Archive for the ‘Facebook’ Category
Posted on July 20, 2011 by Brian Honigman
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?
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social Media, Twitter, Web Analytics
Posted on June 8, 2011 by Brian Honigman
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.
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter, YouTube
Posted on May 27, 2011 by Brian Honigman
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.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
Posted on April 28, 2011 by Jonathan Weber
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 Facebook using 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.
View Comments (16 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social Media
Posted on April 20, 2011 by Brian Honigman
Updated: October 28th, 2011
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!
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
Posted on December 3, 2010 by Brian Honigman
Recently, Facebook made it possible for a brand to merge their Facebook Page and Facebook Place to one concise page. This new feature became available the same time as Facebook rolled out the Deals option for Facebook Places, which allowed for various local deals for users checking into a physical location from their mobile phone. It makes sense these features debuted around the same time because both additions can certainly be utilized in conjunction with one another. However, like any newly added feature there are good and bad aspects. What will you decide to do with your brand on Facebook, merge or remain the same?
The Pros of Merging Your Facebook Page and Place
1. Consistency: The main upside to merging your online presence on Facebook is that it creates a single hub for your customers to interact with your brand and to find information. Having your contact info, location, deals, updates, photos, events and more all on one page offers a helpful streamline for any current or future customer with regard to the goings-on at your company.
2. Convenience: Going hand in hand with consistency, the fact your entire brand is in one spot on Facebook allows for easy updates and maintenance as the owner of your brand. After a merge you only need to update your customer base from one channel within Facebook, which allows for an easy connection to your business’s online presence and physical location. Also, whenever your brand needs to update your profile there’s no need to worry about consistency between a Page and Place, making changing info quick and streamlined.
3. Appearance for Small Business: Another plus to the merge is that it merges the look of a Fan Page and a Places Page, which is specifically beneficial to companies with one physical location. For instance, a small map of your business’s physical location appears at the top of your newly merged page offering quick and easy understanding to consumers as to how to get to where you’re located. Not to mention, your address, phone number, website and hours are now also at the top of the page. This is perfect for a small business like a coffee shop or a shoe store that aims to bring the customer to a physical location.
The Cons of Merging Your Facebook Page and Place
1. Appearance for Medium to Large Business: Although the appearance of this merged page is not unsightly in any way, it still has a disadvantage for most businesses. If you’re a large business owner, especially with more than one location, then it’s recommended that you do not merge your presence on Facebook. The look of the merged page is overtaken by the map at the top of the page, altering the look of a Fan page that users have come to learn and love. It doesn’t make sense for most businesses to merge because of their type of business. If you were a popular eCommerce site with no physical location, consumers would be confused as to why your contact info and address were front and center on your page. Not to mention, FBML customized tabs are shortened in width after a merge. This will alter any existing custom designed tabs you have within your page, squishing the images and distorting them.
2. Inability to Reverse a Merge: One of the main issues with the new merge feature is the fact there’s currently no option to reverse it once it’s implemented. This is hard to deal with because as a business, especially online, your market and product is always changing. Therefore, not having the ability to alter a facet of your brand may become frustrating and in the end troublesome for the transforming state of your business.
3. Confusion: Facebook appears to still be working on the Places feature and hasn’t fully completed work on the way that Pages and Places merge. My prediction is that they will attempt to fix the above problems in the near future. It’s not like the social media giant to release something that isn’t fully complete and user friendly, but then again like any business Facebook is ever changing. Until the confusion passes, what will you do? Will you merge or leave your Facebook presence as is?
View Comments (12 Responses) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
Posted on October 26, 2010 by Robbin Steif
About five months ago, I decided (as did lots of other people) that social media is powerful, but it had to be used well.
So our company — led by one very interested analyst — learned all the nuances of great and no-so-great Facebook company pages. Before we started to put together a “real” facebook presence (as opposed to just a page), we thought a lot about strategy.
What did we want our Facebook page to do for us? Sure, it would be great to do giveaways and prizes and contests there — that’s what we do with lots of our customers — but that doesn’t work as well for a B2B site. Plus, we already have this blog. Hmm.
Ultimately, we decided that our blog was the place that people were going to get more in-depth, technical, cutting edge (do I need more adjectives?) advice about Google Analytics, SEO, PPC and other web marketing. But Internet users comprise an incredible spectrum of knowledge. So we decided to create a Tips and Tricks tab on our Facebook page, where we have basic advice for those who are in the ultraviolet part of that spectrum.
Enjoy.
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Facebook, Social Media
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