Facebook's New Timeline Layout for Business

Inserting a Cover Photo 

The first and the most important step will be to insert a Cover Photograph. The cover photo should be a true and clear representation of your business and not contain sales, discounts, contact information, or overt references to "like" or "share" your page. The cover image should be at least 399 pixels. To get the best quality image and fastest load times for your Page, upload an RGB JPG file that's 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kb. The most important thing is that should be enticing for the target users so much that they should be compelled to tag it to their timeline.

Inserting Profile Picture 

Profile picture is the normal profile picture which was used until now and displays next to wall posts and other members would be able to see it. The best choice would be a logo of your business. It should be at least 180 X 180 pixels.

Admin Panel 

The new business page has Tool Icons at the top of the page - Views, Apps, Admin Panel, Messages, and About etc. This offers great information pertaining to what your fans like, how they interact with your content, where they are located and more marketing information. Furthermore, you can manage one-on-one messages from fans, design new advertisements and campaigns in this top admin panel without leaving your business page.

Organization of Apps 

You can easily arrange the most important news and pictures on the basis of priority. As many as 12 Apps can be tagged here like photographs, events, "Join my List" to grow your email contacts, and so on and, fans will be able to enjoy it using the drop down Icon. The administrator can also modify the photographs using the Admin Panel.

Star, Hide or Pin 

This is a great new feature of the new Business Page Design. By simply hovering over the top right of a post on your page, you can access these tools to: Star/highlight an article or story which would be beneficial for your business and it will spread it across both columns to make it stand out. If you would like an article to remain at the top of your page (for up to a week), simply "Pin to Top". You can also hide content and even delete something irrelevant.

Management of Messages 

This is a great asset for businesses as it enables their fans to connect with them more personally, to send them their suggestions, advice, and other thoughts on various issues. As we all know not all thoughts can be shared publicly. This can also become very helpful business tactics as we can communicate directly with the political leaders, actors, entrepreneurs and in turn these people can learn about their shortcomings and rectify them on a one-to-one basis.

Other Important Features

About - Give a brief and concise description of your business. This is very important also as it can be a crowd puller. 

Milestone - Facebook allows you to keep a record of your worthwhile achievements and growth and it will be tagged on your page along with the historical photograph. You can expect many of compliments! 

Activity Log - The activity Log helps you to manage your posts, messages and comments from a single place.

There are many more such exciting features in Facebook's new Business Timeline Layout that will certainly enhance your business and the way you manage your page. Utilizing Facebook for your business is an asset for success and the new business layout furthers your efforts.

The Pros and Cons of Employee Maintained Business Blogs

Employee blogging is a good thing and a bad thing. A business needs to control their reputation online and offline and having a lot of bloggers spread the word about their business is a good thing, however, it is also a bad thing because it opens up more and more avenues for the business to be attacked on different social media platforms. Therefore, a business must carefully weigh the pros and cons of an action before they go as deep as possible with that action.

The good part of this action is that the business has a greater reach than they did before their employees started to blog on their (or a) website. This means that the company enjoys a greater amount of exposure to the world. They are able to get more traffic because they have more pages to get that traffic. Essentially, the business is casting a bigger net to catch more potential clients and customers. All a very good thing for the business owner or business in the future, because every little piece of publicity helps a business extend their brand.

However, the greater number of pages increases the business's chances of being attacked through those pages. The blogging platforms have their comments set to "on" by default. This means that an internet "troll" can essentially attack a business by posting irrelevant and anger driven comments in the comments field.

The best way to deal with this problem is to turn on moderation in the comment field. This ensures that all comments are moderated and only the positive and constructive comments are allowed on the page. The attacking and devious comments are deleted and do not cause problems for the business. They do not hurt the reputation of the business and they do not hurt the business in the end.

One more thing to keep in mind is that a person who moderates the comments for the blogs should not be the same person who writes the posts. The moderator is a neutral entity who will not take any comments personally, whereas the blog creator is likely to become upset with the comments that some of the blog readers may make on the blog. This keeps the blog writer positive and keeps the reputation of the business clean.

In the end, a business make a decision whether or not the down sides of having employees blogging is worth the upside of having the extra exposure. There are many mistakes that both the business and the employee can make when using this system. Therefore, it must be carefully considered before a business decides to take this course of action.

Remember that employees will extend the reach of the business and may potentially bring in far more customers and clients with their blogs. However, it must be considered that this also opens the business up to attacks from the outside. There is also the problem that a business can be associated with comments from the blogger that they do not believe in themselves. Therefore, there is no right or wrong answer to this question, it just depends on what the business owner wants and needs.

Business Credit Card Payment Processing Solutions

Every business that sells goods and services online requires some form of credit card payment processing. Online payment services are similar to an offline merchant account. When the purchaser enters his details online, the credit card details are passed through an encrypted gateway, authenticated and the funds are transferred to the sellers account. This seamless process is the very foundation that ecommerce is built on. To accommodate international funds transfer, a plethora of different merchant services have arisen. Each of these services differs slightly. Just what are the key types and differences in online credit card payment processing services?

PayPal: PayPal is a payment alternative that is available to facilitate transactions in a diverse range of countries and currencies. Users are required to setup an account and verify their credit card details. They can then purchase goods and services through websites that provide PayPal shopping carts. Merchants that use this service do not need to interface with a bank account. The funds are held within the merchant PayPal account and can be transferred to the merchant FFFDs bank account. If the business is conducted in a foreign currency, currency exchange rates are applied to balance transfers. The advantage of this service is that it is quick to setup and does not require programming experience to establish a payment gateway to the merchants bank account. There are no fees to setup this process and transaction fees are cost-effective for low volume transactions.

3rd Party Solution Providers: Companies such as 2checkout.com provide an internet credit card payment processing service that operates in a similar fashion to PayPal. The advantage of this service is that it supports a wider variety of credit cards. The fees are slightly higher than PayPal and merchants are required to pay a one time activation fee. Funds are held in the merchants 2checkout account and can be transferred to a bank account when required.

Google Checkout: This service is provided by Google and is available only to merchants within the US and UK. Although Google plans to expand this internationally, they have not provided any further details on where and when. The advantage to merchants that qualify is the fee free period that extends into 2008.

Bank Merchant account: Your local bank can usually provide a payment processing service or recommend an authorized solution provider. Bank merchant accounts are usually an advantage to high volume transaction businesses because the processing fees are lower. They usually charge a setup fee and ongoing monthly fee. The service becomes more cost-effective to a business after a certain volume of transactions have been reached. The downside of this option is that it can require programming knowledge to setup the online payment gateway. Unless you have an in-house programmer or use the services of a programmer, the above solutions are usually preferred by web merchants.

This is a basic summary of some common services for processing credit card payments. You can find out more about each service by visiting the respective web site.

Ecommerce Analysis That Counts

E-commerce web analysis deals with traffic measurements, sales conversion, keyword conversion and site performance metrics. Knowing what the numbers mean and interpreting them within the framework of your online business is very important. Small reductions in pay-per-click advertising costs, an increase in sales or site traffic can add significantly to your bottom line. You need to know what ecommerce metrics to focus on and how to setup your e-commerce analysis to benchmark your site performance. Here are some essential components of web site analysis:

Sales Analysis: You should have conversion code installed on all your sales pages to record which search terms your visitors used to produce the sale. This will allow you to refine your search engine and pay-per-click campaigns to target terms that correspond to customer buying behavior. Google analytics has the capacity to measure these statistics. You can learn more about installing and using the features of this package by doing an online search for the Google analytics website.

Keyword Analysis: This applies at the organic and pay-per-click level. By knowing where your traffic is coming from you can refine your advertising options to increase your exposure to traffic that is relevant and decrease exposure to lazy traffic that does not convert. This allows a company to reduce pay-per-click bids and to focus search engine optimization on terms that bring highly targeted traffic that converts.

Traffic Analysis: E-commerce web analysis can indicate where the majority of your traffic is coming form. If you have targeted advertising on portal or partner sites, you can determine the suitability of the target market and adjust your campaigns accordingly. This applies across all search engine disciplines and can indicate areas that need attention and potential hidden areas for further refinement or research.

Content Analysis: A trend that reveals higher page views within your site can indicate potential audience interest that is ripe for further content or product creation. You internet analysis statistics will indicate how long visitors stayed on a web page. Pages that do not attract much interest may be topics that do not interest your target market or that require further advertising effort to bring them to the forefront of visitor attention.

Geographic Analysis: A high percentage of purchasers from a geographic area provides a good indication of where your target market resides. You can then seek advertising partners that have a high exposure to this area and create banner or traffic campaigns to divert relevant traffic to your site.

The above aspects of e commerce web analysis should be considered by any online business that is looking to increase its bottom line.

Ecommerce Sector Growth And Composition

Ecommerce web growth continues to accelerate on a worldwide basis as more consumers gain confidence to transact on the internet, traditional business shifts its service provision to ecommerce platforms and internet access levels in both developed and underdeveloped countries continues to increase. The following information provides a breakdown of the contribution to economic ecommerce growth. The reported statistics are from the US Census Bureau E Stats publication and outline the sector composition and growth rates over the 2000 to year 2005 period.

In the May 2007 edition of the US Census Bureau E Stats publication, it has been reported that business to business transactions by manufacturers and merchant wholesalers accounted for most ecommerce (92 per cent). Trade data indicates that during the period 2000-2005 ecommerce growth for manufacturing continues to outperform merchant wholesale trade followed by retail trade and selected services. As a percentage of total sales, e-commerce sales of merchant wholesalers grew more slowly than total sales.

Ecommerce Growth Rates And Trends:

From 2000 to 2005 manufacturing e-shipments increased at an average annual growth rate of 11.4 percent compare to 2.5 percent for total shipments during the corresponding period.

During 2000 to 2005, e-shipments as a share of total shipments were largest in the transportation equipment group, beverage and tobacco sectors.

The growth of ecommerce sector contributions in value terms: Manufacturing: Transportation and Equipment - 29 per cent

Chemicals - 13%

Petroleum and Coal Products - 8%

Food Products - 8%

Computer and Electronic Products - 7%

Merchant Wholesale trade: In the 16 industries that were recorded, four industry groups stood out contribution wise. Drugs and druggists, sundries, motor vehicles and automotive equipment, and professional equipment and grocery products accounted for 69% of total e-sales.

Retail Trade: Form the period 2000 to 2005, retail e-sales increased at an average annual growth rate of 27.3 percent compared with 43% for total retail sales. Over 90% of retail sales were accounted for by non-store retailers (73%) and motor vehicle parts dealers (18%).

Selected Service Industries: From 2002 to 2005 ecommerce revenues in the selected service industries sector increased at an average annual growth rate of 26.5 percent compared with 6.9 percent for the total revenue of the selected services industries. The two largest sub sector contributions came from the publishing and travel reservation services (23 percent collectively).

Ecommerce growth is expected to continue to accelerate in the years to come as emerging markets integrate into the world economy and as more countries join the world trade organization.