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Google Seems to Have Misplaced My Facebook Fan Page—Have You Seen It Anywhere?

Allen Mireles — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:52:06 +0000

Until recently a search on my name in either Google or Yahoo produced the same results: my website and blog, my profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter; and my fledgling Facebook fan page for my social media consulting business. As a social media consultant, I have used my name as a search term to demonstrate that social networking sites come up early as search results. I have also done this to show how Facebook pages show up at the top of search results.

Earlier this week, in a discussion with a local businessman about the power and benefits of social networking, I did a search in Google for my name. My site and blog came up as did my profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. No sign of my Facebook fan page. My fan page is relatively new and I use it to share information about using social media for business. I share links to the posts others have written, I ask questions often and occasionally get responses from my 324 fans. I share the rare posts from my own blog. I started my fan page deliberately so that I would have personal experience with the positives and negatives of maintaining a Facebook page for my social media consulting business.

So I searched on a former client’s name. No Facebook fan page. Yet he has a carefully tended page with thousands of fans and his page used to come early in results from a search on his name. I then searched for Coca Cola; a well known brand with an extremely popular page. No fan page. I started to ask questions, first surreptitiously and then openly. I have tweeted, emailed and posted and no one seems to have an answer. Yet. Some of my friends offer the opinion that Google has, once again, changed its algorithms and that explains it. Or have posited that the inclusion of real-time search has changed how pages come up in search now. An SEO expert explained that I needed to write my posts differently using my page name within the post so that Google would read it and include it.

That may be the answer. We’ll see. Feels a bit awkward to include that language but it’s worth trying. However, that doesn’t explain why it used to come up and now doesn’t. My fan page, Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting or http://facebook.com/amsocialmediaconsulting, shows up in a search from within Facebook. As does my former client’s and Coca Cola’s. From outside of Facebook, however, not so much. My fan page shows up on page two of a Yahoo! search on my name (it didn’t yesterday) so that’s something. But what changed? And how much does it matter?

Oh wait! A Bing search on my name yields three references to my Facebook fan page on page one of the results. Has my fan page become a victim of dueling search engines?

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? What am I missing here?

If you liked this post, please share it with your networks. Follow me on Twitter or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Is Your Facebook Contest Doomed? New Promotions Guidelines Change Everything!

Allen Mireles — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:50:03 +0000

Last week the popular social networking site, Facebook, revised its promotions guidelines. The new terms of services restrict your ability to use your personal profile or page to conduct contests, giveaways or other promotions.

Creating a Facebook presence has been a popular social media marketing tactic, given Facebook’s active 300 million person user base. Contest and giveaways are effective for engaging with page fans and encouraging repeat page visits. Previously a brand could throw up a quick contest or giveaway, promote it to fans and public and award prizes without authorization from Facebook.

This is all about to change with the new promotions guidelines.

Most significantly, the new terms of service state that you must obtain prior written approval from Facebook before launching a promotion using your profile or page. Prior written approval can only be obtained from an authorized Facebook representative. You may obtain written approval from Facebook directly by submitting your request using this form or by working with an authorized 3^rd party application, which has access to an authorized Facebook representative and will obtain approval on your behalf. The form includes a field for indicating your budget range, which starts at $10,000.

Once you have obtained written approval you may only conduct your promotion using a 3^rd party application approved by Facebook, like Involver or Wildfire Interactive. You may only allow users to enter your promotion using the application’s canvas page (the place on Facebook where the application lives) or in an application box on a tab on a Facebook page.

Will the new promotions guidelines change the way business uses Facebook? Probably. Only brands with budgets of $10,000 and up will receive approval from Facebook directly and Facebook is well known for its slow response to customer service requests. While using an approved 3^rd party application is a viable tactic for some businesses and organizations, many will simply forgo the use of contests and giveaways on Facebook.

Will this drive brands away from Facebook? Probably not. Facebook will continue to grow and 300 million active users is nothing to sneeze at. However, this again underlines the importance of using social networking sites to drive traffic to your blog or website where you can promote your heart out without prior written approval.

Does this makes a fan page less attractive for a brand or business? It may. However the benefits of a Facebook profile or page are not limited to a brand’s ability to conduct special promotions. Social networking is about listening to conversations, offering value, connecting and engaging. These things have not changed. The businesses that get this will find and provide value using their Facebook pages.

Are you looking for other posts about this topic? Read Mari Smith, Nick O’Neill and Justin Smith’s Inside Facebook, for additional thoughts on the revised promotions guidelines.

Did I miss anything? I’d love to know what you think about this. Please take a moment to comment here or tweet your response.

If this post was helpful please share it with your networks.

OneCoach Teleseminar: Intro to Social Media for Business

Allen Mireles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:27:30 +0000

Last week I was honored to lead a teleseminar on social media for John Assaraf’s OneCoach, Intl. OneCoach, a leading provider of business growth and business coaching services, works with entrepreneurs to help them grow their businesses and lead extraordinary lives. John Assaraf , CEO of OneCoach, understands the power of social media and its value as an integral part of a business owner’s marketing strategy.

OneCoach VP of Training and Development, Adrian Ulsh, moderated the call. Our shared objective was to provide members with a basic understanding of social media and its power as a marketing tool. We started by answering this question:

What is social media?

One definition (from Bradley Will’s Purpose Driven Social Media) states that social media is a “term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audios.”

Unofficially, social media is the conversation people are having with each other online. The term “social media” is also used to describe the many tools and sites being developed to facilitate these conversations.

Then we added a list of some of the types of social media being used today.

Social media can include (but is not limited to) the following:

Blogs
Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn
Microblogging sites like Twitter
Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon
Video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo
Social Local sites like Google Local Business Center and Yahoo! Local
Forums and Discussion Boards
Text messaging (social media growth outside the U.S. is in mobile devices)

According to John Assaraf, himself a highly successful businessman who has built and sold several multimillion dollar businesses, small business owners often “don’t know what they don’t know.” This is true of entrepreneurs and social media. Almost everyone has heard the term “social media” by now. Most don’t know what it refers to or, if they do, how to use it for their business. So next we asked:

Why should you care about social media? And we answered: because it’s where your customers are.

As B.L. Ochman wrote in a post for BusinessWeek, “Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.”

The video below from the social media blog, Socialnomics, presents a short and compelling list of reasons why you should care about social media. If you haven’t already seen it, take moment and watch it. We’ll wait.

During the call Adrian and I also discussed one of the compelling reasons business owners must understand social media: customer service and customer complaints. In the past, an unhappy customer would tell 15 people, who would tell 15 people, who would tell…you get the idea. In today’s digital world people are updating their social networks from their iPhones and Blackberries. Complaints posted to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook are seen by thousands–sometimes almost immediately.

Many of us have viewed the YouTube video about United Airlines and the broken Taylor guitar. That customer complaint has been viewed 5,343, 474 times. 21,779 people have taken the time to comment. A Google search for United Airlines lists “United Breaks Guitars” as the third result on the first page. Powerful.

Social media makes it easy for anyone to say anything. Anytime they want. You need to know what is being said about your business.

We cited several other examples of customer complaints during the call but this story makes the point nicely. If you missed the video, go back to my home page and watch it. It’s short and entertaining and has been very effective.

Next we talked about how business owners are using social media marketing. Many people think using social media to build business is just for the big brands like Zappos and Dell Computer. Not so. Small and mid-size business owners all over the world are using social media marketing to:

Generate exposure for their company
Build their brand
Monitor their reputations
Manage relationships
Increase traffic to their websites
Build communities
Develop qualified leads
Create new opportunities
Conduct market research
Provide customer service
Transform customers into brand evangelists
Publicize events, new products and services
Increase sales
Built marketing lists (free of charge)
Dominate local marketplaces
Increase reach and introduce products and services to global markets

At this point we interjected a word of caution:

Social media marketing does not mean broadcasting your marketing message using social media vehicles. This is not just another marketing channel.

Social media is about:

Listening
Responding
Conversing
Adding value
Sharing information
Building relationships
Recommending others
Testing new ideas
Being authentic and transparent

If you treat social media marketing exactly like traditional marketing you will fail miserably.

By now many of our listeners were wondering:

What is my role and where do I start?

As a business owner, one of the most important things you can do for your business today is to understand how social media works and how you can use it in your marketing efforts. OneCoach members can take part in the upcoming teleseminars and learn how to use social media in their marketing. Our next call is scheduled for Wednesday, September 9th at 11:00 AM PT. We will show you how to do one of the most important things you can do (easily, right away and for FREE) to get more traffic to your website, come up in local searches faster and provide special coupons for your customers.

Not a OneCoach member? No problem. Contact us at 1.800.971.3824 to schedule a strategy session. Let’s talk about your business objectives and how you can use social media marketing as a tool to help you achieve them. You can also find us on Twitter or join our Facebook fan page. We’d love to have you!