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Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

Whenever I go to my Facebook Business Page, I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt looking for new feature gems that suddenly appear. Recently I noticed the new per post insights information on my Page and another time I looked at my fans and noticed a “remove admin” box appear quietly next to my name. So I decided to assemble a list of significant changes that have been made over the last six months that affect Facebook Pages and came up with the following eight:

• Remove the Creator Admin – Until the addition of this feature, not being able to remove the originating administrator when the person who created the page left the company was one of the largest complaints voiced by businesses. This lead to people playing games with business accounts and fake profiles that were used primarily to create the page in a more generic way. With the addition of this feature, businesses now can maintain control of their page. There are, however, two potential dangers to this feature:
  • People have mistakenly removed themselves as an admin of the page and had no other admin to take over;
  • Malicious administrators can remove all other admins and take over the page

  The addition of this new feature does solve a lot of the issues experienced by businesses, however just remember to always have more than one admin on your page and pick your admins wisely.

• View Insights Per Post on Small Pages – Being able to see how many impressions per post on your Business Page wall will help small business owners determine what content is valuable to their community and what isn’t as interesting. As an admin, you will see this information just below the post. The number of impressions is how many times a post is viewed, anywhere on Facebook, not how many people have viewed the post.



• Reduced the Size for Landing Tabs – Facebook reduced the size of the tabs from 760 pixels to 520 to provide a more consistent view across all tabs. This required the redesign of custom landing tabs to ensure they weren’t cut off on the right and coincided with the addition of the standard profile image across all tabs.
• Removed Boxes / Boxes Tab – Facebook made changes to the layout of Pages and Profiles to streamline the look for its users and to make more room for advertisers by removing the boxes from the sidebar and the boxes tab in general. Many Page admins used the boxes as ways to provide base information to their community or sign-up forms for their mailing list and now need to do so in other ways.
• Added a Spam Filter on the Page Wall Tab – Facebook added a spam filter for pages that enable visitors to post updates. This is a welcome addition if it helps reduce the amount of spam being posted to Brand Pages, as it is annoying to go to your page and see someone advertising something inappropriate. Comments and interactions are always welcome when within the context of the page, but people who like your page only to put their advertisement there are unwelcome.
• Allowed Page Name Changes for Pages with Under 100 Fans – Although many Business Page owners would like to rethink their page name, being able to rename the page is a welcome change for small business owners that make the attempt but don’t quite name the page in the most beneficial way. This will give those of us who work with small businesses a chance to affect change before they grow their fan base to help them get better visibility.
• Claim Community Pages – Being able to claim a community page is a significant feature for many brands. When Facebook introduced Community Pages, pages were created for everything you listed in your profile, creating many empty community pages. By being able to claim these pages, brands can have better control of their content. After a verification process, Facebook reviews the request  to merge two similar pages. Although the process hasn’t worked for me yet (I keep getting an error message when I complete the verification), I expect this will work for everyone soon.
• Claim Facebook Place Pages – If your business has a store front, chances are you have a Facebook Place page created for your business. Facebook used Localeze to populate Places with owner verified listings. If you already have a Facebook Business page, you will be encouraged to claim the Place page and merge it with your Business Page. Right now, you should only merge a Page with a Place if you have one, physical location and one Facebook Page. However, if you are doing any customization on your fan page, like custom landing tabs, don’t merge the two right now. The merged page no longer has a way of setting the default landing tab.

Facebook continues to advance their platform, providing more features that help small businesses better market their products and services. What new Page features have they added that I missed?

Update: when you merge your Business Page with your Places Page, you also lose the per post insights.

Another update: When you create a page, they are visible automatically, no longer requiring you to publish the page. However, they have now added the ability to make the page visible to admins only. You need to edit the page, go to manage permissions and check the box for visibility.

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/8-recent-updates-for-facebook-business-pages/

Welcome to Masterful Marketing. This blog is for small business owners looking for marketing help and ideas. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You can also subscribe via email by filling in the form to your left. Thanks for visiting!

Content marketing has become one of the most important marketing activities you can do as a small business. Regardless of your industry, people are searching for quality information to help them make decisions, solve problems or keep up with what is happening in the world. Providing valuable information for your reader gets their attention and encourages them to continue to listen.

There are two ways to provide relevant content:

• Write great content
• Curate great content

Curating Content

Content curation is finding, filtering, organizing and sharing relevant content from many sources for your readers so you make it easier for them to get the information they need without doing the work. If you do this well in addition to writing your own, you become a valuable resource for your prospects and clients and keep them listening to what you have to say. The social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, make most of us curators in some respect. If we read something we feel is interesting to our audiences, these tools make it easy to share this knowledge to others.

Writing Great Content

Writing great original web content is hard, but worth the effort. Creating this great content that is compelling and relevant for your reader while written to be found and indexed appropriately by the search engines doesn’t come naturally to most people. Sometimes these two goals seem to contradict each other because humans want to read something that makes learning the topic simple, while search engines care about keyword phrase density and links from authority sites.

If you are a small business owner just starting to step into the world of content marketing to enhance your online and social media efforts, you may want some help writing that powerful and compelling prose that will be found and indexed correctly by search engines.

Check out a simple SEO software product called Scribe SEO, a service that helps you optimize your content for search engines. I had heard about it for a while, but when I read a review by Patsi Krakoff whose business is all about writing for the Web, I went to check it out. I’ve been blogging for awhile, but I learned a few things with this product that has helped me structure my information better for the search engines while keeping a human audience focus.

Scribe analyzes your content and provides a substantial report to help you make modifications for better search engine rankings and more traffic without detracting from its appeal to the human reader. Scribe SEO comes in a few flavors depending on your platform of choice. The WordPress plugin integrates all Scribe’s nice features right into your WordPress dashboard. There are several good reviews of Scribe SEO and a couple of negative ones as well. But they offer a 30 day trial to test out the product, which should allow you enough time to see the value of it for your needs. The monthly fees for Scribe SEO are reasonable and well worth it if it makes your content more visible in the search engines.

It only takes using it with a couple of blog posts to see the value if you are not an SEO expert. If you blog at least once a week, this is worth trying out to get an understanding of the process needed to write content that ranks well.

Have you tried Scribe SEO yet? If so, what do you think?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/content-marketing-creating-content-to-help-you-get-found/

Focus, focus, focus

It’s the mantra of many involved in small business marketing and is important to those of us who need to deliver client projects while continuing to market our businesses. What marketing should your small business consistently execute that will deliver proven results? Here are my recommendations for where you should focus over the next year.

Online Presence

Make sure your online presence is the best it can be. Don’t take short cuts in this important area as people still judge your business by what they see online. Consider some or all of the following depending on your business and how much time you can spend.

• Build your site using WordPress (on a hosted platform, not WordPress.com) to benefit from the wealth of powerful plugins that make complex features easy to implement.
• Make sure you are in control of all the accounts that make up your web presence, including your domain, your website hosting provider and the owner of your local business listings. Do not let someone create them under their personal accounts. If your relationship with them falters, you will need to start all over again which will affect your business success.
• Provide up-to-date content that appeals to your target audience. If you blog, set a schedule and try to stick with it. If you need help with blogging, check out the Blogging Success Summit 2011 from the Social Media Examiner. There’s an early bird rate that expires soon.
• Create a comment strategy to drive awareness and develop credibility.
• Build your email list with an offer that encourages visitors to join. Having a strong list available when you have some special offer can be the difference in the success of a new program.
• Select your social media platforms based on where your customers hang out. Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter or some combination of the three in conjunction with your blog can create a powerful information network that makes it much easier for you to be found. Not all businesses will benefit from social media, but those who will, should implement a social media strategy.
• Create your local business listings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and on the directories that make sense to your industry. According to a Local Customer Review Survey from BrightLocal.com, 70% of people surveyed have used the Internet to find a local business. When it comes to the directories, research them and ask questions before you spend any money with them. Some are reputable directories, others are not. Unless you feel your time is better spent elsewhere, you do not have to hire someone to set these up for you. But if you do, make sure they are creating these listings under your Google, Yahoo or Microsoft Windows Live accounts, not their own.
• Investigate location based marketing if your business has a storefront. Retail businesses with a brick and mortar location benefit from using location based services like FourSquare, Yelp and Facebook Places for driving consumers to their stores. With the explosion of the adoption of smart phones, many consumers are now interacting with brands via these mobile devices, providing more opportunities for you to connect with them in ways that were previously unavailable.

Customers

Those who already do business with you should be one of your prime focus areas. Communicate with your customers and offer them special deals using social media where appropriate. Provide awesome customer service and quick responses to their questions so they can only brag about how wonderful you are. Happy and satisfied customers who understand the value you offer will not hesitate to refer new customers to you.

Word of Mouth / Referrals / Networking

Every small business should include word of mouth marketing activities as one of their focused areas because it will deliver results in the long run. With so much noise in the market, people don’t trust messages coming from your company directly. Notice how many sites encourage you to review your experiences and in fact, according to that same BrightLocal.com survey, 67% of local consumers have consulted online customer reviews of local businesses, influencing whether they contact your business.

The power of word-of-mouth marketing, both online and offline, is valuable for small businesses because it helps you develop your credibility and expert reputation. Through networking events and social media sites, you can establish a quality reputation by having your happy customers provide reviews and testimonials.

At this point, our online and social media strategies should go beyond the experimentation phase and become the foundation for our marketing action plan. You still need to stay aware of what’s new and test those that appear to be of value to your small business, but these tests should not replace any of your ongoing efforts until they have proven themselves.

Theses are my choices for this year’s marketing plan. Where are you focusing your marketing efforts this year?

Article source: http://masterful-marketing.com/small-business-marketing-where-to-focus/