There are several options for how you can pull in your Blog feed (or any RSS feed for that matter) to your Facebook Fan Page. The Facebook Notes application is one that is frequently used as a way to automatically post your blog posts to your Fan Page. The Notes feature also creates a place on your Fan Page where all of your previous posts are archived and accessible to your fans at any time. Some people, however, prefer to use other applications to auto feed their posts to their fan pages. These applications will post your blog posts to your fan page as a link which when clicked on will send your fans directly to the original post.  This can be helpful for driving traffic to your blog however, it might also be a barrier to getting your fans to read your full posts as some people may prefer or be more inclined to read the post if it’s posted in it’s entirety as can be done with the Notes application. The Notes application will also include a link at the end of the note where readers can click through to read the original post. This video will cover the basics for how to import your blog feed to your Facebook Fan Page using the Notes Application.

• Networked Blogs

• RSS Graffiti

Taking your social media efforts offline is a logical next step, especially if your goal is to create community and evangelists for a club or organization. Having a party, a meet-up, workshops or meetings on a face to face basis both empowers and rewards your loyal following. Some may step forward and want to create their own events. Let them. Give them the tools and help they need to succeed and the give them the reins. Sometimes you may have to gently direct them in what the mission of your organization is and it’s a very good idea to have a clear idea of what that is before you start partying it up. On the other hand perhaps you could schedule a meeting or two with some loyal followers to help you define what their goals are and how you can all work together towards a bright future. Empower those early followers and you’ll find they are there in the clinch when you need them most. Event planning is an art form many of us just don’t get, but there are some wonderful tools you can use to promote an event and even sell tickets.Here’s a quick start to online tools to make your event go more smoothly. Getting started. Do some searches in the area you want to hold the event. Are you traveling to a distant city and want to schedule a meet up? Do some searches like “Dallas, Tx, Events” in Google and you’ll quickly see the most popular event announcement sites in that city. Do a few searches on Twtvite and see if there are any tweetups or create your own. (A Tweetup is generally simply a get-together. Sometimes over beverages, coffee or a meal.) Find the person who is organizing Tweetups in that town and let them know you’d like to co-host or attend. Most Tweetup organizers are happy for a little help and some new faces. Some other popular event announcement sites include:

• Eventbrite
• Craigslist
• Facebook events
• Meetup.com
• Upcoming
• Yelp

All of these are national and you’ll need to do a local search to find what other opportunities are out there. Ticketing My personal favorite is Eventbrite. Start here to sell your tickets and then post the announcements everywhere you can find and point all of your announcements here to buy tickets. Why? Simple, although they do take a small percentage for transaction fees, in my opinion Eventbrite gives you some of the best tools to spread the word and reporting of all the sites I’ve seen. You can create custom pages, promote with one click to an array of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, track attendance with spiffy charts, control how many tickets you sell (and create different levels of tickets) and pay for them through the site which means you don’t have to handle credit cards. Oh, and on top of that, every time somebody registers for your event they have an opportunity to tell their friends about your event. At the event Social media can be hugely useful during the actual event as well. Create a Hashtag for your event. Make it short so people have lots of room to add their comments and encourage people to “live tweet” and upload pictures and video clips to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr with those tags. After the event this is a great way to see it through the eyes of the attendees and make the next one even better. Thank each and every poster with a personal thank you and an invitation for feedback. Live streaming This has been controversial of late with horror stories of the things people say in the chat area on some live-streaming sites. It can also be a great way to reach out to people who can’t attend for whatever reason. Either turn off the chat window or moderate it to toss out the jerks right away. Live Friendfeed or Twitter streams It can be a lot of fun to see what people are saying live right up on the wall at an event. It encourages people to post and at the same time encourages a bit of self moderation (they know the room is listening). Again, somebody should moderate. Not so much to squelch the unruly as to respond to issues or questions that come up and gently direct the flow of information. Mobile devices Use mobile devices or cameras like the Flip that can quickly upload video clips to share what’s going on. You can go back and annotate later and give the guests a card with the urls on it to go and add their comments and share with their friends. Find a maven I have to say  I am just not a maven at face to face events, but I have seen some brilliant ones in action and I genuinely admire them. In my opinion it’s an art form. A maven is a connector. She meets people, learns a few things about them and then makes introductions to the people who can help them in some way. Not only that, she remembers their names and pertinent information and is vital to your organization for getting back to attendees and planning your next event. Having a maven at your event can ensure it’s success even if you (like me) are deadly shy and fairly boring. She’ll pull it off and the event will be a smashing success. Make sure you thank her in a big way afterwards. After the event

• Take the time to thank the people you met. Follow up with answers to questions and connect on your networks.
• Create a montage of photos from the event through Flickr or Animoto to commemorate the event and then send it out to the attendees to share with their friends.
• Ask them to send you links to their own pictures and video clips so you can link them all up, perhaps with a re-cap blog post.
• Follow up immediately with anyone who offered to assit with the next event or wants to organize their own.

Showcasing your own videos or your favorite videos from YouTube on your Facebook Fan page is easy using the YouTube Box Application. You can use this application to help customize your page and bring in your own content to show off your area of expertise or tutorials. Importing your favorite videos related to niche can also be an effective way to connect with your fans. The YouTube Box application can also be added and used on your personal profile as well as a Fan Page. This video tutorial will walk you through the steps for adding the application to your Fan Page and setting it up with the videos you want to bring in. After you add the application and set it up, the YouTube Box will show up on the Boxes tab. You can also move it to the Wall tab or add a specific YouTube tab.  There is also the option the add or delete videos later on so don’t feel like the videos you choose to highlight now are set in stone.

A reader wrote in to ask which was better on a Facebook Fan page.

• Use the wall as the homepage?
• Create a custom look using boxes amd FBML?

Facebook fan pages are really mini-websites where a brand, product or individual can create community around themselves, get some feedback and hopefully input from fans and take advantage of the search engine benefits of a Facebook page. Fan pages are also generally a collection of “tabs” with different purposes. Maybe you’ve got pictures or movies, a discussion area or something a little deeper like an application or custom layout using Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and a feature they call “boxes” allowing us to add custom ares to a page. Fan page- Boxes or Wall? To answer that question we need to know more about the purpose of the page. If what you want is lots of user-interaction you may want to consider making the first thing a user sees the input from other users. This could be the wall or discussion area. Most fanpages make use of the wall as their homepage. However, there are notable exceptions. If you’re all about design, using the page to engage with a Facebook Application or simply as an ad or alternate web page, then you might think about building something custom using FBML. This video give you an overview of some Facebook fan page design ideas and how each works to drive traffic to your website or build interaction with your fans.

Blogger blogs can have almost as much fun as Wordpress ones when you add some “Gadgets” (Google’s answer to widgets in Wordpress). You can bring your Twitter feed into the sidebar, add games applications and other tools. There are actually quite a few both third-party and Blogger gadgets. Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how easy it is to add Gadgets to your Blogger blog.

Customizing your Facebook Fan Page can really help strengthen your marketing and branding efforts. You’ve probably seen other Fan Pages that seem to have some extra customized tabs or added boxes for signing up for newsletters. This is usually the result of adding the Static FMBL application and inputting a bit of HTML code. FBML stands for Facebook Mark-Up Language and is a Facebook developed and supported application which makes it safe for adding to any of your pages. (Note: The Static FMBL application can only be added to a Fan Page and cannot be added to a personal profile.) Using the FBML application is easy if you are familiar with using basic HTML code. If you’re not comfortable with HTML code, you might want to hire a web designer to help you with this task. This video will cover the basics for how to add the FBML application to your Fan Page and then how to add a Follow Me Twitter icon to show on your Wall to help your Facebook Fans find you on Twitter. To add the FBML application to your page, go to the application page and click on the “Add to my Page” link underneath the profile picture. If you have more than one fan page, it will ask you which page you want to add the application to. You can add it to one of the pages or to all of your pages right from that window.

• You can more than one FBML box to your fan page

• Images for these boxes will need to be hosted either through your own hosting service or with an online service like Photobucket. In the case of TwitterIcon.com, the images are hosted on their site.

• There are size (height/width)  limitations to the total size of the FMBL box depending on whether or not it’s in the sidebar of your Wall or on it’s own tab. For instance, to add an image to a box that will reside on your Wall tab, it will need to be a size that fits within that column otherwise part of the image will be cut off.

• To add a box for newsletter sign ups, you will need to use an email marketing service like Aweber or Constant Contact and create a web form. Please note that not all email marketing platforms will create a form that works with the FMBL application as the application does not support Java-Script code which some web forms use.

Whether you are an amateur blogger or a professional blogging for a company you need to clearly understand the FTC’s rules for bloggers or suffer the consequences.Like up to $11,000 in fines! Scary? Well it’s supposed to be, but quite honestly if you abide by good old common sense and treat people honestly in the first place this probably won’t be that big of an issue. That said I’m not a lawyer, so downloading the rules and reading them for yourself is a very good idea! Here’s a link to the code FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION 16 CFR part 255 (PDF) Here’s a quick summary of the high points

• If you blog about a product that was given to you to review, you are an affiliate for or you are paid to review in any way you must disclose that information clearly. This includes but is not limited to: ad revenue, testimonials for individuals or products, banner ads for the product “conveniently near” the post you wrote.
• If your blog is sponsored by anyone you must divulge this clearly. No writing about laundry when your sponsor is, say… Clorox, without divulging that fact.
• If you are in any way compensated by the company or parent company of a product you write about. You must disclose it where the reader can clearly see it.

Really when you think about it this isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It may mean the days of free swag are gone, but then again probably not. Magazines and newspapers have been dealing with this for years as have TV and radio. If we want blogging to be recognized as a professional industry we should be happy to be categorized with the rest of the publication industry.

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Facebook profile pictures on either your personal profile or on your Fan Page are typically one of the few items a Facebook user will see first. This means it can be prime page real estate for making a first impression on the person who visits your profile or your Fan Page. If you’ve ever uploaded a photo or an image of your logo, you have probably noticed that Facebook will re-size it to fit within a certain area. However, creating a custom image to fit within Facebook’s set profile parameters gives you quite a bit more space on you Wall for making an impact. Currently, Facebook will allow you to upload a picture with the maximum dimensions of 200 by 600 pixels. There was a recent announcement from Facebook that they will soon be changing this to 180 by 540 pixels. So, if you move ahead with creating an image, you would probably do best with creating one with the new dimensions in mind. It’s also good to keep in mind that part of this picture will be also be used for your thumbnail image next to all of your Wall Posts, so you will want to be sure to create an image with either your logo or a small photo near the top of your profile picture that will also translate well into a thumbnail. This video will give you some examples of custom profile pictures and how to adjust for the thumbnail image which shows up next to each of your posts.

Look at custom Twitter backgrounds and you’ll see there are a lot of similarities in what people do. You can only be so creative with a Twitter background because you are slightly limited by the design constraints of the Twitter content layout. Look at the basic Twitter page design At the top of the page there’s about 50 pixels from the top before you reach the main content area of the page. The Twitter logo takes up the first 160 pixels, then you’ve got a little space and then the navigation area. Notice how some people use this area for a branding statement or sometimes an email address. Most use the first 150-200 pixels from the left side of the page as where they add images and more information. It’s important to remember that people can’t click on any of this, so if you add a URL or email address it only has to be the domain name (SocialMediaCoachingCenter.com ). You’re really just telling them that you have a web site, a blog or whatever social media networks you want to highlight. They’ll have to remember the link if they want to go there. That’s why many people use this space simply to make a statement about themselves rather than trying to share too many links. Tell Twitter who you are, what you do and why they should be interested in following you. This video shows off the specifics of some nicely designed  profiles to give you ideas on how they came together and what could work for you. If you’re ready to create your own background designs here are a couple of ideas for you to download as Photoshop Source Documents (PSD).  Download the Twitter Background Template. Still don’t want to deal with it? Contact us and we can build you one. Hey, and once you’ve built your background add a link in the comments so we can share the love and see what you created.

If you build it, will they come? Maybe. You have your Facebook page all set up and a few people have become fans but you would surely like to continue growing your fan base. The following video tutorial will provide you with a few tips for helping you get more fans on your Facebook fan page.

The first tip will cover how to use the “Suggest to Friends” feature. Just under the profile picture on your Facebook Fan Page, if you click on the “Suggest to Fans” link, you can select any or all of your friends and invite them to become a fan of your fan page. This is helpful for a couple of reasons. First, for people who arrive at your Fan Page who are not your friends, they are likely to check and see how many fans the page already has as a way to determine if they would also like to become a fan of your Fan Page. So, having your friends as fans can help bolster confidence in getting new fans to join. The second reason is that when your friends become a fan of your page, then it goes into their Newsfeed and posts on the Wall of their personal profile which means their is the potential that their friends will see that they’ve joined your Fan Page and possibly join as well. You can also post a status update from your Fan Page to all of your current fans asking them to use the “Suggest to Friends” feature to invite any of their friends to your Fan Page who they think might be interested. The second tip in the video tutorial will show you show to generate the code to add a Facebook Fan Box Widget to your website or blog so that visitors to your website or blog can click to become fans of your Facebook Fan Page directly from your website. This does require knowing where to place the code on your website or blog. If you are not familiar with how to do this, then you can copy the code, paste it into NotePad and create a “.txt” file to send to your webmaster.