Posts tagged as:

Social network

Increasing Engagement On Facebook

by Tim Elliott on May 5, 2009

Like the proverbial shoemaker, I tend to get around to setting up some social services for my company later than I really should. I tend to road-test new services on my wine blog or personal accounts before recommending them to clients. And often it’s weeks or months later before I add them here.

Facebook Page (click to enlarge) Case in point is the Facebook page I just published for Acan Media mostly to demonstrate some cool new tools from a company called Involver. Since Facebook is part of an outpost strategy, my page is setup to aggregate the links I publish on Twitter and my blog posts. Involver has a nice RSS app that takes your blog feed and republishes it to the “News” tab on your Facebook page (I wish they would let you rename this to “Blog” but that might be a future enhancement). Previously I had been recommending the Simplaris Blogcast app which worked about 70% of the time in my experience. The Involver app seems very solid and stable in my early testing here and auto updates on a frequent basis.

What I like most about the Involver toolset is the ability to brand all of them with a banner making your Facebook page an extension of your blog or website. You can check out how this looks on all the Involver apps on my page (currently you have to use the same banner across all apps). But the real value of Involver is the ability for visitors to share your content easier with their Facebook friends and subscribe to your feed or follow you on Twitter.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as Involver has another 7 tools including a coupon app I will be experimenting with in the next few weeks. So if you are looking to increase your visitor engagement on Facebook, give Involver a try. And fan me up, too, when you have a chance ;-)

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Facebook Pages or Groups; Which Should A Winery Choose?

by Tim Elliott on March 6, 2009

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

As a winery engages in conversational marketing one of the first places they setup shop is on Facebook. The social network provides wineries with a destination to foster community and engage customers directly. It also acts as an extension of a permission email campaign making things like events very easy to send to friends of the winery.

But Facebook also presents a winery with a decision of which type of presence, on a Page or a Group. Both offer similar features so it’s probably best to start with what makes them different. Facebook Pages present a winery to anyone on the internet, registered to Facebook or not. It’s content is also indexed into search engines like any other webpage. Facebook Groups, like personal profiles, require the visitor to join before they are able to view the content and participate. This feature alone is enough for many to just choose Pages but Groups also has a major advantage over Pages; bulk invites. This feature allows anyone in the group to pass group invites along to their network of friends giving the winery viral marketing benefits.

Facebook Social AdBut two other features really make Facebook Pages compelling for wineries: visitor metrics and social ads. While Groups only gives the winery a count of membership, Pages goes on step further with page views and other visitor statistics. Additionally, targeted social ads can be launched on Facebook pointing them back to your Page (wine is no longer prohibited in their advertising guidelines).

Therefore I always recommend Facebook Pages over Groups to wineries if they are not doing both. Groups can still be used for hosting forum-like discussions (with wine club members, for example)  while a Page is used to promote the brand generally. But if you are choosing only one, Pages is the best choice.

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Wordpress As A Social Media Platform

by Tim Elliott on January 19, 2009

Wordpress logo

Last week in a meeting with other social media consultants, we talked about how far Wordpress has come in the last year. With a thriving ecosystem of themes and plugins, the open source blogging software has turned into a serious content management system (CMS) but is still relatively easy for anyone with reasonable technical abilities to administer.

We also noted that all the required social media services are supported making Wordpress a great platform for conversational marketing. So I thought I would revive my earlier series on Wordpress over the next few weeks and take a deep dive into exactly how a winery can build their website using this free software. Along the way I’ll build a demo site here giving you a place to kick the tires and decide if this will work for you.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple plugins that I’ve recently implemented on my wine blog that show the potential for Wordpress as a social media platform:

  • Lifestream – Provides a running list of links on your sidebar as you post to various social networks or sharing services.
  • Facebook Connector – Implements Facebook Connect to send blog comments to your Facebook profile and also provide an easy way for your Facebook friends to interact with your blog.

I’ll spend more time in future posts showing exactly how these plugins are configured.

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