Saturday, December 25, 2010
Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page
Amplify’d from www.socialmediaexaminer.com
Top 75 Apps for Enhancing Your Facebook Page
Have you customized your Facebook page? There are thousands of apps that can help you engage with your fans. In this article I’ll focus on the top 75 Facebook apps.
These apps allow you to customize your landing tabs, add your blog, add videos and photos, add chat, add polls, contests, geolocation, scheduling, email, ecommerce and much more.
Why Facebook Apps?
Why add apps to your Facebook Business (Fan) page? By customizing your Fan page with apps, you can significantly enhance the user’s experience. And, the more you keep your fans engaged and coming back for more, the more likely you’ll increase your “viral visibility.”
In other words, every time a fan interacts with your Fan page, it’s free advertising for you because each fan’s activity goes out into their stream (their wall and their friends’ News Feeds). To find the best apps to enhance your Fan page, you could spend endless hours browsing Facebook’s Application Directory:
However, there are literally tens of thousands from which to choose. Even clicking on the Business category as I’ve done in the screenshot above, we get apps like Bartab (send friends real drinks for $1) and Hugs and Hearts. I don’t know about you, but these are hardly business apps in my opinion!
There’s also Appbistro where you can browse their comprehensive directory of apps for businesses.
Now that Facebook nixed the ability to have our own custom content/apps on the Wall tab (left column), we need to get even more creative to ensure content on tabs is actually seen and that your fans interact with it; otherwise there’s not much point in having a dormant app that doesn’t enhance the user’s experience.
You can track your metrics via Facebook Insights and see which of your tabs gets the most clicks as shown in the screenshot below:
However, it may be that very few of your tabs get much visibility except the actual Landing tab (my top scorer in the screenshot above). Your Landing tab is the default page that visitors see who have not yet joined your page (click Edit Page > Manage Permissions > select Default Landing Tab).
So, my recommendation is to focus on those apps that actually publish content to your own Fan page stream (your page wall and the News Feed of your fans). Plus, add a few apps that allow for heightened engagement at specified times, such as live streaming video and live chat apps as I’ve detailed below for you.
Custom Landing Tabs
Let’s start with custom content as it’s important to have a branded Landing tab for your Facebook page. In fact, as reported by InsideFacebook, BrandGlue founder Jeff Widman discovered that a custom Landing tab DOUBLES conversion to fans:
The most popular app by far to add your own custom content has been Facebook’s own Static FBML. Facebook will be replacing all FBML tabs and apps with iFrames at the end of 2010, at which time you’ll be able to create custom tabs using iFrames. However, Facebook will continue to support any and all tabs/apps created prior to when FBML gets deprecated. See the Developers Roadmap for updates on the timeline of changes.
By way of example, here’s the Landing tab for Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page. Note the call to action (”Click the Like button”) and the seamless branding:
Apps for adding custom content/branded Landing tab:
Here are my top two recommendations:
- Static FBML – you’ll need to be familiar with coding or use a WISIWYG editor first. See Tabfusion’s Free Facebook Page Tab Maker here. Plus, review these two helpful tutorials.
Facebook custom tab apps:
For easy-to-use templates, check out these options:
These sites offer suites of apps, including custom Landing tabs. Some apps are free, some have a fee:
For a helpful review of some of these apps, see this post on TechCrunch. Plus, read Jay Baer’s review of several of these apps here. For a list of over 50 Facebook-approved developers, go here.
Your Blog
Once you’re happy with your custom Landing tab, it’s time to import your blog’s RSS feed. My favorite app – used widely by many bloggers on Facebook – is Networked Blogs. It’s free and relatively simple to set up.
Once you’re set up and have a few followers, you can place the Networked Blogs widget on your blog for added visibility. Any time you have the chance to display your fans’ faces, go for it!
You can add the Networked Blogs app to your personal profile in addition to your Fan page, if you wish. Alternate methods for pulling in your blog posts include:
- Facebook’s Notes app (can be a lag time and is sometimes buggy).
- Any of the RSS apps; e.g., RSS Graffiti, Social RSS or others.
RSS Feed and Content Publishers
You can easily import any of your content that has an RSS or Atom feed. For example, I import my Twitter favorites and Google Reader Shared Items using the RSS Graffiti app.
RSS/Content apps include:
- Involver – RSS Feed (free version posts to the tab, Pro version posts to the wall)
- Objective marketer (complete publishing platform – used and recommended by Guy Kawasaki).
Video – YouTube and Viddler
I’ve been searching for some time for the ultimate YouTube app – one that automatically publishes new uploaded videos from your channel to your Facebook page wall, has a nice-looking tab, is easy to navigate and doesn’t take users away from your Fan page to view videos. Plus, if I were really waving a magic wand, I’d love it if YouTube gave us the option under their “Activity Sharing” feature to post liked or favorited videos to our Fan page (versus profile).
The closest I’ve found is YouTube Channels – I like their interface but the downside is they charge a monthly fee of $4.99 and I couldn’t get the Publish to Wall feature to work, so I canceled my subscription. Check out the YouTube Channel app by Involver (screenshot below) or the YouTube Video Box app.
If you have a Viddler account instead of or in addition to YouTube, check out the Viddler app.
I’m not a big fan of importing all tweets onto your Facebook wall, unless you don’t tweet that often! A more effective solution is to only publish select tweets TO your Fan page using this app:
- Selective Tweets – once set up, this app allows you to post your tweets to your Facebook page simply by including “#fb” at the end of the tweet (or there is an option to include #fb anywhere in the tweet but I don’t recommend that option as it’s too easy to make a mistake!). You can choose to post tweets to your personal profile and/or Fan page.
Or, my favorite solution as mentioned in the RSS Feed section above is to only import your Twitter Favorites. I do this using the RSS Graffiti app. To find the RSS feed URL for your Twitter Favorites, with the new Twitter design the only way is to view your Twitter account while logged out:
Another Twitter solution is to simply install an app that pulls in all your tweets onto a tab, but doesn’t publish in the stream. I’m not sure there’s much benefit to this, as I say the primary goal here is to get into the News Feeds of your fans.
To publish your Facebook content TO Twitter as tweets, connect your page using Facebook’s own Twitter app. You have a choice of six different types of content: Status Update, Photos, Video, Links, Notes and Events. Facebook’s publisher (the field where you type your updates) takes up to 420 characters; whereas tweets are 140 characters. With this Facebook to Twitter app, your content will automatically be truncated with a link back to your Facebook page which can help increase engagement by bringing your Twitter followers onto Facebook.
Flickr Photos
To display photos from your Flicker account, you might want to try the Flickr Tab app. See also the suite of app providers above.
SlideShare
If you have slides up on SlideShare, display them on your Facebook Fan page! You’ll have a nice display on the SlideShare tab, but I haven’t found that adding new slides automatically publishes to the wall. So, as you add new slides (and/or videos) to SlideShare.net, also publish the URL right on your Facebook page wall. What this does is pull in an actual player very similar to the video player with the blue play button icon. Your fans can play the slideshow right on your wall, and of course like and comment, providing that coveted News Feed ranking.
Reviews
Facebook has a Reviews app that you can add to your Fan page. The cool thing about this app is whenever a fan writes a review, it goes out into their stream (their wall and friends’ News Feeds). If you have a particularly negative review, spam or trolls, unfortunately there’s no way to remove individual reviews. If that ever happens, you could remove the app altogether. Otherwise, I think the Reviews app is an often-overlooked goldmine for businesses to have on their Fan pages!
Live Video
One of my favorite apps to spark immediate real-time, live engagement is Vpype. You can launch a webcast at any time (or scheduled time) to your fans and the app then posts an announcement on your wall. The app can hold up to 300 viewers with a live chat alongside your webcam broadcast. You can easily record and archive your shows; recordings include the full chat transcript too. Plus, you can even download the FLV file of your shows. The app tab is aptly named “Shows.”
Read my review here from when I beta-tested the app for Vpype.
Alternatives to Vpype include:
- Linqto (going live January 2011 – this should be a very popular webinar/livestream app!)
Live Chat
Along with offering impromptu or scheduled live video broadcasts, you could also offer live chat sessions with your fans. One such app I’ve tried and like is Clobby. The one downside of this app is the obnoxious banner ad at the top of the chatroom as you can see in the screenshot below. However, simply scroll the page down enough to hide the banner while chatting.
Whenever you open your chatroom, you can publish an announcement to your Fan page wall, which of course goes out in the stream and fans start coming over to chat. Publish a tweet as well to get even more people in the chatroom! You could host a regular live chat for your fans; I suggest capturing the chat stream with an app like ScreenFlow for Mac or Camtasia Studio for Mac or PC – that way, you have an archive to refer to.
For a more upscale chat room, see Involver’s premium Facebook Connect Chat app. [UPDATE: 12/21/10 - this app is not displayed on Involver's website but IS available if you contact them.]
If you find yourself continually answering the same questions for your clients and community, be sure to compile a Frequently Asked Questions section – the simple FAQ Page app allows you to have an FAQ tab on your Fan page that you can direct fans to when answering questions on your wall. A couple of things to note about this app: you can’t reorder the questions once inserted, so you may wish to compile your FAQs and all their answers in a separate document before pasting each one in. Also, it would be great if each question had its own unique URL so you could just share the link in answer to questions on your wall, but this isn’t the case.
Polls and Quizzes
For a poll or quiz app to work well, you want your fans to quickly and easily participate and for that activity to spark more engagement and visibility. If users have to jump through extra hoops to participate, they’ll likely just move on. This screenshot shows the Fan Appz poll app live on the Family Guy Fan page – I like how the app provides the option for voters to share (on their personal profiles) and also to share on their Fan pages!
Some choices include (free and paid):
Contests and Promotions
Facebook’s rules around contests, drawings, competitions and sweepstakes are rigorous. Though many Facebook users are either unaware of the rules or choose to ignore them, I personally feel it’s not worth the risk to administer a promotion of any kind that doesn’t adhere to Facebook’s rules. In one fell swoop, you could lose your carefully built Fan page.
The safest way to run any kind of contest or drawing on your Fan page is to use a third-party app such as:
Apps for Local Businesses
With the boom of LBS (Location-based Services), local business have more ways to integrate social and mobile media than ever before. Why not show off your Foursquare customer check-ins with an app on your Fan page?
Plus, be sure to claim your Facebook Place page: just search for your own business name on Facebook and look for the link at the foot of the Place page that says “Is this your business?” Once claimed, you’ll have the opportunity to merge your Place page with your Fan page. The resulting new page looks rather different, so think carefully about this. (For examples of merged pages, take a look at Iron Horse Vineyards and The Ellen Show).
- Foursquare Place Widget – see screenshot below
- Yelp Reviews by North Social
- Store Locator by Involver
Appointment Scheduling
Make it super-easy for your Facebook fans, clients and prospects to book time with you. Add a tab synched with your appointment scheduling platform of choice. Remember, each tab has its own unique URL; you can easily direct your fans to your appointment tab.
- Schedulicity app (requires a Schedulicity account)
- Genbook BookNow! app (requires a Genbook account)
Contact Forms
Ideally, you have your own email marketing service provider as outlined in the next section. However, perhaps you wish to get started with a simple contact form on your Facebook page. Here are a few options:
See this helpful post by Tim Ware at HyperArts with a review and tutorial on JotForm and Allforms.
Email Marketing Apps
Your Facebook Fan page can be a tremendous source of traffic and a means to collect email addresses of your fans. Plus, some email marketing service providers have a feature that allows you to post your latest enewsletter to your Fan page. Check out any of the following:
- Delivra via TabSite integration. (See Delivra on Facebook)
Ecommerce Apps – Sell Products on Your Page
Many Facebook page owners often ask me if it’s okay to put up “Buy now” buttons and actually try to make sales directly from their Fan pages. I say “Go for it!!” If your fans are already spending time on your page learning about you and your products and services, you just never know when someone might be ready to buy from you. There are a few choices for adding a shopping cart tab to your fan page, including:
- Ecwid – free, run your own store, mirrored on many sites
- VendorShop [UPDATE: added 12/21/10. Thanks to Krishna De for the tip + review.]
See also this related blog post on Social Media Examiner: How to Sell Products via Your Facebook Page.
What do you think? Do you use any of these apps? What has been your experience? Also, have I missed any Facebook page apps you’ve tried successfully? Please add your comments in the section below.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/h3nTBl
How To Use ‘Post Insights’ To Grow Your Facebook Fan Page
Amplify’d from socialmediaseo.net
How To Use ‘Post Insights’ To Grow Your Facebook Fan Page
First, let me say that growing your Facebook Fan Page is a process, not an event. You more than likely WILL NOT go from 10 fans to 1500 fans overnight… I’m just saying!
Ok, now let me tell you about a tool I use religiously to help grow my Facebook Fan Page. This tool will allow you to see quickly and easily what posts are clicking with your audience, and what ones aren’t.
This tool is called Facebook Post Insights.
Facebook Post Insights are basically the traffic analytics to your Facebook Fan Page.
But unlike Google Analytics that looks more at the link clicking pattern and referral sources of visitors, Facebook Fan Page insights is concerned with interactions.
You see, interactions on Facebook are the ticket to increasing the overall exposure of your Facebook Fan Page.
And the way Facebook sees it, the most effective element to measure the value of your Facebook Fan Page is to measure the interactions.
Interaction data on your Facebook Fan Page includes actions such as “Likes”, sharing, commenting, recommending, etc… And this data includes interactions that occur within Facebook and other websites where Facebook is integrated – such as the Facebook Like button and Facebook Comment Box box on this blog.
Accessing your Facebook Fan Page insights is a breeze, but of course, you have to first be logged into Facebook and also you need to be an admin of the page.
There are 2 different elements of Insights that I use:
The post insights appear underneath each of your Facebook Fan Page updates and give you a quick glance into the effectiveness of your updates.
Just visit the wall of your Fan Page and look for the small, gray text underneath of your updates – you will see both the “Pageviews” and “Effectiveness” of each post.
It looks like this:
These post insights gives you a quick glance of all the updates on your wall (just scroll down through them all) and you can see which ones are performing better than others – based on the % Feedback indicator.
Again, this % Feedback is based solely on the interaction of your Fan Page update.
This is where you can really start to drill down on what your fans are interested in and what content generates the most interaction on your Facebook Fan Page.
You get to the main Insights dashboard by simply clicking the “See All” link in the Insights section of your Facebook Fan Page.
This is what it looks like:
Once you click the “See All” link, you’ll then be taken to your main Insights dashboard.
There’s a lot of cool info to browse through, but for the purposes of this article I want to focus on one area in particular – interactions.
This is where the good stuff about your Fan Page comes to life.
Go ahead and click on the “See Details” link in your Interactions.
You will now be looking at the details of the interactions that occurred on your site. Scroll down to the “Most Recent Posts” section.
This section gives you a deeper level of insight into the pageviews and interactions that have occurred within your Facebook Fan Page. More specifically, it gives you insights into your Fan Page updates.
The variable I’m usually most interested in here is the Feedback column.
Go ahead and click the Feedback column – this will sort your recent updates from the most interactions to the least.
And now that your Fan Page posts are ranked from “most” to “least”, you can now see what posts got the most fan base interacting with your Fan Page.
This information is invaluable because it tells you what type of updates are encouraging the most interactions from your fans – something Facebook believes is at the cornerstone to building an effective and authoritative Facebook Fan Page.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/fUT7gV
How To Automatically Send Tweets (Twitter) To Facebook Fan Pages
Amplify’d from socialmediaseo.net
How To Automatically Send Tweets (Twitter) To Facebook Fan Pages
RSS Graffiti has updated their application, and is now the premier method for sending tweets to Facebook Fan Pages.
It is a problem that plagues a lot of Twitter / Facebook Fan Page owners.
People don’t want to be logging in a bunch of different social platforms – they just want to update Twitter and have it automatically update their Facebook Fan Page – and that’s what this tutorials achieves.
The method below is going to use the following services: Ping.fm, TwitterFeed.com, and of course your Twitter profile and your Facebook Fan Page.
The assumption here is that you are an admin to your target Facebook Fan Page – if not, then following the steps below will not work. You must first be an Admin on the Facebook Fan Page you desire to set up.
1) First, create an account at Ping.fm (opens Ping.fm in a separate window)
Add your email, password
2) Next screen, select ADD NETWORK link to the right of ”Facebook Fan Pages” (3rd down on left)
3) Click “Connect with Facebook” – this will log you into your Facebook profile.
4) Unclick all of the links on the Facebook Profile side (left side) unless you want to be updating your personal Facebook profile.
5) Then select the FB Fan Page on the right that you want to have your Twitter profile updating.
6) Once you click the fan page, a new facebook Connect box will open – go ahead and click “Allow”.
*** IMPORTANT ***
Make sure the following boxes in the “What messages to you want posted to your Facebook pages?” below your Facebook Fan Page(s) are selected: status updates, Upload and post photos to stream, and Post links to stream
7) Now hit “Save Settings” at the bottom of the list of your FB Fan Pages and you will then be taken back to the “Service Settings” page.
8) Now click “Update Settings”
9) In a new window or tab, go ahead and open TwitterFeed.com
10) Login to Twitter Feed
11) Once you are logged into Twitter feed, click the ”create New Feed” button in the upper right hand corner.
12) Give your feed a name.
How To Automatically Send Tweets (Twitter) To Facebook Fan Pages
** UPDATE: 1/10/10 **
RSS Graffiti has updated their application, and is now the premier method for sending tweets to Facebook Fan Pages.
Here’s a video tutorial on how to set it – it’s now very easy to do:
Now you can automatically stream your Twitter updates to your Facebook Fan Page!
It is a problem that plagues a lot of Twitter / Facebook Fan Page owners.
People don’t want to be logging in a bunch of different social platforms – they just want to update Twitter and have it automatically update their Facebook Fan Page – and that’s what this tutorials achieves.
If you’d like me to help / set this up for you, then contact me here.
Here’s How To Send Tweets Automatically To Facebook Fan Pages
The method below is going to use the following services: Ping.fm, TwitterFeed.com, and of course your Twitter profile and your Facebook Fan Page.
The assumption here is that you are an admin to your target Facebook Fan Page – if not, then following the steps below will not work. You must first be an Admin on the Facebook Fan Page you desire to set up.
1) First, create an account at Ping.fm (opens Ping.fm in a separate window)
Add your email, password
2) Next screen, select ADD NETWORK link to the right of ”Facebook Fan Pages” (3rd down on left)
3) Click “Connect with Facebook” – this will log you into your Facebook profile.
Read the message on the page to understand more “To set up your Facebook profile and Facebook pages, you must first connect your Facebook account to Ping.fm. You can do this by simply clicking the button below. Once you’ve connected, you will be prompted with more options and settings.”
4) Unclick all of the links on the Facebook Profile side (left side) unless you want to be updating your personal Facebook profile.
5) Then select the FB Fan Page on the right that you want to have your Twitter profile updating.
6) Once you click the fan page, a new facebook Connect box will open – go ahead and click “Allow”.
*** IMPORTANT ***
Make sure the following boxes in the “What messages to you want posted to your Facebook pages?” below your Facebook Fan Page(s) are selected: status updates, Upload and post photos to stream, and Post links to stream
This will ensure that any links you share in your tweets will make it over to your Facebook Fan Page stream.
7) Now hit “Save Settings” at the bottom of the list of your FB Fan Pages and you will then be taken back to the “Service Settings” page.
Look at what’s listed – if you see “Post messages to Facebook” is checked, then uncheck it – unless you want to be updating your personal Facebook profile with your tweets – and then make sure “Post messages to Facebook Pages” is checked.
8) Now click “Update Settings”
Moving On Now To TwitterFeed.com
9) In a new window or tab, go ahead and open TwitterFeed.com
10) Login to Twitter Feed
If you don’t have a TwitterFeed account, you can create your account, or you can login with OpenID (see the link below the white “Login” button.
I always sign in with my Yahoo sing in credentials, but you can sign in however you like. Sometimes, TwitterFeed is unresponsive - just retype twitterfeed.com into your address bar and hit enter, this always works for me.
11) Once you are logged into Twitter feed, click the ”create New Feed” button in the upper right hand corner.
12) Give your feed a name.
13) Now go to your Twitter profile that you want to have update your FB Fan page and make sure you are logged in.
14) Click “Profile” and look toward the bottom of the right hand side for the RSS feed.
15) Go ahead and click that link (it’s the link next to the organge and white RSS box)
The window that opened is your Twitter profile’s RSS feed.
16) Copy the URL / Address that’s in the address bar (you should be able to just click once in the address bar > it will highlight the entire address > and either right click and click copy, or hit CTRL C to copy.
The URL that you are copying should look something like this: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17577734.rss
17) Once you’ve copied your Twitter feed’s URL address, go back to your TwitterFeed profile and paste that URL into the box that says “RSS Feed URL”
18) Click “test rss feed” to make sure your feed is working. You should get a green message with a check box that says ”Feed parsed OK”
19) Make sure the “Active” box below your feed is checked.
20) Next click “Advanced Settings” and new section will open up that shows feed settings.
21) In “Update Frequency” select every 30 minutes > for “new updates at a time” select 5 > for “Post Content” select title only > click “Post Link” box > select “biy.ly” as the Shorten link through setting > select “pubDate” for Post Sorting >> and that’s it – leave everything else blank.
** OPTION ** If you don’t want a link in your Fan Page updates that point back to the tweets, then do not click the “Post Link” box. By clicking the “Post Link” box, the updates on your Facebook Fan Page will have a shortened link that if clicked, will open up that particular tweet in your Twitter profile.
22) Now click “continue to Step 2″
Here’s where we are going to link your Ping.fm account.
23) Click the Ping.fm service
24) You now need your Ping.fm Application Key
25) Go back to Ping.fm (you should still be logged into Ping)
26) Click “Dashborad” (upper left hand corner)
27) Once on your Dashboard, find “Application Keys” on the right hand column around the middle of the page and click ”Application Keys”
28) You should now be taken to your App Key screen. Go ahead and copy your Web key and then paste it into the box on TwitterFeed that says “Your Ping.fm Appliction Key”
29) Now click the “Get Available Methods” link that’s to the right of the App key.
30) You should get “ping.fm method to update:” drop down menu > make sure “status” is selected.
Don’t worry about the UTM Tags and Optional Tags
31) Now go to the bottom and click “Create Service”
You should get the message “Service updated successfully”
32) Now click “All Done!” at the bottom
You should get the “Congratulations” message
33) Just click on “Go to Dashboard” to be taken back to your list of services on Twitter Feed.
It will take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours for the TwitterFeed settings to update – so now you just need to go grab a cup a coffee and come back to this “How To” in an hour or so!
See you in a little bit!
…..
And we’re back.
34) Go back to your dashboard at TwitterFeed.com.
If you have a green check mark next to your “Feed Name”, then you are ready to start tweeting and having those tweets auto update your Facebook Fan Page.
35) Go to the Twitter profile you used the RSS feed for and start tweeting.
Remember your settings are set for “Every 30 minutes” to update 5 new updates.
This means your tweets will not instantly appear in your Facebook Fan Page > your TwitterFeed will update every 30 minutes and post up to 5 new tweets to your Facebook Fan Page.
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/i1o5Ge
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