How to use Facebook to promote your website?

Facebook_Logo

Facebook pages seem to be like an opinion these days – every website / company has one. However, it’s surprising how few can actually make it work for them, in terms of converting the likes to traffic, or creating an engaging page where people comment, discuss and share information. It’s easier said than done.

The purpose of this post is to look into couple points that I have noticed working well for Facebook pages I have been involved with in the past. There are tons of articles in the web about this topic, but it seems like everyone of them are saying the same thing: what to post, when to post and so on: generic best practices. I browsed several of those and found most them of very little use. I mean they are good to get started, if you have no clue, but they will not take you very far. Unless of course, you are willing to spend hours and hours daily for long period of time. I am not saying that I have discovered a magic formula, but there are actions that can greatly boost the basic efforts.

The look of the page – Branding

The look and feel is where it all starts – very basics really.

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gamesGRABR sourcing funding at CrowdCube

gamesGRABR

What pinterest did for wider audience, gamesGRABR is doing for people who love games. It’s THE social network for gamers. The idea is based on curating games collections, discovering, engaging, playing, sharing them with other gamers, and following the trends of the favorite games and players – across all game platforms.

gamesGRABR recently launched an equity crowdfunding campaign that aims to raise £150,000 in return of 7% equity. Things are looking good: so far they have raised £116,000 with 46 days to go. What makes the set up even more interesting is that after they reach the £150,000 an additional £200,000 will be added from their existing investors. The company raised £250,000 seed funding round earlier this year and have successfully developed and launched the website. If you are new to how crowdfunding works I wrote an article about it earlier.

In the past months have been working closely with gamesGRABR to support their online marketing and analytics. I am excited about the concept, and it has proven to raise attraction: 35% of the visitors are returning. They are making the desired actions on the website; playing, downloading and buying games.

The team is very knowledgeable and professional and I think the future for the project is looking very bright.

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Hong Kong Trip

I just returned from Hong Kong today. It was a great trip and very positive in many ways. Maybe I should go there more often… There were two main reasons for the trip this time: to finalize the incorporation for a new start up company, and to speak at the Hong Kong University MBA Business Lab program. On top of that I managed to squeeze in some business meetings as well, just to make sure that there would not be any laziness involved. After all it’s Hong Kong – one of Asia’s most hectic business centres!

Hong_Kong_Skyline

Yesterday morning two of my business associates and I met with our trusted accounting partner, who handles Hong Kong company incorporations. I have to confess that I was expecting quite a signature marathon and was prepared defend my existence at the bank ‘interrogation’, same as last time. To my major surprise things just went incredibly smoothly. After less than 10 signatures, we were done with the accountant, and headed to HSBC’s business banking center. The previous time we had to go to a personal banking branch’s sleazy business service section, where a guy who looked like a high school sophomore, was asking questions like “what happens to your job in the company, when you find someone who knows your job better?”

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How to choose the right business partner?

Find the right business partner

Working in multiple startup projects has put me encounters with various people, which has been an excellent learning experience. Some, actually most of them have been and still are just simply great people. Decisions are made easy and it’s just an absolutely pleasure to keep working with them. Usually these projects have successfully moved fast forward. The people and the team dynamism has been a major contributor.

However, then there is the counter part: the negative and difficult people. Everything starts with a “no”, new ideas have to be sold to them, like they were your worst nightmare VC investors. They are always going to different direction than others in the team. Communication is really painful. They think their ideas are great, but when not executable the response is usually hostile. They can really be the killers of a startup, because they drain the energy of others with pointless arguments, and drive the team to focus on wrong things.

Jaguar-attacks-a-Yacare-Caiman-2252805

There are multiple reasons why we end up in a situation of having difficult business partners. Maybe they didn’t show their true colors at the beginning, or we didn’t and they built a different image of us. Or perhaps we didn’t see the signs soon enough.

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Headlines matter (except this one, it sucks)

economic-headlines

Article headline matters. Not just for the obvious reasons – getting attention, shock the reader etc. – but also from search engine ranking point of view. Creating catching headlines has been the art of newspaper editors since day one, but the change from offline to online has put even more pressure on creating article headlines. In some ways it has gotten more difficult. Not only does it have to convert the reader, but it also has to help the article to rise as high as possible for wanted keywords in search rankings (of course there are other factors that effect this too).

Social media has adds some extra spices to the soup as well. A good headline gets a lot more attraction for an article and can gain a lot of shares, retweets etc. (the content obviously plays a role as well…), which can be a major traffic driver. And speaking of social media, now that we have tackled the reader and search engines, twitter adds another challenge: 160 character limit. In case the original header is longer, might be wise to think of a shortened version for twitter as well.

I started to learn the importance of an article headline, when I first started working on SEO back in Agoda days, but it was only when I started writing, I realized how difficult it actually was to create a good headline.

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