By Mary Killelea August 6, 2009

If you have a business page and want to take a look at it’s effectiveness in your engagements with your fans or recent ads check out the new stats. (Insights Page)

This is directly from the Insights page from Face book fan page it’s located on the left side of your page. Click on it and you’ll receive this message and see the graphs of info.

“Welcome to your new Insights Page.
Facebook allows you to engage with your fans in more ways than ever before - and Insights now allows you to dive into the context of those interactions with deep analytics. We now show you how users are interacting with your page, broken down by Wall posts, likes and comments. Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak. If you would like to export your reports, please click “Switch to the Old Insights” in the menu above and follow the Export link. Check back frequently, as we will be adding new metrics in the coming weeks and months!”

A question commonly asked is do I have to have a facebook page or is a group good enough. Well when Facebook first launched Facebook Pages, many businesses and brands who had built up substantial audiences in their Facebook Groups asked Facebook to move their Group members over to their Facebook Page. For example, last year, Facebook converted the Apple Students Sponsored Group to a Facebook Page. (Facebook promoted “Sponsored Groups” back in the day.)

Now that Facebook Pages have been live for a long time, Facebook has stopped converting Groups to Pages in recent months. Instead, Facebook is offering Group owners the following recommendation:

You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.

So what it come down to is  if you’re a business or brand, you shouldn’t be driving users to a Facebook Group any more. You should be creating and promoting  Facebook Pages over Groups because

1. Pages Allow Marketers to Publish to the Stream
2. Pages Allow Marketers to Engage Fans with Rich Media
3. Pages Let Marketers Analyze How Fans are Interacting with the Insights Dashboard
4. Pages Let Marketers Increase SEO

I am always trying to find ways to enhance my fan pages and have found these 8 GREAT Facebook Apps to check out.

Video, Polls, Notes, Static FMB, Social Fly, Slide Share (post pdf and power points), Reviews, Involver

In order to be included in Yahoo’s Directory you need to pay for inclusion for them to guarantee you a listing. I am not an advocate for paying to get listed in any directory. However there are some directories that the pros just out weigh the cons and this is one of them.   

Yahoo currently offers two options of their paid inclusion program: Search Submit Express and Search Submit Pro. Depending on what your needs and the amount of control you want over your submissions will help determine which program is best for you, if any.

Search Submit Express is perfect if all you are looking for is to get a few of your URLs quickly spidered and into Yahoo!. The annual fee for Search Submit Express is $49 for the first URL, $29 each for URLs 2-10 and $10 each for 11 or more URLs.  Your URLs will be visited every 48 hours to keep the listings up to date; which is perfect if you have content that is frequently changing. Once your site is listed, you will incur a cost-per-click fee whenever a user clicks on your listing.  This may be a drawback depending on your ROI for that listing. The cost-per-click  incurred is either $.15 or $.30 depending on what category your Web site falls  into. For basic sites about things like education, music, sports, baby equipment, etc. your fee would only be $.15 per click. If your site is in one of the more popular shopping categories like apparel, electronics, flowers, and personal care, or travel, then the fee is going to be $.30 per click.

A great feature about Search Submit Express is the reporting that is available. Users can access up-to-date information on clicks, rankings and keywords,  as well as get tracking information to help them optimize pages for improved performance. Trend charts are also available so that you can track performance over a span of time.

Search Submit Pro is the 2nd option of the Yahoo paid inclusion program. Search Submit Pro offers more power over your submission and more tools for you. There is no annual fee for Search Submit Pro, but there is still a cost-per-click associated with your listings. Yahoo does not specify what the cost-per-click is for the different categories, but you can assume that the category breakdown is the same as Search Submit Express, with possibly a higher cost-per-click  fee. Yahoo does say that Search Submit Pro is best for those who have a marketing budget of $5000+ per month or for those submitting 1,000+ pages to Yahoo. Depending on how many URLs you want to include in the paid inclusion program, you will have to decide which of these two programs would be most beneficial to you at the lowest cost.

Some of the nice features of Search Submit Pro include the ability to create your own titles and descriptions to be displayed on Yahoo’s search engine results page. You can change these as often as needed to correspond with the changes
on your Web site. Pages are submitted through an XML feed and Search Submit Pro allows you to include pages that might otherwise be difficult for spiders to reach due to cookies, session IDs or dynamic pages. Your content is revisited every 48 hours, just like with Search Submit Express, or if your content doesn’t change that often you can choose to set a schedule for the spider’s visits. One other nice feature of Search Submit Pro is that you are assigned a dedicated account manager to help you with all of your questions, comments, concerns etc.

Similar to Search Submit Express, Search Submit Pro offers tools that give users insight to such things as search engine rankings, the number of times each listing was clicked on, and what keywords were used to trigger those listings. The reports are also customizable so that you only track what is useful to your business. Reports can be viewed online or downloaded to your computer. These reports give  you tons of info to the performance of your site and inof on the visitors to you site. By studying the data you will be able to tweak your submission to increase the click-through-rate and increase traffic to your site

Neither Search Submit Express nor Pro promise improves site rankings. Once you’ve submitted your URLs, your site is still subject to the Yahoo algorithm and will rank based on the content and its relevancy to the keywords. Yes, the paid inclusion program gets the spider to visit your site sooner, but just having spiders visit your site won’t get you rankings. Your site still needs to be optimized and have relevant content, be themed correctly, and  have no major server or spiderability issues.

Video statistics that show the power of online video ads:

• 80% of web users will watch video at least once a month.
• 30% visited the advertiser’s physical store.
• 55% visited the advertiser’s Web site after viewing the video.
• 24% made a purchase after viewing the video.

Video is very powerful you can see the use of video works by:

• Making a personal connection with customers and prospects
• Building trust and showcasing expertise during the decision-making
    process
• Delivering a powerful message in an authentic manner
• Delivering key messages with lasting impact
• Showing the world business attributes with television-quality production  

The toughest part in this whole process is trying to figure out how in the world you are gonna create a video. You don’t know how to shoot video or  you don’t have the time. We’ll Working Web Solutions has a great new partner who focuses on nothing but video production.  They can help set you up with a production team immediately to come out to your business location and tape a commercial for your business so you can begin streaming it on YouTube or embedding it in your website immediately. 

ORDER YOUR BUSINESS VIDEO COMMERCIAL NOW!

The Next Step Promoting your video! That’s where Working Web Solutions comes in!  Once you have your video contact us to learn more about our video marketing services.  We can help monetize your video and send it out to numerous video houses and increase traffic to your site.

One of the BEST portable video cameras on the market is the flip camera. I just bought one and can NOT believe how EASY it is to use!! I highly recommend it if you are trying to create your own video yourself .

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