2011 saw a lot of action in the social media stratosphere, especially when it came to Facebook marketing tactics. Each year social media will continue to change at a faster pace and marketers will need to continue to stay ahead of the curve. Here’s a list of some of the most important tips & tricks for marketing on Facebook from 2011.
1. Use the improved menu for Facebook Page Administrators with more than one Page.Detailed in this article on AllFacebook, the recently added feature eliminates a few clicks to view the notifications to your various Facebook Pages. In a nutshell, it makes the whole process of monitoring your various communities on Facebook a lot quicker.
2. Enable subscribers on your Facebook profile. Are you actively sharing content about a particular topic? Is one of your clients a well known personality? Are you a journalist? This year Facebook made it so people, who couldn’t view your activity before, can now follow your personal profile and follow information you choose to make public. Here’s how to enable subscribers to your profile.
Take a look at following people and how they have a massed a huge following to their personal profiles for a variety of purposes:
3. Add the Subscribe button to your website, especially if you have multiple contributors. Of course, you’ve got to enable the Subscribe feature to your personal Facebook Profile first. Here’s where to find the code to add the plugin to your website.
4. Posting on your Facebook Page between 8PM & 7AM receives 20% more user engagement.Buddy Media produced a white paper on strategies for effective wall posts, sharing a variety of insights on marketing for Facebook based on the analysis of 100′s of Facebook Pages.
5. When posting on your Page’s wall, tell your audience to Click “LIKE” in your posts. Calls to action work wonders for driving engagement to your content in the newsfeed. Here on CVS’s Facebook Page they’ve used this technique at the end of their post to increase the amount of like’s this video received.
6. Use fill in the blank’s style posts for high levels of engagement from your Facebook audience.
7. Optimize your Facebook Page’s photo banner to give a branded experience to your fan base.
8. Have your Page favorite/like other Facebook Pages of related product lines, other store locations or any other relevant subject matters to feature on your Page. These featured likes will rotate between 5 different pages each time your browser refreshes, although you can add more than 5 pages to the list. It’s mainly a chance to express what your brand like’s, giving it a voice it didn’t have prior to the February Page redesign.
9. Ask open ended questions in your Facebook posts to help increase the amount of comments that post receives.
10. Use Sponsored Stories to increase brand lift and utilize this new social aspect of Facebook ads. When people hear about a brand from their friends, they’re twice as likely to engage.
11. Switch between uploading the video content you share from your YouTube channel and from Facebook videos. Uploading your videos on YouTube will get the video greater exposure in the search engines, but uploading your videos in Facebook will get the video added exposure in the newsfeed and the ability for someone to like your page and video from within the video itself.
12. Optimize your Profile photo to highlight your brand, product lines, promotions, fans and more.
13. Choose to set your wall to either display posts by everyone or just from your Page. For some brands, it might be best to hide posts from fans on the everyone tab and only show the Page’s marketing messages as the default views. This depends on many factors, one of which is audience size.
14. Use the vertical link menu on the left hand side of your Page to display applications and destinations that serve as resources for fans about your brand and offerings.
15. Engage with other Pages as your Page, to help drive engagement between Pages and between the related audiences of those Pages. With the Facebook Page redesign in February, Page admins have been able to log in as their Facebook Page and act as if they’re a regular user that’s able to comment, like and interact on Facebook.
16. When creating tabs for your Facebook Page, use the Static Tab 2.0 application. It’s free, easy to use, gives you many options for customization, helps you move away from soon to be deprecated FBML to iFrames and allows you to add up to 7 tabs to an unlimited amount of Facebook Pages. Here’s how to setup your Facebook tabs using Static Tab 2.0.
17. Don’t rely on Facebook’s link function alone, leave the link at the end of the text in your post as well. By giving your fan base more opportunities to click a link in your post, the more clicks you’ll get to the content you’re sharing.
18. Schedule your posts for when you’re away from the computer, but want to reach audiences at times of the day that have the highest levels of engagement and less competitions from other Facebook Pages. Previously, Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, EdgeRank, would give less visibility to a Page’s content when posted through a third party tool like HootSuite or TweetDeck. Now, Facebook’s newsfeed has been altered to not negatively affect posts of this nature, allowing for the same visibility as if it was posted from Facebook. I recommend switching between posting from Facebook and the third party tools.
20. Mentioning your fans by name in the comments on your Facebook posts is one of most beneficial ways to give a personal touch to your brand’s Facebook presence. In some cases you’ll be able to use an @ sign and tag a user in your comments to them, in other cases you’ll just have to type out their name. Either way, this gives a personal feeling that social media is all about, connecting with your advocates one on one.
21. When engaging with your Facebook audience, sign your name when directly interacting with users. By signing your name after a comment, you’re removing the mystery behind who your audience is actually chatting with and again, adding your personal voice to your brand’s page.
22. A handy tip for measuring successful engagement per post, look for 1% of your audience to interact with each post that is shared on your Page. Just take your existing audience size, divide it by 100 and the result will be the number of people who should be engaging with your post via shares, comments & likes.
23. Enable users to tag your Facebook Page in their photos to help organically grow your audience and impressions. Go to Edit Page, then Manage Permissions and be sure to check off the box that says People can add tags to photos by [Your Page Name].
24. To improve the SEO of your Facebook Page, set three keyword rich sub-categories for your Place Page. Go to Edit Page, then Basic Information and then define these sub-categories keeping Facebook search and the search engines in mind.
25. Draw your audience from your YouTube videos and channel to your Facebook Page by including annotations throughout your video with a URL to your Page.
Here’s a wonderful example of using YouTube annotations to grow your Facebook fan base:
26. Use the Talking About This metric to get a true sense of the engagement on your Facebook Page. This public metric give you a better sense of your interactions with your audience, outside of the number of people that just like your page.
27. Add a Facebook Like Box to your website to easily allow your web visitors to become a fan of your Facebook Page.
28. Incorporate photos in line with your other posting strategies, to get higher visibility in the newsfeed. Photos have a higher weight with Facebook’s EdgeRank (plus people love them), so utilize them when you can with other strategies to help get your content get more traction.
Here’s an example of Sephora doing just this:
29. Repost the same article on your Facebook Page for added engagement, but be sure to alter the text/title of the post to give the appearance of different content. Utilize this reposting technique over a short period of time so there’s a gap between when you post the first and second time, while also not waiting to long and risk losing the relevancy of the content you’re sharing.
30. Keep the narrative short to maximize the number of shares of your content, preferable 80 characters or less. Learn some of the many other ways to get your Facebook content shared.
31. Don’t automate connections to your other social networks on your Facebook Page. Having your Twitter feed or YouTube videos as a tab on your Facebook Page is a wonderful way to give your audience as much content about your brand as possible. However, it’s important that your tweets, YouTube videos or content from other platforms aren’t being automatically added to your Facebook Page’s wall. This could lead to too many posts on your Page, repetitive content being shared or irrelevant platform specific messaging, all of which could being to irritate your fan base.
32. Use the updated Facebook mobile app to engage with your fans on the go. There’s a few different versions of the application depending on what phone you have, here’s a deeper look at how to manage your Facebook Pages from the iPhone.
33. Browse Facebook Studio for insights on how others are marketing on Facebook, especially when it comes to creative and innovative ideas that Facebook themselves thought were one of a kind.
34. Occasionally drive traffic to your website from the content you post, being clever or mysterious will often lead to higher click through rates. By clever or mysterious, I mean be vague about the destination of your link but enticing with the copy you use in the post. Basically, teaser content so people are interested to visit your link.
Target’s Facebook Page utilized this exact tip not too long ago, which seemed to get high levels of engagement:
35. Use Facebook Questions to add some variety to the content you share and as a way of polling your audience to see what aspects of your brand they truly enjoy.
36. When offering coupons, don’t make fans do the math. Buddy Media’s study incidcates that “$ off” offers generate twice the engagement of “% off” offers for the retail industry on Facebook.
37. Share milestones you’ve reached on Facebook or as a brand with your audience. Whether you’ve finished a volunteer project as a company or reached 300,000 fans on Facebook, tell your fans, so they can help celebrate and spread the word.
38. Encourage check-ins on your Page and at your physical location. Although Facebook Deals was a flop, getting traction from check-ins on Facebook is still a useful way to grow organic impressions of your brand, especially when it comes local & small businesses.
39. Share the testimonials, positive feedback and recommendations about your brand. If your fans love your brand and are vocal about it, share this sentiment with the rest of your audience, making sure to mention the original feedback. The addition of the recommendations feature on a Facebook Page, specifically when you first like a Page, gives marketers an opportunity to promote their praise and feature one of their most active and happy fans.
40. Measure your return on investment with Facebook’s updated Page Insights. The new version of Page insights has shifted the focus of these internal analytics around engagement as opposed to audience size. Understanding how each post has affected your Page’s virality overall is a wonderful way to see what worked and didn’t work and how you can continue to strategize for the future.
Did you find any of these tips applicable to your own Facebook marketing strategy? Share what Facebook marketing tips and tricks you live by in the comment section below.
Yes, Google+ recently launched but the prevalence of Facebook as a social platform hasn’t changed, especially for marketers. There are a ton of tutorial videos out there, giving insights on different aspects of what Facebook offers marketers. I’ve sifted through the lot and pulled out a list of some of the most helpful Facebook video tutorials for marketing purposes. Here are my top video suggestions:
This video from Facebook itself, helps simply conceptualize the purchase cycle from people engaging on Facebook. This short video is a great way to visualize the power of recommendations from friends and how Facebook is merely echoing recommendation on a measurable scale. It helps give you a simple way to explain the importance of Facebook for business to others (clients) and how a marketer can connect with customers at every point of the purchase cycle.
This video helps highlight everything from the type of content you should be sharing on Facebook (short and sweet is the way to go), metrics to monitor your success within Facebook (engagement per post), the benefits of Facebook Places (there’s lots) and more. Mari Smith, one of the many social media gurus out there, highlights these features in an interview conducted by HubSpot. It’s half hour long video, but worth the info, even if you skip through to different parts of the video.
Brought to you by the Social Networking Academy, this video gives you an in-depth look at Facebook’s Subscribe Feature. This feature, part of the round of updates following F8 and the launch of Google+, has a lot of potential for marketers and publishers on Facebook. By allowing people to follow your public updates from your profile and following the public updates of others, you can help grow a larger, more influential network and gain more exposure for the content you’re sharing. Learn how to allow this feature and how it affects your messaging across Facebook.
4. Anatomy and Best Practices for Facebook Ads via Traffika
Facebook ads are one of the big money makers for Facebook as a company, but they can also help benefit you as a marketer by expanding the reach of the existing content you’re already sharing on Facebook. With amazing targeting capabilities and social features to the ad’s, Facebook ads can be a real benefit. This video by Traffika, highlights the four parts of a traditional Facebook ad and how to use them inline with best practices for higher conversions.
5. Converting Your Facebook Personal Profile into a Facebook Page via Social Vision Media
Pages are the official home for business, brands and public figures on Facebook. However, many businesses are still using a regular Facebook Profile to represent themselves on the platform. This is against Facebook’s terms of service and is a very limited way to connect with a network of loyal fans. Social Vision Media shows you how to convert a personal Profile on Facebook to a Page, changing your friends over to fans, therefore saving your connections and moving them to the appropriate place on the network. This is where you should begin when starting this tutorial: https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18918
6. The World Is Obsessed With Facebook via Alex Trimpe
Facebook and social media is still in its infancy and many people are still doubting its importance. Alex Trimpe put together a wonderful two minute video of some of the most shocking facts and statistics about user activity on the social media giant. This is a resource in terms of viable facts and figures you as a marketer can share with your CEO, potential clients and any one else that is unclear of the benefit Facebook offers.
Soon after the Facebook like button was released, plugins hit the scene. This has helped thousands of websites further connect their web visitors to their social audience and vice versa. Social plugins have been around for awhile now, so you would assume most websites would have implemented them but surprisingly, many still haven’t. This video is a quick and simple overview of how Facebook social plugins are a benefit to any website looking to connect and influence their audience.
8. Eight Ways to Find Great Social Media Content via Mari Smith + Social Media Examiner
Lastly, content is and always will be the driving force behind social media, especially on Facebook. Again, Mari Smith takes us through a tour of some of the most important and effective ways to find content to share about your brand on Facebook. Watch the video to learn ways to find content, like using Google Alerts or Google Reader to find brand mentions.
Have you come across other beneficial Facebook marketing videos? Share these videos with us in the comment section below if they’re worth a look, we’d love to see what you’ve got!
Managing a Facebook Page or multiple Facebook Pages can often be a 24/7 commitment, depending on the size of your Page’s audience and their level of engagement with that Page. One way to help lower the amount of time you’re in front of a computer is by posting and interacting with fans from your mobile phone, in this case, the iPhone. The Facebook App for the iPhone was recently updated, making it much easier for a Page administrator to interact with their Facebook audience on the go. To deal with this problem many schedule their Facebook posts when they know they’ll be away from the computer, but there are reasons why you shouldn’t post on Facebook with third party tools.
The latest changes to the app, which coincide with the release of the Facebook app for the iPad, give users a much cleaner layout of the Facebook platform, making it both easy and effective for Page administrators to use. When you first open the Facebook app for the iPhone, the new home screen lays out all your options much more concisely, allowing you to browse your News Feed, check your messages, check-in with Facebook Places, view upcoming events and search through your friends list with greater ease than before.
Facebook Page Management
One of the biggest improvements to the new layout of the Facebook for iPhone app is how your Facebook Pages are displayed. Previously, you had to search through all the Pages you like and admin, and then add them as a favorite. By adding them as a favorite you could quickly access them from the homepage of the app.
Thankfully the new app eliminates this extra step for Page administrators and simply puts all the Pages you administer in a list on the homepage of the app. This cuts down time, making your social media management efforts that much easier. With this change you can now quickly go down the list and choose which Page you wish to update. You can also see numbers to the right of each Page on your list of Pages, indicating notifications for that particular Page. This change helps Page administrators spend less time roaming their Facebook Page on their iPhone for comments from fans and more time responding to fan feedback because it’s now super easy to see that a notification was triggered.
Posting to Your Facebook Page
You can still share a photo on your Page, write a post for your Page and respond to a comment on your Page as you did before with the previous version of the Facebook for iPhone application. However, sharing a photo on your Page has slightly changed when it comes to the variety of customization options. After you land on the Facebook Page you wish to update, you’re given two options once you’ve reached the wall tab. You can either write a post or share a photo in terms of updating the Page. Writing a post simply allows you to add text or links to an update on your Facebook wall, while sharing a photo allows you to share a photo of your choosing. The photo option has become a little more dynamic in terms of allowing you to tag others and write a caption. By clicking on the photo anywhere, then typing in the name of a person, event, group or Page, you’re able to tag them in the photo you’re about to share. The photo you share can come from a photo you’ve just taken or from the photo album on your phone. The ability to add a caption is super easy as well. All you need to do is tap where it says write a caption and begin typing away. From here you can upload your photo to your wall at your leisure.
Other Noteworthy Features
App Notification Settings, Made Easier
You were always able to change the notification settings of your Facebook for iPhone app, but now they are much clearer and easier to view and change.
External Applications Integration
Applications like Foursquare and Instagram already existed as applications within Facebook, but they’ve been made more accessible from the updated Facebook for iPhone app. The new layout seamlessly integrates the applications already given access to your Facebook account and installed on your iPhone. This is an interesting move for Facebook in terms of Foursquare and Instagram because Facebook at one time wished to dominate the location based social media vertical and in the case of Instagram, Facebook attempted to buy the company and incorporated its photo filters into Facebook. In both cases, Facebook failed to overtake the market these social platforms specialize in. Maybe this is Facebook’s salute to these platforms for capitalizing on what they do best?
Privacy Settings Added to App
The new app also addresses the continuing concerns that Facebook users have regarding privacy. Privacy settings were not very clear within the previous version of the app, but now they are much more concise and easier to customize right from your iPhone.
Facebook Places with an Easy to View Friend Map
Facebook Places was Facebook’s big push for the last year or so, but recently they handed the torch off to Foursquare and gave up on controlling the location based social media space. However, this feature shows you where your friends have recently checked in on a nice, Google Maps style map.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the Facebook for iPhone app will be upgraded again in the future. Until then, do you find these latest changes helpful for your social media monitoring efforts? What other changes to the Facebook for iPhone app would you like to see?
Prices of Facebook advertising have risen 40% in cost-per-click, according to a marketing report on the first quarter of 2011. This clearly shows that the rise in the cost of Facebook advertising is attributed to the growth of the popularity of using Facebook advertising overall. With the introduction of sponsored stories, it appears Facebook truly feels it has the room to raise the cost of its social ads. Since the prices are rising, it’s important to get the most bang for your buck. Begin by understanding what the best practices are for a Facebook ad campaign. What’s better than seeing examples from who’s doing it right?
7 Best Practices for Facebook Ad’s Campaign
1. Social ads work 3x better than traditional Facebook ads. With the addition of Sponsored Stories, many advertisers have seen higher click-through-rates, brand lift, ad recall and increased likeliness to recommend due to the social aspect of these new ads. Users can Like the content of the ad directly on the ad, comment, share, see which of their friend’s already likes the ad’s content and more. In the end, these ads make it easier for word of mouth to spread via the recommendation of friends and for users to interact with and share their content.
Example: Express
2. Re-targeting existing fans helps increase acquisition and engagement. If you’ve already gotten an existing fan base that’s the size you’re looking for, but wish for more engagement, then using ads to re-engage your audience is a wonderful way to help raise the overall visibility of your Page. By increasing your engagements with fans, you will naturally increase the number of fans that like your Page. It’s also helpful to target your existing fans with ads that sent them to your website or product pages because they’ve already indicated they like your Page. 70% of the time when people like a Page, they truly like your brand and sending traffic to your website in this instance will work much more effectively.
Example: Kreayshawn
3. Simple no brainer copy is the best way to go. Facebook users love to browse through their profile and don’t have time to stop and read extensive content with a confusing message. Keep the copy of the ad short, sweet and relevant for the best CTR.
4. Start wide with your demographic targeting, than alter the focus based on the resulting interest the ad receives. Many advertisers make the mistake of using very specific targeting in the beginning of their Facebook ad campaign. Starting much broader, then focusing the targeting as you proceed has shown to be much more successful overall. In this example, RadioShack has added people’s interest in cycling to the ad’s copy. They are running a different campaign involving cycling right now, so they focused their ad campaign to include the right age range and interest groups for ads involving cycling.
Example: RadioShack
5. Avoid ad blindness by rotating ad images and copy often. This is one of the most important things you can do to ensure that Facebook users continue to see your ads among the plethora of other information thrown at them on every page. Different combinations of copy and eye catching imagery will work to help your ads standout from the crowd and continue to spur engagement.
Example: FIAT USA
6. Promote Facebook contests and campaigns with ads to help encourage increased engagement.This technique can help bring more Facebook users to enter your contents or interact with your other promotional campaigns on the network. This will increase the conversions you’re looking to achieve with this original campaign or promotion (like email sign-ups or more Fans) by echoing it through Facebook ads.
Example: Wicked Lasers
7. Similar to the suggestion to use social ads vs. traditional ads, use Like buttons on ads often. It’s super simple for someone to like something and why make them visit your Page to do so, when it can be done with the same effect on the ad they saw first.
RECENT UPDATE: Facebook’s Newsfeed algorithm no longer penalizes 3rd party tools when they post on Facebook, although it is recommended that you post from both Facebook & third party tools when possible. Here are a few articles on the subject from a variety of industry experts: Social Mouths, EdgeRank Checker & Mari Smith.
Everyone uses them right? Social media tools like TweetDeck, Co Tweet, Sprout Social, HootSuite and others have become widely adopted. They are a great asset for managing your social media presence across multiple platforms and accounts. The main benefit of using these tools is they make managing social media much more convenient. One of the best things about these tools is the ability to schedule your posts ahead of time. I use HootSuite everyday to schedule my tweets and interact with users on our various social media accounts. Many also use HootSuite and the other tools to schedule their Facebook posts on their Pages, which is actually a bad idea. This is one instance when convenience limits the amount of people seeing and interacting with your Facebook Page. It’s a darn shame, even I was mad when I found out because who doesn’t like to make things easier!
Why You Shouldn’t Use Third Party Tools To Post on Facebook
The screen shots below were taken from my news feed today and they help illustrate how third party tools actually hide your posts sometimes. Let’s look at this example from the screen shots. So let’s pretend I’m a typical user, first I log into my Facebook account and see this in my news feed. It’s an update by Sprout Social, a newer social media engagement platform, posting about a test they are performing. I may click the link, like the post, leave a comment or continue browsing. However, if you look directly below the post there’s a link that reads “See 2 more posts from Sprout Social.” Most likely I go about my typical Facebook browsing and stalking, never thinking twice about clicking this See More button. What posts am I not seeing?
^This must be clicked to show items hidden from view.
By clicking this button you can see the rest of the recently posted content by the Sprout Social app being used by multiple Pages on Facebook. The algorithm that determines what is seen in Facebook’s news feed bunches together postings from applications on Facebook. To be able to post on Facebook, third party tools create these apps as a means of managing a Facebook Page. Look below to see what content was hidden from the news feed after I clicked the See More button.
Voila! Two posts from the lovely ladies at ModCloth were completely hidden from news feed until I clicked that button. If I were a typical user would I have seen those posts? The answer is yes and no. It depends on when I log in as compared to when the update was posted, but at that moment in time when I logged in those posts were hidden. ModCloth and other brands using these convenient functions are well followed and still receive engagement from these posts because they aren’t completely hidden and their audiences are engaged. However, it’s not worth hiding your posts from some possible visitors by adding another click for them to see your content.
Therefore, continue to use your third party tools as you see fit. I use these tools to engage with my social accounts, but just not to post on Facebook. I recommend just posting manually for the time being until Facebook makes a change to the algorithm correcting this problem if they ever deem it necessary.
Update 8/18/2011
One way to get around this issue (that I neglected to mention when this post was previously published) is if you have a custom branded publishing platform created it can help, since no one else would be publishing from this platform. For instance, Target’s Facebook Page uses a branded publishing platform called ‘Target.’
If you look at all of Target’s Facebook posts they say via Target with their logo. This is great for branding purposes, instead of saying via CoTweet or HootSuite. This custom platform created for Target allows them to schedule posts, but prevents their posts from being hidden in the same way via the News Feed. However, posts from Target, since they are through a third party application, are still grouped together in the News Feed. Yet, they don’t stand the same risk of being hidden because they aren’t grouped with posts from other Pages. This ensures that if Target’s posts become grouped in the News Feed, the very first post shown will be a post from Target. Therefore, using a custom third party tool is one workaround. The only downside to this is that it needs to be designed in-house or bought from an agency, which is going to be fairly expensive. However, i’m sure a few agencies providing these kinds of tools have the ability to white label their platform for your brand, skipping the development phase all together.
Was this a helpful insight? Are you mad that you shouldn’t schedule your posts?
There are constant conversations about the ROI of social media because most businesses take actions completely based upon dollar amounts. Many associate social engagement on the various platforms as a part of the overall sales funnel, but a lot of the time aren’t able to connect eCommerce to engagement. Google Analytics has recently gotten one step closer to defining this relationship. By adding the ability to track social media plugins installed on your website, Google Analytics can track the actions of a social engaged user and begin to quantifying the relationship between their social actions and their behavior on your website.
Google’s +1s are automatically tracked if you already have Google Analytics code installed on your website. To track Facebook Likes, Unlikes, Shares and Twitter’s Tweets you must install tracking code to each network’s button to make sure you’re reaping the full benefits of GA’s new social section. Previously, event tracking provided a general way to track these social engagements on your website, but now Social Tracking allows for a standardized framework for measuring social actions on your website.
This is a step in the right direction for many trying to quantify their use of social media. Many current methods of social media measurement are scattered across different third party tools utilizing the various platforms API. Many of the tools, especially the free ones, don’t have the level of actionable insights many brands would rely on for making enterprise level decisions. Google has some of the highest brand trust among consumers and brands worldwide, that many companies will most likely continue over to include social tracking.
Therefore, Google Analytics measuring how social factors impact a company’s website will hopefully help more businesses and brands utilize social media to its fullest potential. It’s starting to make it easier for a company with multiple social accounts to consolidate their social metrics into one trusted measurement platform. The fact that this rolled out close to the launch of Google+ is most likely on purpose. Google is probably hoping that Social Tracking will drive more legitimacy to its social network, especially from brands looking to measure their efforts, and eventually be able to compete on the same playing field with Facebook.
What metrics do you take into account when measuring social media engagement? What tools have you found to be most effective in delivering results?
Social media is more than just a tool for looking at pictures of your friends and reminiscing about times past. It’s become a tool with measurable and predictable power that truly has a place with almost any kind of business. There are many benefits to using social media for business, but here are my top choices.
1. Branding: This is one of the most obvious benefits for most businesses using social media. Whether users directly engage with your brand or not, they will still see your brand name within the networks they use. The more impressions a consumer gets of your business, the more likely they will remember your name in the future. Whether you’re a shoe retailer or a non-profit looking to gain recognition for your cause, brand awareness is vital for your continued success.
2. Reputation Management: Managing your online reputation is essential within social media because your brand or industry is being talked about regardless of whether you take part in the conversation. It’s beneficial to know what your customers think about your products, cause, services etc, and with this input in mind you can react accordingly. Since social media is open to everyone, anyone has the ability to say what they want about your brand. Therefore, making sure what is being said is truthful, not necessarily positive, is key to developing the trust of your audience and influencing them in a positive manner. Feed back from Social Media can also inform your decision about how you deal with your clients or market your business.
3. Customer Service and Feedback: Providing support to your customers is vital to the success of any business and social media is no exception to the rule. When a person reaches out to you, whether their input is good or bad it is extremely important to respond in a timely and helpful manner. Social media provides the platform for consumers to interact on a person to person level, so that they aren’t talking to a faceless representative over the phone or via email. Respond whenever a user reaches out, just not to users acting profane, misleading or hateful. Providing this level of service, which can be something as simple as thanking someone for mentioning your brand, is completely transparent to your entire network, showing how dedicated you are to your audience.
4. Lead Generation: Social media can help act as a means of finding customers for your business, advocates for your cause or as a means to make many other beneficial connections. Like we’ve previously discussed, conversations are happening constantly within each social network and it’s just a matter of you monitoring these conversations and reaping the benefit. These leads can be anything from an idea for an article to an online sale. For example, just by searching through Twitter you get a feel for the buzz in your industry and who’s saying what and possibly interact with interested future customers.
5. Educational Asset: In any industry its important to remain innovative in your field and find the best ways to continue the conversations about what you do. Since you’re here with us today learning about social media, it’s obvious you’re one of the people looking to stay ahead of the curve on a new form of media. Social media provides your brand with a free source of constant information from other brands, media outlets, friends, coworkers and even your competition.
6. Competitive Analysis: In any industry it’s important to keep pace with your competitors. Social media merely makes this process easier by allowing for complete transparency of the content and conversations your competitors are having on their various social accounts. Social media can help keep you on track with other non-profits, businesses, publications or whoever your interested in keeping tabs on or on the other side of the fence looking to partner with in the future for a promotion, campaign or some other type of partnership.
Staying updated on all the new tools and resources Facebook has to offer seems nearly impossible at times because of the social network’s constant growth. Today, let’s take a look at 5 tools and resources on Facebook that can help a variety of users with different backgrounds and motivations.
Facebook Tools and Resources
1. Facebook Toolbar: The Facebook toolbar allows users to constantly share with their friends in their network while they browse the web. The toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox gives users the ability to get notified about pokes, friend requests, messages, invitations and general notifications. The share feature of this toolbar lets you share the page you are currently browsing by sending it to your friends or posting it to your Facebook Wall. This feature also allows you to upload photos to Facebook directly from your computer, while you continue to browse the web. These features allow you to easily share your favorite blogs, articles and photos with all your friends much more quickly than if you were going back and forth between Facebook and surfing the web. You can download this resource for Internet Explorer and Firefox here: Facebook Toolbar.
The Google Chrome version of the toolbar offers very similar features to the version of the toolbar that is supported by the other browsers and is verified by Facebook. In a similar fashion, it alerts you at the top of your browser whenever a friend likes or comments on one of your posts or something else notification-wise occurs throughout your network. You can download this tool here: Facebook Toolbar for Chrome.
2. Connecting Bing + Facebook: Microsoft’s search engine Bing and Facebook have a long running partnership that is continually evolving and consistently threatening Google’s standing in the industry. Recently, Bing and Facebook have unveiled the roll-out of Facebook Likes across Bing’s search results. Once you connect your Facebook with Bing here, you can start receiving insights within your search results into websites, movies, restaurants, celebrities, music and other things on the web that your friends already Like on Facebook.
People often make decisions based upon the recommendation of their friends and family, and so it makes sense to duplicate this same decision making process across search engines and Facebook. Connect your Facebook to Bing and see what your friends are currently liking.
3. Facebook Resources Page: If you visit Facebook’s Facebook Page (weird, right?) and view their resources tab, there’s a plethora of helpful information on a laundry list of issues you could be having with your business’s page or personal profile. The Facebook Resources tab helps users and marketers do the following:
Get Involved: Whether that’s helping Facebook translate the website into different languages or telling your personal stories about how you use Facebook.
Site Governance: This section covers everything from ways to share feedback to Facebook’s governing principles and guidelines.
Developers: The resource section for developers features links to a variety of tools and forums available to users developing social applications within the network.
Behind The Scenes: Looking to follow the bloggers and engineers at Facebook? This subsection leads you to their blogs as well as the career page for Facebook.
Need Help: Can’t claim your Facebook Place or upload a photo to your wall? All these day-to-day issues can be dealt with in the help section by posting in user monitored forums or looking through Facebook FAQs.
Advertisers: If you’re interested in running Facebook ads or sponsored stories throughout the network, be sure to refer to this section for updates about the process and how to successfully run a promotion using their ad products.
Build A Presence: The most important subsection for marketers is this section dedicated to building a successful branded Facebook Page. This last section will take you to a more comprehensive page dedicated to the ins and outs of a Facebook Page, like Facebook Page best practices and examples of other brands’ successes with using Pages.
4. The Open Graph Protocol: This new resource could get an entire blog post written about it because it’s so helpful and cutting edge in terms of marketing on Facebook; however, here’s a quick summary of how this page can help you get started with the Open Graph. The Open Graph allows websites to customize the data Facebook pulls from their web pages to share within their social network. By adding specific meta tags to their webpages, the webmaster can choose how people view the content they share from their website on Facebook.
For instance: A company focused around movies, like IMDb, can add code to their website that alters the Like button they install on their various pages. Once a user Likes a particular movie on IMDb’s site, the information shared on Facebook is customized by the meta code previously installed. The Like will now not just post the content on a user’s wall that is Liked, but it will add the movie to the user’s favorite movies under their info tab and gurantee an image of the movie is shared along with the title, director or any other information you specifiy in the meta tag. This is just one example of the many things the Open Graph can do to help customize what your brand shares on Facebook. Visit the Open Graph Protocol developers page for further insights on the feature.
5. Buddy Media’s Guide to Facebook EdgeRank: Facebook EdgeRank is the algorithm that helps determine what content shows up in a particular user’s Facebook News Feed. The exact formula for what content gets shown is a closely guarded secret, much like the algorithm Google uses to rank websites within the search engine. Buddy Media is a firm that offers a variety of Facebook services and as a result, develops many whitepapers and studies about the Facebook Platform. Download the guide to Facebook’s EdgeRank and start to understand how to get your posts to the top of your fans’ News Feeds over other content.
In Part 1: How to Implement, Brian told you all about how to get an iFrame app or tab set up in Facebook. Now I want to talk about how we can track it.
In the past, there were a number of methods for trying to track Facebookusing Google Analytics. None of them worked particularly well (for a bunch of boring technical reasons like image caching and cookie domains). Now, however, since we’re putting our very own pages on Facebook via iFrames, the situation is much improved.
Before I go any further with the How, let me be clear about the What:
We can track iFrame applications on canvas pages or on tab pages in our Facebook profile. This includes any interaction people take within the iFrame, as well as information our app can get from Facebook through its SDK (such as whether they “like” us already or not). We’ll get the same tracking on the iFrame pages as any other page on our own website.
We cannot track behavior on non-iFrame pages on Facebook — even something on our profile if it’s not an iFrame, like your Wall or Info page, for example. And if someone gets to our pages simply by browsing from elsewhere on Facebook, we don’t know where exactly they came from (Facebook obscures this for privacy reasons).
Tracking Code
Put the regular Google Analytics tracking code on the pages you’re including in your iFrame. Here are some guidelines about additional things you may want to keep in mind:
You may want to create a filtered profile that includes just the pages that are on Facebook, so that you can easily track their traffic separately.
If the pages for your app are on your regular site’s domain, they share the same cookies that your regular site does. This means GA already recognizes a returning visitor, uniques get counted correctly, etc. Basically, the Facebook app functions as an extension of your site, even though folks are seeing it on Facebook.
If there are interesting things people can do with your app (and there should be!) set up goals, events, or other GA methods to measure them as appropriate. You could, for example, set a custom variable for all the people who’ve “liked” your page, or even just visited your Facebook tab before, so that you can connect that fact to all the conversions that happen over on your site.
You may want to make an alteration to the tracking code as described below.
Traffic Sources
One tactic that’s becoming more common is to use social media as landing pages for advertising and marketing campaigns. For example, you might run promotions that link to your app or tab saying “Try our app and enter for a chance to win X” or “Like us on Facebook and get a free shipping coupon” or whatever.
What we commonly do in Google Analytics is use campaign-tagged URLs to measure these kinds of sources of traffic. We can do this with Facebook, too, but we may need to be a little tricky.
If you are sending people to an app directly (that is, to a canvas page with a URL like apps.facebook.com/my-app-name), you can include campaign tags in the landing page URL and they are passed through to the iFrame page. No problems there.
If you are sending people to a tab page (that is, to a tab within your profile with a URL like www.facebook.com/my-page-name?sk=something, for example), Facebook obscures the referrer to the iFrame page. It’s always something like static.ak.facebook.com/platform/page_proxy.php, and the campaign parameters don’t get passed through. (Facebook does these things, not to make your analysis difficult, but for privacy reasons.)
However, there is a solution for tracking campaigns linking to tab pages, and it’s a pretty simple one. There are two parts to making it work:
Create a page on your site that redirects to the Facebook tab, and link to this page from your ads with the appropriate campaign URLs. On this page, run the GA tracking code before the redirect.
Add _addIgnoredRef(“static.ak.facebook.com”) to the tracking code on your iFrame page(s) in your Facebook tab.
In step 1, when a user lands on this page, the GA tracking code runs, sees the campaign tags, and records the campaign values into your cookies. Then we send them along to the Facebook tab.
In step 2, when the user gets to the Facebook tab with the iFrame, the cookies already exist with the right values (and since the iFrame pages are on the same site as the original redirect page, there’s no problem with sharing those cookies). However, what we don’t want to happen is for GA to see the referrer for the iFrame page and say “Oh, this is a referral from Facebook” and overwrite the campaign information that’s already in that cookie.
So, we use _addIgnoredRef, which is a function in Google Analytics that just ignores a certain referrer. By including this, referrals from static.ak.facebook.com (that is, to all our iFrame pages) will simply be treated as direct and not overwrite any information that’s already in the campaign cookie.
Here’s what the code should look like, depending on which flavor of the Google Analytics tracking code you’re using:
// asynchrounous version
_gaq.push(['_addIgnoredRef', 'static.ak.facebook.com']);
// standard version
pageTracker._addIgnoredRef('static.ak.facebook.com');
This should come after you specify your account number but before the _trackPageview (because that’s the point at which the cookies get written, so we have to tell it to ignore the referrer before that).
Then, all our campaign parameters work out, and we don’t get static.ac.facebook.com overwriting any of the campaign info.
The Data
You get all the same data in GA you’d get for any page on your site, because the iFrame pages are pages on your site. You can also include them in goal funnels, use them to define advanced segments, etc. Your Facebook app or tab basically becomes just like any other page in your GA data.
Customizing your company’s or client’s Facebook Page is vital in terms of branding and encouraging engagement across your network. Until recently, developers created tabs within a Facebook Page using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to customize a user experience with the brand. As of now FBML is being deprecated, which is a fancy way of saying it will be removed in the future. Facebook Pages already using FBML will not need to worry about updating their customizations because they will remain unaffected if already in use, at least for a few years. Pages that haven’t installed the FBML application before its deprecation must now develop custom applications using IFrames.
iFrames allow designers to use HTML, CSS, ASP, JavaScript, Flash and more to create custom Facebook content for their Pages. With iFrames your web content is maintained on an external server, which is then accessible and viewable on Facebook. This is a helpful improvement for designers and developers because it allows for greater freedom in the design and implementation of the content than FBML would have previously allowed. It’s also a wonderful asset to marketers because of the ability to add tracking code to install analytics, thus being able to monitor traffic and conversions. With frequent updates to the way in which information is presented on a Facebook Page, it’s essential to understand how to implement custom content using iFrames.
How to implement IFrames on a Facebook Page
1) Create an image for your Facebook landing page, also known as a page tab. You can use Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.net or FotoFlexer to develop your images assets. Your image for the landing page must be a width of 520px, but the height is unlimited. I don’t recommend the height of your image going past 800px. Save this image as a JPEG. You should look to make two version of your landing page, one for non-fans and one for fans once they’ve liked your Page. It’s important to include the following on your landing page: a clear call-to-action, an understanding of what your Page is all about and an incentive to like your Page. With that being said, you want to create two versions of this image so it changes to provide value to your users once they’ve liked your Facebook Page.
2 ) Now that you have your images assets, upload it to your server via the FTP access on your website. If you have a WordPress hosted website, simply upload this image to your Media Library. Once you’ve uploaded this image asset, you’ll need to copy the URL from your website where your image can be found. Test this URL, just to make sure it uploaded correctly.
3 ) Once you’re image is uploaded to your website, it’s time to create an image map if you wish for parts of your image to link to different destinations on Facebook or external websites. For instance, if you include a Twitter icon on your iFrames landing page you’ll want it to send people to your Twitter account. By adding an image map, you’ll be able to place a link over that icon, allowing people to click on it and visit your Twitter account. The biggest benefit of these image map tools is that you don’t have to be a programmer to use them and create links throughout your iFrames landing page. Two tools I recommend for image mapping are Online Image Map Editor and Image-Map. Here i’m mapping an image we use on LunaMetrics’ Facebook Page using Image-Map, using the rectangle tool to select an area where I want there to be a link to another destination. You can repeat this as many times as you wish throughout your image using the image mapper. If you end up using Image Map don’t fill out the Title/Alt for this map: field. If you do, it’ll show up funky once your Facebook Page tab is live. I also recommend using Firefox because Google Chrome presented some problems with Image Map.
Once you’re done adding your links to the image you’ve uploaded, click on Get Code and choose the CSS Code and copy it to bring into your Facebook iFrame tab.
4 ) Paste this code into a text editor like Notepad and save this as an html file to keep for future reference, we’ll come back to this in a bit.
5 ) Now visit the Static Tab 2.0 application on Facebook to begin creating tabs for your Pages. This application, one of many available on Facebook helps you easily create your own tab without needing the know how to create your own custom application. The best part about this application is that it’s completely free, which is uncommon among the other applications that help you perform the same functions. Scroll to the bottom and choose 1st tab to install your first Facebook Page iFrame tab. You’ll return here in the future to add more tabs to your Pages.
6 ) From here choose which Facebook Page you’d like to add this tab to by selecting one from the drop down menu. Once you’ve selected the page, select the Add Static Tab- Welcome Tab for Pages button to add the tab.
7 ) This will now take you to the Page you’ve added the tab to. It’ll be on the left hand navigation menu, labeled as Static Tab. Click on this item in the navigation menu to visit the tab and begin customizing your landing page. If you hover your mouse over the top of the tab, a grey options bar will drop down giving you the option to configure the current tab, add a new tab, view statistics about this particular tab and learn more about this application. The add a new tab function allows you to add another tab to this existing Page, similar to how you just added this tab to your Page. The statistics function allows you to look at the traffic to this tab over any range of time you define. You can also monitor visits to this tab in your Facebook Page Insights under the reach report. Let’s move on to configure this tab to make a custom landing page, helping convert browsers on your Facebook Page to fans.
8 ) Now it’s time to paste in the assets you’ve uploaded and/or you created an image map with. Once, you click configuration you’ll have two fields to paste your code into. Before doing so, make sure to choose Show custom HTML/CSS/Javascript or Load an External URL from the first tab type field. In this example we used the HTML/CSS/Javascript option. Paste the CSS code from Image Map you created in the first box to display the content to fans once they’ve liked your Page. In the second box, paste the CSS code you generated on Image Map to display this content to non-fans viewing this tab on your Page. Once you’ve done this, press Apply Changes.
9 ) Now view this tab and see if both versions of your landing page are working correctly. To test it, view this tab as a fan and a non fan. After you’ve successfully set up this page tab, it’s time to name it. Go to Edit Page then Apps and the to Static Tabs. Choose Edit Settings to define the name of this tab, in our case we’ve labeled it Greetings! Don’t forget to save your changes and then press Okay.
10 ) You’re almost done with your Page tab, all you need to do now (which is optional) is reorder it in the left hand navigation and set it as your landing tab on your Facebook Page if you wish for non-fans to land on this tab when they initially land on your Facebook Page. To reorder the left hand navigation menu, just click More then Edit to reorder which Page tabs are visible and in what order.
If you wish to set this newly created page tab as the landing tab all non-fans land on when they visit your Page (which I highly recommend) go to Edit Page, then Manage Permissions and select Default Landing Tab. This field will let you choose which tab on your Facebook Page users land on when they aren’t currently a fan. Once they are a fan, the user will automatically land on your Facebook Wall.
The finished product! Let us know if you have any issues with implementation or have other recommended ways of creating your own page tabs using iFrames!
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