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Change a Facebook Profile to a Facebook Page? Yes You Can!

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If you are one of the countless people who set up a Facebook Profile for your business instead of a Facebook Page you’ve no doubt eventually regretted that decision but don’t want to loose all the “friends” you’ve amassed. Now you don’t have to loose those invaluable connections! Facebook has released a tool that will allow you to “convert” your profile to a page.

This is an excellent tool for those public figures, small business owners, freelancers, etc. who need to convert to the much more “business” friendly page (no “approving” friends, no “limits” on the number of people who can connect with your page, etc.) but don’t want to loose all the connections they’ve made.

Be aware, there ARE limitations to what this tool will do, so you’ll need to download all your profile information BEFORE converting, but all your “friends” will be converted over to people who “like” your page without them having to do anything.

Read more about this on Facebook’s FAQ about converting your Profile to a Page.

Facebook Tagging for Business

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Social Media Explorer recently wrote an excellent article about the new Facebook tagging feature and using it for business. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“For a business, this can allow you to stay more top of mind with your friends or fans. When you tag someone, they receive a notification you’ve done so and, thus, come see what you tagged them in. This is potentially very powerful for businesses. As the administrator of a fan page, when you tag someone in a wall post or note, it appears to them as if the business or organization tagged them, not the individual logged in to administer the account.”

Here’s a link to the original article. What are your thoughts?

My Request for Creating Custom Twitter Backgrounds

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I’ve been using Twitter for a while now, and also use it for my clients and I started doing custom backgrounds in Photoshop several months ago. I tend to think of custom backgrounds in 3 categories: good, boring, and frustrating.

The good backgrounds are the ones that are creative or have good contact information AND are optimized for smaller screens. Let’s face it, how many of us use laptops and are using 15″ (or smaller) screens?

The boring backgrounds are the plain standard backgrounds that you choose from in Twitter.

The frustrating backgrounds are the ones where the Tweeple are TRYING to have a good background, but because they have little or no concept of how the viewer’s screen size affects how their background looks to the viewer, half their information gets cut off by the bottom of the screen, the Twitter box or the right side of the screen. What if I DO want to connect with you on Facebook, LinkedIn or call you? I can’t because your information is chopped off and you potentially lost a valuable connection.

Here are MY suggestions for optimizing the viewability of your Twitter background:

  • Don’t put anything important on the right side. Keep that for the “pretty” stuff because unless I’m viewing it on a 21″ monitor I probably won’t see it anyway.
  • Keep the information on the left side no farther than about 130-150 pixels from the left edge (even less if you can swing it). Up to 150 pixels from the left is still visible on my husband’s 15″ laptop.
  • Keep the information on the left side no farther down than about 550 pixels from the top edge (again, even less if you can swing it).

I can not even begin to tell you how frustrating it is for me (even on my 17″ widescreen laptop) when I can’t see the contact information.  You are much more likely to have someone visit a web site, send you an email, connect with you on other social networks, etc. if they can see the information right on their screen.  We are pretty lazy as a society (yes, I’m part of that society), and we don’t want to have to click on your web site link in your bio area (You DO have a web site or other information link on your Twitter profile don’t you?  That’s a whole other can of worms.) and search around your web site to find how to contact you.

So, bottom line, if you are creating your own Twitter background (or having someone do it for you), please check to see what it looks like on at least as small a monitor as a 15″

Here is a resource I found very helpful when I don’t remember the dimensions (which is more often than I care to admit). Croncast

Happy Tweeting!

Social Media Marketing Efforts Should Not Equal Advertising

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I am not an “auto follower” on Twitter – I check out the profiles and web sites of people/businesses who follow me before deciding whether or not to follow them back. I recently was checking the profiles of the Twitter users who recently followed me to see if I wanted to reciprocate the follow. One of the first things I noticed about one of my new followers was their two word bio – not very enticing. The second thing I noticed is that every single one of their Tweets had the link to their web site in it…EVERY ONE. Obviously this business did not get the memo about rule number one of social media marketing – It’s not about advertising, it’s about building relationships with your target audience. Needless to say, they did not earn my follow.