When I speak to groups or am interviewed about Facebook, I am often asked to provide examples of companies that are “doing it right.” With well north of 500 million users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, companies are increasingly interested in how Facebook can be leveraged as part of their marketing campaigns. It’s only natural. Many companies jump in and set up a Facebook Page but aren’t really sure where to go from there. There is no strategy. No goals. No content calendar. Nada. The Facebook Page has been created and viola, all is done. Throw the Facebook logo on your marketing materials and everyone will flock to the Page. While you and I know this isn’t true, this is a consistent issue and one that I’ve run into more times than I can count.

As with any aspect of your marketing, if not done with thoughtfulness and some planning, just setting up your Facebook Page could become disastrous, frustrating and lead to abandoning something that could be a powerful way to build and connect with your community. Over the past couple years of working with clients when I was at New Marketing Labs, researching and writing my book and being an active user on Facebook, I have put together the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages (and their administrators). There surely are many other “sins” and many, if not all of them, apply to other social networks as well.

9 Deadly Sins of Facebook Pages and Their Administrators

Not having any goals

One of these days we will be able to stop talking about the need for goals in social media but so many companies are still just jumping in without knowing why they are doing it and what success looks like for them. You need to have goals. Whatever they may be, whatever success looks like for you, you must have goals. It could be that you want to gain 25 “likes” so you can get your custom URL. You could want your Facebook Page to become a top 10 referrer of traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter what the goal is, it matters that you have goals and a timeline for achievement.

Thinking it’s about YOU

It’s never about you. It’s never been about you. Make it about your community and you’ll find that you will reap far more benefits. It’s really that simple.

Page abandonment

I’m just as guilty of this as the next person managing Facebook Pages. It’s very easy to set up a Page, get all excited about it and then not touch for week’s on end. Not only are you missing out on opportunities to engage with your community on a platform where they’re spending an average of 55 minutes per day, you’re also hurting yourself with increasing your chances of appearing in your fans newsfeeds. If you’ve never read about the EdgeRank algorithm and how Facebook decides what appears in the newsfeed, stop reading this and go read this excellent article by TheNextWeb.

Acting like a robot

This is another one of those face palm moments that I have when I see a brand automating their content to Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are two separate platforms. Treat them as such. Do not post your tweets automatically to Facebook as status updates. Take the time to actually engage on Facebook. Create custom content that’s specific for your Facebook community.

Lack of engagement

If your community is taking time out of their schedule to engage with the content that you’re creating on Facebook, you can take the time to engage with them. Sure, every single comment or like doesn’t have to be responded to and sometimes you will have people there just trying to pick an argument with you or your company. You also don’t need to run down a list of comments with “Great, thanks” type comments. Use your best judgment and take the time to be thoughtful in your responses.

Inconsistency

This is the step prior to complete page abandonment. If you’re inconsistent with creating content and engaging in Facebook, then you can’t expect to have an active community. Not only will it hurt your EdgeRank from a technical perspective, your community won’t be used to the rate at which you produce content. You won’t be one of their “must check” Pages just like if you’re not active on your blog or other platforms, they will quickly move on there, as well.

Giving up too quickly

Just because there are 500 million people on Facebook doesn’t mean that within 3 days of launching your Facebook Page you will be reaching Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber levels. Success on Facebook is just like most other aspects of life: it takes hard and sustained work. You will not be cashing bonus checks a week after launching your Facebook Page just because you launched your Facebook Page.

Using too many tabs

Just because you can create multiple customized tabs doesn’t mean you should. Your Facebook Page is not your website, just on Facebook. If your Facebook Page strategy includes 18 custom tabs, slap yourself. Having a custom landing tab for your Facebook Page is an excellent way to carry brand consistency and to engage with your community as soon as they hit your Page. Having other content on another tab that may be relevant if they choose to “like” your Page can be useful to them. But, too many tabs and they will be confused, turned off and annoyed…the ninth deadly sin.

Annoying your fans

Just as you shouldn’t be inconsistent in your rate of posting content to your Facebook Page, you also shouldn’t post so much content that you annoy your fans. The fact that they clicked the “like” button doesn’t mean that they’re telling you “pummel me with updates and messages.” The fact that you can message your fans doesn’t mean that you should do it so much that it becomes annoying to you. Multiple times I have un-liked a Page or un-friended someone for too frequent of updates. This is your community and it can be a vibrant and successful community if you nurture them well. Always remember that.

There you have it, these are the 9 deadly sins of Facebook Pages. What are other “sins” that you see on the Facebook Pages that you visit?

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Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk

This morning started like every morning usually does, with me taking Sasha outside for her morning walk before heading to the office. I use the time that I walk her in the morning to gather my thoughts for the day, check and process email, jump into Twitter for a minute or two and read Playbook.

Sasha runs down the steps and outside with reckless disregard to my personal safety and therefore it can make it interesting to attempt to do all of those things while still trying to hold onto her leash and keep my shoulder nicely in its socket. As has happened before, I was busy writing a tweet while trying to walk down the steps. With a 60 lb dog charging ahead, I missed a step and stumbled a bit. Still determined to finish the tweet, I continued trying to type with one hand as we walked outside and ran into some scaffolding that’s set up for a little work that’s being done around my complex.

This series of events got me thinking of all of the times when tweeting, updating your Facebook status, texting, sending an email or just about anything else with a smartphone is probably not a smart idea. I then, of course, took to Twitter and Facebook, while still walking Sasha, and asked:

“You shouldn’t tweet or update your Facebook status when _________ [fill in the blank]“

The following are a combination of my own ideas, possibly based on some of my previous experiences (ahem!) and what some others who responded thought. Some are serious while many of them are meant to make you smile:

14 Situations When You Shouldn’t Tweet

1. Driving
2. Walking your dog
3. “You’re having a sleepless night” – Kathy Sperl-Bell
4. Walking up a flight of stairs
5. “You are hurt, upset or angry. Once it is published it is too late to take it back and will hurt someone else.” – Julie Arnold
6. Having a face to face conversation with someone else
7. “You have taken prescription drugs that have a ‘do not operate heavy machinery warning’. The internet is as heavy as it gets.” – Brian Simpson
8. Trying to seduce your significant other (and whatever else might happen after that!)
9. When you’re having your wedding photos taken (woops!)
10. Going down a flight of stairs
11. Swimming
12. “Someone needs your help. Put down the phone and help out!” – Chris Rauschnot
13. “You’re 12 beers into a bender” – Don Martelli
14. “You feel like you can rip someone’s face off.” – Patti Tacardo-Fousek

What would you add to this list?

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Photo Credit: thinkgeekmonkeys

We were interested by some of the data including the prediction that social media will drive more business value than SEO by 2013 and that over the next 3 years Google and Facebook will decline in importance while something new (and currently unknown) will emerge as the most important website or service.

Want to see what else these experts had to say? Here is the complete ebook as a presentation. If you want your own copy, you can download it.

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As engagement and sharing on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools continues to increase, many bloggers are noticing a sharp decrease in comments on their blogs.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that interest is declining.  RSS and email subscriptions, site traffic and social sharing may all be continuing to increase.  These are tracked through a variety of tools and even popular commenting system Disqus scours social networks to find blog posts being shared and displays those as “interactions”.

Increasingly bloggers are concerned that even though they know that their posts are being shared through other channels, that their communities still aren’t commenting on their posts.  It’s a completely understandable feeling.  You work hard at putting together a thought or position, flesh it out, find an engaging photo or video to help enhance your point and then publish it to the world.  A comment makes us feel good and/or helps to extend the post itself.  Sometimes the comments are even better than the post.  So, when a blogger begins noticing a decrease of comments on their blog, it can be depressing.  It can cause bloggers to start rethinking their content strategy and possibly even considering whether or not they should continue blogging.

Every time I’ve been asked whether or not a blogger should be discouraged by a decrease in comments, I immediately ask them whether or not they’ve looked at the sharing of their post through other channels and what the feedback from those channels are.  Usually they tell me that their seeing their content being shared online but they still wish they were getting the comments on their blog.

I’ve been thinking about this often.  Admittedly, I comment a lot less than I used but I share tons more now.  Google Reader trends tell me that I share around 30 articles per day through there.  I also regularly share tons more through Twitter and Facebook throughout the day.  But, I probably comment on about 75% less blogs than a year or so ago.  I know, I need to improve on that.

However, as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been considering whether or not the decline in commenting is actually a bad thing.  If you stop by and comment on a blog, you may extend that conversation and/or let that blogger know that you appreciate their work.  Both are great.  Consider though that the conversation will only be seen by that community which is limited by the number of subscribers and the number of visitors to that blog.  But, if you share that blog post with your community on Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, then you’re promoting that content to your social graph thus extending the total overall reach of that post.  By sharing that post with your social graph, it will extend the number of eyes that may be seeing that blog for the very first time.  Or, if they’ve ignored other content from that blog, it may be that post that pulls them in and triggers them to subscribe or share it with their networks thus continuing to grow the overall subscriber base and reach of the blog.

You may think that I’m suggesting that comments are dead but I’m not.  I love comments as much as the next blogger.  I appreciate everyone that takes the time out to share their thoughts.  I also value everyone that shares my content with their social graphs because it helps to get my content out to more people.

It’s just something I’ve been debating in my own head lately so I figured I’d spill it out into a blog post and see what you had to say and where you may choose to say it.  So, what are your thoughts?  Do you prefer comments, social sharing or a combination of both as a measure of the engagement on your blog?

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Photo Credit: premasagar

With Facebook starting out as a personal network, it has been a hard transition for people to become used to it as also a professional network.  Most use LinkedIn as a professional network, Facebook as a personal network, and Twitter is a hybrid that people are still trying to figure out.  But with the growth rate of Facebook, many have started to turn to it as a personal branding tool and professional network.  Marketers have begun turning to Facebook with Facebook Pages, Groups, and advertising as a way to reach out to their prospects, customers, and fans.

This transition has created a dilemma for many folks because they are resistant to using Facebook as a professional network, yet their colleagues, competition, and companies are become active on the network.  Also, as we develop friends in our industries, we want to extend that friendship and therefore turn to Facebook.  This starts to blur that line even further between work and home.  However, as Dawn Foster of WebWorkerDaily points out, we don’t want to confuse “personal” for “private”:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort.  When we talk about ‘being personal’ on social media websites, I think that many people confuse ‘personal’ with ‘private.’  The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

To deal with this dilemma, individuals typically have three options to choose from:

1. Maintain a single Facebook profile that combines personal and professional.
2. Maintain two different Facebook profiles: one personal and one professional.
3. Keeping Facebook only personal and not mixing work into it.

Each of these has both upsides and downsides with not one clear answer or best practice, as of yet.  Thought it might not be clear yet, this will be important for you as a marketer.  Let’s explore each of these options.

Single Facebook Profile

If you don’t mind mixing personal and professional, you can maintain a single Facebook profile in which all engagement with the platform originates from that one profile.  This enables people to get to know the real you.  It’s just like the two faces that most wear on a daily basis: the way you are at your office and the way you are at home, with friends, or family.

Although so many of us are used to this split personality, why should we act like this?  Why can’t we be the same person at work as we are at home, maybe just dressed up a little nicer?  You have the same likes and dislikes, the same problems and victories, and your family, friends, enemies, colleagues and competitors don’t change when you’re at work versus when you’re at home.

Furthermore, realizing its growth, Facebook has continued to add features that allow you to tweak your privacy settings to allow you to use a single profile but limit access to data sets based on permissions, lists, and rules that you set up.  This means that you can create a list of your colleagues and then deny that list access to certain aspects of your profile.  By setting this up properly, you can achieve the privacy and separation that you want while not having to bother with two separate profiles or avoiding Facebook as a professional network.

Two Different Facebook Profiles

If you want to maintain split personas, between your personal and professional lives, you can create two different Facebook profiles.  One Facebook profile you can create as your personal account in which you upload personal photos, videos, and bio info.  This is the account where you interact with your friends, family, and others that you allow into your personal circle.  Just remember to use a personal email account and not one that anyone in your professional life knows.  If you use the same email, you open your personal profile to being found by colleagues.  Of course, you can always ignore the friend request, but it much easier and simpler to just use a separate email account.

The second account should be set up under a work email address that your colleagues would use to search for you.  Under this profile you can upload any professional content that you would like to share.  To reduce confusion between these two profiles, you should consider hiding one of the profiles from Facebook searches and indexing by search engines.  This can be done through the privacy settings for your profile(s).  Which one to hide is up to you, or you can hide both, if you want.

Not Mixing Personal and Work

Your last option is to simply not mix personal and work.  Some people decide that the easiest route is just not to promote their presence on Facebook.  They maintain Facebook as their personal social network and use LinkedIn as their professional network to connect with colleagues.  For those wanting to maintain that separation between personal and work, you might find this to be your cleanest option.

What’s your take? Do you maintain separate profiles or use a single profile for all engagement?

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Photo Credit: laikolosse

First up is a video review by Chris Brogan:

Next, here are a few other reviews that you may find interesting:

• Tim Peter – Facebook Marketing by Justin R. Levy (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• Valley PR Blog – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• Deidre Breakenridge – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• iMedia Connection – 6 Beach Books for Marketers
• Get Social PR – Facebook Marketing 9-Part Series

If you’ve written up a review of Facebook Marketing, please let me know in the comments.  I will keep this post updated with more reviews as I find them.

If you have already read Facebook Marketing, would you mind leaving a rating and review over on Amazon?

Most importantly, thank YOU for all of your support since the book launch!

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What is Facebook Marketing About?

Facebook Marketing is a deep dive into how Facebook can be leveraged by your company starting TODAY.  This book is not just a Facebook-is-cool-and-you-should-join type book.  This book provides you with actionable information that you can begin implementing into your business.  It gives you the ammunition you need to convince your boss, your board, your IT team, or your employees why they should be investing time and money on “just another social network.”

Who Should Buy This Book

Simply put: This book is designed for professionals who want to understand how Facebook can be integrated into their business.  This includes anyone from the CEO to the CMO to PR, communications, and marketing.  Besides gaining an understanding of how you can use Facebook within your business, you can also gain an understanding of how YOU can use Facebook professionally as part of your own personal/professional branding.

Where You Can Pick Up a Copy

Does all of this sound good and you are itching to grab a copy or 50 for you and your closest friends? Well, first of all, thank you. It means a lot.  You can grab your copy from one of these awesome retailers:

Facebook Marketing – Amazon

Facebook Marketing – Barnes & Noble

Facebook Marketing – Borders

Facebook Marketing – 800CEORead

Facebook Marketing – Books-a-Million

Note: There is a Kindle edition available but not iBooks or audio versions, as of yet.

How Facebook Marketing is Organized

Facebook Marketing is organized into 11 chapters:

Chapter 1, “From Dorm Room to Boardroom: The Growth of Social Networks,” takes you from the beginning of Facebook in the founders’ dorm rooms at Harvard University all the way to their corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California.  This chapter provides an introduction to the phenomenon known as Facebook including major milestones such as opening the platform to everyone, going mainstream, and the major growth data points.

Chapter 2, “Getting Around Facebook: The Basics,” deals with getting you around Facebook by taking a stroll through the basics.  This includes a summary and detailed description of the basic profile options, notes, photos, videos, comments, likes, friends lists, Facebook Chat, and many other features.  This chapter provides you with a foundation for going deeper into the platform and understanding how it can be integrated into your business.

In Chapter 3, “Establishing a Corporate Presence,” you explore establishing a corporate presence including a deep dive into Facebook Pages and Groups.  You gain an understanding of how to set up each of these features for your business, how they can be used, and which ones you should select based on your needs.

Chapter 4, “Extending Facebook into the Interwebs: The Power and Reach of Facebook Connect,” breaks out of the framework of Facebook and discusses extending Facebook into the interwebs through the use of tools such as Facebook Connect.  You learn how this major feature has been integrated into websites and how you can use it for your needs.

In Chapter 5, “Facebook Advertising: How and Why You Should Be Using It,” you can learn about the Facebook advertising platform and why you should use it.  You learn about creating an ad, setting a budget, selecting cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impressions (CPM), discovering your target audience, and using Facebook Insights (analytics).

To gain a full experience while using Facebook, you need to extend its capabilities with Facebook Apps.  In Chapter 6, “Extending the Experience with Facebook Apps,” I discus plug-ins such as flickr, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and several other applications that can help you to connect with your prospects, customers, and fans.

One of the most addressed issues throughout Facebook’s history has been privacy.  Chapter 7, “Addressing Privacy Concerns,” reviews the changes of Facebook’s privacy policy, whether you should have a personal AND professional Facebook account or if you need a single profile, and several other issues as it deals with your privacy, your customers’ privacy, and the privacy of your company.

By the time you make it to Chapter 8, “Developing a Facebook Marketing Strategy,” you will have developed a deeper understanding of Facebook and how you can use it as another part of your marketing toolbox.  Chapter 8 helps you to pull all these tools together to develop a Facebook marketing strategy.

With all the described options, you learn that one of the best uses of Facebook for your business is through the development of communities.  But how do you pull all of this together? Chapter 9, “Using Facebook to Develop Communities,” teaches you how you can use Facebook to develop communities.

Because you’re not the first company to jump into Facebook, Chapter 10, “Best in Class,” shows you some of the Best in Class companies that have fully utilized Facebook to build communities, engage with their audiences, and become more social.

To finish, Chapter 11, “Shaking the Crystal Ball: What’s Next for Facebook,” shakes the crystal ball and tries to guestimate what’s next for Facebook.  This is your sandbox to play in to see if you can figure out where Facebook goes from here.  Place your bets and let ‘em ride!

A Bit of a Warning

While I did my best to keep updating the manuscript, eventually my publisher cut me off from making edits since the book had to head off to the printers and to store bookshelves.  That means that you should expect that some of the stats have changed and that there have been feature set changes.  But, the underlying core is the same.  The theories, strategies and tactics are the same.

Special Thanks

I just really wanted to say thank you for all of the never-ending support.  This opportunity wouldn’t have happened without each and every one of you.  Should you choose to pick up a copy, thank you for skipping a few coffees to grab it.  I hope that you’ll find it useful.

If you have already read it, I’d love to hear your feedback.  What did you think? What can be improved upon in the next edition?

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While this isn’t a major platform upgrade, it would appear that it will drive more engagement with Facebook.  This will occur for 3 main reasons:

1. Many of us live in our email therefore we’re likely to respond faster to an email then if we have to log in to Facebook to leave a follow up comment.
2. This reduces the number of steps required to post a response to Facebook once an email notification was received.  Prior to this upgrade you would receive the notification, click the link in the body of email, log in to Facebook, and then leave a comment.  Now, you receive the email notification, hit “Reply”, type your response and hit “Send”. Much simpler, if you ask me.
3. As ReadWriteWeb notes, employees who work at companies where Facebook is blocked will now be able to engage on Facebook throughout the course of the work day.  They may have been able to make these updates via a smartphone like an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid previously but the risk of getting caught is much higher.  We all know that person that we’ve seen with their head down in their lap all day long texting, playing on Facebook or checking Twitter from their phone.

In my experiences, I tend to respond faster when I can use email as the communications tool.  When I moved my blogs over the Disqus commenting system, I immediately began responding to comments faster because I could easily respond via email.  I think the same thing will happen with Facebook.  I do a decent job responding to comments on Facebook but definitely think that this will increase my engagement with the platform.

Over the past several months of working on my book, Facebook Marketing (affiliate link), it has been very interesting to watch Facebook continue to evolve.  Besides always trying to stay up on everything going around around the social web, I have kept a close eye on what’s happening with Facebook.

Now if they could just enable email notifications for Facebook Pages, the world would rejoice, fireworks would be shot from rooftops and we would all sing carols.  Well, maybe not the fireworks but it would still be very helpful for those of us who manage a Facebook Page, nevermind for those who manage a handful of them.

But, until that happens, I’ll focus on this newest update.  What do YOU think of this new update to Facebook?  Will you engage more via email?

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Photo Credit: Tom Whitnah

My goal with the book is to provide you with a solid overview of where Facebook has come from, where I believe it’s going and then in between all of that, how you can fully utilize the platform to become a trust agent both as an individual and as a business.  I plan on showing you how to build a marketing plan with Facebook as an integral part of that plan, best in class examples, case studies and a ton more.  This won’t be a gimmicky “you should join Facebook”-type book.  I want this to be the type of book that might get you to look at Facebook through a different lens.  I want this book to give you another cannon on your ship from which fire from.  With this book I want to provide you with maps that will help you to chart a course using Facebook that will be helpful to you and your company.

This is an exciting next phase for me as I’ve always wondered whether I had the chops to write a book.  Now we’ll see.  I love challenges and this certainly is going to be a big challenge for me.  Over the coming weeks and months I’ll take you behind-the-scenes and share my experiences as I go through the processes of writing and releasing a book.

As always, thank you for all of the support that you give me.  My hope is that I’m helpful to you in some way that allows you to grow.

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Photo by: avrdreamer

One of the key ways of accomplishing this is through a Facebook Page.  As being someone that manages multiple Pages and Groups on Facebook, I was very interested to watch this interview.  Even though I spend hours each day on Facebook, there is so much development taking place by both Facebook and application developers that it’s hard to keep up.

Check out Robert’s interview with Caitlin:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two resources that Caitlin pointed out that I didn’t know Facebook provided were the Facebook Influencers and Facebook Marketing resource pages.  I’m going to spend a little time poking around there for new ideas, best practices and to see what some the featured pages are doing.

Caitlin definitely left me with a list of ideas I now have for updating my fan pages and groups.  It was also a nice prod to get in there and maintain interaction in the various pages.  I think one of the normal things that happens in a lot of social networks (at least it happens to me) is that you set up a page, group, or forum where you want to build a community.  But, because of other work, home or other page responsibilities, the pages, groups or forums don’t receive the level of attention that they deserve.

Remember when you build these communities you have to stay active in them.  You have people that join them beacuse they care about the subject or brand that the community is based around.  Be that community manager that they need and want whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn or any other community you may be a part of.

If you want some more information on Facebook Pages, check out this excellent and comprehensive whitepaper by C.C. Chapman and his team over at The Advance Guard: About Face

If you’re so inclined, jump onboard my two main pages: Caminito Argentinean Steakhouse and Inbound Marketing Summit.

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