Web Vision

How to Add a Facebook Like/Fan Box to Your Website

Amanda — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:35:13 +0000

I have gotten asked this question a few times and I think the easiest way to explain how to add a Facebook Like Box (or Fan Box) to your website is to show you. Below is a video explaining the steps to customizing and adding your Facebook Like Box to your website.

Adding a Facebook Box to your site is a great way to promote your Facebook presence on your business website. Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world and people are not only using the site to connect with family and friends but to show their support and interest in businesses too. The Facebook Box is interactive and users can click to connect with your company on Facebook right from your website. With Facebook’s easy customization you can style the Box how you would like and Facebook will generate the HTML code for you.

For you non video folks:

First things first: you need to be an administrator to the Facebook page you would like to promote
Go to Edit Page of your Facebook Business Page
Then on the right hand side, click on Promote with a Like Box
Customize your Like Box – choose the width and the information you want to include
Hit Get Code
Copy code
Plug the HTML code into your website files where you want your Facebook Like Box
Publish your web page update

Want more information?

Watch our prerecorded webinar:

Creating and Optimizing a Facebook Fan Page for Your Business
Facebook is becoming a force on the internet. Most of your clients and potential clients are using Facebook. Should you consider using a Facebook Company Page to reach your target audience? In this webinar we will discuss if your business should consider creating a Facebook Fan Page and show you how to optimize the profile to be found easily. We will also show some shortcuts to regularly adding content to your Facebook Fan Page, the difference between a Fan Page and a Facebook Group and show you some examples of what other businesses are doing and if they are getting any value from this popular social network.

Use Your CMS to Create Custom Landing Pages

Alayna — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:16:52 +0000

Photo Credit: jeffk

Using a CMS gives businesses the freedom to update their website as often as they want. Some use this ability more than others by creating targeted landing pages for visitors. With landing pages available, people who search for a specific product or service will get directed to a page that provides just what they are looking for. Plus Google likes seeing distinct landing pages, since it includes specific keywords and is on-target. How can you not create a landing page when both your visitors and Google approve?

So How Exactly Does This Work?

A landing page includes content that is specific to a certain product or audience. It is on topic, to the point and should always provide a conversion action that visitors can take.

Some examples of what a landing page is used for include:

introducing new content or products
providing more details from an ad or email
customizing content for an audience based on location

Whether users get to your page through searching, clicking an ad, continuing from an email, or finding it through social media, the landing page should be able to quickly show them that your website has just what they want!

Landing Page Tips

Once you decide to create a landing page, think about what you want to promote. Start small by picking one topic or item and focusing on that. With a CMS, you have the ability to create as many landing pages as you want, just make sure they all align with your web strategy! When creating your landing pages keep the following in mind:

Keep it simple – You have one page to grab the visitor, so include just what you need to say. By using one relevant message you will be providing useful content that lets users know they are on the right page with the information they need.
Use a clear headline – Quickly get to the point so that visitors are not wasting their time figuring out what they are reading about.
Add multiple call to action items – It is very important to include an action that the user can take, such as signing up for a newsletter, contacting your company, purchasing a product, or downloading a resource. Make sure to put the action item throughout the page in obvious locations so that users can follow through at any point.
Have a helpful thank you page – Your follow up message is just as important as the main page. Make sure to give information about how you will follow up and what other actions the user can take. Give them something else to do!

Finish it Up

Once you have created your new landing page(s) don’t just forget about them! Keep an eye out on the conversion rates through your analytics goals and tweak the pages to make them work better. If users are staying on the page for a while but are not converting, you can try changing the call to action elements or simplifying your form so that it is easier to fill it out. If people are not reading your content, try updating the headline or revising the text. With a CMS you have the power to do what you want with your landing pages!

How Are You Going to Catch Your Social Media Stride?

Amanda — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:22:17 +0000

Photo credit: Hamed Saber

I am not going to lie everyone, I have had a rough couple weeks in this old internet space. Things not going the way they planned, people who I thought would be good business partners ending up being 3 headed monsters, my Google Reader is so out of control I don’t know where to start but with the ‘mark all as read button’, and on and on.

What I needed to do and many of us probably need to do is take a step back and remind ourselves of our goals, our tactics and strategy to reach those goals. I needed to realign myself and find a better stride than the one I was carrying on with. So I did some revamping and I am optimistic about the rest of the year. Here are a few key points I took away on determining my social media stride.

Pace Yourself – When training for an athletic event there is a small window of effort you are supposed to try for. Train too lightly and you aren’t building the muscle or stamina you need. Train too hard and you may get injured or burn out. The same goes for your social media presence. Too little and you won’t even feel like you are seeing return out of your efforts. Too hard and just maintaining your social media presence could be a full time job and your actual responsibilities (like running a business) will suffer. You need to find that balance so you are pushing yourself strong enough to grow but without burning out.

Discard bad relationships – This is hard for many of us to do in business. We feel every relationship has a monetary value to it. Unfortunately, some of those relationships take more than they give. This goes for your online network as well. Sometimes an online relationship that you think will benefit both of you ends up being negative. No matter how many Twitter followers or LinkedIn contacts they have, if they are not in line with your business goals but instead are detracting from them, you may need to step away. If you have thousands of Twitter followers but still find no value in Twitter you may have focused on the wrong things when growing your online network.

Remember why you are here in the first place – I think I say this at every event I speak at but you need to set your goals before you start participating in social media and you need to constantly be checking back and seeing if you are achieving them. It is very easy to get distracted with what competitors are doing, or the biggest social media experts are doing but you joined social media to build relationships for your brand and not to be the next social media expert.

Goals aren’t static – Yes, I am a goals freak but even I know as your business and technology changes your goals need to change too. Sometimes things happen in your industry or your local space that aren’t threatening but are worth realigning your goals to make sure your business will thrive through the coming years.

No one can do this for you – I am not talking about the debate over ghost bloggers or ghost tweeters, I am saying no one can decide for you what you are going to do in this space but you. No one can determine how much time you spend with it and what kind of return you get. If something isn’t working you may need to change your stride. You need to find a rhythm that works with you and your organization that shows you some kind of return.

Of course there are lots of other factors, like the tools you choose, for determining your social media stride. I am looking past tools and to goals, relationships and time. Is there anything you would add on finding your social media stride?

High End Salon Specializing in Mullets – How Focusing on Social Media is Killing Your Business

Amanda — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:30:00 +0000

I don’t really consider myself a social media expert. I DO use the tools social media has given me to promote our business, help our clients grow their businesses, connect with people who will help me make things happen and to build better relationships in my personal life and business life.

I also have no problem talking to people about how I use these tools. I have talked to large and small groups about how they can use social media in their line of work. I have no problem educating people on how I use social media as a tool. Much like how we don’t charge for webinars at Hall because we feel it is better for us overall, if we educate people more on the recent advances in technology and internet marketing. I don’t keep my Twitter strategy or how I use LinkedIn close to the vest. I want you to know too. I think we all can learn from each other.

Social media is like a mullet

Photo credit: heyjohngreen

News flash – Social media is fun. There is nothing wrong with participating in something fun but for some reason we all feel guilty doing it. We have to constantly verify to our peers, bosses and friends that we are working when we use social media. We assume we can’t use something for work and have fun, or can we?

I connect with business partners, share our content and have made some perfect business connections thanks to social media. I have a larger business network, we have more inbound links to our site and we have made sales from people we connected with on social media sites, showing me that this is effective for our business.

More than the business part, social media is fun. Users connect with friends, share pictures, tell stories and tell everyone about fun and exciting things they are doing.

I usually keep these two aspects of how I use social media (work and personal) clearly defined. For example my LinkedIn account is for business – I list business books I am reading, post links to our blog and share company news. My Facebook account is much more personal – I share news about my friends, events I am attending, races I am registered for, photos etc.

So social media is a little business up top, but it is also a pretty big party in the back.

Social Media Agencies, Experts and Gurus – What did you do before?

In my travels over the last few years, I have met and stood shoulder to shoulder with lots of social media experts and business professionals. One thing I am noticing is as companies get into using social media, they are slowly morphing into social media companies. I have seen software consultants blogging about Twitter, retail outlets posting about their favorite Facebook tips and more.

There are lots of pieces to running a business; marketing and networking are big pieces. My concern is that too many people are turning into social media experts and less experts on what it is they joined social media to do in the first place.

You created a Facebook fan page to direct people to your website that sells widgets. Now you are posting about social media tips, people are going to your website and businesses are shocked that no one converted and bought a widget! They didn’t want a widget – they wanted that social media tidbit you teased on Facebook.

What did you do before you added social media marketing to the mix? That should be your goal still. This could be website traffic, building your business network, selling more products, getting more people to your events etc.

By focusing on being a social media expert you are hurting your business

Photo credit: ilovememphis

Constantly remind yourself what goals you had in mind when you joined social media sites. Staying on message should equal more conversions because you have a network of people interested in your products and industry, not social media.

Building a business around social media or morphing your current business into a social media boutique or consultancy has the same benefits as calling yourself a high end salon that specializes in mullets. You are hurting your business by putting too much energy into a tool like social media that changes hourly, how it is used is case-by-case by organization and that doesn’t put money directly into your bottom line.

Mullets happen every day. Someone, somewhere walks into their barber shop and requests their hair to be short up top and longer in the back. Is that what you are going to do? Build a business (reminder – businesses are supposed to make money) around a tool people use for marketing that is mostly personal and has some business usefulness? Or should you stick to what you came to do and be the best widget seller who uses social media for their own marketing efforts?

I owe you a week

Amanda — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:18:02 +0000

Sorry I missed my weekly recap last week! I hope you didn’t feel totally in the dark! So this week some of the news will be from two weeks ago. Being sick in the summer is the worst isn’t it?

Here is the tech news I felt fit to tell you about from the last two weeks:

Facebook changing layout of fan pages, removing boxes – This is important if you are the administrator of a Facebook fan page! Facebook is changing the layout of their Facebook pages on August 23rd. If you have your page set up in boxes you need to take that content and move it to custom tabs. If you are the admin of a page, you should see an alert on the top of the page and the option to see what your page will look like when the changes take place (see below). The new width for custom pages will be 520px, which is significantly smaller than before.

Google Wave, Waves Goodbye – Google wave came out last year and while some loved it for its ability to collaborate on big projects, most were just annoyed with this product. Google announced that they are not going to be sinking any more resources into Google wave and it may eventually come down. The product “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google. For more information about the end of Google Wave check out TechCrunch’s post or you can read CNNs post on Why Google Wave’s demise is good news for Facebook.

Facebook makes browsing photos easier – Perhaps taking a page from Google’s revamped image searches, Facebook has redone how they display photos on profiles. In creepier news, they also added ‘face detection‘ to make tagging easier. I have seen this on my home screen of Facebook a few times in the last week and I was surprised. I get what they are trying to do but it has a hint of creepy, if you ask me.

Delta lets you buy airline tickets right from Facebook – As the lines from social media sites and business get blurred, this new feature from Delta shouldn’t be a surprise but it caught many of us off guard. As of this past week you can now purchase airline tickets right from Delta’s Facebook fan page.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta coming our September 15th – Microsoft will launch the public Beta of IE9 on September 15th. Internet Explorer has quickly lost power to other browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Will this new version pull them our of the mud? We will have to wait and see.

Links I liked:

The numbers don’t lie: Mobile devices overtaking PCs – CNN Money
Connect Your B2B Customers with Social Media Profiles – socialmediab2b.com
Are You Sure You Want That Social Media Job? – Brass Tack Thinking
Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? – TopRank Blog
28 Awesome B2B Social Media Statistics – socialmediab2b.com
The 4 Hottest Social Media Marketing Trends Explained – Hubspot

Using LinkedIn Better: Subscribe to LinkedIn Answers

Amanda — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:41:18 +0000

LinkedIn is a powerful business networking tool. If you are one of the many who have heard this before but still don’t “get it”, here is one way to utilize LinkedIn better so it fits into your work day.

Use an RSS Reader to stay on top of LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn Answers are great! You can drill down into the topic your industry is in and find questions people are asking daily. Taking the time to answer some of these questions in and around your industry is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. As you answer questions it also shows up on your LinkedIn profile and in your network’s activity stream. Letting people know you are the go-to in an industry leads to referrals and business.

Many of us are not on LinkedIn all day though. So by the time you remember to check LinkedIn Answers, there are too many to sort through and if you did answer one, you might be the 50th person to give your opinion and it gets lost in the noise.

By subscribing to LinkedIn in your RSS reader you can scan through Questions as they come in. Using a more central location like your RSS reader makes it more timely, easier to scan and alleviates the need to log into LinkedIn multiple times.

Below is a video showing you how you can quickly subscribe to a LinkedIn topic that interests you:

Not a video person? Here is how you subscribe to LinkedIn Answers

Go to LinkedIn Answers you can either follow this link or pull down the More menu on the LinkedIn Navigation to get there.
On the right hand side, browse and select a category that interests you.
If possible, go back to the browse category and drill down to a more specific topic.
At the bottom of the browse section, click on the Subscribe to new questions in: link.
Choose your preferred RSS reader

Keeping Your Eyes on Your Own Paper

Amanda — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:27:35 +0000

Oh competitors… you can’t live with them and you can’t wish them away to a magical land far, far away. We all have competitors in our jobs and in our life. It is a part of life.

We could drown keeping a constant eye on what our competitors are doing. We could also veer away from what it is we do best trying to keep up with them, we could add services we don’t excel at, we could lose our focus.

Trust me… I could spend all day, every day online gasping, complaining and whining about what other people in my industry are doing, but who does that really help? Not me. What many of us need to do is think back to our school days when Ms. Ross would say ‘Amanda keep your eyes on your OWN paper’ but maybe you didn’t have Ms. Ross (lucky) and maybe your name isn’t Amanda.

Match your competitors but don’t follow them – Something makes you unique from even your closest competitor. Is it customer service, like Zappos? Is it that your employees are more dedicated? Do you have a unique software? Whatever it is, recognize that your differences are also your strengths. If you spend all your time watching what your competitor is doing and then following them, soon you will be way off the path you started on. Sure, you can be as good as them at some things, but be better at the things that make you unique.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going,
because you may not get there. – Yogi Berra

Use proper ‘Netiquette’ when interacting with your shared space online – With sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn it can seem impossible to ignore what other people are doing. When you do stumble across a blog, interview, post or update that irks you, it is usually best to leave it alone. If there is something posted about your company or service, you should consult your social media policy on how to handle reactions to content.

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it. – Lou Holtz

Focus on what people are saying about you, not about them – Trust me, I know how frustrating it can be to see other people talking about your competitor and not about you. Jumping in on the conversation can be tacky though. Pay more attention to what people are saying about you and react and reward them as necessary. Set up things like Google Alerts to get notified when your company is mentioned. Social networking sites got you down? Tired of seeing your competition being tweeted about and to? Here is one thing I have learned – sometimes some people are better at Twitter than they are at business. Ignore it and focus on what cool things you have going on instead. Do you have a Twitter account? Take a minute to review the ‘Lists‘ people have categorized you under. I think Twitter lists are a great dipstick to see how people view your content.

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope. – Josh Billings

Measure against yourself and your goals – We need to stop upholding ourselves to other people’s expectations. We need to measure our own success against ourselves first. I recently read a great blog post, Run Your Own Race, that really ironed this out for me. As many of you know, I recently became a “runner”. My first goal was a half marathon. I run very slow because I never want to run out of gas by mile 6 or 12. I felt pressure to run faster because whenever you tell someone you ran a race they ask ‘what was your time?’ It took me until just recently to not care about telling people my time. I am running these races for my health, to spend time with friends and mostly, so I don’t go insane. It doesn’t matter how fast. It just matters that I am doing it. The same goes for my work. I measure the things that are important to reaching Hall’s goals. Not just measuring all the things that we are able to measure.

If you’re looking sideways all the time, you’re very likely to miss the opportunities, paths, and people that are right in front of you. – Amber Naslund, Brass Tack Thinking

It is a big world out there. We should all be able to coexist, but too often I see people who are obsessed with what their competition is doing. Remember the things that make you different and focus on those. By keeping your eyes on your own paper you will find opportunities that are inline with your strengths and goals. By copying the other guy, you are straying from what it is you have set out to do. Know what makes your competitors different from you as well. It may not hurt to recognize what they flourish in too and if there is a project that is better suited for them, are you comfortable enough to hand it off to them?

5 Quick Things B2Bs Can Do to Update a CMS Website

Alayna — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 14:10:52 +0000

When a business has a CMS website, often times updating it goes to the bottom of a to-do list. Trust me, I know that work can get busy and some things just are not as important as others. However, it is important to keep your site updated with fresh content for many reasons. Updating content on your website does not have to be a chore though, a few quick updates every so often can really make a difference! Sitepoint published a blog post recently with “5 Quick Ways to Freshen Up Your Web Site Copy” and I would like to expand on that with some B2B specific actions that you can do to add value to your website.

Photo Credit: Erica_Marshall

1. Update Information About Your Company and Employees
The first point the article mentions is to update your Bio. In addition to making sure your bio has the most recent information (including awards and presentations) make sure to check your company bio and employee bios as well. The About Us page is one of the most visited pages on a website and is important in B2B for validating your organization and showing that there are real people behind the scenes. It is crucial to make sure that the information about your company is always up to date and that the employee list is current and everyone has the correct titles.

2. Social Media Feed
If your company is active on Twitter or Facebook, then a feed of the most recent tweets and posts can be a great addition to a site if they are updated frequently. A feed that shows the last action being a month ago will not help your site since people will think that you gave up and are not putting forth the effort online anymore. However, an active feed will provide great fresh content to your website while showing your personality (people love to know that other people are behind the site, even B2Bs!).

3. Review Your Products and Services
When other businesses and clients come to your site they want to know the bottom line: what you have that will fill their need. It will make your company look bad if you do not have the most up to date information. Always keep a current list of products and services so that you are not stuck defending something that is incorrectly presented.

4. Review Action Items on High Traffic Pages
Take a look at your analytics (if you do not have any, set it up stat!) and see what pages are the most popular. Now think about what you have for action items on those pages. Any? Think of what you would like your visitors to do once they have viewed those pages and make it easy for them to follow through with that action! Add links to contact you or to view more information. Think of what information you would be looking for if you were visiting and provide that. Then set up goals so that you can see what is working and if visitors are converting.

5. Review Pages with Low Traffic and Take Appropriate Action
While looking at your analytics also take some time to see what pages are getting the least amount of traffic. Are those pages essential? Cut them if they are not. If they do have important information but no visits then maybe the pages are too hard to find. Review your navigation and make sure it is easy to get to the information people need. Finally, review the content and see if there is anything you can do to spice it up or trim it down so that it provides just what visitors want once they get there!

These are just a few things you can do to make sure that your website gives the right impression to your B2B visitors. Clients and prospects have more trust in a company that has an up to date website with expert information and the most recent resources. Your website is the hub of your online brand, so treat it well!