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First steps in planning your Facebook campaign.

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Social Media in general and Facebook in particular is one of the hottest topics in Internet Marketing. The technology is brand new, yet is based on “old fashioned” concepts. First and foremost you must determine your goals. “Increasing your fans” is not a goal, it’s an important first step but you must decide how you will engage your fans and to what end. Below are some basic topics to consider when setting up your Facebook page for your business.

1. Determine your goals, example “Facebook will be used to promote “special” discounts”

2. Decide your market, Facebook with its laser focus is very effective in this respect

3. Decide how much time you have to spend on social media, to be effective a minimum of weekly posting is required

4. Decide who will manage your Facebook page, perhaps the youngest member of your team

5. Gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, example run a special promotion on your Facebook page and track sales

Small Business Saturday – support your local merchants

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American Express is running a great campaign for local merchants that accept American Express, called Small Business Saturday.

First there was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday. Now, there’s the 2nd annual Small Business Saturday, the day people support small businesses. Pledge to Shop Small on Nov 26th. If millions of Americans shop small, it will be huge.

Shoppers can register online and get a $25 credit. Local Businesses that accept AMEX are automatically included in their online list of stores.

However, there’s a free Facebook marketing kit available at http://www.facebook.com/shopsmall

Kit includes a free in-store signage and e-marketing materials. Plus you can signup for a $100 credit for Facebook ads.

Using Google Display Network to increase brand awareness.

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Once the step child of Google, the Google Display Network (GDN) is a fantastic opportunity to considerably increase your online brand awareness, engage your potential customers, and ultimately increase sales of your product and or services.

Google (2010) states that users spend around 5% of time searching and 47% of their time reading web content. The presence of your ads on these pages creates a strong visual message increases, or in some cases, can create brand awareness and boost leads to sales regardless of the viewers position in the buying cycle.

Google even has Display Ad Builder, an online site that helps create your ads. There are some limitations, but it can help you start a simple branding campaign for your company.

What is Facebook's Edgerank ?

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The average Facebook user 130 “friends” and follows plenty of Facebook pages. If every single action of your friend showed up on your Facebook you you would be totally overwhelmed. In order to optimize your Facebook experiences, a formula called Facebook EdgeRank was created.

Facebook EdgeRank decides what’s most important to display on your page. If Facebook EdgeRank decides it’s not important, then it gets dropped off the Feed – very bad news for a business owner who isn’t getting much Facebook interaction from fans and wants his or her brand to stay in the forefront of people’s minds.

There are three basic components to the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm: Affinity, weight, and time decay.

“Affinity” refers to the user’s relationship with the item’s creator. For example, if you have an old acquaintance whose Facebook profile you haven’t visited in two years, they would have a very low affinity ranking. If you have a significant other whose profile you visit every day, they would have a very high affinity ranking. This is good for Facebook EdgeRank.

“Weight” combines what the item is and how it’s being interacted with. As for the “what,” videos, photos, and links are generally considered to have the highest weight. In other words, if a fan views a video on your page, this will score far more points in Facebook EdgeRank than if they simply visit your page.

The other component to Facebook EdgeRank is how the item is being interacted with. A “Like,” for example, gets less weight than a comment.

“Time decay” refers to how recent the item is. Old news drops out of the news feed, so newer items are more likely to appear on a feed than older items.

So now take a look at your page and you will notice that most of the posts are from your “active” friends.

Webmaster Tools is a must

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Webmaster tools is yet another great free program from Google. Think of it has a Google check up for your site. Google Webmaster Tools address provides support for those looking to diagnose errors, improve a site’s visibility and declare preferences on how to handle web site listings. It can point on key pages that are not indexed, slow loading pages and much more. If even can warn you if you are using an outdated copy of WordPress. Below is an example of a message that would appear in your account if your version was too old.

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://YourDomain.com/,

Your site appears to be running an older version of WordPress. Google recommends that you update to the latest release. Older or unpatched software may be vulnerable to hacking or malware that can hurt your users. To download the latest release, visit the WordPress download page.

If you have any additional questions about why you are receiving this message, Google has provided more background information in a blog post about this subject.

Best wishes,

Google Search Quality Team