Facebook Pages are extremely popular among Small Business owners, Artists, Celebrities, Fortune 500 companies and who not! We’ve already discussed that how one can add a custom tab on Facebook Page and how to make your page popular and gain lots of fans. We discussed almost every aspect of gaining the fans for your Facebook Page, however we forgot to mention that if you have a creative, interactive and gripping facebook page, then fans will also engage in conversation pretty easily. So we thought of listing those 5 Facebook Pages that inspire us and we have fallen in love with!

Coca-Cola

Facebook-coke.jpg

This fantastic page is a great way to show that how a user can be engaged. The page is powered through Adobe Flash and the nice use of colors and icons ensures that you won’t skip a single element on that page. The feature that I love the most is shown on Fan Downloads page. Fans can download free goodies only if they become the fan – a great way to add fans.

Victoria’s Secret

facebook-victorias-secret.jpg

This page is also a great display of how users around the world are engaged. You’ll see lots and lots of wall updates from its fans. Their Bombshell custom tab educates its fans to change the pic to few specific images that spread the word about Victoria’s Secret. They even make a great use of the Events feature of Pages. Impressive designs with hot looking models will entice you to become a fan!

Chase

facebook-chase.jpg

This ever so popular Facebook Page has over a million fans and an integrated application lets you search through various NGOs. They’ve integrated the application well in the page thus ensuring that a user not only becomes the fan of the page but they get to add the application easily too. Its neat and clean design is something I love the most!

There are more awesome Facebook pages like Adidas, Starbucks, Red Bull, Sony and a lot more. You’ll notice that small little activities and features ensure that these pages have gained more than million fans each. Of course, their brand helps in gaining the users, its really the interaction in the Facebook page that really kicks of the things. So, which is your favorite page and why you like it the most?

Bookmark and Share

Facebook Logo sticker on Flickr - Photo Sharing!.jpg

In our earlier post we discussed that how we can add a custom tab on a facebook page and in this post we’d discuss that how can we popularize that facebook page to ensure that our brand name spreads and we can find targeted users. Of course, there have been many blogs that have already spoken about it and we’d like to ensure that this blog post will feature the best of techniques to ensure that you’d be able to promote your facebook page in the best of ways.

Lets start with the basics

best-friends-2.jpg 1. Invite your amigo : There will always be friends who’d be close and will be always ready to help you. If you have few friends like that in your list, why aren’t you inviting them? Invite them, ask them to spread the word, ask them to further invite their friends. This should help in spreading the name pretty quickly.

2. Updates are must – In order to ensure that your facebook page becomes a Rock Star, you’d need to keep it up to date. More over, if anyone would interact on your facebook page, its activity may appear in their timeline and thus will help in attracting more eye-balls. You can always use following applications for automating various tasks -

  • TwitterFeed – Using this service you can setup your blog feed and publish the updates on Twitter & Facebook. So whenever you’ll write a blog post, its link will automatically be published on these networks. This will ensure that you’ll get more traffic on your blog plus it’ll engage the fans as well. Since its the feeds that you can setup – you can easily setup feed from YouTube, Digg, Flickr or other services that you use.
  • Twitter Application – This little application displays your tweets on facebook and also lets you publish all your tweets on facebook. So even if you are posting updates on Twitter, they will be pushed on Facebook too. Thus keeps your pages active with fresh content.
  • HootSuite – I think it’s one of the best applications around as far as pushing the content on multiple networks. This wonderful service lets you schedule your tweets and with least amount of efforts you can easily manage Facebook pages, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts. So to ensure that fresh content is posted at all the times, you can schedule the updates easily using this.

Some Free Viral Marketing is on your way

Now that we’ve ensured that the content on your Facebook account is all up to date, its time to ensure that we can try and increase the fans for your business page. There are manual and tiring methods as you need to engage in conversation with new fans. Lets check them out -


viral-marketing.jpg 3. Search New Users – Facebook’s search displays results from updates across facebook. So if you have a business page about Custom WordPress Themes then do a search for “WordPress” and you’ll surely find lots of users that you can target. Engage in conversation with them and try to add them on your network.

4. Add friends of friends – You can also try to engage in conversation with friends of your friends and then add them on your network. This is a slow process however a darn effective one.

5. Add Facebook fan widget on your blog – Its not that you can only visitors from Facebook to your blog. You can also add Facebook fans from your blog. There will always be many visitors who’d come on your blog from search engines and they can become the fan if you give them the option of becoming one. Simply add a widget on your blog and see it in action.

Spend money and market your page quickly

Above activities would require decent amount of hours and efforts, however not everyone is blessed with that much amount of time. So if you can shell out some money, you’d be able to attract thousands of users for your business page. Here are some of the ways -


pay-per-click.jpg 6. Giveaways attracts new visitors – Even small giveaways like e-books, books can help in generating lots of visitors to your account. If you have a product that you can afford to give away, then go ahead and do it. Just ask your current fans to share your specific update and the luck winner can win. This can get pretty viral depending on how excited the fans are about that particular giveaway.

7. Social Ads – Facebook gives great advertising options. You can run various ad campaigns and attract users on your facebook page. Facebook’s social ads are pretty effective and you get to decide that how much money you want to spend. It’s quick and effective for sure!

8. Impress the visitors with custom landing pages – Well, if you can spend some money then get a custom tab designed and coded. An impressive landing tab page will always attract users and they would love to spread it as well.

Engaging with fans is important

Once you’ve added lots of fans, its important that they don’t forget you. We’ve already discussed that how you can keep fresh content coming on your pages, however if you won’t engage in conversation with your fans, all the efforts will go in vein. To avoid that here are few things you should keep on doing -

9. Comments and messages – Make sure that if a user comes and posts updates on your page, then you should thank them by sending messages. Leave comments on their updates regularly, this would keep them active.

10. Help them and they’ll help you – If your fans have blog around same industry then promote it on your pages. This will build a stronger relationship. After all thats what social networking is all about, isn’t it?

Caution – Don’t try to spam. Its good that you want to promote your business, however you shouldn’t forget that there may be many friends of yours who won’t be that much interested in knowing about your business every single hour. Make sure that your idea is to have the positive PR and not to be in the bad books of your close network.

Bookmark and Share

buddypress-logo.jpg

After the release of BuddyPress 1.2, everyone rejoiced as bloggers who are using WordPress only will be able to enjoy the additional community features provided by BuddyPress. Earlier BuddyPress was compatible with WordPress MU only, that kept BuddyPress to not grow as fast as one would have expected. Since WordPress & WordPress MU are merging in version 3.0 – we can expect to see that it will grow by leaps and bounds! Don’t take the impression that BuddyPress has not grown at all, it has grown well enough that it powers some popular websites.

Steps to install BuddyPress on WordPress

Adding BuddyPress is as simple as installing any other plugin on WordPress. It just requires few extra steps to ensure that its compatible with your theme. We’ll cover all the steps to ensure that you won’t be stuck at any moment.

1. Permalinks – BuddyPress requires permalinks to be on. So before you plan to enable BuddyPress, just ensure that your webhost lets you enable pretty permalinks. Most decent hosting services will let easily do so.

2. Installing BuddyPress – WordPress lets you easily install any plugin in its repository. You just need to follow these instructions in order to install BuddyPress through WordPress dashboard.

add-buddypress.jpg

a) Go to Add New under Plugins.
b) Search for the term “buddypress”.
c) Click install in front of BuddyPress 1.2.1
d) Click on Activate and thats it!

install-buddypress.jpg

3. Making existing theme compatible with BuddyPress – Andy Peatling, creator of BuddyPress has taken care of this issue by making a new plugin that makes the WordPress theme compatible with BuddyPress. Simply follow the above instructions to install BuddyPress Template Pack. Just change the term from “BuddyPress” to “BuddyPress template pack“. Its a wizard that you have to follow till the end and it will automatically make your theme compatible with BuddyPress.

Other resources for BuddyPress

1. Pimp your BuddyPress – I’m sure it’ll be a nice domain name ;) Interestingly BuddyPress has quite a handful number of plugins. BuddyPress official repository has some wonderful plugins listed. Don’t forget to extend your BuddyPress installation with these plugins.
2. Premium themes & pluginsWPMU Dev has some decent premium themes and plugins.
3. Amazing BuddyPress themes and getting started guide.

We’ll be constantly pushing out information about BuddyPress and will share various links and resources. So don’t forget to signup for our newsletter at the top of this article.

Bookmark and Share

wordpress-stickers.jpg

One of the core reason for the popularity of WordPress is the community around it. There are thousands of fans and supporters who have created free wordpress themes, free wordpress plugins and most importantly thousands of tutorials, documentations to make it simpler for you to understand and use WordPress! A simple search will ensure that you’d get answer to most of you problems, so we though of listing the best resources about WordPress for you – don’t forget to subscribe them in your feed reader!

Official Channel for news & updates about WordPress

1. WordPress Development blog – Official blog about the latest development happening around WordPress open-source application.
2. Latest news about WordPress.com – Official blog about the latest happenings around WordPress.com (i.e. the hosted service).
3. Planet WordPress – An aggregator of some of the handpicked blogs by the Automattic team. It aggregates posts from various blogs owned by Automattic, core WordPress developers and some community blogs.

Blogs from WordPress community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

weblog-tools-collection.jpg

A multi-author blog that has been delivering high quality content from long time now. The focus of the blog is to talk about tools that help bloggers in running their blogs. It mostly covers plugins, themes and tools related to WordPress since WordPress has become the synonym for “best blogging software”.

2. Pro Blog Design

pro-blog-design.jpg

Another multi-author blog that has been getting extremely popular and has a thriving community around itself. This blog publishes lots of WordPress related articles. Although, its just not about WordPress. This blog also tells you that how you can design a better blog yourself. There are various resourceful posts that ensure that you will always pointed to the best of the best stuff!

3. Cats Who Code

cats-who-code.jpg

A blog by Jean-Baptiste Jung that features super quality posts every now and then. Blog’s primary focus is web development, however it features posts on WordPress more than often. The blog is so good that it is part of Smashing Network and I’m sure a quick look by you at the content quality will convince you to include it in your feed reader. You may also want to follow WP Recipes, a WordPress focused blog by the same person.

4. WPHacks

wphacks.jpg

Unfortunately, this blog hasn’t been updated since December 2010. However, it has got some of the best WordPress hacks that you’d ever come across. We even designed and customized this WordPress based blog with Kyle Eslick, owner of WPHacks. In simple words, WPHacks’ archive is a true gold mine when it comes to WordPress.

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

wpvote.jpg

WPscoop & WPVote are digg like services for WordPress related stuff. If you have a blog that is about WordPress or if you have written a tutorial, hack or a post related to WordPress then feel free to submit the links to these niche bookmarking services. This will not only help generate traffic for your blog but they also act as a great resource to find out what all you can achieve with WordPress.

6. WP Beginner.

wpbeginner.jpg

WP Beginner is one of my favorite blogs when it comes to WordPress. Its constantly updated and has been truly focused on making WordPress easy for the beginners to adopt. The guides in the blog are very simple to understand and have been written to ensure that even the new users won’t find it difficult to follow the instructions.

7. WP Tavern.

wptavern.jpg

We’ve already featured a great interview by Jeff Chandler, WordPress Guru behind WPTavern. Even though, we’ve listed this as 7th blog in this list, I’m sure if you’d ask from any WordPress lover – they’d easily place this blog as number one resource at the moment. Jeff ensures that you get all the scoop and information around WordPress on this blog and thats why it becomes one of our favorite destination as well.

8. WP Engineer.

wpengineer.jpg

WPEngineer is yet another blog that rocks. It features pretty neat articles on how to customize WordPress according to the way you want. This blog will definitely be liked by budding developers as the posts are focused towards editing themes. So if you have a brave heart and love to play around with tech stuff, then you’d surely fall in love with this blog.

If by any chance you think we’ve missed a worthy blog on the topic of WordPress – please let us know about it and we’d happy to include it in this list. If you liked this post, then don’t forget to share it with others!

Bookmark and Share

a-o-n-c-1.jpg

I was always impressed with the fan page of Chris Guillebeau’s The Art of Nonconformity [his blog]. It was one of the first few fan pages that used the power of Custom tabs in Facebook Pages. What I loved about this fan page was that it first loads the Welcome Page for those users who aren’t fan at the moment. Check out the page (link mentioned above) and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Lets find out that how one can add Custom Tabs on Facebook Fan page.

1. Go to Static FBML application

This is the application that helps in creating the custom tabs. This application renders HTML & FBML (Facebook markup language), so pretty much gives enough control to the user to customize the page the way they want. We’ll learn about the customization in upcoming posts.

2. Click on Add to my Page


static-fbml.jpg

As soon as you click on this, it’ll give you the option of selecting the page where you would like to add this application. Just select the right page and click on Add to page. Nothing much will happen, click on Close.

3. Edit your tab page

edit-static-fbml.jpg

At this point, you should continue editing your fan page. You’ll notice there will be a new application that you would need to edit. This application comes from “Static FBML” and once we click on “Edit” (as shown in screenshot) – we’ll get the ability to customize the tab page.

4. Customize the tab page

facebook-tab-page.jpg

As you can see that I’ve used the HTML tags to create a “test” Welcome Page. Of course, you’d need to know HTML or FBML in order to publish anything on these pages. Either you can use a free WYSIWYG web page editor or if you are comfortable with WordPress editor, then simply write your message and then go to HTML editor section and use the code.

5. Adding the tab on the Fan Page

welcome-tab.jpg

Once you are done with designing your custom facebook tab page. You would want to show it on your fan page. You will need to visit the page as administrator and click on the “+” icon at the right hand side of all the tabs. You’ll see your custom developed page in the list, just select it and you are good to go!

Note : You can always drag and drop the tab to change its position. For e.g. you may want to have this tab as the 3rd tab instead of 7th, then you just need to drag it on the left hand side till it comes to the third position.

6. Loading the custom tab at first

edit-wall-settings.jpg

Again edit the page and in that edit the “Wall Settings”. This will give the option of selecting your custom tab page as the “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else

Just save the settings and everything should work the way you always wanted. Custom Tabs on Facebook Fan pages is a wonderful feature as its a quick way to introduce about who you are and what services do you offer. If optimized properly, it can be a great resource in your “Social Media Marketing strategy“. I’ll come up with optimization tricks in the next post and to ensure that you don’t miss it – you can subscribe to our newsletter.

Bookmark and Share

google-god.jpg

[image credit : LTSeo]

For hundreds and thousands of businesses, the term “Google is God” is true. It helps business owners to generate their living-hood and the best part is that they ensure that it can help in every possible way and that too with ease! Google provides various tools that help webmasters in ranking your website well in Google’s search engine index. Here are some of them -

Google Adwords

To start with a commercial product, Google Adwords is the program that helps you in generating targeted traffic for your website. It lets you target the visitors from every possible manner. You can target visitors specific from a city, state, country and who are searching for specific terms. This is now considered to be de-facto of getting the most targeted traffic!

Google Adsense

If Google Adwords is for business owners to get targeted visitors, Google Adsense is the program that helps business owners in making money from the visitors they get on their website. I’m sure that there would be no one on the internet who wouldn’t have seen those ads. Well, there are business who’ve made millions out of it!

Google Analytics

How many people are visiting my website? Where are they coming from? Whey are they going to? Well, there are whole lot of questions like these that get answered by Google Analytics, one of the most powerful tool given for free by Google! It integrates with Google Adwords & Google Adsense to give us the overall picture of the traffic of the website!

Google Webmaster Tools

GWT is one tool that tells you if there are any broken links on your website. If Google is able to crawl your website to include in the index or not. It gives the ability to control the speed of Google Bot’s visit, finds out if your website is infected from malware. It also tell you that if your website is loading slow for users. Isn’t that a must have a tool?

Google Keyword Tool

Google keyword tool is a true gem! As a business owner, you can find out that what exactly visitors are searching for. With the correct strategy, a business owner can easily get their website ranked for the right keywords and thus can reap the benefits easily!

Google Ad Planner

This tool from Google can help you in digging out some very useful information about the competing websites. Not only that, it can certainly help in finding out that what all keywords one should target. After all, choosing the right keywords means eliminating maximum competition!

Google Traffic Estimator

This little nifty tool will help you find out that how much traffic will you get for the keywords that you are eying on. Of course, this is integrated with Google Adwords and thats why you see Google Adwords Logo on top of it. But does that matter when they aren’t charging a single buck from you?

There are other fantastic tools that will surely help you in one way or the other. I’m sure that you’d find them equally useful – Google Zeitgeist, Google Trends, Google website optimizer and Google Insights for search. If you know any other tool, please share it with us and I’ll include it over here.

Bookmark and Share

typography.jpg

Typography definitely plays an important role in enhancing or diminishing the overall look of any web design. And all the web designers/developers were stuck with certain font families, even if they wanted to use the font of their choice, they couldn’t do it freely without compromising on various aspects. Of course, there were other ways too and I would love to include all those methods along with their pros & cons.

siFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic web fonts implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. sIFR embeds a font in a Flash element that displays the text, preempting the need for a font to have been manually pre-installed on a user’s system. [via : wikipedia]

In even simpler words, instead of showing the normal text – it is replaced by Adobe Flash’s text and the font embedded in that flash file is used to display the text. You can add shadow, effects to the text and the best part is that its cross-browser compatible and thats why its loved. However, siFR is often criticized for making the pages load slower and is not supported by iPhone.

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to siFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use [This is not the case, if you are using WordPress]. Some of the benefits of Cufon over siFR are that it loads faster, no plugins are required. [Via - Github]

Of course, nothing comes with cons. Cufon comes with the inability to highlight and copy/paste, not all fonts are supported. However, still its one of the preferred methods of using other fonts. We are using Cufon on this blog, so it can be a good example for you to look at.

There are other ways as well like Typeface.js, FLIR (Face Lift Image Replacement), however as browsers are getting better in supporting CSS3 – the better its becoming to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, with this method, copyright issues often come into play. In order to avoid these issues, few web services have come up with a model where by paying some fee, web designers will be able to choose various fonts (without worrying about licenses) for their website and the fonts will be served from their servers. Here are these services -

Typekit.jpg

Typekit

Typekit is one such service that has partnered with type foundries and have taken care of the legal issues. They let you choose the fonts using their web based editor. They have a plugin for WordPress, that lets you integrate this service with ease. There is an option of free plan and if you have one blog, you should definitely try this service.

fontmeup.jpg

FontMeUp

FontMeUp is another service that allows you to use any font on your website. They have a similar concept and have hundreds of fonts to choose from. They also have a free plan and a WordPress plugin.

So after, looking at the benefits of these services, I’m tempted to use these service for this blog. I’ll notify as soon as this will be applied and will try to post the results as well. Personally, I see no reason for not trying these services and why any one else shouldn’t. Will you be using these to improve the typography on your blog or will you be going via existing ways?

Bookmark and Share