How do you get people to like your page and become fans? How do you engage your fans?

Before you start using techniques to increase your fan base, ask yourself these questions …

• Is my Facebook page branded properly?
• Do I have the time and dedication to regularly post information and respond to comments?
• Do I know what content my fans find useful, funny or interesting?

8 tips to get more fans

1. Add a link on your website or blog to your Facebook page. Add a simple “Like” button to your website or blog.
   When a person clicks on the “Like” button and becomes a fan, a story appears in their friends’ news feed. This links back to your website and spreads the word about your business.

   Facebook offers a variety of other social plugins you could consider.

2. Notify people using your email newsletter. Explain to your subscribers who the Facebook page is for and how it benefits them to become fans of your page.
   Entice people to become fans by asking them questions or offering them some kind of monetary incentive.
3. Get fans to tag themselves in photos. Host an event, take plenty of photos and upload them to your Facebook page.
   Encourage your fans to tag themselves in the photos. When people tag themselves in photos it shows up in their friends’ news feeds and exposes your business to many new potential fans.
4. Target new fans using Facebook Ads. Create your budget, find your target market and place an ad.
   People can then “Like” your ad and become a fan of your Facebook page. People can also see how many of their friends are fans, which adds credibility and increases the likelihood of them becoming fans too.
5. Add all social media URLs to your print material. Add the Facebook icon and the link to your business page to all your printed media. Add all your other social media links as well, such as Twitter, YouTube etc.
6. Do you have a brick and mortar store? Put up a poster or a small sign with the Facebook logo and link to your Facebook page. Encourage people to become a fan straight away by giving them incentives, such as a reward.
7. Encourage your friends to become fans. Use the “Share+” button to notify your friends of your Facebook page. You will find this button in the left column of your Facebook page.Add some exciting news or offer and invite your friends to join.
   Facebook has some very specific promotional guidelines on how to conduct promotions on Facebook.
8. Suggest your fans like and share your posts. Once in a while, at the end of a post, you can suggest fans share the post with friends.For example, you could write the following at the end of a post … (“Kindly ‘Share’ this post with your friends if you find it useful. Thanks!”).

10 tips to engage your fans

So you’ve got some fans, how do you engage them to post comments and interact with your Facebook page?

Simple, ask them questions. Here’s a guide on what kind of questions to ask:

1. Ask specific yes/no or true/false questions. These questions don’t require much effort from fans, which means fans are more likely to leave a comment.
   Lorna Jane (the clothing store) regularly posts a couple of photos of related merchandise and asks people to vote for their favourite photo. It generates a lot of responses. It also lets Lorna Jane gauge which items will be popular with its customers.

   A dietician could post a statement and ask her followers a true or false question … for example: “Does an apple have more calories than a banana?” The question is thought provoking, easy to answer and can be used to educate fans.

2. Ask timely questions. If you’re a beauty salon, you could ask “Summer is here, are you ready to hit the beach? Do you need a fake tan? See our specials.”Greenpeace asked fans: “Do you live near a nuclear power plant?”
3. Post photos. Host events, take photos and post them to your Facebook page so fans can tag themselves. Post a picture of a new product or something interesting and relevant to your industry.
4. Create a poll. Facebook lets you create polls using its Questions feature. Any fan responding to the poll will have the poll posted to their wall and in their friends’ news feeds. This increases awareness of your Facebook page.
5. Go off topic and ask fun questions. Sometimes it’s good to let fans know there’s a human behind the Facebook page who’s just like them. You could ask: “What’s your favourite holiday spot? We love Paris, France.”
6. Post inspirational quotes. Lorna Jane occasionally posts inspirational quotes to motivate their fans to continue with fitness and health. People reflect on these quotes and they tend to generate comments and lots of likes.
7. Target your core fans. Sometimes ask a question and invite a core fan or two to comment. Remember to tag the fans using the @ tag.Type @ and then start typing the fan’s name. This should appear in a drop-down list. Choose the person and in the post their name will become hyperlinked to their profile. The post will also show up on the tagged fan’s wall.
8. Fill in the blank questions. The dietician could ask: “Fill in the blank: My favourite snack is… “. Most people know how this type of question works.
9. Impression of an event. If your business hosts events, ask people questions about an event. If you’re a bar and you hosted a Valentine’s Day party, you could ask your fans: “In three words, what did you like about the event?”
10. Ask for tips. Ask your fans to provide tips. You can use this to get fans to share information that helps other fans. A bar could ask its fans: “What’s your best tip to get over a bad hangover?”

And very importantly, respond to comments from fans. Let them know you’re there, listening to them and engaging with them.

Plan and wireframe

To begin this project we prepared a list of issues and restrictions that were self-evident across the different mobile devices. This included: different screen sizes and resolutions, different browser engines and  W3C standards integration, download speeds via 3G networks and the different user controls available in each platform.

Our next step was to plan out the information architecture, prepare some wireframes and design the interactions for the site. We proposed to model the sites’ interaction on applications typically found on iPhone or Android devices. Our content – thumbnails and information of our work – we anticipated would support the simple browsing behaviour that a single page model view has to offer, while a flexible width design would overcome any issues we have with browsing in landscape or portrait mode. We developed the wireframes in Axure, a rapid wireframing and prototyping application, as this allows us to turn the wireframes into working HTML prototypes and view these on our mobile phone browsers.

Graphic design and build

The wireframes are then handed to our graphic and web designers to begin work on the user interface, HTML, CSS and Javasript. As we identified earlier the screen size and resolutions between devices vary. iPad and other tablets aside the iPhone 4 has the largest resolution at 640px by 960px, and double the pixel density per inch (for every one pixel on iPhone 3GS there are four on an iPhone 4).  This presented an interesting challenge – how do you make the images crisp on the iPhone 4, but not too large on regular phones?  Some methods include targeting specific browsers via CSS3 media queries, image resizing via Javascript or the method we chose; to save a larger image and incorporate scaling techniques offered via CSS3 and within the HTML.

As an example, the new CSS3 background-size property allows images to be scaled to fit within the block level element. The advantage of this, over say providing fixed dimensions is that the CSS will take care of the scaling, and scale to give the best possible image size for that particular device.

Between the iPhone, Android phones and Windows Mobile phone, there are slightly different implementations of Javascript. For us it made sense to use a Javascript framework that would take care of any of the cross browser issues that may arise. There are many out there but we opted for ZeptoJS, a small Javascript library of around 3kb and a rich feature set that gives us access to swipe gestures as well as regular helper methods to work with the document object model.

While the iPhone and Android devices use the Webkit browser and Windows Phone using the proprietary Trident engine, our choice to use HTML 5 and CSS3 animations is not without its shortcomings. Webkit animations and many of the CSS3 properties will not work on the Windows Phone or other web enabled phones. With this in mind we incorporated into the design degradations that allow the site to still function, but with a less advanced feature set. At the time this article was written, Microsoft suggested that their soon-to-be-coming Windows Mobile update with Microsoft Explorer 9, will support Webkit animations and many CSS3 and HTML 5 enhancements. Subsequently the site will automatically switch over to use the advanced features and become a richer experience when this occurs.

Test and delivery

After many hours of testing we launched the site. With the addition some just-in-time image manipulation and lazy loading of images to overcome the download times on 3G networks our site’s initial load is around 80Kb. The site degrades nicely on non-Webkit, non-Javascript and other web enabled phones, while performing nicely on the various iOS and Android devices.

What this design taught us the most was not to take for granted the lessons learnt in the early days of website development. Techniques that were learnt when dealing with different screen sizes and resolutions, different browsers and download speeds of dial-up internet connections; these issues from the past gave us a good grounding from which we built upon the knowledge we have now about modern web design, user experience and content development.

icemedia can help establish and manage your marketing database.

We then handle all direct communications, from ‘snail mail’ (yes, it still has its place in today’s digital world) to outbound and inbound digital communications.

Our unique perspective lets you add an innovative and creative edge to your direct marketing strategies. The combination of traditional direct marketing thinking and a thorough understanding of digital technology is the perfect formula for innovation and success.

icemedia can help with:

• marketing database set-up and management
• data analysis & planning
• creative B2B & B2C direct mail campaigns
• email, sms & mms campaigns
• innovative use of websites and web-apps
• closed-loop marketing
• integration of traditional media, direct marketing & digital

why a customer database is critical for future marketing success

A marketing database is no longer a ‘nice to have’.

It’s a critical requirement for organisations that want to succeed in today’s business environment.

It’s become increasingly difficult and expensive to reach prospects and customers through traditional media channels.

The media environment is fragmenting. People are shifting media consumption from ‘scheduled’ to ‘on-demand’. They are disengaging from traditional forms of media. And, at the same time, traditional media is becoming more and more expensive.

It’s now possible to capture and store customer information very cost effectively.

You can use this information to tailor highly personalised messages in a rich media format – to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

how to establish a customer database

The critical starting point to developing a marketing database is deciding who you want to target and what you want to know about them.

icemedia can work with you to establish a database development and management strategy. We can then help you implement this strategy.

Firstly, look for customer data within your organisation.

We can identify different data sources and how to bring them together in a single data repository.

We can set up a technical environment where data can continue to be fed into your marketing database from various sources across your organisation.

We can develop strategies to build the number of records and enhance the depth of customer information on your database.

Additionally, icemedia can work with you to review and analyse customer data to identify valuable and vulnerable segments.

We then develop strategies to target different segments that help you meet your marketing objectives.

The better the quality of information, the more refined, highly personalised and better timed your messages can be.

This is a formula for greater marketing success.

This year the 5.2km run attracted over 2000 participants, with the icemedia team adding 13.

The race average was 30 minutes and 28 seconds, while our team average was 27 minutes and 69 seconds.