25 May
Here is a simple cheat sheet to help you make your Facebook Page rock!
For more awesome infographics and tips on social media, view my virtual assistant board at Pinterest.
Simple Checklist To Improve Your Facebook Fan Page #Infographic Make Your Fan Page Better With This Simple Cheat-Sheet!
Source: sociallystacked.com via Cosmic on Pinterest
18 Apr
How to Use IFTTT
If you are the type of person who likes to learn things to make your virtual life easy, then you are in for a treat.
Let me introduce to you IFTTT (sounds like “gift” without the “g”). It is a web tool that allows you to create connections between two different websites and services. IFTTT is shortcut for “If This Then That”. It uses that formula to create an automatic action for a specific trigger. When the trigger is set, IFTTT relays that action to create the outcome that you want. For example, you can use IFTTT to automatically post your new blog post to your Facebook, Twitter or your other social media accounts. You can also use IFTTT to back up your post to your favorite file storage site.
You can build these types of automation by setting up the recipe in IFTTT. A recipe looks like this:
IFTTT Recipe
You can create your own IFTTT recipe or use shared templates created by other users and change them to suit your needs. You just need to connect your social medial channels, add the trigger that sets your recipe to action and set the action that you want for your final outcome.
Setting up a recipe is a breeze. Here is a tutorial to show how you can create your own account and create your first IFTTT recipe. By the way, did I tell you that IFTTT is free to use? Well, YES it is!
So start getting creative and share your great recipes at IFTTT. Have fun!
15 Jan
This infographic is very informative. It holds every size of images on your favorite social media platform. Now you don’t have to remember or Google search for it. Just remember that it changes a lot. That is how social media is. So it won’t hurt to be always on your toes.
For more awesome infographics and tips on social media, view my virtual assistant board at Pinterest.
Enjoy sharing!
Source: lunametrics.com via Cosmic on Pinterest
19 Oct
Photo by CarbonNYC
In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use Wolfram Alpha to generate useful statistics based on your Facebook data. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that you can use to generate reports or calculations on any scientific or mathematical inquiries.
Recently, Wolfram Alpha launched its personal analytic for Facebook. Now you can use this powerful search engine to draw insights on your social media activities and interactions. The only thing you need to do is get a basic free account and type in “Facebook Report” on the search bar and hit enter.
Take a look at my step by step tutorial to guide you on how this is done.
As you can see, creating the report is quick and straightforward. You would also notice that the report is quite interactive and can provide you with the most detailed information you require.
What’s inside the report?
The first major part of the report shows statistics on Facebook activity. Here is a sample report which is based on my Facebook data.
Number of posts per month
My Facebook profile is quite new. I post a lot of links mostly social media stuff I read from blogs and websites. I do need to post more of my own content.
Weekly Post Distribution
I work between 9 AM to 6 PM. I am most active on weekdays and my most active day is Monday.
number of likes, comments and post lengths
Yes. I do share a lot of post from YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and blogs mostly about social media stuff. Here is a word could of my posts:
Word Cloud
As you can see, I do a lot of sharing from my other social networks. I connected my other social media account to my Facebook. Some of my connections are automated. For instance, my Twitter feed automatically post recent tweets to my Facebook wall. My recent blogs from WordPress are also automatically promoted on my wall. I also share my pins from my Pinterest boards.
Weekly App Activity
Another major section of the report tackles statistics on your friends. As seen from the results below, most of my friends are male.
Facebook Friend’s Gender Distribution
Majority my friends are married. You can also see that most of my friends between 20-30 years old are single, engaged or on a relationship. Beyond that range, my friends tend to be married.
Facebook Friend’s Relationship Statuses Distribution
Here is the age distribution of my friends. It is also fun to know who is the oldest and youngest among them.
Distribution of Reported Ages
It is noteworthy to know where your friends are. Do you have a friend in each country?
Facebook Friends Location
As of the moment, Wolfram Alpha can only generate this report for your personal Facebook account. I would be great though to have the same information for Facebook pages. Would you agree?
13 Aug
Would you like to increase the engagement activity in your Facebook page? You have a marketing strategy and that you would require names and emails of your target customers. Would you like them to give you their information?
Why not run a contest? Stir up a buzz by doing a sweepstakes. Everybody loves free stuffs and winning it by chance makes it even more exciting. Raffle off a very nice price that they won’t want to miss out on. This is a great way to promote your page and increase your fan base. You can also do a photo or video contest. Let your fans participate by submitting their own photos or videos; or voting for the photos or videos they like. I am sure this will build a lot of hype and engagement to your page.
Running a Facebook contest, however, is not that simple and straightforward. There is a right or should I say ‘legal’ way of doing so. According to the Facebook Page Terms and Standards, promotions should be run using a third party app. This includes sweepstakes and contests of any form. Using the like button and other features and functionality within Facebook is not allowed in any promotional activity. If you do this, Facebook can delete or remove your page.
So, what is the right way of doing a contest? Use an app. In this tutorial, I show you how to create your own Facebook contest the right way by using an app template available at ShortStack.
ShortStack is a design tool which allows you to create your custom Facebook tabs to suite your promotional needs. It also has a variety of widgets and templates which you can use to run your contest right away. You can use ShortStack for free if you just need to run a simple sweepstakes contest. However, you need to avail of their paid services for several features like database storage for storing your promotional entries and analytics for monitoring your interactions over time.
Go to my Facebook page to see my sample contest. Let me know if you have any questions regarding this tutorial. Have a great day!
19 Jul
At this point in time, having a Facebook Page for your business is a must. With 800 million users1, Facebook is still the number one social media platform for online promotions and customer engagement.
By Alessio85
Facebook is free to use, so there is no worries if you are a small business with little or no budget for putting your business online. Having a Facebook page for your business is a good marketing strategy to build your online presence, engage your customers and expand your network by meeting new clients and business partners.
With Facebook, you can put up your company profile and share different types of information, such as photos, videos, blog posts, links to other sites, and other media to promote your business and services. You can now easily alert your customers whenever you have updates to share about your business.
Facebook got a new face
Last March 30, 2012, Facebook fully launch its new layout called Timeline. Even though there were some who literally ‘unlike’ the changes, Facebook has push through with its implementation of the new layout and a long with it some exciting features in posting updates and facilitating engagements.
One very distinguishing feature it presents is the cover photo. Located at the top of the page, your cover photo is the first thing visitors see. It has become the first and foremost face to promote your business or brand. They say, first impression lasts, so it is advantageous to have a unique and eye catching image that represents your page.
The Facebook cover photo is an image file (jpg or png) that’s 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. Your image can be the main product of your business, a photograph of your customer enjoying your service offerings or some events which highlight your company’s milestone.
Another identifiable part of the page is the profile picture. It is the 180 x 180 pixel image on the lower left corner of your cover photo. Since the cover photo and the profile picture overlap, many users even had the vision to blend them together into one single image.
Your cover photo is not limited to photos per se. You can also use text, charts, or graphs that you feel can convey your point across to your audience.
For example, this my current cover photo which is a wordle base on this blog.
wordle base on livingavirtualassistantlife.wordpress.com
The possibilities are infinite. However, there are some rules to consider. These are:
No Price or Purchase Information.Do not put “40% off”, “Download it in our websites” and other similar statements regarding your prices and other promotional information you advertise. You can do these things on your timeline but not in your cover photo.
No Contact Information. Don’t include your website, Email, snail mail address and other contact information. Your contact information is better off listed in your page’s About section.
No References to User Interface Elements. Don’t include “Like us”, “Share” and other Facebook engagement actions on the photo cover. Arrows pointing to the like button is not allowed as well.
NO Calls to Action. Don’t put “Get it now!”, “Tell your friends about us” and other similar statements which suggest a certain action towards your visitors. You can do these things on your tabs and timeline.
Facebook timeline photo cover rules
Your cover photo is the part of your pager where you really need to experiment and be creative in order to grab attention right at the very start and get that page like you deserve.
Highlighting, pinning and milestones
There are new ways to showcase you post in your timeline. Now you can “highlight’ or ‘pin to top’ your post so that your audience any important posts or events you need them to know immediately.
Your timeline is divided into two columns, in which, your most recent post occupies the top left corner of your timeline. When you ‘pin to top’ a post it automatically sends the post to the top left corner of your timeline. That posts now becomes the first article of your timeline, thereby, giving it a greater chance for engagement. A pinned post stays in that position for 7 days or until you create your next post after said number of days. You can only ‘pin to top’ one post at a time.
Highlighting makes the post wider. A highlighted post takes both columns on your timeline. This makes the post very noticeable and hard to miss. You can highlight more than one post. The best posts to highlight are photos and videos. Note that you cannot “pin to top” and highlight a post the same time.
Highlighting lets you see the whole picture.
Milestones are important events you want to insert in your timeline. Examples of milestones are the day you launch your company or a product, your first sale, the completion of a very big project and any other events you want to document. Now you will be able to remember these dates from your timeline. Milestones are like highlighted posts which occupies the full length of your timeline.
These are just some of the new features in the new Facebook timelines. To create your own Facebook page for your business, follow my step by step tutorial below. It also includes instructions on how you can upload your cover photo, post your updates and highlights.
There are a lot more features which I hope to cover in future tutorials so keep coming back or better yet subscribe to my blog to get future updates and tutorials. Please like this post or leave a comment if you have any questions about things I discussed or fail to discuss here. Thank you and I hope hear from you soon!
27 May
Do you want to increase traffic to your website, blog or social media stream? Then consider playing Empire Avenue. It is a social network game that allows users to expand, engage and evaluate their social networks in a fast an effective way.
Buy me at Empire Avenue
Empire Avenue is based on game theory wherein real work is played like a game. Empire Avenue based its system like a stock market. Every user at Empire Avenue is a stock. When you sign up, the first thing you’re going to do is to create a ticker for your user account. With that ticker, you will be assigned a stock price. Your stock price starts at 10 eaves. Eaves are the virtual currency of the Empire Avenue community. Just like the stock market, as more people buy your stock, your stock price goes up.
You can earn eaves when other users buy your stock. The number of eaves a person buys from you; you earn 50% of it. When they buy your stock, they become your stockholder. You can also earn eaves when you buy stocks at a lower price then sell your stock position when the price goes up.
Another way to earn is through dividends. When you sign up to Empire Avenue, you will connect all your social media accounts to your account. You can connect your Google+, Youtube, Facebook account, Facebook pages, twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Flicker, Instagram and so forth. Like the normal stock market, your stockholder also earns dividends based on your productivity. People who own your stock receives dividends based on how much activity you have on all the networks that you have. So if you do a lot of tweeting, Facebook posting, blogging, etc. throughout the day, your dividend will go up. So an Empire Avenue user earns some eaves from you simply by owning your stocks.
Finally, you can earn more eaves when you engage in missions. Missions are paid using eaves. A mission can have a reward as low as 500 eaves and up to 50,000 eaves. Through missions, an Empire Avenue user can ask other users to visit their websites or social network sites and render social media interaction. For instance, a user can ask other users to view their recent YouTube video and give a like (or dislike), share it to their social network or make a comment on the video. They can even require them to subscribe to his YouTube Channel. And all this, they will do in exchange for some eaves.
You can also create these missions yourself after a few days or weeks of playing. I didn’t have my create missions button the first few days after I created my account. It only appeared after a few weeks when my stock price hit 50 eaves.
What makes Empire Avenue an effective tool for Internet marketing is that it gives you the ability to create missions. You can ask other users to go to your websites or social media account platforms and do some interactions. The power of Empire Avenue is that it can help you direct hundreds of real live honest to God human beings (real live users and players) to your websites and online media so that they can give social media interactions.
Here is a tutorial I made on how use Empire Avenue. It covers how to create an account using your own Facebook account. In addition, you would also see some basic functions, one of which is on creating missions.
Don’t think that this is a game. Look at what it can give you. You are here for the potential traffic it can give your network or website; and the future revenue it can bring. So if this is what you want, then you only need to do is create missions within Empire Avenue.
Not yet in Empire Avenue? Click here.
Living a Virtual Assistant Life 
25 Jul
How to Use Involver to Connect your Blog and Twitter to Facebook
Posted by vakenneth in Business tools, How to, Social Networks, tutorial, Virtual Assistant, Work at Home. Tagged: application suite, apps, blog, comments section, facebook, Facebook Pages, Feeds, Flickr, free applications, Involver, media channels, RSS Feed, social media, Static HTML, twitter, youtube. Leave a comment
By dkalo
For today’s blog post, I am going to show you how you can customize your Facebook Page via involver.com. This websites offer a lot of applications which you can install to your Facebook page. There are five apps, namely, Youtube Channel, Twitter, RSS Feed, Flickr and Static HTML which you can easily install for free. You are only allowed two free applications to install per page; otherwise, you can avail of their application suite for a fee and install as many as you want.
The tutorial below demonstrates how you can add Blog and Twitter feeds your Facebook page. In the end, you will be able to create tabs in your Facebook page which contains latest post from your blog and Twitter account. This is a simple way to keep your fans connected to your other media channels.
Do you know any other applications you can use to jazz up your Facebook page? Please share your experience via the comments section below.