Facebook is Changing – Why isn’t your Social Strategy Changing too?

 

Some marketers will tell you, “You’re only as good as your content.” While this is true in many cases, it seems Mark Zuckerberg overlooked the memo. I don’t know; maybe it posted on his Super Wall.

 

Facebook reach changes visible in Insights

A Social Sea Change

With Facebook focusing on profit, it’s becoming more difficult for brands to connect with current fans. The focus on brand reinforcement is shifting toward brand awareness. Statistics form EdgeRanker show that engaged users of Facebook pages dropped from August to September.  An in-depth look at the pages we manage confirmed their belief. Fewer people are seeing posts from brand pages.

Over time, social media managers can see patterns in a post’s engagement versus its reach.  The higher a post’s engagement, the more people see. This is because Facebook displays posts in newsfeeds based on the level of interest in the post. For example, let’s say you and three of your friends like the same page. If those three friends like a status from the page, it’s more likely to display in your newsfeed. At least that’s how it used to be. Now, regardless of engagement, posts are displaying to roughly the same percentage of users who like a page (roughly 15 percent).

A Necessary Evil

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that reach dropped shortly after the advent of the promoted post. With the promoted post, you can pay $5 to $15 to have posts displayed to a much larger audience of fans and friends of fans – much larger than any organic post could possibly deliver. The fee won’t guarantee engagement – just create the opportunity.

So your choices are simple. Show your post to a small group of people for free or show your post to the world for $15.

A company that has always put experience first is being forced to focus on profit, and marketers are an easy target. We all want access to the Facebook population and $15 isn’t an unreasonable price tag.

Marketers understand Facebook as a tool for brand reinforcement; you find people who like your brand and you interact with them – easy. But with pressure from shareholders, the stakes are raised for the social giant.

And make no mistake- the stakes are raised for marketers as well. What if you went to a CMO 10 years ago and said, “I want to allocate a significant portion of our resources to a free service that we have little to no control over?” But that’s what we do with Facebook everyday. We are at its mercy because it has six billion things we want.

A Plausible Solution

Great content and interaction are no longer the key drivers of success. Content still plays an important role, but the entirely organic nature of Facebook is gone. A really great post will no longer maximize your reach. Now, it takes a really great post and $15.

Some brands are trying creative ways to outsmart the system. One page posted an update that propositioned users to favorite their page so they wouldn’t have to “advertise.”

Instead of jamming a square peg in a round hole, our social media strategies have to evolve with the service. You must develop strategies that target the new audience available through promoted posts or find ways to mobilize the people who are still interacting with your page. There’s no simple solution. The technology will continue to change. The best advice: Stay agile. Watch your Insights and be ready to adapt your strategy accordingly.

 

Who’s Pinning From Your Website? And is it for inspiration, purchase or both?

I pin so I don’t buy but according to a survey conducted by Emily Carr University and research firm Vision Critical, more than 1 in 5 people who pin will purchase what they’ve pinned from a physical bricks and mortar store (source: Harvard Business Review). I won’t lie, I’ve bought a few things that I’ve pinned, but they’re usually online purchases and my pocket book certainly isn’t deep enough to buy that sustainable treetop home in Marin County Hills, California, or those amazing $395 wide-leg pants from Barney’s. (Both are items that I pinned.) But they do inspire me to find something similar and/or a bit more suitable for my personal financial status…

 

Rather, I pin for inspiration for purchase. I once attended an Oprah-inspired women’s retreat where we created inspiration boards using old magazines for pictures and words, a pair of scissors, glue, and poster board. When finished, the boards were supposed to help provide you a visual reminder of where you want to go or what you want to have in life or who you want to become, or how you want to feel about a particular someone or something. Pinning reminds me a lot of that – a source of inspiration for things we aspire to have…

 

Whether people pin to buy or pin to inspire to buy, Pinning is a signal indicating a person’s consideration or at the very least their “like” (if we were to liken this to Facebook) for a product, picture, information, etc. And for that, it’s worth noting.

 

If you’re a company selling a product and you want to see who’s pinned your product from your website, you can easily do so. All you have to do is type in pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com and you can see the pins (and the boards) that people pinned from your site. From there, you can click on the individual and/or their boards to see what else they pin and how they categorize their pin(s). For example, someone could have a board called Nursery Inspiration and another board called Must Have. The board names are clear indications of the individual’s intention behind the pin.

 

You can learn a lot about a person from their pins (and their boards), and with the right kind of planning you might even be able to influence a pin from inspiration to a purchase. We want to know: Do you purchase items you’ve pinned?

A Brief (visual) Guide to Facebook Insights

A lot of marketers disagree on which Facebook Insights are important.  But isn’t it important to understand what the numbers mean before deciding how to evaluate a campaign? Different campaigns require different metrics. Even an extremely broad metric like impressions can have relevance for paid ad campaigns.

 

The infographic below shows the relationship between each of the social network’s primary metrics. Each one can be broken down further into organic, viral and paid. They can also be sliced by day, week and month (most recent 28 days).This  infographic also shows how each smaller metric is a part of a larger one. Since every Facebook page is different, it’s impossible to make a perfect scale model. Instead, circles sizes show a general relationship in number recorded by each metric for the average page.

*To see the infographic in its entirety, click on the image.

Facebook Insights infographic

 

 

What’s so “Super” about the Super Bowl?

Super Bowl 46 LogoFor football fans, it’s a holy day. For others, it’s just an excuse to pig out and down some brewskies. But, no matter the age, gender or motive, the Super Bowl represents a profound experience that makes it an “unofficial” holiday in our American culture. As each year passes, it seems as if the brains behind the Super Bowl operations look for the next big idea to take fans’ experience to the next level.

This year, the land of Peyton Manning, Touchdown Jesus and Bobby Knight is the new home of the Super Bowl and the first-ever social media command center created by the Indianapolis Super Bowl XLVI Host Committee to provide visitors with a whole new type of game-day experience. (It’s in Indiana if you’re still in the dark with those sport references.)

The Game Plan

The new social media experience angle of this year’s big game is spearheaded by a group of individuals from Raidious, an Indiana-based social media company, who are committed to giving “Hoosier hospitality” to fans and visitors of Indianapolis by monitoring social media outlets and answering questions about local attractions, parking and other Super Bowl-related topics.

Raidious Super Bowl social media command center

Raidious Super Bowl social media command center

The social media platforms which will be monitored include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Foursquare. The command center is giving others the play-by-play now through Super Bowl Sunday.

The Drive

But, there’s more to this social media-savvy event. The command center goes for a two-point conversion with its SEO efforts, and in my eyes, really puts those extra points up on the board. Not only will the individuals manning (No pun intended, but go Giants) the center monitor conversations occurring on various outlets, they will also use SEO to highlight keywords and phrases people are searching with to obtain certain information.  According to FastCompany.com, a list of about 300 keywords will be used to monitor all social media outlets as well as the Twitter hashtag, #Social46.

The End Zone

Here’s the bottom line: it’s all about customer satisfaction, which directly relates to the individuals’ experience. No matter what business you’re in or which event you’re preparing for, you want outsiders or customers to walk away with the “wow” factor. It’s like Thanksgiving dinner when your mom seems as if her head is going to pop off faster than the cork on a champagne bottle just because she wants everyone to have a great time full of memories.

This social media command center accomplishes that same goal because it reaches out and makes a connection with Super Bowl attendees and tourists visiting Indianapolis. By serving as the scouting team, individuals are left feeling valued and taken care of because the command center has the ultimate Super Bowl playbook. The best offense is a good defense, and by being a step ahead of the game, you are almost always guaranteed to cross the goal line. So whether you’re tuning in for entertaining commercials or watching to see which team will clinch the Vince Lombardi Trophy, remember it’s all about your experience and the memories you take away.

 

Google Analytics – It Just Keeps on Getting Better

Real-time Google Analytics

Google’s infamous Panda updates and the launch of Google+ may have captured search headlines this year, but we’ve had our eye on a series of updates to Google Analytics that resulted in some very cool new tools for data-minded marketers. Here’s a recap of our favorite new(ish) features and how we’re putting them to use for our clients.

  1. Google Analytics Real-Time

    Google has always been great for analyzing past performance but we’ve often wished for a way to gauge the immediate impact of media hit, blog post or Tweet on a client’s site traffic. With Google Analytics Real-Time, we can see how many active visitors are on a site at any given time, which pages they’re viewing, and what traffic source sent the traffic.  Sweet!

  2. Social Plug-In Analytics

    Google Analytics Real-Time tracks Facebook "likes"

    Google Analytics Real-Time tracks Facebook "likes"

    With a tweak to the standard Google Analytics tracking code, it’s now possible to know which site pages, articles or blog posts are most commonly “liked” or shared, and from which social networks. You can track a variety of social actions, from Google +1 clicks to Facebook “likes” and Delicious bookmarks. And you can compare visitor engagement for visits that did and did not include social interaction to determine whether the ability to share content results in more in-depth site visits or more time spent viewing content.

  3. Using Events as Goals

    This one gets a bit geeky, so bear with us. Google Analytics makes it easy to track goals that are tied to a specific set of actions and an outcome (think adding an item to a shopping cart and checking out or completing a contact form). But there are a lot of other on-site activities that can indicate a high level of engagement and interest that aren’t so straightforward. By taking advantage of events as goals, it’s now possible to track PDF downloads, video views (including how many visitors viewed the complete video as opposed to only part of the video), use of site tools like calculators or quizzes or interaction with a slideshow (like clicking through rotating content on a home page).

    We can go one step further and tie these activities back into transactional goals, making it possible to determine, for example, whether visitors who view a video about a new product or download a PDF version of a brochure are more likely to complete a “request more information” form.

There’s a wealth of information buried in your Analytics if you know how to find and interpret it. With end-of-year review season rapidly approaching, we can’t wait to put on our spreadsheet goggles and get to work!