facebook – Page 3 – President of Outskirts Press

Creating a Cover image for Facebook pages

I mentioned in yesterday’s post that these were the 4 “requirements” when creating a new “Cover” image for the Facebook profile pages within the Timeline framework:

It should be at least 399 pixels wide, but 851 pixels wide is better and 315 pixels tall is recommended.
It cannot feature pricing or discount/promotional information.
It cannot contain contact information or website addresses.
It cannot contain call-to-action statements.

When creating your 815 x 315 pixel graphic, there are some other considerations. For one, your avatar is going to appear as an overlay in the lower left hand corner of the graphic, starting approximately 20 pixels from the left edge and 75 pixels from the bottom edge. The box that superimposes over your graphic is 135 pixels wide. So in other words, you shouldn’t put anything important (definitely not any words) in the lower left corner of your graphic, which is defined by a space of at least 160 pixels wide by 90 pixels high. In fact, if at all possible, you should try to “incorporate” this avatar graphic within the design aesthetics of your Cover, in order to give the impression that both elements are a part of the same graphic.

The other area to consider is the upper right hand corner. For users who are not signed-in to their Facebook account (or don’t have one yet, if there are any of those people left), Facebook overlays a “Sign-up box” over your Cover graphic. The simplest thing to do, of course, is to not worry about this (and given the spacing variables that arise, depending upon whether this pop-up box appears on a mobile phone, tablet, or monitor, that’s also perhaps the most realistic option). The second easiest thing to do is refrain from putting any content in this area of your cover graphic. But considering the size of Facebook’s Sign-up Box, that’s a lot of real estate to “give-up” just for those people who aren’t signed in.

A trickier, but ultimately, perhaps, more successful approach, is to design some content to fit within the designated space, so that your cover graphic looks complete both with and without Facebook’s overlay. Trickier still, Facebook’s overlay is somewhat transparent, so you cannot have anything BOLD and BRIGHT under it.

In our first attempt at a cover graphic, we added a testimonial in that space. The graphic (let’s call it our “Survivor graphic” for the sake of identifying it among other graphics) stands on its own when Facebook’s overlay covers our testimonial, and when the overlay is gone, the testimonial supports and further enhances the graphic.

So, given those considerations, and our first opportunity to deal with this new branding opportunity, our first attempt at a cover graphic featured one of our authors holding his book alongside his friend (and subject matter), Benjamin “Coach” Wade from the CBS reality show “Survivor.”

If it helps, below is a graphic representation of the two “trouble spots” I described above, so you can keep them in mind as you design your own compelling cover graphic. The top-right black box is approximately where Facebook overlays their own “Sign-up/log-in graphic” and the bottom-right is where Facebook overlays the “Avatar graphic.”

As we began enhancing other elements of the new Timeline masthead, this Survivor graphic was replaced with something else, and we’ll discuss that next…

facebook

How to create a “Cover” for the new Facebook pages

Now that the new Facebook Pages and its timeline motif have been thrust upon all of us recently (and don’t think you’re exempt if you don’t have a Company page; personal profile pages will be forced into the Timeline on April 15th), we were faced with the task of branding Outskirts Press within the new look.

As you may or may not recall from a Facebook series of posts I wrote a while ago, in which I shared the process of branding your Facebook presence, our Facebook page at Outskirts Press has looked like this for a while:

And then suddenly, it looked like this:

No branding to speak of, really. Fortunately, with the new Facebook timelines, you have the option of creating a “cover” to your Facebook profile page. Here are some rules to keep in mind when designing your own cover (which is just FB’s fancy way of referring to a main graphic).

It should be at least 399 pixels wide, but 851 pixels wide is better and 315 pixels tall is recommended.
It cannot feature pricing or discount/promotional information.
It cannot contain contact information or website addresses.
It cannot contain call-t0-action statements.

In other words, it can’t contain any of the elements normal marketers use to, you know… sell stuff. But it can be designed to brand your page, and then through various tweaks to the timeline itself, you can move some of those promotional tactics elsewhere. I’ll tell you how as we continue this series of posts…

branding, facebook

Customizing new Facebook pages

Since it could have easily been confused for an April Fool’s Day joke, Facebook decided to change all the Company Pages to the “Timeline” motif at the end of March, but certainly the close proximity to April 1st is not just a happy coincidence. For entrepreneurs or companies that have spent a lot of time tweaking their Facebook profile and company pages to get them just right, having to start again from scratch is a little annoying. Note to Zuckerberg: Your hobby doesn’t have to become our hobby. In all fairness, this change seemed inevitable because I’m sure the “old” way was overloading their servers. The “Timeline” presentation of data is much more efficient in terms of server access for its approximately 500 million daily users.

Okay, so now that the change is upon us, in the coming days I’ll share some tips and tricks to help you change your page from looking like this (which is what ours at Outskirts Press looked like on April 1 – April Fools indeed)…

… to looking like this…

blogging, branding, ceo, facebook

Facebook fan leader boards and “Fan of the Week” kudos

I know I should be discussing the proofing process at Outskirts Press, and I will get back to that next week, but in celebration of our passing 5,000 fans on our Outskirts Press Facebook Page, I wanted to mention some of the new apps we added to not only encourage more participation from our FB friends, but to give them recognition for that participation, as well. Of course, anything that I discuss regarding Facebook is a little up in the air, since apparently, the Fan Pages on Facebook will be changing to a new design on March 30. But if the “Preview” is to be believed, this new design will incorporate the oft-debated “Timeline” design that Facebook unveiled for the Personal pages a little while ago. This re-design shouldn’t affect what we’re doing with our Fan Recognition Programs, which I’ll discuss now:

The first is a “Fan of the Week” award, which will publicly recognize a random fan of our Facebook page for participation on our wall — which gives public kudos to fans who have actively engaged in liking something, commenting on something, or posting something. Each week, a new Fan will be chosen, recognized on our wall, and will be featured on a new Fan of the Week page on our Facebook Page, with his/her user profile “up in lights.” The purpose, of course, is to encourage other fans/friends to participate, so they will become the next Fan of the Week. The more you participate, the greater your chances to be chosen as the Fan of the Week.

To that end, we also launched a Top Fans app, which goes one step further. Every Sunday we will recognize the top weekly fans who are responsible for the most likes, the most comments, and the most posts. The top 5 fans in each category will be listed on a new Top Fans leader-board page, along with a 4th category, recognizing the fans who have accumulated the most “points” overall (with certain engagements — likes, comments, posts — earning a certain number of points).

And in the coming months we will be launching our Facebook Publishing Awards, where certain milestones our authors reach in the publishing and marketing process are automatically broadcast to all their Facebook friends. People closely watching my personal FB page may have noticed the first such Award come across my newsfeed a couple of weeks ago. This will be a great way for us to help our authors better establish and earn the public recognition they deserve for their impressive accomplishment — successfully publishing and marketing a great looking, high-quality book!

And if there’s any doubt that all this “stuff” I’m talking about in regard to Facebook (including the tactics I covered yesterday) contribute to significant increases in social media “reach,” one need only look at this recent graphic generated by Facebook Insights for our Facebook Page:

blogging, branding, facebook

How to Increase Facebook Fans (Likes)

Before I proceed with the production/proofing process series of posts, I’d like to take a moment to congratulate David Olson of Albuquerque, NM, who was the winner of a free Barnes & Noble NOOK in our random drawing on the Outskirts Press blog. This was the way we celebrated reaching 5,000 fans on our self publishing Facebook page. And that gives me a reason to really quickly offer 3 steps on increasing YOUR Facebook fan base.

1. Create a Welcome Page that motivates visitors to your page to “Like” you by offering exclusive deals, promotions, events, information, etc. I’ve posted about how to do that here.

2. Engage your community with quotes, quizzes, polls, information, content, and rapid, helpful answers to their questions. Yes, this is the time consuming part, and usually the step that either makes or breaks this 3-step plan. In the case of Outskirts Press, we are fortunate to have a LOT of content to share on Facebook, so it’s more a matter of logistically and efficiently sharing it, rather than having to create it. In our case we share writing and inspirational quotes twice a week (Monday and Friday), “Awesome Covers of the Week” on Wednesday and Saturday, “In Author’s Words” (inspiring and motivational comments and testimonials from our published authors) on Tuesday and Thursday. This is in addition to the daily doses of information about publishing, “self publishing and book marketing” that is shared via RSS from our blog and the periodic polls and quizzes we hold to further engage our community. Plus, with nearly every comment or question, we attempt to respond informatively, helpfully, positively, and with encouragement and professionalism. I.e., this step isn’t “easy.”

3. Give things away. This is actually a combination of #1 and #2 in addition to its own step. You can promote what you’re giving away on your Welcome Page that you create; you can constantly mention it among the tactics you are taking in step #2 (particularly when you have a winner); and you can create a poll for what should be the next prize that is given away, which, in theory, should prevent those who joined solely for the award from “unliking” you once they realize they didn’t win. And that takes us to our NOOK winner, which we announced this morning on our Outskirts Press blog.

ceo, facebook, self publishing

Fandemonium Volume 2 is published

Let’s take a small break from the Outskirts Press pre-production process (which we’ve been covering for the past month), and the production process (which we’ll cover next) to make a few announcements that I haven’t yet had an opportunity to mention.

For instance… late last month we published our second annual Facebook anthology, Fandemonium Volume 2, which is another collection of writing from our talented community of Facebook friends, all 4700 of them (and counting). Congrats to all who are represented. You can save 10% on your copy by ordering directly from our bookstore at http://outskirtspress.com/bookstore/9781432788001.html; although, like approximately 8,500 of our other books, it’s also available on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble’s website if you’d prefer to buy there. Either way, the American Red Cross gets $7.51 (100% of the royalties of the book) for each sale. They appreciate your support.

Here is the table of contents, to see what work is presented and which authors are represented. Unlike our Outskirts Press specific anthologies, of which we’ve published three, it’s not necessary to be a published author with Outskirts Press in order to appear in our Facebook Anthology. All you need to do is be a “friend” of our Outskirts Press page on Facebook. But, I noticed that many authors who were new to Outskirts Press and represented in our first Facebook anthology are NOW Outskirts Press authors, and that’s always gratifying to see. So thank you.

facebook, Social Networking Sites

Adding a Welcome App to Facebook

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…

facebook, Social Networking Sites

Facebook Welcome Page – HTML

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:

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.