Activ8Social

Despite the fact 2010 was arguably the year of the location-based check-in (although others like The Next Web contend 2011 is really the year), there are certain pundits who proclaim that the phenomenon was nothing more than a short lived fad yet many others envision the check-in will evolve beyond simply telecasting one’s whereabouts.

One thing is for sure … Foursquare definitely begs to differ with the doomsday prognosticators and if the newest version of the geo-location platform is any indication of future usage trends, the check-in will eventually grow more sophisticated. In late March 2011, Foursquare launched version 3.0 and with it came a litany of new features most notably more specials for merchants.  The 2 year old startup now boasts more than 250k small and large businesses alike that have taken advantage of specials.

If you work in social media marketing in-house or with an agency, you are most likely familiar with the news that Facebook recently rolled out a new format for Facebook Pages. The majority of regular Facebook users will immediately notice that Pages appear extremely similar in format to user profiles. This is because Facebook espouses a “consistent” user experience across their platform as explained in this official company note.

Upgrading to the new Pages format is not mandatory until March 10, but in the meantime, Page administrators can elect to upgrade at their leisure. In order for you to gain familiarity with each of the new changes, Activ8Social has put together the following walk through based on the step by step preview Tour provided by Facebook. We hope this helps you with your Page’s transition and don’t forget to click on the images below to view the screen shot in full resolution!

In case you didn’t already witnessed it firsthand, earlier this week Facebook rolled out a brand new “social’ advertising format to the right of your News Feed, called Sponsored Stories, which seeks to even further leverage each user’s likes and interests. Sponsored Stories is the newest brain child of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Inc. It’s a reasonably simple concept.

As Ad Age explains, Facebook will take on one of four actions in the daily activity of your Facebook friends and turn them into ads on your home page: 1) Likes,  2) status updates or “page posts”, 3) Places check-ins, and 4) app activity or “application play”.

Odds are if you’re responsible for the digital marketing or social media strategy of an athlete, celebrity, team, league, or company, you will be considering how best to leverage Facebook’s relatively new Social Plugins on an official website or blog.

If you meet this profile, you may find yourself asking “what features does Facebook now provide for my website, how easy is it to implement, and what does all mean”?  For an in depth look into the last question, check out our blog post from last month on the f8 conference.  For part one and part two, we’ve gone ahead and compiled a quick overview that should shed a little light on the basics.

In the second installment of our “Facebook Fan Page Tips” series, we showed you the basic steps for setting up your new Facebook Page such as uploading the most effective profile picture, adding information, and hooking your page up to Faceobok Mobile for the ability to update on the move.

One of the most attractive benefits of the Facebook Platform for building your digital brand equity is the massive global audience and the potential to reach new fans/consumers.  For this reason, it makes a lot of sense for you (whether a personal brand or corporate brand) to syndicate your blog to your Facebook Page where people have opted-in to join your niche conversation.  This way, every time you post new information that your fans/consumers may be interested in reading, the conversation is brought directly to them.

Let’s get one thing straight upfront—social media is not as easy as “if you build it, they will come” for any athlete, team, league, or sponsor looking to establish or enhance brand equity.  Social media marketing is no different than traditional off-line marketing in that it requires a well thought out strategy, devoted resources, and a budget targeted at a reaching a measurable goal for the individual or organization.

With that said, social media’s major advantages—the cost-to-creativity ratio and the ability to expand reach via an engaged audience (key word here is “engaged” but I’ll explain more)—make this form of marketing so powerful that most athletes looking to enhance their salaries with fat endorsement checks should be asking their agency, management team, or friends and family why social media isn’t a part of their overall marketing strategy.

In the first installment of our “Facebook Page Tips” series, we showed you how to create a new Page. Now I will walk you through how to get your Page ready before publishing it to the world.

For the purposes of this walk through, I’ll be focusing on the basic settings, but keep in mind that these seemingly simple instructions are absolutely critical to the success of your Page. Remember you have to crawl before you can walk, and we’ll have you sprinting like Usain Bolt in no time. Read the full blog post for a step-by-step breakdown of the new page set-up process.

As promised in the initial post last month, all of us here at Activ8Social will be sharing our knowledge on the basics of setting-up, navigating, and managing Facebook Pages—one of the most effective tools capable of developing your brand online.

In this installment of the series, I will show those of you who are unfamiliar with Facebook Pages how to create a new page from scratch as well as how to move around the main control panels. Read the full blog post for a step-by-step breakdown.

One of the services that we specialize in at Activ8Social is the creation and management of high volume Facebook Pages for professional athletes, brands and other sports entertainment clients. Through our experiences, we’ve become intimately familiar with the Facebook platform and accumulated a long list of best practices that have led to increased fan engagement and ROI for client pages.

The simple definition of a Facebook Page is “a public profile that enables you to share your business and products with Facebook users”. When you sign up for a regular Facebook user account, you’re given a “Profile” which is private by default.