Unfortunately, the “bug” that wasn’t allowing you to suggest to your friends that they become a fan of a business page is not a bug at all. Facebook removed the feature when it was having problems loading correctly, and confirmed on their help page that they won’t be returning it to users. Administrators will still have this option, but other users will instead have to use the Share option (found at the very bottom of the far left sidebar), which will post the page and a message to their wall and show up in friends’ news feeds. For businesses looking for a quick and direct way to build their page likes, this is going to cause a little bump in the road, as they can no longer ask their employees and friends to send out a personal message to their entire friend list (unless, of course, they are a page admin).

The "Suggest to Friends" option no longer shows up for users who are not admins of the page.

This just means we have to get a little more creative about spreading the word that your business is on Facebook. There are so many simple ways to advertise your Facebook page, which you really should be doing anyway, and if you combine these methods with some good old fashioned talking to your customers and clients, you probably won’t even notice this change.

Some ideas to get you started (which can be applied to any social network, not just Facebook):

• Add your username (facebook.com/username, i.e. facebook.com/handhweb) to the signature of your emails
• Provide direct links from your website to your Facebook page
• Add your username to your business cards
• Put your Facebook page on EVERY single piece of marketing material, period. This includes newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, direct mailers, postcards, brochures, notepads, etc.
• If you do any email campaigns, put a link to your Facebook page
• Put some signs up in your store: on the checkout counter, on the front door, in the dressing room, in the bathroom.
• Staple a piece of paper with your usernames onto customer receipts
• When you’re chatting with a customer or client, tell them about your Facebook page and ask them to follow you

We really cannot stress enough how important it is to fully integrate your efforts when it comes to social media. If people do not know that you are on Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, they’ll never know to search for your business and follow you. The more you talk to your clients and customers about your presence there, and WHY they should be following or liking you, the better results you will see.

We stopped for lunch at Weebee’s Cafe in Bozeman today, and as I was tweeting photos of our food, I realized I was mentioning the wrong username when we saw this on the bottom of their beverage menu:

We’re now following them on Twitter and liking them on Facebook.

We’ll continue to share examples of creative ways businesses are advertising their presence on social media on our own Facebook page, so stay tuned. Have any other ideas we didn’t mention? Leave it in the comments!

In addition to all of our social media marketing work Angela and I also help small businesses build simple WordPress based websites. We love to give people the option of having a web presence that ties into the social media that they are already working on. And we really love WordPress because we can teach people how to update their websites themselves!

Today we sat in on a presentation given by Lynn Weaver, a woman we have worked with in the past who also builds websites. She is an amazing resource, quite funny and someone we respect immensely. Her knowledge of coding and web building and design goes way, way beyond ours and she is the first person we refer people to when they come to us with a project that is beyond our capabilities. In addition to being a total tech geek (in the best sense of the term) she is also an artist, which helps her design websites that are so much more aesthetically pleasing than what a lot of web builders create. Go check out her website!

Listening to Lynn’s presentation got me thinking about one of the most frustrating parts of helping people with their own websites. One issue that we run into repeatedly is the problem of hosting. When someone is starting fresh and has no existing website we breathe a sigh of relief. Why is this? Well, it is because most people who have hired someone else to build their website in the past, or had cousin Bob build it for them, have no idea what company their site is hosted with and what their login information is. And then we spend the next two weeks just trying to track that information down. Honestly, there are a lot of people who do not even know what “hosting” means. To break it down a little: The first step you take when setting up a website is to register a domain name (ex: www.handhweb.com). The next step you take is to pay a hosting company for room on their server for your website. Some examples of hosting companies are: Bluehost, 1&1, AcornHost (one of Lynn’s recommendations). These companies charge a monthly fee for hosting. If you have a website up and running, you have registered your domain name somewhere and you are paying someone to host your site, whether you realize it or not!

Our tip for all of you for today is this: When you have someone else build a website for you, regardless of who it is, make sure that as soon as they register your domain name and set up hosting they send you the email that they will get from that company with all of the information that you need to access the back-end of your website. This should include a link that you will use to access your account, a username, and a password. Keep this information on file somewhere where you can find it! You will need this if you ever want to hire someone else to change, update, redo your website.