Facebook’s New Terms Will Help Small Businesses by Laura Donovan

The New Terms announced by Facebook on August 27, 2013, have removed restrictions that prohibited Pages from running contests and promotions on their pages. (Running promotions on a Personal Timeline is still prohibited.)

While it may come as a surprise to Facebook users who’ve been seeing contests and promotions on Facebook Business Pages since the beginning, until now these contests were illegal. Many Pages got away with this rule infraction because Facebook was not able to monitor all Pages on its site. (Whether Facebook is relaxing its rules because of this is open to debate.)
However, the new Facebook Page Terms now allow companies to:

• Collect entries by having Friends “like” or “comment” directly on an Update/Page Post;
• Collect entries through Messages on the Page; and
• Use Page Likes/Page Post Likes as a voting method.

This is great news for smaller businesses whose contest entries may be limited to a few hundred entries, giving them the option to avoid the fees charged by Third Party apps.

However, larger companies that run contests and promotions that see thousands of entries will still benefit from Third Party services like Wildfire, Woobox and ShortStack that provide useful tools and support for running promotions, sweepstakes and contests.

A quick look at the Facebook Page Terms will show that there are still rules. And while the sheer number of Pages on this social site presents a challenge for enforcement, not following the rules can be a dangerous game for companies with active and successful Facebook Pages.

Following is a snapshot from the FB Terms regarding promotions:
1. If you use Facebook to communicate or administer a promotion (ex: a contest or sweepstakes), you are responsible for the lawful operation of that promotion, including:
a. The official rules;
b. Offer terms and eligibility requirements (ex: age and residency restrictions); and
c. Compliance with applicable rules and regulations governing the promotion and all prizes offered (ex: registration and obtaining necessary regulatory approvals)
2. Promotions on Facebook must include the following:
a. A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
b. Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
3. Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries” is not permitted).
4. We will not assist you in the administration of your promotion, and you agree that if you use our service to administer your promotion, you do so at your own risk.

Courtesy of  http://www.business2community.com

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YouTube It: How To Promote Your Video Effectively Online by Nancy Perkins

Marketing strategies come in different forms like billboards, posters, posts on social networking sites and a lot more. Videos are also a popular form of effective marketing campaigns. One of the most popular video websites existing today is YouTube. It is a video-sharing website where millions of people visit to watch and upload videos every day. In fact, YouTube has recently announced that it reached 1 billion active users in a month. Now that is a lot of YouTubers right there.

Nowadays, companies use YouTube as an alternative means to market their services and products knowing the amount of traffic the website gets each day. But before you start creating videos and posting them on your channel, take time to go over some guidelines that can be useful in promoting your video:

When creating videos for your marketing campaign on YouTube, it helps if you think like a customer. Think what kind of video you would like to watch over and over again, and videos that can simply get your attention. This will help you come up with great ideas for your videos. The key is to make your videos exciting and informative so that people will watch your videos from start to finish.

It also helps if you make an effort to promote your video. Keep in mind that there are over 2 billion videos on YouTube which means you have to push your video to compete with others. It is not enough that you upload a video and just let the users visit your channel and view it. You have to market your video for it to get a huge number of views. You have the option to share your YouTube videos on social networking sites like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and others. If you have accounts on these social media platforms, your video can easily gather more views and those who have viewed it can also share the video as well.

Most probably, your competitors have their own YouTube channel as well and they have a lot of followers on their lists. What you can do is go to their channel and add those accounts under their followers list especially if they are clients. This will give the consumers more choices. If you have something good to offer that their current company does not have, you just might have a good chance to get yourself a new client.

When posting videos on the channel, make sure that you use the correct tags and categories. Most of the time, people add random tags on their videos even if they are not related to their video. Tags are important so that the viewers will be able to easily identify what your video is about. This works similar to keywords. The same goes for choosing a category. If your business is a clothing and makeup company, you can post videos under the “How to & Style” category, if it is a telephone or a computer company like Apple and Ring Central, there is the ”Gaming & Technology,” and the list continues.

YouTube is not only available in the United States. It is also available in the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries all over the world. Think of how much audience you can target in YouTube. These tips can help you market your business using this popular video sharing and hosting website. Make sure that you make the most out of your videos and YouTube channel.

This post comes to you courtesy of www.Business2Community.by Nancy Perkins

Need help with Optimizing YOUR videos? Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/video-optimization.html