Hello friends - on this rainy Spring day!

Found this great article on how to use the Question & Poll app on your Facebook Page to engage your fans. Use this app to ask questions that build loyalty and provide you with valuable feedback.

Enjoy!

- CBB

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Facebook Questions is the in-house poll service from Facebook. Located at the top of your wall and below your profile pic, Questions lets you customize polls in a manner of ways. You can submit an open-ended question or click on the “Add Poll Options” tab to create a custom multiple-choice poll. You can add up to three options. Pro tip: You can link those responses to groups or individuals on Facebook by tagging the name with an “@” when you start typing. This is handy if you want to drive people to your various options.

While you can’t limit your question to a specific demographic (i.e., the question is broadcast to the entire Facebook community to answer), individual Facebook Pages can ask Page-specific questions. To do this, simply click on the “Questions” tab at the top of the Page’s wall. 

Poll is an app, meaning you’ll have to allow it access to your account. Poll operates a lot like Facebook Questions (above), but it has some extra options for tracking your respondents, purchasing premium features like ad blocking, and the ability to hide header tabs. It also allows you to add more than three options to your customized questions. That may not seem like much, but Poll has attracted more than 2 million active users so far, and corporations such as ABC, 20th Century Fox, Nintendo, Pepsi and Wimbledon have used the app.

Poll for Facebook is a free service with a slew of options including the ability to include a poll title, introduction text and advanced features such as creating a custom URL and privacy options. You can specify if you want answers as multiple choice, text or a comment thread. You can modify the appearance further by using HTML tags or adding a tab to your YouTube page. Premium users can add images, too. Poll for Facebook is the most customizable and easiest to use of the available options, attracting major corporate users like the Food Network, the Baltimore Ravens and Clarins Paris to the service.

Poll Daddy Polls offer another take on customization. From the “Create a Poll Tab” you can add an image, customize multiple answers, and select where you want the poll to be posted. It’s simple and to the point, even if it has just 300,000 active users, making it relatively small when compared to its brethren.

Status Updates can be used in place of the more feature-rich polling apps discussed above. If you’re just after some quick, informal engagement with your fans, consider simply asking a question via your page status.

BASIC TIPS

Once you set up your poll using one of the options above, here are some simple best practices for deciding how and what to ask.

• Ask a real question. People on the Internet are great at sniffing out when you really are interested in their response and just asking a question because it’s been a while. Don’t ask questions that are just self-promotional. Something like “What product of ours do you love the most!?” isn’t going to go over well.
• Ask question you actually want answers to. In the same vein, if you’re going to ask questions, come up with something that will help your business. Try to get constructive feedback about your products or ask what your customer would like to see more of. If you’re a musician for example, try asking what kind of bonuses your fans prefer (backstage pass, free tickets, advanced orders, etc.) and then offer the highest-voted perk.
• Ask questions that are topical or relevant. This is a tricky one. Try to find memes and keywords that are both in the news and relevant to your brand. 
• Be clear why you’re polling. Decide what you want out of your poll: Are you looking for more loyalty, honest feedback, brand exposure? Having this in mind will give you focus and make your polls more useful for your business. If you’re looking for exposure, ask yourself if your poll is something that your fans would share with their own friends. Facebook is great for spreading your message — but only if it’s a message worth spreading.

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

News Flash. Spring might just be here!

It is official - we finally launched our new website.  Be sure to check out our new portfolio pages and the trio group (new photos!!).

In other random news, we are planning on attending the HomeStyles show this coming weekend in Saskatoon (we all kind of have a thing for home renovations and decor). Here is a link to the website - http://www.homestylesonline.com/2011homestyles/index.html - If you are free be sure to check it out this weekend.

Enjoy our new site!

- CBB

News Flash. 

We are close to launching our new website!!! very exciting.  Within the next two weeks you will be able to browse through our new portfolio section, learn more about the original trio, and navigate through all the web design services we offer.  This new site has been a long time in the making, so we hope you like the final product.

In other news, Trio Web Design is now on Skype!  Give us a call - our username is triowebdesign.com - we like Skype.

Also, keep up-to-date with Trio news and interesting web design insights by becoming a fan of our Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/triowebdesign

Oh, one last thing.  A big "Happy 1st Birthday" to the Untangled Hair Group Saskatoon - their Trio website has been live for over a year! Check it out http://www.untangledhairgroup.com

- CBB

Hi Friends,

Just a quick reminder to check out our recent Facebook posts:

Google Instant Previews  

CBB Insight. Google rolled out a new feature called Google Instant Previews.  Instant Previews provides people with a screenshot of a website before they even visit it.  This new feature puts pressure on businesses to ensure that their website is visually attractive. 

Marketing to Generation C

CBB Insight. The Nielson Company released an insightful article about Generation C - who they are, how to communicate with them, and ultimately how to keep them interested in your brand.

Here is a link to our Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/triowebdesign

Enjoy the read!

- CBB

Hello Friends,

For all of you who are admins of a Facebook Page, Facebook recently modified the Insights dashboard to make it easier for you to obtain information about Fan interaction on your Page.

To help you navigate through the changes and interpret the data I have sourced an article called "A Beginner's Guide to Facebook Insights" by Ekaterina Walter. Ekaterina is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. 

Facebook Insights is a powerful tool to assist you in identifying and responding to your target audience. If your business doesn't have Facebook Page and would like to know how to build a Facebook strategy or if you would like more information about interpreting your Facebook data, contact us at Trio Web Design - info@triowebdesign.com.

- CBB

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A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FACEBOOK INSIGHTS - by Ekaterina Walter

You have created a Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?”

The Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.”

So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time. Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer.

EXAMINE A WIDE RANGE OF DATA

There are two types of Facebook insights:

• User Insights: Total page Likes, or a number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
• Interactions Insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).

The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for.

Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track.

• Monthly fan size growth: Record the number of fans (or “Likers”) you have on the first of every month to see what your growth looks like. I’d say if you are growing organically and you have 10 to 13% monthly growth, you are doing extremely well. That is probably the highest organic growth number anyone can achieve. You can even go more granular and calculate weekly growth. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to watch for the spikes in fan growth and try to identify what contributes to those spikes.

• The average number of Likes or comments: These are your engagement measures. If you know the average number of times fans interacted with you for every single post, you will be able to identify which discussions are of more interest to your fans. Watch for unusual spikes or drops in this number. I love this metric because it is extremely helpful in making immediate decisions in your content strategy and changes to your editorial calendar. Increase the number of posts around the topic your fans are more engaged with and decrease the number of posts around topics they are not interested in.

• Unlikes and attrition rate: The fact is that you will always have some unsubscribes, no mater how great your engagement is, but hopefully it is just a small number. I usually just watch for spikes in the unlike numbers. You want to try and correlate them with the activity on your page and understand why people are leaving your page. It is rather hard to nail down the exact reason, but if there is an unusual spike, you will usually have a pretty good idea. The simple attrition rate formula is:

Daily Unlikes / Daily Fan Count - This metric will tell you how many of your fans are leaving your site. It is normal to have small constant attrition over time.

• Demographics: No matter what your objectives are, you can always find the demographics data useful: the gender of your fans, their ages and where they are from.

• Mentions: This is the number of times someone tagged you in their post. The reason why this metric is important is because it is the easiest way for your fans’ friends to click through to your page. Every time someone tags you, the name of your Page appears as a link. It is much easier for someone to click on that link and learn more than to search for your Page manually. One of your goals should be to increase the number of mentions by your fans.

• Page views: I like this metric because it helps you identify the number of returned fans. If you take the number of page views and subtract the number of unique page views, you will see how many of your fans are actually coming back to your page. You can also look at the Daily Active Users metric.

• Tab views: This is the new metric Facebook implemented a couple of months ago. If you have multiple tabs on your page, it will tell you which tab gets what percentage of traffic. This metric will help you decide on whether you would want to keep or maybe get rid of some of your tabs. This is especially helpful as you can only have six tabs visible on your page at one time, and this data will help you prioritize accordingly.

• Referrers: Another new metric that tells you where the traffic to your page comes from. You want to increase exposure to your page on the sites that bring you the most traffic.

• Impressions: If your page is over 10,000 fans, you will see the number of times your post was viewed –- impressions. This metric is not exact since every time someone’s page refreshes, it counts as an impression. This number is usually a little overblown, but can show you how many times your post has been seen.

Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers.