Every single product announcement at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show includes a reference to Facebook.

This trend repeats what we noted about last year’s conference in Las Vegas: Announced innovations have some integration with social media, along with a Facebook page to promote the brand.

And this year CES’ exhibitor count hit a new record, roughly 3,100. Their mentions of Facebook seem all the more interesting when you consider that the show is supposed to be focued on electronic devices more than any applications.

That absence means those of us who aren’t attending the conference have to slog through media reports to find out what’s going on. What are you reading about CES and social media that’s got you most intrigued, readers?

Facebook has over 800 million members, all of whom might be potential customers for your company.

That’s great, but it doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t interact with those who currently like your page. 

Here are 10 ways to keep your page in your your followers’ news feeds — and in their minds.

Ask Questions

Whether you’re posting a status update asking a question, or constructing a poll, people love to be asked what they think. Giving your followers a forum for their opinions will surely inspire some responses. 

Most people spend hours on Facebook daily; this is a much easier outlet to share their thoughts than old-school letters. 

Ask something creative or personal. If you sell cars, ask, “What was your first car?”  If you just started a new line of shoes, ask your customers which pair is their favorite and why.

Respond

People enjoy giving their two cents, but they don’t like talking to a void. Reply often to the responses posted by your followers; ask follow-up questions. 

If your site receives a large volume of traffic, you can inspire fuzzy feelings by posting blog entries that address the most popular or intriguing questions you receive. You can also host free webinars to discuss topics that are getting a lot of wall time on your Facebook page.

Personalize Your Comments

Facebook doesn’t have threaded commenting, but we’ve all seen people addressed as “@username.”  Simply acknowledging the person who asked a question or offered a brilliant response will make that person feel special, and it gives him a great reason to post something on his own wall. 

You’d be surprised at how often a personalized greeting can inspire a glowing status update. 

Post Often, And During Peak Traffic

Condition your followers to expect new content from you. If you post daily, or several times per week, your readers will naturally start checking your page to see if you’ve posted something new. 

Best of all, take it to them: Post during times when most of your users will be online — somewhere between 9:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. in your time zone, when everyone’s at work. Popping up in their news feed when they’re online will guarantee you’ll be on their radar.

Host A Promotion

Many of your fans started following companies on Facebook in order to qualify for giveaways or contests. Offer something for free to your users occasionally, on the condition that they “like” your page or update. This increases your number of fans, but it also ups your traffic – your users’ “like” activity will pop up in their friends’ news feeds and provoke more activity.  (Imagine the goodwill you’ll receive from the person who wins!)

Utilize Cross-Exposure

Integrate your website, your Twitter account, and your other social media sites with Facebook. 

This will enable your clients to visit one site and contribute to a conversation on another, without leaving the original site they visited. 

For example, if you’re a microbrewery asking fans for name ideas for your newest beer, you’ll increase the exposure for your marketing campaign by engaging both your Facebook and Twitter audiences.

Do Some Good

Your page doesn’t exist solely to sell your product.  It serves many purposes, and promoting a cause or charity should be one of them.  This activates your fan base in a motivating way, and it demonstrates compassion on your part.  If you own a pet supply store, encouraging your followers to contribute to a Humane Society campaign will push them to impact the outcome of something bigger than themselves – and your company.

Maintain A Positive Image

Facebook pages aren’t the place for companies to complain about the economy or changes in the industry.  Keeping your tone light and your topics engaging is crucial to maintaining readership.  However, that doesn’t mean others won’t post negative comments on your page. Address their concerns quickly and professionally, and follow up with the posters off Facebook. Your fans will watch how you react and respond accordingly. 

Make Your Point Fast

People love Facebook because it allows them to get several bites of information in a short amount of time. Catch their interest by promising them a short time investment — post pictures when they can make your point for you, and keep your status updates short. 

If your updates inch above 200 characters, your audience will lose interest. Brevity is your friend.

Provide Information And Sneak Peeks

If your hours or location have changed, you have new products, or your policies are being updated, let your Facebook fans know. 

Your readers will appreciate a heads-up, and it may remind them to stop by or place an order. When you are releasing new products or services, giving your established followers a preview of your new items will inspire curiosity and convey a sense of loyalty. 
Your Facebook fans are interested in you; they need to feel that you’re interested in them. Reward their investment by engaging with them regularly, and take their feedback under consideration. 

They are your fan base, so they’re going to have the best insight into what your current and future customers want. You may not actually earn 800 million fans, but you’ll garner the ones who are the right fit for you.

Guest writer Louis Rix is the marketing director of NetCars.com.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

The crowded Facebook campaign-management field has a new addition with some questionable features: Self-described “Facebook marketing bomb” FaceDominator.

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Facebook has phased out the native discussion tab for pages, which means administrators need to add their own.

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Message to Check Point Software Technologies: Make sure you have your facts straight before assigning an infographic to an illustrator. The vendor put out a release saying one in five links posted to Facebook’s news feed lead to viruses, when in fact the social network blocks unsafe URLs on up to 20 percent of shares that go up to the site.

Words With Friends narrowly slides into the top spot in the first 2012 ranking of Facebook’s fastest growing applications.
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Many have documented the widespread use of Facebook while intoxicated, but those who make New Year’s resolutions to sober up go uncounted.

A submenu in timeline provides a convenient way to commemorate recovery from addiction,especially when the privacy settings are rigged to limit visibility to likeminded folks.

The international organization with the greatest success in helping people overcome addictions has “a tradition of anonymity at the level of press, radio and film.”

That policy has had individual members of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step recovery groups guessing about what to do with respect to Facebook, especially given the widespread misunderstanding of the privacy settings on the site.

These organizations refrain from maintaining official pages and groups on the site, but individual members tend to post status updates about recovery milestones.

Now the new timeline profile includes a simple way to mark one’s sobriety date, which recovering alcoholics and addicts often regard as a second birthday.

Privacy settings can limit visibility of this life event so as to respect anonymity — while Facebook’s smart lists don’t detect whether friends are members of 12-step organizations, one can manually configure a list consisting of contacts from just such a group.

To post a sobriety date, head for the area where you input a status update on a profile page, then click on the third link to the right, labeled “life event.”

That pulls down a menu from which you’ll want to select “health and wellness.”

Clicking on that pulls out another set of options to the right.

They include “overcame an illness” and “quit a habit,” which could function as ways to commemorate a recovery milestone if you don’t mind having either of those labels.

To use your own words to describe your milestone, such as “sobriety date,”  click on “other life event.”

The set of fields that come up include date, name of the event, location and “who with.”

Most importantly, the bottom right-hand corner of the data entry area includes a link for limiting visibility to friends or a subset of friends — here’s where you can opt to have only people in recovery be able to see the milestone.

Two of the most common New Year’s resolutions, losing weight and and quitting smoking, are more easily kept through using Facebook applications that tap into positive peer pressure.

However, a number of apps in the category with decent monthly user totals aren’t available, making us wonder whether these tools are undergoing upgrades to leverage Facebook’s improved open graph as announced this September.

On the diet and exercise front, MyFitnessPal, with 9,000 monthly users, did not offer a description on its page, and the app was misconfigured.

MyDiet, with 600 monthly users, provided a lengthy description, but trying to load the app resulted in an error message.

Even more surprising, industry kingpin Weight Watchers, with 20,000 monthly users, claimed to have an app, but clicking on the button brings users to the company’s website.

Turning to smoking, Livestrong MyQuit Coach: Dare to Quit Smoking, with 400 monthly users, resulted in the same lack of content or app as MyFitnessPal.

As for apps that did actually work, in the diet and exercise category:

• LilySlim Weight Loss Tickers, with 500 monthly users, uses hand-drawn graphics to display users’ achievements in weight loss, exercise, and diet.

• Fit-ify! Exercise Tracker allows users to track running, cycling, swimming, aerobics, and other exercise activities, giving out awards for reaching milestones. Unfortunately, the app does not yet support secure browsing (via a https://).
• Perhaps the most interesting app we found, DietVille — which is not from Zynga, but resembles the Facebook game giant’s offerings, such as FarmVille and CityVille — brings a social gaming aspect to the process, pushing users within game play to lose weight and meet their goals.

And to aid Facebook users in the quest to quit smoking, there’s:

• QuitNow, with 2,000 monthly users, actually directs users to an app for iPhone and Android devices that tracks information such as day of a user’s last cigarette, days without smoking, cigarettes not smoked, money saved, time saved, and the ability to share results via Facebook and Twitter.
• QuitometeR, which boasts 1,000 monthly users, describes itself as “a community of ex-smokers and smokers who want to quit smoking,” and it displays time since quitting and money saved on users’ Facebook profiles.

• Stop Smoking Counter, with just 200 monthly users thus far, provides similar statistics to QuitNow and QuitometeR, but unfortunately, it also does not yet support secure browsing (via an address beginning with https://).

Readers: Are you using any Facebook apps to help yourselves lose weight, quit smoking or meet other goals?

Religious pages continue to have the most engagement on Facebook.
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Jesus Daily ended 2011 as the leader in page engagement, but how did the holiday impact the rest of the religious pages on the engaging countdown? We’ll also circle the globe and look at the massive surge in interactivity from pages trending within the international pages subcategory.
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