Social Marketing

Influence. Leverage. Authority.

How To Make A Facebook Timeline Fan Page: 5 Essential Steps

by Lisa Angelettie · 6 comments

Facebook is the #1 social marketing tool for small business owners to create a broad reach but stay really up close and personal with readers. It’s important that if you are a small business owner, service professional, etc. that you have a presence on Facebook with a Facebook Fan Page.

But guess what? Facebook is ALWAYS making changes to create a better user experience, and the downside to this is that they are frustrating a lot of folks along the way. The latest change to Facebook’s Fan Pages (business pages) Timeline format is no exception.

You may be grumbling, if you spent major time or money customizing a fantastic landing page for your Facebook Fan Page — but hey, times are a-changin’ and I want you to embrace the possibilities of what’s ahead on Facebook, that’s why I will walk you through the only essential changes you need to pay attention to when creating and/or updating your Facebook Fan Page. Lickity Split!

This tutorial begins with assuming that you already have a Fan Page for your business, but if you do not have one it’s pretty simple. Login to your Facebook account and click on the “create a page” link usually found in the general settings section of your account, then move forward with this tutorial…

Facebook Fan Page Timeline Essential #1 – Cover Image

So the most important part of your new and improved Facebook Fan Page is the cover image. This image is the first thing that people will see when they visit your fan page. This means that you can NO LONGER create a default landing page that people see first. Typically this page would create an incentive for folks to “Like” your page or opt-in to your list, etc. This was a major blow to the business owner, but I get it, Facebook is trying to maintain a certain standard. So we simply have to play by their rules.

This image is “public” which means that anyone who clicks on your page will see it, so it’s important that you do not use any images, etc. that will violate copyright laws etc. On another note it’s important that this image capture you and what you represent. What you love. What you do. People need to connect with you and your message. So for me, I chose pictures of me so people know who I am, pictures of my family, my dogs, and then a blurb about what it is I do.

Other things that you CANNOT include in your cover art are:

Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

To show you what NOT to do, here is cover art that I used on my main Facebook account while I was playing around with the Timeline feature which currently DOES NOT adhere to the new rules, because I have two website addresses listed as well as a call to action on getting free content. I will have to take this picture down asap so that Facebook will not ban my account:

When creating this image, it must be at least 399 pixels wide, but optimally should be a JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes (although I used a PNG file). You can create this image in Adobe Photoshop if you own it, GIMP which is a really robust freeware, or use a shortcut like I did and create your image in a word processing document then take a screenshot of it with something like Jing.

Profile Picture

If you notice, on both of my timeline cover art photos I have left a little space in the bottom, left-hand corner. That is because that is where Facebook will show your profile picture. This is the picture that will represent your page around Facebook and it’s a good idea to add a logo here or a picture of you if you brand yourself. I’m always playing around with my profile pic, and that’s the great thing about this process, nothing is written in stone. Create images for both your cover art and profile pic and play around them. See what best fits your business and your brand.

Facebook Timeline Fan Page Essential #2 – About Page

The next most important part of your fan page is the About Page for obvious reasons. First people are going to look at your cover art and then scan down and they will see your About section. This is a section I really didn’t pay that much attention to with my old fan page because I let the old default landing page do all the heavy lifting, but now it’s important to get this right. Your #1 objective is to get a link in there to your website since you were not able to put it in your cover art.

To make this happen, all you have to do is write all your information in the small ABOUT section of the about page. You don’t have a lot of room, so make every word count.

Here’s how my old about page intro showed up in Facebook’s new timeline format. Notice the address and phone number info was prominent:

Here’s how my new about page intro shows up in Facebook. Notice that I have included what I do and a link to my website:

Facebook Timeline Fan Page Essential #3 – Highlight With Apps

Next to the about section you will see four apps showing, typically they will be photos, likes, and then two others. The photo app shows in the first spot and you cannot change that, but the others can be moved around. Typically I wouldn’t move the second section which is “likes” because first you want to remind people to like your page and secondly, you want to show your likes as social proof that folks are stopping by your page and liking your content.

You can show a maximum of 12 apps but obviously you want to put your most important ones first because the first four are the most visible. I’ve seen different companies do different things such as app links to Twitter, YouTube, their newsletter, a custom welcome page, a freebie, etc. In the future, I’ll probably add a button for a free chapter to the book I’m working on, but for now I’ve linked to my Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Do you like this FB tutorial so far? Let me know by sharing it on Twitter Tweet

Facebook Timeline Fan Page Essential #4 – Highlight Your Content

So here’s something cool that you can do now on your fan page which will help you highlight your content. Hover over an important post and then click on the PENCIL to pin it to the top of your page. This makes it a “sticky” post that stays on top under your app section.

You can also click on the STAR to make your post wider (double width). I think that these particular posts look best when you have a photo to highlight, here’s an example from The Gap:

Facebook Timeline Fan Page Essential #5 – Use Private Messaging

Now you can receive private messages via your Facebook Fan Page and notification for those messages will conveniently show up in your new admin area. Honestly, if you are on Facebook at least an hour a day it’s probably a quicker way of communicating with your community especially around support issues.

I have a support site, my main site, and various niche sites and it would be interesting to funnel all of my “support” emails via Facebook. Of course the person would have to have a Facebook account, so I am not sure about this one, but it’s something to think about in the future.

*Sidenote – Your New Admin Area

With the update to Facebook’s fan page interface, there is a new admin area complete with a list of the latest notifications on your page such as who has just posted on your timeline, a section for your messages, a section for who has recently liked the page, a section titled “insights” which shows you with a simple graph how far your reach is on Facebook vs. how many people are talking about your page on Facebook, and lastly there is a section with tips on improving your page.

Final Comments

As we build our Facebook Fan Pages together, I will be writing more articles on topics that I am interested in such as sharing content effectively using Facebook’s new timeline format and getting more Facebook fans using this new format. If you liked this article and want to stay connected with me, please LIKE my page and if you’d like me to visit and like your page, please leave a link to it in the comment section below. Also, If you have any article ideas that you’d like me to cover in the future, please let me know by contacting me directly on Facebook.

How My Blog Traffic Increased by 33%

by Lisa Angelettie · 8 comments

One of the major ways that you can and you should be attracting more clients and customers is by leveraging the power of the web. Ultimately what that means, is that you should be taking advantage of the free traffic that the search engines will send you when you give them what they want–content.

How I Increased My Blog Traffic By 33%

On February 13th I got the highest amount of traffic ever on my site and most of it was due to several articles I had written over two years ago on February and Valentine’s Day related article ideas. I saw similar results last year, but this year the increase was even higher probably because Google has ranked those articles pretty high for me with related keywords.

For instance, if someone is searching specifically for Valentine’s Day Article Ideas, they will find that two of my articles on this site come up in positions #1 and #2 in Google out of over 49 million results!

Keep in mind that I wrote these articles two years ago — nothing this year around this topic because I was busy promoting Articology. So my point here is that the real key to consistent traffic that will only get better as long as it still is relevant is to just do it! Create it, publish it, rinse and repeat. And realize that you will reap rewards from your efforts immediately when you push your content out in social media AND for years to come as the search engines rank your content higher and higher in a search like the above example.

You can replicate these types of results as well when you follow a few simple rules:

Do Proper Keyword Research
I didn’t accidentally come across the term valentine’s day article ideas. I did my research and knew that there was a select group of people searching this topic using these keywords. So I made sure that I wrote optimized articles around them. I talk about this a lot in my article marketing training program Articology.

Keep Stacking Content
It’s important that you continually publish content to your blog. Not only to keep things fresh for your clients, but for the search engines, who will rank your older content based on how relevant you continue to be with your new content. Simply put, if I hadn’t continued to build my site and stack it with relevant content, I doubt that those articles would hold the #1 and #2 positions. They would get ranked, but probably not that highly.

Keep Sharing Your Content
One thing that I did do differently this year, was to casually remind people through my ezine and social media that if they needed article ideas for February or Valentine’s day that I had a few articles around that topic. I really think that this helped my traffic rise for not only the 13th but the entire month of February. Remember that while you are always sharing new content, it’s important that you remind folks of all your great older content found deep inside your site.

Keep Your Eyes On The Prize
Remember that content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy. It serves as the foundation for your business and you should ALWAYS be doing something content related in your business. This is not a quick fix strategy. Once you adjust your mindset around that fact, you will do the work necessary to see REAL results like mine as you grow your business.

Are You Going To Hit It & Quit It?

I want you to stop thinking about the pursuit of search engine traffic as a one hit wonder, a one night stand, or a quick fix. Sure there are a lot of marketers out there trying to sell you WordPress plugins, software, and “systems” that will assure you a HUGE avalanche of traffic (can you hear me being sarcastic?), but the truth of the matter is that I am not here for a quickie. I’m in it for the long haul. I can stay committed. I am faithful. I want a long term partner and therefore long term results. That is why I consistently feed the search engines what they want:

Content that is original
There is little tolerance for duplicate content by the search engines and rehashed content by readers. The search engines are getting smarter and smarter each day to all the duplicate content tricks, PLR mess, etc. and the readers are getting a little sick and tired of reading something they know that they’ve read somewhere else. Be original.

Content that is high quality and useful
I’m going to be totally transparent here. There are definitely days where I have written articles that I just wanted to get done and rushed it. Or there were articles I’ve written where I didn’t really have a lot to say and perhaps should of saved them to include in a more meaty article — but I didn’t. Ultimately I will pay the price for those so-so articles because people won’t read them or they certainly won’t convert. Not when there is a higher level of content out there on my topic. Now I’m not putting a word count on that content – I’m putting a quality meter on it. If it’s highly informative or entertaining, then publish it. If it’s not really something that you would read yourself, forget it, and go back to the drawing board.

Content that is shared with others
This is a relatively new concept for many business owners but it makes perfect sense. The quality level of any piece of content can generally be judged by how many people share it with others. Think about an article you shared with someone recently. Or a video you “liked” or “tweeted”. If you’re not totally sold on social media yet, think of “old school” sharing. Comments. Or reviews (like Amazon). Anything that gives your content the thumbs up or the seal of approval is of great importance to the search engines and helps them determine where they will rank your content. For example, if you’ve enjoyed this article, I’d really appreciate it if you would comment, Tweet it, share it on Facebook, or give it a G+.

Your Turn!
What strategies have you used to increase your blog traffic this year? What are your trying? What’s working for you? What isn’t?

Pinterest Marketing Tutorial For Small Business Owners

by Lisa Angelettie · 4 comments

Pinterest Was My 3rd Top Referrer Of Traffic To My Website Last Week.

I received pretty good traffic last week. Typically Mondays through Thursdays are good days for traffic to my website and to most websites, but when I checked my statistics, I noticed something really interesting. As usual, my primary source of daily traffic came from the search engines (mostly Google), my secondary source of traffic came from WordPress.org because I have a WordPress plugin in the repository there that I created (which is in beta right now). Bloggers are downloading it, but I haven’t really promoted it yet because I’m still working all the kinks out. It’s called WordPress Guest Post.

BUT my 3rd primary source of traffic was from the new social media website Pinterest and I was pleasantly surprised, because there wasn’t much I had to do to earn that new traffic.

Now I am by no means a Pinterest expert (and really who is at this early stage?), but I believe that the results I have seen by using it for only about 10-15 days are really worth sharing. Therefore if you are a small business owner, solo professional, and your ideal clients are women then I’ve written this especially for you.

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 1

What the heck is Pinterest? Pinterest is a social media site that acts as a virtual online cork board. In my home office, I have about three different cork boards up. Two have lots of personal pictures of my kids, my friends, my hubby, my parents, as well as a few mementos from long ago like a few buttons from high school and college, and stuff that my kids have made me over the last few Mother’s Days:) So needless to say the whole cork board thing resonated with me. I mean it’s fun!

Also, Pinterest is experiencing huge growth especially among women of all age ranges (which is unique) in social media. So if your ideal client is a woman, then this is definitely the place to find her.

It took me a few minutes to “get it”, but the general point of Pinterest is to “pin” or “repin” images of things that you like from websites or from other Pinterest users and create your own virtual corkboards of items that you like. These items then get categorized with topic categories, titles, and descriptions of your choosing. As you can see, I have a mixture of business and personal boards from content marketing to handbags (my favorite accessory, no okay my drug of choice!). I think it’s a good idea to have a mixture of business and personal stuff.

You don’t want to blatantly promote yourself and you DO want to appear personable and authentic. But most of all, there is more to you than your business isn’t there? So why not express that visually over on Pinterest. Again, it’s a lot of fun:)

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 2

1. The first thing you need to do is create an account at Pinterest, and at the time of this writing you still need an “invite” to create an account. This isn’t really hard to obtain. You can request one directly from the home page and wait for it for a few days, or you can send me over your email address and I’ll add you to my list of “friends” to send invites to.

2. Once you are accepted into the fold, the first thing the site will ask you to do is to start pinning, but I wouldn’t do that. Like any major social site I join, I rather build out my profile first.

3. The first thing I would decide on is my Pinterest username. The great thing about this site is that you can change it if you need to, which I did. The best thing is to make your username consistent with the profiles of your other social media profiles. I use Lisa Angelettie everywhere so that is what my username is. Pick yours.

4. When you joined Pinterest you had a choice of logging in and setting up your account via Facebook, Twitter or a manual login. If you set up your account via Facebook or Twitter, Pinterest will automatically use your profile photo on that site as your photo on Pinterest.

5. Next you can add a brief description of who you are which will be located under your profile photo.

6. Then you can add a link to your website (very important!). Use the full url address. [http://LisaAngelettie.com]

7. Decide on whether or not you want to connect your account to your Facebook account & timeline (which I recommend).

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 3

Now that you’re all set up, it’s time to start pinning. Pinterest sets you up with several boards already such as Books That You Like, Stuff For The Home, etc. Very general stuff, but stuff to get you going. You can keep these boards or you can edit them. You can also create more. It’s really simple.

1. The easiest way to start pinning is by “repining” another Pinterest member’s photos. So you can conduct a basic search in Pinterest for a topic such as “dogs”. You will then see results for people who included dogs in their title or description of their photo. If you see a photo that you like, scroll over it and you’ll see 3 icons with which you can decide to:

>> REPIN IT so that you can add it to one of your boards

>> LIKE IT if you like the picture but don’t want to add it to your boards

>> COMMENT ON IT if the pic moves you to speak

2. You can also add a Pin It Bookmarklet to your web browser which will allow you to pin photos that you like as you cruise around on websites. How this works is that you click on Pin It, the bookmarklet will “pull” all the images it sees on that page and give you the option of selecting which photo you want to pin.

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 4

Followers
Like other social media sites, you can follow people on Pinterest, you can follow specific boards that they’ve made and of course they can follow you as well. There will be plenty of people who will want to follow you based on your boards and when you go to follow them back, you’ll see that they have zero boards created yet. So, a word to the wise is decide on what your strategy is going to be.

If you sign up via Facebook or Twitter (I signed up via Facebook), Pinterest found followers for me who were already my Facebook friends and automatically started following them. That’s fine, because I do want to cross promote and engage those friends through multiple platforms.

Will you follow everyone who follows you?

Will you seek others to follow?

*A great benefit to being an early adopter on Pinterest is that you can get in front of many of the leaders in your niche in a very unique way. Most people will take a few minutes to look at your boards regardless of who they are because this site is so new. They won’t ignore you. So it’s important to make sure you are pinning relevant images for your topic and get in front of people who you normally would have a tough time meeting.

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 5

Pinterest Marketing
The biggest question that entrepreneurs ask about Pinterest, is how on earth can it be beneficial to business owners. More importantly — is it a waste of time? We already spend so much time on other social media sites.

The reality is that Pinterest is so new, that no one can truly predict what impact it will have on business owners, but there is one obvious strategy that all business owners can take advantage of on Pinterest and that’s the fact that we know that an unprecedented amount of women are on the site AND that it is a chance to present and establish your brand in a unique way — visually.

A few Pinterest Marketing Ideas

1. Pin your logo.

2. Pin some of the more interesting images from your website.

3. Pin testimonial images.

4. Pin infographics (really big on Pinterest!)

5. Pin pictures of you and your family, you and your clients, or you speaking,

Pinterest Tutorial – Section 6

Search
Pinterest is gaining traction in the search engines, but it’s not what I call a Power Link yet, but it’s new and it needs time to grow. I did do a search for “I love purple” and a Pinterest I Love Purple board did end up high on page 2 of Google. That’s okay, but not great. So I wouldn’t expect any major search engine traffic from Pinterest at this time.

Social
Pinterest makes it very easy to share what you have recently pinned or liked with Facebook and Twitter making it a seamless and effortless visual/social conversation. I really like this about Pinterest. I also like that it adds something different and engaging to our timelines and newsfeeds, instead of just more of the same. Plus, this is where the traffic comes from. Facebook and Twitter. Someone sees something you’ve pinned on there and follows the path back to your board on Pinterest and then back to you and your website.

Engagement
While online engagement isn’t anything like Facebook or Twitter, there is an advantage to that. When someone comments, there is a probably some passion or meaning behind the exchanges that is worth reading. For example, I read a few comments made on a board that features extreme dog grooming hairdos. There are some people on there who are livid with these groomers, and there are other people who believe that it is “art” and that these groomers obviously love dogs. That was probably the only exchange in the form of comments I saw on Pinterest today and it was good! So you see there isn’t a lot of meaningless chatter or hyper-promotional crap on Pinterest – yet:)

So take advantage of the simplicity, quiet and beauty of it now!

Pinterest Articles For Further Reading

56 Ways To Market Your Business On Pinterest

What Marketers Can Learn From Whole Foods On Pinterest

Ideas For Marketing Your Business On Pinterest [Infographic]

Pinterest Infographic, an Infographic by Linchpin SEO

WriteSwap: Content Marketplace Like Fiverr

WriteSwap Is A Marketplace For Content And Looks Like Fiverr I know some of you are never going to take my advice and leave a lot of the creative writing elements of running your business for you to do yourself and not outsource to someone else. So with you rebels in mind, I stumbled across [...]

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