Staying updated on all the new tools and resources Facebook has to offer seems nearly impossible at times because of the social network’s constant growth. Today, let’s take a look at 5 tools and resources on Facebook that can help a variety of users with different backgrounds and motivations.
Facebook Tools and Resources
1. Facebook Toolbar: The Facebook toolbar allows users to constantly share with their friends in their network while they browse the web. The toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox gives users the ability to get notified about pokes, friend requests, messages, invitations and general notifications. The share feature of this toolbar lets you share the page you are currently browsing by sending it to your friends or posting it to your Facebook Wall. This feature also allows you to upload photos to Facebook directly from your computer, while you continue to browse the web. These features allow you to easily share your favorite blogs, articles and photos with all your friends much more quickly than if you were going back and forth between Facebook and surfing the web. You can download this resource for Internet Explorer and Firefox here: Facebook Toolbar.
The Google Chrome version of the toolbar offers very similar features to the version of the toolbar that is supported by the other browsers and is verified by Facebook. In a similar fashion, it alerts you at the top of your browser whenever a friend likes or comments on one of your posts or something else notification-wise occurs throughout your network. You can download this tool here: Facebook Toolbar for Chrome.
2. Connecting Bing + Facebook: Microsoft’s search engine Bing and Facebook have a long running partnership that is continually evolving and consistently threatening Google’s standing in the industry. Recently, Bing and Facebook have unveiled the roll-out of Facebook Likes across Bing’s search results. Once you connect your Facebook with Bing here, you can start receiving insights within your search results into websites, movies, restaurants, celebrities, music and other things on the web that your friends already Like on Facebook.
People often make decisions based upon the recommendation of their friends and family, and so it makes sense to duplicate this same decision making process across search engines and Facebook. Connect your Facebook to Bing and see what your friends are currently liking.
3. Facebook Resources Page: If you visit Facebook’s Facebook Page (weird, right?) and view their resources tab, there’s a plethora of helpful information on a laundry list of issues you could be having with your business’s page or personal profile. The Facebook Resources tab helps users and marketers do the following:
Get Involved: Whether that’s helping Facebook translate the website into different languages or telling your personal stories about how you use Facebook.
Site Governance: This section covers everything from ways to share feedback to Facebook’s governing principles and guidelines.
Developers: The resource section for developers features links to a variety of tools and forums available to users developing social applications within the network.
Behind The Scenes: Looking to follow the bloggers and engineers at Facebook? This subsection leads you to their blogs as well as the career page for Facebook.
Need Help: Can’t claim your Facebook Place or upload a photo to your wall? All these day-to-day issues can be dealt with in the help section by posting in user monitored forums or looking through Facebook FAQs.
Advertisers: If you’re interested in running Facebook ads or sponsored stories throughout the network, be sure to refer to this section for updates about the process and how to successfully run a promotion using their ad products.
Build A Presence: The most important subsection for marketers is this section dedicated to building a successful branded Facebook Page. This last section will take you to a more comprehensive page dedicated to the ins and outs of a Facebook Page, like Facebook Page best practices and examples of other brands’ successes with using Pages.
4. The Open Graph Protocol: This new resource could get an entire blog post written about it because it’s so helpful and cutting edge in terms of marketing on Facebook; however, here’s a quick summary of how this page can help you get started with the Open Graph. The Open Graph allows websites to customize the data Facebook pulls from their web pages to share within their social network. By adding specific meta tags to their webpages, the webmaster can choose how people view the content they share from their website on Facebook.
For instance: A company focused around movies, like IMDb, can add code to their website that alters the Like button they install on their various pages. Once a user Likes a particular movie on IMDb’s site, the information shared on Facebook is customized by the meta code previously installed. The Like will now not just post the content on a user’s wall that is Liked, but it will add the movie to the user’s favorite movies under their info tab and gurantee an image of the movie is shared along with the title, director or any other information you specifiy in the meta tag. This is just one example of the many things the Open Graph can do to help customize what your brand shares on Facebook. Visit the Open Graph Protocol developers page for further insights on the feature.
5. Buddy Media’s Guide to Facebook EdgeRank: Facebook EdgeRank is the algorithm that helps determine what content shows up in a particular user’s Facebook News Feed. The exact formula for what content gets shown is a closely guarded secret, much like the algorithm Google uses to rank websites within the search engine. Buddy Media is a firm that offers a variety of Facebook services and as a result, develops many whitepapers and studies about the Facebook Platform. Download the guide to Facebook’s EdgeRank and start to understand how to get your posts to the top of your fans’ News Feeds over other content.
Last week, someone called me and asked how he could use Google Analytics to segment our state into four sales territories. Unfortunately, the GA interface only allows for segmentation by city – region – country etc. But we can use either Advanced Segments or the filter in Custom Reports (in the newest version of GA) to aggregate cities and thereby create a sales territory (or if you like, a Metropolitan Statistical Area, depending on your needs.) In face, the very first step, no surprise, is to figure out your needs.
Figuring out your needs. Let’s say that you’ve decided to segment by corner of the state. I live in W. Pennsylvania, and would like to create a W. PA segment. I could go into GA and look at all the cities in PA, like the long list on the side here.
But, despite living here for a long time, I still don’t know which ones are in my corner of the state. So a better way might be to decide which geographic area I am interested in using the geographic Map Overlay. When you do this, be sure to set your GA calendar for the entire length of time that GA has been installed on your site, so that you get a lot of data, and then decide upon your area(s) of interest. Notice how I highlighted the area of Pennsylvania that I am interested in (so that I could point it out to you.)
Then mouse over the names of the cities, like this:
See how Irwin shows up with its one little visit, and now I know to include it in the SW sales territory for PA?
Then create the Advanced Segment. Now, I thought a lot about the advanced segment. I really wanted it to use the words “contains” or “begins with” or some other easy way to do this. But the more times I reviewed the post, the more I realized that it had to be a regular expression unless you wanted to really work hard at this (more on this at the end of the post):
Then go through and repeat for other sales regions. A little tedious, but you only have to do it once.
Problem: what about other cities that “appear?” Despite all my work above, other cities in my W. PA sales area will crop up over time, because they were too small to have any visits when the work was first done, even if I did use all the data that I had. So how do we know that visits came from a “new” city?
Of course, we could start by using an atlas, but that might be mind numbing, and we’ll never know if the atlas spells things exactly the way that GA does. Alternatively, we could just keep everything in a spreadsheet, export and compare spreadsheets (“hmm, where did that city come from?”)
And that’s when I realized that if we created the Advanced Segment using Regular Expressions, the way I did above, everything would be easier. We could visit our sales territories segments every quarter, and for each one, change the first field from “Include” to “Exclude.” Apply those segments. After all, if we create a segment for North, East, West and South, then exclude them all from a state, then look at that state — there should be no cities in that state. If there are, we have found the few stragglers we were looking for.
Any other ideas on how to do this kind of sales territory or MSA work?
Many companies often have a few web properties that fall within their brand’s umbrella. In some cases having a few different websites makes sense because the subject matter of these different sites is specific enough to stand on its own. In other instances, the best option is to merge your websites into one because the content of the two sites is similar enough to exist within the same domain. Before completing such a merger of your brand’s websites, make sure to take a good look at your websites and analyze the pros and cons of completing such a merger. Being aware of these factors will go a long way towards making the merger successful and will help guarantee your websites won’t lose any of their existing rankings in search engines.
3 Pros of Merging your Websites
Funneled Link Juice: Every website has a linking profile, which acts as a record of all the websites currently linking to your domain. Each website’s links act as a vote of confidence when it comes to how search engines determine your rankings in search results. Both of your websites have links, but are currently being spread across the two websites. Links are a good thing to have, but if your websites’ content is similar enough to be merged then the consolidation of the two link profiles will greatly benefit your website overall, funneling the link juice from all the links you’ve got into one main web presence.
Consolidated Promotional Efforts: Regardless of your websites’ particular conversion goals, you’re likely to utilize a variety of promotional techniques to spread your content across the web. One benefit of merging your sites would certainly be saving time and money on promotional efforts. For instance, if your websites utilize a variety of social media accounts to leverage content you could be maintaining twice as many social media accounts as necessary. If you merge your two sites, you can focus on the social media related promotion of that one site’s content online and offline. In the end, any kind of marketing of your website would become more focused and a better cost effective means of spreading the word about your brand.
Consistent Branding: Similar to the benefit of focusing your website’s promotional efforts, a merger will help the overall message of your brand remain consistent. Keeping this message linear across the board is important to avoid confusion for your customers and to help keep a sharp focus of what your company does well, which is provide a specific product or service. For instance, if a company created two websites for a very similar product line it would certainly create confusion as to which source a consumer should trust. If there are any inconsistencies in information between the two sites, this could help cause further confusion. Merging websites with a similar focus within an industry can go a long way towards smoothing out any confusion about your brand as a whole.
3 Cons of Merging Your Websites
Possible Loss of Domain Authority: Search engines attribute a great deal of weight to the top level pages of a website, like the home page for instance. If your website is selling many different categories of product lines or services, some of the top level pages may not be able to fully rank on one website as they would on separate web properties. Not merging your two websites would allow you to devote your SEO efforts to a more specific focus on certain key phrases for that service, and also expand into the long tail of those keyword phrases. Therefore, a downside of a merger of your sites is that, dependent on the nature of your content, there may not be enough room to properly optimize content for such a wide variety of subjects.
Extensive 301 Redirecting: When planning a merger of two websites, it’s critical that one website is properly redirected to another using a 301 redirect. This will automatically direct users who type in the old URL to the new site, while also transferring all the link juice to the website from links to the old site. However, dependent on the size of your website, this is easier said then done. Many websites, especially e-commerce sites, have thousand of pages on their websites that need to be redirected to corresponding pages on the new website. This extensive 301 redirect map is extremely important and is actually a benefit in the long term for the future of your website, but in the short term it can be extremely intensive and mundane. Giving each and every page the detail it deserves is necessary, but a very time consuming aspect of merging web properties.
Link Maintenance Monotony: A proper merger of a website, as discussed above, would consist of initiating an extensive 301 redirect map. The current links to your website will automatically send the link juice to the new site, as well as users who click them to the new destination. However, it’s important to take a thorough look at your link profile and begin contacting your most important linkers, a suggestion made by Google’s Matt Cutts. Many websites have thousands of links, so it’s impossible to contact every website and ask them to update the URL of their link to your old site to the URL of your new site.
Pick the most important sites that provide you with the most powerful links and contact them requesting that they update the URL of their links to your new site. This process is the painstaking downside to a site merger, but important to ensure the most accurate linking profile your newly fused website can have.
Just wanted everyone to know that the team at Google who works on GA understands that some of you are experiencing difficulties. From the GA Blog:
“Late last night we discovered an issue in Google Analytics that caused reports with data from April 2011 using custom reports, advanced segments, or secondary dimensions to return 0 visits. Our team has been hard at work since then, and have found the cause and are taking steps to resolve the issue.”
Getting your website to load faster is always a good idea. It can impact your rankings in both Google organic search and the Google AdWords auction, and it’ll make your users happier. No one likes to sit around and wait for a site to render. Sometimes it’s the difference between someone sticking around on your site and them bouncing.
That’s why the latest report announced in the new Google Analytics is all about Site Speed. Now you can find out which pages are loading slowly, how your site’s load times are affecting expensive advertising channels, and the correlation between load times and conversion rates.
Best of all, you now have access to the Average Page Load Time metric in the Custom Report builder, so you can pair it up against all sorts of fun segments: browser, campaign, geo-location.
To start using this new report, just make a small addition to your existing Google Analytics tracking code. Once you’ve done that, Google Analytics will begin to use a sample of your pages to calculate the load time. If you’re interested, you can actually see the number of pages it uses with the Page Load Sample metric.
The count begins as soon as the visitor has clicked to a page and uses the W3C’s NavigationTiming spec. No word yet on whether or not browsers that don’t support NavigationTiming (IE8, Firefox 3) will be tracked with a legacy mechanism.
Recently, I spoke at SMX Toronto about three under-appreciated or often overlooked video ranking factors and how to optimize YouTube videos to encourage the them to show up in universal rankings.
One of the factors I talked about was one that any SEO should already really be familiar with: Inbound links.
It seems to me that, either because of the unique format of a YouTube video page, or for some other reason, people forget that it’s just a web page like any other web page on your site or any site. When you want your site to show up on the SERPs and you’ve already taken care of any on-page issues and optimization, you build links.
Fortunately, building links for YouTube videos is way easier than building links for most types of content. However, there here are some ways to smooth the path:
Finding Potential Links for Your Youtube Video
One of the best examples of low hanging fruit in the link building world is competitive analysis. Finding out who is linking to your competitors’ sites and then figuring out who of those people would also link to your site. You can do this kind of analysis on YouTube as well, to a certain extent. The major difference between doing competitive analysis for a YouTube video page is that you can’t use the same tools you’d use if you were analyzing the backlinks to a competitors’ website. If you did an Open Site Explorer report on Youtube.com, it would be worse than worthless, and doing it for a specific video page on YouTube is also not that great. Same with Majestic SEO. So how, might you ask, can you find inbound links to a competitor video that’s ranking really high? There are a few ways:
1. Using The YouTube Share Button for Competitive Link Analysis
Under the video that you’d like to research is the YouTube Share button.
When you click on it, you get the YouTube shortened URL. Next, simply do a Google search to see who has that link on their page. The resulting SERP has a lot of social media sites listed on it, but if you scroll past the Twitter and FaceBook results you get to some nice blog pages and such that offer dofollow links.
The awesome upshot of this is that you can get a whole boatload of potential twitter followers and facebook fans. After all, if that Tweeter is sharing this particular link then why not yours? Talk about views….
2. Researching YouTube Embeds
Very similarly to the link research, you can also find out who has embedded the competing video. Under that share button, there is also the option to Embed:
Copy that code and paste it into a Google search and you get the following list of sites that embed your competitors’ videos. If these sites don’t all belong to said competitor, there’s a pretty good chance that they will embed your video as well (and include the embedded YouTube link as well.)
3. Getting Links From Within Youtube.
Just like with every website, internal links matter too. Here’s a good way to find out who all is linking to the competing video from within Youtube:
In Google, set advanced search results to display 100 results.
Site Search Advanced Search Operator: site:youtube.com (your keyword) Channel
Export search results into an excel file including title and meta info. (Outwit is my favorite SERPs collection tool.)
Contact and start relationships with people in the resulting list.
Here’s an example of the information I was able to grab with Outwit and format in Excel:
The highlighted entries are the ones that I thought would be the most worthwhile to start a relationship with. Why? Look at those channel view statistics. By the way, if you include the word “views” in your advanced search operator search, you’ll get much more detailed information with regards to channel views in the meta descriptions that you can pick apart, at least most of the time.
So there you have it, 3 ways to increase the actual links to your Youtube video page. Go forth and optimize!
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