I’m really beginning to like Sarah Evans (@PRSarahEvans).  She is always interesting and has great information to share.  Here’s something I read on her blog just recently. 

The social ask is when you ask someone to fan, like, follow you on social media.  What do you think?  Is it time for us to stop asking people to get on board with us and just let them make up their mind without the push?  I’m not saying that we should stop putting links or buttons on our various sites to give people a way to find us.  Sarah isn’t saying that either.  But it seems that by now people know what to do once they get to your site.  Won’t they like you if they really like you?

Let’s talk about it in the comments section below. (Opps, I think that I just made a social ask.) Well, you know what to do.

Social media has been around for a few years now and is finally becoming useful for personal, professional, and business reasons.

However, many B2B companies still believe social media is just a fad.  Some companies might see that social media is not a fad but believe that it is not applicable to their industry.  Often, even when a company acknowledges that social media is valuable, their online life does not reflect that understanding.

Has your B2B company fully accepted the power of social media?  If not, perhaps the following satistics will be very convincing:

Original source:  Social Media Today

In what ways has your company embraced (or not embraced) social media?

EdgeRank is a tool that Facebook uses to decide who should see your status updates.  In recent months we have all wondered why some of our friends no longer show up in news feed or why people are not seeing us in their feeds.  The answer is EdgeRank. 

Social Media Examiner just posted an informative article that explains EdgeRank and gives some pointers on how to have better engagement on Facebook.  In a nutshell it’s all about quality engagement.  Check out the article called 6 Tips to Increase Your Facebook EdgeRank and Exposure.

Facebook sees everything that is published as an object.  Every object receives a rank.  The author of the article Jim Lodico explains how EdgeRank works:

An object’s EdgeRank is based on three factors:  affinity or the relationship between the creator and user, interaction with the object (likes, comments, etc.) and timeliness.  Add the three factors together using a formula that only Facebook truly knows and you’ve got an object’s EdgeRank.

So, you can see that it takes more than just posting your status to be seen on Facebook.  For friends who are truly close and comment to each other frequently, the EdgeRank is high enough for them to see each other in the news feed.  However, for business purposes getting seen will require the use of advertising as well as engaging content.

Has Facebook’s EdgeRank caused you to notice that a few of your friends are missing?  How will you go about getting to a level of engagement with your missing friends so that you can keep up with each other?  

On the business side, does anyone have any suggestions or experiences to share about using Facebook advertising?

People ofter ask me what is the best way to get liked on Fan Page.  Most of the time I find that new social media users tend to believe that is just a matter of exporting a list or just converting their friends from the personal profile to the fan page.  If only it was that simple.

Getting liked in a way that makes sense is acutally a lot of manual labor. You must get found on facebook by people who want to follow your page and who want to contribute to the conversation there.  Who knows where they will come from.  Your job is to give people the opportunity to find the link to your fan page in many places online and offline.

I read this terrific article with great information about getting more likes on Fan Page.  It’s called 15 Ways to Get “Liked” on Facebook.  The article has some great suggestions about how to do this. 

The only additonal information I would add is:

Way #1 – The article mentions the corporate website but don’t forget that your blog is your corporate website.  Most blogging platforms offer a way for you to add the button through a plugin or widget.

Way #2 – Don’t make adding icons hard.  You can simply go to the web and download a typical social site icon as a jpeg.  Add it to your site then hyperlink it to your fan page.

Way #9 – A fan gate is a fancy way of saying a landing page or reveal page.  There is an easy to use site that offers a free fan gate page.  Try out  iFrame from Wildfire.

Can you think of any other ways to get liked?

Attribution: Flickr Creative Commons - Smemon87

Well Facebook is at it again!  Another redesign?  I don’t know about you but I was just coming to terms with the last one.  However, I have to say, I do like the changes that have been made to the fan page so far.  You can read about the changes for yourself on Mashable but you’ll have to go ahead and take the plunge to understand how it will affect the way you interact with your fans/likes or whatever we call them these days.

My favorite change is the way we can choose our persona.  Now we can interact as our personal self or as our business (page) self.  Basically, what that means in action is that when we choose our business self our posts and comments will show our profile information from our fan page not our personal page.  I think that’s great because before I was always a little uneasy about commenting when I knew that the picture the person would see would be that of me on the dance floor at my last birthday party.

I’m not so sure about the photo slide show at the top.  However, it is easy to hide any photos I don’t want to be seen. 

Have you tried the new version of fan page yet?  What do you like or dislike about the changes?