If you’re quite new to the whole internet marketing world and you want to use Facebook as part of your online campaign, here are the most common mistakes other businesses do that you should avoid.

Failing to Apply the Basics

Facebook has thousands of tools and applications that businesses must explore to use Facebook to the max. Even now, there are companies who don’t take the time to create a custom landing page, don’t fill out the Info section, and don’t even edit their thumbnail image after uploading a profile photo. Moreover, businesses don’t invest enough time to learn and analyze their Facebook Insights to know which posts generate the most engagement and what works for them.

“Set It and Forget It” Mentality

Your company’s Facebook page will not run on its own. Creating it and setting it up is just one of the many steps that you have to take in order to create a fan base. Engaging your fans requires investing precious time to update your page. Ignoring this aspect will not just hurt your brand’s fan growth, it will also affect your existing relationship with your customers—especially those who are expecting timely responses to their posts and questions.

Unvaried, Boring and Impersonal Posts

There are businesses who forget or don’t know that Facebook is a social place. As a result, they auto-post content straight from their website only. What they don’t know is that it makes their posts predictable and boring for their consumers. Their content may also suffer from auto-publishing, because Facebook gives low priority to auto-published content. Avoid this mistake by mixing up your status updates with photos, images, fun stories, jokes and use Facebook’s native tool to naturally post your content.

Violating Facebook’s Terms

Aside from learning how Facebook works, you should also educate yourself with the social network’s user terms. At least on the basic level. Business owners usually commit violations for example by using personal page to promote their brand instead of a Facebook fan page, failing to abide with Facebook’s terms about conducting a contest, and over-tagging people in an image. The last one is something that businesses should be aware of, as this can be reported as an abusive behavior on your part.

Facebook, with its 800 million users, is definitely one of the best tools to potential consumer for your brand. However, it’s more than setting up a page and spamming your fans’ news feed with your content. It is really a must to educate yourself on how to build and engage your audience without violating the social network’s term.

Must-Read: The Biggest Facebook Marketing Mistakes is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

36% of Aussies Send Christmas Greetings Through Social Media.

A Recent Study shows that 36% of Aussies Send Christmas Greetings Through Social Media.  A survey by telecom giant Optus found out that 36 percent of Aussies send their Christmas greetings using social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Do you know any good Christmas Card Facebook applications?

Christmas & Social Media is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

Whenever you login to Facebook, you see only a very small fraction of all the content being posted by your friends at any given time. In order to determine which items should appear within your news feed, Facebook grades all content posts according to what it thinks your level of interest with each of them is likely going to be. The mathematical formula that determines this for Facebook is known as Edgerank.

Edgerank has many factors, but today I’m concentrating on comparing the two most basic forms of interaction with a Facebook post – comments & likes.

Research & Statistics behind EdgeRank

The awesome guys at EdgeRank Checker examined a random sampling of 5,500+ Facebook Pages. They analyzed 80,000+ of their Posts over the month of October (2011). The 80,000 posts were all of the “Link” type, to keep Clicks more accurately represented in their data. Each Post was analyzed (clicks, shares, fans, etc).

They analyzed how many Clicks a Post received against each major metric (Likes, Comments, Impressions). This can give a marketer a basic guideline on how many Clicks (on average) they can expect per engagement type. For example if you’re Post received 2 Likes, the Link on average should receive approximately 6 Clicks. The overall results are as follows:

• Avg Clicks Per Like: 3.103
• Avg Clicks Per Comment: 14.678
• Avg Clicks Per Impression: 0.005

So what does this mean?

For every Like a Post gets, it received on average 3.1 Clicks. For every Comment a Post receives, it results on average 14.678 Clicks. This ultimately means that the more engagement your update receives, the more Clicks it will receive. The most interesting fact about this data is that a Comment results in roughly 4 times the amount of Clicks.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re promoting your company’s campaign on Facebook, make sure you share content that your audience will want to engage with. This doesn’t mean that everything you share has to be unique, it just means that the content you share has to draw the attention of your audience and then connect Facebook users with your message.

If you look at Mashable’s Facebook posts, they always ask a question to engage their followers and encourage them to comment. More comments = more clicks.

Facebook EdgeRank Research: Comments 4x More Valuable Than Likes. is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

We have compiled a list with top 15 most popular social networking sites. Together with unique monthly visitors and biggest traffic ranking sites, this list will give you a pretty good overview into the life of Social Networking sites.

Last updated: December 6, 2011

1. Facebook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 700,000,000  | 3 - Compete Rank | 2 - Quantcast Rank | 2 - Alexa Rank.
2. Twitter - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 200,000,000  | 30 - Compete Rank | 5 - Quantcast Rank | 9 - Alexa Rank.
3. LinkedIn - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 100,000,000 | 57 - Compete Rank | 26 - Quantcast Rank | 17 - Alexa Rank.
4. MySpace - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 80,500,000 | 26 - Compete Rank | 44 - Quantcast Rank | 79 - Alexa Rank.
5. Ning - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 60,000,000 | 180 - Compete Rank | 120 - Quantcast Rank | 128 - Alexa Rank.
6. Google Plus+ - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors – 32,000,000 | *NA* - Compete Rank | *NA* - Quantcast Rank | *NA* - Alexa Rank.
7. Tagged - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 25,000,000 | 382 - Compete Rank | 151 - Quantcast Rank | 141 - Alexa Rank.
8. orkut - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 15,500,000 | *570* - Compete Rank | *540* - Quantcast Rank | 93 - Alexa Rank.
9. hi5 - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 11,500,000 | 983 - Compete Rank | 392 - Quantcast Rank | 62 - Alexa Rank.
10. myyearbook - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,450,000 | 522 - Compete Rank | 293 - Quantcast Rank | 1,036 - Alexa Rank.
11. Meetup - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,200,000 | 644 - Compete Rank | 732 - Quantcast Rank | 528 - Alexa Rank.
12. Badoo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,100,000 | 1,346 - Compete Rank | 489 - Quantcast Rank | 125 - Alexa Rank.
13. bebo - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 7,000,000 | 944 - Compete Rank | 434 - Quantcast Rank | 588 - Alexa Rank.
14. MyLife - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 5,400,000 | 118 - Compete Rank | 688 - Quantcast Rank | 1,789 - Alexa Rank.
15. friendster - Estimated Unique Monthly Visitors - 4,900,000 | 1,920 - Compete Rank | 643 - Quantcast Rank | 301 - Alexa Rank.

Statistics from: Compete | Quantcast | Alexa | eBizMBA

Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

1. Convince the users

Why should users do what you want them to do? Before a user is willing to complete a call to action they have to recognise the need. Take infomercials for example. Before they ask people to respond, they first identify a problem and present a product that solves that problem.

Communicate the benefits of your call to action. What will the user get out of completing the call to action?

2. Offer something extra

Sometimes you may have to sweeten the deal to encourage users to complete a call to action.
Incentives could include discounts, entry into a competition or a free gift.

Everybody loves freebies.

3. Use active language!

A call to action should be crystal clear and tell users what you want them to do. They should include active words such as:

• Like
• Buy
• Register
• Subscribe
• Donate

All of these words encourage users to take an action. Also you may want to create a sense of urgency and a need to act now, these words can be used alongside phrases such as:

• Offer expires December 31st
• For a short time only
• Order now and receive a free gift

4. Get the positioning right

Another important factor is the position of your call to action on the page. Ideally it should be placed high on the page and in the central column so people see it right away without scrolling.

5. Use White Space

To make your call to action even more prominent, don’t just rely on positioning. Use also the space around it – White space. The more space around a call to action the more attention is drawn to it. If you clutter up your call to action with surrounding content it will be lost in the page.

6. Use alternative colors

Colour is an effective way of drawing attention to elements, especially if you use alternative colors. For example, if your website uses blues and grey, your call to action will work very well in highlighted orange. This extreme contrast leaves your users in no doubt as to the next thing they should do.

7. Size matters

Make your call to action big. We have already established that position, colour and white space are equally important.However the size does play a large part. The bigger your call to action, the more chance it will be noticed.

Look at Firefox’s call to action. Pretty big, isn’t it?

8. Have a call to action on every page

A call to action should not just be limited to the homepage or landing page. Every page of your site should have some form of call to action that leads the user on. If the user reaches a dead-end they will leave without responding to your call.

But your call to action does not need to be the same for each page. Instead you can use smaller actions that lead the user towards your ultimate goal.

9. Bring it home

So you have created an awesomely clear call to action and the user clicks on it, now what? The rest of the process needs to be as carefully thought through as the call to action itself.
So consider what happens when a user does respond to your call to action. The process should be as simple as possible. Don’t ask any information from the user that you don’t actually need.

Read this: 9 Secrets Towards an Awesome Call To Action is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

But now what? How can you take advantage of that mass? And not only that, how can you keep the existing fans happy and still generate new fans in the process?

1. Keep your content fresh!

Keep your fans a reason to come back. It doesn’t require significant amount of additional time to add fresh content on a regular basis.

As part of your online marketing strategy, integrate your Facebook page with other social media channels to maximize results little extra effort. Post snippets of your blog posts to Facebook and so on.

2. Engage new visitors

The standard landing tab for your Facebook page is the wall. It’s often covered with random discussions and there’s no clear call to action. To get your audience engaged give them a little more than just a generic wall.

Instead of sending new visitors directly to your Facebook page wall, send them to a more controlled, welcoming landing page where you can provide them with useful information about your brand, as well as a strong call to action to become a fan.

Here are 4 free Facebook landing page creation tools, which can help you get started:
Pagemodo | Wildfire iFrames | TabSite | ShortStack

3. Promote a contest via Facebook

A great way to add value to a Facebook fan page is to offer users an incentive to become fans. Contests can serve as an enticing incentive.

Read Facebook marketing guidelines before you start with your Facebook campaign. For example the guidelines require contests to be handled through an embedded application rather than on the page’s wall, among other things.

Read my blog post on how to create a kick-ass Social-Media Campaign.

4. Give fans something they can’t get anywhere else

Contests aren’t the only incentives companies can offer to grow their fan base. Any item of value can entice Facebook users to become fans, including:

• Free download for something valuable if you become a fan first.
• Free shipping for Facebook fans only
• An exclusive product coupon for fans
• A weekly special promoted on the fan page

5. Encourage interaction

The core of social media is built upon interaction and two-way communication. Facebook fan pages have little to no chance of success if they aren’t interactive and engaging.
But it’s not enough to sit back and wait to the interaction to begin. Start conversations by:

• Posting a question to solicit fans’ opinions
• Offering a poll that’s extremely simple to respond to
• Integrating existing Facebook applications like games and quizzes
• Reposting relevant, interesting information from other Facebook users and partners

What to do with your 25 000 Facebook fans? is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

• Stop using auto-posting tools: They cloud your content’s visibility.
• Create a landing tab for new visitors: You wouldn’t believe the impact it has on conversion. Don’t Send Visitors to Your Facebook Wall!
• Newsfeed optimization will become important. Shift your focus from “page views” to “stream views”: The action happens in the newsfeed.

To find out what you can fix now read 14 Signs That You Are Failing at Facebook Marketing.

B2B Social Media: 10 Ways to Boost Your Facebook Fan Page is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

So What are the most important metrics to follow?

Tab Views
In order to engage your fans more and more, brands create custom tabs on their fan pages. When you fans arrive on your page, they will see the custom tabs that you have created. Therefore, tracking the tab views is an important metric to figure out whether your fans are actually seeing your custom content. You can compare the number of people visiting your fan page with those who are viewing your custom tab content to get a clear picture.

Likes
Facebook Insights shows you the sources from which people are liking your Facebook page. For example: Like box and button, Ticker, Search, From your Facebook page etc.

User Engagement or Interaction
One of the most important metrics to track your brand page’s performance is to track the degree of engagement from users. You know that users are visiting your fan page. But what you actually need to track is whether they are taking an action while viewing you custom content. If you have uploaded a product video, are your fans clicking to view it? So, engagement is the action that the visitor takes while going through your custom content.

Clickthroughs
It’s great if you have a fan page for your brand. While using a Facebook page, however, you should make sure that it doesn’t prove to be a dead end for users. If your page is built in a way that engages fans and compels them to want to know more, you can increase the clickthrough rate to your website. A higher clickthrough rate indicates that users are interested to know more about your product.

Content Shares
You can achieve social media marketing success, if you can get your fans to share your posted content. You can imagine the viral potential of getting your content shared through News Feed. That’s why content shares is one of the most useful metrics to measure the success of your Facebook page.

Measuring results

Priit wrote a great article about how to measure your Social Media ROI, so the following is an outtake from his blog post: How To Measure Social Media ROI

The basic business metrics you should measure are:

• Number of transactions
• Number of customers
• Number of new customers
• Revenue
• Profit

Get these numbers tracked before you do anything else. You probably already have a specialist for this job, she’s called accountant. But the thing is, that for most of us, our social media activities influence these metrics only indirectly. Some of our social marketing goals may be:

• Website visitors
• Leads
• Brand awareness
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Facebook fans
• Blog comments
• Social mentions
• Visitor satisfaction index

Now, the trick is to find the connections between social results and dollars earned. Start with the simplest of correlations. Here are just a few examples:

How is the number of your monthly website visitors related to revenue. Segment that and tie website visits to revenue from online and offline segments. Segment yet again and find the most effective online revenue drivers. What you want to know is if site traffic increases X% then revenue goes up how much?

Find out if the customers who are your Facebook fans make purchases more often. Check if the Facebook fans are making larger transactions than average. What you want to know is if your Facebook’s fan-base grows X% then what’s the corresponding increase in frequency of transactions.

Start to monitor the social chatter and tie the number of mention on the internet to changes in sales volume. Segment that and find out what channels have the most impact on the bottom line.

If your sales are mostly online then it is easier to measure all those metrics. When you are operating offline then you have to conduct customer surveys and ask specific questions to figure out why they are doing business with you. You can also implement various incentives to track people from online to offline. For example we have done this for our client by giving Facebook fans special deals that can be used offline and then measuring the results of those activities.

After you have collected these data for some time, you will be able to make pretty good predictions how different social media activities influence you cash flow. A word of caution, don’t stop experimenting. Use 5-10% of your marketing budget for experiments and you will be ahead of the pack.

And, of course, make note of your spending on customer acquisition and establish a base-line. Include all marketing spending. Make note of how much is spent on different channels online and off. Separate the parts that are hard to measure (new logo, upgrading content management system, etc.).

ROI is about the R. Return. No return, no ROI or more precisely negative ROI (ROI = (return – investment) / investment.). One million Facebook fans won’t make any difference if you don’t know how to turn them into paying customers.

Now start measuring results!

Facebook: Important Metrics & Measuring results is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

AllFacebook reports that the Markettools study also found:

Customer Service Through Facebook is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media

For example: if your target audience is teachers, it makes no sense to post during school hours, they just won’t be on Facebook at this time. So you are better off posting after the school day. Now you understand how important it is to know your target audience if you want to get the best results.

But what to do if you don’t know when your target audience is on Facebook?

Test and Experiment with the help of Facebook Insights.

Start by posting at various times during the week. Limit yourself to 1 post per day though(2 if you have to) so you don’t wear out your audience. Then after couple of weeks or so use Facebook Insights to analyze your data to see which times and days your posts generate the most “likes” and comments.

Here is an example of how Facebook Insights data looks like:

As you can see the first half of the week, especially Mondays work pretty good for us.

What if I’m too lazy to experiment?

Maybe you are just starting out and don’t have the time or knowledge to experiment with your Facebook posts. Luckily for you, the smart people at Vitrue analyzed data from August 10, 2007 to October 10, 2010 from more than 1,500 brand streams – more than 1.64 million posts and 7.56 million comments in all (not including shares and “likes”). They found:

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.
• Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week.

Kissmetrics used the data from Dan Zarrella and found out that Saturday is the overall best day to post on Facebook.

Tip: Experiment and be a bit skeptical when using this data. For example sometimes I get the most engagement on Sunday which Vitrue says is the least active day in the week.

Basic rule of thumb

Engagement of your posts varies by industry. BuddyMedia found that the businesses in the entertainment industry should post on the weekend, while fashion, healthcare and beauty companies should post on Thursday for best engagement.

Always be testing to find out the perfect posting time for your business!

The Art of Timing – Posting on Facebook is a post from: DreamGrow Social Media