With more and more businesses jumping into social media, it is important that you read this to avoid mistakes. There are some subtleties that a beginner may not easy grasp when comes the time to create a Facebook page.

First of all, businesses must create a page. Profiles are exclusively reserved for humans. You go against the terms of use of Facebook and many people, including me, will refuse your friend invitations. Think about it. Someone does not want to become friend with a brand, but they might be a fan.

How to Proceed?

You first need to sign in with the profile you want to use as the creator/owner of the page and then, create the Facebook page of the business. One fact that you need to know is that, contrary to group, people do not see who is the creator of a business page.

This is where it may be confusing to beginners. A Facebook page must be created by a person with a Facebook profile. The creator cannot be changed. If you are the sole owner of a small business, it is simple. The owner of the business creates his/her profile and then, the page for the business. What happens if you are a corporation or have multiple owners?

Choose wisely who creates the page

I repeat, the creator of a page have administrative power over the page forever. Therefore, if you ask a consultant or an employee to create a page your business make sure they do it right. Otherwise, they will always have access and control your page forever. It is easy to forget that important detail in the middle of the action.

I got the last piece of the puzzle (the ownership of the page) after a discussion with Jerome Paradis of Paradivision over dinner earlier this week. And we both discussed it with other social media experts. One may be inclined to create a profile that the business will control. One idea is a profile for a top position at the corporation, like the president or even the communications director where it is seen as the position, not the person who holds the title. Notice that it is against the terms of use of Facebook to create a profile for a person who does not exist and that a person cannot have 2 profiles. Facebook may imagine a better way to deal with the business page ownership in the future. Until then, you do not really have a feasible option.

Before you create your page, I invite you to read those texts written by Facebook about their Business Fan pages:

+ Who Owns Your Facebook Business Fan Page? – Talked more about the problematic than the solution
+ Facebook Pages: What are Facebook Pages? Should I create one?

Disclaimer:  Jerome Paradis is my husband and I own shares of Paradivision.

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Talking about social media feels so apropos since social media was central to my husband’s birthday party. Yahoo has its Big Idea chair photo shoot. We hosted our Favorite Social Media Couch photo booth. The concept was to hold the pillow(s) of the social media that is more important for us between Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

No need to say that I am a part of the social media revolution. If you read this post, you probably are. Social media is not a fad. I recalled last January when we traveled to the United States and my husband told me to turn down the data roaming on your iPhone. What!!! A week without Twitter and my RSS reader on the go. Luckily for me, Rogers added a US data roaming plan the week before so I was able to tweet after all.

We stay connected and share photos with our friends through Facebook and Twitter. You probably noticed that you use less the phone. It is more efficient to send a tweet or a text message. Social media has changed the way we communicate. And I feel it is for the good. And due to social media, I met online and offline new like-minded people; some of which have become good friends.

I want to know which is your favorite social media site or tool?

Social Media Revolution Statistics

If you need data to convince the unconverted ones, look at this video. It highlights key statistics about the growth and the impacts of social media in our everyday life. No need to write them down, Geek in Disguise did it for us.

Thanks to Liberty Post for reminding me about this video this morning. Thanks to Pierre Bellerose for noticing Craftsquatch, the seller of the pillows on etsy and for initiating the photo session. Vive the Social Media Revolution!

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Lately, I have been running my own restaurant on Facebook. Café World is another game by Zynga. You are the chef. Your friends/neighbors can be your waiters. As you advance in the game, you will be able to add stoves, service counters and preparing more recipes.

Organizing your room (kitchen and tables) is part of your success as the game determined the maximum resources (number of waiters, stoves and counters) that you can have. You can expand your restaurant at will, if you accumulated enough coins.

You can play at Café World the way you like but here are things that you should know:

• Quicker to make recipe spoils more quickly. (1) Plus, look at the clock and your agenda before deciding what to cook. You do not wish to wake up at 3 am to serve the cheesecake that took 12 hours before being ready to serve.
• Customers that were served in a timely fashion will add .1 to your buzz factor. Customers who cannot be served due to lack of available seats (3) or that are not served fast enough will reduce your buzz factor by .1
• The buzz factor (thumb up) determines how many customers you will get. Keeping a window (from your browser) opens with the game playing speeds up the buzz factor. But make you have enough food on the counters because you will lose pretty quickly your advantage when the food ran out. (2)
• You can close your restaurant to not run out of food while you are not in front of your computer. I close mine at night. Simply remove the door(s), that is put the door back in your inventory.
• One server can serve 8 tables easily. Better to have more tables than risk that waiting customers leave unhappy.
• Each table is for one person. No need to put two chairs. (4)
• Visit your neighbors every day to earn extra cash and leave them a tip

Give me versatile decor elements

Unfortunately Café World is weak on the decor options. A part of the fun is to infuse your own style into your restaurant. There are many choices but nothing that will enable to create a restaurant style that you can brag about. For that reason, I will probably get bored of Café World quicker than usual. If I can not decorate my space to my satisfaction with the extra coins I accumulated, what is the point?

Why can game developers are too cheap (no excuse here, since Zynga makes lots of money) to hire a  with interior design consultant to help them create amazing and versatile decor elements. Zynga assumes that you will go for a kit; so boring and passé! Clearly, the video game industry did not evolve on that topic since the first video games in 1980s. Maybe, we need more girls as lead game developers to change that.

+ Café World by Zynga on Facebook

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It is not really a surprising news if you ask me. First of all, I told you about the female Internet in autumn 2008. At the time, I reported that Women’s community was the most visited and fastest growing Internet category, tied with politics according to ComScore Media Metrix’s year-end report.

I attributed these statistics to the fact that women are the ones who typically lead conversations, share information amongst themselves and create relationships with their peers. This is basically what social media is all about. What surprised me is what age groups haves the most users. As you can see, it is either 35 to 44 years old or 45 to 55 years old.

I added the more popular age group on the graph produced by Information is Beautiful. The data were compiled by Brian Solis.

+ via a tweet by Miss Rogue

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The New Times published an article today about the fact that party hosts and some bars are starting to request no twittering, no blogging, and no photos. I agree with their concerns.

With the capability of uploading our pictures, updating our status and to publish all the time on social network sites, we need to use judgment about what is appropriate to put online or not. As adults, we must consider others’ view on privacy; not just our own.

I love and live in social media. But I also believe that we must keep a line between our private life and our public life. It is not just for you that you must censor what you put online; it is mostly for my friends and family. Not everyone wishes to participate in social networks.

Different Events, Different Venues, Different Rules

This is a lot to take into consideration. The proper code of etiquette is still in the making. Obeying a few basic rules keeps it simple.

Social media conferences encourage video recordings of the entire session, blogging and twittering. It is a given that you can publish your content without asking. But what about when you are in a restaurant, in a bar or when you are invited at a party at a friend’s house?

It is rare to get great shots in a dark bar with a phone camera. Asking your friends if they are OK with you posting the pictures with your phone in the middle of the party is not enough. Your friends may regret it the next morning. It may just be because they may not like the idea that we see them in a bar drinking and dancing. How many of you, have friends requesting that you untag them?

When you go to a party, upload the pictures the next day. You can better judge sitting at home than in the middle of a party. My rule of thumb is to take pictures at the start of the party. Then, forget about your camera.

Family affairs and parties at a friend’s house is generally off-limits. Even a quiet brunch party can be a problem. First, the host may not want to show off their house publicly. I always keep these pictures off the grid. The same is true for a wedding or a birthday celebration, even if they are happening on a public space.

As we continue to use social network sites, the etiquette will mature, will become more universal and will evolve with what we, as a society, feel comfortable with.

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Look at your fan page as a destination for your fans to connect with your brand and amongst themselves. If you accept the fact that the content of your fan page does not have to be just about your brand, it reduces the amount of original content you will need to produce. Here are two ways to make it easy:

1. allow your fans to post their content
2. put content produced by others that is relevant to your readers.

By letting your fans posting their content, you will learn more about them. It gives you a chance to discover:

• what they care about,
• what they do,
• what they like about your blog or your products/services,
• what they want to know.

Their content can inspire new blog stories. If you are a business, letting your fans speak freely enables you to discover how people really use your products in their daily life and what are their expectations. It is also a good tool to discover influencers.

Fans are not necessary Your Blog Readers

One thing I noticed as a blogger active in my local community is that not all my fans read my blog. My case may be special. While these non reader fans are a minority, I welcome them.

I noticed that the gender split of At Home with Kim Vallee’s fans is different from my readership. The reason is that many business bloggers that I am friend with and often met at conferences decided to show their support by becoming fans of At Home with Kim Vallee.

These social media and tech bloggers do not read At Home with Kim Vallee. Reading my tweets, seeing my post links on Facebook and knowing me personally enabled them to determine that my blog was worthy of their support. Although they are a minority, having their support gives my blog (and my brand) exposure outside my targeted circle. Having their trust adds to my credibility. This is one thing a fan page can do to support the growth of your blog.

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A reader asked me to tell him how he can post text on a fan page. The same way that you can decide if your Facebook friends are allowed to post comments on your wall, the owner of a fan page can define their wall settings. In short, a fan can post text, photos, videos and links on a fan page if the page owner has granted permissions to their fans.

To not allow your fans to write or post content on the fan wall is a big no-no on my book. I will go as far as saying that if this is your philosophy, your brand is not ready to be on Facebook. I encourage your brand to go over its fear since you are missing out a big opportunity.

Encourage Participation with the right Wall Settings on your Fan Page

Web 2.0 is based on interactions. The value of a fan page is to have a true dialogue with your fans. For that to happen, they need the power to express themselves. I advise any brand or blogger to use the above settings for their fan page.

There are two elements that you can customize. The first are the View Settings. To not miss any intervention by your fans, set the Default view for wall at “Post by Page and Fans”. For the Fan Permissions, I allow my fans to post anything on my page fans. As the fan page administrator, know that you can always delete inappropriate or unsolicited marketing (spam) material.

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Update: The issue seems to be caused by a glitch in the communication between FarmTown servers and Facebook.
FarmTown access will be restored as soon as these issues are solved.
We will be extending the ‘Ready to Harvest’ period so that crops do not go to waste due to this downtime.

Update – 12:50 AM EDT: ETA for FT to be back online is at 1 hour. (Not there yet)

There is no news when Farm Town will be back online. But it appears that the maker are working to restore it as soon as possible. Let’s hope it would be soon.

September 27th, 2009 Update: This blog is NOT produced by the maker of Farm Town, and I do NOT work for Farm Town. Therefore, it is not the right place to ask about support or why you cannot access the game.

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No blogger can ignore Facebook and Twitter when promoting his or her blog. Link share holds the key element in this equation. I explained before the viral marketing power of adding a post link to your Facebook profile or fan page for every new post.

This technique is more effective if Facebook displays well the content of your post. Look at the differences between examples 1 , 2 and 3. I took those from links that I posted on my On the Web fan page.

Example 1 shows the post title but it displays keywords instead of the excerpt of the post. I was surprised when I saw that Problogger did worst (example 2). His blog returns the title of the post as the excerpt. Example 3 is how I did it. Both of my blogs return the post title and the post excerpt. Example 3 looks more professional and shows that you care about your readers by saving them time. This is something we test before we launched my blog.

Publishing the excerpt gives you more chances to grab the attention of people who see the link on Facebook. Remember that your links are not just for your friends and your fans. Potentially the friends of your friends may see your links. Seeing the excerpt may convince any of them to visit your blog.

If you are not tech savvy, know that the solution depends on the way your blog theme is programmed. This is not something particular to Wordpress; you can reproduce Example 3 with any blog platform where you control the programming of the blog template.

I wrote this post to alert you to this fact. Test it with your own blog and you will see if changes are necessary.

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Farm Town is a fun social game where you design and manage a farm. It takes advantage of the social element of Facebook. Having neighbors helps you make more money and gain experience more quickly.

How to Make Money and Build Experience on Farm Town

Visit your neighbor’s farms daily to rake or water their farm. Doing this simple task delivers 6 points of experience and between 10 and 20 coins. Farm Town rewards collaboration between neighbors. You can send free gifts (trees or animals) to your friends.

When you hire a friend or a hand to harvest your mature crops, they earn a small wage and you will be able to sell your crops at the market for more (more than if you harvest it and store it). You can also hire hands at the market to harvest your crops. Being hired as a temporary farmer enables you to make more money. For that reason, there is never a shortage of hands at the market.

Facebook games are meant to be quick sessions compared to video games where you can play for hours in a row. Playing 5 to 10 minutes one or twice a day is enough at first. As you increase your growing area, the game will demand more of your time. When you feel short in space, stop by the real estate office and buy more land to expand your farm. You can also spend time redesigning your farm or chatting with other players.

You gain experience by planting your farm. Initially, plant seeds that take 1 day to mature. I am partial to strawberries and potatoes. Grapes are ready in 4 hours. If you do not wish to play daily, grow longer maturing seeds. My favorite seeds are: tomatoes and rice maturing in 2 days, coffee and onions growing in 3 days, and pumpkins ready in 4 days). You can coordinate everything to play once every 2 or 3 days if you like. In any events, we could meet at the farmer’s market or cheer with water at the Inn (still not operational), since they are still waiting for their liquor permit.

JUNE 9th, 2009 1:45 AM ET – IMPORTANT MESSAGE:  To all Farm Town players, the maker are working on bringing back the game as soon as possible. Read my complete status here.
I also slightly edited my review of the game to share more tricks that I learned while playing.

September 28th, 2009 Update: This blog is NOT produced by the maker of Farm Town, and I do NOT work for Farm Town. Therefore, it is not the right place to ask about support. To contact the maker of Farm Town, use their Facebook application page.

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I wish to share my experience with my Fagebook pages for my blogs. Yesterday, Jessica of How About Orange asked her readers to enlighten her on why it’s good to have a Facebook page for your blog? She received 42 comments so far. A good number of her readers did not see the point or simply see it as added work. I wish to show you how to add value to your blog with a Facebook page.

Which Content to Put on Your Facebook Page

You will struggle with this question at first. It is intimidating. One mistaken view is to simply duplicate the content of the blog. You should not do that. Continue to publish your latest posts on your page but make sure to add other relevant content that is not on your blog. An easy trick is to write a message telling your fans what they will be getting from your post when you share a post link on your Facebook page.

Enhance the Communications

I wish to publicly thank Michelle Blanc for inspiring me, without knowing it. Michelle talked at 3rd Tuesday last week about how the newspapers and traditional media should use the different channels to complement their stories. It opened my mind.

Now I use my Facebook page as a way to enhance the content of my blog. I published additional pictures on stories I covered on my blog. Used it to say about things about yourself that may interested your fans. For example, I create photo albums when I attended events (see my 3rd Tuesday album). Thinking about my page as a persona makes it easier to write status messages on the page wall. What additional content do your put on your Facebook page?

Get More Feedbacks, More Rapidly

It is fair to assume that most of your Facebook friends do not subscribe to your RSS feeds. The fact that I published each new post URL on my user profile and my Facebook page increases the number of comments I get on Facebook and the like this votes. When you are lucky, a new reader will publish a comment on your blog. Remember that Facebook is a more casual platform than a blog; Facebook encourages communication through word of mouth.

Power of Word of Mouth

More than 175 millions people are on Facebook. The split in the United Stated is about 55% of Facebook users are 25 years old or less, 45% are over 25 years old. The claim that Facebook is only for kids does not added up anymore. Even without that fact, your friends and the friends of your friends are a part of that 45%. It is also possible to use social-demographic targeted advertisement to promote your page within Facebook.

When a fan does an action on your Facebook page, their friends can see it and you get a chance to convert strangers which brings exposure to the friends of your friends of your friends. The multiplying effect on Facebook delivers more exposure than if you limit yourself to your blog and writing blog comments on the blogosphere. It only costs a little bit of your time.

+ become a fan of On The Web with Kim Vallee
+ become a fan of At Home with Kim Vallee

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A few weeks ago I talked about the Quickest and Easiest Way to Promote Your Blog on Facebook. This was based on my own experience and it is still valid. In fact, it may still be the best solution for many bloggers. If you wish to build a brand around your blog, it is another question. The latest changes to the Facebook Fan Pages eliminated my top objection to use them.

With the fan pages behaving almost as user profiles, you can use the same easy techniques I talked about earlier. Moreover, the Fan pages provides statistics on your fan demographics and visits. You can send updates to all your fans (or a target group defined with demographic filters) but you won’t be able to send individual message. Another fact to know is that the owner of a Facebook page stays anonymous.

Having a Facebook page looks more and more appealing. I see the added challenge to build an active community but I also see new opportunities. For example, I answer many viewer’s email behind closed doors. Now I could answer them publicly for the benefit of the group. I am planning to host events to connect with my readers this year. I could report more details on the AHWKV page than on my blog. I feel that over time, it may be better for my brand to promote it via a Fan page – one page per blog.

What do you think? Do you use a Facebook page? If so, do you have any tips to share?

Fan Page for On the Web with Kim Vallee

Help me build a strong community by becoming a fan of On The Web with Kim Vallee. Use the wall to communicate with me and other fans. The Stream shows what the page owner did. The wall is about what the fans did. Send me your questions that could become the topic of future posts.

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