Facebook Marketing Apps Worth Your Attention

Facebook's modifications to fan pages — most importantly the shift to Timeline — has reduced the use of specialized, third-party marketing apps. However, that does not mean these apps have gone away. Many offer promotional opportunities not found within Facebook's native platform.
In this article, I share 13 new apps from 7 different companies that are worth your attention.

1. Lujure

Lujure has transitioned to a new brand called Heyo.
Lujure is one of the more popular Facebook Page marketing applications. However, the company recently made the most significant change in its history and transitioned from being solely a Facebook Page app provider to one that incorporates mobile apps and a website building tool. The company also changed its name from Lujure to Heyo.
Heyo Social
The fan page builder — now called Heyo Social — remains the heart of the new platform and provides the content for use in the mobile app and website.
Page owners can choose from template-driven or custom options. The company also offers over 30 widgets that can be incorporated into fan pages, including contests, buy buttons, and email opt-ins.
Heyo Mobile
Once a fan page is built, its content can be included in a mobile app with a single click. "Customers can call you through your phone widget, email you through your email widget, follow you through your twitter widget, or redeem a deal using your deal widget," states Heyo. Six mobile widgets are available in all.
Heyo Web
Lastly, Heyo offers a hosted, drag and drop website building platform. As with the mobile app, content that has already been created via Heyo Social can be used within the site.
Prices start at $3 per month and scale upward based on the number of fan pages, widgets, mobiles apps, and websites used.

2. North Social

North Social offers a suite of more than 20 Facebook Page apps.
Facebook Page app developer North Social offers a suite of more than 20 apps. Two of the newest include Holiday Advent Calendar and Trivia Contest.
Holiday Advent Calendar
This app allows merchants to set up a series of daily promotions that automatically run from midnight to midnight each day during Advent.
Types of promotions vary from deals, coupons, downloads, or sweepstakes. For example, the app enables page owners to run a week of deals, 12 days of coupons, and up to 24 days of holiday deals (in keeping with the Advent calendar).
Trivia Contest App
The Trivia Contest app is designed to provide page owners with a way to engage their fan base and help spread the word about their brands. Three contest options are included: True/False, Multiple Choice, and Personality Quiz.
Sharing is built in so that, after users complete a trivia challenge, they will be shown their results and prompted to share the application by challenging their friends to beat their score.
North Social offers tiered pricing, which starts at $1.00 per day, and is based on the number of fans a page has. All apps are included in the price.

3. Tabsite

Tabsite recently launched a series of "engagement" apps.
Facebook app provider Tabsite recently launched a series of "Engagement" apps. Three that I recommend are: Pin Deal, Share Deal, and Group Deal.
Pin Deal
This app integrates Pinterest into Facebook by giving page owners the ability to create a special offer or deal. However, to "unlock" the deal, fans must first pin it on Pinterest.
Share Deal
Similar to the Pin Deal app, to unlock a special deal on Facebook, the fan must first share it with others.
According to Tabsite, the Share Deal app is a "great tool for offering a special discount, an e-book download, savings code, or other promo that spreads because fans need to share the deal in order to get access themselves."
Group Deal
The Group Deal app picks up where Share Deal leaves off. In this case, just like using group deal sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, fan page owners set how many times a deal must be shared in order for it to be unlocked.
Tabsite pricing starts at $15 per month for its most popular plan. A 14-day free trial is also offered. However, the apps listed above require the use of what Tabsite refers to as its Platinum plan, which costs $25 per month.
 

4. Blazon

Blazon is a newer player on the Facebook Page marketing scene.
A new player on the Facebook marketing scene is Blazon, which provides a social marketing suite built around promotional campaigns and contests.
Blazon positions itself as the "fastest way to convert impressions into sales leads," and does so using photo, text and video contests, as well as giveaways and sweepstakes.
Prices begin at just $5 per promotion and $0.99 per day. The most popular option starts at $19 and $2.49 per day. Promotions can be run for any period of time the user chooses.

5. Woobox

Two of Woobox newest apps are Pinterest tab and Photo Contests.
Woobox offers a number of apps including group deals, polls, sweepstakes and coupons. Two of its newest, however, are Photo Contests and a Pinterest tab.
Photo Contests
The Photo Contests app, which works with both Facebook and Twitter, allows fan and followers to upload photos that others can vote on. Entrants provide captions for their photo that are shown on the voting screen. Users can also share their own photo entry or that of others.
Fan page owners can download all entry data including email addresses for use in follow-up marketing, which is a particular benefit to using this app.
Pinterest Tab
Though not tied to a contest or promotion, this app allows page owners to showcase their Pinterest boards and pins as a tab on a Facebook page. Users can be required to like the page before viewing the Pinterest tab.
Use of the Pinterest tab app is free. However, the Photo Contests app requires that users pay a monthly subscription fee of $29, which includes use of all Woobox apps.

6. FaceItPages

FaceItPages offers a promotional app to target relevant fans.
Like the other companies included in this list, FaceItPages provides several Facebook Page marketing options. However, there is one in particular that I want to mention. It's called +Promote, which helps page owners gain "targeted likes" to their Facebook pages.
"With targeted fans, you have a much better chance of turning your likes into leads. The more targeted fans you have, the better chance those fans will engage with your page which will also help your Facebook Page Edgerank," says FaceItPages.
The app promotes fan pages using Facebook ads that are targeted around the merchant's market and ideal customer. The company focuses on setting up targeted, low cost, yet high converting ads that produce, according to the company, an 80 percent click-to-like ratio.
The key benefit to using this app is that it places the emphasis on quality over quantity. In other words, it is not designed to get the most fans for the money, but the ones most likely to engage with the brand.
Pricing is $15 per month of the most popular plan, but is free for the first 30 days.

7. PageModo

Pagemodo offers a Facebook Cover creation tool.
Pagemodo also offers social apps. One that I like is the Timeline Cover Photo designer.
The process is simple. You choose a template, which can consist of up to eight images, select a background image (Pagemodo provides a background image maker), choose images either from your computer or from images provided by Pagemodo, then publish the cover to your fan page.
It is important to change cover images on a routine basis to add freshness to the page. This app makes that process easy, and even fun. It's also free to use. Pagemodo also offers a free level for use with a limited selection of its apps. Otherwise, plans start at $6.25 per month and scale up. (At the time of this writing, Pagemodo is running a pricing special, which cuts the monthly rate in half.)

Summary

Just because Facebook is offering its own marketing tools, primarily Promoted Posts, you can still use third-party applications such as those listed here. They contain a wealth of promotional opportunities that can lead to increased fan base growth, engagement and sales.

Read More

• Facebook Promoted Posts: Getting Started
• Facebook Launches Targeted Page Posts 

by  http://www.practicalecommerce.com

How to Make Money Using Facebook

Facebook is a social online community that links everyone to everyone.Do you think that everyone use it for fun or do you think some guys and girls use it as a networking tool to sell stuff ? The obvious reason would be both. These methods don't require you to buy anything or pay someone to tell you the "secrets". As a matter of fact you can start making money with your Facebook right now without having to spend any money at all.There are no"secrets" for making money on Facebook. Simply some very basic methods that people use to make money elsewhere,but with a little work and patience you can apply the same methods to make money on Facebook.

Steps

1. 
   
   Decide how much,and how quickly you want to make the money. There are literally thousands of ways of how to make money with Facebook. Some businesses have their own product lines and they simply utilize Facebook to expose these products to their friends and their friends. Some guys use Facebook to market other people's products. The latter is the way that most individuals do it, from home earning six figure plus incomes, in a period of months.
2. 
   
   Consider using companies that provide you with specific products and websites to market. They also provide training and support on how to use Facebook to market your websites.
3. 
   
   Find a market. In this case the market would be Facebook friends. The more Facebook friends you have, the more chances you have of making more money. What if you don't have many Facebook friends? Fortunately it's very easy to create a massive market (friends for Facebook) simply by searching and inviting others to be your friend. But, if you want to take it to the next level and automate the finding and adding friends process, there are some software that can do just that.
4. 
   
   Show ads on Facebook. With all the Facebook applications that make it easy and a snap to start showing ads on your Facebook, there is no excuse for not taking advantage of this method, especially if you are popular amongst your Facebook friends, and have a big audience to show your ads to. Using AdSense, chitika and other PPC advertising companies you can easily setup your ads and customize it to your liking. Make sure to set it somehow that it serves ads related to product and services that you know your Facebook audience is interested in.
5. 
   
   Use affiliate marketing on Facebook. It's the same idea as showing ads, but in a more direct way. Register for free with affiliate networking sites such as ClickBank, Maxbounty, etc., and pick a product relevant to your Facebook audience interest to promote. You will be provided a simple code which is a link with your affiliate id embedded in it. Whenever someone clicks on that link and buys the product or service, you make money by getting a commission.
6. 
   
   Create an entirely new Facebook for that product and start promoting it there. You can sell multiple products and create multiple accounts for each one. Write short posts about the product and post it on your Facebook with your affiliate link in it. You can make a couple of hundred dollars a month doing this. I know it's not much, but for something that doesn't cost you a dime and takes about 30 minutes to set up, and takes about 20 minutes or so a day to run, I don't think it's a bad deal.
7. 
   
   Write a Facebook book How To. Facebook is attracting more and more members every day. And lets face it, not all of these people are Facebook savvy. And even though getting started with Facebook might be simple and quick for some, many people have problem with the basic things. Write a small and to the point e-book about Facebook and how to use it. Maybe a simple step by step instruction for getting started with Facebook. Or an e-book about how to use different application to make Facebook experience a better one. There are many possibilities. With the huge amount of Facebook apps and all the new ones that are added daily, this can be quite big. You don't even have to pay to promote your e-book, simply use your own Facebook or better yet create one for your e-book and start promoting it.
8. 
   
   Blog about Facebook. There are already some people doing it. But there is always room for new voices. Get a free blog over at blogger and use Google AdSense (which is already integrated in blogger, so even if you don't know how to show ads on your blog, you can set it up with couple clicks) to show ads on your blog and make money that way.
9. 
   
   Get sponsorship. When you have established yourself as an authority and a trusted person for anything related to Facebook, you can get some sponsor and maybe use affiliate networking sites to find and promote Facebook related product.
10. 
    
    Create and sell a Facebook application. If you are savvy enough and know your way around, why not use your skills to make a Facebook app of your own and sell it to Facebook users? Again, once you made it, you can use the same strategies mentioned above (blog or a Facebook page for the app) to promote your app.

 by  http://www.wikihow.com

Facebook Business Strategies

Many small- to midsized businesses today shy away from using Facebook. That's a mistake, say technology experts. Sure, there's the risk of negative comments getting posted on your wall for the whole world to see, but here's the reality: If you're not on Facebook, your competition is.
So instead of avoiding of this powerful social tool, embrace it -- and use it to boost your reputation on the Internet. Here's how.
1. Get your employees to contribute
Creating a successful Facebook page simply requires posting frequently and answering comments. Make it a team effort, and the process will be easier -- not to mention, you'll have a more competitive page, thanks to continuous engagement.
"Fourteen members of our staff have admin status on our Facebook page and are encouraged to share and engage with our fan base," says community manager Dayna Winter of GelaSkins, a Toronto-based company that sells decorative covers for gadgets. Because of the manageable number of employees with Facebook authorization and two people whose job is to actively monitor all comments, Winter says the opportunities outweigh the risks of putting yourself out there.
But if you still want more control, try setting a stricter approval policy. "Some companies have a fairly restrictive creation-approval-post process whereby no official content ever leaves the company without proper approval," says Chenxi Wang, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. "The approval process can be manual and similar to how you would control outbound content for press and media today."
2. Engage your fans with multimedia content
The ultimate goal of your Facebook page is to promote your brand and connect directly with your customers. So post things that update and engage your users so they'll come back to you and have a conversation. At GelaSkins, for example, employees post a good mix of content, including photos (GelaSkins-related skins), new art announcements and conversation-provoking questions.
You can also take the conversation beyond just what your company is doing and include links and pop culture topics. Or, try to poll your audience on various topics to get them to interact.
3. Use negative comments to your benefit
Comments from unhappy customers can actually be a boon to your business image: They're opportunities to display your exceptional customer service. "Resolving the issues directly in this public forum shows transparency," says Winter, "which goes a long way -- and forces us to address these concerns quickly."
And sometimes, customers can help answer questions too. Winter cites a recent example of a Spanish-speaking customer helping out another. "This is very useful for companies that do business worldwide but who may not have the resources to translate or respond in other languages," he explains. So reward your most engaged fans, advises Winter; they'll do a little legwork for you.
4. Mend a bad reputation
Technology experts agree that social media can help your business, as long as you know how to manage the flow of information. "Be aware of what social media content out there is associated with your company's brand," advises Wang.
This goes beyond just what your company is posting on Facebook to include content from third-party sources -- customer and competitor comments, general reviews, community boards and more. Wang suggests MarkMonitor, which can help you understand what content out there is relevant to your brand and reputation. And if you don't like what you discover, try services like Reputation.com and Cyveillance to correct a bad reputation or inaccurate content.
5. Resolve bigger issues offline
Don't let it get ugly on Facebook. Most of the time, you can manage the two-way information flow easily online. But in some situations, the conversation should be temporarily taken off the social platform to find a resolution.
"Generally, we discuss as a team some of the more sticky situations and how we handle," says Winter. "Many times, a customer who has posted negative comments has contacted us via email already and is looking for a more immediate outlet. It's important that our messaging is consistent before we publicly or privately post a reply."
GelaSkins uses iChat internally, so employees can check in with each other before they post, which could work for similar companies too, advises Winter.