What is a Vanity URL?

I have been connecting with a lot of people via Linkedin and Facebook recently that are either unaware of  “What is a Vanity URL” , “How do I get a Vanity URL” or “How to create a Vanity URL”  for their Facebook fanpage.

I hope this will explain it for you 

When creating a Business fan page in Facebook, your link to your business page will be something like this:

facebook.com/The-Name-Of-Your-Page/131080500280235

Once you have reached 25 “likes” on your fan page, Facebook allows you to change the above long link to:

facebook.com/TheNameOfYourBusiness

Keep in mind that when you are creating your Vanity URL – The name of your page may already be in use by someone else, Facebook will let you know if your Business name is available for a Vanity URL or not.

How to create a Vanity URL

• Go to your Business Fan page
• Click on “EDIT PAGE” – (located top right hand corner)
• Click on “BASIC INFORMATION” tab (located on the left under “manage permissions”) or see pic above
• Select your Username (Vanity URL)
• If your Username (Vanity URL) is available click “SAVE CHANGES” at the bottom of the page.
• If it’s not available choose another that is similar to what you want.
• You will now see the below text next to Username, I have used mine only as an example.

Username:	You can now direct people to www.facebook.com/AllysBusinessPage.  Learn more.

That’s it!! – It’s done!! You now have a Vanity URL for your Facebook Fan Page.

A few more tips for promoting your Business fan page

Rather than typing in your Vanity URL or long link on someone else’s business page, try this example below:

“Hi, you have a wonderful and very interesting page! I found you through Linkedin, Here is my Business Page Social Network Sites I hope to connect with you there as well.”

With the above example where I have written Social Network in my post, I first type the @ symbol then type Social, then Social Network Sites appeared in a drop down box for me to select – thus making “Social Network Sites” a clickable link going directly to Social Network Sites Business Page without typing in the link.

This keeps everyone’s Business Pages looking neat and tidy instead of looking like a spam fest!

Thank you to all those who have asked me the question “What is a Vanity URL”? I hope this has explained it for you.

Please pass this on to Business’s and friends who maybe wanting the same questions answered 

Marketing with Social Media Sites

The 4 most popular Social Media Sites for Business's in Australia to be interacting on at the present time are:

Marketing with Social Media Sites has become the latest trend. The US has been utilizing marketing with social media sites for quite a few years and now Australian business's are are jumping on board. Within the next 6mths there will be a huge increase of Australian business's marketing with social media sites.

Facebook - There has been a huge increase in Business's adding their Facebook Fanpage link on their Television Commercials throughout Australia in the past month. Whether it is a brand, product or service - marketing on social media sites has increased sales and profits of many Australian business's.

Twitter - Australian business's have also increased awareness of their business via Twitter. TV commercials, radio commercials and print advertising all including "follow us on twitter".

Linkedin - There is now over 2 million members from Australia on Linkedin.  LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories. CEO's from every business in every country are registered on Linkedin.

YouTube - YouTube is the most popular video sharing site for Australians, in the past it has predominantly been used on a personal basis but over the last 6 mths business's are using YouTube more and more for marketing with social media. Whether they have a professional video made for their business or a slide show video of their products and services.

Tips on Creating Email Newsletters

Sending an email newsletter to your clients/customers to keep them updated on your new products/services is crucial to keep them as your customers and not have them going to your competition.

An email newsletter can be simple and yet extremely effective.

Remember to not make the newsletter too busy, "less is more".

And never forget the "8 second rule", you need to grab the readers attention within the first 8 seconds for them to stay focused and interested in your email newsletter.

Some tips on Newletters:

• Use a simple font like "arial" or "verdana" to make it easy on the eye.
• Include your customers name (if possible) on the subject line.
• Keep paragraphs short and to the point.
• Include the features and benefits of the product/service.

Not putting links in your first email newsletter, will prevent it from ending up in "junk email" or "spam mail".

If you are including links to external sites on your newsletter, don't use shortened url's , either type in the url you want them to click on or link the url to a word or phrase in your newsletter to ensure a higher click thru rate.

Using the above tips on email newsletters will ensure you have a much higher percentage of your newsletters being opened as well as read thru to the end. And a higher rate of your links being clicked on.

Have fun!!



Send Your First Email Newsletter Today - AWeber Communications

What is Twitter

An information network

Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations.

At the heart of Twitter are small bursts of information called Tweets. Each Tweet is 140 characters in length, but don’t let the small size fool you—you can share a lot with a little space. Connected to each Tweet is a rich details pane that provides additional information, deeper context and embedded media. You can tell your story within your Tweet, or you can think of a Tweet as the headline, and use the details pane to tell the rest with photos, videos and other media content..

You don’t have to tweet to get value from Twitter

You don’t have to build a web page to surf the web and you don’t have to tweet to enjoy Twitter. Whether you tweet 100 times a day or never, you still have access to the voices and information surrounding what interests you. You can contribute, or just listen in and retrieve up to the second information. Some people never tweet, they simply use Twitter as a way to get the latest information on their interests.

Twitter for Businesses

Twitter connects businesses to customers in real-time. Businesses use Twitter to quickly share information with people interested in their products and services, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with customers, partners and influential people. From brand lift, to CRM, to direct sales, Twitter offers businesses a chance to reach an engaged audience.

For more information, check out Twitter 101 for Businesses, our guide to doing business on Twitter.

Twitter around the world

Twitter is based in San Francisco, but it's used by people in nearly every country in the world. Twitter now comes in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. People can change their language preference in their user settings with just a few clicks.

Twitter on the go

Experience Twitter on your mobile device by using one of our free Twitter apps for iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Windows7 and Android. To get the latest apps, go to m.twitter.com on your mobile device.

Twitter for SMS

Individuals, businesses and social causes can use Twitter for SMS and our Fast Followprogram to connect directly to anyone with a mobile phone. Twitter for SMS is an instant infrastructure for mobile communications. Here’s a list of all the countries that offer Twitter for SMS. We are actively working to add more countries and more short-codes to the list everyday. Check back for updates.

Twitter and the Community

At Twitter, we believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. Every day we are inspired by stories of people using Twitter to help make the world a better place in unexpected ways.

What Is A QR Code?

Many people are asking "what is a QR Code", below should answer that question for all.

Created by Toyota subsidiary Denso-Wave in 1994 QR Codes were initially used in tracking parts in Vehicle Manufacturing.

QR is the abbreviation for Quick Response, to allow it's contents to be decoded at high speed.

Japan and South Korea adopted the QR Codes technology in their marketing and QR Codes have become common in these 2 countries.

QR codes are now used in a much broader context, including both commercial tracking applications and convenience-oriented applications targeted at mobile phone users. QR codes can be used to display text to the user, to add a vCard contact to the user's device, to open and view a website (URL) or to compose an email or text message.

QR codes may appear in magazines, on signs, buses, business cards, t-shirts or almost any object which users might need information. Users with a camera phone equipped with the correct reader application can scan the image of the QR code to display text, contact information, connect to a wireless network, or open a web page in the phone's browser. The best Iphone4 Application is QR Code City.

If you have not got a smart phone you will find that with all mobile phones that have a camera you can download a QR Code reader within your browser on your mobile phone.

Some websites will not show up "correctly" on your mobile as not all websites are tailored to suit a Mobile Phone browser. OzCodes can make a Mobile Website specifically tailored to suit your Business, and provide you with a QR Code to take your customers directly to your website/mobile website/video etc.

Get the QR Code Reader app on your mobile - tap the app icon - hold your phone up to the code below on the picture and it will automatically scan it and take you to the OzCodes website.

Be the first of your friends to like it

All About Linkedin

Company Background

• LinkedIn started out in the living room of co-founder Reid Hoffman in 2002.
• The site officially launched on May 5, 2003. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members in the network.
• Roughly one million new members join LinkedIn every week, at a rate equivalent to a professional joining the site faster than one member per second.
• The company is privately held and has a diversified business model with revenues coming from user subscriptions, advertising sales and hiring solutions.

LinkedIn Facts

• LinkedIn operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet with more than 100 million members in over 200 countries and territories.
• More than half of LinkedIn members are currently located outside of the United States.
• There were nearly two billion people searches on LinkedIn in 2010.
• Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., LinkedIn also has U.S. offices in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Omaha, Neb. International LinkedIn offices are located in Amsterdam, Dublin, London, Paris, Sydney, Toronto and Mumbai, India.
• The company’s management team is comprised of seasoned executives from companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, TiVo, PayPal and Electronic Arts. The CEO of LinkedIn is Jeff Weiner.
• LinkedIn is currently available in six languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• LinkedIn started off 2011 with about 1,000 full-time employees located all around the globe, up from around 500 at the beginning of 2010.

Worldwide Membership

• 100m+ professionals around the world as of March 2011
• 20m+ members in Europe as of December 2010
• 5m+ members in the UK as of December 2010
• 1m+ members in France
• 2m+ members in the Netherlands
• 1m+ members in Italy
• 1m+ members in the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• 1m+ members in Spain
• 9m+ members in India
• 3m+ members in Canada
• 3m+ members in Brazil
• 2m+ members in Australia
• As of April 2011, LinkedIn counts more than 11 million recent college graduates* around the world as members (*LinkedIn defines recent graduates as members who have graduated within the last five years--between 2005 and 2010.).

LinkedIn and Business

• As of January 2011, LinkedIn counts executives from all 2010 Fortune 500 companies as members; its hiring solutions were used by 73 of the Fortune 100 companies as of March 22, 2011.
• More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.
• LinkedIn represents a valuable demographic for marketers with an affluent & influential membership.
• Thousands of developers are using LinkedIn APIs to create innovative tools and services for professionals.

Facebook The Facts

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Product

Facebook, the product, is made up of core site functions and applications. Fundamental features to the experience on Facebook are a person’s Home page and Profile. The Home page includes News Feed, a personalized feed of his or her friends updates. The Profile displays information about the individual he or she has chosen to share, including interests, education and work background and contact information. Facebook also includes core applications – Photos, Events, Videos, Groups, and Pages – that let people connect and share in rich and engaging ways. Additionally, people can communicate with one another through Chat, personal messages, Wall posts, Pokes, or Status Updates.

Technology

Facebook is one of the most-trafficked sites in the world and has had to build infrastructure to support this rapid growth. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open source caching system, and has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere. The site is largely written in PHP though the engineering team developed a way to programmatically transform PHP source code into C++ to gain performance benefits. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that seamlessly and easily ties together infrastructure services written in any language, running on any platform. The company has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates. Facebook relies heavily on open source software and releases large pieces of its own software infrastructure as open source. See http://facebook.com/engineering and http://facebook.com/opensource.

Platform

Facebook Platform is a development platform that enables companies and engineers to deeply integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users through the social graph. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people’s lives. More information can be found at <http://developers.facebook.com>.

Privacy, Safety and Security

Facebook has always focused on giving people control over their experience so they can express themselves freely while knowing that their information is being shared in the way they intend. Facebook's privacy policy is TRUSTe certified, and Facebook provides simple and powerful tools that allow people to control what information they share and with whom they share it. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php. From its beginning, Facebook has worked to provide a safe and trusted environment by, for example, requiring that people use their real names. Facebook also works with online safety experts around the world and has established a global Safety Advisory Board that it consults with on safety issues. More information can be found at http://www.facebook.com/fbsafety and http://www.facebook.com/security.

Funding

Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company.

Board

Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Peter Thiel; Observer: David Sze; Observer: Paul Madera

Employees

2,000+

Users

Over 500 million active (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days)

Offices

Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. U.S. offices: Atlanta; Birmingham, Michigan; Chicago; Dallas; Detroit; New York; Venice Beach, Calif.; Washington, DC; Austin International offices: Dublin; Hamburg; Hong Kong; Hyderabad; London; Madrid; Milan; Paris; Selangor; Singapore; Stockholm; Sydney; Tokyo; Toronto;