Fan page = Today’s website

The forever-changing Internet landscape has gone social. The sooner you start testing the Web waters, the better position your business will be in. Your best bet is to dip your toe in with a Facebook fan page as soon as possible.

What 's a fan page? It’s a special profile that publically promotes a brand, a product, an artist, a Web site, an organization.

Why does my business need one? Your competitors already have fan pages and are able to reach more than 400 million users! On any given day, 50% of these active users log in to Facebook AND overwhelmingly prefer the social media site to using the overall Web. Once you’ve engaged all these current and potential customers, you can also reach their friends, business colleagues, etc.

What are the benefits? On Facebook, your business is searchable by all users. Outside of Facebook, search engines improve your listing results by scan social sites. Better yet, larger search engines pull real-time search results from Facebook status updates and other real-time content.  There are even studies showing that, overall, Facebook users are more loyal, drive more business and bring in new customers than general Web users.

What are you waiting for? Jump into social media with a fan page!

You need to make your content “STICKY”

There are a couple of points that hold true when trying to keep peoples attention and grow a healthy follower base on your social platforms leading to more online business. Most importantly, you have to post regularly; your businesses opinions and strategies that have value to potential clients which will lead people to your site. Once there, make sure you have powerful content to hold the viewers attention adding call-to-action links that allow people to follow you. Secondly, becoming an expert in your field by commenting on every relevant blog, forum and tweet, solid content, not spam will build credibility and keep you on potential new clients’ radars. Building a follower base of people looking for exactly what you have to offer will be the end result.

Tweet + Comment + Blog = Followers

The next step in social media!?

A platform, based on interests and “personal relevancy” instead of popularity would seem to be the direction most users looking to get more out of their social media accounts, would and should move in. What do you think is missing?

17 Ways You Can Use Twitter

1. Personal Branding

2. Get Feedback

3. Hire People

4. Direct traffic

5. Read News

6. Make New Friends

7. Network for benefits

8. Use it as a ToDo list

9. Business Management

10. Notify Your Customers

11. Take Notes

12. Event Updates

13. Find Prospects

14. Provide Live coverage

15. Time Management and Analysis

16. Set Up Meetings

17. Acquire Votes

If you are interested in reading more details on each one of these points Full Article By Dosh Dosh

Is there really a best time to tweet?

The best time to reach all of your followers is when they are online, obviously. But, that’s easier said than done, since Twitter is global and you are dealing with multiple time zones. So, when you tweet, assume that some of your followers may be asleep, others at work and others may have simply placed themselves on a self imposed Twitter time out.

So, let’s say you tweet at 9am, you will most likely only reach a percentage of your followers. To reach more people try this method, post your most important tweets three times, six to ten hours apart. This will greatly improve your chances on reaching all of your followers. 

Use Google to convert Web Traffic into New Clients

Understanding how visitors use your site can make the difference in having a successful online business.

1. Use Google Analytics to monitor bounce rate, which informs you of how many visitors click away from your site before navigating to the other pages

Why is this important? This number will tell you how effective your content on your landing pages are at pulling visitors deeper into your site. With this information in hand, you can update your keywords throughout your site, making sure visitors find what they’re looking for.

2. With the information gathered using Google Analytics, you  use Google’s Website Optimizer, which allows split testing of newly modified pages.

What does this mean? Using Optimizer’s settings you can direct a certain amount of users to the old page and a similar amount to the new page, then use Google Analytics to compare the results.

Getting familiar with and using Google’s free tools, can allow you a considerable portion of SEO implementation, which before was only available to the experts. 

Make your fanpages go more viral

One of the features of Facebook that users, looking to promote their pages, need to be made aware of is status tagging, which lets you reference your friends, Events, Favorite Pages and Groups within each of your updates. This is something twitter users are all to familiar with and you facebookers need to catch up.

How
Status tagging an update or any other post to your pages is relatively easy. In the publisher, you simply use the “@” sign and type your friend, event, favorite Page or Group’s name. After selecting the item that you want to tag and clicking on the event, person, or page that you want to tag, the object will automatically become hyperlinked within your status update. Again, this process is old school to Twitter users, many Facebook users still have yet to figure out how to take advantage of this feature.

Why
So why would you want to get into tagging? In the case of friends and Pages, it’s a form of acknowledgement, encourages interaction and may bring to the attention of others. However, in the case of events, it will raise awareness, promote and draw attention to others something you’ll be attending in the future or recently attended.