Recently, my friend Rob "The Genie" Toth posted an article called "14 Benefits of Facebook Fan Pages".  It fit so perfectly with my recent Facebook postings that I decided to repost it here. Enjoy!

Here are 14 BIG benefits for giving serious
attention to fanpages:

1) Facebook is THE MOST widely accepted social
network. Some of your friends will be on Twitter
or Linked In, or maybe a few out of date types
will still be on MySpace but even most of them also
have a Facebook account. It is by far the largest
web property on the net and certainly the largest,
busiest, fastest growing community.

2) Facebook is the new email. Email was a novelty
at some point. Now everyone has one. Similarly,
500+ mill*ion users are already on facebook.
And it will keep growing. Being on facebook is
becoming a non-negotiable. And having a FAN PAGE
is the most viral way to tap into that community.

3) Your Fan page also doubles as customer support.
It’s easy enough for someone to post a support
issue within your fanpage and the reply you or
your team posts is now available for everyone.

4) Social proof! Sure this actually works against
you when you first launch your fanpage… but
as you grow your audience (fans), a prospect can
see you have 1000, 5000, 20,000+ fans … that’s
built in social proof that indeed others are
paying attention to you and your business.

5) Search results. Go Google “is Google threatened
by Facebook” .. there’s a lot of talk of
increased time spent on facebook and increased
use of it as a search platform. I do the same thing.
I look for service providers by keyword within
facebook… and if I need a service for X and your
fanpage isn’t there, I’m not buying from you.

6) The Facebook Like plugin! Have you seen the
Like (thumbs up) icon? It can be added to your
blogs and pages for immediate exposure to
potentially thousands of users. You see when
someone has a facebook account and clicks the Like
plug-in button from your site, an update is posted
to their wall saying Firstname Lastname Likes “Your
Website Name Here” … but that update is then
published to their home page feed which ALL of
their friends see. So just one “thumbs up” click
could start a snowball of viral growth.

7) Your Fan Page also enjoys viral growth when
a fan mentions you with @_____, or when they
share any of your posts

Email communication. Having a tough time
building an email opt-in list that someone needs
to leave an email+name for?? What if all they
need to do is visit your FanPage, click the “Like”
button at the top and now you can send messages
to all of your fans. So you created a new communication
\channel. Not to mention anytime you post on
your fanpage wall, it will show up for them in
their homepage feed.

9) Traffic… many marketers will make the same
comparisons… a 10,000 Twitter following is
worth LESS than 500 fans on a fanpage. The viral
growth that 500 can give you and the higher
clickthrough rates you get (from a less cluttered
and more meaningful home page feed) makes FanPage
“fans” *MUCH* more valuable than just Twitter followers.

10) Community building: tap into the monster 500
mill community and create your own “Tribe”

11) Local leads gen: though facebook is obviously
international, you’ll find the majority of your
“fans” will be local area users because of how
facebook handles “networks”.

12) Branding: your name gets seen everytime
you (or your staff) leave a post… it publishes
to the “news feed” of your fans. Fantastic
viral exposure.

13) SEO: a backlink to your main site from facebook
ranks you even higher in the engines

14) Analytics: an optimized fan page comes
with a good amount of analytics tools for page
owners. You can really learn a lot about the
interactions and demographics of who is spending
time on your fan page. This bit of “market data”
is VERY valuable if you then apply it to the rest
of your marketing.

Source: Rob "The Genie" Toth's Blog

14 Benefits of Facebook Fan Pages is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Facebook Fan Pages are all the rage in local business marketing right now. If you are not building a following using Facebook, what are you waiting for? They are at 500 million users and growing!

However, there's a right way and a wrong way to use Facebook Fan Pages. Do it wrong and you will waste your time and your money.

If you have followed my other articles, I suggest that you have the basics out of the way before you tackle Facebook Fan Pages.

Those things are:

• Having a website with a  blog
• Having email lead capture systems set up

If you have the basics set up, it's a lot easier to keep up with your Facebook Fan Page. You can post to your blog and the link to that content will go right to Facebook (if you have it set up correctly.) Having a Fan Page that nobody sees isn't going to do you any good!

Next, you want to customize your Fan Page a bit. I like using the free FBML app that Facebook has. This allows FBML (Facebook's internal coding language) on the Fan Page so it looks a lot better.

You need to be encouraging your Fan Page visitors to "Like" your page. Studies have shown that putting an arrow pointing to your "Like" button will increase your "Likes" significantly.

You should also be using your Fan page to direct Fans to your email lead capture system. The best way to accomplish this is by giving away a free report related to your industry. If coupons are used in your business, they make a great incentive as well.

Once this is done, it's time to promote the page. The next step is to invite all your friends to check out your Fan Page. Here an article that shows how to invite all your friends at once to your Fan Page.

Once you have invited your friends, then its time to invite people you don't know to check out your Fan Page. Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Link to it from your profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc
• Link to it from your website or blog
• Advertise the Fan Page it on your business cards
• If you have a store, please a flyer at the cash register inviting people to the Fan Page
• Put your Fan Page link on your credit card receipts
• Buy advertising on Facebook to direct people to the Fan Page

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, you're right, it is. Ask us how we can help you today with your Facebook presence.

Building Your Facebook Fan Page The Right Way is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

I recently read a really good book about LinkedIn called LinkedWorking by Frank Agin and Lewis Howes. If you are serious about using LinkedIn or are simply curious as to how to maximize its effectiveness, this is a book you should definitely consider picking up.

In the book, Agin and Howes give real success stories about people that have used LinkedIn to grow their business. There really isn’t a right way or a wrong way to use LinkedIn. Rather, its picking a strategy that works for you and doing it consistently.

Here are a few tips that I got from the book and am implementing now:

1. Have a plan of action and do it consistently
2. Join as many groups as possible. LinkedIn limits you to 50 groups. Make sure that they are spread among different interests for best results. Visit the groups and if the group is inactive, drop it and find one that’s better. Alternately, you can talk to the moderator and take over the slow moving group.
3. Better yet, start your own group if you have the time.
4. Use Linkedin Answers. You will meet some great people and help people in the process.
5. Find out your local events and post them to events. Invite your local connections to them.
6. Get and use the Firefox LinkedIn plugin
7. Send helpful newsworthy items to your contacts. Also post your best content in LinkedIn’s Groups. Get people engaged.

I also changed my profile since getting the book. You should add the keyword of your business to your profile in several locations. The video below explains it a lot better than I can. After using the tips from the video below, I got my profile to #3 in the US for the term “SEO”. Nice!

There is some talk as to whether its better to have a lot of contacts you don’t know well or just a few contacts that you know quite well. I’ve decided to take the “lot of contacts” approach. I joined some open networker groups and in a short time grew my contacts from around 300 to now having over 1800. It’s been well worth it as I’m getting more leads and partnership opportunities than ever before.

One of these contacts, Darrell O’Dea sent me a free ebook called Breaking the “Linkedin 500 Barrier”. It’s a great 60+ page book and you can download it here.

I hope you really enjoyed these tips and if you aren’t connected to me on LinkedIn, please feel free to contact me.

How To Leverage LinkedIn Effectively is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Here’s an interesting You Tube video that’s going around about the growth of social media. Wow, that’s some insane growth.

Interesting Video About Social Media Growth is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

There’s been a debate brewing around the net as to whether using sites like Facebook and Twitter is more effective than good ol face to face, belly to belly networking.

To me, the debate is as silly as saying whether a ground game or a passing game is more important in football. The team with a ground game that can’t pass will lose and the team with a passing game that can’t run will lose. The team that is merely above average at both (assuming they also have a decent defense) will win every single time.

The same thing applies with networking. I’ve had online businesses where I didn’t know the people on my email lists. I’ve also had offline businesses where I didn’t use a lot of social media. The results from both were mediocre and frustrating.

Recently, with Dayton SEO Services, I combined the two worlds. Wow, when you truly, truly get this, you will be amazed at what you will find.

Here is my process now when I meet someone….

1. Attend events, meet people and get their business card
2. Enter their contact information into an Excel spreadsheet
3. Upload the spreadsheet into SendOutCards and send my new friend a card
4. Upload the spreadsheet into my email autoresponder and invite them to join my email list. Make sure to get your new friend’s permission by using double opt in. I use Get Response, but I hear Constant Contact is better. It’s a royal pain to move an email list so I just haven’t done it yet.
5. Import the Excel list into Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn to add them to my friends list
6. Paste the email addresses from Excel into Twitter and follow them
7. Blog on a regular basis and automatically sync it with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
8. Send emails to the autoresponder list on a regular basis to invite people to read the blog. Constant Contact even has a way to automatically sync this with the blog through the blog’s RSS feed. Once it’s set up, you dont even need to log into your Constant Contact account. It just goes out automatically every time you update the blog.
9. Get people’s birthday from Facebook and Plaxo and add that info into SendOutCards so I can send them a birthday card. Facebook has a really cool calendar app (I think it’s called Hallmark Calendar) that does this. SendOutCards has a very slick set it and forget it feature called campaigns where I can set it up once in under 10 minutes and birthday cards go out to everyone on the right date.
10. Schedule one on one appointments to get to know my most important contacts. I just go to meet and learn more about them. I’m NOT there to sell anything.

I hope these tips help you out. If they do, please leave a comment below. I certainly didn’t make this stuff up. I want to thank Kody Bateman and the team at SendOutCards for teaching me this at their very powerful Treat Em Right Seminar. I also want to thank Tony Scelzo, Larry Kevin Adams and all members of the amazing Rainmakers team. I’ve learned so much in just the short time that I’ve been with them. If you haven’t checked out Rainmakers yet, what are you waiting for?

Combining Offline with Online Networking is Explosive is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

At a recent Rainmakers hub event at The Greene, Ric Moody of Dayton Commercial Realty asked me about my opinion of Twitter. He had heard from a social media professional that Twitter was pretty much dead and didn’t want to invest too much time with it. My answer to him was, “it depends”

Here’s what I mean…

The days of pontificating about every last thing in your life can certainly be a waste of time. For a business owners, it can be a time suck that produces zero results. If you are doing that, stop now! Even worse are those silly apps that tell people your exact location every second of the day. Who the heck cares!

Think of it this way. Would you forward your latest Twitter message to your friend by email? We forward jokes, quotes, interesting sites, interesting news. We generally don’t forward that we’re at Kinko’s making copies. Do you forward Mafia Wars or crazy, silly stuff to your prospects and customers with your business email account? Of course not! Don’t do it on Twitter either.

Twitter to me is a syndication partner. Nothing more, nothing less. Its simply another place to get my content out there. It’s one of dozens of places to get my content to. If Twitter goes out of business tomorrow, I really could care less since my content is all over the internet.

The key is to use the right tools that allows you to post once to your blog (back to that blog thing again!) and your get content into multiple places. My favorite free tools for this purpose are OnlyWire and Ping.fm, but there are several others you can use. This blog is attached to both of them.

If you don’t have a blog, in my opinion, don’t even bother registering your business for Twitter until you get one. Then, it really will become a time suck.

I hope you enjoyed this quick little tip and get syndicating!

Is Twitter Dead For Dayton’s Small Business Owners? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

I’ve been busy lately learning the ins and outs of Facebook’s Fan Page program. The more I learn about it, the more I’ve come to realize that it’s a goldmine sitting there under the noses of small business owners.

Here’s why:

With Facebook Fan Pages, you can send out updates by email to your fans. It’s not spam since they requested to hear from you. It’s through Facebook’s email system so unlike autoresponders, you don’t have to worry about getting blocked. You can also interact with your fans through the discussion board. Your fans become your evangelists. It’s the very powerful Law of Permission in full effect! The best part is, it’s inexpensive and fairly easy to build a huge fanbase on Facebook.

Here’s how to build a huge Facebook Fan network:

The first thing you will want to do is to get a blog and post to it at least once a week. Next, grab the RSS feed from your blog and link that into your Fan Page through a Facebook App. I like the RSS Graffiti Facebook Application, but there are other ways to do this. This will update your fan page regularly with your blog’s content.

Now that you have a fan page, promote it to your friends and link to it from your print ads and websites. If you have a physical store, you can also put out flyers to invite people to check out your Fan Page.

Now, it gets really fun! It’s time to get a Facebook Ad.

Take some of your marketing budget and log into Facebook’s pay per click ad center. Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook uses demographic targeting. You can target by location. You can target by interests. You can target friends of friends. You can target all of the above at the same time! Once you learn the system, you will find out that overall it’s pretty darn slick.

Say you are a restaurant and want to just target a local zip radius. That’s possible. You want to just target Corvette owners who live in or near Dayton, Ohio? That’s possible too.

You can even target by age, which really makes it a goldmine for Medicare sales reps and reverse mortgage people.

But, get this. The longer you run the ad, the less you will spend to acquire new fans. This is because your fans will tell their friends. And they will tell their friends and so on. Facebook will also ad your Fan Page to recommended lists if you have a large enough fanbase.

Pretty soon, you will have a self growing fanbase and you won’t have to run ads at all if you don’t want to. It will just grow and grow on it’s own exponentially. To me, that’s way more powerful than any other form of advertising where if you don’t spend money, you don’t make money.

But, good content is essential to making this all work. If your page sucks and your fans don’t tell anyone or worse yet unsubscribe from the Fan Page, you are wasting your time. Take your time to do it right.

Are you seeing why I’m so excited about this opportunity here? It really is so, so powerful.

I hope you learned something with this little article about Facebook Fan Pages. Go get your page today! As always, if you need help in this area, do not hesitate to contact us.

Facebook Fan Pages Are A Goldmine For Small Business Owners is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

If you have been following my other posts, you now know the basics of Twitter and you also know how RSS feeds work. If you have not read those posts yet, please read those before continuing.

Today, I’m going to show you how to put it all together and automate your social media. These services are not anywhere close to all of the services available for social media. However, these are the ones that I personally use and recommend. Best of all, they are all free for basic accounts.

The first service that you should know about is twitterfeed.com. With twitterfeed.com, you simply link your RSS feed  one time during set up and your status update will automatically post to Twitter, Facebook and a few other services when you update your blog. It’s really slick!

Another great service I use is called Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite offers a little bookmarklet that goes in your Firefox browser window. With Hootsuite, whenever I’m doing my normal internet surfing and I find something useful that could be Tweeted, I press the Hootlet button in Firefox and Tweet out a link to the content in under a minute. With Hoot Suite, you can also schedule your status updates in the future you don’t post too many updates at one time. This is an excellent time management strategy that I highly recommend.

I also use a free service called Social Oomph (formerly known as Tweet Later). Social Oomph actually has quite a bit of services in their free package, but I only focus on one, the automatic direct message. With the automatic direct message, I will automatically send a welcome message to people who are my followers.

There is some controversy brewing as to whether using automated direct welcome messages is a good idea. People who use Twitter a lot pretty much expect that the very first message is going to be an automated one. Personally, I think it’s ok to use it as long as you are not giving a sales pitch. Even giving away something for free can come across as too salesy. Personally, I just say “thanks for following me” and cross promote my Facebook profile. Simple, non threatening messages like that are fine.

Finally, if you really want to go crazy with your social networking, I recommend that you sign up for Ping.fm. Ping.fm allows you to automatically update your status updates on 30 social networking sites all at once. This is a great way to get your links out there and is also great for Search Engine Optimization.

I hope you enjoyed this social media series of posts. If you need any help getting this set up, shoot us an email and we can discuss it.

Advanced Social Media Strategies is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Twitter is the place to be online at the moment. Many business owners know that they should be on Twitter, but sadly, very few use it correctly. They are either not using it at all or if they are using it, they are disappointed with their results.

Here are some Twitter basics:

Twitter is a simple microblogging platform. Each post or “tweet” has to be 140 characters or less. Instead of friends, Twitter has whats called “followers.” You follow someone and they can follow you. Unlike Facebook or My Space, the “friends” don’t have to be mutual. You can follow someone without getting followed back and vice versa.

Twitter has its own set of abbreviations. If you are replying to someone else’s tweet publicly, you will use @theirusername. This is very similar to the “reply all” feature that your email program has. Yes, the person you are replying to will see it, but so will all your other followers. If you want to reply privately, use the direct message feature instead.

Twitter also has something called “retweets”. This is like when you forward an interesting email to your friends. These tweets will say RT@orginalusername in the beginning of the tweet.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Twitter, here are some ideas of things you should and shouldn’t be tweeting.

A lot of people like to post simple little things like “I’m at the store”. That sort of thing is a real waste of time as a business owner. Don’t do it. Show value or keep quiet.

You should also avoid putting blatant pitches in your tweets. Your specials and coupons  are ok, especially if you decide to make the special exclusive to your followers.

The real secret to Twitter is adding true value without sales pitches. This is where most business owners fail on social media. Add in tips related to your industry. If you can make people say, “wow, this person has great tips” you are on the right track.

This is easier than you think because there are several tools that you can use to automate this process. I will be going over the best ones soon. Stay tuned!

Many Dayton Business Owners Use Twitter. Do You? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Here’s a nice introduction to RSS feeds. I will be posting some Twitter tutorials soon and it’s very important that you understand what RSS is and how it works. Enjoy!

What is an RSS Feed? is a post from: Dayton SEO Services