Aug 1026
Every week, I check out the usage reports for the Matrix Group Web site and blog. I also look closely at the analytics reports from Facebook for our Facebook fan page. In the last year, traffic on this blog has overtaken the traffic on the public Web site. And as we increase the number of fans on our Facebook page, our interactions have grown steadily as well.
A recent article in Ad Age explores how some of the top consumer brands have Facebook pages with a fan base and interactions that far outstrip that of their official Web sites. Starbucks has 12.9M fans; Coke has nearly 11M fans; Oreo has 8.9M fans. Of the companies in the article, only Starbucks has steadily increasing Web traffic.
All of this got me thinking: What happens when an organization’s blog, Facebook, Twitter or other social media page gets more traffic than the official Web site? Is this the ultimate goal for marketers? Is traffic on a social media site worth as much as traffic on a company Web site? Does this increased traffic ultimately lead to more customers and sales?
I have clients who worry about redirecting traffic to social media pages, for fear of losing control over the conversations, not owning the Web property, or that the interactions are not quite official enough. Others hold their social media stats in the highest regard. Most of us wonder what it really means when somebody chooses to “like” our fan pages.
How to make sense of all this? Here are some thoughts:
Aug 1009
Last week, I had the pleasure of being a speaker at the Benefits Communications Conference of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Funds. During the closing session, one of the attendees asked me which social networks I thought were going to survive into the future. The dialogue went something like this:
Me (Joanna): I can’t predict the future, but I think Facebook and YouTube will stick around for a while. Not sure about the smaller networks, especially those without solid revenue models.
Participant: But I’ve heard that the younger audiences are leaving Facebook now that their parents are signing up.
Me: Yes, I’ve read that as well, but Facebook has really tipped in terms of popularity, all the research shows that the older audiences don’t leave a social network once their friends have joined and they’ve made a commitment to the site, and Facebook as a platform for all kinds of third-party applications is really compelling.
But then I got to thinking. Does it really matter if Facebook survives? Does it really matter which of the social networks survives?
If you’re hesitating about investing in a social media strategy because you’re wondering which of the platforms will survive, I think you’re worried about the wrong issue. Here’s why:
- Social media isn’t just a fad. Social networks have fundamentally changed how we communicate, connect and market. Social networks have “tipped;” there is now a critical mass of people on social networks. You can’t ignore the numbers.
- In the end, it doesn’t matter which social network survives because there are now so many mainstream and niche social networks, it’s almost pointless to worry about which ones will make it. Remember when we thought no other search engine could threaten Yahoo!’s primacy?
- Your social media strategy probably needs to include having a presence on multiple networks, depending on where your target audiences are AND to ensure good coverage and reach for your marketing messages.
Here’s what I think IS important:
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Jul 1001
10 days ago, the Matrix Group Facebook fan page had 280 fans. As of tonight, we have 576 fans, more than double our starting number. How did we do it? We launched a campaign and created an incentive for people to “Like” us.
The Background
Matrix Group has had a Facebook fan page for a couple of years now and we had been slowly building up our fan base. We did all the usual things to generate new fans: we let our customers know about our Facebook page, we linked to it from our Web site and blog, we asked staff to invite their friends to “like” us, we included the link in staff e-mail signatures, and we asked our Twitter followers to fan us.
I had recently read an article about how the Weekly World News got to 40,310 fans in 4 days (up from 3,244 fans!) and got inspired to launch our own campaign. Weekly World News offered an exclusive video, they changed their ad daily, they did A/B testing on their ads and they leveraged their huge user base. But what kind of incentive could we offer? Unlike Snapfish, the photo printing site, which recently offered a coupon for a free 8 x 10 photo collage for “liking” its fan page, Matrix Group doesn’t have products to offer. And we don’t have a customer base of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
The Campaign
We decided to use good, old-fashioned corporate philanthropy to incentivize people to “like” us. The campaign was incredibly simple: we would donate $10 to a specific charity for every new fan we got between June 21 and June 30. We selected the National Park Foundation’s (NPF) Disaster Recovery Fund in the Gulf to be recipient of our campaign. NPF is a Matrix Group client and the entire Matrix Group staff, like the rest of the country, is upset about the Gulf oil spill. Selecting this fund only made sense for us. BTW, we put a time limit on the campaign because we know that people are more likely to act when they have a deadline; hence the June 30 end date for the campaign.
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May 1020
Remember when Facebook was a closed network, open only to college students? Then Facebook went mainstream and everyone could create a profile. But even back then, Facebook remained a closed network: you had to have a Facebook profile to see other profiles and connect with friends. Facebook was closed to Google and other search engines, which meant Facebook profiles and pages never showed up on search results.
Back in 2005, Facebook’s privacy policy clearly stated the following:
No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
The Evolution of Facebook’s Privacy Policies
But then, slowly and over time, Facebook’s privacy policies changed.
- In 2007, Facebook made your name, school name and profile photo available to the search engines unless you specifically prohibited this in your privacy settings
- In 2009, Facebook revamped its privacy settings and gave users more control over who gets to see which aspects of their profile. Trouble was, the default gave “everyone” access to information.
- In April 2010, Facebook made the decision to make specific elements of all profiles public (name, hometown, school, interests and fan pages), and eliminate the ability to limit access to these fields. If you didn’t want those elements to be public, Facebook recommended that you delete the information from your profile.
- In April 2010, Facebook also launched the Open Graph, which shares user profiles with third party sites so that visits to those third party sites can be personalized based on a person’s Facebook interests. On the flip side, Facebook opened up its API (application programming interface) so that third party sites can add a Facebook “Like” button to their pages; when clicked, the information would be saved back to a user’s profile.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies, including links to archived versions of Facebook’s policies.
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Apr 1028
In late March, Facebook announced that “Become a Fan” would be replaced by “Like” on Facebook fan pages. The change rolled out in early April and today, the ubiquitous Facebook “Like” button is on all Facebook fan pages, next to the company/organization/page name.
Facebook’s Rationale for the Change to “Like”
Facebook says it changed “Become a Fan” to “Like” to offer businesses a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.
In addition, changing to “Like” aligns with Facebook’s overall strategy of populating the Web with “Like” buttons so that Web surfers can announce their like of pages anywhere around the Web and have these “likes” posted to their personal Facebook pages. (More on this in a future blog post.)
It seems Facebook wants to corner the “Like” market.
For the Most Part, Facebook Pages are NOT Changing
Aside from changing the language in the button from “Become a Fan” to “Like,” the Facebook pages aren’t really changing.
- Status updates on Facebook pages will still appear on fan (er liker) profiles.
- Facebook page owners can still call people who like their pages “fans.”
- When a Facebook subscriber “likes” a page, it will show up in their Profile under Info –> Pages.
What IS Changing About Facebook Pages
- Facebook now allows you to customize the order in which Pages appear on your profile. You can even move some Pages behind a “See all” link, so that you can still connect to Pages without displaying all of them prominently on your profile.
- Instead of seeing a random selection of fans + a link to See All, there are now two boxes: “xx Friends Like This” tells you how many of YOUR friends also “like” a page while “xx People Like This” tells you the total number of likers or fans.
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Jan 1013
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has gotten a lot of flack lately for his pronouncement (during an interview with TechCrunch) that privacy norms have evolved over the years and privacy is essentially dead. I watched the interview myself and think the criticism is overdone. I think that Zuckerberg has correctly described the times and his company is taking advantage of our voyeuristic culture. Facebook did not create this culture. I think it started with the first reality show on MTV back in 80s. We watched the teens living together and reveled in their pranks and arguments.
Does the social Web mean the end of privacy? Are MySpace and Facebook to blame for all the personal revelations we spew out every day? Or should we blame Google and Bing, which manage to index the Web and let anyone find out gobs and gobs of information about each of us? When I Google my name (Joanna Pineda), I find lots of information that I WANT the search engines to find and index. But I also find pages that have my address, my political contributions and address, yada, yada. I’m not happy that Facebook changed its privacy settings and defaulted some of my information to be available to everyone, but I actually appreciate the more granular control that I now have over my posts, link and photos.
What do you think? Is privacy dead? How much do you reveal on social networks? Are you doing anything to keep out of the search engines?
Jan 1005
On December 9, Facebook rolled out new privacy options to its 350 million users. When I logged onto Facebook that Wednesday, I was greeted by a message that asked me to review the new privacy policy and review my privacy settings. Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg blogged about the new changes, which were greeted with raised voices on both sides. Here are some of the major changes:
- You have always been able to limit what information from your profile was public and private. But now, Facebook lets you control access to every status update, link, photo, video, etc.
- When controlling access, you can grant access to different people or groups: Everyone (as in the world), All Friends, Friends of Friends, and specific friends or lists of friends, or deny access/hide from specific friends of lists of friends.
- Facebook eliminated regional networks, which allowed users to unwittingly share their profiles to entire cities, states, countries, etc.
Advocates for the new privacy changes praised the simplified settings and the increased control over every single post. Critics, however, are livid over the fact that the default option was to make nearly everything on a person’s profile available to Everyone (that is, until users edited their settings and posts) and the fact that some information is strictly public and can’t be edited. For example, you can no longer limit who can see your list of friends and your public profile always shows the Facebook pages that you are a fan of. I know I was ticked off that even though I edited my privacy settings so that my photo albums are globally only available to Friends, Facebook made my existing photo albums publicly available until I edited each one manually.
If the new privacy settings and changes confuse you, here are my recommendations:
Dec 0909
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen more and more non-profits and companies create Facebook fan pages for their organizations. Facebook calls fan pages “a customizable presence for an organization, product, or public personality to join the conversation with Facebook users.” Fan pages are great because they are designed for organizations, but they work a lot like personal pages. You can customize them; you can post status updates, links, photos and videos; and updates show up on fans’ streams.
So, you’ve set-up a Facebook fan for your company, now what? Here are some of my favorite Facebook fan pages and reasons I think they’re terrific and effective.
Stanford University – http://www.facebook.com/stanford
- The status updates are a mix of campus news, alumni news, sports updates, research and university news.
- The page has a good mix of updates, links, photos and videos.
- I love the office hours with world-renowned professors. Each week, there is a short video of a professor discussing some important work; the professor takes questions from fans throughout the week.
- I also appreciate the handy list of Stanford Web sites and the photo albums.
Dunkin Donuts – http://www.facebook.com/DunkinDonuts
- When you visit this Facebook fan page, you are not taken to the Wall by default, but rather to a promo.
- This fan page uses a custom Tab for Maurice, the Dunkin Donuts mascot.
- Dunkin Donuts encourages fan posts to the Wall; there are even videos posted by fans.
- To manage fan posts, “DD Facebook Etiquette” is posted right on the front page; this makes it clear that DD welcomes fan interaction, but within specific parameters.
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Nov 0918
I was talking to one of the Cat Herders (Project Manager) at Matrix Group today. She said she was trimming her Facebook friend list and unfriending some people. Unfriending. It sounds so… ummmm… unfriendly.
Facebook says that the average user has 130 friends but I know people who have hundreds, even thousands of friends. 500 friends? I can’t imagine many people who have that many friends with whom they would willingly share personal updates, photos, even their full birthday. So I asked around and got some good insight into the friending and unfriending business. These findings don’t represent a large group, just my friends! :-)
- There is a group of Facebook users who will accept friend requests from anyone and who actively try to expand their friend network.
- There is another group that views Facebook as a place where they can communicate freely so they only connect with true friends. For these folks, Facebook is a place for personal communications, often about self, family, kids, friends.
- There was a general consensus that the new Facebook homepage, which splits updates between News Feed and View Live Feed, makes it harder to see updates from your entire network of friends, which makes it more challenging to have a large network.
- Many people have been cleaning up their lists on Facebook, Twitter, and other social network recently. They’re actively unfriending people so they can manage the communications and flood of updates.
- Even if a person has a large network on a platform like Facebook, they are more than likely only interacting with a small subset of friends. Indeed, the Facebook sociologist says that no matter how large their friend network, Facebook users tend to “comment on stuff from only about 5-10% of their Facebook friends.”
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Sep 0929
I had the pleasure of being part of a panel at today’s Grow Smart Biz conference, sponsored by Network Solutions. Our topic was “Integrating Traditional Marketing with Social Media.” Despite being the last panel of the day (we started around 4:20pm), I estimated that over 80% of the conference attendees attended the panel. And by the number of questions raised, this is a hot topic for sure.
You can read a nice recap of the panel on the Solutions are Power blog, but here were my take-aways: Read the rest of this entry
