Nivi · January 20th, 2010
We now have a Facebook fan page for Venture Hacks. It’s a feed of our blog posts and tweets.
I was surprised to see how many people get their news on Facebook. The fan page already has 677 fans. Check it out.
Here’s how we put it together.
How to get fans
I mentioned the page on Twitter a few times — that’s the first few bumps of fans on the left and middle of this graph.
Then I added a fan page widget to the sidebar on venturehacks.com. That’s the steady slope on the right side of the graph — about 12 new fans a day. Otherwise, I haven’t sent any messages to my Facebook friends asking them to “fan” the page — I think that’s spam.
How to set up your fan page
I looked at a lot of solutions for powering the fan page and this is what I came up with for my needs:
- HootSuite to publish tweets to Twitter and our fan page at the same time. It also lets me schedule tweets.
- NetworkedBlogs to publish our blog posts to the fan page.
- Involver to power the Twitter tab at the top of the fan page.
I also use tweetpo.st to publish our tweets to my personal Facebook profile. I wish tweetpo.st worked on fan pages because it adds pictures to the tweets and changes @names into real names.
(If you’re a complete psychopath, you might like the specs for My Ultimate Twitter Client, which also includes the instructions for my Twitter/Facebook workflow.)
Should I get a fan page?
I recommend a fan page if you’re serious about blogging and tweeting. Facebook already accounts for 5% of the clicks on my bit.ly links:
The top two sources are Twitter of course.
Twitter is my continuous deployment tool
Finally, I like to say that Twitter is my continuous deployment tool. If I build something, I release it that day on Twitter. That’s what I did with our fan page. Even though it took me a few more months to improve it and get around to blogging about it.
Topics Administrivia · Twitter
Great post. Thanks for prompting – I’ll be working on my fan page shortly for just this reason. Seems like more people are consuming news through FB – I agree.
Re: Tweetpo.st – yes, great service. I hear through reliable sources that they will be adding support for fan pages (per your request) in the next few weeks. Watch this space.
I’ve always struggled with getting Twitter publishing to our fan page. Seems like FB goes out of its way to not make it easy. A lot of the FB apps I’ve tried have flat out not worked. As for our blog, I’ve been using their built-in notes app for RSS syncing which works but it’s probably not as good as a native Facebook post.
Thanks for your suggestions; I’ll give them a shot.
FYI–posting too often to Facebook means you’ll reduce the ratio of comments/likes per post.
This in turn means the algorithm is less likely to show your content to your fans because it thinks they won’t be interested…
Craft messages that encourage comments/likes — ask yes/no questions etc, and monitor the # of impressions for each individual post.
More info here:
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/01/20/facebooks-page-administration-tools-getting-upgrades/
Stellar work sharing your recipe for jumpstarting your FB fan page traffic and thanks for spreading the HootSuite love.
One suggestion I’d add is that FB users don’t necessarily understand the Twitter shorthand of @s #tags etc. so for maximum effectiveness, craft messages for Twitter and FB separately. Remember, you can schedule the messages in HS and also track clickthroughs directly in HS with the ow.ly shortener (pardon the plug ;-).
What other benefits do you seek? I’m brewing up a batch of case studies on interesting social-media-powered campaigns so will be keeping an eye on your efforts.
Thanks again.
I would like a rolling schedule of my tweets so I don’t have to schedule them by hand.
That was a very informative post, Nivi. It is really clever to use Twitter as your product launching medium. As for prescheduling your tweets/Facebook posts, I would also recommend ping.fm as it offers excellent features that makes social sharing so easy and effortless.
When you published this post, you were bragging your 677 fans. Today, you fans reached 3567 and that’s not surprising at all because you certainly know how to put the puzzle pieces together. Good luck and keep up the good work!