Facebook is at it again…getting their tentacles further into web traffic. And why not, it’s the greatest platform for social interaction ever developed. There are many ways to integrate Facebook social into your site and you should absolutely do it in as many ways as possible to get more traffic and sharing of your content going on. Here are the various ways you can integrate Facebook social plug-ins into your site.

Like Button
The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click.

Activity Feed
The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.

Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like.

Like Box
The Like Box enables users to like your Facebook Page and view its stream directly from your website.

Login Button
The Login Button shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.

Registration
The registration plugin allows users to easily sign up for your website with their Facebook account.

Facepile
The Facepile plugin displays the Facebook profile pictures of users who have liked your page or have signed up for your site.

Comments
The Comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site.

Live Stream
The Live Stream plugin lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event.

You should absolutely integrate Facebook social plug-ins into all of your sites and blogs that you can. Adding these types of plug-ins can only facilitate increased sharing and interacting around your content and Fan Page. Now go out and make it happen! Have a great day!

WIN a free ticket to Social Media Marketing Las Vegas – all you need to do to Tweet “Win a free ticket to #smlasvegas just after #asw11 Social Media Event in Vegas Jan 12 from @costpernews http://bit.ly/h8I1qr”

If you’re coming for Affiliate Summit West, stay for Social Media Marketing 2011 and escape one more day of whatever it’s like where you live. If you’re lucky, your home airport will be snowed in and you’ll have to stay anyway. It’s only $95 if you register early. (Or show up in swim trunks or a bikini. Just kidding.) Register here use code costpernews for 10% off.

Social Media Marketing 2011 will bring together leading brands and marketing experts to explore the viral power of social networks. Learn how to get coverage like a Lindsay-Lohan-gets-out-of-rehab photo. During this one-day event, a team of marketing experts – like Andrew Dumas, David Koloski and Murray Newlands! – will provide guidance on how to effectively engage with customers via social media, give tips on how to maximize the impact of your campaigns and offer insights into new services to try and trends to watch.

This is the ultimate event for anyone involved in social media or digital marketing.

Bring an extra supply of business cards because you’ll get to network with marketing strategists & directors, PR & communications managers, social media experts, bloggers & journalists.

Who doesn’t want an extra day in Vegas?

Presenters include:
Andrew Dumas – Sharethis
Ron Cates – Constant Contact
Murray Newlands, director of Influence People
Jennifer Neeley Lindsay, host of A-List on BlogTalkRadio
David Koloski, Director of Social Media, Web & Partnership Marketing for Caesar’s Entertainment
Eric Petersen, Manager of Social Marketing Strategy for Caesar’s Entertainment
Raymond Lyle, President of VigLink
Chase McMichael, Co-Founder & CEO of InfiniGraph.com

Sponsors:
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino
VigLink
MarketMeSuite
Share This
352 Media Group

Media Partners:
Mashable: the Social Media Guide
Adrants
Ubergizmo
ReadWriteWeb
State of Search
LeadsCon
Bub.Blicio.us

When: 12th January, 9:00am – 5:30pm
Where: Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas
For more info and to register: http://socialmediamarketing.co.uk/lasvegas/ use code costpernews for 10% off.

Guest post by www.murraynewlands.com

LinkedIn is probably the best professional social network on the Internet. I have been using them for 6 or 7 years, since they launched, and I have seen them go through quite a few changes and improvements over the years. LinkedIn has definitely been expanding their services and functionality in the last year or so. I wanted to cover some of the things I like to do with LinkedIn to maximize my business and grow my own social network. Here are some of ways you can leverage LinkedIn to grow your business and increase your social networking.

1. Adding LinkedIn Connections – adding connections on LinkedIn is pretty easy and effective. One of the nice things is they let you do mass invites to your email address book, and also your other social networks. What this does is pulls all your contacts into a list and you can send a boatload of invites out and grow your network quickly. You can also send a connection request to someone you would like to be connected that’s connected one of your current connections, which is called forwarding a request to connect. As effective as this tool is at connecting with new people, it’s surprising how little it is used I have found.

2. LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn Groups is a tremendous tool that allows you to start your own “group” of like-minded individuals that can join the group and then post topics and comments much like an online forum (check out my LinkedIn Affiliate Group here). The nice thing about Groups is people on LinkedIn look for Groups to join for things they are interested in and the Group grows on it’s own accord. You can also send out invites to your connections to join your Group to build the numbers. Also, when people join your Group their connections see that in your Network Updates and may join as well. The really nice thing about Groups is you can send an email blast to all the Group members every 7 days, which enables you to keep a good rate of messaging. But of course don’t abuse the privilege or people will leave the group. One of the problems with Groups is the posting abuse that goes on, which is why you need to set the ground rules and keep the Group moderated to ensure quality, otherwise it can get over-run with garbage.

3. LinkedIn Advertising - LinkedIn has their own pay-per-click advertising platform that runs on the site as well. Their minimum bid is $2 per click, which is a bid steep, but it does run on a fairly targeted basis, so it can be effective to exposing your ads to professionals in the industry and title you are going after. I have used this with limited success so far.

4.LinkedIn Contacts – One of the great things about building your LinkedIn connections is that you can actually download all your connections into a spreadsheet so you can manage and get a good grasp on your connections and what you want to do with them. Also, if you did want to share them you could forward the spreadsheet as well to colleagues or other people you want to share your connections with, but don’t share with just anyone obviously.

5. LinkedIn Network Activity – similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has added “network activity” which tells you what people are posting, who they have connected to, and some other nice info that you can then respond and interact with. By interacting with your connections in their updates you can get to know people better and build the relationship which is everything in social networking and business. I also like that LinkedIn shows you how many people have visited your Profile on a daily basis and how many times you have come up in the search results on LinkedIn. You can also add 3rd party “plug-ins” to your LinkedIn profile to add functionality which is really cool, so check that out as well.

6. LinkedIn Recommendations – this is my favorite aspect of LinkedIn because your Recommendations can be used to further your business. LinkedIn Recommendations can be given to others and they can return the favor. It’s kind of hard to grow your LinkedIn Recommendations, but the best way to grow them is to give them first and people will return the favor. You can also ask your connections to recommend you first and then return the favor. The nice thing about LinkedIn Recommendation is they tend to be written in a really positive light and make you look good to people looking to do business with you. So make sure to work on building your LinkedIn recommendations.

These are some great ways you can use LinkedIn to build business and increase your social networking reach. Like anything, the more effort you put into it the more you get out of it. I have gotten a tremendous amount of business from LinkedIn so I highly recommend putting a great deal of focus into building your network and reaching out to people to connect and do business…all they can say is no right?? Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any thoughts or comments. Thanks!

I’m so excited about how our Facebook Advertising campaigns have been going! I really think Facebook Ads represents the greatest opportunity for generating targeted traffic to your site or Facebook Fan Page of anything that has come along since pay-per-click search advertising on Google and Yahoo. Facebook really represents the next wave of almost limitless ad inventory for national advertisers, affiliate marketers, and small businesses due to their staggering reach. Really anyone can promote anything at all through Facebook Ads and get their ads in front of a very targeted audience.

The main reason Facebook is such a great advertising platform is the targeting is so good. For example, if you are selling baby toys, you can target only women, between the ages of 25-40, that are fans of Toys R Us, Huggies, or another “interest” that would imply they have small children. Another example might be you are trying to acquire targeted fans for your Facebook fan page which is a bar or nightclub, so you can target men and women, between the ages of 21-35, that live in particular zip codes surrounding the location of the bar or club, which is great for local businesses because you know your ads will only be seen in a local area. Another really cool aspect is that you can see exactly how many possible people your ads will be exposed to when choosing your targeting options. With the ability to target “likes” and “interests” of people on Facebook there really is a limitless amount of ad inventory you can go after to see if it converts into sales or leads for you.

Facebook Ads gives you the opportunity to try various images, titles, and descriptions, which means you have to continuously “tweak” you ads to get the highest click-through (CTR) and conversion rate for your ad dollars. That’s the nice thing actually, you can try various ad elements to get your best possible combination of all three elements. You should definitely use some kind of tracking system of some sort to measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of your various campaigns and ads themselves.

Facebook Ad campaigns can be run on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or a cost-per-impression (CPM – per 1000 ad impressions). CPC is a flat cost-per-click for everyone that actually clicks on your ad or “likes” your fan page. Cost-per-impression will charge you a certain amount for every thousand ad impressions you receive, which can actually work out better than a CPC in some instances. What’s nice is they show you what your campaign is working out to on a CPC and CPM basis so you can see which you want to run on.

While targeted pay-per-click search traffic from Google and Yahoo is still the best way to send relevant paid traffic your site, Facebook Advertising is the next huge wave of online ad inventory that can be leveraged to drive in customers and fans. If you aren’t using this platform you absolutely should. If you are interested in have a good, competent outsourced social media company handle it for you email: evan at experienceadvertising.com. Thanks and happy advertising!

The great thing about twitter is that you can use it to connect with pretty much anyone at any level in any company. It is also used by writers, editors, journalists, bloggers and media types of all persuasions. It is also easy for anyone to pick up, so you can get started today, and if you cannot then find someone who can help.

Everyone has their favourite publications that they like to read: find out which publications your audiences like to read. How would you do that? Ask them, survey your customers and suppliers: you can do this formally or just by casually asking them in conversation.

Research those publications for the edits and contributors and find them on twitter. Listed to the conversations which they are engaged in and see if you can contribute something of value within those conversations and make additions. Then when the topic of conversation comes around to an area which you can really contribute something of value add that, ideally with a link to a blog post or video or some other point of content that you have which shows a source of interest.

You can also ask those writers what they are writing about at the moment, and if they are looking for other elements to contribute to what they are researching or looking to research in future weeks and months.

Trend spotting: we all have our pet fads and things we really like and are interested in at the moment or on an ongoing theme. Reading someone’s twitter stream will provide you with that insight. See if you can spot which journalist or blogger has what pet project. Make a hobby of it and then when you have something of interest to say on that topic tweet it to them and see if they pick it up.

Online as in the real world, some people are much more open to being approached and talking to new people then others are. Find those that communicate only with their friends and those who like to communicate with a wider audience. It is those people you want to connect with.

Looking for corporate Social Media Management? Check out Experience Advertising for effective, pro-active social media management for your company.