3000fans30days

30 Days To 3,000 Facebook
Fans

New Media School 548 Market St San Francisco, CA 94104 T 202-658-7548 contact@newmediaschool.com www.newmediaschool.com

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Table of Contents

Introduction! 1

Day 1: What Has Changed?! 3

Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A Brand You Can Be Proud Of! 5

Day 3: How To Conﬁgure Your Facebook Page! 8

Day 4: Developing A Creative Photo For Your Page! 11

Day 5: Target Network Nodes! 13

Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A Successful Facebook Contest! 15

Day 7: How To Leverage SEO For Your Facebook Page! 17

Day 8: How To Become A Master Of Conversations! 19

Day 9: Create A Note Which Spreads Like Wildﬁre! 21

Day 10: Introduction To Facebook Ads! 23

Day 11: Why Understanding Your Target Market Is Key To Success
With Facebook Ads! 25

Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3! 27

Day 13: How To Use Facebook Applications To Boost Your Fan Base!32

Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A Successful Facebook Event! 35

Chapter 15: How To Use A Landing Page To Convert New Facebook
Visitors Into Fans! 38

30 Days to 3,000 Fans! i

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Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000 Facebook Fans! 40

Day 17: Post Relevant Videos! 42

Day 18: Cross-Promote Your Website! 44

Day 19: Research Other Successful Pages! 46

Day 20: Get People To Invite Their Friends! 48

Day 21: Create Mini-Competitions! 50

Day 22: Work The Forums! 52

Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The Impact Of Guest Blog Posts! 54

Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That Will Turn Facebook Fans Into Custom-
ers! 56

Day 25: Integrate the Page Into Your Existing Blog! 58

Day 26: How To Use Competitive Analysis To Boost Your Fan Base! 60

Day 27: Monitor Your Page Insights To Improve Content! 62

Day 28: Check The Magazine Rack For Content Strategy! 64

Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For Facebook Page Admins! 66

Day 30: Create A Plan For The Next Month! 68

Day 31: Promote Fanning Via SMS! 70

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30 Days to 3,000 Fans! ii

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Introduction

If you have a brand but haven’t yet mastered the most effective
techniques to attracting new followers and fans, you are not alone. With
Facebook updating their design and platform on a regular basis it has
become challenging for brands to follow everything that’s changing let
alone learn all of the techniques necessary to maximize their reach. We
understand the challenges that you face which is why we are introducing
the 30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans project.

Why Does Your Brand Want 3,000 Facebook
Fans?
When Facebook launched their new design early this year, millions of
users revolted against the change but as things have quieted down, one
group not complaining is brands. Facebook’s redesigned homepage
provides brands with the same level of interaction that users have among their friends yet only a few shining brands have
truly leveraged Facebook’s redesign to its full potential. We’ve spent the past few months experimenting with
Facebook’s redeveloped pages product to see what it has to offer.

While Facebook will be launching more features to provide brands with greater exposure and greater access to their
public proﬁle’s data, there is already plenty available for brands to take advantage of. So before discussing how to attract
thousands of fans to your public proﬁle within a month, I think it would be best to explain why your brand or small
business wants thousands of fans.

It should be obvious to any marketer that thousands of fans can create an extremely effective promotional channel but
can you actually take action to drive more fans or is it just a natural evolution? As Fred Wilson states, the future is in
“earned” media, not paid and Facebook is one of the primary platforms for earned media. Large companies like Coca-
Cola will have fans that set up pages for them and those pages can often grow to millions of users but unfortunately
small to medium-sized businesses as well as individuals can’t just set up a page and let the people do the rest.

Instead, less known brands need to invest heavily in brand development and leverage the various social media channels
available to them to interact directly with their followers, fans, and customers. For this guide we used 3,000 fans as a
high yet reachable target that brands can attract through actionable tasks. Some will attract more and some will attract
less but after 30 days I have no doubt that you will have all the tools necessary to build a more effective brand presence
on Facebook.

The measure of success should not be whether or not you’ve attracted 3,000 fans but whether you’ve attracted a large
number of targeted fans.

30 Days to 3,000 Facebook Fans 1

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What The Project Involves And How To Participate
During this project we will spend 30 days listing out all of the techniques needed to maximize the effectiveness of your
brand’s Facebook page. At the end of the 30 days you should have numerous techniques that you can put into practice
immediately. Each day we will include action items that you should take.

Note
Throughout this guide I will use the words “fan pages”, “pages”, and “public proﬁles” interchangeably because Facebook
has yet to solidify their terminology.


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Day 1: What Has Changed?

The New Facebook Public Profiles
On March 4th of this year, Facebook released an updated version on what was previously called “Facebook Pages” and
is now called “Facebook Public Profiles”. The update essentially transformed the ways that brands could interact with
both existing customers as well as potential future customers. While many described it as a move against Twitter
(including myself), the dynamic between Twitter and Facebook is not important to this guide. What’s most important is
that you have a thorough understanding of all the features of Facebook pages and how to leverage them for your
business.

Below is an outline of the new features that have been added to Facebook Pages. As we continue the program over the
coming 30 days, we will outline how to leverage every aspect of the pages product. Here are a few of the features you
will be learning about:

Status Updates
This is probably the most significant upgrade for Facebook Pages. Any page administrator can now post status updates
on behalf of the Facebook page they are managing. Whether you are an individual or a large brand, you will now have
direct access to your fans through the news feed. I’ve personally benefited substantially from status updates. As the
image above illustrates, by posting a status update that’s a question, you can instantly get tons of feedback. We
regularly receive upwards of 30 replies to a single status update.


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This is an excellent way to continue engaging your fans on a regular basis. The status update is one of the core features
of Facebook and the recent site redesign increases the emphasis on status updates.

Ability to Post Rich Content To The
Feed
Under the previous design, Facebook page admins could
post rich media content but it was not included in a
continuous stream from the main page. Instead, rich
media was regularly tucked away. Regardless of where
the content was positioned on the page, when new
content was posted there was no way to notify users of
the new content. The result was that users would
become fans but never return to the public profile
because there was no way to get alerted to the changes.

While there is a feature called “Updates” (that I’ll cover
momentarily), most users were completely oblivious to previous public profiles that they had become fans of. Distribution
of rich-media content in the feeds changes all that. Now you can upload videos and photos and they will immediately be
posted to all of your fans’ feeds to watch, comment on, and increase overall engagement.

Mobile Updates to Fans
This is another great feature which many brands will increasingly take advantage of.
As I mentioned already, public profiles had no way of reaching out to fans previously
(aside from the typically unread “updates”). Now brands can have their status
updates not only broadcasted to their fans’ news feeds but also directly to their
mobile phones. This is a huge opportunity to increase the level of fan engagement.

The only downside to this feature is that there is no way to currently monitor how many mobile subscribers you have or
how many people have read a given status update. While Facebook hasn’t stated that they plan on adding this feature
anytime soon, I would imagine that Facebook will gradually improve their analytics offering to include mobile
subscriptions. Currently Facebook page “Insights” let admins view how many views of videos, photos, and page views
have been made.

A Decreased Emphasis on “Updates”
Facebook has always provided admins with the ability to send messages to their fans via something called “Updates”.
The only problem with the updates is that they don’t go directly to a user’s primary inbox. Instead they go to a separate
tab in their inbox called “Updates”. One person that I spoke with sent a test message out to a public profile with more
than 100,000 fans and received under 50 clicks. In other words: updates are pretty much useless.

That’s why Facebook now emphasizes status updates as the primary channel of communication for public profiles. Have
an event you’re promoting? Post about it via a status update. I hosted a conference last November and found that my
public profile at the time was practically useless because nobody was visiting the page and most people didn’t respond
to updates. While there’s a chance Facebook will improve this feature, the latest upgrades signal that they are phasing
out “Updates”.


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Day 2: 10 Ways To Build A
Brand You Can Be Proud Of

You may be wondering why I’m writing a whole section
on branding when this is a guide to mastering your
Facebook Page. The primary reason that I’m bringing
up branding at the beginning of this program is that a
powerful brand is much more effective at attracting
new fans. Every organization is at a different phase in
their branding process. Oprah Winfrey for example,
doesn’t need to do much promotion of her Facebook
profile to end up with a few hundred thousand fans.
While Oprah may be a distant target, investing time
into building your brand will help you build an avid fan
base on Facebook as well as elsewhere on the web.

Tip 1: Use A Consistent Design
A large portion of branding is about image and that image is portrayed through your design. It can be the logo, a set of
colors, or simply a consistent look and feel. As Jared Spool states in his article, “Determining How Design Affects
Branding”, “Brand elements, such as names, logos, tag lines, trademarks, and packaging are shortcuts to” the
perceptions of the consumer. If you tightly integrate your design into your product or service, the design can begin to
evoke the emotions and perceptions that the consumers experience when interacting with your product or service.

Tip 2: Determine Your Brand Personality
While brands may not be people, the personification of brands helps consumers to connect with them. That’s why it’s
important to determine what your brand’s personality is. Much of that personality can come through your own voice
since people like connecting with other individuals but you should be able to define the overall personality of your brand
as well.

Tip 3: Have A Consistent Dialogue
Whether you are having a conversation on Facebook, Twitter, or during a presentation, it’s important to have a consistent
message. While you can engage in different conversations, it’s important that your conversation is most frequently about
similar ideas or concepts. For example Oprah would not have a conversation with her viewers about computer
programming. Maybe that’s an extreme example but the main point is that there is a consistent dialog that you should
have with your consumers.


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Tip 4: Define Your Target Market
Who are you selling to? That’s a question that many brands fail to
answer and in the end they become so broadly focused that they end up
selling nothing. I’ve made this mistake before and the results can be
extremely painful. You invest months building something only to find out
that you didn’t target a specific market and in the end nobody ends up
making a purchase. As Wikipedia states, your target market “is mainly
defined by age, gender, geography, socio-economic grouping,
technographic, or any other combination of demographics.” Figure out
who you are targeting. This is also extremely important for when you
begin running ad campaigns on Facebook (which we’ll be explaining
later). Figure out your target market and you are well on your way to
3,000 fans.

Tip 5: Know What Your Brand Is Selling
You’ve selected a target market but do you know what your customers want? While you can pick out a segment of the
market to go after, providing them with something that they truly want is a whole other challenge. Often times
companies will spend months preparing for a product launch only to find out that nobody ended up purchasing the
product. Sometimes brands will launch a product or service only to find out that their consumer is using it for another
reason than it was intended. If you don’t understand how your customer is interacting with your brand then good luck
developing a Facebook public profile that’s going to rapidly attract thousands of users. Once you have determined your
target market and you know what your brand is selling, you can proceed to build a large fan base.

Tip 6: Figure Out The Terms That Drive Action From Your Target Market
This is more about sales and marketing then it is about building your brand but at the end of the day, there’s no point in
building a brand if you don’t plan on using it to sell something. While an attractive brand can build you a large fan base,
selling is much more challenging. Each buyer has their own psychological triggers that will drive them to make a
purchase and often times, there are words that will drive an entire market to make a purchase. That’s why you need to
invest the time to test out various forms of copy and see what works with your market.

There are actually words that will make it more likely for your fans to take action. By discovering these words/terms you
can associate them with your brand and increase the bond with your fans.

Tip 7: Listen To Your Target Market
Social media is much more about listening than talking at people. Honestly, the old direct methods of marketing are now
dead and instead marketing has become a conversation that brands have with their customers. Thankfully, this new
model presents many new opportunities and those brands that are quickest to adapt will reap the rewards. Some of
your customers will want to engage in a dialogue with your brand and Facebook public profiles are a great place for that
to take place. Did someone post something negative about your brand? Publicly acknowledge their criticism and then
proceed to offer a solution.

If your brand is willing to publicly acknowledge weaknesses and address them, it will build trust with your brand for
existing and future customers. Many times your fans will actually tell you what they’d like your brand to provide. This is
gold to any effective marketer. Spend the time to listen, don’t just speak at your fans.


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Tip 8: Provide Relevant Content That Amplifies Your Brand
It’s difficult to consistently come up with original content. As someone who has written over 2,000 articles in the past
two years, I can attest to the challenge of developing original content. Thankfully, in social media (and on Facebook
public profiles), you don’t always need to come up with original content. As you browse the web, share content that is
relevant to your brand directly from within your Facebook page. This way you can keep your fans engaged with ongoing
content and you don’t need to always be the one producing that content.

Tip 9: Create Good Content
While sharing content from around the web is always an easy way to get your fans engaged, it’s always better to create
original content. It’s possible to provide original content which rehashes existing content but the best content is truly
original. One of the best forms of original content is educational guides. Educating your future consumer is always a
great way to build trust and to build an ongoing relationship. That’s not to say that the only content you should create is
educational content. Content that entertains, engages, informs, or simply makes the reader smile is great for keeping
their attention. If you want to learn more about creating great content I highly recommend reading Copyblogger on a
regular basis.

Tip 10: Leverage Multiple Branding Channels
No, Facebook Pages are not the end all, be all of your branding strategy. People regularly ask what the best site is for
building their brand and generating new business. The response is always the same no matter who you ask in the
industry: go to where your customers are. If your existing or future customers are on Facebook (there’s a good chance
they are there with over 250 million users) or even MySpace (GASP!), your company should be there. Wherever your
customer is, you should be there.

Daily Task
Spend some time listing out the personality traits of your brand. That’s right ... if your brand was a person, what type of
person would it be?


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Day 3: How To Configure Your
Facebook Page

Overview
In this section we are going to a basic overview for those individuals that don’t know how to get their Facebook page set
up. If you are an advanced Facebook Page user then you may want to consider skipping this day. I receive a number of
emails each week from people that can’t figure out how to get their public profile set up though so I thought it would be
useful to provide a basic introduction.

Step 1: Create Your Facebook Page
Creating a Facebook page is a relatively rudimentary task on Facebook. To create a public profile you can visit the
Facebook public profile advertising page and click on the “Create a Page” button. Next up, you’ll be prompted with a
form titled “Create New Facebook Page” as illustrated below. Select your category and enter the name of your business
or public figure. Finally, you must confirm that you are authorized to create the page by entering your full name as it
appears in your profile.


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Step 2: Edit Basic Information
When you first arrive to your newly created public profile, there will be a link off to the right hand side which says “Edit
Information”. Entering your information is important for search engine optimization (“SEO”) purposes as well as informing
new visitors about your product, service, or yourself (if you are a public figure). Currently Facebook does not enable page
administrators to remove this tab so I highly recommend that you take the time to fill it out with all the relevant
information.

Step 3: Configure A Landing Page (Custom Tab)
When a new fan visits your public profile, it’s extremely useful to explain to them what the public profile is about and why
they should become a fan. The goal of the landing page is to immediately convert the user into a new fan and then
engage the fan after they’ve joined. I’ve seen companies use contests for engaging the user but the vast majority of
Facebook Pages have no separate landing page. The result is that the public profiles have a lower conversion of new
visitors into fans.

There is one exception for public profiles that have no landing page but high conversion: companies with a high brand
affinity. Oprah Winfrey or Coca-Cola can convert users without having a landing page because they have such a strong
brand presence.

How To Configure Your Landing Page
Adding a landing page is relatively simple. One requirement is that you have a basic understanding of HTML. More
advanced landing pages can also be created but that will require some knowledge of the Facebook platform. I’m
assuming that most people reading this section don’t have much experience with the Facebook platform so I’ll provide a
quick walk through of how to get the landing page configured without anything but one application and a little bit of
HTML.

Install the “Static FBML” Application
The first step to configuring a landing page is to install the Static FBML application to your public profile application. After
you visit the Static FBML application about page you can install the application by clicking “Add to Page”. You will then
be prompted to select the public profile that you’d like to install to and click on the button which says “Add Static FBML”.

Edit Your Landing Page
After you installed the “Static FBML” application to your public profile, you should be
redirected back to your page. If you weren’t just go back to your Facebook Page. Click
on “Edit Page” on the left hand side. There will be a number of applications installed by
default but you want to edit the box which says “FBML - FBML”. Next you’ll be
presented a page from which you can edit the title and content within your custom tab.

Currently, Facebook page tab titles are limited to 14 characters including spaces.
Anything beyond that will result in your title being appended to 11 characters followed by “...” Using HTML, modify the
FBML box. To include Facebook relevant information, you can use any of the tags included on the FBML wiki page. If
you are extremely proficient with HTML, you may note that some tags are not allowed. For those tags that don’t work
properly, you’ll need to substitute them with FBML tags as defined on the FBML Wiki page.

Add The New Landing Page As A Tab
Once you’ve properly configured the new tab, you’ll want to add it as a default tab. If
you haven’t added any tabs yet, it will immediately show up as one of your default
tabs. If it doesn’t, simply click on the double arrows and select your custom tab as


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pictured in the photo to the right. When you select the
new tab it will replace the tab which is currently furthest
to the right. The other thing you’ll want to configure is
for your new landing page to show up as the default tab
when a new visitor first comes to your public profile.
To do this click on the “Wall” tab and select “Settings”.
Then next to the area where it says “Default Landing Tab
for Everyone Else:” select the tab that you’d like to show
up by default when a new visitor comes to your public
profile.

That’s it! Now your custom landing tab has been
configured.

Step 4: Add Additional Applications
Other applications make it possible to expand the functionality of your Facebook Page. The more features you can add
that engage the user, the better. While you don’t want to add 20 applications, it often makes sense to add a few
applications that will engage your visitors. The photos, discussions, and reviews tabs are added by default. Make sure
that any tab that you have is actually being used. For example, there’s no point in having a discussions tab if you aren’t
encouraging visitors to participate in ongoing conversations.

While Facebook doesn’t currently list the applications available for Facebook pages, there are a number of third parties
that provide sets of applications. Involver is one company that provides a number of applications that let you import and
RSS feed, publish your Twitter status, easily create polls, share files, and more. If you want to learn more, head on over
to the Involver application gallery. Also check out the promotions application provided by Wildfire Interactive.

Step 5: Start Inviting Friends
Once you’ve finished adding your applications and customizing your public profile, all you need to do is invite people to
get started. One thing that I highly recommend is targeting nodes of individuals. If there is a tightly connected network
of individuals among your friends, invite each of them on the same day. This way you increase the likelihood of your
newly created Facebook Page becoming a recommended page.

Daily Task
I think it’s pretty obvious what your daily task is at this point! Get your Facebook Page up and running using the steps
outlined above.


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Day 4: Developing A Creative
Photo For Your Page

Why Your Photo Is So Important
Most people just quickly upload their photo to their Facebook page and never think about it again. This is probably one
of the worst mistakes you can make. Facebook doesn’t provide many customization options for the main public profile
page meaning that your photo is what sets your public profile apart from others. Back in February, Rob Banagale wrote
a guest post on our blog about various ways of customizing your Facebook profile photo. Since then, thousands of
people have customized their profile photo in creative ways and a few of those individuals have posted screenshots of
their photo.

While the individuals were modifying their personal profile photo, the same rules go for public profile photos. Below I’ve
included a couple creative profile photo screenshots and outline the steps necessary to customizing your public profile in
creative ways.

Public Profile Photo Restrictions
Before designing your custom photo you should understand what restrictions there are. The first thing to understand is
the size of the photo you can have. Facebook by default resizes all photos down to a maximum width of 200 pixels and
a maximum height of 600 pixels. There are plenty of creative uses of this space. Some of the best examples take
advantage of the maximum space available. Four interesting designs I’ve see are included below:


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The Awkward Photo Background
Facebook is known for having an awkward background for photos. There is a line and a darker background at the top
portion of every public profile photo. The top color is the hex color #edeff4. The line is #d8dfea. The most challenging
part of the background is that depending on how long your status update is, the height of the line can be adjusted. The
line is exactly 52 pixels above the top. You’ll need to avoid posting longer updates though if you want your photo
background to stay lined up properly.

If done properly, there are infinite possibilities for extremely creative public profile photos that take advantage of the photo
background line. Below I’ve included a few creative examples that use the awkwardly place line effectively:

One prerequisite of making the necessary changes is that you have a basic understanding of a photo manipulation
software package like Adobe Photoshop. Most people have at least a basic photo editing software on their computer.
It’s well worth the effort of customizing your public profile photo because it can drive users to become a fan.

Daily Task
Spend some time developing a creative Facebook profile photo for your newly launched Facebook Page. You will benefit
greatly from investing a little extra time in developing a creative image.


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Day 5: Target Network Nodes

Overview
So far we’ve discussed a few of the basics behind promoting your
Facebook page. Now we are going to go over a few tips and tricks that
are going to help you reach the 3,000 fan target that we set at the
beginning of this guide. Keep in mind that for some companies, 3,000
fans is excessive while for others 3,000 may not be a lot. You need to
effectively assess your goals and figure out a good number that makes
sense for you during the 30 day program.

Target Nodes and Influencers
In the “Tipping Point”, Malcom Gladwell discusses how key influencers can be the drivers behind viral consumer
epidemics. The point is that the most connected individuals that are also connected to other highly-connected nodes
end up having a ton of influence. We all know super-connecters and if you are looking to build your public profile’s fan
base, you should be targeting them. Randomly pursuing these individuals is not the best way to go about it though. A
well planned and well executed targeting process will yield the maximum results.

How To Perform Influencer Outreach
There are a number of reasons you shouldn’t just start randomly messaging influencers. The first is because it’s just bad
form. Aside from that, if you randomly message people, you will miss out on a ton of opportunity. The largest
opportunity is the phenomenon of overlapping networks. If two influentials share friends, the odds of your public profile
becoming a recommended Facebook Page or ending up in a user’s highlights area on their homepage will be
substantially increased.

So now that you know why I don’t like randomly reaching out to influencers, let’s explore the best way to go about
reaching out to influencers. Here are the steps that I suggest going through:

1. Influencer Research - Prior to reaching out to individuals, you should figure out who the most influential people are in a
given network. There are a number of ways to go about doing this but the easiest is just to find individuals with the
most friends in a network. The easiest influencers to find are among your friends since you’ll probably know which
friends are influencers. Outside of your network it’s useful to browse through individuals on Facebook based on
individual Facebook networks (organizations and geographic networks). You can quickly browse through networks
and jot down the names of those individuals that have the most friends.

2. Initial Outreach - Reach out to network influencers and introduce yourself. Spark up a conversation and explain to
them what you are working on. Do not copy and paste messages. If you send the same message to tens or
hundreds of individuals, Facebook will mark your account for spam. You need to actually build relationships with


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these individuals. It’s fine to make small changes to the first messages that you send out but following those initial
messages, you want to spend time fostering a positive relationship with the influencers.

3. Launch Day - After you have built up your list of network influencers set a date for getting those influencers to become
fans. On that day, reach out to each of your influencers and tell them to fan your Facebook Page. Depending on how
many influencers you have, you may want to consider a phased launch approach. Whichever model you pick, make
sure that you do some research and some basic planning.

Keep in mind that some of these are guerilla marketing strategies, not traditional marketing strategies. Would Facebook
encourage you to take each of the steps listed above? Probably not but the bottom line is that it works. If you abuse the
system, Facebook will surely ban you. Theoretically collecting data about network influencers could be a violation of
Facebook’s terms of service but it’s readily available information. Any research you do on Facebook is at your own
discretion so make sure not to abuse their system!

Daily Task
Come up with a list of at least 20 influencers that you can reach out to. Begin an initial conversation with each and aim
to have them all become fans of your Facebook Page on the same day.


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Day 6: 5 Tips To Creating A
Successful Facebook Contest

While you will receive an initial surge in fans from inviting your friends and
targeting network nodes, the growth will eventually flatten. You’ll need a
way to drive more fans. One of the best ways to attract new fans is by
creating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of the
time this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number of
friends you can invite to a public profile. That bring about the first tip
related to a contest.

Tip 1: Incentivize Invites To Facebook Pages
Facebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can invite
to a public profile which makes invitations one of the most important
components of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users to
invite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the single
best tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fans
to invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite their
friends? Right now there isn’t actually a way of tracking how many friends
a user has invited but you can however develop applications which track
the relative “friend density” of any given user within a public profile.

As users become fans and install an application, you can check to see which of their friends are also fans of the public
profile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes a
bit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.

Tip 2: Create Friend Leaderboards
One of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in the
previous tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboard
among all users, displaying a leaderboard among a user’s friends helps those users set more realistic competitive goals.
If thousands of individuals are competing, the odds are significantly reduced but if the leaderboard is only visible for
friends, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll get a user to engage.

Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart Periodically
If you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you could
theoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which


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weekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shorter
time frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by a
surge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but most
companies should extend things over a month or longer.

Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the Contest
So after a bit of brainstorming you’ve come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get it
programmed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contest
concepts and I’ve had a few which I’ve realized can be gamed. It’s a basic concept but it’s extremely important. I can’t
tell you how many conversations I’ve seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times such
questions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.

Tip 5: Provide Cash Prizes
Want to get somebody’s attention? Offer them cash prizes or something worth some serious pocket change.
Interestingly enough though, this doesn’t always work but it most deﬁnitely will incentivize a lot of people. Will it serve as
a valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that’s up for you to determine when developing the
contest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizes
since you could very well break the bank (then again if you’re targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairly
sizable marketing budget as well).

Daily Task
Come up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to see
which they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!


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Day 7: How To Leverage SEO
For Your Facebook Page

Intro to Search Engine Optimization
For those of you that haven’t spent a lot of time with internet
marketing, you probably are not aware of what search
engine optimization is. The main goal of search engine
optimization is to increase the amount of traffic driven to any
given site by search engines. Currently search engines (and
mostly Google) serve as the starting point of a user’s journey
around the web. While many users will go directly to their
favorite sites, search engines are used multiple times a day
by most internet users to discover resources they haven’t
previously found.

What’s great about Facebook’s public profiles is that Facebook already has a substantial amount of search engine juice.
Google alone claims to have indexed over 430 million pages within the site.

1. Get A Good URL
URLs are a large portion or search engine optimization. Google (and other search engines) use as much information as
possible to determine the relevance of a particular page for a given search. As of Saturday June 13, 2009, Facebook
offers something called “vanity URLs” for those Facebook Pages that have over 1,000 fans. A vanity URL is the short
Facebook URL that helps people easily access your page. For example our blog, AllFacebook, has the following URL:
http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook which makes it easier to access. The short URL is extremely effective at getting
Google “juice”.

2. Configure Your Default Tab
On day 15 we will be going over how to configure a tab as a “landing page” but the primary thing here is to ensure that
the first page being crawled by Google contains relevant text. You can set the default tab by clicking the “Settings” link
on your Facebook Page and then selecting the tab you’d like to have displayed by default. Currently I’m not focused
heavily on promoting my Facebook Page so the current landing page is more focused on getting users to take action
then to organically drive them. This emphasizes how important it is to understand your objectives. You probably don’t
want to create ranking issues with your site versus Facebook.


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3. Generate Links To Your Page
If you are looking to drive traffic to your page from searching engines, the most important variable is always incoming
links. One quick way to boost your Facebook page rankings is by linking to your page from your existing website.
Additionally, any way you can get links from other sites will help increase your rankings. On their own, Facebook Pages
tend to rank extremely well but a little additional effort will go a long way. One great way to increase the number of
incoming links is by participating in forums around the web and setting a signature which links back to your page. If you
are active in any forums on the web, I suggest placing your Facebook Page as one of your signature URLs. This will
most definitely help you gain some traction in Google.

4. Link To Other Relevant Pages
I’ll be elaborating on this tip in Day 10 but essentially linking to relevant content helps boost your ranking. If you created
a site that was about shoes but kept linking to blogs that were about technology, do you think that would really help out
the readers with finding what they’re looking for? Probably not. Google takes into account the relevance of pages you
are linking to when calculating the relevance of any given page. Try linking to a few relevant sites. There’s a good
chance that you’ll not only help out your readers but increase your overall Google rank.

5. Use Facebook For Inbound Links To Your Company Website
One of the most important components of search engine optimization is generating inbound links. While some
companies will take aggressive measures to generate inbound links, generating a link from you Facebook page is
extremely valuable. Take advantage of landing pages and the information tab to link back to your company’s website.

6. Select A Good Name For Your Facebook Page
The name of your Facebook is extremely important. Many search engine optimization experts will tell you that spending
a lot of time on the title of a website isn’t important as long as that page is written for the reader. On Facebook Pages
however there are few things you can use to boost your search engine rankings and page titles happen to be one of
those things. Don’t go overboard with your name and create a keyword dense title. Just name the title after your
company or whatever phrase will be most effective for fans that are searching for you.

Posting Stream Content Doesn’t Provide SEO Juice
Some resources on the web have suggested that generating links to your site by posting links to the news feed. While it
may drive you traffic it’s not going to generate any SEO juice because Facebook dynamically generates feed content
using javascript. Additionally, if you click a link from within Facebook it will redirect you through a Facebook pass-through
page. As far as I know, Facebook isn’t making any exceptions for search engines and providing news feed backlinks.

Conclusion
These were just six tips but overall you should be considering your Google rank when developing your Facebook Page
strategy. Since an increasing number of people are on Facebook, there’s a good chance that the person following a link
on Google also happens to be on Facebook and could quickly become a fan. While targeting keywords other than your
brand name is not at easy from within Facebook Pages, any effort you make is well worth it.

Daily Task
Make at least three adjustments to your Facebook Page that will help boost the optimization of your page. Also
determine where to put a link from your site back to your Facebook Page that will help build awareness and generate
some SEO juice for your Facebook page.


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Day 8: How To Become A
Master Of Conversations

The Art of Social Media
Want to have highly engaging conversations on your Facebook
proﬁle? You better get good at mastering the art of the social
media conversation. How is a conversation within social media
any different than a normal conversation? It isn’t! If you are
going to build a following on Facebook let alone any other site
on the internet, you are going to need to put in the time
necessary to build relationships with others. Whether it’s
posting follow-up comments or reaching out to people that
have asked valuable questions or have even posted criticism,
it’s important that you build an ongoing dialogue with your fans.

The Personiﬁcation Of The Brand
Want to really thrive in the world of social media? Imagine your brand as a person who has a life similar to its customers.
Prior to the internet, brands were organizations which spoke directly at their customers. While there was a number on
the back of a cereal box asking for your feedback, there really wasn’t a two-way conversation for the most part. Thanks
to the internet and new social technologies, you have the opportunity to engage your existing and potential customers
directly. So what types of conversations are most effective at building an engaged fan base?

Ask Questions
Any good conversation involves questions and answers. Facebook Pages present an amazing opportunity to learn
about your existing customers and potential ones. Not until recently was it possible to directly interact with your
customers on an ongoing basis, especially if you were representing a large brand. People love to talk about themselves
so ask them questions that are also related to your company. I happen to write about Facebook so I tend to ask users
about their experience with the site and what their favorite and least favorite aspects are. Additionally you can simply ask
general questions such as “what are you doing over this summer weekend?”

Respond To Questions And Comments
As you build your fan base, fans will begin to regularly post comments as well as questions. Take the time to engage
with them. Any time you take to interact with the fans is always time well spent. Many of the questions and comments
will be extremely easy to respond to, only requiring a few seconds of your time. If you end up with an extremely popular


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brand however, selecting which questions to respond to will become important. That’s a great problem to have though!
Make sure you take the time to reply to your customers and you can just about guarantee continued growth.

Be Supportive Of Your Biggest Fans
Are there fans that continuously post on your Facebook Page? Take the time to recognize them and continue to foster a
relationship with them. Your biggest fans can become extremely valuable. These fans will take the time to promote your
business for you. They’ll reply to other fan comments and do a lot of your work for you. Building relationships with these
individuals is extremely important. One way to help build these types of relationships is to promote those that have
helped you build your business. Give a quick shout out to the person as a comment and they’ll typically be extremely
grateful. Support your biggest fans and they’ll help support you, helping you taking your business to the next level.

Daily Task
Post a conversational update to your Facebook Page. This should become a daily habit and not a one-time event
however. Make sure that you remember to stop by your Facebook Page at least once a day (if not more) to post an
update.


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Day 9: Create A Note Which
Spreads Like Wildfire

Intro to Facebook Notes
Remember the viral Facebook note about “25 things
about me”? If you don’t then you probably haven’t been
on Facebook for long. The 25 things about me note
spread through Facebook and touched millions of users
before it eventually died out. The main ideas behind the
note was similar to a chain letter. You write 25 things
people don’t know about you and then tag your friends
and ask them to write the note as well. The end result
was that million of users ended up writing 25 things
about themselves and it ended up getting covered by
people in the press because so many people had
participated.

How To Create A Viral Note
I wish that I could give you a step by step guide that will result in millions of people sharing your note but I don’t have the
secret answer unfortunately. What I do know however, is that you can tag people from notes that are posted to your
page and thanks to that feature you can begin to have notes spread throughout the social graph. So how do you come
up with a note that’s going to be seen by everybody and will be attributed to you?

While I hate to tell people that they should create a note which is similar to a chain letter, Facebook’s note system works
extremely well through standard chain letter models. The most important component of a note is that users need to be
able to share something personal about themselves. Facebook is a site for sharing and any game or activity that
encourages personalized participation is much more likely to succeed.

Create More Effective Titles
Want to really get someone’s attention? An effective title can make all the difference. I’ve previously written articles using
advertising headlines that I modiﬁed from a book I have about headlines (you can get the book here) and the results have
been phenomenal. While the content is extremely important, you will gain or lose the vast majority of readers via the
headline. Make sure your note’s title stands out and you’ll be well on your way to developing a viral note. If you want
other tips on effective copywriting, I highly recommend checking out Copyblogger.


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Create Multiple Notes To Tag Smaller Groups Of People
While you could create a note and tag all of your contacts, it would be more effective to spread your note postings over a
period of time. This way more people will see the note and you can also spread out the number of people that you tag in
any given note. Tagging people is essentially the way that notes are spread and it can also be leveraged just like the
classic game of tag: “Tag you’re it!”

Adding The Branding Component
So you are trying out your hand at developing a note that will spread throughout the social graph but there’s no branding
component of the note! That’s definitely an issue. By doing things for the betterment of your network (out of the good of
your own heart) you can still generate a lot of recognition and influence. However I know that many people want instant
traffic to their Facebook page so I’ve come up with a few ideas. I suggest trying a few things but keep in mind that the
more you brand a note, the less likely it is to spread. Here are two of the primary ways to brand a note:

1. Put your brand name in the title - This method is pretty aggressive. I personally believe that this is a sure fire way to
have your note fail at growing beyond the people you first tag but if you are an aggressive marketer you can feel free
to test it out. Just remember that I warned you!

2. Go chain letter style - I hate to suggest that companies create chain letters but there are some important things to
learn from chain letters. Chain letters are called chain letters for a reason. One of the primary reasons is that they
actually work! So to get more recognition have people do a traditional pyramid list (we are not sending money here,
just playing a game). Have people write down the name of the last 5 people that were in chain at the end of the note.

There are plenty of other ways to consider branding your note including encouraging users to link back to the source of
the note. Whatever method you come up with, branding is something that needs to be delicately balanced with
contributing to the community. Always keep in mind that sparking the conversation is more important than the branding
being received.

Daily Task
Brainstorm three ideas for notes that you think people will be willing to spread to their friends. Ultimately this task takes
some extra effort but if you want to generate buzz you should take advantage of all of the promotional channels available
to you on Facebook and the notes application is one of them.


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Day 10: Introduction To
Facebook Ads

You Need To Prime The Pumps
While I wish Facebook Pages would start with one person and just grow to
thousands of users, it’s simply not that easy. Building a fan base requires a
fair amount of work and a small amount of cash. The cash is being used
to purchase Facebook advertisements that will drive you new fans. If you
want to approximate how much it costs for each new fan, you can
essentially estimate the cost at $0.50 per fan when using Facebook
advertisements. While you can rely on your natural branding ability, most
companies aren’t as popular as Oprah and need to invest in expanding
their reach.

There are a number of other reasons for investing in Facebook advertisements to promote your page:

1. The more fans you have, the faster you grow - If you are going to get 3000 fans in 30 days, you should be willing to
invest at least a couple hundred bucks. For $200 you could have 400 fans to jump start your viral growth. As I wrote
on Day 5, it’s important to target inﬂuential nodes. If you combine advertising while targeting those nodes you can
increase the effectiveness of your advertisements. The more times you can get your brand in front of people, the
more likely they’ll turn into customers, or in this case: Facebook fans.

2. Promoting your page generates brand recognition if not clicks - While many people are just looking to build clicks on
their ads to convert those users into fans or eventual customers, I’d argue that the process between displaying the ad
and getting the click is just as important. As I mentioned moments ago, “The more times you can get your brand in
front of people, the more likely they’ll turn into customers.” I once read that it takes something like 27 times of a
person seeing your brand before they actually make a purchase. Thankfully the barrier is much lower to creating a fan
because the user doesn’t need to part with their money, which is traditionally the biggest hurdle for any sales person.
So back to the point ... generating impressions within a user’s peripheral is extremely important to converting them
into a fan. While they may not know who you and haven’t heard of your brand, there’s a good chance they’ll say to
themselves, “I think I’ve seen that before” and become a fan.

3. You can track conversions of advertisements and start generating revenue - Tracking conversions is one of the most
important components of Facebook advertising. For the purpose of this guide we are discussing advertising as it can
be used for building your fan base. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t currently provide effective conversion metrics for
Facebook Pages but I typically just use the following equation to determine my cost per fan:


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number of fans added per day / daily spend on Facebook advertising = cost per fan
Unfortunately this model is not perfect since you will organically gain followers without investing in Facebook
advertising but this is the best way to calculate the cost per fan for the time being. We will be discussing more
effective ways of tracking new customers in the future which includes the integration of landing pages. I’m also
expecting Facebook to begin providing more advanced metrics for tracking the effectiveness of your advertisements.

4. Highly effective targeting system - The best part of Facebook’s advertising system is the ability to target individuals
based on a large number of variables including age, gender, location, interests, relationships status, and more. This
presents a massive opportunity for marketers but unfortunately few marketers have ﬁgured out the model to master
Facebook’s advertising system. I will be discussing the various ways of improving ads through techniques like “nano-
targeting” in a later section but what’s important to know is that Facebook presents marketers with a huge opportunity
to reach their target market. Facebook advertising is at the top of what I call the “Facebook sales funnel” and the next
level down is your Facebook Page. I’ll get into more details about that soon.

Daily Task
Take some time exploring Facebook’s advertising offering. Over the next two days we will go into more detail about how
to leverage Facebook advertising more effectively.


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Day 11: Why Understanding
Your Target Market Is Key To
Success With Facebook Ads

Getting Started With Facebook Ads
So now that I’ve made the sales pitch to you for using
Facebook advertising, let’s take a look at what it takes to get
a campaign set up. The most important thing to do first is to
define your target market. What’s the demographic
information of your target market? What’s the average day
for your target market like? Your job as an advertiser is to
connect with the customer on an emotional level as quick as
possible. The only way you’ll be able to do that is to connect
with them.

Who Is Your Customer?
For this section we are going to pretend that we are marketing a high-end, environmentally friendly limousine service. In
the book “Duct Tape Marketing”, author John Jantsch defines marketing as “getting people, who have a specific need or
problem, to know, like, and trust you.” While your Facebook Page will be used to help you build the relationship, you
need to connect with them quickly, and that first connection will be done via your Facebook advertisement. I tend to
think that if you can get a user on Facebook to smile thanks to one of your advertisements, you’ll have connected with
them and they’ll become a fan. In this example we are targeting more of a luxury service, as most people are not looking
for limousine services. Here are some of the initial details about our typical clientele:

• 70% male, 30% female
• Executive level position
• Typically between the ages of 32 and 50
• Many are interested in outdoor activities (we’ve learned this through conversations to and from the airport with our
customers)
• Tend to live in the more populated metropolitan areas (Austin, San Francisco, Boston, Washington, D.C., New York,
etc)
While many companies will have more detailed descriptions of their customer and can walk through a “day in the life of”
scenario, I am simply using these demographics as a basis for setting up a sample campaign. Spending a fair amount of
time on determining your target market is extremely important.


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Questions To Answer When Defining A Target Market
Before we move on to the third day of exploring Facebook advertisements you should answer as many of the following
questions as possible:

1. What are the demographics of your customers?

2. What is your customers fears, desires, and goals?

3. What does a typical day in the life of your customer look like?

4. What is the customer not currently getting?

5. What makes your customer feel comfortable? (This is what I was discussing earlier about making the person smile).

6. What brand affiliations do your customers have?

Daily Task
Define your target market by answering some of the questions we’ve presented. Also do some research on the web
about defining a target market. Hopefully you’ve already defined your target market since this probably isn’t your first
marketing activity for your company. If you already have a clearly defined target market, pat yourself on the back and
take the day off: you deserve it!


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Day 12: Facebook Ads Day 3

Creating the Ad
So you’ve listened to my sales pitch about Facebook advertising and you’ve taken the time to define your company’s
target market. Hopefully this wasn’t the first time that you’ve defined your target market, otherwise you are in serious
trouble ;) So the first thing you want to do is head over to http://www.facebook.com/ads/create. If you haven’t already
created your page then you most definitely want to have it set up by now since we will be integrating our page with our
ad. For the purpose of this article, I’ll go ahead and set up an advertisement for the AllFacebook.com page.

Create Two Ad Creatives For Each Demographic Group
Before walking through the ad creation process, I wanted to note that it’s important to split up your ad creative among
each targeted segment. This is useful for split-testing your advertisements, something that I’ll discuss in the near future.
While this isn’t necessary to get started, testing the performance of advertisements is extremely important to increase
long-term results. For this guide we were focused on 30 days but obviously your marketing activities should not end
after 30 days.

Setup Your First Advertisement
I’m going to quickly run through the set up process of an advertisement. I will be going into more details during our
Facebook Advertising series in addition to providing video tutorials within the New Media School Facebook Business
Insiders course.

Step 1: Design Your Advertisement
The first step of creating an ad is determining the design which includes a 110 pixel x 80 pixel image, and ad title, and
the body text. Since we are promoting something on Facebook, we’ll want to select the Page that we are promoting as
pictured below. Remember that you can only promote pages that have been published. To publish your page, go to
“Edit Settings” from the left-hand column of your Facebook page and then click on the red “Publish this Page” link on the
right hand side of the settings page.

Select Option To Promote Something On Facebook


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Directly under the area that says “Design Your Ad” click on the link which says “I want to advertise something I have on
Facebook”. You will then be able to select anything that you have on Facebook including your Facebook Page.

Select The Page You Want To Promote
As pictured below, select the Facebook page that you’d like promote. Facebook will then automatically generate an
advertisement using your Facebook page’s image. While you can change the image, it’s fine to make at least one using
the default image then split test it against another ad (as I’ll explain later).

Step 2: Select Your Targeting Options
Often times on Google, advertisers will create an ad which targets every person in a single country and then split test two
ad versions against each other. On Facebook, this model will do nothing but cost you money. Placing a generic ad
that’s targeted at an entire country, without any additional targeting, will do nothing but get you a lot of clicks and waste a
lot of money for the most part. Facebook provides the following 11 targeting factors for advertisers:

1. Location - Facebook enables advertisers to target by country, state/province, city, and metropolitan areas. All
advertisements are required to have a location selected. This should be pretty straight-forward as to which location
you’d like to select.

2. Age - Age is a standard demographic factor. Most marketers that have a well defined target-market will be able to
select their age.

3. Birthday - This is one of Facebook’s latest advertising targeting filters. It should be pretty obvious what typeso f ads
should be presented to people who’s birthday it is. Try wishing the user a happy birthday and offer them a gift for
higher conversion rates.

4. Sex - Gender is another typical targeting filter for Facebook.

5. Keywords - Keywords are based on a user’s profile information including activities, favortie books, tv shows, movies,
and more. I believe job titles are included in this field and I typically spend the most time trying to brainstorm effective
keywords. What types of product do your customers like? What’s their job position within an organization? Spend
time on this field and you’ll be rewarded.

6. Education - While you can target based on their level of education, this is most effective for targeting ads based on the
schools that people went to. Want to announce a reunion for the University of Illinois class of 1996? This is a great
way to promote it.

7. Workplaces - This is another great targeting filter. Often times you will know the companies that your target market
works at. If you are looking to get new clients or looking to spread awareness within specific organizations, this filter
can be priceless.

8. Relationship - Want to target people that are about to get married? This is a great tool for that. If you are a bar or
club, you most likely want to go after those people that are single. While this filter can be useful, you also need to


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keep in mind that selecting any of these settings will remove all users that haven’t selected a relationship status in their
profile.

9. Interested In - This factor is useful if a user’s sexual preferences are relevant to whatever you are advertising. I tend to
skip this field for most of my ads.

10. Languages - If your ad is in English but the user speaks Chinese, it’s probably not a good idea to be displaying ads to
them.

11.Connections - The connections fields were launched yesterday by Facebook and they enable you to include and
exclude users based on pages, events, and applications that the users have joined and you happen to be the
administrator of. If you’ve created a Page and don’t want the ads to display to people who have already joined, this is
a great way to avoid duplicate clicks.

If you aren’t taking advantage of the numerous targeting factors then you aren’t using Facebook advertising effectively. In
order to have an increased conversion rate on your advertisements, increase the targeting in order to make the
advertisement more relevant for the users. Relevance will get people to respond to your ad.


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Step 3: Enter Your Pricing Settings
Now that you’ve ﬁgured out the targeting for your advertisement you need to select the pricing. You can choose
between CPM and CPC advertising but there’s pretty much no point of going the CPM route. You want to pay for users
to take an action and in this case it’s either them clicking on the ad that directs them to your Facebook page or
becoming a fan directly from the ad.

Selecting A Campaign
It’s a good idea to group all of your ads for a single Facebook Page into a single campaign. This is because you can
adjust your budget for that speciﬁc campaign at any point. If you adjust the dollar spend of a campaign for your
Facebook Page you can track the change in the growth of fans based on that adjustment, giving you a rough estimate of
the cost per fan.

Selecting A Price To Bid
Facebook will suggest bidding prices that will maximize the number of impressions you receive. The more you bid
typically, the more you receive. While there is a lot of information about how Google ranks their advertisements there is
currently no information about Facebook and rankings such as advertisement quality score. My guess is that there will
be more information about ads on Facebook as time goes along but for now, pick a bid rate that sounds reasonable to
you and then track the number of impressions and clicks that you receive. For now, Facebook doesn’t provide concrete
information on how to improve positioning and impression rates.

Split Test With A Second Advertisement
As I mentioned early on, it’s important to split test two advertisements against each other to see which receive more
clicks. Once you’ve determined which ad has a higher click through rate, only run that individual advertisement.
Otherwise you risk having multiple ads displayed to the same users and the result is that you’ll end up paying for users
more than once.


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Daily Task
At this point you should have a thorough idea about how to manage your Facebook page advertising campaign. As I
wrote yesterday, it’s important that you have a good deﬁnition of your target market. By now you should know that target
and should be able to set up a couple initial ads. For today’s task, create two advertisements on Facebook that promote
your Facebook Page. Feel free to test it out with only a couple dollars a day. You can then adjust your budget as
needed.


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Day 13: How To Use Facebook
Applications To Boost Your Fan
Base

Determining The Best Platform
Strategy
The Facebook platform presents an amazing opportunity for
companies to expand their presence quickly by enabling viral
distribution through the social graph. One of the most
important things to keep in mind is that viral distribution does
not necessarily mean more customers. Many businesses
become easily distracted with mind-boggling numbers. “If I get
millions of users to my application, I only need one percent to
purchase my product!” Unfortunately things aren’t that simple,
especially considering that most Facebook users are not ready
to purchase at any given moment.

Engaging Your Customers Versus
Engaging “Users”
Yes, you can end up with millions of untargeted users within
Facebook applications but that won’t necessarily get you any
customers, unless of course you are a large corporation. An
untargeted application is almost as effective as a television ad except that you are gambling with the potential
demographics. For example all of your users may end up coming from Turkey and Italy, so how is that going to help your
U.S. based company? Anyways, you probably understand my point by now: untargeted applications are typically less
effective than single, highly-targeted applications.

Why Create A Targeted App?
There is one thing that you want from visitors to your page: repeat engagement. If you can get fans to consistently return
and participate in conversations on your Facebook Page, you will increase the level of personal afﬁliation with your brand.
In the long-term, these users will eventually turn into customers. On Facebook the majority of users are not ready to buy
a product right then. Instead, they are looking to build relationships and at some point in the future they are looking to


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buy something. By creating a targeted application you will accomplish two things: increase engagement and increase
the viral nature of your page (if the application is built correctly).

What Are The Risks?
There are a few risks involved with creating an application. While I’ve written this as one day out of 30, the reality is that
building an application requires the investment of relatively significant resources in comparison to the other days outlined
in this guide. If you are a developer then you have the advantage of being able to build the application yourself although
you will have to invest your own time. If you aren’t a developer, you are going to need to invest time to manage the
project and money on the developer.

The bottom line is that there is no guarantee your application will pay off. Thankfully a few companies have already built
applications that you can integrate right away into your Facebook Page right away with a very small investment. Involver
has developed a suite of application that you can take advantage of and Wildfire Interactive has also developed some
great tools that will help you launch promotions from within your page. If you want the best bang for your buck, I’d highly
suggest working with one of these companies rather than building your application from scratch.

What’s Are The Options For Branded Apps?
So let’s say you are considering developing a Facebook application because you have a great idea. How much does it
cost? A simple application can be as cheap as a few thousand dollars although the vast majority of branded applications
cost tens of thousands of dollars. The price ranges and there isn’t a flat rate that you can tell people. You need to
determine what your goals are first. Below are the various types of applications you can build:

Appvertisements
BuddyMedia, the New York based social media agency, essentially defined the concept of appvertisements. The model
is pretty straight forward. Your company pays for an application and the invests in an install campaign. You will then
have thousands of users visit your application but unfortunately there’s no guarantee users will stick around or return
later. Most applications that use this model that I’ve seen tend to have a quick fall off of usage. BuddyMedia would
most likely argue that repeat engagement isn’t necessarily the most important component as it’s a better investment over
traditional media buys like television and newspapers where there is no engagement whatsoever.

Integrated Applications
Don’t want to spend money on a large install buy? You can have a custom application developed for your business
instead. For this group there are two types of applications: those that are an experiment and those that are tightly
integrated into the company’s website. For example one large e-commerce company I spoke to recently was looking to
let users extend their existing shops to their Facebook profile and Facebook Page. That means there isn’t much
promotion necessary as the application is an added value offering to the company’s existing customer base.

Experimental Viral Applications
I like to call this one more of an educated guess. Rather than investing in large install buys (upwards of half a million
users at around $0.50 per user), brands often prefer to spend $5,000 to $50,000 on experimental applications that grow
on their own. The best example of this is ConextOptional’s Kidnap application which has attracted over 3 million users
and has upwards of 130,000 daily active users. The application was a great application that users enjoyed interacting
with.


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Integrated Page Applications
The last type of application is those that are integrated with Facebook Pages and are used to drive awareness of your
Facebook page. That can include gifting applications, polls, and other basic applications that are extremely simple and
used to drive trafﬁc to your page. I high recommend opting for this type if you want to minimize your investment. There
are numerous companies which currently offer applications that are integrated into Facebook pages. Use those
companies to save time and save money.

Application Strategies
There are numerous types of applications out there but there are some great strategies you can use that will increase the
likelihood of your success. I outlined 13 Facebook application strategies earlier this year that I recommend you checking
out. I’ll also be providing more content in the near future on how to maximize the impact of your Facebook applications.

Daily Task
First of all you may want to consider whether or not developing an application is worth your investment. At the least you
can use some readily available applications to build into your Facebook Page. Today’s task is to determine which type of
application, if any, is the type you’d like to implement. Also brainstorm a couple of ideas for applications that you can
launch. Set a date over the next couple weeks when you will have your application completed or at least under
development.


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Day 14: 5 Steps To Hosting A
Successful Facebook Event

The Networked World
Success in a socially networked world comes through building
relationships with others. As I wrote on day 8, leading conversations on
your page is extremely important. The same thing goes for the offline
world. One of the best things you can do for building your company’s
reputation is to host offline events. For hosting the event there are a few
things to keep in mind but the most important is that you already have a
large enough reach that you’ll be able to get attendees to come to your
event. Given that you at a minimum have a few hundred fans after your
initial efforts, you should have a great start to building buzz about your
new event. Today I’m going to walk you through the important steps
necessary to hosting a successful event.

Step 1: Pick An Event Topic & Format
To get your event off the ground you’ll first need to know the theme of
your event and what the format is. Are you looking to host a conference
or just a networking happy hour? My suggestion is that you start small
before you jump into launching a full blown conference. Hosting a happy
hour is relatively easy and has many less requirements. While many
individuals will look for sponsors to cover the cost of an event, you can actually get away with hosting a happy hour for
next to nothing. If you don’t have $1,000 to cover a full open-bar, you may want to just limit the tab to a couple hundred
dollars and tell the attendees that the first drink is on you. This is a networking event, not a bash, so attendees shouldn’t
have any issue with you only covering one drink.

Step 2: Pick A Venue & Negotiate A Deal
Picking a venue can be the most challenging step if you haven’t had any experience with picking a venue. People will try
to charge you on a per person basis or other random rates. One of the best things about venues is that they’re totally
negotiable and at the end of the day, you have the upper hand because you can just go somewhere else if the venue
manager/owner doesn’t provide you with a good deal. I tend to use Yelp when finding event venues to go to but I’ve
also invested a large amount of time building out a network so that now I can just post a status update and get venue
suggestions from others.


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It’s always best to ask your friends and professional contacts for recommendations before going it alone. Venues are
much more open to people who have been referred to them through others and will typically be more flexible with rates.
If all else fails, just pick a place that you like and run a tab to a specific limit.

Step 3: Create An Event On Facebook
Now that you’ve got your venue it’s time to set up a page for promoting the event. The quickest way to get started is to
set up an event on Facebook. You can do this by going to the events application and clicking on the button that says
“Create Event” (or follow this link). Setting up an event is relatively straight forward. Facebook will walk you through the
process which entails entering an event name, selecting the event visibility (which I recommend setting to “Global” if you
want to maximize the turnout), and enter the other event details.

While you can create an event directly from your Facebook Page, there is one downside of creating events directly from
pages: event updates are sent to the user’s “updates” tab within their inbox, rather than their regular Facebook inbox.
This can significantly reduce the response to the event (most people don’t read their updates). The one benefit of
posting the event from your Facebook Page is that there will be a link to the event displayed on the left-hand side of your
page. I personally don’t believe that this benefit outweighs the advantages of creating the event outside of your
Facebook Page.

Once you have gone through the first step of creating your event, you will be prompted to upload an image and then
select which features you’d like to have included in your event (videos, photo album, forum, attendee list, etc). At the
bare minimum I would recommend that you include a photo. The other features depend on whether or not you plan on
uploading photos from the event and videos. I’ll leave that option up to you.

Step 4: Notify Your Fans and Run An Event Ad
Now that you’ve set up your event, it’s time to start promoting it. The first step to promoting the new Facebook event is
to send out an update that lets people know about the event. You can also target your update to users based on their
geographic location which can be extremely useful if you want to limit the event to locals. I personally like sending out
event updates to all fans since some people occasionally come into town for events. Whatever you choose to do when
sending your update, you also need update your Page status a few times so that a message about the event goes out to
your fans’ news feeds. As I’ve written before, you’ll receive a greater response from status updates then from page
updates.

Create An Event Ad
Targeted ads on Facebook present a huge opportunity for event promoters. You can target people by company, job
position, interests, and more as I wrote about on days 10 through 12. I honestly believe that event promoters are the
single greatest beneficiaries of Facebook’s advertising system. When hosting conferences I use Facebook to promote
the events directly through their advertising system, which increases the list of potential attendees and my promotional
reach. I cannot emphasize how powerful Facebook advertisements can be for events. When you go to create your
advertisement, select the option which says “I want to advertise something I have on Facebook”. You can then select
your event from drop down which is displayed under the sub-heading “Facebook Content”.

Targeted Updates
In addition to creating ads, it’s also possible to send targeted updates (as pictured in the image below). If your event
happens to be a local event, there’s no point in updating all of your fans if you have a country-wide or international brand.
Create a targeted update by clicking on “Send An Update To Fans” on the left-hand side of the Facebook Page you’d


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like to promote the event to. On the next page check the box which says “Target this update” and select the region,
gender, and age of people that you’d like to update.

Step 5: Send Out Event Reminders
Now that you have invited people to your event and people are registering to attend, it’s a good idea to send out regular
event updates. Make sure you don’t overdo it though because too many updates will turn people off and result in less
attendees. Once or twice a week (depending on how soon your event is), send an update to let them know about the
current number of RSVPs, and updates about the venue, and any information about new sponsors. These event
updates will get people to RSVP “Yes” that have not yet RSVPed or have replied “Maybe”. It’s also a great people to
remind those individuals that have RSVPed from one of your event ads about your event and instruct them to take any
other necessary actions (such as purchase a ticket if the event costs something).

Daily Task
Now that you’ve learned how to set up a successful event, it’s time to start brainstorming! Today your task is to
brainstorm and event idea and come up with 5 potential venues. Once you’ve determined the what and the where, you
are halfway there! And if you are hesitant about creating a new event, just remember the Wayne’s World quote: “If you
build it, they will come.”


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Chapter 15: How To Use A
Landing Page To Convert New
Facebook Visitors Into Fans

The Concept Of A Landing Page
If you haven’t studied internet marketing then there’s a
good chance you don’t know what a landing page is. If
you already know what one is, congratulations, you are
well ahead of most people. According to Wikipedia, a
landing page, “is the page that appears when a potential
customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine
result link.” Honestly, the Wikipedia deﬁnition isn’t the
best one since there are new types of advertisements.
The main point is that a landing page is where you
capture a customer’s information or entice them to take
another action (such as purchase a product). On Facebook, the action that you want the user to take is to become a
fan.

Facebook previously had two places to become a fan but they have since reduced it to a single link at the top of a Page.
When a person lands on your page you want to answer the following questions:

1. Who are you or what is your company?

2. Why should the user be interested in you or your company?

3. What will they get out of becoming a fan of your page?

4. Who’s in your community?

The fourth question is the most important thing and you can answer this question one of two ways: tell the user the type
of people that you’d like as fans or let them just browse through your existing fans. The main point is that new users will
be attracted to your Page based on your ability to attract others. If you only have a few fans, your landing page becomes
even more important.


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How To Create A New Tab
The easiest way to create a new tab within your Facebook Page is by using the Static FBML application. One downside
of the Static FBML application is that you will need to understand a basic level of HTML. If you have no idea how to write
HTML then you can use an application like Dreamweaver of Microsoft Frontpage to design your landing page and then
copy the HTML that’s provided by the software.

5 Tips For Improving Your Landing Tab
While you can create a fairly effective landing tab by answering the questions I posted above, here are a few other tips
that you should keep in mind:

1. Have a call to action - While you’ve educated your visitors about why they should joining your Facebook Page, you
also need to encourage them to actually join your page. That’s what the call to action is for. If you view the
AllFacebook page, you’ll notice that I’ve designed an image which says “Click on the ‘Become a fan’ button above”
with an arrow pointing up toward the “Become a fan” button.

2. Write in the second person - Rather than writing about yourself and your company, talk about the person who you
want to become a fan. Explain to them why they should join and the benefit (as outlined above in the four questions).
Use the words “you” and “your” when writing your copy.

3. Place important parts at beginning and end - People tend to read the beginning and end of landing pages before
reading the middle so you probably want to put your call to action early on and toward the end. Put the most
important copy at the beginning or at the end.

4. Don’t link to other pages - If you want to get visitors to take an action (join your page), it’s a good idea to providing
links that will drive them to other pages or other areas. Once they’ve navigated away from the tab or to another site,
there’s a greater chance that you’ve lost them.

5. Perform some basic testing - While Facebook doesn’t currently provide metrics for where new fans came from, you
can assume that all new fans have viewed your landing tab. Try making subtle adjustments to your landing tab and
measure the difference in the number of new fans you receive each day. Ultimately I wouldn’t get overly invested in
the testing process but it’s always a good idea to do at least a minimal level of testing.

Other Resources
There are numerous resources for learning about landing page optimization. While I don’t recommend becoming overly
invested in learning about this topic (unless of course you want to study internet marketing), you should definitely check
out Copyblogger’s landing page resources as well as checking out a few books on Amazon about landing page
optimization. One really good book that I’ve used is “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing And
Tuning For Conversions” by Tim Ash.

Daily Task
Today’s task is to come up with the first version of copy that you are going to use for your Facebook landing tab. Over
the next few days you can test out the HTML and more. If you already know HTML you should be able to come up with
a top notch landing page in a few hours. While you can invest in beautiful design, you really don’t need to have it look
that amazing.


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Day 16: Tag Your Way To 1,000
Facebook Fans

Photo Tagging Is Viral
One of the best features of Facebook Pages is the
ability to tag fans in photos. As soon as you tag
somebody, their friends can see the photo that
they’ve been tagged in. Additionally, those photos
will link back to your Facebook Page. I’ve seen a
number of people abuse photo tagging in order to
get more trafﬁc. While that’s a strategy that could
possibly work in the short-run, over longer periods
of time you’ll end up turning people away. It’s
probably better to avoid most black-hat tactics as
they can result in your Facebook account being
banned and will frequently piss people off. Feel
free to test the limits but just remember that we
warned you!

Photos Are For Events
The best reason for using photos is for events. After you’ve hosted the event (as I recommend in this guide), you should
tag people with all the photos from the event to spread awareness of your Facebook Page. I often hire a photographer
just for this purpose. At my conferences I’ll even bring in two photographers just so I can tag all the people that were at
the event in their photographs. One of the best things that will happen is people that were photographed will use the
photos for their proﬁle. The bottom line is take advantage of all events, including events that you attend to upload photos
of people and tag them.

You Can Only Tag Friends
One of the worst aspects of photo tagging within Facebook Page photo albums is the inability to tag people that aren’t
your friends. I honestly have no idea why the album functions this way and assume Facebook will eventually resolve this.
My recommendation is to friend as many of the people at the event as possible. That way you’ll increase the likelihood
that other people who visit the album will tag other people.


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Create A Tagging Game
Have you ever been tagged in one of those Facebook photos with 15 other people and the tag location is a unique
attribute about you? If not, I’ve included an example below. The basic concept is to tag other users in a fun image
which ends up attributing a personal characteristic to each user that was tagged. It’s a really create way to build buzz
and not annoy others. Don’t go over board with this model though. I’ve had numerous users tag me in irrelevant photos
and I instantly untag myself from them. Check out the image below for an example of a smart tagging strategy from Real
Drinks.

Daily Task
Since you’ll need at least a small archive of photos to take advantage of this task, you might want to consider spending
more time planning your event. If you do have an archive of photos from previous events you can spend some time
uploading photos and tagging your friends that are in the photos. You can also brainstorm some ideas for creative
tagging images like the one pictured above.


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Day 17: Post Relevant Videos

Videos Help Us To Connect
If you want to connect with your fan base you need to use as many
forms of media as possible. While written communication and photos
are extremely effective tools for communicating, video happens to be
one of the most popular forms of communication on the internet. It’s
not surprising that video sites happen to rank as the most trafficked
sites around the web. While there are many ways to integrate video
into your Facebook Page, we’ve come up with three simple ways to
use video on your Facebook Page.

Take Advantage Of YouTube
I love wasting time browsing through video sites online. Whether it’s
YouTube, Vimeo, or College Humor, I end up wasting so much time
browsing through videos. Typically I would say that it’s a bad use of
time but if you happen to find videos that would be relevant to your
brand, it’s not a complete waste. When you find an interesting video
you can just post a link to that video and the majority of the time, the
video will be visible in all of your fans’ news feeds.

It’s an opportunity to quickly start a conversation with little effort on your end. As I’ve already written, the most important
aspect to attracting fans is the ability to spark interesting dialogue. Relevant videos are an excellent way to do just that.

Event Videos
Just like yesterday’s tip, “Post Photos From Events and Tag Fans”, you should also do the exact same thing with videos.
While videos that you didn’t produce are an easy thing to link to, uploading your own videos are also extremely valuable,
especially if you have fans that you can tag in the video. I highly recommend taking short video clips such as interviews
as an easy way to generate taggable content for your Facebook Page.

If you don’t have a video camera, I highly recommend the Flip Mino HD. I’ve been using mine for a few months now and
it has come in handy.

Creative Video Tags
As mentioned in yesterday’s task, you may want to consider developing short videos that you can then tag users in with
references in each video to the people you’re tagging. While the people may not be in the video, you can insert
references to them or personality traits of them that you think would be relevant. One issue with video tagging on


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Facebook is that you can’t actually tag a speciﬁc moment in a video as of now. While this may eventually become a
feature, most videos should actually have or references the individuals being tagged.

Daily Task
I like buying things, so if you don’t have a video camera, go research Flip Mino cameras or consider grabbing the latest
iPhone 3GS. If you’d prefer not to spend money and would like to save up to purchase a device which supports video,
spend some time looking for relevant videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Don’t post all of the videos at once though! Keep
a list of all the videos you ﬁnd and post them over time.


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Day 18: Cross-Promote Your
Website

Take Advantage Of Existing Trafﬁc
Have you already invested time and money in building your web presence? Take advantage of it and use your website to
cross-promote your Facebook Page. Many people are concerned that directing visitors from their website to their
Facebook Page isn’t useful because those users end up not returning to the site. Ultimately the user’s navigational
pattern should be based on the goals for your site.

Driving users to your Facebook Page is extremely useful for creating an ongoing dialogue. As I previously wrote in “The 5
Phases of the Facebook Sales Funnel”, Facebook pages provide an optimal platform for building relationships with your
existing and future customers. This is why driving users from your website to your Facebook Page is important. While
Facebook Pages may one day be able to exist on your own site, for the time being the product provides marketers with
an instant community platform.

If you don’t want the user to leave your site but you’d like them to become a fan right away you can use the Facebook
fan box as we’ll discuss in more detail later in this program. Depending on the size of your website and your
organization’s goals you can determine which is the best way to promote your Facebook Page. Linking directly to your
Facebook page is a great way to generate new fans and to continue the engagement.

Send Them Back To Your Site
Now that you’ve directed a user from your website to your Facebook Page, it’s time to do the exact opposite! Once a
user becomes a fan of your Facebook Page, they will receive status updates in the news feed as we’ve already
described. Some of the links you provide should direct the user back to your website. I say that assuming that you have
regularly updated content on your website as well. If you don’t, your Facebook Page may be good enough for engaging
users.


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If you don’t have regularly updated content on your website, what’s the point of having a website though? If you aren’t
updating it regularly with content, you may want to consider setting up a blog so that you have something to keep users
coming back. As any effective marketer knows, it takes a customer numerous times of seeing your brand before they
decide to make a purchase with you.

A Perfect Balance
Each company will have its own goals and those goals should dictate what types of promotional activities you do. At the
least, you should consider driving users directly from your website to Facebook Pages in order to engage them on an
ongoing basis. This guide isn’t meant to explore the intricacies of user’s navigational patterns within your site but I would
strongly recommend making the process of turning new visitors into fans an integral part of your site.

Daily Task
Place a conveniently located link to your Facebook Page from your website. Take some time determining where to place
the link. Also consider testing out the location against other locations and measure the impact of each.


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Day 19: Research Other
Successful Pages

Copy From The Best
One of the best ways of ensuring that your
Facebook Page will be successful is to copy
other successful ones. It’s no secret that the
best marketers are most influenced by other
successful marketers. While there are a lot of
research methods I would suggest taking a look
at our Facebook Pages leaderboard, and
selecting the most popular as well as the fastest
growing. We’ll also soon begin to provide more
advanced ways for sorting through Facebook
Pages.

Aside from copying the best, this guide should be
sufficient to put you into the top percentage of Facebook Pages with a little bit of effort and time.

What To Take Note Of
Aside from the finding Facebook Pages that have a lot of fans, it’s also important to know the context under which they
attracted a lot of fans. For example, Starbucks may have an impressive number of Facebook fans but it didn’t require a
lot of effort to build a Facebook fan base for a multi-national corporation. Yes, Starbucks may have put in some extra
effort (including large advertising campaigns) to ensure their page was as effective as it could possibly be but it’s more
important to seek out those companies that may not be as popular but have built a large fan base.

I personally look for pages that have between 5,000 and 50,000 fans and have a decent growth rate. If a Facebook
Page is growing extremely fast (e.g. 50 percent growth a week), it probably isn’t run by a small company. Over the
coming weeks I’ll be releasing statistics that help you more effectively find those pages that are doing well but browsing
through our Pages directory will be a great start.

Page Features
Once you’ve discovered legitimate Facebook Pages that are growing at a decent pace, you’ll want to explore what they
are doing that have made them so successful. Take a look at their company’s website to see if they are linking to their
Facebook Page and how prevalent the link is. Also take note of the types of applications that the Page administrator has


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installed. How often is the page updated with statuses and links? All of the things that we covered in this guide are
things you should take note of from other Facebook Pages.

Daily Task
Today’s task is to come up with a list of 10 to 20 Facebook Pages that you can ﬁnd inspiration in. Browse through our
Facebook Page directory and also just search through Facebook to ﬁnd interesting conversations being generated by
Pages. What types of users are becoming fans? How often to the page administrators engage their fan base?


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Day 20: Get People To Invite
Their Friends

Creative Incentives
This actually has to be one of the more challenging tasks. In
order to get a boost in your fan base, it’s important to get users
to invite their friends. So what methods are there for getting
users to invite their friends? The ﬁrst and most obvious method
is to ask users to invite their friends. This can surprisingly have
a large impact. The other day I asked my users to invite their
friends and a few people invited hundreds of their friends. The
problem with this is that it doesn’t maximize the impact you
could theoretically have by providing some sort of incentive.

By incentivizing the user to invite their friends to your Page, you
increase the likelihood that one of their friends will actually be
interested in your company or brand. On applications
Facebook has strict rules surrounding incentivizing invites
because many applications has used this feature to force users
to spam their friends. While the restrictions don’t exist on Facebook, the best invite responses will come from those that
aren’t forced.

Applications Are Important
While applications take more resources to get completed, you can use Facebook’s API to develop contests as well as
run basic statistics about your user base. There are numerous ways to take advantage of applications to get users to
invite their friends but here are three that we suggest:

1. Create A Gifting Application
Many Facebook Pages now have gifting applications that have become integrated with them. The reason is that every
time a user sends a gift to their friend, you can drive them back to your Facebook Page. Free gifts happen to be the
most obvious thing to send to friends which would explain why a number of Pages have already begun implementing this
feature. Thankfully there are a few applications like Wildﬁre’s promotions app that lets you quickly create a gifting
application.


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2. Have A Referral Leaderboard
This one will require a little bit of programming but in thinking about incentivized invites, I thought of one of the most
obvious ways of getting people to invite others: create a contest out of it. Using the Facebook API, you can’t track the
actual invites that are sent but you can track the relationships among fans. This means you can rank people within your
community based on the number of friends that they have as fans. It’s kind of a gimmicky model but should be worth
the effort.

3. Create A Contest
The third model would be to create a contest application. I’ll outline more about contests and competitions in the next
section but the point is that contests are a great way to attract repeat engagement. Check out the Promotions
application created by WildﬁreApp for examples of existing contests.

Daily Task
Brainstorm two or three ways to get users to invite their friends. What can you offer to your existing fans that will make
them want to tell their friends?


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Day 21: Create Mini-
Competitions

Playing Games With Your Fan
Base
Rather than investing in a complete contest
application, try creating mini-competitions. For
example, ask your fans to go on a Facebook
scavenger hunt. I’m sure there are many other
ideas for mini-competitions but the point is to get
your fans active around your brand. It’s also
possible to generate traffic to external sites if you
have more robust competitions. Ultimately I’d think
back to when you were a kid to the types of games
you used to play with your friends.

The games were always simple but were able to
entertain for hours. Peoples’ interest in games
never goes away and that’s why mini-competitions
are a great way to fuel your fan base.

Five Games That Will Get Fans’ Attention
Like I mentioned, mini-competitions are not applications but ways to engage your fan base in mini games. Using some
of the strategies that we already outlined in the first 20 days, you should be able to come up with plenty of games and
determine the best incentives. Below are five games that we think would be interesting.

1. Profile Photo Contest
This is probably one of the easiest ones to handle. As I mentioned on day 4, having a great profile photo is extremely
important. The same goes for your Facebook fans! It’s easy to get more friends on Facebook when you have a creative
Facebook profile photo. Show your fans the Facebook profile photo guide for photo examples and then get them to
change their profile photo. Give an award to the user who has the most creative photo. If you want to take this a step
further, you can require that they integrate your brand into their photo.


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2. Facebook Scavenger Hunt
This is probably one of the easiest competitions to set up. Post 10 or 20 clues about random items scattered around
Facebook. Get people to come back and post with links to the content that they ﬁnd for each item. The quickest to
complete the scavenger hunt wins. Keep in mind that this can get extremely challenging to handle once you have a large
number of fans. The more fans you have, the less clues you want to provide. Otherwise you’ll have more comments on
your wall then you’ll be able to handle.

3. Facebook Photo Theme Game
We’ve already written about taking advantage of the Facebook photos application from your Page but the best ideas I’ve
seen related to photos come in the form of a game. The lying down game for example, is a Facebook group which
encourages members to post photos of themselves lying down in various places. So far over 8,000 photos have been
posted from 36,500 members. While I’m sure that number will grow dramatically by the time this article is posted, it
illustrates the types of possibilities available and how viral photo contests can be.

4. Top Score In Other Games
I have spent too much time ﬁnding addictive games on Facebook to write about. The end result is that I’ve wasted many
hours in front of my computer, not being productive. However, other people are always looking for good ways to waste
there time which presents a great opportunity. Browse through some of the most addictive games on Facebook and
once you’ve found one, challenge your fans to beat your high score and post them. It’s a simple action but can generate
a large response. Plus, you’ve also given all of your friends something extremely addictive

5. Facebook Acronym Breaks
Joe Cockrell, a popular Twitter user, came up with a pretty smart game which is coming up with the various things a
random acronym could stand for. I would try doing something similar except on your Facbeook Page. Give users an
acronym such as PBS and ask them what it could stand for. It’s a great way to get users responding to your messages
on Facebook. I’m sure there are many other similar word games that would be particularly useful on Facebook.

Don’t Blow The Bank With Giveaways
Before you start giving away products, you may want to consider what goals you have. I’d suggest starting with smaller
items and grow from there depending on the response. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen giveaways fail
miserably. Giveaways need to be combined with other effective marketing activities to obtain the maximum response.

Daily Task
Try a mini-competition on your Facebook Page and see how large of a response you can generate. Experiment with
other mini-competitions over time to see which ones your fans are most responsive to.


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Day 22: Work The Forums

World Wide Forums
Forums are one of the best places on the internet to
generate awareness about a product and to drive
traffic. There are forums for just about anything and
relevant forums around the web provide a great
opportunity to participate in the conversation and
drive awareness to your Facebook Page. In addition
to forums around the web, you also have forums on
your Facebook Page, which are installed by default.
Today we’ll be going over a few external forum
strategies as well how to take advantage of your
Facebook Page forums.

External Forum Strategies
In general, forums are a great place for targeted
conversations. You can search for forums on any
given topic (hopefully one related to your brand) from
Google and then join those forums to communicate with
others. It’s valuable for building relationships as well as promoting your brand. Here are three strategies that we think
are extremely important when using forums to build your brand:

1. Use A Consistent Signature
When you register for any forum, you can typically modify your profile. From that profile, I suggest that you go modify our
signature to include you name, general information about yourself and include a link to your Facebook Page. When
search engines crawl those pages it will generate search engine juice for you as well as drive new users from the forum
to your Facebook Page.

2. Make Valuable Contributions
Forums are filled with people that are talking crap and making useless contributions. Don’t be one of those people!
Contribute to the conversations and even step out on a limb to create your own forum threads once in a while. Active
forum users tend to take note of those users that are also active . The more active you become, the more likely that you’ll
drive traffic back to the sites in your forum signature.


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3. Avoid Aggressive Self Promotion
While posting a link in your forum signature will help drive traffic, the last thing that you want to do is spam the forums.
Don’t post threads that are about your Facebook Page or website. Instead be conversational and eventually there will be
opportunities to insert your company into the conversation. It’s not about you, it’s about the community.

Internal Forum Strategies
In addition to the external forum strategies that you can use to drive new fans to your Facebook Page, you also want to
continuously engage users on your Page. As such, the forums application can be extremely useful for accomplishing
that. Below are three strategies that I recommend for engaging users within your forums:

1. Regularly Monitor The Forums
Often times users will go to your forums if you’ve left it as a tab. Whether or not there is content there, many users will
go ahead and post their own threads and then check back later for replies. It’s important to make sure that you are
engaging the community within your page on all fronts and that includes within the forums. Check back regularly to see
if any content has been posted and be sure to reply to any new posts.

2. Post New Thread Topics To Your Page
If you are looking to create a new dialogue and drive more users to the forums, post links to new discussion threads to
your Facebook Page feed. I receive a number of new threads from users on a regular basis but often times those
threads aren’t relevant to all of my fans. For those threads that are relevant, it makes sense to post them to the feed and
encourage fans to go contribute to the forum thread.

3. Promote The Forum On Your Website
While you can promote your Facebook page forum you can also take advantage of the forum for things like support. I
have a couple of pages on AllFacebook which encourage users to go post threads to the AllFacebook page forum in
order to get a response. Most often I find that other fans will answer a fan’s question without needing to answer it
myself. Other times I can engage users directly and answer whatever questions they may have.

Facebook Pages serve as an excellent community platform for any brand and whether it’s posting updates to your fans
or providing them with a forum to post questions and have general discussions, you should leverage all aspects of them.

Daily Task
For today’s task you should take the time to get your forum going. Post a couple of discussion threads and link back to
them through a feed update. This way you can get some initial conversation going in your forums. As your fan base
grows you’ll notice activity in your forum will increase.

Why Use The Forum?
Some of you may be wondering why I’m suggesting to use the Facebook Page forums when status updates and wall
posts duplicate much of the functionality of forums. The first reason is that at the time of writing this guide, Facebook did
not allow page admins to remove their discussion forums. That means you have two choices: have an empty forum or
have an active forum. Forums most definitely serve a different purpose and also provide page admins with another
communication channel. While some could live without forums, I recommend taking advantage of them since they are a
permanent fixture on your page for the time being.


New Media School

Day 23: 5 Tips To Maximize The
Impact Of Guest Blog Posts

The Power Of Helping Others
One of the best rules of success is to help others as much as
possible and eventually they will pull you up with them as they
become more successful. In terms of building your Facebook
Page one of the best strategies for growing your fan base is by
helping others. In addition to providing great content and
engaging users, there are great ways to help people elsewhere
on the web. I have benefited greatly from growing a
successful blog and know the power it can have. One of the
quickest ways to gain some traction is to help out other
bloggers with well written guest posts.

Just about any blogger will let you submit a guest post and
include a link back to your site no matter what it is. If you use
your Facebook Page for your bio link you are just about
guaranteed to get a few extra fans.

5 Steps To Writing A Successful Guest Post
Now that you’re convinced writing a blog post will be worth the time, I’ve written up a few strategies that will be most
effective at maximizing the effect of your post and increasingly the likelihood that you can land a post on a big blog.
Ultimately you want to drive as much traffic as possible and that means reaching for the stars for a top blog. So how do
you get a post on a top blog? There are a few things you can do but below are five strategies that will get your post up
there quickest:

1. Write Something The Readers Want
You may think that this tip is pretty obvious but for most people it isn’t. It’s extremely easy to write an article that’s just
not relevant to a site. I can’t tell you how often I get articles sent to me that have nothing to do with what I write about or
is flat out irrelevant to the readers. If you’re going to take the time you write a guest post, you want to make sure that the
article is going to resonate with the blogger’s audience.

The benefit of spending a little more time researching the most successful articles on different sites and brainstorming
more ideas is that you’ll get a better response. Even I spend a couple hours brainstorming ideas for new posts once in a
while and it’s well worth the effort to do so.


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2. Try Pitching Your Idea First
Rather than writing an entire article and asking for it to be posted, you might want to start with a couple ideas that you
forward to the editor of the blog. Yes, a full article is always great if it’s a top notch article but if you’ve put a lot of work
into it ahead of time, you may be disappointed when the editor tells you that they’d like it to be modified. Some writers
understand right away what makes a good article while others need a little bit of guidance. There’s nothing wrong with
coming to the table with a full article but you can save yourself a lot of work by pitching the idea rather than the full
article.

3. Write A Thorough Article
Once you’ve found a blog to write a post for and have determined the topic you will be writing about it’s time to get to
work on the article. There are a number of things that are most important to a successful article: a title, a teaser entry,
sub headings, and images. Obviously that’s not all there is to a good article but there are a number of trends among the
most popular blog articles. One of the most important aspects is keyword optimization.

If you can rank high for a specific keyword, the owner of the site will be forever grateful. They’ll also most likely invite you
back to write again. Yes, writing your own blog can be effective but it takes time to get over the hump with building a
blog and oftentimes it’s much better to write a few guest blog posts rather than spend the time building an entire blog
(although I actually recommend doing that as well).

List article happen to be some of the most popular articles as well and no editor will turn down a well targeted list.

4. Repost the Article Around The Web
The worst thing a guest writer can do is send you an article and then do nothing to help promote it. You worked so hard
to get this far why are you going to let the article just sit there? Update your Facebook status with a link to the article and
post the article elsewhere on the web. Whether you are tweeting the article, saving it on Delicious, posting it to
StumbleUpon, or adding it to Digg, you should make sure your article gets the maximum impact possible. The more
traffic your article gets, the more people that will click through to your Facebook Page or any other site that you’ve linked
in the post.

If you get your article linked to by other blogs you can often drive upwards of thousands of users per hour and that can
turn into some serious traffic to anything that you linked to within the article. With that in mind, it’s never a bad idea to
send your article to other blogs that would find the article to be relevant.

5. Work The Comments
Now that your article is live and you’ve shared it around the web, hopefully you also have users commenting on your
post. Make sure to engage all the commenters and reply to all of their comments. There’s typically a direct correlation
between the number of comments and the volume of traffic to a post. That means anytime someone posts a comment,
you should reply. Also it’s a good idea to try to keep the dialogue going rather than just post a simple answer, this way
you’ll boost the number of comments.

Daily Task
For today’s task you should brainstorm a few solid article ideas and then send out the ideas to at least three bloggers.
You’re now on your way to getting a guest blog post published!


New Media School

Day 24: 4 Calls To Action That
Will Turn Facebook Fans Into
Customers

The Facebook Sales Funnel
I previously wrote about a concept that I call the
Facebook sales funnel. In the article I discuss how
Facebook is a relationship marketing platform. The most
important phase of the Facebook sales funnel is the
action phase. When you create your Facebook Page
you should probably have some sort of goal in mind
aside from attracting 3,000 fans. While large brands are
not as focused on turning Facebook fans into direct sales, smaller businesses should be focused on generating leads
and occasionally selling products or services directly.

The ﬁrst priority is obviously on building a community but you eventually need to drive users to take some sort of action
right? Below are four ways of getting your fans to take action:

1. Facebook Page Lead Form
Create a form that lets users put in their name and email address for posting other content. There are a number of ways
to develop a lead form, some of which are easier than others. The easiest method is to embed simple HTML into a tab
on your Facebook Page using the Static FBML application. You can then use an application like Wufoo to collect
information using an embeddable form. You could also use email marketing services such as Constant Contact,
AWeber, or Campaign Monitor and then use their pre-made forms from a custom tab.

The second method of creating a custom form is much more complicated and requires creating a basic Facebook
application from scratch which installs a custom form on the sidebar of your Facebook Page. You’ll need to have a
hosting provider that supports PHP (or other compatible language with readily available Facebook API library) and you’ll
need to set up a one page application.

2. Publish One-Time Offer Promotions
Standard promotions are always a great way to get your fans to take action. Offering discounts or alternative offers such
as “buy one, get one free” should effectively entice fans to make a purchase. However you need to be careful with using
aggressive direct sales as it will most deﬁnitely turn off a portion of your fan base who will end up unsubscribing from


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your updates. Some marketers that I know have actually developed separate Facebook Pages specifically dedicated to
promotional updates. All users that become fans of those pages are expecting to receive promotions and in turn are
less likely to unsubscribe as a result of promotional stories that show up in their news feed.

3. “Read More”
The call to actions don’t need to be strictly one step conversions although those are always the best. Another great way
to convert fans into sales is to drive them to your website where you have engaging copy that will be more likely to
convert them. There are a number of guides on how to develop effective landing pages but one of the classic guides is
“The Irresistible Offer” by Mark Joyner. I continuously reference this book because it’s one that all of the best copywriters
have read and used as a guide for themselves. I suggest researching effective copywriting techniques in order to convert
fans that click on your links into customers.

4. Play This Game
As I mentioned already, Facebook is a relationship marketing platform. That means you can’t always just drive fans to
make purchases. Instead you should be engaging them. On Day 21 I discussed mini-competitions as a model for
engaging your Facebook fans. Through that engagement you will ultimately build a stronger relationship and brand
affiliation with your fans. While the purchase may not be instant, the more a fan engages with your Facebook Page, the
more likely they are to purchase something from you eventually.

Daily Task
Prior to making a call to action you should have a plan about what you want to sell and what your goals are. Develop a
plan about what you are looking to sell and once you’ve developed a plan begin testing these four calls to action. While
none of these tactics are going to necessarily attract more fans, they will most definitely help you effectively market to
existing fans. By now you most likely have a decent number of fans and it’s better to begin testing calls to action sooner
rather than later.


New Media School

Day 25: Integrate the Page Into
Your Existing Blog

Building Out Your External Page
Presence
There are a number of ways to build up your fan base as
we’ve already discussed in the past twenty-four days but
one of the best ways to get new fans is to let users
instantly join your Facebook Page is to integrate it directly
into your blog or website. We already discussed cross-
promoting your website and your Facebook Page but
with the Facebook Fan Box widget, you can instantly get
visitors to your site to become fans without them ever
leaving the page.

Having new visitors become fans is a great way to get
ongoing reach and engagement. While RSS feeds to
your blog or email newsletters are a great way to continue
promoting your business through content, getting new Facebook fans is also an excellent way to obtain ongoing reach.
So how do you get your fan box set up? All you need to do is visit your Facebook Page and click on the link on the left
which says “Add Fan Box to your site”.

After you’ve clicked on the link you can customize your fan box to include or exclude your content stream and fan list. At
a minimum you must include your page logo and the “Become a Fan” button. If you know basic CSS you can also
customize your Facebook fan box to use the design of your site.

How To Create Content That Drives People To Action
While a large portion of attracting new fans is dependent on the positioning of the Facebook page link on your site, there
are many other ways to drive people to your Facebook Page. The best way to get people to take action is to create
insightful content that has a great call to action. Below I’ve created a list of ﬁve different tactics to developing content
that will drive people to action. With these ﬁve steps you are practically guaranteed to get more readers and to drive
more fans. As I keep emphasizing throughout this guide, attracting fans is not just about promoting on Facebook, it’s
about building your overall brand and leveraging that brand to drive new users to your Facebook Page.


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1. Master The Art Of Creative Headlines
Later in this program I’m going to discuss headlines in more depth but let me emphasize how important this is. You can
write short form content all day long on your Facebook page or long form content on your blog and in both cases the
headline will be the single most important thing that will drive responses. Investing time in the headline is extremely
important.

2. Develop Succinct Content That’s Easy To Read
It’s easy to go on and on .... and on and on .... and on ... about something when most of the time it can be quick and to
the point. On the internet, most people do not tend to stick around for a long period of time. That’s why you need to
give them all the information they are looking for in an easily digestible format. One example of easy to read content is
lists. Throughout this guide I’ve used lists as a way to break up content and make it easy to understand.

I’ve found that lists can often generate two times the traffic of an average article. Lists also break up content in quick to
digest segments. If you aren’t using a list, at least use sub-headings within your content to make it easier to read. If a
person wants to skip ahead to the next section they can do so with the help of sub-headings.

3. Test Out Various Call To Actions
Want to figure out ways to drive new users to your Facebook page from text in your article? There are limitless ways to
do it and each way will covert a different percentage of readers. So which links end up getting the most clicks? That’s
for you to measure but to get an idea of how many varieties there can be for a simple link, check out this article entitled
“Designing ‘Read More’ and ‘Continue Reading’ Links”. The main lesson learned is to spend time tracking links that
users are clicking on.

If you use Google Analytics to track visitors, check out this article on how to track outbound links.

4. Know Your Audience
When you write an article it’s important to know that it will strike a chord with with your reader base. In order for an
article to resonate you need to target the article content at them. If you write an article titled “10 Things Every Marketer
Should Know About Selling Shoes” but your reader base is mostly manufacturing engineers, you probably aren’t going to
get a lot of traffic to your article even though it contains valuable content. If you don’t know who your readers are, try
running a survey to ask them!

5. Create Variety To Keep People Interested
While you can create countless lists that keep your target market informed, it’s a good idea to switch the flow of your
writing. As you write content you’ll find that it’s easy to get into a routine and just churn out similar content from day to
day. This will eventually reduce the growth of your site. Provide a variety content and try switching it up on a regular
basis. Once a week throw in an article that’s completely off topic or plays devil’s advocate to common wisdom among
industry peers.

Daily Task
Get your Facebook Fan Box widget set up on your site and start experimenting with new types of articles. This is a
learning process and testing out new writing models is the best way to learn!


New Media School

Day 26: How To Use Competi-
tive Analysis To Boost Your Fan
Base

Do What Other Successful People Do
If you are the average small business owner, there
is a good chance that the majority of your
competition isn’t doing much in the social media
space. However there always is at least one
person who stands out from the rest and I’m sure
you can think of at least one company which
accels where others aren’t even trying. For larger
brands, having a social media presence (including
Facebook) hasn’t been optional for at least a few
years now. If you plan on succeeding at building a
large presence on Facebook, you will most
definitely want to invest time researching how
others are succeeding.

The Keys To Success
If you want to analyze the competition, you’ll need to determine what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.
To acquire this information you’ll need to do some research but first you need to define what you consider to be
successful. If generating more sales is your definition of success, no amount of research you do on Facebook will
provide you with answers unfortunately but I can just about guarantee you that any business which has built a sizable fan
base is sitting on an opportunity to generate a lot more income. Despite not being able to track the direct impact of new
fans to your competitor’s Facebook Pages, you can track a number of other variables:

• Demographics of fans base - This takes some time to compile depending on the number of fans but is extremely
valuable information. If you don’t have the time to do this, grab an assistant off oDesk to do the research for you.
Ultimately what you can determine is whether or not the Facebook page administrator for each page has done an
effective job at aggregating their target market. If you have thousands of fans but none of them fall within your target
market, you aren’t doing a good job.
• Frequency of updates - Are your competitors actively engaging their fans? What methods are they using to engage
them? Over the past 25 days we’ve discussed a number of effective models for engaging fans. Which of those


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methods are your competitors using? Has increased engagement resulted in an increased number of fans? Take
notes about each of their updates and the type of content they are posting. Is there any way you can improve upon
what they’ve already begun testing?
• Level of comments and likes - It’s great if your competitors are updating their fans on a regular basis but how many
comments and likes are they receiving? Take a look at those updates which are receiving the most feedback and post
similar updates!
• Completeness of profile - Did your competitor fill out all of their profile information to make themselves more accessible
in Facebook’s search tool? Are there empty boxes that aren’t being used and are just sitting around? If so, improving
upon what your competition has done won’t be that hard. However if they’ve completed their profile and have a lot of
information, see what added value your competitor has been able to provide their fans with. Is there a custom tab
which includes additional information? Is there a unique offering in the content of the custom tab? If there are any
subtle adjustments that you see in your competitor’s profile, try using them out in yours to see what effect that has.

Post Research Activities
Now that you’ve taken a look at your competition and have essentially ranked them on how effective they’ve been, start
figuring out ways you can improve upon what they’re already doing. While I’ve provided a large number of ways to
increase your new fan acquisition rate, there are plenty of methods that I’ve missed in this guide. Come up with a full list
of some of the new tactics that you’ve found and start testing them out.

Daily Task
Create a list of all your competitors' Facebook Pages and analyze them using the four factors outlined in this article.
Now that you’ve determined some of the tactics that are used by the best Facebook page administrators (as described
on Day 19) as well as those tactics already outlined in this guy, you will be able to see what opportunities your
competition is seizing as well as missing out on.


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Day 27: Monitor Your Page
Insights To Improve Content

Introduction To Insights
Facebook provides all page
administrators with a tool for tracking
the growth of the page as well as the
number of interactions on your page.
There are a few numbers which you
can look at to determine how to
improve you page most effectively.
Ultimately by performing the steps
outlined over the 30 days to 3,000
fans program, you should have
ﬁgured out the most effective
methods of improving your page.

Understanding Post Quality
Facebook provides one metric which they suggest page administrators use to determine the quality of their posts called
“Post Quality”. I tell most people to take this metric with a grain of salt. The system encourages that you increase the
volume of posts that you make to a reasonable level (2 -3 times a day) and to improve the quality of the posts as
measured by the number of comments and likes on each post.

As I’ve written a number of times, it’s possible to increase the number of comments and likes by asking questions as well
as posting more relevant posts. I’ve also found that jokes tend to get a larger response. Facebook then determines post
quality in a number of ways but the most obvious is the number of interactions as a percentage of the size of your fan
base. If 50 percent of your fan base is interacting regularly, you’ll end up with a high post quality score.

While there are a number of other metrics that you can keep track of to increase your post quality, I honestly don’t think
this is the most effective measure of the success of your page. It may be possible to attract a large number of fans who
are simply not active. Well known brands and personalities tend to get a larger number of replies per post. The best
model to improving your post quality is to test out various types of posts and see which attract the most responses.

Whenever you ﬁnd a post which attracts a large response, you may want to make it a habit to post similar updates.


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5 Important Insight Metrics

Total Fans And Unsubscribed Fans
One of the most useful charts is the number of fans you have and the number of unsubscribed fans. Depending on the
type of page you have and the level activity on your page, you will tend to see different growth charts. One of the most
important levels to monitor is the percentage of fans who’ve unsubscribed. If this percentage is increasing over time, you
may want to check out the type of content you’re posting as well as the volume of posts. While posting often is
important, you can chase fans away by posting too often.

Interactions
As the number of fans on your Facebook page increases, the number of users interacting with your page should increase
as well. Whether it’s comments, wall posts, or likes, you can view the number of interactions on your Facebook Page by
viewing the “interactions” graph. This graph tends to be pretty useful for seeing how well you are engaging users on your
Facebook page and also happens to be the default graph when you view your page insights.

Interactions Per Post
This happens to be one of my favorite charts. If you’re fan base is growing you should also slowly improve the quality of
your posts as you see how fans respond. It can be a misleading chart though as interactions per post should increase
proportionally to the number of fans you have. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t show any percentage charts but basic
division will give you that information. If your interactions per post aren’t increasing over time then you aren’t doing a
good job of producing valuable content. Tomorrow I’ll be discussing content strategy more in depth if this is an area
where you are having problems.

Page Views
If you’re a webmaster there is no doubt that you have spent countless hours working with Google Analytics. The page
view has become one of the standard measures of success on the internet. This chart is pretty straight forward as it
depicts the total number of pageviews to your Facebook Page. Whether it’s new fans or existing fans, all page views are
grouped into this metric. As you grow your page, the total number of daily page views should be increasing as well.

Demographics
One of the best features of Facebook page insights is the ability to track the demographics of your fan base. While
Facebook has the breakdown of your fans’ demographics as percentages you can also view the absolute number of
users within your Facebook page by their gender and age. By viewing the demographics chart you will be able to see
which demographic groups are growing quickest as well as which demographic groups are the largest.

Daily Task
Spend some time navigating your Facebook Page metrics. To get there, click on “See All” from within the “Insights” box
on the left-hand side of your Facebook Page.


New Media School

Day 28: Check The Magazine
Rack For Content Strategy

How To Create Compelling Content
Copywriting is one of the most important skills for developing
a successful presence on the web. Compelling content helps
drive traffic and can get users coming back to your Facebook
Page on a regular basis. Of all the copywriting skills you
should master, headline writing is the most important. There
are numerous resources on the web for developing effective
headlines but the best resources are also the most frequently
used and eventually the impact is reduced. That’s why it’s
important to always search for effective headlines.

The easiest place to find effective headlines is on a magazine
rack. There are numerous things that make people buy
magazines but outside of provocative images, headlines are
there to grab a user’s attention. With numerous magazines on
a rack, headlines are an important differentiator. That’s why
you should go browse a magazine rack and find which
headlines stand out to you. I always reference Cosmopolitan
magazine as a great headline resource.

Most often Cosmopolitan magazine makes sexual references
but they occasionally use non-sexual headlines as well. All
their headlines grab a user’s attention and learning from one
of the top selling magazines is always a great way to improve
your copywriting. Before listing out 10 powerful headlines that will drive instant traffic to your site, let me note that these
headlines are most effective to drive users from your Faceook Page to external websites. While you can use them within
custom tabs on your Facebook Page, the main goal is to drive users to a destination and then to have them provide
feedback.

If you continuously provide compelling content, users will always return for more.


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5 Headlines That Will Get People To Click Everytime

How To Write Headlines That Make You Rich and Famous
How to articles are always extremely popular especially when you offer the reader a tangible benefit from reading.
Headlines get people in the door and one of the best ways to get readers to your site is to teach them something.
Whatever you are teaching the reader, make sure that the headline appeals to your reader base. Teaching marketers
how to hang a painting is great but even better is to help them improve their existing skill base.

You can substitute the words in this headline to be “How To [Random Task] That [Great Benefit]”.

7 Things Every Marketer Should Know About Copywriting
List articles are also extremely effective at getting readers in the door. The reason is that they expect to instantly get a
significant benefit just from reading. There are numerous versions of this headline but you can easily duplicate the impact
of using this headline by filling in the blanks “X Things Every [Target Market] Should Know About [Specific Topic]”.

The Secret Of Building Successful Facebook Pages
Being an expert at whatever you do, you have a lot of information to share with your reader. If someone was to ask you:
“What is the most important lesson that you’ve learned from working as a [fill in the blank]?” What would you tell them?
Take that information and put it in a post and you’re practically guaranteed to drive a lot of users to your site. It piques
the user’s interest and then informs them. You can follow up the article by asking them to take an action, such as
becoming a fan of your Facebook page.

Create A Beautiful Facebook Page In 10 Minutes
This one is pretty straight-forward. Offer your readers an extremely valuable proposition. Whether it’s something you are
giving away for free, or a benefit from purchasing something, this is called an “Irresistible Offer”. In his famous book “The
Irresistible Offer: How To Sell Your Product in 3 Seconds or Less”, Mark Joyner spells out how to turn copywriting into
sales. The most important thing to closing the sale is to ..... (drumroll please) ... create a valuable offer! If you take the
time to provide something valuable, your readers will thank you for it.

The Best Facebook Page Software I’ve Ever Used
Want to get your fan base to try out something that you thought was an extremely valuable service or product? Turn a
headline into a powerful testimonial. Be honest, be succinct, and speak positively and you’ll instantly get your fans to
click on a link.

Daily Task
Start brainstorming potential headlines that will most effectively grab the attention of your target market. Proceed to
develop content around each of those headlines. If you develop writer’s block and need other headline ideas, check out
the book “Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich” by David Garfinkel. If you really can’t come up with any other
headlines, search for “swipe file” in Google and you’ll find tons of resources for smart headlines that will get people to
flock to your articles.


New Media School

Day 29: E-Mail Marketing For
Facebook Page Admins

Any internet marketer knows about the power of e-mail
marketing. As I discussed in “The 5 Phases of the Facebook
Sales Funnel”, it’s important to drive users to take an action.
Often that may be registering for an email newsletter which can
then be used to upsell the user on a product or service. In
addition to e-mail newsletters, every modern marketer sends
numerous e-mails every day and each of those e-mails should be
used as an opportunity to drive new fans.

4 E-Mail Marketing Strategies For
Facebook Page Admins
Despite the power of social technology as a platform for
marketing, e-mail marketing still remains to be one of the most
effective tools for keeping in touch with users and promoting
services and products. That’s why we think it’s a great idea to take
advantage of e-mail marketing to promote your Facebook Page. Below are ﬁve e-mail marketing strategies that will
instantly boost your Facebook fan base.

1. Promote Your Newsletter Via Your Facebook Page
If you have a newsletter one of the best ways to get new members is via your Facebook Page. Use sidebar promotions
as outlined on Day 24 to drive new member registration. Also feel free to occasionally post updates that encourage fans
to register for your e-mail newsletter. Be careful though because overly promoting your e-mail newsletter will drive many
Facebook users away from your page.

2. Use Mundane Emails As A Promotion Opportunity
I personally send hundreds of emails a day and any professional marketer is most deﬁnitely sending numerous emails
daily. That’s why I suggest taking that opportunity to drive new fans to your Facebook Page. In addition to your name
and phone number, add a link which directs your contacts to your Facebook Page. Most people are willing to become a
fan. To increase conversion place a call to action at the end of your email such as “Please support me and join my
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/allfacebook”.


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3. Promote Your Page Via Your Newsletter
This one should be pretty obvious: use your e-mail newsletter as a tool to promote your Facebook Page. Also invest the
time necessary to optimize the conversion of newsletter subscribers to Facebook Page fans. As you promote your
Facebook Page it’s a great idea to ﬁnd out how many of your readers are clicking on your Facebook Page. There are
numerous email marketing platforms but not all of them provide detailed analytics services. One of the best email
marketing systems I’ve found is Aweber but there are many others as well. Determine what sort of click through rates
you’re getting and modify your email as necessary to increase the number of people clicking on your Facebook Page
link.

4. Use E-Mail Registrations To Score Interviews
One of the best features about e-mail marketing is that it’s easy to quickly browse through e-mail addresses and
determine what companies your subscribers work at. I typically reach out to people that may have interesting positions
and ask them for an interview. When somebody provides you with an email address look them up on Facebook and
LinkedIn to determine what their position is and if it sounds interesting, just ask them for an interview opportunity. It
helps you to expand your network and it provides valuable content for your readers.

Daily Task
Register for an email marketing service. Not all services cost money. For example, Campaign Monitor is free to register
and only charges you when you send emails ($5 + $0.01 per recipient per campaign). AWeber is another great service
and charges you a ﬂat fee based on the number of subscribers you have, not the number of emails you send out. If you
are going to turn any of your Facebook fans into customers, the best way is through contacting them directly and the
easiest way to reach them online is via email.


New Media School

Day 30: Create A Plan For The
Next Month

There’s an old proverb which says “He who fails to
plan, plans to fail” and while there are people that will
debate the importance of planning, mapping out a
guide for the next month will make things a lot easier.
What blog posts will you be writing? What content
will be most effective to drive new fans to your
Facebook? What steps will you take to promote your
Facebook Page? While we’ve listed 29 techniques to
boost your fan base, have you really taken advantage
of all the suggestions we’ve made?

By putting aside a little bit of time ever month to plan
what the best next steps are, you will come up with
some new promotion ideas as well as determine what are reasonable expectations.

How Much Time Should You Spend On Your Facebook Page?
After reading through this guide you may think that developing your Facebook Page takes countless hours. Honestly it
shouldn’t take more than a few strategic minutes per day. Most of the tasks outlined shouldn’t take a substantial amount
of time. The most time consuming component of building your Facebook page is providing relevant content. Spend
some time determining what blog posts your should write over the next month.

Set up Google Reader to follow the most relevant resources and repost any article that you find interesting directly on
your Facebook Page. While you can always spend more time on your Facebook Page, it’s possible to spend too much
time on your page. In economics there is something called the “Law of Diminishing Returns” and that law applies to time
you spend on your Facebook Page. The first few hours are extremely important but as you over invest, you will not only
take time away from other marketing activities but also decrease the number of new fans per hour invested.

Line Up Tasks And Execute
While you can accomplish many of the tasks outlined in a short period of time, space out each task so that you have
time to accomplish each step well. I personally use an application called Remember the Milk to plan out my tasks over a
longer period time. One huge mistake that I used to always make was using my calendar as a method for planning tasks
that need to be accomplished. Tasks lists are useful because you can go through them and mark them off without
cluttering up your schedule. While you may aim to have an article completed by a specific day or an upgrade to your


New Media School

Facebook Page, things tend to change and you can adjust due dates as necessary (although adjusting due dates is a
sign that you have too many tasks and need to start delegating).

Plan Well And Sleep Well
I spent the ﬁrst year and a half after starting my company under an immense amount of stress as my inbox became
bloated and I became an organizational nightmare. While there were numerous opportunities I found it difﬁcult to
prioritize. More recently I developed a system which works for me and that involves a combination of two things: a
calendar and a to do list. As I mentioned moments ago, putting tasks where they should go will remove a lot of stress in
your life. You have the potential to grow a fan base well beyond 3,000 but none of that can be done without proper
planning. The only way to get there without planning is to not sleep for months on end as you attempt to balance a
million tasks.

Develop a content schedule and a task list for items that you would like to add to your Facebook Page.

Daily Task
Take the lessons learned over the past 30 days to develop at least 5 tasks and begin to plan out a content schedule. As
I’ve stated repeatedly throughout this program, content is critical to your success. If you drive an immense number of
fans to your page, the easiest way is to create original content. While you’ve already come up with a few headlines for
articles you can write, develop a schedule for writing and posting them.


New Media School

Day 31: Promote Fanning Via
SMS

A Mobile Revolution
Use of internet sites in the United States may mostly take
place from computers but a growing percentage of internet
users are shifting to their mobile devices as the primary tool
for browsing the internet. The trend toward mobile has
seen a dramatic upsurge with the launch of the iPhone and
competing smartphone devices. Facebook has also
continued to increase their mobile offerings. More recently
the company has added the ability to let users subscribe to
mobile updates.

Mobile Subscriptions Are Easy
There are currently two ways to subscribe to a Facebook Page. The first is to click “Subscribe via SMS” on the left hand
side of a Facebook Page. The second is to text “subscribe [username]” to 32665. You’ve most likely seen a number of
commercial that promote subscriptions via SMS. Facebook provides this service for free and it can be extremely useful
for communicating with fans.

Why Use Mobile Subscriptions?
If a user gets your published stories via their feed, why do you need to encourage fans to subscribe via SMS? The
primary reason is because not all users will view your feed updates, only a percentage will. SMS subscribers are also
guaranteed to get your updates which makes this a no-brainer. So what steps can you take to make sure you get more
mobile subscribers and how can you track new subscribers? Unfortunately for the time being you can’t track the
number of mobile subscribers through your page insights, however you can always promote the service.

Important Caveat
While you can get SMS subscribers they will only be notified of text stories that you publish. If you post a link as an
attachment to a story, the user will not be notified even if you have posted text in addition to the link. That means you
should be posting questions on a regular basis that users can reply to if they received the update via their mobile device.

Daily Task
Post something to your feed explaining to users how they can subscribe to mobile updates from your page. Remember
that mobile subscribers get 100 percent of your text status updates.


New Media School

New Media School

Want More?
I hope that you found this guide to be extremely
valuable. After a couple months of working on
this guide off and on, I realized that it was time to
provide the information to the public. There are a
number of other guides that I currently have under
development but in addition to guides many find it
useful to interact with others in order to hold
themselves accountable and to get feedback from
others. That’s why I’ve spent the past few months developing New Media School, a site dedicated to helping individuals
and businesses succeed in the digital economy.

Our Programs
Since this is the first significant guide that we’ve released outside of the Facebook privacy guide which was released at
the beginning of the year, I’ve decided to create an exclusive trial program for our first official New Media School
program. The “Social Media Marketing” program involves the following components:

• Monthly Newsletter that will keep you up to date on everything taking place in the industry that will impact your
business.
• Weekly Q&A Sessions during which Nick O’Neill will answer your most important questions related to challenges
your company is trying to overcome.
• Step by Step guides that explain things such as attracting new fans to your Facebook Page (this guide) to attracting
more traffic to your company’s blog.
• Guest Lectures from top industry experts that will provide you with insight and an opportunity to pick the brain of
industry leaders.
• Community Forums that are filled with expert opinions and lessons. These forums also present an opportunity to get
instant feedback from your peers.

Guest Lectures
As I mentioned a moment ago, we have industry leaders that will participate in live sessions with course participants.
Some guests will have prepared comments while others will be more of an interview format. At the end of each live
session course participants will have the opportunity to get live feedback from the guest experts. Below are some of the
experts who have already confirmed participation:

• Brad Feld - Co-Founder of Foundry Group and author of widely read venture capital blog


New Media School

• Chris Bucchere - Founder of Social Collective
• Clara Shih - Author of “The Facebook Era”
• Craig Stoltz - Author of “Web 2.Oh...Really?”, one of Time.com’s Top 25 Blogs
• Dan Schawbel - Author of “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success”
• David Berkowitz - Director of Emerging Media & Client Strategy for 360i, author of the blog Inside the Marketer’s
Studio
• Debbie Weil - Author of “The Corporate Blogging Book”
• Don Steele - Vice President of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks
• Frank Gruber -
• Harper Reed - CTO at skinnyCorp, Co-Founder of Threadless
• Hiten Shah - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics
• Jake Brewer - Engagement Director of Sunlight Foundation
• Jesse Thomas - Founder of JESS3
• Jared Goralnick - Founder of Set Consulting
• Joe Suh - Founder and CEO of myChurch
• John Bell - Managing Director of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence and President of WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing
Association)
• Leslie Bradshaw - Director of Engagement, New Media Strategies
• Mike Lazerow - CEO and Founder, Buddy Media
• Mike Volpe - VP of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot
• Neil Patel - Co-Founder of KISSmetrics
• Shashi Bellamkonda - Head of Social Media Strategy, Network Solutions
• Ted Leonsis - Owner, Washington Capitals, Chairman of Revolution Money, and Vice Chairman Emritus of AOL
• Tim O’Shaughnessy - Co-Founder & CEO, LivingSocial
• Victoria Ransom - Founder, Wildfire Interactive

Each of the guest lecturers above are involved in developing tools that help individuals or businesses in the social media
space or are actively using social media to promote their existing business. We will be announcing other guest lectures
as well throughout the course. We will leverage our large network of contacts to bring in the most relevant guest
lecturers for each topic we cover.

Registration
If you are interested in participating in our first New Media School program (or any others) you can visit the New Media
School website. If you would like to participate in our first Social Media Marketing program, you must be one of the first
150 participants to register. Registration will also be open for a limited period of time. Also, if you register now with the
discount code “FBPAGEBUYER” we will take $25 off the first month.

If registration is closed by the time you visit the site don’t worry! We will begin offering new programs in the near future.
Just fill out your information in the contact area and we will send you information as we release new programs!


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