So you’ve been told to create a Facebook business page right? Apparently having a page will put your business on the map, you’ll drive loads of leads to your website, blog, offers and make a ton of sales!
Along the way you’ll also build your credibility, reach and influence and perhaps become a celebrity CEO or a well known public figure (if that floats your boat!)

Well, all this is actually true! It can all happen and more, there is a “but” though and it’s a BIG one!

It will come down to the amount of time and effort you put into your page. Unfortunately we can no longer just slap a page up and people come flocking.

Oh no, times have changed on Facebook.

So what are the fundamental things you MUST do to get your first 1,000 fans on Facebook and consequently your leads & profile?

Here’s 10 Steps which, if carried out with gusto and invested in regularly will bring you untold rewards of great engagement and exposure! Ready? Let’s begin.

Step 1. Make your page interesting

I know this sounds obvious, but actually you wouldn’t believe how many boring pages there are on Facebook. This of course is great news for you as it means the market is wide open for fabulously designed interesting Facebook pages!

Here’s what I mean by interesting;


Step 2. Create epic content

This is a toughie. You would have to be some kind of Super Hero if you could create EPIC content with every post you make. But you must strive to deliver the most interesting, relevant and results based content you can for your target market.

One of the ways to do this is to ask yourself – Will this content I am about to publish create CHANGE! How can I invoke action? How can I add the most value?

All great questions to ask as you make a post and I mean any post, from a small status update to a full on promotional campaign. Need some inspiration for content ideas?

In the meantime by content I mean, status updates, videos, images, comments, blog posts, webinars, contest. Pretty much anything you publish publicly!

Step 3. Invite and tell all your friends

Facebook gives us the opportunity to invite our friends in the admin panel above our page.



So make good use of it and go and ask your pals if they’ll come and like your page.

You could also send a message out to some of your nearest and dearest and ask them to share with their community. Please note this will only work if their community is in the same niche as you. So if your target market is arts & crafts, it’s no good sending it your pal who specialises in personal finance!
Also please don’t SPAM! It’s super uncool. So don’t just send this out to a random group of people in your FB address book, hoping someone will do the right thing. You will end up with lots of people leaving your conversation, probably some spam reports and many unlikes!

Something you can do though, that is super powerful is to post about your new page on your personal wall, (include a photo), asking your friends to like it. I’ve done this very regularly and it always gets great results!

You can also set up a Facebook event announcing your new page and invite all your friends to the event and of course you can offer an ethical bribe in the form of a free gift, but people need to head over to your page to retrieve it. Very effective!

Step 4. Get networking

Absolutely necessary and absolutely time consuming! This is probably the most time consuming role you will have on Facebook but without this your business will grow very slowly!

The more you can get out into the Facebook community and comment on others posts, get involved in the conversation, like pages and generally be a social butterfly, the more you will reap the rewards!

One great tool to help you do this is “Interest Lists”. You can create interest lists for all your favorite pages and people, and then save it as your main news feed. This means you’ll only see posts from the pages and people you most want to see content from / network with and filter out all the noise!

Very effective and time saving!


Step 5.  Run contests

Who doesn’t love a good contest eh?? That’s what makes these little gems go viral! People love to win free stuff! Done correctly contests can rocket your fan base and your customer database in a very short space of time.

The key is to create a page tab for a contest and add a like-gate to the tab. That’s basically an image that overlays on top of the contest information and tells visitors they need to ‘like’ the page before they can enter the contest. You need to be creative with this as it can turn some people off, but on the whole, you’ll get a lot more likes and lots of contest entries also! (Remember on the thank you page of your contest you can encourage people to visit your website and all sorts, but I’ll save the benefits of funnel building for another post!)

Here’s my Top Tips to running a successful contest;

• Make your prize great & relevant! Not just an mini iPad. Remember you want to attract a targeted audience.
• Know the objective of your contest. If you’re simply looking to get a lot of likes and optins over a short period of time, make the contest super easy. A simple sweepstake will do, where the visitor enters their email address to enter. If you want to increase engagement, encourage reviews or create some user generated content for your site, then perhaps a picture contest or a video contest. Remember the higher the barrier to entry the less entrants, but possibly a higher quality more targeted audience.
• Make your contest easy to share! You want it to get out to as many people as possible, so add share links and encourage the entrant to share the contest for an increased chance of winning.
• Keep it short. To create excitement, add a bit of scarcity. Make the contest 1 – 2 weeks max and let everyone know as time is running out to enter. You’ll have lots of frantic activity in the last few days and a nice viral effect!
• Use a 3rd party app and ensure you comply with the Facebook promotional guidelines – https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.phpHave fun with it!!!

Here’s 15 more Steps for Creating Successful Social Media Giveaway Contests

Step 6. Host webinars

I LOVE webinars! When I first started my Facebook career way back when, I would say that webinars were the biggest draw of fans to my page and customers to my business! The same is true today. With every webinar I market, present and replay I gather a huge new raft of fans and potential customers.

PLUS and here’s the biggie… A webinar means you create INSTANT RAPPORT with your audience. If you invite people to attend a webinar with you and you spend an hour or so giving epic content and chatting with your audience you will find there is really nothing more powerful, except perhaps to be in a room one to one with them.

Again you can create a page tab for your webinar registration form and market the page. As people come to register for the webinar, because you have an interesting page, epic content and loads going on they will of course like your page and engage with your posts. Thereby building your fan base, your engagement rates and your subscriber database.

Step 7. Facebook ads

I couldn’t write an entire post about increasing your fan base without Facebook ads. Well I can’t nowadays anyway. I remember the days when our posts were seen by the majority of our fans!
Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Our posts are only seen by approximately 10 – 15% of our fans so to get our message out into the news feeds of all of our likers, we have to pay! Whilst I would rather get it for free, as someone who has been in marketing for over 20 years I can also see why FB are doing it this way and I have to say, Facebook ads are cheaper and more targeted than any offline marketing techniques I have used over the years.

So as business owners and marketers we really shouldn’t moan too much!


I have to tell you, the ads that get us the BEST results are page post ads. In other words, you post a normal status update, with a very interesting 90 character first line, a fantastic image and a compelling description and then use the Facebook ads platform to target it specifically. These ads show up on the right hand side of the newsfeed like normal ads, but are more descriptive and have the wonderful social element of people liking, commenting, sharing etc.

You can also get these ads into the newsfeed and hence pockets (via mobile) of your target audience by using the power editor. I’m afraid I will have to leave explanation of using the power editor to another post as it really is a subject all on it’s own. It is there and it is very effective.

Step 8. Interesting threads

OK, we’re heading towards the home stretch here! I have seen some great threads over my time surfing the Facebook landscape. But I have to tell you, they’re few and far between. Most of the stuff you’ll see coming down your newsfeed is absolute drivel! Sorry posters, but it’s true.

Much like Point 1, this leaves it wide open for you to get in there and be original and interesting!

An example of an interesting thread is when it’s more focused on the customer than your business. I saw a speed coaching thread recently that made me go and instantly like the page.

The host had posted – in the next 30 minutes I am going to answer all of your questions, post NOW. He had absolutely loads of comments and questions being fired at him and he went through and answered every single one. It was an amazing thread of info. Another idea is having a guest ‘poster’, So getting someone well respected in your niche and having them come to your wall for a couple of hours to answer fan questions.

Something we used to do was at a specific time on a specific day have a themed event, ie., one very successful one we ran was 60 book suggestions in 60 minutes. We had hundreds of comments, book suggestions and discussions that everyone could get a lot out of. Plus of course a whole load of new likes!

Please note to run these type of ‘wall’ events, you need to be consistent. Just doing one won’t cut it. So only start this if you have the resource to keep it going.

Step 9. Add a Facebook “like” box to your blog/website

Super important and super easy! Add a like box to your blog.

Here’s how.

1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
2. Click on “Like Box”
3. Enter the URL of your fan page
4. Copy the code and paste into the sidebar of your blog or wherever you want it to show on your website.

People can now “like” your facebook page from your website.

Step 10. The engagement circle

This is a little diagram I created maybe a year or so ago and I affectionately called it “The Engagement Circle”.


As you grow your Facebook page and your business, you will build a customer database or a ‘list’ as it’s known in the online marketing world. As you create more content and more posts and hold more events etc, you should be emailing your database and inviting them to come over and like and engage with your page. Not everyone who signs up will have liked your page, so you need to ask them to!

Why do I need them to like my page if they’re already in my email database Jo, I hear you cry? The answer is you want to be able to communicate with your prospective audience on a multitude of platforms. Email, Social Media, Skype, Instant Messaging, Evernote, Drive – there are so many more options these days.

The more channels you can disseminate information across, the more chance you have of getting in front of the eyes of your target market. Remember there is a lot of noise out there, it’s your job as a marketer to cut through that noise and directly impact your potential customers with your Epic Content!

I’m sure you’ve heard this before many times, but please remember it’s about quality not quantity. There’s no point in having a page with 100,000 fans if no-one engages, gets involved or turns into a customer! This is a business remember!

But know this, getting to your first 1000 fans is just the first step. Next you need to turn your fans into customers, but that’s another story coming to a blog post near you soon…..

Now don’t just read – go out and take action on one of these steps today! Right NOW!

Have you ran any super successful fan getting campaigns? If so I’d love to hear about them! Let’s chat! Comment or leave feedback below, I will respond to every single post!

Thanks so much for reading! I hope this post has been useful!

Twitter is about making news, information and content flow across the social web.
It is loved by politicians, often used badly by celebrities and is a bloggers best friend. Twitter is often misunderstood as it has a funny name, can be seen as trivial (only 140 characters) and only available in mono-media (text only).

Scratch its surface and start to dig deeper and Twitter’s true character starts to be revealed. It is nimble, efficient and it works well in a time poor society.

It has developed multi-media capabilities and YouTube videos, images and even Slideshare presentations are viewable and can be embedded in the stream of tweets.

There are two basic principles that will help you get your tweets to be shared by your followers in large numbers.

1. Quantity – Build a significant following on Twitter as bigger is better.
2. Quality – Engage with your followers and build a  loyal and fanatical fan base that will love to share your tweets.

Combine these two and you are well on the way to having your news, information and content retweeted widely at velocity.

So how do you get more retweets on Twitter?

10 top tips to get more retweets

There are some  basic tips that will help you get your tweets retweeted  more. Some are obvious and others may surprise you.

Here are some easy to implement tips on how to get more retweets.

1. Ask  for a retweet (eg. “Please ReTweet”)
2. Tweet links
3. Pick the right time of day (Tweet between 12-2)
4. Leave room for a retweet (The sweet spot for a retweet is use between 71-100 characters)
5. Use hashtags
6. Include one of the top retweetable phrases
7. Write a tempting headline
8. Pick the right day of the week (Friday)
9. Don’t make the tweet about you
10. Tweet the latest news

Here is an infographic which puts the art of getting retweeted on Twitter in a visual format.



Infographic source: Visual.ly 

In 2005 a Greek American woman started a political blog. As the traffic grew more funding was required. This meant that in August 2006 the venture fund SoftBank Capital was called upon to invest $5 million into the site to hire more staff and to provide the resources needed to make the updates to feed the news cycle 24/7 as the site grew in popularity.



Two years later in November 2008, another $15 million was raised to maintain the momentum as the blog added more journalism resources and local reporting was ramped up across the USA.

The power of celebrity was embraced with politicians, academics and famous power brokers in all areas of business and industry contributing articles to the blog.

It was in June 2011 that the blog’s website traffic passed the doyen of traditional media, the “New York Times” for the first time.

“In just six years new media had disrupted 100 years of traditional media”

Seven years after the first post was published, it was sold to AOL for $315 million to add to its other online blog assets including Engadget, TechCrunch and MovieFone.

Today it’s website traffic is measured at over 77 million visitors per month.

That  blog is Huffington Post.

Tipping point

In the blogging world this was a watershed moment. Never before had so much money been paid for a blog.

New media is replacing and disrupting old media.

The old business model that made many media moguls billionaires and king makers was based upon the rivers of gold which were generated from classified ads. Today it is the website traffic that is creating the cash and the influence is moving online.

Huffington Post was purchased by AOL because of three key elements.

• Its online and global influence
• Advertising revenue 
• Traffic

In one sense this new media is just a variation of old media except that it is online. It is still traffic, eyeballs and advertising.

It just happens to be digital.

The new media models

The new models are not so simple but multifaceted and convoluted. Making money from new media is not a singular approach but often a matrix of multiple opportunities and tactics.

Blogging has evolved rapidly because of the social web and in the past was driven by building email lists which took a lot of time. With the advent of social media their marketing and growth have been supercharged.

Global reach and influence at the speed of a tweet, a Facebook share or a viral video.

To make money from a blog in 2013 you do not have to be a Huffington Post. There are many ways to make a living out of blogging that can enhance your current business and lifestyle that are within everyone’s reach.

Let’s have a look at some of them.

1. Advertising

Just to show that the Huffington Post is not a one off, there are many blogs that generate significant revenue in then millions. One of those is Mashable.



Mashable’s model is based almost exclusively on building huge amounts of traffic that makes it an attractive platform for advertising. Current page views per month total approximately 50 million.  This also means producing a lot of content. To put that in perspective Mashable publishes dozens of articles a day to feed the content beast.

They work hard at optimizing their advertising and  have developed technology for:

• Infinite ad scrolling
• Story telling ads unit
• Content velocity algorithm

This blogging business model is becoming harder as advertising rates fall. But the rewards can be great with some reports that Peter Cashmore is worth nearly $100 Million US and the blog has been valued at over $200 million.

2. Sponsorship

Suzi Dafnis is the clever business brain behind a very successful blog that targets business women in Australia. It is called the Australian Business Women’s Network.  She must be doing something right! It has just won “Best Australian Blogs Competition” in the business Category.



Sponsorship is the main revenue source with sponsors including American Express, Optus and GoToWebinar.

3. Webinars and Seminars

Social Media Examiner was only started 4 years ago by Mike Stelzner and made its first million dollars within 12 months through paid online webinars. Mike (who by the way is one of the true gentlemen of the blogging world) has used his attention to detail, process and savvy business acumen to create a blog that is now ranked in the top 60 blogs in the world in just 48 months.
Mike knows how to shine the spotlight on others and hence they have returned the favour.



Prior to starting the Social Media Examiner blog Mike had run other blogs and businesses including one on how to “Write White Papers”. Mike has moved into producing conferences, with the recent success of the inaugural “Social Media Marketing World” in  San Diego.

If you want an insight into how he made his blog such a success I would recommend you read his book “Launch – How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition”

4. Speaking

Blogs can be the platform that makes you visible. This includes being invited to speak at conferences, workshops and seminars. Guy Kawasaki uses his blog as an online platform to promote his speaking and his books.



Guy understands the importance of an online platform for building credibility and marketing his personal brand. He also understands the power of social media and has nearly 1.3 million Twitter followers

5. Books

Tim Ferriss is the author of  the New York Times best seller “The Four Hour Work Week”, which was about creating a success lifestyle in a web world. He has used his blog to launch not just one but three books after the huge success of his first book.



Tim uses his blog as his promotion platform for his books and for engaging and sharing his inspiration for experiments in lifestyle design.

6. Affiliate

Affiliate marketing  is the art of either selling other people’s products on your blog or getting affiliates to sell your products.  Brendon Burchard is one of many who have perfected this art and science.



One of the the key secrets to succeeding in this is building promotional partnerships with powerful online influencers and other bloggers who have significant followings online. Some of the pioneers in this space include Frank Kerns and Jeff Walker.

It can supercharge your revenue. For a further insight into how Brendon achieved success his book “Millionaire Messenger” is worth a read.

Another blogger and podcaster that understands how to use affiliate marketing to create revenue and is worth checking out is Pat Flynn, who is the force behind the blog “Smart Passive Income”

7. Consulting

Mark Schaefer is the force behind the awesome blog “Grow“. He uses his blog as his front door and shingle to his consulting, educating and training business that helps businesses grow by tapping into the marketing power of social media.




8. Online Courses

Amy Porterfield is a blogger and a professional Facebook expert who has created and developed online training which is her main revenue stream. Her flagship course is Facebook  Training 101 – FB Influence. 



She understood the importance of her blog as the online portal to her online courses.

9. eBooks

Darren Rowse is the genius behind Problogger. Not only has he made that blog a business success but also started a Photography Blog called “Digital Photography School” with over 1 million subscribers . His eBooks on “blogging” and “photography” have become his main source of income.




Darren makes money from his blog in 12 different ways. So making money from your blog is not just limited to one revenue stream. The challenge is working out how you can monetize with multiple channel sources.

10. Premium content – Paid Membership

Timothy Sykes blog is about how to make money on the stock market and his main source of revenue is by selling premium content which is accessed through paying to be a member on his site.



Premium content that is only accessible via monthly membership is a proven model and another one worth checking out is Psd.Tutsplus.com which is a resource and learning site for those who want to learn photoshop.

11. Sell Products

Tucker Max is a blog and brand that is memorable but maybe for all the wrong reasons. If hedonism is your thing then Tucker Max is is your man. He makes money from the blog in a variety of ways. The main source of income is selling his products on Amazon.


It highlights that even a bad image can be monetised. The creativity is up to you!



































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Twitter has been my number one social media platform for quite a long time. That was actually the first social network I embraced after I started my blog.



Over the course of more than two years I dedicated a lot of my free time to not only expanding my Twitter network but to also to actually engage with  people who cared about what I shared and who enjoyed my content.

As much as you’d like to say that quantity doesn’t matter, well, it does.

The more people I “persuade” to follow me, the more visitors my blog ends up receiving. The traffic Twitter brings me is now significant with 5,500 visitors a month coming from the 140 character social network.

If you’d like to increase your targeted Twitter traffic the way I did, here are six of the most effective ways to get more quality Twitter followers that I have discovered.

Anyway, let’s get started:

1. Start with the profile picture

When someone lands on your profile, the first thing to catch their eye is your profile picture.
Especially now with the new profiles, where the photo is at the center of the header, it can really give people a hint of whether or not they should click ‘follow’.



So, when it comes to choosing a suitable avatar, there are three golden rules:

1. Make sure it’s a photo of “you”

When you follow someone you expect them to be a real person. And unfortunately when it comes to Twitter, there are literally millions of fake accounts. That is why you have to make sure to add a real photo and not one you found on the internet for instance. Additionally if you are a business then you are far better off creating an additional Twitter account instead of putting a business logo on your personal profile just to promote your business.

2. Make sure it’s big enough

A lot of people tend to click on the avatar to see a person’s profile picture in a bigger size. There are a lot of folks out there however, whose photo is just as big as the size of the frame. What I’d advice you is to re-size your photo to say 300 by 300 pixels, so that it actually becomes bigger once someone clicks on it. A small, blurry and pixellated picture says that you don’t pay attention to the small details and that isn’t a good start.

3. Make sure your face is recognizable

What many Twitter users do is to simply upload a picture of them in full-size. Consider how small the avatar is, if you put a whole-body picture, then end result will be hard to distinguish. So absolutely make sure that the photo is only of your upper-body.

2. Don’t forget about hashtags

Hashtags are kinda like when you use a specific keyword within an article to make it rank higher in the search engines. When you use them, you are targeting your tweet to the people using the words you’ve included in your hashtags.



I used to have a problem with hashtags. In my eyes they just didn’t look good and were making some of the tweets look quite unreadable.

But you know what?

Hashtags aren’t the problem. Using them is a great way to guarantee your message gains more exposure with the right people.

The problem is how you use them.

The 3 “Don’ts” of Hashtags

1. Don’t include too many

Let’s assume you are sharing an article of yours on Twitter and decide to add some hashtags to improve its visibility. Since the title is short and doesn’t take much of your 160 characters limit, you decide to include five hashtags. Is that a good move? No. It just looks spammy… And no one likes that kind of obvious self-promotion. I’d say two or three hastags at most.

2. Don’t be too specific

Twitter unlike Google doesn’t have a huge search volume. This basically means that you can get your message seen even if you use a broader term. On the other hand if you are too specific, probably no one is going to see your tweet via Twitter search. I’ve found that including more general terms like #Marketing, #SocialMedia, #Blogging or #Design results in the most retweets and favorites.

3. Don’t make your tweets unreadable

A bad practice I often see is replacing parts of an article’s title with hashtags. For instance if we have the article “10 Great Social Media Tips for Marketers”, some folks would tweet it like “10 Great #SocialMedia #Tips for #Marketers”. The end result is a tweet that you don’t really feel like clicking or retweeting just because it looks ugly.

3. Get into guest blogging

Guest blogging… What does this have to do with getting more Twitter followers?



Guest blogging is a popular link-building technique. Many bloggers out there write guest articles only because they want to improve their search traffic. That behavior is probably one of the reasons why Google will keep a close eye on guest blogging this year.

And indeed guest blogging is much more than just being a way to improve SEO. In fact getting your content published on well-known, high-trafficked blogs is a sure way to create awareness about your brand.

This can be done by being a guest author. I have written articles for blogs like Traffic Generation Cafe and Kikolani.

Although all those guest posts helped me boost my organic traffic, the more important benefit was that I got in front of a new and highly relevant audience. This resulted in a torrent of new subscribers, followers and fans.

The thing is if people enjoy what you have to say, they will most certainly look for your social accounts. You don’t even have to share them. To date my five-week guest blogging endeavour has resulted in hundreds of new Twitter followers, Facebook fans and Google Plus users circling me.

4. Follow others with a strategy

Following new Twitter users is a great way to discover people with similar interests and to find interesting sources of information.

Another great benefit from doing so is that you can also get more eyeballs on your content.
How is that possible?

Well, the fact is a lot of people take a look at your Twitter profile when you follow them. So, if you follow people in your own niche who share your topics, there’s a good chance to get them to also follow you.

If we have to speak in numbers, I am able to get around 20% of the ones who I follow to also follow me back.

But how do you find relevant folks to follow in the first place?

Obviously you shouldn’t just go for the first dozen of Twitter users who you come across. You need to think strategically.

Tweepi is a great tool that allows you to follow either the followers or the friends (i.e. mutual followers) of a Twitter user of your choice.

For instance you can discover some of the influencers in your niche and start following their followers. Additionally Tweepi allows you to filter the list of followers by how active they are, how much tweets they are sharing, how much followers they have and how much people they are following.



How to use Tweepi

• You sign-up for an account and connect your Twitter profile. You hover over “Follow Tweeps”, click “@user’s friends”, choose whose friends you’ll follow and click “Start Following“.
• From that point on you can simply click on the different fields (e.g. “#followers”, “#friends”, “#statuses”), choose filters and set them up.
• Once you are finished with that you start following people from the list. Make sure to follow only those who have a real photo as an avatar!

NOTE: You should be very careful with the number of people you follow per day. I’d say you are safe with around 100-150 follows every day. That way you are far from the 1,000 follows limit and your account is safe.

5. Think about your email signature

As a blogger you will be sending and receiving a ton of emails.

And when it comes to email that is probably the most “personal” way to communicate in the online world. That in terms means most of the people you email to will probably be interested to stay in touch.

The simplest set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing you could do is to create some sort of signature. The signature will be automatically inserted at the end of each email you write and send.



If you are an Yahoo user, you can easily set your signature by going to the wrench-like icon on the right hand side, beside your profile image. Clicking on it will display a menu. There you choose “Mail options” and go to “Signature”. Now it’s all up to your creativity. You can include fancy images and HTML if you like.

As for me I am sticking to simplicity:

Follow me on Twitter | Join my Facebook page | Connect with me on LinkedIn | Circle me on Google+
That is basically how my signature looks like. Simple yet effective.

You definitely won’t get a ton of new followers that way, but you can be almost certain that the ones who follow you will actually engage and click on your tweets.

6. Feel free to ask for retweets

Some weeks ago at my blog I shared a very interesting infographic that shared a study’s results on how to get more retweets. Something important that the study reveals is that you can get a lot more people (around 51%) to retweet your tweets if you simply ask them to.


And since that seemed like a very promising strategy I decided to give it a try. Now over the course of almost a month I have probably sent out over 30-40 tweets, asking people to retweet the tweet.

The interesting thing was that although those tweets ended up receiving double or even triple the usual retweets, people were not clicking at all.

So it turns out that for instance tweeting something along the lines of

“I would really appreciate a retweet! –> Post Title http://post.url.com” is a better way to promote your profile and get people to see it than to actually get a ton of traffic from clicks.

Basically since your post will get more retweets, more of the followers of your followers will see the tweet. Hence you can expect new follows from Twitter users, who you haven’t been able to reach before.

And there’s the question, how often should you follow that practice?

I am doing it every time I publish a new article, which equates to not more than three times per week. That is how I’d recommend you to proceed as well.

































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Facebook keeps changing the rules.



Some of us will love them, others will tear their hair out and wring their hands. There will be those who complain and scream at the moon.

So what are the new rules, guidelines and policies that Facebook wants you to embrace? In essence you are now allowed to include a “call to action” for promoting that event, book or competition. The old rule of not having anymore than 20% text still applies.

The previous policies that prohibited effective marketing text in the image for brands was always a nonsense. So it’s good to see some commonsense emerge after 12 months!

How are some brands taking advantage of these new rules and breaking what were the old Facebook cover photo guidelines? How can you take advantage and apply them to Facebook’s cover photo and images to increase sales and conversions?

Here are 5 examples that you can use as inspiration to get people to book, buy or subscribe.

1. Mari Smith

Mari hasn’t messed about and has leapt in and is promoting her free webinar. You just gotta love that great smile!



2. Skype

The new rules from Facebook allow you to promote a contest. Here is one of Skype’s efforts with its “presenters” contest.



3. Hubspot

Hubspot has aalways been big on offering free ebooks that offer great value. Here is an example of their Facebook cover image which takes advantage of allowing that call to action in three simple steps.

 

4. Inbound Zombie

John Haydon’s “CTA” couldn’t be much simpler for his Inbound Zombie brand. The “Call to Action” is very clear… text and arrow!



5. ShortStack

It seems that simplicity is a consistent theme with ShortStack making asking for a “like” ….simple, fun and colorful.













































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Content curation services, which had been one of the choice tools of marketing experts for some time now, are finally entering the mainstream.



Some research done by the guys over at LikeHack showed that this service is now often used not by marketing consultants but by ordinary people. This is due to information overload and the rising need for content filtering.

For this reason, content curation is evolving from not being only a professional tool but a tool that saves web surfers time as personal service.

The demise of Google Reader is only going to accelerate the use of these tools as people switch to these emerging technologies to filter their content to save them time and increase content relevance.

What is content curation?

A content curator is a service that uses algorithms to show the user only the most relevant and appropriate content with respect to a specific niche or topic. It is a great marketing tool with unusually broad filtering capabilities and information selection that can be used to develop and promote a business. In 2012, Forbes called content curation one of the five hottest new web trends.

Companies like American Express and Whole Foods already actively use this marketing tool to curate content that might be of interest to their customers. Other companies use it to create their own online newspapers or select articles for the corporate blog.


However, content curation has been gradually developing from a niche marketing tool into a mainstream product. Personal content curation services are proliferating*:



Moreover, the team at LikeHack used SEMRUSH to analyze the search engine traffic  to curation sites like paper.li and observed that the increase in the number of visits slowed to nothing in the past six months.

Paper.li traffic:



It is important to note that the actual popularity of the phrase “content curation” has not decreased. On the contrary, GoogleTrends clearly show that the popularity of the keyword query and its various forms is growing.

What does this mean?

It means that more and more people are interested in content curation; it is no longer just for marketing professionals..

Why is this happening?

Everybody knows that the amount of information exchanged through social networks and feeds is growing exponentially, following the well-known Moore‘sLaw. According to LikeHack’s research based on 3 million user accounts, people spend approximately one hour every day looking through unnecessary information. There are several services available today which solve this problem, and they are growing in popularity:  Likehack, Storify, Pearltrees, Getprismatic and others.

For example, here are the stats for GetPrismatic:



Traffic to the site has grown considerably. A similar trend can be observed with other services. Today there are services that allow you to filter your Facebook, Twitter and RSS feed, showing only what’s most interesting and relevant.

4 Content Curation Tools

Here are four tools that will help you get the content you need on the topics that you love without having to Google every time.

1. LikeHack

LikeHack is an easy to use tool that helps save you time by aggregating, curating and delivering the top stories on your topics of interest.

Key features

• Aggregates your Facebook, Twitter and blogs
• Curates and highlights what really matters
• Delivers top stories via web app, e-mail, etc.
• Providing a personal search engine for all your content

2. Storify

Storify users tell stories by collecting updates from social networks to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It can source content from journalists, bloggers, editors and people just like you.

Key features

• Top stories – see the best of what other people are posting with stories made from images, videos, links, updates and other media collected by Storify users
• Search – You can search to find media collected on Storify. Search results are based on the resonance each media item has on the platform
• Create your own stories – It lets you curate social networks to build social stories, bringing together media scattered across the Web into a coherent narrative
• Find key elements on different social networks – You can search social media networks to find media elements about the topic you want to Storify. Includes Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and more
• Curate the elements – Drag and drop status updates, photos or videos to bring together the social media elements that will best illustrate your story
• Add your own voice and narrative to the the elements you have curated
• Embed your stories on blogs and websites using an embed code

3. Pearltrees

Pearltrees in essence is a visual and collaborative library.

Key features

• Collect – Allows you to collect web pages, photos and notes and turn into what they call “pearls”
• Organise – These can be organised on categories into “Pearltrees” that can e synchronised across devices
• Discover – Allows you to explore content already organised by people with similar interests and also collaborate
• Share – Allows you to share what you have created in your library 

4. GetPrismatic 

GetPrismatic is about creating a news feed based on your interests. It’s along the lines of Google Reader and Flipboard.

It finds the things you like on your social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and serves them up to you.



Conclusion

Thus, a marketing tool has also become a personal service. Different software makers use different algorithms for selecting and showing content, but any of them can save the web surfer time and increase their productivity. This niche is expected to grow as long as there is a glut of information and a demand for increased personal productivity and efficiency.

Insights provided by LikeHack, a personal content curation tool that helps people to stay in the loop and still be productive.











































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If you’ve been keeping an eye on your Facebook page’s reach metrics, you may have noticed some changes in what you’re seeing and who’s seeing you.



In February, Facebook announced they had killed a bug which had been affecting the way reach had been reported within insights since last September.  Actual reach was never affected, but the way it was reported within “Insights” was, causing massive confusion.   After the bug was killed, and “Insights” was returned to “normal”, Facebook issued a statement which made several vague promises: your reach may not change, but it may improve, but it depends…

Whatever.

Their statement didn’t make much sense. Here’s what we’ve discovered since the bug was killed, and how it may affect you.

What we discovered

Based on data collected from over 4,000 pages of all sizes, as of May 27th, the average page post reaches about 21.4% of the total fans for the page, according to the Agorapulse Barometer. But this fan reach varies tremendously depending on the size of your page, going from 28% of the fans for pages with less than 1,000 fans to 9% for pages with more than 100k fans.

Between February 25th and April 22nd, organic reach remained pretty steady, but viral reach has increased by 200% on average.  Monthly viral reach stats have gone from the equivalent of 100% of fan bases to almost 400%.

 
This doesn’t necessarily mean your viral reach will have tripled since February.  These averages span a broad spectrum of over 4,000 pages of all sizes, and the bug was only affecting certain types of impressions (for example, paid impressions in the newsfeed or impressions of shared content).

Your reach will vary greatly depending on your content strategy, posting frequency and the type of engagement you were getting.

Case studies

Below are the results immediately following the bug fix from three pages with normal posting activity from the sample above:

1. One very (very!) active political page with good engagement (600,000 fans)
2. Charity page with very (very!) high engagement (230,000 fans)
3. e-commerce page with low engagement (1 Million fans)

Example #1.

In three weeks, our active political page experienced an increase in organic reach of about 15%, while viral reach increased by more than 739%.



Example #2.

Our charity page remained steady in their organic reach, but their viral reach increased by 1,000%.

Example #3.

Our e-commerce brand page also had no increase in organic reach, but their viral reach increased by 135%.

The Facebook “Bug” is fixed

Based on the data we’ve collected, most pages won’t see an increase in organic reach since the bug was killed. Nearly all pages have experienced an increase in viral reach since February, but the magnitude of the increase will depend highly upon the level of engagement each page was receiving on its posts.

If you spent six months worrying about the crazy fluctuation of your page’s reach, you can lay your concerns to rest. Actual reach was never down.  The way it was being reported in your insights was.  And, if your content strategy is still the same, you should find your reach metrics have gone back to their pre-september level.

If you’d like to see how your reach statistics have been affected by this bug fix, you can check it out on the free Facebook Page Performance Barometer we used to extract this data.








































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This week's need-to-know social-media news.

After explosive devices detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, killing three and injuring 180 people, social media sites including Twitter erupted -- but not always with trustworthy information. Several top news organizations came under fire for reporting information despite conflicting reports of what was unfolding. For business owners who often share or comment on breaking news over social media, it was easy to wind up sharing faulty information. And some brands ran afoul of consumer rage when their marketing efforts -- many running on automated programs -- were issued amid the chaos.


The confusion continued as the week went on. By Thursday, the FBI reprimanded users of sites like reddit for conducting their own digital manhunt for the Boston bombers. Similarly, local Boston police asked journalists on Friday to stop live-tweeting police actions and scanner traffic in order to preserve the safety of officers and the effectiveness of their manhunt.

Given the immediacy of how news is spread over social media, and the potential for sharing incorrect information, business owners should avoid sending scheduled marketing messages and commenting on moment-by-moment updates during sensitive breaking news events. For brands, a more effective use of social media could be to share links to positive and constructive services. In this case, examples might have included Google's Person Finder tool or EvidenceUpload.org, a way for people to send their photos and videos from the marathon directly to the FBI. -- PRDaily, ReadWrite, Daily Dot and Mashable

Twitter Music officially launches.

Twitter's much-rumored music service helps users discover new music that was previously under their radar. "Most of Twitter Music feels like just another Spotify, or just another Last.fm," writes the Wall Street Journal's Matthew Lynley, noting that heavy music listeners probably already have profiles on other music-discovery services, and may not want to duplicate them. On the other hand, Lynley says, the emerging artists section of Twitter "shows exactly how powerful Twitter's data set can be at surfacing relevant music to even the most well-equipped music fanatics." -- The Wall Street Journal

Medium acquires long-form publishing platform MATTER.

Publishing startup Medium has joined forces with MATTER, an innovative platform for long-form journalism on science, technology and the future. Launched last October by Twitter and Blogger co-founder Evan Williams, Medium is an invite-only service that aims to be a new kind of home for thoughtful reading and writing. MATTER raised $140,000 on Kickstarter early last year to launch a site that promotes quality, in-depth journalism through subscriptions and individual article sales. "Experimenting with tweaks to the model and the way we distribute our content will be a vital way of making MATTER robust in the long term," MATTER said in an announcement. -- Mashable

Twitter creates a new position: data editor.

Twitter has hired Simon Rogers away from British newspaper The Guardian to be its first data editor. Rogers is a 15-year veteran of The Guardian and editor of its Datablog, which he created in 2009. "Twitter has become such an important element in the way we work as journalists," Rogers said on his personal blog. "As data editor, I'll be helping to explain how this phenomenon works." -- AllTwitter

Gotcha! Social media popularity doesn't equal credibility.

Kevin Ashton, a manager at electronics firm Belkin and a former entrepreneur, created a persuasive online identity for an imaginary digital-culture guru named Santiago Swallow. The fake expert's online presence included a website, a Wikipedia page and a seemingly verified Twitter account with 80,000 followers. Ashton's explanation of how and why he did it makes for a fascinating read. He used the experiment as a springboard for outing self-proclaimed experts and bestselling authors whose online followings are mostly fake. -- Quartz




































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YouTube has become a hot site for businesses looking to promote their products and services. But not every business gets acceptable results from their YouTube marketing videos.


Success on YouTube depends on what you want to accomplish with your online videos. So, before you press the record button your video camera, answer some key questions about your YouTube video strategy.

1. Should your business even be on YouTube?

Not every type of business is a good fit for YouTube. Put simply, if you can't show your product or service in action, don't put it on YouTube.

For example, if you sell or manufacture power tools, it can be easy to show how a power drill works in a short video. But if you offer college-tutoring services, you don't have much to demonstrate on camera, so YouTube might not make sense.

Even if you can demonstrate what you do in videos, you still need to set a clear goal for what you hope to accomplish. Your goal will help you determine what type of video to produce.

2. Do you want to attract new customers or support existing ones?

For many companies, YouTube is an ideal medium for attracting new customers. You pull them in by showing them your product and how it works, and then direct them to your website for more information or to close the sale. Since you can't link directly from a video, you'll need to superimpose your URL onscreen and include the URL in the video's text description.

You also can use YouTube to provide additional information and support to existing customers. For example, if you sell children's outdoor playsets, you might produce a video showing how to assemble them. A how-to video can be much more effective than printed instructions, and can cut down the volume of post-sale customer support calls.

3. Do you want to inform or educate with your video?

The most successful YouTube videos tend to accomplish one of three things: inform, educate or entertain. While entertaining videos are the most likely to go viral, they're also the most difficult to pull off. That's why most businesses focus on either informing or educating with their videos.

An informative video can provide details about a specific product, your company or industry, or simply topics of interest to potential customers. For example, if you're an attorney, you might produce a series of videos that discuss important legal issues. If you run a bed and breakfast, you might offer video tours of your facilities.

An educational video shows customers how to do something, typically in step-by-step fashion. For example, if you sell computer-networking equipment, you might produce a video that shows customers how to set up a home network -- using your equipment, of course. If you sell musical instruments, it's a no-brainer to offer a series of music instruction videos.

Some businesses naturally gravitate to either an informative or educational approach, while others can go either way. For example, if you run a restaurant, you could produce informative videos that show your top dishes in attractive settings, or you could produce educational videos that show customers how to cook their own versions of some of your favorite recipes.

Whether you take the informative or educational video approach depends a lot on your company's image and your own personal style. But whichever approach you take, remember that YouTube is a soft sell medium, meaning viewers tend to reject direct commercial messages. Offer potential customers something useful, however, and you'll help to build your brand over the long term.



































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Do you often update your Facebook business Page with new photos?



Do you have a particular posting strategy or just publish random pictures from time to time?

The fact is that with the latest Facebook policy changes, photo updates are now getting less organic reach than ever before. Nevertheless, the popularity of photo posts remains unshakeable: the majority of content posted on Facebook is pictures.

How can you use photo updates on Facebook to drive more engagement including likes, comments and shares?

Here are seven practices picked from popular Facebook Pages to help your photo posts get higher viral results and make more people learn about your business.

#1. Appeal to Personal Experience

On the whole, Facebook fans are ordinary people with similar tastes and habits. So photos appealing to fans’ personal experience have a good potential to reach large audience on Facebook. Fans more willingly respond to familiar things and situations, when they can say “Look, it’s about me!”.



Caption: AXE makes their fans recollect best school moments. Result: 34.5K likes, 2.1K shares.

There are some general themes everyone can use in this kind of photo update: memories from childhood, hard Mondays and long-awaited Fridays, Internet addiction, well-known movies and games, handheld gadgets, etc.

Perhaps, such a picture won’t tell much about your company or product (unless you try to tie it in). But this helps you to increase engagement around your photo update which will give you better exposure in news feeds and attract others to your page.

#2. Use Humor

Most likely, the products or services your company offers have little to do with humor.

However, is there a way for you to use funny pictures around your product features?



Caption: Firefox shows their page display options in such a funny way. Result: 9K likes, 1.7K shares

There are lots of cool images on the Web to make your fans laugh (or at least draw attention to your post in the news feed).

Put yourself in your fans’ place. Pick a funny picture your fans will understand and try to connect it with your brand or product.



Caption: Intel jokes on the “conception” of computers. Result: 105K likes, 36K shares.

Don’t go too far with black humor or vulgarity; otherwise the message of your update will be lost.
Images that are too provocative may encourage your fans to unsubscribe from your Facebook Page.

#3. Ask for Likes and Shares

Nobody welcomes long complicated comments that accompany photo posts; they’re simply ignored by fans in the news feed. So when you write text to go with an image, keep it short and ask your fans to like or share the update if they agree or feel the same.



Caption: Skype asks fans to like the post if they occurred in the similar situation. Result: 1.7K likes.

You may even invite fans to vote for one thing or another by using Like and Share buttons.



Caption: Walmart launches Facebook voting for the best Monopoly token: “Like” for cat, “Share” for iron. Result: 48K likes, 2.8K shares.

You won’t get valid stats using such a polling method, but inviting social sharing can increase the virality of such posts.

#4. Capitalize on Current Events

Use news or sensational topics as a way to remind fans about your brand. This could include political happenings, business or tech news, sporting events, upcoming holidays, etc. Just be sure you pick a tie-in that isn’t obscure; you want to find one that the masses will understand.


Caption: Lay’s plays around the election topic. Result: 6.3K likes, 3.3K comments.

Or you could just post a funny picture to provoke a discussion.



Caption: Freemake asks fans to share their opinion about Apple Maps. Result: 1.1K likes, 492 shares.

#5. Post Coupons and Giveaways

Though Facebook has a paid app called “Offers”, most businesses continue to post discount coupons and giveaways in the form of photo updates. Quite simply, photos are widely seen in the news feed and you don’t have to pay money to reach your customers globally or locally.

Such posts also have potential to attract new customers when seen by your fans’ friends.



Caption: Community Coffee grants 20% discount to all fans who manage to see the promo code.
Result: 2.2K likes, 347 shares.

#6. Provide an Inside Look at Your Company

People are curious by nature. That’s why to learn more about a person, we’d rather look through their photos than their bio. That said, try to put faces to your business.

Facebook fans will definitely love to see photos of your employees, especially if the pictures are done in an original way.

Show your employees as they assemble products, meet customers, or even ask a celeb to participate.



Caption: Dropbox employees meet Bono and The Edge (who actually invested into project). Result: 2.4 likes, 297 shares.

Photos that show what happens behind the scenes are a good way to enhance brand credibility.

#7. Push Fans to Comment

Comments are an important component of photo virality, so put thought into what you post. People comment when they have something to say in response. So why not publish content that will urge your fans to comment?

A simple question posted as a status update may easily be ignored in the news feed, while a question presented as a photo update will attract more attention and push fans to answer it.

Try to ask your fans something general about your product or their everyday life, so that everyone could answer your question.



Caption: A simple yes/no question got 3.6K comments from Microsoft fans.

You don’t have to stick to questions, though. You may post a quiz or a funny experiment; anything that pushes fans to share their opinions in comments.



Caption: A funny Freemake’s experiment with cell phone name brought 2.2K comments (vs. 269 likes and 289 shares).

What do you think? What other image posting tips have you had success with on Facebook? Share your thoughts in the comments below.











































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