Last week we finished up the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program and while some people may or may not have reached the 3,000 fan target, the real question is: does the number of fans really matter? Last night I was watching a video of Seth Godin where he says “it’s worthless to have lots and lots of friends on Facebook.” With so many people selling the importance of having fans, followers, and friends though, how could Seth Godin, a thought leader in marketing, make such an assertion?

It’s Relationship Marketing
Seth has a valid point. If you don’t build…

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Sheryl Sandberg is speaking today at 11:00 AM EDT. We’ve embedded the stream of the keynote live below. We’re expecting Sheryl to announce “Brand Lift” the company’s new partnership with Nielsen to measure the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns. We actually have some screenshots of Brand Lift in action that we’ll be updating this post with shortly. In the meantime you can watch the stream live below.

[11:06 AM EDT] – We’re still waiting for Sheryl to come on stage. The stream just temporarily posted a shot of the stage however we’re still on stand by.
[11:13] – We’re still…

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This is Day 26 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
If you are the average small business owner, there is a good chance that the majority of your competition isn’t doing much in the social media space. However there always is at least one person who stands out from the rest and I’m sure you can think of at least one company which accels where others aren’t even trying. For larger brands, having a social media presence (including Facebook) hasn’t been optional for at least a few years now. If…

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Last week we wrote about Facebook’s new tagging functionality but as of this afternoon the feature finally went live. While the functionality is no different than initially described, many users are finding that this transforms the overall user experience. There are also many objects on Facebook which still can’t be tagged with applications and pages such as photos. You also can’t include tags within Facebook messages but I’d expect more robust tagging functionality to be added over the coming weeks and months.

So does this new functionality eliminate the need for Twitter? No, but it most definitely helps users to…

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A new report published yesterday suggests that Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days to post status updates on Facebook. The reason is that click through rates are dramatically higher on those two days. It’s not surprising considering that this is a trend found around the web in traditional publishing channels. If you do a press release, the best days have traditionally been Monday through Wednesday as those are the days that most people read the news.

What was somewhat surprising was the substantial drop off in click through starting on Thursday. Content published on Thursday receives half the clicks…

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While most people don’t the “problem” of thousands of daily page views to their Facebook Pages, many large page administrators have an untapped monetization opportunity which is where FanChecker comes in. FanChecker is a new service which lets Page administrators get paid for advertisements placed on their Facebook Page. The service dynamically loads keyword based products that page administrators get paid for once a user makes a purchase.

In essence it’s an extremely basic CPA (cost per action) advertising model. While the company is claiming that the “earnings per click is up to $0.30″, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll generate…

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This is Day 19 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
One of the best ways of ensuring that your Facebook Page will be successful is to copy other successful ones. It’s no secret that the best marketers are most influenced by other successful marketers. While there are a lot of research methods I would suggest taking a look at our Facebook Pages leaderboard (which is in the process of being updated), and selecting the most popular as well as the fastest growing. We’ll also soon begin to provide more advanced…

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This is Day 18 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Have you already invested time and money in building your web presence? Take advantage of it and use your website to cross-promote your Facebook Page. Many people are concerned that directing visitors from their website to their Facebook Page isn’t useful because those users end up not returning to the site. Ultimately the user’s navigational pattern should be based on the goals for your site.

Driving users to your Facebook Page is extremely useful for creating an ongoing dialogue. As…

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