Online Word of Mouth for Your Brand: facebook

Small and Medium businesses are always facing interesting set of challenges, which they try and address with innovation. With the internet becoming mainstream and especially social media taking center stage, businesses are leveraging the media to not only reach out to the intended target audience, but also engage prospects into the busiensses' brand value and communication.

Now track your brand's word of mouth on facebook
One of the strongest and the most credible ways of marketing for your brand, especially for an SME is word of mouth. A customer you gain by the reference of an existing customer can not only help you be far better operationally but also help you reduce down your cost of sales and also customer retention could increase far more for your business.

You can now track the word of mouth about your brand on facebook. The latest feature added by facebook below your fan page likes ‘number’ called the People Talking About! This number essentially represents the number of people who are talking about your brand (mentioning you in comments, liking updates) etc. in a week. As an obviously logical extension to the thought, the more the number of people talking, the more is your brand reaching out to the relevant target audience and engaging them.

The number as shown in the screen capture above, '284' shows the number of people on facebook which are engaging with the content of the page int he current week. This number obviously keeps changing and is publicly available.

This essentially will also suggest how engaging is the content on your page. This ensures that brands create more engaging and exciting content which calls for action from the target audience.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to enable SMEs with tools, tips and techniques to help them reach up the value chain and hence achieve the next level of growth. For more information on how you can create new opportunities for your business, drop in a comment to this post and we will get in touch with you!

Its Out Finally: facebook for Businesses

Many businesses, both large and small have been overtime trying to understand what all they could do with facebook, how can they best leverage the service and how can their business get the real ROI, while helping them achieve business objectives. Almost all the time, these companies have to turn to agencies who claim to do social media magic. The investment in such projects is huge and may a times does not really gets the results smaller companies are looking at.

Now learn how you can leverage facebook for your business?

The above screen capture shows you what new has facebook come up with. Its a facebook business page. Its purely an information driven page which actually helps you as a business understand the various features of facebook which you can explore and use for your business.

From creating a facebook fan page for your business to creating your presence on facebook places. facebook Ads to the realm, the page essentially helps you understand how best can you leverage various facebook features for your business.

To know more about the best practices of how businesses have leveraged facebook, click on the following Best Practices link.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities or SMEs to grow. To know more about how you can leverage the internet and new media technologies, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!

Doing an Event, Promote it Free on Facebook

Events are the best places for executives to network and businesses to promote their products and offerings. There are interesting events which happen throughout the industry and the year which create a powerful platform for executives and entrepreneurs to network and generate business.

Many Small and Medium businesses are finding it very relevant to participate in events and many of them are hosting smaller and more focused versions of large format events themselves. There are many popular events in the industry which have been started small by SMEs and are gaining vast acceptance by the community and popularity by the audience.

Promote your events for free through facebook!
facebook helps you create events and promote them for free online. To start with, you need to click on the "events" tab on the left sidebar menu on your profile. Once done you will be re-directed to the following page:

To create your own event, click on the "Create Event" link on the top of the page and you will be re-directed to the following screen:

Once you key in the details of your event, simply press the "Create Event" button on the bottom of the event page and your event will be created, which will look like the following:

You can now very easily share the event on your wall using the share button and also invite people from your friends network for the event. If your event is compelling enough and if you position it well for your audience they might share the link in their network and many more people who you might not be able to reach directly will get to know about the event.

How does it help my business?

facebook has a large captive base globally, with over 750 million people. In India as well, facebook have millions of active users. Not everyone is your target audience, but many of these people are in the networks of others who might be relevant to your event. This essentially helps your business reach out to a whole captive base which you might not have previously been in touch with or explored.

facebook events also help users engage with your event. They can post their queries by posting on the event wall, which you can answer. Also when someone updates their status of "I am Attending" the event by clicking on the link on the event page, it shows up on their profile page to their friends list, which increases your chances of reaching out more people and hence increased registrations.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities or SMEs to grow. To know more about how you can leverage the internet and new media technologies, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!

How to Build a HTML Tab on a facebook Fan Page: iwipa

Social Networking has revolutionized the way the world works. The simplest basis of communication has changed from being a one to one to one to many and many to many. Its not just about writing an Email now. Its about engaging into a conversation which has different viewpoints given by people who might be sitting anywhere across the world.

facebook: the fan pages for businesses
facebook is one of world's largest social networks. While it allows users to do many things, one of the most used and attractive features of facebook for businesses are its fan pages. We have previously simplified facebook fan pages for you in our blog post.

So now that you have your facebook fan page, how do you make it look attractive, with engaging tabs, which help you create applications and other engaging features on your fan page such that your fans find increased stickiness to your message.

Example of a facebook fan page:

One of the attractive points of this fan page is the "fan page image/ logo" on the top left. It shows great call to action other than in the first look, telling the user, what is the fan page all about?!

The above screen capture shows a landing page which this facebook fan page has. This landing page interactively and in an engaging manner shows what all features can the fans interact with, while they are on this facebook fan page.

The tabs above "Home" "Events" "Top Hiring This Month" etc. are interactive tabs which re-direct the users to relevant sources of information in an interactive format.

How to create such interactive tabs?

iwipa is an application which facebook allows to integrate within pages, which allows you to create such powerfully engaging interactive facebook fan pages.

To install the app on your page, you need to click on "Edit Page" on the top right of the page and then click on "Apps" in the left sidebar menu. This will re-direct you to the following screen:

Click on browse more applications on the bottom of this page and search for iwipa. Once you have it installed in your page, it will ask you to activate the same by landing on the tab which you have created on your page. It will by default have the name "welcome". Once you click on activate the app, you will be re-directed to the following page:

Click on the edit page option as marked in red in the screen capture above. Once you click on "edit your page" you will be re-directed to the following screen, as shown in the screen capture below:

Once you click on "Edit" the page layout, you will be re-directed to the following screen, where you can simply drag and drop the various elements on the page to include/ exclude them from your page.

While you are using this application, once you have made relevant changes to the page, click on "Save Layout" and instant changes will be made to your page.

How do I make it more interactive?

Using "permissible" HTML coding, you can make your page more interactive. But this HTML coding must be handled critically as this must adhere to the facebook guide and rules, otherwise facebook might shut the page.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to create new opportunities or SMEs to grow. To know more about how you can leverage the internet and new media technologies, drop in a comment to this post and our team of experts will be happy to help!

Engage Your Facebook Audience With @facebook.com Email Id

If you still haven't claimed your @facebook.com email id, you are missing out on some relevant action for your business. facebook launched he @facebook.com messaging system with its offer to its users to claim their email Ids for free. So now eve if I am not logged into facebook, anyone can send me a message at my facebook Email id.

How do I get a @facebook.com email Id?
Its simple. Go to the facebook message inbox and click the "Claim Your facebook Email Link", as shown in the screen capture below:

Once done, you will quickly have yourname/ your business name @facebook.com. Obviously it depends upon the availability of the email id. In general your profile name (which is again unique) becomes your Email Id. Eg: profile: facebook.com/indiamart, the Email id would be: indiamart@facebook.com

Can I send messages from this Id

Yes you can! a facebook Email id is as similar to your existing real world Email Id, just that whe you send Emails from this Id, they go to the external world formatted as a facebook message, with your profile picture etc, which recognizes that the mail is from your fb Id.

How is it useful for SMEs?

SMEs can strongly target their facebook users while messaging only through facebook. Any responses form the same will help the SMEs understand the conversion ratio of their facebook fan base. This will help in determining the cost for the business to leverage social media and the ROI delivered.

There are many such online tools available, which are benefiting the Small and Medium Enterprise segment. To know more, get in touch with the experts at IndiaMART Knowledge Services. Do drop in a comment to this post to let us know what else would you want us to share about!