Facebook Guide Book by Mashable

Facebook is the world's leading social network, with over 300 million users and more than 900 employees. But how do you get the most out of it? To answer this question and more, Mashable has created The Facebook Guide Book, a complete collection of resources to help you master Facebook.

- Pete Cashmore, Mashable

Thriving in the Post-Media Age

Are You Using Linked In Effectively?

Communicator and LinkedIn expert Chuck Hester discusses how to build your network, contact journalists and look for a job on this popular professional networking site.

Goal Setting that Works!

Have you ever worked all day and have nothing to show for it? Get yourself back on track with some simple goal setting and time management techniques that work:

1. Long Term Goals: Take a look at the big picture. What do you want to accomplish in the next three months? The next year? Be specific and write it down - better yet, use Evernote to keep all your notes in one place.
   
2. Write down three things you must do today in order to advance your long term goals. Keep these tasks in front of you all day. Don't deviate from these tasks.
3. Add two more tasks related to current events but not related to your long term goals. Label these as "if I have time."
4. Eliminate ALL distractions. These time-hogs KILL productivity and creativity:

• Close your email client, and only open it 2-3 times per day
• Shut off Twitter,
  
• Disconnect from the internet entirely (yes, we said disconnect from the internet) at a few points throughout the day.

Review your progress every day. Look at your long term goals and set your short term tasks for the next few days.

Try this method for a day. See what happens, and let us know! We think you will be surprised at how much you can accomplish with simple goal writing and distraction busters.

Americans Want Brands That Inform

The top characteristic US consumers want from brands they like is to improve their knowledge—and the least desirable one is for a brand to “only be visible in store”—according to the “Global Web Index” from Lightspeed Research.

Helping consumers keep up to date on topics that were important to them was also key, followed by being entertaining, becoming part of a daily routine, and informing consumers about the product and the company. Consumers were relatively uninterested in brands that tried to act like their friends. Read more from emarketer...

Social Media versus Search Engines for Website Traffic

Getting visitors to your website is a primary goal, but finding loyal visitors is even better. According to research by ad network Chitika, leads generated from Facebook and Digg are more likely to create repeat vistitors than search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo. In the course of one week, more than 1/5th of users referred to a website by Facebook visited at least four times. Google-referred visitors were less loyal at 12%. And visitors coming from Twitter were the least likely to return.

But in the bigger picture, social media sites are only sending a small fraction of traffic. An earlier Chitika Study concluded that “the overwhelming dominance of search engines is facing little, if any, threat from social networks.” Taken together, search engines made almost 98% of all referrals, while social networking sites made up just 0.55%. Google alone accounted for 76.13% of referrals.

What's a web marketer to do? Staying "in the conversation" is more important than ever.Google and Microsoft have both made deals with Twitter, and Microsoft has one with Facebook that integrates Twitter and Facebook updates into Bing search results. Google will soon be adding tweets to search results.

Google's Marissa Mayer says, "We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you'll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information."

These Twitter and Bing's deals make it all the more important for marketers to be found in real-time searches and Facebook/Twitter in general:

1. Use keywords
2. Talk about current events
3. Increase your followers
4. Promote conversation with retweets, linked in answers, etc.
5. Include calls to engagement

You have to keep people talking to stay relevant "right now." Subscribe to the Strategy140 blog for upcoming information on these social media marketing tactics.

Genders Rule on Social Networks!

Statistics compiled by Brian Solis from Google Ad Planner data, indicate that men and women are not equal in their preference for social networks. While men and women use sites like LinkedIn and YouTube equally, when it comes to sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and Bebo, women outnumber men. See the infographic by Information is Beautiful

There’s only one major preference for men on the social web: social news site Digg, where 64% of users are male.

What makes women more social? Let us know in the comments.

Great Photography Options for Tweeters!

If you have a Twitter page, try Portwiture.com It mashes together your tweet keywords and flickr photos based on those keywords and creates a mosaic of photos. This is what was generated for one of our clients, Twitter name @floridahalfback:

6 Strategies to Build Fans on Your Facebook Page

Social networks are growing at an explosive rate. Just take a look at Facebook’s growth:

• More than 300 million active users
• 50% of active users log on in any given day
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
• More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

If you’re not promoting your business on Facebook, have no fear. It’s easy to get started and maintain. Setting up a personal profile and finding your friends is the first step to making a presence. However, promoting your business requires a second step – establishing a fan page. To get started, look for the menu bar in the lower left hand corner of your personal profile and click on the small blue and grey icon with the letter “f” on it. From there, you can create your business fan page quite easily. Many articles are available to assist in creating your page, and editing is quite simple. Just make sure to publish your page early on, so your work will be saved.

Building your fan base can be a bit tricky because you cannot “friend” someone like you can on your personal profile. On the contrary, people ELECT to become fans of their page. Your job is to make sure they know about it. You’ve got to spread the word on a consistent basis to introduce people to your Page and to your company. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Place a Fan Box widget on your website or blog, making it easy for your visitors to become fans with one click. You will find this widget in your fan page in the upper left corner (see diagram below) and follow the Facebook prompts to receive your code:

• Post a Facebook icon on your website, preceding it with text such as "Become a Facebook fan"
• Post a message on your blog about your Facebook fan page, and provide a link to your fan page in your post to your fan page.
  
• Ask your Facebook friends to become fans, but please be careful not to spam them.
  
• Promote your page within Facebook with a Facebook ad. Familiarize yourself with the Facebook guidelines for advertising fan pages. Facebook allows you to carefully target your ad's placement throughout the site so the right fans will find you.
  
• Post keyword-rich content on your Facebook page so your page will be found quickly within the site.

Facebook also offers guidelines for promoting your business page externally, including an icon and a code-generating widget for a unique badge. Visit their help section for fan pages to get the icons, badges, and details.

Facebook is where consumers are, and you need to be there if you want to be found!

8 Steps to Accelerate Your SEO

Understand the concept of content marketing and creating link bait
Be an innovative copywriter
Understand the power of social networks
Create and build a community
Know your niche
Research the competition
Understand your customers

Facebook Ads Announce the Addition of "Like"

If you're familiar with the interactive thumbs up and thumbs down icons on Facebook, the ad team has announced the addition of "Like" to Facebook Ads. By clicking on the "Like" link, users are able to express themselves and share this expression with their friends. When a user likes an ad, their friends will be able to see that action in their version of the ad.

Another progressive step being taken by Facebook to provide businesses with targeted advertising and a greater ROI on their advertising investment.