Friday again, and this post is a little late in coming today.  What with downloading World of Warcraft onto a new machine (I know, I know), listening to Jack White’s Love Interruption, and waiting patiently on my invite from Gentlemint, its been a busy day.  With that in mind, I wanted to share a free tip and explain my latest business purchase.

WHAT EVERY FACEBOOK PAGE SHOULD HAVE

Businesses need to have a Facebook page for several obvious reasons, but it’s easy for owners and marketers at small businesses to neglect these pages. Sure, you can be posting relevant content, asking questions to heavy users, and sharing other stuff along, but small businesses have a good way of pulling us away from social media tasks and into other important jobs.  It’s important to communicate with your fans through multiple mediums since they might miss something in one place but find it in another.  While Facebook still has 450 million DAILY users, many more use e-mail and use it on a daily basis.  In 2009, there were 1.4 BILLION e-mail users alone.

What does this mean? Your business needs to have an e-mail capture system on its Facebook page, and preferably as the landing tab to increase e-mail acquisitions.  But how do you do this?

That’s where the free tip comes in today.  AWeber is an e-mail management system that has a Facebook App that allows you to create a capture form for e-mails and add it to a list.  In addition to that, you can also grab other information and add it to intelligence projects.  For example, I created a form on the Dark Horse Facebook page that includes 2 drop down boxes that record user ratings on different service aspects.  This form allows me to not only grab e-mails, but also gather customer comments at the same time!

The monthly fee for AWeber is $19 per month for up to 500 users.  This is well worth the investment.  As for other services, I do not know if they have Facebook Apps but I am sure they are out there,  For anyone wanting to incorporate my suggestions, there are several online tutorials from the AWeber folks themselves that will walk you through them without issue.

The other thing I wanted to talk a bit about today was the continuing importance of multimedia across social media channels and promotions.  For a small business, pictures are an easy of showing your true product, service, culture, etc. while giving your fans the tools to help spread the word.  Evergreen social media marketing always considers the next emerging site and/or technology, and the more I pay attention, the more new sites that seem to cater to multimedia pop up.  Tout offers 15 second videos while several other microblog sites are designed solely for pictures; the trend is towards multimedia and away from text.  Twitter itself is changing towards this trend.

Which leads me back to my latest purchase.  Best Buy tempted me again, and this time I splurged on digital camera and memory card. $300, and the ability to hold over 5k pictures, later I can help owners with events by taping and taking HD pics and vids.  This a second camera that I use, and now offers me a chance to take second perspective pictures.  If it gives me the chance to have 300 unique back links that help drive traffic and community, cool.

All right, Im dozing off here, so it’s off to bed.  Have a good one and enjoy the weekend!