Socialmedialand

Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Or just an evolution?

Either way I think the most recent change in Facebook’s homepage News Feed is going to force marketers to rethink the way they use Facebook.

As I explained earlier, Facebook developed an algorithm to display only the most “interesting” posts from your friends and fan pages in your news feed, presumably based on your previous “likes” and comments. Although this is the default view for most users, you can click to view the live stream, which shows everything. But unless you remember to do that, you’re going to see the filtered version.

Now that some time has passed, I want to revisit the topic and look at some of the fallout.

The major problem I see from a brand standpoint is that the new algorithm makes it almost impossible for a brand page to get featured on a user’s news feed. Since each news feed is tailored to the individual user, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most popular brand ever and used to get hundreds of comments on each post, you won’t get featured in a news feed unless that one user interacts with you regularly. I don’t know about you, but even for the brands I love I only “like” or comment on their updates once in a blue moon, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to see the information.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s completely based on the history of activity. For example, I recently became a fan of Southwest Airlines (which is btw, a VERY popular brand in case you haven’t heard.) They’re running a promotion for fans to win a free flight, and as a loyal Southwest customer I was surprised to find out I wasn’t already a fan – I’d love to get updates from them since I use their service frequently. Anyways, flash forward a day or two and I checked their page to see how the contest was going – and realized I’d missed several updates from them. I checked my news feed (filtered) – not there. I checked my live feed (unfiltered) – and there they were, all my missed updates.

Not sure if you caught the significance of that. I had just become a fan. Facebook didn’t even give them a trial run in my main news feed to try to elicit some interaction – they went straight to the land of lost updates.

This is a huge barrier for most brands. If that’s the treatment that a popular brand, with a strong social footprint like Southwest, gets what about that new page you just helped your client build? How are you going to get any attention?

The only answer I can see is, by paying for it. Remember when Facebook came up with that targeting feature to send ads just to fans? Well, it may be the only way you can reach them now (yes you can send “updates” but those go into a subsection of the inbox and can be lost just like your published statuses.) And I think there will be more [paid] options coming for “increasing” visibility with your own fans. I’m a fan of Pink Ribbon (for Breast Cancer research) and they are somehow able to put messaging into my “notifications” bar. They’re also able to send me email messages to my inbox. I don’t know how they do it but I’m thinking they may be part of a trial run for new offerings (because who’s going to get mad at spam from a charity?) I hope I’m wrong about that last part, because both of those options are much more disruptive to me than simply seeing the updates in my news feed.

Personally, I’m bummed because it cuts down on that viral, discovery based aspect of Facebook. If one of my friends comments on a Fan page – I won’t see that unless the friend who said it is someone I interact with frequently. It’s creating a black hole of updates. As a user myself, it’s infinitely carving away at the amount of content I see. It gives me a whittled down list of updates, and since that’s all I see, it’s all I interact with. Then as I fail to comment on every single one of those posts, it will filter out some of the people on the smaller list, and so and so on. For myself I’ll choose the live feed option to counteract the issue, but unless everyone else remembers to do that as well I think the value of Facebook is going to be ultimately decreased.

What do you think? Anyone out there have some ideas for ways to gain back visibility for pages beyond paying for it? Leave a comment! Maybe together we can brainstorm a way around this roadblock…

Tonight is the night (at 9:01pm). We can all finally pick out a Facebook profile name to make an easy to remember URL. Oh the joy – we can finally print it on business cards, put it in our email signature lines and more!

Amidst all the excitement and pledges to logon at 9:01 exactly to get the most sought after common names first, Facebook issued a warning to be careful what name you pick because – you’re stuck with it FOREVER.

When I first saw that; I dismissed it. My name really isn’t that common. I found one other Katie Van Domelen on Myspace back in high school, so I guess it’s a race between me and her. Then I started to think about it a little harder. I plan to get married one day; will I then wish I’d picked a different name? And what about my friend Lacey? She’s currently engaged and I wonder if she’ll pick her maiden name or her soon-to-be married name? Is that bad luck? What if someone is married now and they use that last name in their URL but then they get divorced- could become a pretty big thorn in their side. On the other hand, who’s going to insist on using a maiden name in case they get divorced? That has to be bad luck.

The more I thought about this the more it bothered me. I won’t pretend to understand all the technical issues that go into this and I definitely realize that making it permanent might make it easier to keep things straight (Myspace’s URLs are permanent as well.) But I know other networks have found a way to make change possible. LinkedIn, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Friendfeed all let you easily update your name/username and URL. Some even include a space for a maiden name to make searching easy.

Am I being overly sensitive to think that a social network should take into consideration that roughly 50% of the population will experience at least one name change in their life? Or is this another one of those things that we, as women, will just have to adjust ourselves to?

I’ll probably follow in the footsteps I’ve seen other women take on Facebook – keeping their maiden name on their profile  in addition to their taken name (i.e: Jane Smith Brown) or simply using their maiden name for social networking purposes. So I plan to sign up for katie.vandomelen to create my Facebook URL (no one take it!) what will you do?

Sometimes there is a tendency for people, especially when dealing with cutting edge topics like social media, to be so obsessed with “the next big thing,” that they completely overlook the current big thing.

Jason Baer talked about the danger of putting the cart before the horse - he cautions us to focus on the basics before jumping into the “sexy and new(ish)” rage of social media ideas, campaigns and strategy. I completely agree that you have to start with a good strategy around traditional online media, such as email, before getting ahead of yourself in social media. But I think the same concept carries through once you are ready to engage with social media.

Don’t Forget the Big Guy

I feel like there’s been something of a backlash against services like Facebook - like it’s soo 2007  and the really hip social marketers wouldn’t be caught dead there. (I’m exaggerating for effect, but you know what I mean.) I definitely see the allure of being on the cutting edge, being on the little social network first – before it gets big. I’m not trying to deter you from your quest. If you find the holy grail of social networks, let me know! But in the meantime I think when you’re planning what tactics to use in your social media plan (because you’ve already covered the social media strategy and mindset right?) you can’t pass over the big guys.

They’re big for a reason – your customers use them*. Your customers, the average social network user, isn’t constantly searching to find the next network – they want value, and they get value from being on the same network as all their friends, who get value from being on the same network as all their friends, and so on. I received an email from ShareThis, a social bookmarking service, with the following graph showing percentage of shares by network, as well as growth from August 08. This is only one metric (from one source,) but I think it shows a compelling picture. This gives us an idea of where people are the most active and what their go to method of communicating with their contacts is.

Notice first, that email still controls a healthy majority (though it’s decreased since August) which reinforces Jason’s point that we can’t skip traditional online media in favor of social. After that you see that Facebook is the second most popular, followed by good old Myspace.  You can also see that Facebook and Twitter are the only two that have grown (besides AIM) since August. This growth is further supported by monthly visitors as reported by Compete.com

So the next time you, or your client, are thinking how tired you are of hearing about making a Facebook page or opening a Twitter account, think about this graph and grin and bear it. Step 2 can be creating a presence on that new little network you’ve heard so much about.

What do you think? Do you have more stats? Different stats? Opposite view of the same stats? Leave a comment!

*Use this nifty technographics tool from Forrester to really see where your customer demographic is. I was generalizing earlier and of course, when creating a plan, you need to do a little more specific research.

Courtesy of gapingvoid

As I promised in an earlier post about Myspace’s advertising practices – here is my evaluation of the two giants of social networking from both my professional and personal view.

Advertising: Ok so if you read the post about advertising on Myspace you already know my position on this. But just to recap – Facebook has a social element to their advertising, users can vote ads up or down based on what they like (or don’t like) and they can even share ads with their friends if they want. Myspace follows the more traditional display advertising formula of throwing the most ads at the most people to get impressions based only on demographic/geographic targeting.

Friend Updates: People hated it when it first came out (and maybe they still do) but I’m a fan of the news feed and mini feed. I have a lot of friends on Facebook – ok not a whole lot but a decent amount. It would be impossible for me to keep up with what they’re all doing by going to their page and trying to remember what it looked like last in order to find out what has changed for them recently. Myspace has tried to imitate this to an extent with a friend updates section. Both allow you to customize what you see by type (more or less pictures versus events) and person. But Myspace limits the number of people you can “subscribe to” and doesn’t include an alert for commenting – I’ll talk about how difficult it is to follow conversations later. The other main thing that is lacking on Myspace is the mini-feed. The news feed gives me an overview of what’s going on in my network, the mini feed gives me an overview of that one person. When I go to my friend’s page I want something to tell me right away if there are new pictures or a new favorite song I should check out. I don’t want to have to hunt through the news feed to find her updates.

Applications: This one is seriously just my own opinion but when I set up apps on Facebook, it works. When I do that on Myspace it doesn’t. I have to admit I haven’t spent a lot of time messing with apps on Myspace because the first few experiences I had with it went so poorly so I can’t say much more than that.

“Threading” of Conversations: This is a big pet peeve of mine on Myspace. It is so hard to follow a conversation! Facebook added the “wall to wall” function a long time ago allowing you to see both sides of a conversation in one view (as long as you are friends with both parties – this maintains privacy). In addition, on Facebook you can “comment” on just about anything anybody does at this point and that string of comments is easily tracked from each participant’s feed. If you see something a friend wrote on another friend’s wall on Myspace you have to hunt through their wall to see what the response is. This slows down the rate of communication. Let’s say they’re talking about what they want to do on Friday and I know of something going on – I have to go searching around to see what the other person said to see if my idea even makes sense. It just makes things inconvenient when it doesn’t have to be.

Design/Customization: Myspace allows a lot more customization. Over and over I hear this as the main reason people like it and I totally understand it. It really is your space. You design it. You customize it. You can do almost anything with it. Facebook is more like a glorified form that you fill out. I get that. But I have a type-a personality and I’m in love with organization, so the clean cut format actually appeals to me. But Myspace has come out with a version of that too. They have a new profile tool that lets you easily customize your page without all the fancy HTML stuff which made it a lot nicer for people like me. Kudos.

Search: I like that Facebook uses real names. That makes things easy. If I meet you and you say your name is John Smith, I go to Facebook, type that in and like magic there you are (except if your name is actually John Smith – then you’re there in a huge list of other people that I’d have to filter by location, school, age, etc.) But if I do the same thing on Myspace…hmmm maybe, maybe not. Depending on your privacy settings, depending on if you used your real name at all. The idea of the “display name” confuses me a lot. A name that you can change whenever you want just makes things hard. Even a user name that isn’t your real name but stays the same (like AIM) makes more sense. I look at my Myspace friend list and can’t figure out who half the people are, then when I go to their profile I realize that it’s one of my good friends who just randomly changed her name to some obscure line from a song. How was I to know?

Commercial Pages: This is a toss-up for me and the reason why professionally I never make the mistake of writing off either of these sites (although, personally, I’ve clearly made my choice for a favorite:). I would say (and feel free to disagree) that Myspace is better for anything that is artistic or creative while Facebook is better for anything corporate. If you’re a band and you need a page to show off your music, style, and post upcoming events I’d say go on Myspace without hesitation. Same for comedy, movies, etc. If you’re a brand like Target or Crest or GM, I would say create a Fan page on Facebook. In reality you might want to consider doing both but this is just how I would prioritize.

In the end it’s pretty simple to choose a network. For your personal profile pick the one that fits your needs best. For your brand/corporate profile, pick the one that your customers use. And you can always maintain a basic profile on both networks (and a few others, like LinkedIn for example, if it makes sense) and then use your favorite one as your main portal. There are lots of apps available that help you integrate your networks together so you can mainly operate out of your favorite one. Maybe I’ll write a quick how-to on that for a future post…

Ok, I think that about covers it. Give me a comment if you disagree with me (which is fine, like I said this is all just my opinion) or if you think there’s a section I missed.

There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter circulating throughout the industry over the last few months so I’m going to try not to repeat too much of what’s already been said but I would like offer up my view of Twitter’s impact on all of us.

A majority of my time during the day is spent “monitoring” social media for various clients. Monitoring is just a fancy word for listening, watching and reading as much content as I can about my brands. I use Radian6 (my favorite) and a few other tools and integrate everything I learn into a concise report that summarizes what’s being said in the blogosphere. I realize this isn’t revolutionary and even at times I’m frustrated by how far behind we are because none of this includes responding to any of it. But more on that later.

The main reason why this is important is that across all my brands over the last few months I’ve seen a marked increase in the amount of Twitters showing up in my reports over time.

I thought this was interesting, mainly because it was across the board in at least 4 different industries. The timing was also a little funny to me because it coincided with about the same time that I, and a few of my coworkers, became active on Twitter. So in my personal view it felt like all of a sudden Twitter went from the “next big thing” to “the big thing.” This prompted a little research to see if it was all in my head or if there really had been a huge spike – check it out from two different sources:

Courtesy of Quantcast

Courtesy of Compete.com

Ok so now comes the disconnect in my life – I think Twitter is really fun and I have Twhirl up on my desktop at work all day, but as for my personal life, I never use it. A quick background, I’m 22 years old and graduated from ASU in May, so most of my friends are still in college or are recent grads like me, all in their early to mid 20s. This is completely unscientific but if I had to guess how many of them knew what Twitter was – I’d go with 10%. I can’t even begin to illustrate the trouble I have explaining what I do, and what Twitter is, to a guy my age at a bar. Or to my best friends. It just doesn’t click with them. The best I’ve come up with is “You know Facebook status? It’s an entire site of just you and your friends’ statuses.” But if there was a huge spike in activity, why do so few “young” people know what it is? I did a little more research on the average age group of Twitter users:

Courtesy of Google Ad Planner

Courtesy of Quantcast

And here you go, the main age group for Twitter isn’t the 18-25 college kids, it’s the 25-45 educated, working adults. As soon as I saw that, it all clicked into place.

Disclaimer: the rest of this post is based on pure theory…

My reasoning goes that when you’re in college sites like Facebook are the best way to keep in touch. You have the extra time in boring classes, or procrastinating on homework, to do all the extra legwork. You upload videos, painstakingly upload and tag pictures; you stalk people’s walls to see what they’re up to and write them messages. But what about when you grow up a little and get a job? All of a sudden all of that takes way too much time. In a completely unscientific poll of the people I work with who sit near me – all of them told me they gave up on maintaining their Facebook profile the way they used to and now they check it weekly or even bi-weekly.

Enter Twitter. Twitter is quick and fun – no extra work here. Simply write a message and voila all your friends know what’s going on. Want to Twitter at work? No problem, install a small desktop app that’s easily minimized and looks almost like email updates. You can’t have your Facebook page up at work – way to conspicuous, and takes way too much time, your boss would totally figure out what you’re up to. Twitter is the perfect way to continue to socialize all day long while you’re working. And since it’s caught on so well, it’s even started to integrate into how we work, collaborate and network. Some sites are even basing innovating new work place message systems on the Twitter format.

And all of that is what I think becomes the basic support for why brands can’t ignore Twitter anymore. Social media has become a part of our daily life. It’s not like Trix and “just for kids.” It’s become an integral part of daily communication for a lot of people, including working professionals. Do I think every company should just jump onto Twitter? No, of course not. No one technology will solve a brand’s need to participate in the social sphere. But do I think it’s become a crucial part of the social media marketing mix? Yes.

But this is just my opinion and experience with Twitter, what do you think? Leave me a comment below!