3000fans30days

30 Days To 3,000 Facebook
Fans

New Media School 548 Market St San Francisco, CA 94104 T 202-658-7548 contact@newmediaschool.com www.newmediaschool.com

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Table of Contents

Introduction! 1

Day 1: What Has Changed?! 3

Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A Brand You Can Be Proud Of! 5

Day 3: How To Conﬁgure Your Facebook Page! 8

Day 4: Developing A Creative Photo For Your Page! 11

Day 5: Target Network Nodes! 13

Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A Successful Facebook Contest! 15

Day 7: How To Leverage SEO For Your Facebook Page! 17

Day 8: How To Become A Master Of Conversations! 19

Day 9: Create A Note Which Spreads Like Wildﬁre! 21

Day 10: Introduction To Facebook Ads! 23

Day 11: Why Understanding Your Target Market Is Key To Success
With Facebook Ads! 25

Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3! 27

Day 13: How To Use Facebook Applications To Boost Your Fan Base!32

Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A Successful Facebook Event! 35

Chapter 15: How To Use A Landing Page To Convert New Facebook
Visitors Into Fans! 38

30 Days to 3,000 Fans! i

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Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000 Facebook Fans! 40

Day 17: Post Relevant Videos! 42

Day 18: Cross-Promote Your Website! 44

Day 19: Research Other Successful Pages! 46

Day 20: Get People To Invite Their Friends! 48

Day 21: Create Mini-Competitions! 50

Day 22: Work The Forums! 52

Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The Impact Of Guest Blog Posts! 54

Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That Will Turn Facebook Fans Into Custom-
ers! 56

Day 25: Integrate the Page Into Your Existing Blog! 58

Day 26: How To Use Competitive Analysis To Boost Your Fan Base! 60

Day 27: Monitor Your Page Insights To Improve Content! 62

Day 28: Check The Magazine Rack For Content Strategy! 64

Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins! 66

Day 30: Create A Plan For The Next Month! 68

Day 31: Promote Fanning Via SMS! 70

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30 Days to 3,000 Fans! ii

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Introduction

If you have a brand but haven’t yet mastered the most effective
techniques to attracting new followers and fans, you are not alone. With
Facebook updating their design and platform on a regular basis it has
become challenging for brands to follow everything that’s changing let
alone learn all of the techniques necessary to maximize their reach. We
understand the challenges that you face which is why we are introducing
the 30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans project.

Why Does Your Brand Want 3,000 Facebook
Fans?
When Facebook launched their new design early this year, millions of
users revolted against the change but as things have quieted down, one
group not complaining is brands. Facebook’s redesigned homepage
provides brands with the same level of interaction that users have among their friends yet only a few shining brands have
truly leveraged Facebook’s redesign to its full potential. We’ve spent the past few months experimenting with
Facebook’s redeveloped pages product to see what it has to offer.

While Facebook will be launching more features to provide brands with greater exposure and greater access to their
public proﬁle’s data, there is already plenty available for brands to take advantage of. So before discussing how to attract
thousands of fans to your public proﬁle within a month, I think it would be best to explain why your brand or small
business wants thousands of fans.

It should be obvious to any marketer that thousands of fans can create an extremely effective promotional channel but
can you actually take action to drive more fans or is it just a natural evolution? As Fred Wilson states, the future is in
“earned” media, not paid and Facebook is one of the primary platforms for earned media. Large companies like Coca-
Cola will have fans that set up pages for them and those pages can often grow to millions of users but unfortunately
small to medium-sized businesses as well as individuals can’t just set up a page and let the people do the rest.

Instead, less known brands need to invest heavily in brand development and leverage the various social media channels
available to them to interact directly with their followers, fans, and customers. For this guide we used 3,000 fans as a
high yet reachable target that brands can attract through actionable tasks. Some will attract more and some will attract
less but after 30 days I have no doubt that you will have all the tools necessary to build a more effective brand presence
on Facebook.

The measure of success should not be whether or not you’ve attracted 3,000 fans but whether you’ve attracted a large
number of targeted fans.

30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 1

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What The Project Involves And How To Participate
During this project we will spend 30 days listing out all of the techniques needed to maximize the effectiveness of your
brand’s Facebook page. At the end of the 30 days you should have numerous techniques that you can put into practice
immediately. Each day we will include action items that you should take.

Note
Throughout this guide I will use the words “fan pages”, “pages”, and “public proﬁles” interchangeably because Facebook
has yet to solidify their terminology.


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Day 1: What Has Changed?

The New Facebook Public Profiles
On March 4th of this year, Facebook released an updated version on what was previously called “Facebook Pages” and
is now called “Facebook Public Profiles”. The update essentially transformed the ways that brands could interact with
both existing customers as well as potential future customers. While many described it as a move against Twitter
(including myself), the dynamic between Twitter and Facebook is not important to this guide. What’s most important is
that you have a thorough understanding of all the features of Facebook pages and how to leverage them for your
business.

Below is an outline of the new features that have been added to Facebook Pages. As we continue the program over the
coming 30 days, we will outline how to leverage every aspect of the pages product. Here are a few of the features you
will be learning about:

Status Updates
This is probably the most significant upgrade for Facebook Pages. Any page administrator can now post status updates
on behalf of the Facebook page they are managing. Whether you are an individual or a large brand, you will now have
direct access to your fans through the news feed. I’ve personally benefited substantially from status updates. As the
image above illustrates, by posting a status update that’s a question, you can instantly get tons of feedback. We
regularly receive upwards of 30 replies to a single status update.


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This is an excellent way to continue engaging your fans on a regular basis. The status update is one of the core features
of Facebook and the recent site redesign increases the emphasis on status updates.

Ability to Post Rich Content To The
Feed
Under the previous design, Facebook page admins could
post rich media content but it was not included in a
continuous stream from the main page. Instead, rich
media was regularly tucked away. Regardless of where
the content was positioned on the page, when new
content was posted there was no way to notify users of
the new content. The result was that users would
become fans but never return to the public profile
because there was no way to get alerted to the changes.

While there is a feature called “Updates” (that I’ll cover
momentarily), most users were completely oblivious to previous public profiles that they had become fans of. Distribution
of rich-media content in the feeds changes all that. Now you can upload videos and photos and they will immediately be
posted to all of your fans’ feeds to watch, comment on, and increase overall engagement.

Mobile Updates to Fans
This is another great feature which many brands will increasingly take advantage of.
As I mentioned already, public profiles had no way of reaching out to fans previously
(aside from the typically unread “updates”). Now brands can have their status
updates not only broadcasted to their fans’ news feeds but also directly to their
mobile phones. This is a huge opportunity to increase the level of fan engagement.

The only downside to this feature is that there is no way to currently monitor how many mobile subscribers you have or
how many people have read a given status update. While Facebook hasn’t stated that they plan on adding this feature
anytime soon, I would imagine that Facebook will gradually improve their analytics offering to include mobile
subscriptions. Currently Facebook page “Insights” let admins view how many views of videos, photos, and page views
have been made.

A Decreased Emphasis on “Updates”
Facebook has always provided admins with the ability to send messages to their fans via something called “Updates”.
The only problem with the updates is that they don’t go directly to a user’s primary inbox. Instead they go to a separate
tab in their inbox called “Updates”. One person that I spoke with sent a test message out to a public profile with more
than 100,000 fans and received under 50 clicks. In other words: updates are pretty much useless.

That’s why Facebook now emphasizes status updates as the primary channel of communication for public profiles. Have
an event you’re promoting? Post about it via a status update. I hosted a conference last November and found that my
public profile at the time was practically useless because nobody was visiting the page and most people didn’t respond
to updates. While there’s a chance Facebook will improve this feature, the latest upgrades signal that they are phasing
out “Updates”.


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Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A
Brand You Can Be Proud Of

You may be wondering why I’m writing a whole section
on branding when this is a guide to mastering your
Facebook Page. The primary reason that I’m bringing
up branding at the beginning of this program is that a
powerful brand is much more effective at attracting
new fans. Every organization is at a different phase in
their branding process. Oprah Winfrey for example,
doesn’t need to do much promotion of her Facebook
profile to end up with a few hundred thousand fans.
While Oprah may be a distant target, investing time
into building your brand will help you build an avid fan
base on Facebook as well as elsewhere on the web.

Tip 1: Use A Consistent Design
A large portion of branding is about image and that image is portrayed through your design. It can be the logo, a set of
colors, or simply a consistent look and feel. As Jared Spool states in his article, “Determining How Design Affects
Branding”, “Brand elements, such as names, logos, tag lines, trademarks, and packaging are shortcuts to” the
perceptions of the consumer. If you tightly integrate your design into your product or service, the design can begin to
evoke the emotions and perceptions that the consumers experience when interacting with your product or service.

Tip 2: Determine Your Brand Personality
While brands may not be people, the personification of brands helps consumers to connect with them. That’s why it’s
important to determine what your brand’s personality is. Much of that personality can come through your own voice
since people like connecting with other individuals but you should be able to define the overall personality of your brand
as well.

Tip 3: Have A Consistent Dialogue
Whether you are having a conversation on Facebook, Twitter, or during a presentation, it’s important to have a consistent
message. While you can engage in different conversations, it’s important that your conversation is most frequently about
similar ideas or concepts. For example Oprah would not have a conversation with her viewers about computer
programming. Maybe that’s an extreme example but the main point is that there is a consistent dialog that you should
have with your consumers.


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Tip 4: Define Your Target Market
Who are you selling to? That’s a question that many brands fail to
answer and in the end they become so broadly focused that they end up
selling nothing. I’ve made this mistake before and the results can be
extremely painful. You invest months building something only to find out
that you didn’t target a specific market and in the end nobody ends up
making a purchase. As Wikipedia states, your target market “is mainly
defined by age, gender, geography, socio-economic grouping,
technographic, or any other combination of demographics.” Figure out
who you are targeting. This is also extremely important for when you
begin running ad campaigns on Facebook (which we’ll be explaining
later). Figure out your target market and you are well on your way to
3,000 fans.

Tip 5: Know What Your Brand Is Selling
You’ve selected a target market but do you know what your customers want? While you can pick out a segment of the
market to go after, providing them with something that they truly want is a whole other challenge. Often times
companies will spend months preparing for a product launch only to find out that nobody ended up purchasing the
product. Sometimes brands will launch a product or service only to find out that their consumer is using it for another
reason than it was intended. If you don’t understand how your customer is interacting with your brand then good luck
developing a Facebook public profile that’s going to rapidly attract thousands of users. Once you have determined your
target market and you know what your brand is selling, you can proceed to build a large fan base.

Tip 6: Figure Out The Terms That Drive Action From Your Target Market
This is more about sales and marketing then it is about building your brand but at the end of the day, there’s no point in
building a brand if you don’t plan on using it to sell something. While an attractive brand can build you a large fan base,
selling is much more challenging. Each buyer has their own psychological triggers that will drive them to make a
purchase and often times, there are words that will drive an entire market to make a purchase. That’s why you need to
invest the time to test out various forms of copy and see what works with your market.

There are actually words that will make it more likely for your fans to take action. By discovering these words/terms you
can associate them with your brand and increase the bond with your fans.

Tip 7: Listen To Your Target Market
Social media is much more about listening than talking at people. Honestly, the old direct methods of marketing are now
dead and instead marketing has become a conversation that brands have with their customers. Thankfully, this new
model presents many new opportunities and those brands that are quickest to adapt will reap the rewards. Some of
your customers will want to engage in a dialogue with your brand and Facebook public profiles are a great place for that
to take place. Did someone post something negative about your brand? Publicly acknowledge their criticism and then
proceed to offer a solution.

If your brand is willing to publicly acknowledge weaknesses and address them, it will build trust with your brand for
existing and future customers. Many times your fans will actually tell you what they’d like your brand to provide. This is
gold to any effective marketer. Spend the time to listen, don’t just speak at your fans.


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Tip 8: Provide Relevant Content That Amplifies Your Brand
It’s difficult to consistently come up with original content. As someone who has written over 2,000 articles in the past
two years, I can attest to the challenge of developing original content. Thankfully, in social media (and on Facebook
public profiles), you don’t always need to come up with original content. As you browse the web, share content that is
relevant to your brand directly from within your Facebook page. This way you can keep your fans engaged with ongoing
content and you don’t need to always be the one producing that content.

Tip 9: Create Good Content
While sharing content from around the web is always an easy way to get your fans engaged, it’s always better to create
original content. It’s possible to provide original content which rehashes existing content but the best content is truly
original. One of the best forms of original content is educational guides. Educating your future consumer is always a
great way to build trust and to build an ongoing relationship. That’s not to say that the only content you should create is
educational content. Content that entertains, engages, informs, or simply makes the reader smile is great for keeping
their attention. If you want to learn more about creating great content I highly recommend reading Copyblogger on a
regular basis.

Tip 10: Leverage Multiple Branding Channels
No, Facebook Pages are not the end all, be all of your branding strategy. People regularly ask what the best site is for
building their brand and generating new business. The response is always the same no matter who you ask in the
industry: go to where your customers are. If your existing or future customers are on Facebook (there’s a good chance
they are there with over 250 million users) or even MySpace (GASP!), your company should be there. Wherever your
customer is, you should be there.

Daily Task
Spend some time listing out the personality traits of your brand. That’s right ... if your brand was a person, what type of
person would it be?


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Day 3: How To Configure Your
Facebook Page

Overview
In this section we are going to a basic overview for those individuals that don’t know how to get their Facebook page set
up. If you are an advanced Facebook Page user then you may want to consider skipping this day. I receive a number of
emails each week from people that can’t figure out how to get their public profile set up though so I thought it would be
useful to provide a basic introduction.

Step 1: Create Your Facebook Page
Creating a Facebook page is a relatively rudimentary task on Facebook. To create a public profile you can visit the
Facebook public profile advertising page and click on the “Create a Page” button. Next up, you’ll be prompted with a
form titled “Create New Facebook Page” as illustrated below. Select your category and enter the name of your business
or public figure. Finally, you must confirm that you are authorized to create the page by entering your full name as it
appears in your profile.


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Step 2: Edit Basic Information
When you first arrive to your newly created public profile, there will be a link off to the right hand side which says “Edit
Information”. Entering your information is important for search engine optimization (“SEO”) purposes as well as informing
new visitors about your product, service, or yourself (if you are a public figure). Currently Facebook does not enable page
administrators to remove this tab so I highly recommend that you take the time to fill it out with all the relevant
information.

Step 3: Configure A Landing Page (Custom Tab)
When a new fan visits your public profile, it’s extremely useful to explain to them what the public profile is about and why
they should become a fan. The goal of the landing page is to immediately convert the user into a new fan and then
engage the fan after they’ve joined. I’ve seen companies use contests for engaging the user but the vast majority of
Facebook Pages have no separate landing page. The result is that the public profiles have a lower conversion of new
visitors into fans.

There is one exception for public profiles that have no landing page but high conversion: companies with a high brand
affinity. Oprah Winfrey or Coca-Cola can convert users without having a landing page because they have such a strong
brand presence.

How To Configure Your Landing Page
Adding a landing page is relatively simple. One requirement is that you have a basic understanding of HTML. More
advanced landing pages can also be created but that will require some knowledge of the Facebook platform. I’m
assuming that most people reading this section don’t have much experience with the Facebook platform so I’ll provide a
quick walk through of how to get the landing page configured without anything but one application and a little bit of
HTML.

Install the “Static FBML” Application
The first step to configuring a landing page is to install the Static FBML application to your public profile application. After
you visit the Static FBML application about page you can install the application by clicking “Add to Page”. You will then
be prompted to select the public profile that you’d like to install to and click on the button which says “Add Static FBML”.

Edit Your Landing Page
After you installed the “Static FBML” application to your public profile, you should be
redirected back to your page. If you weren’t just go back to your Facebook Page. Click
on “Edit Page” on the left hand side. There will be a number of applications installed by
default but you want to edit the box which says “FBML - FBML”. Next you’ll be
presented a page from which you can edit the title and content within your custom tab.

Currently, Facebook page tab titles are limited to 14 characters including spaces.
Anything beyond that will result in your title being appended to 11 characters followed by “...” Using HTML, modify the
FBML box. To include Facebook relevant information, you can use any of the tags included on the FBML wiki page. If
you are extremely proficient with HTML, you may note that some tags are not allowed. For those tags that don’t work
properly, you’ll need to substitute them with FBML tags as defined on the FBML Wiki page.

Add The New Landing Page As A Tab
Once you’ve properly configured the new tab, you’ll want to add it as a default tab. If
you haven’t added any tabs yet, it will immediately show up as one of your default
tabs. If it doesn’t, simply click on the double arrows and select your custom tab as


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pictured in the photo to the right. When you select the
new tab it will replace the tab which is currently furthest
to the right. The other thing you’ll want to configure is
for your new landing page to show up as the default tab
when a new visitor first comes to your public profile.
To do this click on the “Wall” tab and select “Settings”.
Then next to the area where it says “Default Landing Tab
for Everyone Else:” select the tab that you’d like to show
up by default when a new visitor comes to your public
profile.

That’s it! Now your custom landing tab has been
configured.

Step 4: Add Additional Applications
Other applications make it possible to expand the functionality of your Facebook Page. The more features you can add
that engage the user, the better. While you don’t want to add 20 applications, it often makes sense to add a few
applications that will engage your visitors. The photos, discussions, and reviews tabs are added by default. Make sure
that any tab that you have is actually being used. For example, there’s no point in having a discussions tab if you aren’t
encouraging visitors to participate in ongoing conversations.

While Facebook doesn’t currently list the applications available for Facebook pages, there are a number of third parties
that provide sets of applications. Involver is one company that provides a number of applications that let you import and
RSS feed, publish your Twitter status, easily create polls, share files, and more. If you want to learn more, head on over
to the Involver application gallery. Also check out the promotions application provided by Wildfire Interactive.

Step 5: Start Inviting Friends
Once you’ve finished adding your applications and customizing your public profile, all you need to do is invite people to
get started. One thing that I highly recommend is targeting nodes of individuals. If there is a tightly connected network
of individuals among your friends, invite each of them on the same day. This way you increase the likelihood of your
newly created Facebook Page becoming a recommended page.

Daily Task
I think it’s pretty obvious what your daily task is at this point! Get your Facebook Page up and running using the steps
outlined above.


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Day 4: Developing A Creative
Photo For Your Page

Why Your Photo Is So Important
Most people just quickly upload their photo to their Facebook page and never think about it again. This is probably one
of the worst mistakes you can make. Facebook doesn’t provide many customization options for the main public profile
page meaning that your photo is what sets your public profile apart from others. Back in February, Rob Banagale wrote
a guest post on our blog about various ways of customizing your Facebook profile photo. Since then, thousands of
people have customized their profile photo in creative ways and a few of those individuals have posted screenshots of
their photo.

While the individuals were modifying their personal profile photo, the same rules go for public profile photos. Below I’ve
included a couple creative profile photo screenshots and outline the steps necessary to customizing your public profile in
creative ways.

Public Profile Photo Restrictions
Before designing your custom photo you should understand what restrictions there are. The first thing to understand is
the size of the photo you can have. Facebook by default resizes all photos down to a maximum width of 200 pixels and
a maximum height of 600 pixels. There are plenty of creative uses of this space. Some of the best examples take
advantage of the maximum space available. Four interesting designs I’ve see are included below:


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The Awkward Photo Background
Facebook is known for having an awkward background for photos. There is a line and a darker background at the top
portion of every public profile photo. The top color is the hex color #edeff4. The line is #d8dfea. The most challenging
part of the background is that depending on how long your status update is, the height of the line can be adjusted. The
line is exactly 52 pixels above the top. You’ll need to avoid posting longer updates though if you want your photo
background to stay lined up properly.

If done properly, there are infinite possibilities for extremely creative public profile photos that take advantage of the photo
background line. Below I’ve included a few creative examples that use the awkwardly place line effectively:

One prerequisite of making the necessary changes is that you have a basic understanding of a photo manipulation
software package like Adobe Photoshop. Most people have at least a basic photo editing software on their computer.
It’s well worth the effort of customizing your public profile photo because it can drive users to become a fan.

Daily Task
Spend some time developing a creative Facebook profile photo for your newly launched Facebook Page. You will benefit
greatly from investing a little extra time in developing a creative image.


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Day 5: Target Network Nodes

Overview
So far we’ve discussed a few of the basics behind promoting your
Facebook page. Now we are going to go over a few tips and tricks that
are going to help you reach the 3,000 fan target that we set at the
beginning of this guide. Keep in mind that for some companies, 3,000
fans is excessive while for others 3,000 may not be a lot. You need to
effectively assess your goals and figure out a good number that makes
sense for you during the 30 day program.

Target Nodes and Influencers
In the “Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwell discusses how key influencers can be the drivers behind viral consumer
epidemics. The point is that the most connected individuals that are also connected to other highly-connected nodes
end up having a ton of influence. We all know super-connecters and if you are looking to build your public profile’s fan
base, you should be targeting them. Randomly pursuing these individuals is not the best way to go about it though. A
well planned and well executed targeting process will yield the maximum results.

How To Perform Influencer Outreach
There are a number of reasons you shouldn’t just start randomly messaging influencers. The first is because it’s just bad
form. Aside from that, if you randomly message people, you will miss out on a ton of opportunity. The largest
opportunity is the phenomenon of overlapping networks. If two influentials share friends, the odds of your public profile
becoming a recommended Facebook Page or ending up in a user’s highlights area on their homepage will be
substantially increased.

So now that you know why I don’t like randomly reaching out to influencers, let’s explore the best way to go about
reaching out to influencers. Here are the steps that I suggest going through:

1. Influencer Research - Prior to reaching out to individuals, you should figure out who the most influential people are in a
given network. There are a number of ways to go about doing this but the easiest is just to find individuals with the
most friends in a network. The easiest influencers to find are among your friends since you’ll probably know which
friends are influencers. Outside of your network it’s useful to browse through individuals on Facebook based on
individual Facebook networks (organizations and geographic networks). You can quickly browse through networks
and jot down the names of those individuals that have the most friends.

2. Initial Outreach - Reach out to network influencers and introduce yourself. Spark up a conversation and explain to
them what you are working on. Do not copy and paste messages. If you send the same message to tens or
hundreds of individuals, Facebook will mark your account for spam. You need to actually build relationships with


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these individuals. It’s fine to make small changes to the first messages that you send out but following those initial
messages, you want to spend time fostering a positive relationship with the influencers.

3. Launch Day - After you have built up your list of network influencers set a date for getting those influencers to become
fans. On that day, reach out to each of your influencers and tell them to fan your Facebook Page. Depending on how
many influencers you have, you may want to consider a phased launch approach. Whichever model you pick, make
sure that you do some research and some basic planning.

Keep in mind that some of these are guerilla marketing strategies, not traditional marketing strategies. Would Facebook
encourage you to take each of the steps listed above? Probably not but the bottom line is that it works. If you abuse the
system, Facebook will surely ban you. Theoretically collecting data about network influencers could be a violation of
Facebook’s terms of service but it’s readily available information. Any research you do on Facebook is at your own
discretion so make sure not to abuse their system!

Daily Task
Come up with a list of at least 20 influencers that you can reach out to. Begin an initial conversation with each and aim
to have them all become fans of your Facebook Page on the same day.


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Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A
Successful Facebook Contest

While you will receive an initial surge in fans from inviting your friends and
targeting network nodes, the growth will eventually flatten. You’ll need a
way to drive more fans. One of the best ways to attract new fans is by
creating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of the
time this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number of
friends you can invite to a public profile. That bring about the first tip
related to a contest.

Tip 1: Incentivize Invites To Facebook Pages
Facebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can invite
to a public profile which makes invitations one of the most important
components of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users to
invite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the single
best tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fans
to invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite their
friends? Right now there isn’t actually a way of tracking how many friends
a user has invited but you can however develop applications which track
the relative “friend density” of any given user within a public profile.

As users become fans and install an application, you can check to see which of their friends are also fans of the public
profile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes a
bit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.

Tip 2: Create Friend Leaderboards
One of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in the
previous tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboard
among all users, displaying a leaderboard among a user’s friends helps those users set more realistic competitive goals.
If thousands of individuals are competing, the odds are significantly reduced but if the leaderboard is only visible for
friends, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll get a user to engage.

Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart Periodically
If you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you could
theoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which


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weekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shorter
time frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by a
surge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but most
companies should extend things over a month or longer.

Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the Contest
So after a bit of brainstorming you’ve come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get it
programmed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contest
concepts and I’ve had a few which I’ve realized can be gamed. It’s a basic concept but it’s extremely important. I can’t
tell you how many conversations I’ve seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times such
questions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.

Tip 5: Provide Cash Prizes
Want to get somebody’s attention? Offer them cash prizes or something worth some serious pocket change.
Interestingly enough though, this doesn’t always work but it most deﬁnitely will incentivize a lot of people. Will it serve as
a valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that’s up for you to determine when developing the
contest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizes
since you could very well break the bank (then again if you’re targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairly
sizable marketing budget as well).

Daily Task
Come up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to see
which they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!


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Day 7: How To Leverage SEO
For Your Facebook Page

Intro to Search Engine Optimization
For those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet
marketing, you probably are not aware of what search
engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine
optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any
given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and
mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey
around the web. While many users will go directly to their
favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day
by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t
previously found.

What’s great about Facebook’s public profiles is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of search engine juice.
Google alone claims to have indexed over 430 million pages within the site.

1. Get A Good URL
URLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as
possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. As of Saturday June 13, 2009, Facebook
offers something called “vanity URLs” for those Facebook Pages that have over 1,000 fans. A vanity URL is the short
Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page. For example our blog, AllFacebook, has the following URL:
http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting
Google “juice”.

2. Configure Your Default Tab
On day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure that
the first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” link
on your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focused
heavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take action
then to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’t
want to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.


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3. Generate Links To Your Page
If you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incoming
links. One quick way to boost your Facebook page rankings is by linking to your page from your existing website.
Additionally, any way you can get links from other sites will help increase your rankings. On their own, Facebook Pages
tend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number of
incoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If you
are active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This will
most definitely help you gain some traction in Google.

4. Link To Other Relevant Pages
I’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you created
a site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help out
the readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages you
are linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a good
chance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.

5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company Website
One of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While some
companies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page is
extremely valuable. Take advantage of landing pages and the information tab to link back to your company’s website.

6. Select A Good Name For Your Facebook Page
The name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spending
a lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pages
however there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one of
those things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after your
company or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.

Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO Juice
Some resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While it
may drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed content
using javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-through
page. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.

Conclusion
These were just six tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Page
strategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a link
on Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than your
brand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.

Daily Task
Make at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Also
determine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generate
some SEO juice for your Facebook page.


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Day 8: How To Become A
Master Of Conversations

The Art of Social Media
Want to have highly engaging conversations on your Facebook
proﬁle? You better get good at mastering the art of the social
media conversation. How is a conversation within social media
any different than a normal conversation? It isn’t! If you are
going to build a following on Facebook let alone any other site
on the internet, you are going to need to put in the time
necessary to build relationships with others. Whether it’s
posting follow-up comments or reaching out to people that
have asked valuable questions or have even posted criticism,
it’s important that you build an ongoing dialogue with your fans.

The Personiﬁcation Of The Brand
Want to really thrive in the world of social media? Imagine your brand as a person who has a life similar to its customers.
Prior to the internet, brands were organizations which spoke directly at their customers. While there was a number on
the back of a cereal box asking for your feedback, there really wasn’t a two-way conversation for the most part. Thanks
to the internet and new social technologies, you have the opportunity to engage your existing and potential customers
directly. So what types of conversations are most effective at building an engaged fan base?

Ask Questions
Any good conversation involves questions and answers. Facebook Pages present an amazing opportunity to learn
about your existing customers and potential ones. Not until recently was it possible to directly interact with your
customers on an ongoing basis, especially if you were representing a large brand. People love to talk about themselves
so ask them questions that are also related to your company. I happen to write about Facebook so I tend to ask users
about their experience with the site and what their favorite and least favorite aspects are. Additionally you can simply ask
general questions such as “what are you doing over this summer weekend?”

Respond To Questions And Comments
As you build your fan base, fans will begin to regularly post comments as well as questions. Take the time to engage
with them. Any time you take to interact with the fans is always time well spent. Many of the questions and comments
will be extremely easy to respond to, only requiring a few seconds of your time. If you end up with an extremely popular


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brand however, selecting which questions to respond to will become important. That’s a great problem to have though!
Make sure you take the time to reply to your customers and you can just about guarantee continued growth.

Be Supportive Of Your Biggest Fans
Are there fans that continuously post on your Facebook Page? Take the time to recognize them and continue to foster a
relationship with them. Your biggest fans can become extremely valuable. These fans will take the time to promote your
business for you. They’ll reply to other fan comments and do a lot of your work for you. Building relationships with these
individuals is extremely important. One way to help build these types of relationships is to promote those that have
helped you build your business. Give a quick shout out to the person as a comment and they’ll typically be extremely
grateful. Support your biggest fans and they’ll help support you, helping you taking your business to the next level.

Daily Task
Post a conversational update to your Facebook Page. This should become a daily habit and not a one-time event
however. Make sure that you remember to stop by your Facebook Page at least once a day (if not more) to post an
update.


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Day 9: Create A Note Which
Spreads Like Wildfire

Intro to Facebook Notes
Remember the viral Facebook note about “25 things
about me”? If you don’t then you probably haven’t been
on Facebook for long. The 25 things about me note
spread through Facebook and touched millions of users
before it eventually died out. The main ideas behind the
note was similar to a chain letter. You write 25 things
people don’t know about you and then tag your friends
and ask them to write the note as well. The end result
was that million of users ended up writing 25 things
about themselves and it ended up getting covered by
people in the press because so many people had
participated.

How To Create A Viral Note
I wish that I could give you a step by step guide that will result in millions of people sharing your note but I don’t have the
secret answer unfortunately. What I do know however, is that you can tag people from notes that are posted to your
page and thanks to that feature you can begin to have notes spread throughout the social graph. So how do you come
up with a note that’s going to be seen by everybody and will be attributed to you?

While I hate to tell people that they should create a note which is similar to a chain letter, Facebook’s note system works
extremely well through standard chain letter models. The most important component of a note is that users need to be
able to share something personal about themselves. Facebook is a site for sharing and any game or activity that
encourages personalized participation is much more likely to succeed.

Create More Effective Titles
Want to really get someone’s attention? An effective title can make all the difference. I’ve previously written articles using
advertising headlines that I modiﬁed from a book I have about headlines (you can get the book here) and the results have
been phenomenal. While the content is extremely important, you will gain or lose the vast majority of readers via the
headline. Make sure your note’s title stands out and you’ll be well on your way to developing a viral note. If you want
other tips on effective copywriting, I highly recommend checking out Copyblogger.


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Create Multiple Notes To Tag Smaller Groups Of People
While you could create a note and tag all of your contacts, it would be more effective to spread your note postings over a
period of time. This way more people will see the note and you can also spread out the number of people that you tag in
any given note. Tagging people is essentially the way that notes are spread and it can also be leveraged just like the
classic game of tag: “Tag you’re it!”

Adding The Branding Component
So you are trying out your hand at developing a note that will spread throughout the social graph but there’s no branding
component of the note! That’s definitely an issue. By doing things for the betterment of your network (out of the good of
your own heart) you can still generate a lot of recognition and influence. However I know that many people want instant
traffic to their Facebook page so I’ve come up with a few ideas. I suggest trying a few things but keep in mind that the
more you brand a note, the less likely it is to spread. Here are two of the primary ways to brand a note:

1. Put your brand name in the title - This method is pretty aggressive. I personally believe that this is a sure fire way to
have your note fail at growing beyond the people you first tag but if you are an aggressive marketer you can feel free
to test it out. Just remember that I warned you!

2. Go chain letter style - I hate to suggest that companies create chain letters but there are some important things to
learn from chain letters. Chain letters are called chain letters for a reason. One of the primary reasons is that they
actually work! So to get more recognition have people do a traditional pyramid list (we are not sending money here,
just playing a game). Have people write down the name of the last 5 people that were in chain at the end of the note.

There are plenty of other ways to consider branding your note including encouraging users to link back to the source of
the note. Whatever method you come up with, branding is something that needs to be delicately balanced with
contributing to the community. Always keep in mind that sparking the conversation is more important than the branding
being received.

Daily Task
Brainstorm three ideas for notes that you think people will be willing to spread to their friends. Ultimately this task takes
some extra effort but if you want to generate buzz you should take advantage of all of the promotional channels available
to you on Facebook and the notes application is one of them.


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Day 10: Introduction To
Facebook Ads

You Need To Prime The Pumps
While I wish Facebook Pages would start with one person and just grow to
thousands of users, it’s simply not that easy. Building a fan base requires a
fair amount of work and a small amount of cash. The cash is being used
to purchase Facebook advertisements that will drive you new fans. If you
want to approximate how much it costs for each new fan, you can
essentially estimate the cost at $0.50 per fan when using Facebook
advertisements. While you can rely on your natural branding ability, most
companies aren’t as popular as Oprah and need to invest in expanding
their reach.

There are a number of other reasons for investing in Facebook advertisements to promote your page:

1. The more fans you have, the faster you grow - If you are going to get 3000 fans in 30 days, you should be willing to
invest at least a couple hundred bucks. For $200 you could have 400 fans to jump start your viral growth. As I wrote
on Day 5, it’s important to target inﬂuential nodes. If you combine advertising while targeting those nodes you can
increase the effectiveness of your advertisements. The more times you can get your brand in front of people, the
more likely they’ll turn into customers, or in this case: Facebook fans.

2. Promoting your page generates brand recognition if not clicks - While many people are just looking to build clicks on
their ads to convert those users into fans or eventual customers, I’d argue that the process between displaying the ad
and getting the click is just as important. As I mentioned moments ago, “The more times you can get your brand in
front of people, the more likely they’ll turn into customers.” I once read that it takes something like 27 times of a
person seeing your brand before they actually make a purchase. Thankfully the barrier is much lower to creating a fan
because the user doesn’t need to part with their money, which is traditionally the biggest hurdle for any sales person.
So back to the point ... generating impressions within a user’s peripheral is extremely important to converting them
into a fan. While they may not know who you and haven’t heard of your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll say to
themselves, “I think I’ve seen that before” and become a fan.

3. You can track conversions of advertisements and start generating revenue - Tracking conversions is one of the most
important components of Facebook advertising. For the purpose of this guide we are discussing advertising as it can
be used for building your fan base. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t currently provide effective conversion metrics for
Facebook Pages but I typically just use the following equation to determine my cost per fan:


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number of fans added per day / daily spend on Facebook advertising = cost per fan
Unfortunately this model is not perfect since you will organically gain followers without investing in Facebook
advertising but this is the best way to calculate the cost per fan for the time being. We will be discussing more
effective ways of tracking new customers in the future which includes the integration of landing pages. I’m also
expecting Facebook to begin providing more advanced metrics for tracking the effectiveness of your advertisements.

4. Highly effective targeting system - The best part of Facebook’s advertising system is the ability to target individuals
based on a large number of variables including age, gender, location, interests, relationships status, and more. This
presents a massive opportunity for marketers but unfortunately few marketers have ﬁgured out the model to master
Facebook’s advertising system. I will be discussing the various ways of improving ads through techniques like “nano-
targeting” in a later section but what’s important to know is that Facebook presents marketers with a huge opportunity
to reach their target market. Facebook advertising is at the top of what I call the “Facebook sales funnel” and the next
level down is your Facebook Page. I’ll get into more details about that soon.

Daily Task
Take some time exploring Facebook’s advertising offering. Over the next two days we will go into more detail about how
to leverage Facebook advertising more effectively.


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Day 11: Why Understanding
Your Target Market Is Key To
Success With Facebook Ads

Getting Started With Facebook Ads
So now that I’ve made the sales pitch to you for using
Facebook advertising, let’s take a look at what it takes to get
a campaign set up. The most important thing to do first is to
define your target market. What’s the demographic
information of your target market? What’s the average day
for your target market like? Your job as an advertiser is to
connect with the customer on an emotional level as quick as
possible. The only way you’ll be able to do that is to connect
with them.

Who Is Your Customer?
For this section we are going to pretend that we are marketing a high-end, environmentally friendly limousine service. In
the book “Duct Tape Marketing”, author John Jantsch defines marketing as “getting people, who have a specific need or
problem, to know, like, and trust you.” While your Facebook Page will be used to help you build the relationship, you
need to connect with them quickly, and that first connection will be done via your Facebook advertisement. I tend to
think that if you can get a user on Facebook to smile thanks to one of your advertisements, you’ll have connected with
them and they’ll become a fan. In this example we are targeting more of a luxury service, as most people are not looking
for limousine services. Here are some of the initial details about our typical clientele:

• 70% male, 30% female
• Executive level position
• Typically between the ages of 32 and 50
• Many are interested in outdoor activities (we’ve learned this through conversations to and from the airport with our
customers)
• Tend to live in the more populated metropolitan areas (Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York,
etc)
While many companies will have more detailed descriptions of their customer and can walk through a “day in the life of”
scenario, I am simply using these demographics as a basis for setting up a sample campaign. Spending a fair amount of
time on determining your target market is extremely important.


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Questions To Answer When Defining A Target Market
Before we move on to the third day of exploring Facebook advertisements you should answer as many of the following
questions as possible:

1. What are the demographics of your customers?

2. What is your customers fears, desires, and goals?

3. What does a typical day in the life of your customer look like?

4. What is the customer not currently getting?

5. What makes your customer feel comfortable? (This is what I was discussing earlier about making the person smile).

6. What brand affiliations do your customers have?

Daily Task
Define your target market by answering some of the questions we’ve presented. Also do some research on the web
about defining a target market. Hopefully you’ve already defined your target market since this probably isn’t your first
marketing activity for your company. If you already have a clearly defined target market, pat yourself on the back and
take the day off: you deserve it!


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Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3

Creating the Ad
So you’ve listened to my sales pitch about Facebook advertising and you’ve taken the time to define your company’s
target market. Hopefully this wasn’t the first time that you’ve defined your target market, otherwise you are in serious
trouble ;) So the first thing you want to do is head over to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create. If you haven’t already
created your page then you most definitely want to have it set up by now since we will be integrating our page with our
ad. For the purpose of this article, I’ll go ahead and set up an advertisement for the AllFacebook.com page.

Create Two Ad Creatives For Each Demographic Group
Before walking through the ad creation process, I wanted to note that it’s important to split up your ad creative among
each targeted segment. This is useful for split-testing your advertisements, something that I’ll discuss in the near future.
While this isn’t necessary to get started, testing the performance of advertisements is extremely important to increase
long-term results. For this guide we were focused on 30 days but obviously your marketing activities should not end
after 30 days.

Setup Your First Advertisement
I’m going to quickly run through the set up process of an advertisement. I will be going into more details during our
Facebook Advertising series in addition to providing video tutorials within the New Media School Facebook Business
Insiders course.

Step 1: Design Your Advertisement
The first step of creating an ad is determining the design which includes a 110 pixel x 80 pixel image, and ad title, and
the body text. Since we are promoting something on Facebook, we’ll want to select the Page that we are promoting as
pictured below. Remember that you can only promote pages that have been published. To publish your page, go to
“Edit Settings” from the left-hand column of your Facebook page and then click on the red “Publish this Page” link on the
right hand side of the settings page.

Select Option To Promote Something On Facebook


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Directly under the area that says “Design Your Ad” click on the link which says “I want to advertise something I have on
Facebook”. You will then be able to select anything that you have on Facebook including your Facebook Page.

Select The Page You Want To Promote
As pictured below, select the Facebook page that you’d like promote. Facebook will then automatically generate an
advertisement using your Facebook page’s image. While you can change the image, it’s fine to make at least one using
the default image then split test it against another ad (as I’ll explain later).

Step 2: Select Your Targeting Options
Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two
ad versions against each other. On Facebook, this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad
that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a
lot of money for the most part. Facebook provides the following 11 targeting factors for advertisers:

1. Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. All
advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location
you’d like to select.

2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to
select their age.

3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what typeso f ads
should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishing the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for
higher conversion rates.

4. Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.

5. Keywords - Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including activities, favortie books, tv shows, movies,
and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective
keywords. What types of product do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend
time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.

6. Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the
schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great
way to promote it.

7. Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market
works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter
can be priceless.

8. Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or
club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to


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keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their
profile.

9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to
skip this field for most of my ads.

10. Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to
them.

11.Connections - The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and
exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the
administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is
a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In
order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the
advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.


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Step 3: Enter Your Pricing Settings
Now that you’ve ﬁgured out the targeting for your advertisement you need to select the pricing. You can choose
between CPM and CPC advertising but there’s pretty much no point of going the CPM route. You want to pay for users
to take an action and in this case it’s either them clicking on the ad that directs them to your Facebook page or
becoming a fan directly from the ad.

Selecting A Campaign
It’s a good idea to group all of your ads for a single Facebook Page into a single campaign. This is because you can
adjust your budget for that speciﬁc campaign at any point. If you adjust the dollar spend of a campaign for your
Facebook Page you can track the change in the growth of fans based on that adjustment, giving you a rough estimate of
the cost per fan.

Selecting A Price To Bid
Facebook will suggest bidding prices that will maximize the number of impressions you receive. The more you bid
typically, the more you receive. While there is a lot of information about how Google ranks their advertisements there is
currently no information about Facebook and rankings such as advertisement quality score. My guess is that there will
be more information about ads on Facebook as time goes along but for now, pick a bid rate that sounds reasonable to
you and then track the number of impressions and clicks that you receive. For now, Facebook doesn’t provide concrete
information on how to improve positioning and impression rates.

Split Test With A Second Advertisement
As I mentioned early on, it’s important to split test two advertisements against each other to see which receive more
clicks. Once you’ve determined which ad has a higher click through rate, only run that individual advertisement.
Otherwise you risk having multiple ads displayed to the same users and the result is that you’ll end up paying for users
more than once.


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Daily Task
At this point you should have a thorough idea about how to manage your Facebook page advertising campaign. As I
wrote yesterday, it’s important that you have a good deﬁnition of your target market. By now you should know that target
and should be able to set up a couple initial ads. For today’s task, create two advertisements on Facebook that promote
your Facebook Page. Feel free to test it out with only a couple dollars a day. You can then adjust your budget as
needed.


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Day 13: How To Use Facebook
Applications To Boost Your Fan
Base

Determining The Best Platform
Strategy
The Facebook platform presents an amazing opportunity for
companies to expand their presence quickly by enabling viral
distribution through the social graph. One of the most
important things to keep in mind is that viral distribution does
not necessarily mean more customers. Many businesses
become easily distracted with mind-boggling numbers. “If I get
millions of users to my application, I only need one percent to
purchase my product!” Unfortunately things aren’t that simple,
especially considering that most Facebook users are not ready
to purchase at any given moment.

Engaging Your Customers Versus
Engaging “Users”
Yes, you can end up with millions of untargeted users within
Facebook applications but that won’t necessarily get you any
customers, unless of course you are a large corporation. An
untargeted application is almost as effective as a television ad except that you are gambling with the potential
demographics. For example all of your users may end up coming from Turkey and Italy, so how is that going to help your
U.S. based company? Anyways, you probably understand my point by now: untargeted applications are typically less
effective than single, highly-targeted applications.

Why Create A Targeted App?
There is one thing that you want from visitors to your page: repeat engagement. If you can get fans to consistently return
and participate in conversations on your Facebook Page, you will increase the level of personal afﬁliation with your brand.
In the long-term, these users will eventually turn into customers. On Facebook the majority of users are not ready to buy
a product right then. Instead, they are looking to build relationships and at some point in the future they are looking to


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buy something. By creating a targeted application you will accomplish two things: increase engagement and increase
the viral nature of your page (if the application is built correctly).

What Are The Risks?
There are a few risks involved with creating an application. While I’ve written this as one day out of 30, the reality is that
building an application requires the investment of relatively significant resources in comparison to the other days outlined
in this guide. If you are a developer then you have the advantage of being able to build the application yourself although
you will have to invest your own time. If you aren’t a developer, you are going to need to invest time to manage the
project and money on the developer.

The bottom line is that there is no guarantee your application will pay off. Thankfully a few companies have already built
applications that you can integrate right away into your Facebook Page right away with a very small investment. Involver
has developed a suite of application that you can take advantage of and Wildfire Interactive has also developed some
great tools that will help you launch promotions from within your page. If you want the best bang for your buck, I’d highly
suggest working with one of these companies rather than building your application from scratch.

What’s Are The Options For Branded Apps?
So let’s say you are considering developing a Facebook application because you have a great idea. How much does it
cost? A simple application can be as cheap as a few thousand dollars although the vast majority of branded applications
cost tens of thousands of dollars. The price ranges and there isn’t a flat rate that you can tell people. You need to
determine what your goals are first. Below are the various types of applications you can build:

Appvertisements
BuddyMedia, the New York based social media agency, essentially defined the concept of appvertisements. The model
is pretty straight forward. Your company pays for an application and the invests in an install campaign. You will then
have thousands of users visit your application but unfortunately there’s no guarantee users will stick around or return
later. Most applications that use this model that I’ve seen tend to have a quick fall off of usage. BuddyMedia would
most likely argue that repeat engagement isn’t necessarily the most important component as it’s a better investment over
traditional media buys like television and newspapers where there is no engagement whatsoever.

Integrated Applications
Don’t want to spend money on a large install buy? You can have a custom application developed for your business
instead. For this group there are two types of applications: those that are an experiment and those that are tightly
integrated into the company’s website. For example one large e-commerce company I spoke to recently was looking to
let users extend their existing shops to their Facebook profile and Facebook Page. That means there isn’t much
promotion necessary as the application is an added value offering to the company’s existing customer base.

Experimental Viral Applications
I like to call this one more of an educated guess. Rather than investing in large install buys (upwards of half a million
users at around $0.50 per user), brands often prefer to spend $5,000 to $50,000 on experimental applications that grow
on their own. The best example of this is ConextOptional’s Kidnap application which has attracted over 3 million users
and has upwards of 130,000 daily active users. The application was a great application that users enjoyed interacting
with.


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Integrated Page Applications
The last type of application is those that are integrated with Facebook Pages and are used to drive awareness of your
Facebook page. That can include gifting applications, polls, and other basic applications that are extremely simple and
used to drive trafﬁc to your page. I high recommend opting for this type if you want to minimize your investment. There
are numerous companies which currently offer applications that are integrated into Facebook pages. Use those
companies to save time and save money.

Application Strategies
There are numerous types of applications out there but there are some great strategies you can use that will increase the
likelihood of your success. I outlined 13 Facebook application strategies earlier this year that I recommend you checking
out. I’ll also be providing more content in the near future on how to maximize the impact of your Facebook applications.

Daily Task
First of all you may want to consider whether or not developing an application is worth your investment. At the least you
can use some readily available applications to build into your Facebook Page. Today’s task is to determine which type of
application, if any, is the type you’d like to implement. Also brainstorm a couple of ideas for applications that you can
launch. Set a date over the next couple weeks when you will have your application completed or at least under
development.


New Media School

Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A
Successful Facebook Event

The Networked World
Success in a socially networked world comes through building
relationships with others. As I wrote on day 8, leading conversations on
your page is extremely important. The same thing goes for the offline
world. One of the best things you can do for building your company’s
reputation is to host offline events. For hosting the event there are a few
things to keep in mind but the most important is that you already have a
large enough reach that you’ll be able to get attendees to come to your
event. Given that you at a minimum have a few hundred fans after your
initial efforts, you should have a great start to building buzz about your
new event. Today I’m going to walk you through the important steps
necessary to hosting a successful event.

Step 1: Pick An Event Topic & Format
To get your event off the ground you’ll first need to know the theme of
your event and what the format is. Are you looking to host a conference
or just a networking happy hour? My suggestion is that you start small
before you jump into launching a full blown conference. Hosting a happy
hour is relatively easy and has many less requirements. While many
individuals will look for sponsors to cover the cost of an event, you can actually get away with hosting a happy hour for
next to nothing. If you don’t have $1,000 to cover a full open-bar, you may want to just limit the tab to a couple hundred
dollars and tell the attendees that the first drink is on you. This is a networking event, not a bash, so attendees shouldn’t
have any issue with you only covering one drink.

Step 2: Pick A Venue & Negotiate A Deal
Picking a venue can be the most challenging step if you haven’t had any experience with picking a venue. People will try
to charge you on a per person basis or other random rates. One of the best things about venues is that they’re totally
negotiable and at the end of the day, you have the upper hand because you can just go somewhere else if the venue
manager/owner doesn’t provide you with a good deal. I tend to use Yelp when finding event venues to go to but I’ve
also invested a large amount of time building out a network so that now I can just post a status update and get venue
suggestions from others.


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It’s always best to ask your friends and professional contacts for recommendations before going it alone. Venues are
much more open to people who have been referred to them through others and will typically be more flexible with rates.
If all else fails, just pick a place that you like and run a tab to a specific limit.

Step 3: Create An Event On Facebook
Now that you’ve got your venue it’s time to set up a page for promoting the event. The quickest way to get started is to
set up an event on Facebook. You can do this by going to the events application and clicking on the button that says
“Create Event” (or follow this link). Setting up an event is relatively straight forward. Facebook will walk you through the
process which entails entering an event name, selecting the event visibility (which I recommend setting to “Global” if you
want to maximize the turnout), and enter the other event details.

While you can create an event directly from your Facebook Page, there is one downside of creating events directly from
pages: event updates are sent to the user’s “updates” tab within their inbox, rather than their regular Facebook inbox.
This can significantly reduce the response to the event (most people don’t read their updates). The one benefit of
posting the event from your Facebook Page is that there will be a link to the event displayed on the left-hand side of your
page. I personally don’t believe that this benefit outweighs the advantages of creating the event outside of your
Facebook Page.

Once you have gone through the first step of creating your event, you will be prompted to upload an image and then
select which features you’d like to have included in your event (videos, photo album, forum, attendee list, etc). At the
bare minimum I would recommend that you include a photo. The other features depend on whether or not you plan on
uploading photos from the event and videos. I’ll leave that option up to you.

Step 4: Notify Your Fans and Run An Event Ad
Now that you’ve set up your event, it’s time to start promoting it. The first step to promoting the new Facebook event is
to send out an update that lets people know about the event. You can also target your update to users based on their
geographic location which can be extremely useful if you want to limit the event to locals. I personally like sending out
event updates to all fans since some people occasionally come into town for events. Whatever you choose to do when
sending your update, you also need update your Page status a few times so that a message about the event goes out to
your fans’ news feeds. As I’ve written before, you’ll receive a greater response from status updates then from page
updates.

Create An Event Ad
Targeted ads on Facebook present a huge opportunity for event promoters. You can target people by company, job
position, interests, and more as I wrote about on days 10 through 12. I honestly believe that event promoters are the
single greatest beneficiaries of Facebook’s advertising system. When hosting conferences I use Facebook to promote
the events directly through their advertising system, which increases the list of potential attendees and my promotional
reach. I cannot emphasize how powerful Facebook advertisements can be for events. When you go to create your
advertisement, select the option which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You can then select
your event from drop down which is displayed under the sub-heading “Facebook Content”.

Targeted Updates
In addition to creating ads, it’s also possible to send targeted updates (as pictured in the image below). If your event
happens to be a local event, there’s no point in updating all of your fans if you have a country-wide or international brand.
Create a targeted update by clicking on “Send An Update To Fans” on the left-hand side of the Facebook Page you’d


New Media School

like to promote the event to. On the next page check the box which says “Target this update” and select the region,
gender, and age of people that you’d like to update.

Step 5: Send Out Event Reminders
Now that you have invited people to your event and people are registering to attend, it’s a good idea to send out regular
event updates. Make sure you don’t overdo it though because too many updates will turn people off and result in less
attendees. Once or twice a week (depending on how soon your event is), send an update to let them know about the
current number of RSVPs, and updates about the venue, and any information about new sponsors. These event
updates will get people to RSVP “Yes” that have not yet RSVPed or have replied “Maybe”. It’s also a great people to
remind those individuals that have RSVPed from one of your event ads about your event and instruct them to take any
other necessary actions (such as purchase a ticket if the event costs something).

Daily Task
Now that you’ve learned how to set up a successful event, it’s time to start brainstorming! Today your task is to
brainstorm and event idea and come up with 5 potential venues. Once you’ve determined the what and the where, you
are halfway there! And if you are hesitant about creating a new event, just remember the Wayne’s World quote: “If you
build it, they will come.”


New Media School

Chapter 15: How To Use A
Landing Page To Convert New
Facebook Visitors Into Fans

The Concept Of A Landing Page
If you haven’t studied internet marketing then there’s a
good chance you don’t know what a landing page is. If
you already know what one is, congratulations, you are
well ahead of most people. According to Wikipedia, a
landing page, “is the page that appears when a potential
customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine
result link.” Honestly, the Wikipedia deﬁnition isn’t the
best one since there are new types of advertisements.
The main point is that a landing page is where you
capture a customer’s information or entice them to take
another action (such as purchase a product). On Facebook, the action that you want the user to take is to become a
fan.

Facebook previously had two places to become a fan but they have since reduced it to a single link at the top of a Page.
When a person lands on your page you want to answer the following questions:

1. Who are you or what is your company?

2. Why should the user be interested in you or your company?

3. What will they get out of becoming a fan of your page?

4. Who’s in your community?

The fourth question is the most important thing and you can answer this question one of two ways: tell the user the type
of people that you’d like as fans or let them just browse through your existing fans. The main point is that new users will
be attracted to your Page based on your ability to attract others. If you only have a few fans, your landing page becomes
even more important.


New Media School

How To Create A New Tab
The easiest way to create a new tab within your Facebook Page is by using the Static FBML application. One downside
of the Static FBML application is that you will need to understand a basic level of HTML. If you have no idea how to write
HTML then you can use an application like Dreamweaver of Microsoft Frontpage to design your landing page and then
copy the HTML that’s provided by the software.

5 Tips For Improving Your Landing Tab
While you can create a fairly effective landing tab by answering the questions I posted above, here are a few other tips
that you should keep in mind:

1. Have a call to action - While you’ve educated your visitors about why they should joining your Facebook Page, you
also need to encourage them to actually join your page. That’s what the call to action is for. If you view the
AllFacebook page, you’ll notice that I’ve designed an image which says “Click on the ‘Become a fan’ button above”
with an arrow pointing up toward the “Become a fan” button.

2. Write in the second person - Rather than writing about yourself and your company, talk about the person who you
want to become a fan. Explain to them why they should join and the benefit (as outlined above in the four questions).
Use the words “you” and “your” when writing your copy.

3. Place important parts at beginning and end - People tend to read the beginning and end of landing pages before
reading the middle so you probably want to put your call to action early on and toward the end. Put the most
important copy at the beginning or at the end.

4. Don’t link to other pages - If you want to get visitors to take an action (join your page), it’s a good idea to providing
links that will drive them to other pages or other areas. Once they’ve navigated away from the tab or to another site,
there’s a greater chance that you’ve lost them.

5. Perform some basic testing - While Facebook doesn’t currently provide metrics for where new fans came from, you
can assume that all new fans have viewed your landing tab. Try making subtle adjustments to your landing tab and
measure the difference in the number of new fans you receive each day. Ultimately I wouldn’t get overly invested in
the testing process but it’s always a good idea to do at least a minimal level of testing.

Other Resources
There are numerous resources for learning about landing page optimization. While I don’t recommend becoming overly
invested in learning about this topic (unless of course you want to study internet marketing), you should definitely check
out Copyblogger’s landing page resources as well as checking out a few books on Amazon about landing page
optimization. One really good book that I’ve used is “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing And
Tuning For Conversions” by Tim Ash.

Daily Task
Today’s task is to come up with the first version of copy that you are going to use for your Facebook landing tab. Over
the next few days you can test out the HTML and more. If you already know HTML you should be able to come up with
a top notch landing page in a few hours. While you can invest in beautiful design, you really don’t need to have it look
that amazing.


New Media School

Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000
Facebook Fans

Photo Tagging Is Viral
One of the best features of Facebook Pages is the
ability to tag fans in photos. As soon as you tag
somebody, their friends can see the photo that
they’ve been tagged in. Additionally, those photos
will link back to your Facebook Page. I’ve seen a
number of people abuse photo tagging in order to
get more trafﬁc. While that’s a strategy that could
possibly work in the short-run, over longer periods
of time you’ll end up turning people away. It’s
probably better to avoid most black-hat tactics as
they can result in your Facebook account being
banned and will frequently piss people off. Feel
free to test the limits but just remember that we
warned you!

Photos Are For Events
The best reason for using photos is for events. After you’ve hosted the event (as I recommend in this guide), you should
tag people with all the photos from the event to spread awareness of your Facebook Page. I often hire a photographer
just for this purpose. At my conferences I’ll even bring in two photographers just so I can tag all the people that were at
the event in their photographs. One of the best things that will happen is people that were photographed will use the
photos for their proﬁle. The bottom line is take advantage of all events, including events that you attend to upload photos
of people and tag them.

You Can Only Tag Friends
One of the worst aspects of photo tagging within Facebook Page photo albums is the inability to tag people that aren’t
your friends. I honestly have no idea why the album functions this way and assume Facebook will eventually resolve this.
My recommendation is to friend as many of the people at the event as possible. That way you’ll increase the likelihood
that other people who visit the album will tag other people.


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Create A Tagging Game
Have you ever been tagged in one of those Facebook photos with 15 other people and the tag location is a unique
attribute about you? If not, I’ve included an example below. The basic concept is to tag other users in a fun image
which ends up attributing a personal characteristic to each user that was tagged. It’s a really create way to build buzz
and not annoy others. Don’t go over board with this model though. I’ve had numerous users tag me in irrelevant photos
and I instantly untag myself from them. Check out the image below for an example of a smart tagging strategy from Real
Drinks.

Daily Task
Since you’ll need at least a small archive of photos to take advantage of this task, you might want to consider spending
more time planning your event. If you do have an archive of photos from previous events you can spend some time
uploading photos and tagging your friends that are in the photos. You can also brainstorm some ideas for creative
tagging images like the one pictured above.


New Media School

Day 17: Post Relevant Videos

Videos Help Us To Connect
If you want to connect with your fan base you need to use as many
forms of media as possible. While written communication and photos
are extremely effective tools for communicating, video happens to be
one of the most popular forms of communication on the internet. It’s
not surprising that video sites happen to rank as the most trafficked
sites around the web. While there are many ways to integrate video
into your Facebook Page, we’ve come up with three simple ways to
use video on your Facebook Page.

Take Advantage Of YouTube
I love wasting time browsing through video sites online. Whether it’s
YouTube, Vimeo, or College Humor, I end up wasting so much time
browsing through videos. Typically I would say that it’s a bad use of
time but if you happen to find videos that would be relevant to your
brand, it’s not a complete waste. When you find an interesting video
you can just post a link to that video and the majority of the time, the
video will be visible in all of your fans’ news feeds.

It’s an opportunity to quickly start a conversation with little effort on your end. As I’ve already written, the most important
aspect to attracting fans is the ability to spark interesting dialogue. Relevant videos are an excellent way to do just that.

Event Videos
Just like yesterday’s tip, “Post Photos From Events and Tag Fans”, you should also do the exact same thing with videos.
While videos that you didn’t produce are an easy thing to link to, uploading your own videos are also extremely valuable,
especially if you have fans that you can tag in the video. I highly recommend taking short video clips such as interviews
as an easy way to generate taggable content for your Facebook Page.

If you don’t have a video camera, I highly recommend the Flip Mino HD. I’ve been using mine for a few months now and
it has come in handy.

Creative Video Tags
As mentioned in yesterday’s task, you may want to consider developing short videos that you can then tag users in with
references in each video to the people you’re tagging. While the people may not be in the video, you can insert
references to them or personality traits of them that you think would be relevant. One issue with video tagging on


New Media School

Facebook is that you can’t actually tag a speciﬁc moment in a video as of now. While this may eventually become a
feature, most videos should actually have or references the individuals being tagged.

Daily Task
I like buying things, so if you don’t have a video camera, go research Flip Mino cameras or consider grabbing the latest
iPhone 3GS. If you’d prefer not to spend money and would like to save up to purchase a device which supports video,
spend some time looking for relevant videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Don’t post all of the videos at once though! Keep
a list of all the videos you ﬁnd and post them over time.


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