Following the post related to how to get the most out of Twitter, here comes the one related to Facebook. We cannot stress enough on how important social media is nowadays, whether we are talking about social networking, bookmarking, micro-blogging and so on. Facebook is not only great for business but also for getting in touch with your prospects, making new friends and sharing your expertise as an authority in the industry you are performing.

1. Market your Facebook page

Once you have a Facebook page, a great step forward would be to add it to as many marketing channels as you can. From email signatures, business cards, even your homepage, all must contain this information in order to get fans that can become further customers.

1. Something new? Share it!

Have you hired someone lately? Have a new discount? Maybe you received a prize or just entered a new partnership? Update your Facebook page as often as you can but try not to make your updates only “advertising-related”.

1. Contests, discounts, deals

One thing is sure: people like spending less money for a product or service, less than they have been used to. Offer discounts and special deals for your fans with regularity. Another brilliant way to become more “like-able” is by creating contests. Use your imagination and launch a socially-engaging contest for your fans, there are literally hundreds of way of doing this. Hint: take a sneak peek on your competition as well…

1. Facebook isn’t just business

Write funny posts, ask questions, answer questions and contribute to the community. Share some insightful tips, communicate with your fans. Not to forget, the first thing a business must do in order to have a good start is to fill all the details, from URL, mission, information and so on.

1. Engage with your readers offline as well

Have fellow readers in your hometown? Know them face to face, post pictures on your page, let them know you are not just an online presence. However, when travelling away from your town see if there are any fans living in those areas and meet them as well, it’s all worth the effort!

The web designers at WebCreationUK have a strong presence on social media channels, check out our Facebook page and let’s have some fun!

As we got used to lately, social networking websites are coming with new and improved features for a better user-experience. On Sunday, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new redesign of profiles, change that is available immediately for all those wishing to upgrade but also will become a permanent auto-change in a short period of time.

Photos, friends and personal information are the main areas where Facebook guys thought about bringing some extra-features. The most important change has been made to the way personal information is displayed, right below the name. From where do you live to relationship status, work information and education information, all these are available from the start with small icons along with each piece of information.

Another change has been made to the way recently tagged photos are displayed, now a row of them being available under the personal information “box”. No reasons to think your privacy is threatened while they are only available to friends, this being an improved way to preview friends’ pictures.

When it comes to friends, two major improvements has been added by Facebook’s tech guys:

-          Search for a friend by name, current city, hometown, school and even interests

-          Friends’ highlighting: this can be used to showcase the most important friends of yours, whether we are talking about family, colleagues or other chaps.

Also, sending messages without leaving a friend’s profile is a great feature that already became popular amongst Facebook users. Again, these recently changes focus most on personal information and photos, we at WebCreationUK will keep an eye on this story while great changes are to be unveiled in a short time.

Do you want to upgrade your profile? Just go to Facebook.com/about/profile and do it while in a matter of weeks this change will be mandatory for all users.

This is a debate that started a few years ago and seems will last for many years. Many companies/bloggers are still in doubt whether they should concentrate their efforts and budgets on SEO, social media or both. In the end, we all want the same thing: traffic that converts. I mean, it’s of no use having massive amounts of traffic that do not convert, right?

One thing is sure: both methods, if used appropriate, can be tremendous ways for getting the traffic everyone is chasing. But what kind of traffic is the most profitable one, that coming from search engines or that coming from social media? This all depends on the communities you are involved in (for social media) and the keywords you rank for (for SEO).

Let’s start with a simple example related to our industry: when you have traffic coming from the keyword “free web design builder” does it mean something profitable for your business, or it would be more profitable/converting traffic that coming from “affordable website design firm”? You guessed it right, the second one is much more likely to convert into a buyer. Keep in mind, we are talking about the web design industry, if it is to make an example from websites monetising with Adsense, “free web design builder” could also be a money maker.

This does not mean social media traffic does not convert while we get to keep in touch only with targeted people, people that could translate into buyers. However the trend is somehow different nowadays while SEO and social media seem to blend with each algo changes from the search engines. We see Twitter updates in organic search engines from Google and Facebook is already integrated with Bing. We believe there will be 3 major “metrics” people will choose to purchase a product or service: search engine rankings, social media buzz (word of mouth) and reviews.

Whether you are more into Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn than SEO, one thing is sure: your campaign should definitely use all available methods for a better exposure, thus a more profitable online business.

A recent CNN study for how news is shared and consumed revealed that “shared news matters more”, in translation, social media is the most frequent way for sharing news online. The study was conducted on 2,300 people and the results were that 43% from the online news sharing piece is through the way of social media, through popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and MySpace. The other 30% shared through emails, 15% to SMS and 12% to Instant Messaging.

Other interesting results from this study show that 65% of shared content is regarding ongoing stories, 19% for breaking news and 16% is related to “funny” content,  however let’s discuss a little more about the news sharing through social media. Why is this the most used method for news sharing?

A simple and logical answer would be that social media is featured nowadays on almost all online sites. Just think about how can you share a story on Facebook? Click on a “Like” button and the story gets on Facebook in a blink of an eye. For Twitter the same patterns apply. By being accessible on each and any news website and being so easy to share stories through a single click, it’s no wonder why people choose to share news through social media instead of logging in to their email accounts, add the people for sending the news, copy/paste link and so on. Sharing through social media is indeed, a no-hassles way for making news popular nowadays.

As top UK website designers, WebCreationUK is also very familiar with the social media wave so you can easily follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Social bookmarking, as defined, is a method of saving and sharing favourite websites or just posts of a website to another site that anyone online can access, view and vote. Voting is the most important aspect while as the number of votes increases the more chances of hitting “most popular bookmarks” page which translates into a flood of traffic which can result in short term viewers or can become regular readers.

Social bookmarking is associated with viral marketing or link baiting and in a way it’s almost the same thing: a link is shared, the story becomes popular getting more and more votes, the word is spreading and it can become a fantastic way of marketing a site. From traffic perspective, this is extraordinary, but how important is this for search engine optimisation?

Although lately many bookmarking sites have changed their policy into adding nofollow to outbound links, whenever an article or site is bookmarked that very website gets a link from an authority and popular site. This might seem as a great way of link building but as other great methods can have a negative aspects, this should not be over-used as well, as spamming it.

Another positive aspect of social bookmarking sites is that bookmarking definitely increases the time for search engines to index in a new page or a new blog post recently added. Last, but not least, another trick most people seem to forget is using tags when bookmarking a website while tags might help the targeted keywords to rank higher.

Although one should not create an entire SEO campaign based on this method, it would be best to include it in the “to-do list” for promoting a website and ranking it as high as possible in the end.

Or better, allow the experts in web design at WebCreationUK to apply their advanced SEO programme and skyrocket your website to the top.

Employees and social media use is a hot topic for many companies. While some companies have banned staff from using social media in work time, others have wholeheartedly embraced it. To help you to make up your mind about social media, here are some top tips from a couple of experts.

The first top 10 list for employers comes from Megan C. Winter of law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP:

1.  Get familiar with Facebook, LinkedIn or other sites that are popular with your employees.
2. Update current company policies.
3. Consider whether your company environment needs a specific social media policy.
4. Prohibit use of the employee’s company e-mail address.
5. Discourage your managers from “friending” their subordinate employees.
6. Immediately get a copy of any post that is the subject of a complaint.
7. Only use social media for employment screening in a consistent way.
8. Warn managers to follow standard policies for recommendations on LinkedIn or other professional sites.
9. Be aware of possible protected, concerted activity.
10. Above all, use common sense.

Meanwhile, on-line social media giant Mashable gives their social media policies:
1. Introduce the purpose of social media
2. Be responsible for what you write
3. Be authentic
4. Consider your audience
5. Exercise good judgment
6. Understand the concept of community
7. Respect copyrights and fair use
8. Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info
9. Bring value
10. Productivity matters.

WebCreationUK can assist you in not only website design but social media. Take a look at our social media package and come speak to us for more information, you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook!