The latest stats on Facebook are staggering: more than 500 million active members and 500,000 interactive applications. The site says members are spending over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
For business owners, it’s clear you need some type of presence on the world’s number one social networking site.  However, once you sign up, what’s the next step?
First, you should create a Facebook “like” page (formerly called “fan” pages). It’s fairly simple. Just create your page, edit your information, and push it live.  The real challenge with your page is to get people joining, and coming back for more.  I’ve had an Amber Mac Like Page for many months, but it wasn’t until this year that I truly understood how to make the most of my presence there.
Early this spring I sat down with a friend on Facebook’s strategy team.  I asked him to spend an hour with me to demystify the page experience, and give me some insider tips for Facebook success.  I learned a lot within these sixty minutes that changed the way that I approach my own Facebook Page. Here’s a summary what other businesses need to start doing now.
1.  Fill the wall.
Many companies spend time prettying up their pages, diving into the Info, Photos, and Notes tabs, but the truth is that very few people actually venture out to Read more…

What is it? What is it good for? Engagement.
One of the primary selling points of social media is the concept of engaging a potential customer or partner in your product or service. So how do you accomplish engagement on a personal level?
25 Ways to Engage a Potential Customer Using Social Media
1. Start a blog. This seems like an obvious one. This should be one of the first things you think about doing when contemplating using social media as a marketing tool. There should always be a hub where your contacts can interact. The so called “hub.” Wordpress is a great tool to start blogging. Get on it!
2. Join Foursquare and Use it during the business day. Foursquare is a service that allows you to update your location to the people following you on a regular basis. I do not recommend using this tool after business hours (could turn a little creepy) but it can help your contacts get an idea of what you do on a daily basis. Even if you are just sitting in your office for most of the day.
3. Join LinkedIN and recommend your partners. Most of us are already using LinkedIN (if you are not click thislink for great information on LinkedIN). When you start to recommend the people you love working with it will help spread Read more…

There are many well-known examples of companies doing some wonderful stuff with social media and marketing.
Often, though, we hear about the usual suspects. Comcast, Zappos, Sharpie, JetBlue and Southwest are doing great things in the social space, but other businesses have many other fresh social media marketing ideas that you may not have heard about.
What sets them apart and makes them worth a look? These companies share the common traits expressed by three F-words: They are Friendly, Focused, and Fertile. Here’s what I mean:
Friendly. Social platforms and tools aren’t one-way broadcasting tools or mouthpieces to just talk about your own stuff. Instead, they are tools for engagement, and they give a business an enormous opportunity to put a face and personality and voice to the corporate edifice by communicating directly with their customers in a very real way.
In other words, the countenance of a Friendly company is human, genuine and sincere. It’s clear who manages accounts on various platforms, so that customers (or would-be customers) can easily feel the presence of an actual person (or persons).
Who does this well: Wiggly Wigglers, based in Hereford (UK), is a natural gardening company that sells to the backyard gardener. Founder Heather Gorringe is a lively, approachable presence on Twitter (Her husband, “Farmer Phil,” posts there, too.) I particularly like Wiggly Wigglers Facebook page for its friendly, Read more…

You’re going to give this social media thing a solid chance. You’ve heard that social media delivers leads, connects you with customers and you’re confident that you can avoid falling victim to the many social media myths. All that’s left to do is create the accounts hop in.
Wait! Not so fast.
Before you enter in the world of social media, make sure you’re presenting your best possible face. Getting things in order before you take your first public steps will help customers trust your interactions and get things start on the right foot. You wouldn’t show up to your wedding without taking some time to primp, right?
Here are 9 things to do BEFORE you enter social media.
Create a rulebook: Before you step onto that field, memorize your plays. Study the channels you plan to use, listen to the conversation, understand the behavior and create your rulebook for how your company will engage. Identify how you’ll handle common support issues, the tone you’ll take, how you’ll address negativity, how fans will be rewarded, etc. Work up fake scenarios and create a plan for how you’ll deal with them. Look at issues competitors have had in social media and map out how you’ll do it better. The more you prepare, the better off you’ll be. Negative commenters are a lot less imitating when Read more…

Wrong actually. Yesterday I heard the managing director of a long-established digital marketing agency tell a room full of people that he advises his clients the main reason to engage in social media activities is to improve search engine ranking.
Social media purists will balk at the notion… using authentic person-to-person communications merely to game the search engines. Realistically, the businesses that are using social media in this way won’t see much return for their investment; since the SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits are fairly limited.
A blog is certainly a good tool to have in your search engine marketing strategy. However it is not the fact that it is a blog per se, but more that it is a part of your website that is regularly updated with fresh content covering a wide range of topics. You could achieve this without actually using blog software.
I haven’t heard too many talk about the identifiable SEO benefits of Twitter, Facebookor LinkedIn. That’s because there are not too many. Having them will certainly ensure that your tentacles on the web are wider. Ideally you want as many of the search results for your key terms to be occupied with properties you own.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Weedle here. Already we’ve seen some surprising results for people who have created skill profiles on the platform Read more…

May 04, 2010 -
In life we expect outgoing people to be better at tasks like networking or sales. We use terms like “extrovert” and “Type-A personality” to describe what many of us believe to be true about many of the people we work with… that seemingly natural parts of their personality make them ideal candidates to do certain types of jobs. Chances are as you have built your own small business, a part of any success you have had has come from your own natural abilities and skills.
The problem with how we think about our natural abilities (and those of others) is that it also forces us to consider that the exact opposite must be true as well. After all, if you can be naturally good at some things, surely you could be naturally bad at other things, right? And being naturally bad at something is a great excuse to just avoid doing something. If you’re “not good with numbers” then you get someone else to handle that. Or if you’re not a technology guy (or girl) then you can justify not investing in better systems to optimize your business.
This is just silly. Having an inherent ability certainly helps, but it is not a prerequisite – particularly when you consider social media. Many small business owners falsely believe that the more technical Read more…