Get on the Bandwagon!
On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will get a new design.
-A message from Facebook on the top of all the Facebook Pages I manage.
No sooner had I just finished three Facebook business pages when Facebook comes out with a game changer: Facebook Timeline for Business Pages. Continue reading
You can be proud that you have a couple of hundred fans on your Facebook page, but are they quality fans? What’s the difference really? Well, the difference is something called Edge rank. Edge rank is an algorithm that Facebook uses that determines what shows up on the newsfeed, and that includes the posts and other information from your pages.
We can all understand why everything that everyone posts on Facebook can’t possibly make it to our newsfeed, but how does Facebook go about determining what actually does show up on your feed?
EdgeRank formula
Looks complicated? Well, let’s go through it:
μe – the affinity score. How often you interact with a particular Facebook friend raises your affinity with that friend.
we – the edge weight. What interaction is going on? more weight is given to a comment than a like, for example.
de – the time delay. How long has the information been up. The longer, the less it’s worth.
So what does this all mean? Well, when all these factors are multiplied together, a high number means your object (picture, comment, tag, etc.) is more likely to show up on your Facebook friends’ newsfeed.
Taking this all into consideration, and making it simple; the people that interact with you, and you with them, are more likely to get your fresh objects in their newsfeed.
One of the most common mistakes that businesses make when starting out in Social Media is creating a Facebook Profile instead of a Facebook Page to represent their business.
Using a Facebook Profile for your business is against Facebook’s Terms of Use http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=12814 Facebook has the right to erase the profile and all your connections with it. Granted, it’s rare but it does happen. Are you willing to take that chance?
Because Pages are for businesses and Profiles are for people it may reflect badly on your business for using a Profile. Your business may seem incompetent or uninformed.
Not all is lost!! Facebook allows you to convert your Profile to a Page. All your Friends will change to Page Likes and all your pictures will be transferred but that’s it! you will lose all other content so it’s a good idea to save that content somewhere else so you can add it to your Page after conversion. Also note that this does not work vice versa, Pages cannot be converted to Profiles.
In a political campaign team, there’s the candidate, the campaign manager, the volunteer manager, but do you have a Social Media manager? As campaigns move increasingly on to the web, and connecting with constituents through the Internet becomes crucial, every campaign now needs an online manager.
Using social media in a campaign is not about a couple of blog posts, a website, and a few tweets. You will have an online manager with staff, and responsibilities such as (but not limited to):
We were recently part of a campaign with almost all candidates having an online presence. The top three candidates had: website/blogsite, Facebook page (one had a locked profile not a page). Our candidate also had a LinkedIn profile, and a Twitter account. Our candidate’s web site added pages almost weekly, with more and more content as time went on especially near “e” day. He was tweeting three or four times a day with useful messages. His Facebook page was constantly getting comments, and he was commenting back. We were also monitoring important forums and pages. As for the other guys; one did nothing online except set up his channels and not so much as review them for the duration of the campaign. The other had some comments in his Facebook page, a blog of self promotion, and no presence outside of that. Needless to say, our candidate dominated the online media. Oh, and won the election.
I’m not saying that you will win the election if you have a competent online manager, I’m just saying that without one you will be missing out on a huge opportunity to effectively connect with the people that are voting. Your online manager and their staff are responsible both for the message of your online campaign and the messages online about your campaign. A social media marketer experienced in political campaigns can guide your online team to success.
The end of FBML: Tomorrow marks the end of an era for Facebook:
Starting Friday, March 18th, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible. Lastly, we want to be clear that our deprecation of FBML does not impact XFBML, such as the tags that support social plugins.
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love By Nikolay Valtchanov – Friday at 9:40pm http://developers.facebook.com/blog/
So what does this mean? Basically, from tomorrow on, you have to make any Facebook pages and apps in iframes. So if you’re not handy in iframes, you’ll have to learn them–or hire us to do them for you 
.
When it comes to Facebook pages, an iframe works like a window within a Facebook page that shows content from outside Facebook. So If I have an HTML page stored on my server, I can point to it in Facebook and show it on my page. Basically, it’s that simple. If you check out ADC Online’s Facebook page you’ll see that we’ve taken it one step further and actually pointed our Facebook page to a specially modified WordPress website. Handy for clients versed in WordPress, so they can keep their own Facebook page fresh with new content.
As for FBML? Well, no one is saying exactly when Facebook is going to stop supporting pages and apps currently running FBML, they’re just saying on March 18th no new apps or pages will be made with it. The complete depreciation of FBML may not take place for years, but as far as I can tell, no one is saying for sure.
