Facebook is becoming more and more powerful everyday and everyone wants to become a part of it.  Here are 3 quick ways to promote your page and build up your company’s fan base.

Step 1 – Invite people from your Facebook friends list. Do you have your personal friends and professional colleagues segmented into lists on your Facebook home page? You can invite these lists as groups to your Facebook fan page rather than sending individual invites. This is the easiest and fastest way to jump-start your fan base. When you click “Suggest to Friends” on your fan page, start typing in the name of your friends list in the filtered friends section; for example, “Social Media Experts.” This will automatically send an invitation to your Facebook fan page to all of your colleagues listed in that category.

It’s possible that it may take a while before you start seeing those known faces pop up in your fan page, because people are busy. If is really crucial for a particular person to become a fan, you can also send them an individual invite. As you add more people to your network, remember to go back to your same lists and send the invite to the new people you have added. The names of those who have already been invited will be “grayed out” and the invite will only be sent to your new contacts.

Step 2 - Find People with Facebook Search.

The updated Facebook Search feature (see the Search bar at the top of Facebook) gives you a view into conversations of your friends and status updates that may even show you who may be looking for the services you offer.

There is even an option to search “Posts by Everyone,” which gives you a glimpse into conversations of people who may not be connected to you. After entering a search term, there will be a display, “Posts By Everyone.” This allows you to view conversations from others who aren’t in your friend lists. Then you can start up a direct conversation with them, telling them what you do and how you may be able to help them and let them know about your Facebook page.

Step 3 - Attract People With Facebook Social Ads

Social Ads provide advertisements alongside your Facebook sidebar which show related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like “Mike is now a fan of Mashable”. Would you like to become a fan too?” It is possible to tailor ads to your friends and their interests, which makes it more appealing for them to take action because you are interested as well.

This strategy requires a small budget, but can be effective in finding your target market. It is very important to do a Facebook search with specific keywords in your particular niche to find out if it’s being talked about on Facebook.

If you click on “Promote with an Ad” on your fan page, you can start a campaign.  You can set a daily spending limit of $10, $25, or other appropriate amount. Use your keywords to identify your prospects. If they use those words in their profile, possibly in a job description they could come up in your fan page.

It’s possible to run your Facebook ads for only 4 to 5 days with a $25 per day budget. Then stop the ad for a few weeks and run the same ad again a few weeks later. This allows your fan page to grow in spurts. This can be effective in growing fan bases without spending a lot of money at once.

These are just three easy and quick ways to build up your fan base.  Some require less effort and some require a little more but overall the more faces seeing your business page the better.

Are you interested in starting your own blog?
If you are, there are a couple of things that you will need to consider.
Do you want to set up your blog as a user host platform or on a developer hosted platform? A lot of people tend to choose developer hosted platforms, since all they require is a set up of an account and no installation is required from the part of the user. If you decide to go for a user host platform, you will need to install your blog, which in many cases gives you freedom to change the blog’s style more easily and faster. Another important factor that user host platform blogging software provides is the implementation of SEO in the template of the site; usually developer host sites have a restriction when it comes to making the site template.

A question that might help you decide which blog platform to choose is: do you currently host a site? If you do, you can place blogging software in your current hosting server, meaning you will use a user host platform. This will allow you to keep all of your web content in the same location, which allows the indexing of your site and blog to be to the same domain and not two separate domains, allowing a better SEO implementation toward your main site.
If you decide to place your blog in the same hosting server, you should do a little research if you don’t already know about the type of server that you are using. Is it a Windows server or Linux? If it’s a Windows server you can use Engine.net, DotNetNuke or Subtext if using .Net. If you currently use PHP on the server you have a lot more options to choose from. If you are using a Linux based server, you need to check what has been installed on your server. Do you have PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, or other languages or platforms installed in the hosting server? After having that information you can begin looking for the right blogging software for your blog.
If you do not currently host a site, you might decide to use a developer hosted platform, such as Blogger, wordpress (developer hosted version), or typepad. If you would like to use a user hosted platform, a lot of blog sites offer different hosting services. 

Another question that you need to have in mind is: Are you going to add widgets to your blog? If you are, you will need to conduct research on what kind of widgets you would like to add. Depending on the blogging software that you choose, the widgets will either be free or you will need to pay a fee for them. In the case of free open source software blogs, the widgets are usually free and there are more available. It is a good idea to keep in mind that there are widgets available for SEO implementation and these widgets should be a priority when creating a blog.

After gathering all the information needed and doing research on the widgets you would like, you can make the decision of which blogging software or sites is best for setting up your blog and customize it.

There used to be a time that if a consumer had a complaint with a company, they would write a letter or make a phone call. If the issue wasn’t resolved a consumer would probably complain to family and friends and discontinue any business that they had with the company. In rare cases, some consumers went as far as getting a lawyer or asking a TV station to look into their story. This might cause a company to lose a little business, but normally it didn’t cause a major dent in productivity. However, Social Media is changing the way the game is played. This means businesses have to pay attention and respond quickly; otherwise, they could get unwanted publicity.

Consumers are now using Social Media to make their voices heard. Take the Bank of America incident that happened recently. According to an article on CNNMoney.com, Ann Minch posted a video on YouTube after she claims her credit card interest rate shot up to 30%. She did attempt to work things out with the bank before posting her YouTube video. The bank responded, after getting much unwanted attention, and according to the article, “Jeff Crawford, the bank’s senior vice president of existing customer credit services, called Ann to discuss her concerns.” They reached an agreement. In this situation, it appears that Bank of America’s slow response caused them to get unwanted publicity. If they had acted quickly when the complaint first surfaced,   fewer people would know about Ann Minch and her ordeal with Bank of America.

On the other hand, when businesses act quickly to resolve a consumer’s complaint, the results can be win/win. Recently, one of my colleagues was able to get results from Disney via LinkedIn. My colleague visits Disney frequently with her family. As a frequent/returning guest Disney acknowledges this on future visits by greeting you by last name in restaurants and hotels on property.  For example: Hello Smith family and welcome to breakfast. However, Disney kept calling her family by the wrong name. She had updated her information with Disney before, but apparently Disney didn’t make the change. She didn’t rant and rave, instead she called to get the change made, but to no avail. Then she decided to go to LinkedIn, where she found the profile of a top Disney marketing executive, and sent that person an e-mail explaining the situation. In a few days, she was contacted, apologized to and told that the situation would be rectified. Disney acted quickly to solve the issue and everybody came away happy.

Many consumers are using social media to make their voices heard. Think about it, in a matter of minutes a consumer can e-mail a top executive on LinkedIn, post a video on YouTube and tweet on Twitter for the entire world to see, about an issue they had with your business. Companies need to pay attention when a consumer reaches out to them concerning a matter they want to get resolved. Good customer service and an effective response can save a company from having to spend time and money on damage control later on.

Facebook has made several updates to their advertising platform over the past year in order to make their ads more appealing to users. These ads, called Engagement Ads, provide more features, like the option to “Become a Fan”.

Now they are offering a new option, “Friends of Connections”, which will let companies target their ads to users whose friends are fans of your page.  Setting up the option requires just one additional step:

While the ability to see this feature in the ad is not new, the option for page owners to target just those friends of friends is. The thought behind the “Friends of Connections” targeting is that whatever one friend finds important on Facebook, their friends will as well. Not groundbreaking by any means, but definitely a great way to stand apart from other ads that are displayed to the user. This is an easy way to try and get more fans to your page directly from Facebook itself. In addition, because you are targeting your audience, you can help to increase the quality of traffic to you site from you Facebook campaigns.
 

People on the web publish content in many different ways that include using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social channels. But if you have ever searched on Google to find a blog your friend published, you most likely wouldn’t find it in the top search results. Google is changing all of that by introducing Google Social Search on Google Labs.

Google Social Search is designed to help you find more relevant public content from your social network in one place. In Social Search, Google will find personalized results from your friends or contacts and highlight them at the bottom of your search page.

No private information will be seen, as Google will only show information that is published publicly on the web. All the information in Social Search can be found elsewhere, however Google is putting all of the content together in a single place to make your results more relevant and personalized.

Google builds a social circle of your friends, connections and contacts using the links from your public Google profile, such as people you are following on Twitter or other social media channels. This new feature will also use your connections from Gmail; however you will need to be signed into your Google account because the results are specific to you. Your social search results will show up at the bottom of the page under “Results from people in your social circle.”

Social Search will make search results more relevant and personalized for you specifically. Next time you do a search on Google, be sure to see what your social network has published about the topic.

With the boom of users participating in the social media channel, Facebook, many advertisers have begun to realize the value of advertising within social media networks.  Facebook allows advertisers to specifically target their exact demographic based on sex, age, location and interests.  However, many advertisers participating within the Facebook network are not actually indicating a precise demographic, and are causing their ads to be displayed throughout the entire site.  Targeting just a specific age group or gender may not be enough to generate brand awareness and sales.

By designating particular groups you may be able to capture a more relevant sector of users that are more inclined to purchase your product.  It is important think of category variations in order to further segment the audience.  For example, if a concert promoter is trying to gain publicity for an upcoming show, selecting ‘music’ as an interest within their profiles, is going to reach too broad of an interest base.  Instead, try choosing musical artists or bands that closely resemble the concert’s music genre as interest groups.  Not only will you be getting a specific demographic, but you know that those users will be more likely to attend the show.

There is an incredible value in reaching an audience through social media networks, but remember that not everyone thinks the same or has similar interests.  Even with the evolution of social media, in the short time of its existence much has changed, including the user base.  This makes targeting the appropriate visitor very important, and by doing so, you spend your advertising dollars wisely.

If you’re an avid Twitter user, the announcement of Twitter Lists is probably old news.  If you are not, then you may find this post helpful to manage the many different types of people or companies that you follow on Twitter.

In mid October, Twitter announced a new feature called Twitter Lists.  Lists are basically a way for users to organize those who they follow into groups, referred to as lists. Any Twitter user can create a list and by default these lists are public but can also be made private.  Lists can be created around any subject or theme and are viewable on the page of the user who created the list.  You can also follow others’ lists to see what is being discussed about a particular topic. Following lists enables you to easily find users that you can connect with and see the information discussed about that topic.  Just as you can follow others’ lists, other Twitter users can follow your lists as well if they are public.

Creating lists is easy.  Simply log into Twitter and look toward the right-hand side of your homepage.  You will see a link to create a new list. Once a list is created it can be easily shared, as each list has a unique URL.

There are a few ways to add users to lists however, at this time there does not appear to be a way to add multiple users to a list.  Instead, you have to do this one by one. You can add users to a list just about anywhere that profiles are listed. Just look for the list button next to the profile. When clicked, it will show the lists that you’ve created and allow you to add them to your list of choice. You can also add users to a list when viewing their page.

So where do you go to find lists that might interest you to follow? You can browse lists created by another Twitter user by viewing their profile and browsing through all of the lists that they’ve created.  Another place to look is http://listorious.com/, a site that offers many different lists available to follow. You can also add your list to this site too.

One of the most interesting concepts today is the inclusion of real-time web results. Web indexes from search engines update at astounding rates. It normally takes quite a long time to populate results from the entire web and to index results for searchers; but getting “real-time” results has been challenging. The immediacy of real-time data has been created primarily by Twitter.

The explosive popularity of Twitter is the best example of this “real-time” results opportunity. Twitter produces millions of tweets every minute on any subject you can imagine. Twitter lets the public express their opinions and thoughts in a way that has never before been possible.
 
Shortly after Bing launched, an experiment was conducted with the team at Twitter. A small number of “celebrities” tweets were incorporated as part of Bing search result. Here is a great example of real-time results using the keyword “Ryan Seacrest.”

What if Bing could index the Twitter stream and make it available to seachers? At The Web 2.0 Summit, Bing announced that working with the “real-time pros” over at Twitter. There now is access to the publics Twitter feeds and a beta of  Bing Twitter search has been rolled out in the US. Instead of the usual descriptions that are used for links, Bing and Twitter decided to give a “social media caption” to display what people are saying about those links.