Social Media & Facebook for Business

Social media is definitely the current online buzzword for small business. The problem is that many small businesses do not have a good grasp of what social media is and how to use it for business.

What is Social Media?

According to Wikipedia social media is;

“The term Social Media refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue… Social media can take on many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking… there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter), content communities (e.g. Youtube), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.”

Essentially, as far as businesses are concerned, social media is a form of two-way communication between the business and its customers, as oppposed to the traditional one-way communication of outbound advertising in its many forms.

The two major problems with social media for business is that;

1. businesses do not know how to use social media
2. the time factor involved in learning and using social media properly

As with any problems there are solutions available and Lead Generating Websites can provide them for you.

 

Facebook for Business

 

We create custom Facebook business pages using the latest technology;

iFrames – our pages are hosted on WordPress blogs specially configured for Facebook.

SSL Certifcates – all our hosted pages are covered by an SSL certificate so that you are covered for the changes coming on 1st October 2011.

Reveal tabs – our pages all use ‘Reveal’ tab technology to increase the number of likes that you get.

Paid ads – we take 10% of the fee and plough that back into a paid FB ad campaign to get fans for your page.

Viral applications – we offer viral apps, custom built based on you business objectives, that can super-charge your Facebook marketing

What does that all mean?

iFrames

iFraming is a technical procedure that allows portions of one website to be displayed in a window, or frame, on a second website.

Facebook used to have its own coding language (FBML) which was used to build custom business pages, but now it requires that users host everything themselves. Thsi means taht you can still create a basic business page for free on Facebook, but if you want any form of customisation you will need to host and create that yourself.

SSL Certificates

SSL provides security in the form of encryted pages – you may have noticed messages popping up, usually when buying something online, explaining that you are leaving a “Secure connection – do you wish to continue”. This happens when you switch from a secure connection to a regular connection.

A regular web address starts with http://, whilst a secure web address starts with https:// – the additional ‘s’ stands for… secure! You’ll find this form of secure, encrypted address when using Gmail and other email clients, Paypal and many other online commerce sites.

From October 2011 Facebook is switching to https:// accross the board – this means that any iFrame-based business pages that are not hosted on domains that are covered by an SSL certificate WILL NOT BE VIEWABLE after this date!

Reveal Technology

A Reveal tab is a landing tab specially configured to encourage users to ‘Like’ your page. The tab is set as the default landing page for non-fans – this means that any non-fans coming to your page will be automatically sent to this Reveal tab.

Once the user has clicked like the page will refresh and they will be presented with new content – generally the new content is a free gift in the form of training material, discount codes, or some other useful and valuable (to the user) item.

Paid ads

Facebook advertising is a relatively quick and easy way to get some ‘Likes’ to your page. We set up and monitor your campaign leaving you to concentrate on the important stuff like interacting with your fans and producing great content to turn these fans into paying customers.

Viral Applications

Very few are aware of the business possibilities of using applications and even fewer have the knowledge and ability to create them.

We create custom applications that can help businesses spread their messages faster and further on Facebook.

These apps can be used to quickly build an email list, promote a special offer, promote an event or just to gather more fans to a page.

Additional Social Media Services

Our Facebook pages come with a custom Twitter stream and a custom Youtube channel for your business and we will also create custom promotional videos for your Youtube channel that can be embedded on your Facebook page.