SUMMER 2011

26 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S

26 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK Joe Dysart Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in Thousand Oaks, California. A journalist for 20 years, his articles have appeared in more than 40 publications, including The New York Times and The Financial Times of London. During the past decade, his work has focused exclusively on ecommerce. Voice: (631) 256-6602; web: www.joedysart.com; email: joe@joedysart.com. FACEBOOK: Next Generation Best Practices for Fasteners With the roll-out of Facebook’s new make-over this spring now a fait accompli, many fastener Web marketers rejoice that some of the service’s new features will make it much easier for them to do business on the social network – both creatively, and from a business analytics perspective. Millions of Facebook users have been watching the latest evolution of the service – which includes a new look and feel for everyone who has a Facebook account – roll-out across the network since late 2010. But for fastener marketers, one of Facebook’s most anticipated changes is the service’s new ability to easily add framed content to a Facebook page – technically known as content presented within iFrames. Essentially, the change enables any company to easily mirror the Web design on their company home page and other pages on a Facebook page – as long as it’s within an iFrame. Scores of Web designers are celebrating the move, since attempting to duplicate the look and feel of a company’s Web site pages on Facebook had previously presented quite a challenge in many cases. Moreover, Web marketers say the introduction of easy iFraming also makes it much easier for a fastener business to crunch analytics, including tracking user activity on Facebook pages, and thoroughly analyzing how sales and other sought-after conversions are SearchMojo says new changes at Facebook make the social network much more business-friendly. Fastener companies can now analyze their Web traffic on Facebook using Google Analytics. unfolding on company Facebook pages. All told, the make-over has stimulated marketers to update their best marketing practices for the service, as detailed below: Understand Why Facebook is So Powerful While social networking has been around for awhile (it was done on discussion forums long before Mark Zuckerberg got his first tricycle) Facebook was one of the services that made such networking so effortless, so fun and so multifaceted. For example, once someone signs up for your ‘fan’ or business page on Facebook, they immediately begin getting info about your fastener firm in their News Feed, can instantly share your offers to others in their social network, can effortlessly engage in discussions on your Facebook page, can give their opinion about your products or services and can shop on your Facebook page – all without even thinking about how to do these things. Small wonder Facebook now has 1/2 billion registered users and is still growing. Get Creative With Facebook’s Newly Unshackled Web Design Features For years, Web designers have bemoaned the fact that they were forced to use Facebook’s propriety programming for much of the designing they did on the Facebook site. No more. With the roll-out of Facebook’s please turn to page 140