So when I stumbled on Clipix, I first assumed that it was just a Pinterest copycat! Well, I was wrong!

“Clipix provides you with one central place where you can keep all the things you see online and want to come back to. We call those things “clips.” You organize all your clips in clipboards and you can create a clipboard for anything imaginable; articles you want to read, gift ideas, comparison shopping, home decorating”. 

Well ok, it does sound very similar to Pinterest but it has many features which sets it apart that makes it worth checking.

Features

• Whenever you see something online that you want to come back to, click the “Clip” button. That’ll turn whatever you’re looking at into a clip by giving it an image and a little description.
• Drag the “Clip” button to your bookmarks toolbar in your web browser.
• In addition to regular clipboards you can also create syncboards and multiboards. This is pretty cool!
• You can upload a clip from a picture you have on your computer.
• You can choose the language in which you’d like to use clipix.

Sharing

• You can also share a clipboard on Facebook, Twitter, or in an email.
• Choose “Share as a clipboard” to send a copy of the clipboard to a friend on clipix who will then be able to add it to their own clipix.
• A syncboard lets you clip collaboratively with friends or colleagues in real-time. Have you ever tried to collaborate on Pinterest, not that easy.

Privacy

• A clipboard can be visible to “Only me” which means that you’ll be the only one who can see it, “Only clipix friends” which means that only people you’re friends with on clipix can see it or “Everyone which means that anyone will be able to see the clipboard. This is a major plus!
• You can choose for your account not to display in search engines.

Copyright

• A Copyright watermark is placed on clips in order to protect the property of original content creators.
• If you own the rights to a clip and agree to the terms and conditions you can remove the watermark. 

How I use Clipix

Since I’m very visual, whenever I come across an article that I want to keep for reference or ideas I find across the web, I clip it to Clipix and save a short description. So it’s a visual way to organize all my bookmarks. The biggest advantage it has over Pinterest is that you can keep your boards private. This is more of a productivity tool for me than a photo sharing site.

Founded just this January 2012, Clipix is still very new. I’m hoping it gets the credit it deserves and doesn’t get passed over because of the similarities to Pinterest.

I want to thank my friend Joel Carter at http://www.carterarch.com for being the inspiration for this post when he asked me which bookmarking tool I used.

Image: gameanna / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

According to my research which I provide in the infographic below, we’re seeing a huge trend that clearly demonstrates how consumers are being influenced by the web in addition to the growing popularity of mobile devices and smartphones.

Small business owners have amazing opportunities to market and grow their business online but according to the numbers, this is simply not the case!

According to socialmediaexplorer.com:

• 44 percent of small businesses don’t even have a website
• Only 27 percent of small businesses use Facebook.
• 65 percent of small businesses say that mobile marketing is not valuable to them.

This should be a wake-up call to all small business owners and hopefully they will take advantage of these findings to take action and get in the game!

Why do you think small businesses are not taking advantage of the web and technology as much as they should?

So, here are 2 social media tools you should check out: Buffer and Timely. One of the reason I love these tools is that not only do they save me time, but they’re also really simple to use.

Remember: Scheduling posts is not a replacement for your presence on social networks. It’s really important to make sure that you’re online and respond, engage, discuss and thank people for engaging or sharing your content.

Also: Keep in mind that using third party tools to post to your Facebook Page should be kept to a minimum as it “may” affect your Edgerank score. Facebook has been rumored to penalize posts from third party applications in the past.

Buffer

Buffer lets you schedule your Tweets, Facebook and LinkedIn post using predetermined time slots you have set ahead of time.

Features

• You can put posts in your Buffer directly from inside Google Reader (I love this).
• The free version allows you to schedule 10 posts at the time.
• The browser extension (Chrome, Firefox and Safari) makes it really simple to share the content you find on the web just by clicking the Buffer icon in your browser window.
• Use your Bit.ly details to keep a track of your links and clicks.
• The analytics features let you see how many people clicked on your posts and who retweeted them. You can even thank them for sharing from within Buffer.
• There are 3 different plans: Free, Pro and Premium. The Pro and Premium versions allow you to add more social accounts, work in teams and offer advanced scheduling in addition to other features.

Timely

Timely analyzes your past 199 Tweets or Facebook posts and figures out the best time slots (read more on how it works).

Features

• Queue posts and let Timely figure out the next best time for that post to go out (you can’t specify specific times or days to post in Timely).
• Timely lets you schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook Pages and Facebook personal profiles.
• You can pick between 1, 3, 5 and 9 posts per day.
• You can chose to also posts on weekends or keep the weekends off.
• Just drag the Timely button to your bookmark bar for easy sharing.
• Connect your Bit.ly details to keep a track of your links and clicks.
• You can invite people via email to collaborate on Timely on a particular Twitter or Facebook account.
• See how many clicks and retweets your Posts generated using the Performance tab.
• Timely is totally Free for everyone.

Your turn! What tools do you use to manage your time effectively on social media sites?

 Photo Credit: Natasha Wheatland via Compfight

Facebook is rolling out Offers which allows someone who “likes” a business or brand on Facebook to receive special deals. Facebook offers are free to use for Page owners.

How it works

• A Business Page can post Offers to their page just like they would any status update and the Offer will appear in the follower’s news feed.
• Offers images are 90 pixels by 90 pixels.
• Headline text allows 90 characters.
• Terms and conditions text allows 900 characters.
• You have to set an expiry date.
• Make sure your Offer is well thought-out. According to Facebook “…offers with substantial discounts of at least 20% off regular prices will generally reach more people. Similarly, offering something for free typically performs better than discounts.”
• You can’t edit an Offer after you post it.
• To stop an Offer that hasn’t expired yet, simply delete the Offer from your Page. Make sure that you honor your Offers and follow the terms that you have set.
• You can see how many people have claimed your Offer below the offer’s headline.
• You can choose to target your Offer’s audience by country and language.
• Make sure that all your staff is aware of the ongoing Offers so that there’s no confusion when customers try to redeem them.

To Claim Offers

When people see your Offer in their news feeds or on your Page, they’ll need to follow these steps to claim and redeem your Offer:

1. Click Get Offer to see details.
2. Click Claim Offer to have the offer sent to their email address associated with their Facebook account.
3. Assuming that you have a physical location, they will need to bring the Offer email to your business to redeem it. They can show it in printed form or on their mobile phone.
4. If for some reason the Offer wasn’t received by email, visitors can go back to the Offer on the business’s Facebook Page or on their own timeline and Click Resend Offer.

From a Business Page perspective, this new feature can be really beneficial but it should also be very interesting to see if Offers will be well received by Facebook users and if business will abuse or misuse them.

It’s important that if you’re going to create Offers, you make them substantial and interesting enough that you’re fans will want to click on them. If your Offers are seen as “spammy”, you’re running the risk of people unliking your Page and you’ll end up losing potential customers instead of gaining business.

For now, Offers are not available for all Page owners but you can contact Facebook to request it by filling out this form here.

What do you think about this new feature?

Image: Michal Marcol / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s pretty interesting to look at the trends and can be beneficial in helping you determine where to focus your social media marketing efforts or compare yourself against other marketers.

Some key findings in the report:

• The number-one benefit of social media marketing is generating more business exposure
• More experience with Social Media means more time spent on social media marketing.
• Social media outsourcing is underutilized
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and YouTube were the top 5 social media tools used by marketers, in that order.
• The number one question marketers most want answered: How do I measure the effect of social media marketing on my business?
• A significant 65% of small business owners were more likely than others to generate leads, compared to the 58% average for all marketers.
• YouTube/video is the top area where marketers plan on increasing their social media efforts.
• 68% of participants indicated that they’re planning on increase their blogging activities.
• Marketers are more likely to decrease their use of direct mail than any other marketing channel (17% planning to decrease). 34% had no plans on using direct mail.

The report is free and available for download until April 19. Visit SocialExaminer.com

Are you surprised by any of these findings?

The average Facebook user has around 130 friends and is connected to approximately 80 community pages, groups and events. Most users would be overwhelmed to see all of the activity generated by these connections.

To avoid this, Facebook use an algorithm formula called EdgeRank to decide what users will see in their newsfeed. This formula is based on 3 elements: Affinity, Weight and Time Decay.

[Note: There's an unfortunate typo in my infographic, it should say Time "Decay". I apologize for that and thank you for those who brought it to my attention.]

One important thing you need to know about affinity is that affinity is one-way. This means that even if you’re visiting your friends profile and commenting or liking their content, it doesn’t increase the chances of your Page posts to appear in your friends’ newsfeed.

It’s also worth mentioning that each person’s Edge Weight is different. As an example, someone who clicks and looks at pictures is more likely to have them show up in their newsfeed than someone who isn’t as keen on them. 

What type of post gets more interactions on your Page?

By now, brands and businesses understand the importance and the need to include online marketing to their overall marketing strategy but the problem is that it seems like a huge number of them are doing it WRONG!

Unfortunately, the lack of understanding, planning and commitment is leading businesses into social media failure!

• 30% Online Customer’s questions or compliments get no reply
• 71% Complaints on Twitter are NOT responded to
• 82% of all of the Facebook pages have less than five wall posts per month ( Recommend.ly)

Keep in Mind:

• 77% Customers read brand posts but don’t comment
• 17% Comment and share experiences
• 13% Post about your brand
• Of the 29% of customers that were contacted, 83% liked that they got a response and were satisfied with it

To be successful, social media campaigns need consistent daily attention which requires committing resources and time. There are no short cuts to actively listening and building relationships with customers!

The good news is that there’s a lot of room for improvement which also means great opportunities for those businesses who will take the time to understand social media marketing and use it more strategically.

 

Did you know that it’s against Facebook terms to use a business name in a personal profile?

According to Facebook:

“Profiles (timelines) represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook”.

This means that if you’ve been using a personal profile for your business (especially those using their business names instead of their own personal names), you run the risk of having your Facebook account shut down and often without any warning.

The suggested way to market your business on Facebook is to have a business Page. There are many benefits to having a Facebook Business Page versus a personal profile.

• A profile has a limit of 5000 friends (including liked pages). A page has no limits!
• A Business Page is visible to search engines like Google, helping create more visibility for your business.
• Pages offer analytic tools. Insights will allow you to measure your effectiveness and fan engagement on Facebook. This also helps you understand and improve your marketing efforts.
• You can add different applications to your Page to increase further engagement. You can use them to run contests, include opt-in forms, events, etc.
• Pages are public, so anyone can follow you and don’t require accepting friend requests like a personal profile.
• Pages allow for different people to be added as administrators so you can have several people helping you manage your Business Page.
• Pages have different social plugins which allows you to embed a Like button and other Open Graph plugins into your own website.

OK, so you didn’t know and made a mistake when you created your Facebook account …now what?  You want to convert to a business Page instead of using a personal profile, you have 2 options.

Option One

Start a Business Page from scratch

You’ll need to invite your friends from your personal profile to go “Like” your Page. You can send your friends private messages to explain your move and announce it on your wall slowly migrating everyone to your Business Page. This might work well if you don’t have a large number of friends.

If the name of your profile is the name of your business, you should change it to your real name to keep with Facebook terms.

PROS: If you’ve mixed your personal and business on the same profile which means you have your friends, family, personal pictures, etc. This option might be better for you since you don’t lose your personal profile, pictures, posts and don’t need to close your account.

CONS: This might be a lengthy process and not all your friends will take the time to transfer to your Business Page. Also keep in mind that if you had set your personal vanity URL with your business name in it, you probably won’t be able to use it again for your business page.

Option Two

Convert your personal Profile into a business Page

If you don’t mind losing your profile history assuming you’ve used it mainly for business, this option might be ideal for you. Being able to convert your friends into Likes automatically is a real benefit. It might be a good idea to backup your data from your profile before converting. Facebook will also make your account’s username the Facebook web address for your Page when you convert.

As well, if you admin any Groups you should appoint a new group admin to any groups you manage. The account you’re converting will lose these admin rights during the conversion process.

PROS: You convert all your friends into Likes automatically. It’s a fast process. This is best for people with a high number of friends.

CONS: Your content doesn’t move over, only connections and you lose all your personal profile content, posts, comments and pictures. You’ll probably have to use a different email address if you need to create a new personal profile.

If for some reason, you realised that you made a mistake and want to revert back to a personal profile, you can “try” contacting Facebook using the Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal here: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact_us.php?id=189265951117017

Here are the instructions from Facebook on how to convert your Profile to a Page.

Whichever approach you take, there’s no guarantee that your friends will follow you to your new Page. From what I’ve read, converting your profile can also have some issues so be ready for the unexpected.

But lets face it, having a Business Page is the proper way to market your business on Facebook not only because of the added features and benefits but especially if you consider Facebook terms and the risks you’re taking by conducting your business using a personal profile. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be for you to switch to a business Page.

Do me a favor, whenever you get a friend request from a business…share this article with them!

Image: Nutdanai Apikhomboonwaroot / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

If you don’t link your Page, your place of work will usually be linked to an empty community page like the one you see on the right.

Here’s how you link your Facebook Page to your Profile.

• Go to your personal profile and click on your–>“About” box

• Under Work and Education click–>Edit

•  In the “where have you worked?” box, enter –>your page name. Your page should come up but make sure it’s spelled exactly how you have it on your page.

Click on–>Done Editing

That should be it!

Your place of work should now have a hyperlink to your Facebook Page. When people go check out your profile, they should easily find your Facebook Business Page.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Covers

The Timeline cover picture is where you can really make a real impression on your visitors so try to be creative! Use a unique image that represents your Page and business. You can change the cover as many times as you wish, for events, different seasons, using different themes, etc. as long as you’re following Facebook’s terms.

According to Facebook, your cover image cannot contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property. You may not encourage or incentivize people to upload your cover image to their personal timelines.

Cover Pictures Size

For best results, your cover picture should be 851pixel by 315pixel.

2. Profile Pictures

The big profile banners on the left are now gone. This has been replaced by a simple profile picture which shows on the bottom left corner of your cover image. This might be a good place to display your company logo or any image that represents your brand across your different social media channels.

Profile Picture Size

Your profile picture should be 180 pixel by 180 pixel. This will display at 124px by 125px.

[update April 20, 2012: The profile pictures are getting resized on April 26th. The new profile pictures will be 160 x 160 pixels and will sit at 23 pixels from the left and 210 pixels from the top of the Page.]

3. Custom Pages and Apps

You are no longer able to set a default landing Page. This was used by many businesses to direct people to a custom page such as a Welcome or promotion page. With the new Timeline, visitors land directly on your Page wall. This will definitely make people upset as many businesses had invested in this feature.

Custom Pages Size

Custom Pages which used to be 520 pixels wide can now be up to 810 pixels wide (794px of content plus margins).

4. Tabs

Your tabs for apps, pictures, videos, events and likes now appear under your Page cover. You can have up to 12 tabs but only 4 appear under the cover and the picture tab is the first one to appear and cannot be moved. To change the order of the other tabs:

1. Expand the views and apps menu by clicking on the    to the right of your Page’s views and apps
2. Hover over the position you’d like to put a view or app and click the pencil icon  that appears
3. Choose the view or app you’d like to swap into that spot from the menu

To remove a view or app, select Remove from Favorites in step 3.

Also, you can now change the large thumbnails tabs for most apps you DIDN’T create. Here’s how:

Click: Admin Panel > Manage > Edit Page > Apps. Click “Edit Settings”, then next to “Custom Tab Image” click “Change”.

Tabs size

You can upload a 111 pixel by 74 pixel image to replace the one that’s there.

5. Pinning posts

Pinned posts are Page posts that admins have chosen to display prominently at the top of their Page. A pinned post always appears in the top left of a Page’s timeline and has a  flag in its top-right corner. A pinned post will remain there for 7 days. After that, it’ll return to the date it was posted on the Page’s timeline.

Posts from people who like a Page are not eligible to be pinned posts. Page admins can only pin posts created by the Page.

Since you can no longer set a default landing Page, pinning items to the top of the Timeline might be a good strategy to include; images, blog posts, call-to-action asking for the visitors to click one of your tabs under the cover photo or anything else that might promote engagement.  



6. Highlight posts

Highlight important stories by clicking on the star icon in the top right corner of your post. This will expend your post over the two columns making it more visible for your visitors.

7. Messages

Page visitors can now send private messages to Page owners. This is a fantastic new feature!

Note that as far as I know, Pages still can’t initiate the contact unless they’re replying in a message sent by the fan. 

8. Milestones

Milestones are key moments you’ve decided to highlight on your Page. Milestones are automatically expanded to widescreen and will display pictures at 843 pixels wide and 403 pixels tall.

To add a milestone:

1. Click Milestone in the sharing tool at the top of your Page’s timeline
2. Add a headline, location, date and details for your milestone
3. Choose to add a photo
4. Click Save

You can also add Milestone from anywhere on your Page’s timeline, scroll to a spot and click  + to post a milestone or other type of story to a particular date.

Here again, this allows you to get creative and use this feature to add important and interesting events you want to share with your visitors.

 9. About

You can use around 160 characters (including spaces) in your “about” section. It’s also a good idea to add a link to your website in this section. You can change the description by clicking on the about box.

If your Facebook Page is categorized as a Place Page or Local Business, the “About” content for your Timeline will show an address, phone number, and hours. If you want to change the category of your page:

Click: Admin Panel > Manage > Edit Page > Basic Information. Click “category”, then select the appropriate category for your business and finally click Save Changes at the bottom.

10. Admin Panel

You can access the admin panel at the top of your Page. It offers a quick snapshot of  your notifications, and also gives you access to your Insights, New Likes and Messages. You can also manage and edit your page from there. You can choose to hide and expand the admin panel from view.

Other features you should know

Friend Activity: On the right side of your Timeline, people will see stories about how their friends are interacting  with your Page throughout your Page timeline. When visiting your Page, each visitors will see a different view of the right side of your Timeline according to how their friends have interacted with your page.

Activity Log: Under the manage button, you can view all your Page posts from the activity log, even the ones you’ve chosen to hide. You can also highlight, delete, hide or change the date of a post from here.

Posts Dates: You can change the date of a post at anytime and it will move it up or down your Timeline according to your date.

Note

According to Social Media Examiner:

Some studies show that a whopping 90% of Facebook users don’t return to a fan page once they click the Like button. They only see and interact with your content in their news feed.

It’s very important that you try to keep your audience engaged so that your posts appear in their newsfeed. This also tells us that although you should optimize your Facebook Page Timeline features, investing thousands of dollars in the design might not be the best place to put your money. It is definitely possible to create a successful Facebook Page without breaking the bank!

Simply make sure that you understand all the Timeline features and how to best use them, create a posting strategy, make a unique visual impact for your visitors and add valuable posts on a consistent basis to your Timeline.

Learn more

Take a look at Facebook interactive course to learn more about Pages.

What do you think about the new Facebook Timeline for Brands?

Source: Facebook.com/help, Hyperarts.com