Ways To Transform Most Facebook Friends Into Customers

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Companies doing business in social media, especially on Facebook, are

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faced with the challenge of enticing their online friends and fans who are not yet customers to patronize their products. From the millions of friends and fans that a brand can get on Facebook they need to capture a sizeable number of loyal customers so as to get a good return on investment. Online marketers know that the true value of most Facebook friends and fans is not in their quantity but in their quality. Hence a brand has to be friendly itself to be able to win over new customers and build up its base of repeat customers. Brands must be able to connect with their Facebook friends and fans, engage with them and create mutual value.

What marketing strategies can a brand use in social media? Marketers have found three ways that bring in good results on Facebook. First is to recognize the fans and friends by ranking their engagement with the brand. If a brand provides content on its page that encourages friends and fans to cultivate habit-forming behavior, then it will better its chances of having friends and fans who not only engage once but repeatedly. Second is to give them exclusive deals. A brand can do this effectively by thinking like a fan to know what that fan likes. This is a time-tested marketing strategy and still works online. Third is to reward loyal customers with incentives. This is mutually beneficial as loyal customers can, on their own initiative, become ambassadors of the brand.

It’s not easy to know if most Facebook friends and fans of a brand are really there for the business, so it’s best for the company to find out by engaging with them. What other social marketing strategies can a brand use on Facebook?

Zuckerberg and the Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline

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It has been reported that Facebook is introducing a totally new design and that all the more than 800 million Facebook users will have to learn the redesigned profile. Called Facebook Timeline, this big change will surely surprise you as you begin to use its features and get the hang of it all. The redesign will show a cover for your personal account that is quite a striking visual. While you may have read or been told of the Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline, chances are you didn’t know that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has used these even before the official launching. Yes, he probably gets to try first everything new in this social networking site.

Timeline was officially unveiled on September 22 in San Francisco during a Facebook developers’ conference, but Zuckerberg actually began using the cover of the new profile much earlier – on June 18 when he updated his cover photo and added a couple more for the first time. You can actually see the history of his cover photo uploads because these are open to all. Yes, you can see photos of his fluffy white dog on these covers. For your own personal account you would likely choose the best image or images you like because the cover photo is actually the main visual of the new profile. And any user can actually see your cover photo album despite privacy settings.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline may be history now and one may probably not know all the details of the early beginnings of the new look and style of Facebook, but for anyone who wants to dig into the past his story is available online. Now that it’s over a month after its release, how do you find Timeline, so far?

The Unpopularity of Facebook Emails

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Do you use Facebook emails? If not, have you even tried using it? Or are you one of the millions of email users worldwide who remained loyal to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail after the introduction of Facebook email? The questions are valid because one year ago when Facebook email was touted to be the next generation messaging system the citizens of cyberspace were abuzz with the announcement. But now it seems to have vanished from the collective memory of email users who plod on with their old trusted accounts. Facebook email did not take off and has remained unpopular despite the worldwide popularity of its social networking site.

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Brands Should Invite All Facebook Friends Of Its Fans

For a brand to increase its reach on Facebook, it must invite all

Facebook friends of its fans inasmuch as the total number of these friends can be as much as over 100 times the size of the fan base. This holds true particularly for brands that have over a million fans. With this wide reach, a brand can expect to gain more Facebook users browsing its page. This could lead to new customers. But, of course, all this could take some time especially for brands that are still starting out on the social networking site. It is therefore imperative that a brand create Facebook content that its fans would want to share to their friends.

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You and Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline

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Change seems to be inevitable on Facebook and now another one, a big one called Timeline, has been rolled out in New Zealand before making it worldwide. This profile is a totally new design that needs getting used to for you to navigate comfortably as you say goodbye to the old version. This visually-rich design begins with a so-called cover in which you introduce yourself with an image that is quite large. The Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline are definitely a big change in this social networking site.

Following the cover, which is on the top part of the new layout, will be the main section of your stories and photos as well as all the previous posts. This will go back to the very first entry on your wall and will be sort of an online yearbook of your life. New entries will appear in this section and you can easily share everything with various social apps to express yourself, including such items as the songs you like. It will be here where your friends can know what’s up in your life and join in what you do. While the posts on the old version of Facebook profile were arranged in chronological order that required scrolling, this time it will be more of clicking than scrolling as you pull up a timeline in your life, say the year 2010. And be prepared to do things on two columns rather than just one.

Obviously Facebook is making these changes and many more to keep them on top of the online social networking world, especially since other sites are competing with their own special features. Will the millions of Facebook users like the new Facebook Covers and Profile Timeline so much so that they will stay with Facebook or will some of them get tired of the many recent changes?