Facebook - Jamie Faidley's Internet Marketing Blog

16Jun/110

When to Post on Twitter & Facebook

Both Twitter and Facebook have a huge audience of potential customers who might be interested in what you are selling, but what is the best way to reach them? You are competing for each user's attention with a lot of other noise, so it's not easy to get your followers or fans to listen to and be interested in what you have to say. One of the ways that you can give yourself the best chance of social media success is to post at the right time of day and on the right days of the week.

I have found two different studies (Buddy Media and Dan Zarella) that tried to figure out just when is the right time to post, how often you should update, and what days work best. One of the thing that is clear from both studies, what works for most people might not necessarily work for you. As always, you are going to want to test your social media strategy to find your own sweet spot.

What Time of Day to Post

If you want your updates to be seen, early in the morning is the best time to post. When people wake up in the morning they go online. Their Twitter streams and Facebook news feeds are ordered in chronological order with the latest updates appearing first. If you can post right before the person checks their account, you will appear at the top and have a great chance of being seen.

Zarella found that if you want to get your updates retweeted, the majority of people do this between 2 PM and 5 PM, but if the goal is clickthroughs then the rates are fairly even throughout the day.

What Day of the Week to Post

Buddy Media says the best day to post is Thursday and Friday. Zarella found that retweets go up slightly towards the end of the week as well. One of the theories behind the data is that people don't want to be at work, so they are more likely to look for distractions online.

Sharing on Facebook goes way up on the weekend, even though most stories are published during the week.

How Often

Zarella studied how often people post on Twitter and correlated that to how many followers they have. The results were pretty surprising as the users with the most followers post 22 tweets per day and even post the same message in slightly different formats a few times each day. If you are posting links to your own content, once per hour seems to be a good guide to achieve the highest clickthrough rate.

Using Zarella's information I would try to tweet once per hour, nearly every hour of the waking hours of your target audience. Don't be afraid to send out a link to the same article once in the morning and once in the afternoon, using slightly different text accompanying the URL each time.

Zarella also found that Facebook was a completely different animal. While users might not get overwhelmed by a lot of updates on Twitter, your Facebook friends and fans will give you more "likes" if you post every other day. If you clog up their Facebook stream, they are less likely to want to see your stuff.

Tagged as: Facebook, twitterNo Comments

21Mar/110

Engaging Online Communities

One of the hot terms in Internet marketing over the past few years has been to "engage your community" to attract people to your site. With the rise of social media there are lots of conversations going on about your niche and by building relationships with these members you can get more links to your site, build your brand recognition, and get more customers. How exactly can you successfully engage your community and get more traffic and sales? It's not all that hard.

Find the Community

The first step to engaging an online community is to actually find them. The obvious places to look are Facebook pages and groups, and Twitter. All you have to do is search for your keyword terms in their built in search boxes and look through the results. It's also beneficial to search for forums (Google "(keyword) forums"). Forums might not be as popular right now, but a lot of times they are places that a large group of people interested in your niche have gathered together for an extended period of time, making them a dedicated group.

How to Engage Your Audience

Nobody likes the person who comes into their community and tries to endlessly promote themselves without adding anything back. If you do that you could get banned, but even if you don't you aren't going to make many friends.

You know what the members will like? An expert who helps them out. Forums are a perfect place to find an archive of questions that people in your market have had. If you want to engage your market, answering their questions and becoming known as a helpful expert in the field is the easiest way to do that. Plus, it's a great way to find content ideas for your site.

Getting Links & Referrals

So someone in an online community asks a question and you know the answer. If you post a quick reply, you might make a few friends with your knowledge, but you won't generate many links to your site nor refer many prospective customers that way. The best way I have found to answer the question is to write a detailed article covering the solution or answer, then give a short summary in response to the person who asks the question with a link back to your site. If you have a decent following on Twitter and Facebook, I'd even repost the question with a link to the answer. This should generate additional tweets, Facebook likes, and referrals from others.

This is the best way to engage online communities. Find out what the people are talking about in your market and then contribute something of value to their conversations.

Tagged as: Facebook, forums, twitterNo Comments

26Jan/110

Future SEO Ranking Factors

The game of SEO is always changing. More than ten years ago all you had to worry about was on-page factors and keyword stuffing. Five years ago buying links could guarantee you a top ranking. Where is the future of SEO heading?

First of all, let me stress that the importance of quality content and links isn't going away any time soon. Sites that produce quality content will get links and have users that keep coming back for more. Focus there first, and then worry about some of these other factors.

Page Loading

There is no doubt that faster sites convert better than slow sites. Visitors do not want to sit around waiting for your site to load. They are there to find information, and they want to find it quickly. The goal for all of the pages on my site is four seconds.

How fast is your site loading? Take a look at the "Site Performance" link in Google's Webmaster Tools, or take a link at Pingdom Tools. Follow Google's recommendations, look to upgrade to hosting solution, and read my how to speed up your blog for ideas on how to make your site faster.

Social Media

Google is already using Twitter and Facebook to help determine relevant content. The more times your pages get tweeted, retweeted, and liked on Facebook the better you are going to rank.

If you want to improve your social media score, get active on each of the platforms. Make it easy for visitors to follow you on either and use it to communicate, not just push your products or post automated junk.

Clickthrough Rate

If you are lucky enough to have a high listing on a results page you better make sure that it's relevant to what users are searching for. If they are not clicking through then Google is going to think you are not relevant for those keywords and knock you down the rankings.

Want a higher clickthrough rate? Treat your descriptions the same way you would a PPC ad. Call the user to take action and click through to find what they are looking for. Use the keyword in the title and description so it shows up bold.

Bounce Rate

So a user is clicking through from the results page to your site, but once they get there they quickly realize it's not what they are looking for. Google is tracking bounce rates and if you aren't giving users what they want, they will "bounce" you down the results pages.

To help improve your bounce rate, give the user what they want. Write quality pages or try and ranking product pages for what the user would be searching for, and not something that is borderline relevant.

Tagged as: bounce rate, clickthrough rate, Facebook, page loading, Search Engine Marketing, twitterNo Comments

1Dec/100

How Much is Facebook Worth?

Mark Zuckerberg has to be a happy man these days. He is a 24% shareholder in Facebook, the company that he co-founded with a few of his classmates while attending Harvard. Sure he has to deal with a seemingly endless amount of lawsuits as people try to take a piece of the pie, but Facebook was recently valued at over $50 billion based on private market transactions disclosed to TechCrunch.

While $50 billion seems like a lot (and it is) that is still around 1/4th the size of Google or Microsoft. Facebook is worth more than Yahoo or eBay, but it still has some catching up to do to chase down Amazon's $80 billion valuation.

How fast has Facebook reached the $50 billion mark? Let's take a look at some past transactions that give an indication of the company's worth:

November 29, 2010 - The SecondMarket.com auction closes with share prices indicating a valuation of $50 billion.

January 20, 2010 - TechCrunch reporting that offers on Second Market for Facebook's private shares put the company at roughly $14 billion.

May 2009 - Digit Sky Technologies invests $200 million for a 1.96% stake, giving Facebook a value of $10 billion.

October 2007 - Microsoft invests $240 million for a 1.6% stake, giving the company a $15 billion valuation.

April 2006 - Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital contribute $27.5 million to give Facebook a value of $525 million.

May 2005 - Accel Partners invests $12.7 million to give the company a value of $100 million.

Not a bad track of growth! A lot of people think that there are a lot of profits to be made with Facebook, but right now Zuckerberg is still concentrated on growth. Once the company goes public, he is going to have less control and more of a demand from investors on increasing profits. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

Tagged as: FacebookNo Comments

23Jul/100

How to Make Money With Facebook

The number of people using social networking sites is tough to imagine. Let's take a look at Facebook alone, which now has over 500 million users worldwide. Over half of those members login to Facebook each and every day. The average user has 130 friends, spends more than two hours per month on the site, and is connected to 80 community pages, groups, and events.

It isn't just big, but the users are active as well creating 3 new pieces of content each day. 30 billions links, stories, blog posts, photos and other pieces of content are shared each month.

Facebook users are turning to their mobile devices more all the time. More than 150 million people are currently accessing the site though a mobile device and those users are more than twice as active as their non-mobile counterparts.

What all of this means is that there is a large audience waiting for you to tap into. Imagine having a Facebook fan page with over $1 million targeted fans. All of these users have expressed an interest in whatever product or service you are tied to. What if you sent an affiliate offer to these fans? Can you imagine how much money you could make off of just a single blast?

With our how to make money with Facebook series, we are going to offer you a step-by-step guide on how you can create fan pages with a large number of followers. Then we are going to show you how to take advantage of these fan sites so you can monetize them and make money off of the Facebook system. You won't need to use their pay-per-click advertising to do it either.

Our system works like this: create profiles and then learn how to get more Facebook friends, learn how to create facebook fan pages that people will join, getting your friends to become fans of your page, and then how to make money off of that fan page by using it to promote your sites and/or products.

Tagged as: FacebookNo Comments

20Jul/100

How to Create Your Fan Page

Facebook pages are different than personal profiles. Businesses can't have profiles on Facebook, but they can have pages to house all of the pertinent company information they want to display. The technical details of creating a fan page are not difficult to master and you can easily walk through the steps on Facebook's create a page section. With this article we are more concerned with a creating the type of page that people will actually become a fan of and not the generic how-to fill out the forms.

Why Even Have a Facebook Page?

This is a question that you should be asking before wasting your time putting something together just to have it. What are the benefits? Here is a short list:

1. Fan pages are open to the public and open to the search engines to index. This means people can find you without actually having to be your fan.

2. Facebook allows pages to have a custom URL once there are a certain number of fans.

3. Pages can have message boards that allow users to interact

4. There are detailed traffic statistics covering the demographics of the fans of your page.

5. Facebook allows admins to message all of the fans, update the page's status which will show in each fans' live feed

All of those will help you increase your exposure and/or help you gain trust with potential customers.

Title of Your Fan Page

The first key in creating your fan page is to start with a good title. Don't make the title generic or a name that people have never heard of. You want to go for some name recognition, a belief or a cause, or some kind of gimmick that piggybacks off a current event or something in popular culture. You are targeting a certain niche or demographic with your page so make sure your title shows that.

Quality

You want quality with your fan page. Don't just create a fan page just to say you have one and then never update it, or just update it with non-stop spam offers. If you want people to join and stay fans of your page, or better yet, to recommend your fan page to their friends then you have to provide them with quality content. Sure you can broadcast special offers, but do it occasionally (about once per week) and not all of the time. Funny status updates keep people interested in everything else related to your fan page. If you deliver value such as solving a problem or offering current events then it is more likely the friends of your current fans will also join.

Admins

Create more than one admin for your page. This is important if you are going to get aggressive in trying to add people as friends in order to refer them to your page. If your account has problems, the page could disappear if you are the only admin and you have wasted a lot of time and effort gathering a group that you can't use.

Those are three quick tips in creating a fan page that people will actually join and that you can actually use to make money off of Facebook.

Tagged as: FacebookNo Comments

Future SEO Ranking Factors

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