Why Your Company Should Have a Facebook Page (Not a Profile)………..

The need to leverage social media for business is a no-brainer at this point, but a company’s effectiveness on Facebook can be hampered if the account isn’t set up properly.

Here are four reasons why your business should be set up as a Page, rather than a standard profile.

Facebook Says So

According to Facebook’s terms of service, “Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook.” If your business’ profile gets shut down by Facebook for violating this rule, your friends list will vanish with it, and Facebook will shut down your business profile if it is not set up as a “page”.

Pages Offer Analytics and Like Widgets

Two really crucial advantages of administering a Page are user analytics and easily-embeddable Like buttons and widgets.

With Facebook Insights, you can view all kinds of useful data about user activity on your page, including how many likes and comments you received each day, demographic break-downs and much more. This data can be really useful for understanding the characteristics of your customer base, and knowing which wall posts get the best reaction. This data is not available to individual profiles.

Another thing profiles don’t offer is the means to embed a Like button and other Open Graph plugins into your own site. This is a major setback for businesses hoping to grow their audience on Facebook.

Pages Can Have Unlimited Fans.

On Facebook, individual profiles are limited to 5,000 friends, whereas Pages can have unlimited fans (or likes). Once your profile friend list reaches 5,000, Facebook will encourage you to set up a Page, but doesn’t offer a tool to convert your profile to a Page. For that, you’re on your own.

Converting a Profile to a Page

If you already set up your business on Facebook with a profile, converting “friends” to “fans” is no simple process. The only way to switch them over is to politely ask the friends to do it themselves. This can be accomplished either via status update or by sending them all a message explaining the change and linking them to your new Page.

A third option would be to use Facebook’s formal Page recommendation tool to suggest that friends Like your new page. However, this option doesn’t give you the opportunity to type a custom message explaining why you’re asking them to do it.

When converting friends to fans, it’s important to clearly articulate to users why you’re asking them to like your business, because in their mind they’re already connected to it via Facebook and shouldn’t need to take any further action. You’ll need to include a concise and friendly note to your users explaining that you’re switching from a profile to a Page to better serve them and ask them to click the like button to stay connected.

Whichever approach you take, there’s no guarantee that each and every one of your friends will end up clicking on your Page’s like button, and repeatedly following up to remind them to do so can annoy users. However it is better to make the change now before Facebook shuts down your Business acting as a profile taking your friends with it. 

At some point, you’ll have to decide if you’re going to delete the original profile, keep it semi-hidden via privacy settings or just let it sit there. Maintaining two different presences on Facebook can be confusing for your users, and thanks to Facebook’s friend recommendation feature, your long-abandoned profile will continue to pop up when friends of friends log in, and the requests will keep rolling in.

Despite this the Facebook Page remains the best option for business and a FREE way to track your likers demographics, which as anyone looking at marketing will tell you, the first thing you want to know is your target audience.

Getting started on the conversion can be a little scary so Thumbtack Media has taken the hassle out of it. Find out more by contacting our Social Media Manager today.

If you are directing people to your website through any kind of marketing and you are not using landing pages, you might want to STOP EVERYTHING AND READ THIS!

What is a landing page?

The short answer is that a landing page is any page within your website that a visitor lands on as an entry point, including your home page.

Why are landing pages critical for website owners today?

There are two main reasons, but before we get intothem let’s touch on the variety of ways that a new visitor can arrive at any landing page within your website. Typically visitors come from word of mouth, word of mouse (email, Twitter, Facebook, blog post, etc), a link within another website, your usiness collateral print material (brochures, fliers, stationery, business cards, signage, livery, uniforms etc), traditional advertisements (TV, print, radio, outdoor, directories, etc), search engines, or paid online advertisement (Google Adwords, display ads, yahoo, online directories, Facebook etc).

The first reason for landing pages is heavily associated with the smart marketing methodology of making relevant and specific calls to action, tailored to the people who will see them. Without going deep into it, smart marketers know that creating relevant and targeted calls to action can improve your conversion rate and reduce your cost per sale.

The typical website

Imagine a salesperson standing outside her business, working hard starting dialogues with people about her various products as they pass by, but as soon as someone shows interest in a product she mentions, she directs them into the showroom and shuts the door behind them leaving them alone to find the product that interested them and work out what to do next, amongst the mass of options on display before them. Similarly for websites, businesses tend to direct all enquiries to a homepage that has been designed to deliver all the available information for their business, but not the specific information for whatever it was that got the attention of the prospect in the first place.

This may be fine if you only ever sell one specific product, to only one type of client, with only one call to action. However if like most businesses you don’t, and you have invested your time and money starting multiple, targeted and relevant dialogues with your prospects (through your marketing pieces and advertisements), to the point where they are interested and have landed on your website, doesn’t it make sense to continue that dialogue directly, with little or no distraction, and walk them through your specific steps to complete the sale for that product or service? This can really only be done by creating a focused landing page, or system that does just that for each and every unique dialogue that you open.

The second reason is equally important. Do you know the exact return on investment you are getting for the money you are spending on your advertising? For most businesses it can only be estimated from an overall period sales/leads/enquiries report. When you utilise unique landing pages for each and every marketing piece, you can track every online enquiry, sale, or visit, right back to the originating piece. It is as simple as creating a landing page and URL like this for a campaign: www.thumbtackmedia.com.au/landing-page-example and using Google Analytics intelligently in your website.

The good news is that Google Analytics is a free resource. The bad news is that your web team may not understand landing pages or Google Analytics, or if they do, may not have the practical experience to implement a system that will work for you.

There is a pretty good chance you have encountered a landing page style currently being used by growing numbers of internet marketers which is appallingly ugly. It is really saddening, though they do follow some basic principles that we believe in and practice too. Those are to make the page a single column and include all the answers to the typical questions that a prospect will ask, and to direct the visitor to one specific action, either buy, contact, subscribe to a list, or a variant of one of these. Here at Thumbtack Media we believe there is absolutely no reason for your website to be aesthetically unpleasant in order to make you more profitable. In other words, you can have beautiful and effective landing pages.

I hope this has got you thinking and I would love to receive any questions that arise and comments.

To me brainstorming new online business models is a great deal of fun. My team and I really enjoy the challenge of developing innovative ideas and understand the technical freedoms and limitations of the internet. Recently we have had the opportunity to work on some exciting and boundary pushing online strategies. In this post I will share with you some of the key questions we work through to develop an effective online strategy.

In most cases an online strategy is not an off the shelf solution. The internet gives us the freedom to market any combination of products and services and with the technological advancements that are constantly being developed it creates the opportunity to be innovative in the way that they are delivered. These innovations can create a superior user experience and generate a real consumer buzz.

To develop an effective online strategy my team and I like to spend a couple of hours with a client working through (and often brainstorming) what we believe to be some of the key questions. I have grouped them into bite size pieces below. Keep in mind that a lot of these questions are broad stroke and are intended to spark meaningful (and often lengthy) conversations and have natural follow up clarification questions. To keep it relatively simple they are not included here.

Knowing that there is an worthwhile opportunity

1. Who is your potential market or markets?
2. Are they on the internet?
3. Is there a proven demand for your offering?
4. Is demand rising or in decline?
5. Is there an undersupply, or an oversupply of what you are offering?

Branding your offering

1. Is this a new brand, a sub brand or a standalone offering?
2. Have you named it to position it correctly for your market?
3. Does your brand identity and design style appeal to your market? Does it convey the value of what you have priced it at?
4. Does your value proposition communicate the value of your offering clearly and concretely to your market?
5. Is your domain name easy to say, memorable and matches your brand name?

Selling your offering

1. Do you know what motivates your market to buy?
2. What is truly unique about your offering?
3. Why will your market buy from you?
4. Does your offering require short or long term education to be accepted by your market?
5. Does your offering require an introductory offer, or free trial period to make a sale?

Delivering on the sale

1. How do you intend to handle online payments?
2. Are you delivering locally, interstate, or globally?
3. Does your offering require warehousing and shipping? How do you intend to manage this?
4. Is your offering a onetime sale, or is there an opportunity for repeat sales, or a subscription sale?
5. Does your offering have natural complimentary offerings that you can also provide?
6. How do you intend to deliver your customer service?
7. How can you add value for your customers over and above your offering? (This question fits in next category too!)

Marketing & Usability – Getting more sales

1. Does your offering have an inherent referability? Is there one you can create?
2. Is it more important to constantly add new customers, or increase the number of transactions with your existing ones?
3. How scalable is your offering?
4. Do you know what else can be done on the internet with current technologies that may complement of advance your offering?
5. Do you intend to create a community for your clients?
6. Have you considered the useability and functionality of your website for your customers, both immediate and for the future evolutions?

Financing, Longevity & Exit

1. Is your offering immediately monetizable?
2. How many sales do you need to break even and then become profitable?
3. What does success look like for you?
4. Is your offering a short term or a long term business model?
5. What is short term and long term to you?
6. Do you have an exit strategy?
7. How do you intend to fund your venture (short and long term)?

I hope these questions help you with your online strategy. If you would like to dive deeper into any of these categories or questions, or get some professional help developing your online strategy, simply drop us an email now.

The days of the brochure-ware website is dead. Today, for the highest conversion rate, your website needs to have a specific objective (and ideally just the one).

In Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less he talks about a grocery store that alternated between allowing customers to sample 24 different flavours of jam & 6 different flavours of jam. With 24 flavours on offer, more people came to the table BUT only 10% as many people bought jam than when only 6 flavours were on offer. This demonstrates that when offered too many choices a human being is paralysed and simply chooses the default, which is to do nothing (your biggest competition!).

This doesn’t mean that your business needs to have only one product or service. It simply means that you need to rethink the one action you need your visitor to do on your website in order to get them into your sales pipeline. This will vary from business to business, but a great place to start is getting their permission to receive emails from you in exchange for something of value to them. Ideally this is something that doesn’t cost you anything to deliver (apart from the initial production of course) and can be automatic, like a free PDF report.

Now, if your website and what you offer is simply too complex, you may want to think about it differently. You can build specific landing pages for any traffic generating marketing campaign you run, that are built with the single focus and desired response. Today domain names are are so cheap that you can afford to purchase one for each campaign or offering. You will need to speak to your web partner about the best way to deal with these pages.

The beauty of the web is that you have the flexibility to test, measure and react in realtime. There are powerful statistics available for free like Google Analytics that show you what is working and what isn’t, so you can make any necessary changes as soon as you need.

With all this power and flexibility comes a challenge. Do you invest in a Content Management System (plus other design software) and training to understand and handle all the changes in-house? Do you commission your design and marketing partner to build a website and then pay them periodically to update it? Or do you work with a partner to lay down some long term strategy and get on a maintenance program with them where a fixed amount of time is regularly allocated (weekly, fortnightly) to review and make recommendations in light of what is working elsewhere on the Internet?

Apart from the comfort in knowing your website will be supported ongoing, what are some of the benefits of a maintenance program?

Price – With a maintenance program your prepaid fees may not be subject to the same minimum time charges as the time is deducted exactly as used. The rate is often discounted from the regular rate on account of the reduced costs that come with a contract.

Priority – as a contracted maintenance client your website should take priority over non-contracted update requests, as ultimately if you are not getting significant value out of your agreement you won’t renew it. Look at what turn around time you are promised for your requests.

Expert advice – A great web partner should take pride in knowing what is going on online and how any new technologies and strategies can work for your business. Look for a partner who make it their goal to recommend any new developments that will generate a return for your business.

I will end this with a Lee Iacocca quote that I often think about for branding and marketing, especially when it comes to the web.

If you are standing still – you are really sliding backwards.