Changing your affiliation with the Facebook Pages follow button

Facebook has been making a lot of updates to Facebook Pages over the past few months. Not only did they roll out the Facebook reviews button, which let’s fans leave a review about a business, but now they have now rolled out the Facebook Pages follow button.

While the follow button was a feature they were testing for Facebook Pages in October, it’s finally here.

What this means is that instead of liking every Facebook Page, fans and customers have a choice. They can like a page or choose to follow Facebook Pages.

I consider this to be a major announcement because it changes the level to which fans and customers can engage with a Facebook Page.

Changing interactions with Facebook Pages

Previously, the Facebook follow button was a feature only reserved for Facebook Profiles.

This gave people the opportunity to friend people they knew personally and to follow people they didn’t.

For example, most people would send a friend request to a family member and follow a celebrity or public figure. This way they would be able to see updates from both people in their news feed without being friends with everyone.

Now, instead of liking a Facebook Page by becoming a fan and liking their page, you can choose to follow a page instead.

Following vs. Liking a Facebook Page

As I mentioned, this is pretty significant. Here’s why.

Previously, in order to interact with a Facebook Page, you could add them to an interest list or if you wanted to see their updates in your news feed, you had to like their page.

This is great if it’s someone you know and you support their business. But what if you want to see their updates in your news feed, but you don’t really want to endorse them (because that’s what liking a page essentially does). There really was no other option.

With the follow button for Facebook Pages, now you can selectively choose which pages you like and which ones you follow.

In both situations, this solves the problem of seeing their updates in the news feed and it let’s fans and customers be more selective about which pages they endorse to their friends.

How to use the Facebook Pages follow button

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Facebook community management (the right way) with Agorapulse CEO, Emeric Ernoult

Agorapulse CEO, Emeric ErnoultThis interview with Emeric Ernoult, owner of Agorapulse, a Facebook community management tool, is the ninth in an ongoing series of podcasts with individuals doing great things in social media marketing.

I am very honored to have the opportunity to interview Emeric Ernoult from Agorapulse on today’s podcast.

For those of you who are not familiar with Emeric’s work, he created a social media tool called Agorapulse just for helping you better manage Facebook Pages.

Real Facebook community management with Agorapulse

While there are lots of tools on the market that let you manage multiple social networks at one time, Emeric chose to focus on Facebook Page management because it was an area he felt could be improved upon (significantly).

Here are some of the major businesses that use Agorapulse.

Agorapulse clients
List of businesses using Agorapulse.

Obviously, if major businesses are using Agorapulse, it has to be a good social media tool. We tend to agree, because we featured it on our list of 10 Wildfire alternatives for managing Facebook Pages earlier this year.

Just to prepare you, this week’s podcast with Emeric Ernoult clocks in at nearly 50 minutes. If you want to take it with you, it’s also available as a download as well.

Here is a breadown on the topics that Emeric and I talk about on the show.

The good, the bad, and the ugly about Facebook Page management

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Building a Twitter Facebook landing page tab using Shortstack

Last week we showed you how to add a Google Calendar to your Facebook Page. Now we’re going to show you how you can use Shortstack to add a Twitter feed to your Facebook Page.

Here is an example of a Facebook landing page tab we built using Shortstack to display our tweets.

Example of a Twitter feed embedded on a Facebook Page

Example of a Twitter feed on a Facebook Page
Example of a Twitter feed added to a Facebook landing page tab using Shortstack.

Let’s get started teaching you how to display your Twitter stream on your Facebook Page.

Display Twitter on your Facebook Page using Shortstack

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10 Ways to increase holiday sales on your Facebook Page

Are your holiday sales not where you want them to be? While there are just a few weeks left until Christmas, there’s still plenty of time to increase your sales on your Facebook Page.

We have compiled a collection of 10 ways to increase holidays sales using your Facebook Page.

The great thing is that you can implement these now and see results immediately!

10 Ways to increase holidays sales on Facebook Pages

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3 Steps to make your Facebook Page private

Do you need to do some work on your Facebook Page before you launch it? Maybe you just want to hide your Facebook Page because you are rebranding your business. Learn how to make your Facebook Page private and hide it from fans and friends.

Who can see my Facebook Page?

When you make your Facebook Page private, this will hide it from fans. This means they won’t be able to see it or even find it within Facebook Graph Search.

If someone is an admin on your Facebook Page will still be able to see it.

If someone is a manager, they will be able to see your Facebook Page and make changes to it.

To make your Facebook Page private, follow the instructions listed below.

How to make your Facebook Page private

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7 Common questions about Facebook locations

Facebook recently launched Facebook locations. If you have questions about setting up locations for your business, we’ve compiled a list of common questions to help you get started.

Questions on Facebook locations
Common questions about using Facebook locations.

Before you get started with using Facebook locations, you probably have quite a few questions. Here are a few tips to avoid when setting up your page.

Things to do:

  • Make sure you have the correct Page ID for the main Page
  • Make sure your page web address doesn’t have any spaces or symbols
  • Get your latitude and longitude coordinates

Things to avoid:

  • Do not add or remove columns in the spreadsheet
  • Avoid assigning store IDs that you previously assigned to other locations for your business

Keep reading for a list of common questions about Facebook locations.

Common questions about Facebook locations

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Rename your Facebook Page with suggest an edit

Have you tried to rename your Facebook Page; however, you’re over the 200 fan limit? If you find yourself in this situation, don’t panic or create a new Facebook Page just yet. Instead, here’s a shortcut using the suggest an edit feature on Facebook.

We’re going to walk you through renaming your Facebook Page using the suggest an edit feature, which should help save you time when you need to rename your Facebook Page.

The problem

Once you reached 200 fans on your Facebook Page or you have changed your Facebook Page name one time, you no longer have the ability to rename your Facebook Page.

This isn’t so bad unless you are going through a rebranding or you’ve spelled your business name incorrectly. If you’re in this situation, you are essentially stuck with the name you chose when you launched your Facebook Page.

Fortunately, you can fix this issue and rename  your Facebook Page with the help of suggest an edit on Facebook.

The solution

Instead of creating a new Facebook Page, you can rename your Facebook Page with the help of the suggest an edit feature on Facebook.

This feature also comes in handy because you can retain your Facebook vanity URL, keep your fans, and all of the content you have shared on your Facebook Page.

To use this feature, here are a few things to know when renaming your page.

  • Make sure the category of your Facebook Page is set to local business
  • Gather 15-20 of your friends or fans
  • Tell them what you want to rename your Facebook Page to
  • Have them enter it in the page name in the suggest an edit area on your Facebook Page

Seems simple, right?

Now that you’ve done the preliminary work, here are the instructions you need to use suggest an edit to rename a Facebook Page.

Note: Be sure you follow these exact instructions. Otherwise, it may not work for your page.

If you are concerned about changing the category on your page, you can always change that part back.

Suggest an edit on Facebook to rename a Facebook Page

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Facebook hashtag marketing tips

Facebook rolled out Facebook hashtags as a way to compete with Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn. While adoption has been slow and feedback has been mixed, they are still an effective way to track conversations on Facebook. Here are some Facebook hashtag marketing tips you can implement now to help you tap into the 1 billion active Facebook users.

Is Facebook hashtag marketing effective?

Not everyone agrees that Facebook hashtags are effective. In fact, some suggest that Facebook hashtags don’t help boost exposure at all.

This is rather surprising because the purpose of Facebook hashtags is to help group conversations across different Facebook profiles and pages and help marketers reach new audiences. To me, this suggests that we need to give Facebook hashtags some more time to develop, as it sounds like they haven’t yet caught on with everyone.

One other surprising stat reported by Consumer Reports is that just 28% of Facebook users make their Facebook posts public.

For those of you using Facebook hashtags, for them to be effective and to reach people, you want to make sure you tell your audience to make any Facebook posts they share that include a Facebook hashtag public. If they don’t make these posts public, this means the posts are not being seen when someone clicks into a hashtag, which means lower exposure.

Missed opportunities with Facebook hashtags

While I have personally used Facebook hashtags in some of my Facebook marketing posts, one thing that I consistently notice is that I’m seeing the same people using Facebook hashtags. This suggests that a lot of people are not using Facebook hashtags (or if they are, they are not setting them to public) so that everyone can see them.

This means there are a lot of missed opportunities for marketers.

This infographic from Prestige Marketing looks at different Facebook hashtag marketing tips to consider implementing in your digital marketing strategy.

Facebook hashtag marketing tips

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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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Build awareness, drive Facebook traffic for promotions – Infographic

With the launch of Facebook Timeline, Facebook tabs saw their engagement drop by 50%. This isn’t good news if you’re a business trying to leverage promotions to drive Facebook traffic.

If you have created Facebook landing page tabs and you’re trying to target users on mobile devices, things only go from bad to worse. This is because Facebook landing page tabs don’t work on mobile devices (unless you create them using ShortStack and promote the link to your page tab).

At this point, this  means that your business now has even more work to do on-top of running your Facebook promotions just to get the word out to fans and customers.

Fortunately, there a number of things you can do as a business owner after creating a Facebook promotion to help increase awareness and drive Facebook traffic when you’re running your next promotion.

For starters, if you’re promoting a Facebook landing page tab, you’ll want to be sure to share that link with fans. Otherwise, they won’t be able to access them from their mobile devices.

So you have your Facebook promotions created – what else can your business be doing to help increase awareness with customers and to drive Facebook traffic for your promotions? Let’s find out.

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