By now we are all aware as to how our newsfeed has become our hub on Facebook since it is where we receive a river flowing of all of our connections status updates allowing us to see more of what is happening on Facebook in less time than it would take to go to individual profiles or pages. The newsfeed is not only the spot where we gain information, but also where we do our actions, such activities as likes, comments and re-sharing a post or status update. Facebook now has a newsfeed for Facebook Pages.

What is Pages Feed on Facebook?

This week Facebook is rolling out “Pages Feed” to profiles for its Facebook Pages to have their own newsfeed since clearly the profile newsfeed is where its 1.01 billion users like to spend most of their time. This means that any page that you have “liked” will be displayed within the “Pages Feed” collectively. Allowing you to again see more in less time, therefore you can keep informed about the latest status updates from your “liked” pages.

Where is the location of “Pages Feed” on Facebook?

If the “Pages Feed” has been rolled out onto your profile it will be seen on the left-hand menu bar under the “Pages” section. Below a few of your connected pages that you admin or own you will now see “Pages Feed” above “Like Pages”. If you have yet to see it, it will roll out to you shortly.

How does the new “Pages Feed” help Businesses on Facebook?

This is simple enough to answer, your Facebook Page has yet another way on Facebook to be seen and since it has been created as a familiar feature people will hopefully use it more. It is not another thing they have to learn on Facebook since every Facebook user is well acquainted with the newsfeed layout. Basically, Facebook is providing another place to amplify your brand without you having to do anything besides keep updating your Facebook business page. People when using the “Pages Feed” will now be able to see an array of their connected pages in one stream. Allowing your brand to not get drowned out by other posts that may be more personal to the user as well as increasing more actions since when a user decides to click on their customized “Pages Feed” they are there to actually see pages on Facebook.

What is “Follow Post”? A “Follow Post” allows users when using the “Pages Feed” to be able to click on the arrow located at the top right-hand corner of every post. When clicked, you will now be able to follow the activities of the chosen post and receive notifications wherever you happen to be on Facebook.

It is unknown if Facebook Page status updates will be removed from the profile newsfeed since it will defeat the purpose of the “Pages Feed” in the minds of many, however personally I think Facebook should not remove the ability of users seeing Facebook Pages posts within their newsfeed and to remain to leave it as is. Instead, I think the “Pages Feed” should be the additional option for its users in the instance that this feature does not gain popularity or help businesses as it is intended.  

By now we are all aware as to how our newsfeed has become our hub on Facebook since it is where we receive a river flowing of all of our connections status updates allowing us to see more of what is happening on Facebook in less time than it would take to go to individual profiles or pages. The newsfeed is not only the spot where we gain information, but also where we do our actions, such activities as likes, comments and re-sharing a post or status update. Facebook now has a newsfeed for Facebook Pages.

What is Pages Feed on Facebook?

This week Facebook is rolling out “Pages Feed” to profiles for its Facebook Pages to have their own newsfeed since clearly the profile newsfeed is where its 1.01 billion users like to spend most of their time. This means that any page that you have “liked” will be displayed within the “Pages Feed” collectively. Allowing you to again see more in less time, therefore you can keep informed about the latest status updates from your “liked” pages.

Where is the location of “Pages Feed” on Facebook?

If the “Pages Feed” has been rolled out onto your profile it will be seen on the left-hand menu bar under the “Pages” section. Below a few of your connected pages that you admin or own you will now see “Pages Feed” above “Like Pages”. If you have yet to see it, it will roll out to you shortly.

How does the new “Pages Feed” help Businesses on Facebook?

This is simple enough to answer, your Facebook Page has yet another way on Facebook to be seen and since it has been created as a familiar feature people will hopefully use it more. It is not another thing they have to learn on Facebook since every Facebook user is well acquainted with the newsfeed layout. Basically, Facebook is providing another place to amplify your brand without you having to do anything besides keep updating your Facebook business page. People when using the “Pages Feed” will now be able to see an array of their connected pages in one stream. Allowing your brand to not get drowned out by other posts that may be more personal to the user as well as increasing more actions since when a user decides to click on their customized “Pages Feed” they are there to actually see pages on Facebook.

What is “Follow Post”? A “Follow Post” allows users when using the “Pages Feed” to be able to click on the arrow located at the top right-hand corner of every post. When clicked, you will now be able to follow the activities of the chosen post and receive notifications wherever you happen to be on Facebook.

It is unknown if Facebook Page status updates will be removed from the profile newsfeed since it will defeat the purpose of the “Pages Feed” in the minds of many, however personally I think Facebook should not remove the ability of users seeing Facebook Pages posts within their newsfeed and to remain to leave it as is. Instead, I think the “Pages Feed” should be the additional option for its users in the instance that this feature does not gain popularity or help businesses as it is intended.  

People often ask me how I'm able to stay up on the millions of things that are happening in the world of automotive internet marketing on a daily basis. There are tons of blogs, social networks, and industry websites with enough posts to fill a full day if you plugged them all into an RSS reader. How does an automotive professional with limited time during the day stay ahead and not miss out on the important things?

#AutoMarketing

It's one of the keys to success.

There are content producers galore in the industry. Everyone has an opinion on what to do with search, social, websites, analytics, CRM, classifieds, PPC, banner ads, and every other aspect of internet sales. Throw in the best practices and tips on how to actually work with customers and you have a huge mess. It's not that it's bad. It's that it needs to be curated.

The Twitter hashtag #automarketing is the easiest way to do it. Sure, there's going to be poor content that makes its way into the hashtag. That's inevitable. Many use it as a marketing tool to get their message out regardless of quality. However, the majority of what gets into the hashtag and stays at the top is high-quality.

Here's how it works. People read the blogs, social networks, and industry websites. They find content they like. They share this content on social networks like Twitter. Those who are very active on the internet side of the industry realize that certain hashtags like #AutoMarketing and #CarDealers get fed into Twitter chatter monitor widgets everywhere on the web. Thus, they put in the hashtag whenever they find something of interest.

The more that people curate and share the best content, the more powerful the hashtag becomes. It's not just the industry sites that get posted. Marketing sites that have content pertinent to car dealers often find their content shared with the hashtag as well.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, this is one of the easiest ways to do it. Just do a search in Twitter for "#AutoMarketing" and you'll find content that curators have enjoyed. You can become a curator yourself by adding it to tweets of important industry posts. The more people that do it, the better the hashtag can become.

We need curation. You can save time by taking advantage of it. You can help by participating.

People often ask me how I'm able to stay up on the millions of things that are happening in the world of automotive internet marketing on a daily basis. There are tons of blogs, social networks, and industry websites with enough posts to fill a full day if you plugged them all into an RSS reader. How does an automotive professional with limited time during the day stay ahead and not miss out on the important things?

#AutoMarketing

It's one of the keys to success.

There are content producers galore in the industry. Everyone has an opinion on what to do with search, social, websites, analytics, CRM, classifieds, PPC, banner ads, and every other aspect of internet sales. Throw in the best practices and tips on how to actually work with customers and you have a huge mess. It's not that it's bad. It's that it needs to be curated.

The Twitter hashtag #automarketing is the easiest way to do it. Sure, there's going to be poor content that makes its way into the hashtag. That's inevitable. Many use it as a marketing tool to get their message out regardless of quality. However, the majority of what gets into the hashtag and stays at the top is high-quality.

Here's how it works. People read the blogs, social networks, and industry websites. They find content they like. They share this content on social networks like Twitter. Those who are very active on the internet side of the industry realize that certain hashtags like #AutoMarketing and #CarDealers get fed into Twitter chatter monitor widgets everywhere on the web. Thus, they put in the hashtag whenever they find something of interest.

The more that people curate and share the best content, the more powerful the hashtag becomes. It's not just the industry sites that get posted. Marketing sites that have content pertinent to car dealers often find their content shared with the hashtag as well.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, this is one of the easiest ways to do it. Just do a search in Twitter for "#AutoMarketing" and you'll find content that curators have enjoyed. You can become a curator yourself by adding it to tweets of important industry posts. The more people that do it, the better the hashtag can become.

We need curation. You can save time by taking advantage of it. You can help by participating.

Despite the rise of social signals and the continued prominence of content as primary search engine optimization tools, high-quality inbound links remain one of the three big components in improving rankings. The automated processes have been devalued; low-quality posts, footer links, and sidebar links are a thing of the past and in excess can actually hurt a website.

Strong, contextual links are still valid. In fact, some have shown that they're more important than ever.

In this infographic by Digital Net Agency, they examine the two different types of link-acquisition strategies. They talk about the six major bad strategies to avoid and then highlight five techniques that work. One in particular, "contributing", should be fleshed out a bit. The idea is that by creating and sharing content that brings value to others, it's possible to generate high-quality contextual links by the sheer merits of the content and its promotion. In essence, if you're bringing value, you'll get value in return.

Click to enlarge.

"Links" image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Despite the rise of social signals and the continued prominence of content as primary search engine optimization tools, high-quality inbound links remain one of the three big components in improving rankings. The automated processes have been devalued; low-quality posts, footer links, and sidebar links are a thing of the past and in excess can actually hurt a website.

Strong, contextual links are still valid. In fact, some have shown that they're more important than ever.

In this infographic by Digital Net Agency, they examine the two different types of link-acquisition strategies. They talk about the six major bad strategies to avoid and then highlight five techniques that work. One in particular, "contributing", should be fleshed out a bit. The idea is that by creating and sharing content that brings value to others, it's possible to generate high-quality contextual links by the sheer merits of the content and its promotion. In essence, if you're bringing value, you'll get value in return.

Click to enlarge.

"Links" image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Last month I had a conversation with a potential client who was describing their content marketing strategy. They had a strong understanding of the theories of posting content that people will share and mixing in promotional content from time to time. It's a basic and effective way to build a community and a following while still getting the benefits of exposure for their business-focused messages. Post what they like, then post what you want them to see.

Fast forward to earlier this week and I finally had a chance to examine their content. What I found disappointed me. The way they were handling "content that people will share" was to post two types of content - entertaining content and content that could be a valuable resource. The challenge I found was that they drew an extremely clear line between entertaining posts and resource posts. The line was so clear that their entertaining posts brought zero value to the reader while the resource posts were as enjoyable as eating chalk.

Content marketing is quickly becoming the cornerstone to both search and social strategies. It is a best practice to try to make sure that what your posting has both entertainment and resource value. Each post can definitely lean in one direction or another, but your entertaining posts should be interesting as well while your resource posts shouldn't put the reader to sleep.

Here's an example of an entertaining post that is also mildly useful. It's a list of the top 5 most searched Dodge Chargers on Google. The entertainment value is clear - classic Dodge Chargers are loved by many drivers and high-resolution images of mint condition Chargers can appeal the target audience (in this case, a Dodge dealer's visitors). However, rather than just making a picture gallery of some cool cars and calling it "5 Epic Pictures of Classic Dodge Chargers", they inserted some resource value. First, the title itself shows that it has resource value: "The 5 Most Searched Dodge Chargers in History". There's not a ton of resource value floating through the page - it's mostly just trivia. However, a resource doesn't have to be a case study or a thesis. The two or three bits of trivial information that the reader can learn from this page are enough to give it value. Remember, this page is primary for entertaining.

Now, let's take a look at a resource page. This one is a historical look at the once-famous Willys Jeep. It has a graphic and information that is informative as well as a couple of images of the iconic vehicle. However, it's not presented in a way that makes it sound like it came out of a history textbook or even Wikipedia. The graphic is fun. The images are high-resolution and interesting. The text focuses on some little-known facts about the vehicle that help it to fall into both the resource and entertainment categories. It may be a resource piece, but there's nothing boring about it.

Posts that are exclusively resources or exclusively entertaining bring value to the table, but not nearly as much as doing both at the same time. People go to the internet for many reasons, but the three primary ones are communication, education, and entertainment. If you want them to do the first thing - communicate - then you have to master the second and third things first. When you can consolidate and kill two birds with one stone, the other bird will fall nicely into your trap.

Last month I had a conversation with a potential client who was describing their content marketing strategy. They had a strong understanding of the theories of posting content that people will share and mixing in promotional content from time to time. It's a basic and effective way to build a community and a following while still getting the benefits of exposure for their business-focused messages. Post what they like, then post what you want them to see.

Fast forward to earlier this week and I finally had a chance to examine their content. What I found disappointed me. The way they were handling "content that people will share" was to post two types of content - entertaining content and content that could be a valuable resource. The challenge I found was that they drew an extremely clear line between entertaining posts and resource posts. The line was so clear that their entertaining posts brought zero value to the reader while the resource posts were as enjoyable as eating chalk.

Content marketing is quickly becoming the cornerstone to both search and social strategies. It is a best practice to try to make sure that what your posting has both entertainment and resource value. Each post can definitely lean in one direction or another, but your entertaining posts should be interesting as well while your resource posts shouldn't put the reader to sleep.

Here's an example of an entertaining post that is also mildly useful. It's a list of the top 5 most searched Dodge Chargers on Google. The entertainment value is clear - classic Dodge Chargers are loved by many drivers and high-resolution images of mint condition Chargers can appeal the target audience (in this case, a Dodge dealer's visitors). However, rather than just making a picture gallery of some cool cars and calling it "5 Epic Pictures of Classic Dodge Chargers", they inserted some resource value. First, the title itself shows that it has resource value: "The 5 Most Searched Dodge Chargers in History". There's not a ton of resource value floating through the page - it's mostly just trivia. However, a resource doesn't have to be a case study or a thesis. The two or three bits of trivial information that the reader can learn from this page are enough to give it value. Remember, this page is primary for entertaining.

Now, let's take a look at a resource page. This one is a historical look at the once-famous Willys Jeep. It has a graphic and information that is informative as well as a couple of images of the iconic vehicle. However, it's not presented in a way that makes it sound like it came out of a history textbook or even Wikipedia. The graphic is fun. The images are high-resolution and interesting. The text focuses on some little-known facts about the vehicle that help it to fall into both the resource and entertainment categories. It may be a resource piece, but there's nothing boring about it.

Posts that are exclusively resources or exclusively entertaining bring value to the table, but not nearly as much as doing both at the same time. People go to the internet for many reasons, but the three primary ones are communication, education, and entertainment. If you want them to do the first thing - communicate - then you have to master the second and third things first. When you can consolidate and kill two birds with one stone, the other bird will fall nicely into your trap.

There are times when you're going to post a piece of content that is too good to post in just one place. It could be extremely informative, very timely, majorly entertaining, or perhaps you just really liked it and want to post it in other places. There are times when you can syndicate the content, but when it's your own site, you'll want to "reblog" it.

This is different from syndicating. If you have places where you can post and it makes sense to let the original content stand on its own, then simply copying, pasting, and reformatting is just fine. There are three instances when you won't want to do this:

1. If you're posting on another one of your own sites where you control all of the content, reblogging can give you a reason for your visitors to one site to explore your other site.
2. If you're posting on one of your domains that is not "aged and weathered" - in other words, it's either a newer domain or does not index very well in the search engines - then reblogging like this will allow you to make sure the content is unique without having to start from scratch on the same topic.
3. If you have a topic that is extremely important and deserves more than one article to highlight it, reblogging is a fast way to write one long-form piece of content and then support it with other websites.

By reblogging, you'll want to do what is posted in the image above. We took a piece of content about Facebook pictures that we posted on Dealer Bar, then reblogged it onto the KPA Internet Marketing Blog. The original story showed five types of Facebook customer picture posts. The reblog focused on the reasons this is important. We put out three short paragraphs of original content, took an important excerpt from the original, and linked to it.

The easiest way to understand it is to start from the reblog and then follow it to the original post. You'll be able to get more mileage out of your content without having to come up with as many fresh ideas. You'll also be exposing your content to different sets of readers. It's a win-win.

There are times when you're going to post a piece of content that is too good to post in just one place. It could be extremely informative, very timely, majorly entertaining, or perhaps you just really liked it and want to post it in other places. There are times when you can syndicate the content, but when it's your own site, you'll want to "reblog" it.

This is different from syndicating. If you have places where you can post and it makes sense to let the original content stand on its own, then simply copying, pasting, and reformatting is just fine. There are three instances when you won't want to do this:

1. If you're posting on another one of your own sites where you control all of the content, reblogging can give you a reason for your visitors to one site to explore your other site.
2. If you're posting on one of your domains that is not "aged and weathered" - in other words, it's either a newer domain or does not index very well in the search engines - then reblogging like this will allow you to make sure the content is unique without having to start from scratch on the same topic.
3. If you have a topic that is extremely important and deserves more than one article to highlight it, reblogging is a fast way to write one long-form piece of content and then support it with other websites.

By reblogging, you'll want to do what is posted in the image above. We took a piece of content about Facebook pictures that we posted on Dealer Bar, then reblogged it onto the KPA Internet Marketing Blog. The original story showed five types of Facebook customer picture posts. The reblog focused on the reasons this is important. We put out three short paragraphs of original content, took an important excerpt from the original, and linked to it.

The easiest way to understand it is to start from the reblog and then follow it to the original post. You'll be able to get more mileage out of your content without having to come up with as many fresh ideas. You'll also be exposing your content to different sets of readers. It's a win-win.