5 Facebook Marketing Hacks for Your Website

Is your website using Facebook to the fullest?

Are you wondering how you can get the most out of Facebook for your business?

To learn how to use Facebook to your advantage, this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast goes deep into the subject.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, you’ll discover 5 Facebook hacks you can employ on your website to help drive more traffic and exposure.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Facebook Marketing Hacks

#1: Use the Correct-Size Images on Your Website

You have probably noticed on Facebook that some posts have large images at the top, and underneath there is a URL, the website name and a small description.

If you have content on your website that you want seen in the news feed, then you can alter the size of the image, which will lead to more exposure and click-throughs to your website.

Here’s an example of a shared link with a small image in the Facebook news feed.

Here’s an example of how a large image appears in the Facebook news feed.

Facebook queries all of the actual images that are on your website and will choose to display the image with the largest dimensions. Facebook only allows users to select three images.

To see how this works, check out my friend Jon Loomer’s guide on Facebook Link Thumbnail Image Dimensions.

The aspect ratio of your image is the critical factor. The aspect ratio is 1.91:1. This calculates out to about 1200 pixels wide by 627 pixels deep. The ideal size is 400 pixels wide by 209 pixels deep.

You need to make sure that at least one of your images inside the article is larger than all of the others. It should be in the 1.91:1 aspect ratio.

Listen to the show to find out what happens when an image is deeper than it is wide and how it can appear in the Facebook news feed.

#2: Implement Facebook Open Graph Tags

Facebook has its own language called Open Graph. This allows you to tell Facebook certain kinds of attributes, which include the image it should use as a default on a page, where it should pull text from and what the description should be. This kind of information helps your content appear more appropriately in the news feed.

You can discover all of the data behind Open Graph and find everything you need to know about how it works. It’s a great guide even for the non-techie.

To learn more about Open Graph, check out the Get Started tutorial.

If you are on WordPress, Open Graph is easy to implement with a plugin called WP Open Graph. It allows you to set data on a macro-level and on a post-by-post basis. It’s a great way to control what shows up when people share your articles on Facebook.

The best way to keep your shared content up to date on Facebook is to use Facebook’s Debugger. It’s a great tool to stop Facebook from pulling in information that’s no longer relevant.

Listen to the show to find out how the Debugger tool works, and how it will help you with your Open Graph.

#3: Add a Facebook Share Button to Your Website

When you add a Facebook Share button to your website, you need to make sure that you use the code from Facebook or the WordPress plugin, which was developed by Facebook.

It doesn’t matter if your website is WordPress or not, you can visit here and paste in the URL you want to share and choose the different layouts for your button.

There are many different Share buttons to choose from.

You’ll discover the best Share button to use for social proof on your website.

If you use WordPress, it’s easy to use their default plugin. This plugin allows you to do the same as the Facebook one, but it does everything automatically for you.

When it comes to the placement of the Share button on your website, many people like to put it at the top of a blog post. This way, users can see how many people have shared the article, which incites them to read it too. Others like to put the button at the bottom of the post.

You can also use a plugin like Digg Digg, which allows the Share buttons to float down the side of the article as people scroll through.

Listen to the show to learn why I’m a big fan of having a Share button at the top andthe bottom of an article.

#4: Leverage Google Analytics

Although a lot of you may already have Google Analytics installed on your website, you may not know that you can use Google Analytics to analyze your traffic that comes from Facebook.

When you log into Google Analytics, you need to click on Acquisition. Underneath Acquisition is a category called Social. When you click on Social, it will show you all traffic that comes from all of the different social channels.

You can view your social traffic sources with Google Analytics.

You can click on a social network—Facebook, for example—and it will show you which URLs Facebook drives the most traffic to. You can narrow it down to a specific day or over a certain time period.

You’ll discover how to see the traffic source for your sales pages and why this is great for comparative analysis.

Listen to the show to hear how you can use Google Analytics to see if there are any increases or decreases in traffic trends from Facebook.

#5: Use the Facebook Like Box for Pages to Grow Your Facebook Fan Base

If you have a website that has a lot of traffic, then it’s important to put up a Facebook Like box for pages.

When someone visits your site and they are already logged into Facebook, they will see their friends who are already fans of your page. They can become a fan with the click of a button without leaving your website.

The Facebook Like box on Social Media Examiner.

It’s a great way to grow a healthy following for your Facebook page, just with the traffic that comes to your website.

Listen to the show to find out why this type of button works better than a Like Us on Facebook one.

This Week’s Social Media Questions

Question #1: John, whose wife is interested in starting a new lifestyle-type business online, asks, “In regards to a strategy for launching this new idea, my thoughts would be that she would start with Facebook and then Twitter, based on the fact that there is already foot traffic. Once she achieves a certain level on these two channels, then she would have an official announcement or launch of her new website. Is this a good strategy? If not, does it make more sense to launch all three simultaneously? In regards to Twitter and Facebook, what specific strategy could you give us for how to get valuable content for Twitter?”

I think it’s more important for you to launch something that you own first and then launch a community. You should start with a website, then a social channel. The reason is because you rent open ground with a social channel and there are no assurances that your content will be seen. To acquire fans, you need to have a hub or destination for them to go to.

You’ll hear how the team at Social Media Examiner uses Twitter and Facebook to find interesting articles to share with our audience.

Check out our Getting Started With Social Media: Resource Guide, which contains a number of resources to help bring you up to speed.

Question #2: Adam, the owner of Fresh Idea Websites that helps a lot of small businesses build WordPress websites and also provides social media community management, asks, “What tools do you find are the most helpful for managing multiple business pages for different brands, and why do you like those tools?”

Fresh Idea Websites.

At Social Media Examiner, we have two primary pages. One for Social Media Examinerand one for My Kids’ Adventures. To manage Facebook, we use the built-in tools.

We like to use Facebook’s tools to schedule posts because in the past, Facebook has penalized people who use third-party tools. For the most part, Facebook is a very manual process. I’m not in a position like you are with many different clients to manage, so there isn’t really a tool I can recommend.

If you want to check out some of the tools that are out there, you can visit our Tools category.

You’ll discover why we use SocialOomph and HootSuite to schedule tweets ahead of time.

Question #3: Amanda Skidmore is marketing director for a startup company calledCEU Central, an online education website where health professionals can take the continuing education courses they need to renew their professional license.

Amanda is currently trying to develop a marketing plan and asks, “Do we need a separate Facebook, Twitter, blog, etc., for each of our divisions, since the professionals we serve have such vastly different interests?”

CEU Central.

Unfortunately there is no simple answer to this.

It really comes down to resources. In an ideal world, you should have separate social channels for each of the primary audiences that you are trying to reach. If you have different products with different audiences, then it does make sense to begin to develop different communities. Having said that, it can become a management nightmare.

I would encourage anyone who has gone through this to let Amanda know what your thoughts are in the comment section below.

Question #4: Greg Elwell, host of the Expert Interviews podcast, asks, “How can you have two instances of a blog on a single WordPress site? For example, on Social Media Examiner you’ve got your home page, which is where all of your blog articles are and then you have a Podcast menu item, which contains all of your podcasts. Is there a simple way to do this in WordPress, where you can have separate instances or pages and RSS feeds configured on a single WordPress website?”

Expert Interviews podcast.

All you have to do is create a separate category inside of WordPress. We have a category called Podcasts, where every podcast is tagged with that particular category. So when you go to www.socialmediaexaminer.com/podcast it will only show you the blog posts that are tagged “podcast.” All we did was create a forwarding URL that takes users to www.socialmediaexaminer.com/category/podcast-episodes.

You can create any category you want. These categories can have their own RSS feed. In the end, it’s how you can create what appears to be a customized subsection of your website.

You’ll hear why we hired a developer to create a special code for the podcast category.

Question #5: Lucy from Lucy’s Web Designs creates websites for clients and teaches them how to keep them up to date.

Lucy asks, “On one of your podcasts, you said to put content where the client is. I’m just wondering how that affects SEO, as I have heard you are not supposed to duplicate content on websites. For instance, if I were to put a blog post onto Google+ and then onto Tumblr and Facebook, how would that work given the fact that it’s already residing on my blog or my client’s blog?”

Lucy’s Web Designs.

I know that some people copy and paste their entire article onto social platforms, and I’m not necessarily an advocate of that. When I talk about sharing content across social networks, I’m not talking about republishing or redistributing your content, I’m actually talking about linking back to your content.

The idea is to drive as much traffic back to your website as possible. You can take a portion of your content, such as the first couple of paragraphs, and put it on the different social networks and have a Click Here to Read More option.

You’ll hear the disadvantages of when you publish your content elsewhere and why Google will penalize you.

Question #6: Mike Haldas, co-founder of AppBurst, develops content-driven applications for businesses and events. Mike shares his concern for competitors’ ability to use tools to research and find social media connections on every major platform.

AppBurst.

Mike asks, “Let’s say that I’m a company that’s really good at connecting with my customer base through social media platforms and I build up a large following. Isn’t that kind of risky, because in a way, I just exposed part of my customer base or leads to any competitor that knows how to watch and track this? Does this concern ever come up in your circles, and what do you think about it?”

I don’t think this is a huge concern. For example, we have 230,000 email subscribers and 210,000 Facebook fans. There isn’t necessarily a correlation between the Facebook fans and the email subscribers. I’ve learned over the years that different people want to consume content in different ways.

For example, a lot of our email newsletter subscribers are now probably following us on Facebook instead, because they don’t want to get our emails anymore. In addition, there are people who discover us on Facebook who have no idea that we have an email newsletter list.

More importantly, there’s no way for me to know who all of our fans are on Facebook very easily, let alone our competitors.

Facebook likes to keep this information private. I believe only LinkedIn groups allow the administrator to download this type of information.

You’ll find out why it’s more important to grow a following on these social networks and how you can use this to move people into your lead funnel.

Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

Other Show Mentions

My Kids’ Adventures

I want to bring you up to speed on My Kids’ Adventures. This is a project I have been working on for the last 5½ months.

Watch this video to get a feel for the vision for My Kids’ Adventures.

The reason why I started this website was because as a busy parent, I felt like I wasn’t spending enough time with my kids. At the end of the workday, I didn’t have enough creative juices to think of something fun and exciting to do with them.

So I brought together a lot of creative minds, and at present we publish fun and adventure-themed activities three times a week.

Some of the articles include:

• How to Create a Backyard Treasure Hunt, Minecraft Style
• How to Have an Outdoor Photo Scavenger Hunt
• How to Make Slime
• How to Create Glow-in-the-Dark Bowling in Your Home

Since our launch in mid-July last year, we have had more than 142,000 unique visitors to the site and the video above has been viewed 9,300 times. These figures are awesome.

I’m trying to make a huge impact in the world and I could use your help. The first thing that you can do is to head over to My Kids’ Adventures and take advantage of all of the great free resources.

There is also a Resource Guide where you will find activities in every category you can imagine.

The other way you can help with My Kids’ Adventures is to apply to become a writer. If you are really creative and do fun stuff with your kids, we would love to hear from you.

If you can help us get the word out, visit here.

Social Media Marketing World 2014

Social Media Marketing World 2014 is our physical mega-conference, which is set to return to San Diego, California on March 26, 27 and 28.

The conference features more than 60 sessions in four major tracks: social tactics, social strategy, community management and content marketing.

The excitement for this conference is building like nothing we’ve experienced before.

The average temperature in San Diego is 72°, so why not bring your family and make a vacation out of your business trip? There are some awesome attractions in San Diego, including the world-famous San Diego Zoo, the Safari Park, SeaWorld and LegoLand.

Check it out and make sure you click on the Travel section to see all that San Diego has to offer.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

• Read Jon Loomer’s guide on Facebook Link Thumbnail Image Dimensions.
• Learn more about Open Graph.
• Use WP Open Graph plugin for WordPress sites.
• Try Facebook’s Debugger to keep your content up to date on Facebook.
• Install Facebook’s Share button on your website.
• Use WordPress’s Facebook social plugins on your website or Digg Digg’s Floating Share Bar.
• Leverage Google Analytics.
• Install the Facebook Like Box for Pages plugin for your website.
• Check out the Getting Started With Social Media: Resource Guide.
• Head over to Fresh Idea Websites, CEU Central, the Expert Interviews podcast, Lucy’s Web Designs and AppBurst.
• Use SocialOomph and HootSuite to schedule tweets.
• Learn more about Social Media Marketing World 2014.
• Contact Emily at emily@socialmediaexaminer.com if you are interested in corporate sponsorships for Social Media Marketing World 2014.

Help Us Spread the Word!

Please let your Twitter followers know about this podcast. Simply click here now to post a tweet.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast, please head over to iTunes, leave a rating, write a review and subscribe. And if you listen on Stitcher, please click here to rate and review this show.

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

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What do you think? What are your thoughts on these 5 Facebook marketing hacks for your website? Please leave your comments below.

How Brands Can Leverage Holidays for Their Social Campaigns

Do you plan marketing campaigns around major holidays?

Do you need ideas for your 2014 holiday social media marketing?

From Valentines Day to Easter and beyond, holidays are an important time for brands to engage customers and promote products in new and exciting ways.

And holiday-themed storytelling is an especially great way to build and cultivate a growing and engaged audience.

Here are four ways brands use social media to create and promote holiday campaigns throughout the year.

#1: Show the Fun Side of Your Brand With a Holiday Vine

Because Vines show up in Twitter’s main feed, they’re eye-catching and easy for people to share across Twitter and Facebook. Marketers have been quick to adoptTwitter’s 6-second video looping app to show a lighter and more creative side to the brands they promote.

Home improvement store Lowe’s used Vine to animate everyday household tools to look like bursting fireworks and wish their followers a happy 4th of July.

Lowe’s has used Vine in a number of ways to reach their followers.

Use stop-motion video to bring your products to life in a quirky animation and send your followers a holiday message. It’s a simple and clever way to draw attention to your brand and celebrate a holiday.

#2: Promote a Dedicated Microsite Campaign With Twitter

Microsites are a great idea if you want to set up a central hub for a competition or event, but keep it separate from your main site. Once the event is done, you can easily close it down or remove links and then reinstate it later with minimal hassle.

But how do you let everyone know about your campaign if it’s tucked away on its own? Integrate Twitter functionality!

Cosmetics and beauty brand Sephora‘s Sephora Claus campaign proved hugely successful. On the microsite, fans were asked to wish for a Sephora beauty product and connect to their Twitter account to complete the wish. One wish was granted each day for 30 days.

All the wishes are collected on the microsite in the form of clickable gift tags, which look really stylish and give a fun visual twist to the page.

Requiring wishers to connect their Twitter accounts meant that the ‘wishes’ were visible across social media, which boosted engagement—a staggering 50,000 tweets were sent overall.

Sephora made user-generated tweets an integral part of their latest holiday campaign.

Build social media functionality into the holiday campaign on your microsite toensure visibility.

#3: Add Facebook Games to Your Annual Product Campaigns

It can be challenging to encourage engagement that makes your campaign visible to people outside your fan base. Adding a gaming component to your campaign is a surefire way to bring it to people’s attention who’ll spread your message to wider networks as they play.

Every year, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are sold for a limited time (January 1 until Easter Sunday) in the run-up to Easter, and every year Cadbury comes up with a fun campaign to boost sales in this limited timeframe.

The Creme Eggs are so popular they even have their own Facebook page with an incredible 2.6 million likes, which shows how successful Cadbury has been at increasing online engagement.

In 2012, Cadbury capitalized on their massive fan base and used their status as one of the London Olympic Games sponsors to introduce the Goo Games as part of their annual Creme Egg marketing.

Based on real Olympic events, fans could choose from several games including ‘Pole Yolk,’ ‘Goodles’ and ‘Triple Bump,’ and were rewarded with virtual medals and real-world prizes. Participants in any of the Goo Games had to like the Facebook page before playing, which helped to widen the campaign’s reach and generate huge levels of sustained engagement on the page.

Goo Games created sustained engagement for Cadbury’s Facebook Easter campaign.

Visitors to the Cadbury site and Facebook page could also participate by sending in a photo of themselves “getting the goo out” of their own eggs by splattering them in original and funny ways.

Combine user-generated marketing with a high-engagement activity like an online game for maximum reach and visibility.

#4: Get the Most Out of Image Sharing With Pinterest Boards

Although brands still produce traditional TV and print ads, some of the biggest brands are putting their most creative input into their digital content. Image-sharing sites likePinterest are becoming the focus of some exciting new targeted campaigns that drive engagement, as well as website traffic and online sales.

When Target partnered with Pinterest last spring to pilot Rich Pins—pins that work like a catalog with prices and other product information—it resulted in a 70% increase in visits to Target.com from Pinterest.

This Thanksgiving, Target teamed up with one of the most sought-after event producers in the world, David Stark, to offer guests a first-of-its-kind party-planning resource on Pinterest with a board called Best.Party.Ever.

The Best.Party.Ever. board features David Stark’s “secrets to creating the perfect holiday party, from DIYs to recipes to unique decorating ideas,” as well as rich pins that make shopping easy and videos that show tips and ideas.

Target’s Best.Party.Ever. campaign used rich pins to drive holiday engagement on Pinterest.

Build up your campaign’s secret board through the year. Unveil it by making it public in the lead-up to a holiday and remember to move your current holiday-themed boards to the top of your Pinterest profile to increase engagement at key times of the year.

Conclusion

Forward-looking brands are putting social media at the center of their holiday marketing campaigns and taking advantage of themed campaigns to build up long-term loyalty.

When you use the tips in this article to make the most of frequent, relevant campaigns, you’ll benefit from increased engagement and a growing audienceas well as enjoy a greater online presence, increased sales and website traffic.

What do you think? Are you using any of these tactics to get noticed? Which will you try in the coming year? Please leave your questions and comments in the box below.

5 Ways to Blog From Your Mobile Device

Do you need to blog while on the go?

Would you like to have the ability to blog from your mobile device?

In this article, I’ll show you what you need to run your blog from your mobile device.

Why Blog From a Mobile Device?

OK, so you’re not going to build a robust blog entirely on mobile.

But once you’ve launched your blog using a platform like WordPress, a computer is no longer required to continue posting, engaging and building your brand online.

In today’s mobile, 140-character world, more readers prefer their content in bite-sized chunks—which makes quick-hit and multimedia posts from a mobile device ideal in some cases.

“Every day you have to be communicating; that’s the important thing,” said rock starvideo blogger Gary Vaynerchuk, when asked what today’s businesses are lacking online. “Long-form blogging was the big thing in years back. Microblogging is now the big thing. It’s changed the dynamics a bit.”

And microblogging doesn’t have to be just a Twitter thing. Many new WordPress themes have custom content types baked into the editor and design for short blurbs, photos and even asides.

In fact, a standardized list of these “short-form” post formats has been recognized since WordPress 3.1, and bloggers can now customize their themes around these specific, shorter-than-normal posts. That standard list of post formats includes Aside, Audio, Chat, Gallery, Link, Quote, Status and Video.

WordPress makes it easy to publish short-form content with those callouts on the content management side of things. It’s encouraging Google and other search engines to become more flexible when it comes to ranking quality content, no matter how many words the body area contains.

You’d be hard-pressed nowadays to find any official Google documentation that suggests minimum word counts for blog posts. As long as you do your best tocreate unique, resourceful content that provides value to search results, you’re going to rank well in search.

That, combined with the unprecedented adoption of mobile, makes posting to a blog from a mobile device easier and more valuable than ever. This means bloggers no longer have to remain chained to a desktop to stand out online.

#1: Mobile Blogging Apps

In the mobile world, “note”-worthy apps such as Evernote get a lot of the attention. And while cloud-based note-taking apps are a huge leap forward in terms of mobile content development, I prefer to cut out the middleware and publish straight from the app I’m writing in.

With that approach in mind, my top three mobile blogging apps right now are:

• WordPress for iOS: (WordPress also has apps for five additional mobile platforms): The WordPress app is amazing because it streamlines the bloated desktop-publishing process and lets you simply publish text, photos and video straight from your device. The only drawback is formatting text and HTML can be a pain, so save yourself the headache and keep your copy simple when blogging from a mobile device.
• CoveritLive: I’ll focus on event marketing in a bit, but whenever I’m blogging an event and want to collaborate with others, there’s no better app than CoveritLive, which essentially embeds a live chat into your blog.
• Quicklytics: In terms of blog stats, I rely on Quicklytics to track Google Analytics on all of the blogs in my portfolio. So if a topic on a blog starts going gangbusters, I know about it at the swipe of a thumb and can complement that topic with a related post or make any necessary tweaks from my handy-dandy WordPress app.

But you don’t even need an app to push quality mobile content to your blog. Read more below.

#2: Mobile Blogging by Email

One of my favorite mobile blogging approaches is to send posts to my site via email.

With some tweaks to your admin settings, you can publish via email to your WordPress blog. WordPress gives you a unique address to email posts to, so be sure to keep that email address secret to avoid spam hitting your site. In terms of posting, the title of the post goes in your email subject line; the body text goes in the body of the email.

Post a blog by email from your mobile device.

Hit Send, and your post will get published as soon as the email hits your web server.

#3: Photo Blogging With Flickr

While emailing posts can be convenient, attaching and getting multimedia to display properly on your blog can be challenging.

That’s where a photo portfolio site like Flickr can come in handy, allowing you to kill two birds with one email send: double-publishing mobile photos to a photo-sharing service like Flickr, as well as to your own blog.

The Flickr publish-by-email feature is great for review posts, where photos often carry the post.

Use Flickr to publish photos from your mobile device to your blog.

And if you use an automated feed service such as Feedburner to syndicate your blog to your social networks, those six keystrokes can also generate a tweet and Facebook post that spread the word and kick off the link-building process for you automagically. All in 30 seconds or less!

 #4: Video Blogging via Mobile

Video blogging isn’t quite as quick as photo blogging via mobile, because it takes more time to process videos, but it’s become a lot easier thanks to the evolution of WordPress and YouTube.

As we know, the WordPress app allows video uploads straight from your phone, but did you know WordPress allows you to embed a YouTube video by simply pasting the YouTube URL into your blog editor? That means a video blog can be published via mobile in these easy steps:

• Upload your mobile video from your gallery to YouTube, using default sharing functionality from your iPhone gallery.
• Copy the YouTube URL once it’s published.
• Paste the URL in the body of your next blog post.

A local surf shop recently followed this model, and was able to shoot and publish a viral Surfing Sasquatch video and photo gallery all in the same day using nothing more than iPhones and an iPad. They also edited the video on their iPad equipped with iMovie, which is another great, easy-to-use video editing app worth picking up.

#5: Event Blogging

CoveritLive allows multiple bloggers to collaborate on a live blog from anywhere in the world. You can even post to the live blog via Twitter; again, killing two birds with one iPhone.

Using my iPhone, I was even able to live blog while kayaking San Francisco’s McCovey Cove during the 2012 World Series. That’s right, blogging while kayaking—at night—at the World Series; something that would have been unfathomable prior to the advent of the smartphone.

Blogging from a mobile device opens new possibilities today.

And because I was one of the only sportswriters who paddled out into the cove for Game 2, my live blog was picked up by everyone from Deadspin to the Detroit Free Press and was one of my most popular posts ever.

Conclusion

As you can see, today you can build a blog via your mobile device.

Use these tips to build a blog where you only share short-form content, or to add short-form content to keep your business blog active while you are away from your desk.

Keep in mind that these mobile blogging options may help you publish content faster than your competition or larger mainstream sites. For example, this can help you be the first to cover breaking news at events and increase your visibility within your industry.

What do you think? Have you used your mobile device to blog? What have been your challenges and successes? Please share your comments below.