Hints and Tips #124: Student App, What's a URL, Facebook Likes Quantity vs. Quality, Blogging: New Affiliates

In This Issue:

• Technology Term: URL
  

• Marketing: Facebook Likes - Quantity versus Quality
  

• Student App: GalaxyGuide

• Blogging: New Affiliate Program - Link Connector
  

 Technology Term: URL

The term URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are like the street address, city, state, and zip code that allows mail to reach a destination. The URL is the Internet's form of a street address and has to include certain letters and characters to identify a location on the Internet, just like the Post Office needs certain information to idenfity a building for delivering a letter. A complete URL like //www.bobology.com begins with the text http://www, then includes a domain name (explained below) to the right, which includes a period, followed by a specific set of characters like com, edu, or gov.

Domain names are used on the Internet to identify the files and data which all managed by the specific domain owner. For example, google.com includes not just one Web page, but many Web pages, files, and services that are managed by the owner of the domain, which is Google. Google "owns" the domain name, and can place Web pages, data, and other files in the domain. Domain names are read by the Internet from left to right. The first group of letters on the right of domain name, the com, edu, gov, etc, are Top Level Domains and are specific terms managed by an international organization called ICANN that manages domain naming rules. In addition to the original Top Level Domains (.com, .gov, .edu, .mil, .net, .org), each country has a Top Level Domain. For example, a domain ending in .ru is for Russia, while one ending in .fr is France.

To the left of the Top Level Domain is a period, which separates the Second Level Domain from the Top Level Domain so the Internet computers can read it correctly. Second Level Domains are registered by people and organizations for use on the Internet. Internet Registrars are companies authorized by ICANN to register, and charge for domain registration. GoDaddy is one of the best known but there are many others such as Network Solutions and Yahoo!.

When you enter a specific domain name after the “www” as in “http://www.yahoo.com ,” and type it in your Web browser, you're telling your computer to contact that Web site and bring the information back to your computer to display it on your Web browser.

$7.99 .COM Domains w/Free InstantPage Site

 Student App from Sacramento: GalaxyGuide

Congratulations to Mary Hellen Fein of Parallax Design Group who published her app GalaxyGuide on both Google Play for Android and the Apple App Store. The app includes information about constellations, myths, stars, a correct pronunciation of each constallation, and help on how to find each constallation in the night sky.

GalaxyGuide is based on the award winning GalaxyGuide multimedia CD-Rom. This is a completely new edition, fully revised. GalaxyGuide won the Silver Apple Award for best Educational Software from the National Educational Media Network. Mary Helen attended the class How to Start Your Own Smartphone App Business at Sierra College in Roseville.

Facebook Likes: Quantity versus Quality

Which would you rather have for your Facebook brand page, 1000 likes or 50 devoted Fans? If you said 50 devoted Fans you understand more than you know about how Facebook brand page marketing works. When I refer to a brand page, I'm referring to a Facebook page for a business or organization, not a personal profile page. People have friends while pages have fans, which are the users that 'Liked" the Facebook page.

But isn't getting Likes necessary to be able to reach people on Facebook? Well, yes, but most marketers who rely on Facebook know how Facebook prioritizes the status updates using what's called EdgeRank. EdgeRank is Facebook's algorithm for determining how important a user's friends and pages are to them and determines what and where status updates appear in a user's Newsfeed.  A higher EdgeRank score by Facebook results in status updates appearing higher in the user's Newsfeed. EdgeRank is a secret formula, but Facebook marketing experts have determined that three factors influence the EdgeRank score. These are recency, frequency, and the type of interaction. An interaction is action such as liking a status update, commenting, sharing, or posting on a Wall.

Recency is how recently the user interacted with a friend or a page. The longer the time after an interaction, the lower the EdgeRank score. Frequency compares how often a user interacts with friends and pages and results in  a higher score for those friends and pages that have the most common interaction. Type of interaction is used to give a weighted value to interactions that are interpreted by Facebook as more significant than others. For example, comment on a status update is considered more important than a like action.

Let's look at a Facebook page that has 1,000 likes but with no status update likes, comments, or shares. EdgeRank assigns low scores for frequency (one like per fan), recency (after the first like, the score goes down), and type of interaction  (virtually none). As a result, although the page has 1,000 fans, it's unlikely that the status updates will be visible to any fan since they simply don't interact with the page.

The Facebook page with 50 active fans scores higher with its fans for recency, frequency, and type of interaction. As a result, the page's status updates appear higher in each fan's Newsfeed, so they are likely to be visible. Also, the user's friends are more likely to see the page's status updates when viewing the user's Timeline. Each interaction by a fan can also create a notification to the fan's friends about the interaction. An example is when a user comments on a status update, it's likely that the user's friends will see that comment.

So what does this mean for Facebook marketing?

Quantity does give a page the ability to communicate with fans, but if the fans have no interaction with the page it's unlikely that the page will be visible. Interaction is the way to get visibility with a fan, which means understanding the type of content your fans find important and are willing to like, comment, and share. As a result, smaller, more engaged fan base can have significantly more impact that a larger, unengaged fan base.

Blogging: New Affiliate Program LinkConnector

Linkconnector is a new affiliate network that I've started using with a few merchants. It's an easy network to sign up with, just click on the logo on the left or the link below. The merchants include over 200 merchants with a wide variety of products and services including stock photos, software, publishers, household, kitchen, and more. It's easy to get lnks to use for the merchants and Link Connector has a useful Widget creator that will generate HTML code to match a Web site design, sizes, and styles. Here's an example of a merchant widget for iPhone accessories I inserted into this newsletter with a scrolling list of items pulled and updated from the merchant's Web site. It took about three clicks to create this, get the HTML code, and insert it on the page.

Join the LinkConnector Network