1. Design is key – Anyone can create a Facebook Page, it’s not a difficult task, but there’s more to it than just creating the page. Like a website or banner advert, a corporate identity is important. Hiring an agency to create your visual presence on Facebook is crucial, users on Facebook move incredibly quickly, you want them to see your page and click the LIKE button, not vanish. For this to happen, it needs to be attractive and needs to be designed correctly.
2. Vanity URL – Each Facebook Page has the opportunity to get a vanity URL. What I mean by this is something along the lines of: www.facebook.com/yourbrand, rather than the initial strange www.facebook.com?page=23420398432. Having a vanity URL will increase the chances of your Page being findable in search engines. Please note that a vanity URL can be created by visiting www.facebook.com/username when you’re logged into your account, but you will need 25 fans on your Page before the option is available.
3. About Box – Below your Page’s profile picture is an About Box, this box is highly important in terms of optimization. You should use your primary keywords in this box, but please do take the time to write a neat description and don’t just stuff it with keywords. You’re limited to 250 characters in this box, so be careful.
4. Static FBML – Facebook has an application called Static FBML, which allows you to create multiple tabs on your Facebook Page. What this means is that you can create several tabs with highly unique content. As with websites, content is king, and unique content on your Page will attract search engines. Using Static FBML to create tabs with unique content, YouTube videos and photographs.
5. Info Tab – The info tab on your Page should be considered as your meta data, like on a website. Fill out as much information as possible on this page, be sure to include accurate information and do it as organically as possible. What I mean is, don’t try to stuff keywords onto this page, be natural when filling the fields out.

A great looking Facebook Page, with a good vanity URL and a nice amount of fresh content can lead to far more fans being attracted to your page via the search engines. Attracting fans to your page gives you another audience that you can talk to and hopefully sell your products or services to. I cannot stress how important it is to create a Page properly, if you can’t design or are uncertain about Welcome Tabs, then hire a professional and get it done correctly – An audience of 600 million is no laughing matter.

Facebook’s growth in Africa has exploded, it’s important to realise that Facebook is not all about foreign countries, it’s growing exponentially right here! The Next Web wrote an excellent article on the growth in Africa, you can read it by clicking here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined in dictionaries along these lines: the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. This definition is correct, but it’s hardly easily to understand. I like to define SEO as the process of attracting as much traffic from search engines as possible. I further this definition by explaining that one of the areas covered in SEO is the process of ranking a website as high in the search engines as possible. By “ranking”, what I am referring to is seeing your website as close to the top of the search engine results as possible. Let’s look at an example: Jonny is a plumber who operates in Cape Town, Jonny would like his website to appear right at the top of Google when someone Google’s for “Cape Town plumber” – The process of getting his website to the top is what I mean by “rank”. SEO is not limited to the ranking, this is just part of it and anyone who says SEO is only about that is incredibly wrong. You do not have to rank at the top for certain words to experience the power of SEO – Again, the definition states that SEO “is the process of improving visibility of a website in search engines search results”.

Let me not confuse you, you do need to rank in order to receive traffic to your website, but you don’t need to rank for the specific keywords which you think are best. For example, the words “Cape Town plumber” might be highly competitive, in other words, a large number of sites might be competing to rank for these words and therefore jumping onto the band wagon later than your competitors might mean many months and lots of expense to start ranking higher. So, what you do is target less competitive words, but words which will still lead to attracting traffic to your website through search engines. For example, “Cape Town Rondebosch plumber” might be a lot less competitive and far easier to rank for. “Cape Town plumber” might get searched for more often, but you might only capture a small percentage of this traffic, whereas ranking more easily for “Cape Town Rondebosch plumber” or the likes, you would have a good chance of capturing a larger percentage of traffic, thus evening things out – difference being that “Cape Town Rondebosch plumber” would most likely result in less expense being incurred. The tricky part is knowing which words to choose and that’s when it makes sense to hire an SEO.

SEO is a big topic, it takes years to master the tricks of the trade and because Google updates it algorithms daily, you have to stay on top of the game daily. If you’re serious about getting more traffic to your website and you’ve read a little about SEO and are interested in exploring it, then you’re ready to chat to an SEO.

Here are a 5 quick points to note when trying to hire an SEO:

• Any SEO who guarantee’s ”a page one rank” is lying.
• Any SEO who tells you it will only take a couple months is probably lying too, SEO is a process, it normally takes 6 to 12 months to rank well for words, unless they’re hugely uncompetitive.
• SEO does not involve paying for clicks – that’s Cost Per Click (CPC) or Pay Per Click (PPA) marketing, which falls under Search Engine Marketing (SEM), which is a topic for another day.
• Any SEO will need to thoroughly look at your website before they can tell you anything about SEO for your website.
• Don’t believe an SEO who tells you that you will need to buy links!

I’m going to stop there for now, and hope that you’ve learnt something from this. If you want SEO done on your website and you’d like me to assist you with it, you’re welcome to contact me by using my contact form.

Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn amongst others fall under the topics of Social Networking, Social Media and Social Bookmarking.

Social Networking – A social network service focuses on building and reflecting social network or social relationship among people, e.g., who share interests and/or activities. A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide various ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social Media – Social media is media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). It supports the democratization of knowledge and information, transforming people from content consumers into content producers.

Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Now that we have a better understanding, let’s look at how these services work and how they could integrate with your business. Please bare in mind that I am only scrapping the tip of the iceberg here.

Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service itself costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

In its simplest form, Twitter allows users to send short, 140 character, messages to each other. The special part about Twitter is that it allows you to follow other users, if you are following another user, any 140 character message they send out, you will receive. In a real life scenario – A company such as Woolworths might like to announce specials that they are having, any user that follows Woolworths will see these specials when they are announced. In other words, if you can build up a strong following, you have a very direct target audience to communicate with. Sticking with the example, Woolworths might want to announce a new special and when they do, they could put a link through to more details on their website, thus encouraging more people to visit their site, which potentially leads to greater brand awareness or more sales.

Facebook

Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc.Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.

Facebook does not only offer people the ability to create profiles and update them with photographs and other nonsense, it features two powerful marketing tools know as groups and pages. Groups and Pages work in a very similiar fashion, allowing a business/brand to create a group and communicate information to people who join the group. In much the same way as Woolworths can use Twitter to send out messages to its followers, Woolworths could use a Facebook group or page to gather strong following and market their specials.

Don’t forget to read: 5 Tips for Optimizing your Facebook Page.

Conclusion

You might be thinking to yourself that these things all sound the same, and to be honest, they are quite similiar in terms of person to person communication, the best way to look at it is to compare it to normal marketing ways – By this I mean, take traditional marketing for instance, a business could choose a myriad of different channels to market itself, such as TV, radio, newspaper, etc. At the end of the day, the purpose of using a channel is to sell a good or service, but each channel has a different audience and Social Networks can be seen in the same light.

If you’re interested in these topics, you’re welcome to click the links below and see first hand what these social networks look like:

• Christopher Mills on Twitter – click here
• Christopher Mills on Facebook – click here

With social networking and search engine optimization you stand the chance of shining through amongst the hundreds and thousands of other websites on the Internet. Spending a great deal of money on just a website is no longer sufficient – Ensuring that you spilt your budget for the development and design of a website as well as search engine optimization is what will keep you above your competitors.

Be careful when you decide to get a website, make sure the company you’re looking at using has a good track record. Most agencies claim to understand search engine optimization and social networking, but I have, personally, experienced huge problems with companies which actually have no clue about these topics.

Another thing to look out for is agencies which are too busy to really help you. If you’re unfamiliar with all these fancy terms such as social media, search engine marketing, search engine optimization and so forth, using an agency which is too busy is going to put you in a frustrating position. Having your hand held through the process is what you need, so take the time to explore who you want to use.

The web evolves from day to day, make sure you’re up to date with what’s happening!

~ Christopher

Each of my services has been broken down into exactly what they involve, so please take your time having a look. If you’re interested in previous work that I’ve done, you can see the projects I’ve been involved in on the far right hand side of the page. My clients testimonials page showcases some feedback from clients I’ve worked with.

If you know what you want, please contact me or even if you just have a question, pop me an email. Don’t forget to have a read about what my clients are saying about my work.

Hope to hear from you soon,
Christopher