December 13,  2012 by Mary Killelea

I am a huge fan of Amy Porterfield, she and I connected on Facebook
awhile back. We both love Facebook Marketing.
I am thrilled to help her promote her new
product that really breaks Facebook Marketing down into easy to follow steps!

Please watch her video!

In order to thrive in growing your business using online
marketing strategies you need a few KEY things:

1. The right tools
2. Traffic
3. Conversions

It’s simple when you know exactly what to do.

Luckily for you, right now there is one resource
you can to leverage to achieve these 3 things.

That resource is……… Facebook!

With close to 1 Billion members on Facebook
there is no question this is the best place online
to get more leads, traffic, and sales.

Are you making the most out of it right now
or letting your competitors take the leads from you?

Seriously you gotta see this video

You’ll learn exactly what you need
to do to create more fans on Facebook and how to
turn them into Super Fans!
Cheers to a prosperous 2012!

December 5, 2011 by Mary Killelea

No matter what type of company you own, Facebook is a fantastic venue to market your business on. Facebook has over 800 million active users and according to http://www.socialbakers.com the average person spends about 55 minutes a day engaged on Facebook. Facebook allows every person to have a free profile but they make it clear that personal pages are for personal use only and they do NOT want you to promote your businesses through your profile. Facebook has created business pages for this purpose, making them equipped with business reporting tools, custom tabs, apps, and other business specific assets.

Why Market on Facebook? What you have to understand about Facebook is for many people, it’s become their virtual world.. that’s where they hang out with friends, family and engage with businesses. People’s expectations of businesses has changed over the past 5 years, now people want to engage with a business and expect for that business to be accessible and transparent thru social media, like Facebook, and Twitter. For this article we are focusing on Facebook.

People buy from companies they know and trust. Facebook provides businesses this ideal setting to extend your brand by creating a Facebook business page and tools to allow you to engage with customers on a one to one basis.

Facebook is a great place for small businesses because it levels the playing field no matter what size your company is you have the same resources to market side by side the big companies. You can find most of the top fortune 500 companies engaging with their fans (customers) on Facebook and take the time to watch and learn from them. Face it if the top companies in the country are utilizing Facebook to build relationships and establish repoire with their exiting and potential customers shouldn’t you as a small business.

Facebook business marketing is free and if you consider each person on average has 130 friends and when a person likes your page, you can market to them thru daily posts and when they like or comment on your posts, those interactions are shared with their friends now your message, brand, services and products have very high chance of being viewed by other liked minded friends who too can become fans and customers of yours.

As you can see the viral marketing effect of Facebook can be enormous but one essential thing to realize when marketing on Facebook, your efforts need to be sincere, your goals needs to be altruistic and your company needs to be transparent. Your marketing strategy should be focused on what solid, beneficial content can you share that will build repoire with your customers and start a dialogue, how can you connect with them in ways that your competition isn’t, what makes your business different. There is a great rule of thumb to follow it’s the 90/10 rule which means 90 percent of the time you are adding value and finding creative ways to connect with fans in an authentic way, 10 percent of the posts should be sales oriented.

One really important thing to recognize is that you want everyone that visits your Facebook business page to “Like” the page. This is achieved in a various ways but one of the most successful ways is to create a reveal tab that they land on by designating this in your settings. This reveal tab will be your first impression so it’s very important to make it a good one. You want to ask them to “Like” your page and offer them some type of incentive, the incentive or payoff is revealed to them once they have clicked the “Like” button. Most people will typically check out a companies business page and in less than 5 seconds decide whether or not they want to click “Like” and give you permission to market to them thru their news feed. “Liking” a business page is the equivalent of a person giving you an endorsement and allowing you to update them with news, information, tips and offerings similar to signing up for a newsletter.

As mentioned above having a business page is free. But when it comes to setting up a custom landing page with a reveal offer there are companies like ours that will design your custom Facebook business reveal tab for you if you are not tech savvy or there are tools out there that you can purchase and some that are even for free that allow you to set up the business custom tab yourself. It’s important to understand that you should optimize your business page with keywords that help identify your products or services as well as your company name so when people do searches for businesses on Facebook either by company name or keywords your company will come up. This can be achieved by thoroughly going through your set up steps and filling out all the information in the about us section and knowing that adding photos of your products and services is beneficial as well as who your page lists as their favorites can be strategic.

One of the best ways to get fans is by posting out as your page on other business pages. This is a powerful marketing strategy you can practice. This is achieved by identifying 5-6 other business pages that you think your potential customers visit, hang out or interact with. When you are on your business page you select “use Facebook as my business page” and then visit their pages see what the conversations are and interact and posts feedback and comments where appropriate. You will be amazed at how many companies will like your page just because they saw you engaging with them and others will visit your page because they saw you posting something interesting and want to learn more about you.

Facebook advertising is another incredible resource that businesses have today, like Google’s pay per click or adwords this is setup very similarly but the advantage that Facebook offers is that you have the ability to market to specific segments of people based on their likes and interests. When each person signs up and builds a profile on Facebook, they fill out a series of questions and over time people add interests and activities to their profiles as a means of enriching their virtual world presence. Facebook so brilliantly tracks all this data giving advertisers a huge advantage allowing them the ability to target VERY specific demographics making an ad campaign a great investment.

As a business owner Facebook can be daunting because there are tactics that are beneficial and tactics to avoid. In writing this article I hope I have shared the importance of getting into the game, and utilizing Facebook to market your business, convinced you it’s an amazing tool that can help grow your business, that there are differences between having a business page and profile page and what the value is in having a person “Like” your page.

Working Web Solutions has been in business for 10 years offering Web Design, SEO and Facebook Business Marketing, our motto is Your Success Is Our Success “Like” our business page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/webdesignandseo and visit us online at www.workingwebsolutions.com to watch a video about Facebook business marketing.

Below is a list of additional resources that I hope you find helpful.

Facebook Business Marketing www.facebook.com/business
Advertising Guidelines: www.facebook.comads_guidelines.php
Guide to Facebook Ads: www.facebook.com/adsmarketing
Advertising Help Center: www.facebook.com/adshelp
Create a Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
Facebook Page Promotional Guidelines:www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
Creating a custom Facebook Fan Page http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84bEDBVmdsM&NR=1
Software to create a custom Facebook Fan Page http://www.fanpageengine.com
Software to create a custom Facebook Fan Page http://get10000fans.com/
Wildfire iFrames app (Contests etc.) http://www.wildfire.com

November 29, 2011 Posted by Mary Killelea

So on my Facebook Fan page www.facebook.com/webdesignandseo and through this blog I get asked a variety of questions… I thought I’d share some recent questions I received about Facebook Business Marketing.

(Q) My regular Facebook page is:  www.facebook.com/stevenbfulmer and my fanpage is www.facebook.com/StevenFulmerInc.  How exactly are they connected or interrelated?

(A) www.facebook.com/stevenbfulmer this is your personal profile… FB allows everyone to have one profile and multiple business pages but one person can only have 1 profile page. A profile page should not be for business related promotion.
www.facebook.com/StevenFulmerInc as you said this is your business fan page - here you have “Likes” vs. friends . There are many benefits to having a business fan page but the greatest is that if you can get a person to “Like” your page you basically are getting them into your marketing list because when you then write on your business wall it is displayed on their personal profile wall and if they like it then it is shared with their friends. So the #1 key is to get “Likes” the number two goal is to get fans to ENGAGE with your posts… either by liking it or commenting on it or sharing it with others.

When I go to your business page and I didn’t know you I would not know this was owned by you there is no link to your personal page — which is good if you have multiple businesses or if you want to keep business and personal separated.

(Q)  Also, what is “promote with an Ad?” When I have my book and products done, will I be able to put ads on my fanpage to promote them?

(A) Promote with an Ad means from your business page if you click on that you can automatically go into their advertising tool and set up an ad promoting your page… here you have a number of criteria’s you can set for your ad, etc.. (this is a long discussion but for the most part its pretty simple… set a budget, write the ad and select your audience particulars then run the ad to those that you are specifically targeting)

When you get your books and products upload those photos and they will be listed at the top of your wall and then under the photos when you are uploading them add the description of the product and how they can order it.
There are advanced ways of setting up a shopping cart right within your Facebook business page and this is definately growing in popularity. I have written a blog post on this…  http://www.portlandwebdesignblog.com/facebook-business-marketing/setting-up-shop-on-facebook-fan-page-ecommerce/

(Q) And lastly, I noticed on some huge fan pages that they have videos and music tracks that stay at the top of their wall.  If I wanted to post a welcome video and have it stay at the top, how would I do that?(A) I have not seen the videos that stay on top of the wall section as that content flucuates based on what is posted and how you have it displaying  (Most recent or Top Posts)
Typically when I see a Video used as a marketing technique it is embedded into their custom landing page as a means of evoking a user to like the page — this technique is called setting up a custom reveal tab.  I have one on my welcome tab: https://www.facebook.com/webdesignandseo if you have not liked my page and you go to my page it will take your directly there. Other examples would be https://www.facebook.com/DarrenSpruyt?sk=app_154997147898345

There are all different kinds of tactics you can take with a welcome page reveal tabs have the best conversion rate for increasing “Likes”  There are companies like North Social where you can set up apps and run contests, set up videos etc..

(Q) OK, one more, now that I have a fanpage, is there anything I need to understand about it to take full use of the tool?

(A) Lastly now that you have a fan page… engage with your audience in real conversation… add value, post simple questions, don’t be obsessed with getting likes just be real, approachable and helpful.  Go to pages where potential clients are and comment on posts as your business page. Join the conversation on a few pages of businesses that you can learn from, add value to or gain clients from.

To learn more about Facebook business marketing “Like” our page.  For our Facebook Business Marketing Services visit our website.

October 6, 2011 by Mary Killelea

This morning when I was sipping my coffee before I got started on client tasks I took a few minutes to look at our own Google analytics and see how we were doing based on some new marketing strategies we’ve implemented for ourselves. It was then that I came across in my keyword report people had found us by typing in “who is the best SEO in portland ” intrigued I opened up Google and did my own search for the same term. Here’s what I found….

I loved the results.. because it was Jeremy Morgan, my company Working Web Solutions and Greg Beddor owner of Webfu. I know both Greg and Jeremy and have a great deal of respect for both of them. Many years ago I think it might have been 11 now I applied to ad in Craigslist for a link building job with US Outdoor. It was thru that job post that I got to know and work for Greg Beddor. He in my mind was definitely the pioneer in the Portland market for SEO and he taught me a lot and really got me introduced to all the possibilities of online marketing.

Over the years Jeremy and I have crossed paths and I enjoy reading his blog http://www.jeremymorgan.com/. Technically he is so smart and so willing to help teach others to succeed in SEO and programming. Now don’t get me wrong there are a lot of other very talented and dedicated marketers in the Portland area but it sure was nice finding that the three of us showed up in the top results for the term: “who is the best SEO in Portland” I take great pleasure in ranking in the top three with these guys.

Being a business woman in Portland and owning my own company for over 10 years I have learned a lot and have pride in knowing we have helped businesses grow online. I try and share my pride in this with my daughters and hopefully am teaching them they can be or do anything they want to do, that hard work and dedication pays off and whether you get award recognition, have a fancy office downtown or work out of your home or not at the end of the day if you can help support your family and enjoy what you do life is good!

I think the secret to my success has been evolving with online marketing, adapting quickly with a wiliness to learn new things constantly and taking risks. Working Web Solutions is now offering Facebook business marketing and because of this our business is growing and serving a new niche.

I’m not sure where I see myself or my company in 10 more years but for now I enjoy all the possibilities of online marketing and helping other business succeed.

September 21, 2011 by Mary Killelea

Increase your bottom line and sell your products and services on Facebook thru shopping cart applications.

Fan Page — Yes it is possible and it’s a growing trend! A Facebook Store front  is a fan page that is just like your website store, offering the similar functions and operational procedure. Still being a Facebook page, it allows to integrate some features more tightly (“likes”, comments etc).

Below I have listed four different ecommerce applications for Facebook that  I have found. I have not used personally nor do I endorse one over the other  I am just sharing with you the ones I’ve found out their online .I do hope after reading a bit about each you have a better idea of which one  you may choose in the future for your ecommerce needs.The first two applications that I have listed below allow users to directly shop within the walls of Facebook which if you ask me has great value. People tend not to want to be directed outside of Facebook if this was their entry  point.

Infused Commerce is very cool. With this application you an quickly create a branded Facebook store, grow fans with revenue generating events, track your store’s and promotions’ performance, release promotions with their support assistance, deploy your Facebook store as a widget on any website or blog, and assured security and available custom integration.Once you sign-up you can login to create and deploy your Facebook store all within minutes. You can set your colors and logo, add your products to the store, set your payment and shipping options, and install the shop on Facebook from their administrative interface.

View a live demo of this application in action. These guys look to have the best support that I’ve found so far. They actually   provide a phone number in case you want to talk to someone directly http://infusedcommerce.zendesk.com/home

———————————————————————————————-

Shop Igniter is another great ecommerce application that is available if you  want to set up a store within Facebook. Their selling points include Social  Merchandising, Social Marketing and Social Metrics. They distinguish themselves from others by offering retailers and brands the ability to quantify their most influential customers, products and promotions. Which in today’s social world can help retailers significantly. 

As written in Website Magazine “This product promises to give retailers and brands insights into who their most influential customers are (and how to create rewards for them), what their most viral products are (and adjust their stores and collections to reflect that) and test and optimize the virality of their promotions.” Read their full review.

I have signed up to get a demo to truly understand how these are executed but from what I can see the concepts and offerings all seem to be in place and all encompassing. Unfortunately no pricing is available online. To find out what the available pricing options are request a demo.

June 16, 2011 by Mary Killelea

Even though it’s been awhile I think it’s good to cover this again.. Google informed merchants using the service was shut down on April 29. Tags was an experiment which led to a similar local advertising product called Boost which appears do be doing much better, judging by how much it is now appearing in search results.

Boost ads are all of those blue-colored pushpins on Google Maps and in paid search results. Rather than linking to a website, an offer, or a menu, Boost highlights some listings information from Google Places such as an address or phone number. Boost is a “set it and forget it” service targets local businesses that have stopped using AdWords due to its relative complexity and the time required to manage ad campaigns, essentially re-creating a subscription-based model. A business just has to add Boost to their listing in Google Places, set up a monthly budget, and select relevant categories. Boost does the rest, advertising on Google and Google Maps. (You may have seen the blue pin at the top of a Google Map search? That’s a Boost ad.)

As of today’s post I have not experimented with YEXT tags yet but plan to soon so it’s a uncharted territory for me and up to you. For local businesses that like tags, they can still buy them across a dozen competing non-Google sites through Yext Tags.  A tag and customized message can be added to any local business listing on sites like Citysearch, Local.com, and SuperPages, Incidentally, Yext is planning on changing the name of this product to PowerListings.

Local Search is very hard to control but this is one thing you can do .. remember it is super important that your business listing (address and contact inf) be consistent when ever put out there on the web.

May 12, 2011 by Mary Killelea 

Ever wonder how your posts get seen by others? EDGE RANK is Facebook’s formula for ranking — This is CRITICAL to understand for your Facebook Business Marketing Success

Facebook launched back in 2004 which seems like a life time ago and it is in the internet world. In a recent article I was reading from Tech Crunch Edge Rank the secret sauce that makes facebook’s News Feeds Tick  they said Zuckerberg put the compents of FB’s Like buttons, instant chat and auto login capabilities into context: Zuckerberg says “we are building a Web where the default is social.”

Here’s a little explaination about each of these features that makes FB so social.

Social plugins enable you to provide engaging social experiences to your users with just a line of HTML. Because the plugins are served by Facebook, the content is personalized to the viewer whether or not they have signed into your site

The Graph API is the core of Facebook Platform, enabling you to read and write data to Facebook. It provides a simple and consistent view of the social graph, uniformly representing objects (e.g., people, photos, events, and pages) and the connections between them (e.g., friendships, likes, and photo tags)

Facebook authentication enables your application to interact with the Graph API on behalf of Facebook users, and it provides a powerful single-sign on mechanism across web, mobile, and desktop apps.

Insights enable you to access key metrics and statistics about your Page, Application or domain.

Collectively these interactions make up everyone’s EdgeRank

News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, it would be overwhelming. SO this is where Facebook Business Marketing comes into play. Yes there is or should be a strategy to your posts.  Successful Facebook Business Marketers are always trying to make sure their posts (objects) are engaging and interactive so they can get good EDGE RANK.

The Edge Rank is pretty simple to understand in theory. Every item ( text post, photo, video or link ) that shows up in your News Feed is considered an Object. If you have an Object in the News Feed which in simple terms is a status update, whenever another user interacts with that Object they’re creating what Facebook calls an Edge, which includes actions like tags and comments.

Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:

• First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
• Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
• When the post was written is a factor as well. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.

Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed. It’s worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends’ feeds before anyone has interacted with them.

It has been talked about that the two tabbed viewing of your Top News and Most Recent is a little confussing for most users.  Many people still use both tabs, with over 50% of users clicking over to the ‘most recent’ tab on a regular basis.

It has been said also that posts that come in from third party automated systems don’t weigh as much but if that is the only way you can manage to post then I would recommend you continue for now.

This is such an imporant post because this is the basis for your success on facebook as a marketing vehicle. This is why posts need to be engaging, and you need to have a strategy around how and when your business is interacting on facebook. Done right you can have a successful Edge Rank.  Unfortuantely most business owners don’t realize this.

Here are our recommended steps for facebook business marketing:

1. create a welcome tab for your fan page that offers an incentive and true value to people to become a fan of yours on FB. It’s your first impression make it a good one. Here are some examples of custom fan page designs.

2. create a customizable profile banner for your fan page

3. optimize your fan page there is a lot of areas on your fan page that are key areas of real estate and you should not waste that marketing opportunity.

4. develop a marketing strategy that includes identifing your facebook team contributors and strategist, unified  messaging &  purpose and determine a consistent engagement protocal while being flexible and responsive to your fans.

If you want to learn more or have Working Web Solutions work with you on any of these goals.
Please contact us at 503-997-6935 we’d love to share what we’ve learned and been able to do for other clients.  Facebook Business Marketing can be really rewarding.

April 27, 2011 by Mary Killelea 

A wonderful way to help increase your local presence for your business is to create a presence for your business on yelp!

What is Yelp?  Yelp is a website that aims to connect people with great local businesses and Yelp Business Accounts allow businesses to share information with the Yelp Community. Simply put, it’s word of mouth — amplified.

10 tips to get you started on Yelp

1. Create your profile - This shows Yelp users who you are and where you’re located, etc. 

2. Unlock your Business Page - If you don’t know what that is or how to do it go watch this video from Yelp that shows how business owners can use the business tools.

3. Add an Event - If you’re a local business and you’re sponsoring a event share this with people on Yelp. Also promote these type of events on Facebook and Twitter.

4. Fill out your bio - Tell people about you and let them connect to you in away the competition doesn’t offer.

5. Choose a Custom URL for Your Yelp Profile - it’s another great opportunity for branding and for looking professional and current and it’s easier to remember.

6. Offer Specials & Discounts - Encourage people to check out your listing by offering special discounts, special events or limited time offers on your page. Consider a special discount if a customer says “I saw you on Yelp.”
Yelp recently rolled out check-in offers, similar to Foursquare this is great because when people checkin then it shows others where their friends are going and it’s likely they too will want to visit.

7. Recommend Other Businesses - Remember Social Media isn’t just about you.. share with others great businesses you love.

8. Respond to Reviews  - People love to see a business owner own up to mistakes or address concerns of their customers. Respond in a very nice and polite way and it will have a great impact.

10. Publish Your Reviews to Facebook and Twitter - Log into your Yelp account, click on the “My Account” button, and then follow the instructions in the “External Services” tab.

If you utilize this one tool you will start to see better traffic to your site - like any social media engage and respond to clients. They want a personal experience and Yelp is a great tool for connecting with customers.

 April 25, 2011 By Mary Killelea

Today I was reading a great article on Mobile SEO from Chris Silver Smith who writes for the the Locals Only column at Search Engine Land. Chris “Silver” Smith is director of optimization strategies for KeyRelevance.

Here are the highlights from his post on .

Optimizing for mobile is fairly simple. In fact, it’s so simple that it’s surprising that more companies are not delivering mobile-friendly versions of their pages.

To optimize for mobile search, try the following:

• Perform content negotiation when a user lands on your site — if their accept-header indicates a preference for a mobile flavor webpage, deliver the mobile version of your page to them.
• Google has a separate bot for crawling/indexing mobile versions of pages. So, you can deliver both a mobile version page up on the very same URL you’re using for the regular, full-blown HTML page, as long as you’re performing the content negotiation check on the backend.
• Google has identified a few different mobile-friendly languages which they support, so you’ll want to use one of them: XHTML Basic 1.1, XHTML MP 1.2, cHTML, or WML 1.3.
• Disclose that you have mobile-friendly pages outright. Googlebot-mobile will eventually discover them, but it could happen quicker if you generate a mobile sitemap and then notify Google through your Webmaster Tools account.
• Let smartphone users choose formats manually, if they wish. Provide a link from the regular page to the mobile version, and vice-versa so users can choose to switch.
• WordPress has some plugins that may handle delivering up mobile-friendly versions of blogs.
• Similar to WordPress and depending on your content management system, or the programming language used to develop your site, there could also be freeware programs, modules or libraries that would make it easiest to get your mobile version set up. Using off-the-shelf code may get you up and running quicker, and save you time.

April 21, 2011 by Mary Killelea

Today I attended the 2011 eMarketing Summit and once again it was a wonderful event filled with useful sessions that highlighted areas in the world of Social Marketing, Search and Mobile Marketing.

The highlight for me for sure was the presentation on The Mobile Marketing Frontier by Aron Ezra, CEO Macroview Labs. It was hard not to be overwhelmed by the numbers and opportunity he presented in the Mobile arena.  Here are some of the interesting stats he provided. 

650,000 Smart phones are activated daily

over 350,000 apps are available in the Apple App Store

there have been over 10 BILLION downloads

mobile searches are up 500% in the last 2 years.

more time is spent by users on their smart phones browsing the web than talking on their phones

Ask yourself if you accidently left your wallet and your mobile phone behind some where like on a bus, which would you be more concerned about retrieving? The majority say their phone!

Another interesting take away from Aron’s presentation was and I am summarizing this is, that just like social media the value or motivation for a company has to be engagement with users not so much sales - sales will come thru user engagement, exposure of your business, and the interation you create. If you are looking to create an app don’t create for the sole purpose of making a buck. Create apps that are free, more peope will sample them and use them as opposed to even selling them for .99 cents.  There are ways to monitize it not at the expense of customers but think out side the box at partnerships or sponsors, while still making it accessible to users for free.

Each company is unique and each purpose and function and desired engagement from their audience is unquie - know your audience, test your apps, listen to feedback and study the anyaltics and if you can afford to test amoungst focus groups do so.

Developing a mobile site  is different from a regular website, KNOW what you’re doing or hire an expert in mobile development, there are compability & design issues that need to be addressed. Users use their desktops differently than they use their mobile phones — don’t just recreate your site in a mobile version. When designing think of of the users reason for looking up your site via thier phone vs. the desktop, understand their reason for engagement, help them understand and appreciate their reason for engagement. If you have a mobile site promote that from your website - share that info with your users to build your relationship with them.  Some of your users depending on your offering or business type might be android users vs. iphone users. This is valuable information keep this in mind when you are designing your mobile site or app. 

Lastly the biggest take away from Aron’s presentation which I don’t think people get yet is  MOBILE MARKETING should be a part of your marketing mix. I still believe as a business you should try and increase your web presence thru SEO and Social Media like facebook and seriously consider mobile marketing as another opportunity to build your brand!