Brent Sampson: CEO of Book Publishing & Marketing Firm OutskirtsPress.com

Ah, we’ve arrived upon the last posting in this series of posts about designing, coding, and setting a Facebook Welcome page. Wednesday of this week we covered the HTML portion and then yesterday we chose an app from among the many choices and installed it to our Facebook Page.  The final step is setting your Facebook page settings so that the first page that loads is the “Welcome” page rather than the Wall or Newsfeed page.  And you do this simply enough:

1. Make sure you’re logged-in to your Facebook account as the administrator of your page.
2. Click on “Edit Page” in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Along the left-hand menu choices, click on “Manage Permissions”
4. You’ll see a number of fields and settings on the resulting screen. One of them says “Default Landing Tab.”
5. Set the “Default Landing Tab” to “Welcome.”
6. Click “Save Changes.”

That’s it! You know have a welcome page incentivizing people to “like” your Page. Depending upon the strength of your incentive, you’ll watch your friends numbers grow.  Our Facebook friends for Outskirts Press have more than doubled in less than 2 months, from about 2,000 fans at the beginning of December to 4,456 as of today.  When we reach 5000, we’re going to hold a drawing for a free Barnes & Noble NOOK, and in January, all our FB Friends were invited to submit material for our 2nd Annual Facebook Anthology – Fandemonium Volume 2!

See you next time…

Continuing our topic from the past couple of weeks: Now you have your creative content designed for your Facebook welcome page, and you have your HTML code containing all the elements within a 520 pixel wide table.  The next step is adding a Facebook “app” to your page to enter the HTML.

There are several apps that do this. Some companies even create “easy” ways to do this and charge monthly subscription fees for them.  In those cases, you can usually skip the HTML portion that I discussed yesterday, because what those companies are charging for is the ease with which they allow you to do your welcome page.  Time and knowledge is worth money, so there’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing.  But this series of posts is designed to help you do it yourself for free.

The app we use for our Outskirts Press Facebook page is the “Static HTML : iframe tab.”  Installing it to your page is as easy as:

1. Be sure you are logged in to Facebook.
2. Find the Static HTML’s Facebook page by clicking here:
3. Click on the blue ”Add Static HTML to a page” button.
4. Voila, that app has been added to your page.
5. Return to your page on Facebook
6. Click on the “Welcome” link along the left-column menu.

You have to be logged-in as the administrator of your page. If you are, when you click on the “Welcome” link you’ll see two blank fields in which you can enter content. The top field is labeled “Enter your content here” and this is where you cut n paste your HTML code from yesterday — or your own HTML code if you prefer.  The bottom field is labeled [Optional] Fans-only content and this is where you add content that is only visible for people who have “liked” your page.   After you have entered your contet, preview it and save it.

Now, whenever a non-administrator clicks on that Welcome link, they’ll see your brand new Welcome page content.  How, then, do you get new visitors who have not yet “liked” your page to see your Welcome screen first instead of your wall when they come to your page?  That’s the topic of tomorrow’s post…

For the past several weeks I’ve been discussing the steps for creating a landing page, or “welcome page” on Facebook. I’ve broken it down into two parts – the creative component, which I covered last week and the week before, and the technical component, which I’m going to cover this week. The technical component consists of three parts:

1) The HTML formatting of the welcome page. I’ll discuss this today
2) The Facebook app. I’ll discuss that tomorrow
3) Setting Facebook settings so they utilize the app. I’ll discuss that on Friday.

See the previous posting for an idea of what our current Facebook Welcome page looks like for Outskirts Press, or click here to go to our Facebook page and you will see our Welcome page if you haven’t already liked us. That graphic is actually a composite of 6 graphics, put back together again with HTML. The previous postings have explained the reasoning for that. So, here’s the actual HTML:

<table width=”520″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″>   <tr>     <td colspan=”2″><img src=”TOP IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”520″ height=”125″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td width=”75″ rowspan=”4″ valign=”top”><img src=”SIDE IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”75″ height=”350″></td>     <td><img src=”YEAR IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”JAN IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”FEB IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”100″></td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td><img src=”BOTTOM IMAGE HOTLINK” width=”446″ height=”50″></td>   </tr> </table>

You’ll notice two things when looking at this HTML table coding. The first is that the width parameter is set for 520 pixels across. That is the optimal width for a Welcome page graphic for Facebook. Or even if you’re planning on incorporating both text and graphics, and even a form, the entire width of all your content should not exceed 520 pixels.  The Welcome app uses an “iframe” tag, and once the content starts to exceed 520 pixels across, your users may start to see vertical scrolling bars (not optimal or aesthetically pleasing).

The second thing you’ll notice is that the actual image hotlinks have been removed, although I bolded their location so you can easily replace them with your own graphics. The width and height parameters of each graphic remain.  Simply hotlink those images to their location on your company’s server, and Facebook will pull them into the Welcome page as it loads the HTML. Voila! Graphic Facebook Welcome page.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how to add the Facebook app to your profile or company page to make a Welcome page for your HTML…. stay tuned.

Here’s the last part of our first phase of discussing the Facebook Welcome page – the creative component.  Over the last six posts, I have focused on specific elements of our current Facebook Welcome page for our Outskirts Press Facebook page at http://facebook.com/outskirtspress.  The elements were “cut up” to make for faster loading and faster redesign.  Then, within HTML, you put all the elements back together again and when a new visitor comes to our Facebook page they see this:

So beginning next week we’ll talk about exactly what the HTML looks like that forms this graphic, and exactly HOW Facebook visitors come to this welcome page (rather than directly to our wall, for instance) when they enter our Facebook URL into their browser.

But in the meantime, here’s a little known fact.  Did you know it’s not necessary to actually like a company to see their wall content, even if they have a Welcome page like this that is almost implying “Liking” them is a requirement?   If you come across a welcome page like this, and don’t necessarily want to “like” the page, but DO want to see what’s on their wall, you can just navigate to their wall from the left-hand column navigation links. 

To combat that little-known fact,  I’ll also show you how you can specifically create content that ONLY your fans/friends can see.  Stay tuned…

There’s only one main graphic element remaining to be discussed as we talk about the current Outskirt Press Facebook welcome graphic and its creative elements. The creative component is “phase 1″ of a 3-4 week series about how to creatively design a “Facebook Welcome Page” and then how to technically create it within Facebook. We’re almost done with the creative part.  In fact, there’s only one more graphic left. (Well, there are actually two, but the last graphic is just a small element to complete the very bottom part of the vertical banner.). Tomorrow I’ll reveal the whole Facebook welcome graphic in its entirety,  Of course, you’re welcome to cheat by going straight to our Facebook Page and, if you’re not a fan/friend, yet, you’ll see our Welcome page.   

Our Welcome graphic is composed of rolling monthly opportunities, promotions, incentives, or perks. We discussed the general giveaway, concerning the Barnes & Noble NOOK last week, and we discussed January’s event (Fandemonium Volume 2) yesterday.   Our graphic will show two months at a time.  That means, on February 1, the January graphic will go away, February will move “up” and the March monthly event or announcement will drop neatly into place.  One general suggestion to keep in mind when it comes to incentivizing Facebook links is to KEEP giving your friends/fans valuable promotions or content above and beyond whatever prompted them to join in the first place.   Many of our current fans “liked” us on the chances they would win an Amazon Kindle last Christmas.  Only one could win.  So what do you do, as a business, an entrepreneur, a marketer, or an author, to keep those fans from “unliking” you once the giveaway is over?   You keep giving them value.  In our case, we kept the giveaway going, and even upped the stakes for a NOOK, but we also gave them a chance to publish for a free in a Facebook anthology.

And, in February, we’re giving them the chance to win a free Apple iPad2:

We don’t reveal too much more than that in our Facebook Welcome graphic — just enough to whet their appetites and hopefully get them to “like” us, if they haven’t already - or to get those who have already “liked” us to stick around for a couple weeks on Facebook.  By that time, hopefully, they’ll have come to see our value as a book publishing and marketing firm and we’ll have earned their business when they’re ready to publish.

And that, in short, is an example of how you can use Facebook to build relationships with your potential clients/customers, regardless of whether you are a start-up, a corporation, or a published author.

Over the course of last week I started covering the topic of creating an easily-modifiable Facebook Welcome graphic and dividing it into sections. I showed three elements of our current Facebook Welcome graphic. Element one (the top element) contained instructions for “liking” our page (since liking the page is the number one point of a Welcome page graphic).  Directly underneath this top element was a graphic element devoted to our ongoing incentive, this one for a free Barnes & Noble NOOK. And to the left of that element was the third element, a vertical banner holding the graphic “together” aesthetically. That left three remaining graphics, all of which we’ll cover this week.

Outskirts Press is devoted to making 2012 an exciting year for our Facebook friends, and to that end we’re planning on doing a special event, promotion, or announcement in each month of 2012.  So, in addition to incentivizing links and promoting larger giveaways, our Welcome Page is designed to allow us to mention each of those monthly “perks” as they come up.  So, naturally, the next graphic we needed for our Welcome graphic was for January.

Last January, we solicited poems and short stories from our Facebook fans to compile into a Facebook anthology that we called Fandemonium (our fans voted on the title).  The royalties go to The American Red Cross. The anthology was such a big success that this year we decided to do it again, so the focus of our “January” portion of our Facebook Welcome graphic is devoted toward mentioning this opportunity:

So, after seeing how the HTML tables for the Welcome graphic look in the previous posting, you can see how and where this graphic element plays a part in the entire image.

All last week, after announcing the upcoming anthology in more detail on our blog, we started receiving submissions to our wall for Fandemonium Volume 2.  We opened up the submissions for one week, ending Sunday night.  Not surprisingly, since we have nearly 10 times as many friends on Facebook this year, we received way more submissions, too. Now that the submissions are closed, the manuscript is being compiled from among all the submissions and we’ll continue to keep our Facebook community up-to-date. The Anthology is a fun, fast, free way that writers who are new to Outskirts Press can experience the thrill of seeing their work in a professionally-produced publication for sale throughout the Internet and available for order just about anywhere that sells books.

We don’t “do” this anthology to make money (after all, even the royalties go to The American Red Cross, which is the charity our Facebook community voted for with Fandemonium Volume 1).  But, from a business perspective, it is an effective marketing exercise to build relationship with new authors.  So if you’re able to create some excitement for Facebook friends, give to a worthy charity, AND market your business in a way that has a positive ROI, what’s the downside? Not much.  And perhaps that’s why we’re doing a second one.   Thank you to everyone who contributed!

And tomorrow we’ll talk about what we have coming in February and how that fits in to our Facebook Welcome Graphic…

Over the past week I’ve displayed two graphic elements of our new Facebook Welcome page for 2012, which incentivizes “likes” for our Outskirts Press Facebook page.  We’ve talked about the advantages of “cutting” up the welcome graphic, not only for speed of loading, but also for the efficiency with which it allows you to update elements.  This was particularly important for us, since we plan on updating the Welcome graphic every month with new monthly opportunities, perks, and events.  In fact, the top-most element of our Welcome page (the one that actually asks for the “like”) outlines those benefits:

Now, the trick to making such a graphic not LOOK like a graphic that is horizontally cut up for efficient marketing purposes is to put a vertical element into the design.  You can see the start of that element in the graphic above, that curved gold… “thing.”   Here’s the rest of that element, which runs down the side of the whole Welcome graphic:

And now the pieces are starting to fall into place. Let’s see what we have so far when we put these three elements (including the first one I showed on Tuesday) together in HTML. I’ll talk about how to do that when we get into the next portion of this series, the technicalities of creating a Welcome Page, but for the sake of this post, I’ll show the HTML tables so you can start to see how the elements fit together into a cohesive whole:

In this fashion you can also see the three blank table cells that still require graphics. And we’ll discuss those next week, which really bring the plans for our Outskirts Press efforts on Facebook into sharper focus.

How did Outskirts Press increase its Facebook friends by 40% in one month? By “incentivizing links” and using a “Facebook Welcome page” to promote that incentive. In our case, we encouraged visitors to our Facebook page to “like” us for an opportunity to win either a free Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble NOOK, or Apple iPad 2. The more “likes” we received by Christmas, the better the prize.   We unlocked the first tier (Kindle), but not the second.  So with the start of 2012 we knew we wanted to continue the opportunity for our Facebook friends to still win that free Barnes & Noble NOOK.  Therefore, that opportunity became an element of our new welcome page that we unveiled on Facebook on January 1st.

On it’s own, this graphic doesn’t look very impressive.  But don’t worry, I’ll show you the whole thing soon; or you can cheat and look at our Facebook Welcome page now to see how this element plays its role in the Facebook Welcome page as a whole.

By designing this welcome page graphic in “pieces” we are easily able to swap out elements without having to redesign the entire graphic each time. This is particularly efficient (and cost effective) when using rolling monthly promotions and events like we plan to do in 2012.  When January ends and February begins, we won’t have to create a whole new graphic. Instead, we will only have to create a new month.  All this will become clear as we continue this series next time, and more of the pieces fall into place… stay tuned.

In this previous post about automating social media content, particularly as it applies to the new Google + pages for business, I indicated that I “requested” such automation from HootSuite and I would keep you posted.   The short version is, it’s not widely available yet. Here’s the email I received from HootSuite in response to my request. I think I mentioned that I fully expected to get some sort of sales pitch, which I did, although a subtle one referring to their Pro Plan along with a promotion code for their University isn’t evasive at all. Thumbs up, Hootsuite.

Hello Brent,

Recently you applied for access to Google+ Pages in the HootSuite dashboard. We want to thank you for taking the time to fill out our form and appreciate your patience as we roll out this new tool.

As this is a limited release, access is limited to HootSuite Enterprise clients at this time. However, we look forward to expanding the offering in the near future.

In the meanwhile, we’ve prepared a special coupon to say “Thanks” – Please redeem this coupon for a free month of HootSuite University, our professional certification program to help you learn advanced tips and techniques for using social media in general, and HootSuite specifically.

Coupon: HOOTLEARNGPLUS

Not a HootSuite Pro user yet? Visit HootSuite.com and sign up for a 30-day free trial of HootSuite Pro featuring unlimited social network profiles and much more.

If you’d like to learn more about HootSuite Enterprise, we encourage you to request a demo to learn how our leading security, team workflow and engagement tools can help your business.

Also, we appreciate your feature requests and encourage you to contribute your ideas to the feedback forum.

With Thanks,

The HootSuite Team

I know I promised to talk about how to create a Facebook landing page, and I will, although that topic will probably have to wait until January. Because tomorrow’s posting is going to be a follow-up to the recent posting regarding Hootsuite and Google + pages for business and then for the next two weeks I’m going to do a series about the funniest contractual clauses I’ve read in other self-publishing agreements. Seemed like a good Christmas series of postings…

But, speaking of Christmas and of the Facebook landing pages topic that I’m pushing to January, I thought I would at least share our current Facebook landing page for Outskirts Press. Hey, you too can be eligible to win an Amazon Kindle, and perhaps even a Barnes & Noble Nook or an iPad 2.  Here’s what our landing page looks like (well, without the actual “Like” button, which is where Facebook comes in when you visit our page.)