When you click on view shares (which is highlighted in blue color), you will be able to see who shared your post along with their respective comments.

This new share feature is available for both pages and personal profiles. It is a good measurement tool to gauge whether the content posted by brands has created enough interest  for the fans to share the same or not. The more the number of shares, the more interesting the content is. This feature has not been added in the Facebook insights yet. Let’s wait and watch how Facebook will improvise this feature.

1. Create a page
2.  Fill in the bio with all necessary information, including URLs
3.  Add an appropriate display picture
4.  Create a relevant landing page
5. Write an engaging welcome post
6. Link your blog and Twitter account to Facebook
7. Add Facebook plug-ins and widgets on other sites

All done. What next, you ask? How do I get people to like my page? How do I reach people and let them know a page exists?
This can be done in the following ways:

• Run an offline marketing campaign and provide necessary links for people to sign up.
• Run Facebook ads targeting the right audience. The better copy the Facebook ads have, better conversion rate they will result in.
• Tap into other platforms like blog and Twitter and ask people to join.
• Invite all people you know to ‘like’ the page. This is highly unrecommended as repeated behaviour will create an impression of a spammer. The only time this should be done is for highly personal brands.
• Promote the Facebook page on another page or website which has good traffic.
• Create a viral concept on Twitter or Youtube and promote your fan page.

Businesses and brands are in an unprecedented chase for fans. Facebook marketing is being equated to acquisition of fans. But does having more fans mean you are marketing yourself better? Does having more fans improve the bottom line of your business?
Any marketing strategy should be built upon a fundamental understanding of the needs and goals of a business and solve any business related problems if possible. Social media marketing, like any other form of marketing should be aligned with the overall strategies of the organization and aim at achieving specific goals in this respect.

When it comes to facebook, the more number of fans might be better but is it relevant for a brand? It is not so always. Here are a couple of examples of face to contrast the necessity of fans and importance of the alignment of marketing strategy with business.

SYN

Syn, is a restaurant cum lounge at Taj Deccan and 84ideas has been associated with them since their inception.  The aim of Syn was to be the place to get great exotic food and be an ideal after party place.

Syn is a local business at single location with no proposed branches or offshoots. The focus is to get people in the geography(Hyderabad) interested in the lounge and build a community of those who have been to Syn. The strategy is aimed at creating walk-ins, enticing the fence sitters and facilitating interactions among visitors and with the brand.  This was done in various ways by promoting the events at venue including weekly programs (for the regulars) and running contests and campaigns (for loyalty and newer audience)

Syn now has 1948 fans out of which at least 25% are active users and the interactions per post are on an average of 5 for regular updates to 10 for campaigns.

Dealivore

Running well designed ads with the apt targeting and engaging fans with contests while sticking to the primary aim of informing fans about the latest deals, has made Dealivore page a success.

Here are some important stats:

• 210,967 (as of Nov 8 2010)
• 96.9% of the fans are from India.
• 86.2 % are from the metros Dealivore.com is operating at or planning to operate soon
• We have successfully reduced the CPC of ads from $0.10 to $0.06.

As we see from above, though the number of fans do matter, it is very essential to know how they are relevant to your business, how they can be engaged and can be convinced to utilize your product or service. We at 84ideas took into consideration these aspects, built a strategy which is most effective to reach and engage the target audience. For Dealivore it was about reaching a large relevant audience which was done by acquiring fans from various cities over the country. On the other hand for Syn, the target group was in Hyderabad and the focus was creating brand loyalty and ensuring repeat visits along with getting new walk-ins than building a large number of fans most of who have never been to Syn or Hyderabad. These are two very different approaches to run a facebook page, yet they have worked well.

How do you keep your fans engaged and does your facebook page help in boosting your bottom line?

p.s: Yes, Facebook wants it to be called ‘Likes’ but the nomenclature is confusing and for simplistic purposes we have used ‘fans’ here who are technically your ‘like’rs

Basically what you will be able to do is share your actual location data with friends by checking in at a location. You can also tag the friends who are there along with you, just like you would tag them in pictures. You can get alerts about (or even from) friends who are nearby like you do in Latitude. Like in every other service you will be able to check in from a mobile device. They are currently rolling out support to facebook on iphone and touch.facebook.com . The best thing about this feature’s rollout by facebook is its privacy settings. They have been properly done. You can read about them and the features here.

This is quite a significant development in social media. Read more..

Firstly because Location based services are growing leaps and bounds. Many (including me) reckoned 2010 as the year of location and it has turned out that way. After statuses took centre stage couple of years back, Location is new facet to social media. There are several strong players in the field. Foursquare has now 3 million users and leads the pack. This is largely due to the gaming aspect of the service where people are rewarded with points and badges for moving around and travelling to new places. Gowalla is very similar to foursquare and is catching up strongly. However location sharing is not new. Brightkite, Loopt, Dopplr etc have been around for a while. Google has its very own service latitude which sits upon google maps(which has 100 million users) which are present on almost every GPS enabled device on the planet. The fact that Google hasnt been able to leverage is another story altogether.

We have connected online to friends and friends of friends. We have connected to people who share same interests based on interactions and on recommendation. Location is the new way to connect online.

Location is the new way to discover places. It thwarts the age old misconception that the internet robs you of the real life adventure. Location based services and the sharing aspect if not anything else encourage you to go out, try new things and tell the whole world about it.

So how is Facebook entering the location sphere important? That brings me to the second point. As Pete Cashmore, rightly put it Facebook is going to steal the crown now held by Foursquare as the King of location. Facebook’s 500 million user base of whom atleast 150 million access through mobile. Though not necessarily all possess a GPS phone, the base is still so huge, facebook could easily become the wikipedia of places!

I am not saying the foursquares and gowallas will disappear and am pretty sure Facebook doesnt want them too. Facebook has in a way validated their business by introducing places. (Foursquare and Gowalla representatives were there at the launch of Places.) These services have had facebook (and twitter) integration for ever and instead of just posting stories into your feed they can now integrate with the facebook places platform. They will have to reinvent themselves providing newer and exciting features and incentivize people to share location. They will definitely flourish considering the fact that foursquare has seen most number of signups in a day after the Place announcement. Facebook has that Midas touch. Doesnt it?

Finally, the location sharing phenomenon explosion if it happens thanks to the advent of Facebook is going to be a major boon for businesses. Imagine being able to advertise your specific product or service to someone who like similar things and is in a place nearby. Conversions shall skyrocket. It is paradise. It is only a matter of time facebook refines the location targetting feature in the advertising and insights. It will be a huge benefactor by strengthening the word of mouth for restaurants, hotels, pubs, supermarkets, malls, multiplexes and even minor business like tailors, laundromats etc. (like Yelp for everything and everywhere) On the flip side it will benefit the end user because he or she has the access to reviews and tips from people about these outlets. With the negative buzz put on the same plane as positive word of mouth it will alert the business owners in providing quality services and conducting efficient feedback along with providing loyalty benefits easily. With the entry of something as massively adopted as Facebook into this space not only does it give a boost in adoption but also in aggregation of geo location data.

There are many issues to emerge yet and roadblocks to overcome but the geo location sharing is in its infancy and already we can see a prophetic culture changing future ahead.  What do you think about will the future of Location based sharing services be like?

Let us just look at the statistics dealing with people and their activities on facebook and try to understand what it means for users and businesses right now and what it can be in the future.

More than 500 active million users

They have been adding a 100 million every 5 months since late 2008 and this shows no sign of slowing. With the internet growing rate of 400% but having only penetrated <27% of worlds population there is still a lot that can be done. Also 500 million active users is roughly 27% of the 1.8 billion internet users around the world. These numbers are massive and will just keep growing redefining the meaning and usage of facebook.

50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day

That is phenomenal! Says a lot about the stickiness of facebook and how important it has become for the user in his or her life. That also means they are keeping tabs on whats happening everyday. It means if you are an active marketer you cant not ignore that you have a chance to grab eyeballs everyday. What would be really interesting to know is how many of these users actually spend more than hour a day!

Average user has 130 friends

That’s quite a lot! Seems like the Facebook fraternity is quite a social lot taking into considerations that it has rigid privacy settings and most people I know and have heard from in real life, online etc claim that they only add people they have (or going to have) a real life connection with.  That means the connections made are strong and tend to have a greater meaning and interaction.

With the presence of photos, videos and most importantly status updates with comments and likes every person is a community by himself. Every post in the broader sense is a thread and creates humongous opportunity for information exchange.

With the last privacy setting change (or debacle as most would like to call it) the default option for status update is global. If only Facebook could now work on properly indexing those updates and creating a usable search engine like that of twitter’s they will be creating the next Gold Rush.

People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook

Active user is defined here as someone who logs in atleast once a month. 500 million active users totally 700 billion minutes means 1400 minutes per person. That’s 40 minutes shy of a day. A whole day! That is more time we spend more time on Facebook than we spend on eating (considering an average meal lasts for 15 minutes)

So the signing in and presence is not just for trivial pursuits (Hey! Farmville is very important to many), people are quite serious about facebook and spending quality time on it. They are posting and sharing content, interacting with others and entertaining themselves for a considerable time every day. If somebody doesn’t have Facebook has an integral part of their brand promotion, they are forgetting to fill oil in their online marketing car. It will eventually break down.

Here are the statistics about the activity on facebook.

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events
• Average user creates 90 pieces of content each month
• More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

With recent incorporation of community pages (a sort of automatically created Wikipedia on Facebook) and their integration with people’s interests and likes, Facebook has opened a treasure trove of information and connections. Groups, Events and Facebook pages have long been quite integral to a user’s Facebook experience. They are now slowly embracing community pages (though I doubt if it will be so immensely popular as the others). These all combined are objects as Facebook puts them and they are 900 million in number. This makes even Wikipedia green with envy. If and when people decide to populate these pages meaningfully it has the power to obliterate a bunch of other sites based on events (meetup, eventful), wikis(squidoo, wikia, wetpaint), groups (google and yahoo groups) and so on. This becomes all the more easy to do because people do not have to go to a new site in order to access, create or sign up for something.

When the average user creates 90 pieces of content (status updates, wall posts, photos, videos, etc) and there are 30 billion pieces of content shared every month Facebook is becoming a complete internet onto itself. If they can create a Google alternative (or integrate Bing as they most probably will) to index and display search results I might never have to leave Facebook for anything.

This is like creating the ultimate living room with the best entertainment and communication systems in it and the most comfortable lazyboys and well provided nourishments. Add some more features and I might not even have to go out of this space for a leak.