For the most part, by looking at your analytics software (I’ll use Google Analytics for example, since it’s what I use and it’s free), you can click on the Referring Sites section and see how many visitors came to your website from Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare and other social sites, but the real fly in the ointment is Twitter. You’ll see Twitter.com in your Referring Sites section, but it’s likely that you’re getting more visits from Twitter than just the ones you see.

The visits you see from Twitter.com are just that – they’re only visits made by people clicking on your link while looking at their Twitter accounts on Twitter.com. In fact, Mashable just reported that Twitter just announced that 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices – an astounding number. This only underscores the importance of making sure you can track all Twitter traffic accurately. Currently, you won’t see mobile or desktop applications like TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic show up in your analytics data. So, there’s a large group of visitors that you may not be properly attributing to Twitter.

If you’re using Google Analytics to track your web stats, it’s actually pretty easy to begin capturing all of your referrals from Twitter. We’ll be using Google Analytics Campaign tracking codes to do this. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic Campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name
• utm_source: The source for the link (HootSuite, TweetDeck, TwitterFeed, Email Newsletter)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (email, search, social media, twitter, facebook, etc.)

For example, if I wanted to point people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, I would post this link on Twitter from TweetDeck: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But to more accurately track those visitors from Twitter I’ll append the following data to the URL above:

?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interview

So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=TweetDeck&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Interviews. Nice long URL, huh? Not to worry, your standard URL shortener will compress all that to a nice small URL to post to Twitter (http://bit.ly/fwzSam).

Now, next time you log into Google Analytics, look under Traffic Sources then Campaigns and you can search for all the campaigns you ran through Twitter and find out how many people clicked through. You can even have one Campaign with different links you post to Twitter, Facebook, Email and other mediums and all you have to change is the utm_medium or utm_source parameters.

The best part is you don’t have to remember how to add all the parameters to your links, just check out Google’s free URL Builder and it will create the URLs for you. In fact, if you use TwitterFeed to push your blog posts through to Twitter or HootSuite to manage your social media presence, you can set up their baked-in URL shorteners to automatically append analytics tracking data.

TwitterFeed:

Log in, and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed. On Step 2, you can add services to push your feeds to, add or edit one of your Twitter services to see the ability to add UTM Tags.

I really like the ease of using TwitterFeed because there are several options they allow and you can push your feed to multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. The ability to add in custom tracking parameters is a real plus.

HootSuite:

HootSuite is just as easy. When you’re logged in, click in the box where you add a URL to shorten, Then click on the down arrow to the left of the Shrink button. Select Custom URL Parameters and you can fill out either one-time parameters or you can add parameters in as a default. Now these parameters will be added to the end of any link you shorten through HootSuite.

If you selected the Always apply when creating Ow.ly links box, the parameters will be appended to every link you create, so if you’re linking to external websites, they’ll see your tracking code on their site as well, but as long as it’s included on links to your site, that’s what really matters.

Hopefully this brief walk-through helps you to start tracking more of your visits from Twitter. Have you noticed that your referrals from Twitter didn’t look as strong as you expected them to?

Related posts:

1. How To: Monitor Twitter Using Twilert
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. What is Twitter?

I’ve recently noticed that while lots of Facebook Fan Pages have created a custom username for their URL (facebook.com/VisitIndiana, for example), there are still plenty of Fan Pages out there that still use their long, cumbersome URL instead of a shortened username (facebook.com/pages/Visit-Indiana-Indiana-State-Tourism/42785429080).

With so many URL Shorteners being used today (Bit.ly, Goo.gl, etc.), it might seem like it doesn’t matter what your Facebook Page URL is,

Luckily, Facebook makes it easy to create a custom username for your personal Facebook account and your business’ Fan Page.

The only caveat is that you have to have at least 25 fans of your page before you can create a username for it. This is Facebook’s way of ensuring that people aren’t creating pages just to squat on popular names.

The video below gives you a quick walk-through to help you create your custom Facebook Username. If you can’t view the video, just click through to the full post and you’ll see text directions to create your username.

Here’s a simple 4 step guide to creating a Facebook Username:

• Log into Facebook and go to Facebook.com/username
• Select whether you want to create a username for your personal profile (recommended) and/or your Fan Page
• Enter the username you want and click on Check Availability
  • VERY IMPORTANT: Facebook doesn’t allow you to change your username, so double-check the spelling to make sure you get it right!
• Read the terms and click on Confirm

There you go, you’ve created your username on Facebook. Now you can promote your new shortened Facebook URL!

Related posts:

1. Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages
2. How to Provide “Fans Only” Content and Deals on your Facebook Page
3. How To: Pull Your Blog Posts Into Facebook

Now, with the huge expansion of Facebook and Twitter users, not to mention Location Based networks and the continued importance of blogging, Google Alerts does a pretty good job of grabbing content from blogs and websites, but they haven’t quite nailed real-time streams such as Twitter yet.

That’s where a service like Twilert comes in. Twilert is a service that allows you to set up Twitter Alerts to be sent to you on a regular basis for any number of search terms. You can set up fairly broad searches, but you can also narrow down your search for very specific terms and even geographically target which Tweets to look at. This is extremely helpful for local businesses or for other organizations that only need to see tweets sent in their area.

Here’s a short screencast that shows how to get started with Twilert:

Do you use Twilert or another keyword alert system? More importantly, what do you do with these alerts when you get them?

Related posts:

1. Twitter to Launch Ad Platform
2. Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter
3. What is Twitter?

Here is a brief rundown of some of the most popular blogging platforms, as well as a few up-and-comers, along with some of the benefits and drawbacks of each platform. I’ll just cover free blogging platforms today, there are plenty of other paid platforms, including TypePad and Compendium.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a hosted blogging solution. That means that when you create a WordPress.com blog, your address will look like: YourBlogName.wordpress.com. I switched from Blogger to WordPress.com several years ago as I wanted more control over what my blog looked like.

Here are the WordPress.com features available for bloggers.

Blogger

Blogger is another popular hosted blogging platform. It’s been around since the late ’90s and was purchased by Google in the mid-2000s. Blogger is where many of today’s blog authors got their start. As one of the first free hosted blog platforms, Blogger is, at least in part, responsible for what blogging has become today. It tends to be the blog platform of choice for many first-time bloggers.

Here’s a full list of reasons to use Blogger.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a relative newcomer to the blogging world, but with more than 6 million users, it’s made quite a splash lately. Tumblr’s strength lies in microblogging. You can very easily post short updates, photos, videos or audio on the fly. Tumblr’s “Reblog” button allows you to re-post someone else’s Tumblr post on your own account with all the ease that you would Retweet a post on Twitter.

Here’s a full list of reasons to use Tumblr.

Posterous

Posterous is another relative newcomer to blogging. The Posterous platform was built on the idea that anyone can blog and it’s as simple as sending an email. You can create new posts via the Posterous back-end as well, but Posterous wants blogging to be as easy as sending an email to your unique account. This enables more on-the-fly posting and doesn’t require nearly as much prep time for posts. However, if you’re crafting a blog for your company or organization, you may want more crafted and detailed posts as opposed to on-the-fly, short posts.

The official Posterous blog has a ton of posts about why you should switch to Posterous.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is one of the most popular and widely-used blogging and CMS platforms on the web today. If you already have a blog on WordPress.com, it’s an easy upgrade to WordPress.org. You’ll have the most flexibility by using WordPress.org, but you also have to have your own web host and, while the setup is relatively straight-forward, you might want to ask a tech-friend or your agency to help you with the initial setup on your server.

Since WordPress.org is free open-source software, the possibilities of what you can do with WordPress are nearly limitless. This WordPress.org features page is a bit more technical than the others, but here it is.

Conclusion

In the end, the blogging platform you choose is completely up to you and should be based on the goals your organization has for blogging. If you’re looking for a fully-functional, SEO-friendly blog that you have complete control over, you’ll probably want to use WordPress.org. If you’re looking for something more casual, maybe a blog devoted to pictures from in and around your location, Posterous or Tumblr might work best for you.

Regardless of which blogging platform you use, blogs are becoming an important tool for businesses to utilize when reaching out to existing and potential customers.

Have you used any of these blogging platforms? Which do you prefer? Is there anything I missed in this post? Let me know in the comments!

Related posts:

1. How do I blog? (2 of 3)
2. Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Hootsuite
3. What are Blogs? (1 of 3)

A few days ago I wrote about how to get started on Foursquare, but today, I want to show you how to use Foursquare as an organization. There are many benefits for organizations to get involved in Foursquare and tourism entities of all types – restaurants, hotels, attractions, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and more – can benefit the most.

In our increasingly connected and mobile world, visitors to your destination are using printed guides less and less and are relying on the internet, social media and their mobile devices more and more. While Foursquare is still used primarily by early adopters, new users are signing up every day – especially as people begin to realize how they can benefit from using Foursquare.

Claim Your Business:

Check out this post for more information about how to get started with Foursquare, but once you’ve created an account and are signed in, do a quick search for your organization. Once you’ve found it, click on Are you the manager of this business? Once here, you’ll need to copy and paste a link to your business on Yelp, Google Maps or a similar service. If your organization isn’t listed on any of those services, you can also fill out your name, email address and phone number and a Foursquare team member will be in touch to verify that you are, indeed, the manager of that business.

Why do you need to claim your business? If you don’t claim your business, you won’t get access to back-end analytics (click on the image to the left for a closer view) and you won’t be able to create a special offer at your location. Starbucks gives mayors at each individual store $1 off Frappuccinos and Scotty’s Brewhouse (with locations in Indianapolis, Bloomington, Muncie and West Lafayette, Indiana) offers a 10% discount to ANYONE who checks in during lunch (Mon-Fri).

Create Your Special:

Once you’ve claimed your business you can set up specials for people who check-in at your location. Foursquare actually offers quite a range of different ways to set up your offers. You can offer discounts to Mayors only, like Starbucks, or you can offer discounts to anyone who checks in, like Scotty’s. You can also offer a special to customers who visit a certain number of times within a set time period (ex. Free Coffee if you check-in 3 times in 1 month). You also have the choice to offer a special on every X check-in (ex. 5% off your bill on every 5th check-in). The final, and most flexible, option is to offer a special to a customer dependent on whatever you choose (ex. Free burger if you check-in during the NFL season and are wearing a Colts jersey). You can also offer more than one special at a time. This kind of targeting allows you to decide which kind of offer works best for your business.

In fact, Foursquare recently blogged about the successes that some businesses have seen since implementing Foursquare Specials.

Promote your Special:

Now that you have claimed your business and you have a special up for customers, you have to let people know about it! Promote the special through Facebook, Twitter and your blog. Put it in an email letting people know you want them to check-in when they get to your location. You can even fill out this form to request a window cling to put in your storefront. You can also download this pdf that you can print out and hang in your store.

Get creative, think of other ways you can promote your new Foursquare Special and make sure to keep track of your redemption rate. With the analytics available as a manager of a location on Foursquare, you can see who has checked in to your location, when they checked in and how frequently they check-in. Keep a close eye on those metrics to make sure you’re getting the most out of Foursquare.

Related posts:

1. How To: Get Started on Foursquare
2. Bing to Integrate Foursquare Data into Maps
3. Location, Location, Location…

I’ve written about Foursquare, the most popular location-based social media game, a couple of times before, but I wanted to write about how to actually get started with Foursquare. How to create your account, how to connect your mobile phone and how to get started checking in.

What is Foursquare?

Foursquare's Newbie Badge

First of all, a brief explanation of Foursquare. Foursquare is a location-based social media game that allows you to check-in at different locations when they’re out and about. You earn points for each time you check in at a location and you can also unlock custom badges that tell your friends about some of the things you’ve done. If you check in at a particular location more often than anyone else, you’re considered the Mayor of that location.

Friends that follow you on Foursquare will see where you’ve checked in and, who knows, maybe they’ll join you at the coffee shop while you’re relaxing there in the evening. You can also leave tips at each location when you check in. Want to let your friends know about the appetizer they should order at the new restaurant in town or let them know where the best place to park for a Colts game is? Leave a tip and anyone on Foursquare can view it.

Still confused? Here’s a quick video from HowCast that explains Foursquare in a nutshell:

Why should I use Foursquare?

Part of the reason to use Foursquare is the same reason you use any other social media platform; to connect with people you know. The difference with Foursquare is that you’re broadcasting what you’re doing while you’re doing it and you can see what your friends are up to at the same time. Foursquare’s real benefit becomes apparent when you’re in a new city. Are you in Chicago for a conference and looking for a place to eat dinner? Fire up Foursquare to see what the locals recommend. By checking in and leaving tips at the places you frequent, you could provide just the help a visitor is looking for.

Create An Account:

Creating your Foursquare account is simple. Go to Foursquare.com and click on the big Join Now button. Fill out the standard account information; name, email, current location, etc. then head to the next step. You can easily add your Twitter or Facebook friends who already have Foursquare accounts and you can invite other friends who haven’t yet signed up for Foursquare.

Connect Your Phone:

Now that you’ve got a Foursquare account, you need to connect it to your mobile phone. Foursquare makes this very easy if you have a smartphone (iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or an Android-based phone). Simply visit Foursquare.com on your mobile device and download the app for your phone. The Foursquare apps available for each mobile device are simple and easy to use, just fire them up and enter your login information to get started.There are also a host of other applications that allow you to check in with Foursquare, but the easiest thing is to download the official Foursquare app for your phone.

If you don’t have a smartphone but you can access the internet on your phone, you can still check-in by visiting m.foursquare.com. If you don’t have a smartphone or a web-enabled phone, it’s time for you to upgrade . Seriously, though, you can check in by sending a text message if your phone can’t connect to the internet.

Start Checking In:

Now that you’ve downloaded your Foursquare app, you can start checking in at your favorite locations. Load your Foursquare app and start checking in and leaving tips. If you’re don’t have a web-enabled phone, you can still check in via text. Send a text message to 50500 (like this: @ Ace Bar ! Playing skeeball)

Related posts:

1. Bing to Integrate Foursquare Data into Maps
2. Location, Location, Location…

On Tuesday, I moderated and sat on a panel of bloggers who write for the Indiana Insider Blog, which I manage for work. We had a good discussion and the audience members had some great questions ranging from blogging best practices to FourSquare and the future of social media. The focus of the panel was on blogging, but Facebook was brought up during the session as well. It got me thinking about a best practice for Facebook Pages – feeding your blog posts through to Facebook. It’s a relatively straight-forward process, but there are many different ways to feed your blog content through to Facebook.

There are a multitude of apps that will pull in your feed as well as Facebook’s Notes app, so I’ll go through some of the most popular ways to pull in your Facebook content and give you the pluses and minuses of each.

I’ll detail Facebooks Notes App, the RSS Graffiti and Networked Blogs apps and Hootsuite after the jump…

Facebook’s Notes App

This app comes preloaded on your Personal Facebook account as well as on your business’ page. When you’re editing on the back end of your Facebook Page, click on Edit under the Notes icon, then click on Import A Blog on the right side of the page. From here, you can enter your blog’s website or RSS feed. Now your blogs will be fed through to your Facebook page soon after they’re published. Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Keeps everything contained within Facebook – the title clickthru goes to the full post in the Facebook Notes section, allowing Facebook members to comment and Like your post.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Everything is contained within Facebook – a link to the post on your blog is hidden within the full post in your Notes section.
• Notes is a very inflexible system. The only option you have is whether or not to use it.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti has become Social Mediarology’s blog feed app of choice. It’s fairly easy to set up and manage and does exactly what we want a blog feed app to do.

You can set up this application by going to facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti and clicking on Add to my Page. From there, setup is pretty simple. Just go fill out the information for your blog (either the URL or your RSS Feed), fill out a few preferences and your posts will start feeding through to Facebook! Positives:

• Fairly easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Allows you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. I have it set to “As Soon As Possible”.
• Application easily manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages or groups that you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Slightly more difficult to set up.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

Networked Blogs

Networked Blogs is one of the more popular blog feed apps on Facebook today and it has some great networking features built in. You can install a Networked Blogs widget on your blog and readers can easily click to follow your posts. When you install Networked Blogs, you can also follow other blogs within their network. It’s a nice way to stay up-to-date on your favorite blogs.

Just like with RSS Graffiti, visit facebook.com/networkedblogs and click Add to my Page to get started. Here’s where it gets a bit more confusing. While Networked Blogs offers many features, I found it extremely difficult to navigate and do even simple things like edit my feed, determine whether the feed would get pulled to my personal profile or fan page. Once you figure out the process, it’s not too bad, but there’s a fairly steep learning curve with Networked Blogs.

Positives:

• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog, or a screenshot of the blog if there are no images in the post.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Gives you a Networked Blogs page on Facebook where you can keep up with your other favorite blogs.
• Application manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.
• Appends Tweet This and Follow Blog links to the update so you can easily share the post outside of Facebook.

Negatives:

• Significantly more difficult to set up.
• Does not allow you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. Networked Blogs manages this based on the number of followers you have. It can vary from once in 24 hours to every half-hour.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

HootSuite

I use HootSuite to manage multiple social media initiatives and enjoy its ease of use and robust features. In fact, I do use Hootsuite to push my blog posts through to Twitter, but other apps do a better job in pushing blog posts to Facebook.

When you’ve set up your Facebook account and fan page in Hootsuite, simply click on the Settings, then RSS/Atom tabs and add a new feed. You can add multiple feeds and you can specify which accounts you want them pushed through to. It’s very simple to set up and once you’ve done it, you shouldn’t have to go in and modify it. You can definitely set it and forget it.

Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pushes the user directly to your blog to read each post.
• If you use HootSuite’s ht.ly links, you can see robust analytics for each post.
• If you already use HootSuite, this is a great way to manage just about everything with one program.

Negatives:

• No thumbnails pulled in, just any prepended text you specified, the blog title, the beginning of the post and a link.
• This is the simplest-looking post of the ones mentioned.
• Post is not sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook – it just appears as a link within update copy.

Recap

There are many ways to feed your blog into Facebook, but whichever method you use, be sure you do pull your blog feed into Facebook. It’s a great way to give your fans and friends relevant content. Do you use any of these methods to feed your blogs into Facebook or do you use something else?

Related posts:

1. How do I blog? (2 of 3)
2. Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages
3. How to Provide “Fans Only” Content and Deals on your Facebook Page

Enhanced Team Collaboration:

In an effort to expand team collaboration, HootSuite has changed the way users manage accounts.  When you add an account, you’ll be asked if you are the owner. As an owner, you can give access to the account to other team members who also manage the account. As account owner, you have full control of adding or deleting members. Since the account owner can give access to team members, each member can manage those accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc) through HootSuite without needing to know the master password for each social media account. This just enhances the privacy for those accounts and puts the organization in control of their social media accounts.

The video below should give you a good feel for HootSuite’s expanded team collaboration features.

Reply All Feature:

If you’ve ever tried to reply to a tweet where multiple people are mentioned, you know it’s a bit of a hassle to type in everyone’s handle. HootSuite has fixed that problem by implementing their Reply All feature.

Simply hover over  the right-hand corner of any tweet and click on the down arrow. Then click on Reply All and your updates box will automatically populate with the twitter handles of everyone mentioned in the Tweet. This makes replying to multiple people in the same message easy.

Hootsuite University:

HootSuite University is another featured that was launched last week. Beginning on May 1, HootSuite will offer their HootSuite Professional Program. The program includes HootSuite Training Certification, a monthly webinar and a place for members to network, share ideas and talk with one another. For more information click on the image below or visit Learn.HootSuite.com.

If you have an iPhone, you can start managing your social media efforts from your cell phone. If you have an Android phone or a Blackberry, rest assured that HotSuite is working on an app for you as well.

Are you using HootSuite to manage your social media efforts? If not, how do you manage them?

Related posts:

1. Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Hootsuite

Sharing on Twitter: Retweeting

On Twitter, there are a few different ways to share, or Retweet, information. The first way to do it is through what I’ll call the “classic retweet.” Seen below, the “classic retweet” simply consists of copying and pasting the message that someone else posted, and adding an “RT @username” to the beginning of the message to let people know you’re sharing someone else’s message. In this case, both @VisitIndy posted the message and @TCMIndy retweeted it before we did:

This “classic retweet” has been around nearly as long as Twitter has and was a practice that grew organically from Twitter’s users. Recently, Twitter implemented an official Retweet function, seen in the image below:

You can see the underlined Retweet link in the image above. If you wanted to retweet the message that @ThisIsIndiana posted, simply click on the Retweet icon and you’ll share that message with your followers.

You can see the Retweet icon () next to the status update. In this case, @VisitBtown clicked on the Retweet link to share @IIB‘s message with their followers.

However you choose to share information on Twitter, retweeting is a useful way to share important updates with your followers. You can use these retweeting techniques to spread the word about different events going on in your area, sales going on at local establishments or state-wide promotions to help inform your followers about what they can see and do in Indiana.

Sharing on Facebook: Shares and Mentions

Sharing information on Facebook isn’t always as easy as clicking a Retweet button and being done, but in some cases, it can be!

If you like Visit Indiana on Facebook (see Quick Update below), you can easily share any of our photos, blog posts, links and anything else that has the share link as seen below:

When you click on the share link, you’ll be presented with an overlay window like the one seen below. You can then insert your own message and when you click the Share button, the message and link/image/post you shared will show up on your wall.

Sharing content in this way is extremely easy and can dramatically increase the reach of your content. Once your page has 10,000 fans (I know, that’s a lot of fans!) you’ll be able to see detailed sharing statistics in addition to the information you can currently view with Facebook Insights.

One last feature I’ll talk about is the use of Facebook Mentions. Similar to the way you can mention @VisitIndiana in your tweets on Twitter, you can also now mention people you are friends with or organizations you like through Facebook.

Quick update – Right when I was in the middle of writing this post, Facebook changed the way they refer to organizations’ fans. From now on, you can “Like” pages rather than become “A Fan”. This appears to be merely a semantic difference, but we’ll start referring to our fans as people who “like Visit Indiana”. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also refer to “Fan Pages” as simply “Pages”

In the image below, you can see I mentioned both Tastings Indianapolis and Conrad Indianapolis. This message was posted on our Visit Indiana Page, but since it mentioned Tastings and the Conrad, it also showed up on each of their pages! This is a great way to spread the word from your official page, rather than from your personal profile.

The only caveat here is that in order to mention an organization, you have to personally “like” their page. In other words, if you manage the Madison Indiana Facebook Fan Page, buy you haven’t personally “liked” the Visit Indiana Fan Page yet, you won’t be able to mention us.

It’s really easy to mention another organization or person in your status updates. Simply type the @ symbol then start typing the name of the person or page and a list will pop up for you of all people you’re friends with and all pages that you “like”. You can see in the status update below that it’s very easy to include mentions in your Facebook status updates.

It’s really easy to share information via Twitter and Facebook and these techniques will give you even more flexibility to share the information you want with the people you want.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages
2. What is Twitter?
3. How to Provide “Fans Only” Content and Deals on your Facebook Page

Within Indiana’s Tourism Industry, I’ve noticed that most organizations have created Fan Pages, while a handful have decided to instead create Groups or even a Personal Profile for their organization. Hopefully this post will clear the air about the differences between the ways you can reach out to potential and current customers on Facebook.

Whether you decide to use a Fan Page or a Group for your organization depends on your goals for Facebook. One thing you should not do, however, is create a personal profile for your organization. Beyond being against Facebook’s Terms of Service, your organizational goals will be much better met by setting up a Group or a Fan Page.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups started out as the only way to interact with organizations and other groups of people. My college class has a Facebook group that is used to update members when reunions are happening or when something big is happening at my Alma Mater. A Facebook Group is a great way to keep a small group of people updated on what’s going on with your organization.

A great example of an effective group in the tourism industry is Travel Michigan’s. They recently shifted their industry communications from the standard email newsletter to a Facebook Group – Travel Michigan Industry News. This has the potential to be a great change for Travel Michigan, as they now can reach industry members in a medium they prefer. Also, by creating a group for the dissemination of Michigan tourism industry news, they’re also providing a place for industry members to have conversations and participate. A standard email newsletter doesn’t allow for this level of interaction.

That being said, the Facebook Group works great for groups like a college alumni class or an industry group, but it might not be the best fit for a true business to consumer (B2C) communication.

Facebook Fan Pages (AKA Public Profiles)

Facebook Pages were created as a way for companies, organizations, politicians, celebrities, non-profits  and others (basically, anything that isn’t an individual person) to have a profile on Facebook. Several years ago, before the advent of the Fan Page, the only way for organizations to interact with their customers on Facebook was through a group. Luckily, Facebook realized they needed to give organizations, celebrities, etc, a more robust and customizable way to interact with their fans. Thus was born the Facebook Fan Page.

At Visit Indiana, we use a Facebook Fan Page (also known as a Public Profile) to connect with our fans. Pages give you all the flexibility of a personal profile and (most importantly) provide you with in-depth statistics on your page and demographic information about your fans.

Pages also allow you to install different applications, like the FBML application I talked about in my last post, Flickr applications and many more.

One more great thing about a Fan Page. Once you have more than 25 fans, point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/usernames and you can create a vanity URL for your Fan Page. The Visit Indiana Fan Page URL used to be: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Visit-Indiana-Indiana-State-Tourism/42785429080; quite the headache to remember. Now that we’ve created a vanity URL for the page, you can find it at http://www.facebook.com/VisitIndiana.

All in all, there is a lot more flexibility available through a Facebook Fan Page than through a Group. In the end, you can decide what’s best for your organization, but here’s a quick comparison chart so you can see, at a glance, the differences between Facebook’s Fan Pages and Groups.

Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages

Now that you’ve seen the differences between Facebook’s Groups and Fan Pages, you can make an informed decision about which will best serve the needs of your organization. Let me know which one you’re using and how you came to that decision.

Click here to get started with your organization’s Facebook Fan Page.

Or click here to get started creating a Facebook Group for your organization.

Related posts:

1. How to Provide “Fans Only” Content and Deals on your Facebook Page
2. Plan your first steps into Social Media
3. Your Social Media Footprint