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If your competitor doesn’t have Twitter, or you’ve exhausted what you can learn in 140 character bites, let’s continue by learning how to use Facebook for competitor research. Here are some sneaky (or little known) ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitor’s online marketing strategy.

1. Find out your competitor’s strength on Facebook.

When it comes to competition, the first thing people want to know is if their competitor is using something and how well are they using it.

Facebook offers a simple link.getStats console that will give you basic statistics about any domain’s popularity on Facebook.

For example, if you wanted to check out the popularity of Southwest.com on Facebook, enter southwest.com and click on Call Method to get the following:

This shows the number of likes and shares for their root domain, along with other interesting tidbits of data.

You can also enter the fan page URL in the Test Console of your competitor to get some basic popularity data about their fan page as well.

Note that you’ll need to visit their Facebook fan page and grab the URL directly out of the browser as it won’t return any data for http://www.facebook.com/southwest but will for http://www.facebook.com/Southwest simply because of the capitalization of Southwest.

2. Get the competitor’s raw Facebook data using the Facebook Open Graph.

By using Facebook’s own Graph API, you can view the basic data setup of any Facebook entity.

Let’s say you’re in the process of setting up your fan page. Maybe you’re not sure what category you should place it in or what information you should fill out. By finding your competitor’s fan page and appending their username or fan page ID number to the http://graph.facebook.com/ URL, you can see all their basic details in one shot without even liking their page!

If you put one of my personal favorite restaurant fan page’s username into the URL, for example, you would get the following.

Fan Page URL: http://www.facebook.com/chipotle
Open Graph URL: https://graph.facebook.com/chipotle

For fan page URLs that don’t have a simple custom username, simply put their fan page ID number in place of the username. The fan page ID is the 15 digit number at the end of fan page URLs in this format: http://facebook.com/pages/page-title/123456789012345/.

You can see even more applications of this on the Graph API page. You can use it to grab basic information about events, groups, applications, status messages, photo albums, and much more. Basically, anything that isn’t private can be discovered.

3. Find out what freebies excite and encourage your competitor’s fans to like their page.

One of the best ways to get more likes on Facebook is to offer a freebie in what is known as a reveal tab or fan gate.

Red Bull, for example, found that extreme videos would attract more people into liking their page, and with 21 million fans, they must have been right! If your competitor has a similar tab with content promised to people who like their page and their page has lots of fans, you might want to try this strategy for your own fan page.

4. See what the competitor’s fans love and hate about their brand.

One of the best things about Facebook fan pages is that the majority of information is open and available for public consumption. You generally don’t even have to like the page to find out what people are saying – just go directly to the wall and ignore the welcome tab / reveal tab.

Once you’re there, you may only see updates from the page itself, and that’s not where the gold lies. Just below the photo strip at the top, you will want to select the Top Posts link and then filter with Most Recent. You’ll be able to see posts by the page and posts by fans on the wall in chronological order. Then you can read the updates and find out exactly what fans of your competitor love.

This includes everything about the brand like the products and services they provide as well as everything about their status updates, photos, videos, etc. This can give you a great idea of what you should be doing with your business and your Facebook strategy if you want the same love from fans too!

The flip side to seeing everything a fan loves about the competition is seeing what the fans despise. Surprisingly, a lot of people will like a fan page just to complain about the products and services of the brand who owns the page.

This can give you some key insights into what things your brand can improve upon in hopes that the people who are unsatisfied with your competitor may come check you out instead!

5. Learn how to respond to criticisms.

Whenever you see complaints on the competitor’s fan page, you might want to laugh unless you have been struggling to find better ways to respond to criticism on your own fan page from disgruntled customers. If that is the case, you can learn how your competitors respond to negative posts on their wall.

Having the interaction lumped into one update makes it much easier to follow the conversation from complaint to resolution compared to when a customer and competitor are going back and forth on Twitter.

6. Follow all of your competitors in one place.

Ok, this one isn’t necessarily sneaky, but it helps you organize your sneaky spying. :)

At the bottom of the left sidebar of a fan page (usually beneath the number of people who like the page or the list of pages that the fan page likes), you can find a Subscribe to RSS link.

Using this option, you can then subscribe to all of your competitors fan page status updates in your favorite RSS reader. This means you don’t have to like the page to see what their latest updates are and you don’t have to visit multiple pages regularly to check on their updates.

My preferred choice is Google Reader because you can also easily search the updates using the search feature for particular keywords and you can organize your pages into folders by type.

The only downside of this is you’re only getting the updates by the fan page itself, and not any updates posted by fans. But it’s still a nice way to monitor your competitors’ strategies without having to keep visiting their page routinely.

7. Advertise to your competitor’s fans.

This one is a bit of a dirty trick more than a sneaky trick, but I’ve seen other brands use it to some successful degree, so it felt wrong not to mention it.

Imagine your biggest competitor is having some kind of crisis. For hosting companies, it would be massive server downtime. For automobile makers, it would be major recalls. For a restaurant, it would be an outbreak of food poisoning. This is all stuff you can learn about if you are following your competitors closely via their fan pages as previously mentioned.

Now image you could put an ad right in front of all of their fans that addressed their biggest concern. For hosting companies, it could be an ad that says 99.9% uptime guaranteed. For automobile makers, it could be an ad that says your brand has the least recalls of them all. For a restaurant, it could be an ad that says they have a five star rating!

Well guess what? You can! Facebook Advertising lets you target ads down to specific demographic details.

The best part – you can also target your ad to fans of a competitor’s fan page using Precise Interests!

Once you enter a brand, it will estimate the people you will reach (assuming that you have a country selected). You can even add in multiple brands and competitors for each ad.

Your Sneaky Facebook Strategy

There you have it – seven great ways to use Facebook to learn more about your competitors and their Facebook strategy. How do you use Facebook for competitor research? Please share your thoughts in the comments, and happy spying!

Want to learn more about Facebook marketing for your business?

Be sure to check out the Facebook Success Summit, the web’s largest online Facebook marketing conference.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Using the Facebook Javascript SDK

Some features for the Facebook Like options are only available if you use the XFBML code for the buttons. In order to use XFBML, you must implement Facebook’s JavaScript SDK onto your website. It’s not just an additional line of code, however. You have to have an Application ID to use the JavaScript SDK.

Creating a Facebook Application for Your Website

So let’s look at creating an application on Facebook – it’s easier than you think!

Step 1: Create an App

To create an application for your website, you will want to start on the Create an App page and enter your site’s name, URL, and language.

Click on the Create an App button to continue, and enter the captcha.

Step 2. Copy Your Application Data

On the following screen, you will get your App ID and Secret Key. Be sure to keep this handy as you will need it to implement some of the following Facebook Like code.

You can also get it by visiting your Applications Dashboard at a later date.

Installing the JavaScript SDK on Your Website

Next, you will want to install the JavaScript SDK on your website using the code on the JavaScript SDK page.

There are two versions of the code as shown above – I personally go with the code under Loading the SDK Asynchronously as this option will make sure that, should the Facebook code not be responding, it will not hinder other objects from loading on your page, leading to faster page load times.

You will want to replace the text YOUR APP ID in either version with the App ID you generated earlier. Then place this code between your website’s <HEAD> </HEAD> tags. Depending on your CMS, you may need to place this in your header.php file or similar header template file.

Now that we have the JavaScript SDK covered, let’s move onto Facebook Like buttons.

Installing Facebook Like for Your Website Content

The general consensus is that Facebook Likes may influence search rankings. Whether it is direct, or just one among many other social indicators of good content is still debatable, but search engines nonetheless are taking cues from social signals. Hence, it can’t hurt to increase the likes of your website and its content.

Implementation of the Facebook Like button for your website content is relatively simple. Facebook has an easy to use code generator for the Like button.

Here, you will:

1. Enter the URL you want a Facebook user to like which can be your homepage or an internal page on your site.

2. Decide whether or not you want to use the Send button which allows Facebook users to privately send the URL specified to another user, group, or email address. This option requires you to use the XFBML code along with the JavaScript SDK.

3. Choose between a standard, button, or box count layout – changing the dropdown will show you an example of each.

4. Set the appropriate width.

5. Show the faces of a user’s friends who have also liked the URL specified. This only applies to the standard layout.

6. Set the button to say Like or Recommend. This will change the verbiage on the user’s profile to say that person likes or recommends your URL.

7. Choose a color scheme. Most sites seem to choose the light one.

8. Choose a particular font to match your website.

Once you have all of these settings the way you like them and the Like button appears the way you want it as previewed on the side of the screen, you can hit the Get Code button to get your code.

If you did not want to install the JavaScript SDK and do not need the Send button, then you can use the iFrame code – just insert it where you want the Like button to appear on your page.

If you did install the JavaScript SDK and would like to use the Send button and give users the option to add an additional comment to the post when they like it, use the XFBML version. Again, just insert it where you want the Like button to appear on your page.

I like the option to add a comment, as it allows users to add in their personalized recommendation with the link. Here’s an example with and without a comment on the same link.

A personalized comment makes the recommendation much stronger and likely a user’s friends will click on it!

Installing Facebook Like in a Template

If you want to have the Facebook Like button installed in a theme, such as a single post template file, you will need to modify the code to reflect the changing current page’s permalink. For WordPress, you would need to enter any URL to generate the code, then replace that url in the code with <?php echo rawurlencode(get_permalink()); ?>. For both the iFrame and XFBML Like button code, this is the part you would change:

href=<?php echo rawurlencode(get_permalink()); ?>

If you use a CMS other than WordPress, you will need to figure out what code you need to use to ensure that no matter what page the user is on, that is the one they will like.

Implementation of the Like button can go from blog posts to article content. But it’s not just about website content. What about product pages? Buy.com is a great example of using the Facebook Like button as social proof when you’re about to make a purchase!

Facebook Share – The Facebook Like Alternative

Some sites alternatively use the Facebook Share button instead of the Like button because of the difference in functionality. The Share button will give users the following screen.

This allows users to always have the opportunity to add their own comment to an item they like, change the thumbnail for the post if there are other images on the page, and even change the page title and description before it posts to their wall. The code is also a bit more simple, as it has only one option that works no matter where you place it on templates or directly in the content.

<a name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php">Share</a><script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

This code will simply try to share the URL it is displayed upon.

Installing Facebook Like for Your Fan Page

Now let’s say your next goal is to increase the number of fans for your fan page, and you want to do so directly on your website. Not a problem! You have two different options for allowing users to become a fan of your Facebook page without leaving your site.

The Facebook Like Box

The most popular option for adding information about your Facebook page on your website is the Facebook Like Box. By entering the URL of your Facebook Fan page, you can get the following customize-able box.

Here, you can change the settings for the width and whether to display the faces of people who like the page, latest stream of status updates, and the “Find us on Facebook” header.

Once you have customized your settings, you can click the Get Code button and choose either the iFrame or XFBML code. The functionality between the two is the same.

The Facebook Like Button for Your Fan Page

If you want something a little more subtle, you can use the same Like button as you used for your website content. Just use the URL of your fan page to ensure that any likes will count as fans for your fan page.

One of my favorite implementations of this is Mashable’s subscribe box.

They simply used their fan page’s URL, set the width to 286, left the checkbox for Show faces checked and used the XFBML code. Why the XFBML? Because in this instance, if people are not logged into Facebook, the iframe code would leave a big blank whitespace where the faces of friends who have liked the page would normally be. The XFBML will collapse that space and keep it neat.

This way, people won’t have to wonder what is missing in the whitespace.

Parting Thoughts on Facebook Likes

The Facebook Like button is powerful for bringing social proof to your website content and fans to your fan page, and the beauty is it all can be done without a Facebook user leaving your website. So what do you have to lose? If you aren’t using the Facebook Like button, be sure to start using it today so your visitors, fans, and customers can engage with you through their favorite social network.

How do you use Facebook Like? Share your strategies and any results you’ve seen in the comments!

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

1. Using Facebook as a Fan Page

This is by far one of the most powerful changes, in my opinion, to fan page functionality. Why? Before this change, there were only a few ways to share your fan page with people who are not a fan of your brand on Facebook. The first was by sharing the page directly with your personal profile’s contacts. The second was by hoping that your page’s fans would share it with their contacts. And the third was by spending money with Facebook advertising.

Now, with the option to use Facebook as your page, you can do something that reaches out to Facebook users in your targeted audience for free. Here are easy steps on how to get your brand in front of a larger Facebook audience.

How to Use Facebook as Your Page

You must be an admin of the page you want to market before going any further – if you aren’t, then become a fan of the page and ask another admin of the page to add you as administrator.

Step 1. When logged into your personal profile, go under the Account menu and select Use Facebook as Page.

Step 2. Choose the page you want to participate as on Facebook and Switch.

Step 3. Find fan pages that have the same target audience as your brand and Like. For example, if you’re brand sells handmade dog collars online, then your target audience is probably also a fan of PetSmart, Petco, the Westminster Dog Show, and other similar pages.

Step 4. Start interacting on those pages just like you would do with your personal profile in terms of liking and commenting on new wall posts by the page or by the fans of the page. Instead of being linked to your personal profile, your activity will be linked to your fan page. This means if you provide useful, valuable comments, you will be seen as an authority and fans of that page might become a fan of yours as well.

Using Facebook as your fan page will help you get more exposure for your brand’s Facebook page, leading to more likes and engagement with your targeted audience.

2. Featured Likes

Speaking of Likes, did you know your fan page can now display five favorite likes of its own? Southwest’s fan page is a great example of using this feature to market related brands of subsidiaries of your brand.

You can also feature the fan pages of your partners, and connect with them in hopes that they will feature you on their page as well. Here’s how to do it!

Setting Your Fan Page’s Featured Likes

Step 1. Using Facebook as your fan page (as detailed in the previous section), be sure to like the pages you want to select as Featured Likes first.

Step 2. Go to your Facebook fan page and click the Edit Page button.

Step 3. Find the Featured settings and click on Edit Featured Likes.

Step 4. Check the box next to the five fan pages you want displayed in your Featured Likes section.

Unfortunately, there is not a way to see who has set your page as a featured like yet. But as you can imagine, this feature will probably lead to more likes from other fan pages, or likes for your subsidiary pages from your main page.

3. Top Five Profile Photos

The new top strip of five profile photos is a great way to display the best of your brand. It can be used in a variety of ways, such as:

• A vendor displaying their latest products.
• A corporation showing off the well-recognized faces of the brand.
• A freelancer giving a quick presentation of their latest designs.

Selecting the Top Five Photos

These top photos are automatically chosen from your fan page’s default photo album. Here’s how to make sure the right images that best represent your brand show up in the top five above your wall.

Step 1. Go to your Facebook fan page and click on Photos, then the Upload More Photos.

Step 2. Use the Select Photos button to upload photos from your computer to your profile.

Step 3. Create a new album for your uploads.

Step 4. After you enter details about your photos and either publish them (or skip publishing them) to your wall, go to your page’s wall. If you have more than five photos, you can choose which one will be in the top five by simply hovering over unwanted photos and clicking on the X to remove them.

One thing I should warn you about – you may not have full control over your top five photos right now! If you allow people to tag your Facebook fan page in photos, then the latest tagged images will show up in this top five strip on your wall. You can either be vigilant and keep an eye on new photos, removing them as they come along if inappropriate. Alternatively, you can do the following.

Disable Fan Page Photo Tagging

Step 1. Go to your Facebook fan page and click the Edit Page button.

Step 2. Find the Apps, and click on the Go to App link under Photo

Step 3. Adjust your settings for allowing fans to post or tag photos for your page.

If you really want to get creative, you can use the tips in this post about using the Facebook photo viewer as a marketing tool and create a banner like advertisement out of your top five images.

4. Showing Page Owners

Another new option for Facebook fan pages is to show Featured Owners of the page, which shows up under the fan page’s Featured Likes.

Some fan pages may want to keep the page owners / administrator private, but a benefit of making them public in some cases would be if one or more of the page owners would be more easily recognizable than the page’s brand. For example, I usually don’t become a fan of any random blog, but if I saw that it was a well-known blogger behind that fan page, I might be more likely to become a fan.

Setting Featured Page Owners

The following steps will allow you to display your featured page owners.

Step 1. Go to your Facebook fan page and click the Edit Page button.

Step 2. Find the Featured settings and click on Edit Featured Page Owners.

Step 3. Check the box next to the page owners you want displayed, similar to what you do with the Featured Likes.

The one thing you should keep in mind is that this is essentially linking the page owner’s personal profiles on the fan page. You will want to be sure that each page owner agrees to having their personal profile displayed prior to publicizing them as owners.

5. Getting in Your Fans News Feeds

While this isn’t as new as the other Facebook fan page changes, this is something important that every page owner should know. People can be a fan of your page and rarely see your page’s updates. This is due to the fact that Facebook “prioritizes” a user’s news feed with the people / pages they interact with the most. Therefore, if you want people to see your fan page’s updates, you will need them to engage with your fan page.

It’s almost like the thing with credit – you can’t get credit until you build a good credit history, but you can’t build a good credit history if you don’t have credit. So how do you encourage engagement with your fan page if they possibly aren’t seeing it in their news feed?

Encouraging Fan Page Engagement

Here are three easy ways to build up audience engagement on your fan page.

Step 1. Post updates regularly. I would guess that most fan pages should update once a day, or at least a few times a week.

Step 2. Ask questions, or ask for opinions on something. People love to answer questions, and this will definitely drum up interactivity between your page and your fans.

Step 3. Cross promote your fan page activity across your other networks. When you ask questions on your Facebook fan page, tweet the question and link to the fan page (if the question is going to be the top item for a while) or link directly to the status update with the question itself. To grab the direct link to a status update, right click on the timestamp for the update and copy the URL.

Step 4. Host regular “events” on your Facebook fan page and cross promote them. Social Media Examiner does a great job of this by having a regular Friday expert question and answer session.

6. Linking to a Fan Page from a Personal Profile

If your fan page’s brand has employees who are willing to promote their employer, here is a way to get them to share the fan page with their connections.

Adding a Fan Page as an Employer

Here are the steps to adding a fan page to a personal profile as an employer, like I have done with the fan page for Vertical Measures.

Step 1. Be sure you have liked the fan page with your personal profile first.

Step 2. Go to your personal profile, click on the Edit Profile link above your top five featured images and navigate to the Education and Work section.

Step 3. If you have your company in your list already, but it isn’t linked to the company’s official fan page, then you will want to click on the X link next to their listing and remove them first.

Step 4. Start typing in the name of your employer in the Where have you worked? box next to Employer. If they appear in the dropdown, then click on their name, but if not, just hit enter to add them. It will usually connect to the fan page if you have liked them. Then continue to fill out your employee details and click Add Job.

Step 5. Go to view your profile and confirm that it has added your employer’s fan page link to the top information.

You can also use this same approach to get the fan page of your website or other favorite fan page listed at the top of your personal profile, using the “position” of blogger, owner, founder, photographer, etc. by using the fan page as the employer.

Also, if you have multiple employers, you will notice only one shows up on the front of your personal profile. This is usually the one with the most recent start date that is also checked as a place you currently work. Therefore, if you are trying to get one in particular up there, you will have to make your start date for that one more recent that the others.

7. Where Are My Tabs?

The last thing I’d like to talk about, since it is something that people have gotten pretty used to, is the movement of the custom tabs from the top of your fan page to the left side menu, underneath your fan page’s profile picture.

So how do you promote these items now that they have moved from the top of the fold?

Promoting Custom Fan Page Content

Step 1. If you had a lot of custom tabs, you can prioritize them by clicking on the Edit link below them, and then dragging the ones you prefer under the Wall and Info items which cannot be moved.

Step 2. You can still have one tab that shows to anyone who isn’t a fan yet. Go to your Facebook fan page and click the Edit Page button. Under Manage Permissions, choose the tab you would like as the Default Landing Tab.

Step 3. If you want to drive visitors to a specific tab on your fan page, you can link to it directly by clicking on the tab’s link from your fan page and then copying the URL from your browser.

Also, as you may have also heard, Facebook is doing away with FBML, so new custom content on your fan page must be created via iFrames and HTML. The best guide I have seen so far on how to do this step by step is How to Build a Facebook Landing Page with iFrames from SocialMouths. Highly recommended! So if you haven’t created your content yet, or need to update it from FBML, this is your guide!

Additional Resources for the New Facebook Fan Pages

Want to learn more about the new Facebook fan pages, or Facebook marketing in general? Here are some additional resources to check out.

• Essential Guide to Facebook Page Upgrades and Changes
• 15 Frequently Asked Questions About Facebook Pages
• Free Facebook Marketing Webinar (registration required)
• 8 New Facebook Page Changes You Need to Know
• 4 Facebook E-Commerce Tips for Brands
• Facebook Social Plugins for Your Website
• Facebook Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

Your New Facebook Fan Page Strategy

I hope you got some great ideas in this post! Please feel free to share additional marketing ideas and strategies you have seen results from after the latest Facebook updates in the comments below!

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

Above: Portion of the Multiple Identities infographic provided by Gigya, a leading provider of social plugins.

It makes sense that website owners would want to take advantage of the power of Facebook on their own sites, especially since Facebook is the most used identity when it comes to people signing into sites, as shown in the infographic above.

The best part is that Facebook offers several social plugins that you can implement onto virtually any website, some with very little coding knowledge required. Let’s look at these plugins, and the reason why you would want to have a few of them on your site.

Like Button

The Like Button is probably the most well known and recognized of the Facebook social plugins. Like buttons can be placed on any page of your website and can be targeted to like the page that the button is on, or a URL that you specify. For example, you can have a Like button on every page of your site that, when clicked, will create a Like to your homepage.

To get the code for the Like Button, simply visit the developer’s page, enter the URL you want visitors to like and then customize the other features such as layout style, showing faces of people who have liked it, width, wording (Like or Recommend), font, and color then get the code.

If you want to incorporate the Like Button on a WordPress theme (say in your single post templates to work with each of your posts), you can use the following code in place of the URL:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo rawurlencode(get_permalink()); ?>&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=100&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light&height=21" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:100px; height:21px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

This will dynamically put the current page’s permalink in place of the URL for the Like, as used in the blog posts here at Kissmetrics!

The benefit of using the Like Button? It is great social proof when people come to a page or domain to see a large number who have liked it. Also, when people like or recommend your page, it shows up on their personal profile…

…to be shared in their news feed with all of their friends.

The visitor benefit – it’s easy to use. One click and they have shown their support. For your website – it makes it easy for visitors to promote you to their friends as well as increase the social support count. A win-win situation!

Activity Feed

The Activity Feed shows all of the recent activity on a website to anyone, whether or not they are logged into Facebook. The Activity Feed box will start with activity on a website by a user’s friends (if they are logged in), and also can show the number of times certain content on the website has been recommended.

This will help guide logged in Facebook users to the items that their friends have liked as well as the top items that others like. To add the Activity Feed box, visit the documentation page, enter your website’s domain, and customize options such as the size, header, colors, and font. Then check whether you want to show recommendations (which I would recommend) and get the code to place on your website.

Recommendations

Similar to the Activity Feed’s show recommendations option, the Recommendations plugin shows the recent top content and the number of times that content has been liked to users whether or not they are logged into Facebook. If the user is logged into Facebook, they will see any friends who have liked content on the site.

This will make it easy for you to highlight the top content on your site for new visitors to find. To implement Recommendations, visit the documentation page, enter your website’s domain, customize the design options, and get the code to place on your website.

Like Box

The Like Box allows website owners who have Facebook fan pages to see how many users are fans of their page on Facebook, see recent Facebook fan page posts, and like the fan page directly from their website.

To place a Like Box for your website’s fan page on your website, visit the documentation page, enter your fan page URL, customize the design options, and get the code to place on your website.

Comments

The Comments plugin allows you to incorporate Facebook comments onto any part of your website.

This can be a great way for a static website to incorporate comments onto a feedback or other interactive page on their website. Why use Facebook comments? Some users will prefer to simply comment with Facebook because they won’t have to fill out any other information or register.

Users also have the option to publish the comment to their profile, which will include their comment plus a link to the page they are commenting upon. This is a great way to expose your page to a Facebook user’s friends through their news feed.

The catch with the Comments plugin is that you have to take an additional step beyond just getting the code from the plugin’s documentation page. First, you must register your website as an application with Facebook by creating an application. You will start by entering the App Name as your website or company name and agree to the Facebook terms and conditions.

After a captcha, you will then enter details about your application / website. The main essentials are entering your website’s privacy policy and terms of condition URL’s.

Also, be sure to enter your website URL and domain so that Facebook knows to authenticate on the correct domain.

Once you have your application setup, you may need to wait a day or two to start using it.

To implement Comments on a web page on your site, head over to the Comments’ documentation page, customize the settings and get the code. After that, go to the Developer’s App and copy your App ID. Replace that number with the APP_ID in the Comments code. Then paste the code onto the page of your site you want to have Facebook comments.

Login Button

The Login Button allows users to connect to your site through their Facebook accounts. This social plugin can be implemented simply to show how many people connect to your site, or using more complex aspects of your website application (the same one you create for the Comment plugin above) to pull in user information such as email, location, interests and more, or even publish information from your website application to the user’s profile.

This plugin requires you to get more in-depth into authentication and permissions and use of the Javascript SDK, but it can be a powerful way to connect Facebook users to your website. Learn more about the Login Button from the documentation page.

Facepile

The Facepile plugin allows you to show a row of users that have liked your page or connect to your site through the Login Button via the website’s application ID.

While this is a simple way to show how many people have liked or connected with your page, it is (in my opinion) not any stronger than the Like Button, and certainly not more powerful than the Activity Feed or Recommendations box.

Live Stream

Last, but not least, the Live Stream plugin allows you to create a real-time chat for users on your website or connected through your website’s application.

This plugin is useful when you are holding an event, such as a webcast, webinar, or online class. I haven’t seen any Live Stream applications in action, but it does sound like a good concept. You can learn how to implement this on your site on the plugin’s documentation page.

Your Thoughts on Facebook Social Plugins

There you have it – a roundup of Facebook plugins for your website. If you haven’t used any of them, you ought to try them out as Facebook is the second most popular website on the Internet.

What social plugins have you tried out on your blog or business website, and what kind of benefits have you seen from using them? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

About the Author: Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, blogger, and social media enthusiast. Her blog Kikolani focuses on blog marketing, including social networking strategies and blogging tips.

As the largest social network in the world, it has more than 500 million active users, half of whom log in on a daily basis. They rack up a total of more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. People share more than 30 billion pieces of content every month, including links, news stories, blog posts, photo albums, and notes.

With numbers like those, ignoring Facebook isn’t really an option anymore for most marketers. The problem is, how are you supposed to use it?

If you’re not an active user, it can be confusing. Sure, catching up with old classmates is easy enough, but how do you turn all of those little messages and profiles into actual results?

Well… it’s simpler than you might think. In this post, I’ll show you the basics of how to use Facebook to your advantage. It’s aimed at the beginner who maybe has a personal profile but has done little else, and it’s restricted primarily to marketing on Facebook, not with all the FB social add-ons recently released.

Let’s get started.

Who’s On Facebook?

Let’s get one common misconception out of the way right off: Facebook is not just for college kids anymore. Sure, it started out that way, as a social network specifically for college students, but Facebook now has millions of members across the demographic spectrum.

The largest segment of Facebook users fall into the 35-54 age range, while the fastest-growing segment is over 55. So regardless of how old your target market is, Facebook can be a great way to reach them.

How Can You Market on Facebook?

Facebook has three tools that can be used by anyone. Each of these options has its own purpose, and can be combined for greater reach.

Pages

Facebook pages are similar to profiles, but for businesses, organizations and public figures.

While profiles require a mutual relationship between friends, pages can be liked by anyone, without a requirement for the page creator to accept a fan. They also don’t have the same restriction on the number of friends/fans they can have, unlike profiles (which are limited to 5,000 friends).

Advantages: They’re free and easy to set up.

Disadvantages: Can be hard to get a foothold and build a fan base.

Ads

Facebook offers a fantastic targeted advertising platform. You can create ads targeted at specific geographic areas, age groups, and even things like college major. Facebook also lets users like ads or close ads they don’t like, meaning that Facebook is constantly delivering better-targeted ads to their users.

Advantages: Powerful targeting parameters.

Disadvantages: Can get expensive, depending on your goals.

Groups

Facebook groups are similar to discussion forums but with additional features similar to what pages and profiles have (like a Wall). You can create groups related to your industry or product offerings as a way to reach out to potential customers.

Advantages: Free and high levels of engagement.

Disadvantages: Can be very time consuming.

How to Market with Pages

Facebook pages are the simplest, easiest way to get started marketing with Facebook. They’re free, relatively easy to set up (at least in their basic forms), and incredibly flexible. There’s not much of a downside, either.

Unfortunately, many companies don’t use them to their full potential, or worse, use them badly. These guidelines will prevent you from doing either.

Don’t Ignore Your Info Tab

Think of the info tab on your Facebook page as the equivalent to the “About Us” page on your website. It’s where people go if they want to know who you are and what your company does.

Make sure you put good information here, telling people what you’re company does, why you’re different, and other interesting details. If you can, take the time to write it specifically for your Facebook audience. You can also copy the text from your about page of your website or blog, if you’re in a pinch.

Just remember to keep it friendly and informal. A casual tone usually works best on Facebook.

Create Custom Tabs with FBML

FBML is Facebook’s own, special version of HTML.

You can create FBML tabs that can feature any content you might include in an HTML page, including JavaScript. This can be used for any custom content you want your fans to see. FBML is very similar to HTML, though there are some differences. If you can code a basic HTML page, you can handle a basic FBML tab (the same goes for most web designers). The complete FBML documentation is available here.

Create Landing Pages for Different Users

One thing to use those custom tabs for is creating landing pages for different users.

For instance, you might want a special landing page for people who already like your page that showcases special discounts or offers only available to fans. You might want to show a different landing page to people who aren’t yet fans that showcases why they might want to become a fan.

There are a number of companies who have fantastic landing pages on Facebook:

• Vizio sends you to a sweepstakes tab when you land on their page
• Vitamin Water has a special home tab that gives you some information on why you’d want to like their page as well as product info
• Coach has a page that showcases their products and encourages you to invite friends to like their page
• Starbucks has a tab devoted to their rewards card when you land on their page.

These are all great examples of companies doing more than just sending you to their wall or info tab when you land on their page. Use them for inspiration.

Post Useful Info to Your Wall

What you post to your wall will show up in the news feeds of everyone who has liked your page, just as it does when you post something to your personal profile.

So, make sure what you’re posting is useful to your fans. Don’t post endless updates about the same thing, or post too many updates, clogging the news feeds of your fans.

Here are some ideas for the kinds of things you might want to post to your wall:

• Links to articles related to your company or your industry
• Coupon codes for fans to save on your products
• New product announcements
• Links to online tools your fans might find useful

Again, make sure that your posts are useful. Also, don’t post more than a few times each day unless there’s some special event going on.

Ask Your Fans Questions

Getting your fans involved with your page is a great way to inspire loyalty.

Asking questions in your updates gets people involved, but on their own terms. What you ask depends largely on your product and your niche, but asking open-ended questions usually garners the best responses. Asking opinions on a new product idea or project can also be a good way to convince your fans that your company cares about what they want.

Run Contests

Contests can be a really effective way to not only inspire fan loyalty, but also to get new fans.

One of the best examples of a contest run by a local company via their Facebook page was a superhero face-off run by Vermont’s Barre Army Navy, a military surplus store with a robust online business. The contest was a huge hit and got them a lot of attention.

Here’s how it worked:

There were a certain number of entry slots available, and it was on a first-come, first-served basis. Contestants entered by posting their “superhero name” and abilities to the page’s wall. Entrants were then pitted one-on-one against each other in a series of ten minute heats. During each heat, the entrant who got the highest number of “likes” on their status moved on to the next round. The catch here was that only people who are fans of the page can like the updates.

Of course, what this did was inspire entrants to get their friends to like the page and then like the status update for their entry. The contest ran over a few days, with the final heat running twenty minutes. The prize was some camouflage netting, something that normally costs over $100.

A number of factors came together to make this contest a success:

• It was something different. Many companies run simple sweepstakes or contests where the first to answer a question correctly gets a small prize, but this was intense and much more of a game.
• It got people involved. Entrants needed votes, so they recruited their friends.
• It was active. This wasn’t just a contest where you submitted an entry form and waited. You actually had to do something to have any chance of winning.
• It gave away a valuable prize. Nobody’s going to put that much effort into it for a $10 prize.
• It was drawn out. The fact that the contest ran over multiple days offered more opportunities for people to get involved with the contest and recruit others.
• It was fun. This might be the most important point here. The contest was not only fun, but it got downright hilarious at times.

In exchange for roughly $100 worth of product and a few days time, this page gained hundreds of new fans. That means all those new fans are now getting the updates they post every day. Most people won’t bother un-liking a page after they’ve gone to the trouble to like it, unless you do something they perceive as very negative (like clog up their news feed or spam them).

While this exact format wouldn’t work for every company, it’s an excellent example of how trying something different can be a great way to get more fans for your page and your company. Don’t be afraid to try something a little off-the-wall!

Don’t Spam

Spam is one of the quickest ways to lose fans. If you do nothing but send out promotional blurbs about your company, without ever adding anything of value, then you’re going to have a hard time getting and keeping fans.

Before you send out any update, ask yourself if it is honestly adding value to the conversation. If not, don’t send it.

Study Your Statistics and Results

Facebook offers some really great analytics for pages. Pay attention to them. If you see a big surge in fans (or a drop off), look at what you’ve posted recently and see if you can figure out any trends. Then post more of that kind of content (or less, in the event that you’re losing fans).

Targeted Advertising

Because it gathers so much demographic information about its users, Facebook has one of the best targeted advertising programs online. You can target users based on virtually anything you might find in their profile, as well as track your success with each segment.

Ads can be run on a per-impression or per-click basis. Facebook shows you what bids currently are for ads similar to yours, so you know if your bid is in line with others in your industry. You can also set daily limits so there’s no risk of blowing your budget.

Types of Facebook Ads

There are a number of ad subtypes you can choose from.

You can create ads that direct to your Facebook page, or to a site not on Facebook. You can also create ads to promote a Facebook event, complete with an RSVP link. Ads can be created for FB groups and applications, too.

Users Can Rate Your Ads

Other than the FB event ads, any ad you run on Facebook will include a Like button.

If users click on the “Like” button, it increases the effectiveness of your ad. If your ad is being run for a FB page, then clicking on the “Like” button automatically makes that user a fan of your page, and ads an update to the user’s profile, further promoting your page.

Facebook users can also close ads they don’t like, and then specify why they didn’t like it. It’s valuable information, providing insight into why your ads might not be doing very well.

Powerful Targeting Options

As already mentioned, Facebook has some of the most powerful targeting tools of any online advertising program.

You can target by virtually anything on a user’s profile. You might start with the location, if that’s important. You can specify either city or country, which works particularly well for local businesses. From there, you can choose basic demographics, including relationship status, age, birthday, and likes and interests.

The potential uses are limitless.

Say, for example, that you have a product that’s targeted at baseball fans. You could enter baseball in the Likes & Interests field.

Or maybe you’ve written a book and you’re sure that people who like a certain other book will also like yours. Enter the book’s title under Likes & Interests, and you’ll specifically target those users.

Custom-Tailor Your Ads

The other big advantage to tightly-targeted ads is that you can create different ads for different demographic groups. Better-targeted ads are going to garner better results.

If you’re targeting baseball fans, you might create individual ads for different popular teams. You could have one ad specifically aimed at Red Sox fans, one at Yankees fans, and another at Cubs fans, and then have those ads shown only to people who have indicated their fans of those teams in their Likes & Interests.

Or let’s say you’ve targeted people based on their love of a particular book. You could then mention that book in the ad itself, which is more likely to catch a user’s attention. Create different ads for different books, and then target accordingly.

Groups

Facebook Groups are another great way to foster a community around your company and products. While groups are generally much less commercial than pages, there’s still room for some marketing. The advantage to groups is that they can encourage discussion and participation better than pages in many cases.

Don’t create a group based on your company. Instead, create a group based on the industry or niche your company serves.

Fostering Discussion

The backbone of any successful group is an active discussion tab. Again, this is just like a forum, though less organized than most online forums. Discussions can be started by any group member, and any other member can then comment.

Discussions require some moderation and care. You’ll want to have a clear set of content policies prior to starting your group. Make sure you post those policies where all your members can see them. You’ll also want to moderate the discussion boards to make sure you’re not being overrun by spammers.

Best Practices for Group Messages

Groups also allow you to send bulk messages to all of your members. It works almost exactly like email, allowing you to send members messages similar to newsletters. You can also send messages to highlight certain discussions that members may be interested in.

Just be careful about spam. Although group members aren’t giving you their email address, they’ll still be upset if you send them messages too often, or if everything you send them is nothing but advertisements for your products and services.

Joining Groups

Creating and managing your own group can be time consuming. The alternative is to join groups related closely to your niche, where your customers are also members.

While this is a great strategy for building awareness, there is one big pitfall: many groups have very strict spam policies. If the admins see you posting commercial content, they’ll ban you from the group at worst, or just delete the offending messages at best. In either case, you’ve wasted your time and lost goodwill.

Be sure to check out what the group’s policies are for posting commercial content, and if they’re not displayed, ask an admin. Some allow certain types of commercial posts on their walls. Others have dedicated discussion threads for commercial content. Still others ban it entirely. It’s good manners to abide by the rules of any group you join, so be sure to adhere to whatever policies they’ve set up.

Conclusion

Facebook isn’t just powerful. It’s flexible. No matter what type of company you run, it has enough different marketing options that you can tailor your marketing efforts to fit your company, your budget, and your time constraints.

Yes, it can take some time to get to know of its features, but it’s worth it. Facebook is still growing at a rapid pace, and every day it becomes a more indispensable part of social media marketing.

It’s also important to strike while the iron is hot. For the moment, companies who are savvy about Facebook marketing still enjoy an early adopter advantage. Once more more traditional marketers start transitioning into the space, competition will go up, advertising prices will increase, and users will become much more picky.

If it’s not a current part of your marketing campaign, it should be. Set aside some time to tinker around, start a few test campaigns, and see what happens. Like anything, it takes practice to get good at it.

My advice: get started now.

Get a lot out of this post? Bookmark it on Delicious.

Who else is sick and tired of marketers who view social media as nothing more than a source of free traffic?

You know the type.

• They have dozens of niche blogs, pumping out an endless stream of crap content they pay writers five dollars per post to produce
• They DM us all kinds of lame affiliate offers on Twitter
• They have a gang of buddies who help them push inappropriate content to the front pages of Digg, Delicious, and Reddit

No, they’re not going to destroy social media or anything as dramatic as that, but it’s still pretty ugly. These marketers have become like leeches, bleeding people of trust and contributing nothing in return. And it’s time for it to stop.

So, I decided to take a little time off from our usual marketing tips and write a good old-fashioned open letter (a.k.a. rant), telling them how it is. No, I don’t think it’s going to change the minds of any hardened spammers, but it might open the eyes of a few businesses who don’t know any better.

Let’s get started:

Dear Mr. Marketer:

The Social Web is not your "traffic honey hole."

Yes, we understand you’re just trying to run a business. Yes, we know social media is the biggest marketing opportunity in the history of mankind, and you’re just trying to get your piece of it. Yes, we are aware that social media marketing is endorsed by many top Internet marketers, and they’re making millions off it every day.

But we’d like you to stop, or at least change the way you’re doing it.

We’re not going to give you another self-righteous argument about how you can’t make money with social media. We’re not going to sermonize about the pitfalls of sleazy marketing. We’re not going to tell you you’re ruining opportunities for all of the other marketers out there who are trying to do things the right way.

You’ve probably heard enough of that, and it doesn’t matter anyway.

No, the honest truth is that it’s just a bad business strategy, and eventually you’re going to get burned. Sure, you can make a few quick bucks, but over the long term, trying to manipulate social media to get free traffic for your business just isn’t a sustainable strategy.

Here’s why:

1. Social Media Isn’t about Getting. It’s about Giving.

It’s tempting, I know.

Here you are, struggling to get anyone to pay attention to your product or service, and you hear that Facebook now has 500 million active users, twitter publishes over 2 billion tweets per month, and YouTube gets 2 billion views per day.

You think, "If I could only get a piece of that, my troubles would be over." You’d make a fortune, travel around the world, and enjoy the lifestyle of the New Rich.

So you design a marketing strategy around getting people to opt in to an e-mail campaign, friend you on Facebook, or follow you on Twitter. You dream about getting 5,000 Facebook friends, 10,000 twitter followers, 100,000 e-mail subscribers.

And when it doesn’t work, you wonder what you did wrong.

The answer: you’re trying to "get" with social media, and that’s not what it’s about. It’s about giving, about creating something stunningly awesome people can’t help talk about it, and then putting the tools in place to help them spread the word.

• Instead of jotting down a few thoughts for another quickie blog post, take several days and put together the most comprehensive guide in your niche for an important subject, and then give it away for free
• Instead of just talking about the theory of how to do something, prepare a video case study showing people in-depth examples of exactly how to do it
• Instead of just tweeting a few links to blog posts, set aside several hours each week to help anyone who asks you questions on Twitter, and then go out of your way to help them

In short, do something remarkable. Give people an experience they’ll want to talk about.

2. Social Media Isn’t about Algorithms. It’s about People.

Far too many bright people waste their time trying to figure out Google, Digg, and Twitter algorithms so they can game the system.

Sure, it might work… for a little while. Eventually though, algorithms change, and then your entire business falls apart. So then you have to find another exploit, another way to get around what it was meant to do, so you can resume making money.

It’s not sustainable. Every year, the algorithms get better and better, and it gets harder and harder to game the system.

If you’re smart, you have to ask yourself, "Is it really worth trying?" Why not just use the system the way it was meant to be used?

The purpose of social media is to give people information they want. If you understand the people, then you automatically understand the algorithm:

• Want to get to the front page of Digg? Watch it for a few weeks, get to know what the Digg community likes, and then submit something you know they’ll enjoy.
• Want to go viral on twitter? Browse around popular blogs, look at the posts that get more than 1,000 retweets, and then write content with a similar style, covering a similar topic.
• Want to release a popular product? Use social media to listen to what people want, and then create your product based on their ideas, not yours.

The data is all there, waiting for you to use. All you have to do is listen to people, and then use their feedback to guide your marketing.

3. Social Media Isn’t about Numbers. It’s about Relationships.

RSS subscribers, Twitter followers, Facebook friends — when you’re just getting started, it’s easy to be obsessed with how many you have. You check every day, you brainstorm ways to get more, and you’re envious of people with a higher number.

But you shouldn’t be. Sure, numbers are important, but the real measure of influence with social media is the strength of your relationships.

You can build a following of 10,000 or more people on twitter, just by following everyone related to your subject, and waiting for a percentage of them to follow you back. The problem is, very few of them will remember who you are or actively watch your tweets, so it’s really like you have no one following you at all.

On the other hand, if you actively tweet great links and help people one on one, you may only have an audience of a few thousand, but all of them will know who you are, and all of them will be interested in what you have to say. If you have a new post, they’ll want to read it, and if you release a product, they’ll want to check it out. You’ll drive dramatically more traffic and sales.

And here’s the thing: relationships can’t be automated.

You can use different websites and software to artificially inflate your numbers, giving you lots of subscribers, followers, friends, or whatever, but there’s not a tool to build relationships for you. If you want to have influence online, then you actually have to take the time to talk with people, getting to know them and proving every day that you’re someone worth listening to.

You need to:

• Take the time to answer people’s comments on your blog. They’ll be grateful, and it’ll make them more likely to come back.
• Don’t just tweet about your products and services. Give your opinion on industry trends, tell stories from your business, and let people get to know you. They’re tired of buying from faceless brands.
• Actively listen to your most vocal customers. Follow them on twitter, subscribe to their blogs, comment on their posts, and do your best to keep up a dialog with them. It’ll pay off in positive press, and it’ll also help you build a better product.

Will any of it pay off in more traffic, followers, and subscribers?

Not immediately, no. Stick with it long enough though, and let people see that you’re serious, and it certainly can. You’ll get more retweets, links, comments, bookmarks — everything you could ask for to increase your traffic.

They won’t be doing it because you offered them a gift certificate or some other incentive. They’ll be doing it because they know you, like you, and want you to succeed.

And you know what?

You can’t buy that type of marketing.

Isn’t Doing All of This A Lot of Work?

Sure, but when is effective marketing not a lot of work?

One of the greatest myths about social media is that it’s an "Easy Button" for building a business. All you have to do is start a blog, create a Twitter account, or publish a few videos to YouTube, and you’ll have millions of people beating a path to your door.

But it’s not true. Yes, social media is revolutionary, both in technology and concept, but at its core it’s really about one thing: creating genuine connections with people.

You have to set aside the time to find out what people really want. You have to work at building relationships with both your customers and leaders in your industry. You have to create genuinely awesome experiences for people to talk about, as well as put the tools in place for them to help you spread the word.

Do that, and you’ll have all of the free traffic you can handle.

Don’t, and you’ll be just another annoyance, ignored today and banned tomorrow.

Who do you want to be?

It’s entirely up to you.

Sincerely,

Jon Morrow

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the Editor of KISSmetrics and the Associate Editor of Copyblogger. Get more from him on twitter.

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube — they’re all powerful tools for marketing your business online, and you might be tempted to pursue them all. Before long, you’ll have half a dozen accounts, hundreds of people to respond to on each website, and a sense of dread about what’ll happen to your online reputation if you can’t manage it all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are plenty of things you can do to simplify your social media marketing strategy. Here are eleven of my favorites to get you started:

1. Only Go Where Your Customers Are

There are so many social media channels nowadays that it can be overwhelming just trying to figure out which sites you need to participate on. The simplest solution: focus on the sites where your prospective customers are already congregating.

For most businesses, that’s going to include the two big social media sites of the moment: Facebook and Twitter. Beyond that, though, it will depend largely on the niche you’re targeting. Listen to your customers, and see which ones they talk about most, and then deliberately ignore all the rest.

Not only will it take less time, but you’ll be able to do it better. By limiting the number of sites you’re focusing on, you’ll be able to give each one the attention it deserves, and over the long run, that will pay off with much deeper engagement with your customers.

2. Take Advantage of Available Tools

There are hundreds of tools out there that can help you better manage your social media presence. Most of these let you update all of your accounts from one, meaning you only have to visit one site, rather than half a dozen.

A few tools you might want to check out include:

• Flock, a web browser with built-in social media and blogging tools.
• TweetDeck, a Twitter client that also has support for MySpace and Facebook updates.
• HootSuite, an online Twitter client with support for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace, and others, as well as support for multiple authors and scheduling of updates.
• Ping.fm, an online tool with support for virtually every major social media site and blogging platform.

3. Share the Responsibility

If you look at the successful social media efforts of many companies, both large and small, you’ll see that they don’t just have one person in charge of their social media activities. They have multiple people all chipping in.

Companies like Wired magazine and Etsy use one employee at a time to update their Twitter feeds, rotating that employee on a regular basis. Some companies do it daily, while others rotate on a weekly basis. Either way, everyone gets to disconnect and take a break.

Other companies, such as MediaTemple and Comcast, have several people working at once. Employees may either update one account (often signing their respective updates with initials) or each have accounts that are then associated with their employer (such as ComcastBonnie and ComcastSteve on Twitter, both representatives of Comcast).

4. Enlist Help from the Community

Providing useful, relevant information to your social media friends and followers gets difficult after a while. When you’re immersed in a subject day after day, it all starts to sound the same, and you end up spending more and more time finding content to post.

The simplest fix: ask your community for help.

Let everyone know you’re looking for fresh, interesting content, and then let them send you ideas. You can also follow others who post relevant links and then repost it. No, you won’t be releasing totally original content, but most people won’t care. Chances are, they’re not following the same people you are, so they’ll hear it from you first anyway.

5. Schedule Your Updates

The best social media management tools allow you to schedule updates. This lets you batch your messages so they post regularly throughout the day. Rather than taking five minutes every hour to post an update, you can just take half an hour in the morning or evening to schedule all of your posts for the day.

6. Don’t Follow Everyone Who Follows You

It’s common to feel like you should follow everyone who follows you.

On sites like Facebook, following is a two-way street. You accept a friend request and they automatically see your updates as you see theirs. But on sites like Twitter, users can follow you without any technical requirement to follow them back.

A lot of people think it’s good manners to follow anyone who follows you, and when you only have a few hundred followers, that can make sense. But as your follower numbers grow from a few hundred to a few thousand or more, trying to keep up with all of those people is impossible, so don’t even try. Nothing says you’re obligated to follow them back, and most people won’t be offended if you don’t.

7. Organize Your Friends and Followers

If you just can’t bring yourself not to follow everyone who follows you, then take advantage of the organizational tools out there to filter your feeds.

Use lists on Twitter to categorize those you follow so you can make sure you’re getting the updates from those you care about most. Use friend lists on Facebook, and don’t be afraid to hide updates from certain people who tend to clog up your news feed.

With other sites, use the filtering tools built into some of the social media management apps mentioned above to organize everyone. You can create lists of most and least important people, allowing you to prioritize who you want to watch the most.

8. Stick to a Time Limit

Social media can be addictive.

It’s easy to get lost spending hours on sites like Twitter and Facebook. You find yourself popping over to check your new notifications every ten minutes, interrupting your other work.

The best solution: use a timer. Set it for 15 or 30 minutes, and when the time is up, make yourself logout. Or, if you’re managing multiple accounts, set the timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and then move on to the next account when it dings.

9. Use Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free service from Google that keeps track of everything published to the web and sends you an email about anything containing keywords you specify.

Rather than spending hours looking for new content to post, set up Google alerts for common keywords and topics associated with your niche. You should also set up alerts for your company name and product names so you know what’s being said about you and your products and can respond appropriately.

You can opt to have the information emailed to you as soon as it’s found, or on a daily or weekly basis. For alerts related to your company or products, immediate alerts are probably the best idea so you know as soon as something is said and can address it quickly. For everything else, a daily digest-style alert is more efficient.

10. Scan Instead of Read

Hang around social media long enough, and you become a master at scanning for relevant information. Reading every update that comes your way would take hours, but you can scan all of them in a few minutes, picking out what’s important and what’s not, and then spending your time where it counts.

The simplest strategy is to look for relevant keywords from your company and industry, and then focus on those. Or, if you’re looking for content to send to your friends and followers, most people will put the headline in their update before the link, allowing you to decide whether or not to click it.

In the beginning, it’ll be tough to figure out what’s relevant and what’s not, but give it time. The longer you are active in social media, the better you get at instinctively spotting things that are important. Like everything else, it just takes practice.

11. Measure Your Impact and Adjust Accordingly

Too often we make a plan for how we’re going to use social media in our business and then blindly stick to that plan for months or years, with little review or adjustment. But that leads to a lot of waste. Like with any other marketing channel, you should periodically review your social media marketing strategy and make any necessary adjustments.

For instance, you may find that you’re just not getting the results you expected from Twitter, Facebook, or one of the other social media sites you were targeting. If that’s the case, do your best to figure out if there’s something you’re doing wrong, and if there’s not, then ask yourself if it’s really worth your time to continue.

This simplifies things by streamlining where we’re placing our efforts. If a certain channel just isn’t working for your business, then stop using it. Refocus your energy into the channels that are working for you.

Social media marketing is powerful, yes, but at the end of the day it’s still just another marketing strategy. You expect it to produce results, and if it’s not, then something has to change.

That’s just smart business.

Whether you have already leveraged it or not, here are 41 resources that will help you on your way.

For Beginners

If you aren’t familiar with Facebook Connect, don’t worry because the resources bell should get you on track to becoming an expert. Just be careful though because reading isn’t enough, you have to actually dabble with it if you truly want to understand Facebook Connect.

1. Facebook Connect – Facebook’s page that explains the basics and advantages of Connect.
2. Facebook Connect: how to and why – Robert Scoble breaks down the how and why.
3. Why your website should be using Facebook Connect to attract visitors – a look at the traffic side of Connect.
4. Facebook Connect 5 Things You Wish You Had Known Before You Started – go through this presentation before you start.
5. 10 Great Implementations of Facebook Connect – unqiue examples of companies using it.
6. 10 More Great Implementations of Facebook Connect – more unqiue examples…
7. What ‘Facebook Connect’ Means for Corporate Websites – although this is an older article, it’s still a good read.
8. Why Facebook Connect Matters & Why It Will Win – here’s another old article that’s worth reading.
9. Facebook Connect tutorial – a good tutorial for beginners.
10. Facebook Connect Wizard – 3 easy steps to integration.

Tools for the Average Joe

If you aren’t a developer, don’t worry. You can still install Facebook Connect on your website. Through the following plugins and tutorials, it should be easy as pie. All you need is FTP access to your server.

11. WordPress Plugin – if you want to use it one your blog, this plugin should make life a lot easier.
12. Faux Facebook Connect Plugin Allows Facebook Users to Comment on WPMU Blogs – a must read for WordPress MU users.
13. Facebook Connects with Movable Type – you don’t have to have a WordPress blog to use it.
14. Facebook Connect Plugin for Drupal Launches – and if you don’t have a Movable Type blog, there is hope for you too. ;-)
15. Facebook Connect Plugin Directory – a one stop shop for your plugin needs.
16. HOW TO: Add Facebook Connect to Your Blog in 8 Minutes – if you have a blog and 8 minutes to spare, you should check this out.
17. How to add Facebook Connect to your website using the PHP API – step by step instruction for PHP users.
18. 16 Best Facebook Connect Plugins for Your Blog, Forum, Wiki, or CMS – there are way too many plugins for you to test out.
19. Facebook Connect Magento Module – if you are running Magento, you probably want to buy this module.

iPhone

If you’re into creating iPhone apps, here are some resources that are worth your time. Not only will they teach you how to implement Connect with your iPhone app, but they should also help spur some creativity that will help you create a better app.

20. Facebook Connect Wiki for iPhone – this is a good place to start if you have iPhone apps.
21. iPhone Implementation – here is a quick video of how you can implement it on the iPhone.
22. 5 Great Examples of Facebook Connect on the iPhone – examples of iPhone apps leveraging Facebook Connect.
23. 10 Fantastic iPhone Apps That Use Facebook Connect – 10 more iPhone apps that are worth checking out.
24. Marketing In Code, Part 1: Using Facebook Connect For iPhone To Increase App Visibility/Discoverability – a quick guide to increasing your discoverability.
25. Facebook Connect Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPhone – good news for iPhone developers, Facebook has released a SDK for iPhone that allows you to hook up your native iPhone applications with Facebook Connect and take advantage of the vast facebook userbase.
26. Facebook Connect for iPhone: Great, or Yet Another Privacy Threat? – with new technology comes more privacy issues.
27. Facebook Connect expands beyond iPhone to mobile web – there’s more to the mobile web than just the iPhone.

General News

News, news, and news! You can never get enough of it because the more up-to-date you are, the better you’ll be able to leverage Facebook Connect. Whether it’s old or new, here is some news that you should be familiar with.

28. Facebook Connect Growth and How it Pertains to New Privacy Policy – Brian Solis analyzes their new privacy policy.
29. 60 Million Users a Month – during La Web, Facebook released some data on how many users were using Connect.
30. Connect Sites – here is a list of sites using connect and they are sorted by popularity.
31. Facebook Connect + Facebook Ads = A Social Ad Network – what Facebook maybe doing in the near future.
32. Facebook Connect: One Year Later – over 80,000 websites and applications are using it.
33. Is Facebook Connect good for business? – if you own a business, you should watch this video.
34. Facebook Connect Live Sites – a thorough list of companies using Connect.
35. Facebook Connect: More Important Than SEO? – SEO isn’t the only form of traffic acquisition out there.

Resources For Developers and Designers

Whether you are running into problems or you’re looking for some jazzy buttons for your website, the following resources should help you. Just make sure you take the time and fully utilize the resources below because there are a ton of hidden jems instead them.

36. Connect Forum – if you can’t find answers to your Connect questions, go there.
37. Facebook Connect Login Buttons – button options for your website.
38. How to Setup Facebook Connect for Your Custom Domain – a quick tutorial with pictures.
39. Facebook Connect: A Feature Walkthrough – in you want to learn the ins and outs, here is a feature guide.
40. Facebook Connect Logout – here is how you can add a logout button.
41. Dealing with multiple login systems (Facebook Connect, Google Account, and others) – an easy solution for multiple logins.

Here is the letter that was posted on the Pet Society Forum from the Mayor of Pet Society introducing the competition:

Dear villagers,

As part of our Pet Society holiday season celebrations, I thought it might be fun to create our own greetings cards to celebrate together… but not just any cards, oh no, I’d like YOU to decide how they should look!

Here’s what I had in mind. You draw a fun picture for a greetings card and upload it onto our specially made website. Let’s focus on everything that’s fun about the holiday season — snowball fights, presents, great food… but with a Pet Society twist.

I’d like to be as inclusive as possible so I won’t be able to accept anything which may offend anyone. Oh, and checking through all the entries may take a little while, so please be patient if you don’t see your image right away!

You’ll be able to rate every image you see on the site out of five. The top five images as voted by you by Sunday the 30rd of November will be edited by my art team and made into greetings cards which anyone will be able to buy in our village shops. Can you imagine? Your very own greetings card design in thousands of Pet Society homes!

But that’s not all. The five lucky winners will receive an exclusive Pet Society figurine and 10,000 coins, with 5,000 coins for each of the ten runners up!

Does that sound like fun? Then what are you waiting for, it’s over to you!

Most Sincerely,

Your Mayor

To take part in the competition, you needed to visit the Pet Society Greetings Card Competition website where you could upload cards that you’ve created and you can vote (on a scale from 1 to 10) on cards that others have created. The 5 cards that have the most votes by November 30th will be made available for purchase in the Pet Society village shops and the designers of those cards will receive 10,000 coins that can be used in the game as well as a Pet Society figurine.

Card submissions concluded on Wednesday, November 26th and voting ended November 30th. The winners of the Greetings Card Competition should be announced soon.

While the forum states that they’ve received “…tens of thousands of entries…” that have “…surpassed all of [Pet Society's] expectations,” the website was displaying just over 6,000 cards after submissions had concluded on the 26th. This may have been because they had already started to remove entries as they worked their way down to the top 50 cards, which were then voted on again between the 26th and the 30th in order to narrow it down to the top 5 winners.

This Greetings Card Competition is significant because Playfish has found a way to engage their users and promote their application in an unobtrusive and fun way, while at the same time potentially earning revenue from the sale of these cards through the virtual currency system in Pet Society. Perhaps other applications could benefit from running promotions similar to this. For example, Pieces of Flair or Bumper Sticker could run a competition to see who could design the best piece of flair or the best bumper sticker in a certain category, for a specific event such as a holiday, or for a particular purpose such as getting out the vote during an election year.

This isn’t the only way that Playfish is celebrating the holiday season–in addition to holding the Greetings Card Competition, they’ve also introduced “…all kinds of festive clothes, decorations, furniture and food” into the village shops. During Thanksgiving, for example, Playfish added food items like turkey and pumpkin pie to their village shops. The pumpkin pie became quite a hit as people’s pets “…managed to chomp their way through five million pumpkin pies during Thanksgiving alone!” This is a great way to motivate their users to make purchases–the items are festive and are only available for a limited time. We decorate our homes and eat special foods during the holidays in our everyday lives, why not extend this to our virtual lives as well?

While some other Facebook developers have incorporated holiday themed elements into their applications (YoVille, for example, offers holiday themed attire for a limited time to their users), Playfish is really taking things a step further, not only by incorporating festive items to be purchased in Pet Society, but by holding a competition outside of Facebook while promoting it from within Facebook and offering rewards that are really only useful within the game. This is a fun and unique way to engage their users and promote their application at the same time.