Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Each week, as the main administrator for the Matrix Group Facebook fan page, I get a weekly report from Facebook that details the change in number of fans (people who have “liked” our page), as well as the number of views and interactions.

Getting lots of fans and interactions is the holy grail of Facebook marketing. The more people “like” your page, “like” your posts, click through to your offers, comment and otherwise interact with your page, the more likely they are to become loyal fans and customers.

So how do you increase likes and interactions on your Facebook page? Here are my top tips, based on the experiences of the Matrix Group marketing team.

• Give your Facebook updates an authentic voice. What most people love about Facebook is the fact that they’re reading their friends’ thoughts and comments in near real-time.  And these comments are not written in corporate-speak; they read and sound the way people talk, like they’re having a conversation with you.  Your company’s Facebook posts should probably not be too casual, but they should sound less like a press release, and more like a comment from a friend or colleague.
• Don’t just RSS your news items or blog posts. I’ve said this before but if all you’re doing is republishing headlines from your website or blog, you’re not giving people an incentive to follow you on on Facebook because the information is the same.
• Don’t automatically post your Twitter updates to your Facebook page. Why?  Because you’re probably chattier on Twitter than you are on Facebook and chatty people and companies dominate Facebook streams, so fans are more likely to right-click and press Hide.  Besides, on Twitter, all you get is 140 characters; you get more words on Facebook, why not use them?
• Make your posts stand out by adding photos and videos. You know the old saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  It’s definitely true on Facebook and it’ s not surprising.  Most people scan their Facebook streams and a photo or video will catch people’s attention much more than a plain text status update.
• Ask for feedback. I’m always amazed that the simple act of soliciting feedback often results in feedback.  Funny how that works.  Heck you don’t even need to ask for serious feedback.  Ask your fans what color to paint your office walls; or ask them to comment on your holiday menu.
• Spark a debate. If you’re comfortable doing so, posting about topics that generate a little heat are great for interactions.  But always keep the language appropriate.
• Use Facebook apps to add interactive features to your Facebook page. For example, you could create a custom tab, sponsor a contest, or host a game.
• Offer exclusive benefits to your followers. Last holiday season, Snapfish offered a daily discount on its Facebook page that generated lots of interest, clicks and comments. I know because I could see the activity and I certainly checked the Snapfish Facebook page regularly for deals!
• Test, test, test. My marketing team is always playing around on our Facebook page to see what time of day is best for posting, the types of messages that generate interactions and ultimately sales, and how to wordsmith updates to generate the highest number of interactions.

Here are some good resources on Facebook marketing and interactions:

• Zimply Zesty has 7 ways to increase interactions.
• A study by Vitrue found that morning posts are more effective, users are more active at the top of the hour and weekdays are busiest.
• Smart Passive Income has some great how-to videos on how to create and customize your Facebook page.

How about you? What tactics have you used to increase interactions on your Facebook page?  Please share your stories!

• 1 Comment
• Tags: Facebook, marketing

I was researching an organization last week and visited their website, blog and social media pages. The website was nicely designed, easy to navigate, and had good information.  The blog was terrific and I quickly subscribed to the RSS feed.  When I got to the organization’s social media pages, I was sorely disappointed.  Their Twitter and Facebook pages had nothing but headlines from the blog. Clearly, all they did was take the blog RSS feed and use it to populate their social media pages.

So did I decide to “follow” the organization on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  Absolutely not. Since I had already subscribed to the blog RSS feed, I didn’t feel compelled to follow them on Twitter and Facebook.  Why add clutter to my social media streams with information I can already get elsewhere?

I know it’s tempting to set-up pages on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms and populate them with posts from your blog or press room.  We’re all busy and most communications and marketing departments are stretched thin.  But posting the same information across platforms isn’t doing your organization any good. Why?

• By posting headlines that meet the least common denominator across platforms (probably Twitter, with its 140 character limit), you miss out on functionality offered by the other platforms.  For example, Facebook lets you post longer updates, upload photos and videos, include links, host discussions, etc.
• You don’t give your target audiences a reason to follow or fan you across platforms.  Just imagine this.  If you post complementary but different content across platforms, your clients, prospects and supporters might just follow you on multiple platforms, giving your company an incredible voice with those individuals.
• If you’re posting headlines from your news room, you’re not offering people the authentic, personal voice we’ve come to expect on the social media pages.

Here’s what we do at Matrix Group:

• Our website showcases our products, services, clients, portfolio, news and webinars.
• This blog, which is authored by me, Joanna, the CEO, features my thoughts and commentary on social media, marketing, communications, strategy, customer service, trends and gadgets.  This blog DOES feature website launches at the bottom of each page.
• Our Twitter page showcases our work and clients, but the majority of the tweets are about industry news, trends, how-to articles, and case studies.  Twitter will tell you who we are and what we’re reading.  We’re pretty chatty on Twitter; we post updates multiple times a day.
• Our Facebook page also showcases our work and clients, but we also post photos and updates about happenings in the company, including trainings, parties, fun events, etc.  Facebook will tell you a lot about who we are as a company and our culture.  For example, our staff pumpkin carving contest was featured on our Facebook page.  We’re less chatty on Facebook, just updating a few times a week.
• Our Flickr page is home to our photo library of company events, while our Facebook page has the “best of” photos.
• Our YouTube channel is a work in progress and will soon feature short interviews with senior staff about their areas of expertise, including branding, the user experience, software development and security.

As you can see, our various pages are all designed to showcase our expertise, clients and work but the user experience on each platform has been carefully crafted to take advantage of that platform’s capabilities.  And while the website is clearly a marketing channel for the company, we’re not very sales-y on our social media pages, focusing instead on posting useful and interesting links.

How about you?  How are you creating an integrated use experience across your company’s social media pages?  What’s working for you?

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• Tags: Blog, Content Strategy, Facebook, marketing, social networking, Twitter

I found out recently that the iPhone version of the Facebook app synchronizes with personal profiles on Facebook.  Which means (gasp!) that if a friend has your private phone numbers in his/her phone, it’s possible that those numbers are now on Facebook.  Egads!

While I love Facebook, Twitter, instant messenger, etc., I try very hard to limit the amount of personal information that I share on those networks, including and especially my address, home phone number, information about my family, etc.  But with the social networks constantly updating their terms of use and adding new functionality to their sites and apps, it’s hard to keep up with the changes and monitor the impact on our privacy.

Which is why I recommend an audit of your Facebook (and other social network) privacy settings on a regular basis. Here’s how:

• Log in to Facebook and click on Account in the top right corner of any Facebook page.
• You’ll get a dropdown of options; click on Privacy  Settings.

Facebook Privacy  Settings Landing Page

Here’s what your Facebook Privacy Settings Landing page looks like.  Note that you can share parts of your profile with Everyone, Friends of Friends and Friends Only.  I have edited my profile so that nearly everything about my profile is visible to Friends Only.  But wait, this page only shows you a fraction of the privacy settings available to you.  To view and edit all of your privacy settings, click on Customize Settings.

You’ll also notice two navigation items on the left for Recommended and Custom.  Click on Recommended and you’ll see that Facebook recommends that a great deal of your profile be available to everyone.  You can select these default settings with a click.  Me, I definitely opted for the Custom Settings.

Customize Settings Page

Here’s what the Customize Settings page looks like.  You’ll see that you can select who can see elements of your profile.  Here are my recommendations:

• If you post photos of your family, especially your children, make Posts By Me visible to Friends Only.
• Be sure to pay special attention to the Things I Share section.  This is the section where you can control what others are doing, including tagging you in photos and videos, checking you into Facebook Places, etc.  This allows you to NOT allow friends to check you into a bar or party, and stops them from tagging you in photos and videos and thereby making your photo visible to their friends.  Here’s a blog post about how someone nearly sabotaged a dinner party by checking all the guests into Facebook places.
• If your Facebook network is vast, consider creating custom lists and then specifying with each post and update which list can see your updates.  For example, I have a Family list that I use to share family photos and insider updates.
• Be sure to audit your privacy settings for existing photo albums. If you created albums before Facebook rolled out its new privacy settings, you may find that all or many of your albums are available to Everyone (I know I did!).

As for that pesky iPhone app that uploads your personal information to Facebook, unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do about that.  Facebook did recently add a warning to the app, warning users to make sure their friends are comfortable sharing their information with others.  This is a small consolation to me; I would venture to guess that most people don’t think about the privacy ramifications of their actions and apps and will blow right past this user agreement.  What to do?  This may sound dorky, but here’s what I’ve told my friends:

• Please don’t sync your iPhones with Facebook.
• Don’t try to check me into Facebook places.
• When you’re at my house, never check into Facebook Places or FourSquare so you don’t reveal my home information.
• Please don’t upload photos and videos that are unflattering to me and my friends/guests.  (When I throw Rock Band parties at my house, videos are not allowed; we DO allow photos of us band members looking cool with our instruments.)

How about you?  Have you audited your Facebook privacy settings recently?  Any revelations?  Any privacy disasters?  What are you doing, if anything, to maintain a semblance of privacy online?

• 3 Comments
• Tags: Facebook, privacy

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:

• If your Facebook page is getting increased traffic and interactions, while traffic on your regular Web site is on the decline, ask yourself, “What is it about my Facebook page that’s working?  What’s making people “like” us, click through to articles and comment?  What are the lessons for content and opportunities for interaction on our official Web site?”
• Your goal should be to have your Web site, Facebook page, Twitter page, blog, e-mail campaigns, microsites, etc., all be part of an integrated strategy where each Web property is complementing the others and encouraging cross traffic.
• Ultimately, the goal should be conversions, whether that means more sales, more subscribers, more members or more donations.  Your goals should never be about traffic on specific platforms; that’s just a tactic.
• You need a way to track the effectiveness of followers, likes, clicks and fans across the different platforms.  Use tracking codes, cookies and marketing codes to determine which platforms are really helping your business to thrive.

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• Tags: Blog, Facebook, marketing, social networking, strategy

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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• 8 Comments
• Tags: Facebook, social networking, trends, YouTube

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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• Tags: Facebook, marketing, Matrix Group, strategy

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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• Tags: Facebook, privacy

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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• Tags: Facebook

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?

• 3 Comments
• Tags: Facebook, privacy

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:

• Review your Privacy Settings by clicking on Settings, then Privacy Settings in the top right menu. Ignore Facebook’s Guide to Privacy and privacy recommendations and set-up your settings they way you like.  Facebook, for example, recommends that “Everyone be able to see information that will make it easier for friends to find, identify and learn about you. This includes basic information like your About Me description, Family and Relationships, Work and Education Info, and Website, as well as posts that you create, like photo albums and status updates.”  For me, this is way too much information for the public to see.

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• Tags: Facebook, social networking