Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages

With all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc.  

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Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management. One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it. As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with one of the best social media monitoring tools out there called KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough. You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile. For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media.

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503 Status Code (Service Unavailable)

Are you familiar with 503 status code?

If not, this post can help you to know about 503 status code. Search engines like 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance.

In a thread at Google Groups, Googler JohnMu told that Google prefer to use 503 status code if your site is down for maintenance. With the help of 503 status code search engine determines that the site is temporary down for maintenance.

If you are not using 503 status code and your site is in maintenance mode that means you are offering 200 status code, which means everything is OK and still no content. It can harm your presence and ranking on search engine. So the best way is use 503 (services unavailable) status code to prevent the search engine from indexing the error pages.