As more and more business owners make the leap into the social media world, Tallahassee business owners should understand the difference between Facebook ‘Fan Page’s and Facebook ‘Group Pages’ to ensure they make the right decision for their business.
Let’s look at some of the top reasons why Tallahassee businesses would want to use a ‘FAN’ page on Facebook:
- unlimited membership – profiles or groups are capped at 5000
- administrators appear as the business when posting – so you can have multiple admins and they can all be posting as the business
- indexed by external search engines (Google, etc.) – one of my favorites!
- can host applications – once you get the basics of Facebook, having a more interactive fan page is a must and the ability to host applications is important
- enables analytics and tracking – you get detailed statistics on who ‘LIKE’s your business, the age and sex demographics, etc.
- resembles a regular profile page – and function like profile pages too!
Now let’s look at some of the reasons why businesses might choose a ‘GROUP’ page on Facebook:
Have more control over who joins by setting for member approval.
Can be ‘private’ thus creating a more ‘secure’ environment for sharing.
Now obviously, the choice for Tallahassee businesses is Facebook fan pages.
The BIGGEST reason to choose a fan page is that the updates you make to your business fan page appear in the news stream of your fans so they can instantly react and INTERACT with you and your business!
While both Fan and Group pages can be beneficial in certain instances, overall the Fan Page is far superior to the Group Page when it comes to maximizing a brand’s Facebook presence.
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Here is a good search engine optimization tip for you to check out on your own Tallahassee business web site.
Type in the URL of your website as www.design850.com replacing the ‘design850′ with your web site URL. Your web site should load in the browser.
Now do the same thing only this time leave off the ‘www’ at the front and just type design850.com and replace the ‘design850′ with your web site URL. Again, your web site should load in the browser.
In the second example, you now want to check to see if your web server added the ‘www’ to your domain name. If not, you need to contact your web master or web host.
What you want to prevent from a search engine optimization point of view is having your domain search by Google (and other search engines) from viewing www.design850.com and design850.com as two separate domains/web sites. As you add more and more content to your site, you want to ensure that only ONE gets indexed and ranked by search engines.
This can be corrected on your server (or your web host) by performing what is known as a ’301 redirect’. This redirect is done by a single setting to tell any browser or search engine bot that is visiting your site that it should add the ‘www’ to the domain if it was not there when someone visited a link or typed in your domain.
Design850 can help correct this and other SEO basics on your web site to ensure that you are being ranked as high as possible in the search engines – give us a call at 850-445-2076.
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For all of you that have business web sites here in Tallahassee, here are a few techniques that you can do on your web site to ensure that it is functioning normally. I would recommend that you (or your webmaster) complete this kind of review at minimum once every 90 days – maybe less depending on the site.
- Links – check your links to ensure that they are still live. This would refer to both links that point to other pages within your web site and then also links that point to pages that are not on your web site. Hopefully your internal links will not be an issue, but linking to external sites could be problematic because other web sites might change their site structure periodically and your links might need to be updated.
- Mobile Phones – since just about everyone has a mobile phone, you should be checking your site on a regular basis on multiple mobile phones to ensure that your site is visible and functions properly in the mobile environment.
- Analytics – this should be done at least every 30 days. You should always be looking at analytics so you know where your site visitors are coming from and how they are finding you. I know that approximately 40% of traffic to design850.com and I can see how that is changing every month (or week in my case). I also can know what other sites are driving the most traffic to my site.
- Newsletters/Forms – you should be testing your forms on a regular basis to ensure that the emails are getting through to you and to also know what the end user receives if they sign up for your newsletter or send a request through your contact form.
- Images – the last item that you should check on a regular basis is that the images that you have on your site all load correctly. This is especially true if you have any sort of online store where the images are a necessary part of your ability to conduct business.
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