

Fortunately, the Facebook recommendations box did come back, but what happens when Facebook removes this feature or takes more than a few weeks to fix this valuable business tool?

As I have mentioned on numerous occasions, don’t put all of your marketing eggs in the Facebook basket and trust that they will be around forever. Just look at MySpace. Nothing lasts forever.

Based on the spottiness of Facebook, there are a number of alternatives that you can use to collect feedback from customers and fans. We’ve highlighted a few of our favorites Facebook recommendations box alternatives that you can implement to collect feedback from fans and customers.

3 Facebook Recommendations Box alternatives

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How to delete Facebook recommendations [video]

Delete Facebook recommendations

The Facebook recommendations box can be a valuable tool for your Facebook Page. What do you do when you receive Facebook recommendations that are negative or untrue?

Facebook recommendations – the good and the bad

Unfortunately, not every review your business receives on your Facebook Page is always going to be positive.

Reputation management is extremely important for every business, even when we’re talking about Facebook. When you are in this situation and have Facebook recommendations like this, what can you do to handle them?

Handling Facebook recommendations

The positive Facebook recommendation

If you receive a positive recommendation on your Facebook Page, since you cannot respond directly to that person, try seeking them out through their website, Facebook profile, or even their Twitter account, and thank them for the review. Hopefully you’ll make new friends and potentially create new opportunities for your business.

The negative (but true) Facebook recommendation

If someone has used your services and has left an unfavorable review about your business, don’t get mad because you don’t like what they had to say. Instead, you should try to make it a point to fix that aspect of your business. It could be a customer service issue or they simply received a bad product. The best thing you can do is not to delete this Facebook recommendation. Instead, work to resolve it.

This will go a long way to help your business improve and get better.

The negative (and entirely untrue) Facebook recommendation

In some cases, people will leave a recommendation on your Facebook Page that isn’t true. In fact, they may not have even used your services (ridiculous).

If you find yourself in this situation, it’s time to delete these types of Facebook recommendations from your Facebook Page.

How to delete recommendations from the Facebook recommendations box?

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Facebook Page Images & Optimizing for EdgeRank

It’s no secret, Facebook EdgeRank is tough to crack. In fact, according to PostRocket, you’re more likely to get into Harvard than to get into the Facebook news feed (seriously). So why is it so difficult for your Facebook Page to break into the news feed? One of the main reasons is because your Facebook Page images are not optimized properly.

Facebook Page images and the news feed

Studies show that 1 of 500 stories actually make it into the Facebook news feed. So how can you increase your odds of getting your content seen?

Instead of posting status updates that focus on text updates only, post Facebook Page images instead – and optimize them.

Ways to optimize Facebook Page images:

  • Start with a high quality image and resize it, don’t go the other way!
  • Make sure images are not blurry
  • Decide if you want to use a regular image or highlight an image on your Facebook Page (the sizes are different)

How to optimize Facebook Page images for EdgeRank

Now that you have a few ideas on what you can do to improve the Facebook Page images that you post, what are the image sizes that you need to know?

Mike Maghsoudi put together this helpful infographic that covers how Facebook chooses to resize images that you include in your updates. Be sure to read through this, as it does a great job highlighting image sizes and how they appear on Facebook.

Remember, if you start off with a bad image, it will only get worse when it gets resized by Facebook.

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Facebook for business or Facebook for personal – a comparison

It doesn’t really matter who you ask – when you mention the term social media, everyone instantly thinks Facebook. That’s because not only does Facebook have over 1 billion users looking to connect with their friends and family, but the social network also works great for business owners as well.

So how effective is Facebook at driving personal and business interactions?

Consider these stats about Facebook for personal and business use:

  • 1 in 7 people use Facebook for personal use
  • 1 in 3 businesses are on Facebook
  • 79% of Facebook fans are more likely to make a purchase
  • 74% of Facebook fans are more likely to recommend a brand to their friends

Couple that with the fact technology research firm, Gartner feels that social commerce is the next big thing and suggests that by 2015, social commerce will generate $30 billion in sales, there are plenty of reasons as to why you should be using Facebook for both personal and business reasons.

So which way should Facebook be used primarily for?  Facebook for business or Facebook for personal? Check out this infographic on how Facebook is currently being used – and the impact that it is having for personal uses and in business.

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How to add the Facebook recommendations box to your Facebook Page [video]

One of the most overlooked features for your Facebook Page is the Facebook recommendations box. This is a valuable tool to add to your Facebook Page because it allows you to collect feedback from fans and customers.

Adding value to your Facebook Page with the Facebook recommendations box

The Facebook recommendations box isn’t just a way to collect feedback. It can serve multiple purposes:

  • Drive customers to your Facebook Page
  • Collect feedback about your business, improve products, improve your posting strategy, etc
  • Improve different areas of your business such as your website

Drive customers to your Facebook Page

When you add the Facebook recommendations box to your Facebook Page, you now have a single place to collect feedback from fans and customers on your Facebook Page.

Because the recommendations box is only available on your Facebook Page and not in your news feed, if someone hasn’t visited your page, this is a great opportunity to direct someone to your Facebook Page who hasn’t yet become a fan yet.

Collecting feedback with the Facebook recommendations box:

The Facebook recommendations box isn’t just a way to get people to your Facebook Page. Once you get them there, you can collect valuable feedback from them to learn what they like and don’t like about your business.

There are lots of types of feedback you can collect from the recommendations box; new product feedback, customer service issues, website improvements, etc.

Facebook recommendations for business success:

With the feedback you’ve collected, you’re now ready for business success. Just be sure you take the recommendations you receive and put them to use to improve different aspects of your business.

How to add the Facebook recommendations box to your Facebook Page

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How to use Hyperalerts to never miss Facebook Page updates again – Video

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You’ve set up your Facebook Page and you’ve started to build your fan base and you’ve noticed that you’re not getting a lot of comments on your Facebook Timeline or you find yourself overlooking them for one reason or another. With 95% of Facebook Pages never responding to comments from fans, this means a lot of missed opportunities to connect with current fans and lost opportunities to strengthen your brand in the process. So why do we overlook comments?

Why we overlook comments:

  • No notification that you received a comment
  • They were posted towards the bottom of your Timeline
  • Forgot to respond
  • Did not feel the need to respond

If you have overlooked a comment on your Facebook Page, then you should check out the free social media tool called HyperAlerts.
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