Increase Facebook Page Engagement By 52.3% In 10 Days!

You have a Facebook fan page for your blog or company. You tend to see your Facebook insights but get demoralized each time? 

Well today, i would like to share my experience with you guys and would hope that i could help you out in increasing your Facebook fan page activity due to more fan interaction.

I wont stretch up this post long. There are 3 straight forward moves that you need to make in order to get such results coming. Its been only 15 days approximately that i installed 3 of the following Facebook fan interaction apps (applications). And that work just GREAT! 


Before that, you may like to see Top 20+ Facebook Fan Page Designs

Bonus Video: How To Increase Your Facebook Group To 10,000 Members! SECRET!

How to Measure Facebook Engagement?

Tip #1 Install 'Fan Of The Week' App

One of the most enticing application for Facebook fan page for increasing fan interaction. People like to get rewarded. And indeed they should be if they are spending their valuable time while interacting with your blog on Facebook.

The application basically determines the top fan (considering various attributes) depending upon the number of likes he made on any Fan page post, any comment that he made, shares etc.

The more he would interact with the Fan page, the more points he gets and jumps up the ladder and finally becoming 'Fan of the week'. As the name suggest, 'Fan of the week', the app automatically publishes a status on your Facebook fan page wall, announcing the top fan for the entire week.

Also checkout this blog post that shares all the great apps to increase Facebook engagement

• 15 Types of Facebook Apps to Enhance Your Facebook Page 

Though you can forcibly choose the top fan at any point within the week. There are some other cool premium features to the app too. Though i haven't tried them yet, but the free ones are paying off already. Hope to see you guys using it soon on your blog's Facebook Fan page.

 | Install Facebook Fan Of The Week App |

Tip #2 Install 'Top Fan' App

This application is some what like the app mentioned before (fan of the week) but is kind of more advanced. Its by the same company and is still under development. (At present, the premium features are open to use too for the testing purposes, so you can test it out with full functionality).

Top Fan app would award points to your fans and would build bar charts to display the results. The best thing about it is that i automatically publishes the status 'every single day' to pump up the fans. You can set different (custom) sentences for each day. (This feature will get paid once the app gets out of testing mode).

| Install Top 'Top Fan' |

Tip #3 Publish Your Latest Blog Posts On The 'Right Timings'

Timings is so important in the field of blogging in general. The whole aim and idea is to make use of the times that would give you the maximum in flow of traffic. You can notice this by using your stats (Google Analytics).

For post timings, you may like to read:

• 4 Killer Ways To Prepare Your Blog For 2012
• How I Increased Google Page Rank To PR 4 And Why You Couldnt

If you're blog is new and your stats are not mature yet, that simply decide on the basis of your viewership. Where do you get most of your blog traffic from?

Say United States. Then time your blog posts followed by Facebook Fan page post at peak times according to that country. I like to publish it at 12-2pm as per United States timings.

Though it could vary a lot. The best approach is to take help from Google Analytics. But be sure you're not spending your time much into such tools.

You may like to read:

• DONT Use Google Analytics In The FIRST 3 Months Of Blogging

This is it! I continued to follow these 3 tips (installed two of those apps and published on Facebook fan page regularly) and thus finally increased the Fan page activity by whooping 58.3%. Hope to see the rise coming with the support of you guys. As always.

You may like to read:

• 2 Steps To Get a Custom Username For Your Facebook Page

What I Need From You Now?

Give me your views about these 3 tips. Simple Would you like to add any other Facebook fan page activity increasing tip that you experienced? Looking forward to listen from you.

Now you can read:

• 5 Vital SEO Tips That You MUST Apply To Your Blog
• 2 Reasons Google+ Brand Page Helps Your Blog In SEO

[SOLVED] 'Your Computer Needs To Be Cleaned' Facebook ERROR!

Don't download it! It's a malware it's self!

Today I tried to login to Facebook to interact with AskHassam Facebook Family (Group) and Facebook gave me this weird login error/gate where I couldn't login. It mentioned that my computer is infected and I someone might be stealing the information with in. It suggested, that to solve the issue, you have to download this weird software 'Trend Micro' which would find the malware and clean it up!.

In fact! IT WAS THE MALWARE IT'S SELF! Glad that I first searched it up on Google and found that Facebook only officially endorses only McAfee and Microsoft Security Essentials anti viruses offically. Anything other than that is a pure malware its self.

How To Solve This?

There are many solutions out there BUT the easiest is to clear out all the cookies in your browers related to Facebook.

For Firefox:

Step #1 Go to Options >> Privacy >> Remove Individual Cookies

Step #2  search for "Facebook.com" and select and highlight all the cookies that mention Facebook in it's address. Then hit 'delete Selected'.

For Chrome:

Step #1 Go to 'Tools Menu'

Step #2 Click on 'Options'

Step #3 Click on 'Under the Hood'

Step #4 Under 'Privacy' section select "Show Cookies'

Step #5 A new window will open called 'Cookies' Here you can see all the cookies within your Google Chrome Browser.

Step #6 Simply highlight the Facebook related cookies and click "Remove"

Hope this will help! Once the cookies are removed, you can simply login back to your Facebook account seamlessly! Do let me know if this solved your problem!

• [message]
• ##check## Also Checkout
• 10 Facebook Cover Photo Themes You Can Make For Your Self

YouTube Vs Facebook Video View Criteria? 30 vs 3 Sec?

 

It can get extremely confusing when it comes to decide between your ultimate video hosting platform. It's the battle between YouTube and Facebook. When I started making AskHassam episodes, it was a very tough decision to whether upload my videos to YouTube, Facebook or other relatively smaller websites like Daily Motion or Vimeo etc.

Looking forward to this, I made a short video sharing my thoughts on the issue.

Then finally, I settled with YouTube for some reasons and I'll share that with you brothers and sisters in a bit. First, lets go through how Facebook and YouTube determines their 'video view'.

YouTube Video View

So each time when a person clicks on a YouTube video, may that be on YouTube it's self or via any embed video in third party blogs/websites, YouTube video player starts counting the seconds the guy has watched the video.

Once he watches the video upto 30 seconds, that gets counted as a video view and the stats for that particular video get updated.

Facebook Video View

Though with Facebook, it's quite different. First of all, Facebook plays all the videos in a timeline automatically. Many doubt whether a person was actually interested in the video or not, even though the counter for views got incremented.

Secondly, Facebook counts a video view just after the second mark! This is 10 times less than what YouTube believes the criteria should be.

My Personal Take

It's important to understand is why video views actually matter. The more the video views, the more attention a video gets. As it's thought to be.

Do you think that 3 second duration actually portrays a person watching a video that might be a 10 min log if not more? Not that 30 seconds does, BUT it still displays that the user tried watching the video and loosed his interest on the way.

With Facebook, more video views obviously attracts advertisers and gives confidence to the publishers and video makers.

There are few doubts about the credibility of the video views on Facebook? A video playing automatically, and for just 3 seconds get's counted as a video view. Does that show that the viewer actually had interest in the video? Will the video convert well?

Imagine you have 10,000 video views on Facebook and most of them were auto plays on time lines. This means, that you get near to no conversion for your goal. With conversion, I mean with every video, you could related an aim. Some marketers like to take traffic to their websites via Facebook videos.

They could either ask the viewers to follow them on other social media profiles. Or they could ask them to subscribe to their newsletter. Or just buy a product!

The Point

The point is, that videos on YouTube have a bit more edge for 2 reasons,

1- The user intentionally clicks on the video that he/she feels interesting. This could bump up the conversion rates.

2- The videos with more views on YouTube actually shows that people watched the videos for sure! Unlike on Facebook where an auto play. 3 seconds attention span is fairly less!.

3- For people who post more of searchable content, they could go for YouTube as it's still a better video search engine. People hardly search for videos on Facebook as of yet. But for viral video creators who rely on social shares, I think Facebook is a pretty good choice for them.

My Decision

Looking forward to this, as I create more informative AskHassam videos that feature your questions mostly, these could be search on YouTube by tons of other people. SO looking forward to this I decided to stick with YouTube even though YouTube is banned in Pakistan by the authorities.

What do you think?

Let me know what you think about this? Is Facebook's criteria of 3 seconds video view okeh? How could one justify a view in your opinion?

Looking forward to your thoughts brothers and sisters!

You can also read:

• Uploading Videos Directly To Facebook Vs Sharing YouTube Videos? - Which Gets More Interaction?

Uploading Videos Directly To Facebook Vs Sharing YouTube Videos? - Which Gets More Interaction?

We often get confused between whether or not we should directly upload videos to our Facebook pages or share a video from our YouTube channel on Facebook. Today, I've got a great report to share with you guys done by socialblackers which pretty much sums up the conclusion in the favor of uploading videos directly to Facebook pages.

As many of you would know, I've a huge obsession with Bodybuilding and fitness in general and I started my Facebook page for that purpose in order to share my story and how I workout in specific. I intended to post out workout videos to my Facebook page so that I could inspire my other fellows to stay healthy all year along.

For this, I searched for couple of studies that would support that matter of Facebook Videos vs YouTube videos being shared on Facebook platform. I wanted to know which one works better in terms of user interaction.

Even though I had a gut feeling that Facebook native videos started to work out much better than YouTube videos being shared, as Facebook videos just felt more simpler and easier to play and interact.

SocialBlackers examined over 20,000 Facebook pages that included entertainment companies, celebrities, brands etc and found out that now videos uploaded to Facebook directly are comprising of 80% of all the videos traffic on Facebook. This is HUGE!

Earlier this year, socialblackers mentions that they saw a 50% increase in all the video interactions from May to June 2014.

What I Plan Now?

Looking forward to this study, I then planned on to record my workout videos frequently and upload them directly to Facebook instead of uploading them first to YouTube and then sharing on the Facebook page.

Post by Hassam Ahmad Awan.

Even though I thoroughly believe in "being everywhere" and utilizing all the great platforms out there, still to start of with, I'll stick to Facebook page and after 1-2 months, I look forward to examine how the progress is going with the native videos on Facebook.

I'll keep you guys posted on that and would share what I learned along the way.

Till, next time, Allah Hafiz. Peace out.

Facebook Threatening Social Site 'Ello' Raises Millions In Funding, Aims To Remain Ad Free Forever!

Ello is a new social networking website that was created last month and until now it has managed to get $5.5 million as investment. Moreover, the company's executives have decided that the website will never have ads so that they can provide its users an excellent experience.

To make sure that Ello remains ad free the investors and founders have signed a charter according to which the user data can't be sold to a third party. The initial investment was $450,000 and now it has increased 10 times.

disqus

How To Redirect & Track Facebook Fan Page Tab To Blog?

 As being Bloggers and webmasters, we keep on implementing new strategies to drive as much traffic as possible towards are blog. May that be via search engines or from our social media campaigns.

This time around, we'll take a lot at simple and easy to follow steps that you can make use of to Drive your Facebook fan page traffic that clicks on the tabs you'll set, towards your blog.

This means, that any person that clicks your fan page tabs, they'll be redirected towards a landing page you'll set on your blog, instead of adding something to that tab and not utilizing the fans to directly land on your blog.

See Also: 3 Steps To Block Stupid Facebook Game Requests [Infographic]

How I Have Utilized This On BloggingeHow?

Previously if you would notice, on BloggingeHow's fan page, I had setup a tab that said "1000$ a Month". This was supposed to be the landing page which I setup as Facebook tab.

So each time when a fan clicked that tab, he was taken to a landing page with in Facebook.

Why you need to redirect the fan instead of creating landing page with in Facebook?

1- That won't really matter until you the visitor to better engage with your blog or squeeze page. I realized that our squeeze on the blog would open more opportunities to convert the visitor instead of letting him stay with in Facebook environment.

2- There are tons of distractions on Facebook and the conversions could be fairly less on Facebook instead of a stand alone squeeze page.

How To Redirect Facebook Fan Page Tab To Your Blog In 5 Quick Clicks?

We'll be using a third party tool for this called 'woobox' which is fairly popular for Facebook tabs. Previously I used another third party tool, but after getting my hands on this one, I can't get over how easy it is with woobox to setup a redirection tab or other sort of custom tabs.

These folks have made it just too simple.

Step #1 Go to Woobox.com (don't worry page will open in new tab.)

Step #2 Click 'Get Started for Free' on the top right

Step #3 Click "Create new tab" at top right corner.

Step #4 Click "HTML fan gate" option from drop down.

Step #5 Click "Redirect". Now this is where you'll be adding your landing page URL (in BloggingeHow's case, I added the squeeze page's URL, that is the download page for the eBook "6 Month to a 1000$ Blog.")


There are 3 things we'll setup here:

1- Your Tab Redirect URL towards your blog
2- Tab Name.
3- Tab Thumbnail image (which needs to be 111x74 px)

The more clear the call to action would be in the Thumbnail, the more clicks you'll be getting on your tab and thus the more traffic towards your blog. So invest some time creating a great looking Thumbnail.


You can add mouse click arts on it too as I did with BloggingeHow, which motivates the user to click.

Adding URL

Adding Thumbnail

Finally once you've uploaded the thumbnail and choose your Facebook tab title, hit 'save settings'. That's all! Your new tab is already live with everything setup for you!

How to Adjust / Drag Position Of Facebook Tabs?

You just need to review it's position in Facebook which can be done as below.

Once you hit 'manage tabs' you'll be displayed a popup where you can drag the tabs to adjust their placement on the Facebook fan page.

Hope that helped guys. The best part is, you can track all the clicks via your woobox powered Facebook tabs towards your landing page.

How to Track Clicks on Your Facebook Tab?

Once you're in 'static tab menu option' in your woobox dashboard, you can hit the stat button right on a specific tab you want to track as shown in the picture below.

 Once your tab would start getting clicks, you'll notice the stats graph being populated. Give it some time to collect data.

demo tab stats

Hope that was helpful brothers. I really look forward to how you'll be utilizing it for your brand and convert your Facebook fans into long term customers.

Till next time
Peace

You can now read: Facebook Shadow Profiles May Cause Your Data to Get Leaked?

3 Steps To Block Stupid Facebook Game Requests [Infographic]

If you're here on this post, I'm sure you get those stupid Facebook game requests a lot like 'Candy Crush' and what not. Facebook game developers make sure they develop a seamless way for the players to share the game with their Facebook friend list. They would do anything in their power to share the game via your account.

I never played Candy Crush and don't even know what this stupid game wants from us, though we all keep getting such pointless game requests that make up major percentage of my Facebook notifications. And it's annoying to not properly be able to reach out to friends that have actual interaction with your Facebook activity.

This Infographic shows simple 3 steps to block these Facebook game request notifications for EVER!

Do that as soon as possible before you end up leaving Facebook entirely.

Share with your friends

If you liked the Infographic, and you believe it would help any of your friends get rid of these crazy notifications, make sure you share it with them.

5 Highly Rewarding Alternatives To Facebook Like Gating

If you're new to the term 'Facebook like gating' and probably wondering what it  would be, then you're on the safe edge already. 'Like Gating' is when you as a blogger/webmaster would lock out a certain content, that may be a premium content, some blog widget, an ebook or a contest, with Facebook Like Button.

Some examples of like-gates include:

• Entering a Contest by Like a Facebook page
• Giving access to coupons or promo codes once someone likes your Facebook fan page.
• Liking a Facebook Page in order to watch a video
• Giving access to PDFs or eBooks after someone likes Facebook page.

That is you only provide access to the stuff when people would 'like' your Facebook page. There are tons of free widgets out there that you can use to Like-Gate your content, but the question now is that is it really worth Like Gating a content?

Facebook recently announced that it would ban Like-Gating from November 5th 2014 which is a call that is received with mixed views all around the net.

Facebook mentioned:

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app�s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

People who grew their Facebook fan bases with by like gating an iPad giveaway back in 2009-2010 would probably the most worried notch out there.

While other experts believe it's one of the most sound decisions made at Facebook Headquarters as it would promote the idea of gaining loyal Facebook likes rather than a bunch of people who signed up just to get what you were giving away for free in response to a mere Like-Gate.

In the worst case, people would 'unlike' your page once your contest is over or when they get the content delivered.

Below is how a typical Facebook Like Gate Looks like:

Intelligent marketers know how less valuable could an un-targeted Facebook like can be in comparison to other data that you  could gather instead of forcing someone to 'like' your content.

I hope that you don't really make use of Facebook like gate already, though if you had done it in the past, it is time to up your marketing game and go after collecting more wise data that would help you better engage with your followers in the long run.

#1 Email Form Gate > Then Facebook's 'Like' Gate

As I talk about capturing email as much as I can and published a list of cruel mistakes that I did that you should avoid. 4.5 Blogging Mistakes That Would Hit You Back Hard - And Solutions

You can tremendously grow your email list by asking people to signup via emails to get access to the content. Though, these people won't be as targetted and interested in the content that you might want to sent in later, still you have a 'better' chance to engage with them, far more than if they converted into a Facebook fan.

With email subscribers, you could get to know their interest and feed them content as to what they like.

You can also later send these subscribers similar premium content or solve their problems with a specific product that you would make. They would be far too interested to checkout in comparison to if they were your Facebook fan.

#2  Use 'Share' / 'Engagement' gate instead of 'Like' gate.

This technique is already being used by major brands that offer giveaways and promotions. They would actually hold a contest on their websites and users would be able to enter the contest by submitting their art work, videos, content etc.

For example a photography blog may be holding a contest. Fans would be asked to share their version of the best well taken photographs with certain hashtag (e.g #takeapic) and the winner would get rewarded.

This way, you'd be creating massive engagement on your Facebook page and viral traffic would be your destiny.

Later, you can drive that traffic to your site and pass it along other funnels to make use of that. And if your website/blog is well setup, that traffic could be later converted into email subscribers too.

Sara at sociallystacked published a very comprehensive post on creating great Facebook ads:

• 3 Tips for Designing Around Facebook's 20% Ad Text Rule

#3 Manipulate The News Feed With Facebook Advertisement

Alternatively, if you have an advertising budge at your disposal, you can setup Facebook Ads (Which actually what Facebook wants), and promote your contests, content or email gates setup at your landing pages.

With Facebook ads, that are pretty easy to setup you can reach the exact audience that you want. Promoting your landing squeeze page, may that be promoting your mobile app or just giving your website more exposure in front of targeted demographics.

#4 Utilize Likes on Fan Page as an Entry Scheme

You can setup a contest where people could enter by commenting on your fan page. The best comment or idea that gets most likes wins. The same can be ported over to a landing page with Facebook comments plugin.

Obviously you would want to drive traffic towards your landing page to later convert that into email subscribers or convert those leads directly into sales, may be.

#5 Using Facebook Tabs

Making use of the online tools such as Shortstack you can create mobile/desktop friendly Facebook tabs for free.

You  can setup an email sign up box with in that tab before you let the fan get access to the content. For such email subscription boxes, you would have to make use of popular email marketing tools like Aweber.

You can read: 6 Reasons to Get Started With Aweber - You'd Be Foolish Otherwise to learn more about how Aweber could  help you in this regard.

I hope these alternatives to Facebook like gating would prove to be rewarding to you if you're looking forward to grow your fan base and drive some viral traffic towards your landing pages.

Till next time,
Peace.