facebook – Page 2 – President of Outskirts Press

branding, ceo, marketing, Social Networking Sites

How to automate social media postings for Facebook, Google+ Pages, and more

Yesterday I finished the blog series about creating a Google+ page for business by suggesting that with this post, today, I would share a method to automate posts to Google+. And before I do that, let me dispel the notion that “automating” posts is any sort of “click it and forget it” type of thing. The task (yes, it’s a task) of “automating” your social media presence still requires a fair amount of work. For instance, for the purposes of maintaining our growing social network communities for Outskirts Press, we use the following “automation” and tracking tools: TweetDeck, HooteSuite, Klout, Ping, Rooster, and FTTT. And to give you a visual representation of what all that involves, here’s a screen shot of JUST our HootSuite dashboard:

Scary, yes? Helpful? You bet! In this particular screen shot, if you squint closely, you may notice that we are able to monitor 5 social media “streams” simultaneously, plus we’re able to post directly to our Facebook page, keep track of retweets from Twitter, and even schedule posts in advance on a few of our networks all at once. Unfortunately, no single application that I’ve been able to find has access to ALL the social media networks that we use, which is why we have several (and of course, that sometimes causes scheduling conflicts where several of us at Outskirts Press may inadvertently schedule various posts too close to one another). And up until very recently, NONE of them automated posts to Google+ Pages (simply because Google+ Pages are so new). But within the last couple of weeks, the API was opened up to six applications, including Hootsuite.

Sounds too good to be true? The ability to automate posts and content to our new Google+ Page using an application we were already familiar with and using heavily? Well, right now, it IS too good to be true. Development of new functionality like this takes time and even though Hootsuite has the Google API available, they don’ t yet have anything operational on their dashboard. Instead, they direct you toward a “landing page” requiring you to “apply” for the benefit of having Google+ added to your dashboard. Here’s a link to the application.

So until it is officially added to Hootsuite — or to the others, which are: Buddy Media, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, Involver, and Vitrue– this is the procedure for putting the steps into place to be able to automate your Google+ pages as easily as your other social channels. Of course, you might get hit up by some marketing emails from Hootsuite or even sales calls, so… just sayin’.

I’ve applied and will keep you posted…

Speaking of landing pages, today also marks the beginning of our new Facebook landing page to encourage more “Likes” to build our Facebook community, which surpassed 3,000 this week. And I’ll discuss all the fun details involved in creating and implementing Facebook landing pages next…

Social Networking Sites

Advertising on Facebook with the Photoviewer – Part 3

Once you realize that the thumbnail image shown along the top photo strip row of the Facebook fan page is not identical to the larger image viewed when clicking on the thumbnail, a world of potential marketing and promotional opportunities presents itself. The trick is to make the photo strip image look pleasing AND to make the resulting larger image effective at whatever your goal is. In our case, we wanted the larger image to brand our company, Outskirts Press, and we wanted to offer some information about each package, along with a URL for purchase.

To accomplish all these goals, you have to know the image dimensions for the optimal large image and the dimensions for the interior space pre-determined by Facebook as the thumbnail portion. This is a little tricky because the larger image is optimal when it is square and the thumbnail image is optimal when it is rectangular. Complicating matters further is the fact that Facebook doesn’t take the precise CENTER of the larger image to generate the thumbnail image; it skews high.

Your full image should be 720 pixels wide by 720 pixels high at 72 dpi. The image for your thumbnail should fall into a space that is 535 pixels wide by 375 pixels high at 72 dpi. This “thumbnail” graphic should not be centered, but rather off-set 90 pixels from the top and 93 pixels from either edge. This leaves you with 255 pixels below the thumbnail image for marketing/promotional purposes — content that will ONLY be seen in the larger view. Use the bottom 190 pixels for optimal visuals, although you should also leave a blank strip approximatley 25 pixels high along the very bottom because this is where Facebook is going to add its “Like/Comment/Tag Photo” overlay boxes, and you don’t want that stuff interfering with your image.

Was that too confusing? Perhaps a graphic will help. If you follow the directions above, you’re left with a template that looks roughly like this:

Tomorrow we’ll see what our new “Diamond” package graphic looks like once we follow this template…

branding, Social Networking Sites

How to market on Facebook with the Photo strip – Part 2

In yesterday’s post I mentioned that the Facebook photo strip along the top of business fan pages offers a good branding opportunity and can also be used to effectively market or promote a product or service. Up until recently, we at Outskirts Press were only using the photo strips for the first part of that equation — branding. And we were losing the opportunity to market or promote when someone clicked on the image for a closer look.

Realizing the potential for what can be done with these images required first realizing that Facebook doesn’t “thumbnail” images in the traditional way. Typically, when an image is “thumbnailed” (meaning, made smaller), the thumbnail image is an exact duplicate of the “larger” image, just at a reduced size. But Facebook does something different, as seen by their use of the Profile Picture along the left-hand column, which also contains the square “avatar” picture. In other words, the Thumbnail for the Profile picture is NOT an exact duplicate of the image, but rather a pre-defined section of the larger image.

The Photo strip images work the same way. The thumbnail images shown along the top of the fan page are pre-determined sections of the larger version of the image that is viewed when the thumbnail is clicked. In fact, when an image is created correctly, the same image can be both a successful, “clean” thumbnail image AND a more promotional image.

For instance, with our 5 package graphics, I wanted to maintain the look and feel of the 5 gemstones in a row (shown below)…

… and at the same time, I wanted the user to see a more branded graphic for each package when viewing the larger image. I even wanted to include a “call to action.” All it took was determining the optimal image specs for both the “large” version of the graphic and the “thumbnail” portion of the same graphic.

And I’ll reveal what those settings are tomorrow…

Social Networking Sites

Facebook statistics

When writers publish their books with Outskirts Press at the Diamond or Pearl level, we spend the next two years sharing marketing and promotional suggestions with them via email. The act of “publishing a book” doesn’t end when you are holding the copy in your hand. Marketing that book is just as important.

Over the last several months, our company has made a big push into social networking, and we’re working hard to bring out authors along for the ride. We’ve added Facebook “like” buttons to all our products and services; we have added the same buttons to all our published books in our bookstore and to our author webpages, and we’ve added Facebook plug-ins within the Publishing Center so authors can keep up-to-date on our Facebook community from within Outskirts Press.

Why are we taking all these steps? Because Facebook is an important marketing tool for a published author. One of our recently published authors, Kirk Byron Jones, Ph.D., recently wrote a guest article for our Outskirts Press blog titled 7 Ways to Build Your Facebook Community: Imagine Your Book Before Thousands of Faces. In the article, he discusses his Facebook community and its 12,000 (!) supporters. That’s quite a platform.

In fact, by any measure, Facebook is quite a platform. Just listen to some of these statistics, according to Facebook themselves:

More than 500 million active users are registered
50% of the active users log on to Facebook in any given day
The average user has 130 friends
People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
There are over 900 million objects that people interact with, including profiles, groups, events and community pages
The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
More than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month, including web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.
Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with the Facebook Platform
People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day
Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook from external websites
An average of 10,000 websites integrate with Facebook every day
So far, more than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
More than 70 are translations available on the site
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application
There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Social Networking Sites

Facebook Images

Continuing our discussion of branding various social networking and video sharing sites, I’d like to return to Facebook for a moment and touch upon a topic I briefly mentioned a few posts ago when I was discussing the new Facebook Page design and its new “branding graphic” specifications along the left-hand side:

In addition to the graphic along the left, I mentioned that the five image slots along the top also provide a branding opportunity if you manage the photographs correctly. This section of a Facebook page randomly presents the 5 most recent images uploaded into the main folder. In the case of Outskirts Press, this is ideal because we have five different publishing packages that are represented by five different gemstones. They add a splash of color and “interest” to what might otherwise be a normal, standard Facebook page.

The downside to this is that you have to prevent other users from uploading images. Another downside is that when you, as the page administrator, upload an image, it may disturb the “branding” efforts you have put forth. This is what happened with Outskirts Press on St. Patrick’s day when we offered a one-day “Search for the pot o’ gold” Internet search opportunity for a Facebook community, the prize being a book teaser video worth $99. We uploaded the image of the pot of gold that was within one of our YouTube Videos, and of course, as a result, that image also appeared as one of our top five images:

But that’s okay. If anything, the temporary “difference” to the Image Section brought even more attention to the one-day only St. Patrick’s Day event.

Interestingly, no one “won.” I don’t know if it was because the search was “too hard” or “too boring” but that’s always one of the fun things about running social networking events — you never know what is going to happen…

Social Networking Sites

Branding Facebook Pages

When you grow as fast as Facebook, you are constantly tweaking “things” to improve them. The same thing happened (and is still happening) with us at Outskirts Press. Not that I’m comparing our growth to Facebook’s (I wish!) – but we have had quite a few “versions” of our website since it launched in 2002, and to this day we are constantly improving it.

For Facebook, every change they make has the potential to upset 500 million people. That’s a lot of pressure. Generally, people don’t like “change” very much. Even if, in the long run, a change is for the better, people are just more comfortable with the familiar. When transitioning to a new Facebook Pages layout, the Facebook folks offered an opportunity for people to proactively opt-in to the new design before enforcing the transition. Frankly, I’m not even sure when that “deadline” is, but we actively opted-in to the new design as soon as we could, and then started tweaking our Facebook Page layout to take advantage of some of the changes.

Aesthetically, the most noticeable difference is that the Facebook Pages now look nearly identical to Facebook Profiles. Some comment filters have been added (profanity filters, for example), and new dimensions are set for logos and other branding opportunities. While these variables are not yet as robust as those offered by YouTube (more on that in the near future), the new Facebook page does provide some branding opportunities for the creatively-minded.

The first thing you should do to “brand” your company page on Facebook is shorten the URL for it by creating a custom url (for example, www.facebook.com/OutskirtsPress, instead of facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789)

When this functionality first launched in 2009, Facebook required companies to have at least 1000 fans in order to create a custom URL. But now it appears to be available for Pages with as little as 25 fans. If you have that many fans, you can set a custom URL in your Settings.

The next thing to do is customize the logo box along the left-hand side. The profile image dimensions used to be 200 x 600 and are now 185 x 540. Yes, that means there is a chance you will need to resize or recreate your “old” graphic to optimize it for the new layout once that change is enforced.

At Outskirts Press, we’re in the process of branding all our social networks (or at least the four main ones we use: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and our blog on WordPress). This includes uploading graphics, logos, and summary statements that look the same and communicate the same message across all channels. For Facebook, this meant uploading a new profile image to take advantage of the new size dimensions offered by Facebook. This new graphic matches the front page of our website as well as online and offline advertisements we run. We call it our “Write Anything, Publish Everything, Market Everywhere” creative, or “write.publish.market” for short, which is our new tagline we introduced with the lauch of our new logo and new Version 4 website in 2010.

Facebook allows you to select a square portion of the new profile picture to create your “Avatar” so consideration has to be made to “kill two birds with one stone” so to speak, since successful Avatar images often are not the same as successful branding images. That is why our profile image contains both our new name treatment logo at the top and our “older” circular logo at the bottom – the latter being an element I wouldn’t otherwise have included in the profile graphic; but it is the Avatar we have built our social presence around and I’m not inclined to change it (at least, not now).

If you look closely at that screen shot above you’ll notice the cover image for Fandemonium (our Facebook anthology), which just published today, and it seemed fitting that we should announce that publication to our Facebook fans first. It’s not even available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble yet, but only through our bookstore at Outskirts Press (at a 10% discount, by the way).

And you’ll also notice images of our book publishing package icons (the gems) along the top of our new Facebook Page (another branding opportunity available on Facebook through “manipulation” of the images functionality). And I’ll discuss those topics next time…

branding, self publishing, Social Networking Sites

Adding Facebook Plug-ins to your Author Website

Last time I suggested that having an author website, webpage, or blog was the single most important aspect of promoting a book after it is published. This was also the consensus of the “Promote Your Book” panel I was on during the recent Writer’s Digest conference in New York. This next suggestion is admittedly further along the “promotion tactic timeline” but is worth mentioning now for a number of reasons. For one, this is also a suggestion I made while at the conference, albeit to the attendees of the other panel I was on, involving social networking. And secondly, we just recently performed this enhancement to our site at Outskirts Press.

In fact, as you surf the Internet, you may notice this specific functionality cropping up more and more, on a wide variety of sites, both informational and commercial in nature. What functionality am I talking about? The Facebook “Like” button. By adding a Facebook “Like” button to your own web presence you give your visitors an opportunity to interact with your site in a “fun” easy way that they are already accustomed to. Additionally, their act of “liking” your site is reported on their Facebook account to their friends, which theoretically helps increase your exposure.

We recently added “Like” buttons on our site for all our products and services. We haven’t yet invited our Facebook community to visit our site and tell us which services or products they like, but that is a recommended course of action once you add the “Like” functionality. After all, the benefit of adding this functionality is so that people recognize that a large number of other people “like” what you have to offer. And, of course, when you first add the functionality, the number of “Likes” is zero. So you want to take steps to increase that number.

The good news is that Facebook makes adding this functionality very easy. They offer a variety of “plug-ins” that are easy to add to your site. Just go to developers.facebook.com and see if any of their plug-ins will help you. Of course, gettting a large and growing number of people to “like” what you offer is a different challenge entirely. If only Facebook offered a plug-in for that…

marketing, Social Networking Sites

Why is Facebook so Popular?

I’m becoming a believer in this “Facebook phenomenon.” Only recently has Outskirts Press actively engaged the “social community” in terms of Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest. Even though it sounds like I’m mindlessly jumping on the bandwagon when I say this, I’ll say it anyway: It has shown immediate dividends.

Sure, we’ve been “blogging” for a number of years; but to successfully engage the promise of “Web 2.0,” companies need to embrace the multiple platforms and entertwine them.

Yes, we as a company have a long way to go on all those platforms. It’s an on-going exercise that requires quite a lot of effort, actually. For example, thanks to our Kindle giveaway in December and our Facebook Anthology project in January, we are seeing large increases to our Facebook Community, and we will continue to offer our community more promotions and incentives to become involved. It is wonderful that these people are all supportive of each other and positive in general.

And perhaps that is one of the main reasons Facebook is so popular. People there are nice and respectful. Isn’t that a refreshing change of pace from other “locales” on the internet where anonymity allows people to be rude, spiteful, argumentative, and sometimes downright jerks? Amazingly even those who aren’t anonymous often choose to show their true colors daily, a la Russell Hantz on the TV show Survivor. Every comment to a Yahoo article ridicules something; many bloggers seem to believe the only opinion they’re allowed to have is a negative one; and forums are filled with such pervasive confrontation they’ve actually coined a term for it: flame war.

And yet on Facebook, people are supportive of one another, kind, giving of their time and knowledge, and respectful. This never became more obvious to me than it did a few days ago on my birthday (January 19th). Current friends, old high school and college friends, relatives, Outskirts associates, and Outskirts authors all took a moment to wish me “Happy Birthday” on Facebook. So did my wife, since I was on a business trip that day.

Why is Facebook popular? Because Facebook makes people feel good. It makes them feel liked, popular, and as if they are a part of something bigger than themselves.

This doesn’t seem to be a happy accident, either. Facebook appears to have been designed with that specific purpose. Unlike other “voting” mechanisms on other sites (“thumbs up vs thumbs down” on many sites or the 1 star thru 5 star rating on Amazon, for example), Facebook only has a “Like” option. It doesn’t give you the opportunity to dislike something or to be mean, even if that is your intent. The “meanest” thing you can do is NOT vote . And that’s probably not very satisfying for mean people. As a result, they don’t get involved. Facebook stays a happy place while the rest of the Internet continues to revel in its own misery. Win-win.

It just so happens I’ll be talking more about Facebook and other social networking opportunities for writers the day after tomorrow at the Writer’s Digest Conference in Manhattan. But I thought I’d give another sneak peek here first. And I’ll be discussing more about Facebook in upcoming posts, too.