Business Cat approves of your online conduct.

Let’s face it: social media marketing jargon can sound like a different language, especially if you’re wrestling with the eternal question of “What do my Facebook fans want to see? How do I keep them happy?” You know your brand inside and out, so it can be helpful to think of your social media content in the same way you think about your business. Unless you’re a professional trapeze artist, chances are the day-to-day grind of your job can sometimes leave you bored to tears. The same applies to online communities in terms of marketing and promotion. For many of the 800+ million active Facebook users, logging on is habitual and something they’re doing multiple times per day. Facebookers who follow your page don’t want to see the same type of content over and over. That’s the fastest way to turn them off from interacting with your page in a positive way, or at all. The most successful Facebook pages have a give-and-take relationship with their fans. Three things to remember for growing and motivating your online communities:

• Show them you care, you really care! Ensure your newest followers feel valued, appreciated and motivated to interact with your page. Welcome new fans personally, like you would a new co-worker, by tagging them in a welcome message or sending a quick and friendly (non-spammy, of course) direct message.
• Beware of the disgruntled fan. When considering a Facebook contest as a way to gain likes, it’s important to keep in mind the resulting new “Fans” can easily turn on you should they be promised something that is not delivered. These are not the fans you want to attract to your page, as the wreckage they often leave can be detrimental to your brand’s reputation. Many a Facebook page has suffered when the competition gets ugly due to misunderstood rules. Fans can become aggressively competitive, rallying other fans around them. Remember, any competition on Facebook should comply with Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines, or you run the risk of having your page removed entirely. Don’t get me wrong, free stuff is awesome. Offering ‘added value’ as a way to gain more followers has proven successful in the past, but the lines between friendly competition and cut-throat rivalry can be blurred very quickly. There are tons of alternative ways to engage with people, and getting creative with your content doesn’t have to cost money but can work wonders for motivating your online community.

Image macro rewards such as this "Cyber High-5!" seem simple, but can be a great way to motivate interaction and connect with your audience.

• Creative content is king. Organically grow your fan base my keeping existing fans engaged with your page. Think about how you might get your co-workers motivated in the office and apply the same tactics to your Facebook fans. In terms of contests, sometimes the big ticket prize items will only spark jealousy and animosity among the group. Often a much smaller scale pat on the back will do the trick. Consider running a weekly trivia contest with a funny, motivating and free (for you) prize like a “cyber high-5” or an original Internet meme. Instead of gaining a bunch of superficial ‘Likes,’ your fans will engage, comment and even share your content with their own friends.

Lighthearted, fun content will ensure you and your Facebook fans’ interactions are positive and mutually beneficial. Keep the fans you have engaged and your number of ‘Likes’ is bound to keep climbing.

The SI Blog sends a special thanks to Lauren Litwinka for her insight and contribution to this post. Lauren is an Account Manager at aimClear where she’s pretty awesome at online community management.

That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

The Facebook page for the group is nothing more than a simple sales pitch for businesses becoming involved on the site. It’s tips for publishing, appeals to outmoded user statistics, and overall tone is clearly directed at the first-time Facebook advertisers. Promoting Sponsored Stories seems to be the main goal, though the ability for a small business to achieve such a close relationship with the company behind the site is not clear at first glance: Nike, American Express, and a page that can get 100 answers to the question “Blue or purple?” are featured, but no one just starting out with limited brand awareness. However, as you delve deeper into the videos, a number of case studies can be heard by the part-time Internet marketer to help understand the basics of the varied services Facebook offers, explained in a way that focuses on what makes social media advertising different from traditional venues.

But July 27th brought a new arena for the first-time marketer. The Facebook for Business site offers a set of introductory slides more like what one would expect on the Facebook page. The Best Practice Guide and other tips take the unedited rambling of the taped live webinars from the Facebook page and put them into clear slideshows (though inexplicably as unsharable and minimally-graphable PDFs). Discussing Pages, Ads, Sponsored Stories, and the “Platform,” Facebook lays out its basic services in an all-too-simple way.

The site is clearly for someone who doesn’t muck with websites, as just one tab describing the Open Graph protocol for a new marketer would show a whole new world, integrating on-site tagging with a need to contact a Preferred Developer to best take advantage of the depth of information one can provide, shape, and offer to their clients.

It’s easy, at least for the somewhat experienced marketer, to come up with counterexamples, glossed-over topics that are the core of Facebook advertising such as effective demographic targeting, and the just-seething disdain for squares who just haven’t gotten how cool Social Media is. But I applaud Facebook for their efforts; the only other major social media outlet for business is Twitter, which starts its Promoted links at $5,000 per month and provides little information for its non-paid business partners. Google+ recently purged business accounts, asking creators of those accounts to “hold off,” and have been “focusing on the consumer experience” — words that are hardly music to marketers’ ears.

What the shortcomings of the Facebook for Business and Facebook Marketing Solutions pages really show off is that a business needs dedicated social media management, whether through an SEO firm or internally. The waters are murky and best handled by someone who knows not just the sales pitch for getting involved, but also the mechanics of the process and what little stuff can greatly improve the social footprint of the small business. It’s too hard to sum up everything that should and could be done to optimally advertise using social media just on a few webpages or through a few taped webinars — the best thing is to call Ghostbusters and let Peter and Ray and Egon worry about the ghosts so business owners can get back to directly helping their customers.

Since Facebook’s native markup of a combination of HTML and XML can be clunky and very limited (especially when it comes to more sophisticated elements like Javascript), iframes offer a sleeker approach to Facebook brand display. They pull content directly from a business’s site, so that traditional HTML and the aforementioned advanced elements can be utilized to create a much more multi-faceted approach to drawing in eyeballs both before and after the “like.” Additionally, multiple tabs can be created within the frame, allowing for a customized complexity not normally seen in the basic FB layout. These tabs can offer different aspects of the business such as a “thank-you for liking” display, locations, specials, and forms.

As most Facebook users simply “like and forget,” this kind of direct data can draw traffic to the business’s page instead of its Facebook. Since the third-party content exists on a familiar platform, though, it can function as a preliminary landing page, easing the users in to getting to know the brand or service. The more dynamic aspect of the frame tabs also makes it easier to track page views and user behavior. In turn, targeting demographics by aspects such as location, sex, age and interests is made simpler as well — something that anyone with an interest in Facebook marketing is surely invested in.

On a more surface-level aspect, this approach is simply more engaging to the user than passive newsfeed updates. There are over 750 million users on Facebook (150 million + in the US alone), and maintaining a strong presence is a must for any social media-savvy brand. The updates can be informational (such as special offers and exclusives shown directly from the website onto the viewer’s feed), but also allows for direct interaction in the form of contests, mailing list sign-ups and other conversion points from viewer to participator.

It was an educational afternoon at Search Influence, and we thank Anthony for his hard work putting together his presentation! He’s got an upcoming blog post on more Facebook tactics, and you can bet that future Lunch & Learns will be written up right here. In the meantime, you can check out his heroic (and informative!) presentation here.

Quora looks similar to many other Q&A sites, and indeed, the basic format hasn’t changed. However, a few things Quora handles particularly well are the profile, the feed, and the search. When starting an account, Quora emphasizes ties to either Twitter or Facebook and insists that you use your real name. The real identity becomes especially important as your name and title accompany each answer. While anonymous answers and questions are an option, a real identity and relevant title greatly increase the answer’s credibility. This becomes particularly important when insiders answer questions about their company, often the case for questions about Quora itself, Twitter, or even Google.

Much like Facebook’s newsfeed (the two founders came from Facebook, after all), Quora provides questions and answers that should be relevant for each user. Not only can users follow topics, but they can also follow other users or particular questions to be notified of any new answers. As you develop your interests, the newsfeed becomes more interesting to explore as new things are constantly popping up.

The search bar at the top helps users find the content they need with suggestions much like Google’s, and by combining search with the question input field, redundant questions also get rooted out. Quora seeks to keep duplicate questions out, so users only have to find one place for the information they need. Once the right question is found, the answers are ranked by various up-votes and down-votes much like Digg, so the relevant information comes easily.

These features, an overall smooth performance, and a little bit of the right publicity have created a user experience that attracted many of the Silicon Valley insiders that laud the service. This emphasis has helped create valuable and high-quality content in a relatively niche subject. However, the scope of this subject has reached beyond just the tech world. Other topics such as politics, food, science, movies and business have good followings that have developed high quality answers. Already, I have found Quora to be a great way to learn about new topics such as cooking and real estate at a moderate depth. This way, you gain a little personality in your answers and also avoid much of the lower quality advice that can creep to the top of some Google searches.

I happen to eat through Quora’s content like candy, and there doesn’t seem to be an end to it in sight. However, I rarely feel guilty about spending my time there as I’m constantly learning new things, finding new viewpoints, or keeping up on relevant topics. If you are unfamiliar with this site, I strongly suggest you check it out. Chances are you’ll learn something.

The world according to Facebook.

Following advertisements for a contest where Facebook fans can enter to win a 60” 3D television, anchors’ guffaws at “The Facebook” and “The Twitter,” and the third run of a talk about how Facebook and social media peacefully brought down a dictator in 18 days, FOX8, our beloved Fox affiliate network channel, ran a special report on Facebook privacy which showed how confused people are about Facebook.

Stirring up fears about Facebook’s lackadaisical attitude towards users’ privacy is almost as old as the site itself, but really took off after the introduction of the news feed, prompting this post from Michael Cera himself. But FOX8 reports that there yet is one more person who knows “everything” about you, even after 170 types of privacy options: the social media marketer.

We’ve determined a rough estimate of the gay population of the military using the tools they’re talking about. Dr. Kimberly Mason, cyber-bullying expert at UNO, claims:

“The majority of the individuals who use Facebook of course are on there to make their social connections and keeping in touch with friends and family. So looking at advertising and looking how they monitor that really is not in their realm of awareness.”

Strengthening this argument is the general concern about privacy that Facebook users have cultivated. Avoiding questions of survey design, there is no attempt by Gallup/USAToday to reconcile this data with the knowledge users displayed about the privacy settings even at an early stage of development for the site, nor with the skyrocketing membership and constant activity seen as the site has become the second-most-trafficked site on the web. Obviously we’re not dealing with an all-or-nothing situation, and maybe even analysis of risk perception could be appropriate, though of course not under the language of physical harm.

The FTC supports a browser-based “Do Not Track” system, while Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) offers a much more nebulous, but more proactive and far-reaching system. These proposals and recommendations are to protect the users of the site from their private lives being compromised.

But the privacy argument driving interest, polls, and media stories is too muddled to be coherent — there’s privacy, and then there’s privacy, and then there’s privacy. These three realms where users can unknowingly give out information — your network, the public, and advertisers — have different priorities and different interdependencies when it comes to blocking access.

The first kind of privacy — hiding your information from your own network — seems simply counterintuitive to me. Like having a private Livejournal, not using the social aspect of a social network seems a bit counterintuitive. There’s got to be some kind of control here — Reuben Foster of UNO says, “If I don’t want it to be public, then I won’t … click these things,” and that’s right on the money.

Found directly beneath the status box.

In addition, the News Feed is smart. That first variable, the affinity score, is user-controlled. If you don’t talk to someone, they won’t show up as often. To boot, the other variables, weight and time, simply fulfill the definition of a social network. Combined with easy to navigate deletion and blocking capabilities, it’s a hard sell to me that there isn’t enough privacy options for the user.

But that’s a straw man; privacy can be breached in other ways. While privacy settings can stop a lot, so many checkboxes to look at and discover over time might be overwhelming. Worse still, Facebook has a bad habit of resetting its users’ privacy settings when it updates its features. We’ve talked before about other people looking at your posts and online image branding. There are a number of news stories where someone posts something that unintentionally irritates the wrong people, all of which bring up the divide between what is or isn’t public speech.

While I’m not about to open that can of worms, two alternate court cases show the two likely outcomes of privacy issues: either an out of court settlement or a court siding with the company, who can probably show a solid link between loudly kvetching about work and “job performance.” The question on the level of privacy and anonymity of your Facebook profile has not been answered; best to tread with care, but not necessarily lightly.

Even with careful Facebook pruning, you still have your information going to advertisers, and it is this what puts Facebook in a unique position for privacy. Google doesn’t have the instant interest data to tailor their content offerings like Facebook does. Even Microsoft, whose use of Internet Explorer to strengthen Bing’s ranking pages is more insidious and less publicized, gets their data from Facebook

Obviously not the best tool for small fanbases...

WVUE reflects the average Facebook user’s view when it refers to all ads as “Sponsored Stories.” Ads are ads — it’s neither Facebook’s intent nor in their interest to try to fool you into thinking they’re not, and you’d have to ignore clear headings to think they’re from your friends. There is a difference, though: Sponsored Stories refers to ads that look more like regular news feed posts; however, they again have the telltale heading. They also can only be shown to people “whose friends are already connected to” the Facebook page or post that they’re connected to. Similarly, fan page ads can only be shown to people not already connected to the fan page.

See, nothing terribly creepy here...

Facebook’s ad targeting is much less sinister than it seems. You can filter by age, sex, and broad category of interest. While the Family Status category under interests is on one hand a bit questionable, it can heavily influence relevance of ads; you wouldn’t want to be showing ads for singles sites if a member is married with kids.

You can then target by Connection to a Page, Event or App. The next section, the Advanced Demographics, provides advertisers with better opportunities to provide relevant content and avoid marketing gaffes. Finally, you can target by education level or workplace.

And that’s it, right? You get your broad information, and nothing’s even tracked deeply enough to cause any concern. That doesn’t seem so bad.

... But we could make this comparison much creepier. I just like music.

But when something* happens with your account, the advertiser gets access to Likes & Interests. This narrows the interests so that it is more like traditional keyword bidding. This isn’t unusual, and follows the traditions from Google pay-per-click advertising. The advertising platform provides vague statistics to give advertisers an idea of how many people are interested in ideas that are related to your link.

But not only does the advertiser get this information. Another privacy craze was raised over Facebook’s Open Graph Platform, which began the rash of “Like” buttons on the site. Extending the simplicity of the “Like” from every kind of “Edge” — the term Facebook uses for any post, link, comment, or ad — to web pages seems logical and extends not only the brand, but the whole social media mentality.

Open Graph allows a content provider to, like Google Analytics, track his links’ likes and clicks on Facebook, even without having a Facebook presence. While this might seem like nothing new to your loss of privacy, an important distinction has to be drawn between this and Google’s tracking programs. Facebook offers this information with your personal information like your friends list in the unseen data. Obviously, this is used not for advertisers, but for the inner machinery. However, the concern remains that someone with a bit of knowhow can get that information.

But that information isn’t useful for advertisers right now. A list of friends might be interesting on a massive level, but then again, the individual is lost looking at larger trends. The other factors, publicly displayed on your profile

Through these three realms of privacy, it seems that there’s good reason to be afraid of Facebook and its privacy issues. But here’s the catch — who’s really looking at this? Advertisers and content providers, even among the slimiest of content farms, simply want to provide a better user experience. They, including us, are looking for the most people clicking on ads and, more importantly, interact with the content behind the ads.

There’s a tendency for people versed in Facebook to blame the user — we all see the inner workings, we know how easy the whole system is if you turn off your brain. We know that all you have to do is click the “Like” button and you’re giving us good information that we can use to give you more of what you already, at least in a marketing sense, “Like.” Those that are trying to target you are trying to give you more of what you’ve already said you want, even if it’s an admittedly selfish gift, since advertisers obviously get benefits from you clicking the link.

But the Skinner box that is Facebook, and particularly the games and apps that tweak and complicate privacy settings beyond the basic problems described, is ultimately something from which its users benefit. The on-first-glance underhanded data-gathering techniques are ultimately the way that Facebook serves its users, by providing content relevant to them, as determined by them.

Don’t forget to “Like” this page. We promise to do every creepy thing we can with your information and show you what you’re sending to advertisers and content providers in an upcoming blog post.

Facebook Ads. Are You Doing it Right?

Recently a slew of articles have been popping up about the ineffectiveness of Facebook advertising. While we recently touched on this subject in a previous blog post, I thought I would explain why this statement has little credence when Facebook ads are done properly. If you’ve read any of our previous FB blog posts, you are aware that for Search Influence, Facebook yields a low cost per lead making it one of our most effective ways to drive leads to clients’ sites. With that being stated, I can proceed to explain (in a Clarissa-esque manner) why Facebook is effective and ineffective for some online marketers and industries.

Are You a Facebook Friendly Business?
I’ve mentioned this before but Facebook ads follow the same methodology that magazine and television ads follow.  While choosing images for your ads is important, determining whether your business is right for Facebook is the key to success. You would never hire a fertility specialist, carpal tunnel expert, or babysitter from a 30 second TV spot (well maybe you would. I would never trust my semen, wrist, or subsequent children in the hands of a stranger on TV, but I was raised right). I think that is the fundamental problem some advertisers have with Facebook. They’ve read a few cleverly written articles on online advertising on Facebook and they think they can create those successes for all their clients. However industries such as elective surgery, social causes, and the entertainment service industry fair considerably well for local businesses.

Facebook Ad Demographic

Is the Facebook Demographic Right for You?
Why do these previous mentioned industries succeed? Before I address that let me just get this out of the way – Facebook is not for everybody. If your business is a retirement home and a certified social media specialist tells you he can increase you fan base and leads from Facebook by some unthinkable number, he’s lying. Certain demographics just do not exist on Facebook, blame social media and technological darwinism. The largest demographic using Facebook are between ages of 18 – 34. They are the beauty obsessed, socially aware, fun-loving Youth of America. This is the age group your business must pander to in order to be truly effective.  From an ROI perspective, the subgroup of the young professionals between the ages of 25 – 34 are where the disposable income is the ripest. By targeting this age group with the correct interests and properly crafted ads you can increase your leads stream significantly.

Are Facebook Ads Ineffective Because of Bad Advertising?
We have all seen these ads. The married man being shown dating site ads despite his status being “married”, the teenage boy being shown breast augmentation ads because he has “breast” as a interest.  And my personal favorite, the work from home search marketing ads (as seen in the image below). I see these ads and I am filled with laughter, sorrow, and disdain. Is it such a surprise that Facebook is deemed ineffective with such a large percentage of ads misspelled, using irrelevant images, and just down right offensive ads running? I mean, get high on Jesus? Really?

Bad Facebook Ads are BAD

At the end of the day, the performance of Facebook advertising is directly tied to your business, the demographic you are targeting, and how well you compose your ads.  People assume this is an ad space issue marketers and industries have dealt with since commercialization of goods. So instead of questioning whether Facebook is effective, social media marketers should be questioning whether Facebook fits their clients business model.

Thanks to Salvo Vaccarella for the image.

It was a great excuse to do a little impromptu analysis. We may do a brief series of these.

Hall Piano Company Local Search Analysis using Matt McGee's 7 Questions Businesses should be asking.

Steve Kinchen: Read the article… How does HPC stack up?

Will Scott: Pretty darn good, I’d say.

By @mattmcgee‘s standards you’re pretty well covered

1. How do the search results look for my company name?

- http://www.google.com/search?q=hall+piano – you have the top 1/2 of the page with no negatives.

2. Have I put all my marketing eggs in one basket?

- Definitely not. You do TV / Radio, print, PR and Web / Social thanks to Dee Clubb

3. Have I claimed my local business listings?

- If not, they’re in progress (I know Bing is in the works):

- http://maps.google.com/places/us/la/metairie/david-dr/901/-hall-piano-company?gl=us
- http://local.yahoo.com/info-18122605-hall-piano-company-metairie
- http://www.bing.com/local/details.aspx?lid=YN365x6567331
- and more, of course

4. How do my reviews look on Google Maps? Yahoo? Bing? Yelp?

- We could always use more reviews but those we have are looking great.

5. Am I using social media wisely?

- I would say yes. And in your case that means using it conservatively. You’ve got great presence on Video and are developing on Facebook. You’ve got a nice twitter following. There’s always room for more but, yes, wisely for sure.

6. Am I focusing on metrics that matter?

- Definitely – Brand + Conversions are where one with a product so niche as yours needs to be.

7. Am I earning trust with everything I do online?

- For sure. Online, you and your team represent @hallpiano with the class and professionalism due your product and customers.

http://www.facebook.com/HallPiano
http://twitter.com/hallpiano
http://www.hallpiano.com/

Great Apps to Customize Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook recently hit a new milestone: 500 million users! With this high volume it is a perfect platform for marketing, and people are already taking advantage of this opportunity. Here is a list of great apps that allow you to customize your fan page to its fullest potential.

35 of the Best Facebook Fan Pages

To go along with the above link, here is a fantastic list of fan pages that have taken full advantage of Facebook’s customizable applications. Some examples include pages from the likes of Skittles, Red Bull, and Harley Davidson.

Forrester to Advertisers: Hold Off on Foursquare

Forrester Research recently came out with a study that revealed 84% of people polled are not familiar with location-based applications, a la foursquare. This is useful information, but they conclude that businesses should hold off on using these FREE services because of it. This article explains why their conclusion should not follow their results.

Foursquare Means Businesses: Have you checked-in yet?

We’ve never been shy in our support for foursquare, and this link is a perfect follow-up to the previous one. The article just lists some more of the many advantages to utilizing this and other location-based applications.

10 Sources For Better Conversion

Getting people to your site is only half the battle. Once they’re there, you need to get them do whatever it is you want them to do. In the SEO world, this is known as conversion. This is a list of 10 resources that explain how to get better conversions on your site.

Local Citation Finder: Must-Have SEO Tool

From the article: “The tool looks at the businesses ranking for your keyphrase, grabs their phone numbers, and then does a Google.com search (or .ca or .co.uk) for those numbers, collecting and collating all of the mentions/citations that it finds.” In other words, you can get a list of citation sources your competitors use, and mimic them. Nice and easy!

10 Great Local Search Tools That Don’t Exist Yet

It’s pretty clear what this article is about, so I won’t bore you with an explanation. I will say that these tools would be incredibly easy to make, and some of these developers need to get on the stick!

On-Site SEO: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

A blog is a great tool for SEO, but simply posting one every week or so won’t be that great of a help. This is a great guide on how to optimize your blog to maximize your exposure on the web.

Using Bing’s New Webmaster Tools For SEO

Bing recently released a new version of their Webmaster Tools. Upon being asked by Bing to give feedback on how to improve it, Chris Smith decided to provide this advice via blog post for the world to see.

Google’s New Local UI Proving Conspiracy Theorists Right

In our last installment of Top 10 for the Weekend, we discussed some changes Google made to their SERPs and Places listings. It looks like the conspiracy theorists were right. This article explains why.

We all knew it was a matter of time before Facebook started expanding into web search and they’ve finally done it by unveiling their own Facebook local search option: Open Graph search engine. What is Open Graph, you might ask, here’s what Facebook reps are saying, according to an allfacebook.com story:

“all Open Graph enabled web pages will show up in search when a user likes them”

Why is this important? Imagine a more personalized web experience where community feedback drives interaction and search position. You can search for a cosmetic surgeon or dentist and immediately be able to contact his patients for real feedback. This is huge! No longer will you type in “Atlanta dentist” and dozens of sleek websites – you’ll be able to find information on the dentist, his office location, and talk with his clients. As Facebook continues to develop this open graph search, you will see Facebook profiles and page results as well as websites being ranked by user feedback from REAL people.

If this catches on, not only will the face of SEO change, how people think about searching will change as well. It’s like Facebook is developing Deathstars and photon rifles, while Google is reloading the Spaniard cannons.

Do I think this is the end of Google local search? No, but I do think that Facebook is moving in the right direction. Users having control over results and ranking seems like a no-brain. My only concern is potential spammers hindering the evolution of search.

As the world’s largest social media site, Facebook has become the popular choice for the local and niche businesses. By allowing marketers to directly interact with people through paid ads, interest groups and applications, it adds a level of engagement lacking in traditional online marketing.

Grammar Fail. Picture Win?

Facebook Paid Ads

With the increasing cost of paid search marketing, advertisers are looking for more cost effective alternatives. As previously discussed on this blog, FB advertising yields a much higher conversion rate for a significantly lower cost. This is attributed completely to demographic targeting and graphical ads. Running an ad with ad content that appeals to your targeted demographic is key to conversion.

Little Nugget: Paid ads are great for new and niche businesses trying to generate brand awareness locally.

Using Facebook Groups and Fan Pages

Active engagement with potential leads is priceless – literally. The best way to do this is through groups and fan pages. Free to set up and great for social media and SEO, groups and fan pages give businesses an opportunity to strengthen customer interest. Because of Facebook’s social nature, they also give businesses the human element that websites lack.

Little Nugget: Groups and fan pages can be used to market to leads before they reach the business’ website.

If you get this message, you're doing it wrong.

Facebook Applications

While many only think of Facebook apps in the terms of Farmville and the endless number of “gifts”, there are many applications that are indispensable for brand building. Two personal favorites of mine are Extended Info and Blog RSS Feed Reader.

Extended Info allows you to integrate custom HTML to create new and interesting fields on the page. Instead of being overly pushing with daily reminders on their timelines, you can designate areas on the page for contest and promotional offers.

Like with Extended Info, Blog RSS Feed Reader can be used to incorporate content you are discussing on your blog with your profile without the use of status updates. Reader always allows fans a chance to share this information via other social media outlets.

Internet marketing is no longer the Wild West. It’s becoming more interactive, sophisticated, and accessible to people of all walks of life. While there has always been a question of how to leverage social media, Facebook is making it easier to build communities and generate higher quality leads. I am positive that as it continues evolving, there will be feverish migration of online marketers looking to capitalize on its success.

Thanks to larcher the Facebook ad image!