MyFanMachine

Making Your Business Social

From Your Website To Their Phone

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Can You Get Your Business Here?

People don’t like to commit. No, it’s not just a guy thing.

When a person first meets you or your company, they make a judgement. It’s not whether to buy from you or not. It’s way before that.

The first decision is whether or not they’re going to trust you. It’s instinctual.

You want your website visitors to trust you, but you only get a few seconds to make a good impression. And with people so busy, they’re likely not going to browse around your entire site to find out how great you are.

You need to give people the option to learn more about you on their own schedule.

And you need to make it easy.

This is why it is so important to give your interested visitors a chance to leave you with their email address or mobile number.

Keeping in touch with people through email marketing is almost as old as the internet. It’s a little more challenging to get the attention of people in their inbox, but email does give you a chance to tell more of your story at once. You can also direct them to your main site to find out more about you and your offers.

A new and exciting way to keep in touch with your visitors is with text messaging (also known as SMS).

Visitors can just enter their mobile number in a form on your site and they will instantly get updates from you! By setting expectations on how often you will be sending messages you can be a welcome visitor with interesting news just for them right on their phone!

And when they are ready to make a purchase, they will have your contact information right on their phone. A simple tap on their phone and you have a hot lead calling you, ready to do business with you.

Want to see how it works? Just enter your own phone number in the form to the right of this page. You can also find the link on our mobile marketing home page.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Getting Facebook “Likes” – Why It’s All Wrong

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What Value "Likes"?

An article came out recently that said businesses will spend more on social marketing this year. And most of that will be for getting new “likes”. What a huge waste of money. Here’s why…

There are a number of companies that will sell “likes” for your Facebook Page. You can easily buy thousands of them if you want to. But why would you want to?

I can think of two reasons why you would want to buy bulk “likes” for a page.

The first is that you want to get your first 25 “likes” so you can claim a custom URL for your Facebook page. I can see the reasoning in that, but honestly it shouldn’t be too hard to get those first likes if you’re providing good information for your market on your page.

The other reason is to make it look like you’re more popular than you really are. This is just deception piled on deception. Not only are you getting people to like your page who really don’t care about what you say, but any legitimate customers joining because of that inflated number will soon realize that there is nothing going on within your page to make it worth staying.

And when people who are your true “fans” don’t interact with your page by leaving more comments, the posts that you make are less likely to show up at the top of their news feed. Then you have spent all that time, energy and cash for nothing.

The best strategy is to update your page regularly with content your fans will appreciate. Occasionally ask them to spread the word and the amount of interaction with your page will increase organically without any tricks.

What’s your take on focusing on number of “likes” rather than the amount of activity with your customers?

Danger of Subtle Fear

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When you’re starting up a new project, whether its a Facebook page, a web site, or an entire new business, you have forces working against you.

The biggest one is fear.

It’s not big ugly dog barking in your face fear. Its more subtle.

Its a kind of fear that you might not even notice, but its just strong enough to keep you from moving forward and following through on your ideas.

Its the whispers on the back of your mind.

“what if this doesn’t work”

“what if people don’t like it”

“what if someone else steals my idea”

“what if I fall flat on my face”

Be assured that all great creators have had these thoughts. What makes them great is that they were able to push through these fears and keep moving toward their vision.

Will there be stumbles?

Yes.

Will there be failures?

Yes.

Its part of the process.

Recognize the fear and keep working past it. You will surprise yourself with what you can achieve if you just keep moving forward.

Keep on going. The world needs your great ideas.

Ranking Posts on Facebook

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One of the factors in Facebook’s ranking algorithm is how engaged your fans are with your page.

“What’s that”, you ask? “Facebook has a ranking algorithm?”

Indeed they do.

Facebook doesn’t just show all of the content from every page (or person) you friend or like. They give everything that could show up on your news feed a weight.

The more you interact with a page the greater weight it has and is more likely to show up in your news feed.

The takeaway here is that not only should you post regularly to your fan page, but you should make the effort to make posts that your fans will want to comment on.

A couple of popular ways to do this is to make posts that are funny or get some other emotional reaction. You can also ask your fans questions about what kinds of products or services they would like to see you provide.

This has the extra benefit of giving you insight onto what your customers want and the key to making more from your business.

Social Media Design and Perception

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In the process of developing MyFanMachine I’ve realized how much people value good design.

It’s a big part of success not just for web sites but also for physical products. This is made abundantly clear with the launch of both the iPad and the iPad2.

I’m really not an Apple fanboy, but my wife is really into the brand so we have an iPad in the house and soon we’ll have the iPad2. I didn’t truly appreciate the design until I had the chance to hold a Motorola Xoom.

Coming nearly a year after the first iPad you would think Motorola’s best effort would have significant improvements.

And it does. On paper.

But in your hand it feels heavier and clunkier than an iPad. This is really too bad because I wanted to like the Xoom and have some real competition for the iPad. People are not exactly standing in line to get the Xoom while there’s a one month wait to get an iPad2 at launch.

It’s true that Apple have become genius at marketing, but there’s solid aesthetics and design behind their products too.

And this is the lesson to learn.

Even if you have a great product, you’ll see a lot more success if it looks great too!

Don’t overlook design even if your products features blow the competition out of the water. Taking care of the human experience is just as important as getting the engineering right.