3000fans30days

30 Days To 3,000 FacebookFansNew Media School 548 Market St San Francisco, CA 94104 T 202-658-7548 contact@newmediaschool.com www.newmediaschool.com

Company NameTable of ContentsIntroduction! 1Day 1: What Has Changed?! 3Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A Brand You Can Be Proud Of! 5Day 3: How To Conﬁgure Your Facebook Page! 8Day 4: Developing A Creative Photo For Your Page! 11Day 5: Target Network Nodes! 13Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A Successful Facebook Contest! 15Day 7: How To Leverage SEO For Your Facebook Page! 17Day 8: How To Become A Master Of Conversations! 19Day 9: Create A Note Which Spreads Like Wildﬁre! 21Day 10: Introduction To Facebook Ads! 23Day 11: Why Understanding Your Target Market Is Key To SuccessWith Facebook Ads! 25Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3! 27Day 13: How To Use Facebook Applications To Boost Your Fan Base!32Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A Successful Facebook Event! 35Chapter 15: How To Use A Landing Page To Convert New FacebookVisitors Into Fans! 3830 Days to 3,000 Fans! i

Company NameDay 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000 Facebook Fans! 40Day 17: Post Relevant Videos! 42Day 18: Cross-Promote Your Website! 44Day 19: Research Other Successful Pages! 46Day 20: Get People To Invite Their Friends! 48Day 21: Create Mini-Competitions! 50Day 22: Work The Forums! 52Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The Impact Of Guest Blog Posts! 54Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That Will Turn Facebook Fans Into Custom-ers! 56Day 25: Integrate the Page Into Your Existing Blog! 58Day 26: How To Use Competitive Analysis To Boost Your Fan Base! 60Day 27: Monitor Your Page Insights To Improve Content! 62Day 28: Check The Magazine Rack For Content Strategy! 64Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins! 66Day 30: Create A Plan For The Next Month! 68Day 31: Promote Fanning Via SMS! 70New Media School! 7130 Days to 3,000 Fans! ii

New Media SchoolIntroductionIf you have a brand but haven’t yet mastered the most effectivetechniques to attracting new followers and fans, you are not alone. WithFacebook updating their design and platform on a regular basis it hasbecome challenging for brands to follow everything that’s changing letalone learn all of the techniques necessary to maximize their reach. Weunderstand the challenges that you face which is why we are introducingthe 30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans project.Why Does Your Brand Want 3,000 FacebookFans?When Facebook launched their new design early this year, millions ofusers revolted against the change but as things have quieted down, onegroup not complaining is brands. Facebook’s redesigned homepageprovides brands with the same level of interaction that users have among their friends yet only a few shining brands havetruly leveraged Facebook’s redesign to its full potential. We’ve spent the past few months experimenting withFacebook’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 theirpublic proﬁle’s data, there is already plenty available for brands to take advantage of. So before discussing how to attractthousands of fans to your public proﬁle within a month, I think it would be best to explain why your brand or smallbusiness wants thousands of fans.It should be obvious to any marketer that thousands of fans can create an extremely effective promotional channel butcan 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 unfortunatelysmall 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 channelsavailable to them to interact directly with their followers, fans, and customers. For this guide we used 3,000 fans as ahigh yet reachable target that brands can attract through actionable tasks. Some will attract more and some will attractless but after 30 days I have no doubt that you will have all the tools necessary to build a more effective brand presenceon Facebook.The measure of success should not be whether or not you’ve attracted 3,000 fans but whether you’ve attracted a largenumber of targeted fans.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 1

New Media SchoolWhat The Project Involves And How To ParticipateDuring this project we will spend 30 days listing out all of the techniques needed to maximize the effectiveness of yourbrand’s Facebook page. At the end of the 30 days you should have numerous techniques that you can put into practiceimmediately. Each day we will include action items that you should take.NoteThroughout this guide I will use the words “fan pages”, “pages”, and “public proﬁles” interchangeably because Facebookhas yet to solidify their terminology.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 2

New Media SchoolDay 1: What Has Changed?The New Facebook Public ProfilesOn March 4th of this year, Facebook released an updated version on what was previously called “Facebook Pages” andis now called “Facebook Public Profiles”. The update essentially transformed the ways that brands could interact withboth 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 isthat you have a thorough understanding of all the features of Facebook pages and how to leverage them for yourbusiness.Below is an outline of the new features that have been added to Facebook Pages. As we continue the program over thecoming 30 days, we will outline how to leverage every aspect of the pages product. Here are a few of the features youwill be learning about:Status UpdatesThis is probably the most significant upgrade for Facebook Pages. Any page administrator can now post status updateson behalf of the Facebook page they are managing. Whether you are an individual or a large brand, you will now havedirect access to your fans through the news feed. I’ve personally benefited substantially from status updates. As theimage above illustrates, by posting a status update that’s a question, you can instantly get tons of feedback. Weregularly receive upwards of 30 replies to a single status update.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 3

New Media SchoolThis is an excellent way to continue engaging your fans on a regular basis. The status update is one of the core featuresof 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 covermomentarily), most users were completely oblivious to previous public profiles that they had become fans of. Distributionof rich-media content in the feeds changes all that. Now you can upload videos and photos and they will immediately beposted 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 orhow many people have read a given status update. While Facebook hasn’t stated that they plan on adding this featureanytime soon, I would imagine that Facebook will gradually improve their analytics offering to include mobilesubscriptions. Currently Facebook page “Insights” let admins view how many views of videos, photos, and page viewshave 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 separatetab in their inbox called “Updates”. One person that I spoke with sent a test message out to a public profile with morethan 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. Havean event you’re promoting? Post about it via a status update. I hosted a conference last November and found that mypublic profile at the time was practically useless because nobody was visiting the page and most people didn’t respondto updates. While there’s a chance Facebook will improve this feature, the latest upgrades signal that they are phasingout “Updates”.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 4

New Media SchoolDay 2: 10 Ways To Build ABrand You Can Be Proud OfYou may be wondering why I’m writing a whole sectionon branding when this is a guide to mastering yourFacebook Page. The primary reason that I’m bringingup branding at the beginning of this program is that apowerful brand is much more effective at attractingnew fans. Every organization is at a different phase intheir branding process. Oprah Winfrey for example,doesn’t need to do much promotion of her Facebookprofile to end up with a few hundred thousand fans.While Oprah may be a distant target, investing timeinto building your brand will help you build an avid fanbase on Facebook as well as elsewhere on the web.Tip 1: Use A Consistent DesignA large portion of branding is about image and that image is portrayed through your design. It can be the logo, a set ofcolors, or simply a consistent look and feel. As Jared Spool states in his article, “Determining How Design AffectsBranding”, “Brand elements, such as names, logos, tag lines, trademarks, and packaging are shortcuts to” theperceptions of the consumer. If you tightly integrate your design into your product or service, the design can begin toevoke the emotions and perceptions that the consumers experience when interacting with your product or service.Tip 2: Determine Your Brand PersonalityWhile brands may not be people, the personification of brands helps consumers to connect with them. That’s why it’simportant to determine what your brand’s personality is. Much of that personality can come through your own voicesince people like connecting with other individuals but you should be able to define the overall personality of your brandas well.Tip 3: Have A Consistent DialogueWhether you are having a conversation on Facebook, Twitter, or during a presentation, it’s important to have a consistentmessage. While you can engage in different conversations, it’s important that your conversation is most frequently aboutsimilar ideas or concepts. For example Oprah would not have a conversation with her viewers about computerprogramming. Maybe that’s an extreme example but the main point is that there is a consistent dialog that you shouldhave with your consumers.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 5

New Media SchoolTip 4: Define Your Target MarketWho are you selling to? That’s a question that many brands fail toanswer and in the end they become so broadly focused that they end upselling nothing. I’ve made this mistake before and the results can beextremely painful. You invest months building something only to find outthat you didn’t target a specific market and in the end nobody ends upmaking a purchase. As Wikipedia states, your target market “is mainlydefined by age, gender, geography, socio-economic grouping,technographic, or any other combination of demographics.” Figure outwho you are targeting. This is also extremely important for when youbegin running ad campaigns on Facebook (which we’ll be explaininglater). Figure out your target market and you are well on your way to3,000 fans.Tip 5: Know What Your Brand Is SellingYou’ve selected a target market but do you know what your customers want? While you can pick out a segment of themarket to go after, providing them with something that they truly want is a whole other challenge. Often timescompanies will spend months preparing for a product launch only to find out that nobody ended up purchasing theproduct. Sometimes brands will launch a product or service only to find out that their consumer is using it for anotherreason than it was intended. If you don’t understand how your customer is interacting with your brand then good luckdeveloping a Facebook public profile that’s going to rapidly attract thousands of users. Once you have determined yourtarget 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 MarketThis is more about sales and marketing then it is about building your brand but at the end of the day, there’s no point inbuilding 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 apurchase and often times, there are words that will drive an entire market to make a purchase. That’s why you need toinvest 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 youcan associate them with your brand and increase the bond with your fans.Tip 7: Listen To Your Target MarketSocial media is much more about listening than talking at people. Honestly, the old direct methods of marketing are nowdead and instead marketing has become a conversation that brands have with their customers. Thankfully, this newmodel presents many new opportunities and those brands that are quickest to adapt will reap the rewards. Some ofyour customers will want to engage in a dialogue with your brand and Facebook public profiles are a great place for thatto take place. Did someone post something negative about your brand? Publicly acknowledge their criticism and thenproceed to offer a solution.If your brand is willing to publicly acknowledge weaknesses and address them, it will build trust with your brand forexisting and future customers. Many times your fans will actually tell you what they’d like your brand to provide. This isgold to any effective marketer. Spend the time to listen, don’t just speak at your fans.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 6

New Media SchoolTip 8: Provide Relevant Content That Amplifies Your BrandIt’s difficult to consistently come up with original content. As someone who has written over 2,000 articles in the pasttwo years, I can attest to the challenge of developing original content. Thankfully, in social media (and on Facebookpublic profiles), you don’t always need to come up with original content. As you browse the web, share content that isrelevant to your brand directly from within your Facebook page. This way you can keep your fans engaged with ongoingcontent and you don’t need to always be the one producing that content.Tip 9: Create Good ContentWhile sharing content from around the web is always an easy way to get your fans engaged, it’s always better to createoriginal content. It’s possible to provide original content which rehashes existing content but the best content is trulyoriginal. One of the best forms of original content is educational guides. Educating your future consumer is always agreat way to build trust and to build an ongoing relationship. That’s not to say that the only content you should create iseducational content. Content that entertains, engages, informs, or simply makes the reader smile is great for keepingtheir attention. If you want to learn more about creating great content I highly recommend reading Copyblogger on aregular basis.Tip 10: Leverage Multiple Branding ChannelsNo, Facebook Pages are not the end all, be all of your branding strategy. People regularly ask what the best site is forbuilding their brand and generating new business. The response is always the same no matter who you ask in theindustry: go to where your customers are. If your existing or future customers are on Facebook (there’s a good chancethey are there with over 250 million users) or even MySpace (GASP!), your company should be there. Wherever yourcustomer is, you should be there.Daily TaskSpend some time listing out the personality traits of your brand. That’s right ... if your brand was a person, what type ofperson would it be?30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 7

New Media SchoolDay 3: How To Configure YourFacebook PageOverviewIn this section we are going to a basic overview for those individuals that don’t know how to get their Facebook page setup. If you are an advanced Facebook Page user then you may want to consider skipping this day. I receive a number ofemails each week from people that can’t figure out how to get their public profile set up though so I thought it would beuseful to provide a basic introduction.Step 1: Create Your Facebook PageCreating a Facebook page is a relatively rudimentary task on Facebook. To create a public profile you can visit theFacebook public profile advertising page and click on the “Create a Page” button. Next up, you’ll be prompted with aform titled “Create New Facebook Page” as illustrated below. Select your category and enter the name of your businessor public figure. Finally, you must confirm that you are authorized to create the page by entering your full name as itappears in your profile.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 8

New Media SchoolStep 2: Edit Basic InformationWhen you first arrive to your newly created public profile, there will be a link off to the right hand side which says “EditInformation”. Entering your information is important for search engine optimization (“SEO”) purposes as well as informingnew visitors about your product, service, or yourself (if you are a public figure). Currently Facebook does not enable pageadministrators to remove this tab so I highly recommend that you take the time to fill it out with all the relevantinformation.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 whythey should become a fan. The goal of the landing page is to immediately convert the user into a new fan and thenengage the fan after they’ve joined. I’ve seen companies use contests for engaging the user but the vast majority ofFacebook Pages have no separate landing page. The result is that the public profiles have a lower conversion of newvisitors into fans.There is one exception for public profiles that have no landing page but high conversion: companies with a high brandaffinity. Oprah Winfrey or Coca-Cola can convert users without having a landing page because they have such a strongbrand presence.How To Configure Your Landing PageAdding a landing page is relatively simple. One requirement is that you have a basic understanding of HTML. Moreadvanced landing pages can also be created but that will require some knowledge of the Facebook platform. I’massuming that most people reading this section don’t have much experience with the Facebook platform so I’ll provide aquick walk through of how to get the landing page configured without anything but one application and a little bit ofHTML.Install the “Static FBML” ApplicationThe first step to configuring a landing page is to install the Static FBML application to your public profile application. Afteryou visit the Static FBML application about page you can install the application by clicking “Add to Page”. You will thenbe 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 theFBML box. To include Facebook relevant information, you can use any of the tags included on the FBML wiki page. Ifyou are extremely proficient with HTML, you may note that some tags are not allowed. For those tags that don’t workproperly, you’ll need to substitute them with FBML tags as defined on the FBML Wiki page.Add The New Landing Page As A TabOnce you’ve properly configured the new tab, you’ll want to add it as a default tab. Ifyou haven’t added any tabs yet, it will immediately show up as one of your defaulttabs. If it doesn’t, simply click on the double arrows and select your custom tab as30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 9

New Media Schoolpictured in the photo to the right. When you select thenew tab it will replace the tab which is currently furthestto the right. The other thing you’ll want to configure isfor your new landing page to show up as the default tabwhen 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 Tabfor Everyone Else:” select the tab that you’d like to showup by default when a new visitor comes to your publicprofile.That’s it! Now your custom landing tab has beenconfigured.Step 4: Add Additional ApplicationsOther applications make it possible to expand the functionality of your Facebook Page. The more features you can addthat engage the user, the better. While you don’t want to add 20 applications, it often makes sense to add a fewapplications that will engage your visitors. The photos, discussions, and reviews tabs are added by default. Make surethat any tab that you have is actually being used. For example, there’s no point in having a discussions tab if you aren’tencouraging visitors to participate in ongoing conversations.While Facebook doesn’t currently list the applications available for Facebook pages, there are a number of third partiesthat provide sets of applications. Involver is one company that provides a number of applications that let you import andRSS feed, publish your Twitter status, easily create polls, share files, and more. If you want to learn more, head on overto the Involver application gallery. Also check out the promotions application provided by Wildfire Interactive.Step 5: Start Inviting FriendsOnce you’ve finished adding your applications and customizing your public profile, all you need to do is invite people toget started. One thing that I highly recommend is targeting nodes of individuals. If there is a tightly connected networkof individuals among your friends, invite each of them on the same day. This way you increase the likelihood of yournewly created Facebook Page becoming a recommended page.Daily TaskI think it’s pretty obvious what your daily task is at this point! Get your Facebook Page up and running using the stepsoutlined above.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 10

New Media SchoolDay 4: Developing A CreativePhoto For Your PageWhy Your Photo Is So ImportantMost people just quickly upload their photo to their Facebook page and never think about it again. This is probably oneof the worst mistakes you can make. Facebook doesn’t provide many customization options for the main public profilepage meaning that your photo is what sets your public profile apart from others. Back in February, Rob Banagale wrotea guest post on our blog about various ways of customizing your Facebook profile photo. Since then, thousands ofpeople have customized their profile photo in creative ways and a few of those individuals have posted screenshots oftheir photo.While the individuals were modifying their personal profile photo, the same rules go for public profile photos. Below I’veincluded a couple creative profile photo screenshots and outline the steps necessary to customizing your public profile increative ways.Public Profile Photo RestrictionsBefore designing your custom photo you should understand what restrictions there are. The first thing to understand isthe size of the photo you can have. Facebook by default resizes all photos down to a maximum width of 200 pixels anda maximum height of 600 pixels. There are plenty of creative uses of this space. Some of the best examples takeadvantage of the maximum space available. Four interesting designs I’ve see are included below:30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 11

New Media SchoolThe Awkward Photo BackgroundFacebook is known for having an awkward background for photos. There is a line and a darker background at the topportion of every public profile photo. The top color is the hex color #edeff4. The line is #d8dfea. The most challengingpart of the background is that depending on how long your status update is, the height of the line can be adjusted. Theline is exactly 52 pixels above the top. You’ll need to avoid posting longer updates though if you want your photobackground to stay lined up properly.If done properly, there are infinite possibilities for extremely creative public profile photos that take advantage of the photobackground 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 manipulationsoftware 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 TaskSpend some time developing a creative Facebook profile photo for your newly launched Facebook Page. You will benefitgreatly from investing a little extra time in developing a creative image.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 12

New Media SchoolDay 5: Target Network NodesOverviewSo far we’ve discussed a few of the basics behind promoting yourFacebook page. Now we are going to go over a few tips and tricks thatare going to help you reach the 3,000 fan target that we set at thebeginning of this guide. Keep in mind that for some companies, 3,000fans is excessive while for others 3,000 may not be a lot. You need toeffectively assess your goals and figure out a good number that makessense for you during the 30 day program.Target Nodes and InfluencersIn the “Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwell discusses how key influencers can be the drivers behind viral consumerepidemics. The point is that the most connected individuals that are also connected to other highly-connected nodesend up having a ton of influence. We all know super-connecters and if you are looking to build your public profile’s fanbase, you should be targeting them. Randomly pursuing these individuals is not the best way to go about it though. Awell planned and well executed targeting process will yield the maximum results.How To Perform Influencer OutreachThere are a number of reasons you shouldn’t just start randomly messaging influencers. The first is because it’s just badform. Aside from that, if you randomly message people, you will miss out on a ton of opportunity. The largestopportunity is the phenomenon of overlapping networks. If two influentials share friends, the odds of your public profilebecoming a recommended Facebook Page or ending up in a user’s highlights area on their homepage will besubstantially increased.So now that you know why I don’t like randomly reaching out to influencers, let’s explore the best way to go aboutreaching 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 with30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 13

New Media School 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 Facebookencourage you to take each of the steps listed above? Probably not but the bottom line is that it works. If you abuse thesystem, Facebook will surely ban you. Theoretically collecting data about network influencers could be a violation ofFacebook’s terms of service but it’s readily available information. Any research you do on Facebook is at your owndiscretion so make sure not to abuse their system!Daily TaskCome up with a list of at least 20 influencers that you can reach out to. Begin an initial conversation with each and aimto have them all become fans of your Facebook Page on the same day.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 14

New Media SchoolDay 6: 5 Tips To Creating ASuccessful Facebook ContestWhile you will receive an initial surge in fans from inviting your friends andtargeting network nodes, the growth will eventually flatten. You’ll need away to drive more fans. One of the best ways to attract new fans is bycreating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of thetime this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number offriends you can invite to a public profile. That bring about the first tiprelated to a contest.Tip 1: Incentivize Invites To Facebook PagesFacebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can inviteto a public profile which makes invitations one of the most importantcomponents of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users toinvite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the singlebest tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fansto invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite theirfriends? Right now there isn’t actually a way of tracking how many friendsa user has invited but you can however develop applications which trackthe 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 publicprofile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes abit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.Tip 2: Create Friend LeaderboardsOne of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in theprevious tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboardamong 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 forfriends, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll get a user to engage.Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart PeriodicallyIf you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you couldtheoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 15

New Media Schoolweekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shortertime frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by asurge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but mostcompanies should extend things over a month or longer.Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the ContestSo after a bit of brainstorming you’ve come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get itprogrammed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contestconcepts 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’ttell you how many conversations I’ve seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times suchquestions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.Tip 5: Provide Cash PrizesWant 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 asa valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that’s up for you to determine when developing thecontest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizessince you could very well break the bank (then again if you’re targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairlysizable marketing budget as well).Daily TaskCome up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to seewhich they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 16

New Media SchoolDay 7: How To Leverage SEOFor Your Facebook PageIntro to Search Engine OptimizationFor those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internetmarketing, you probably are not aware of what searchengine optimization is. The main goal of search engineoptimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to anygiven site by search engines. Currently search engines (andmostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journeyaround the web. While many users will go directly to theirfavorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a dayby most internet users to discover resources they haven’tpreviously 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 URLURLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information aspossible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. As of Saturday June 13, 2009, Facebookoffers something called “vanity URLs” for those Facebook Pages that have over 1,000 fans. A vanity URL is the shortFacebook 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 gettingGoogle “juice”.2. Configure Your Default TabOn day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure thatthe first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” linkon your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focusedheavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take actionthen to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’twant to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 17

New Media School3. Generate Links To Your PageIf you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incominglinks. 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 Pagestend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number ofincoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If youare active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This willmost definitely help you gain some traction in Google.4. Link To Other Relevant PagesI’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you createda site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help outthe readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages youare linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a goodchance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company WebsiteOne of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While somecompanies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page isextremely 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 PageThe name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spendinga lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pageshowever there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one ofthose things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after yourcompany or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO JuiceSome resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While itmay drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed contentusing javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-throughpage. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.ConclusionThese were just six tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Pagestrategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a linkon Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than yourbrand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.Daily TaskMake at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Alsodetermine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generatesome SEO juice for your Facebook page.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 18

New Media SchoolDay 8: How To Become AMaster Of ConversationsThe Art of Social MediaWant to have highly engaging conversations on your Facebookproﬁle? You better get good at mastering the art of the socialmedia conversation. How is a conversation within social mediaany different than a normal conversation? It isn’t! If you aregoing to build a following on Facebook let alone any other siteon the internet, you are going to need to put in the timenecessary to build relationships with others. Whether it’sposting follow-up comments or reaching out to people thathave asked valuable questions or have even posted criticism,it’s important that you build an ongoing dialogue with your fans.The Personiﬁcation Of The BrandWant 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 onthe back of a cereal box asking for your feedback, there really wasn’t a two-way conversation for the most part. Thanksto the internet and new social technologies, you have the opportunity to engage your existing and potential customersdirectly. So what types of conversations are most effective at building an engaged fan base?Ask QuestionsAny good conversation involves questions and answers. Facebook Pages present an amazing opportunity to learnabout your existing customers and potential ones. Not until recently was it possible to directly interact with yourcustomers on an ongoing basis, especially if you were representing a large brand. People love to talk about themselvesso ask them questions that are also related to your company. I happen to write about Facebook so I tend to ask usersabout their experience with the site and what their favorite and least favorite aspects are. Additionally you can simply askgeneral questions such as “what are you doing over this summer weekend?”Respond To Questions And CommentsAs you build your fan base, fans will begin to regularly post comments as well as questions. Take the time to engagewith them. Any time you take to interact with the fans is always time well spent. Many of the questions and commentswill be extremely easy to respond to, only requiring a few seconds of your time. If you end up with an extremely popular30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 19

New Media Schoolbrand 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 FansAre there fans that continuously post on your Facebook Page? Take the time to recognize them and continue to foster arelationship with them. Your biggest fans can become extremely valuable. These fans will take the time to promote yourbusiness for you. They’ll reply to other fan comments and do a lot of your work for you. Building relationships with theseindividuals is extremely important. One way to help build these types of relationships is to promote those that havehelped you build your business. Give a quick shout out to the person as a comment and they’ll typically be extremelygrateful. Support your biggest fans and they’ll help support you, helping you taking your business to the next level.Daily TaskPost a conversational update to your Facebook Page. This should become a daily habit and not a one-time eventhowever. Make sure that you remember to stop by your Facebook Page at least once a day (if not more) to post anupdate.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 20

New Media SchoolDay 9: Create A Note WhichSpreads Like WildfireIntro to Facebook NotesRemember the viral Facebook note about “25 thingsabout me”? If you don’t then you probably haven’t beenon Facebook for long. The 25 things about me notespread through Facebook and touched millions of usersbefore it eventually died out. The main ideas behind thenote was similar to a chain letter. You write 25 thingspeople don’t know about you and then tag your friendsand ask them to write the note as well. The end resultwas that million of users ended up writing 25 thingsabout themselves and it ended up getting covered bypeople in the press because so many people hadparticipated.How To Create A Viral NoteI 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 thesecret answer unfortunately. What I do know however, is that you can tag people from notes that are posted to yourpage and thanks to that feature you can begin to have notes spread throughout the social graph. So how do you comeup 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 worksextremely well through standard chain letter models. The most important component of a note is that users need to beable to share something personal about themselves. Facebook is a site for sharing and any game or activity thatencourages personalized participation is much more likely to succeed.Create More Effective TitlesWant to really get someone’s attention? An effective title can make all the difference. I’ve previously written articles usingadvertising headlines that I modiﬁed from a book I have about headlines (you can get the book here) and the results havebeen phenomenal. While the content is extremely important, you will gain or lose the vast majority of readers via theheadline. Make sure your note’s title stands out and you’ll be well on your way to developing a viral note. If you wantother tips on effective copywriting, I highly recommend checking out Copyblogger.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 21

New Media SchoolCreate Multiple Notes To Tag Smaller Groups Of PeopleWhile you could create a note and tag all of your contacts, it would be more effective to spread your note postings over aperiod of time. This way more people will see the note and you can also spread out the number of people that you tag inany given note. Tagging people is essentially the way that notes are spread and it can also be leveraged just like theclassic game of tag: “Tag you’re it!”Adding The Branding ComponentSo you are trying out your hand at developing a note that will spread throughout the social graph but there’s no brandingcomponent of the note! That’s definitely an issue. By doing things for the betterment of your network (out of the good ofyour own heart) you can still generate a lot of recognition and influence. However I know that many people want instanttraffic to their Facebook page so I’ve come up with a few ideas. I suggest trying a few things but keep in mind that themore 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 ofthe note. Whatever method you come up with, branding is something that needs to be delicately balanced withcontributing to the community. Always keep in mind that sparking the conversation is more important than the brandingbeing received.Daily TaskBrainstorm three ideas for notes that you think people will be willing to spread to their friends. Ultimately this task takessome extra effort but if you want to generate buzz you should take advantage of all of the promotional channels availableto you on Facebook and the notes application is one of them.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 22

New Media SchoolDay 10: Introduction ToFacebook AdsYou Need To Prime The PumpsWhile I wish Facebook Pages would start with one person and just grow tothousands of users, it’s simply not that easy. Building a fan base requires afair amount of work and a small amount of cash. The cash is being usedto purchase Facebook advertisements that will drive you new fans. If youwant to approximate how much it costs for each new fan, you canessentially estimate the cost at $0.50 per fan when using Facebookadvertisements. While you can rely on your natural branding ability, mostcompanies aren’t as popular as Oprah and need to invest in expandingtheir 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:30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 23

New Media School 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 TaskTake some time exploring Facebook’s advertising offering. Over the next two days we will go into more detail about howto leverage Facebook advertising more effectively.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 24

New Media SchoolDay 11: Why UnderstandingYour Target Market Is Key ToSuccess With Facebook AdsGetting Started With Facebook AdsSo now that I’ve made the sales pitch to you for usingFacebook advertising, let’s take a look at what it takes to geta campaign set up. The most important thing to do first is todefine your target market. What’s the demographicinformation of your target market? What’s the average dayfor your target market like? Your job as an advertiser is toconnect with the customer on an emotional level as quick aspossible. The only way you’ll be able to do that is to connectwith them.Who Is Your Customer?For this section we are going to pretend that we are marketing a high-end, environmentally friendly limousine service. Inthe book “Duct Tape Marketing”, author John Jantsch defines marketing as “getting people, who have a specific need orproblem, to know, like, and trust you.” While your Facebook Page will be used to help you build the relationship, youneed to connect with them quickly, and that first connection will be done via your Facebook advertisement. I tend tothink that if you can get a user on Facebook to smile thanks to one of your advertisements, you’ll have connected withthem and they’ll become a fan. In this example we are targeting more of a luxury service, as most people are not lookingfor 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 oftime on determining your target market is extremely important.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 25

New Media SchoolQuestions To Answer When Defining A Target MarketBefore we move on to the third day of exploring Facebook advertisements you should answer as many of the followingquestions 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 TaskDefine your target market by answering some of the questions we’ve presented. Also do some research on the webabout defining a target market. Hopefully you’ve already defined your target market since this probably isn’t your firstmarketing activity for your company. If you already have a clearly defined target market, pat yourself on the back andtake the day off: you deserve it!30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 26

New Media SchoolDay 12: Facebook Ads Day 3Creating the AdSo you’ve listened to my sales pitch about Facebook advertising and you’ve taken the time to define your company’starget market. Hopefully this wasn’t the first time that you’ve defined your target market, otherwise you are in serioustrouble ;) So the first thing you want to do is head over to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create. If you haven’t alreadycreated your page then you most definitely want to have it set up by now since we will be integrating our page with ourad. 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 GroupBefore walking through the ad creation process, I wanted to note that it’s important to split up your ad creative amongeach 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 increaselong-term results. For this guide we were focused on 30 days but obviously your marketing activities should not endafter 30 days.Setup Your First AdvertisementI’m going to quickly run through the set up process of an advertisement. I will be going into more details during ourFacebook Advertising series in addition to providing video tutorials within the New Media School Facebook BusinessInsiders course.Step 1: Design Your AdvertisementThe first step of creating an ad is determining the design which includes a 110 pixel x 80 pixel image, and ad title, andthe body text. Since we are promoting something on Facebook, we’ll want to select the Page that we are promoting aspictured 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 theright hand side of the settings page.Select Option To Promote Something On Facebook30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 27

New Media SchoolDirectly under the area that says “Design Your Ad” click on the link which says “I want to advertise something I have onFacebook”. You will then be able to select anything that you have on Facebook including your Facebook Page.Select The Page You Want To PromoteAs pictured below, select the Facebook page that you’d like promote. Facebook will then automatically generate anadvertisement using your Facebook page’s image. While you can change the image, it’s fine to make at least one usingthe default image then split test it against another ad (as I’ll explain later).Step 2: Select Your Targeting OptionsOften times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test twoad versions against each other. On Facebook, this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic adthat’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste alot 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 to30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 28

New Media School 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. Inorder to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make theadvertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 29

New Media SchoolStep 3: Enter Your Pricing SettingsNow that you’ve ﬁgured out the targeting for your advertisement you need to select the pricing. You can choosebetween CPM and CPC advertising but there’s pretty much no point of going the CPM route. You want to pay for usersto take an action and in this case it’s either them clicking on the ad that directs them to your Facebook page orbecoming a fan directly from the ad.Selecting A CampaignIt’s a good idea to group all of your ads for a single Facebook Page into a single campaign. This is because you canadjust your budget for that speciﬁc campaign at any point. If you adjust the dollar spend of a campaign for yourFacebook Page you can track the change in the growth of fans based on that adjustment, giving you a rough estimate ofthe cost per fan.Selecting A Price To BidFacebook will suggest bidding prices that will maximize the number of impressions you receive. The more you bidtypically, the more you receive. While there is a lot of information about how Google ranks their advertisements there iscurrently no information about Facebook and rankings such as advertisement quality score. My guess is that there willbe more information about ads on Facebook as time goes along but for now, pick a bid rate that sounds reasonable toyou and then track the number of impressions and clicks that you receive. For now, Facebook doesn’t provide concreteinformation on how to improve positioning and impression rates.Split Test With A Second AdvertisementAs I mentioned early on, it’s important to split test two advertisements against each other to see which receive moreclicks. 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 usersmore than once.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 30

New Media SchoolDaily TaskAt this point you should have a thorough idea about how to manage your Facebook page advertising campaign. As Iwrote yesterday, it’s important that you have a good deﬁnition of your target market. By now you should know that targetand should be able to set up a couple initial ads. For today’s task, create two advertisements on Facebook that promoteyour Facebook Page. Feel free to test it out with only a couple dollars a day. You can then adjust your budget asneeded.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 31

New Media SchoolDay 13: How To Use FacebookApplications To Boost Your FanBaseDetermining The Best PlatformStrategyThe Facebook platform presents an amazing opportunity forcompanies to expand their presence quickly by enabling viraldistribution through the social graph. One of the mostimportant things to keep in mind is that viral distribution doesnot necessarily mean more customers. Many businessesbecome easily distracted with mind-boggling numbers. “If I getmillions of users to my application, I only need one percent topurchase my product!” Unfortunately things aren’t that simple,especially considering that most Facebook users are not readyto purchase at any given moment.Engaging Your Customers VersusEngaging “Users”Yes, you can end up with millions of untargeted users withinFacebook applications but that won’t necessarily get you anycustomers, unless of course you are a large corporation. Anuntargeted application is almost as effective as a television ad except that you are gambling with the potentialdemographics. For example all of your users may end up coming from Turkey and Italy, so how is that going to help yourU.S. based company? Anyways, you probably understand my point by now: untargeted applications are typically lesseffective 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 returnand 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 buya product right then. Instead, they are looking to build relationships and at some point in the future they are looking to30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 32

New Media Schoolbuy something. By creating a targeted application you will accomplish two things: increase engagement and increasethe 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 thatbuilding an application requires the investment of relatively significant resources in comparison to the other days outlinedin this guide. If you are a developer then you have the advantage of being able to build the application yourself althoughyou will have to invest your own time. If you aren’t a developer, you are going to need to invest time to manage theproject 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 builtapplications that you can integrate right away into your Facebook Page right away with a very small investment. Involverhas developed a suite of application that you can take advantage of and Wildfire Interactive has also developed somegreat tools that will help you launch promotions from within your page. If you want the best bang for your buck, I’d highlysuggest 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 itcost? A simple application can be as cheap as a few thousand dollars although the vast majority of branded applicationscost tens of thousands of dollars. The price ranges and there isn’t a flat rate that you can tell people. You need todetermine what your goals are first. Below are the various types of applications you can build:AppvertisementsBuddyMedia, the New York based social media agency, essentially defined the concept of appvertisements. The modelis pretty straight forward. Your company pays for an application and the invests in an install campaign. You will thenhave thousands of users visit your application but unfortunately there’s no guarantee users will stick around or returnlater. Most applications that use this model that I’ve seen tend to have a quick fall off of usage. BuddyMedia wouldmost likely argue that repeat engagement isn’t necessarily the most important component as it’s a better investment overtraditional media buys like television and newspapers where there is no engagement whatsoever.Integrated ApplicationsDon’t want to spend money on a large install buy? You can have a custom application developed for your businessinstead. For this group there are two types of applications: those that are an experiment and those that are tightlyintegrated into the company’s website. For example one large e-commerce company I spoke to recently was looking tolet users extend their existing shops to their Facebook profile and Facebook Page. That means there isn’t muchpromotion necessary as the application is an added value offering to the company’s existing customer base.Experimental Viral ApplicationsI like to call this one more of an educated guess. Rather than investing in large install buys (upwards of half a millionusers at around $0.50 per user), brands often prefer to spend $5,000 to $50,000 on experimental applications that growon their own. The best example of this is ConextOptional’s Kidnap application which has attracted over 3 million usersand has upwards of 130,000 daily active users. The application was a great application that users enjoyed interactingwith.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 33

New Media SchoolIntegrated Page ApplicationsThe last type of application is those that are integrated with Facebook Pages and are used to drive awareness of yourFacebook page. That can include gifting applications, polls, and other basic applications that are extremely simple andused to drive trafﬁc to your page. I high recommend opting for this type if you want to minimize your investment. Thereare numerous companies which currently offer applications that are integrated into Facebook pages. Use thosecompanies to save time and save money.Application StrategiesThere are numerous types of applications out there but there are some great strategies you can use that will increase thelikelihood of your success. I outlined 13 Facebook application strategies earlier this year that I recommend you checkingout. I’ll also be providing more content in the near future on how to maximize the impact of your Facebook applications.Daily TaskFirst of all you may want to consider whether or not developing an application is worth your investment. At the least youcan use some readily available applications to build into your Facebook Page. Today’s task is to determine which type ofapplication, if any, is the type you’d like to implement. Also brainstorm a couple of ideas for applications that you canlaunch. Set a date over the next couple weeks when you will have your application completed or at least underdevelopment.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 34

New Media SchoolDay 14: 5 Steps To Hosting ASuccessful Facebook EventThe Networked WorldSuccess in a socially networked world comes through buildingrelationships with others. As I wrote on day 8, leading conversations onyour page is extremely important. The same thing goes for the offlineworld. One of the best things you can do for building your company’sreputation is to host offline events. For hosting the event there are a fewthings to keep in mind but the most important is that you already have alarge enough reach that you’ll be able to get attendees to come to yourevent. Given that you at a minimum have a few hundred fans after yourinitial efforts, you should have a great start to building buzz about yournew event. Today I’m going to walk you through the important stepsnecessary to hosting a successful event.Step 1: Pick An Event Topic & FormatTo get your event off the ground you’ll first need to know the theme ofyour event and what the format is. Are you looking to host a conferenceor just a networking happy hour? My suggestion is that you start smallbefore you jump into launching a full blown conference. Hosting a happyhour is relatively easy and has many less requirements. While manyindividuals will look for sponsors to cover the cost of an event, you can actually get away with hosting a happy hour fornext 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 hundreddollars and tell the attendees that the first drink is on you. This is a networking event, not a bash, so attendees shouldn’thave any issue with you only covering one drink.Step 2: Pick A Venue & Negotiate A DealPicking a venue can be the most challenging step if you haven’t had any experience with picking a venue. People will tryto charge you on a per person basis or other random rates. One of the best things about venues is that they’re totallynegotiable and at the end of the day, you have the upper hand because you can just go somewhere else if the venuemanager/owner doesn’t provide you with a good deal. I tend to use Yelp when finding event venues to go to but I’vealso invested a large amount of time building out a network so that now I can just post a status update and get venuesuggestions from others.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 35

New Media SchoolIt’s always best to ask your friends and professional contacts for recommendations before going it alone. Venues aremuch 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 FacebookNow 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 toset 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 theprocess which entails entering an event name, selecting the event visibility (which I recommend setting to “Global” if youwant 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 frompages: 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 ofposting the event from your Facebook Page is that there will be a link to the event displayed on the left-hand side of yourpage. I personally don’t believe that this benefit outweighs the advantages of creating the event outside of yourFacebook Page.Once you have gone through the first step of creating your event, you will be prompted to upload an image and thenselect which features you’d like to have included in your event (videos, photo album, forum, attendee list, etc). At thebare minimum I would recommend that you include a photo. The other features depend on whether or not you plan onuploading photos from the event and videos. I’ll leave that option up to you.Step 4: Notify Your Fans and Run An Event AdNow that you’ve set up your event, it’s time to start promoting it. The first step to promoting the new Facebook event isto send out an update that lets people know about the event. You can also target your update to users based on theirgeographic location which can be extremely useful if you want to limit the event to locals. I personally like sending outevent updates to all fans since some people occasionally come into town for events. Whatever you choose to do whensending your update, you also need update your Page status a few times so that a message about the event goes out toyour fans’ news feeds. As I’ve written before, you’ll receive a greater response from status updates then from pageupdates.Create An Event AdTargeted ads on Facebook present a huge opportunity for event promoters. You can target people by company, jobposition, interests, and more as I wrote about on days 10 through 12. I honestly believe that event promoters are thesingle greatest beneficiaries of Facebook’s advertising system. When hosting conferences I use Facebook to promotethe events directly through their advertising system, which increases the list of potential attendees and my promotionalreach. I cannot emphasize how powerful Facebook advertisements can be for events. When you go to create youradvertisement, select the option which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You can then selectyour event from drop down which is displayed under the sub-heading “Facebook Content”.Targeted UpdatesIn addition to creating ads, it’s also possible to send targeted updates (as pictured in the image below). If your eventhappens 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’d30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 36

New Media Schoollike 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 RemindersNow that you have invited people to your event and people are registering to attend, it’s a good idea to send out regularevent updates. Make sure you don’t overdo it though because too many updates will turn people off and result in lessattendees. Once or twice a week (depending on how soon your event is), send an update to let them know about thecurrent number of RSVPs, and updates about the venue, and any information about new sponsors. These eventupdates will get people to RSVP “Yes” that have not yet RSVPed or have replied “Maybe”. It’s also a great people toremind those individuals that have RSVPed from one of your event ads about your event and instruct them to take anyother necessary actions (such as purchase a ticket if the event costs something).Daily TaskNow that you’ve learned how to set up a successful event, it’s time to start brainstorming! Today your task is tobrainstorm and event idea and come up with 5 potential venues. Once you’ve determined the what and the where, youare halfway there! And if you are hesitant about creating a new event, just remember the Wayne’s World quote: “If youbuild it, they will come.”30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 37

New Media SchoolChapter 15: How To Use ALanding Page To Convert NewFacebook Visitors Into FansThe Concept Of A Landing PageIf you haven’t studied internet marketing then there’s agood chance you don’t know what a landing page is. Ifyou already know what one is, congratulations, you arewell ahead of most people. According to Wikipedia, alanding page, “is the page that appears when a potentialcustomer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engineresult link.” Honestly, the Wikipedia deﬁnition isn’t thebest one since there are new types of advertisements.The main point is that a landing page is where youcapture a customer’s information or entice them to takeanother action (such as purchase a product). On Facebook, the action that you want the user to take is to become afan.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 typeof people that you’d like as fans or let them just browse through your existing fans. The main point is that new users willbe attracted to your Page based on your ability to attract others. If you only have a few fans, your landing page becomeseven more important.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 38

New Media SchoolHow To Create A New TabThe easiest way to create a new tab within your Facebook Page is by using the Static FBML application. One downsideof the Static FBML application is that you will need to understand a basic level of HTML. If you have no idea how to writeHTML then you can use an application like Dreamweaver of Microsoft Frontpage to design your landing page and thencopy the HTML that’s provided by the software.5 Tips For Improving Your Landing TabWhile you can create a fairly effective landing tab by answering the questions I posted above, here are a few other tipsthat 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 ResourcesThere are numerous resources for learning about landing page optimization. While I don’t recommend becoming overlyinvested in learning about this topic (unless of course you want to study internet marketing), you should definitely checkout Copyblogger’s landing page resources as well as checking out a few books on Amazon about landing pageoptimization. One really good book that I’ve used is “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing AndTuning For Conversions” by Tim Ash.Daily TaskToday’s task is to come up with the first version of copy that you are going to use for your Facebook landing tab. Overthe next few days you can test out the HTML and more. If you already know HTML you should be able to come up witha top notch landing page in a few hours. While you can invest in beautiful design, you really don’t need to have it lookthat amazing.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 39

New Media SchoolDay 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000Facebook FansPhoto Tagging Is ViralOne of the best features of Facebook Pages is theability to tag fans in photos. As soon as you tagsomebody, their friends can see the photo thatthey’ve been tagged in. Additionally, those photoswill link back to your Facebook Page. I’ve seen anumber of people abuse photo tagging in order toget more trafﬁc. While that’s a strategy that couldpossibly work in the short-run, over longer periodsof time you’ll end up turning people away. It’sprobably better to avoid most black-hat tactics asthey can result in your Facebook account beingbanned and will frequently piss people off. Feelfree to test the limits but just remember that wewarned you!Photos Are For EventsThe best reason for using photos is for events. After you’ve hosted the event (as I recommend in this guide), you shouldtag people with all the photos from the event to spread awareness of your Facebook Page. I often hire a photographerjust for this purpose. At my conferences I’ll even bring in two photographers just so I can tag all the people that were atthe event in their photographs. One of the best things that will happen is people that were photographed will use thephotos for their proﬁle. The bottom line is take advantage of all events, including events that you attend to upload photosof people and tag them.You Can Only Tag FriendsOne of the worst aspects of photo tagging within Facebook Page photo albums is the inability to tag people that aren’tyour 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 likelihoodthat other people who visit the album will tag other people.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 40

New Media SchoolCreate A Tagging GameHave you ever been tagged in one of those Facebook photos with 15 other people and the tag location is a uniqueattribute about you? If not, I’ve included an example below. The basic concept is to tag other users in a fun imagewhich ends up attributing a personal characteristic to each user that was tagged. It’s a really create way to build buzzand not annoy others. Don’t go over board with this model though. I’ve had numerous users tag me in irrelevant photosand I instantly untag myself from them. Check out the image below for an example of a smart tagging strategy from RealDrinks.Daily TaskSince you’ll need at least a small archive of photos to take advantage of this task, you might want to consider spendingmore time planning your event. If you do have an archive of photos from previous events you can spend some timeuploading photos and tagging your friends that are in the photos. You can also brainstorm some ideas for creativetagging images like the one pictured above.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 41

New Media SchoolDay 17: Post Relevant VideosVideos Help Us To ConnectIf you want to connect with your fan base you need to use as manyforms of media as possible. While written communication and photosare extremely effective tools for communicating, video happens to beone of the most popular forms of communication on the internet. It’snot surprising that video sites happen to rank as the most traffickedsites around the web. While there are many ways to integrate videointo your Facebook Page, we’ve come up with three simple ways touse video on your Facebook Page.Take Advantage Of YouTubeI love wasting time browsing through video sites online. Whether it’sYouTube, Vimeo, or College Humor, I end up wasting so much timebrowsing through videos. Typically I would say that it’s a bad use oftime but if you happen to find videos that would be relevant to yourbrand, it’s not a complete waste. When you find an interesting videoyou can just post a link to that video and the majority of the time, thevideo 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 importantaspect to attracting fans is the ability to spark interesting dialogue. Relevant videos are an excellent way to do just that.Event VideosJust 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 interviewsas 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 andit has come in handy.Creative Video TagsAs mentioned in yesterday’s task, you may want to consider developing short videos that you can then tag users in withreferences in each video to the people you’re tagging. While the people may not be in the video, you can insertreferences to them or personality traits of them that you think would be relevant. One issue with video tagging on30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 42

New Media SchoolFacebook is that you can’t actually tag a speciﬁc moment in a video as of now. While this may eventually become afeature, most videos should actually have or references the individuals being tagged.Daily TaskI like buying things, so if you don’t have a video camera, go research Flip Mino cameras or consider grabbing the latestiPhone 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! Keepa list of all the videos you ﬁnd and post them over time.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 43

New Media SchoolDay 18: Cross-Promote YourWebsiteTake Advantage Of Existing TrafﬁcHave you already invested time and money in building your web presence? Take advantage of it and use your website tocross-promote your Facebook Page. Many people are concerned that directing visitors from their website to theirFacebook Page isn’t useful because those users end up not returning to the site. Ultimately the user’s navigationalpattern should be based on the goals for your site.Driving users to your Facebook Page is extremely useful for creating an ongoing dialogue. As I previously wrote in “The 5Phases of the Facebook Sales Funnel”, Facebook pages provide an optimal platform for building relationships with yourexisting and future customers. This is why driving users from your website to your Facebook Page is important. WhileFacebook Pages may one day be able to exist on your own site, for the time being the product provides marketers withan instant community platform.If you don’t want the user to leave your site but you’d like them to become a fan right away you can use the Facebookfan box as we’ll discuss in more detail later in this program. Depending on the size of your website and yourorganization’s goals you can determine which is the best way to promote your Facebook Page. Linking directly to yourFacebook page is a great way to generate new fans and to continue the engagement.Send Them Back To Your SiteNow that you’ve directed a user from your website to your Facebook Page, it’s time to do the exact opposite! Once auser becomes a fan of your Facebook Page, they will receive status updates in the news feed as we’ve alreadydescribed. Some of the links you provide should direct the user back to your website. I say that assuming that you haveregularly updated content on your website as well. If you don’t, your Facebook Page may be good enough for engagingusers.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 44

New Media SchoolIf you don’t have regularly updated content on your website, what’s the point of having a website though? If you aren’tupdating it regularly with content, you may want to consider setting up a blog so that you have something to keep userscoming back. As any effective marketer knows, it takes a customer numerous times of seeing your brand before theydecide to make a purchase with you.A Perfect BalanceEach company will have its own goals and those goals should dictate what types of promotional activities you do. At theleast, you should consider driving users directly from your website to Facebook Pages in order to engage them on anongoing basis. This guide isn’t meant to explore the intricacies of user’s navigational patterns within your site but I wouldstrongly recommend making the process of turning new visitors into fans an integral part of your site.Daily TaskPlace a conveniently located link to your Facebook Page from your website. Take some time determining where to placethe link. Also consider testing out the location against other locations and measure the impact of each.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 45

New Media SchoolDay 19: Research OtherSuccessful PagesCopy From The BestOne of the best ways of ensuring that yourFacebook Page will be successful is to copyother successful ones. It’s no secret that thebest marketers are most influenced by othersuccessful marketers. While there are a lot ofresearch methods I would suggest taking a lookat our Facebook Pages leaderboard, andselecting the most popular as well as the fastestgrowing. We’ll also soon begin to provide moreadvanced ways for sorting through FacebookPages.Aside from copying the best, this guide should besufficient to put you into the top percentage of Facebook Pages with a little bit of effort and time.What To Take Note OfAside from the finding Facebook Pages that have a lot of fans, it’s also important to know the context under which theyattracted a lot of fans. For example, Starbucks may have an impressive number of Facebook fans but it didn’t require alot of effort to build a Facebook fan base for a multi-national corporation. Yes, Starbucks may have put in some extraeffort (including large advertising campaigns) to ensure their page was as effective as it could possibly be but it’s moreimportant to seek out those companies that may not be as popular but have built a large fan base.I personally look for pages that have between 5,000 and 50,000 fans and have a decent growth rate. If a FacebookPage is growing extremely fast (e.g. 50 percent growth a week), it probably isn’t run by a small company. Over thecoming weeks I’ll be releasing statistics that help you more effectively find those pages that are doing well but browsingthrough our Pages directory will be a great start.Page FeaturesOnce you’ve discovered legitimate Facebook Pages that are growing at a decent pace, you’ll want to explore what theyare doing that have made them so successful. Take a look at their company’s website to see if they are linking to theirFacebook Page and how prevalent the link is. Also take note of the types of applications that the Page administrator has30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 46

New Media Schoolinstalled. How often is the page updated with statuses and links? All of the things that we covered in this guide arethings you should take note of from other Facebook Pages.Daily TaskToday’s task is to come up with a list of 10 to 20 Facebook Pages that you can ﬁnd inspiration in. Browse through ourFacebook Page directory and also just search through Facebook to ﬁnd interesting conversations being generated byPages. What types of users are becoming fans? How often to the page administrators engage their fan base?30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 47

New Media SchoolDay 20: Get People To InviteTheir FriendsCreative IncentivesThis actually has to be one of the more challenging tasks. Inorder to get a boost in your fan base, it’s important to get usersto invite their friends. So what methods are there for gettingusers to invite their friends? The ﬁrst and most obvious methodis to ask users to invite their friends. This can surprisingly havea large impact. The other day I asked my users to invite theirfriends and a few people invited hundreds of their friends. Theproblem with this is that it doesn’t maximize the impact youcould theoretically have by providing some sort of incentive.By incentivizing the user to invite their friends to your Page, youincrease the likelihood that one of their friends will actually beinterested in your company or brand. On applicationsFacebook has strict rules surrounding incentivizing invitesbecause many applications has used this feature to force usersto spam their friends. While the restrictions don’t exist on Facebook, the best invite responses will come from those thataren’t forced.Applications Are ImportantWhile applications take more resources to get completed, you can use Facebook’s API to develop contests as well asrun basic statistics about your user base. There are numerous ways to take advantage of applications to get users toinvite their friends but here are three that we suggest:1. Create A Gifting ApplicationMany Facebook Pages now have gifting applications that have become integrated with them. The reason is that everytime a user sends a gift to their friend, you can drive them back to your Facebook Page. Free gifts happen to be themost obvious thing to send to friends which would explain why a number of Pages have already begun implementing thisfeature. Thankfully there are a few applications like Wildﬁre’s promotions app that lets you quickly create a giftingapplication.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 48

New Media School2. Have A Referral LeaderboardThis one will require a little bit of programming but in thinking about incentivized invites, I thought of one of the mostobvious ways of getting people to invite others: create a contest out of it. Using the Facebook API, you can’t track theactual invites that are sent but you can track the relationships among fans. This means you can rank people within yourcommunity based on the number of friends that they have as fans. It’s kind of a gimmicky model but should be worththe effort.3. Create A ContestThe third model would be to create a contest application. I’ll outline more about contests and competitions in the nextsection but the point is that contests are a great way to attract repeat engagement. Check out the Promotionsapplication created by WildﬁreApp for examples of existing contests.Daily TaskBrainstorm two or three ways to get users to invite their friends. What can you offer to your existing fans that will makethem want to tell their friends?30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 49

New Media SchoolDay 21: Create Mini-CompetitionsPlaying Games With Your FanBaseRather than investing in a complete contestapplication, try creating mini-competitions. Forexample, ask your fans to go on a Facebookscavenger hunt. I’m sure there are many otherideas for mini-competitions but the point is to getyour fans active around your brand. It’s alsopossible to generate traffic to external sites if youhave more robust competitions. Ultimately I’d thinkback to when you were a kid to the types of gamesyou used to play with your friends.The games were always simple but were able toentertain for hours. Peoples’ interest in gamesnever goes away and that’s why mini-competitionsare a great way to fuel your fan base.Five Games That Will Get Fans’ AttentionLike I mentioned, mini-competitions are not applications but ways to engage your fan base in mini games. Using someof the strategies that we already outlined in the first 20 days, you should be able to come up with plenty of games anddetermine the best incentives. Below are five games that we think would be interesting.1. Profile Photo ContestThis is probably one of the easiest ones to handle. As I mentioned on day 4, having a great profile photo is extremelyimportant. The same goes for your Facebook fans! It’s easy to get more friends on Facebook when you have a creativeFacebook profile photo. Show your fans the Facebook profile photo guide for photo examples and then get them tochange their profile photo. Give an award to the user who has the most creative photo. If you want to take this a stepfurther, you can require that they integrate your brand into their photo.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 50

New Media School2. Facebook Scavenger HuntThis is probably one of the easiest competitions to set up. Post 10 or 20 clues about random items scattered aroundFacebook. Get people to come back and post with links to the content that they ﬁnd for each item. The quickest tocomplete the scavenger hunt wins. Keep in mind that this can get extremely challenging to handle once you have a largenumber of fans. The more fans you have, the less clues you want to provide. Otherwise you’ll have more comments onyour wall then you’ll be able to handle.3. Facebook Photo Theme GameWe’ve already written about taking advantage of the Facebook photos application from your Page but the best ideas I’veseen related to photos come in the form of a game. The lying down game for example, is a Facebook group whichencourages members to post photos of themselves lying down in various places. So far over 8,000 photos have beenposted from 36,500 members. While I’m sure that number will grow dramatically by the time this article is posted, itillustrates the types of possibilities available and how viral photo contests can be.4. Top Score In Other GamesI have spent too much time ﬁnding addictive games on Facebook to write about. The end result is that I’ve wasted manyhours in front of my computer, not being productive. However, other people are always looking for good ways to wastethere time which presents a great opportunity. Browse through some of the most addictive games on Facebook andonce you’ve found one, challenge your fans to beat your high score and post them. It’s a simple action but can generatea large response. Plus, you’ve also given all of your friends something extremely addictive5. Facebook Acronym BreaksJoe Cockrell, a popular Twitter user, came up with a pretty smart game which is coming up with the various things arandom acronym could stand for. I would try doing something similar except on your Facbeook Page. Give users anacronym such as PBS and ask them what it could stand for. It’s a great way to get users responding to your messageson Facebook. I’m sure there are many other similar word games that would be particularly useful on Facebook.Don’t Blow The Bank With GiveawaysBefore you start giving away products, you may want to consider what goals you have. I’d suggest starting with smalleritems and grow from there depending on the response. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen giveaways failmiserably. Giveaways need to be combined with other effective marketing activities to obtain the maximum response.Daily TaskTry a mini-competition on your Facebook Page and see how large of a response you can generate. Experiment withother mini-competitions over time to see which ones your fans are most responsive to.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 51

New Media SchoolDay 22: Work The ForumsWorld Wide ForumsForums are one of the best places on the internet togenerate awareness about a product and to drivetraffic. There are forums for just about anything andrelevant forums around the web provide a greatopportunity to participate in the conversation anddrive awareness to your Facebook Page. In additionto forums around the web, you also have forums onyour Facebook Page, which are installed by default.Today we’ll be going over a few external forumstrategies as well how to take advantage of yourFacebook Page forums.External Forum StrategiesIn general, forums are a great place for targetedconversations. You can search for forums on anygiven topic (hopefully one related to your brand) fromGoogle and then join those forums to communicate withothers. It’s valuable for building relationships as well as promoting your brand. Here are three strategies that we thinkare extremely important when using forums to build your brand:1. Use A Consistent SignatureWhen you register for any forum, you can typically modify your profile. From that profile, I suggest that you go modify oursignature to include you name, general information about yourself and include a link to your Facebook Page. Whensearch engines crawl those pages it will generate search engine juice for you as well as drive new users from the forumto your Facebook Page.2. Make Valuable ContributionsForums are filled with people that are talking crap and making useless contributions. Don’t be one of those people!Contribute to the conversations and even step out on a limb to create your own forum threads once in a while. Activeforum users tend to take note of those users that are also active . The more active you become, the more likely that you’lldrive traffic back to the sites in your forum signature.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 52

New Media School3. Avoid Aggressive Self PromotionWhile posting a link in your forum signature will help drive traffic, the last thing that you want to do is spam the forums.Don’t post threads that are about your Facebook Page or website. Instead be conversational and eventually there will beopportunities to insert your company into the conversation. It’s not about you, it’s about the community.Internal Forum StrategiesIn addition to the external forum strategies that you can use to drive new fans to your Facebook Page, you also want tocontinuously engage users on your Page. As such, the forums application can be extremely useful for accomplishingthat. Below are three strategies that I recommend for engaging users within your forums:1. Regularly Monitor The ForumsOften times users will go to your forums if you’ve left it as a tab. Whether or not there is content there, many users willgo ahead and post their own threads and then check back later for replies. It’s important to make sure that you areengaging the community within your page on all fronts and that includes within the forums. Check back regularly to seeif any content has been posted and be sure to reply to any new posts.2. Post New Thread Topics To Your PageIf you are looking to create a new dialogue and drive more users to the forums, post links to new discussion threads toyour Facebook Page feed. I receive a number of new threads from users on a regular basis but often times thosethreads aren’t relevant to all of my fans. For those threads that are relevant, it makes sense to post them to the feed andencourage fans to go contribute to the forum thread.3. Promote The Forum On Your WebsiteWhile you can promote your Facebook page forum you can also take advantage of the forum for things like support. Ihave a couple of pages on AllFacebook which encourage users to go post threads to the AllFacebook page forum inorder to get a response. Most often I find that other fans will answer a fan’s question without needing to answer itmyself. Other times I can engage users directly and answer whatever questions they may have.Facebook Pages serve as an excellent community platform for any brand and whether it’s posting updates to your fansor providing them with a forum to post questions and have general discussions, you should leverage all aspects of them.Daily TaskFor today’s task you should take the time to get your forum going. Post a couple of discussion threads and link back tothem through a feed update. This way you can get some initial conversation going in your forums. As your fan basegrows you’ll notice activity in your forum will increase.Why Use The Forum?Some of you may be wondering why I’m suggesting to use the Facebook Page forums when status updates and wallposts duplicate much of the functionality of forums. The first reason is that at the time of writing this guide, Facebook didnot allow page admins to remove their discussion forums. That means you have two choices: have an empty forum orhave an active forum. Forums most definitely serve a different purpose and also provide page admins with anothercommunication channel. While some could live without forums, I recommend taking advantage of them since they are apermanent fixture on your page for the time being.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 53

New Media SchoolDay 23: 5 Tips To Maximize TheImpact Of Guest Blog PostsThe Power Of Helping OthersOne of the best rules of success is to help others as much aspossible and eventually they will pull you up with them as theybecome more successful. In terms of building your FacebookPage one of the best strategies for growing your fan base is byhelping others. In addition to providing great content andengaging users, there are great ways to help people elsewhereon the web. I have benefited greatly from growing asuccessful blog and know the power it can have. One of thequickest ways to gain some traction is to help out otherbloggers with well written guest posts.Just about any blogger will let you submit a guest post andinclude a link back to your site no matter what it is. If you useyour Facebook Page for your bio link you are just aboutguaranteed to get a few extra fans.5 Steps To Writing A Successful Guest PostNow that you’re convinced writing a blog post will be worth the time, I’ve written up a few strategies that will be mosteffective at maximizing the effect of your post and increasingly the likelihood that you can land a post on a big blog.Ultimately you want to drive as much traffic as possible and that means reaching for the stars for a top blog. So how doyou get a post on a top blog? There are a few things you can do but below are five strategies that will get your post upthere quickest:1. Write Something The Readers WantYou may think that this tip is pretty obvious but for most people it isn’t. It’s extremely easy to write an article that’s justnot relevant to a site. I can’t tell you how often I get articles sent to me that have nothing to do with what I write about oris flat out irrelevant to the readers. If you’re going to take the time you write a guest post, you want to make sure that thearticle is going to resonate with the blogger’s audience.The benefit of spending a little more time researching the most successful articles on different sites and brainstormingmore ideas is that you’ll get a better response. Even I spend a couple hours brainstorming ideas for new posts once in awhile and it’s well worth the effort to do so.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 54

New Media School2. Try Pitching Your Idea FirstRather than writing an entire article and asking for it to be posted, you might want to start with a couple ideas that youforward to the editor of the blog. Yes, a full article is always great if it’s a top notch article but if you’ve put a lot of workinto it ahead of time, you may be disappointed when the editor tells you that they’d like it to be modified. Some writersunderstand right away what makes a good article while others need a little bit of guidance. There’s nothing wrong withcoming to the table with a full article but you can save yourself a lot of work by pitching the idea rather than the fullarticle.3. Write A Thorough ArticleOnce you’ve found a blog to write a post for and have determined the topic you will be writing about it’s time to get towork on the article. There are a number of things that are most important to a successful article: a title, a teaser entry,sub headings, and images. Obviously that’s not all there is to a good article but there are a number of trends among themost popular blog articles. One of the most important aspects is keyword optimization.If you can rank high for a specific keyword, the owner of the site will be forever grateful. They’ll also most likely invite youback to write again. Yes, writing your own blog can be effective but it takes time to get over the hump with building ablog and oftentimes it’s much better to write a few guest blog posts rather than spend the time building an entire blog(although I actually recommend doing that as well).List article happen to be some of the most popular articles as well and no editor will turn down a well targeted list.4. Repost the Article Around The WebThe worst thing a guest writer can do is send you an article and then do nothing to help promote it. You worked so hardto get this far why are you going to let the article just sit there? Update your Facebook status with a link to the article andpost the article elsewhere on the web. Whether you are tweeting the article, saving it on Delicious, posting it toStumbleUpon, or adding it to Digg, you should make sure your article gets the maximum impact possible. The moretraffic your article gets, the more people that will click through to your Facebook Page or any other site that you’ve linkedin the post.If you get your article linked to by other blogs you can often drive upwards of thousands of users per hour and that canturn into some serious traffic to anything that you linked to within the article. With that in mind, it’s never a bad idea tosend your article to other blogs that would find the article to be relevant.5. Work The CommentsNow that your article is live and you’ve shared it around the web, hopefully you also have users commenting on yourpost. Make sure to engage all the commenters and reply to all of their comments. There’s typically a direct correlationbetween the number of comments and the volume of traffic to a post. That means anytime someone posts a comment,you should reply. Also it’s a good idea to try to keep the dialogue going rather than just post a simple answer, this wayyou’ll boost the number of comments.Daily TaskFor today’s task you should brainstorm a few solid article ideas and then send out the ideas to at least three bloggers.You’re now on your way to getting a guest blog post published!30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 55

New Media SchoolDay 24: 4 Calls To Action ThatWill Turn Facebook Fans IntoCustomersThe Facebook Sales FunnelI previously wrote about a concept that I call theFacebook sales funnel. In the article I discuss howFacebook is a relationship marketing platform. The mostimportant phase of the Facebook sales funnel is theaction phase. When you create your Facebook Pageyou should probably have some sort of goal in mindaside from attracting 3,000 fans. While large brands arenot as focused on turning Facebook fans into direct sales, smaller businesses should be focused on generating leadsand occasionally selling products or services directly.The ﬁrst priority is obviously on building a community but you eventually need to drive users to take some sort of actionright? Below are four ways of getting your fans to take action:1. Facebook Page Lead FormCreate a form that lets users put in their name and email address for posting other content. There are a number of waysto develop a lead form, some of which are easier than others. The easiest method is to embed simple HTML into a tabon your Facebook Page using the Static FBML application. You can then use an application like Wufoo to collectinformation using an embeddable form. You could also use email marketing services such as Constant Contact,AWeber, or Campaign Monitor and then use their pre-made forms from a custom tab.The second method of creating a custom form is much more complicated and requires creating a basic Facebookapplication from scratch which installs a custom form on the sidebar of your Facebook Page. You’ll need to have ahosting provider that supports PHP (or other compatible language with readily available Facebook API library) and you’llneed to set up a one page application.2. Publish One-Time Offer PromotionsStandard promotions are always a great way to get your fans to take action. Offering discounts or alternative offers suchas “buy one, get one free” should effectively entice fans to make a purchase. However you need to be careful with usingaggressive direct sales as it will most deﬁnitely turn off a portion of your fan base who will end up unsubscribing from30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 56

New Media Schoolyour updates. Some marketers that I know have actually developed separate Facebook Pages specifically dedicated topromotional updates. All users that become fans of those pages are expecting to receive promotions and in turn areless likely to unsubscribe as a result of promotional stories that show up in their news feed.3. “Read More”The call to actions don’t need to be strictly one step conversions although those are always the best. Another great wayto convert fans into sales is to drive them to your website where you have engaging copy that will be more likely toconvert them. There are a number of guides on how to develop effective landing pages but one of the classic guides is“The Irresistible Offer” by Mark Joyner. I continuously reference this book because it’s one that all of the best copywritershave read and used as a guide for themselves. I suggest researching effective copywriting techniques in order to convertfans that click on your links into customers.4. Play This GameAs I mentioned already, Facebook is a relationship marketing platform. That means you can’t always just drive fans tomake purchases. Instead you should be engaging them. On Day 21 I discussed mini-competitions as a model forengaging your Facebook fans. Through that engagement you will ultimately build a stronger relationship and brandaffiliation with your fans. While the purchase may not be instant, the more a fan engages with your Facebook Page, themore likely they are to purchase something from you eventually.Daily TaskPrior to making a call to action you should have a plan about what you want to sell and what your goals are. Develop aplan about what you are looking to sell and once you’ve developed a plan begin testing these four calls to action. Whilenone of these tactics are going to necessarily attract more fans, they will most definitely help you effectively market toexisting fans. By now you most likely have a decent number of fans and it’s better to begin testing calls to action soonerrather than later.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 57

New Media SchoolDay 25: Integrate the Page IntoYour Existing BlogBuilding Out Your External PagePresenceThere are a number of ways to build up your fan base aswe’ve already discussed in the past twenty-four days butone of the best ways to get new fans is to let usersinstantly join your Facebook Page is to integrate it directlyinto your blog or website. We already discussed cross-promoting your website and your Facebook Page butwith the Facebook Fan Box widget, you can instantly getvisitors to your site to become fans without them everleaving the page.Having new visitors become fans is a great way to getongoing reach and engagement. While RSS feeds toyour blog or email newsletters are a great way to continuepromoting your business through content, getting new Facebook fans is also an excellent way to obtain ongoing reach.So how do you get your fan box set up? All you need to do is visit your Facebook Page and click on the link on the leftwhich says “Add Fan Box to your site”.After you’ve clicked on the link you can customize your fan box to include or exclude your content stream and fan list. Ata minimum you must include your page logo and the “Become a Fan” button. If you know basic CSS you can alsocustomize your Facebook fan box to use the design of your site.How To Create Content That Drives People To ActionWhile a large portion of attracting new fans is dependent on the positioning of the Facebook page link on your site, thereare many other ways to drive people to your Facebook Page. The best way to get people to take action is to createinsightful content that has a great call to action. Below I’ve created a list of ﬁve different tactics to developing contentthat will drive people to action. With these ﬁve steps you are practically guaranteed to get more readers and to drivemore fans. As I keep emphasizing throughout this guide, attracting fans is not just about promoting on Facebook, it’sabout building your overall brand and leveraging that brand to drive new users to your Facebook Page.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 58

New Media School1. Master The Art Of Creative HeadlinesLater in this program I’m going to discuss headlines in more depth but let me emphasize how important this is. You canwrite short form content all day long on your Facebook page or long form content on your blog and in both cases theheadline will be the single most important thing that will drive responses. Investing time in the headline is extremelyimportant.2. Develop Succinct Content That’s Easy To ReadIt’s easy to go on and on .... and on and on .... and on ... about something when most of the time it can be quick and tothe point. On the internet, most people do not tend to stick around for a long period of time. That’s why you need togive them all the information they are looking for in an easily digestible format. One example of easy to read content islists. Throughout this guide I’ve used lists as a way to break up content and make it easy to understand.I’ve found that lists can often generate two times the traffic of an average article. Lists also break up content in quick todigest segments. If you aren’t using a list, at least use sub-headings within your content to make it easier to read. If aperson wants to skip ahead to the next section they can do so with the help of sub-headings.3. Test Out Various Call To ActionsWant to figure out ways to drive new users to your Facebook page from text in your article? There are limitless ways todo it and each way will covert a different percentage of readers. So which links end up getting the most clicks? That’sfor you to measure but to get an idea of how many varieties there can be for a simple link, check out this article entitled“Designing ‘Read More’ and ‘Continue Reading’ Links”. The main lesson learned is to spend time tracking links thatusers are clicking on.If you use Google Analytics to track visitors, check out this article on how to track outbound links.4. Know Your AudienceWhen you write an article it’s important to know that it will strike a chord with with your reader base. In order for anarticle to resonate you need to target the article content at them. If you write an article titled “10 Things Every MarketerShould Know About Selling Shoes” but your reader base is mostly manufacturing engineers, you probably aren’t going toget a lot of traffic to your article even though it contains valuable content. If you don’t know who your readers are, tryrunning a survey to ask them!5. Create Variety To Keep People InterestedWhile you can create countless lists that keep your target market informed, it’s a good idea to switch the flow of yourwriting. As you write content you’ll find that it’s easy to get into a routine and just churn out similar content from day today. This will eventually reduce the growth of your site. Provide a variety content and try switching it up on a regularbasis. Once a week throw in an article that’s completely off topic or plays devil’s advocate to common wisdom amongindustry peers.Daily TaskGet your Facebook Fan Box widget set up on your site and start experimenting with new types of articles. This is alearning process and testing out new writing models is the best way to learn!30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 59

New Media SchoolDay 26: How To Use Competi-tive Analysis To Boost Your FanBaseDo What Other Successful People DoIf you are the average small business owner, thereis a good chance that the majority of yourcompetition isn’t doing much in the social mediaspace. However there always is at least oneperson who stands out from the rest and I’m sureyou can think of at least one company whichaccels where others aren’t even trying. For largerbrands, having a social media presence (includingFacebook) hasn’t been optional for at least a fewyears now. If you plan on succeeding at building alarge presence on Facebook, you will mostdefinitely want to invest time researching howothers are succeeding.The Keys To SuccessIf you want to analyze the competition, you’ll need to determine what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.To acquire this information you’ll need to do some research but first you need to define what you consider to besuccessful. If generating more sales is your definition of success, no amount of research you do on Facebook willprovide you with answers unfortunately but I can just about guarantee you that any business which has built a sizable fanbase is sitting on an opportunity to generate a lot more income. Despite not being able to track the direct impact of newfans to your competitor’s Facebook Pages, you can track a number of other variables:• Demographics of fans base - This takes some time to compile depending on the number of fans but is extremely valuable information. If you don’t have the time to do this, grab an assistant off oDesk to do the research for you. Ultimately what you can determine is whether or not the Facebook page administrator for each page has done an effective job at aggregating their target market. If you have thousands of fans but none of them fall within your target market, you aren’t doing a good job.• Frequency of updates - Are your competitors actively engaging their fans? What methods are they using to engage them? Over the past 25 days we’ve discussed a number of effective models for engaging fans. Which of those30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 60

New Media School methods are your competitors using? Has increased engagement resulted in an increased number of fans? Take notes about each of their updates and the type of content they are posting. Is there any way you can improve upon what they’ve already begun testing?• Level of comments and likes - It’s great if your competitors are updating their fans on a regular basis but how many comments and likes are they receiving? Take a look at those updates which are receiving the most feedback and post similar updates!• Completeness of profile - Did your competitor fill out all of their profile information to make themselves more accessible in Facebook’s search tool? Are there empty boxes that aren’t being used and are just sitting around? If so, improving upon what your competition has done won’t be that hard. However if they’ve completed their profile and have a lot of information, see what added value your competitor has been able to provide their fans with. Is there a custom tab which includes additional information? Is there a unique offering in the content of the custom tab? If there are any subtle adjustments that you see in your competitor’s profile, try using them out in yours to see what effect that has.Post Research ActivitiesNow that you’ve taken a look at your competition and have essentially ranked them on how effective they’ve been, startfiguring out ways you can improve upon what they’re already doing. While I’ve provided a large number of ways toincrease your new fan acquisition rate, there are plenty of methods that I’ve missed in this guide. Come up with a full listof some of the new tactics that you’ve found and start testing them out.Daily TaskCreate a list of all your competitors Facebook Pages and analyze them using the four factors outlined in this article.Now that you’ve determined some of the tactics that are used by the best Facebook page administrators (as describedon Day 19) as well as those tactics already outlined in this guy, you will be able to see what opportunities yourcompetition is seizing as well as missing out on.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 61

New Media SchoolDay 27: Monitor Your PageInsights To Improve ContentIntroduction To InsightsFacebook provides all pageadministrators with a tool for trackingthe growth of the page as well as thenumber of interactions on your page.There are a few numbers which youcan look at to determine how toimprove you page most effectively.Ultimately by performing the stepsoutlined over the 30 days to 3,000fans program, you should haveﬁgured out the most effectivemethods of improving your page.Understanding Post QualityFacebook provides one metric which they suggest page administrators use to determine the quality of their posts called“Post Quality”. I tell most people to take this metric with a grain of salt. The system encourages that you increase thevolume of posts that you make to a reasonable level (2 -3 times a day) and to improve the quality of the posts asmeasured by the number of comments and likes on each post.As I’ve written a number of times, it’s possible to increase the number of comments and likes by asking questions as wellas posting more relevant posts. I’ve also found that jokes tend to get a larger response. Facebook then determines postquality in a number of ways but the most obvious is the number of interactions as a percentage of the size of your fanbase. If 50 percent of your fan base is interacting regularly, you’ll end up with a high post quality score.While there are a number of other metrics that you can keep track of to increase your post quality, I honestly don’t thinkthis is the most effective measure of the success of your page. It may be possible to attract a large number of fans whoare simply not active. Well known brands and personalities tend to get a larger number of replies per post. The bestmodel to improving your post quality is to test out various types of posts and see which attract the most responses.Whenever you ﬁnd a post which attracts a large response, you may want to make it a habit to post similar updates.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 62

New Media School5 Important Insight MetricsTotal Fans And Unsubscribed FansOne of the most useful charts is the number of fans you have and the number of unsubscribed fans. Depending on thetype of page you have and the level activity on your page, you will tend to see different growth charts. One of the mostimportant levels to monitor is the percentage of fans who’ve unsubscribed. If this percentage is increasing over time, youmay want to check out the type of content you’re posting as well as the volume of posts. While posting often isimportant, you can chase fans away by posting too often.InteractionsAs the number of fans on your Facebook page increases, the number of users interacting with your page should increaseas well. Whether it’s comments, wall posts, or likes, you can view the number of interactions on your Facebook Page byviewing the “interactions” graph. This graph tends to be pretty useful for seeing how well you are engaging users on yourFacebook page and also happens to be the default graph when you view your page insights.Interactions Per PostThis happens to be one of my favorite charts. If you’re fan base is growing you should also slowly improve the quality ofyour posts as you see how fans respond. It can be a misleading chart though as interactions per post should increaseproportionally to the number of fans you have. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t show any percentage charts but basicdivision will give you that information. If your interactions per post aren’t increasing over time then you aren’t doing agood job of producing valuable content. Tomorrow I’ll be discussing content strategy more in depth if this is an areawhere you are having problems.Page ViewsIf you’re a webmaster there is no doubt that you have spent countless hours working with Google Analytics. The pageview has become one of the standard measures of success on the internet. This chart is pretty straight forward as itdepicts the total number of pageviews to your Facebook Page. Whether it’s new fans or existing fans, all page views aregrouped into this metric. As you grow your page, the total number of daily page views should be increasing as well.DemographicsOne of the best features of Facebook page insights is the ability to track the demographics of your fan base. WhileFacebook has the breakdown of your fans’ demographics as percentages you can also view the absolute number ofusers within your Facebook page by their gender and age. By viewing the demographics chart you will be able to seewhich demographic groups are growing quickest as well as which demographic groups are the largest.Daily TaskSpend some time navigating your Facebook Page metrics. To get there, click on “See All” from within the “Insights” boxon the left-hand side of your Facebook Page.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 63

New Media SchoolDay 28: Check The MagazineRack For Content StrategyHow To Create Compelling ContentCopywriting is one of the most important skills for developinga successful presence on the web. Compelling content helpsdrive traffic and can get users coming back to your FacebookPage on a regular basis. Of all the copywriting skills youshould master, headline writing is the most important. Thereare numerous resources on the web for developing effectiveheadlines but the best resources are also the most frequentlyused and eventually the impact is reduced. That’s why it’simportant to always search for effective headlines.The easiest place to find effective headlines is on a magazinerack. There are numerous things that make people buymagazines but outside of provocative images, headlines arethere to grab a user’s attention. With numerous magazines ona rack, headlines are an important differentiator. That’s whyyou should go browse a magazine rack and find whichheadlines stand out to you. I always reference Cosmopolitanmagazine as a great headline resource.Most often Cosmopolitan magazine makes sexual referencesbut they occasionally use non-sexual headlines as well. Alltheir headlines grab a user’s attention and learning from oneof the top selling magazines is always a great way to improveyour copywriting. Before listing out 10 powerful headlines that will drive instant traffic to your site, let me note that theseheadlines are most effective to drive users from your Faceook Page to external websites. While you can use them withincustom tabs on your Facebook Page, the main goal is to drive users to a destination and then to have them providefeedback.If you continuously provide compelling content, users will always return for more.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 64

New Media School5 Headlines That Will Get People To Click EverytimeHow To Write Headlines That Make You Rich and FamousHow to articles are always extremely popular especially when you offer the reader a tangible benefit from reading.Headlines get people in the door and one of the best ways to get readers to your site is to teach them something.Whatever you are teaching the reader, make sure that the headline appeals to your reader base. Teaching marketershow to hang a painting is great but even better is to help them improve their existing skill base.You can substitute the words in this headline to be “How To [Random Task] That [Great Benefit]”.7 Things Every Marketer Should Know About CopywritingList articles are also extremely effective at getting readers in the door. The reason is that they expect to instantly get asignificant benefit just from reading. There are numerous versions of this headline but you can easily duplicate the impactof using this headline by filling in the blanks “X Things Every [Target Market] Should Know About [Specific Topic]”.The Secret Of Building Successful Facebook PagesBeing an expert at whatever you do, you have a lot of information to share with your reader. If someone was to ask you:“What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned from working as a [fill in the blank]?” What would you tell them?Take that information and put it in a post and you’re practically guaranteed to drive a lot of users to your site. It piquesthe user’s interest and then informs them. You can follow up the article by asking them to take an action, such asbecoming a fan of your Facebook page.Create A Beautiful Facebook Page In 10 MinutesThis one is pretty straight-forward. Offer your readers an extremely valuable proposition. Whether it’s something you aregiving away for free, or a benefit from purchasing something, this is called an “Irresistible Offer”. In his famous book “TheIrresistible Offer: How To Sell Your Product in 3 Seconds or Less”, Mark Joyner spells out how to turn copywriting intosales. The most important thing to closing the sale is to ..... (drumroll please) ... create a valuable offer! If you take thetime to provide something valuable, your readers will thank you for it.The Best Facebook Page Software I’ve Ever UsedWant to get your fan base to try out something that you thought was an extremely valuable service or product? Turn aheadline into a powerful testimonial. Be honest, be succinct, and speak positively and you’ll instantly get your fans toclick on a link.Daily TaskStart brainstorming potential headlines that will most effectively grab the attention of your target market. Proceed todevelop content around each of those headlines. If you develop writer’s block and need other headline ideas, check outthe book “Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich” by David Garfinkel. If you really can’t come up with any otherheadlines, search for “swipe file” in Google and you’ll find tons of resources for smart headlines that will get people toflock to your articles.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 65

New Media SchoolDay 29: E-Mail Marketing ForFacebook Page AdminsAny internet marketer knows about the power of e-mailmarketing. As I discussed in “The 5 Phases of the FacebookSales Funnel”, it’s important to drive users to take an action.Often that may be registering for an email newsletter which canthen be used to upsell the user on a product or service. Inaddition to e-mail newsletters, every modern marketer sendsnumerous e-mails every day and each of those e-mails should beused as an opportunity to drive new fans.4 E-Mail Marketing Strategies ForFacebook Page AdminsDespite the power of social technology as a platform formarketing, e-mail marketing still remains to be one of the mosteffective tools for keeping in touch with users and promotingservices and products. That’s why we think it’s a great idea to takeadvantage of e-mail marketing to promote your Facebook Page. Below are ﬁve e-mail marketing strategies that willinstantly boost your Facebook fan base.1. Promote Your Newsletter Via Your Facebook PageIf you have a newsletter one of the best ways to get new members is via your Facebook Page. Use sidebar promotionsas outlined on Day 24 to drive new member registration. Also feel free to occasionally post updates that encourage fansto register for your e-mail newsletter. Be careful though because overly promoting your e-mail newsletter will drive manyFacebook users away from your page.2. Use Mundane Emails As A Promotion OpportunityI personally send hundreds of emails a day and any professional marketer is most deﬁnitely sending numerous emailsdaily. That’s why I suggest taking that opportunity to drive new fans to your Facebook Page. In addition to your nameand phone number, add a link which directs your contacts to your Facebook Page. Most people are willing to become afan. To increase conversion place a call to action at the end of your email such as “Please support me and join myFacebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook”.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 66

New Media School3. Promote Your Page Via Your NewsletterThis one should be pretty obvious: use your e-mail newsletter as a tool to promote your Facebook Page. Also invest thetime necessary to optimize the conversion of newsletter subscribers to Facebook Page fans. As you promote yourFacebook Page it’s a great idea to ﬁnd out how many of your readers are clicking on your Facebook Page. There arenumerous email marketing platforms but not all of them provide detailed analytics services. One of the best emailmarketing systems I’ve found is Aweber but there are many others as well. Determine what sort of click through ratesyou’re getting and modify your email as necessary to increase the number of people clicking on your Facebook Pagelink.4. Use E-Mail Registrations To Score InterviewsOne of the best features about e-mail marketing is that it’s easy to quickly browse through e-mail addresses anddetermine what companies your subscribers work at. I typically reach out to people that may have interesting positionsand ask them for an interview. When somebody provides you with an email address look them up on Facebook andLinkedIn to determine what their position is and if it sounds interesting, just ask them for an interview opportunity. Ithelps you to expand your network and it provides valuable content for your readers.Daily TaskRegister for an email marketing service. Not all services cost money. For example, Campaign Monitor is free to registerand only charges you when you send emails ($5 + $0.01 per recipient per campaign). AWeber is another great serviceand charges you a ﬂat fee based on the number of subscribers you have, not the number of emails you send out. If youare going to turn any of your Facebook fans into customers, the best way is through contacting them directly and theeasiest way to reach them online is via email.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 67

New Media SchoolDay 30: Create A Plan For TheNext MonthThere’s an old proverb which says “He who fails toplan, plans to fail” and while there are people that willdebate the importance of planning, mapping out aguide for the next month will make things a lot easier.What blog posts will you be writing? What contentwill be most effective to drive new fans to yourFacebook? What steps will you take to promote yourFacebook Page? While we’ve listed 29 techniques toboost your fan base, have you really taken advantageof all the suggestions we’ve made?By putting aside a little bit of time ever month to planwhat the best next steps are, you will come up withsome new promotion ideas as well as determine what are reasonable expectations.How Much Time Should You Spend On Your Facebook Page?After reading through this guide you may think that developing your Facebook Page takes countless hours. Honestly itshouldn’t take more than a few strategic minutes per day. Most of the tasks outlined shouldn’t take a substantial amountof time. The most time consuming component of building your Facebook page is providing relevant content. Spendsome time determining what blog posts your should write over the next month.Set up Google Reader to follow the most relevant resources and repost any article that you find interesting directly onyour Facebook Page. While you can always spend more time on your Facebook Page, it’s possible to spend too muchtime on your page. In economics there is something called the “Law of Diminishing Returns” and that law applies to timeyou spend on your Facebook Page. The first few hours are extremely important but as you over invest, you will not onlytake time away from other marketing activities but also decrease the number of new fans per hour invested.Line Up Tasks And ExecuteWhile you can accomplish many of the tasks outlined in a short period of time, space out each task so that you havetime to accomplish each step well. I personally use an application called Remember the Milk to plan out my tasks over alonger period time. One huge mistake that I used to always make was using my calendar as a method for planning tasksthat need to be accomplished. Tasks lists are useful because you can go through them and mark them off withoutcluttering up your schedule. While you may aim to have an article completed by a specific day or an upgrade to your30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 68

New Media SchoolFacebook Page, things tend to change and you can adjust due dates as necessary (although adjusting due dates is asign that you have too many tasks and need to start delegating).Plan Well And Sleep WellI spent the ﬁrst year and a half after starting my company under an immense amount of stress as my inbox becamebloated and I became an organizational nightmare. While there were numerous opportunities I found it difﬁcult toprioritize. More recently I developed a system which works for me and that involves a combination of two things: acalendar and a to do list. As I mentioned moments ago, putting tasks where they should go will remove a lot of stress inyour life. You have the potential to grow a fan base well beyond 3,000 but none of that can be done without properplanning. The only way to get there without planning is to not sleep for months on end as you attempt to balance amillion tasks.Develop a content schedule and a task list for items that you would like to add to your Facebook Page.Daily TaskTake the lessons learned over the past 30 days to develop at least 5 tasks and begin to plan out a content schedule. AsI’ve stated repeatedly throughout this program, content is critical to your success. If you drive an immense number offans to your page, the easiest way is to create original content. While you’ve already come up with a few headlines forarticles you can write, develop a schedule for writing and posting them.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 69

New Media SchoolDay 31: Promote Fanning ViaSMSA Mobile RevolutionUse of internet sites in the United States may mostly takeplace from computers but a growing percentage of internetusers are shifting to their mobile devices as the primary toolfor browsing the internet. The trend toward mobile hasseen a dramatic upsurge with the launch of the iPhone andcompeting smartphone devices. Facebook has alsocontinued to increase their mobile offerings. More recentlythe company has added the ability to let users subscribe tomobile updates.Mobile Subscriptions Are EasyThere are currently two ways to subscribe to a Facebook Page. The first is to click “Subscribe via SMS” on the left handside of a Facebook Page. The second is to text “subscribe [username]” to 32665. You’ve most likely seen a number ofcommercial that promote subscriptions via SMS. Facebook provides this service for free and it can be extremely usefulfor communicating with fans.Why Use Mobile Subscriptions?If a user gets your published stories via their feed, why do you need to encourage fans to subscribe via SMS? Theprimary reason is because not all users will view your feed updates, only a percentage will. SMS subscribers are alsoguaranteed to get your updates which makes this a no-brainer. So what steps can you take to make sure you get moremobile subscribers and how can you track new subscribers? Unfortunately for the time being you can’t track thenumber of mobile subscribers through your page insights, however you can always promote the service.Important CaveatWhile you can get SMS subscribers they will only be notified of text stories that you publish. If you post a link as anattachment to a story, the user will not be notified even if you have posted text in addition to the link. That means youshould be posting questions on a regular basis that users can reply to if they received the update via their mobile device.Daily TaskPost something to your feed explaining to users how they can subscribe to mobile updates from your page. Rememberthat mobile subscribers get 100 percent of your text status updates.30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 70

New Media SchoolNew Media SchoolWant More?I hope that you found this guide to be extremelyvaluable. After a couple months of working onthis guide off and on, I realized that it was time toprovide the information to the public. There are anumber of other guides that I currently have underdevelopment but in addition to guides many find ituseful to interact with others in order to holdthemselves accountable and to get feedback fromothers. That’s why I’ve spent the past few months developing New Media School, a site dedicated to helping individualsand businesses succeed in the digital economy.Our ProgramsSince this is the first significant guide that we’ve released outside of the Facebook privacy guide which was released atthe beginning of the year, I’ve decided to create an exclusive trial program for our first official New Media Schoolprogram. The “Social Media Marketing” program involves the following components:• Monthly Newsletter that will keep you up to date on everything taking place in the industry that will impact your business.• Weekly Q&A Sessions during which Nick O’Neill will answer your most important questions related to challenges your company is trying to overcome.• Step by Step guides that explain things such as attracting new fans to your Facebook Page (this guide) to attracting more traffic to your company’s blog.• Guest Lectures from top industry experts that will provide you with insight and an opportunity to pick the brain of industry leaders.• Community Forums that are filled with expert opinions and lessons. These forums also present an opportunity to get instant feedback from your peers.Guest LecturesAs I mentioned a moment ago, we have industry leaders that will participate in live sessions with course participants.Some guests will have prepared comments while others will be more of an interview format. At the end of each livesession course participants will have the opportunity to get live feedback from the guest experts. Below are some of theexperts who have already confirmed participation:• Brad Feld - Co-Founder of Foundry Group and author of widely read venture capital blog30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 71

New Media School• Chris Bucchere - Founder of Social Collective• Clara Shih - Author of “The Facebook Era”• Craig Stoltz - Author of “Web 2.Oh...Really?”, one of Time.com’s Top 25 Blogs• Dan Schawbel - Author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success”• David Berkowitz - Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy for 360i, author of the blog Inside the Marketer’s Studio• Debbie Weil - Author of “The Corporate Blogging Book”• Don Steele - Vice President of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks• Frank Gruber -• Harper Reed - CTO at skinnyCorp, Co-Founder of Threadless• Hiten Shah - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics• Jake Brewer - Engagement Director of Sunlight Foundation• Jesse Thomas - Founder of JESS3• Jared Goralnick - Founder of Set Consulting• Joe Suh - Founder and CEO of myChurch• John Bell - Managing Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and President of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association)• Leslie Bradshaw - Director of Engagement, New Media Strategies• Mike Lazerow - CEO and Founder, Buddy Media• Mike Volpe - VP of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot• Neil Patel - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics• Shashi Bellamkonda - Head of Social Media Strategy, Network Solutions• Ted Leonsis - Owner, Washington Capitals, Chairman of Revolution Money, and Vice Chairman Emritus of AOL• Tim O’Shaughnessy - Co-Founder & CEO, LivingSocial• Victoria Ransom - Founder, Wildfire InteractiveEach of the guest lecturers above are involved in developing tools that help individuals or businesses in the social mediaspace or are actively using social media to promote their existing business. We will be announcing other guest lecturesas well throughout the course. We will leverage our large network of contacts to bring in the most relevant guestlecturers for each topic we cover.RegistrationIf you are interested in participating in our first New Media School program (or any others) you can visit the New MediaSchool website. If you would like to participate in our first Social Media Marketing program, you must be one of the first150 participants to register. Registration will also be open for a limited period of time. Also, if you register now with thediscount code “FBPAGEBUYER” we will take $25 off the first month.If registration is closed by the time you visit the site don’t worry! We will begin offering new programs in the near future.Just fill out your information in the contact area and we will send you information as we release new programs!30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 72

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