DiamondFans

A facebook page we started in March 2008, DiamondFans, has grown to over a million fans or “likes”. I’ve been talking about DiamondFans for a while and it’s been an wild ride up to this point. I’d say it’s become a great asset for my business and personal brand. If you’re looking for ways to benefit from your facebook page, I can only tell you how it’s helped me and Samuelson’s Diamonds.

1) PR

The page has gotten Samuelson’s Diamonds a tremendous amount of media coverage. From trade magazines to local and national publications, we’ve been there. Pretty cool for a 90 year old small family business to be ranked ahead of most national and international brands.

Click here for the press release titled, “Baltimore Jeweler Beating Ravens to 1 Million Fans on Facebook.”

2) RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

DiamondFans has gotten my foot in the door, meeting and building relationships with the best and brightest in the jewelry and tech industries. I’ve been a featured speaker at numerous jewelry trade shows and even shows like Etail. So I’m thankful for that and I’ve learned a lot and continue to learn from it. We have gained new clients and customers from all over the world and that has been unbelievable.

3) WEBSITE TRAFFIC

Let’s not kid ourselves. A page with a million fans generates some serious web traffic for whatever it is promoting. In this case it’s diamonds, diamond education, and my business of course. Back when facebook tracked IMPRESSIONS (which they do not do anymore), we were recieving 300,000 impressions per link. The clicks follow. Now facebook is tracking “people reached” and “people talking about this” which is actually a much more useful stat. I wonder if twitter could do this – which brings me to my next post which may be titled, “Is It Better To Have A Million Facebook Likes Or A Million Twitter Followers?”. Let’s just say this – a lot more people are reading our DiamondFans posts than most celebrity tweets. There aren’t many who even have a million followers. Tweets are really useless jumble compared to the interaction on a facebook page. It’s so much richer with pix, videos, comments, likes, etc.

4) INSIGHTS INTO TASTES AND TRENDS

If I ever want to know what kind of reaction a diamond or piece of jewelry will get, I poll the DiamondFans. I can see what metals, trends, diamond shapes and jewelry people “like” and I learn from it as a diamond dealer and jewelry retailer. You can’t ask for a better way to test the waters.

CONCLUSION

I know most people will be looking for #5 to be SALES. It really doesn’t have much to do with direct sales so if that’s all you’re looking for, you may not find it on a fan page. If you’re looking to communicate with your customers, pages are very effective. If you’re looking to get visitors to your website and more people to notice your brand, it’s great for that too. However, I do think that Facebook may build an easy, user friendly platform to sell product on your page. Some are doing it now but through outside apps which don’t seem to work as well – plus facebook can’t make any money from that. Either way, I do know that we are doing more business than we were 3 1/2 years ago.

So who knows where this will go?  I’m loving it and I think it’s doing a lot of good for people who LOVE DIAMONDS LIKE ME!

I feel like this has inhibited me a little bit with my creativity. You know, the videos, facebook stuff, and the other ideas that make us who we are. So I’ve been Lost in Transactions. Is it a good thing? Isn’t the whole point of creative marketing efforts to get new customers and create business? Well, it is and we are doing it, so I’m not complaining. But I do need to make time to be more creative.

On that note, keep an eye out for a few more videos – the next one will have to do with our Living Social Deal – it’s a doozy! We are also planning something for our Diamonds Facebook Fan Page when we reach 1 million fans. We’re at 916,000 right now, so it’s coming soon – we may even giveaway a big diamond!

DiamondFans

We reached a big milestone a week ago. Over a half a million fans on our facebook “Diamonds” page! (I know they’re “likes” but I still call them fans). In fact, this week we’ve gained about 30,000 new fans, so the page is cruising.

It’s been a great ride for the past 2 1/2 years and I want to thank the community of DiamondFans for their support. If anything the story is great. A small family business from Baltimore owns the single largest jewelry page on Facebook. We’re very proud of our accomplishment and I thank each and every fan of Diamonds for their support!

What are our plans for this page? Have a listen to Eric Clapton’s “Keep On Growing”…

Of course, my natural reaction was…PANIC! How could this be? I googled everything I could think of and nothing came up. In my mind, there were a few explanations to this:

DiamondFans.net

1) A certain country banned Facebook and all of those fans (I know they are “likes” now but I still call them fans) are gone.

2) Facebook was clearing out phantom/fraudulent accounts and there just happened to be 7,000 of them on my page.

3) People just don’t like diamonds anymore.

4) Facebook is out to get me.

Well, checking this page every five minutes was driving me nuts so I just accepted it and hoped that it would stabilize. Then, Friday night I did a twitter search (don’t do that enough) and found this article on InsideFacebook.com:

Note: Facebook Working on Fixing Fan Count Bug For Pages

Over the last couple days, some Page administrators have been noticing incorrect counts for the number of people who like their Facebook Page. Facebook has confirmed that this is a bug, and is working to fix it today.

According to a Facebook spokesperson, “There was a bug that caused an accounting error for the number of people who like a Page. We are working hard to fix this bug and restore the counts as quickly as possible. No fans or data was lost, and news feed distribution has not been affected.”

We’ll let you know as Facebook makes progress on fixing the issue.

Phew, that was a close one!

Then I found this post the next day on AllFacebook.com:

Facebook Bug Results in Decreasing Fan Counts

Over the past few days many Facebook Page administrators have noticed their fan counts decreasing. If you’ve seen this happen, you are not alone. We’ve reached out to Facebook but haven’t received a response on the issue, which means there is probably a bug which needs to be fixed. Unfortunately there hasn’t been any clarifications from Facebook, but don’t worry as many other people have noticed similar issues.

Logically, it didn’t make sense, and I needed to go with my gut and realize that Facebook can make mistakes. They do have 500 million users and an unbelievable amount of content and data.

So now we’re back up to speed and moving forward on making DiamondFans bigger and better. And I will not let Facebook glitches take me off my game anymore!

Yesterday, Samuelson’s Diamonds wrote a blog post about the fan page changes that Facebook made:

“… Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager…”

I thought about this change and although I understood why the change was being made, it upset me. It upset me because I have put a lot of time and money into our pages, most notably our “Diamonds” Page, which now boasts almost 350,000 fans. Not just Facebook ad money (we have spent a little) but actual jewelry prizes and a lot of TIME, which we paid our employees.  And although we have way more than 10K fans, I do not have an account manager.

On top of that, our Samuelson’s Diamonds Fan Page, for our local retail store, is hovering around 1000 fans. And, although the Diamonds Fan Page has almost 350k fans, we consider our smaller page to be of great significance to our business. We’ve invested a great deal of time and effort in building its content and appeal. Facebook’s determination that a fan count should decide how user friendly the fan page could be just seemed wrong.

How about all of the marketers, big and small, who are building fan pages for other companies? In fact, we are about to launch a new service for the jewelry industry, giving independent retailers and manufacturers the ability to create a dynamic Facebook presence for under $500.

Well not long after this change a message popped up on the developer site:

Hello,

As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.

Thanks for all your feedback,

Matt Trainer

You can follow this topic by clicking here.

I say it’s great and thank you Facebook for taking the first step in caring about your customers.

I firmly believe that your website is still very important, but don’t forget to use your Facebook page to increase your database and talk to your customers. Both can and should work together to make your brand a stronger one.

“I am a fan. I will say pre FB, who would have thought I would be a fan of a jewelry store I have not even been to. Or even just a jewelry store for that matter..Yet I know the history of the store, and watched the footage. Prince on the big screen etc..Even Ron’s Strat…
PS..Ron, go for a Gretch Nashville next…Heaven on Earth!”

There you go.  It’s not about shoving product down people’s throats.  It’s not about selling yourself all the time.  It’s about being yourself and showing everyone your brand and what YOU are all about.  Whether it’s next week or in 10 years, if this guy is ever in the market for a diamond, I think I’ll be on his list.  And even better, maybe we’ll have a jam session!

“Samuelson’s Diamonds, a Baltimore, Md.-based retail jeweler, was chosen as a finalist in the contest for its use of a viral marketing campaign.

The brand created a Facebook fan page simply called “Diamonds,” so that anyone searching for that term could become a fan, thus expanding the retailer’s exposure to a global audience.

The page currently counts more than 260,000 fans worldwide, with diamond enthusiasts in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and everywhere in between connecting with the retailer.

Samuelson’s adds frequent posts, updating its friends on giveaways and photos of new diamond designs that link fans over to Samuelson’s own Web site, SamuelsonsDiamonds.com.”

Here is the full article.  Now the winner was ok, but to me just another flash website from NYC.   But, hey, I’m just a diamond guy from Baltimore so what do I know?  We were honored to get a mention and the good news is that we’re getting some recognition for our Diamonds Fan Page. (currently in the top 30 fan pages in the fashion category)

Look for some more great stuff on the way soon!

On another Facebook note, back in March I created a page called “Diamonds”. Plain and simple. Put up some pics and wanted to see what would happen. Long story short the page has grown to 90,000 fans. Click here and check it out. I have people from all over the world on this page. Now what to do with it is the big question…stay tuned.

In my next post, I’m hopefully going to post a video showing and talking about a BIG DIAMOND I just bought, but for now you’ll have to settle for a great version of “Stagger Lee” from July 4th, 1989 – Enjoy!