Make the Most of Your Facebook Business Page

Lots of changes have been happening behind the scenes at Facebook. The platform now has a lot more functionality for business and professional users. If you have a Facebook page for your business, now is a great time to try out some of these new tips and tricks for increasing your exposure and reach on the Facebook platform.

Use Facebook Photo Tags

The ability to “tag” people in photos has been around for a long time. Clicking on the tagged person’s name will take you straight to their personal profile. Now, Fast Company reports that Facebook users can tag photos with page identities as well as personal profiles.

What does this mean for business page owners? Imagine that someone posts a picture of you at a social event in your town. You want people to know it’s you there at the raffle booth, but you want that tag link to send people to your page, not your profile. Simple! Just click on your face, begin typing the name of your business page, and Facebook will add that tag to the picture. Note: this only works for pages in the Brand/Company or People categories at present. If your page is listed as a Local Business or other category, you may have to wait for implementation of this feature. But it’s worth the wait!

Create Effective Page Posts

The key to building a successful page is posting relevant content on a regular basis. If you’re a Realtor, this may mean posting links to local news items, or recommending shops and other resources for buyers and sellers. For a non-profit, you will want to publicize events you are sponsoring, and engage your readers in discussion of topics related to your mission.

Thanks to the analysts at Buddy Media, we now know more about how to structure those posts for maximum engagement. First, keep your post on the short side. Posts with 80 characters or less had 27% greater engagement rate than longer posts. Second, the hard-sell approach is the least effective. Posts using words like “events” and “winning” in garnered much more activity than those with words like “buy” and “shop.” Finally, keep in mind the best days and times to post updates to your page. Updates posted on Thursdays and Fridays were 18% more popular than on the other days, and posting after regular business hours increased engagement 20%!

Make the Most of Every Link You Post

Facebook likes it when users post links to outside content, and so do the people who “like” your Page. If you’ve ever posted a link before, you will recognize this picture of what you see after entering the URL for your link:

At the top is the title in bold, then a line for the URL, and below that an excerpt from that page. Underneath all of that is the “Say something” line where you can comment about the link.

If you don’t like how the link title and excerpt appear, you can (and should) edit them. Simply mouse-over the excerpt and it will appear with a yellow background, as in the picture. If you click anywhere in the yellow field, the entire field will turn into an editable window. You can then enter a better excerpt or title that will be more interesting for your readers.

Don’t Be Shy About Asking People to Like Your Page and Posts

Once your page is up comes the inevitable question of how to get people to “like” it. If you have hundreds or thousands of friends on Facebook, you can simply use the “Invite Friends” link on the right side of your page. But there are many other great ideas to try, like putting one of Facebook’s excellent social plug-ins on your website, including a link to your Facebook page in your email signature, and sending out a notice to your email list asking people to visit your page.

One great tip from this article is that simply asking people to “like” your wall posts increases the likelihood that they will do so by 216%! This kind of interaction on your page is one of the metrics Facebook uses to determine how popular your page is. The more popular the page, the more visible it will be on the News Feed of your friends and fans. So even if it feels awkward, make a point of asking directly for what you want: more visitors to your page, and more interaction with them once they’re there.

List Your Page as Employer on Your Personal Profile

A shout-out to social media maven Mari Smith for this very simple yet incredibly important tip! You may have a Facebook page for your business, but does your personal profile link to that page as your employer? To find out, go to your profile page and mouse-over the very first link under your name, the employment link. Because this is the first piece of information that friends and visitors to your profile see, you want to make sure if they click the link they will end up on your business Page.

To create that link, go to “Edit Profile” in the upper right hand side of the screen, then click on the Work and Education tab in the left-hand sidebar. For “Employer” start typing the name of your business page until the full name shows up. Then fill in the rest of the information, and voilà! Your Facebook page will have top billing on your personal profile, as it should.

There are many more great ways to expand the reach of your page, as Facebook rolls out more features and functionality for business users. In the meantime, take advantage of these tips and make the most of your professional presence on Facebook!

A version of this article was published at Creative Content Coaching. Subscribe to the CCC blog on Kindle.

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India has highest number of Gmail users

Many Indian government departments tend to use Google’s free Gmail accounts and its security agencies have demanded access to Gmail user data in the country. This makes sense. After all, India has the highest percentage of Gmail users in the world, more than twice the figure for even the United

States.

According to data from the Reston, Virginia-based digital marketing intelligence firm Comscore, Gmail’s market penetration in India stands at 62%, the highest in the world, far above the second ranked Brazil, which is at 41%. The corresponding figure for the US is 29%.

Andrew Lipsman, Comscore’s vice-pesident for Industry Analysis, said, “Penetration is defined as the percentage of total home and work Internet users who engage in a particular behaviour. I am not surprised that India is the leader for Gmail penetration given the market’s general affinity for Google-branded products and services.”

Gmail is obviously the number one webmail provider in India, and is at number two in the US. According to Lipsman, “Global Gmail usage is up 32% in the past year. It is up 24% in the US, 91% in Brazil and 16% in India.”

The popularity of Gmail in India could also have been a factor behind the early success in India of Google’s social networking initiative, Google+, as Google’s tussle with Facebook for dominance of the Indian market, one of the hottest globally, continues.

According to Comscore, while the US accounted for nearly 5.3 million of Google+’s audience since its late June launch, India is ranked a “strong” second with about 2.8 million visitors.

It’s also indicative of how the Indian market is evolving. In mid-2010, the social networking platform with the largest user base in India was Orkut, with 19.7 million.

At that time, Facebook trailed Orkut by over one million users. By the end of June this year, Facebook’s usage had jumped to 34.5 million with Orkut dropping to 13.4 million, going by Comscore statistics.

Orkut, of course, is the original Google social media platform, predating even the failed Google Buzz network. Google did not comment on its plans for Google+ in India.

However, a spokesperson said, “We’re committed to making the web more people-centric, and we’ve been gradually giving people new ways to share things and interact within our products.”

Facebook didn’t comment on Google+’s early success in India, saying that it was “hard to comment” on the issue since Google+ had a “very different, invite-only model”.

But Facebook’s Global Communications Manager Kumiko Hidaka stressed the importance of India to the company. She said, “As a global company, we are very focused on every region and India remains very important to us.”

She pointed out that Facebook had opened an operations office in India last year and established a “presence on the ground” there.

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