Socialmedialand

Archive for October, 2009

Publish (and interact) or perish

Author: Katie

Until recently, the best way for a brand to get free impressions on Facebook was to publish from their fan page. Anything they updated would show up in their fans’ news feeds and potentially be passed on to their friends.

Things have changed. The new News Feed shows top stories to a user based on their behavior. In that view they’ll see updates from the friends they talk to most. The same goes for brands. The only way for a brand to get featured in a user’s News Feed is if that user visits the page often, comments on the page, likes the page’s status updates, etc - or if a bunch of their friends do those things.

This puts a lot more emphasis on interactions on pages rather than just publishing. In truth this shift was a long time coming. Facebook provides a post quality score based on the number and type of interactions the page’s posts get. It seems Facebook has been looking for a way to encourage pages to publish more engaging content for its users.

For marketers this piles on some pressure to come up with that engaging content – questions, polls, videos – things people will want to interact with. This implies a deep understanding of what your target actually wants. And essentially, it marks the end of the “at-least-get-your-page-and-write-weekly-updates” era of Facebook Fan Page strategy. Now a brand’s minimum Facebook strategy has to include a pretty robust content plan.

We’ve been search engine optimizing for some time now – it’s time to start Facebook feed optimizing as well. (Thanks to Inside Facebook for that great turn of phrase)

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So what if YouTube is the second largest search engine?

Author: Katie

YouTube is the second largest search engine. That's old news. But recently I've seen that stat bounced around more and more often at conferences, in blogs, and, frankly, all over the place.

So what?

No one (that I know of – feel free to correct me) has addressed the real meaning behind that. Yes, it means people are looking for videos and that online videos are popular. But what are they searching for?

I've started playing with this idea of intention – that it's not enough to say "Facebook is the most popular social network so you need to be there." You have to supply context. What are people doing on Facebook? What is their intention, why are they there? Then the ultimate question becomes; can your brand develop a message or strategy that fits within those intentions?

If people are on YouTube to find interesting, quirky videos – do you have an interesting or quirky product/service? Will your video content be searched for, will your advertising fit in with people's mindset while on YouTube? If so, yes it matters to you that YouTube is the second largest search engine. If not….well maybe you need to rethink what that stat means to you.

P.S: speaking of keyboard cat…here's a pretty good one:

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Social Monitoring: Facebook + Bing + Looking Glass = ??

Author: Katie

Ok, maybe I just read the blog posts in my RSS in the wrong order but I think there might be something to this.

First, I read about Microsoft’s new program, “Looking Glass” that’s a social media monitoring tool currently in closed beta. I’ve heard about this before, but today Jay Baer wrote an interesting article on how it will affect the marketplace of social monitoring tools. Cool.

Second, I read on Inside Facebook about Facebook making a deal with Microsoft’s Bing on indexing public status updates. [If you go the security settings on your account, you can select the "everyone" option. Right now - if you do that - your status updates show up on Facebook search. Now's the time to double check your settings.] Apparently Facebook is also looking into providing this information to Google – but the deal on the table today is with Bing.

In the past, Facebook updates have been off-limits to us social monitors. The only way to look for them was to search on Facebook and even then you mainly just saw what you’re own friends and networks were saying (ineffective) so most Facebook “monitoring” really occurs on the brands own pages and groups. In recent months, Radian6 (and I’m assuming a few other tools, I just happen to prefer R6) has introduced functionality to pull in mentions that occur on discussion boards located in public groups – cool but still pretty limiting.

After Facebook added the search function on its own site where you could search “Posts by Everyone” I started thinking it was only a matter of time before these public updates were accessible by monitoring tools. So in my mind, this deal with Bing is related to Microsoft’s development of Looking Glass. Getting in on the ground floor of publically indexing Facebook updates would make it easy for them to integrate those results into Looking Glass. That would give them an advantage out of the gate. I’m sure it wouldn’t last long, other tools would have to pick up the capability pretty quickly – and as first movers they’re already ingrained in a lot of corporations and agencies, but…could shake things up a bit.

Posted via email from Katie Van Domelen’s Posterous

UPDATE: Google’s adding Twitter to it’s search database (Mashable)- Bing no longer has the upper hand there. However…still no solid news on Facebook and Google so Bing may still be a front runner on that side.

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Changes to the Facebook News Feed – What it Means for Users and Brands

Author: Katie

Facebook is redesigning it's news feed in an attempt to increase relevance and become a central web portal for users. Highlights:

Top Stories Feature: Facebook is developing an algorithm to display the most interesting posts from your friends, presumably based on previous "likes" and comments. You will still be able to access the full stream (as it is now) by clicking "recent stories."
Several story types that were lost in the recent news feed update will come back including: friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs (good news for brands on that one) and group memberships.
Speaking of Groups – they've gotten an overhaul as well. They'll begin to look a lot more like pages and activity that your friends do in groups that you're a part of will be displayed in your feed. Group admins still can't push updates to the whole group so if you need that kind of reach, a page is still your best bet.
For pages: virtual gifts and friends who fan a page will also show up in the news feed
Birthdays will move back up above the fold (which is nice for us forgetful types)

Major take away for brands: The right hand column will be less cluttered (giving the homepage ad a potentially larger impact) and they'll have more opportunities to get into the news feed stream with event RSVPs, virtual gifts, and new fans.

What's next? Facebook recently bought FriendFeed so there's hope that they'll be able to incorporate some of the things that FriendFeed did (and I guess, still does) do well that Facebook hasn't yet mastered. This includes things like sharing automatically imported items faster (from personal experience – blog posts take anywhere from 3-5 hours to show up) and more fine-tuned filtering system.

I'd think that the general user won't notice these changes too much which is good because it will cut back on those annoying "I hate the new layout and all forms of change" groups that take over your new feed for the first few weeks making it impossible to tell if you like it or not. For myself, I think these all represent steps in the right direction – at this point the only way Facebook can sustain continued growth is to give users better tools to organize the information overload that's happening there. The only thing I would suggest is more communication from Facebook. They know how to advertise brands using engagement ads – they need to do the same for their own network. Put out some video content on how to use the advanced filtering options (including lists and now the new top stories feed) so people can use it to their advantage and ultimately have a better experience on the network.

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Social Media Time Management

Author: Katie

Amber Naslund did a session at the Blog World Expo, and while I wasn't fortunate enough to see it in person she did post her slides online. Planning out corporate infrastructure around social media is something I've been dabbling in when writing strategies for clients. I found a few of the slides in the middle of this presentation to be especially useful so I attached them here. I like how she shows the progression from mainly listening to responding, creating and engaging and the breakdown of how many resources you'll need at each stage. She's committed to exploring the meat of her talk on her blog over the next few posts which you can see here: http://altitudebranding.com/2009/10/social-media-time-management/ and you can check out the full slide show here:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Setting Up My Posterous

Author: Katie

Why hello there!

This is my brand new posterous account – I'm pretty excited about it. As I mentioned on my blog (www.socialmedialand.net) I've decided to take a break from full-fledged blogging and try out some free form posting here instead. I'm planning to share snippets of my life, pictures, updates, thoughts, as well as more information stuff – insights and opinions related to social media marketing. Depending on the type of stuff I'll push that out to my Twitter, Facebook and blog as well. Bear with me as I work through all the mechanics of that…

Enjoy! And thanks for reading!

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Switching to Posterous

Author: Katie

I haven’t written in a while.

I know that.

But I’ve been doing some soul searching in the meantime. I really love my job, and I love what I do – but it just doesn’t seem like I have the drive to get home from work and put together a cohesive blog post anymore. All of my passion and all of my drive is going into my work and there’s not enough left over to maintain this blog. At the same time, so many other people out there are doing a fantastic job covering this industry and I don’t feel like I’ve been offering anything here that’s not already being done.

That being said, I DO love to share the things I learn and offer my particular opinion on them. Often that opinion exceeds 140 characters. So, I’ve decided to switch over to Posterous.

In case you’re not familiar with Posterous, it’s billed as “the simplest blogging platform to date” and I would describe it as a cross between a full fledged blog, and Twitter. By using a suite of email addresses you can send updates to Posterous that will then update your Facebook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube, Flickr, or any combination of those things.

My plan is to use my Posterous feed for a wide varity of things I’m interested in and send those updates to Facebook, Twitter or here to Socialmedialand, depending on the type of content. Doing it that way will allow me to share an article, write a paragraph about my thoughts on it, and post to Twitter and here, without feeling like I need to develop an entire blog post.

You heard right, Socialmedialand is not closing – I think I’ve built up some great content here and a sizeable repository of resources (if you haven’t checked out the resource pages, I sincerely recommend it) so I want to keep it going, but just use it in a different way. Most of what you’ll see from now on will be short format posts summarizing other information I’ve found and offering my insight to what it means. If that’s not something you’re interested in, feel free to unsubscribe, I won’t be hurt (too much.) If you think that sounds great- click that orange subscribe button on the sidebar.

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