When Facebook announced the Fan pages, there were a number of mixed reviews.  Some were hailing it and its integration to the new advertising platform and some hated it – claiming it was turning Facebook into Myspace.  Whatever your stance is, here are 6 reasons you need to make a Facebook page for your website or company now.

Business Pages Are Indexed by Google – Most of Facebook is behind a login, preventing search engines from indexing.  However, Business pages are not behind a login and thus search engines can index the page.  Hopefully, people will stumble on the result in SERPs, visit the Facebook page, and then get to your site via a link .

Business Pages Include Links – Because the pages are public, you can get some nice facebook.com link credit back to your website.   

You Can Send Updates to “Friends” -  One of the greatest features is that you can send “updates” to friends/fans whenever you want.  It’s a nice way of building a database of interested users.  Send messages about new products, updated website, etc.

You Control the Page & Your Message -  You are able to send the messages, edit or remove sections, and control the information to an extent.

Facebook Is A News Feed - When a someone joins a Business page, it’s published in their News feed for all their friends to read.  It makes someone joining your Business page somewhat viral.

Facebook Places Is A New Platform for Small Business! – What makes Places so important is not so much the functionality (which appears to be largely lifted from existing players), but rather the fact that it’s being launched by Facebook. With over 500 million users, who are automatically opted in to the new feature, it may well be Facebook that pushes geolocation into the mainstream.  It’s another channel for word of mouth promotion that you want to be in on from the start!

By:  Sandy Mullis

CCP Web Design

Lead Designer

I have been experimenting with different Facebook Ads over the past few weeks.  Thought I would share some of my successes as well as failures.

Basic Formating:
Facebook Ads only allow 25 characters in the title, 135 characters in the body text and the ads may not be larger than 110 x 80 pixels.

Tips:

• As I suspected the ads that have smiling faces in the graphic work better.  Something about people smiling at us that makes us want to click!
• Casual ads with coupons or other offers are working better than serious business ads. 
• Ads with white backgrounds are clicked on more often than complex backgrounds.

Look for more tips in a few weeks!

Thanks as always for reading.

Libby Lucas

www.ccpwebdesign.com

Apple on Wednesday waded into the social-networking sphere with the introduction of Ping, a service with iTunes that chief executive Steve Jobs called “social music discovery.”

The service is part of iTunes 10, which Apple released today.

Ping is like Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes, Jobs said at a San Francisco press event. It’s a “social network all about music and built right into iTunes,” he said. It centers around a newsfeed of what your friends are listening to and watching through iTunes. It provides custom song and album charts, as well as 17,000+ concert listings and, of course, deep integration with the full library of iTunes content. Users can follow their favorite artists publicly or create their own, private profiles, much like Facebook. Users can set up a “circle of friends” and share information only with those people. ITunes will then display top 10 charts that reflect what friends are downloading.

It’s available on the computer, the iPhone, and the iPod touch.

“Get as private and public as you want,” Jobs said. “Privacy is super simple – anyone can do it.”

Ping also includes 17,000 concert listings.

It will be open to 160 million users in 23 countries immediately.

Amir Efrati of the Wall Street Journal released an article regarding the new “Google Real Time Search” service.  He explained how the new product would pull information from blogs, facebook, twitter and other real-time posting resources.  It’s a good article.  Click here to read it if you get the chance.

The morsel of information that I found interesting is this new search engine will offer yet another way to sell ads.  Google will more than likely offer a way to sell “ad links” on the search page or possibly within the search results themselves. 

Uh Oh!  Stop right there … It’s the “possibly within the search results themselves” that is the attention getter!  From the moment ET ate Reese’s Pieces , product placement skillfully incorporation into our media has been the preferred ad delivery method.   

Google’s motto is “Do No Evil”.   So is this good or evil?  Answer:  Both. 
It’s up to you, the individual. 

I would imagine that many of you are on the uncomfortable fence post with me.  It’s evil when you are trying to find a reliable piece of information that has not been tainted by an advertising/seo specialist but it’s great if you are the one selling a product.  Either way, you might as well learn the process and get ahead of the curve because one thing remains true … the trend always follows the money!