How to get your Facebook followers to mosey over to home base

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, brands, businesses, Web publishers.

One benefit of having a Facebook Page is that once you build up a healthy community, you can start directing them to your website to join an email list, sign a petition, donate or take some other action.

But have you optimized your Facebook Page for this purpose?

Here are seven ways to increase the amount of website traffic you’re getting specifically from your Facebook Page:

Optimize your info tab

1Your info tab should be optimized for search and viewers — overlapping goals. You optimize the info tab for search by filling in the appropriate fields with keyword-rich content. You can research the best keywords by using Google’s Keyword Tool and Google Analytics. You optimize your info tab for viewers by writing compelling copy for your info tab.

Within your info tab, make sure your put your website URL in the URL field. Also, enter specific URLs to pages related to each section. For example, in the “mission” add a link to the page on your site that talks about your mission.

Create a custom tab

2If you don’t have a custom tab, you should at least create a custom welcome tab and set it as your default tab. Not only will this convert more Facebook users into fans, it will be another way to drive more traffic to your website. (Check out my CharityHowTo webinar on March 8.)

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The upgraded Facebook metric tool explained in plain English

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, individuals.

Two weeks ago, Facebook launched a completely new version of Facebook Page Insights along with several new metrics.

Some of the new metrics include:

• People Talking About This – This is the number of people who engage with your Page and includes users who have liked your Page, commented on or shared a post from your Page, answered a Question you’ve asked on your Page, or tagged your Page in an update or in a photo. This also includes Facebook users who’ve responded to an event on your Page.
• Friends of Fans – This is the total number of friends all your fans have.
• Reach – The number of people who have seen content associated with your Page.
• Virality – The percent of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it.”

How to access Insights on your Facebook Page

You can access your Facebook Page Insights directly under your Facebook Page’s main image in the sidebar (FYI – this tab can only be viewed by Page admins).

When you click on the Insights icon (see image above), you’ll go directly to an overview of analytics for your Facebook page. You’ll also notice that three sub-tabs have appeared in the sidebar: “Fans,” “Reach” and “Talking About This.”

Making sense of your Page overview

The first tab you’ll see when you click on Insights is an overview of your Page. This tab shows you the day-to-day information you need to know as a page administrator.

What do those four numbers at the top mean?

Those four numbers at the very top of this page are the most current snapshot of your page. Following is the definition for each number:

• Total Likes – Total likes is simply the number of people who have liked your Facebook Page up until yesterday.
• Friends of Fans – Friends of fans is the total number of friends that all of your Facebook fans have, taking mutual friends into account. This number is more useful if you are running a Facebook Sponsored Like Story because it would be the total number of people who could see that ad. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.
• People Talking About This – This is the number of people who engaged with your Page over the past seven days and includes users who liked your Page, commented on or shared a post from your Page, answered a Question you’ve asked on your Page, or tagged your Page in an update or in a photo. This also includes Facebook users who’ve responded to an event on your Page. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.
• Weekly Total Reach – This is the number of people who have seen any content associated with your Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page) over the past seven days. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.

Underneath these four numbers you’ll see a graph with rolling weekly numbers for “Talking About This” and “Weekly Total Reach” for the past month. You’ll also see dots for each day that you’ve posted to your page (dot size indicates the number of posts for that day).

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Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, individuals

Up until now there has been no way for the leaders within your nonprofit to join discussions about your cause on Facebook, unless they were willing to compromise their privacy. But now with the Subscribe Button, Facebook users can opt in to their public updates without being a friend.

Multiply the No. of organizational touch points on Facebook

1The Facebook experience is essentially a personal one. If given the choice, your fans would rather connect with the people they already know and respect in your organization.

One way to give them what they want is to select a handful of these respected employees to be spokespeople for your cause on Facebook. Once you’ve selected these folks, you can add them as featured admins on your Facebook Page displayed in the left-hand sidebar (see below).

You could also create a custom tab called “Our People” with a two-sentence bio for each spokesperson and a link to their Profile.

Enhance relationships with your Facebook fans

2One way to think about the strategy mentioned in #2 is to remember that your brand is ultimately your people. They’re your brand at events, and on the telephone. So why wouldn’t they be your brand on Facebook?

By putting multiple spokespeople on the Facebook front lines, you’re giving your supporters more human ways to connect with your organization. Quantity and quality.

Segment communication channels

3It gets really interesting if you have leaders within specific focus areas. For example, UNICEF might promote spokespeople based on the countries they serve. This way, a donor who consistently supports the organization in Ghana can subscribe to updates from that UNICEF spokesperson.

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Causes, with 140 million+ users, takes it to the next level

Guest post by Joe Green
Co-founder, Causes

On Thursday Facebook announced two of the biggest product changes in its history. First, Facebook is making it easier for people to share the action they take on Causes and get their friends involved in real time. Second, Facebook is launching Timeline, which will allow people to curate all of the information on their profiles to better share the moments in life that matter most.

Because taking action and then sharing it with friends is the core of what people do on Causes, we think that these changes will have profoundly positive effects on people trying to help the world by using Causes.

Causes was founded with the mission of empowering anyone to change the world. Our model is based upon the belief that everyone has the power to have an outsize impact on the world by banding together with other like-minded individuals, taking direct action, and inspiring their friends and their friends’ friends to join in. In short, we provide the grassroots with organizing tools for creating large-scale collective action.

We could not have launched Causes without Facebook Platform, providing real identity and real friends. Facebook Platform was created so that experiences that are inherently social in our offline lives could be brought online as an authentic expression of who we are; Facebook did this best in revolutionizing photo sharing.

Altruism is one of the most fundamentally social impulses, and doing things for others without expecting anything in return is core to what makes us human. This is why from the day Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Causes has been honored to be one of the most popular applications, with over 140 million users.

Timeline + new Causes profiles = a townsquare of giving

One of the most popular features we included in the launch of Causes was the ability for Facebook users to feature their favorite Causes on their profile. With Facebook updates over time, those featured boxes were removed, leading to the greatest user uproar in our history. Our users’ reactions demonstrated that people feel that their causes represent an integral part of their identity, and that we need to make it as easy as possible for them to express that.

Since then, we have worked with Facebook to once again empower our users to make their causes a core part of their Facebook profile, which is now an even more expressive and powerful tool called “Timeline.” Your timeline will include “reports” that roll up all of a user’s activity through a given application in a comprehensive report of what he or she has done. This change, combined with our newly re-launched Causes profiles, provides people a central public place to organize and promote all of their giving.

Until now, Facebook profiles have been dominated by recent information, such as a friend’s posts on your wall, or relatively static information, such as your hometown), but Timeline now offers an important middle ground for people to feature and curate lower frequency, but highly meaningful information that changes and builds over time.

My mom, for example, can join the Arts in Education cause, which supports her favorite nonprofit, choose it to be her featured cause, recruit friends to join it, and donate. Currently, all of these actions can be published to my mom’s friends in real time, but there is not a good way for her to showcase this cause and the work she has done to support it on her profile, which ideally should be the most complete representation of who she is. The reality is that my mom’s involvement with the Arts cause may be less frequent than playing a game on Facebook, but she may care more deeply about the Arts organization and its mission.

Frequency and recency don’t necessarily correlate with quality or “coreness” with respect to her personal identity. Facebook’s willingness to tackle this issue and give people the power to curate their timeline to feature depth of attachment and not pure frequency of engagement is exciting for developers like Causes that power deeply meaningful social experiences.

Facebook turns your profile into a life scrapbook

From the day Facebook launched in 2004, the profile was the most critical page on the site. People used to navigate the site by surfing friends’ profiles, and used their own profile as their navigational starting point. The profile mostly contained a list of interests, actively curated by the profile owner. Only with the addition of the news feed in 2006 did attention shift away from profile and toward recent activity. This shift certainly allowed Facebook to capture what someone was doing in the moment, but that information did not represent the whole of the person.

Now Facebook is making your profile into a more holistic timeline, or scrapbook, of your life. This will enable a new class of applications focused on helping people express themselves to emerge and revolutionize existing industries and experiences. We are grateful at Causes to be in a position to lead this sea change in the way people give and get involved in social change and will continue build a platform that empowers anyone to make a difference by taking action with their friends.

Look out for new ways to integrate Causes into your online identity and check out this piece in TechCrunch for a first look at the Facebook Timeline.

Custom Facebook tabs are not about technology. (Note: We still call them tabs even though they’re now simply links in the left sidebar of your organization’s Facebook Page.) They’re not about having the ability to display content once a fan likes your Page. They’re not about widgets or animated mouse-over things, either.

If it doesn’t convert, it failed

The smart nonprofit marketer uses custom tabs to motivate action. Following are six tips to help you improve the effectiveness of your custom tabs:

1. Each tab should have one goal – Do you want people to like the page? Or do you want to tell people about your latest news?
 
2. Each tab should have only one call to action – If you ask people to follow you on Twitter, like your Facebook Page, and join your email list, your results will be poor. Facebook users will take action on one item, if they take any action at all.
 
3. Keep the copy clear, short and concise – Take the copy you now have on your custom tab and cut it in half. The increase in conversions will be worth the painful editing.
 
4. Use a powerful image – An image that stirs an emotion will help motivate action.
 
5. Make buttons easy to see – Make sure the button is a contrasting color and is at least 110×80 so it can compete with the size of Facebook ads.
 
6. Create a unique landing page for Facebook – If your call to action sends Facebook users to your website, make sure they land on a page dedicated to receiving traffic from the Facebook tab. This way, you can easily measure the effectiveness of the tab.

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, foundations, social enterprises, brands, cause organizations, small businesses.

No doubt you’re aware that more and more websites are getting more traffic with Facebook’s Like button.

Facebook has been measuring the impact of these social plug-ins for almost a year now. Here’s what they’ve found:

• More traffic. The average site received a 300 percent increase in referral traffic.
• Lower bounce rates. People who sign in with Facebook at The Huffington Post view 22 percent more pages than those who don’t.

Now before you go and slap a Like button on your website, follow these placement tips to get the best results:

Placement at the top of blog posts

Many people who read content on your website will scan the title and maybe the first couple of paragraphs. In their mind, they’re thinking, “Is this worth sharing?”

With a Like button prominently at the top of articles, they’ll be able to take the action you want them to take!

Placement on single bits of content

When a user clicks on a like button, they send that specific article (or video, or blog post, or product, or event) into their New Feed, which can be a fast-moving stream for many Facebook users. Concise and highly specific content tends to get the most engagement.

Blogging is a way to create a constant flow of this type of “likable” content.

Placement above the fold

As with any landing page, you must have the call to action (in this case clicking Like) above the fold. When I put my email subscription form prominently up at the top of my site, I saw a 300 percent increase in new weekly email subscribers. The same holds true for Like buttons.

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This week I conducted a free webinar for CharityHowTo with my good friend Kurt Steiner.

More than 1,300 people registered and about 700 people showed up. Over 85 percent of the nonprofits that attended were already using Facebook, but more than 75 percent considered their knowledge level beginner or intermediate.

Together we spent over an hour answering 10 of the most common question nonprofits have about Facebook:

1. Why should you use a Facebook Page instead of a Group or Profile?
2. Should you name your Facebook Page after your organization?
3. What category should you choose for your Page?
4. What applications can you use to customize your Page?
5. How can you begin to promote your Facebook Page?
6. How can you save time managing your Page?
7. How can you tell if your fans like your content?
8. How often should you update your Facebook Page?
9. How can you collect donations from your fans?
10. How can you revive a Facebook Page that’s gone stale?

Above is the deck, which includes a few pointers on each of these questions. You can download the PDF as well.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and community organizations, foundations, NGOs, businesses, brands, government agencies, conference organizers, educators. First of two parts. Also see part 2: Using Twitter & LinkedIn to promote your event.

Guest post by Tamara Mendelsohn
Director of Marketing, Eventbrite

We often get asked, “How can I leverage social media to promote my event?” So we started collecting best practices from event organizers who use Eventbrite and pulled them into this post to help you get started down the path to social media glory.

It’s important to note that social media is a clunky gun — it’s a channel, not a strategy. The best way for each event to utilize this channel will vary depending on who the target audience is and how they engage online.

Social media: the perfect tool to generate buzz

It’s no silver bullet. That said, social media can be an incredibly powerful promotional tool, allowing you to reach more of the people who care about and ultimately want to attend your event. When people share information about your event with their network, that message carries much more weight than a traditional ad. It’s a personal endorsement of your event. Social media is also the perfect tool to generate buzz, to get people talking about your event in a recorded fashion where others can stumble across it and get caught up in it, too. It’s not a new phenomenon. That’s how people have promoted their events from the beginning: get people talking about it. What social media brings is the ability for anyone to discover the chatter, giving it far more reach and power.

But it can be a game-changer. We’ve built a lot of features into Eventbrite to support sharing of events through social media and we see the results every day. Facebook is the greatest driver of traffic to our site, which means people are sharing your events on Facebook, their friends are seeing the posts show up in their feed, and they are clicking on the links that bring them back to your Eventbrite event page. That’s really exciting, and I hope you can see the powerful implications that it has on the way events are promoted and discovered.

Some guiding principles on promoting events

Choose the platforms that make sense for your event.

1There are a few options when it comes to promoting your event through social media, and each has advantages and disadvantages. For example, Facebook and LinkedIn show who’s attending and they aggregate conversations about the event in one place, while Twitter provides the opportunity for anyone to discover the event. Building your own social network around your event may be the thing to do if you have an appetite for building a richly branded online experience, but it won’t give you the virality of established social networks. Look to strike a balance across several platforms. Most important, understand where your target audience is already engaging. Identify existing communities by searching on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other forums, monitor Twitter conversation, and locate the platforms that have the most activity. This is where you’ll want to place the majority of your efforts.

Define success metrics and don’t underestimate the effort required.

2To new users, online communities might look self-sustaining. They’re not. Facebook, Twitter and the rest all take work, ideally in the form of a dedicated individual who can keep dialogue flowing and seed productive conversations. Continuous new content and engagement tactics are required to grow the vibrant community necessary for achieving buzz around your event. Define success metrics so that you know how you’re tracking — number of fans or followers is a great place to start, but engagement metrics are most important. The Facebook Page dashboard gives good stats and there are some great free Twitter analytics tools (we use Twitalyzer) that can measure engagement levels of your tweets.

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Here’s a simple guide to getting started in 5 easy steps

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, businesses, educators, citizen publishers, individuals. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

Guest post by Azin Mehrnoosh
Founder, HiDef

Facebook isn’t just a potential market that many nonprofits haven’t yet tapped. It’s also a place for real-time personal conversation and feedback from your constituents. You shouldn’t treat it trivially, but you shouldn’t be afraid of it, either.

Many posts emphasize the need to get started on Facebook and offer a long list of tips. Those lists can be quite daunting, so in this post we’ll help you get up and running from ground zero — nice, easy and simple.

To start off, you should already have a personal Facebook account and be logged in. Don’t worry, you’re not going to share any of your personal information. Facebook just needs an administrator for your organization’s new Facebook Page, and you can do that via your personal account. You can add other administrators later.

Now, if you’re already familiar with Facebook for personal use, you’ll quickly notice how similar creating a Page for your organization is to your own Facebook profile. Most of the functions — like uploading pictures, posting updates, updating your organizational bio — are almost exactly the same.

Let’s get started!

Create an official Page

1For this step, navigate to http://www.facebook.com/page.

Note: Don’t create a “Community page.” Those are used for creating communities around ideas that don’t necessarily represent anything tangible.

Select your page type, give it the name of your organization, click the terms and conditions checkbox, and click “Create Official page.” It’s that simple.

Now you’ll do some configuration before you promote it to the world.

Upload a logo or image for your organization

2Make sure you have your logo or a clearly identifiable branding image that your potential Facebook fans will be able to draw lasting connections with. It’s important that this image match up with your website and even print materials. Photos of people are often more effective than a logo — sometimes you can incorporate the logo at the bottom of the image.

Put your mouse over the big gray “?” image and click “Change Picture.” Upload your logo or image by selecting one of the upload options.

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