Facebook Redesigns Continue With Timeline: Community Managers Be Ready

Yesterday Facebook posted another major announcement to its blog.  The long tested redesign of Timeline is beginning to roll out.  The new look of Timeline will give users a place for all the things they care about.

As you can see, the Facebook clean-up continues.  The rich media look that they recently featured in the preview of the News Feed redesign carries over into the cleaner two column look of Timeline.  The about and interests of users will be far more prominently featured to the left of the Timeline posts.  This area of the Timeline will offer users a great deal of flexibility to show off the things they care about the most.  Be ready to see bibliophiles showing off the books they’ve read while film buffs feature the movies they’ve watched and look forward to seeing.

The impact that this change has for Facebook marketers is 3-fold.

• Graph Search will have greater depth and breadth of information to display.
• Advertising will benefit from more complete user identities.
• Community Managers will find more information about the people they connect with.

First of all, as the changes finally start rolling out, there will be the usual outcry from the average users about how much they dislike the fact that Facebook is changing AGAIN.  It always happens.  But, the vitriol always causes a portion of their friends to take the time to log into the full desktop version to see what all of the fuss is about.  That is where the next batch of data collection will begin.  As soon as a user lands on their redesigned space they will be prompted to update and customize.  BINGO!  Fresh info.

Immediately, Graph Search benefits from all of the fresh updates.  Search will be better able to tell users where their friends have been, what they like, and other stuff that could lead them to your marketing presence in Facebook.  Make certain that your business is ready to be optimized and searchable.

The influx of fresh user data will give savvy advertisers even better targeting buckets to mine for optimum ROI.  Just think how much better your geographic targeting will be when massive numbers of Facebook users update their current locations.

Finally, for those really super smart community managers, this will be a boon to better understanding the people they interact with on behalf of a brand.  Although you can count on many users to take the time to play with new features, few will delve deep into their privacy settings.  Most of the information that will come out of the redesign will continue to be publicly visible to any other Facebook user logged into the network, including page administrators.  It won’t be difficult at all to click the link to your most active community members and find out more about the music, locations, and activities that they enjoy the most, and then use that information to improve your page content and engagement.

What are your thoughts and concerns about all of the changes coming to Facebook this year?

Image Credit: Facebook

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Seven Quick Tips For Using Social Media In Your Small Business

Today, I’m going to share real briefly with you the idea of giving you seven quick tips for using social media for your small business. As entrepreneurs, as solopreneurs, as home-based business professionals, as Internet marketers, whatever it is, social media is clearly here to stay. The reality is social media is being dominated by the large brands and by these enormous viral offers that are out there. What’s interesting is that we as small business owners can actually tap in to the enormous strength and stream of prospects on the web right alongside the big companies. It’s truly a way to be able to have a level playing field because social media opportunity is a very low point of entry to get in and market to. The key is knowing a few simple tricks and tips that will help you be able to compete.

Facebook & Twitter

Let’s talk about those right now, the seven quick tips for you using social media in your small business. I’m going talk first about Facebook and Twitter. You might think this is pretty obvious, Aaron. Here’s the reality, Facebook and Twitter are powerful mediums if you don’t make a simple mistake that many small businesses do. They try to be like the big guys. That doesn’t make sense because you do not have the brand, you do not have the recognition, nor the financial resources to compete. They can get away with just putting a logo that they worked for many years to brand. You can’t. It’s called Facebook not Logobook, so don’t go faceless. It’s important to make sure that people can connect you and your staff or your team. The other thing is that it’s about personal connection. People like the idea that with Facebook and Twitter they get to know who they’re doing business with. This gives us as small businesses an advantage to the big companies.

Candid Open Conversations

The other beautiful thing about social media is it opens up an opportunity for people to be able to have candid open conversations. Think about this for just a minute. If you have a retail store and a customer walks in do you say hello to them first or do you immediately bombard them with offers, sales pitches, throwing new products at them, a sales rack at them, of course not. My question is why do people find that in their mind that is a logical thing to do in online business? It doesn’t make any sense. You have to make sure that you are friendly and you have to invite people like you’re inviting them into your home and get to know them and let them get to know you before you ask them to business with you.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

A picture is worth a thousand words. We’ve all heard this so many times, but people don’t include pictures in their social media. Look, if you have a cupcake business, show the pictures, don’t tell me what kind they are. If you have a business where you have lots of clients that you’ve helped or they’ve lost weight because of what you’ve done, show before and after pictures. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words and you need to do it. People are very visual these days, so it’s super important to do this.

You Are The Expert

You’re an expert. People need to see you as the expert. One thing that small business owners typically aren’t very good at is bragging, bragging about themselves, whether you’re a hair stylist, whether you’re a creative director, whether you’re a web developer, whether you’re a public speaker, you have to learn to brag about what you’re great at so people know what you’re the expert in. You have to let your potential clients and customers know what you’re great at. You can do this by offering them tips and tricks, hints. You can also comment on the industry that you’re in as a whole. You can offer a debate about people. Let me tell you something, when you offer debates it’s a fine line about forcing your particular opinion on people. Put your common sense cap on, go the common sense corner, and then just be logical.

YouTube

YouTube, another powerful tool. Once you started showcasing why your business is somebody that they want to work with; why your business is friendly; why they’re welcome and invited into your home, if you will; then you need to show them through YouTube the different ways that you can help them. It’s a great channel to help you begin to build more relationships with the people that you’re talking to.

Ask For Recommendations

Ask for recommendations from people. Listen, it’s important that you tell people, “Look, if you like my product or service refer it to a friend.” Ask them to give you testimonials, to talk about their personal experiences. Ask for it because this is just more social proof that will show that you are the expert.

Why Friends & Family Matter

I want to tell you why your friends and family actually really do matter. People don’t understand this. When your friends and family are on your social media platforms they have friends and those friends are your potential customers, and those friends’ friends are your potential customers. It’s important that no matter what you do you’re always professional. You operate in a professional manner. You become personable, and that you always remember the golden rule. Even if they don’t do business with you, you treat them with respect so that you can gain referrals. Your friends and family absolutely matter because they are an extension of you which gives you even a broader, bigger reach.

I hope that these seven quick tips for social media have helped you just to try to put things into perspective and give you a reminder. I appreciate you all. Remember, success is a choice.

To Your Success visit: News Source

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Facebook’s Graph Search: the Ultimate Personalized Discovery Engine?

Facebook Graph Search is a social search feature the company announced Jan. 15. The feature is currently in private beta with a waitlist for individuals and businesses. You can join the waitlist here (scroll down to the bottom).

Facebook’s announced plan is to roll it out gradually to hundreds of thousands of individuals first (English only), then more broadly for PC-based users, then for non-English languages, and then on mobile.

It isn't clear how quickly this expansion will occur, but several Facebook product people are on record saying they still have work to do to figure out how to scale the computationally intensive searches across millions of concurrent users. (Think of crawling a user’s social and open graph connections across hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of nodes for every search.) Non-trivial engineering challenges stand in the way of mass availability of this feature set.

The potential for Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is huge. Brands, digital marketers, and publishers can and should be doing a number of things right now to benefit from it as it reaches critical mass.

A simple rule of thumb is that the more content that gets shared, liked, or commented on through Facebook, the greater the chances of discovery of that content through Graph Search.

What is Facebook Graph Search?

What Does it Do?

It's a very cool feature. When I type in a query, such as “friends who have been to Rome, Italy,” Graph Search traverses all of my relationships and those of my friends to find people who have visited Rome. It then pulls back these people and displays them alongside relevant content. This is a simple example that illustrates the difference between the kinds of results Graph Search returns and how search results from Google (or Bing) would appear.

Another key aspect of this feature is how it appears to include implicit affinities and experiences, in addition to explicit likes and shares people have done through Facebook. When you think about the significance of that, it’s pretty impressive.

Based on the content I’ve shared, as well as the check-ins, posts, and comments I’ve made, plus the images I’ve tagged, etc., Graph Search can infer what I like, where I’ve traveled to, and so forth. The inclusion of implicit affinities is only possible due to Facebook’s massive scale and could ultimately be the component of Graph Search that makes the results valuable enough to get people to use the feature.

What is it Good for?

• People Search – Finding people you’re connected to who have specific interests and experiences
• Local (and Vertical) Search – Finding a business and/or events that friends have visited and/or liked
• Media and Entertainment Search – Finding TV shows, movies, music, and games liked, watched, etc. by your friends

How Will Facebook Monetize it?
Facebook hasn’t announced how they will monetize the feature. The obvious opportunity is to charge for sponsored listings much like AdWords. There are a few other options as well, including:

• Syndicate aggregated data to advertisers. Data would show what people are searching for, who/what they’re finding, etc.
• Creation of premium audience segments for targeting across the network via the FBX.

Find more for Facebook Graph Search

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