30 Days To 3,000 Facebook Fans

New Media School 548 Market St San Francisco, CA 94104 T 202-658-7548 contact@newmediaschool.com www.newmediaschool.com

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Day 1: What Has Changed? 3

Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A Brand You Can Be Proud Of 5

Day 3: How To Configure Your Facebook Page 8

Day 4: Developing A Creative Photo For Your Page 11

Day 5: Target Network Nodes 13

Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A Successful Facebook Contest 15

Day 7: How To Leverage SEO For Your Facebook Page 17

Day 8: How To Become A Master Of Conversations 19

Day 9: Create A Note Which Spreads Like Wildfire 21

Day 10: Introduction To Facebook Ads 23

Day 11: Why Understanding Your Target Market Is Key To Success With Facebook Ads 25

Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3 27

Day 13: How To Use Facebook Applications To Boost Your Fan Base 32

Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A Successful Facebook Event 35

Chapter 15: How To Use A Landing Page To Convert New Facebook Visitors Into Fans 38

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30 Days to 3,000 Fans i

Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000 Facebook Fans 40

Day 17: Post Relevant Videos 42

Day 18: Cross-Promote Your Website 44

Day 19: Research Other Successful Pages 46

Day 20: Get People To Invite Their Friends 48

Day 21: Create Mini-Competitions 50

Day 22: Work The Forums 52

Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The Impact Of Guest Blog Posts 54

Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That Will Turn Facebook Fans Into Custom-ers 56

Day 25: Integrate the Page Into Your Existing Blog 58

Day 26: How To Use Competitive Analysis To Boost Your Fan Base 60

Day 27: Monitor Your Page Insights To Improve Content 62

Day 28: Check The Magazine Rack For Content Strategy 64

Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins 66

Day 30: Create A Plan For The Next Month 68

Day 31: Promote Fanning Via SMS 70

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Introduction

If you have a brand but haven’t yet mastered the most effective

techniques to attracting new followers and fans, you are not alone. With

Facebook updating their design and platform on a regular basis it has

become challenging for brands to follow everything that’s changing let

alone learn all of the techniques necessary to maximize their reach. We

understand the challenges that you face which is why we are introducing

the 30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans project.

Why Does Your Brand Want 3,000 Facebook

Fans?When Facebook launched their new design early this year, millions of

users revolted against the change but as things have quieted down, one

group not complaining is brands. Facebook’s redesigned homepage

provides brands with the same level of interaction that users have among their friends yet only a few shining brands have

truly leveraged Facebook’s redesign to its full potential. We’ve spent the past few months experimenting with

Facebook’s redeveloped pages product to see what it has to offer.

While Facebook will be launching more features to provide brands with greater exposure and greater access to their

public profile’s data, there is already plenty available for brands to take advantage of. So before discussing how to attract

thousands of fans to your public profile within a month, I think it would be best to explain why your brand or small

business wants thousands of fans.

It should be obvious to any marketer that thousands of fans can create an extremely effective promotional channel but

can you actually take action to drive more fans or is it just a natural evolution? As Fred Wilson states, the future is in

“earned” media, not paid and Facebook is one of the primary platforms for earned media. Large companies like Coca-

Cola will have fans that set up pages for them and those pages can often grow to millions of users but unfortunately

small to medium-sized businesses as well as individuals can’t just set up a page and let the people do the rest.

Instead, less known brands need to invest heavily in brand development and leverage the various social media channels

available to them to interact directly with their followers, fans, and customers. For this guide we used 3,000 fans as a

high yet reachable target that brands can attract through actionable tasks. Some will attract more and some will attract

less but after 30 days I have no doubt that you will have all the tools necessary to build a more effective brand presence

on Facebook.

The measure of success should not be whether or not you’ve attracted 3,000 fans but whether you’ve attracted a large

number of targeted fans.

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What The Project Involves And How To ParticipateDuring this project we will spend 30 days listing out all of the techniques needed to maximize the effectiveness of your

brand’s Facebook page. At the end of the 30 days you should have numerous techniques that you can put into practice

immediately. Each day we will include action items that you should take.

Note

Throughout this guide I will use the words “fan pages”, “pages”, and “public profiles” interchangeably because Facebook

has yet to solidify their terminology.

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Day 1: What Has Changed?

The New Facebook Public ProfilesOn March 4th of this year, Facebook released an updated version on what was previously called “Facebook Pages” and

is now called “Facebook Public Profiles”. The update essentially transformed the ways that brands could interact with

both existing customers as well as potential future customers. While many described it as a move against Twitter

(including myself), the dynamic between Twitter and Facebook is not important to this guide. What’s most important is

that you have a thorough understanding of all the features of Facebook pages and how to leverage them for your

business.

Below is an outline of the new features that have been added to Facebook Pages. As we continue the program over the

coming 30 days, we will outline how to leverage every aspect of the pages product. Here are a few of the features you

will be learning about:

Status UpdatesThis is probably the most significant upgrade for Facebook Pages. Any page administrator can now post status updates

on behalf of the Facebook page they are managing. Whether you are an individual or a large brand, you will now have

direct access to your fans through the news feed. I’ve personally benefited substantially from status updates. As the

image above illustrates, by posting a status update that’s a question, you can instantly get tons of feedback. We

regularly receive upwards of 30 replies to a single status update.

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This is an excellent way to continue engaging your fans on a regular basis. The status update is one of the core features

of Facebook and the recent site redesign increases the emphasis on status updates.

Ability to Post Rich Content To The

FeedUnder the previous design, Facebook page admins could

post rich media content but it was not included in a

continuous stream from the main page. Instead, rich

media was regularly tucked away. Regardless of where

the content was positioned on the page, when new

content was posted there was no way to notify users of

the new content. The result was that users would

become fans but never return to the public profile

because there was no way to get alerted to the changes.

While there is a feature called “Updates” (that I’ll cover

momentarily), most users were completely oblivious to previous public profiles that they had become fans of. Distribution

of rich-media content in the feeds changes all that. Now you can upload videos and photos and they will immediately be

posted to all of your fans’ feeds to watch, comment on, and increase overall engagement.

Mobile Updates to FansThis is another great feature which many brands will increasingly take advantage of.

As I mentioned already, public profiles had no way of reaching out to fans previously

(aside from the typically unread “updates”). Now brands can have their status

updates not only broadcasted to their fans’ news feeds but also directly to their

mobile phones. This is a huge opportunity to increase the level of fan engagement.

The only downside to this feature is that there is no way to currently monitor how many mobile subscribers you have or

how many people have read a given status update. While Facebook hasn’t stated that they plan on adding this feature

anytime soon, I would imagine that Facebook will gradually improve their analytics offering to include mobile

subscriptions. Currently Facebook page “Insights” let admins view how many views of videos, photos, and page views

have been made.

A Decreased Emphasis on “Updates”Facebook has always provided admins with the ability to send messages to their fans via something called “Updates”.

The only problem with the updates is that they don’t go directly to a user’s primary inbox. Instead they go to a separate

tab in their inbox called “Updates”. One person that I spoke with sent a test message out to a public profile with more

than 100,000 fans and received under 50 clicks. In other words: updates are pretty much useless.

That’s why Facebook now emphasizes status updates as the primary channel of communication for public profiles. Have

an event you’re promoting? Post about it via a status update. I hosted a conference last November and found that my

public profile at the time was practically useless because nobody was visiting the page and most people didn’t respond

to updates. While there’s a chance Facebook will improve this feature, the latest upgrades signal that they are phasing

out “Updates”.

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Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A Brand You Can Be Proud Of

You may be wondering why I’m writing a whole section

on branding when this is a guide to mastering your

Facebook Page. The primary reason that I’m bringing

up branding at the beginning of this program is that a

powerful brand is much more effective at attracting

new fans. Every organization is at a different phase in

their branding process. Oprah Winfrey for example,

doesn’t need to do much promotion of her Facebook

profile to end up with a few hundred thousand fans.

While Oprah may be a distant target, investing time

into building your brand will help you build an avid fan

base on Facebook as well as elsewhere on the web.

Tip 1: Use A Consistent DesignA large portion of branding is about image and that image is portrayed through your design. It can be the logo, a set of

colors, or simply a consistent look and feel. As Jared Spool states in his article, “Determining How Design Affects

Branding”, “Brand elements, such as names, logos, tag lines, trademarks, and packaging are shortcuts to” the

perceptions of the consumer. If you tightly integrate your design into your product or service, the design can begin to

evoke the emotions and perceptions that the consumers experience when interacting with your product or service.

Tip 2: Determine Your Brand PersonalityWhile brands may not be people, the personification of brands helps consumers to connect with them. That’s why it’s

important to determine what your brand’s personality is. Much of that personality can come through your own voice

since people like connecting with other individuals but you should be able to define the overall personality of your brand

as well.

Tip 3: Have A Consistent DialogueWhether you are having a conversation on Facebook, Twitter, or during a presentation, it’s important to have a consistent

message. While you can engage in different conversations, it’s important that your conversation is most frequently about

similar ideas or concepts. For example Oprah would not have a conversation with her viewers about computer

programming. Maybe that’s an extreme example but the main point is that there is a consistent dialog that you should

have with your consumers.

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Tip 4: Define Your Target MarketWho are you selling to? That’s a question that many brands fail to

answer and in the end they become so broadly focused that they end up

selling nothing. I’ve made this mistake before and the results can be

extremely painful. You invest months building something only to find out

that you didn’t target a specific market and in the end nobody ends up

making a purchase. As Wikipedia states, your target market “is mainly

defined by age, gender, geography, socio-economic grouping,

technographic, or any other combination of demographics.” Figure out

who you are targeting. This is also extremely important for when you

begin running ad campaigns on Facebook (which we’ll be explaining

later). Figure out your target market and you are well on your way to

3,000 fans.

Tip 5: Know What Your Brand Is SellingYou’ve selected a target market but do you know what your customers want? While you can pick out a segment of the

market to go after, providing them with something that they truly want is a whole other challenge. Often times

companies will spend months preparing for a product launch only to find out that nobody ended up purchasing the

product. Sometimes brands will launch a product or service only to find out that their consumer is using it for another

reason than it was intended. If you don’t understand how your customer is interacting with your brand then good luck

developing a Facebook public profile that’s going to rapidly attract thousands of users. Once you have determined your

target market and you know what your brand is selling, you can proceed to build a large fan base.

Tip 6: Figure Out The Terms That Drive Action From Your Target MarketThis is more about sales and marketing then it is about building your brand but at the end of the day, there’s no point in

building a brand if you don’t plan on using it to sell something. While an attractive brand can build you a large fan base,

selling is much more challenging. Each buyer has their own psychological triggers that will drive them to make a

purchase and often times, there are words that will drive an entire market to make a purchase. That’s why you need to

invest the time to test out various forms of copy and see what works with your market.

There are actually words that will make it more likely for your fans to take action. By discovering these words/terms you

can associate them with your brand and increase the bond with your fans.

Tip 7: Listen To Your Target MarketSocial media is much more about listening than talking at people. Honestly, the old direct methods of marketing are now

dead and instead marketing has become a conversation that brands have with their customers. Thankfully, this new

model presents many new opportunities and those brands that are quickest to adapt will reap the rewards. Some of

your customers will want to engage in a dialogue with your brand and Facebook public profiles are a great place for that

to take place. Did someone post something negative about your brand? Publicly acknowledge their criticism and then

proceed to offer a solution.

If your brand is willing to publicly acknowledge weaknesses and address them, it will build trust with your brand for

existing and future customers. Many times your fans will actually tell you what they’d like your brand to provide. This is

gold to any effective marketer. Spend the time to listen, don’t just speak at your fans.

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Tip 8: Provide Relevant Content That Amplifies Your BrandIt’s difficult to consistently come up with original content. As someone who has written over 2,000 articles in the past

two years, I can attest to the challenge of developing original content. Thankfully, in social media (and on Facebook

public profiles), you don’t always need to come up with original content. As you browse the web, share content that is

relevant to your brand directly from within your Facebook page. This way you can keep your fans engaged with ongoing

content and you don’t need to always be the one producing that content.

Tip 9: Create Good ContentWhile sharing content from around the web is always an easy way to get your fans engaged, it’s always better to create

original content. It’s possible to provide original content which rehashes existing content but the best content is truly

original. One of the best forms of original content is educational guides. Educating your future consumer is always a

great way to build trust and to build an ongoing relationship. That’s not to say that the only content you should create is

educational content. Content that entertains, engages, informs, or simply makes the reader smile is great for keeping

their attention. If you want to learn more about creating great content I highly recommend reading Copyblogger on a

regular basis.

Tip 10: Leverage Multiple Branding ChannelsNo, Facebook Pages are not the end all, be all of your branding strategy. People regularly ask what the best site is for

building their brand and generating new business. The response is always the same no matter who you ask in the

industry: go to where your customers are. If your existing or future customers are on Facebook (there’s a good chance

they are there with over 250 million users) or even MySpace (GASP!), your company should be there. Wherever your

customer is, you should be there.

Daily TaskSpend some time listing out the personality traits of your brand. That’s right ... if your brand was a person, what type of

person would it be?

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Day 3: How To Configure Your Facebook Page

OverviewIn this section we are going to a basic overview for those individuals that don’t know how to get their Facebook page set

up. If you are an advanced Facebook Page user then you may want to consider skipping this day. I receive a number of

emails each week from people that can’t figure out how to get their public profile set up though so I thought it would be

useful to provide a basic introduction.

Step 1: Create Your Facebook PageCreating a Facebook page is a relatively rudimentary task on Facebook. To create a public profile you can visit the

Facebook public profile advertising page and click on the “Create a Page” button. Next up, you’ll be prompted with a

form titled “Create New Facebook Page” as illustrated below. Select your category and enter the name of your business

or public figure. Finally, you must confirm that you are authorized to create the page by entering your full name as it

appears in your profile.

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Step 2: Edit Basic InformationWhen you first arrive to your newly created public profile, there will be a link off to the right hand side which says “Edit

Information”. Entering your information is important for search engine optimization (“SEO”) purposes as well as informing

new visitors about your product, service, or yourself (if you are a public figure). Currently Facebook does not enable page

administrators to remove this tab so I highly recommend that you take the time to fill it out with all the relevant

information.

Step 3: Configure A Landing Page (Custom Tab)When a new fan visits your public profile, it’s extremely useful to explain to them what the public profile is about and why

they should become a fan. The goal of the landing page is to immediately convert the user into a new fan and then

engage the fan after they’ve joined. I’ve seen companies use contests for engaging the user but the vast majority of

Facebook Pages have no separate landing page. The result is that the public profiles have a lower conversion of new

visitors into fans.

There is one exception for public profiles that have no landing page but high conversion: companies with a high brand

affinity. Oprah Winfrey or Coca-Cola can convert users without having a landing page because they have such a strong

brand presence.

How To Configure Your Landing PageAdding a landing page is relatively simple. One requirement is that you have a basic understanding of HTML. More

advanced landing pages can also be created but that will require some knowledge of the Facebook platform. I’m

assuming that most people reading this section don’t have much experience with the Facebook platform so I’ll provide a

quick walk through of how to get the landing page configured without anything but one application and a little bit of

HTML.

Install the “Static FBML” Application

The first step to configuring a landing page is to install the Static FBML application to your public profile application. After

you visit the Static FBML application about page you can install the application by clicking “Add to Page”. You will then

be prompted to select the public profile that you’d like to install to and click on the button which says “Add Static FBML”.

Edit Your Landing Page

After you installed the “Static FBML” application to your public profile, you should be

redirected back to your page. If you weren’t just go back to your Facebook Page. Click

on “Edit Page” on the left hand side. There will be a number of applications installed by

default but you want to edit the box which says “FBML - FBML”. Next you’ll be

presented a page from which you can edit the title and content within your custom tab.

Currently, Facebook page tab titles are limited to 14 characters including spaces.

Anything beyond that will result in your title being appended to 11 characters followed by “...” Using HTML, modify the

FBML box. To include Facebook relevant information, you can use any of the tags included on the FBML wiki page. If

you are extremely proficient with HTML, you may note that some tags are not allowed. For those tags that don’t work

properly, you’ll need to substitute them with FBML tags as defined on the FBML Wiki page.

Add The New Landing Page As A Tab

Once you’ve properly configured the new tab, you’ll want to add it as a default tab. If

you haven’t added any tabs yet, it will immediately show up as one of your default

tabs. If it doesn’t, simply click on the double arrows and select your custom tab as

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pictured in the photo to the right. When you select the

new tab it will replace the tab which is currently furthest

to the right. The other thing you’ll want to configure is

for your new landing page to show up as the default tab

when a new visitor first comes to your public profile.

To do this click on the “Wall” tab and select “Settings”.

Then next to the area where it says “Default Landing Tab

for Everyone Else:” select the tab that you’d like to show

up by default when a new visitor comes to your public

profile.

That’s it! Now your custom landing tab has been

configured.

Step 4: Add Additional ApplicationsOther applications make it possible to expand the functionality of your Facebook Page. The more features you can add

that engage the user, the better. While you don’t want to add 20 applications, it often makes sense to add a few

applications that will engage your visitors. The photos, discussions, and reviews tabs are added by default. Make sure

that any tab that you have is actually being used. For example, there’s no point in having a discussions tab if you aren’t

encouraging visitors to participate in ongoing conversations.

While Facebook doesn’t currently list the applications available for Facebook pages, there are a number of third parties

that provide sets of applications. Involver is one company that provides a number of applications that let you import and

RSS feed, publish your Twitter status, easily create polls, share files, and more. If you want to learn more, head on over

to the Involver application gallery. Also check out the promotions application provided by Wildfire Interactive.

Step 5: Start Inviting FriendsOnce you’ve finished adding your applications and customizing your public profile, all you need to do is invite people to

get started. One thing that I highly recommend is targeting nodes of individuals. If there is a tightly connected network

of individuals among your friends, invite each of them on the same day. This way you increase the likelihood of your

newly created Facebook Page becoming a recommended page.

Daily TaskI think it’s pretty obvious what your daily task is at this point! Get your Facebook Page up and running using the steps

outlined above.

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Day 4: Developing A Creative Photo For Your Page

Why Your Photo Is So ImportantMost people just quickly upload their photo to their Facebook page and never think about it again. This is probably one

of the worst mistakes you can make. Facebook doesn’t provide many customization options for the main public profile

page meaning that your photo is what sets your public profile apart from others. Back in February, Rob Banagale wrote

a guest post on our blog about various ways of customizing your Facebook profile photo. Since then, thousands of

people have customized their profile photo in creative ways and a few of those individuals have posted screenshots of

their photo.

While the individuals were modifying their personal profile photo, the same rules go for public profile photos. Below I’ve

included a couple creative profile photo screenshots and outline the steps necessary to customizing your public profile in

creative ways.

Public Profile Photo RestrictionsBefore designing your custom photo you should understand what restrictions there are. The first thing to understand is

the size of the photo you can have. Facebook by default resizes all photos down to a maximum width of 200 pixels and

a maximum height of 600 pixels. There are plenty of creative uses of this space. Some of the best examples take

advantage of the maximum space available. Four interesting designs I’ve see are included below:

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The Awkward Photo Background

Facebook is known for having an awkward background for photos. There is a line and a darker background at the top

portion of every public profile photo. The top color is the hex color #edeff4. The line is #d8dfea. The most challenging

part of the background is that depending on how long your status update is, the height of the line can be adjusted. The

line is exactly 52 pixels above the top. You’ll need to avoid posting longer updates though if you want your photo

background to stay lined up properly.

If done properly, there are infinite possibilities for extremely creative public profile photos that take advantage of the photo

background line. Below I’ve included a few creative examples that use the awkwardly place line effectively:

One prerequisite of making the necessary changes is that you have a basic understanding of a photo manipulation

software package like Adobe Photoshop. Most people have at least a basic photo editing software on their computer.

It’s well worth the effort of customizing your public profile photo because it can drive users to become a fan.

Daily TaskSpend some time developing a creative Facebook profile photo for your newly launched Facebook Page. You will benefit

greatly from investing a little extra time in developing a creative image.

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Day 5: Target Network Nodes

OverviewSo far we’ve discussed a few of the basics behind promoting your

Facebook page. Now we are going to go over a few tips and tricks that

are going to help you reach the 3,000 fan target that we set at the

beginning of this guide. Keep in mind that for some companies, 3,000

fans is excessive while for others 3,000 may not be a lot. You need to

effectively assess your goals and figure out a good number that makes

sense for you during the 30 day program.

Target Nodes and InfluencersIn the “Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwell discusses how key influencers can be the drivers behind viral consumer

epidemics. The point is that the most connected individuals that are also connected to other highly-connected nodes

end up having a ton of influence. We all know super-connecters and if you are looking to build your public profile’s fan

base, you should be targeting them. Randomly pursuing these individuals is not the best way to go about it though. A

well planned and well executed targeting process will yield the maximum results.

How To Perform Influencer OutreachThere are a number of reasons you shouldn’t just start randomly messaging influencers. The first is because it’s just bad

form. Aside from that, if you randomly message people, you will miss out on a ton of opportunity. The largest

opportunity is the phenomenon of overlapping networks. If two influentials share friends, the odds of your public profile

becoming a recommended Facebook Page or ending up in a user’s highlights area on their homepage will be

substantially increased.

So now that you know why I don’t like randomly reaching out to influencers, let’s explore the best way to go about

reaching out to influencers. Here are the steps that I suggest going through:

1. Influencer Research - Prior to reaching out to individuals, you should figure out who the most influential people are in a

given network. There are a number of ways to go about doing this but the easiest is just to find individuals with the

most friends in a network. The easiest influencers to find are among your friends since you’ll probably know which

friends are influencers. Outside of your network it’s useful to browse through individuals on Facebook based on

individual Facebook networks (organizations and geographic networks). You can quickly browse through networks

and jot down the names of those individuals that have the most friends.

2. Initial Outreach - Reach out to network influencers and introduce yourself. Spark up a conversation and explain to

them what you are working on. Do not copy and paste messages. If you send the same message to tens or

hundreds of individuals, Facebook will mark your account for spam. You need to actually build relationships with

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these individuals. It’s fine to make small changes to the first messages that you send out but following those initial

messages, you want to spend time fostering a positive relationship with the influencers.

3. Launch Day - After you have built up your list of network influencers set a date for getting those influencers to become

fans. On that day, reach out to each of your influencers and tell them to fan your Facebook Page. Depending on how

many influencers you have, you may want to consider a phased launch approach. Whichever model you pick, make

sure that you do some research and some basic planning.

Keep in mind that some of these are guerilla marketing strategies, not traditional marketing strategies. Would Facebook

encourage you to take each of the steps listed above? Probably not but the bottom line is that it works. If you abuse the

system, Facebook will surely ban you. Theoretically collecting data about network influencers could be a violation of

Facebook’s terms of service but it’s readily available information. Any research you do on Facebook is at your own

discretion so make sure not to abuse their system!

Daily TaskCome up with a list of at least 20 influencers that you can reach out to. Begin an initial conversation with each and aim

to have them all become fans of your Facebook Page on the same day.

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Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A Successful Facebook Contest

While you will receive an initial surge in fans from inviting your friends and

targeting network nodes, the growth will eventually flatten. You’ll need a

way to drive more fans. One of the best ways to attract new fans is by

creating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of the

time this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number of

friends you can invite to a public profile. That bring about the first tip

related to a contest.

Tip 1: Incentivize Invites To Facebook PagesFacebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can invite

to a public profile which makes invitations one of the most important

components of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users to

invite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the single

best tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fans

to invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite their

friends? Right now there isn’t actually a way of tracking how many friends

a user has invited but you can however develop applications which track

the relative “friend density” of any given user within a public profile.

As users become fans and install an application, you can check to see which of their friends are also fans of the public

profile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes a

bit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.

Tip 2: Create Friend LeaderboardsOne of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in the

previous tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboard

among all users, displaying a leaderboard among a user’s friends helps those users set more realistic competitive goals.

If thousands of individuals are competing, the odds are significantly reduced but if the leaderboard is only visible for

friends, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll get a user to engage.

Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart PeriodicallyIf you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you could

theoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which

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weekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shorter

time frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by a

surge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but most

companies should extend things over a month or longer.

Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the ContestSo after a bit of brainstorming you’ve come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get it

programmed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contest

concepts and I’ve had a few which I’ve realized can be gamed. It’s a basic concept but it’s extremely important. I can’t

tell you how many conversations I’ve seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times such

questions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.

Tip 5: Provide Cash PrizesWant to get somebody’s attention? Offer them cash prizes or something worth some serious pocket change.

Interestingly enough though, this doesn’t always work but it most definitely will incentivize a lot of people. Will it serve as

a valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that’s up for you to determine when developing the

contest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizes

since you could very well break the bank (then again if you’re targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairly

sizable marketing budget as well).

Daily TaskCome up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to see

which they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!

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Day 7: How To Leverage SEO For Your Facebook Page

Intro to Search Engine OptimizationFor those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet

marketing, you probably are not aware of what search

engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine

optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any

given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and

mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey

around the web. While many users will go directly to their

favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day

by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t

previously found.

What’s great about Facebook’s public profiles is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of search engine juice.

Google alone claims to have indexed over 430 million pages within the site.

1. Get A Good URLURLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as

possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. As of Saturday June 13, 2009, Facebook

offers something called “vanity URLs” for those Facebook Pages that have over 1,000 fans. A vanity URL is the short

Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page. For example our blog, AllFacebook, has the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting

Google “juice”.

2. Configure Your Default TabOn day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure that

the first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” link

on your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focused

heavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take action

then to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’t

want to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.

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3. Generate Links To Your PageIf you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incoming

links. One quick way to boost your Facebook page rankings is by linking to your page from your existing website.

Additionally, any way you can get links from other sites will help increase your rankings. On their own, Facebook Pages

tend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number of

incoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If you

are active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This will

most definitely help you gain some traction in Google.

4. Link To Other Relevant PagesI’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you created

a site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help out

the readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages you

are linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a good

chance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.

5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company WebsiteOne of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While some

companies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page is

extremely valuable. Take advantage of landing pages and the information tab to link back to your company’s website.

6. Select A Good Name For Your Facebook PageThe name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spending

a lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pages

however there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one of

those things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after your

company or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.

Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO JuiceSome resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While it

may drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed content

using javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-through

page. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.

ConclusionThese were just six tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Page

strategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a link

on Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than your

brand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.

Daily TaskMake at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Also

determine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generate

some SEO juice for your Facebook page.

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Day 8: How To Become A Master Of Conversations

The Art of Social MediaWant to have highly engaging conversations on your Facebook

profile? You better get good at mastering the art of the social

media conversation. How is a conversation within social media

any different than a normal conversation? It isn’t! If you are

going to build a following on Facebook let alone any other site

on the internet, you are going to need to put in the time

necessary to build relationships with others. Whether it’s

posting follow-up comments or reaching out to people that

have asked valuable questions or have even posted criticism,

it’s important that you build an ongoing dialogue with your fans.

The Personification Of The BrandWant to really thrive in the world of social media? Imagine your brand as a person who has a life similar to its customers.

Prior to the internet, brands were organizations which spoke directly at their customers. While there was a number on

the back of a cereal box asking for your feedback, there really wasn’t a two-way conversation for the most part. Thanks

to the internet and new social technologies, you have the opportunity to engage your existing and potential customers

directly. So what types of conversations are most effective at building an engaged fan base?

Ask QuestionsAny good conversation involves questions and answers. Facebook Pages present an amazing opportunity to learn

about your existing customers and potential ones. Not until recently was it possible to directly interact with your

customers on an ongoing basis, especially if you were representing a large brand. People love to talk about themselves

so ask them questions that are also related to your company. I happen to write about Facebook so I tend to ask users

about their experience with the site and what their favorite and least favorite aspects are. Additionally you can simply ask

general questions such as “what are you doing over this summer weekend?”

Respond To Questions And CommentsAs you build your fan base, fans will begin to regularly post comments as well as questions. Take the time to engage

with them. Any time you take to interact with the fans is always time well spent. Many of the questions and comments

will be extremely easy to respond to, only requiring a few seconds of your time. If you end up with an extremely popular

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brand however, selecting which questions to respond to will become important. That’s a great problem to have though!

Make sure you take the time to reply to your customers and you can just about guarantee continued growth.

Be Supportive Of Your Biggest FansAre there fans that continuously post on your Facebook Page? Take the time to recognize them and continue to foster a

relationship with them. Your biggest fans can become extremely valuable. These fans will take the time to promote your

business for you. They’ll reply to other fan comments and do a lot of your work for you. Building relationships with these

individuals is extremely important. One way to help build these types of relationships is to promote those that have

helped you build your business. Give a quick shout out to the person as a comment and they’ll typically be extremely

grateful. Support your biggest fans and they’ll help support you, helping you taking your business to the next level.

Daily TaskPost a conversational update to your Facebook Page. This should become a daily habit and not a one-time event

however. Make sure that you remember to stop by your Facebook Page at least once a day (if not more) to post an

update.

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Day 9: Create A Note Which Spreads Like Wildfire

Intro to Facebook NotesRemember the viral Facebook note about “25 things

about me”? If you don’t then you probably haven’t been

on Facebook for long. The 25 things about me note

spread through Facebook and touched millions of users

before it eventually died out. The main ideas behind the

note was similar to a chain letter. You write 25 things

people don’t know about you and then tag your friends

and ask them to write the note as well. The end result

was that million of users ended up writing 25 things

about themselves and it ended up getting covered by

people in the press because so many people had

participated.

How To Create A Viral NoteI wish that I could give you a step by step guide that will result in millions of people sharing your note but I don’t have the

secret answer unfortunately. What I do know however, is that you can tag people from notes that are posted to your

page and thanks to that feature you can begin to have notes spread throughout the social graph. So how do you come

up with a note that’s going to be seen by everybody and will be attributed to you?

While I hate to tell people that they should create a note which is similar to a chain letter, Facebook’s note system works

extremely well through standard chain letter models. The most important component of a note is that users need to be

able to share something personal about themselves. Facebook is a site for sharing and any game or activity that

encourages personalized participation is much more likely to succeed.

Create More Effective TitlesWant to really get someone’s attention? An effective title can make all the difference. I’ve previously written articles using

advertising headlines that I modified from a book I have about headlines (you can get the book here) and the results have

been phenomenal. While the content is extremely important, you will gain or lose the vast majority of readers via the

headline. Make sure your note’s title stands out and you’ll be well on your way to developing a viral note. If you want

other tips on effective copywriting, I highly recommend checking out Copyblogger.

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Create Multiple Notes To Tag Smaller Groups Of PeopleWhile you could create a note and tag all of your contacts, it would be more effective to spread your note postings over a

period of time. This way more people will see the note and you can also spread out the number of people that you tag in

any given note. Tagging people is essentially the way that notes are spread and it can also be leveraged just like the

classic game of tag: “Tag you’re it!”

Adding The Branding ComponentSo you are trying out your hand at developing a note that will spread throughout the social graph but there’s no branding

component of the note! That’s definitely an issue. By doing things for the betterment of your network (out of the good of

your own heart) you can still generate a lot of recognition and influence. However I know that many people want instant

traffic to their Facebook page so I’ve come up with a few ideas. I suggest trying a few things but keep in mind that the

more you brand a note, the less likely it is to spread. Here are two of the primary ways to brand a note:

1. Put your brand name in the title - This method is pretty aggressive. I personally believe that this is a sure fire way to

have your note fail at growing beyond the people you first tag but if you are an aggressive marketer you can feel free

to test it out. Just remember that I warned you!

2. Go chain letter style - I hate to suggest that companies create chain letters but there are some important things to

learn from chain letters. Chain letters are called chain letters for a reason. One of the primary reasons is that they

actually work! So to get more recognition have people do a traditional pyramid list (we are not sending money here,

just playing a game). Have people write down the name of the last 5 people that were in chain at the end of the note.

There are plenty of other ways to consider branding your note including encouraging users to link back to the source of

the note. Whatever method you come up with, branding is something that needs to be delicately balanced with

contributing to the community. Always keep in mind that sparking the conversation is more important than the branding

being received.

Daily TaskBrainstorm three ideas for notes that you think people will be willing to spread to their friends. Ultimately this task takes

some extra effort but if you want to generate buzz you should take advantage of all of the promotional channels available

to you on Facebook and the notes application is one of them.

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Day 10: Introduction To Facebook Ads

You Need To Prime The PumpsWhile I wish Facebook Pages would start with one person and just grow to

thousands of users, it’s simply not that easy. Building a fan base requires a

fair amount of work and a small amount of cash. The cash is being used

to purchase Facebook advertisements that will drive you new fans. If you

want to approximate how much it costs for each new fan, you can

essentially estimate the cost at $0.50 per fan when using Facebook

advertisements. While you can rely on your natural branding ability, most

companies aren’t as popular as Oprah and need to invest in expanding

their reach.

There are a number of other reasons for investing in Facebook advertisements to promote your page:

1. The more fans you have, the faster you grow - If you are going to get 3000 fans in 30 days, you should be willing to

invest at least a couple hundred bucks. For $200 you could have 400 fans to jump start your viral growth. As I wrote

on Day 5, it’s important to target influential nodes. If you combine advertising while targeting those nodes you can

increase the effectiveness of your advertisements. The more times you can get your brand in front of people, the

more likely they’ll turn into customers, or in this case: Facebook fans.

2. Promoting your page generates brand recognition if not clicks - While many people are just looking to build clicks on

their ads to convert those users into fans or eventual customers, I’d argue that the process between displaying the ad

and getting the click is just as important. As I mentioned moments ago, “The more times you can get your brand in

front of people, the more likely they’ll turn into customers.” I once read that it takes something like 27 times of a

person seeing your brand before they actually make a purchase. Thankfully the barrier is much lower to creating a fan

because the user doesn’t need to part with their money, which is traditionally the biggest hurdle for any sales person.

So back to the point ... generating impressions within a user’s peripheral is extremely important to converting them

into a fan. While they may not know who you and haven’t heard of your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll say to

themselves, “I think I’ve seen that before” and become a fan.

3. You can track conversions of advertisements and start generating revenue - Tracking conversions is one of the most

important components of Facebook advertising. For the purpose of this guide we are discussing advertising as it can

be used for building your fan base. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t currently provide effective conversion metrics for

Facebook Pages but I typically just use the following equation to determine my cost per fan:

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number of fans added per day / daily spend on Facebook advertising = cost per fan

Unfortunately this model is not perfect since you will organically gain followers without investing in Facebook

advertising but this is the best way to calculate the cost per fan for the time being. We will be discussing more

effective ways of tracking new customers in the future which includes the integration of landing pages. I’m also

expecting Facebook to begin providing more advanced metrics for tracking the effectiveness of your advertisements.

4. Highly effective targeting system - The best part of Facebook’s advertising system is the ability to target individuals

based on a large number of variables including age, gender, location, interests, relationships status, and more. This

presents a massive opportunity for marketers but unfortunately few marketers have figured out the model to master

Facebook’s advertising system. I will be discussing the various ways of improving ads through techniques like “nano-

targeting” in a later section but what’s important to know is that Facebook presents marketers with a huge opportunity

to reach their target market. Facebook advertising is at the top of what I call the “Facebook sales funnel” and the next

level down is your Facebook Page. I’ll get into more details about that soon.

Daily TaskTake some time exploring Facebook’s advertising offering. Over the next two days we will go into more detail about how

to leverage Facebook advertising more effectively.

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Day 11: Why Understanding Your Target Market Is Key To Success With Facebook Ads

Getting Started With Facebook AdsSo now that I’ve made the sales pitch to you for using

Facebook advertising, let’s take a look at what it takes to get

a campaign set up. The most important thing to do first is to

define your target market. What’s the demographic

information of your target market? What’s the average day

for your target market like? Your job as an advertiser is to

connect with the customer on an emotional level as quick as

possible. The only way you’ll be able to do that is to connect

with them.

Who Is Your Customer?For this section we are going to pretend that we are marketing a high-end, environmentally friendly limousine service. In

the book “Duct Tape Marketing”, author John Jantsch defines marketing as “getting people, who have a specific need or

problem, to know, like, and trust you.” While your Facebook Page will be used to help you build the relationship, you

need to connect with them quickly, and that first connection will be done via your Facebook advertisement. I tend to

think that if you can get a user on Facebook to smile thanks to one of your advertisements, you’ll have connected with

them and they’ll become a fan. In this example we are targeting more of a luxury service, as most people are not looking

for limousine services. Here are some of the initial details about our typical clientele:

• 70% male, 30% female

• Executive level position

• Typically between the ages of 32 and 50

• Many are interested in outdoor activities (we’ve learned this through conversations to and from the airport with our

customers)

• Tend to live in the more populated metropolitan areas (Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York,

etc)

While many companies will have more detailed descriptions of their customer and can walk through a “day in the life of”

scenario, I am simply using these demographics as a basis for setting up a sample campaign. Spending a fair amount of

time on determining your target market is extremely important.

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Questions To Answer When Defining A Target MarketBefore we move on to the third day of exploring Facebook advertisements you should answer as many of the following

questions as possible:

1. What are the demographics of your customers?

2. What is your customers fears, desires, and goals?

3. What does a typical day in the life of your customer look like?

4. What is the customer not currently getting?

5. What makes your customer feel comfortable? (This is what I was discussing earlier about making the person smile).

6. What brand affiliations do your customers have?

Daily TaskDefine your target market by answering some of the questions we’ve presented. Also do some research on the web

about defining a target market. Hopefully you’ve already defined your target market since this probably isn’t your first

marketing activity for your company. If you already have a clearly defined target market, pat yourself on the back and

take the day off: you deserve it!

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Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3

Creating the AdSo you’ve listened to my sales pitch about Facebook advertising and you’ve taken the time to define your company’s

target market. Hopefully this wasn’t the first time that you’ve defined your target market, otherwise you are in serious

trouble ;) So the first thing you want to do is head over to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create. If you haven’t already

created your page then you most definitely want to have it set up by now since we will be integrating our page with our

ad. For the purpose of this article, I’ll go ahead and set up an advertisement for the AllFacebook.com page.

Create Two Ad Creatives For Each Demographic GroupBefore walking through the ad creation process, I wanted to note that it’s important to split up your ad creative among

each targeted segment. This is useful for split-testing your advertisements, something that I’ll discuss in the near future.

While this isn’t necessary to get started, testing the performance of advertisements is extremely important to increase

long-term results. For this guide we were focused on 30 days but obviously your marketing activities should not end

after 30 days.

Setup Your First AdvertisementI’m going to quickly run through the set up process of an advertisement. I will be going into more details during our

Facebook Advertising series in addition to providing video tutorials within the New Media School Facebook Business

Insiders course.

Step 1: Design Your AdvertisementThe first step of creating an ad is determining the design which includes a 110 pixel x 80 pixel image, and ad title, and

the body text. Since we are promoting something on Facebook, we’ll want to select the Page that we are promoting as

pictured below. Remember that you can only promote pages that have been published. To publish your page, go to

“Edit Settings” from the left-hand column of your Facebook page and then click on the red “Publish this Page” link on the

right hand side of the settings page.

Select Option To Promote Something On Facebook

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Directly under the area that says “Design Your Ad” click on the link which says “I want to advertise something I have on

Facebook”. You will then be able to select anything that you have on Facebook including your Facebook Page.

Select The Page You Want To Promote

As pictured below, select the Facebook page that you’d like promote. Facebook will then automatically generate an

advertisement using your Facebook page’s image. While you can change the image, it’s fine to make at least one using

the default image then split test it against another ad (as I’ll explain later).

Step 2: Select Your Targeting OptionsOften times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two

ad versions against each other. On Facebook, this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad

that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a

lot of money for the most part. Facebook provides the following 11 targeting factors for advertisers:

1. Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. All

advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location

you’d like to select.

2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to

select their age.

3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what typeso f ads

should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishing the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for

higher conversion rates.

4. Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.

5. Keywords - Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including activities, favortie books, tv shows, movies,

and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective

keywords. What types of product do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend

time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.

6. Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the

schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great

way to promote it.

7. Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market

works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter

can be priceless.

8. Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or

club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to

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keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their

profile.

9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to

skip this field for most of my ads.

10. Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to

them.

11.Connections - The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and

exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the

administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is

a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In

order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the

advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.

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Step 3: Enter Your Pricing SettingsNow that you’ve figured out the targeting for your advertisement you need to select the pricing. You can choose

between CPM and CPC advertising but there’s pretty much no point of going the CPM route. You want to pay for users

to take an action and in this case it’s either them clicking on the ad that directs them to your Facebook page or

becoming a fan directly from the ad.

Selecting A Campaign

It’s a good idea to group all of your ads for a single Facebook Page into a single campaign. This is because you can

adjust your budget for that specific campaign at any point. If you adjust the dollar spend of a campaign for your

Facebook Page you can track the change in the growth of fans based on that adjustment, giving you a rough estimate of

the cost per fan.

Selecting A Price To Bid

Facebook will suggest bidding prices that will maximize the number of impressions you receive. The more you bid

typically, the more you receive. While there is a lot of information about how Google ranks their advertisements there is

currently no information about Facebook and rankings such as advertisement quality score. My guess is that there will

be more information about ads on Facebook as time goes along but for now, pick a bid rate that sounds reasonable to

you and then track the number of impressions and clicks that you receive. For now, Facebook doesn’t provide concrete

information on how to improve positioning and impression rates.

Split Test With A Second AdvertisementAs I mentioned early on, it’s important to split test two advertisements against each other to see which receive more

clicks. Once you’ve determined which ad has a higher click through rate, only run that individual advertisement.

Otherwise you risk having multiple ads displayed to the same users and the result is that you’ll end up paying for users

more than once.

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Daily TaskAt this point you should have a thorough idea about how to manage your Facebook page advertising campaign. As I

wrote yesterday, it’s important that you have a good definition of your target market. By now you should know that target

and should be able to set up a couple initial ads. For today’s task, create two advertisements on Facebook that promote

your Facebook Page. Feel free to test it out with only a couple dollars a day. You can then adjust your budget as

needed.

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Day 13: How To Use Facebook Applications To Boost Your Fan Base

Determining The Best Platform

StrategyThe Facebook platform presents an amazing opportunity for

companies to expand their presence quickly by enabling viral

distribution through the social graph. One of the most

important things to keep in mind is that viral distribution does

not necessarily mean more customers. Many businesses

become easily distracted with mind-boggling numbers. “If I get

millions of users to my application, I only need one percent to

purchase my product!” Unfortunately things aren’t that simple,

especially considering that most Facebook users are not ready

to purchase at any given moment.

Engaging Your Customers Versus

Engaging “Users”Yes, you can end up with millions of untargeted users within

Facebook applications but that won’t necessarily get you any

customers, unless of course you are a large corporation. An

untargeted application is almost as effective as a television ad except that you are gambling with the potential

demographics. For example all of your users may end up coming from Turkey and Italy, so how is that going to help your

U.S. based company? Anyways, you probably understand my point by now: untargeted applications are typically less

effective than single, highly-targeted applications.

Why Create A Targeted App?There is one thing that you want from visitors to your page: repeat engagement. If you can get fans to consistently return

and participate in conversations on your Facebook Page, you will increase the level of personal affiliation with your brand.

In the long-term, these users will eventually turn into customers. On Facebook the majority of users are not ready to buy

a product right then. Instead, they are looking to build relationships and at some point in the future they are looking to

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buy something. By creating a targeted application you will accomplish two things: increase engagement and increase

the viral nature of your page (if the application is built correctly).

What Are The Risks?There are a few risks involved with creating an application. While I’ve written this as one day out of 30, the reality is that

building an application requires the investment of relatively significant resources in comparison to the other days outlined

in this guide. If you are a developer then you have the advantage of being able to build the application yourself although

you will have to invest your own time. If you aren’t a developer, you are going to need to invest time to manage the

project and money on the developer.

The bottom line is that there is no guarantee your application will pay off. Thankfully a few companies have already built

applications that you can integrate right away into your Facebook Page right away with a very small investment. Involver

has developed a suite of application that you can take advantage of and Wildfire Interactive has also developed some

great tools that will help you launch promotions from within your page. If you want the best bang for your buck, I’d highly

suggest working with one of these companies rather than building your application from scratch.

What’s Are The Options For Branded Apps?So let’s say you are considering developing a Facebook application because you have a great idea. How much does it

cost? A simple application can be as cheap as a few thousand dollars although the vast majority of branded applications

cost tens of thousands of dollars. The price ranges and there isn’t a flat rate that you can tell people. You need to

determine what your goals are first. Below are the various types of applications you can build:

AppvertisementsBuddyMedia, the New York based social media agency, essentially defined the concept of appvertisements. The model

is pretty straight forward. Your company pays for an application and the invests in an install campaign. You will then

have thousands of users visit your application but unfortunately there’s no guarantee users will stick around or return

later. Most applications that use this model that I’ve seen tend to have a quick fall off of usage. BuddyMedia would

most likely argue that repeat engagement isn’t necessarily the most important component as it’s a better investment over

traditional media buys like television and newspapers where there is no engagement whatsoever.

Integrated ApplicationsDon’t want to spend money on a large install buy? You can have a custom application developed for your business

instead. For this group there are two types of applications: those that are an experiment and those that are tightly

integrated into the company’s website. For example one large e-commerce company I spoke to recently was looking to

let users extend their existing shops to their Facebook profile and Facebook Page. That means there isn’t much

promotion necessary as the application is an added value offering to the company’s existing customer base.

Experimental Viral ApplicationsI like to call this one more of an educated guess. Rather than investing in large install buys (upwards of half a million

users at around $0.50 per user), brands often prefer to spend $5,000 to $50,000 on experimental applications that grow

on their own. The best example of this is ConextOptional’s Kidnap application which has attracted over 3 million users

and has upwards of 130,000 daily active users. The application was a great application that users enjoyed interacting

with.

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Integrated Page ApplicationsThe last type of application is those that are integrated with Facebook Pages and are used to drive awareness of your

Facebook page. That can include gifting applications, polls, and other basic applications that are extremely simple and

used to drive traffic to your page. I high recommend opting for this type if you want to minimize your investment. There

are numerous companies which currently offer applications that are integrated into Facebook pages. Use those

companies to save time and save money.

Application StrategiesThere are numerous types of applications out there but there are some great strategies you can use that will increase the

likelihood of your success. I outlined 13 Facebook application strategies earlier this year that I recommend you checking

out. I’ll also be providing more content in the near future on how to maximize the impact of your Facebook applications.

Daily TaskFirst of all you may want to consider whether or not developing an application is worth your investment. At the least you

can use some readily available applications to build into your Facebook Page. Today’s task is to determine which type of

application, if any, is the type you’d like to implement. Also brainstorm a couple of ideas for applications that you can

launch. Set a date over the next couple weeks when you will have your application completed or at least under

development.

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Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A Successful Facebook Event

The Networked WorldSuccess in a socially networked world comes through building

relationships with others. As I wrote on day 8, leading conversations on

your page is extremely important. The same thing goes for the offline

world. One of the best things you can do for building your company’s

reputation is to host offline events. For hosting the event there are a few

things to keep in mind but the most important is that you already have a

large enough reach that you’ll be able to get attendees to come to your

event. Given that you at a minimum have a few hundred fans after your

initial efforts, you should have a great start to building buzz about your

new event. Today I’m going to walk you through the important steps

necessary to hosting a successful event.

Step 1: Pick An Event Topic & FormatTo get your event off the ground you’ll first need to know the theme of

your event and what the format is. Are you looking to host a conference

or just a networking happy hour? My suggestion is that you start small

before you jump into launching a full blown conference. Hosting a happy

hour is relatively easy and has many less requirements. While many

individuals will look for sponsors to cover the cost of an event, you can actually get away with hosting a happy hour for

next to nothing. If you don’t have $1,000 to cover a full open-bar, you may want to just limit the tab to a couple hundred

dollars and tell the attendees that the first drink is on you. This is a networking event, not a bash, so attendees shouldn’t

have any issue with you only covering one drink.

Step 2: Pick A Venue & Negotiate A DealPicking a venue can be the most challenging step if you haven’t had any experience with picking a venue. People will try

to charge you on a per person basis or other random rates. One of the best things about venues is that they’re totally

negotiable and at the end of the day, you have the upper hand because you can just go somewhere else if the venue

manager/owner doesn’t provide you with a good deal. I tend to use Yelp when finding event venues to go to but I’ve

also invested a large amount of time building out a network so that now I can just post a status update and get venue

suggestions from others.

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It’s always best to ask your friends and professional contacts for recommendations before going it alone. Venues are

much more open to people who have been referred to them through others and will typically be more flexible with rates.

If all else fails, just pick a place that you like and run a tab to a specific limit.

Step 3: Create An Event On FacebookNow that you’ve got your venue it’s time to set up a page for promoting the event. The quickest way to get started is to

set up an event on Facebook. You can do this by going to the events application and clicking on the button that says

“Create Event” (or follow this link). Setting up an event is relatively straight forward. Facebook will walk you through the

process which entails entering an event name, selecting the event visibility (which I recommend setting to “Global” if you

want to maximize the turnout), and enter the other event details.

While you can create an event directly from your Facebook Page, there is one downside of creating events directly from

pages: event updates are sent to the user’s “updates” tab within their inbox, rather than their regular Facebook inbox.

This can significantly reduce the response to the event (most people don’t read their updates). The one benefit of

posting the event from your Facebook Page is that there will be a link to the event displayed on the left-hand side of your

page. I personally don’t believe that this benefit outweighs the advantages of creating the event outside of your

Facebook Page.

Once you have gone through the first step of creating your event, you will be prompted to upload an image and then

select which features you’d like to have included in your event (videos, photo album, forum, attendee list, etc). At the

bare minimum I would recommend that you include a photo. The other features depend on whether or not you plan on

uploading photos from the event and videos. I’ll leave that option up to you.

Step 4: Notify Your Fans and Run An Event AdNow that you’ve set up your event, it’s time to start promoting it. The first step to promoting the new Facebook event is

to send out an update that lets people know about the event. You can also target your update to users based on their

geographic location which can be extremely useful if you want to limit the event to locals. I personally like sending out

event updates to all fans since some people occasionally come into town for events. Whatever you choose to do when

sending your update, you also need update your Page status a few times so that a message about the event goes out to

your fans’ news feeds. As I’ve written before, you’ll receive a greater response from status updates then from page

updates.

Create An Event Ad

Targeted ads on Facebook present a huge opportunity for event promoters. You can target people by company, job

position, interests, and more as I wrote about on days 10 through 12. I honestly believe that event promoters are the

single greatest beneficiaries of Facebook’s advertising system. When hosting conferences I use Facebook to promote

the events directly through their advertising system, which increases the list of potential attendees and my promotional

reach. I cannot emphasize how powerful Facebook advertisements can be for events. When you go to create your

advertisement, select the option which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You can then select

your event from drop down which is displayed under the sub-heading “Facebook Content”.

Targeted Updates

In addition to creating ads, it’s also possible to send targeted updates (as pictured in the image below). If your event

happens to be a local event, there’s no point in updating all of your fans if you have a country-wide or international brand.

Create a targeted update by clicking on “Send An Update To Fans” on the left-hand side of the Facebook Page you’d

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like to promote the event to. On the next page check the box which says “Target this update” and select the region,

gender, and age of people that you’d like to update.

Step 5: Send Out Event RemindersNow that you have invited people to your event and people are registering to attend, it’s a good idea to send out regular

event updates. Make sure you don’t overdo it though because too many updates will turn people off and result in less

attendees. Once or twice a week (depending on how soon your event is), send an update to let them know about the

current number of RSVPs, and updates about the venue, and any information about new sponsors. These event

updates will get people to RSVP “Yes” that have not yet RSVPed or have replied “Maybe”. It’s also a great people to

remind those individuals that have RSVPed from one of your event ads about your event and instruct them to take any

other necessary actions (such as purchase a ticket if the event costs something).

Daily TaskNow that you’ve learned how to set up a successful event, it’s time to start brainstorming! Today your task is to

brainstorm and event idea and come up with 5 potential venues. Once you’ve determined the what and the where, you

are halfway there! And if you are hesitant about creating a new event, just remember the Wayne’s World quote: “If you

build it, they will come.”

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Chapter 15: How To Use A Landing Page To Convert New Facebook Visitors Into Fans

The Concept Of A Landing PageIf you haven’t studied internet marketing then there’s a

good chance you don’t know what a landing page is. If

you already know what one is, congratulations, you are

well ahead of most people. According to Wikipedia, a

landing page, “is the page that appears when a potential

customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine

result link.” Honestly, the Wikipedia definition isn’t the

best one since there are new types of advertisements.

The main point is that a landing page is where you

capture a customer’s information or entice them to take

another action (such as purchase a product). On Facebook, the action that you want the user to take is to become a

fan.

Facebook previously had two places to become a fan but they have since reduced it to a single link at the top of a Page.

When a person lands on your page you want to answer the following questions:

1. Who are you or what is your company?

2. Why should the user be interested in you or your company?

3. What will they get out of becoming a fan of your page?

4. Who’s in your community?

The fourth question is the most important thing and you can answer this question one of two ways: tell the user the type

of people that you’d like as fans or let them just browse through your existing fans. The main point is that new users will

be attracted to your Page based on your ability to attract others. If you only have a few fans, your landing page becomes

even more important.

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How To Create A New TabThe easiest way to create a new tab within your Facebook Page is by using the Static FBML application. One downside

of the Static FBML application is that you will need to understand a basic level of HTML. If you have no idea how to write

HTML then you can use an application like Dreamweaver of Microsoft Frontpage to design your landing page and then

copy the HTML that’s provided by the software.

5 Tips For Improving Your Landing TabWhile you can create a fairly effective landing tab by answering the questions I posted above, here are a few other tips

that you should keep in mind:

1. Have a call to action - While you’ve educated your visitors about why they should joining your Facebook Page, you

also need to encourage them to actually join your page. That’s what the call to action is for. If you view the

AllFacebook page, you’ll notice that I’ve designed an image which says “Click on the ‘Become a fan’ button above”

with an arrow pointing up toward the “Become a fan” button.

2. Write in the second person - Rather than writing about yourself and your company, talk about the person who you

want to become a fan. Explain to them why they should join and the benefit (as outlined above in the four questions).

Use the words “you” and “your” when writing your copy.

3. Place important parts at beginning and end - People tend to read the beginning and end of landing pages before

reading the middle so you probably want to put your call to action early on and toward the end. Put the most

important copy at the beginning or at the end.

4. Don’t link to other pages - If you want to get visitors to take an action (join your page), it’s a good idea to providing

links that will drive them to other pages or other areas. Once they’ve navigated away from the tab or to another site,

there’s a greater chance that you’ve lost them.

5. Perform some basic testing - While Facebook doesn’t currently provide metrics for where new fans came from, you

can assume that all new fans have viewed your landing tab. Try making subtle adjustments to your landing tab and

measure the difference in the number of new fans you receive each day. Ultimately I wouldn’t get overly invested in

the testing process but it’s always a good idea to do at least a minimal level of testing.

Other ResourcesThere are numerous resources for learning about landing page optimization. While I don’t recommend becoming overly

invested in learning about this topic (unless of course you want to study internet marketing), you should definitely check

out Copyblogger’s landing page resources as well as checking out a few books on Amazon about landing page

optimization. One really good book that I’ve used is “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing And

Tuning For Conversions” by Tim Ash.

Daily TaskToday’s task is to come up with the first version of copy that you are going to use for your Facebook landing tab. Over

the next few days you can test out the HTML and more. If you already know HTML you should be able to come up with

a top notch landing page in a few hours. While you can invest in beautiful design, you really don’t need to have it look

that amazing.

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Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000 Facebook Fans

Photo Tagging Is ViralOne of the best features of Facebook Pages is the

ability to tag fans in photos. As soon as you tag

somebody, their friends can see the photo that

they’ve been tagged in. Additionally, those photos

will link back to your Facebook Page. I’ve seen a

number of people abuse photo tagging in order to

get more traffic. While that’s a strategy that could

possibly work in the short-run, over longer periods

of time you’ll end up turning people away. It’s

probably better to avoid most black-hat tactics as

they can result in your Facebook account being

banned and will frequently piss people off. Feel

free to test the limits but just remember that we

warned you!

Photos Are For EventsThe best reason for using photos is for events. After you’ve hosted the event (as I recommend in this guide), you should

tag people with all the photos from the event to spread awareness of your Facebook Page. I often hire a photographer

just for this purpose. At my conferences I’ll even bring in two photographers just so I can tag all the people that were at

the event in their photographs. One of the best things that will happen is people that were photographed will use the

photos for their profile. The bottom line is take advantage of all events, including events that you attend to upload photos

of people and tag them.

You Can Only Tag FriendsOne of the worst aspects of photo tagging within Facebook Page photo albums is the inability to tag people that aren’t

your friends. I honestly have no idea why the album functions this way and assume Facebook will eventually resolve this.

My recommendation is to friend as many of the people at the event as possible. That way you’ll increase the likelihood

that other people who visit the album will tag other people.

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Create A Tagging GameHave you ever been tagged in one of those Facebook photos with 15 other people and the tag location is a unique

attribute about you? If not, I’ve included an example below. The basic concept is to tag other users in a fun image

which ends up attributing a personal characteristic to each user that was tagged. It’s a really create way to build buzz

and not annoy others. Don’t go over board with this model though. I’ve had numerous users tag me in irrelevant photos

and I instantly untag myself from them. Check out the image below for an example of a smart tagging strategy from Real

Drinks.

Daily TaskSince you’ll need at least a small archive of photos to take advantage of this task, you might want to consider spending

more time planning your event. If you do have an archive of photos from previous events you can spend some time

uploading photos and tagging your friends that are in the photos. You can also brainstorm some ideas for creative

tagging images like the one pictured above.

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Day 17: Post Relevant Videos

Videos Help Us To ConnectIf you want to connect with your fan base you need to use as many

forms of media as possible. While written communication and photos

are extremely effective tools for communicating, video happens to be

one of the most popular forms of communication on the internet. It’s

not surprising that video sites happen to rank as the most trafficked

sites around the web. While there are many ways to integrate video

into your Facebook Page, we’ve come up with three simple ways to

use video on your Facebook Page.

Take Advantage Of YouTubeI love wasting time browsing through video sites online. Whether it’s

YouTube, Vimeo, or College Humor, I end up wasting so much time

browsing through videos. Typically I would say that it’s a bad use of

time but if you happen to find videos that would be relevant to your

brand, it’s not a complete waste. When you find an interesting video

you can just post a link to that video and the majority of the time, the

video will be visible in all of your fans’ news feeds.

It’s an opportunity to quickly start a conversation with little effort on your end. As I’ve already written, the most important

aspect to attracting fans is the ability to spark interesting dialogue. Relevant videos are an excellent way to do just that.

Event VideosJust like yesterday’s tip, “Post Photos From Events and Tag Fans”, you should also do the exact same thing with videos.

While videos that you didn’t produce are an easy thing to link to, uploading your own videos are also extremely valuable,

especially if you have fans that you can tag in the video. I highly recommend taking short video clips such as interviews

as an easy way to generate taggable content for your Facebook Page.

If you don’t have a video camera, I highly recommend the Flip Mino HD. I’ve been using mine for a few months now and

it has come in handy.

Creative Video TagsAs mentioned in yesterday’s task, you may want to consider developing short videos that you can then tag users in with

references in each video to the people you’re tagging. While the people may not be in the video, you can insert

references to them or personality traits of them that you think would be relevant. One issue with video tagging on

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Facebook is that you can’t actually tag a specific moment in a video as of now. While this may eventually become a

feature, most videos should actually have or references the individuals being tagged.

Daily TaskI like buying things, so if you don’t have a video camera, go research Flip Mino cameras or consider grabbing the latest

iPhone 3GS. If you’d prefer not to spend money and would like to save up to purchase a device which supports video,

spend some time looking for relevant videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Don’t post all of the videos at once though! Keep

a list of all the videos you find and post them over time.

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Day 18: Cross-Promote Your Website

Take Advantage Of Existing TrafficHave you already invested time and money in building your web presence? Take advantage of it and use your website to

cross-promote your Facebook Page. Many people are concerned that directing visitors from their website to their

Facebook Page isn’t useful because those users end up not returning to the site. Ultimately the user’s navigational

pattern should be based on the goals for your site.

Driving users to your Facebook Page is extremely useful for creating an ongoing dialogue. As I previously wrote in “The 5

Phases of the Facebook Sales Funnel”, Facebook pages provide an optimal platform for building relationships with your

existing and future customers. This is why driving users from your website to your Facebook Page is important. While

Facebook Pages may one day be able to exist on your own site, for the time being the product provides marketers with

an instant community platform.

If you don’t want the user to leave your site but you’d like them to become a fan right away you can use the Facebook

fan box as we’ll discuss in more detail later in this program. Depending on the size of your website and your

organization’s goals you can determine which is the best way to promote your Facebook Page. Linking directly to your

Facebook page is a great way to generate new fans and to continue the engagement.

Send Them Back To Your SiteNow that you’ve directed a user from your website to your Facebook Page, it’s time to do the exact opposite! Once a

user becomes a fan of your Facebook Page, they will receive status updates in the news feed as we’ve already

described. Some of the links you provide should direct the user back to your website. I say that assuming that you have

regularly updated content on your website as well. If you don’t, your Facebook Page may be good enough for engaging

users.

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If you don’t have regularly updated content on your website, what’s the point of having a website though? If you aren’t

updating it regularly with content, you may want to consider setting up a blog so that you have something to keep users

coming back. As any effective marketer knows, it takes a customer numerous times of seeing your brand before they

decide to make a purchase with you.

A Perfect BalanceEach company will have its own goals and those goals should dictate what types of promotional activities you do. At the

least, you should consider driving users directly from your website to Facebook Pages in order to engage them on an

ongoing basis. This guide isn’t meant to explore the intricacies of user’s navigational patterns within your site but I would

strongly recommend making the process of turning new visitors into fans an integral part of your site.

Daily TaskPlace a conveniently located link to your Facebook Page from your website. Take some time determining where to place

the link. Also consider testing out the location against other locations and measure the impact of each.

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Day 19: Research Other Successful Pages

Copy From The BestOne of the best ways of ensuring that your

Facebook Page will be successful is to copy

other successful ones. It’s no secret that the

best marketers are most influenced by other

successful marketers. While there are a lot of

research methods I would suggest taking a look

at our Facebook Pages leaderboard, and

selecting the most popular as well as the fastest

growing. We’ll also soon begin to provide more

advanced ways for sorting through Facebook

Pages.

Aside from copying the best, this guide should be

sufficient to put you into the top percentage of Facebook Pages with a little bit of effort and time.

What To Take Note OfAside from the finding Facebook Pages that have a lot of fans, it’s also important to know the context under which they

attracted a lot of fans. For example, Starbucks may have an impressive number of Facebook fans but it didn’t require a

lot of effort to build a Facebook fan base for a multi-national corporation. Yes, Starbucks may have put in some extra

effort (including large advertising campaigns) to ensure their page was as effective as it could possibly be but it’s more

important to seek out those companies that may not be as popular but have built a large fan base.

I personally look for pages that have between 5,000 and 50,000 fans and have a decent growth rate. If a Facebook

Page is growing extremely fast (e.g. 50 percent growth a week), it probably isn’t run by a small company. Over the

coming weeks I’ll be releasing statistics that help you more effectively find those pages that are doing well but browsing

through our Pages directory will be a great start.

Page Features

Once you’ve discovered legitimate Facebook Pages that are growing at a decent pace, you’ll want to explore what they

are doing that have made them so successful. Take a look at their company’s website to see if they are linking to their

Facebook Page and how prevalent the link is. Also take note of the types of applications that the Page administrator has

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installed. How often is the page updated with statuses and links? All of the things that we covered in this guide are

things you should take note of from other Facebook Pages.

Daily TaskToday’s task is to come up with a list of 10 to 20 Facebook Pages that you can find inspiration in. Browse through our

Facebook Page directory and also just search through Facebook to find interesting conversations being generated by

Pages. What types of users are becoming fans? How often to the page administrators engage their fan base?

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Day 20: Get People To Invite Their Friends

Creative IncentivesThis actually has to be one of the more challenging tasks. In

order to get a boost in your fan base, it’s important to get users

to invite their friends. So what methods are there for getting

users to invite their friends? The first and most obvious method

is to ask users to invite their friends. This can surprisingly have

a large impact. The other day I asked my users to invite their

friends and a few people invited hundreds of their friends. The

problem with this is that it doesn’t maximize the impact you

could theoretically have by providing some sort of incentive.

By incentivizing the user to invite their friends to your Page, you

increase the likelihood that one of their friends will actually be

interested in your company or brand. On applications

Facebook has strict rules surrounding incentivizing invites

because many applications has used this feature to force users

to spam their friends. While the restrictions don’t exist on Facebook, the best invite responses will come from those that

aren’t forced.

Applications Are ImportantWhile applications take more resources to get completed, you can use Facebook’s API to develop contests as well as

run basic statistics about your user base. There are numerous ways to take advantage of applications to get users to

invite their friends but here are three that we suggest:

1. Create A Gifting ApplicationMany Facebook Pages now have gifting applications that have become integrated with them. The reason is that every

time a user sends a gift to their friend, you can drive them back to your Facebook Page. Free gifts happen to be the

most obvious thing to send to friends which would explain why a number of Pages have already begun implementing this

feature. Thankfully there are a few applications like Wildfire’s promotions app that lets you quickly create a gifting

application.

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2. Have A Referral LeaderboardThis one will require a little bit of programming but in thinking about incentivized invites, I thought of one of the most

obvious ways of getting people to invite others: create a contest out of it. Using the Facebook API, you can’t track the

actual invites that are sent but you can track the relationships among fans. This means you can rank people within your

community based on the number of friends that they have as fans. It’s kind of a gimmicky model but should be worth

the effort.

3. Create A ContestThe third model would be to create a contest application. I’ll outline more about contests and competitions in the next

section but the point is that contests are a great way to attract repeat engagement. Check out the Promotions

application created by WildfireApp for examples of existing contests.

Daily TaskBrainstorm two or three ways to get users to invite their friends. What can you offer to your existing fans that will make

them want to tell their friends?

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Day 21: Create Mini-Competit ions

Playing Games With Your Fan

BaseRather than investing in a complete contest

application, try creating mini-competitions. For

example, ask your fans to go on a Facebook

scavenger hunt. I’m sure there are many other

ideas for mini-competitions but the point is to get

your fans active around your brand. It’s also

possible to generate traffic to external sites if you

have more robust competitions. Ultimately I’d think

back to when you were a kid to the types of games

you used to play with your friends.

The games were always simple but were able to

entertain for hours. Peoples’ interest in games

never goes away and that’s why mini-competitions

are a great way to fuel your fan base.

Five Games That Will Get Fans’ AttentionLike I mentioned, mini-competitions are not applications but ways to engage your fan base in mini games. Using some

of the strategies that we already outlined in the first 20 days, you should be able to come up with plenty of games and

determine the best incentives. Below are five games that we think would be interesting.

1. Profile Photo ContestThis is probably one of the easiest ones to handle. As I mentioned on day 4, having a great profile photo is extremely

important. The same goes for your Facebook fans! It’s easy to get more friends on Facebook when you have a creative

Facebook profile photo. Show your fans the Facebook profile photo guide for photo examples and then get them to

change their profile photo. Give an award to the user who has the most creative photo. If you want to take this a step

further, you can require that they integrate your brand into their photo.

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2. Facebook Scavenger HuntThis is probably one of the easiest competitions to set up. Post 10 or 20 clues about random items scattered around

Facebook. Get people to come back and post with links to the content that they find for each item. The quickest to

complete the scavenger hunt wins. Keep in mind that this can get extremely challenging to handle once you have a large

number of fans. The more fans you have, the less clues you want to provide. Otherwise you’ll have more comments on

your wall then you’ll be able to handle.

3. Facebook Photo Theme GameWe’ve already written about taking advantage of the Facebook photos application from your Page but the best ideas I’ve

seen related to photos come in the form of a game. The lying down game for example, is a Facebook group which

encourages members to post photos of themselves lying down in various places. So far over 8,000 photos have been

posted from 36,500 members. While I’m sure that number will grow dramatically by the time this article is posted, it

illustrates the types of possibilities available and how viral photo contests can be.

4. Top Score In Other GamesI have spent too much time finding addictive games on Facebook to write about. The end result is that I’ve wasted many

hours in front of my computer, not being productive. However, other people are always looking for good ways to waste

there time which presents a great opportunity. Browse through some of the most addictive games on Facebook and

once you’ve found one, challenge your fans to beat your high score and post them. It’s a simple action but can generate

a large response. Plus, you’ve also given all of your friends something extremely addictive

5. Facebook Acronym BreaksJoe Cockrell, a popular Twitter user, came up with a pretty smart game which is coming up with the various things a

random acronym could stand for. I would try doing something similar except on your Facbeook Page. Give users an

acronym such as PBS and ask them what it could stand for. It’s a great way to get users responding to your messages

on Facebook. I’m sure there are many other similar word games that would be particularly useful on Facebook.

Don’t Blow The Bank With GiveawaysBefore you start giving away products, you may want to consider what goals you have. I’d suggest starting with smaller

items and grow from there depending on the response. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen giveaways fail

miserably. Giveaways need to be combined with other effective marketing activities to obtain the maximum response.

Daily TaskTry a mini-competition on your Facebook Page and see how large of a response you can generate. Experiment with

other mini-competitions over time to see which ones your fans are most responsive to.

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Day 22: Work The Forums

World Wide ForumsForums are one of the best places on the internet to

generate awareness about a product and to drive

traffic. There are forums for just about anything and

relevant forums around the web provide a great

opportunity to participate in the conversation and

drive awareness to your Facebook Page. In addition

to forums around the web, you also have forums on

your Facebook Page, which are installed by default.

Today we’ll be going over a few external forum

strategies as well how to take advantage of your

Facebook Page forums.

External Forum StrategiesIn general, forums are a great place for targeted

conversations. You can search for forums on any

given topic (hopefully one related to your brand) from

Google and then join those forums to communicate with

others. It’s valuable for building relationships as well as promoting your brand. Here are three strategies that we think

are extremely important when using forums to build your brand:

1. Use A Consistent SignatureWhen you register for any forum, you can typically modify your profile. From that profile, I suggest that you go modify our

signature to include you name, general information about yourself and include a link to your Facebook Page. When

search engines crawl those pages it will generate search engine juice for you as well as drive new users from the forum

to your Facebook Page.

2. Make Valuable ContributionsForums are filled with people that are talking crap and making useless contributions. Don’t be one of those people!

Contribute to the conversations and even step out on a limb to create your own forum threads once in a while. Active

forum users tend to take note of those users that are also active . The more active you become, the more likely that you’ll

drive traffic back to the sites in your forum signature.

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3. Avoid Aggressive Self PromotionWhile posting a link in your forum signature will help drive traffic, the last thing that you want to do is spam the forums.

Don’t post threads that are about your Facebook Page or website. Instead be conversational and eventually there will be

opportunities to insert your company into the conversation. It’s not about you, it’s about the community.

Internal Forum StrategiesIn addition to the external forum strategies that you can use to drive new fans to your Facebook Page, you also want to

continuously engage users on your Page. As such, the forums application can be extremely useful for accomplishing

that. Below are three strategies that I recommend for engaging users within your forums:

1. Regularly Monitor The ForumsOften times users will go to your forums if you’ve left it as a tab. Whether or not there is content there, many users will

go ahead and post their own threads and then check back later for replies. It’s important to make sure that you are

engaging the community within your page on all fronts and that includes within the forums. Check back regularly to see

if any content has been posted and be sure to reply to any new posts.

2. Post New Thread Topics To Your PageIf you are looking to create a new dialogue and drive more users to the forums, post links to new discussion threads to

your Facebook Page feed. I receive a number of new threads from users on a regular basis but often times those

threads aren’t relevant to all of my fans. For those threads that are relevant, it makes sense to post them to the feed and

encourage fans to go contribute to the forum thread.

3. Promote The Forum On Your WebsiteWhile you can promote your Facebook page forum you can also take advantage of the forum for things like support. I

have a couple of pages on AllFacebook which encourage users to go post threads to the AllFacebook page forum in

order to get a response. Most often I find that other fans will answer a fan’s question without needing to answer it

myself. Other times I can engage users directly and answer whatever questions they may have.

Facebook Pages serve as an excellent community platform for any brand and whether it’s posting updates to your fans

or providing them with a forum to post questions and have general discussions, you should leverage all aspects of them.

Daily TaskFor today’s task you should take the time to get your forum going. Post a couple of discussion threads and link back to

them through a feed update. This way you can get some initial conversation going in your forums. As your fan base

grows you’ll notice activity in your forum will increase.

Why Use The Forum?Some of you may be wondering why I’m suggesting to use the Facebook Page forums when status updates and wall

posts duplicate much of the functionality of forums. The first reason is that at the time of writing this guide, Facebook did

not allow page admins to remove their discussion forums. That means you have two choices: have an empty forum or

have an active forum. Forums most definitely serve a different purpose and also provide page admins with another

communication channel. While some could live without forums, I recommend taking advantage of them since they are a

permanent fixture on your page for the time being.

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Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The Impact Of Guest Blog Posts

The Power Of Helping OthersOne of the best rules of success is to help others as much as

possible and eventually they will pull you up with them as they

become more successful. In terms of building your Facebook

Page one of the best strategies for growing your fan base is by

helping others. In addition to providing great content and

engaging users, there are great ways to help people elsewhere

on the web. I have benefited greatly from growing a

successful blog and know the power it can have. One of the

quickest ways to gain some traction is to help out other

bloggers with well written guest posts.

Just about any blogger will let you submit a guest post and

include a link back to your site no matter what it is. If you use

your Facebook Page for your bio link you are just about

guaranteed to get a few extra fans.

5 Steps To Writing A Successful Guest PostNow that you’re convinced writing a blog post will be worth the time, I’ve written up a few strategies that will be most

effective at maximizing the effect of your post and increasingly the likelihood that you can land a post on a big blog.

Ultimately you want to drive as much traffic as possible and that means reaching for the stars for a top blog. So how do

you get a post on a top blog? There are a few things you can do but below are five strategies that will get your post up

there quickest:

1. Write Something The Readers WantYou may think that this tip is pretty obvious but for most people it isn’t. It’s extremely easy to write an article that’s just

not relevant to a site. I can’t tell you how often I get articles sent to me that have nothing to do with what I write about or

is flat out irrelevant to the readers. If you’re going to take the time you write a guest post, you want to make sure that the

article is going to resonate with the blogger’s audience.

The benefit of spending a little more time researching the most successful articles on different sites and brainstorming

more ideas is that you’ll get a better response. Even I spend a couple hours brainstorming ideas for new posts once in a

while and it’s well worth the effort to do so.

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2. Try Pitching Your Idea FirstRather than writing an entire article and asking for it to be posted, you might want to start with a couple ideas that you

forward to the editor of the blog. Yes, a full article is always great if it’s a top notch article but if you’ve put a lot of work

into it ahead of time, you may be disappointed when the editor tells you that they’d like it to be modified. Some writers

understand right away what makes a good article while others need a little bit of guidance. There’s nothing wrong with

coming to the table with a full article but you can save yourself a lot of work by pitching the idea rather than the full

article.

3. Write A Thorough ArticleOnce you’ve found a blog to write a post for and have determined the topic you will be writing about it’s time to get to

work on the article. There are a number of things that are most important to a successful article: a title, a teaser entry,

sub headings, and images. Obviously that’s not all there is to a good article but there are a number of trends among the

most popular blog articles. One of the most important aspects is keyword optimization.

If you can rank high for a specific keyword, the owner of the site will be forever grateful. They’ll also most likely invite you

back to write again. Yes, writing your own blog can be effective but it takes time to get over the hump with building a

blog and oftentimes it’s much better to write a few guest blog posts rather than spend the time building an entire blog

(although I actually recommend doing that as well).

List article happen to be some of the most popular articles as well and no editor will turn down a well targeted list.

4. Repost the Article Around The WebThe worst thing a guest writer can do is send you an article and then do nothing to help promote it. You worked so hard

to get this far why are you going to let the article just sit there? Update your Facebook status with a link to the article and

post the article elsewhere on the web. Whether you are tweeting the article, saving it on Delicious, posting it to

StumbleUpon, or adding it to Digg, you should make sure your article gets the maximum impact possible. The more

traffic your article gets, the more people that will click through to your Facebook Page or any other site that you’ve linked

in the post.

If you get your article linked to by other blogs you can often drive upwards of thousands of users per hour and that can

turn into some serious traffic to anything that you linked to within the article. With that in mind, it’s never a bad idea to

send your article to other blogs that would find the article to be relevant.

5. Work The CommentsNow that your article is live and you’ve shared it around the web, hopefully you also have users commenting on your

post. Make sure to engage all the commenters and reply to all of their comments. There’s typically a direct correlation

between the number of comments and the volume of traffic to a post. That means anytime someone posts a comment,

you should reply. Also it’s a good idea to try to keep the dialogue going rather than just post a simple answer, this way

you’ll boost the number of comments.

Daily TaskFor today’s task you should brainstorm a few solid article ideas and then send out the ideas to at least three bloggers.

You’re now on your way to getting a guest blog post published!

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Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That Wil l Turn Facebook Fans Into Customers

The Facebook Sales FunnelI previously wrote about a concept that I call the

Facebook sales funnel. In the article I discuss how

Facebook is a relationship marketing platform. The most

important phase of the Facebook sales funnel is the

action phase. When you create your Facebook Page

you should probably have some sort of goal in mind

aside from attracting 3,000 fans. While large brands are

not as focused on turning Facebook fans into direct sales, smaller businesses should be focused on generating leads

and occasionally selling products or services directly.

The first priority is obviously on building a community but you eventually need to drive users to take some sort of action

right? Below are four ways of getting your fans to take action:

1. Facebook Page Lead FormCreate a form that lets users put in their name and email address for posting other content. There are a number of ways

to develop a lead form, some of which are easier than others. The easiest method is to embed simple HTML into a tab

on your Facebook Page using the Static FBML application. You can then use an application like Wufoo to collect

information using an embeddable form. You could also use email marketing services such as Constant Contact,

AWeber, or Campaign Monitor and then use their pre-made forms from a custom tab.

The second method of creating a custom form is much more complicated and requires creating a basic Facebook

application from scratch which installs a custom form on the sidebar of your Facebook Page. You’ll need to have a

hosting provider that supports PHP (or other compatible language with readily available Facebook API library) and you’ll

need to set up a one page application.

2. Publish One-Time Offer PromotionsStandard promotions are always a great way to get your fans to take action. Offering discounts or alternative offers such

as “buy one, get one free” should effectively entice fans to make a purchase. However you need to be careful with using

aggressive direct sales as it will most definitely turn off a portion of your fan base who will end up unsubscribing from

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your updates. Some marketers that I know have actually developed separate Facebook Pages specifically dedicated to

promotional updates. All users that become fans of those pages are expecting to receive promotions and in turn are

less likely to unsubscribe as a result of promotional stories that show up in their news feed.

3. “Read More”The call to actions don’t need to be strictly one step conversions although those are always the best. Another great way

to convert fans into sales is to drive them to your website where you have engaging copy that will be more likely to

convert them. There are a number of guides on how to develop effective landing pages but one of the classic guides is

“The Irresistible Offer” by Mark Joyner. I continuously reference this book because it’s one that all of the best copywriters

have read and used as a guide for themselves. I suggest researching effective copywriting techniques in order to convert

fans that click on your links into customers.

4. Play This GameAs I mentioned already, Facebook is a relationship marketing platform. That means you can’t always just drive fans to

make purchases. Instead you should be engaging them. On Day 21 I discussed mini-competitions as a model for

engaging your Facebook fans. Through that engagement you will ultimately build a stronger relationship and brand

affiliation with your fans. While the purchase may not be instant, the more a fan engages with your Facebook Page, the

more likely they are to purchase something from you eventually.

Daily TaskPrior to making a call to action you should have a plan about what you want to sell and what your goals are. Develop a

plan about what you are looking to sell and once you’ve developed a plan begin testing these four calls to action. While

none of these tactics are going to necessarily attract more fans, they will most definitely help you effectively market to

existing fans. By now you most likely have a decent number of fans and it’s better to begin testing calls to action sooner

rather than later.

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Day 25: Integrate the Page Into Your Existing Blog

Building Out Your External Page

PresenceThere are a number of ways to build up your fan base as

we’ve already discussed in the past twenty-four days but

one of the best ways to get new fans is to let users

instantly join your Facebook Page is to integrate it directly

into your blog or website. We already discussed cross-

promoting your website and your Facebook Page but

with the Facebook Fan Box widget, you can instantly get

visitors to your site to become fans without them ever

leaving the page.

Having new visitors become fans is a great way to get

ongoing reach and engagement. While RSS feeds to

your blog or email newsletters are a great way to continue

promoting your business through content, getting new Facebook fans is also an excellent way to obtain ongoing reach.

So how do you get your fan box set up? All you need to do is visit your Facebook Page and click on the link on the left

which says “Add Fan Box to your site”.

After you’ve clicked on the link you can customize your fan box to include or exclude your content stream and fan list. At

a minimum you must include your page logo and the “Become a Fan” button. If you know basic CSS you can also

customize your Facebook fan box to use the design of your site.

How To Create Content That Drives People To ActionWhile a large portion of attracting new fans is dependent on the positioning of the Facebook page link on your site, there

are many other ways to drive people to your Facebook Page. The best way to get people to take action is to create

insightful content that has a great call to action. Below I’ve created a list of five different tactics to developing content

that will drive people to action. With these five steps you are practically guaranteed to get more readers and to drive

more fans. As I keep emphasizing throughout this guide, attracting fans is not just about promoting on Facebook, it’s

about building your overall brand and leveraging that brand to drive new users to your Facebook Page.

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1. Master The Art Of Creative HeadlinesLater in this program I’m going to discuss headlines in more depth but let me emphasize how important this is. You can

write short form content all day long on your Facebook page or long form content on your blog and in both cases the

headline will be the single most important thing that will drive responses. Investing time in the headline is extremely

important.

2. Develop Succinct Content That’s Easy To ReadIt’s easy to go on and on .... and on and on .... and on ... about something when most of the time it can be quick and to

the point. On the internet, most people do not tend to stick around for a long period of time. That’s why you need to

give them all the information they are looking for in an easily digestible format. One example of easy to read content is

lists. Throughout this guide I’ve used lists as a way to break up content and make it easy to understand.

I’ve found that lists can often generate two times the traffic of an average article. Lists also break up content in quick to

digest segments. If you aren’t using a list, at least use sub-headings within your content to make it easier to read. If a

person wants to skip ahead to the next section they can do so with the help of sub-headings.

3. Test Out Various Call To ActionsWant to figure out ways to drive new users to your Facebook page from text in your article? There are limitless ways to

do it and each way will covert a different percentage of readers. So which links end up getting the most clicks? That’s

for you to measure but to get an idea of how many varieties there can be for a simple link, check out this article entitled

“Designing ‘Read More’ and ‘Continue Reading’ Links”. The main lesson learned is to spend time tracking links that

users are clicking on.

If you use Google Analytics to track visitors, check out this article on how to track outbound links.

4. Know Your AudienceWhen you write an article it’s important to know that it will strike a chord with with your reader base. In order for an

article to resonate you need to target the article content at them. If you write an article titled “10 Things Every Marketer

Should Know About Selling Shoes” but your reader base is mostly manufacturing engineers, you probably aren’t going to

get a lot of traffic to your article even though it contains valuable content. If you don’t know who your readers are, try

running a survey to ask them!

5. Create Variety To Keep People InterestedWhile you can create countless lists that keep your target market informed, it’s a good idea to switch the flow of your

writing. As you write content you’ll find that it’s easy to get into a routine and just churn out similar content from day to

day. This will eventually reduce the growth of your site. Provide a variety content and try switching it up on a regular

basis. Once a week throw in an article that’s completely off topic or plays devil’s advocate to common wisdom among

industry peers.

Daily TaskGet your Facebook Fan Box widget set up on your site and start experimenting with new types of articles. This is a

learning process and testing out new writing models is the best way to learn!

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Day 26: How To Use Competi-t ive Analysis To Boost Your Fan Base

Do What Other Successful People DoIf you are the average small business owner, there

is a good chance that the majority of your

competition isn’t doing much in the social media

space. However there always is at least one

person who stands out from the rest and I’m sure

you can think of at least one company which

accels where others aren’t even trying. For larger

brands, having a social media presence (including

Facebook) hasn’t been optional for at least a few

years now. If you plan on succeeding at building a

large presence on Facebook, you will most

definitely want to invest time researching how

others are succeeding.

The Keys To SuccessIf you want to analyze the competition, you’ll need to determine what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

To acquire this information you’ll need to do some research but first you need to define what you consider to be

successful. If generating more sales is your definition of success, no amount of research you do on Facebook will

provide you with answers unfortunately but I can just about guarantee you that any business which has built a sizable fan

base is sitting on an opportunity to generate a lot more income. Despite not being able to track the direct impact of new

fans to your competitor’s Facebook Pages, you can track a number of other variables:

• Demographics of fans base - This takes some time to compile depending on the number of fans but is extremely

valuable information. If you don’t have the time to do this, grab an assistant off oDesk to do the research for you.

Ultimately what you can determine is whether or not the Facebook page administrator for each page has done an

effective job at aggregating their target market. If you have thousands of fans but none of them fall within your target

market, you aren’t doing a good job.

• Frequency of updates - Are your competitors actively engaging their fans? What methods are they using to engage

them? Over the past 25 days we’ve discussed a number of effective models for engaging fans. Which of those

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methods are your competitors using? Has increased engagement resulted in an increased number of fans? Take

notes about each of their updates and the type of content they are posting. Is there any way you can improve upon

what they’ve already begun testing?

• Level of comments and likes - It’s great if your competitors are updating their fans on a regular basis but how many

comments and likes are they receiving? Take a look at those updates which are receiving the most feedback and post

similar updates!

• Completeness of profile - Did your competitor fill out all of their profile information to make themselves more accessible

in Facebook’s search tool? Are there empty boxes that aren’t being used and are just sitting around? If so, improving

upon what your competition has done won’t be that hard. However if they’ve completed their profile and have a lot of

information, see what added value your competitor has been able to provide their fans with. Is there a custom tab

which includes additional information? Is there a unique offering in the content of the custom tab? If there are any

subtle adjustments that you see in your competitor’s profile, try using them out in yours to see what effect that has.

Post Research ActivitiesNow that you’ve taken a look at your competition and have essentially ranked them on how effective they’ve been, start

figuring out ways you can improve upon what they’re already doing. While I’ve provided a large number of ways to

increase your new fan acquisition rate, there are plenty of methods that I’ve missed in this guide. Come up with a full list

of some of the new tactics that you’ve found and start testing them out.

Daily TaskCreate a list of all your competitors' Facebook Pages and analyze them using the four factors outlined in this article.

Now that you’ve determined some of the tactics that are used by the best Facebook page administrators (as described

on Day 19) as well as those tactics already outlined in this guy, you will be able to see what opportunities your

competition is seizing as well as missing out on.

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Day 27: Monitor Your Page Insights To Improve Content

Introduction To InsightsFacebook provides all page

administrators with a tool for tracking

the growth of the page as well as the

number of interactions on your page.

There are a few numbers which you

can look at to determine how to

improve you page most effectively.

Ultimately by performing the steps

outlined over the 30 days to 3,000

fans program, you should have

figured out the most effective

methods of improving your page.

Understanding Post QualityFacebook provides one metric which they suggest page administrators use to determine the quality of their posts called

“Post Quality”. I tell most people to take this metric with a grain of salt. The system encourages that you increase the

volume of posts that you make to a reasonable level (2 -3 times a day) and to improve the quality of the posts as

measured by the number of comments and likes on each post.

As I’ve written a number of times, it’s possible to increase the number of comments and likes by asking questions as well

as posting more relevant posts. I’ve also found that jokes tend to get a larger response. Facebook then determines post

quality in a number of ways but the most obvious is the number of interactions as a percentage of the size of your fan

base. If 50 percent of your fan base is interacting regularly, you’ll end up with a high post quality score.

While there are a number of other metrics that you can keep track of to increase your post quality, I honestly don’t think

this is the most effective measure of the success of your page. It may be possible to attract a large number of fans who

are simply not active. Well known brands and personalities tend to get a larger number of replies per post. The best

model to improving your post quality is to test out various types of posts and see which attract the most responses.

Whenever you find a post which attracts a large response, you may want to make it a habit to post similar updates.

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5 Important Insight Metrics

Total Fans And Unsubscribed Fans

One of the most useful charts is the number of fans you have and the number of unsubscribed fans. Depending on the

type of page you have and the level activity on your page, you will tend to see different growth charts. One of the most

important levels to monitor is the percentage of fans who’ve unsubscribed. If this percentage is increasing over time, you

may want to check out the type of content you’re posting as well as the volume of posts. While posting often is

important, you can chase fans away by posting too often.

Interactions

As the number of fans on your Facebook page increases, the number of users interacting with your page should increase

as well. Whether it’s comments, wall posts, or likes, you can view the number of interactions on your Facebook Page by

viewing the “interactions” graph. This graph tends to be pretty useful for seeing how well you are engaging users on your

Facebook page and also happens to be the default graph when you view your page insights.

Interactions Per Post

This happens to be one of my favorite charts. If you’re fan base is growing you should also slowly improve the quality of

your posts as you see how fans respond. It can be a misleading chart though as interactions per post should increase

proportionally to the number of fans you have. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t show any percentage charts but basic

division will give you that information. If your interactions per post aren’t increasing over time then you aren’t doing a

good job of producing valuable content. Tomorrow I’ll be discussing content strategy more in depth if this is an area

where you are having problems.

Page Views

If you’re a webmaster there is no doubt that you have spent countless hours working with Google Analytics. The page

view has become one of the standard measures of success on the internet. This chart is pretty straight forward as it

depicts the total number of pageviews to your Facebook Page. Whether it’s new fans or existing fans, all page views are

grouped into this metric. As you grow your page, the total number of daily page views should be increasing as well.

Demographics

One of the best features of Facebook page insights is the ability to track the demographics of your fan base. While

Facebook has the breakdown of your fans’ demographics as percentages you can also view the absolute number of

users within your Facebook page by their gender and age. By viewing the demographics chart you will be able to see

which demographic groups are growing quickest as well as which demographic groups are the largest.

Daily TaskSpend some time navigating your Facebook Page metrics. To get there, click on “See All” from within the “Insights” box

on the left-hand side of your Facebook Page.

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Day 28: Check The Magazine Rack For Content Strategy

How To Create Compelling ContentCopywriting is one of the most important skills for developing

a successful presence on the web. Compelling content helps

drive traffic and can get users coming back to your Facebook

Page on a regular basis. Of all the copywriting skills you

should master, headline writing is the most important. There

are numerous resources on the web for developing effective

headlines but the best resources are also the most frequently

used and eventually the impact is reduced. That’s why it’s

important to always search for effective headlines.

The easiest place to find effective headlines is on a magazine

rack. There are numerous things that make people buy

magazines but outside of provocative images, headlines are

there to grab a user’s attention. With numerous magazines on

a rack, headlines are an important differentiator. That’s why

you should go browse a magazine rack and find which

headlines stand out to you. I always reference Cosmopolitan

magazine as a great headline resource.

Most often Cosmopolitan magazine makes sexual references

but they occasionally use non-sexual headlines as well. All

their headlines grab a user’s attention and learning from one

of the top selling magazines is always a great way to improve

your copywriting. Before listing out 10 powerful headlines that will drive instant traffic to your site, let me note that these

headlines are most effective to drive users from your Faceook Page to external websites. While you can use them within

custom tabs on your Facebook Page, the main goal is to drive users to a destination and then to have them provide

feedback.

If you continuously provide compelling content, users will always return for more.

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5 Headlines That Will Get People To Click Everytime

How To Write Headlines That Make You Rich and Famous

How to articles are always extremely popular especially when you offer the reader a tangible benefit from reading.

Headlines get people in the door and one of the best ways to get readers to your site is to teach them something.

Whatever you are teaching the reader, make sure that the headline appeals to your reader base. Teaching marketers

how to hang a painting is great but even better is to help them improve their existing skill base.

You can substitute the words in this headline to be “How To [Random Task] That [Great Benefit]”.

7 Things Every Marketer Should Know About Copywriting

List articles are also extremely effective at getting readers in the door. The reason is that they expect to instantly get a

significant benefit just from reading. There are numerous versions of this headline but you can easily duplicate the impact

of using this headline by filling in the blanks “X Things Every [Target Market] Should Know About [Specific Topic]”.

The Secret Of Building Successful Facebook Pages

Being an expert at whatever you do, you have a lot of information to share with your reader. If someone was to ask you:

“What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned from working as a [fill in the blank]?” What would you tell them?

Take that information and put it in a post and you’re practically guaranteed to drive a lot of users to your site. It piques

the user’s interest and then informs them. You can follow up the article by asking them to take an action, such as

becoming a fan of your Facebook page.

Create A Beautiful Facebook Page In 10 Minutes

This one is pretty straight-forward. Offer your readers an extremely valuable proposition. Whether it’s something you are

giving away for free, or a benefit from purchasing something, this is called an “Irresistible Offer”. In his famous book “The

Irresistible Offer: How To Sell Your Product in 3 Seconds or Less”, Mark Joyner spells out how to turn copywriting into

sales. The most important thing to closing the sale is to ..... (drumroll please) ... create a valuable offer! If you take the

time to provide something valuable, your readers will thank you for it.

The Best Facebook Page Software I’ve Ever Used

Want to get your fan base to try out something that you thought was an extremely valuable service or product? Turn a

headline into a powerful testimonial. Be honest, be succinct, and speak positively and you’ll instantly get your fans to

click on a link.

Daily TaskStart brainstorming potential headlines that will most effectively grab the attention of your target market. Proceed to

develop content around each of those headlines. If you develop writer’s block and need other headline ideas, check out

the book “Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich” by David Garfinkel. If you really can’t come up with any other

headlines, search for “swipe file” in Google and you’ll find tons of resources for smart headlines that will get people to

flock to your articles.

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Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins

Any internet marketer knows about the power of e-mail

marketing. As I discussed in “The 5 Phases of the Facebook

Sales Funnel”, it’s important to drive users to take an action.

Often that may be registering for an email newsletter which can

then be used to upsell the user on a product or service. In

addition to e-mail newsletters, every modern marketer sends

numerous e-mails every day and each of those e-mails should be

used as an opportunity to drive new fans.

4 E-Mail Marketing Strategies For

Facebook Page AdminsDespite the power of social technology as a platform for

marketing, e-mail marketing still remains to be one of the most

effective tools for keeping in touch with users and promoting

services and products. That’s why we think it’s a great idea to take

advantage of e-mail marketing to promote your Facebook Page. Below are five e-mail marketing strategies that will

instantly boost your Facebook fan base.

1. Promote Your Newsletter Via Your Facebook PageIf you have a newsletter one of the best ways to get new members is via your Facebook Page. Use sidebar promotions

as outlined on Day 24 to drive new member registration. Also feel free to occasionally post updates that encourage fans

to register for your e-mail newsletter. Be careful though because overly promoting your e-mail newsletter will drive many

Facebook users away from your page.

2. Use Mundane Emails As A Promotion OpportunityI personally send hundreds of emails a day and any professional marketer is most definitely sending numerous emails

daily. That’s why I suggest taking that opportunity to drive new fans to your Facebook Page. In addition to your name

and phone number, add a link which directs your contacts to your Facebook Page. Most people are willing to become a

fan. To increase conversion place a call to action at the end of your email such as “Please support me and join my

Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook”.

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3. Promote Your Page Via Your NewsletterThis one should be pretty obvious: use your e-mail newsletter as a tool to promote your Facebook Page. Also invest the

time necessary to optimize the conversion of newsletter subscribers to Facebook Page fans. As you promote your

Facebook Page it’s a great idea to find out how many of your readers are clicking on your Facebook Page. There are

numerous email marketing platforms but not all of them provide detailed analytics services. One of the best email

marketing systems I’ve found is Aweber but there are many others as well. Determine what sort of click through rates

you’re getting and modify your email as necessary to increase the number of people clicking on your Facebook Page

link.

4. Use E-Mail Registrations To Score InterviewsOne of the best features about e-mail marketing is that it’s easy to quickly browse through e-mail addresses and

determine what companies your subscribers work at. I typically reach out to people that may have interesting positions

and ask them for an interview. When somebody provides you with an email address look them up on Facebook and

LinkedIn to determine what their position is and if it sounds interesting, just ask them for an interview opportunity. It

helps you to expand your network and it provides valuable content for your readers.

Daily TaskRegister for an email marketing service. Not all services cost money. For example, Campaign Monitor is free to register

and only charges you when you send emails ($5 + $0.01 per recipient per campaign). AWeber is another great service

and charges you a flat fee based on the number of subscribers you have, not the number of emails you send out. If you

are going to turn any of your Facebook fans into customers, the best way is through contacting them directly and the

easiest way to reach them online is via email.

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Day 30: Create A Plan For The Next Month

There’s an old proverb which says “He who fails to

plan, plans to fail” and while there are people that will

debate the importance of planning, mapping out a

guide for the next month will make things a lot easier.

What blog posts will you be writing? What content

will be most effective to drive new fans to your

Facebook? What steps will you take to promote your

Facebook Page? While we’ve listed 29 techniques to

boost your fan base, have you really taken advantage

of all the suggestions we’ve made?

By putting aside a little bit of time ever month to plan

what the best next steps are, you will come up with

some new promotion ideas as well as determine what are reasonable expectations.

How Much Time Should You Spend On Your Facebook Page?After reading through this guide you may think that developing your Facebook Page takes countless hours. Honestly it

shouldn’t take more than a few strategic minutes per day. Most of the tasks outlined shouldn’t take a substantial amount

of time. The most time consuming component of building your Facebook page is providing relevant content. Spend

some time determining what blog posts your should write over the next month.

Set up Google Reader to follow the most relevant resources and repost any article that you find interesting directly on

your Facebook Page. While you can always spend more time on your Facebook Page, it’s possible to spend too much

time on your page. In economics there is something called the “Law of Diminishing Returns” and that law applies to time

you spend on your Facebook Page. The first few hours are extremely important but as you over invest, you will not only

take time away from other marketing activities but also decrease the number of new fans per hour invested.

Line Up Tasks And ExecuteWhile you can accomplish many of the tasks outlined in a short period of time, space out each task so that you have

time to accomplish each step well. I personally use an application called Remember the Milk to plan out my tasks over a

longer period time. One huge mistake that I used to always make was using my calendar as a method for planning tasks

that need to be accomplished. Tasks lists are useful because you can go through them and mark them off without

cluttering up your schedule. While you may aim to have an article completed by a specific day or an upgrade to your

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Facebook Page, things tend to change and you can adjust due dates as necessary (although adjusting due dates is a

sign that you have too many tasks and need to start delegating).

Plan Well And Sleep WellI spent the first year and a half after starting my company under an immense amount of stress as my inbox became

bloated and I became an organizational nightmare. While there were numerous opportunities I found it difficult to

prioritize. More recently I developed a system which works for me and that involves a combination of two things: a

calendar and a to do list. As I mentioned moments ago, putting tasks where they should go will remove a lot of stress in

your life. You have the potential to grow a fan base well beyond 3,000 but none of that can be done without proper

planning. The only way to get there without planning is to not sleep for months on end as you attempt to balance a

million tasks.

Develop a content schedule and a task list for items that you would like to add to your Facebook Page.

Daily TaskTake the lessons learned over the past 30 days to develop at least 5 tasks and begin to plan out a content schedule. As

I’ve stated repeatedly throughout this program, content is critical to your success. If you drive an immense number of

fans to your page, the easiest way is to create original content. While you’ve already come up with a few headlines for

articles you can write, develop a schedule for writing and posting them.

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Day 31: Promote Fanning Via SMS

A Mobile RevolutionUse of internet sites in the United States may mostly take

place from computers but a growing percentage of internet

users are shifting to their mobile devices as the primary tool

for browsing the internet. The trend toward mobile has

seen a dramatic upsurge with the launch of the iPhone and

competing smartphone devices. Facebook has also

continued to increase their mobile offerings. More recently

the company has added the ability to let users subscribe to

mobile updates.

Mobile Subscriptions Are EasyThere are currently two ways to subscribe to a Facebook Page. The first is to click “Subscribe via SMS” on the left hand

side of a Facebook Page. The second is to text “subscribe [username]” to 32665. You’ve most likely seen a number of

commercial that promote subscriptions via SMS. Facebook provides this service for free and it can be extremely useful

for communicating with fans.

Why Use Mobile Subscriptions?

If a user gets your published stories via their feed, why do you need to encourage fans to subscribe via SMS? The

primary reason is because not all users will view your feed updates, only a percentage will. SMS subscribers are also

guaranteed to get your updates which makes this a no-brainer. So what steps can you take to make sure you get more

mobile subscribers and how can you track new subscribers? Unfortunately for the time being you can’t track the

number of mobile subscribers through your page insights, however you can always promote the service.

Important Caveat

While you can get SMS subscribers they will only be notified of text stories that you publish. If you post a link as an

attachment to a story, the user will not be notified even if you have posted text in addition to the link. That means you

should be posting questions on a regular basis that users can reply to if they received the update via their mobile device.

Daily TaskPost something to your feed explaining to users how they can subscribe to mobile updates from your page. Remember

that mobile subscribers get 100 percent of your text status updates.

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New Media School

Want More?I hope that you found this guide to be extremely

valuable. After a couple months of working on

this guide off and on, I realized that it was time to

provide the information to the public. There are a

number of other guides that I currently have under

development but in addition to guides many find it

useful to interact with others in order to hold

themselves accountable and to get feedback from

others. That’s why I’ve spent the past few months developing New Media School, a site dedicated to helping individuals

and businesses succeed in the digital economy.

Our ProgramsSince this is the first significant guide that we’ve released outside of the Facebook privacy guide which was released at

the beginning of the year, I’ve decided to create an exclusive trial program for our first official New Media School

program. The “Social Media Marketing” program involves the following components:

• Monthly Newsletter that will keep you up to date on everything taking place in the industry that will impact your

business.

• Weekly Q&A Sessions during which Nick O’Neill will answer your most important questions related to challenges

your company is trying to overcome.

• Step by Step guides that explain things such as attracting new fans to your Facebook Page (this guide) to attracting

more traffic to your company’s blog.

• Guest Lectures from top industry experts that will provide you with insight and an opportunity to pick the brain of

industry leaders.

• Community Forums that are filled with expert opinions and lessons. These forums also present an opportunity to get

instant feedback from your peers.

Guest LecturesAs I mentioned a moment ago, we have industry leaders that will participate in live sessions with course participants.

Some guests will have prepared comments while others will be more of an interview format. At the end of each live

session course participants will have the opportunity to get live feedback from the guest experts. Below are some of the

experts who have already confirmed participation:

• Brad Feld - Co-Founder of Foundry Group and author of widely read venture capital blog

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• Chris Bucchere - Founder of Social Collective

• Clara Shih - Author of “The Facebook Era”

• Craig Stoltz - Author of “Web 2.Oh...Really?”, one of Time.com’s Top 25 Blogs

• Dan Schawbel - Author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success”

• David Berkowitz - Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy for 360i, author of the blog Inside the Marketer’s

Studio

• Debbie Weil - Author of “The Corporate Blogging Book”

• Don Steele - Vice President of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks

• Frank Gruber -

• Harper Reed - CTO at skinnyCorp, Co-Founder of Threadless

• Hiten Shah - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics

• Jake Brewer - Engagement Director of Sunlight Foundation

• Jesse Thomas - Founder of JESS3

• Jared Goralnick - Founder of Set Consulting

• Joe Suh - Founder and CEO of myChurch

• John Bell - Managing Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and President of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing

Association)

• Leslie Bradshaw - Director of Engagement, New Media Strategies

• Mike Lazerow - CEO and Founder, Buddy Media

• Mike Volpe - VP of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot

• Neil Patel - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics

• Shashi Bellamkonda - Head of Social Media Strategy, Network Solutions

• Ted Leonsis - Owner, Washington Capitals, Chairman of Revolution Money, and Vice Chairman Emritus of AOL

• Tim O’Shaughnessy - Co-Founder & CEO, LivingSocial

• Victoria Ransom - Founder, Wildfire Interactive

Each of the guest lecturers above are involved in developing tools that help individuals or businesses in the social media

space or are actively using social media to promote their existing business. We will be announcing other guest lectures

as well throughout the course. We will leverage our large network of contacts to bring in the most relevant guest

lecturers for each topic we cover.

RegistrationIf you are interested in participating in our first New Media School program (or any others) you can visit the New Media

School website. If you would like to participate in our first Social Media Marketing program, you must be one of the first

150 participants to register. Registration will also be open for a limited period of time. Also, if you register now with the

discount code “FBPAGEBUYER” we will take $25 off the first month.

If registration is closed by the time you visit the site don’t worry! We will begin offering new programs in the near future.

Just fill out your information in the contact area and we will send you information as we release new programs!

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