There are a lot of articles circulating about the benefits of mobile advertising. In fact, many companies and brands are embracing mobile advertising and seeing impressive results. However, the mobile advertising market hasn’t been cornered by one particular vendor and some are wondering if Facebook is going to join the mobile scene.

Facebook is recognized as one of the top social media sites. Plus, numerous businesses appreciate the advance targeting features that are available in Facebook such as demographics, interests, connections, etc. Some would like to use these advanced settings to reach the mobile market. This means businesses would already be prepared to pay Facebook to reach their respective audience. Another plus is that people use their cell phones to check on their Facebook accounts already, so it’s not like Facebook would have to entice anyone to go on their site via a mobile device. They also, have loads of mobile user data at their fingertips. According to an article on CNET, “Facebook already has access to data of a large mobile user base”… Facebook says nearly half of its nearly 800 million users already log in via mobile devices, giving the network momentum in a market estimated to be worth $630 million.” 

Facebook seems to be in a great position to join the mobile market, and despite rumors that they will be offering mobile advertising soon, Facebook has declined to speak about the matter.  Many businesses will benefit if Facebook gives them the ability to run mobile ads.  The ball is in their court to enable mobile ads and only time will tell how they’ll proceed.

All too often, beginners in social media marketing treat their corporate accounts like a dumping ground for links. Of course, link building is an important part of any social media campaign. However, the concept of “too much of a good thing” certainly applies. Posting as many links as you can to your social media profiles can backfire quickly and cost you the attention of your audience.

In general, you have to be very careful to avoid being overly self promotional and focus on providing innovative and informative content to your social media channels. Excessive self promotion, advertising, and linking can undermine your company’s credibility and make your content seem “spammy.”

Your company website, product pages, and SEM efforts can handle your advertising. Successful social media campaigns are ones that engage users. Get others to talk to your brand and interact with your posts. By encouraging this interaction, you get the chance to learn about the thoughts and preferences of your consumers – which is invaluable marketing data. If you are having trouble creating content, have a look at our list of content ideas.

As you establish authority and gain more followers, self promoting or linking to your site’s other content is advisable in moderation – so long as it is relevant to the topic and/or channel to do so. Try to think like your consumer. If you think a status update is going to look like spam in a newsfeed – you’re probably right.

Here’s a trend you’ve probably participated in: you “like” a company’s page on Facebook, then you never return to that company page again. Unfortunately, it’s a common trend that likely happens on your own company page. If these users never visit your page again, how can you interact with them?

The answer is to increase your EdgeRank. Facebook users rely on their newsfeed to supply them with new content. EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to prioritize posts in a user’s newsfeed.

Every piece of content you produce on your company page is assigned a score in EdgeRank. The higher the score, the more likely you are to appear in users’ newsfeeds, which in turn increases the chance that users will interact with your company’s page. EdgeRank scores are determined by three factors:

Affinity – measures how often a user and his/her friends interact with the content your company’s Facebook page produces. Your Affinity score will naturally increase as your page collects more likes and users interact with your content. To increase Affinty faster, post updates to your company pages that request comments or interaction from your users.

Time – measures the age of your posted content. The freshest content receives the highest time score.

Weight – measures the type of content you’ve posted. Different content types each receive different Weight scores – which are even further narrowed based on user behavior (e.g. for a user who interacts with a lot of pictures, EdgeRank assigns higher Weight scores to picture posts, which in turn appear more frequently in said user’s news feed). In light of that, Weight score will always vary, so it’s a good idea to produce a variety of different types of content.

Knowing how Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works is fundamental for getting your content in front of users, and in turn, getting them to interact with it.

A quick look at several of the corporate pages on Facebook can reveal a number of sparse, even abandoned looking pages. Maintaining your corporate Facebook page with interesting content can be tough. But if you have good ideas, content will flow naturally. Here are a few tips you can use to liven up your Facebook page and connect with your users.

Giveaways: These are perhaps one of the most common types of consumer engagement for companies on Facebook. However, there are all sorts of twists you can add to them to stand out in people’s news feeds. Invite users to try and come up with creative captions to pictures you post, or have them submit a story about using your products. By asking your users to answer a call to action to be eligible for the giveaway, you have the opportunity to learn more about them and how to market to them.

A Company Exposé: Loyal customers will be keen to learn more about your company. Post “behind-the-scenes” photos and videos, share comments from employees, or talk about the founding of the company. Use your posts to tell a story. This will humanize your brand – making your company trustworthy, authentic, and relatable.

Industry Specific Updates: Being able to comment on developments in your industry helps establish you as a trustworthy authority. You can post:

• How-to guides
• Trivia about your company/industry
• Breaking news
• Third-party content (when relevant)
• Guest experts to speak about your company/industry
• Industry specific advice

Keeping a lively Facebook page is all about posting content that gets your fans to interact with you. By maintaining this type of engagement, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of what your target audience thinks of your brand and its products.

 There’s been a lot of buzz around Google+ and Facebook these last few days. Google+ recently made its social network available to the public and Facebook had its F8 conference touting the new features that will be rolling out.  Both Google+ and Facebook want to be the social media site that everyone goes to for social interaction. The real question is why?  It could be because they want to boast that they have the most visitors, but Facebook (see the Computerworld article) already won that title. Plus, it’s safe to say that neither Facebook nor Google+ is improving their social media site for that warm and fuzzy feeling.  So what’s the real reason? It could be that by reaching out to people, they are both competing for the attention of businesses and their advertising dollars.

Facebook and Google+ know that companies will pay top dollar to reach their target audience. Businesses already pay to reach their target audience, so what’s the big deal?  The social media sites can use data and information to predict a user’s actions.
According to an article on CNET, Facebook’s  “algorithm can determine what you’re likely to like based on who you like, what you do, where you go, which apps you use (and how), and so forth–all of which is information that Facebook will now collect through its own service and all the apps that are being built to run on it.”   This is a game changer.

It means that Facebook and Google+ (at a later date) can help corporations pinpoint people who should be in their target audience based on their social behavior.  This makes advertising dollars even more valuable.  In the past people’s profile information, their interests and their “likes” determined which ads would be relevant.  Now, their actual behavior and interactions will be watched and ads will be served based on those actions. Its one thing for a social media site to say a user is interested in country songs based on their status; it’s another thing to say that they listen to the song “Sweet Home Alabama” once a week.  By collecting and providing more valuable data, a social media site can make itself of greater worth to advertisers. In fact, it can help advertisers adjust their strategy based on the data received.  According to CNET, if this works, “Facebook is on its way to becoming the source of the most valuable information on the Web: who likes what, who they influence, and how to reach the people most likely to influence others (hint: go through their friends).”

It’s no wonder that Facebook and Google+ continue to attempt to out-do each other. In the end, it adds up to greater revenue for both companies.

About a year ago, comprehensive social media campaigns seemed like risky territory for many companies. Now that they’ve shown great ROI for several business, they are growing like wildfire with companies scrambling to get a Facebook page up and running.

However, rushing into any marketing strategy – whether SEO, SEM, or Social – without a plan is not going to yield stellar results. All too often, businesses rush off to claim their company name on Facebook without really taking advantage of the site. Here are some common errors companies make on their Facebook pages:

They don’t leverage SEO: Facebook pages can be indexed and show up in search results. As such, many of the SEO techniques that work on a webpage also work on a Facebook page. For example, keywords matter and need to be utilized. Titles, custom URLs, and even bolded font on a Facebook page get extra attention from search engines, so be sure to construct your page accordingly. In addition, don’t forget to collect inbound links to your Facebook page. Just as with your webpage, inbound links will help your Facebook page rank higher.

They hide their content: Companies may choose to hide content behind gateways in their custom tabs that are only accessible to subscribers or Facebook fans. Search engines have no way to access this content, so it can’t get indexed. While making exclusive content can increase your number of fans, it can cause your brand to lose out on some valuable visibility. Before opting for exclusive content, weigh the impact carefully.

They don’t stay active: Most of all, you will want to stay constantly active with your Facebook page because customer interaction is the central tenant of any Social Media campaign. Users view active Facebook pages as positive reflections of their respective companies. Also, updated pages have added SEO value because wall posts are indexed by search engines.

Until recently you had to be “friends” with someone to be able to receive their updates in your News Feed.  Facebook rolled out a new feature recently which has now changed that.  You are now able to “subscribe” to someone else’s updates regardless of whether or not you are connected (i.e. “friends”). The idea behind this is to give Facebook users a bit more control over the type of information that fills their News Feed. Anyone on Facebook knows how quickly new information populates in the News Feed, and sometimes it’s not information you care to see. In the image below you will note that a user has the ability to select the type of information they’d like to subscribe to.

So if you have a friend who constantly posts updates related to games, you can opt out of seeing those types of updates if you choose.

There are a few things to note.  First is that all of your friends will have a subscribe button on their profile.

This is because you’ve already subscribed to that person’s feed by becoming friends.

Additional people can subscribe to your updates after you allow subscribers. Once you do this, a Subscribe button will show up on your profile and your public updates will appear in their News Feeds once they click this button. If you are interested in getting subscribers, you will need to follow the steps mentioned below:

1. Go to your profile and click Subscriptions on the left side of the page, under your profile picture.
2. Click “Allow Subscribers” at the top of this tab.
3. After you click “Allow Subscribers,” your settings appear. From here, you can edit who can comment on your public posts and when you’re notified about new subscribers. You can also see who subscribes to you.

To encourage subscribing to others, there is new a section that now shows suggestions of who to subscribe to when logged in (very similar to Twitter’s Who to Follow suggestions).

This subscribe option now can make Facebook posts more useful if you want them to be public, and particularly if you start gaining and audience. On the other hand, it also may add more confusion to the already confusion privacy options in Facebook.

Since launching Facebook Deals four months ago, the social network has decided to exit the online daily deal business with industry-competitors like Groupon and Living Social, in the near future. Facebook emailed the following statement to Reuters:

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks. We think there is a lot of power in a social approach to driving people into local businesses. We’ve learned a lot from our test and we’ll continue to evaluate how best to serve local businesses.”

Facebook says that they are planning to keep Check-In Deals, which works differently than Facebook Deals. Check-in Deals are based on people’s Facebook check-ins when they visit your business. You can run check-in deals across multiple store locations, and create different types of deals to achieve different business goals.

Check-In Deals is currently available to all businesses in the United States and Japan and is free to create, although the product, its availability and pricing are subject to change in the future. 

Facebook Social Deals required businesses to have a Facebook page and allowed the merchants to offer deals that didn’t specifically offer a percentage-based discount. In addition, Social Deals was only open to five cities: Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego and San Francisco.

Facebook’s advertising platform is great for audience targeting in that you can target its 500 million users based on a user’s location, demographics, interests and education and workplace. In addition, although Facebook does not advertise the fact that occupational targeting is available, it most certainly is, along with the ability to direct your ads to users who “Like” your competition.

In order to target a user’s occupation, you can enter job titles in the “Precise Interests” box under “Interests”:

If you are seeking a way to target a specific industry or even a certain company of an individual, you can use the “Workplaces” section under “Education & Work” targeting.

For example, if you are trying to sell hospital scrubs to people who work in hospitals in the Miami, FL area, you can isolate users in the target city and then enter names of hospitals in the area. Users that work at the specific companies you listed in the area you are specifying will see your ad.

You can also direct your ads to users who “Like” competitor companies, in addition to finding users who “Like” yours.  In the same “Precise Interests” box, you can list names of competitors to target. For example, if you are a lesser-known sneaker brand, you may want to target other brands of sneakers like: Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Reebok, Puma, Converse, etc., which will put your ads in front of users who like similar products.
As you can see, there are more ways to target Facebook’s 500 million users than meets the eye. The social network promotes the capability to target its users by location, demographics and interests, but if you dig deep, you can find innovative ways to reach a very specific audience that fits the goals of your company.

Did you know that Facebook has an algorithm in place for what you see in your News Feed? No…?  Well I didn’t either, until today. It is called EdgeRank.

You may have not recognized it, but Facebook’s News Feed only displays a portion of the posts generated by your friends. (I always had my sneaking suspensions)… Well, this algorithm can potentially affect the reach of your Facebook updates.

The EdgeRank algorithm is said to be in place to enhance the user experience. In short, it is all about making sure that users see relevant and useful information in their News Feed. The measuring stick for EdgeRank is displaying information your friends found relevant by virtue of interaction. (i.e. commenting, liking, sharing).

From a more technical perspective, Facebook views every item that shows up in a user’s News Feed as an “object.” A good example of an object would be a person’s status update. Now, should any user decide to interact with that status update (say, by commenting on it) they are creating what Facebook terms as an “Edge.” Other interactions on Facebook can be actions such as tagging, sharing, and liking.

To explain how EdgeRank works, it is simple: The more interaction your posts get, the greater your EdgeRank. The greater your EdgeRank, the more likely your posts will show up in the News Feeds of a majority of your fans or friends (see, simple enough). If you are interested in your current score, you can check it here.

So how can you improve your EdgeRank?

1). Spread The Word!

Be sure to post and share links with others, such as photos and videos. Interaction happens when a user wants to investigate one of those posts or links. Not only can you post links to your own website or blog, you can also post information from other sources that you think your fans or friends might find interesting – it’s called being social, and it can potentially spread like wild fire and attract a lot of attention.

2). Stay Up to Date

Information on Facebook is shared at an extremely rapid pace, so in a short time your post can go from the top of News Feeds to the bottom. And users are more likely to share what is at the top of their News Feed than the bottom. Also, if a post starts to get feedback you are not looking for, you can post something new and swing the population back in the direction you intended.

3). Continue to Be Interactive & Ask Your Fans to Share

Even if you’re new to Facebook, don’t hesitate to ask other users to share your information or click the like button for your posts. A good strategy is to pose the question, such as “like this post if you agree with (fill in the blank)” This should help you to encounter less resistance.