Facebook Pages don’t grow by themselves. In order to grow your fan base, you must take action to promote and market it. Once you do, your Facebook Page will prove to be an invaluable marketing tool, each and every day.

Follow the tips below and your fan base will be growing in no time!

Note: To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

1. Invite Your Friends

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But this is where you must start! There are two ways of inviting your friends directly on Facebook:

1. The “Invite Friends” link on the right side of your Facebook Page lets Page admins select a bunch of friends to invite at once. 

2. The “Share” link on the left side of your Facebook Page lets anyone share the page to their personal profile, with an optional message. This is actually more effective than the invite friends method above, since sharing it to your profile makes it more noticeable to your friends.

2. Promote on Your Website

Add the Facebook “like” or “recommend” button to your website, so visitors can become a fan with a single click, without leaving your site! You can construct the code for this button from Facebook:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

3. Add Your Facebook Page to Your Email Signature

You can set this up in just a couple minutes, and it’ll continue to pay dividends by promoting your Facebook Page to everyone you email through out the day!

4. Hook to Twitter

Why update your posts in two places each time? Synchronize Facebook with Twitter, so every time you post to your Facebook Page, it’s automatically tweeted to your Twitter account!

It’s extremely easy to setup: just to go http://facebook.com/twitter to synchronize your accounts.

5. Add Facebook to your Business Cards

Each time you hand out a card to a colleague or community member, they’ll have your Facebook address in the palm of their hand! 

6. Add Facebook to Your Obituary Notifications

We send thousands of obituary notifications on behalf of our clients, each day. And every email contains a link to their Facebook Page.

7. Get a Vanity URL

By default, your Facebook Page’s web address (URL) will be long and obscure, with a bunch of meaningless numbers and letters. Fortunately, Facebook lets you shorten it to something easier to remember!

Facebook used to require you to have at least 25 fans to get a vanity URL, but now every page can!

Just go to http://www.facebook.com/username to choose a shorter address for your Facebook Page.

Just one word of warning: once you set your username, Facebook will not let you change it!

8. Facebook Comments

Replace your blog’s comments with Facebook comments to gain more exposure and distribution. Every comment that is left is also optionally shared to the user’s Facebook profile, providing more distribution back to your blog!

Additionally, any comment you add is also posted to your funeral home’s Facebook Page, engaging your fans. You can find the comments plugin here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

As an added bonus, Facebook Comments dramatically cut down on spam, since it requires a valid user account!

9. Fan Gating

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page’s wall is a huge lost opportunity? If they don’t fan your page the first time they see it, they’ll probably never return. 

Fan Gating is a technique to show a custom splash page to non-fans, encouraging them to “like” your page and become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. Fan-Gating has been shown to increase your fan conversions by up to 300%! 

10. Share Good Content

Sharing good content is the single most important way to succeed on Facebook. The reason is that when your fans engage with your posts (like, comment, or re-share), two important things happen:

1. Subsequent posts by you will be shown to them more prominently by Facebook.
2. Your post will be exposed to your fan’s social network, thereby promoting your page to new potential fans! 

In other words, good posts result in more growth.

Want More???

 To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

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At the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference in Las Vegas, we had the pleasure of presenting to the audience on how funeral homes can go viral on Facebook. We described the basics of setting up a Facebook Page for your funeral home, and presented some tips for growing and engaging your fan base. 

We were floored by the response! We were amazed at how many funeral directors recognized the value of Facebook, yet before the presentation, they were still unsure of how to take advantage of the opportunity.

Make no mistake, Facebook is a huge wave washing over this industry, and those who "learn to surf" are going to succeed at the expense of those who don't. 

Check out the presentation slides below. To access exclusive tips for improving your Facebook presence, just fan the Funeral Innovations Facebook Page and download our whitepapers: 

1. 20 Funeral Insider Tips to Get More Facebook Fans
2. 15 Tricks for Funeral Homes to Engage Their Facebook Fans

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The end of another year means another opportunity for a year-end list! Here's you'll find the 5 most popular Funeral Innovations blog posts of 2011. If you missed any of these, be sure to read up on them to stay on top of the industry!

As a bonus, I've included a short summary of what made each post imporant and why it was particularly popular in 2011.

5. Top 5 Reasons Why Your Obituaries Should be Hosted on Your Website

Many companies sperad misinformation to take advantage of funeral directors, particularly when it comes to the value of obituaries and search engine optimization. This article busts one of those lies and educates funeral directors about why it is critically important for your obituaries to be hosted on your own website, rather than through a 3rd party site or iframe.

This article was particularly popular because many funeral directors can relate to how companies within this industry try to take advantage of them. Educating and empowering funeral directors on the importance of having the obituaries on their website was very eye openeing to many folks.

4. SEO for Small Funeral Homes

Small funeral homes have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), since their funeral home website naturally has fewer backlinks and less authority within Google. Fortunately, this article offered several tips that can drammatically help a small funeral home's SEO, and increase the amount of organic traffic they attain.

This blog post appealed to many funeral directors because the tips for improving SEO, while targeted towards small funeral homes, can actually improve the performance of any funeral home website!

3. Announcing Remembrance Codes

This year Funeral Innovations became the first company in the industry to use QR codes as a way of memorializing your loved ones. Funeral Innovations released a new way for these small barcodes to be scanned by people's cellphones to be brought to a loved one's permanent online memorial. While many other companies have since followed our lead, we were the first to put the QR codes on monuments, to link the physical stone to the online memorial. We now are using QR codes within service folders so service attendees can quickly access to the funeral home's mobile website and leave a tribute.

Read the article to learn more about how Remembrance Codes work. This article garnered a lot of attention because it introduced a new concept of using QR codes within the funeral industry, that has since been more widely adopted by others.

2. Leaders vs Followers in the Funeral Industry

In 2011, Funeral Innovations became the industry's leader in Facebook for Funeral Homes, offering custom Facebook Pages for funeral homes, including powerful fan-gating techniques and Facebook Microsites, full-fledged tabbed websites right within Facebook. Our new approach to Facebook for funeral homes, along with our beautiful designs gained us a lot of attention. Our competitors were caught off guard by our offerings and scrambled to catch up, in some cases copying our designs and marketing a little too closely! But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we are indeed humbled by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception to our Facebook solution.

A little controversy is always good for getting attention, and this post was no exception. Published at the end of 2011, it quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog, receiving a huge amount of viral traffic through Twitter and Facebook. 

1. Top 25 Funeral Companies and Funeral Homes on Twitter 

In advance of our presentation on social media for the funeral industry at the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference, we compiled a list of the top funeral homes and funeral companies on Twitter. Little did we know just how popular this list would become! It has driven an enormous amount of viral and organic visitors, and continues to be one of our most popular posts ever, even a year after it was initially published! 

This post became popular for several reasons. It's particularly useful to know the top funeral companies on Twitter, especially with so many funeral homes now recognizing the value of social media. Additionally, many people who are searching for top funeral companies are coming across this post, and it has consistently ranked as one of our most trafficked organic results. 

And the good news is we'll be compiling a new list of top funeral companies in social media in 2012. So keep your eyes open for that!

What's Coming in 2012?

We hope you enjoyed all the amazing and exciting developments from 2011. We encourage you to continue returning to this blog for education, insights and announcements of the latest innovations in the funeral industry. We promise you that 2012 will be an even bigger year than the last!

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There are 800 million people on Facebook. Are you getting their business?

FI Social Sites helps you harness the viral power of Facebook through its powerful "Fan-Gating" technique and Microsite. Learn more below, contact us to get started, or See A Live Example Now

Fan-Gating

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page's wall is a lost opportunity? If they don't fan your page the first time they see it, they'll probably never return.

Social Site's "Fan-Gating" shows non-fans a custom splash page to convince new visitors to become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. We'll help you increase your fan conversions by up to 300%!

Microsite

Engage your Facebook Fans! Social Sites offer an exclusive microsite, a full-fledged tabbed website right within your Facebook Page.

Drive Customers

Let your Facebook Fans pre-plan without leaving Facebook. Social Sites' offer Facebook-customized pre-planning widgets embedded within your Facebook Page.

Learn More

Contact Us for pricing or to get started today!

Like Us on Facebook to get exclusive "20 Secrets for Gaining More Facebook Fans!"

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At Funeral Innovations, we've always had a friendly relationship with Ryan Thogmartin, founder of Connecting Directors. We've demoed our products to him, and he's praised our web based solutions' simplicity and effectiveness. We've even spent money advertising on his website.

So imagine my surprise when I received an email from his mailing list on Friday, promoting his Facebook solutions, with his headline copied directly from our Facebook Marketing Page!

Here's the headline used on our Funeral Innovations Facebook marketing page, which I wrote over a week ago.

There are 800 million people on Facebook. Are you getting their business?

Now look what Ryan wrote in his email on Friday, a full week after we published our page!

There are 0ver 800 million People on Facebook. Shouldn't you be getting their business?

Wow, pretty similar, right? He changed a few words, but took the rest verbatim. At first I chuckled at his lack of creativity. But as I continued to read his email, it was apparent that he stole much more than a simple headline.

For our Facebook Fan-Gating technique, I wrote the following:

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page's wall is a lost opportunity? If they don't fan your page the first time they see it, they'll probably never return.

Social Site's "Fan-Gating" shows non-fans a custom splash page to convince new visitors to become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. We'll help you increase your fan conversions by up to 300%!

Now let's see what Ryan wrote:

The main goal of your Facebook Page is to get visitors to click the "Like" button! Sending a first time visitor to your Facebook Page's wall is a major no no and a huge lost opportunity.

With Disrupt MG's custom designed landing pages a first time visitor (has never "liked" your page) will be directed to a custom landing page that guides them to click the "like" button, giving you marketing exposure to them. Our custom landing pages will help increase your "Like" conversions by up to 300%.

At least he had the sense here to change a few more words. But still: "lost opportunity", "marketing exposure to them",  "increase conversions up to 300%". He even ripped off our stats!

It gets worse. Not only did he copy the marketing material I wrote myself, but he also directly copied our actual product! 

Take a look at the beautiful custom Fan-Gate we created for Fred Hunter's Memorial Services Facebook Page over a month ago:

Over a week ago Ryan became a fan of the Fred Hunter's Facebook Page. He must have realized how great our Facebook Pages looked because lo and behold, he showed off his new design, which looks almost exactly like the one we created for Fred Hunter's (just less polished)!

Can you spot the similarities? They are hard to miss. Same style arrow pointing to the Like button, vibrantly graphical background, logo with the soft glow. Granted, we didn't invent these techniques, but out of all the ways you can design a Facebook Page, it's amazing how closely he copied ours. 

Here are some more "tells":

See the nice looking ribbon technique we use around "Become a Fan"?

Looks like Ryan decided he likes our ribbon as well!

Guess who else has a new-found fondness of semi-transparent white boxes, vertical listings of 4 benefits, and the value of "Community News"!

Of course, he even separated the benefits with opaque white lines. I wonder where he came up with such a small detail.

Apparently our Facebook pre-planning widget got his attention as well. Funeral Innovations was the first to release a Facebook-embedded pre-planning widget. In fact, we put it right within our customer's tabbed Microsites on Facebook. Now, we'll gladly admit we did not invent the concept of a pre-planning widget. But there a million ways you can construct and word the pre-planning form and questions. Ryan couldn't figure out how to put the pre-planning widget in a Microsite like ours, but he did manage to steal the wording on our pre-planning widget verbatim!

First look at ours, which we created over a month ago.

I love competition. I started my career at IBM, spent time living and developing a startup in Silicon Valley, and enjoy nothing more than pushing ourselves and our competitors towards more and more innovative solutions within the funeral industry. Competition is the lifeblood of innovation. But Funeral Innovations would never, ever blatantly copy our competitors' products or steal their marketing material. That is not competition, that is not innovation, and that is not how we were raised. 

So as you choose who you place your firm's reputation with when working on a social media solution, you must ask yourself:

• Does your technology partner share your firm's values and morals?
• Does your technology partner innovate or do they copy others?
• Do you want to align your firm with a leader or a follower?

Note: I've reached out to Ryan to seek an explanation but he has not responded to my emails.

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Magic Videos by Funeral Innovations were already the fastest and simplest way to generate beautiful tribute videos and engage obituary visitors online.

Magic Videos are the first and only solution to automatically publish tribute videos to the online obituary without lifting a finger. It is the first and only solution to let you use photos submitted by the family and friends from the online obituary.

Now, Magic Videos have become the first and only solution to automatically publish videos to your Facebook Page!

Why is this such a big deal? Because videos shared on Facebook have over 200% engagement versus text only status updates. And videos shared on Facebook have twice the reach of photos. In short, sharing tribute videos to Facebook can drive more traffic to your website and more fans to your Facebook Page.

It all boils down to this: in under 5 minutes you can generate a beautiful tribute video, have the video and its photos automatically published to the online obituary, and now have it automatically posted to your Facebook Page!

Be sure to fan our Facebook Page. We've got some big, exciting changes coming!

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Magic Videos by Funeral Innovations are the easiest and fastest way to create and publish tribute videos. If you are unfamiliar with Magic Videos, they let any funeral director generate beautiful tribute videos online in literally minutes. 

What makes our videos so magical?

First of all, any photos posted to an online obituary are automatically available for use in a Magic Video. That means family and friends of a deceased individual collaboratively contribute the photos to be used in their tribute video. The funeral director can then easily add more photos through a simple drag and drop interface.

But the real magic occurs next. Once the photos are loaded and a song is chosen, a funeral director clicks "Submit." By the time he or she is done with their cup of coffee, the video is rendered and published straight to the online obituary! Not only that, but any new photos used for the video are published to the photo gallery of the online obituary as well. The video file is then available for the funeral director to burn to a DVD to offer to the family or play at the service.

Think about that for a moment: within minutes, not only can you generate a gorgeous video tribute, but also have the video and the photos published to the obituary without lifting a finger! 

Oh, and did we mention that the Magic Videos arecompletely web-based, meaning there's nothing to download and you can generate videos on any computer anywhere in the world?

Having photos and videos on your funeral home's obituaries are important for multiple reasons:

1. The obituaries become much more engaging to the visitors
2. More content drives more traffic to your funeral home's website
3. Rich, beautiful obituaries shows that your funeral home values permanent, online memorialization, helping differentiate your brand

Want to see a Magic Video in action? Watch Savitri Jeethan's tribute video.

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After reading this article, I realized just how far some companies will go to spread misinformation and take advantage of funeral directors' trust and lack of web experience. 

The article is titled "Traffic vs Visitors" and attempts to convince a funeral home why it's ok to host their obituaries on a 3rd party site instead of embedded directly in your funeral homes' website.

It is critical to your funeral home's online success to host the obituaries on your own website, rather than on a 3rd party obituary providers'. It results in more traffic, better SEO, more leads, increased sales conversions, and increased revenue. It allows the obituaries of the families you serve to benefit your funeral home, rather than some other company. And with today's technologies, there is no technical reason you should be using iframes or a 3rd party obituary host.

Our customers have seen up to 15,000 visits for a single obituary! To claim that amount traffic (times thousands of obituaries) has no value to the funeral home demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding modern web strategies. In fact, these obituary providers know exactly how valuable that traffic is, which is the reason they choose to keep it on their own site rather than the funeral homes'!

So to help set the record straight and educate you on how your funeral home can succeed online, here are the top 5 reasons why it is critically important for your obituaries to be hosted on your website within your funeral home's domain. 

1. SEO, aka "Google"

An average funeral home gets between 30-50% of their traffic from search engines. Much of that traffic results from people searching for a particular obituary, and the rest of it is for potential customers who are searching for a funeral home in your area. 

If someone searches for "funeral home in iowa city", how does Google (or another search engine) decide which to show first? Here are some ways your funeral home SEO is calculated, but the main criteria is popularity. What makes a website popular? Other sites linking to pages on that site. And can you guess what pages other sites are most likely to link to on a funeral home website? Yes, the obituaries. 

In other words, if the obituaries aren't hosted on your site (and your domain), then you aren't getting credit for any of the links, and as a result Google and other search engines will not consider your website popular. So the next person that searches the web for a funeral home in your town will see your competitors' website come up before yours. You've just lost a sale! 

2. Branding

Most funeral homes, like other small businesses, spend a lot of money on branding and marketing. It's important for your firm to project a single vision and voice, so potential customers understand what you stand for and why they should use your services. It's so important that businesses spend tens of billions of dollars per year on advertising!

If your obituaries do not project the same look and voice as the rest of your website, you are losing a branding opportunity. The visitor to your obituary no longer associates it with your funeral home. Therefore, your obituaries not only need to be top of the line in terms of user experience and engagement, but they also need clearly link that experience with your brand. If not, your obituary visitors (which is up to 80% of your web traffic) are using your resources without you receiving any credit!

While some 3rd party obituary providers put your name on the obituaries they host, that it not enough. The obituaries should be part of your funeral home's brand, and thus need to be fully embedded in your website.

3. Control

If your obituaries are not on your website then they are out of your control. The links found on the obituaries likely point back to the obituary provider's website, and are put there in order to benefit your obituary provider, not you. Any link on the obituary that does not point back to your own website or services is potentially stealing away traffic and conversion opportunities. If a visitor clicks a link that takes them away from the obituary, they will likely not come back and they will certainly be unable to visit any other part of your website at that point. Again, a lost sale.

Even worse, if you don't control your own obituaries, someone else does. And they might put tracking cookies or even ads and content on the obituaries or their linked-to pages that you or the families you serve don't approve of.

4. Monetization

If the obituaries are hosted on your website, you can control the monetization options. If you want to sell flowers, goods or services on the obituaries, that's a way for you to make money from the service you are providing. If you want to keep the obituaries free, that is up to you as well. It all comes down to your funeral home's approach and how you want to balance serving families with increasing your revenue. We advocate both approaches!

However, if you do not control the obituaries, guess who is likely trying to make money from them in your place. Yes, the obituary provider. Many obituary providers put ads or try to sell flowers, goods, and services within their obituary directories, or even worse, right on the obituary itself. In our view, the obituary and its content is the property of the funeral home, and if it's going to be monetized, that money should rightfully go to the funeral home!

5. Mobility

At Funeral Innovations, we pride ourselves on partnering closely with funeral homes and providing the best customer service in the industry. In fact, our customers are so impressed with this approach that they have never left for another provider!

But what happens if a funeral home wants to leave whomever is providing their website and obituaries to find a better provider? If the obituaries are hosted right within your website, then the old provider will work with the new provider to seemlessly transfer the obituary data and there will be no negative impact on your brand or SEO. All of your existing obituaries will still be found right on your site.

However, if your obituaries are hosted outside of your website, then you will be shocked to discover that the obituary provider was poaching your traffic and search engine optimization all along. Since the obituaries were hosted by them, not on your site, you will have very few pages indexed in Google's search engines. You will realize that the obituary provider is your competitor, not your partner. In that case, you are trapped and the obituary provider knows it. Therefore they have little incentive to keep up with the competition and as a result, they become old, slow and stale in comparison.

Conclusion

As the funeral industry's reliance on the web continues to accelerate, your firm's online success depends on you optimizing your web presence. You literally can't afford to be giving away your most precious online asset: the obituaries.

If you aren't sure whether your obituaries are optimized for the web today, give us a call and we'll be happy to review your current web strategy with you.

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Our company is barely over 3 years old. We are a small (yet rapidly growing) business and we're proud of it. In fact, our competitors would be shocked to learn just how small we are!

If your funeral home is looking for a provider of websites, online obituaries, social media, and DVDs should you trust a small company likes ours, or follow a safe route with one of our much larger competitors?

In order to answer that question, it might help to review this short quiz:

• Do you want to have direct contact with the company founders?
• Do you want to have a voice in the product development and creation of new web solutions?
• Do you want to stick with the status quo, or be on the cutting edge?
• Do you want to work with a company that can execute, adapt, and innovate quickly?
• Do you want to stand out among your competition?
• Do you want to be a partner rather than simply a customer?

If you found yourself answering yes to these questions, then you understand the advantage of working with a small company. And if that is not convincing enough, consider this fact: No funeral home who has tried Funeral Innovations for a couple months has left to a competitor!

How do we manage such unmatched customer satisfaction and loyalty? It's because we are small! We listen to our customers so that they are partners in the process. We use their feedback to improve our products and develop new solutions. We give them direct access to the company co-founders, so they have a voice and know their ideas are being heard. And instead of simply saying that we are innovative, we prove it by continually releasing the most unique, cutting-edge new solutions in the industry.

So the next time a big web provider tries to convince you that a small company can't suit your needs, ask to speak with their founder and find out how quickly they are innovating. Because your business can't risk falling behind the speed of Funeral Innovations.

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Previously we explained how Google's new +1 feature allows Google users to vote on search results that they find particularly useful. The votes are then used by Google to promote the pages in the search results of other people in your network.

Yesterday, Google released new +1 buttons for websites, allowing webmasters to put the voting button right into their website to make it easier for Google users to vote on their page. 

Today, FI announces that we've already integrated the Google +1 buttons in all of our supported obituaries! In addition to the existing Facebook recommendation buttons we already include, the new +1 for Obituaries will make it easy for visitors of an obituary to promote and share it within their network of contacts. 

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Remembrance Codes are an exclusive offering developed by Funeral Innovations that creates a permanent link to a deceased individual's online memorial via a 2-D barcode (or "QR Code"). This one-of-a-kind remembrance makes it easy for the family and friends to visit the online memorial and leave memories, without having to remember a long URL or typing a Google search.

For funeral directors, Remembrance Codes drives additional traffic to the online obituary on their website, and creates customer loyalty and buzz when the Remembrance Code is displayed in a cemetery, or in the family's home. 

Remembrance Codes are available to be installed within a glass case on the granite memorial, or as an elegant, framed keepsake in the family's home. Funeral Directors have also been printing Remembrance Codes right on the service handouts to allow service attendees to quickly read and write tributes from their mobile phones!

The St Paul Pioneer Press, one of the premier newspapers in Minnesota, recognized the unique value of this technology and the benefit provided by the funeral directors who use it. They talked to us about Remembrance Codes and published a very fascinating article.

I talked with one of Funeral Innovations' customers, Roberts Family Funeral Home in Forest Lake. Owner Kelly Roberts told me the QR codes used in memorial folders have been well received, once attendees figure out what the codes are (many have no idea).

"I've had to explain what it is," Roberts said. Once they understand, "They say, 'Oh, wow, that's neat.'

"They see it as a unique way to remember and honor their loved ones, from here on out well into the future," he said. "People who attend the memorial will keep the folder knowing they can go back to access the memorial" via the QR code.

Be sure to read the full article here.

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There are 600 million people on Facebook. We send them to your website.

Funeral Innovations believes social networks are transforming communication faster than any other technology ever has. That's why we've created the best, and easiest, Facebook integration in the industry.

Facebook made easy

Funeral Innovations' Facebook integration makes it simple and automatic to tap into the power of social networks. If you already have a Facebook Page for your funeral home, we connect it to FI by pressing a single button. The rest is automatic.

Don't have a Facebook Page yet? We'll set one up for you!

Publishing obituaries

When you publish an obituary, we give you an option to "post to social media."

1. When selected, the obituary is published to your Facebook Page, including the deceased individual's name, obituary, and a link back to your site.
2. The obituary is then promoted to the News Feed of all your Facebook Page's fans, meaning they'll see it the next time they log in. If they re-share or "like" it, it's distributed to their entire network.
3. We include a link to your Facebook Page in every obituary notification email.

Sharing obituaries

Every obituary on your website contains multiple ways for a visitor to share it.

1. By simply clicking "Recommend", the obituary is shared to that person's Facebook profile
2. By clicking "Share", the visitor can share the full obituary to their entire social network

Sharing tributes

Every tribute left on your funeral home's obituaries contains hooks for "viral" distribution.

1. Each tribute is automatically shared as a comment to your Facebook Page
2. Upon sharing a tribute, the visitor is given the option of publishing the tribute to their Facebook wall, thus sharing it with their entire social network.
3. Every tribute notification email includes a link to follow your funeral home's Facebook Page.
   1. Nothing is shared or published on behalf of the user without their consent
   2. Facebook users and their friends will not be spammed or annoyed by excessive publications
   3. The Funeral Home is the admin of their Facebook Page and has full control over the posts and comments put there


 

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Measure the results

FI Analytics will show you in realtime exactly how many people have viewed each obituary and where they came from. This helps you see the effect your social media campaign is making!

  

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What we believe

Social networks provide powerful distribution channels, but without proper design, can become spammy or annoying. Funeral Innovations designs all of its Facebook integration keeping respect and integrity at the forefront.

Contact us by clicking here to learn more.

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Your firm's reputation is the most valuable aspect of your business. The products and solutions you use reflect on you and your company. That is why it's critically important to control the content that is shown to the families you serve, and ensure it is tasteful and respectful. After all, as a funeral home you are dealing with a much more sensitive subject matter than a social network.

That's why I was shocked to see the following page on Tributes.com. Plastered next to the deceased's obituaries are two large ads showing the message "President Trump?"

Leaving politics aside, these ads are undeniably distasteful and also disrespectful to the families of the deceased. 

So how do you avoid something like this? Protect your families by keeping your obituaries on your funeral home website, and choose your technology partners wisely. Contact us if you'd like to discuss more options or want some guidance and advice.

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Funeral Innovations' goal is to create new, ground-breaking technologies that drive more traffic to your website, more revenue to your bank account, and deliver measurable results. 

How have we done so far?

• We were the first to let you run your funeral home from an iPad
• We were the first to allow customers to design monuments from your website
• We were the first to fully integrate Facebook into your obituaries
• We were the first to utilize QR Codes with our patent-pending Remembrance Codes

Now we're getting ready to release yet another first of its kind technology!

If you are a funeral director looking to stay ahead of the curve and beat your competitors, you won't want to miss this. 

Sign up for our newsletter below, and you'll be the first to hear about this first-in-the-industry solution from the industry's innovation leader: Funeral Innovations.

Sign up for our free newsletter!

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Yesterday Google announced the release of their new social search feature, called Google +1. The concept behind +1 is that you'll get better search results if the people you know share and promote good search results. With the new feature, there is a +1 button next to each Google search result. Clicking this button promotes the content socially within your circle of friends (such as through Google Buzz and Reader), but also the +1 results are aggregated and presented when others perform search results that include a site you voted on.

Google will be rolling this new feature out slowly, but you can get a preview by opting in on the Google experiments page. First, after logging in to Google, click "Join this experiment."

Click the +1 button and confirm that your vote will be public. Then when someone within your network performs a search that includes the result you rated, such as Forest Lake Funeral Home, they'll see the +1 vote for that result.

What does this mean for your funeral home?

It's too early to tell exactly how Google plans to use all of this data. Currently Google says it will influence how the link will appear in search results to people within your social network. In other words, it'll be easier for folks who know you, or you have contacted via Gmail, to find your funeral home's website via search.

However, it is not a stretch to believe that Google will be taking these votes into account for everyone's search results, meaning by voting for your site (particularly within your targeted search terms), you'll be giving your funeral home an SEO boost and could potentially drive more traffic and customers to your site.

In fact, Google themselves hint at this in their official blog:

Say, for example, you’re planning a winter trip to Tahoe, Calif. When you do a search, you may now see a +1 from your slalom-skiing aunt next to the result for a lodge in the area. Or if you’re looking for a new pasta recipe, we’ll show you +1’s from your culinary genius college roommate. And even if none of your friends are baristas or caffeine addicts, we may still show you how many people across the web have +1’d your local coffee shop.

So give Google +1 a try, and let us know what you think. We'll be keeping an eye on Google +1 and all of the latest SEO news to ensure our customers stay on top of the SEO game and drive organic traffic back to their websites.

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Funeral Innovations is constantly researching search engine optimization (SEO) to learn the best techniques and apply them to funeral homes. We confess that we will never know everything there is to know, but we strive to be the SEO experts in the industry, in order to help our customers get the most out of organic web traffic.

No Respect

Lately, we've been studying the SEO challenges inherent to small funeral homes, oftentimes in rural areas. Namely, the small guys (and gals) get less respect from Google and the other search engines! Here's the reason: search engines determine where to put their resources based on their perceived authority of each website. This authority is based on the number of relevant sites linking to the website in question, as well as the amount of traffic and popularity of the website. If your funeral home is small and in a rural area, there's a good chance that you do not have a large amount of traffic or links from other sites to yours. As a result, Google will consider your site to be of lower authority.

What happens if your site is not considered popular in the eyes of the Google? Not only will your pages be ranked lower in the search results, but search engines might take weeks or even months to put it into their search index in the first place - until then, your new pages will be invisible to anyone searching for its content! 

Fortunately, your popularity is only one factor for determining your pages' rankings in search results. Even if you have a relatively low PageRank, you can still take plenty of actions to improve your search rankings.

Unfortunately, if Google and other search engines aren't even indexing pages on your site, there is much less you can do to improve their rank of those pages!

Are Sitemaps the Answer?

At this point, some of you may be wondering, "Can't I just submit a sitemap of all of my links each time I add a new page, to ensure they are indexed?" Yes, you can and should submit a sitemap regularly. In fact, we do this automatically for all of our customers every time they post an obituary. However, just because Google receives and even crawls your sitemap doesn't mean they are going to index all the pages in it!

5 Ways Improve Your Odds

While there is no silver bullet to ensure all the pages on your site are promptly indexed by Google and other search engines, here are some steps you can take to improve your chances.

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What is a Remembrance Code?

Remembrance Codes are elegant keepsakes that use a patent-pending technology to link it with the deceased individual's online memorial via a mobile device - forever.

On the surface, the Remembrance Code provides a family utmost personalization through a unique and beautiful glass keepsake that displays a fingerprint, signature, and even incorporates the deceased individual's favorite color. The magic happens courtesy of a 2-D bar-code displayed on each glass Remembrance Code; when scanned with any smart phone, it automatically opens the associated online memorial within the funeral home's website. Behind the scenes, an algorithm is used to ensure the online memorial is displayed forever, even if the associated funeral home is no longer in business.

Remembrance Codes are available as a keepsake for the family as well as an option to be attached to the foundation of a monument or bronze memorial at a cemetery.

Try it now!

If you don't already have one, search for a 'barcode reader' application on your smartphone. Once installed, use it to scan the Remembrance Code below, to be brought straight to Gloria Elaine Young's permanent online memorial.

 

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Benefits for Funeral Homes

• A permanent link from a physical memorial to your funeral home website
• A new revenue stream for your funeral homes or cemeteries
• A unique and branded keepsake that your families will cherish and talk about
• A way to drive traffic to your online memorials for years to come

 

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Benefits for Families

• A permanent link to your loved one's online memorial
• A unique keepsake that your entire family will talk about and cherish
• A sturdy and lasting build that can be passed on for generations
• Easy access to your loved one's online memorial - no need to remember a URL or perform a search
• Lasts forever - even if the funeral home is no longer around, your loved one's online memorial will be

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Get them now!

We're looking for progressive funeral homes to be our pilot partners for Remembrance Codes. If you want to be among the first to offer this unique service and product to your families, Contact us now. 

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Funeral Innovations is gearing up for something huge. A revolutionary new funeral product that will transform your funeral home's web presence. A new revenue stream for your funeral home. An amazing new service to offer families you serve. A way to drive traffic to your website for years to come. 

You've never seen something like this before!

Sign up for our newsletter below to be the first to find out about this new, patent-pending offering from the industry's innovation leader: Funeral Innovations.

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