Many Facebook page owners are disappointed with the results they are getting from their Facebook pages. Why? Sometimes because they think they’ll put up a page and their fan base will flock to the site, dynamically post content on their own and discuss it with their peers, all without much effort from the community manager (if there is one).

Hooey. This just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a vibrant community and are expanding it to Facebook.

So what do you do?

1. Quit broadcasting
   If you tell me everything I need to know through your Facebook page, and it reads like your email newsletter, then that’s all I’m going to do. Scan it, extract information and move on.
2. Quit marketing
   If I feel like you’re streaming ads to me and calling it interaction I’m going to tune you out. I may scan the headline in my newsfeed, but unless there’s a hook to something for me, I’m not going to read further. I want to be talked TO not AT.
3. Find out who I am
   Did you ever go look to see who someone was after they fanned your Facebook page? I’m guessing that less than 5%  of page owners, and maybe 50% of community managers would answer yes. What a missed opportunity to learn more about your market, what they like, and what value they might be able to add to your Facebook community!
4. Like me back
   Let’s say you sell photography equipment. Wouldn’t it be useful to you to know if your fans are photographers? What if you not only liked my Facebook page but shared my work on your page? What if you made a comment on my photo about how beautiful it was? I’d be grateful. I’d tell my friends. I might even buy something.
5. Give me something to do
   Photos and videos make us think, or laugh, encourage us to add a comment and share with our friends. Give me a poll (that isn’t a focus group question and I’ll give you my opinion.
6. Gimme respect
   Show enough respect to your fans to say please and thank you. To ask opinions and respect the answers. To feature case studies or examples of real people who have impacted you, your product or the world.
7. Rinse, repeat
   Doing all of the above once is not enough. You’ve got to do it over and over until it’s a part of your natural work-flow. The miracle happens when it’s no longer “work” but fun!

A client contacted me this morning, upset because her “reach” seems to be  seriously declining on Facebook. For some reason Facebook chooses Reach to be the metric graphed on the insights page, and it’s little understood, so here’s the long and the short of it.

 Here’s how Facebook defines reach
“The reach chart shows how many people have seen any content about your Page, and where applicable, whether these people were reached through an organic, paid or viral channel. People might see your content through more than one of these channels. As a result, the sum of your organic, paid and viral reach might be larger than your total Page reach.

• Organic reach is the number of unique people, fans or non-fans, who saw any content about your Page in their News Feed, Ticker or on your Page.
•  Paid reach is the number of unique people who saw an ad or Sponsored Story that pointed to your Page.
•  Viral reach is the number of unique people who saw this post from a story published by a friend.”

The problem is, the “reach” graph in your Facebook Insights combines all 3, Paid, Viral and Organic reach. So let’s say you run some “story” ads. The reach from those ads is included in your overall reach. When your ads reach your set funds limit or you quit running ads, your reach may drop significantly.

Another consideration is how the metrics of each individual fan affects the reach too
For example; if you have 10 fans who each have 100 friends then their reach is considerably lower than another page with 3 fans who each have 1,000 fans. So basically if you want to inflate your “reach” you just have to attract fans with big friends lists. Even if they don’t engage, your reach goes up. How bogus is that?

 Basically reach doesn’t have a whole lot to do with how effective you are at engaging your fans 
As you can see from the chart above, not only are they getting more engagement on this page, and the page reach (5,636,087) is increasing slightly AND the “people talking about this” is awesome, all the client sees at first glance is that downhill slump of the reach. To me it seems like a marketing ploy to put the reach as the one big graph in your “insights” tab and not the “people talking about” tab.

Why am I suspicious?
Isn’t it interesting that so many people are complaining about their reach dropping and Facebook coes out with the “Reach Generator”? This little tool is available only to “qualified accounts” who are then guaranteed that their content will be seen by 75% of their fan base. Not the paltry 16% that most pages get on a good day, but 75%!!

Wow. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get that?

This is from the Facebook doc on the reach generator. Download it here.

Unless you’re a big brand I’m guessing you can’t afford to pay to have this much showing, so you’d better think about how to really engage people.

Bottom line?
Quit worrying about reach and worry instead about engagement. I’ll be writing a post about how to get real engagement from your fan base later this week, so stay tuned for that, but really, forget about reach. It means very little.

Part of what I do as a social media coach is help businesses large and small manage their facebook pages.Our social media management team is frequently asked to go to a client’s event and help live-tweet, take photos or video and post them live during the event to share with their fans. Most of us have iPhones, so we get good pictures, but we can’t upload in batches to a Facebook page from the phone.

Frankly, Facebook’s iPhone app simply sucks at photo management. We can only upload images one by one, which is seriously painful when you’ve got 20-30 images to upload. Besides, it’s just not good practice to flood your Facebook page with too many photos at once. No matter how great the event is, people just don’t want to see them all in their news feed if they’re not in them. Better to wait until you can create an album and then post.

Until now, the only option was to download images to a laptop during the event and frantically upload them to Facebook through the website so you could get back and take more. Ugh. Sometimes the photos don’t get up for days if the client doesn’t have time to deal with it after the event. Ah, but no more. Weaver Mobile has built on their first iPhone app, PhotoBox! to offer a version that allows you to create n

Manage Facebook photos from your iPhone
You can create new albums on Facebook from your iPhone and upload the whole batch at once to Facebook. With PhotoBox! Pro, you can upload to your profile or any page you manage. You can also batch download entire albums and archive them on the spot, edit and re-upload too.

Did I mention editing?
Both versions of the PhotoBox! app offer a nice set of filters you can apply to your Facebook photos including cropping rotation and annotation. The filters are intuitive to use and save you from having to edit them later.

Browse liked pages
The “My Likes” tab now allows you to view all of the photos the pages you’ve liked have uploaded. View them on your iPhone and download the ones you want to save to a folder on your phone, your iPhone album, or a private album on Facebook with a collection of all the photos you’ve liked through PhotoBox!. Download is super-fast and you can view several thousand images, pick the ones you like and download with a click.

Recent Feed
Another feature I like is the ability to view all the images posted recently in my news feed. I have quite a few friends and things fly by in the news feed. Being a visual kind of girl it’s fun to scan the recent uploads from my friends, and then I can save them to a private “liked photos” album on Facebook to view them later, or download them.

Un tagging
With all the uproar in the last few weeks about employers viewing Facebook pages and demanding passwords, it’s good to be able to view all the photos you are tagged in and un tag them easily. Both PhotoBox! apps allow you to easily scan them all on one tab and un-tag with a click.

Weaver Mobile has two great apps here, and I’m not saying that just because they’re a client. I’m thrilled  they are listening to what us page admins really want to see in a Facebook photo management app. This is an app built for people who use Facebook a lot, take lots of photos on their iPhones, and want to work efficiently in the field.

Download the apps and give them a spin. PhotoBox! and PhotoBox! Pro are both available in the iTunes store (sorry, no Android yet, but soon!) Then come back and let me know what you thought!

A recent AP Newswire story tells the tale of one Justin Bassett who was asked by a hiring manager for his user name on Facebook. When she opened the site and saw that his profile was private, she asked him for his password. Bassett refused and withdrew his application, stating that he didn’t want to work for a company that would ask for such personal information.

Apparently this is all too common. Simply doing a search for a social media mention or profile isn’t enough, some companies want to look into your personal posts as well. Even if they don’t ask for your password you can bet an HR person will have googled you and viewed your profiles on Linkedin,Twitter, Facebook and Google+ at the very least. Sometimes they require you to log in during your interview so they can see your profile and be sure you aren’t a hazard to the corporate reputation or a spy for competitors.

Some companies are a bit sneakier than others. Sears for example “allows” job applicants to log into their jobs page with Facebook, Myspace or Linkedin, just to make it convenient for you. Isn’t that nice?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Privacy online is a myth. If you want something to be private, don’t put it online in the first place.

The problem with that model is; you aren’t the only one who might be posting information about you online. Maybe it’s a mention of a great weekend away on a blog, photos on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr, a video on youtube of you being silly. All of these things can easily be taken out of context if it suits the goals of the viewer.

So what to do?

Fake profiles have been used to harass and defame the real account holder many, many times. Check for identity theft on a regular basis. You can even sign up for regular monitoring from sites like Reputation.com

Search for yourself, not just on Google but on Bing and popular social sites. Not everyone uses the most popular sites and there may be information buried out there.

Keep your profiles active and up to date. You want people to find YOU when they do a search, not some lame broken profile or a fake one set up to mock you.

Untag photos on Facebook. Scan tags on popular sites frequently to see what has been tagged with your name.

Download Outspoken Media’s Online Reputation Management Guide for more tips and tricks to keep your reputation squeaky clean.

Personally i think it’s reprehensible for a potential employer to ask for your password or even to ask you to log into a social profile in their presence. But that’s why I am a happily self-employed entrepreneur!

We’ve mostly gotten comfy with the changes to our personal pages when Facebook went to the timeline model, but trust me, that was nothing compared to the changes you’re going to see for business. Let’s face it, the tab system with Pages never really worked, and it was hard to keep those really important posts at the top of your page for long. All that is changing.

I don’t begin to have enough room to do this in a blog post, so I’ve got a handy-dandy free e-book on Facebook Timelines for you to download that will give you lots of details, specific rules to know and ideas about how to make your Facebook timeline really pop.Here are a few highlights for you to think about.

Cover photos

These are what everybody already knows except a bit bigger (850X3You’ve got them on your personal profiles already right? Many marketers have been practically drooling over all that potential ad space too, but Facebook is having none of that.

Cover photos may not contain:

• Calls to action
• Discount offers
• Contact information
• References to “Like” or “Share” your page.

Here’ re the rules on Facebook on covers, and while you are there read the Facebook page terms too. Best to avoid surprises.

Tabs

Applications and custom pages used to live in the “tabs” on the side of your page. It turns out nobody ever went there and now they will be prioritized and even give a little glam with buttons at the top of the page. These can be re-ordered to show what is really important to you. When you click on a tab you’ll have much more real estate to work with too, no more cramming content into a tiny window!

Pinning news

The ability to float a news story or milestone to the top of your page is big. You can “highlight” a post and it floats at the top of your page for as long as a week.

The timeline

The timeline has a whole new meaning for businesses and especially for nonprofits. Here you can tell your story, highlight key events and even make some of those milestones stand out by making them show across the whole page. I love what pages like Doctors Without Borders and Ford did with their timelines to tell a compelling story. Go take a look and see how you could use these ideas to tell your story.








Then come back here and get the Facebook Timeline For Business e-book. It’s packed with information including specific details on dimensions and the rules of the new road on Facebook!

Yes, it’s all hallow’s eve, and while the kiddies are thinking about candy and costumes and spooky houses they’ll visit tonight, business people have a different idea of what’s truly scary. Especially PR and marketing professionals who are watching social media speed up the reaction time of their customers to light speed. How can we keep up? For your reading pleasure a few horror stories and near misses from businesses around the world. There is a lesson in every single one, so pay attention!

Citibank
Social Media is no new medium to Frank Eliason, SVP for Citibank, so when Occupy Wall St protesters heard that Citibank staff had called 911 when protesters entered a branch in New York and the word went out on multiple social media channels that people were being arrested, he didn’t sit on his hands hoping it would all blow over. He didn’t waste any time gathering as much data and content as he could so people could get a better picture.

Sure, there was the video of protesters being arrested, prevented from leaving the building, but there was also video from inside the building during the protest which basically showed the protesters disrupting business, not canceling accounts, but asking for support from the staff.

Now Frank was on his way to speak at PivotCom, where he could have expected a lot of tough questions about leaving his office at a critical time to attend a conference. He opened his talk with the video of the arrests followed by the video of what was going on inside which prompted the staff to call 911.

The lesson?
By doing this, Frank reached thousands of people through Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and several blogs, possibly many more than the Occupy Wall St folks simply because of his own network combined with the powerful networks who were at Pivotcom. Basically leveraging social media to show the whole story and showing at the same time that transparency is ALWAYS best.

Ragu
Ragu sauces thought they could take a poke at Dads’ apparent ineptitude at cooking dinner for the kids fairly safely, and many years ago mebbe so, but with today’s social media savvy dads, many of whom make the choice stay at home to care for the family and/or work at home– it just wasn’t so smart to launch their “Dad Cooks Dinner” video channel. Needless to say Dads didn’t think it was funny.

Then somebody at Ragu got the bright idea of reaching out to some Dads on Twitter, notably CC Chapman, a blogger and social media celeb who is also known as a “Digital Dad”.

CC went on a pretty good rant on the subject and of course other social media people picked up the flag and ran with it, although not all of them took his side in the discussion, including the mommy bloggers who gave their opinions in the video. In fact I brought it up in a panel on Social media for brands at OMMA Social in San Francisco last week.

In the end CC decided to make his own sauce, showing that yes, Dads CAN cook too. He even offered a little social media advice for Ragu, just in case they were paying attention. It’s good advice too. Click the link and go read it. It doesn’t look like Ragu did though.

What did Ragu do? Eventually they called CC to talk to him, but their initial reaction was to stick their head in the sand and ignore it. The videos are still up, showing they either decided to ignore the whole mess, or they really just don’t care, but not before it got a little out of hand.

The lesson?
After being dissected in social media circles for weeks, in the end Ragu leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouths. Why? Because they didn’t do their homework and they didn’t engage their target market in a genuine way. Rather than offering the videos up as a sauce in your face slap, they might have posted a contest that pitted both Moms and Dads against each other for the most innovative recipes and put a positive spin on Dads in the kitchen instead. They could have reached out to Dads and asked them for their secret ways to use the sauce to spice up meals instead of pitting Mommy bloggers against Daddy bloggers. Lastly they should have researched who they were reaching out to sop they would have a clue as to how it would be received.

Chapstick
As you’ve seen above not all of these social media nightmares are huge worldwide disasters, and if responded to in some way that engages the people involved things can settle down and people can be reasonable. But if you don’t talk to them, or try to muffle their voices it’s going to get ugly. Take Chapstick for example. They posted a pretty silly add of a woman up-ended over her couch, hair flying, apparently looking for her long-lost tube of Chapstick on their Facebook page above the catchy title “Where do lost Chapsticks go?”. Apparently the image needed to be explained, and they wanted to invite people to share their thoughts on this riveting topic on their Facebook page.

OK, silly image right? No big deal right? Well, some people posted comments on the Facebook page complaining about the ad and blogger Margot Magowan didn’t think it was funny. She blogged about it and then posted on the wall of the Chapstick Facebook page. Chapstick admins deleted the comment. Others posted their thoughts on the subject and Chapstick deleted those too. Then they took down the ad and replaced the picture of the girl with one of some tubes of Chapstick. Problem solved right? Oh no, this opened a Pandora’s box of complaints and user launched “Butt seriously, Chapstick” a page on Facebook all about the whole mess where people could complain to their heart’s content. Golly, we can hardly wait to see response to the new campaign featuring Australia’s top model with the tag line “Never let your lips go naked”….

Had they not pulled the comments down it might have all blown over with a simple heart felt apology for any offense.

The lesson?
Seriously. It wasn’t the ad itself, it was how it was handled. Chapstick had a great opportunity here to reach out to the consumer and say something like “Gee, we’re sorry you don’t like the ad, we didn’t mean any harm”. and call it a day. They could have made a series of images with people in equally silly situations searching desperately for lost tubes in odd places. Really, their only mistake was trying to cover it up by deleting comments. Negative comments are an opportunity to learn from your users and to let them know you are listening. To correct a negative assumption.

This time the changes at Facebook are really big. Graphically pleasing perhaps, but also very noisy and cluttered with duplicate information and graphics. Good thing we’ve all got broadband these days isn’t it or it would take forever to load Facebook’s Timeline. I did a quick video overview of what is in the new Facebook profile and a few thoughts on how we might use it (or not). Overall it’s very attractive and once we get used to the new look I think people are going to like it. As usual though there is going to be an adoption period and that can be tough, especially for people who were perfectly happy with the old look!

Gone are the tabs we are used to and your information is distributed on the page instead. Oddly enough the same information is accessible in several places, especially photos friends and your info section. For example if you update your profile or cover image then it shows in the header section as well as lower in your timeline and again in the photos section. Now that everything is on the home page it gets pretty noisy. Seems a little redundant to me but who knows, maybe it’s only in the beta? Or maybe it’s so you can pick your favorite view and hide the rest? Still, the photo and frinds browsers are much easier to navigate and visually engaging. It’s possible to hide photos from others by just clicking an X to hide the image.

I think business people will quickly see that the new “cover” graphic can be a whole lot more than a picture of the family trip to the Rockies, it’s ready to tell the world all about your business like a big ol’ billboard. Please resist this temptation lest all your friends shun you.

Business will also see the value of running social ads based on the piles and piles of demographic and personal information they’ll be collecting and the filtering they’ll be able to do to target social ads to you, your friends and the friends of your friends’ friends. This will be great for businesses wanting to leverage the social graph, but could soon become annoying for users.

Facebook is showing off a brand new look and as usual everybody’s in a snit about it. Honestly, it amazes me that they seem to do their re-designs in a total vacuum. Any web developer knows the first rule of web design is to listen to what the client wants, collect their feedback and do a needs assessment. That’s even more true in a social network whose users are often less web savvy and thrown by major UI changes as well as concerned about privacy issues.

On Twitter today Myspace is trending, not because it’s about Myspace but because people are suggesting Facebook is doomed to the same fate as Myspace. People are migrating to Google plus now that it’s open and even though that interface just got a whole slew of new features it’s still got a long way to go to be useable for Facebook’s typical user base.

Personally I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot again and it’s a mistake for Facebook to chase Google Plus. Trying to do too much has been the downfall of many a platform. Facebook should focus on it’s strengths and what it’s user base wants. Both networks have their place and can easily exist together, each seeing more use from a particular user base. But that’s my take.

Here are just a few quotes from my Facebook page, sans names to protect the innocent:

• Dear FaceBook: Here’s a story you might like: WHAT THE #@! are you doing????????
• All these new features being rolled out before f8 seem to be pretty intuitive, but its a li’l much all at once!
• Okay FB, I don’t need your “help” with categorizing news feeds and creating lists. Anyone else find this not so helpful?
• WOW, OMG Poking is, like, SO MUCH EASIER NOW! I HEART YOU FAECBUK!!!!!
• Which annoys you more, the news feed or the ticker?
• This outrage happens every time anything new is introduced on facebook. I’m now just waiting for all the “NOTICE: Facebook is sharing your most secret information with everyone on earth including OJ Simpson and space aliens unless you change this one obscure setting
• I mean, at least give it a chance. It’s been all of what? Maybe 9 hours for many… try it out before you start whining JUST because it’s a “change”.

You may know that Facebook is not my favorite network, but still it serves a purpose for me and for my clients. It’s also still a great place for close friends and families to be in touch, though not with the privacy one might have hoped for. Now the changes have people confused again, and while I’m happy to answer questions it would be a lot easier if Facebook thought things out a bit better and made the UI intuitive.

Here’s a very happy little video that explains it all.

Facebook news feed changes

The most recent posts are no longer at the top of your news feed. Facebook chooses top stories for you.Top stories are based on how active people are on the story (remember the importance of edge rank!). If a lot of your friends have shared, commented or liked a story, or if you are particularly close to theperson, then it’s a top story for you.

If you don’t agree with Facebook’s choices you can demote a story by clicking the arrow in the upper right corner of the story to “unmark” that story. If you do that often enough it’s assumed you don’t want stories from that person or page anymore and you won’t see them as often in your news feed.

If you want to add that person or page back to your news stream, go to your home page, hover your cursor over the left side of the left hand news feed menu and you’ll get a pop up list of people, apps, pages and groups you’ve hidden and you can select the ones to start showing again.

If you want to hide an application or a type of post (games, quizzes etc.) click the drop down menu in the top right corner and choose “hide all or “unsubscribe” to hide everything from that person, “hide story” to hide just that story and of course you can still “report spam” here too.

confused about the changes? Here’s a link to explain the news feed changes on Facebook.

The Ticker

On the right hand side of your page you’ll see the news ticker. This is where you will see the real time comings and goings of your friends. You’ll see images, videos, stories, tags and friendings. You can control what is seen in the ticker by un subscribing from a person’s feed, selecting most important or Most Updates. If you really HATE THE TICKER here’s how to get rid of it. This is a joke actually, for now you’re stuck with it, but I thought their examples were great.

Lists

Very much like Google Plus circles, you can now filter your news feed by lists. Isn’t it nice that Facebook is now creating your lists for you based on your interests with the new “smart lists“? (yes, I’m being facetious) Click the name of a list and see just the posts from the people on that list.

Email alerts

Starting Sept 30 Pages won’t be able to email all of their fans but even better you’ll be seeing fewer email alerts from your friends

I know, sounds crazy right? If you’ve head me speak on social media you’ve heard me say that social media is not about numbers but about quality. This is particularly true on Facebook. Why? Because Facebook has a ranking system called “EdgeRank”. (check your Edgerank  here) To put it simply Facebook looks at how many friends you have for your Facebook page, how many times your friends have interacted with your posts (share, liked, commented), The algorithm runs and checks to see if there is an affinity between you and each fan.

Facebook is looking to see if you have common interests and the quality of those interests, and it does this with an algorithm. For example has this fan responded on your page before? Have you commented on something they posted? Have you exchanged posts only once or twice in two years? Are the topics you talk about on your page showing up in the fan’s daily activities? Are friends of the fan interacting with it?

Flatly stated, if nobody shares, comments or likes your posts, Facebook isn’t going to put it in their news feeds because you’re not interesting to them. Or at least they haven’t demonstrated any interest.

What does that have to do with numbers?
Facebook also looks to see how many fans you have and how many are interacting to come up with a ratio of interaction. The higher the ration there better your ranking and the more likely you will show up in people’s news feeds. Low ranking? You could be the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Nobody will hear you.

So, for the sake of discussion let’s say you have two Facebook pages.

Page one talks about reptile raising
Posts are about housing, feeding and caring for snakes, lizards etc. This page has 1,000 fans and 500 “interactions” per day.

Page two is about Wine
Posts are about enjoying fine wines, comparing regions, tasting wines and visiting wineries. This page has 10,000 fans and 500 “interactions” per day.

Which page would you say is the most popular?
If you guessed the wine page wrongo, back to square one you go! Those lizards are getting a 50% interaction rate while the wine page is at a lousy 5%!

If you fan both pages and so do your friends you will likely see a lot more posts about snakes than Cabernet in your news feed. In fact, without a real effort to go view the wine page often it may seem like it’s disappeared altogether.

What to do?
Quit focusing on getting more fans and start getting deeper engagement so your posts start showing up in people’s news feeds. THEn, and only then will you grow a valuable fan base on Facebook.

Encourage interaction
Whatever your page is about, find ways to encourage people to comment and share your posts and their own posts on your page. Be polarizing. Start lively discussions.

Post pictures, videos and jokes
I know, I know, but people love this stuff. Make sure there’s real content there too, but the occasional cat doing the macarena is going to get your page shared. Live with it or come up with something equally intriguing. Maybe an infographic?

Be timely
If we already read it on everybody else’s page what do we need you for? Keep it fresh and be the go-to person for the latest in your field. Toss in a dose of politics or breaking local and world news to get things shared.

Good content
Bottom line figure out what your page is about and make sure you stay on track with that. Use the hints above but add your own flavor so it suits the goals of the page.

Feature users
Face it, we all love a good stroke now and then. Find out what interests your fans and talk back to them. Show off their blogs and products, help them grow their pages and they’ll help you grow yours.

This post is taken from my member site, the Facebook Success Kit. Learn more about using Facebook, my best tips and tricks and how to build your own Facebook pages for your business for one low annual fee.

Google just introduced their “plus 1” button. It hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but you’ll probably see it soon. If you’re in a big hurry you can sign into Google’s Experimental Labs and add this experiment to your services. Here’s a video description of how it works (from Google’s point of view.)

So who sees your +1′s? People in your Google chat or Gmail lists, stored in Google Contacts or who you are following in Google Reader or Buzz. Learn more about managing your social connections and view your existing connections in Google’s help section.

It seems that Google is taking on the Facebook like, and +1 buttons will start showing up on web sites so you can like a web site and have it show up in your like stream too. Your +1′s will be visible to anyone in the lists above, or , if you set your +1 settings to public, anyone can see what pages you’ve clicked the +1 button on by just visiting your Google profile.

So what’s the downside here? Just like Facebook “Likes”, advertisers can also access this information and form an idea of who you are, where you go online and what you prefer to fine tune ads for you. Is this a bad thing? Is it going to stir up another privacy debate?

Likely so…

What do you think?