1. With everyone asking you to “become a fan” of their crappy business, groups have become the exclusive domain of small projects set up amongst friends. By using a group you positively associate yourself with these close knit communities and people are more likely to give you their attention.
2. Messages sent by the admin of a Page appear only appear in an “updates” panel. Problem: no one ever checks their “updates” panel and so these messages are left unread. Facebook groups send their messages directly to their member’s Inbox and so actually get read. I mean it’s right under your nose appearing alongside personal mail so it makes sense right?
3. You get “invited” to a group, whereas a page only gets “suggested” to you. Semantically, there is a huge difference between an invitation and a suggestion. An invitation feels exclusive, fun and special. A suggestion feels like criticism – it connotes that whatever is being suggested is in some way tainted as it is only worthy of being weakly “suggested” rather than more overtly offered. Invitations switch the power around – an invitation says “hey, we’ve got something great… want to take part? it’s cool if ya don’t, we’re having fun anyway”.
Pic unrelated.
Want to become an Internet celebrity? Perhaps even (god forbid) a real life celebrity?
A good first step is placing a photo and a short biography on every page of your blog. Notice I said to place in on every page of the blog – I’m explicitly ruling out limiting yourself to only placing the picture hidden away in some “About Us” page which nobody will ever read. I mean you need to place the picture loud and proud in your template for all to see.
Take this example from Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project”:
On every page of Gretchen’s blog you see this photo of her and a snappy bio. Whether or not it was her intention to become well known (and don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a healthy and perfectly normal intention to try to draw attention to oneself), having a picture on every page means that most every person who ever stumbled across her blog knows her face and a little about who she is and what she stands for.
Having a pic and a short biography humanizes your Internet presence. No longer are you just one more page of Times New Roman font and blue/red links. You are now a person, with a face and a story.
I logged into Facebook today (ok… I logged into Facebook many times today but happened to notice this thing when I happened to be desperately searching for post material), and this advert here caught my eye:
I like when I have new Facebook notifications.
That red box with a number inside is newsworthy to me. It’s often something funny, something about me (which having a huma sense of “I”, I’m obviously interested in), or something about someone in my life, someone very close or someone connect yet still on the outskirts. The notification is the social network’s bell and I am Pavlov’s dog. I slobber.
Now look at what Facebook’s advertising team have done. They’ve created an ad which piggybacks on the power of that red notification popout so as grab your attention advertising their need for a site reliability engineer in the UK and Ireland. (An urgent need judging from how glitchy the site has gone as of late.)
The advert worked on me… I’ll admit I looked. And I’ve looked when I’ve seen that ad before too. Every time. Notifications get my attention.
What to do with this knowledge…..what to do…..
The internet today was lit up with news that Lady Gaga was dead. The truth is, however, that she ain’t; it was just a marketing ploy.
There’s a formula for these new marketing ploys: make something newsworthy enough and reinforce it with enough forged corroborative evidence – like photoshopped BBC News screenshots, realistic clones of real websites (www.peoplemagazine.tk) and faked Yahoo questions and answers (answered of course in your favour)! And that’s about it – you’ve got a story….and a whole lot of traffic too Kudos to the Irish radio station 102-104fm
God I love the Internet.
Commenting on other blogs gets you traffic, builds relationships with other bloggers, and sharpen’s your blogger wit. Do it.
- Quality beats quantity.
- Be in the first three to comment. How? Look at posting patterns
- Target high traffic blogs. Being in the top results in Google is a good indicator.
- Link back to an article on your blog / another website if it really is relevant.
- Have a consistent commenting schedule - e.g. five comments/day.
- Target blogs in your niche.
- Help the blogger achieve their goals by offering help/advice.
- Use HTML to stand out.
- If the post author poses a question, answer it.
