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I was quite shocked to learn that when I created the Binkd Facebook page I was going to create a Welcome Page and that will be that. Until I realized that I had never tested or measured the effect a Welcome Page would have on my Facebook following. I was just following the trend – a stupid thing to do unless you know why.

So how did we go?

I tested this through the use of Facebook Ads just to quickly get results in using the same demographic of people from the same source. (I know this isn’t a true scientific test but it gives us a good indication.)

1. Without The Welcome Page

I started out and after a several hours I had 11 clicks on my ad. Of that 11 I only had 4 people “like” my page.

Well I was a little upset that 7 people didn’t see how awesome we all were. Also after stopping the ad we received another 2 likes (an after effect of the ads when people see their friends liking pages.)

So all in all 11 clicks -> 6 fans = 54% conversion.

Very dismal in my opinion.

So yes I stopped right there, I didn’t want to dump in a few hundred dollars to make sure something didn’t work.

2. With A Welcome Page

Now I spent a good few hours and created a welcome page and pointed the traffic from the advertisement to it.

I started the ad once again with no changes.

After several hours I have 26 clicks (just because I left it running longer) and 17 people liked the awesome Facebook page. Also after the ad stopped running I received an additional 5 followers (again the after effect of a Facebook ad).

So I had 26 clicks -> 23 followers = 88% conversion.

Now that was much better.

3. Result

Without Facebook welcome page = 54%.

With Facebook welcome page = 88%.

A 34% jump.

Now I could also improve my welcome page to make it more enticing to click, things I will be implementing in the coming month. But for now here are some great tips if you have a welcome page to boost those conversions.

4. Boosting Welcome Page Conversions

I will write a proper post on this soon but just to wet your appetite here are some things you should do:

1. Ask for the like. As you can see on our welcome page we ask people to like us and even offer a refund of their like should they not be satisfied.
2. Tell them what you do really quickly. Our welcome page at present doesn’t detail what we do in seconds of people looking at it. Some people have really short attention spans. Make sure that you have in big bold print what exactly you offer being a part of your Facebook community. Take note that now the page image is at the side of every page on your Facebook pages you can tell people what you do there, but it isn’t as noticeable as if it was on the welcome page specifically.
3. Offer a bribe. As I have experienced with other Facebook pages I have run that offering a bribe to join works really well. For example on your welcome page you can have a link that is only accessible when they become a fan of your page.

There are many other tips but I will leave them for later. So remember to follow us if you are interested in receiving more content like this.

Many of you may know that each person only has a certain amount of likes of pages before they can no longer like a page. The official documentation says that the “like” limit on Facebook is 5000 likes.

This is 5000 total likes and friends. So if you are connected to 2,000 people you can only like 3,000 pages. If you have 4,900 friends you can only like 100 pages.

[Disambiguation: Clicking the like button above this article or on a website and clicking like on a Facebook page are 2 different things. Only clicking like for Facebook pages counts towards this limit, not the liking of articles or websites.]

Hitting The Boundary

Now 500 likes is a lot of liking but I have already crossed paths with a few people who have hit that limit. At that point they can no longer like any page but if someone sends them a suggestion/request to like the page they can like it.

Why Did Facebook Impose The Limit?

While there is no official word, they would have obviously done this due to the large amount of processing power required to collate all of this information into your feed. As we have seen over the years they have made many enhancements to your front page feed, hiding many updates from friends and pages in order to get you the most relevant information for you.

This alone has limited our Facebook pages update reach as many of our fans won’t see every update you put out. This problem is only likely to get worse.

Also could you imagine trying to keep up with 5000 page feeds and all of your friends feeds?

Entering The World Where No One Can Like You

It has occurred to me that in the coming years many more people will hit this 5000 like limit. So who is going to be left to like your page? Well with 750 million people probably quite a lot but are they going to be the customers you want liking your page?

Let’s hope Facebook will lift that limit or come up with a better solution. It is unclear how this will play out or even if it will occur on a large scale. But the number of likes each user has left is diminishing by the day. Will only those that started early be the winners on Facebook?

Is The Open Graph Protocol The Answer?

The open graph protocol as many would know is tagging objects on the web with extra pieces of information and feeding that back into Facebook (in simple terms). As far as I know liking open graph protocol objects has no limit and may be a piece of the solution for the future. I am sure Facebook have already planned out the next 5 years.

What do you think of this situation, will business Facebook pages be unable to get followers because no one can like a page anymore?

First off let me say I don’t like auto-follows or any other form of twitter follower inflation. I want quality followers who are actually interested in my information. There is no point in having 100,000 people who aren’t listening.

Here is how to explode your twitter following with legitimate followers (people who actually chose to follow you).

1. Give Value – Be Positive – Be Awesome

Simple things that make Twitter a great place to be. Genuine people will only follow you if you are saying things that interest them. So what can you tweet about?

1. Links to great resources (your own or others)
2. Quirky Quotes
3. “How can I help you?” – a very powerful one.

Make sure your tweets are positive. No one wants to listen to whining all day long.

But to make you a very attractive follower you have to be awesome. Be yourself, be genuine and generally just be awesome.

2. Interact – Tweet Often – Retweet

Interaction is very important to gaining and keeping followers. Keeping followers is an aspect most people forget. The more often you tweet, interact and retweet the more likely you are to keep followers and get your followers to listen and retweet to your content.

Twitter moves at such as fast pace you must keep tweeting regularly to be seen. The more you are seen the greater chance you will be heard. It sounds simple but most people won’t commit to it. Even us at Binkd are not that great at it currently. (But we are working on it)

3. Endorsed Tweets

Tweets from other people regarding your content is the fastest way to gain credibility and gain followers. Even if you are awesome and do everything on Twitter brilliantly there is still a jump to make for people to follow. Especially the ones that use Twitter properly.

Getting someone else to endorse your content or even better endorse your profile will transfer a part of their existing trust they have with their followers to you.

4. Tweet Exchange

Expanding on the idea of endorsed tweets, how many friends do you have on Twitter? If you have similar interests then you could ask your following to follow each others. A simple exchange that could lead to many new followers.

If you haven’t heard of #FollowFriday it is also an expansion of this concept. Each Friday you nominate a few people to follow to your followers. Other people do the same. If you recommend following other people they are likely to recommend following you.

For example: #followfriday Awesome biz and social media info: @getbinkd

5. Follow Me Links

Put a link to your Twitter profile:

1. Email signature
2. Website / Blog
3. Facebook page
4. Article signatures if you do article marketing
5. Twitter directories (for example wefollow.com)

6. Follow Awesome People With Similar Interests

If you use Twitter then you will want to fill your feed with awesome content that is interesting to you. The only way to do that is to follow awesome people with similar interests. So how does that boost your Twitter following.

Well assuming you are following point 2 then you will see that you will be retweeting and interacting with other awesome people who will have lots of followers due to their awesomeness. Now that I have used awesome far too many times I will leave it at that but you see how it will help.

7. Leverage

Social media tools compliment each other. People who are social are on many networks. Ensure to include sharing buttons for all networks, sometimes people on Facebook will tweet something as well. There is a lot of cross over.

Be everywhere. From personal experience I have seen people tweet and share on Facebook from StumbleUpon traffic and vice versa. And when someone sees you on another network and is using Twitter they are likely to come and follow you.

Photo Credit: JoshSemans

Going viral on Twitter is easier than most other networks. Twitter is designed for sharing and chatting at a very rapid pace. People love to retweet good information and share with their followers. So what does it take to go viral on Twitter?

Not all strategies need to be used at the same time but many can be used together to increase your chances of going viral.

1. A Great Crafted Headline

Headlines are everything when getting your content noticed. Your headline is the first point of contact with your potential reader and retweeter. But there are certain points you need to note when dealing specifically with twitter.

1. Your headline must be short. Twitter only allows 140 characters and when the retweeting starts your headline or link could start to disappear.
2. Tweeters like short bit sized pieces of info. So if you have 10 tips for something mention that.
3. Research how to write headlines that work. The same goes with any social medium, certain headlines always get more clicks.

2. A Link To Great Content

According to Dan Zarrella most retweets contain a link, in fact over 69% of retweets contain a link. Since tweets are so small you can never fit anything of great value into 140 characters. Since twitter is a sharing mechanism and people love to share great information, links are used a lot on Twitter.

3. Link Shortening

Use bit.ly or another URL shortener. Tweets are incredibly small and you don’t want to waste space by adding a huge link at the end. Twitter now has it’s own shortening service called t.co. And if you use the Twitter share button it will automatically shorten the link for you.

4. Time Of Day

It is well known that you will only get noticed if there are people to notice you. You need to post when people are on Twitter, especially since Twitter has such a rapid pace. There are a few times when you should tweet.

1. During the lunch during a working week. (this is the best time)
2. At 9/10pm at night when people have had dinner and have relaxed for the evening.
3. Also take note of Timezones. If you have a local following it is easy, if you have a global audience tweet at the correct times as above for large groups of your followers.

5. Getting More Followers

It is a fact on any social network the more people that follow you the more likely you are to be tweeted. At a rough estimate from sites I have run and monitoring of large sites you will at least get 0.1% of your followers tweeting you. I will link to my post on getting more valuable twitter followers shortly and link in here once it is done.

6. Watch Your Language

Another great fact discovered by Dan Zarrella is that certain words are tweeted more often than others. The data here is getting old in the social media space but I still can see it is just as applicable today. The words are: you, twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, free, media, help, please retweet, great, social media, 10, follow, how to, top, blog post, check out, new blog post As you can see these are all fairly predictable. Asking for help or a retweet and sharing valuable information.

7. Saying Pretty Please

I thought I would make a specific mention of asking for a retweet. When you ask someone for something they first off know what you want to happen and secondly people generally love helping other people. In a psychological study done when people ask for help they normally won’t respond too well. But if you ask for help and explain the reason why you need the help the response becomes astoundingly positive, regardless of the reason. Just having a reason inclines people to help more. So while I haven’t tested this aspect yet, if you can fit a reason as to why they should retweet your content the more likely it will be retweeted.

8. Social Proof

Everybody loves to be an individual, just like everybody else. When people see other people retweeting content you are far more likely to get more retweets. Actually the more levels down you are retweeted the more likely you are to be retweeted further. There are 2 factors working here:

1. People like to agree with other people, connect and make friends. They like being the same as other people.
2. The biggest reason however is people who retweet are adding their credibility to it. It is essentially endorsed material.

9. Talking About Twitter

Talking about something that everyone has in common, e.g. using twitter makes it lovable by a huge audience. The entire Twitter community. If you can relate your content to Twitter in some way it is applicable to everyone on the medium you are trying to go viral on.

10. Tag The Influential

If there is a big heavy weight in your division then tag them in your post. Let them know of your content. Try to engage them and let them know why you have tagged them. Having a good reason to tag them will certainly increase your chances of having them notice your tweet and maybe retweeting it themselves.

11. Leverage Other Outlets

No ones uses just 1 social media outlet these days. Post your content on other social media outlets such as Facebook and Digg. People are always looking for new information to share with their followers so they can become known as someone with great knowledge and hence increase their influence in the community. They might see it on Facebook and quickly tweet it to their other community.

12. Interact With Your Followers

For any of your followers to take notice of your content you need to interact with them. You must give them value for following you and interact with them on a personal level.

The more trust you build with your followers the greater the retweets will be.

13. Generate Discussion

If possible make your content generate discussion. Use the question headline. e.g. Why does this happen http://bit.ly?879343

This means people are more likely to discuss the content when they retweet it. Your content needs to be of a nature that people can discuss and voice their opinions on.

14. Entertaining Or Humorous

Some of the most viral content on the net isn’t a great piece of wisdom or a valuable article on how to improve something in the world, it is all about people getting overly emotional about double rainbows and cat’s playing piano’s.

They make people laugh and when people laugh they will share. But don’t try to be funny as that never works. If you are going to create a funny article or video then it will just happen.

15. Easy For Readers To Share

A simple thing to do is make sure you have a tweet button next to your content.

Go to: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton if you don’t already have one.

16. No Semi-colons

Dan Zarrella has compiled information on millions of tweets. He has found that a retweet with a semi-colon in it is almost non-existent. So be it for only superstitious reasons or maybe a psychological aspect we are unaware of, I would steer clear of the semi-colon.

17. Tweet Multiple Times

With followers from almost every country it would be hard to tweet at a time when everyone is online. So if you really believe your content is worthy of going viral then tweet it up to 3 times in a day at different times.

It is up to you to gauge how your following will react to the amount of tweets about the same link will be.

18. Time Of Week

Did you know that most retweets happen on a Friday? Sunday is the worst and it steadily climbs throughout the week. This makes perfect sense. The weekend many people are spending time with their family or friends. During the week people are working, but as the week progresses (yes we all do it) we start slacking off until the end of week when we are possibly doing more personal related activities than work activities.

So aim your post for lunch time on a Friday.

19. Tweet About Someone Influential On Twitter

Getting noticed by an influential person is enough on it’s own to get your tweet viral. If their is an influential tweeter in your network, talk about them in a post then tag them in on it. It more often than not gets their attention.

20. Advertise

Many great viral campaigns start off by being pushed via advertising. I am sure you remember the Old Spice “The man your man could smell like” campaign. That originally started by super bowl ads.

In every other viral campaign, advertising has been the way to get things started.

Advertising on Twitter can now be done but as of the writing of this post they are still rolling it out meaning you might not have access to it yet.

21. Polarize Your Audience (use caution)

Posting something controversial is always going to get bites. But you need to use extreme caution. Do not say something controversial for the sake of it, say something you believe in that you know is controversial and that part of your audience agrees and the other part don’t.

Getting that mix to 50/50 is the perfect ratio as it will generate a lot of discussion between your audience and your content. Also encourage comments on your post to try and get the conversation happening on your site as well.

22. Be An Expert

This does take time and isn’t a quick way to get viral. If you tweet high quality consistently and do a few of the other expert making things such as

• Book Writing
• Speaking
• Interviewed By Someone

You can become an expert. Once you are an expert your tweets carry a lot of influence and hence are retweeted more often.

23. Know Your Audience

Look over past articles, posts and tweets. Which ones where shared or gained the most interaction. This is a sure way to tell what content your audience likes.

Then create a new article, post or tweet based on a similar idea and see how it goes. You will quickly see what your audience likes. Then keep giving it to them. Some people seem to forget that last sentence.

24. Simplicity

Do not over complicate your information. Stick with a single them. Twitter uses want quick sharable information about a specific point or topic. Make sure your information has a single goal or point. For example how to go viral on Twitter.

25. Use Hashtags

Now this one is more for when you get things going it will help keep it going. If you can get into the trending topics on Twitter your posts are more likely to go very viral. So hashtag your tweets. e.g. #binkd

It may not lead them to the specific tweet that is going viral but it will certainly create an awareness of you.

26. Freebies Or Competitions

Many big public faces have used competitions to get their posts going viral. It is essentially bribing them to retweet your post. It is something that I wouldn’t consider doing just to get a tweet viral but I would hold a competition on my site and tweet about it.

Freebies are also great source of getting things viral. I have once given away a free ebook and it brought me nearly 2,000 subscribers within the week. Make sure your free offering is digital as free samples of product can cause you a massive drain on your finances.

27. Give Value

Like every social media interaction some value must always be given. There are certain types of value you can give that do very well on Twitter

• How To
• X Ways To
• News
• Entertaining Videos About Double Rainbows

If there is simple concise awesome value in your tweet it will be shared.

A great way to determine whether it would go viral is to ask yourself the question: “Would I retweet this?” Ask for your friends opinions too.

If you want to look cool because you found out how awesome #Binkd was before everyone else or you are just grateful I created this post, please retweet.

Would you like to infect thousands if not millions of Facebook users with your idea or information? I certainly do.

Going viral requires you to understand that this isn’t a business to consumer communication, it is a consumer to consumer communication. You need to think about how consumers talk to each other, what they would consider worthy of sharing and getting the right people to spread it.

So how do you go viral on Facebook?

It comes down to these 7 points:

1. Your Following
2. Your Interaction
3. Your Content
4. Your Headline
5. Social Proof
6. Timing
7. Your Push

1. Your Following

So why is your following so important? Because

• The more followers you have and
• The more responsive they are

The higher chance you will go viral.

With a reasonably responsive list a good post can get 5-10% of the amount of followers you have in shares. One of my great articles on another site received 300 Facebook shares from a fan base of just under 3,000 fans. Some of my other popular posts received 150-200 shares from a similar fan base.

Here is how to boost your followers on Facebook

Depending on your niche you may have followers that have businesses or lists of their own. This is great as I have had happened before, these people also shared my link to their list. Having influential people on your list enables your idea to spread.

2. Your Interaction

A Facebook following will do nothing if you don’t nurture the relationship. A warm list will help you achieve many things. 1,000 warm people will do far more good than 100,000 cold people. Make sure you give out value frequently and engage with your following to build the trust.

Yes this takes time, sorry you can’t build trust or rapport in instantly. If you ever do prove me wrong let me know.

3. Your Content

Ok, firstly you need to understand that people aren’t going to share you latest product or service deals. Consumers will only share valuable information, something that makes them look good for sharing.

Your content must be valuable, it must solve a problem or provide great entertainment. Facebook has an interesting mix where both informational and entertaining information can go viral. You will find that videos that go viral are generally of the entertaining nature and links that go viral are providing great information or entertainment.

Developing Your Content

• Offer some amazing information
• Ask your following what they would like to learn about
• Have a look at viral content that you get and see why you would want to pass it on
• Be entertaining
• Be yourself, don’t try to be something else just to try and get viral
• Look at what has gained the most comments or shares before and try something along those lines again

Going viral is an art mashed with science. There are things you can do to help but you can only guess (an educated one) at what your followers are interested in and will share with others.

Keep trying until you succeed.

4. Your Headline

The headline is the most important aspect to going viral. Your headline needs to attract people to click on the link to even have a look at it.

I could talk a lot about headlines but here is a great resource on creating headlines.

5. Social Proof

In many studies people will always behave differently depending on what their peers are doing. If a lot of their friends think something is great, they will too. You can increase social proof by doing a few things:

• Get your friends to share it, ask them on an article you think deserves to go viral
• Put a Share button on your page. The larger the amount of shares it shows the more likely someone will be to share.
• Put a like button on your page. The same principle applies.
• Anything else that shows other people have liked your article or post

6. Timing

Timing is tricky one to accurately get but there are certain principles you should abide by. With Facebook feeds flooded with so much information you need to know when they are watching.

Each audience of each page will read their feeds at different times so you need to test. You can put out your content (the same piece) at 3 different times in the day and see which one gains more interaction.

Some other general guidelines are:

• Monday – Wednesday is the most active period
• Depending on your audience, either work hours or after work / dinner is a good time

7. Your Push

If you have a great piece of content it may take a little bit of work to get off the ground. Share it on your personal profile, page feed and maybe even pay for advertising if necessary.

Like the post yourself and even add a comment to it related to the post.

If you have a bunch of nice friends you can ask them to share the link as well.

[Bonus Point] 8. Shareability

Now why didn’t I just say 8 secrets of going viral. Well then the headline wouldn’t be as catchy and I really mean that.

On to the extra point, making your content easily sharable is another key factor in getting your content to go viral.

Make sure you have on the page:

• A Facebook like button
• A Facebook share button (Yes I am aware that Facebook do not recommend this button any more but as even Mashable tested and found out, shares are a lot lower with just a like button.)
• Ask in the post for people to share the article. So if you really like this post, please share it with your friends and it would help me greatly in getting more shares than another writer I am competing with for the most shared article.