Cindy Ratzlaff

Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.

Bill Gates Tops the Scrabble Leader Board | Facebook adds Subscribe Option to Profiles

By Cindy Ratzlaff

I admit I have no idea if Bill Gates plays Scrabble on Facebook; yet. But I just might soon enough.

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?

Facebook’s New Fan Page Features Cheat Sheet | Facebook Victories and Missteps

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Facebook began offering the new fan page design yesterday and it will become mandatory sometime in March according to reports. Here’s a quick cheat sheet of some of the most important features for brands and businesses to familiarize themselves with as they manage their brand image on Facebook.

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.

How to add a “Follow Me on Twitter” Button to your Facebook Profile and Fan Page

By Cindy Ratzlaff

Note:  Since the publication of this article in January of 2009, Facebook has discontinued their support of FBML.  Facebook no longer allows you to add an FBML box to the left hand side of your Fan Page.

Take your Social Media Image Seriously

Your Facebook® profile and your Facebook® Fan Page are two key social media touch-points for connecting with potential clients. Creating your on-line funnels in a variety of social mediums helps people find you and clearly understand the service you provide. Now, the yellow pages will do the same thing but social mediums let customers engage with you first and then decide, based on your attitude, the comments they read from your friends and followers and the value you provide in your various postings, whether or not they want to take the next step and become your customer. They can literally shadow you while deciding. That’s why it’s so critical for you to take your social media image seriously.

The Key Ingredients to your Social Media Strategy

Because your potential customer might be exploring numerous social media sites, you’ll want to be on at least Twitter, Facebook, Linked In and I highly recommend that you have a blog. If you already have your own website that becomes your home base. If you don’t, you’re blog can serve that purpose.

Now the number one rule of any great marketing campaign is to make sure that every consumer touch-point is integrated with every other one. All of your social media sites should link to each other, carry a similar look and message all while speaking to the consumer in the voice most appropriate for that medium. For example, you’ll communicate in short 120 character* bits on Twitter, longer more detailed thoughts will be incorporated into your blog and your Facebook profile and fan pages might be more personal and intimate. Yet an integrated marketing strategy means that the core values and the key message points will be the same, albeit communicated differently.

Helping Customers Find, Follow and Friend You

If you were the owner of a Deli, you wouldn’t hide the checkout counter. You’d make it very easy to find. Shoppers would never have to guess where to find you, talk with you and pay you. It’s the same with social media sites. Be user friendly. Make it easy for someone who finds and follows you on one site to find and friend you on another.

I recently installed a “Follow me on Twitter” button on my Facebook Profile and my Facebook Fan Pages. This is a nice visual addition to your profile or page and there are a lot of designers and programmers out there offering free buttons. I happen to love http://twitbuttons.com for it’s user-friendly interface. You simply enter your Twitter name in the URL box at the top of the page and all the HTML code in every Twitter Button box is changed, automatically, to customize the button for your twitter page.

So here are the instructions for adding a “Follow me on Twitter” button to your Facebook Page.

  1. Log onto your Facebook Page and go to the applications link on the bottom left hand side of your screen.
  2. Click “Browse applications and the find ” “Extended info” application. Add that to your profile. Then click the edit settings link to the right of the app in the list of apps you’ve downloaded. Where it says “Tab” click “add.”
  3. Then go to http://twitbuttons.com and pick out your favorite button. Be sure to enter your twitter name in the black space above the buttons. This will automatically enter your correct twitter name link to the code under each twitter button image.
  4. Copy the code of the button you like and go back to Facebook to the Applications list (link on bottom left of page).
  5. Open the Extended info application by clicking directly on that link. A window will pop up for you to paste your code.
  6. Paste the code and click the “Add to Profile” button on the upper right of that page.
  7. Then click the Save changes button below the code and return to your page. You can change the look of your button at anytime by returning to these instructions and choosing a new button from the website I mentioned or another you may find. You can design your own if you’re skilled with HTML too.

Transparency is Currency in Social Media

I recommend adding your “Follow Me” button or link to all of your social media sites and using the custom options on your Twitter background to provide the URL’s for your Facebook, Linked In and Blog to your Twitter followers. You get the picture. The name of the game is to be visible. For some inspiring examples of people who are doing this well, check out these social media pros. Each one of these people are helping potential clients find them and utilizing a slightly different style. Take a look and make a plan to help yourself stand out in the crowd.

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*Always try to keep your tweets to 120 characters so that people can Re-tweet your post. When they re-tweet, some of the character spaces are taken up with their Twitter name. At 120 characters you’ll be re-tweet-friendly.

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