Allan Vest

A simple social media marketing strategy is to create what is called a “Fan Gate”. This is where you create a dedicated “Fan Page” for your business or yourself on Facebook and you then add content that displays differently depending on whether the person visiting the page has “liked” the page or not.

On Facebook, if you haven’t already, you can create a dedicated “Fan Page” for your business or yourself by going to your personal “Home” page, click “Ads and Pages”, then “Pages” and then “Create Page”. This will let you create a public page on Facebook with it’s own newsfeed (completely separate from your personal account) where you can post updates to your business followers. If your account isn’t showing the “Ads and Pages” option, you can simple go to any fan page and click the “Create A Page” link.

The goal of adding a “Fan Gate” to your “Fan Page” is to create an incentive for people to click the “like” button. When someone clicks the “Like” button, a message is added to their newsfeed where all of their friends and followers see it, which in turn hopefully leads to more followers for you!

So, if you have an e-commerce site, an example of a simple “Fan Gated” page might be something such as showing a message that says “Like this page to get a 10% discount on your next order”. Behind the scenes, we then make the page smart enough to know whether the “like” button has been clicked and automatically change the content to show a discount code once it has.

Several of my clients have recently asked me to send them articles about Facebook, Twitter, etc…

The Social Media Examiner has just a ton of excellent information related to Social Media.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/

Most of the businesses that I’m talking to everyday have now realized that they have to incorporate social media into their marketing mix (if they haven’t already). But most of the business owners I work tell me that they are still struggling with how to best leverage social media for their business.

So let me ask everyone out there… Is your business leveraging social media? And if so, what has worked best for you?

The follow page at Conversion Rate Experts is a great quick-start guide to learning about optimizing the conversion rate of a web site.

http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/101-google-website-optimizer-tips/

Many of the clients I work with have either started blogging or have been thinking about blogging as a way of promoting their business. This article includes a few tips about blogging for small businesses.

http://www.inc.com/guides/201103/7-blogging-mistakes-that-small-businesses-make.html

I have found the Marketing Experiments web site and mailing list to be a great resource for keeping current with the latest in web site optimization.

A large part of creating a web site is knowing how to create pages that convert into leads and sales… This site shows actual test results of how small changes to a web page can make a big difference. Very informative.

Anne Holland’s Which Test Won – A/B Test & Multivariate Testing Education for Marketing Professional