By now everyone is going through the 5 stages of grief over the loss of default landing tabs as the fact that all Facebook fan pages will convert to the new Facebook Timeline for Pages Design on March 30, 2012 sinks in.

Questions about the content housed on the millions of custom tabs created by businesses and entrepreneurs such as contests, opt-in offers, streaming video channels and e-commerce pages have people scrambling and questioning whether or not Facebook fans pages will be a worthwhile investment for small to mid-sized businesses and entrepreneurs, in both time and money.

All of your custom tabs still exist. You just need to think creatively about how to market them.

As of this writing, all of the content on custom tabs is still live and accessible. The only change has been that you cannot set up a default landing tab for non-fans. So how does a page entice fans to search for and click on a tab now that they are no longer displayed on the left hand side of a page?

Page admins can upload a custom image to represent the tab or app as Facebook is now referring to all tabs. Imagine seeing a series of evocative, engaging images in this 180 x 180 pixel format under the cover photo.  Color, words, and images will call out to the reader like carnival barkers. “Come see the amazing offer.”

Page admins can also rearrange the order in which the apps appear. Four apps are “above the fold” and the rest live under the drop down arrow on the right hand side. Three of those app spots are available to admins to highlight the apps of their choice.  Photos will always display.  So admins can change the view to highlight specials, sales, contests or whichever three apps are most important to a page in any given time period.

I created two simple word images just to illustrate what’s possible. It was easy to upload the new app cover images and I expect to see brands and entrepreneurs doing some very creative work with these images.  If you have examples of fun, enticing or downright awesome images fan pages are using to highlight their custom tab offerings, please post their URL below.  Let’s amass some examples to inspire one another.

According to a post today on the Lujure blog, and at Hubz, Facebook will announce they are dropping some older ad formats and adding some new premium features as of February 29th. The ads will be larger, have more engagement options such as comments and likes directly on the ad, and include video or photos. Basically anything you post on a page can be marketed as an ad.  A complete slide show of the Facebook presentation is available here.  According to Facebook’s presentation, people are four times more likely to make a purchase when they see their friends interacting with a brand. So Facebook is set to release upgraded premium ads that are heavily weighted to interaction with the comments box, like option and perhaps even the share button under the ads.

Facebook is set to launch six new premium ad options on February 29, 2012.

The new suite of premium ads includes an option to create an ad out of a “Post Like Story,” which is nothing new.  But Facebook says brands will now be able to choose to run ads that appear to be posts to their wall, but will only appear as ads and not as wall posts.

Why is this interesting and potentially useful to a brand? Say you’re launching a new product, having a sale or desire to hammer home your biggest brand promise and you want to target only people who are not yet your fans because those folks are already aware of your offer.  In the past, your brand would have had to post the special offer to your page wall several days in a row so that the Post Like story would continue to run that offer.  Basically, you’d have to spam your own wall to keep the offer as the ad image and message.  This new options will allow brands to create a Page Post Story that never runs on their page and is only served up to non-Fans or whomever the brand chooses at set up.

The upgraded ad units are called photo, video, questions, status, events, links, which are all types of posts a brand currently can make to their page. Currently these new ad options may only be offered to premium advertisers who already have, or will have, a Facebook advertising account rep.  But rumors persist that these options will be offered to everyone soon.

Along with the expected announcement that Facebook fan pages will migrate to the Timeline design, and these new ad options, administrators and brand managers are scrambling to prepare their clients for change.

So what do you think? Will your brand or business try the new ads when they’re available?

Large companies pay consulting firms big bucks for this information and Facebook gives it to entrepreneurs free of charge.

For newbies, you’ll find your Facebook Insights on the left hand side of your business or fan page under your avatar. Click on the Insights link and for the purpose of this tutorial, scroll down the page until you see a grid of your most recent posts called “page posts.”  We’ll be discussing the fourth column called “Engaged Users.”

Facebook Insights are a suite of information tools built into the Facebook platform to help you test and refine your marketing and branding strategy.  Understanding each of those metrics or insights is powerful information about your current communications style, the tribe you’ve gathered and whether or not your current messaging is hitting home or falling flat.

Engaged Users, according to Facebook, is a measurement applied to individual posts. It is the number of unique people who have clicked on a individual post. The data reflects actions taken on that post in a 28 day period.  There are several key pieces of information attached to this insight.

• Total Engaged Users: This overall number is interesting in and of itself and your insights can be sorted, high to low, to see which posts are garnering the most clicks. You can look for patterns, tone, and content to see which types of posts are most interesting to your current tribe. As a percentage of your total fans, this number also gives you an idea of the reach of your posts. If you have 20,000 fans and 12 engaged readers, it’s time to evaluate your conversation.
• Pie Chart: When you click on the Engaged Users number, you’ll see a pie chart to give you even more details about user behavior.  You’ll see metrics for photo views, other clicks and stories generated.
• Photo Views: The first number you’ll see tells you if users viewed your photos at full size.  This means they clicked on your photo to make it larger. This means they were highly motivated to interact with, spend time with, and look over your visual content.  This is an indication of how strongly Facebook values photos in their algorithm. Using photos in your posts will increase your likelihood of being served up in the news stream of your fans and Facebook believes (and I agree) that Facebook has evolved into a much more visual platform. Photos add value and appeal and attract more eyeballs to your content.
• Other Clicks: Other clicks is the measurement of additional actions your viewers took, within a post, such as clicking on the number of likes to see who else liked your post, people’s names, or the timestamp. Facebook says this is a strong indicator of the attention viewers are paying to your content. They’re digging deep, looking for more information, interacting with the content longer.
• Stories Generated: A story is generated when a fan likes, comments on, shares your post with his or her friends, answers a question or responds to an event. This is an important number because it reflects the ability of your content to cause a second action. Your fans actually read what you wrote, they were compelled to share, like or otherwise amplify your content, creating a story or action in their own news stream that subtly tells their friends they “endorse” you or at least found what you wrote to be engaging enough to make them take an action.
• Negative Feedback: This number tells you how many people hid your content in the newsfeed or otherwise gave it negative feedback, perhaps by blocking you or reducing the number of posts they see from you by choosing “only important.”  Again, this is great information and if this number begins to climb over time, you’ll know that some of the people you’ve gathered to your tribe are not resonating with your message. Do an audit of your posts and decided whether you want to adjust the message or gather a different tribe.  Both are valid choices.

Information gathered from insights is just that; information. What you do with that information is up to you. These insights can help you understand if you’re communicating to a receptive crowd or shouting into the dark. They can help you find “hot” topics that are important to your crowd so you can hit those more often. They can show you what doesn’t interest your readers and if what doesn’t interest them is what you care about most, then you’ll know you’ve got some work to do either on the message or on building a new, more diverse tribe.

Take a look at your fan page insights, and please let me know if you have questions.

Facebook’s new Insights have many people scratching their heads, trying to understand how these social media metrics can help their marketing and branding efforts, how best to use the information available and exact what it all means. This is the first in a series of articles on Facebook Insights. Here we’ll talk about the “Talking About This” metric.

Want to make sure everyone is Talking About This?

Talking About This: What does that mean?

Talking About This is a consumer facing number. It appears on your Facebook fan page directly below your number of fans and is visible to everyone who visits your page. This number is most likely a very small percentage of your overall fan base. In fact, recent studies show this number is likely to be 4-6% of your fan base. This number represents the unique users who have created stories about your page in their stream or the ticker by liking, commenting, sharing or tagging your page, post or photo during the 7 preceding days. This number changes daily because it is measuring a different set of days each day.

Talking About This: How can this number help me?

The rise and fall of your “Talking About This” number indicates the level of engagement your current fans have with you page and posts. If this engagement is falling, look at the content of your posts and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is the content of my posts valuable to my ideal customer?
2. Does the post clearly present a call to action asking my readers to comment, like, share or tag?
3. Am I asking questions at the end of the posts that require a reader response?
4. Could I offer the reader a “bonus” for responding; i.e. “Go ahead and post your website link here and I’ll be happy to look at your landing page and give you feedback.”
5. Have I tried asking my readership how I can best serve them?

You will always have readers who simply read and move on, enriched by what you write but not motivated to leave a comment.  But, increasing your Talking About This number means increased visibility for you in the streams and tickers of your fans.  This ambient and real awareness can be considered as valuable as an endorsement or referral, so it’s worth your time and a little extra effort in the crafting of your posts to solicit a response.  Remember, 90% of your fans never return to your page after liking it.  They only see and interact with your content in their news stream or ticker.  They are only served your content in their stream IF you’ve enticed them to interact with your page recently.  Creating content that demands, elicits or excites a response is the Facebook marketing holy grail of visibility.

If you’ve noticed that your fan engagement has fallen, doesn’t respond to any of your new posting strategies and seems stagnant, you might consider a quick, creative and inexpensive Page Post Like Story Ad Campaign targeted to current fans.  We’ll talk about that in an upcoming post.

Now, here’s where we put these strategies to work.  Are you noticing a change in your Talking About This number?  If you try one of the strategies above and have success, I’d love to hear from you and perhaps highlight you in a future post.

We’ll curate the important moments in our lives through Timeline, aggregate our yearly news in Reports, watch movies and listen to music together through Canvas apps and we’ll discover these apps through the Graph Rank that depends on how our own social circles use Facebook apps.

Apps from Netflix, Spotify, Nike, USAToday, Ticketmaster, GiftRocket, Foodspotting and many others have launched apps using open graph to help us “tell the story of our lives,” according to Zuckerberg.

The sweeping new redesign features a very large piece of real estate at the top of our page where we’ll share an iconic photo that gives friends a sense of who we are. We’ll still have our avatar photo but this visual dominates the new profile page.

Facebook assured f8 attendees today that users will have complete control over their timeline but mentioned that the real-time ticker on the upper right hand side of our news stream will contain all the “lightweight social activity” we participate in, such as “liking” something or playing games.

Another new feature will be the ability to change the “Like” button. We’ll be given the opportunity to be “reading, watching, listening,” to things instead of just “liking” them. Facebook developers found that younger users didn’t want to give their endorsement by “liking” something but would be willing to share their activity with different wording.

What this means for entrepreneurs and business people using Facebook socially and for business will reveal itself as the beta test of Timeline rolls out over the next couple of weeks. As always, conduct yourselves as though you are living your life in public…because you are.

Among the new features being rolled out this week from Facebook are the enhanced friends lists options which many feel was a response to Google Plus Circles, and the introduction of a Subscribe button with multiple implications and applications.

The subscribe button is, by far, the most radical of the changes and for the first time, allows people who are not your friends to see your personal profile updates if you enable the subscribe button.  So, Guy Kawasaki or Pete Cashmore haven’t accepted your friend request.  Bill Gates is ignoring your pokes and messages.  You can now subscribe to their personal profile posts if they decide to enable Facebook’s new Subscribe button.  Why should you or your brand care?  You should care because Facebook has just opened up an interesting option for celebrities, authors, entrepreneurs, speakers and other high profile public figures to create great reach for their posts, beyond their friendship circle.  However, this comes with some challenges, privacy concerns and the need for those users to understand exactly how this works and what they’ll be sharing.

What does this mean for brands, small businesses and entrepreneurs?

For business people who use their Facebook profile as yet another entry point to their brand, albeit a more casual one, you can now place a subscribe button on your profile.  This allows people who aren’t your friends access to those posts you mark as public. This will be useful to celebrities, speakers, authors or other very public Facebook users who have reached their 5,000 friend cut-off, but still want to allow new friends to see their posts.  If you use your profile strictly for personal communications with family and friends, you’ll want to skip implementing the subscribe button and continue to decline or ignore requests for friend connections with business contacts.

What does this mean for you, the user?

As a user, you can subscribe to the posts of industry leaders, celebrities or political figures who set their personal profiles to allow subscriptions and you can decide what types of posts you want to see.  For example, you can hide all posts related to games so that you’ll never know when Lady Gaga hits a new high score on Bejeweled, but you’ll always be notified when she posts a new photo.

Facebook provides more details and the link to add the Subscribe button to your Facebook profile here. The profile owner can choose to be notified when someone subscribes, too. This is one to watch as it evolves in use.

Will you enable the Subscribe button?  Why or why not?

Using digital marketing tools can help authors and publishers by-pass the network television gatekeeper and take book messages directly to the reader.  Digital tools help authors connect with potential readers wherever they spend time online, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs or search engines. And, it is essential to remember that nearly half of all web users are accessing the web throughout the day via their mobile devices so creating digital content that plays nicely in mobile formats is key.

I recently spoke on the topic of digital tool kits at BookExpo America 2011 on the Digital Marketing Panel with Sally Dedecker, Fauzia Burke and Kathleen Schmidt. The panel consensus was that authors and publishers need to consider utilizing a wide variety of digital strategies to reach new readers. You can view my powerpoint presentation here. But many digital tools are expensive to create and not every author or publisher has the budget to develop and implement the more complicated and costly digital strategies used by major brands.

Here’s a list of my favorite low-cost digital tools authors and publishers can their book campaigns.

Blogsite or Website with a blog

This is the author’s home base.  Readers should be able to read more about the author, find  links to the current and previous works of the author, view a personal appearance schedule and read the author’s blog.  Readers should also be able to sign up for a continued relationship with the author, perhaps through a newsletter or to receive a sample chapter of a new book.  Whatever the offer, the author needs to capture the e-mail addresses of people who express an interest in hearing from them. Authors can create a free blog using WordPress or Blogger and an e-mail management system like MailChimp is free until the author has attracted 2,000 fans.  MailChimp automatically generates the HTML code needed for an Opt-in box, which the author can place on his or her blog.  By working with the publisher to offer a sample chapter as a digital download, authors can offer a sneak peek for new books for fans who sign up for the mailing list.

Social Media

Social media amplifies the authors website and blog messages and creates a connection to help readers feel as though they’re involved in the author’s world.  Authors can share tour information, preview books, give fans special content such as original stories on their website or blog and spread the word via social media. It’s easier and faster to amass a large following on Twitter and Facebook than to acquire a large subscription base on a website because millions of people are already gathered on social media sites.  Go to where the readers are already gathered.  Bring the author’s message to those readers instead of waiting for them to stumble upon that message on a website.  It’s free to sign up for accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.  There is no cost to use them.  However, investing a few hundred dollars in design and custom tabs will allow authors to sell books directly from their Facebook Fan page, offer that sneak peek free chapter through an opt in box right from Facebook, create the look and feel of their own television channel on YouTube and give readers a sense of their personality on Twitter.  For under $500, each of the author’s social media sites can be design to promote the others and ultimately to drive fans back to the author’s blog or home base.

Opt in

The theme for an author’s digital tool kit is “make it easy for the reader to find, follow, friend and like you.”  By developing an e-mail database of readers who have expressed an interest in what an author writes, authors and publishers will be able to easily and efficiently push updates and marketing messages to potential book buyers who have already identified themselves as being interested.  This permission based digital marketing is cost effective and can have a higher ROI than nearly any other book marketing.  Adding an Opt in box and an enticing sign up offer on both the author website and their Facebook Fan page is an easy, inexpensive digital marketing strategy.

Video

We’re living in a social world where Facebook is the Wal-Mart of digital platforms.  With nearly 700 million users now conditioned to expect to see a face attached to every brand, authors who use video effectively will have a competitive advantage in reaching readers.  Readers like seeing and hearing from the artists they admire.  In the past, meeting a favorite author or even a new author, was relegated to book signings and perhaps major events.  Now authors can create short home videos and talk directly to their potential readers, sharing their tour experiences, their creative process and even concepts from their books.  Readers enjoy authors who share a bit of their personality and their time by creating short video messages.  This, too, is an easy and inexpensive digital marketing concept.

Digital Assets

Authors can now  create digital badges, original digital content like blogs or articles, downloadable author photos and bios, digital press releases, quizzes, games and contests.  All of these digital assets can be used to create visibility for the author and his or her books online.  The more interesting and compelling the digital assets are, the more likely they will be referenced, shared and valued by potential readers.  Creating 5-10 original essays or blog posts that can be used as guest blogs on sites visited by an author’s ideal reader is a free way to use these digital assets to promote an author’s books.  The topic of the posts could be related to the topic of the new book and the author by-line can reference his or her latest work.  By providing desirable content to other websites, the author extends his or her own visibility and attracts new readers.  Sharing charts, graphs, photos, videos, quizzes or other interesting and relevant content on these high traffic websites is another strategic use of an author’s digital assets. Think about what digital assets you can create to support the launch of your books and prepare those assets so they’re ready and available at launch time.

Online Advertising

Facebook advertising campaigns can fit any budget.  Authors and publishers can set a daily or a lifetime cap to the dollar amount of the campaign. If an author already has several thousand fans, Facebook’s sponsored stories ads display an image of the author’s fan page to friends of that author’s fans with a subtle visual that implies “Your friends like this page.  You should too.”  Authors and publishers can try different types of ads, different images and different creative messages until they find one that drives new fans to press “like.”  Facebook ads can also be created to redirect Facebook users to the author’s blog or website.  Again, even a budget of $100 to $200 can have an impact, not just in new fans or readers, but in author and book visibility.  Hundreds of thousands of impressions can be achieved for a very modest budget.  This is a digital marketing strategy that is often overlooked because publishers and authors think advertising is expensive or that it’s difficult to measure the ROI.  With Facebook advertising, daily metrics will tell the tale of these ad campaign affects.

These are just a few of the digital marketing strategies authors and publishers can implement for little or no monetary outlay.  Are you using digital marketing strategies effectively?  We’d love to hear your ideas and success stories.

Brands can now post to Facebook as brands. This is huge.

1. Posting as a Brand: The most important change is that administrators can now post throughout Facebook, on both other pages and on profiles, as the brand. This means that if a brand could potentially comment on the Facebook page of a popular television show with millions of fans and gain visibility with those fans. Conversely, a magazine or television show could comment on the pages of their advertisers to thank them for their support and again, gain additional visibility. We’ll be watching for best practices in this area.  To use this feature, administrators can toggle between posting as themselves and as the brand simply by using a drop down menu at the top of the page under “account.”
2. Visuals: Just as on the new profile designs, business pages will now feature the panel of five most recent photos across the top of your page.  This means that brands must exercise particular care when uploading images.  When another brand or individual tags a company in a photo, that photo will now appear above their newstream, giving less control of the images a business wants to show and making it more essential to have someone monitor the page regularly.
3. Changing Categories: Many companies set up their fan pages using either the wrong category or one that no longer is a good fit for their growing brand.  For example, a business might have been local but has grown to be regional or national. Or, a speaker with national reach might have set himself up as a company but now wants to represent himself as a “person” and a consultant.  For the first time, business pages can now change their category.  This changes the fields under the info link.  If a person wants to be a local business, changing categories will allow him to enter store hours and location along with details on parking.  If a local business wants to become a consultant, the new fields will provide spaces to share product offerings and packages.
4. Featured Likes: A fan page can now, for the first time, “like” another fan page.  Companies can use this feature to associate themselves with sister companies, clients, like-minded organizations and industry leaders.  The pages a business page “likes” will show up on the left hand side of the brand’s page.  By clicking “Edit Info” to the right of a business page name, administrators can now select a feature called “Featured Likes” and choose the top pages they want to have shown on the left hand column of their page.  Again this will be useful for companies that include multiple brands and divisions.
5. Featured Page Owner: Under the “Edit Info” link, business pages may now designate one or more “Featured Page Owners” to be displayed in the left hand column. This can be useful for pages with multiple voices or owners posting.  This definitely gives a public and individual face to a business page, however, and for small business owners or others not wanting to share their personal profile link with the world, this is a feature to understand clearly before utilizing.
6. Filtered News: This is the feature that has people concerned today and hopefully Facebook will listen to the discontent and reverse this.  As of this morning, Facebook and Facebook alone controls the newsfeed of a business page, serving up posts they deem “most interesting.” This seems to create a feed where the posts with the most interactions show up first, leaving the brand without the ability to feature their newest updates first.  This one new feature is counter intuitive to encouraging brands to use Facebook to promote their businesses.  Without control over the order in which their messages appear to fans, a huge opportunity has opened up for outside developers to create something that better serves brands. (*UPDATE: March 5, 2011: Facebook has reverted back to allowing fan pages to post in reverse chronological order, after an uproar from users.)

Over the next week, there will be additional updates on the nuances of using Facebook fan pages to promote businesses.  We’d welcome the sharing of best practices here and feel free to include links to those pages as examples.  If you found this post useful, please let us know by leaving a comment.

Facebook makes micro-targeting custom tabs easy.

This is particularly exciting for businesses using a custom landing tab with a video welcoming message or a sweepstakes application or even an e-commerce application.  You have total control over exactly where your ad will lead people, without having to change your landing tab options for anyone finding your page for the first time through other means.

Additionally, you can now directly target friends of people who already like your page.  With repetition, this should reinforce your brand name with people who’s friends are already interacting with your page, a very important metric because people like to interact with pre-qualified or pre-approved pages. In other words, everyone wants to be friends with the popular kids.  The more often people see your ads and their friends interacting with your brand, the more likely they are to “like” the page themselves.

A successful ad campaign needs to be supported with content designed to make fans “stick.” When they give your brand a chance by clicking on your ad, they need to discover a fascinating, fun, engaging or information packed page that makes them whisper, “I like this.”  Running ads during periods in which you are very actively engaged on your page and be sure to offer your best stuff.  Think about this moment as a first date.  Be on your best behavior and show the potential new fan what a catch you are.  You won’t get a second chance.

Another new feature is called “Sponsored Stories.”  Sponsored stories have been around for a while and you’ve probably noticed them on the right hand side of your page when you see something promoted and underneath it says, “John Brown and three other friends like this page.”  But including Sponsored Stories on the ad creation page seems to indicate that you can now dictate which Facebook actions you’d like to promote to friends and followers.  This may have implications for affiliate marketers trying to lend their influence to a particular program.  I don’t have enough information yet on this aspect but will dig deeper and report back.

So, quickly, Facebook is adding some micro-targeting options to the ad platform that could lead to better, more cost efficient use of ad campaigns.  If you liked this story, please leave a comment.  If you have questions about Facebook ads, I’ll be happy to answer them.