Hello,

I have a FFan page started and I want to grow the fan base.

What is the url that I send people to request that they sign on? The url I find in my browser is so long that I can't imagine sending that long piece of text.

Do I shorten that with bit.ly or something similar and use that url?

What are some ways to grow the FFan page fan base? I do not want to ask my personal profile friends because I really want to keep my personal separate from my business.

Thank you.

Janine

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New VAs: I personally recommend Become A Virtual Assistant to Get Started!

Hi Janine,

For the URL you can create a redirect on your domain. Something like yourvirtualwizard.com/fanpage. Once you hit 25 fans you can create a custom URL http://facebook.com/username and your fan page URL will not contain the all those extra characters. You can use bit.ly if you want but I would recommend using the redirect on your domain for branding.

Growing your fan numbers:


1 Create a welcome page. Talk about your business, provide links, show your other social networks, maybe an audio or video.
2 Post exclusive content on your fan page. When you do tweet about it so people have to come to your page to read it.
3 Use Twitter. Tweet about content, say come connect with me here too, start discussions on your page and tweet about them to encourage interaction.
4 Do a "hide and seek" Place something on one of your pages within your fan page and when they find it they are taken to a free report or something. People will see all of your pages and the value you have to offer and become a fan. Be careful if you want to do a "contest" http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php
5 Interact, use the discussion board to start conversations. If someone comments on your page respond, ask questions, start discussions.
6 Have the fan page widget on all your internet real estate.
7 You can use facebook ads. These are very customizable so you can target your audience better.
8 At events make sure your business card as your fan page URL on it somewhere so people can find you there.
9 Use applications to improve your page: fbml, bizcards, extending, twitter. There are lots of applications look around and see what will help your fan page

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Erin Stinson
http://premierevirtualoffice.com

It depends on how you want to market your business. Ideally, you would like your Fan page to drive business to you/your website. My recommendation is that you use bit.ly to shorten the URL (although Facebook typically shortens it for you and I'm puzzled why they didn't this time). The following are some items you might keep in mind as you market your business, as well:

Create a LinkedIn page for your business. You can link to both Facebook and Twitter at LinkedIn, and since the objective for LinkedIn is professional as opposed to personal networking, more people will find you.

Create a Twitter page for your business. Update it daily (optimum) or weekly (bare minimum) with your current projects, thoughts on the VA industry as a whole, lead generation, anything that is pertinent to you on any given day, and any email marketing you may be doing. People will find you on Twitter, although it would be interesting to search and see if any other VA's have Twitter pages.

Post your Twitter link on your FB fanpage since Twitter will send any update on Twitter to your FB page (reducing the need to post things twice). Link both your FB and Twitter to LinkedIn, so more people can find you.

Erin,

Thank you for your reply.

What do you mean by a redirect? Where is the url shortened in facebook? I've been all through the profile on the fan page and I couldn't find this.

Good ideas there on the fan base growth plan. I've copied the badge to my website some time ago and other areas and have a few fans but not enough to create the url.

I wanted to know what url to use in the meantime until I get the 25 users.

Thanks,
Janine

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New VAs: I personally recommend Become A Virtual Assistant to Get Started!

Hi Janine,

A redirect can be done in a number of ways on your domain. I usually use PHP coding as I find it responds the fastest. Here is a post with a few ways of doing a redirect: http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-redirect-a-webpage.php Let me know if you need help with how to set this up.

When you say "shortened" do you mean the custom URL? I think I am understanding correctly. To get the custom URL when you hit 25 fans go to: http://facebook.com/username and click on the link that says "Set a username for your pages"

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Erin Stinson
http://premierevirtualoffice.com

Hi J&L,

Thanks for the info.

I saw the LI to twitter option in LI. So I use that when the status is a good enough tweet. Since I didn't know my url in my facebook fan page, I don't think I included that in my LI profile. I'll check that one out once I 'get' the url, which has become elusive to me.

I have seen a twitter page idea...which I believe you to mean sort of a squeeze page just for twitter. So in the link area in the twitter profile, are you saying to use the squeeze page domain instead of the website business url where the facebook fan page sign up badge is more prominent? Or are you saying just create another twitter account specifically for twitter with business-only tweets?

There doesn't appear to be a place in fb to post a twitter url. Are you saying that the connection from twitter comes from tweets using the #fb hashtag? Or is there another place in fb to link twitter on a facebook fan page?

One more...is there a way to change the facebook fan page name or is that permanent?

Thank you for your help...this is terrific information.

Janine

Originally Posted by J+L Consulting

It depends on how you want to market your business. Ideally, you would like your Fan page to drive business to you/your website. My recommendation is that you use bit.ly to shorten the URL (although Facebook typically shortens it for you and I'm puzzled why they didn't this time). The following are some items you might keep in mind as you market your business, as well: Create a LinkedIn page for your business. You can link to both Facebook and Twitter at LinkedIn, and since the objective for LinkedIn is professional as opposed to personal networking, more people will find you. Create a Twitter page for your business. Update it daily (optimum) or weekly (bare minimum) with your current projects, thoughts on the VA industry as a whole, lead generation, anything that is pertinent to you on any given day, and any email marketing you may be doing. People will find you on Twitter, although it would be interesting to search and see if any other VA's have Twitter pages. Post your Twitter link on your FB fanpage since Twitter will send any update on Twitter to your FB page (reducing the need to post things twice). Link both your FB and Twitter to LinkedIn, so more people can find you.

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New VAs: I personally recommend Become A Virtual Assistant to Get Started!

Your facebook name is permanent so choose it wisely.

Your Fan page URL is going to be the one you see in the address bar when you go to your fan page. It is LONG!

Until you get your 25 fans you can either do a redirect through your hosting account or you can get the memorable web address app from facebook. Either way is great.

You can also get the twitter app from FB apps and it will automatically update your twitter when you update your FB.

Another option is ping.fm. With Ping you can do all your networks (FB profile and fanpage, twitter, myspace, LinkedIn, etc) at one time. Just make sure that you don't have something hooked in to them that will automatically update them again because then you will have like 3-4 updates of the same thing. Another thing I like about ping is that you can use the email address it gives you to schedule your updates through outlook. One of my clients has a gmail account and so I have to use another tool to schedule theirs.

There are many tools that you can use for your social networks. I would suggest that you look at them and see which you like better. My tools for mine are ping.fm, hootsuite.com (I have all my profiles for twitter in there so I can monitor them all at once), and Lettermelater.com (the tool I use to schedule my clients updates that use only gmail).

If you have questions you can get me on yahoo, if i have confused you.

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Rebecca Thompson
CLR Virtual Connection * fanTABulous fan pages

Hi Rebecca,

The name I chose is long, which is a problem because now I can't change it. Hmmm...

I may need to create another FFan page and redo the name properly. I didn't know that when I set the thing up which was many months ago.

That's why I posted here because I couldn't figure out which url to use in the meantime until I got my 25 fans. The url I can copy from the browser, is as you know, way too long.

Would you suggest I dump the page and redo it with a shorter name?

I did download the twitter app into my fan page but I can't find any settings page to connect fb to twitter. I'm not a fan of the fan page. Ha!

Let me know what you think and I think that should take care of the url problem.

Thanks,
Janine

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New VAs: I personally recommend Become A Virtual Assistant to Get Started!

Janine,
I don't think you need to dump your page and start over. I think what Rebecca is referring to is when you choose your unique URL after you get 25 fans, that you should choose that wisely because you can't change it but it can be shorter than the actual "title" of your fan page.

For linking your FB Fan Page status updates with twitter, go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter. This will give you the option to link your fan page to your Twitter account. If you want to update your FB Fan page from twitter you can use the Selective Twitter Update Application.

If you posted your link here, then we could be come fans and get you to the 25 fan mark fairly quickly. I think we all have a number of other VAs that are fans on each our pages and we tend to comment and share information among each other...which is also good for your fan page.

Plus, we could take a look at it and give you more specific help if you still needed it.

Also, I took a look at your web page, and it isn't the Facebook badge that you want on there (which is what you have now), you want the Facebook Fan Box widget which allows people to click and become a fan right from your website (provided they have a FB account.) You can find this by clicking on "Edit Page" and then off to the right side about midway down, click on Promote With a Fan Box. This will give you the code to put on your site for the Fan Box. To see an example of this, click on the link to my website as I have it on my home page.

Hope this helps.

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Kimberly
Facebook Marketing Magic!