Hi…I’ve compiled a rather long post today – but in a way it had to cover quite a few aspects of the new Facebook Timeline. If you would prefer to read it as a pdf you can download it to your computer for future reference. No Opt-in Required ==> “Facebook Timeline PDF“

Cover Photo, Profile Image, Feature Tabs/applications and About.

Cover Photo [851 x 315]

Facebook’s new Timeline cover photo now gives us the ability to create a really cool eye-catching image that will represent what your business is about. Facebook also suggests that to get the full use out of your main Timeline cover image…that you switch it around occasionally to keep in line with new promotions and events relevant to your brand.

Be sure to take a look at ‘Facebooks Terms & Conditions’ to keep within their guidelines, by keeping your Main Timeline cover mostly image based. Note: you can’t have any url’s, phone numbers, call-to-action or any such arrows pointing from your Timeline image to any other features/apps on Facebook.

Profile Image [180 x 180]

Your profile image/logo will represent your brands individuality uniqueness or identity; you should chose a logo which will best represent your brand/business…which will set you aside with distinctiveness when it comes to using your Facebook page throughout other positions on the Facebook platform. Note that it will probably be best to stick to the one logo without changing it…as that’s what people and brands will come to recognise you by.

Feature Tabs/applications [111 x 74]

With the new changes put in place – we now have the ability to change the image on our tabs/apps to a much larger one…right from within our page itself.

This is a nice feature Facebook have introduced where they have left it much easier for the admin of a page to swap images around …and also… with the now much larger image dimensions [111 x 74]…it leaves a much clearer call-to-action.

To get the best use out of your tabs/apps…if you have a Website or Blog or are using any other Social Networking sites on the Internet, go ahead and place your tabs main url on these other platforms you use…where it can increase your traffic even more by leaving a link directing back you your Facebook custom tab/app page…you can also consider using Facebook ads too, which are very targeted.

The screenshot below is an example of the much larger tabs/apps we now have to place a clear call-to-action within.

Note that the new Timeline from Facebook sets the first one as your photo tab/app to their default which cannot be changed – but the remaining apps can be changed around and placed in whatever order you choose.

You can have up to 12 tab/apps on your page…the first 4 are in view once a person lands on your “main page,” (as shown in the screenshot above. Additional tabs/apps can be seen by clicking the drop down arrow next to the tab image furthest to the right as shown in the screenshot below.

To get the best uses from your now larger tab/apps…

• Create a nice graphic that automatically catches the reader’s eye once they land upon your Facebook Page.

• Be clear and concise, “Click here for your Free Gift” – “Enter our Competition to WIN” and so on…

• Be sure to label your tab/apps with an appropriate name, which clearly indicates what the visitor/s will receive if they click to view.

About Section

Your Page “About” section is important to get right also, it should be brief but clearly expressed at the same time. Try and fit within this viewable area what you and your page is about.

As you can see from the screenshot above – within my about section I introduce myself and then encourage my latest visitor to join in. Also, if you have a Website or Blog…this is a good place to leave that url link which takes the reader back to any other platforms you would like them to visit.

Pin Posts, Stars, Milestones and Messages.

We now have more facilities to take full advantage of on our new Timeline layout too…

(No1) Create Creativity… (No2) “Pin a Post” for 7 days at the top of our page where you create a greater chance of someone distributing it virally… (No3) Staring a post so as it spans the full width of your page, this is a great way to showcase any product images you have or any other important pictures that can make your brand stand out… (No4) Milestones are a great new feature for your brand, with Milestones you can set a date for a new product launch, opening of a new department/store, or even a special event which receives special attention.

Pinning a Post

With Timeline you can now pin a post to the top of your page for 7 days…after this 7 day period Facebook will switch it back to your stream again (at the date you posted it when you first uploaded it).

You can always pin another post back up again for another 7 days once your last posts time has elapsed. This is a great way to highlight important posts so people landing on your page… (Either for the first time) or, unique visitors who return often, can see that you have a post pinned notifying them that it has something of real value attached…this is a great introduction by Facebook as it leaves a greater chance of that particular post being shared virally throughout the Web…so take full advantage of this feature.

Some key points to consider when pinning a post.

1. Pin to highlight key posts or key events and link them to a customised tab where they can get the full information/story when they click through.
2. If you run any type of gambling site you can pin a post with a sweepstakes (or contest)…where it briefly touches upon a certain aspect of importance that stands out to the reader, which again should then lead the reader off to another specifically customised tab for more details on your offer.

Highlight [Star a post]

As the admin of your page, you now have the ability to star any post made by yourself or others on your page. Once you do star a post it will effectively span the full width of your page (spreading across both columns) so as it will catch a reader’s attention more effectively and remain always visible.

Best uses of staring a post can be to highlight product images and other important aspects like…your best photography work and so on at certain dates/times throughout your Timeline.

Milestones

With a milestone you can go back in time and add business milestones to your Timeline. When you add a milestone these posts will show up on your Timeline with the correct date attached and also show up in your fans newsfeeds where it can create even more visibility and engagement.

Milestones are important, because they will reflect on a major event that is important to your business/company, such as a product launch, opening of a new department/store, or even a special event (where a particular moment in history is important to your brand) which should receive special attention.

To receive the best attention for the use of milestones here are some tips:

1. Upload photos and videos
2. Get the reader to engage by prompting for a response where they’ll automatically want to respond with a comment etc.
3. Customize your content which best suits your business/trade/commerce.

Messages

Another new feature is the ability to send a brand/page a private message. Facebook allow page admins the ability to turn this feature off in your settings; however, you may want to consider keeping it switched on so as it encourages fans and lets them know you are a willing company that is there for all their needs.

The new messaging feature can only be first initiated by someone who contacts you first…only then can you reply with an answer. This new channel can be highly viewed as an enhanced customer support facility.

I hope you enjoyed the post – if you feel it has benefited you…please feel free to use the share buttons that you’ll find here somewhere lol, or leave a comment below.

All the best,

To your success,

Eamon.

Facebook’s new tab layout

So Facebook’s done it again, they’ve went and changed the whole layout of a page, no surprise really, but I’m hearing a lot of people complain about Facebook taking away the Welcome Landing Tab.

Personally…I must admit I liked the option where we could set it to the default landing tab as it was a great way to interact with them first time visitors, but it’s changed now and we’ll just have to use what we’ve been given to the best of our ability.

But all is certainly not lost – far from it, (as people would make you believe). Facebook do seem to be favouring the advertising platform here and after all that’s how they make their money…but you don’t have to use their advertising platform just to bring people to your Facebook page…IN FACT! We can be more creative here and use facebook’s newly designed tab icons, placing more attractive looking graphics where it draws the reader to want to click on them…if you look at my own page…       The Social Networking Base you can see where I created a Free Gift Tab…It’s attractive and it stands out (don’t you think)? If someone was to land on my page and click that particular tab, then they would go straight to a Free Gift with an opt-in form and when they fill in the fields the product will be delivered to them straight away.

Other ways that you can take full advantage of this Free Gift Tab is to use that particular pages tab URL, if you have a website or a blog, even twitter and other social media sites that you are present on…take this URL and place it in these platforms linking back to your main “FREE GIFT TAB” that way when people are on these other sites and click the link, they’ll land on your FREE GIFT TAB instead of your actual Facebook page wall.

Here’s an example ==> Click Here.

When using this link on a website or blog, you can cover the long URL link with whatever text you like as I done above by using (Click Here), but say you were to use Twitter you’d have a long URL…so you could either use a redirect or simply use bit.ly to shorten the link for you…so we have a few options to use

Below is a short video on how to edit the new Facebook tabs – some were a little confused on how to edit them and place their own little graphic in them to spice up their page.

Remember this YouTube video can be viewed in 720p HD…to change the quality of the video, First click play, then look to the bottom right and navigate to the little gear icon – click that, change it to 720p HD, then go full screen if you prefer to watch it that way.

All the best – hope you enjoy the video…if you find it useful then go ahead and share it. You’ll find the share buttons around here somewhere and please leave a comment and let me know your thoughts on the new Facebook layout.

Until next time – see yaaa!!!

Eamon.

The FLV Embed Plug-in Which Works A Treat…

It’s been a while since I’ve last been blogging – so I thought I’d set aside half an hour today and concentrate on getting one done. The reason I haven’t been blogging as much, is because I’ve been headlong in to creating products and that can really use up your time , but it is also what every marketer should be gearing themselves towards by moving forward in that direction.

Here’s two of them products that are completed…

http://www.understandingnichemarketing.com/
http://www.ebookcreationsimplified.com/

There’s another on the way too “sales pages explained” where I’ll be going into detail on which angle to approach a sales page – it’s about a week away before it’s finished and once it is…I’ll post it on my blog.

Here’s some questions that I found when on the warrior forum…

…people were asking to know how to embed video on to their blogs. Some threads varied in their questions of what way they wanted to embed the video, some were complaining about uploading a YouTube video where they were needing to use the Visual and then switch to the html to maybe upload their auto-responder code which was in html; but it kept striping the code out, leaving them having to start over again. I know how annoying this can be…especially for a beginner that can’t find an answer or remedy to fix it.

I did a video on this a few months back where it showed a way of getting around this; you may or may not have seen it.

But there were also those that were looking to know how to use some kind of a plug-in, as an alternative to using YouTube. The first video I done on my blog was about YouTube and how to get a way around not having to use YouTube’s (or any other Video sites) html code. So I’ve recently done another video on this and uploaded it to my “Weekly IM Success Journal” showing both methods (1). YouTube and (2). The FLV Embed plug-in.

If you’re not already using the plug-in, you can click the link below and view the video on the next page…

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO:

I hope you enjoy the video, if so leave me a comment and let me know or give it a facebook like or tweet.

All the best for now,

Eamon.

Hosting Your Videos and More with Amazon s3

Videos eat up a lot of bandwidth…sure you can upload your videos to your own server, but the problem with that is you’re limited to the amount of bandwidth you can have and once you reach that limit, it’s going to put a strain on your account and your videos are going to play really slow or worse…won’t play at all.

So for a really good streaming experience – that’s where Amazon S3 comes in.

Remember…most people that have hosting are signed up to SHARED HOSTING meaning…the hardware you are using is also shared with other people as well and could already be reaching its full capacity. One choice you have here is to update to a dedicated hosting account and even then…if you get a lot of hits on your hosting from people landing on your site at the one time, it’ll eventually do the same and your hosting service could shut you down – and without warning too.

So how do we get around this? — well we’ve now got Amazon S3.

Amazon s3 is simply an online storage service…now it offers a whole lot more than just uploading videos too…but for the most part, people are mostly looking for somewhere to host their videos because of their size and amount of bandwidth videos use up, leaving the possibility of their hosting to come crashing down.

When you do get signed up – your best bet is to also sign up for Cloudfront too and I’ll explain why in the video.

A great addon I use that coincides with Amazon very well is S3 fox…

Amazon S3 is very cheap to use, but it is not user friendly at all and a lot of people signing up for the first time have a difficult time navigating around it. Remember! This (plug in) is for FireFox, but you can do a search for other windows clients that connect to Amazon too and also mac clients and so on. When these clients are opened up – they all work similar to an ftp client like filezilla, so if you are familiar with using such clients like filezilla…then you’re life will be a whole lot easier when you go to use S3 Fox

I’ll briefly talk a little here about Content Distribution Networks and then we’ll move into the video.

So what Content Distribution Networks (CDN) are is this…they have got a lot of servers in a whole lot of different places around the world — like Europe — Asia — and America. So that’s what we’re after, we want the fastest way available — with the higest transfer rate possible, no matter where that request is made from and with cloudfronts (CDN) – having servers in all these different places throughout the world means that the person requesting the file/video and so on, will have no downtime.

So simply put your amazon S3 is where you upload your content/media too, then when you set up a Cloudfront distribution – your content and media form amazon S3, gets transferred to your Cloudfront where it takes care of the distribution – remember!!! Cloudfront is a Content distrabution network that has servers all over the world that speeds up the user (friendliness) of (for example) – streaming videos.

So when your clients makes a request to see your information – that url that you give them to view your videos, is coming through Amazons Cloudfront, meaning they’re going to get that information from the closest server near them — and that will get routed to the closest location to them…meaning now downtime…basically if a person you give the url to is from Ireland – they’re going to get that information from Ireland – even though your server could be in America.

So this really is the fastest way to get your videos out to these people without any buffering issues and it’s all down on a pay as you go basis – which is (very very) cheap, big companies used to pay thousands for this before Amazon made it dirt cheap for everyone.

Remember, you’re not going to get charged for any on-going monthly bills or anything like that, it’s simply a pay for what is being used service…(so it’s pay as you go).

P.S. (CLOUDFRONT) is the distribution service…you don’t need to use it…but if you want the most optimal speed for the distribution of your videos, then it’s certainly something to consider – most people that sign up use Cloudfront also.

I hope you enjoy the video…

~ Eamon.

]]> http://www.eamondiamond.com/amazon-s3-online-storage-service/feed/ 21 http://www.eamondiamond.com/facebooks-roles-out-new-newsfeed/ http://www.eamondiamond.com/facebooks-roles-out-new-newsfeed/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 12:44:35 +0000 Eamon Diamond http://www.eamondiamond.com/?p=1014
So I’ve had a few ask me about the new Facebook Newsfeed layout, but One in particular? “Why have they done away with the old “Top Stories” & “Most Recent” seeing as almost 50% of the people on Facebook actually … Continue reading →]]>

So I’ve had a few ask me about the new Facebook Newsfeed layout, but One in particular?

“Why have they done away with the old “Top Stories” & “Most Recent” seeing as almost 50% of the people on Facebook actually used it.”

This has always been on Facebooks agenda to try and sort out what way the newsfeed works. Way back when Facebook was starting out, they would give you a listing of posts that they thought were important, the downside to it was…the posts were sitting there and could have been up to 3 or 4 hours old news.

SO! along came 2009 and Facebook give a statement that it would no longer display feed that was any older than 10 minutes, leaving it that the newsfeed would show up as it happened; (but this raised other issues) – “which posts were actually important.” Then came the ‘Live Feed’ and ‘News Feed’ view – which Facebook later renamed to “Top News” and “Most Recent.”

New Changes.

The new “NewsFeed” has it that both of the above two tab features that used to be; are now merged into the same feed…Facebook’s now determining how much it thinks it should allocate to show up in your newsfeed.

• ‘Top Stories’ will be based on how recently you have logged into the site.

• If you are like myself checking Facebook quite often, then most of the items in your feed will be recent.

• If however you are logging back in after a few days, then Facebook will try to give you an overview of the most important things your friends have been sharing.

• Important stories will now be denoted with a small light blue triangle in the top left hand corner…shown in the image.

• You can also click on the triangle to let Facebook know if they missed an important story that you find interesting and it will mark it as a top story…or on the flip side of that…you can also let them know if you don’t care for some of the feed they thought was important.

  So that’s it on the new News Feed, hope you’re liking it, I know a few ain’t, but given time I’m sure they’ll understand why Facebook have made the changes.

  See yaaaaaaaaaa ~ Eamon.

Googles raising their game a little, better for us

They’ve now introduced a few more options that is going to make a big difference…especially where we can now enter into a group discussion with up to 9 other people and show each other our computer screens, currently these options are still in testing mode, but they are really on it here and are asking for peoples feed back.

• The fact that we are now able to screen share has changed things dramatically in our favour…this is a biggie, now we can share our desktop/laptop with the people who are in the “Hangout” I can see this having an effect on the Webinar platform…where some are just charging ridiculous prices just to be able to show screen sharing. I’m sure there are plenty of groups out there that meet up every week to discuss things on a Webinar say! Or the fact that you may offer a one on one with a lucky contestant who has won a consultation with you on a walk through on how things are done….what I’m saying here is social media is going to change the way things are done online.

• Naming your hangout, you can see from the image above…we’re now getting the chance to give the hangout a “unique name,” so the name always says it all; doesn’t it . Say you wanted to start a hangout and name the topic “Online Beginners,” then that means if it were open to the public, your followers can view the name and see if it would be of interest for them to get involved or if they weren’t a beginner they could simply pass on, it opens up the stage for people with a large following that want to talk about a specific topic and give it that name, others followers can then see the name and skip it if it doesn’t appeal to them.

P.S. another big one here is “Google docs” I know a lot of people outsource and usually use jing and other software to get the point across, now being able to use Google docs in a Hangout – you can have a live one on one with your outsourcing team, showing them directly how to go about doing certain tasks.

So I’m loving the new changes G+ are making to the hangouts; lets hope they get even better .

See yaaaa all over at a Google hangout, lol.

~ Eamon.

Yehaaaa….Facebook Subscribe 

Facebook has changed a few things again, but this time it’s really going to help us out a lot.

We now have the option of allowing (non-fans) to subscribe to our public posts on our personal profile. (NOTE)…Facebook have left this an optional feature were if you decide you want to use it — you can turn it on here.

…Here’s a quick rundown on the benifits:

• First off…If you’re in BUSINESS, you’ll still need a FAN-PAGE, if your goal is to represent your business, brand, or product on Facebook, your best bet is to still create a Page. You have better tools and features and admin rights; where pages let you engage more with people and other pages, they also let you manage and track engagement.

• If you want to start sharing your updates from your (personal profile) with a wider audience, then allowing the subscriber option on your profile is a good option. When you allow the subscribers option on your profile, anyone can subscribe and get your public updates in the News Feed, even if you’re not friends on Facebook.

• You can have an unlimited amount of non-friends subscribe to your public posts, (that’s if you allow it to be activated) and (subscribe) to as many as 5000 people, this means you can receive public updates of up to 5000 non-friends on your wall, if them people have the subscribe turned on.

• Your friend limit is still capped at 5000

• Public posts – this used to be called everyone, but Facebook has renamed it and now we have the Public Posts option when we go to share something to our wall.

• As regards to your actual friends — (You will be automatically subscribed to posts already).

• When you subscribe to a person this automatically goes out into the newsfeed and is visible by all your friends.

• Don’t over do it with using the subscribe button to often, or you’ll get a spam warning, so as is the same with adding friends – if you start to see this pop up…slow it down a little and use with caution.

• If you decide to use the subscribe option, you’ll start to see subscribers and subscribing to others on the left hand side of your profile under friends. Subscriptions (non-friends you are now following) and Subscribers (non-friends who are now following you).

• You can choose what shows up in your news feed by hovering over the subscribe button of each individual person and selecting what you want to show – you may only want to see a photo and videos from someone, or most recent updates…or choose not to see things like games or live events etc.

• To filter these options – you can go to either the subscribe button on the persons profile  – or navigate to the subscribe button on the left hand side of your profile page – click there and when it brings up the page – hover over that persons subscribe button and it will give you a drop down menu to select what you want and don’t want to show up in your newsfeed.

You can get a further read of the new feature here if you like.

All the best for now, hope you’s enjoy the new feature.

Catch you’s all later…Eamon )