Is Facebook Playing A Game With Me?
November 17, 2011 at 9:28 am
OK I’ll confess – I tend to fail capcha tests on the first go. It doesn’t make me any less of a person, just makes me concentrate more on the second go. But since yesterday Facebook has either been playing a big joke on me, or it’s ‘add admin’ function is broken.
I’ve completed about 12 capcha tests and have ‘failed’ them all, but I haven’t (see below). The black box on the last one said to me ‘game over’.
Tags: capcha
Facebook Landing Tabs – Yes or No?
August 15, 2011 at 8:01 am
I’m doing some testing at the moment as to whether having a landing or welcome tab on your Facebook Page increases the likelihood of a like, or whether it acts as a barrier (like an old school ‘skip intro’ page on websites). I don’t think there is a hard and fast answer; it depends on YOUR fans and their preferences. But I’ve carried out a little research into what some brands do, and collate below my thinking towards best practice on Facebook landing tabs. If you’re trying to decide whether to have one or not, I hope this helps.
Important Features of Facebook Landing Tabs
- Engage and get the max impact with the first 10-15 words
- Ask for the like and be human about it – I like this “We like you, do you like us?”
- Show the best of the Page’s content, and give people an idea of what they can expect as part of your community
- If you’re in hotels, or car hire, or ecommerce, it can be a good idea to offer some form of incentive to encourage visitors to become a fan – such as a money off coupon.
https://www.facebook.com/threadless
Design Led Landing Tabs
Here are some of my favourite examples of landing tabs that go straight in and ask for the ‘like’ but in a visually creative way:
http://www.facebook.com/VirginItalia
https://www.facebook.com/EnjoyEngland
http://www.facebook.com/TescoIreland
http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft
http://www.facebook.com/redbull
Getting The Tone Right
It’s really important to set the right tone. Don’t overwhelm people who are browsing, and don’t demand that they DO stuff straightaway – “upload all your pics and tell us why [our brand] is so great”. Kind of like what these guys do, but that could just be a cultural thing {smirks}.
Here are some of my favourites that get the tone right:
http://www.facebook.com/holdenaustralia
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sweden/49607452291
http://www.facebook.com/sonyericsson
And finally, I have to give this one a mention – Ford.
I like the way they creatively use the profile pic and landing tab image, and very neatly show off their team. Ford gets a lot of kudos online about how great they are on social media, yet I have contacts on the inside who tell me that they are only now nutting down a strategy for Facebook and are in the process of rolling out monitoring software. I think the reason they get such good press is because they are doing better than most other car companies. If you are a car company and you want to earn yourself lots of online love, get started, invest a little and create a community.
Tags: facebook landing tabs, facebook welcome tab
Great Pickup
March 17, 2011 at 5:16 pm
When you read stuff like this after a long hard week that isn’t over yet, it makes it all worthwhile..
Tags: Ireland Town
Understanding Edgerank
March 1, 2011 at 5:27 pm
Now don’t come over all cold sweats please, this is a non-mathematician’s take on Edgerank!!
You may have heard of Google Page Rank which is a number Google gives to a web page based on its algorithim – the higher the number the better, and the further up the search engine results page your site will be displayed. Google Page Rank is all about relevant content. Similarly Facebook has an algorithim that it uses to display what goes in your Top News feed. It’s called Edgerank and you need to understand it if your message is going to be found by 95% of your fans.
Fact:
- The Top News feed is the default feed that everyone sees, and 95% of users don’t bother changing this setting – so it’s extremely important that you get your message into the Top News feed.
- Only 35% of commercial news gets into the Top News feed (according to this post).
Too many brands only focus on the numbers when it comes to Facebook metrics. Edgerank is is a nice qualitative metric that you can use – and it denotes a more accurate picture of success. What’s the point of having thousands of fans if your wall posts aren’t getting into the Top News streams? It’s like sending emails that are going straight to the spam folder. If you’ve thrown a whole lot of money at building fans through advertising, ensuring you engage with them through their Top News Feeds is the follow through.
Understanding Edgerank
Techcrunch has written the clearest explanation yet. Go read the Techcrunch Edgerank post for the detail.
Lifted directly from Techcrunch, Jason Kincaid succinctly explains the following (I wonder if he’s any relation to Flesch-Kincaid of the readability index fame?)
In its simplest sense, every item that appears in your news feed is an Object.
Whenever another user interacts with that object, it’s called an Edge.
Each Edge has three components important to Facebook’s algorithm:
- First, there’s an affinity score between the viewing user and the item’s creator — if you send your friend a lot of Facebook messages and check their profile often, then you’ll have a higher affinity score for that user than you would, say, an old acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in years.
- Second, there’s a weight given to each type of Edge. A comment probably has more importance than a Like, for example.
- And finally there’s the most obvious factor — time. The older an Edge is, the less important it becomes.
Multiply these factors for each Edge then add the Edge scores up and you have an Object’s EdgeRank. And the higher that is, the more likely your Object is to appear in the user’s feed. It’s worth pointing out that the act of creating an Object is also considered an Edge, which is what allows Objects to show up in your friends’ feeds before anyone has interacted with them.
My take on this – Facebook values engagement more than anything else.
To optimise Edgerank, you need to create content that people engage with – and do that frequently. But don’t worry – it’s a lot easier than optimizing Page Rank!! Here’s a handy tool you can use to calculate your Edgerank.
Start by checking your Edgerank now as a baseline, then work hard to ensure you’re engaging. Make every wall post work for you. Invite answers through questions. Be a good Facebooker and give lots of engaging content. Then go back and see if your Edgerank has increased. If it has, use your Insights to see the kind of content that delights your fans. Then give them more of it.
How Well Do You Use Facebook?
February 23, 2011 at 2:37 pm
I posted a status update on my Facebook wall last week about how you can adjust the settings in your profile to display all your friends and not just top stories. This made me think about a statistic I read somewhere where Facebook said that 95% of people only read top news. So I thought it might be helpful to show people a few things you can do to control your news feed on Facebook.
Firstly, know that there are two types of news: Top News and Most Recent.
Have you ever clicked on the arrow beside Most Recent?
You can set it to show you just updates from friends, from pages, games, or even just photos. If you’ve got lists set up, you can choose to see just updates from your lists, eg. “Close Friends & Family”, “Cool Thinkers”, etc.
What happened last week was that Facebook rolled out a change that defaulted people’s settings to Top News. So if you noticed that your news feed changed to only contain a few of the regular faces you interact with – that is the reason why. I put out a message on my profile to let people know how to change this (go to the bottom of the page, click edit settings, and change to “all of your friends”.)
Another little thing I noticed, while changing my settings, was that you can set your Facebook to NOT receive wall posts from people you don’t like – but are too afraid to unfriend! How do you do this?
Hover to the right of their most recent post and an X will appear. Click that. You get the option to hide just this post or all by that person. If you want to keep someone out of your feed but are too afraid to let them know that, then this is what you’re looking for. I am using the example of Ian above because he writes in Portugese which I unfortunately don’t understand.
So there you have it! A few little tips on how to make your News work for you. I really had thought that we’d moved away from the ‘how to’ guides for Facebook, but that statistic about 95% of people not knowing / bothering how to change their news feed demanded some action.
New Facebook Page Design
February 17, 2011 at 4:12 pm
On 10 February, Facebook introduced its new look for Pages. Designed to bring ‘consistent experiences across profiles and pages’ it will be applied to all pages from 10th March. Between now and then you can view how the new page will look when logged in as an administrator. You can make the switch before 10 March – in research I carried out of one industry more than half of the leading pages have already done that.
Appearance:
- Photos at the top: The most recent photos that you post to the Wall of a Page you admin, or photos you tag your Page in, will appear here.
This area will not include any photos posted by people who like your Page, so you can control this. What you can’t control is the order in which they appear. While you can manage this on personal profiles, on pages it’s random.
- Information box is gone, but you can put information up top, alongside the page name. None of the leading pages in my study are doing this.
- Wall logo has been reduced in size from 200 X 600 to 180 X 540.
- What we were calling tabs are now navigation links on the left hand side. It seems to allow for up to 7 at a glance. Admins will be able to re-order these menu items and they will be able to set a selected one as the default for non-fans.
- New page design is preset to display page owners on bottom left. Remove that by clicking edit page/featured/page owners. While this could be a good way of adding personality to the page, I think it’s safer to continue to add personality through the wall posts and not display pics. It could potentially be a minefield – what if fans friend request the admins? Should they accept? What if your page has a high turnover of staff and the faces keep changing? And what if your admin forgets she’s also visible on your page and changes her profile pic to something wildly inappropriate.
- Mutual connections: on the right hand side, it shows how many of your friends like this page. It also shows other liked pages the brand and you share. It’s a good idea now to think about your strategy for which pages you will like that you wish to associate with.
- Wall Filters: fans can now view wall posts by ‘everyone’ or just us. If they choose ‘everyone’, they will see all posts with the most liked/commented ones first. This has not gone down well and many people are demanding the chronological order to be brought back in place. The posts by brand filter will display only brand posts in the order they were posted. The new pages can also filter out wall posts in a language you don’t speak.
Administration:
- It’s great news that Admins can now like and post on other pages as the fan page. It overcomes the problem we’d been facing of when you want to interact with fans off the page, how to do it? Not as your personal profile, now you can do it as your page. To do this, simply click on Account in top right corner/use Facebook as page and there you can select the page you want to administer.
- Manage permissions – you can add keywords to a moderation list. When users include blacklisted keywords in a post and or a comment on your Page, the content will be automatically marked as spam. Comments will appear in grey to admins, but will not appear to the public. Or you can set the Profanity Blocklist to medium or strong. In these cases, Facebook will block the most commonly reported words and phrases marked as offensive by the broader community.
- Email notifications – you can opt to receive email notifications whenever someone posts or comments on your page. Probably more useful for sleepy pages, or if you’re managing a whole load of pages on behalf of a number of clients. With this feature, there’s now no excuse for a delay in replying to questions or comments from the wall.
Apps:
According to Facebook:
We are now ready to move forward with our previously announced plans to deprecate FBML and FBJS as a primary technology for building apps on Facebook. On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app.
• If you have apps installed that are built in FBML, they will continue to work but you will not be able to add any new instances after 10th March. If you’re getting new apps, make sure they are developed in an iframe format.
What To Do Now
- Rethink your profile picture as the size change may affect it.
- Check your ‘page category’ is correct as this will now be displayed.
- If you previously posted important links in the information box, ie. your phone number or twitter link, make sure they are included in the about us section.
- Very important to consider the 5 images that will display at the top of the page. Upload 5 images that you wish to set as your default, but do not rely on the order in which they are presented.
- Remove the page owners and page admins.
- Consider carefully what pages you like as the top 30 of these will now be displayed.
- Uncheck the email notification settings (edit page/your settings).
Sources:
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/02/11/facebook.page.redesign.mashable/
http://blog.neworld.com/?p=886
http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/facebooks-new-fan-page-design-reduced-tab-width/
Facebook Privacy Setting Change Was A Bug
December 13, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Phew! It turns out that the Facebook privacy setting change from last week was in fact a bug and it has now been fixed by the folks at Facebook.
You can read more about it here. But rest up now and know that you can talk to your fans from your page despite privacy settings!
Tags: facebook privacy setting bug
Anarchy in Dublin 3….
December 12, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Last night I realised that I am now in fact an Anarchist! I always thought of those people as black jumper wearing, nail biting, nobodies, but I am now one of them.
Why do I say this?
Because I firmly believe that we need to make a paradigm shift in the way this country is run. When Lehman Bros bank collapsed, I thought it might have been an opportunity for the world to shake up the banking system and realign it to represent what is needed today, utilise technology to match those with money and those who need it, and remove a lot of the fat.
But that didn’t happen.
Now I am certain that a paradigm shift needs to occur in Ireland to ensure that what is happening now NEVER gets a chance to happen again.
What do I want to see?
The best people for the job in each of the main depts – Finance, Health, Education, Justice. A system that’s based on a model of social principles, and commercial efficiency. Not one that is based on old school party politics. I support many of the things that Fintan O’Toole asks for in his petition – you can read and sign here.
I was told last night that what I describe is Anarchist - – if that is so, let that be my new belief system. This revolution will not be televised. We know that. But it sure as hell can be Facebooked, Tweeted, Flickrd, blogged, and of course Youtubed. I’m ready and willing to my bit if I’m asked. But there seems to be a lot of talk, and nobody doing the asking.
What do you think?
Tags: Anarchy Ireland, Ireland IMF Scandal, Politics Ireland
Facebook Change That Impedes Engagement
December 9, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Facebook have introduced a new change that’s going to cause havoc for Page owners. Brought to my attention by the poor people at Tommy Tippee baby bottles, they were unable to comment back to me on a post I made on their wall. Why was this?
Because Facebook has introduced a change that means page owners cannot communicate with fans unless they have their privacy setting for commenting set to “everyone”. I have all my settings so that only friends can see what I’m up to. But if you want to allow Pages that you are fans of to comment to you, you must make the following change:
- Click on account / privacy settings
- Click on customise settings
- Scroll down to ‘things others share’
- Can comment on posts – change it to “everyone”
This little change is going to cause much moaning on Facebook unless they sort it out fast.
If you are a Page owner, you need to be ready for this. If you find you are unable to comment back to a fan, try sending them a message and ask them to change their setting in the message. Good luck and let us know how you get on with this.
Tags: facebook privacy setting
Facebook Relax Promotions Rules
December 2, 2010 at 7:08 am
Collectively SME’s breathe a big sigh of relief as Facebook has decreed that they can now run promotions on their pages without having to reach a target advertising spend. (In practice, many were already doing their own thing anyway.)
This time last year, Facebook changed it promotion/sweepstakes rules so that anyone wishing to run a promotion or sweepstake on its page had to first run it by FB for approval and, more onerously, be spending upwards of $10,000 in advertising. This week they’ve changed it back again so that:
- We no longer require prior written Facebook approval to administer a promotion on Facebook.
- We no longer require a minimum media spend investment to support the promotion.
This means that you are not required to have a media campaign on Facebook to run a promotion, nor do you need to ask for approval on the contest T&Cs from the Facebook team.
Hurray indeed! What I’ve seen over the course of 2010 is that advertising your promotion on Facebook really powers the numbers, so it’s not really worth your while to invest in an app and not allow budget for promoting it. So Facebook are probably finding in practice that most if not all promotions will have media spend tied to it – although perhaps not in the region of $10k.
The real reason they’ve changed their minds is most likely because they are finding it takes ages to approve all the promotions and is likely costing them money! E-Consultancy where I heard this news makes a good point that we can probably expect to find Facebook insert itself in this space. So while they’re giving with one hand, they might take away with the other. But for now, it’s all joyful and pre-Christmassy, so let us rejoice!!
Tags: Facebook Promotions
