Facebook is rolling out a new feature today, the Facebook Subscribe Button. It allows people to get public updates from others whether or not you are Facebook friends. It also allows people to decide what content they want to see from their Facebook friends. Here’s what it will allow you to do:

•     Choose what you see from people in News Feed
•     Hear from people, even if you’re not friends
•     Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends

How the Subscribe Button works with Facebook Friends
Right now, you don’t have much choice in what friend activity shows up in your feed. If you’re like me, you block all those annoying games, and get bored with some friends’ content, but other than blocking someone completely, there’s no way to filter it. With the new subscribe feature, you will be able to choose what you’d like to see. Here are the options you’ll have:

• All updates: Everything your friend posts
• Most updates: The amount you’d normally see
• Important updates only: Just highlights, like a new job or move

You should start seeing the Subscribe Button on personal profiles in the upper right corner of the page, as Facebook has started rolling this out today. However, it’s important to know that it will only show up on profiles for people who have opted in to the feature.

How the Subscribe Button works with Non-Friends
If you want to allow non-friends to see your public updates you must opt-into the subscribe button. Then, anyone who wants to subscribe to your public updates, can click the subscribe button on your personal profile. They will only see the updates you designate as public. They will not see information that you have previously set for friends only.

After you allow subscribers, you can decide who can comment on your public updates and whether or not you want to get notifications for new subscribers. To do this, click the Subscribers link that will be on the right side of your profile page. From there, you can also manage your subscriptions, by clicking the Subscriptions link.

How to Allow People to Subscribe
To allow people to subscribe to your public updates go to the Facebook Subscribe page and click Allow Subscribers. Facebook also has a short Facebook Subscription FAQ that you might want to read.

How to Post Public Updates
This isn’t a new feature but if you’re not sure how to post public updates, it’s easy. Just click the drop-down under your status box, and click on public. After you post your update, if you want to go back to posting for friends only (or another custom setting) be sure to click the appropriate option in the drop-down box again.

If you aren’t sure if an update you posted was public or not, just look for the icon off to the right of your post. If it’s the little globe, it’s public. The silhouette icon means it went out to friends only, and if it’s the gear icon, it went out to a custom group of people that you specified. For example, I made this update public, so it has the globe icon on the right.

I’ve been toying with the idea of setting up a Facebook page in my name, but just haven’t been sure I want to go that route. I have it made, and it’s sitting in “visible to admins only” mode for a while.  Now that Facebook has introduced the new Subscribe Button I think I’ll let that page sit there for a while longer. I already have a personal profile and a number of pages, so being able to use my personal profile for personal and business reasons may be a real time saver. If you want to subscribe to my public Facebook updates, go here.

Yes, you read right! Facebook has finally set up a way for people to convert their personal profiles to business pages.

First, why convert a profile to a page?

Because it’s against the Facebook terms. If you have your business on a personal profile, you run the risk of having it deleted. (and yes, I do know of people who have had this happen) Profiles are for people and pages are for businesses. For more info, see my earlier blog post, Facebook Fan Pages vs. Personal Profile.

Things you need to know before converting your personal profile to a page:

• All your confirmed friends will be converted to people who like your new Page.
• Your profile pictures will be migrated to your new Page.
• Photo albums, profile information, etc. will not be transferred. Be sure to save any important content before beginning your migration. (see step one, below)
• Once you convert your personal profile to a business page, that profile will no longer exist.
• You will not be able to convert your page back to a personal profile.
• You will continue to login with the email/password that you used before you converted the page.

Now, here’s how to convert your Facebook profile to a business page:

Step one
Backup your Facebook profile. Login to Facebook and click the down arrow next to Account in the upper right corner of your screen, then select Account Settings. Toward the bottom of that page, you’ll see Download Your Information. Click the learn more link to the right and follow the instructions.

Step two
Go to this page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate and select the type of page you want to create. If you’ve never set up a Facebook page, you’ll see that you have a number of categories to select from. Pick the one that’s right for you, and follow the instructions.

Now, if you want to, you can set up a personal profile in your name, and make yourself an admin of the new page. You can also assign admin rights  to someone else if you’d like.

I could be wrong, but my guess is, that since Facebook is making this option available they may be gearing up to crack down a bit more on businesses that are set up on personal profiles. So, I think it would be wise for anyone with a business presence on Facebook to be sure it’s set up properly – on a page.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Apparently, although Facebook has made converting a profile to a page, all of the bugs haven’t been worked out yet. Earlier this evening, one of the Mashable bloggers wrote about some of the problems she had when she converted her personal profile to a business page. See her post here: Facebook Profile Migrations: A Cautionary Tale.

UPDATE #2 (April 2, 2011)

Facebook has disabled this feature. Hopefully they’ll fix it and make it available again.

By default, Facebook pages don’t show who the admins are. I have long thought it would be great if Facebook allowed page owners to make it easy to show visitors who the admins were. Personally, I want people to know who is running my business pages, so on the info tab I give people my name and let them know how to get in touch with me. I don’t know how many people see it though since it’s not very prominent and not in a place people are accustomed to looking for a contact name. Well, finally, along with other changes Facebook made recently, they made it easy to publicly show admins for a page.

Using this feature means you will be showing a link to your page admin’s personal profile, which I know won’t appeal to everyone. Some people don’t want to make their personal profile publicly available to people they don’t know. This is perfectly understandable, but I highly encourage anyone with a page to at least include the a name and contact info somewhere. Again, think transparency!

For people who use Facebook like I do, as a way to interact with a number of different people, I think this is an excellent way to be a bit more transparent with my business.

Watch this short video to see how you can show the admins for your page. . .

“If you build it, he will come” – that may apply to baseball fields, but with a Facebook page, you’ll need to do some things to get people to come visit. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Send people an email
If you have a mailing list, send out an email letting them know you’re now on Facebook. Ask them to like your page, but also tell them why they should like it. Do you give free doggie biscuits to all new (4-legged) clients? Are you donating money to a local animal charity for every like? Let people know what’s in it for them if they click the like button.

If you’re just starting out, and don’t have a mailing list for your business, ask your family and friends to like your page. Their friends will see it and may decide it’s interesting enough to like it as well.

Link to it on your website
Make sure your website has a link to your Facebook page. You can use a Facebook icon or a Like Box, (like we have on our PetsitUSA blog) which will show who likes it already – and if they have friends who like it, they’re more likely to like it. And make sure it’s in a place where people will notice it!

Set up a Facebook social ad
Once you determine the demographic you want to reach, set up a social ad on Facebook. You’ll be able to set the ad up so that it only goes to the people you want to see it. Before doing this though, make sure your fan page really rocks! You want them to be compelled to click the ad, but your landing page needs to sell them on clicking the like button.

Add it to your marketing materials
Whether you’re designing new brochures, a print ad, new business cards, a flyer for an event – include the link to your Facebook page. Ideally, if you have more than 25 fans, you will have already set up a custom URL and can share the exact link. Keep in mind, that the easier you can make it for people to get to your page, the more likely they are to go there.

This:

Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/petsitusa

is much better than this:

Find us on Facebook!”

If you just say “Find us on Facebook” you’re making people work to find you. If you give them the link they don’t have to play a hunting game. And face it, there may be more than one ABC Pet Sitters on Facebook. You want them to find YOU, not someone else with a similar name.

Post interesting content
When you post interesting content, people who find it interesting may share it with their friends. Doing this not only shares the content, but it lets people know who posted it in the first place. If it’s interesting enough, they may check your page out and click the like button so they can get your content first hand.

What are some of the ways you’ve promoted your Facebook page?

Have you ever wondered how to get an email when someone posts to your Facebook page?

Part of having a Facebook page is keeping up with what others are posting. Unfortunately Facebook doesn’t make that easy. Although they send notifications when someone posts to a personal profile, pages don’t have the same feature. As a page admin you have to actually go to that page periodically to see if there have been any new posts. So unless you have your eyeballs on that page 24/7, fans (aka clients!) may not get their answers as quickly as possible, spam comments may linger, etc. Being able to react to comments on your wall in a timely manner can be really important to the success of your page.

Well, finally there’s a way to get email notifications for comments on Facebook fan pages.

Hyper Alerts lets you set up an account, so you can get an email whenever someone posts to the wall on your Facebook Page. I’ve been using it for a couple weeks and it works like a charm! Since I’m getting an email whenever someone posts to my page, I don’t have to check in quite as often, which means I can concentrate on other work and not worry about what’s happening on my pages. It also means I won’t miss a post – and if you have an active page, that can be a real problem.

When you set up your account, you’ll need the numeric ID for your page. The easiest way to find that is to go to your page, and click on the image you have on the left of the page. The page ID will be at the end of the URL, right after the equals sign. The video below shows how to set up your alerts.

Thank you, Hyper Alerts!

Here’s How to Get Your Blog Working for Your Business

Suppose you could hire 23 of the biggest names in blogging to give you proven tips and techniques for using a corporate blog to generate leads, win customers and achieve your sales goals.

Suppose each of those experts came to your home or office and gave you 60 minutes of their time. Each one could easily charge you hundreds of dollars.

But suppose you got all of those experts for less than $300. Not $300 per expert, less than $300 for all of them.  Only $300 for 14 hours of highly implementable training.

That’s exactly what you’ll get when you sign up for the early-bird discount to attend Social Media Examiner’s Blogging Success Summit 2011. (aff) It’s an online conference scheduled throughout the month of February 2011. You won’t need airline tickets, hotel rooms, a rental car or a week of fast food.

All you need is an Internet connection and speakers.

Just look at this partial list of the 23 instructors:

• Richard Jalichandra, Technorati CEO
• Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett, authors of the best-selling book, ProBlogger: Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
• Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book
• Douglas Karr, co-author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies
• Joe Pulizzi, co-author of Get Content Get Customers
• Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger
• Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner
  
• Rick Calvert, co-founder and CEO of BlogWorld
• Denise Wakeman, co-founder of The Blog Squad

You’ll also hear from people in the trenches – bloggers and social media marketers from Ford, McDonald’s, Southwest Airlines, Sony, Cisco and Procter & Gamble.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn:

• The State of the Blogosphere: What Businesses Need to Know
• Transforming Your Small Business Blog Into a Lead Generation Machine
• 20 Actionable Techniques to Enhance Your Blog’s Content
• How Big Businesses Are Leveraging the Power of Blogs
• How to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings With Blogging

HubSpot found that businesses with an active blog get 55% more online traffic than those without a blog.

Which part of that statistic are you in?  What do you think your competitors are doing?

To learn more about the upcoming summit click here. (aff)



Here’s another new feature from Facebook that’s been needed for a long time – a spam filter for Facebook pages. If you’re a page admin, you probably get tired of all the get rich quick posts and other garbage that people post on your page. Now, Facebook will be weeding some of those out and putting them in a holding area for you to OK – or not.

Posts that appear to be spam will be placed in the filter, and will not show up on the wall. A spam notification, that only admins can see, will pop up at the top of the page. The admin can then view the messages and decide if they’re spam or not. If they are spam, you don’t need to do anything. If the messages are OK, and you want to let them go through to the wall:

1. Hover your cursor over the post you wish to unmark as Spam.

2. Click on the X that appears in the upper right corner of the post.

3. Click on the “Unmark as spam” option.

To get to your spam filter, click options under your status box, then click on the spam button. If you have any spam posts, that’s where you’ll see them.

Facebook has more info about the new spam filter here.

It’ll be interesting to see how accurate the spam filter is. If it’s anything like Akismet (I hope! I hope!)  it’ll be pretty darn good.

Thank you, Facebook!

Some Facebook page admins can now change the name of their page. So far it looks like only pages with fewer than 100 fans have this option, and from what I’ve read, that’s probably how it’s going to stay. According to Inside Facebook, the most likely reason this feature is only available for pages with fewer fans is because Facebook doesn’t want people setting up generic pages and then changing the topic of the page later.

If your page has the option to change the name, you’ll see it in your admin area.  It’s important to note this does not affect your custom URL. If you do make a change, keep in mind that your fans will not be notified, so it’s best not to change it completely. If you do, make sure you let your fans know what you’ve done. And, if there are any other changes that go along with the name change, be sure to announce that as well.

You’ll also notice some nice changes in the admin area. The navigation buttons are over to the left of the page. I don’t see any change in functionality, but I do like the new layout.

To see the new layout, and see if your page has the name change option, click the “Edit Page” link on the left sidebar of any page you admin, or go to the Ads and Pages link on your home page.

If you’ve ever shared a link on Facebook, you may have noticed that the title and description that shows up aren’t always what you’d like them to be. For example, if you want to share an article you found in the local online newspaper, it might show the name of the newspaper in the title instead of the title of the article you want to share. You can actually change that and this tutorial I put together shows you how.

Changing the title and description on the link you want to share on Facebook can make the link more interesting to your readers, which means they’re more likely to click. It can also be used to add just a bit more SEO juice to your Facebook page (as opposed to your personal profile).

On one of my earlier blog post, Facebook page ownership can now be changed,  someone brought up a good point about Facebook Pages and admins. I started to answer in the thread, but it’s a pretty important question, so I decided just to do a new post about.

Here’s the comment this person had:

The real issue is that the page is still tied to the person’s Facebook account regardless of whether they administer the page or not. Thus, if they delete their Facebook page [profile] for any reason, the page will forever be gone.

I know the short-term answer, but I want to know the long-term answer. So, here’s what I did – step by step:

• Set up a new profile – aka Jane.
• Jane logged into her personal profile and set up a Facebook fan page.
• Jane appointed me as an admin of the page.
• I logged out of Jane’s profile and logged into my own to be sure I was set as an admin of the new page. I am.
• I removed Jane as an admin.
• I logged out of my profile, and logged back in as Jane.
• I deleted Jane’s account.
• I logged in again as myself, and the page is still there. I am now the only admin for the page Jane created.

Once a person gives up their admin rights (or has them revoked by another admin), it appears that they have no rights to that page.

However . . .

I need to follow up with this in 15 days and here’s why:

Facebook allows profiles to be deactivated or deleted – and they are two different functions.

Deactivation – This allows you to make your account inactive, which means your stuff is locked away and made secret but you can get it later if you want to. Facebook keeps all of your information in case you decide to reactivate it at a later date.

Deletion – This permanently deletes your account after 14 days. During that initial 14 day period you’re allowed to reactivate your account if you want to (just by logging in), but after that it will be permanently deleted.

So at this point, Jane’s account has been set for deletion and the page she created is now in my possession. What I want to know for sure is if that page will still be mine once her account has been permanently deleted. Or will it be deleted along with her account since she was the original owner? I’m fairly certain it will still be my page since she was removed as an admin, but I’ll check back in another 15 days to find out for sure.

UPDATE: It’s been more than 15 days since I deleted the Jane account and I’m still the admin for the page she turned over to me. So, it looks like if an admin turns over a page, then is deleted, that page will still exist and it will belong to whoever is the current admin