I currently have the fortune to experience two different fronts of digital marketing. Under Plural, I work with brands and, with SocialMouths I mostly jam with small business, personal brands, and bloggers.

One of the reasons I absolutely love this setup is that they are two different worlds in how the social web is approached, how it’s handled and how success is measured.

So I’m here to tell you that, despite the ridiculous budgets and unlimited resources, small business has a huuuge advantage over brands when it come to social media.

Here are my thoughts:

Strategy. Or Not?

This is a touchy subject, I’m sure you’ve seen tens or hundreds of blog posts about the importance of having a strategy in place. Listen to what I’m about to say here: An entrepreneur does not need to elaborate a huge document to handle social media marketing. You need the necessary product and industry knowledge and you need to have the sensibility on how to use the social networks.

Having a set of goals in place and knowing what you are aiming to achieve with your daily activities is enough for an entrepreneur to dive in and adjust as needed.

When it comes to big brands, that’s a whole different story. The requirements to manage social media presence are different. You now have to consider the involvement of employees and even outsourced efforts. We’re talking about heavy documentation here on how to represent the brand, the language, the tone, how to respond to problems and inquiries and even how to handle a crisis, when things are escalated to higher ground.

A brand without this type of documentation is just an invitation to media disaster. One of the beauties of open voice channels is that the consumer can take your brand down in a few hours. If policies and processes are not in place, guess what…

Being Human

There is a huge gap here. Brands that are successful on social media have implemented communication channels for specific needs like customer service or promotions but they fail at reaching true engagement. Even in those areas most brands fail to reach their full potential. We have lately seen how Social Commerce and Social Customer Service are not performing as well as we expected.

Brands are far from becoming human and getting the user engaged for real. It’s simple, the average social media user is not online to interact with their bank in a conversational manner. They will take advantage of your special deal or rant about bad experiences but that’s it.

When it comes to small business, it’s easy for an individual to become the voice of the company, a personal brand that builds trust around a product or service with a human touch. This person becomes a resource of good advice, a problem solver that people feel comfortable interacting with. In fact, they’re responsible for huge part of the company’s success online.

I have a couple of examples of these individuals that do an amazing job representing a product and making it human: Leo Widrich from Buffer and Oli Gardner for Unbounce. These guys are not hired community managers, they’re co-founders of the respective companies, part of the key team, but they are also the face and voice, producing content, listening and interacting in the frontline and building community.

These guys are perfect examples of how a small business can be human online and reach true engagement.

Satisfaction

Another advantage of small business over brands is the possibility of ensuring satisfaction. Guys like Oli and Leo are approached with questions and issues on a daily basis (I know I bug them from time to time).

Small businesses are able to do this on a smaller scale and on a personal level.

@socialmouths Hi Francisco, great to hear from you. This guide should help: blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-add-the… Let me know how you get on

— Leo Widrich (@LeoWid) May 8, 2012

There are a few brands that are able to focus on satisfaction and do an excellent job on quick responses and providing solutions. Directv comes to mind. But I’m sure you’ve seen more brands handling customer service in a very poor way. Imagine how a customer with a problem feels when arriving to an endless Twitter stream of apologies…

I have contacted Time Warner Cable via Twitter for massive interruptions to my Internet service and after not getting a solution over the phone, to sadly have no response.

Management

If you are an entrepreneur that is naturally involved in social media marketing, chances are you don’t label daily activities such as brand monitoring, content creation and curation, front-end interaction, etc. But you are performing them. Something similar happens when a small business has designated two or three people to handle things, there is a small setup with basic agreements on who does what.

The other advantage is how quick a small operation can make an unexpected turn or have a reaction without the bureaucracy that comes along with corporate land. Small business can focus on honesty and satisfaction while a brand will often take the damage control approach, usually with a bit of delay.

But when it comes to the enterprise, management can get pretty complex. We talked about the need of having a strategy in place and even though employees are familiar with how to handle themselves, there is still a lot of management needed. Those daily activities become departments that at some point need to come together to measure things.

Which brings us to the next point…

ROI

Another controversial topic indeed. We often read about the complexity of figuring out return on investment. Think about it, a national fast food franchise runs a TV campaign, how do you measure if it resulted in an increased amount of sales. They do, they have systems in place that provide a clue when the needle moves in certain markets. Nothing is ever exact.

How is social media ROI measured? often times brands focus on shiny numbers like Likes and Followers. Numbers that are definitely part of social media measurement but not how the bottom line is affected. The fun part is when the CEO asks: “So now, how do we turn all those likes into actual sales?”

How is all that tied up to measure sales and profits?

Measuring ROI for global brands is still a puzzle.

Now don’t get me wrong, figuring this out can also be complicated for small business. But does it need to be?

What if you create your own formula to determine ROI? Let’s see…

In my previous business I used to run tons of advertising on different media vehicles. I used to measure the lead cost and sale cost to determine my magic number, I knew exactly what magazine ad or TV spot was working or not. In actual profit, not just percentages.

Cost per time spent. Not media.

When it comes to marketing in the social web, you do not have costs for media (unless you run Facebook ads or something like that) but you do have time spent. Either by your team or yourself. Can you measure that? Of course you can, you don’t need massive data to figure out that if you’re spending 4 hours a day to get only a couple of sales a week, things are not working that well… unless you sell cars.

A simple tracking spreadsheet can tell you if your time is being well spent.

Measure Sources

When you have a new client, do you ask him where he found you? Sometimes it’s obvious, you know you established contact on Twitter or Facebook, sometimes it’s not that easy, for example if this relationship started a while back. But the point is that by manually tracking this kind of information, you can easily get an idea of what channels are giving you better results and where to spend more of your time and energy.

I can easily tell you without looking at any numbers that 80% of my relationships turned into clients come from Twitter, even tough I generate more traffic more Facebook. That is enough for me to know I need to be present there but it also indicates that I could improve things on other networks as well.

Of course no system is perfect, my point here is that for a small business things are easier to establish and track, with a simple custom approach that fits your company needs you can get a better idea of your performance.

Final Thought

You, as an entrepreneur, might not have the budget and resources big brands have but I can guarantee you, the average digital citizen will interact with you before interacting with a brand and that right there, gives you a huge advantage.

The social web levels the field, if you are there to deliver what a brand can’t, you might just be able to create great opportunities. People like doing business with people.

Dive in with a short set of goals, be human, focus on satisfaction, manage your efforts and track your results in a simple way.

Your Turn

Do you have a strategy in place? How often do you revisit and adjust this strategy? How do you measure success? How do you approach issues? Share with us in the comments section!

Photos are mine, I’m a “saved by the filter” wannabe iPhone photographer. The coffee shop is Single Origin in the L.A. Farmer Market, they serve hand-brewed coffee that rocks your world. 

Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North.

Effective display of social media buttons on your blog and website becomes more critical every day:

• On the people side, social media for business has gone mainstream, so building a community around your company pages opens up huge opportunities for sales, leads and referrals.
• On the SEO side, social shares are being given more weight by Google and other search engines. Content that is liked, tweeted and +1’d will perform better in SERPs than lonely, unloved blog posts and web pages.

This post includes several suggestions for displaying social buttons, as well as screen captures to illustrate various details.

Tips for Displaying Social Media Buttons

Displaying Community Buttons

1. Display community buttons for networks where you have an active presence. (If it’s only a token presence, think about whether you want to encourage people to check you out on that network.)
2. You can help visitors find your community buttons quickly by making them reasonably large, using standard images, and grouping them together in a single block.
3. Since visitors may get the urge to connect no matter where they are on your site, it makes sense to place your block of community buttons in the header of every page template. Placement at the top of the sidebar is a good alternative for blog sites.
4. Another good place to display community buttons is in the footer. Visitors don’t always want to scroll back to the top, but may be very interested in connecting after reading a page of great content.
5. Somehow let visitors know that these buttons are for joining your communities, not for sharing your content. Since share buttons look similar, visitors may be unsure about the purpose of a particular button.
6. Test buttons periodically to make sure everything is still working.

Displaying Social Sharing Buttons

1. Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter share buttons should always be displayed, since there’s a high probability visitors will be active on at least one of these networks.
2. Display buttons to other networks if they are especially applicable to your content and audience. Popular candidates are StumbleUpon, Digg, and Pinterest (especially if you have cool images). Be careful about displaying every possible button, though: offering too many options can clutter your design and possibly confuse the visitor.
3. Share buttons should be large enough to be easily seen, yet not so large as to overwhelm the content.
4. If possible, keep all share buttons grouped together in a single block where visitors can find whatever they need all in one place.
5. The most popular placement for share buttons is at the top and bottom of the blog post. Sometimes people share content before they read it, based purely on the title and/or your reputation. And certainly, the motivation to share will be high after someone has read your post. Be careful not to let share blocks to get lost among other design elements such as ads, bylines, subheads, bios, and comments.
6. Another popular display option for share buttons is a vertical sliding button panel on the left page margin. The nice feature of this approach is that the buttons are always in view no matter where the reader is on the page.
7. Test button functionality periodically to make sure everything is working properly.

Two Big Display Issues

1. Should you show the number of fans and shares?

If your numbers are small (e.g., fewer than 100 in your community and single-digit tweets), it seems sensible to hide them, but then again, many people are as likely – maybe more likely — to retweet under-shared content as widely shared content, as long as it’s good content.

If your numbers are huge, displaying them would seem to be a no-brainer, And yet, how interested are people in sharing content that’s already been shared a thousand times? How interested are they in joining a community where they will just be a face in the crowd?

What do you think? Show numbers or hide them?

2. Should you display big honking community widgets on your sidebar?

When Facebook introduced its widget, everybody rushed to display it. Other networks offer them as well, and though they may be effective for some bloggers, they have disadvantages.

First, these widgets distract from the page’s content. Second, when social –link design elements are scattered, they force users to search harder for the links they want. Third, if widgets are placed high on the sidebar, this valuable real estate probably can be put to better use. If widgets are low on the sidebar, few users will see it, so what’s the point?

What do you think? Widgets or no widgets?

Social Linking in the Real World

A. Community Buttons

Example 1 – Good design by Dianna Huff

Dianna’s blog header nicely combines branding and conventional button images – notice how the white space helps focus attention on the various design elements. She positions her community “link block” perfectly, at the top right of the header where nobody can overlook it. Placing contact information below the link block helps users identify the buttons as community buttons rather than share buttons.

Example 2 – Less effective design

Here, the community buttons appear as something of an afterthought, not clearly identified and unevenly spaced. The buttons are not large enough to be easily noticed, and having two Facebook buttons could be confusing to users.

Example 3—Good positioning from Skyje

Skyje’s blog home page is extremely long, so footer links aren’t practical. Instead, Skyje places this community block on the sidebar, just below the fold. The buttons are large and use standard colors, making them hard to miss. I also grabbed the hover text here, so you can see how helpful it is.

Example 4 – Creative linking from Memeburn

Memeburn’s Mobile links are extremely cool. Memeburn is making it easy for content to be read and shared on mobile devices, which is something all content marketers should be doing. Very smart.

Example 5 – Creative design from Adverblog

Remember the tip about always using standard images? Adverblog does the opposite and succeeds brilliantly. By sticking with standard colors and smartly positioning the link block, they have a little fun and get the job done.

B. Share Buttons

Example 1 – Sliding vertical panel at SocialMouths

Vertical slide panels are arguably more noticeable than share buttons that appear at the top and bottom of a post, and they are always right in front of you. Here, six links are displayed, which is about perfect: some blogs display upwards of ten buttons, which gets distracting.

Example 2 – Simple and complex linking options from Technorati

Technorati places share buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ at the under the post title, which is good:

Then, at the bottom, they place share buttons to more than 300 sites in the author bio section:

When you click on the share links, a dialog box opens that contains a plethora of additional links:

The placement of these share links is strange, but all these options may have appeal to Technorati’s geeky audience. Technorati is probably wise to have simple sharing options at the top, and bury the complexity.

Example 3 – Subtle emphasis from Jason Falls

To avoid having the share buttons get lost at the top of the post, Jason adds a little shading to the share block, making it stand out and yet not overwhelm the actual content. As usual, Jason hits the ball out of the park!

Over to You!

What do you think? What are your likes and dislikes about social button display? Do you see anything in your own design you’d like to change?

Further Reading

Studying web design and usability is quite helpful for maximizing a site’s effectiveness – and that includes social media community building and content sharing. To learn more:

• Don’t Make Me Think, by Steve Krug. Subtitle is “A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” Be uncommonly great by reading it!
• Jakob Nielsen – The guru of web usability. Tougher reading, but well worth the effort.

Do you have any great resources to share?

Photo credit: Coletivo Mambembe

This is a guest post by Sookie Shuen from Tomorrow People.

How much can your company benefit from a timely rebranding and revitalization?

When considering this question, one must keep in mind that rebranding does not necessarily address the wants and needs of the company directly, but rather speaks to the wants and needs of that company’s current and prospective customers.  Therefore, the important factors to consider when assessing the value of a rebrand include equity measurement; market differentiation and accessibility; brand awareness, relevance and vitality; and consumer personality, preference, usage, associations, and emotional connectivity.

If your company can improve relationship to its customer base in any or all of these key areas, you may want to think seriously about revitalization.

Reason #1: Competitive advantage

Your brand is the public face of your business.  As the economic climate changes, it must change along with it.  A well planned and executed rebrand will enable your company to reflect current market dynamics and thereby gain competitive advantage, accelerate pipeline performance and become a leading voice of the industry.  Sidestep the competition and increase your market share through an updated image.  By revisiting your brand messaging, you can counter a loss in consumer confidence and/or decreased profitability.

Reason #2: Stimulate growth

Rebranding can serve to reduce the cost of operation and to cater more efficiently to current customer demands.  In markets where complex and confusing mixes of product portfolios frequently undermine brand impact via advertising clutter and media proliferation, a rebrand can combat incongruence and audience fragmentation to regain customer impact and promote growth.  As the company continues to grow, subsequent rebranding will ensure that customers hungry for change will keep coming back to see “what’s new.”  In this sense, the rebrand becomes a public expression of the company’s evolution and a constant check to potential outgrowth.

Reason #3: Long terms market expansion

When a small business prospers and expands, they and/or their products frequently require a rebrand or revitalization to reflect the larger, more sophisticated business it has become.  Any emergent company not employing this essential business strategy will inevitably be dwarfed by its competition. The modest brand offerings typical of the small company and its contingent budget restrictions will ultimately prove inadequate as that company grows and evolves.  However, budding economic prosperity and subsequent operational expansion are not the only facets of business growth and evolution that necessitate revitalization and rebranding.

Reason #4: Innovation = Profitability

Just as a company’s brand must reflect changes in size and market position, it must also reflect changes in technological innovation.  Constantly evolving at an exponential rate, technology and business prosperity are often inseparable from one another.  Any brand associated with technology or technological advancement, must keep pace with the industry of which it is a part.  Therefore, tech-dependent businesses, such as those associated with the internet or with computer hardware or software, might need to consider more frequent revitalization and rebranding.  If a company’s production line is subject to a constant, rapid rate of change, the wise owner and/or manager will subsequently revitalize his or her brand at a commensurate rate.  Again, your brand is the public face of your business.  When it fails to reflect the level of innovation your business has achieved, your customers will quite naturally assume that you have fallen behind the times.  Competitors who consistently rebrand their products and services—even those competitors who have yet to achieve your company’s level of technological acumen—will likely outperform you in terms of reputation and/or economic profitability.

Whatever your reason for rebranding—be it economic and operational expansion, technological innovation, or any other type of growth and/or change—your company’s brand must remain consistent with the latest and greatest your business has to offer.  Whether reflecting advancements in your product and/or service lines or the evolving nature of your business in and of itself, the process of rebranding is essential to communicate your level of quality to your audience of consumers. Furthermore, although taking the step to rebrand your business will, first and foremost, revitalize your consumer base, the change can also have quite a rejuvenating effect upon the internal culture of your company.  As your brand evolves to reflect new innovations in a constantly changing marketplace, your employees will inevitably be swept up in the momentum.  Launching a rebrand will call for new levels of worker support, knowledge and feedback, as well as affording them the opportunity to join in the creation of a new, positive business culture.  In this way, the process of rebranding not only brings the public face of your company in step with its internal machinations, but also, in turn, actively engages your management team and workforce to contribute to the new business culture that your new brand represents.

The business rebrand is about a great deal more than making your business look good. It’s about making your bottom line look good, too. So what is it that makes a company rebrand such a valuable proposition for your business? Please share your thoughts and comments.

This week I want to talk about blog conversion, the art of making your visitors take action whether that means spending more time reading your content, buying one of your products or subscribing to your email list.

There is plenty of content out there on how to convert your readers to subscribers and buyers and, if you take your blogging seriously as an integral part of your marketing, you’ve probably read tens or even hundreds of posts about the topic.

Me? I went to Derek Halpern for advice on how to improve SocialMouths. Derek is the author of SocialTriggers, where he writes about using psychology to help increase traffic and turn your visitors into loyal subscribers and buyers. He’s also the head of marketing for the famous WordPress theme Thesis. I first met Derek through a series of videos where he reviews sites for popular guys like Chris Brogan and from that moment I have been consuming his content, specially the newsletter.

So I wrote this post to share those tips, some have been implemented into SocialMouths’ new design and others haven’t but I still want to share them with you. The good thing is that these tweaks are not huge and they’re not hard to implement on your blog but, the impact is definitely significant.

Let’s dive right into it…

1 – Strategic areas for Opt-in forms

We’re not discussing the importance of building a successful list but, as I said last week, email subscribers are THE counter a blogger should focus on. For that reason, it’s very important to display clear and prominent calls-to-action and sign-forms throughout your blog.

Here are the main sections Derek recommends for sign-up forms:

Feature Box – The box between the site’s header and your content. Made famous by Thesis, is probably the hottest area of your site. Right here on SocialMouths, which runs proudly on Thesis, the feature box opt-in form is responsible for roughly 40% of email conversions.

Here is a great example on Lewis Howes‘ site:

Sidebar

The top of the sidebar is probably the most obvious location for an opt-in form, specially on post pages. If you don’t have a Feature Box on your blog, it will most likely be your # 1 converter.

If you are running a Feature Box on your blog and you feel having an opt-in box also on your sidebar is too much, use it only for your posts and pages, where that Feature Box is not displayed.

Post

The bottom of your blog post is key. A visitor that reads your entire piece of content is most likely ready to take action, that can be simply navigating to a different page or post on your site, share the post, write a comment or more importantly, sign up for email updates.

The following example is from Derek’s site Social Triggers

Footer

Basically the same criteria of the post box is applied here, the decision of staying on your site is made in a split second, people will either abandon or give you a few more seconds to engage them. But the people that scrolls all the way down on your site are more likely to take action.

Resources

I’ll give you 2 recommendations here, the first one is in case you are shopping around for a WordPress theme, Marketers Delight by Alex Mangini is a skin that runs over Thesis and it’s highly optimized for email list building, featuring several options you can activate right from your dashboard.

And the second one, also by Alex, are the signup forms made available for free download on the Thesis blog. These are already designed forms you can use use with Aweber or Mailchimp and they come with easy to follow instructions on how to apply your code.

2 – Sidebar

The sidebar is often used by bloggers to accumulate all kinds of widgets, turning this piece of important real estate into a deposit for clutter.

The sidebar is important because in most blogs, no matter where you navigate, is one of the elements that remains visible. Sit down in front of your blog with a cup of coffee and dedicate an afternoon to reconsider each one of the elements on your sidebar, the criteria is simple, what does each one of these widgets do to your business.

Some of the items Derek recommends you should eliminate from your sidebar:

• Badges – from rankings or associations you might belong to. You might consider if any of these badges really makes a difference as social proof, some people in the marketing industry for example, display the AdAge badge. I eliminated all of them and just recently added the Social Media Examiner Top 10 Blogs
• Social Network widgets – A blog is the hub of your online marketing, the final destination, you should not be sending the traffic back out. If you display the number of followers or fans and this number is not significant, it could damage rather than serving as social proof

Must-have elements:

4 – Resource Pages

This is important, even though I have not yet applied it in this blog. The concept of resource pages is basically to direct your readers to the most relevant content on your site. The thought of people navigating your blog using categories, tags and even the search function is obsolete and it often results on the reader not finding that relevant content on your site.

WordPress makes it very easy to highlight your recent posts but not the old content due of its chronological format. And I bet you have some relevant content buried in your blog.

I invite you to search a term on your site and see if the results are relevant, or even better, if that is the content you want your readers to find, specially if your blog is fairly new and you don’t have tons of posts. The same thing happens with category pages, your content is organized in a chronological order rather than relevancy.

Resource pages are created as a regular page and they’re based on the most important topics on your blog, in other words, you’re replacing a category page for a page where you control its content. For example, if your blog is about business and one of your main topics is business plans, chances are you have more than a few related posts. You should create a dedicated resource page for that.

Derek uses Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich to illustrate this example:

As you can see, Ramit gives you a little intro and a series of links to content on his own blog.

5 – Topical Navigation

This is also related to the previous point. A first-time visitor will usually land on a post, if this person didn’t find what s/he was looking for, a Topical Navigation might give you a second chance with that visitor.

This is why a blog should have the main navigation and a secondary navigation featuring resource pages.

If your design does not allow the second navigation or you don’t have the resources to implement this, a good way to do it is on the sidebar. You can actually make this more visual as Derek has done on his own blog but, you should make sure they don’t look like ads because they’re often ignored by visitors.

6 – About Page

If you look at your traffic analytics, you will notice that visitors, specially news ones, will usually hit either the homepage or the About page after landing and reading a blog post. On SocialMouths, the most visited page after content pages is Who Is This Dude?.

This is why this page is crucial for your blog conversion. Derek recommends you structure the content a little like this:

1. An introduction that sets expectations, what will your reader find here and how you can help them
2. Email signup form
3. About yourself
4. Email signup form
5. Social proof: Accomplishments and media outlets where have been featured
6. Email signup form

It’s pretty clear that if your reader is going through this page is because s/he is almost ready to take a more serious commitment with your blog. If you feel 3 forms are too much, go with 2.

I also like to add contact information at the bottom of this page, since in my experience people don’t use contact forms.

7 – Negative Social Proof

I know I briefly mentioned this before but let’s elaborate a bit on social proof.

Social proof can be achieved with different vehicles on a blog:

• Media outlets where you have been featured
• Testimonials from influential individuals in your niche
• A top spot in a ranking that’s relevant in your industry
• High number of followers or RSS subscribers
• And even high numbers in your sharing buttons (if you display counters)

Social proof is displayed on a site to show that other people trust you in that particular industry, it will make people feel confortable with you or your brand, however, if the numbers shown are not significant, they can damage your brand.

A good example of this is sharing buttons on pages. People don’t usually share or tweet your About page and showing your count when it has only 3 tweets and 2 shares really gives the wrong impression to your visitor. Even if we talk about numbers not being important all day long, everything has an impact.

Make sure your social proof has a positive impact.

8 – Categories, Tags and the Search Function

One of things I’ve seen Derek mention several times, and for some folks is a bit controversial, is that people do not click on Category or Tag links and, they do not use the search function either. I wanted to see this by myself so I ran several “move” and “click” heatmaps on my site, the result was this: I did not see one click on either category or tag links and not one soul came even close to using the search form on the sidebar.

As you can see they are completely gone from my site.

If you have something in your blog that nobody ever uses, it might as well be invisible.

Resources

Heatmaps are a great way to see how visitors behave in your site, how they move their mouse or where they click so you can work on improving its overall performance. Here are two services you can try: CrazyEgg and ClickTale.

Here is an example of a heatmap:

9 – Action Colors

Something as simple as the text on your content can often confuse readers. I’ve seen bloggers out there that play a lot with text styling like using different colors because they want a line to stand out.

You might be thinking right now that this is something too small to make any difference but, the problem is that if you are adding a link inside a post is because you want your visitor to click on it. That’s not going to happen if that visitor doesn’t identify that text as clickable.

You need two different kinds of text, your “Reading” text and your “Clicking” text. Your links should be a different color or underlined, if you’re using a different color for your links, try not to use that color to highlight other text in your post.

10 – Header Removal Test

And lastly, this is not much of a tip but a test you can do on your own. First impressions are everything, you all know there is a split second when a visitor lands on your blog for the first time to convince them that they are on the right spot.

In order to do this successfully, Derek recommends doing the “Header Removal Test”, which consists on imagining your blog without the header to see if your reader will understand what your blog is about without it and without scrolling below the fold.

Look at what elements below your header help communicate your message successfully. A good example of this could be a prominent topical navigation, as we discussed before.

I want to use Sean Platt’s blog Ghostwriter Dad as example because I think he does a great job with this. Here’s a screenshot of his blog without the header:

It’s pretty clear that his blog is about copywriting, self-publishing and content marketing. He’s accomplishing this without being too graphic.

Final Thought

How often do you look at your blog to find opportunities for improvement? Sometimes adjusting little details you might think are not significant, can make a huge difference in performance.

Also, don’t forget this is a testing game, you should not just apply things you assume are working for somebody else. Even though these techniques are pretty universal, meaning they will work in most niches, you should test what works best for you.

It’ll be great if you can comment on what’s working for you or what are you planning on testing next. Feel free to ask any questions or to completely disagree with the ideas shared here.

Again, you can find Derek on SocialTriggers and on Twitter or Google+.

Happy converting!

This is a guest post from Ryan Critchett from RMC Tech.

Editor’s note: I usually don’t do this but in this case I thought it was important to point out that, the intention behind this type of content is to showcase real entrepreneurs and their stories of successful use of social media marketing, rather than presenting the usual suspects nobody can relate to, like Redbull or Starbucks. These are real examples you can put into action. The story is told by Ryan and, if you have something similar going on, share it with me. Here goes…

It’s no secret, video blogging is a great tool that anyone can benefit from by adding it to their arsenal of business marketing weapons.

Some take advantage of it, some don’t know its power exists and some, don’t understand the force impact you can make by showing people the “face and feeling” of the company.

I’m in the former category. I started video blogging on a blog some of you may remember called Imarketinghacked. Long gone and taken down, Imark (as it was called in the street) was a blog mainly about the awesomeness of new marketing and social media. That’s where it all started for me.

Video Blogging Has This Much Power?

I was blown away. Months after launching the blog, I had actually (contrary to collective expectation) built a pretty solid readership.

Was my content awesome? Well, I think so! But it wasn’t the quality or practicality that brought in such quality readers, it was the fact that they saw my face, felt my feelings and were bonded to me emotionally that got that blog traffic.

That was well before I decided to start a full blown business. I was just dabbling around, learning the landscape, testing things out. But, as it turns out, it was not only the perfect primer, but the most powerful social marketing training I ever could have gotten.

Taking It Into Business, iPhone Style

My company, RMC Tech, is a technical service company that goes where the market needs us. Right now, we’re needed in, and are attacking the iPhone screen repair market.

We replace screens on broken iPhones nationwide, and locally here in Pennsylvania. But, with just the technical skill to replace a screen, could I really make any money?

Could my business get traction, press, awareness and leads just because I’m a hardware geek? I think not! And I certainly didn’t for the first month I offered the service.

I knew, I had to do something big, something contagious, something that spread. The video blogging begun.

I started thinking about how I could use the power of storytelling to reach the local market in the Lehigh Valley, expanding out to the rest of the US. The answer? The iGraveyard.

iPhones break, and when they do, we normally keep the parts. With the parts, comes a story. The story of how the phone met its demise.

Here’s a clip of one of our latest:

My friends started telling me they were drawn in by the iGraveyard videos, that each new one that came out, they were excited to watch and it’s at that point that I knew I was onto something.

Tweeting the videos out to people in my local market, it started to spread the awareness for me. Even if the video gets retweeted 5 times, 5 more people see it, the idea that I repair iPhones gets pressed into their brains, and I’ve effectively just indirectly marketed to them.

But wait, there’s more. It isn’t just the Ryan Critchett theory, I’m getting leads from this. People are not just calling for the service, they now ask me if I’m going to showcase their iPhone on the iGraveyard videos.

I’m now getting a steady flow of leads saying things like “I stumbled across one of your iGraveyard videos on Youtube, and I have a broken iPhone..” not just locally but also from states like like Massuchusetts, New York, and Texas. The main sources for this lead generation, as I ask each one of my customers, are YouTube, Google and Twitter.

I’ve also been able to get some interesting press coverage, land meetings with executives from worldwide brands about technical services within the enterprise, and attract a nationwide franchise technical service company. We’re now in negotiations to do some major partnership stuff.

The videos helped my company get the exposure we were not able to get by building backlinks to our website or attending local networking events. The formula is simple, I use video as a digital emotion vehicle to reach people in a more personal format, through storytelling and showing my face to spread something entertaining and get a message across, which is much more effective than interrupting people.

We’re moving into a new age. In fact, it’s arrived. We’re here. Internet technology and the social web makes it possible to reach customers, and generate leads, in a whole new way. Video blogging transfers emotion. It gives you the ability to show the company’s personality. The human being behind it.

How are you approaching your target?

Let’s take the bull by the horns. Find creative ways to built trust through video with your target market. Reach your potential customers before your competitors do.

Take advantage of the fact that this makes huge budgets in advertising obsolete, because you’re getting to the consumer first by being with them in the trenches and entertaining them.

Crank out some awesome videos, not just about the service you provide but about something entertaining around that service, without trying to sell all the time. People want to do business with people, they want an emotional connection and there is an enormous opportunity to build real trust points through video marketing.

Your R.O.I. is more likely to show up.

Photo Credit: Rego – d4u.hu

This is a guestpost by Jim Belosic, CEO and co-founder of ShortStack.

If you’ve been keeping an eye on news regarding Facebook then you haven’t missed the multitude of articles discussing whether the change to Timeline has been a good or bad thing for business pages and fan engagement.

Numerous studies have been released saying that pages are seeing an increase in fan engagement since the switch and right behind those are studies revealing the exact opposite. So which is true? The answer is neither.

The truth is, it’s always been a Timeline era. The switch to Timeline has not changed any of the rules on Facebook. Was it easier to market prior to Timeline? Yes. But just because it was easier doesn’t mean it was being done properly. Businesses with a strong social media strategy that has proven to work will continue to see success with Timeline. The businesses that are blaming Timeline for negative changes in engagement are going to be disappointed to learn the problem is probably with their social media strategy, not with Facebook.

Marketing in the Timeline era is about getting back to basics. With all the hype surrounding Timeline, here’s some tips that businesses may have forgotten to truly be successful on Facebook.

Focus on Your Existing Fan Base

Don’t exclude your existing fans. Businesses were obsessed with default landing tabs and many were convinced the world was going to end when Facebook took them away. In fact, Francisco just wrote an article on how custom tabs aren’t dead but more alive than ever. He accurately addresses how custom tabs weren’t as successful as everyone had previously thought; and how custom tabs are now more successful than they’re being credited for.

Facebook has never been about getting in the face of a million strangers, it’s about getting your message out to your fans — your fans who already love you and want to share how cool you are with their friends. Facebook is organic and referral-based by nature — something businesses need to keep in mind when building a successful Facebook presence.

If you’re unsure how to engage your fans, run some test content. Try posting an update with a video or a photo, show trends, pick an interesting fact about your history and post something new each week, offer an awesome deal or a prize for entering a contest. Use Facebook analytics to see what your fans are responding best to and use your existing fans to bring you new fans. Facebook analytics are free to all business page owners. In addition, if you use a third party application to create custom tabs on Facebook, most platforms include their own analytics that track engagement.

Measuring fans does not measure success

We touched on this lightly before, but it’s worth mentioning again. We hear clients say everyday, “I want to create a tab that gets me more fans.” Any social media guru, marketer, or expert will tell you, it’s not about getting more fans, and it never has been.

If you have 5,000 fans and you hold a contest and your fan base increases to 10,000 fans, that’s great for your likes, but did your actions increase? In the long run, gaining 5,000 new fans won’t mean anything for your business if none of those fans are engaging with your brand.

Use Timeline for its advantages

Yep, you heard right, Timeline has advantages. We’re not just talking about the ability to pin and highlight posts, we’re talking about the transparency that the Timeline layout offers. For the first time since traditional websites, Facebook now allows a business to tell their story, from day one.  There is room for a huge amount of content on the page. Without default landing tabs, everyone who visits your page learns about your history and sees how you engage with your fans.

It’s now more important than ever to make sure your Facebook content is clean and up to date. You need to be answering questions, thanking your happy customers, and dealing with your unsatisfied customers. Someone interested in your business can see all of this upon visiting your page, so their first impression of your business is in your hands. This means that Timeline can be either beneficial or detrimental to a business’s Facebook page.

Facebook takes time

“Social networking is a full time job” has become a cliche in our line of work, but the adage is true. A successful Facebook presence takes lots of effort and tremendous amount of time and thought. It also takes more than just Facebook to make your page successful. Once you’ve built an amazing page you have to give fans a reason to talk about your brand, so advertise it by posting on your wall, promoting it through email newsletters, even purchasing Facebook ads.

A successful Facebook page does not happen overnight. Timeline has pulled the veil back on what consumers are really interested in. It’s proven that likes aren’t everything, and for some businesses, has revealed the truth about their social media strategy. The key is not to be scared of Facebook, or throw blame at Timeline. Just get back to the basics. It’s the simplest steps that are the most successful, and often times, the most overlooked.

Every blogger knows it, the most important counter is the one that’s not publicly disclosed, the number of email subscribers.

Email subscribers is the highest form of engagement in inbound marketing, it also represents more commitment than a Like, a Tweet and even an RSS subscription.

Your reader is basically giving you permission to enter the only method of online communications that’s still private.

And this, my friends, is one of the reasons SocialMouths has been completely redesigned.

Today I’m sharing with you how, with a few changes, I was able to increase my email subscription rate by 500%.

Let’s start by saying that my previous approach was very healthy, a decent amount of subscribers every month with an unsubscription rate that was nearly non-existent. These changes were made with the objective to improve my conversion rate and to change my entire approach to email marketing to deliver a better service for my subscribers.

So here goes…

Switched from MailChimp to Aweber

Step one was to switch providers from MailChimp to Aweber. This is the point were you’re expecting me to trash MailChimp, not gonna happen. I still think MailChimp is a great service, I really love the beautiful interface, the reports, the social integration and the kick-ass iPhone app to check your campaigns on the move. I’ll miss that for sure.

The problem is not the platform. The problem is that we, as clients, sometimes go for the wrong solution for our needs. In this case, Aweber is a much better solution for bloggers for many reasons.

Free Mini-Course

For the first time in almost 3 years of blogging, SocialMouths created a free product. Now when you subscribe to receive email updates you get full access to the DIY Mini-Course for Building Facebook Custom Tabs, a massive 28-page online tutorial that covers the entire process.

More importantly, I chose this particular topic by listening to my readers in order to deliver exactly what they wanted from me. I did not have to figure out what the reader wanted or run any crowdsourcing campaigns to figure this out. My most popular content (by far) has been related to this topic with more than 100k pageviews and thousands of shares and likes, as well as an average of 20 weekly emails with Facebook Tab-related questions.

It doesn’t matter how prominent your offer is if you’re not fulfilling a need. Identify what your reader wants from you before you spend time and energy building the wrong product.

Multiple Signup Forms

One of the main reasons for switching providers was the ability to handle multiple signup forms in a single page. This is key for a blog and MailChimp makes it very difficult. Even when I tried using the same code snippet for 2 different forms, one on the sidebar and one on the  footer, it created several conflicts.

Aweber not only allows you to create multiple signup forms, they also provide you with the necessary data to see which forms are performing better.

Feature Box

The “Feature Box” is a design option from the Thesis framework, probably not used enough considering the benefits. Here are three reasons why after all this time, I decided to use it:

Prominency

Your offer must be positioned on prime real estate on the site, there is no way around it.

Uniqueness

The Feature Box is really a blank canvas since it’s only a space for you to insert code. This is more important than it sounds, it gives you full creative control. One of the problems I see with Signup Pop-up plugins is that it makes every site looks the same.

When you are serious about business and marketing, looking like a template is not on your roadmap.

Not Intrusive

There is a huge difference between using the Thesis Feature Box and using a Pop-up. To me this is defined in one single element: If I put something in your face and you need to take action to remove it, just to be able to see what you came here to see, I’ll consider that intrusive.

With the Feature Box, you do not have to take any actions, if you don’t care about the offer you simply continue on to the content.

Related Content

I published a post called Facebook Tabs Are Not Dead, They’re More Alive Than Ever to support the launch of the free product. I included a standalone signup form inside the post to be able to track the response.

This post alone was responsible for 30% of the week’s total subscribers.

This is a technique you can’t use every single week so, make sure your post is rock solid to drive enough subscribers.

More “Opens” and “Clicks”

As I said before, one of the reasons for changing my entire email marketing was to deliver a better user experience. This has nothing to do with improving your signup conversion rate and for that reason, success can’t really be measured with subscriber numbers.

The success of your campaigns is measured by “Opens” and “Clicks”.

To improve this, I implemented 2 changes that resulted in an increase of almost 1,000% in Opens and 450% in the Click-through rate.

Frequency

A very delicate matter since it’s hard to visualize what the right amount of content and frequency is. If you are just broadcasting your blog content to your email subscribers, this is specially tricky.

The content here at SocialMouths can be 1 or 2 pieces a week but it can sometimes go up to 3. For some people getting 3 emails in a week is way too much. I noticed open and click-through rates were decreasing and the low amount of unsubscribers were usually happening on the third email of the week.

I’m now mailing only one piece per week.

Original Content

I also stopped broadcasting blog posts. Email subscribers now receive an email I’ve written manually.

By crafting each email you send out, you have the possibility to:

• Write a kick-ass subject for your email. You know how important a headline is, specially when that’s the only piece of content you see on media like Tweets. Your email subject is your headline in this case and it will increase the chances of that email being opened
• Write a compelling call-to-action to click through. Give your subscriber a reason to click s/he can’t resist. When you’re just broadcasting blog posts, your click-through is depending on a boring “Read More” link

How About You?

As you can see, the changes I implemented are not really rocket science but the results I was able to get are significant.

What is your strategy for email subscriptions? Have you identified how it can perform better? Share your experiences with email marketing or feel free to ask any questions if you want.

Happy Emailing!

Image Credit: Dry Icons

Guest post by Joel Runyon of Impossible HQ.

About a month ago, I was getting ready to launch my first product ever – Impossible TRI – a triathlon training program. I had everything in place. I had written 25,000-30,000 words, created training programs, done interviews, had them transcribed, and got it all designed into one sexy program. When I went to put it up for sale, I realized there was one small problem.

I didn’t have a landing page. How was I going to sell this thing?

I tried for a while to make landing pages based on my blog’s template, but I quickly realized I would either have to make custom templates for my theme or just use a standard blog post template for my sales page – both of which were not ideal.

I had almost resigned myself to thinking that I would need to spend hours in photoshop or cough up some serious cash to get the whole thing designed by a professional. Then I found Premise 2.0.

What Is Premise 2.0?

Premise 2.0 is landing page software from Copyblogger for your wordpress blog. Unlike most landing page software, it’s a plugin for your wordpress blog – not a theme – which means you can utilize Premise in addition to any theme you’re currently running – rather than instead of it. This also lets you manage everything from inside your own wordpress installation instead of having to install different pieces of software on different subdomains or subdirectories in your hosting account and managing it from there.

The Importance of Landing Pages

Backing up a bit, the importance of landing pages can’t be understated. It’s easy to dismiss them as unnecessary, but a targeted landing page can double or even triple your conversion rate and make or break a product launch or new campaign.

A lot of people will try to do just what I did – create landing pages based on their current theme. Oftentimes, you’ll see these pages be the standard size of a blog post and have distracting sidebar elements that take away the focus from the actual purpose of the page. To convert a reader into a customer.

Premise creates clean landing pages that are meant to be landing pages – not random templates which you have to mess with for countless hours to get them to work. The one and only focus is on whatever action you want your customers or readers to take.

What Types of Landing Pages Can You Make With Premise?

Premise offers a lot of options. It’s not just one blank landing page that once enough people buy the software, you’ll start seeing everywhere (I’m looking at you pop-up domination). The default landing page is pretty basic in and of itself, but it’s also incredibly flexible. Out of the box, Premise 2.0 comes with the following 8 variations of landing pages:

• Sales Page – A Simple Sales Page
• Content Page – A Content Based Landing Page
• Pricing – A Landing Page With A Pricing Table
• Opt-In Page – A Landing Page With An Opt-In Form
• Video – A Landing Page With Video
• Tab Scroller – A Landing Page With Multiple Tabs on A Content Scroller
• Thank You – A Thank You Page After They Take An Action
• Social Share – A Landing Page That Prompts Your Users To Share The Page Before They Can Access All The Content

Depending on the purpose of your landing page, you can choose any of the ones available. You have to choose the type of page you want before you make it so if you’re not sure what you want to do right away, create a basic sales page and once you have your main sales page up, you can experiment with the different templates of landing pages later.

Landing Page Design Made Easy With Premise 2.0

I have the design skills of a 5th grader drawing a stick figure. Needless to say, design is not my strong suit. And while I have a pretty solid grasp on html, css and design still evade me. Luckily, Premise takes the guess work out of this.

With Premise, you can create different “Styles” via a simple back-end interface. Instead of learning to code CSS from scratch, you can simply lookup your site’s main colors and plug them into the fields. Everything is customizable, from the background color or image to the font size, headline colors and the spacing between words. The block quotes, testimonials, opt-in box, and pricing tables are all able to be customized. You have total control without having to learn a single line of code.

Once you settle on a style that you’re happy with, you can save it. If you want to make a small change, you can duplicate it and change the headline, color scheme or call-to-action. If you want to make a new style altogether, you can create another one from scratch as well. You can create as many styles as you want and save them however you like.

Another element that Premise brings to the table for design-challenged people like me is a library of over 1,100 image graphics. These were a god-send for me. I can mock up a buy-now button in Photoshop, but it’d take me a few hours, a mountain of frustration and a few choice words. Premise make this simple. Whether you want someone to buy now, add to cart, or add a money-back guarantee, there’s an image for that. However, if the 1,100 graphics somehow don’t suit you, Premise even includes a button generator where you can create custom buttons yourself.

How To Build A Killer Landing Page In 20 Minutes Using Premise 2.0

So how do you actually go about building a killer landing page anyways? Here’s a step by step guide to building a landing page with Premise 2.0.

Buy Premise 2.0

Buy Premise 2.0 and download the plugin software.

Install Premise

Install Premise like you would any other plugin. Simply go to “Plugins –> Add New –> Upload” and upload Premise and activate it.

Configure Your Main Settings

These settings will be your default settings for every page you create. All of these settings can be overridden on a page-by-page basis, but if you set things up here to start, it will save you time from replicating this step on every page you make.

On the main settings page, you’ll need to input your API key so that the software will work. You can also choose to have your landing pages off of the site root (ex. domain.com/landing-page) or set off in another directory all-together (ex. domain.com/lp/landing-page). Here you can also choose to enable the membership features of the software (which bring even more features to the table).

You can set up the default favicon, header image, and header image link (where a user is directed when they click on the link) as we well as the default footer text for all the pages here as well.

If you’re planning on using any sort of opt-in form, you can link up Premise with your Mailchimp, Aweber or Constant Contact accounts via their authentication methods. If you’re planning on creating a social sharing page, you can configure your options here too.

The last part of the main settings are your overall tracking. If you have analytics such as Clicky, Crazy Egg or Google Analytics you’ll want to add in your tracking scripts below. If you want to get even more advanced and do some A/B testing on your pages with either Google Website Optimizer or Visual Website Optimizer, you’ll set up your account information here too.

Create a New Landing Page

Now that everything’s set-up, it’s time to get to work building your page. You’ll see a new Premise buttons in your wordpress sidebar. Click on Landing Pages –> Add New and you can select from any of the 8 types of landing pages. Each one has different custom options, but we’ll focus on the simple sales page because its – well – simple. You can experiement with the 7 other landing pages on your own.

Create Your Landing Page Headline & Sub-headline

You’ll notice Premise landing pages look very similar to your standard wordpress pages. You’ll see a headline and a sub-heading content area. Fill those in with your compelling headline content.

Add In Your Main Landing Page Content

If you’ve already had a landing page, you simply need to copy, paste the content into here. If you don’t have something already written up, you’ll want to take some time to work on the copy. It’s more important and more difficult to create compelling content that works than you think. To get started writing your copy, Premise provides sample copy templates that populate your landing page with content in one click. This takes all the guess work out of how you should layout your landing page – all you have to do now is replace the sample text with your text!

If you still need some help creating compelling content for your landing pages, check out the following resources:

• The 7 Point Checklist For Creating Powerful Landing Page Copy – HubSpot
• Landing Page Rehab – Unbounce
• Applying Landing Page Best Practices to Boost Conversions – Search Engine Journal
• Landing Page Best Practices – Unbounce
• More Landing Page Best Practices – Visual Website Optimizer

And if you’re still concerned about your copywriting skills, don’t fear. Premise comes with an integrated copywriting assistant chock-full of tutorials on effective copywriting that will help you every step of the way (not to mention a manual on writing more effective copy.)

Put A Buy Now, Add To Cart or Some Other Call-To-Action Button On Your Landing Page

You must have a call to action. You must. Otherwise you’re wasting your time. If you don’t have a social share or an email opt-in page, you should have a buy now, add to cart, or some other types of button for your users to actually take action on. Remember those 1,100 pre-made graphics that come with Premise? This is where they come in really handy. Use them.

Include Testimonials

Sold a product that people rave about? Make sure you include them here. Testimonials from real people can be the one thing on a sales page that truly convince your customers that your product is everything that you say it is. You can use the notice box to include these testimonials in call-outs throughout the landing page so you can be sure that people actually do notice them.

Money Back Guarantee

A money back guarantee is one of the tipping points in a decision. If you have a rock solid money-back guarantee, remind your customer right at check-out that they have nothing to lose. Once again, this is where the graphic library is your friend.

Going Above and Beyond With Premise 2.0

Boom. Done. You got the essentials of your page put together. Now that that’s finished, you can go above and beyond on your landing page, if you’re up for it.

Style Your Page

Spend some time in the style editor mentioned above and create a style for your page. The default style isn’t a bad start, but this is the time to make your page stand out and also choose your colors so they’re focused on conversion metrics. You can select which style you want to use and switch between them with a simple drop down button.

Add a Custom Header And Favicon

If you want to override the default header and favicon you designated in the main settings, you can go ahead and change it. Otherwise, you’ll be fine to leave it.

Add Any Scripts You Need

If you set up your analytics scripts correctly in the main settings, you won’t need to do them again here. This script section is the place to use your Google Website Optimizer or Google Conversion codes (especially on the thank-you pages). If you’re tracking event specific items for your individual pages, this is where you add them.

SEO It All Up

Don’t build out your entire landing page and never have it be found. If SEO is a goal for your landing page, be sure to fill out the SEO title and meta description to give you more control of your results in the search engines – no SEO plugins necessary.

A/B Testing

A/B testing is like high school sex. Everybody says they’re doing it, but hardly anyone really is – and the ones that are, aren’t doing it well.

A/B testing seems like a good idea, but it’s always a little bit cumbersome to actually implement. Fortunately, Premise makes this a cinch by integrating with Google Website Optimizer and Visual Website Optimizer. Once you create one version of your landing page, you can simply hit a button and duplicate it. Then you can change the colors, headlines or make a completely different one altogether, set up your optimizer code and boom– you’re done.

What Else Can You Do With Premise 2.0?

If you’ve read this far, you might be under the impression that Premise is just landing page software. Well, if you thought that – you were wrong. That might have been the case with Premise 1.0, but Premise 2.0 is much, much more. Besides simply allowing you to do A/B testing, Premise 2.0 has built-in functionality that will let you do the following:

• Premise integrates with forum software VBulletin (Hello Membership Sites).
• Sell E-books Software and other Digital Downloads
• Take Recurring Payments With Automated Access Management
• Drip Content Over Time
• Create Private Forum Areas with vBulletin
• Easy check out pages for PayPal and Authorize.net
• Password-Protected Content Libraries

A lot of these are beyond the scope of simply building landing pages, but if you have a digital product or an online community you want to charge access to, Premise 2.0 can help keep it all in one system.

Wrapping It Up

Depending on your familiarity with the various tools, you can easily spend way more than 15 minutes building your Premise 2.0 landing page, but if you’re already ready to go, you can put together a solid page in minutes compared to hours. If you want to get your next landing page up and running, Premise 2.0 can help you do it in under 20 minutes.

FCC Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Purchasing a copy of Premise 2.0 will result in you having an awesome landing page and me getting some beer money. Win- Win.

As we all know, Facebook deployed the new Timeline Pages last month and, as expected, the first public reaction was a waterfall of rants about the new approach for Tabs.

Marketers have been in a period of  adaptation for the last couple of weeks, creating new strategies to improve their communications, adapting to a new marketing approach through more visual content and storytelling, and why not, what to do with Tabs.

One of the most significant changes that came with Timelines for Pages is that we no longer have the possibility to set up a Tab as default landing for first-time visitors. A Tab that was mostly used to improve on Like Conversion and gave you the possibility to welcome visitors with a customized message.

Why Custom Tabs didn’t work before

If you are used to spending some time looking at your Page Insights, you’ve probably noticed that Tabs other than the “Landing Tab” get much lower traffic if any at all. The reason is that we were forcing new visitors to hit the “Landing Tab” before they could get to the wall. It will be as saying the most visited page on your website is the homepage.

Additional Tabs were receiving fewer hits mostly because their links were hidden below the profile photo on the left sidebar, when the eye automatically goes to the right of the screen, exactly were Facebook Ads are located.

This is the reason why Facebook marketers exploded when they saw the “Landing Tab” go away. We immediately assumed that without the “Landing Tab”, the whole Tab concept is dead… or is it?

Why Tabs are more relevant than ever

Tabs are more important than ever because:

• They were moved to prime real estate in the page right below the Cover Photo, what we now know as the “Favorites” section, making them more prominent
• They got a lot more visual with the 111x74px graphic rather than the small favicon-like icon

These 2 points turn Facebook Pages almost into a brand minisite, think of the “Favorites” section as the navigation bar on your website.

This is the Social Media Examiner Facebook page already making great use of the “Favorites” section to promote products and events.

810 pixel Tab

Let’s point out the obvious here, you have more space since the width was changed from 520px to 810px. What you’re not looking at is the fact that everything else on the screen has been eliminated for you, turning a Tab into the perfect Sales Page, all sidebars and distractions are gone so your prospect can focus specifically on your content.

Here is a great example of a product sales page from Amy Porterfield

The Landing Tab is still Alive

Sure, the new default landing for Pages is now the Timeline and there is no way around it, however, the “Landing Tab” is not dead yet. Let me explain…

Fan Gates, Reveal Tabs…

The functionality has not changed, you are still able to build things like Reveal Tabs because nothing has really changed on the actual tab, other than its size. The possibilities in terms of programming are still the same.

Using URL’s

Chances are you link to your Facebook Page from external properties such as your website/blog and even from other social profiles. Here are a couple of examples:

Here is how I’m linking to the SocialMouths’ Facebook Page from LinkedIn

And from my Digg profile

We usually use the main Page link, which looks a little like this https://www.facebook.com/socialmouths.

All you have to do is replace this “main” address with the URL of the actual Page Tab on every single place where you promote your Facebook Page.

Facebook Ads

If you run Facebook Ad campaigns that point to your Page, you can do the same thing here, instead of using the main address, you can direct visitors to any specific Tab on your page.

The Like Box

The Facebook Page Like Box, like the one I display on my sidebar here, does NOT allow you to direct visitors to Tabs, they will land on the Timeline no matter what.

In other words, with this technique you can send all the traffic coming from external sources like your website and other social profiles and from your Ad campaigns to your Landing Tab, the only traffic that will still go directly to the Timeline is the one that comes from the Like Box and people coming from inside Facebook.

In that case, the only thing you can do is have a compelling call-to-action in your “Favorite” icon to hopefully drive people to click through. I named my Tab “Start Here” to see if that helps a bit. I’ll tell you later how it goes…

How to build Facebook Tabs DIY style

This week I launched a FREE online Mini-course on how to build Facebook Custom Tab on your own. The course is a massive 28-page tutorial that covers the entire process from becoming a Facebook Verified Developer to different ways of creating the actual content for your tab and types of media you can use to how to install your Tab on the Page.

Did I mention the course is FREE?

If you’re up to the challenge, sign up below to receive free updates from SocialMouths and get full access to the course:

Guest post by Brad Shorr from Straight North.

Everybody knows social media and SEO are connected, but how? The better you understand the nature and strength of the various connections, the better you can focus your efforts on activities that get results.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to sort things out because the social-SEO relationship is becoming more intertwined (some would say, muddled) all the time. In this post, I’ll bring up a few points we’ve been discussing at our agency as we try to respond to the changing environment.

Comments and ideas welcome! We are all learning together here.

Ranked Results versus Display in SERPs

The first thing we’ve been trying to do is distinguish between rankings and display visibility on Google SERPs.

• Ranking optimization is the traditional way of thinking about SEO. We apply a set of activities to specific URLs and domains in ways that leverage Google’s search algorithm and improve the ranking position of particular pages of web content.
• Display optimization applies to making content visible in new/other sections of Google SERPs – personalized search, time subsections, and search subsections such as “Blogs” and “Discussions.”

Google is now giving much greater emphasis to personalized results, at the expense of traditional results. Social content, such as Google+ postings and blog posts, appear prominently in SERPs. As time goes on, it’s likely that Google will give equal weight to content in SERPs that is both subjective (i.e., content that is favored by people in your social networks) and objective (i.e., content that is indexed and ranked according to Google’s traditional algorithm).

So, as personalized results gain emphasis, display optimization becomes more important. Here is an image that shows the complexity of Google SERPs, and how traditional search results are being deemphasized:

In light of all this, here are three strategic points worth thinking about from a social and SEO perspective.

1. Social shares – Tweets, Likes, Google +1’s, etc. – carry weight in Google’s ranking algorithm, but as yet it’s hard to establish more than a ballpark impact.
2. In contrast, social media content and shares have a clear and significant impact on display visibility. Original Google+ and/or blog content is indexed and displayed in regular, personalized, time-sensitive and social subsections of a SERP. Content endorsed with shares by your social connections is visible. (Original Twitter content has been devalued lately, but I think in the long term it is likely to gain prominence.)
3. User behavior and preferences are critical element in devising SEO strategy. The importance of display visibility depends largely on whether a user is logged into Google, and the extent to which a user has an active social media network. If your target market is not logged in and/or has few active relationships, traditional search results are all that will matter to them.

10 Social SEO Action Steps

In terms of focusing on social media activities that have SEO impact, here are things most worth doing.

1. Add Google+ buttons to your blog and most sharable web pages. Make social sharing as easy as possible across all popular/relevant social platforms.
2. Create a Google+ company page and share your content on it.
3. Write keyword optimized, original content on Google+.
4. Shares and original content on Google+ matter more if your company page is circled by many users. It therefore may be helpful to make a strong effort to build your Google+ community.
5. Encourage people to +1 your content.
6. For Facebook and Twitter, having an active social media presence is useful IF social sharing is generating links to your content. Links, not shares, are the more important social media metric from an SEO perspective.
7. Content that is unlikely to be shared on social media, such as a company’s About page, should be optimized in the traditional way. Pushing social shares is not worth the effort.
8. Content that is likely to be shared, such as a blog post, should, conversely, be promoted heavily through social media activities.
9. If your target market isn’t active or interested in social media, focus less on content sharing through social media and more on traditional link acquisition activities. If your target market is active in social, balance the two.
10. Measuring traditional rankings is pretty straightforward: what we need are ways to measure display visibility. Any tips for how to do this?

Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North, a Chicago-based SEO company that works with B2B firms in a variety of specialized niches, from merchant credit card processing for gas stations to orthodontic web design.

Photo credit: Go Local Search