Facebook pages are where it goes, with Facebook pages, you can add apps so that you can feed twitter and YouTube onto it so any YouTube videos you have will pull onto the fan page, here is an example on that we done at Find Me:

If you notice, all YouTube videos that Loft Shop has on their YouTube channel has now pulled across, users love watching videos, this is a great tool.

You can use the fan page to interact and engage with your users.  One company I feel do this really well and admire what they are doing is the Italian restaurant chain Prezzo.  They have really got it right; here are some great examples of how they engage with you:

Competitions – allowing users to take part and win vouchers, which are used in the restaurant.  £50 is generous if you have a meal for two.

Sometimes if you do not want to do a competition, just give away vouchers:

Posting images of new restaurants near you:

If you see this new restaurant is not near you then Prezzo make it simple to find a restaurant near you:

Prezzo have 117,166 (at time of posting this) followers.  Imagine the potential market they have at their disposal.  I have picked Prezzo to speak about because I have on several occasions used Prezzo for dinner or lunch because of their interaction with the followers, as well as admiring how they do their online marketing.

This is something a plain website cannot do.  Image how much more work is involved if you wanted to be engaged by other means like email marketing and mail shots.  It is just not cost effective, if you consider a Facebook fan page is free to set up.  You may have to pay a designer to design the banner and maybe sort the apps for you if you are not confident to do it yourself.  But those are all the costs involved.  It is not like a website where you have to pay to renew your domain name and hosting.  There is nothing like that on Facebook.  You may wish to take out adverts to gain more followers but costs are small and can be capped daily.

Are you convinced yet?

The answer should be yes, but if not then here a few other points to this massive market (straight from the horses mouth/Facebook themselves)

1. Facebook is popular with all age groups;
2. Your Facebook Business Page appears in Google Search;
3. It is public, so you can link it from your web site;
4. It is an 2-way communication channel with your customers and prospects;
5. It has easy-to-manage photo albums - a picture speaks a thousand words;
6. You can manage the page yourself;
7. You can share the management of the page using the administrator feature.

As mentioned earlier, Facebook has over 800 million users; this is bigger than most countries.

Lets crunch some numbers

If for example I set up a page for you, I would charge around £300 and this would include a banner on the left, design a front-page image, install YouTube and Twitter apps.

Lets say you are able to tap into only 0.01% of the Facebook users, that’s all, a measly 0.01%.  That equates to a potential market for you of 80,000 users.  I would not mind a database of 80,000 customers and I am sure you would not either!

When you work in design there are a few different file formats like jpeg etc.  So when your designer gives you say a logo for example, he/she will give you different formats, I call it a logo pack.  So what are all these different file formats for? A small brief explanation:

JPEG

A JPEG is currently one of the most popular file formats to compress and store images for use online or offline.  JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.  One of the reason JPEGs are so popular online is because they hold a high quality so will look good presented on your website or letterhead.   JPEGs are great at maintaining a smaller file size by compressing the image in a way that retains details which matters most to the image.

PNG

A PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. PNG or sometimes known as PING was actually originally created to replace GIF.  PNG formats can be true colour and this allows for a much higher quality of image than GIF files allow.  This allows PNG images to be on par with the quality of JPEG images.

One noticeable difference between JPEG and PNG is background, it can be transparent.  If for example you have a black website.  Should your logo be in JPEG format then it will likely have a white background (unless background edited by the designer) and this will look show on the black background, so you will have a logo with a white shape around it.  PNG’s will usually not have a background and while still maintaining quality, these are usually the better formats to use online should you have a different colour background.

GIF

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format.   GIF files do not hold a great deal of colours and the quality can be lost if you try anything too “fancy”.  So using basic shapes is best suited for GIF files.   GIF files unlike JPEG can give a transparent background but due to the inability to use more complex effects with GIFs like shadows etc, PNG files work best for transparent background images.   Basically you would not really want your logo in a GIF format.   GIF Files can also be used for animated graphics mostly used on websites these are called animated GIFs.   These are not as popular as they used to be as you can use flash or the up and coming HTML 5 for animated graphics which will hold a vastly better quality.

TIFF

TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format and is a standard format in the printing and publishing industry and is particularly popular with photographers.   TIFF files are usually much larger than JPEG files.   This is one of the main set backs of a TIFF file and one of the reasons you are unlikely to receive a TIFF file from your designer.  However TIFF files are very high quality but more common among desktop publishing and 3-D imaging applications.

PDF

PDF’s are quite common formats for printers, if you want your leaflet/flyer, business cards etc printed, the designer will likely send you a high resolution/high quality PDF to send to the printers for printing.

I have looked at videos and read reviews and the Windows 8 platform seems quite impressive. Will it be? or will be be another windows flop with and endless list of bugs and compatibility issues? can Microsoft be that stupid? surely not?

Windows 8 is really designed for touch screen devices even though compatible to desktops, will it have the same effect? or is this more evidence that we have moved into a post PC era?

Image showing windows 8 desktop compatibility mode

Windows 8 has a dual personality too, if you tap the button called desktop, a window which looks the same as windows 7 appears. Impressive? well time will tell…….

(thank you to the guardian for the images)

Of course doing this is time consuming, well how about automating it? You can do this using RSS feeds, by subscribing to the best websites with the best information. There is an app called RSS Graffiti which allows you to use the RSS feeds in your Facebook account and share information to your Facebook friends or fans, depending whether you wish to use the app on your personal account or fan page. Here is a quick “how to” guide.

I am going to add an RSS Feed for the BBC News as an example.




Step 1:

Sign into your Facebook account.

Go to the search bar at the top and type RSS Graffiti.

Click on the top one, once you have done it you will be prompted to like or add the app at the top of the page, do either.






Step 3

You will see this page, naturally on mine you can see RSS feeds already there, you will see none on yours.

Step 4

Open a new tab in your web browser and go to the website you want the RSS Feed from, in my case I am going to BBC News.

Locate the RSS Feed, which is on the top right corner in this instance, click on the RSS Feed.






Step 5

After you have clicked the RSS feed, a page like this or similar will appear.

Highlight the URL in the address bar and copy it.




Step 6

Go back to your Facebook account where the RSS Graffiti app will be present, then click the “+add feed” button.

Step 7

When you have clicked the “+add feed” button, this will appear, paste the URL where it says feed URL as I have done.

Step 8

Under the word PREVIEW you will notice it says click here to generate a preview, click this and you will see this:

Simply click the save button on the top right above the article and it will start auto feeding.  There are other further things you can do, like control how often the feed posts and how many posts per feed etc in the tabs.  Feel free to contact me if you need more information.

Others may use other check in tools, such as Gowalla or Facebook places. I use foursquare because you can get special deals for being the “mayor” of that particular place or just by simply checking in. For example:

JD Wetherspoon plc offer 20% discount if you are the mayor of a particular pub. not a bad incentive to check in.

However it does not stop there, in fact this blog was not motivated by these financial gains at all. It was motivated more from the social gain.

I finally got to have a 121 with a very nice gentleman Marc Summers, only because I kept seeing him popping up in my Facebook feed checking in via foursquare into places I go to around my local area. This prompted me to think “this guy lives round the corner, he is also in my network and we have never had a chat”, so a meeting was arranged.

Another prompt for this blog today was when I checked into Enfield Garden Centre in Crew Hill yesterday whilst shopping. A VERY OLD friend of mine noticed I checked in and he and his girlfriend also happened to be there and saw the check in, so we saw met each other and had a catch up. We had not seen each other for around a decade.

This has happened on several occasions now.

A lot of people are worried about the security aspect of it which is understandable, but many positives also comes with this applications.

What experiences have you had? what are your thoughts, positive or negative?

A lot of talk lately has been going on about facebook fan pages, setting them up, how valuable they can be and not to mention low cost to maintain with no hosting fees etc.

How do we know that this is the start of organisations moving forward with facebook as their “social media hub”……….?

…………..we know when their TV adverts no longer promote their main website and just move straight towards their facebook page.

Here are a couple examples of organisations that have done EXACTLY this:

The delightful bread spread Philadelphia recently put out an advert and promoted their facebook fan page, not their website. Check it out here – http://www.facebook.com/LoveMyPhilly

The shampoo company head and shoulders is also now onboard, I saw their TV advert and all they promoted was their facebook fan page, not their website, you can see it here – http://www.facebook.com/makingheadshappier

Movie organisations are also advertising their forthcoming releases by displaying their facebook fan page and not a dedicated website. This makes perfect sense, you can get something just as effective for less money (no domain registration or hosting fees). An example of a forthcoming movie that I saw advertised on TV is the film The Source Code Mission, check out the page – http://www.facebook.com/SourceCode

What happens when organizations decide that it’s cheaper and just as effective to use a facebook fan page as their main website? It is completely possible and easily doable. What is stopping anyone doing it now? What is stopping an organization buying a domain name and just diverting it to their facebook fan page?

With the current ability to search for goods and services within facebook and the fact that facebook are working on improving their own search engine, why would you not want your own fan page? Your goods and services easily accessible to millions and millions of people.

Warner brothers have now for a while been trailing the ability to rent movies through fan pages, click here to read the article.

You can also now create e-commerce (online shop) websites inside the facebook fan page system.

To upgrade yours, simply sign into facebook and go to this link

There are going to be some changes also to the Facebook coding, they are dropping FBML (Facebook markup language) and will start using iframes, which is superb for us designers

Let me know when you have upgraded your page, I would love to have a look.

How about a quick step by step guide to help you get started on setting up a facebook fan page?

Have you ever gone to someone’s fan page and thought “I like that, I need to get me one of those” well on that page you can scroll down and on the left you will see a link which says “create a page”, click that.

You will now see this page:





















Pick your niche and click on it. In this case I will click on “company, organization or institution” it will then pull up this box.






Choose your category from the drop down menu and then type in the company name. Check out the terms and conditions, if you are happy then tick the box and click “get started”.


You will then see this page:


























If you start by clicking “upload an image” which you will see right in the middle there. Go ahead and upload your logo. I would recommend getting a nice banner designed which incorporates your logo as it will be more prominent and eye catching. Check ours out here.


Once that is done your page will look like this:



























After all this, click on “edit page” which is under your logo and you can insert all your relevant info.


Once that is done, you will notice some tabs at the top of the page, to the right of the logo. Here you can add images etc of products or services you offer.







Then after all this is done, work down the “get started list” and start inviting friends etc.


























Remember facebook has over 500 MILLION users! It is worth doing this.