It seems that everyone and their monkey are on Facebook these days. Recent stats show that Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 new users each day, swelling the network to over 140 million active users.
For nonprofits, these numbers represent an increasingly huge opportunity to get the word out about your cause. If your organization doesn’t already have a Facebook presence, you can’t afford not to. Go and create a Facebook page, which will be your organization’s home on the popular social network. (The Wild Apricot blog has a handy guide that will get you started.
Once you have a Facebook page, people won’t come knocking on your door without a little work. Here are thirteen tips to promote your page, help you increase your number of “fans”, and use Facebook to get the word out about your work.
Invite your posse
You’ve got your own friends on Facebook, and odds are some of them are interested in the work you do. Send them a personal message inviting them to check out your page. Don’t ask everyone. Just your pals who may truly be interested.
Keep your page fresh and tasty
Once your page is up, don’t make the mistake of neglecting it. Keep the content fresh. Don’t forget the viral nature of Facebook. When someone interacts on your page it may appear on that person’s Facebook feed, promoting your page to their friends.
Suck in content from other social media
Add Facebook applications that draw your content from sites like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. This will bring new content on your page without needing to add it manually, while promoting your presence on other sites at the same time.
Create an incentive to join
There are a lot of Facebook pages out there, so give people a reason to become a fan of yours. Have a monthly prize draw just for your fans, offer a discount to an upcoming event, or make special announcements on your page before you do elsewhere.
Bribe your mailing list
Email folks on your mailing list and invite them to check out your Facebook page. Again, offering an incentive of some sort can help. Don’t shy away from adding a few words to your newsletter about what is happening on your Facebook page. And if you don’t already have a email newsletter, get one. There are many free or cheap services that make newsletters quick, simple and fun. (I highly recommend Mad Mimi.)
Pop a button on your website
This might seem obvious, but most organizations don’t do it. Grab a button and flaunt it on your website, your blog, or anywhere else you have available pixels.
Use Facebook ads
Facebook’s advertising program allows you to promote your page to a very targeted audience. (21- to 24-year-old hairless cat lovers in Idaho? Check!) And since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, it’s actually quite inexpensive. Create different ads targeting different chunks of your target audience — or several for the same audience — and track them to see which ones are most effective.
Play with your fans
Don’t leave your fans hanging. Respond to comments on your page. Ask them questions in the discussion board. When someone new becomes a fan of your page, sent them a message to say hello. Do they use Twitter? Follow them, or send a direct message. Remind them that there are flesh and blood people behind the organization’s page, and that you’re interested in them, not just your stats.
Rock your own domain name
URL’s for Facebook pages are long and ugly. Register a separate domain name for your page and forward it to your Facebook page. If you already have a website for your organization, you can use a subdomain instead (ex. facebook.mynonprofit.com).
Pimp out your business card
Include the shortened address of your Facebook page on your business card. If you don’t have one, get one. If you don’t like the idea of a traditional business card, get a funky personal calling card, like Moo’s MiniCards, to promote your page.
Delegate and spread the love
If you have other staff, volunteers, or trusted community members who are on Facebook, consider adding them as an admin. You’ll spread out the responsibility of keeping the page fresh, and will hopefully create passionate pilgrims who will promote your page, and your organization, to their friends.
Send updates (just not boring ones)
Facebook allows you to send updates to your fans, and by all means you should. Just make sure they’re interesting to your fans, not just to yourself. You can even target your update to fans in a certain city, region, or age range. But whatever you do…
Don’t spam
Sure, this is actually one way not to promote your Facebook page, but just don’t do it. No one likes to receive Facebook updates every other day from anyone, so don’t abuse the privilege. I’ve ditched many pages and groups because they sent out too many updates, so unless you want your numbers to shrink, treat your updates like you drink your scotch — in moderation.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Understanding Google Adsense
By S. Housley
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content relevant advertisements on web pages. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral. Google's AdSense program essentially allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google's pay-per-click AdWord results.
Website maintenance related to AdSense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert a Google generated java script into the web page or website template.
Google's spider parses the AdServing website and serves ads that relate to the website's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served. The java script calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the web page.
Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain's ads from being served on any websites in their account. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitor's ads from being dynamically served on their websites.
Google provides a wide variety of ad formats to match the most suitable option with a website. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted towers, inline rectangles, banners and buttons.
Google AdSense program offers more than one way of earning revenue from serving Google AdSense Ads. Though �Google AdSense for Feeds� is one of the more recent ways of advertising using Google AdSense Ads, it�s in no way less effective than the others. Here, Google places the Ads of the advertisers in the relevant feed articles (again, note the most important characteristic of the Google AdSense program comes into play here too i.e. �relevant feed� not just any feed).
The feeds are in the form of articles, headlines or summaries. These content formats allow the users to easily access the content from several publishers (content owners) at one place. This is achieved through feed aggregators like Bloglines etc. Again, Google Adsense uses its technology to determine what advertisements would be contextually suited for a particular feed. You get paid as the publisher of original content and hence make easy money. As for the readers, they as such get a rich experience because they can see the relevant advertisements with the content that they are interested in. Moreover, they can also choose the feeds that they want. Users can click the advertisements to visit the advertiser�s website and check if their products and/ or services are of any use to them. Of course, the Advertisers benefit too. They get targeted advertising which means only the really interested people get to know about their products and services (and hence there are more chances of a better conversion rate for sales).
Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.
The campaigns will likely be site targeted, rather than contextual, but details on the actual implementation of these new ads are still under wraps. With these kind of top-secret beta tests, NDAs are often requirements before being accepted into it.
Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that “float in” from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.
No further details are known about the new rich media beta test, but I will see what I can find out. I can probably safely say that this is an invite-only beta test to which only a small number of publishers were invited to. So emailing the AdSense team for an invite to this beta probably wouldn’t work. But the good news is that often beta tests are turned into features that all publishers can utilize, so if you are interested in implementing rich media through AdSense, keep your fingers crossed and it may be added in the future.
This is definitely a departure from the usual text ads as well as the image and Flash ads in standard ad unit sizes that AdSense usually runs. Rich media ads are usually associated with companies such as Fastclick, PointRoll and Falk eSolutions, so the fact that AdSense is making inroads on this territory is quite significant. If AdSense offered rich media to all publishers, it could really hurt competitor companies offering similar rich media ad formats because of the vast number of publishers that AdSense has.
And if AdSense did offer rich media to all publishers, they could easily add a new clause that would mean companies such as Fastclick and PointRoll would suddenly be competitive ads and not be permitted on the same pages as AdSense. Many AdSense publishers implement rich media ads to compliment AdSense, and as non-contextual, most of these ad products are well within the AdSense terms. But if AdSense decided to not permit rich media ads on pages also running AdSense or AdSense rich media style ads, this could mean that many publishers would drop competitor’s ads and just show AdSense… as well as those advertisers flocking to AdWords to get their rich media creatives showing through the AdSense program.
In terms of dominating the online advertising market, AdSense rich media could seal the deal to make AdSense the force to be reckoned with, by not only dominating the online text ad and graphical banner-style advertising, but in the entire online advertising market. Definitely a story to watch.
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content relevant advertisements on web pages. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the website, the website owner is credited for the referral. Google's AdSense program essentially allows approved websites to dynamically serve Google's pay-per-click AdWord results.
Website maintenance related to AdSense is very easy and requires very little effort. Webmasters need only to insert a Google generated java script into the web page or website template.
Google's spider parses the AdServing website and serves ads that relate to the website's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served. The java script calls the ad from Google and will ensure that ads are served each time a visitor goes to the web page.
Early on Google implemented a filtering system that allowed webmasters to prevent a specific domain's ads from being served on any websites in their account. Ad blocking meant that webmasters could prevent their competitor's ads from being dynamically served on their websites.
Google provides a wide variety of ad formats to match the most suitable option with a website. Webmasters can select from a handful of preformatted towers, inline rectangles, banners and buttons.
Google AdSense program offers more than one way of earning revenue from serving Google AdSense Ads. Though �Google AdSense for Feeds� is one of the more recent ways of advertising using Google AdSense Ads, it�s in no way less effective than the others. Here, Google places the Ads of the advertisers in the relevant feed articles (again, note the most important characteristic of the Google AdSense program comes into play here too i.e. �relevant feed� not just any feed).
The feeds are in the form of articles, headlines or summaries. These content formats allow the users to easily access the content from several publishers (content owners) at one place. This is achieved through feed aggregators like Bloglines etc. Again, Google Adsense uses its technology to determine what advertisements would be contextually suited for a particular feed. You get paid as the publisher of original content and hence make easy money. As for the readers, they as such get a rich experience because they can see the relevant advertisements with the content that they are interested in. Moreover, they can also choose the feeds that they want. Users can click the advertisements to visit the advertiser�s website and check if their products and/ or services are of any use to them. Of course, the Advertisers benefit too. They get targeted advertising which means only the really interested people get to know about their products and services (and hence there are more chances of a better conversion rate for sales).
Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.
The campaigns will likely be site targeted, rather than contextual, but details on the actual implementation of these new ads are still under wraps. With these kind of top-secret beta tests, NDAs are often requirements before being accepted into it.
Floating ads are ads that either stay on top as the page is scrolled, or ones that “float in” from the side of the page to the center of the page. Expanding ads are those that require user interaction to expand, either with a mouseover or a click. Interstitials are perhaps the most interesting addition to this rich media beta, because they are a format that people love to hate, and that are often more annoying than pop-ups. You have likely stumbled across an interstitial ad - they appear when you click through to read a page, and before they will show you the page, you are bypassed through to a full page ad that you must view before seeing the actual content you were wanting, often by having to click a link on the interstitial ad page.
No further details are known about the new rich media beta test, but I will see what I can find out. I can probably safely say that this is an invite-only beta test to which only a small number of publishers were invited to. So emailing the AdSense team for an invite to this beta probably wouldn’t work. But the good news is that often beta tests are turned into features that all publishers can utilize, so if you are interested in implementing rich media through AdSense, keep your fingers crossed and it may be added in the future.
This is definitely a departure from the usual text ads as well as the image and Flash ads in standard ad unit sizes that AdSense usually runs. Rich media ads are usually associated with companies such as Fastclick, PointRoll and Falk eSolutions, so the fact that AdSense is making inroads on this territory is quite significant. If AdSense offered rich media to all publishers, it could really hurt competitor companies offering similar rich media ad formats because of the vast number of publishers that AdSense has.
And if AdSense did offer rich media to all publishers, they could easily add a new clause that would mean companies such as Fastclick and PointRoll would suddenly be competitive ads and not be permitted on the same pages as AdSense. Many AdSense publishers implement rich media ads to compliment AdSense, and as non-contextual, most of these ad products are well within the AdSense terms. But if AdSense decided to not permit rich media ads on pages also running AdSense or AdSense rich media style ads, this could mean that many publishers would drop competitor’s ads and just show AdSense… as well as those advertisers flocking to AdWords to get their rich media creatives showing through the AdSense program.
In terms of dominating the online advertising market, AdSense rich media could seal the deal to make AdSense the force to be reckoned with, by not only dominating the online text ad and graphical banner-style advertising, but in the entire online advertising market. Definitely a story to watch.
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