For businesses using Facebook or any other social media,  it is essential and plain good business practice to be aware and up-to-date on all outlet policies, and therefore have the ability to make informed decisions on what information to post on your account.

The following is the exact language used on Facebook’s Rights and Responsibilities page that deals with content rights and ownership:

Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings. In order for us to use certain types of content and provide you with Facebook, you agree to the following:

1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (”IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (”IP License”).
2. This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account (except to the extent your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it). When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them)

This statement means that any content you post on Facebook is still yours, however, Facebook has a right to use whatever content you post without having to credit you in any way until your delete that content from Facebook. To maintain control over the content you post on Facebook, it is essential that you are proactive about using your privacy settings to ensure that the content you post is always used for your original purposes.

Facebook’s Full Privacy Statement

It is  important that your business have active policy concerning what is posted on Facebook by employees or with the company name. Sensitive material should never be posted on Facebook and all employees should be reminded that company ethics and confidentiality statements apply to social media outlets.

Also, to make sure that your business’s Facebook presence stays positive and useful, it is also important that all posts are consistent with branding and web strategy.

Google Analytics is a program that measures how successful your website is by collecting detailed data on traffic, visitors, and content.

This provides valuable insight into what things are working well and what things may need to change within your site to achieve an optimal level of use. We believe in the importance of clients being actively involved in their site’s execution and success. This document is a reference for how to use and understand the data in Google Analytics. At iBec, we offer Google Analytics monitoring programs for our clients if it is appropriate. We are always available for questions, so feel free to contact us if you need assistance.

Logging In

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics
2. Click the “Access Analytics” Button
3. Enter you username and password.
4. Fine the site analytics you wish to view and click “View Report”

Google Analytics Dashboard

When you first log into you Google Analytics account, you will be directed to the dashboard. The dashboard is like Google Analytics’ table of contents. As a default, it includes a line graph of visitor traffic and quick visitor statistics like bounce rate, % new page visits, and page views to name a few. It also gives you the overview of each of categories:

• Visitors
• Traffic
• Content
• Map Overlay
• Goals

The dashboard is great for getting a quick look at how everything is going with your website and should be noted at least once a week to ensure no dramatic changes in site performance. Each of the categories breaks down into more detail, which can be viewed by clicking their respective menu buttons on the left side of the screen. Also, the dashboard is customizable by clicking and dragging the boxes and deleting or adding reports from the dashboard view.

Navigating Google Analytics

To find any report on Google Analytics, simple click on the menu item in the left-hand box. When you click on a category it will expand within the box to show more detailed report links. Simply click the one you wish to view and you will be directed to that report.

Also in the side box there is a help section. If you ever want to know more about the report you are viewing, click the “About this Report” link.

Exporting/Emailing reports

When you are looking at any report in analytics, there are always buttons at the top of the report that say: Export. Email. Add to Dashboard.

To Export a Report:

1. Click “Export” at the top of the report
2. Select the format you wish to export the report in (PDF, Excel, CSV, etc)
3. Save to your computer.

To Email a Report:

1. Click “Email” at the top of the report
2. Select “Send Now” tab.
3. Enter the email addresses you wish to send to, the subject, and message.
4. Select the format you wish to email the report in (PDF, Excel, CSV, etc)
5. Enter the word verification and click “Send” Analytics Education for Clients – Google Docs

To Schedule an Email:

1. After clicking “Email” on a desired report, click the “Schedule” tab.
2. Enter all the information like you would for a regular email.
3. Select the desired schedule from the drop down list.
4. Click “Schedule”

Customizing the Dashboard

Customizing your analytics dashboard makes it easier for you to quickly view and assess the data you want in Google Analytics, which is especially helpful for weekly check-ins.

To Remove a Box from your Dashboard:

1. Log in and go to your Google Analytics dashboard
2. At the top right-hand corner of every box on the dashboard there is a gray “X”. Click this to remove the box from the dashboard view.

To Add a Box to the Dashboard:

1. When you are looking a report (ex. Adwords Campaigns) The top will have a “Add to dashboard” button. Simply click that and Google Analytics will add this report to your dashboard.

Note: If you use Google Adwords, it is helpful to add this report to your dashboard as it is not a default dashboard report.

To Add a Goal/Funnel to your Analytics

1. Login to your Analytics accounts
2. Find the account you wish to create a goal/funnel for and click “Edit”
3. Under the “Conversion Goals and Funnel” box, Click “edit” to create a goal (you can have up to 4)
4. Enter the goal information. Make sure your URL is correct for the page you want viewers to visit (ex. a “thank you for purchasing” page or a e-newsletter sign-up page)
5. You can then set up a funnel for the goal. This is an ideal page-by-page path you want visitors to take through your site to complete the goal. Enter in each page URL in the order you hope visitors will take. This step is not required to create a goal, but it is useful if you have a specific path you want visitors to follow.

What is Bounce Rate?

Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits. In other words, visitors who leave your site from the same page they entered on, without viewing any other pages. Bounce Rate is a measure of visit and page quality; a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors and need revising.

According to Wikipedia, Twitter “is a social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 bytes in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them…Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them <and> users can send and receive updates via the Twitter Web site, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, Twitterfon, TweetDeck and Feedalizr.”

What’s more, Twitter is free, and easy to use. In fact, as of this writing, millions of people are currently on Twitter…or tweeting. So, ready to start?

First off, you may want to educate yourself on the ins and outs of Twitter: how it works, who is using it, what kind of information you can gather, and how it can work for your business.

For those of us who like to information-gather before we jump in, check out Mashable’s benefits accrued through Twitter use. You can read Union Street’s Twitter for Lead Generation and Twitter for Business pages, and Zappos’s notes on the Twitter site. Even the Wall Street Journal has published an article about Twitter. Finally, Laura Fitton’s comprehensive piece has several step by step articles and guides for getting started using Twitter. So go ahead, poke around, and give it a whirl. Part Two of our Twitter blog will help you get started tweeting for your particular business needs.

How can Twitter Help My Business? (Part 2)

So now you’ve checked out a few articles on what Twitter is, and how it can work for you. Now it’s time to experience Twitter on your own terms! Are you ready to Tweet? Let’s get started.

First, determine whom you want to follow.

Mashable has a rundown of 15 different Twitter directories (if you’re in the real estate industry, check Union Street’s Twitter for Real Estate article).

Next, start posting.

Once you have an account, and found folks to follow…let’s get people interested in following you. Best way? Start posting—post often, and post well. Check out great tweeting tips, or post your own Twesume.

1. Embrace good social networking etiquette.

Remember, all messages posted to Twitter—even updates you send by phone or IM—are on the Web where prospective employers and customers can find them. Tweets are short and sweet—but can still convey a sense of style and savvy, or look cheeky and unprofessional.

* Check out Peter Shankman’s tips, as well as some great info on Twitter etiquette.

* Not understanding the strange lingo that is sometimes used on Twitter? Shannon Yelland has made an excellent dictionary of Twitter jargon and slang.

* Still need a little help figuring out how to maintain your sincerity and play nice in Twitter? AgentGenius gives you some great social media etiquette and business tips.

Now get ready, get set…and start tweeting!

The content for your Web site is written and laid out. Now what?

It’s important, now, to create a site that appeals to your visitors with meaningful, dazzling visual impact. This is accomplished easily, with content-appropriate graphics. Done well, the visual impact will draw in your readers, and hold their interest—long enough for them to read your message, and want to learn more.

First, identify what your business, service, or offering is trying to convey. Who is your target audience? Do you want to portray stable and secure, or modern and cutting edge? Professional and corporate, or fun and lively? Intended for children or teens, or for senior citizens?

Next, decide what colors you want to base your design on, and limit the color family to three or four. Choose colors, designs, and images that portray who you are, and who you want to appeal to. For instance, a children’s site might be visually enhanced with primary colors and geometrical shapes. A real estate consulting service may be done in more subdued colors, and portray images of business-attired professionals poring over blueprints. In general, consider the emotions and impressions that you want to leave your reader with—and which colors evoke them (for instance, red = passion or danger; yellow = happiness, summer, and lightness; green = young, the environment, spring. For more information, check out http://www.infoplease.com/spot/colors1.html.

As you begin to add your graphical enhancements, start with your landing page heading. As the adage goes, a book IS often judged by its cover. So it is with your Web page. In this age of information glut and split-second surfing, your site has to catch a reader’s eye—quickly. If possible, and for best results, use a graphics software such as Adobe PhotoShop or Fireworks (http://www.adobe.com).

Finally, take the extra step and ensure your Web pages are reader friendly. Compress your graphics, to speed up the loading time. Web graphics are usually 72 dpi resolution, and most commonly in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format for easy compressing by Web browsers.

Once you’ve finished laying out your landing page, move to your internal pages. Tie your pages together with repeating and associated designs and colors that help to convey your message, tell your story, and keep your reader interested and informed. A well-planned and laid out Web site, with copy and graphics that complement each other, will not only serve you well—it will be a pleasure to visit!

As you start to put your chunks, headings, and subheads together into a cohesive flow, remember these four key points:

1. Web writing is best laid out in an inverted pyramid style. This is accomplished by starting with your conclusion or main point, and ending with the finer points and details of your topic.
2. A successful site is written for many different levels of interest. It’s a tough concept, but the best sites are written from the viewpoints of “there is no interest in my topic,” to “my reader is thirsting for more info.” How do we do this?
3. Avoid promotional, boastful, or subjective writing, or exaggerated claims
4. Keep your paragraphs concise. What’s more, using high quality graphics will help get your key points across quickly, and without belaboring the point with unnecessary text.

As you plan your site, remember: less is more. Plan your page layout so the reader doesn’t have to scroll far down the page. You can accomplish this by presenting one idea per paragraph, ensuring your salient points tell the story succinctly and effectively. If it’s necessary to have a fair amount of information on one page so that scrolling is unavoidable, try to:

• Provide a strong, cohesive flow for scrolling pages
• Provide links back to top if long scrolling (over 1.5/2 scrolls)

Lastly—and perhaps the biggest point to remember as you plan your site—provide all your information within three clicks from the landing page. Usability studies show that if a reader is required to drill down any more than three clicks, you may lose their interest. When your information does require the user to click to another area, use a one-sentence summary for the link. Note: longer links give more info, so it’s fine to create them using:

• associated text as clues
• trigger words to describe content
• different links to same content

Do try to avoid adding excessive links, however, as too much colored, underlined text can be distracting to your readers.

Above all, remember: we only have a few seconds to influence the reader. Make those seconds count!v

For starters, the word blog comes from Weblog. A blog is typically a series of entries on a Website, and often a commentary on something important to the author and/or the author’s customers (if the blog is associated with a business). Blogs can cover any and every type of subject including: information on a specific topic, market, product, service, or group of people; a daily diary of someone’s life; the progress of a project; the blogger’s stream of consciousness; a commentary on social, political, or other issues or viewpoints; or any other manner of topic. Generally updated with regular (often daily or weekly) entries, blogs can be located on a specific section of an author’s Web site, or be the sole point of the site.

So why should you blog? In a word: connection. Blogging helps us stay in touch with our readers, and readers have come to expect it. What better way to get in touch with your readers on a personal basis, and keep them informed in a friendly, up-to-date, and informal way? Establishing yourself and your personality in a blog opens the door to easier communication. (In fact for businesses in particular, social media is being considered as part of current customer service.)

What’s more, blogging keeps your content fresh. As we discussed in our blog entry, Fresh Content for Discerning Palates (November 21st, 2008): Web visitors and search engines…prefer to visit sites that have fresh, new, rotating content. Web search engines… look for the signs that a site is dynamic—and that is largely governed by how often your content is updated.

So blogging is the easy and perfect way to ensure you have up-to-date, fresh information on your site. Some key components to keep in mind:

• Make sure your blogging is relevant to your site/services/business
• Be real, honest, and consistent
• Make sure your content is keyword-rich words—in other words, it contains words and phrases that are important to what you do.  Search engines will love you, and will pick up your site more readily.
• Be sure to add good enough content, and add it often enough, so your readers want to keep coming back

Follow these simple guidelines, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how fun it is—and your readers will appreciate it.

Need help getting started? Check out these do-it-yourself blogging sites—and have fun!

• www.blogger.com
• www.thoughts.com
• www.wordpress.com

OK, so what is RSS? Rich Site Summary (RSS) is a standardized group of Web feed formats that publish regularly changing Web content. Those of us who want to stay informed by receiving up-to-date information can now do so with RSS. And the fact that the RSS format is standardized makes it easy for sites that publish content—such as news headlines, audio/video clips, and Weblogs—to automatically syndicate their content as an RSS feed. What’s more, we viewers can easily combine feeds from a host of our favored sites—eliminating the need to log onto each site and surf through content.  And finally, we save time (and reduce any privacy concerns) because there’s no more need to join a myriad of e-newsletter subscriptions.

So—how to get started? We suggest you check out the variety of RSS readers that are available. (Don’t forget the Web-based feed readers such as My Yahoo, Google Reader, and Bloglines.) Remember to double-check each one to ensure it will work with the platform (Microsoft^® Windows^®, Linux^®, Mac^®, and so forth) you’re running. Once you’ve selected your RSS feed reader, select your desired sites that syndicate content. (Look to see that they’ve displayed an icon indicating XML, RDF, or RSS availability, sometimes viewed as.) Set ‘em up, sit back, and stay informed with your favorite feeds. It’s as simple as R-S-S!

Consider Google Analytics. It provides you, a Web site owner, invaluable help in finding out what keywords attract the most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you. It offers the best of high-end analytics, and is tightly integrated with Google AdWords. And the best part? It’s absolutely free.

With all that power, is it hard to use?
Nope. Google Analytics is designed as an easy-to-use tool for all levels—yet delivers like you hired a Web analytics professional.

Will it work for my smaller business needs? What if I grow?
Google Analytics is a hosted service that handles all types and sizes of sites, from large, high-traffic corporate sites to small sites. And, like Google itself, Google Analytics delivers consistent service.

I also use Google AdWords. How does Analytics work with AdWords?
Google Analytics is accessed directly from your AdWords account interface. It’s that simple. What’s more, Google Analytics calculates Return On Investment metrics for you, from automatically imported cost and keyword tracking data.

What if another search engine is used?
Google Analytics tracks all online campaigns, from emails to keywords, regardless of search engine or referral source.

How safe is my data?
Google pledges to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. They provide an in-depth privacy policy, and promise data integrity and protection.

What else can Google offer me besides Analytics?
Google Analytics is part of a comprehensive Google system that includes AdWords, AdSense, Website Optimizer, DoubleClick, Internal Site Search, TV Ads, Audio Ads, Analytics for Blogs, Checkout, Webmaster solutions, and more. Check them all out, and decide for yourself how Google can optimize your Web site experience.

Here’s how:

• Sending a scheduled eNewsletter gets you—and keeps you—regularly in front of your target market. Be sure to provide plenty of information that’s specific to your industry, with a healthy dose of how your product or service provides what they need. In this way, your company can easily become synonymous with the solution to their issues, problems, wants, or needs.
• Provide tips, hints, useful information, and industry facts. Be truthful and honest, and your readers will trust what you have to say. If your advice is well founded, grounded, makes sense, and is creative, your audience will trust you. If it sounds like hype, it probably is—and your audience will know it.
• Consider providing some kind of value-add for subscribing to your eNewsletter. A free helpful-hint download, money-off coupon, or a free consultation or service is a great incentive to sign up—and it ultimately builds your business.

Incorporating a few basic navigation rules into your Web site will make it easier for your visitors can get around… and the better their experience, the more likely they’ll come back. A few key pointers will keep them on the trail and heading in the right direction.

Be Sure to Leave Breadcrumbs
Having a visitor get lost in your site is equivalent to lost business. So, leave breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs is a standard Web design and navigation term used to describe the links back to where you started. They typically appear horizontally across the top of a Web page, below the title bar or header. They provide links back to each and every previous page that the user navigated through in order to get to the current page. In other words, breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of your site.

Keep your links consistent. Every Web site landing page needs a consistent menu—one that lets you drill down the same way every time, and brings you to the same main menu. Whether you use drop-down, tree, tab, or other menu style, be sure the menus and overall layout of each page follow the same format.

Standards. Yes there are navigation standards, and Web users have gotten used to having them.  For instance, put your logo in the upper left of the site—and be sure to link it to the homepage.  Every page needs a footer that links your key information—your “call to action” and FYI items such as contact, sitemap, index, and so forth. Use established naming conventions such as “Home” (for your main page—and be sure to link back to it from all the interior pages), and “Contact” for your e-mail/phone/address info. Keep your standards consistent with the industry standards, and you’ll be set.

Simplify the Clicks. Please, please—don’t go link crazy. Users tolerate a couple of clicks to get where they want to go, but much more than that and they’re annoyed.  Keep your menus organized—even group items in main and subgroups—to further your intuitive navigation. An extra click here and there may not seem like much, but add them up over a large site and they begin to be seen as wasted time to your site visitors.

Provide Search Capability. Searching for information is a necessity—even within your Web site. Adding a search link or a search box to every page of your site is the first step. Adding a search engine like the free plug-in offered through Google completes the process.

Organize your Content. Create a navigational framework that chunks information into fairly broad categories—categories that are succinctly and appropriately named. Web users are happier (and thus stay on a site longer) with less menu options and a more meaningful naming structure. Best practice for naming your categories is using simple, concise language that says what the link is—and what it means to your visitor