So you are on Facebook,  you have a page for your business/interest and you want to get more people looking at your page, how do you go about it? Well in my experience there are a few ways to make it happen, some that work well, some that cost and some that are free.

Your first point of call is obviously to ask for your friends for a little assistance, if your friends are anything like mine they are usually happy to obliged. Get them to become a fan and then just ask them to share your page on their wall, that way you get exposed to all their friends too. You can just appeal to them as friends or you can incentivise the request with a freebie or discount code…but, discount codes don’t work as well as something in the real world like a bag of retro sweets, Wham bars anyone?

I would imagine with that first post on Facebook you should be able to get a enough ‘Fans’, so that, you can get your facebook url (see my recent post). Once you have ‘lightly’ mined your real friend list, you need to go outside that circle and promote your page in a varity of ways, as the more people you can get as Fans, the more likely you are to get other fans.

I great way of promoting your page is on your printed marketing material and website, even on your email signature. If you have a van or shop window get your Facebook address on there too. I have noticed a growing trend for big brands to put their Facebook page on the end of their TV advert. If big business is waking up to the power of Facebook you had better get onboard. You should also push links, to your page, out on your twitter account (assuming you have one, if not you need one too).

The above is relatively cost free and here are a few more ideas, these do have a cost attached to them, but it is up to you to find the amount you are happy with spending to get a Fan. You may not feel it is worth much expense if it is just a hobby page, but even then the following can be done without money, as I’ll explain. A couple of things that have worked for us are competitions and advertising. We have run a number of comps in the last six months and we have had two types that seem to work better than others (which I will go into on another post) but just to say we were able to double our facebook fans with one of these competitions. If yours is a hobby page and you don’t want to spend money, why not ask a related business for something free to giveaway for putting a link on your facebook page, if you run a husky dog page, ask a local pet shop for 24 cans of dog meat for a mention on your page…just an idea

Advertising on Facebook is quite interesting as the demographic data is built in, so if you want to target young women, or men that are 35 and over, you can do. Again we have experimented with different adverts and found some types work better than others, we found advertising our competitions worked better than just advertising our products. Of course there are people that will leave after the competition is over, but overall we gained more Fans than just pushing our products alone.

As I wrote this post I realised one post was just going to be too long on this subjects so this is now a two part post the rest will follow this week. I will talk about converting visitors to fans, and other widgets that will help you build you Facebook community.

Disclosure: The above image is of our friend, Coolest Gadgets, fan page. I haven’t got that many fans, yet.

A friend recently set up a Facebook page for her new Antiques business in a small market town not too far away from where we are based. She dropped me a line and said “still alot to learn, but free word of mouth advertising on fb is as good a place to start as any”.

That got me thinking that there must be a few tips and tricks to promote your business on Facebook that I’ve used and seen used.

One of the quickest and easiest things is to get yourself a Facebook URL so you can put a nice simple facebook.com/yourname rather than a massive one like this

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Items-for-sale-and-free-in-the-MaltonPickering-area/1190535350?sk=wall

Facebook call this a username or vanity URL and all you have to do is get 25 fans of your page.

Once you have those, then go to the following page http://www.facebook.com/username/ and select your page and username.

Now you can put your short Facebook Page address on all your marketing and link it on your website. In the next post on Facebook tips I’ll explain landing pages and how to convert visitor to fans.

A trick to get 25 fans is to just ask all your friends on Facebook to help, even explain you need 25 fans.

I hear regularly that I should be using email as a marketing tool, however I have to say I am not a huge fan of email so maybe this is the reason I have taken a long while to get onto doing our newsletter. I am game for any initiative that gets me more hits/sales so I forced myself to do our second ever newsletter.

Recently we have been suffering from a downturn in hits mainly due to Google messing around with their algorythms, as in my previous post about it. I have another post coming that will also venture on to this subject, which I will link to when done. The short story is that with the recent hot weather and poor rankings, hits have been low and sales have been slow. So in this situation what do you do? Well apart from sitting around moaning about the panda updates you have to try new things. We are regular users of Twitter and Facebook and we couldn’t use these to see any short term improvement as we were already running two competitions so we resorted to a newsletter and some extra Google Adwords. The Adwords is good as it is instant, it puts you back up top in front of everyone, but if you are not careful it can get expensive especially if you do not monitor the conversion rate.

The newsletters’ benefit is that we already have a database of subscribers that we can email, so as we were coming up to the Easter break I thought it the perfect opportunity to remind our previous customers that there was two long weekends together…perfect for DIY! After creating a newsletter using Campaign Monitor I sent it out to our database and we had a significant amount of people opening the email and going to our website from the email. 22.72% of our database opened the email, half of those re-opened the email a second time and 20.68% of those clicked on a link, so far no one has made a purchase using our discount code. When you analyse these figures you can see that whilst the current sales are zero and therefore there is no return on the investment of the cost of the newsletter, it shows that just under a quarter of people are interested enough to open the email and therefore be marketed to. I see the next process as doing another newsletter in a few weeks and doing a few test variations to see if the opens can be improved and the conversion rate increased. Though the analytics from Campaign Monitor are great they seem to have coincided with a marked increase in hits and sales on the website so it may be that some people are also going to the website after reading the email and not clicking on the links in the email.

So do email newsletters work? This post shows you that although we haven’t had a massive return on our investment, we have had a lot of people look at our email then our website and this is long-game marketing. So I believe email can make a difference to your overall marketing campaigns and with some fine tuning could be a significant weapon in your arsenal.

Today I was asked by a freelance writer if I would mind doing a little questionnaire on how we use social media in business. Below is may response.

How would you describe what your business does?
- We sell stickers, two types mainly wall stickers on www.wallglamour.co.uk and Gadget stickers, or skins as people call them on www.gadgetglamour.co.uk

What position do you hold within the business?
- I am the owner of the business.

How long has it been up and running?
- The company has existed since 2003 in various guises but we went limited in 2006.

What advantages did using social media give you when trying to set up your business?
- Well I used to be a freelance graphic designer and only ever achieved a certain amount of work/income in a year. So when I switched to a sticker/product based business, a couple of friends gave me some tips and tricks regarding blogging and twitter in 2007 and from there it changed everything as I was no longer a ‘local business’ in the Yellow Pages, we could sell to the whole world via the internet.

Describe the positive impact social media has had on your business since you set it up.
- Since I started using social media I was able to grow my company to six fold of our pervious turnover.

Do you think you would have been as successful/your success so rapid without social media?
- No never, I love social media and it has been great to see the changes it has on the world of business and specifically our business, even from an offline perspective. We have a working partnership with another company that would never have happened if we didn’t have a website that we push to number one on Google with the help of social media.

What types of social media do you use and how often do you use them?
- We have a blog, of course which is updated a few times a month, we have some guest bloggers also. Twitter and Facebook are used almost everyday, but with tacked as we don’t want to be spammy. We use photos (flickr), videos (youtube), social bookmarking (delicious etc) and anything else that comes out. I am always looking for the next thing and read a lot about social media and web.

Of these, which form of social media is the most effective for your business?
- It’s funny I have seen a shift in the short time we have been using it, blogging was the medium in 2007, then Twitter and now Twitter is almost becoming useless as there are too many people selling on it (like us) Facebook is where it is at right now and we are trying to use that more effectively.

Are there any cost benefits to your business from using social media?
- The biggest cost benefit is that we don’t have to pay a thousand pound a month PR company to do press releases etc – we can do it our self though we still use PR too, but we didn’t for a long time.

How crucial would you say social media is to the ongoing success of your business and why?
- I think as social media matures we need to refine how we use the tools, to become masters, rather than enthusiastic novices, but there is no doubt that social media is good for business. Personal recommendation is a far better advocate for a product, and a better use of money, than a slot on the TV at tea time….though I don’t have that kind of money to evaluate the two side by side, but that is also the point SMEs have a chance now.

How do you see your business growing and developing in terms of using social media?
- Actually I am a really interested in how I can launch new products/ventures and hit the ground running with all the stored knowledge of social media. We can also crossover and advertise our new products to our existing followers so we are not starting from scratch. As I had help from friends in the beginning I have also been helping other friends and it is amazing to see what we can do with the list of social media apps. From zero to hero in no time…it is exciting.

What do you think are the advantages of social media to your industry specifically.
- Our customer base on the gadget side are tech savvy and the devices we sell for are perfect social media tools so we have to be on there doing ‘it’ or we are missing out big style. Similarly on the wall stickers side we are dealing with design led customers, who are probably Apple users and either in the creative industry like design and web or least ‘just get’ social media, so again it is a must.

What advances would you like to see in social media over the next 5 years?
- From a technical point of view I really have no idea, I know that location services will be the next mass thing, with Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places and I have a few interesting ideas on how to use that.

On a business level I would add words of warning, businesses need to make sure they are not exploiting social media, it is not a cash cow. People will switch you off, just like they hop channels on the TV, if you are not ‘real’ or genuine and offering something positive.

I am currently having a nervous breakdown as we have dropped a long way down the first page of Google for our main keyword. The problem for us is links, we have a good number of quality links, but it would seem our new competitors have a considerable amount more. Having been number 1 for a over a year we were ousted by another competitor who had a different product catalogue to us and so they had a broader range of people linking to them for these different types of products as well as the one that we were competing on. Whilst I was a bit annoyed to give up that number one spot it never really affected sales. I don’t think we even noticed when we went to number three, when another competitor had a lot of SEO work done on their site.

However within the space of two or three months all three of us at the top of Google were jumped by a gaggle of new companies that had come from nowhere. After some digging it would seem that these new sites had a lot more links than us. Thousands more in fact. The links seem to be coming from sponsored themes or comment spamming and we have lost out, big time. When I look at our online figures we are down at least 20% on last year and this has to be due to our positioning on Google as we are now ‘below the fold’ at number 7

I have a bit of an issue with all this. I had set my business up knowing this could happen and in a sense when I got to number one I was trampling over the last person who was at number one, so it is hard to be to overly critical of these new companies, business is business as they say. But what does really annoy me, and the other competitor who had the SEO done, is that Google seems to be allowing these companies to have un-relevant links. I looked at one of the many sponsored theme links and it was about the Gospel of ST. Thomas which is a completely unrelated subject, if ever there was one. In a sense its a bit like in a shopping-mal where the big brand stores get to take prime spots, as they are the big draw for people. However in this case someone is advertising that they sell the big brand stuff only for the customers to walk in and find a sign saying “go through this ting corridor and we’ll sell you something totally different for what you came in for”. On Goggle it clearly isn’t illegal to do these things, and I hear talk of people being band, but when they allow this kind of thing they are affecting other businesses that are not doing the “dodgy” practices.

So what do you say Google? Are spammy links allowed or not?

Getting links is not illegal, so if Google is not penalising others for doing such things should we? As that is exactly what we will have to do to beat these guys back to the top. Then what if Google moves the goal posts yet again….there has to be a better way of doing businesses…maybe!?

Thoughts from me, also on Gadget Glamour.

I’ve been involved in the web for years, I worked on lots of websites and at the time I thought I knew a lot about web design. However, I met this chap called Guy (SimpleUsability), who introduced me to a thing called “usability”. Guy then introduced me to a chap called Tom (Everythingability) who talked about “social media”!? Eventually I was introduced to a fella called Dom (Think Visibility) who talked about “SEO”!? By this point I realised I knew nothing about web.

Armed with Shopify, the e-commerce platform, and after stealing as much knowledge from their brains as I possibly could, I managed to make a reasonable go of running a website. However, I realised that web innovation never stops and the only way to stay visible on the web is to be around the people who know how to do that. This is where Think Visibility comes in; thinkvis, as it is commonly known, is an SEO conference (Search Engine Optimisation), where some of the brightest talents of the SEO industry come together to hear experts on subjects like domain buying and selling, backlinks and getting the best of your Pay Per Click advertising. But also interesting sidelines like outsourcing your life a-la Tim Ferris, cake making!? and twitchiking the globe.

I can honestly say that I have learnt lots, my little black notebook is crammed full of great tips. Now, maybe I am a little different to most of the attendees that come to ThinkVis as I don’t really understand the technicalities of the more complexed subjects, but what I have learnt has helped me to develop not only my website, but my whole business. We have been lucky enough to be able to grow the business every year, which isn’t bad in these economic times… 50% of our turnover comes from online sales and the offline sales we get come through contact with our website. I have learnt through the collective knowledge of the Think Visibility speakers that it is all about being visible to people on the web, Google or Facebook looking for what we do…so we never stop thinking about our visibility!

I will also mention that, you couldn’t find a nicer group off people. If you search on Twitter for #thinkvis all you will read is how great the conference was and how great all the people were that attended. There is some true online heavy-weights that attend and you would never know as everyone is so friendly. The beauty of ThinkVis is the extras, Dom goes to a ton of effort to make the attendees day just …how can I say it?… AWESOME! You start the event with a DrinkVis on the Friday, including Scalextric racing, Saturday morning starts with bacon butties, the pic-n-mix came out at the mid-morning break and food at dinner as well as some amusing entertainment. To top it all off there is the after party. It’s just a great day and you can pick up a few business cards whilst having a chilled out drink with great people.

So, to sum it up, if you are at all interested in doing business online you need to get yourself along to the next ThinkVis.

http://mashable.com/2009/02/16/facebook-tos-privacy/

I also can’t get over this. I have emailed FB which I would think be the best course of action for us all. How can we agreed to TOS that we have never seen as they’ve been snuck in!?!?! Surely they should have an opt in or leave Facebook option.

I’m sure everyone has heard of Spotify by now, but I just wanted to salute a cool app and distribution method. As I am sure you know, this little app/service is by invitation only. I like the fact that when you join you get 10 invites (which is a great way of tracking peoples circle of friends i.e. are they an evangelist or recluse) which means you get to pass them onto your tribe. I’ve only given out four invites, but that’s because all my friends are of the ‘connected’ persuasion (meaning they heard it first and invited me) or not at all and so are not interested.

…Anyway, I like the fact that the network of users only grows by word of mouth, only by contact with someone else who has invites. Big props to Spotify for a great distribution method (though not new)…I mean who wouldn’t tell their mates about a free service. The free service has ads though, this then leads me to think about the interesting juxtaposition of new era advertising i.e. Spotify through the tribe and the old fashioned advertising which is shout at you about the product.

I can’t help but think they have missed a trick or two in this era of social networking…where is the “your friends are listening to”, or the user rating system and the usability of the app is a bit frustrating if you want to look for new tracks…..but having said that it is free!

For those who don’t know what Spotify is, it’s like Free iTunes (streamed).