32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business Marketing

Facebook’s not just for keeping tabs on friends and filling out quizzes — it can also be used as a highly effective business tool. It’s great for marketing your products, landing gigs and connecting with your customers.

32 ways to use Facebook in your business.

Manage Your Profile

1. Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.
2. Establish a business account if you don’t already have one.
3. Stay out of trouble by reading the Facebook rules regarding business accounts.
4. Install appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile. (Although you should be careful before integrating your Twitter feed into your Faceboook profile, as a stream of tweets can seem overwhelming to your contacts.)
5. Keep any personal parts of your profile private through Settings.
6. Create friends lists such as “Work,” “Family” and “Limited Profile” for finer-grained control over your profile privacy.
7. Post a professional or business casual photos of yourself to reinforce your brand.
8. Limit business contacts’ access to personal photos.
9. Post your newsletter subscription information and archives somewhere in your profile.

Connect and share with others

1. Obtain a Facebook vanity URL so that people can find you easily.
2. Add your Facebok URL to your email signature and any marketing collateral (business cards, etc.) so prospects can learn more about you.
3. Post business updates on your wall. Focus on business activities, such as “Working with ABC Company on web site redesign.”
4. Share useful articles and links to presentation and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility.
5. Combine Facebook with other social media tools like Twitter. For example, when someone asks question on Twitter, you can respond in detail in a blog post and link to it from Facebook.
6. Before traveling, check contacts locations so you can meet with those in the city where you’re heading.
7. Research prospects before meeting or contacting them.
8. Upload your contacts from your email client to find more connections.
9. Use Find Friends for suggestions of other people you may know to expand your network even further.
10. Look for mutual contacts on your contacts’ friends lists.
11. Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.
12. Market your products by posting discounts and package deals.
13. Share survey or research data to gain credibility.
14. Use Facebook Connect to add social networking features to your web site.
15. Suggest Friends to clients and colleagues — by helping them, you establish trust.
16. Buy Facebook ads to target your exact audience.
17. Read up on Facebook Beacon to see if it might be useful for you.

Use Network, Group and Fan Pages

1. Start a group or fan page for product, brand or business. Unless you or your business is already a household name, a group is usually the better choice.
2. Add basic information to the group or fan page such as links to company site, newsletter subscription information and newsletter archives.
3. Post upcoming events including webinars, conferences and other programs where you or someone from your company will be present.
4. Update your group or fan page on a regular basis with helpful information and answers to questions.
5. Join network, industry and alumni groups related to your business.
6. Use search to find groups and fan pages related to your business by industry, location and career.

Business Benefits of Social Media Marketing or Social Media Optimization

Press Release

"Formatting Your Press Release or "Presentation can be just as important as content."

Mixed case
Never write your press release in all UPPER CASE LETTERS. Your release will not be approved my the FPRC editors and it if did, it would be ignored by journalists.

Check your spelling
Errors in spelling and grammar will lower the credibility of your press release

No HTML
Never include HTML or other markup languages (like XHTML or XML) in your press release.

Make sure it is long enough
There is a minimum of 250 words at FPRC, if your press release is shorter than that then it probably isn't newsworthy.

Email addresses
Do not include an e-mail address in the body of the release. Your e-mail address goes only in the "Contact Email" box when you submit your press release. To stop spam, your address will not appear on the site, but rather people will be able to contact you via a special contact link displayed with your press release.

Social Media ROI Success Stories

How To Optimize A Dynamic Website ?

Internet technologies and e-commerce are advanced now and still developing day by day. As a result people prefer to have a dynamic website for their businesses or their online presence. So for some webmasters or new search engine optimizers who have experience in doing SEO for a simple static websites becomes necessary to know also about how to optimize a Dynamic Website?

For successful search engine optimization (SEO) of a dynamic website it is require to have some complex search engine technology and methods that are substantially different and much more sophisticated than the SEO techniques used for ordinary, more conventional "static" web sites.

In this article you can find some useful and important tips for how to optimize a dynamic website but first I would like to describe about what are Dynamic Websites?

Introduction to Dynamic Websites:
Now days often business websites are dynamic means that the web pages are dynamically built pages that allow user interaction and online shopping cart is an example for that.

Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the fly and usually built with a programming language such as ASP, PHP or JAVA. Often Dynamic sites are database-driven means that the site content is stored in a database and the dynamic code "pulls" the content from a database.

Problems in indexing Dynamic URLs:

It is really difficult to get dynamic web sites properly indexed in the major search engines unless they are professionally optimized. Even most search engines claim that they now index the majority of dynamic web sites but still only in some cases and it is limited to a number of URLs.

One of the most important reason behind having problem with dynamic sites to get indexed by major search engines is that Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as a set of infinite number of links.

Now days often dynamic web pages are created "on the fly" with various technologies such as ASP (Active Server Pages), Cold Fusion technology, JSP (Java Server Pages) and so on. Now all these pages are user friendly and works very will for real users actually visiting the web site, but they usually create a mess with most search engine spiders.

The main reason behind it is because all dynamic pages do not even exist until a user actually goes through a query or variable that generates the pages. Often search engine spiders are not programmed to select or choose any of query or variables. In this way, those dynamic pages do not get generated and that is why do not get to be indexed.

One of the main difficulties with search engine spiders are that they cannot read and are not trained to understand any of the dynamic databases of URLs which either contain a query string delimited by a question mark or any other database characters (#&*!%) that refers to as "spider traps." Once a search engine spider falls into any of those traps, it usually spells bad news for that dynamic web site.

As a direct consequence that most search crawlers have significant problems "reading" any level into a typical dynamic database, most of these search engine spiders have been programmed to initially detect and then ignore most dynamic URLs.

How to optimize a dynamic website to get it indexed by major search engines:

1. Using URL Rewriting Tools or Softwares - There are some URL Rewriting Tools and software available on the web that converts a dynamic URL to Static URLs. So it is better to use these tools to convert a dynamic URL of your site to Static URL.

For an example- Exception Digital Enterprise Solutions offers software that helps to change the dynamic URLs to static ones.

In this way, changing a dynamic URL to static one helps it to get easily indexed by search engines.

2. Using CGI/Perl Scripts - Using CGI/Perl scripts is one of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address.

In order to correct this problem, it is needed to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable.

When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable. So, in the above example "?id=586" is assigned a variable, say "X".
The dynamic URL www.xyz.com/abcproduct.asp?id=586

will change to- www.xyz.com/productname/A

through CGI/Perl scripts that can be easily indexed by the search engines.

3. Managing Web Servers-

Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn't installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

ColdFusion - It is needed to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the "?" in a query string is replaced with a '/' and pass the value to the URL.

4. Static Page linked dynamic Pages - Creating a Static Page that linked to an array of dynamic Pages becomes very effective especially in case you are the owner of a small online store. Initially just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages. And optimize this static page for search engine rankings.

Make sure to include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate "alt" tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business. Submit this static page to various major search engines including all the dynamic pages as per the guidelines for search engine submission.

In this way if you are going to optimize a dynamic website then all above tips can help you to successfully optimize your dynamic website and your site will get indexed by major search engines without facing any problem and you have a great chance to take your site among top ranks on major search engines.