inapro.posthaven

piece from mashable on Facebook's homegrown resources for marketers

Take a peek at the following resources and, as always, please share your own Facebook marketing advice in the comments below.

1. Facebook Studio

If you’re looking for examples of successful social marketing, turn to Facebook Studio for inspiration. Studio curates game-changing campaigns that have appeared on the social network. In addition to a gallery of marketing efforts, the site presents Facebook Studio Awards to exceptional campaigns. You can even submit your own. Studio highlights campaigns from all over the globe, so you can see what works in other cultures, too.

back in march, facebook removed the default landing page feature as part of the shift to timeline. developers of landing page tab apps felt the pain, losing a ton of volume. a few are coming back, however, as this article in inside facebook describes. reason - the landing page isn't dead, you just have to work a little harder to get new visitors there. read the whole article there. 

The key difference since Timeline is that now page owners have to actively promote their tab applications, whereas previously the app was the first thing new visitors saw when they came to the page. Woobox’s DeCarlo says he immediately recognized this and when Timeline launched, Woobox added a feature to give page owners a short shareable URL with a customizable image, headline and summary that would appear when the link was posted to Facebook.

In the rush to compare advertising engagement levels between Twitter and Facebook last week, TBG Digital made a hasty and significant error. The social media marketing vendor originally reported that Facebook mobile ads outperformed Twitter by at least four times, but days later it reversed its finding, admitting that it was "not comparing like for like."

While the desire to juxtapose largely incomparable channels like Twitter and Facebook is understandable, the fact of the matter is that most brands already know that such guesswork is an effort in futility. In its report, TBG Digital compared the click-through rates of Promoted Accounts on Twitter with Newsfeed ads on Facebook. "A more comparable product for Twitter would have been Promoted Tweets," it later noted.

However, the end result still doesn't carry much weight for brands. If Promoted Accounts and Newsfeed ads are akin to comparing apples to elephants, Promoted Tweets and Newsfeed ads are like apples and oranges. Neither of those directly compare, so advertisers learn little in the process.

Based on those misleading comparisons, TBG Digital drew the wrong conclusions. Facebook isn't beating Twitter on mobile ad engagement. Indeed, it appears to be doing quite the opposite.

excerpt; click on link to see whole article

think twice, write once

paraphrasing the old carpenter’s saw (get it? get it?), it is a good thing in the age of frictionless sharing and instant communication to think twice before unleashing your bon mots upon an unsuspecting world. it’s been possible for a while to censor your own posts and comments on facebook. with the latest update, users now have the option of editing comments instead of simply deleting them.

good news. you can now go back to less than perfect comments (and theoretically posts soon) and get all 20/20 hindsight on their behinds.

when edit means ‘delete’

facebook has allowed users to go back and remove or hide (in the new timeline) posts and comments for a while now. mouse over the top right cormer on a post of yours in your regular facebook stream and you will see an X pop, offering to delete the post. If you go to your own profile page, you see more options:

note that your edit options are limited – in this case, since the post came in through my rss reader, I am able to amend the source controls, but not the content itself. there are more options differ depending on the post. when you are tagged in someone’s picture, you first have the option of saying whether you want it to show up on your page at all (in your privacy settings). when it is there, your edit/delete options are a bit different:

check it out. you have the option to edit the date, add a location, and even reposition the picture. This does not affect the positioning on the poster’s page, but can make you look a little prettier on your own timeline (I tried, but there is simply no way to make myself look good here short of sliding myself out of the frame).

You can also untag yourself in the picture, which will also result in removing the image from your timeline.

when edit means edit

now, with your comments at least, you can do more. here is the initial post:

now a regrettable comment:

but I got the prized first comment spot! if I just delete, I’ll be buried somewhere down the list and it will no longer be about me, me, me. but look…

correct-o-mundo

and no one the wiser…but wait – what’s that “edited” thingie?

oh well – it’ll be like privacy settings and hardly anybody will see them.

and so that’s it. as I note above, it’s just comments that can be edited for now, but I expect soon we’ll see this for posts as well.

 

 

Related articles

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  Facebook Now Lets You Edit Comments(mashable.com)

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  New Facebook Feature Lets You Go Back In Time(huffingtonpost.com)

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Victoria Ransom is founder and CEO of Wildfire, a global leader in social media marketing software. She is also a sought-after expert on social marketing trends and was recently named a 2012 TechFellow by the Founders Fund, NEA, and TechCrunch. For more on social advertising, register here for Wildfire’s free on-demand webinar.

In the run up to Facebook’s fast-approaching IPO, the company is making extensive and ongoing improvements to its advertising platform. The most recent updates, which are not yet live, will allow marketers to optimize their ads for any Facebook action (not just likes). These new capabilities will also give advertisers a much greater understanding of their consumers, allowing them to segment marketing messages based on certain user groups. All of this goes to support the general belief that Facebook wants to turn their ad platform into the main driver of a brand’s reach. To be successful in this space, brands will have to be very authentic. The first big move towards making ads into more organic-feeling messages came when Facebook introduced the updated Premium ad format, in which Premium ads could only be created from real content posted to a brand’s page.

It continued with the recently announced extended feature set for the ads manager, which includes the ability to set different metrics and goals for different campaigns. This capability allows you, for example, to set up one campaign and optimize it to be shown to users most likely to post comments; and set up a different campaign for users most likely to spend their Facebook credits on an in-app purchase. With this tool, marketers will be able to more efficiently use Facebook advertising to capture the attention of very different kinds of Facebook users.

This means that now, more than ever, the challenge to create organic-feeling and genuine ads is on! Here are four ways to drive more engagement with the new Facebook ad units, along with tips for how to enhance performance once the new action-driven optimization capabilities are live.

1. Create Versatile Video Content

When viewing a premium ad with video, users can watch the clip in its entirety straight from the ad, or click through to the page to learn more. The variety of options means more interactions are possible, which is great news for an ad because it can be doubly effective!

Above, McDonald’s and Tide turn video posts into premium ad units. McDonald’s adds in a second user interaction: a hyperlink to the local farmer campaign on an outside domain. In this way, users can land in one of two different places: the outside website or the fan page itself. They can also just watch the video without leaving their news feed at all.

Tip: When Facebook makes the new action-oriented optimization features ready, you’ll be able to optimize your budget by the action you value most. Those actions can include targeting users who are more likely to watch the video, targeting users who are more likely to share the video, or targeting users who are more likely to post a comment on your video.

2. Use Promotions to Track ROI and Ad Performance

Soon, Facebook advertisers will be able to segment the demographic coverage of their varied ad campaigns by propensity to buy, click, or share (or any other activity). For the time being, however, brands like Starbucks and Schick can track the ROI of their premium advertising placements by tracking mention of the $2 Petites deal in Starbucks stores, and by tracking entry rates to the XTreme3 Eco remake contest by using custom referral links for the promotion.

Tip: Once you’re able to target your ads based on action-specific metrics, ROI will become easier to track. For example, if your product can be purchased from the Facebook page either with credits or through a custom application, the Facebook ads manager should be able to optimize the reach of your ad to those users more apt to make purchases ahead of those who take longer to buy.

3. Showcase New Product Lines

Since Premium ads make use of the content a brand posts to its own page, it can be challenging to think of posts that will both organically attract user attention but also serve as compelling advertisements. Consider showcasing individual items by pointing to their trendiness, or showing off a unique set of products from a new product line. These are both good ways for users to view your ad from their fan page.

Incase and Rugby Ralph Lauren demonstrate two ways to advertise products without crossing that delicate line into inauthenticity. The photo of the new Andy Warhol iPhone case collection reveals an interesting and limited edition collection. Rugby Ralph Lauren’s post about spring-ready classic oxfords and blazers offers helpful advice, while linking directly to a ready-for-purchase catalogue item. In line with all the “typical” posts to Rugby Ralph Lauren’s Timeline, nothing about the post looks out of place, or forced.

Tip: When you endorse page posts by turning them into sponsored ads, and you optimize those ads for certain engagement activities (i.e. comments or likes), your ads will be served first to the users most likely to perform those actions. Since your page post is receiving the benefit of being served to more “engaged” users, once those users interact with the ad, your brand benefits from the boost in EdgeRank and subsequent posts enjoy an increased reach.

4. Post Interactive Content

Posting content that specifically instructs users to take action, and pairing that call-to-action with an example image, is a great way to influence engagement. Iams is a good example of this.

Tip: The Facebook ads manager will be able to optimize for photo tags, which is one of many new metrics a brand can set a campaign around. An example of how a brand might use this can be illustrated with the Iams ad. The Iams fan page administrator will be able to track the viral effect of requests in their ads if, say, a user posted a photo to the Iams page even a week after the ad ran (in response to the call to action). Before, Iams wouldn’t know if the success resulting from asking their fans to post their own photos to the page was because visitors saw the ad or the Timeline.

Which in-network actions do you anticipate optimizing most of your campaigns for? In-app purchases? Shares? Share in the comments!

Third-party apps like HootSuite just got a little less relevant with an update from Facebook that lets Page admins schedule posts. A new help center page from Facebook also outlines how brand pages can now dole out specific duties to multiple page admins, each with varying degrees of permissions.

The chart below outlines the new roles of manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst.

A separate help center page from Facebook also provides an answer to one question many Facebook Page admins have been asking for some time: How do I schedule a post to appear later? The answer:

Posts can be scheduled up to six months in advance at 15-minute intervals.

SEE ALSO: 5 ways these new scheduling feature falls short

Facebook Page admins, are these features you’ve been waiting for? How does this change your Facebook marketing strategy?

In the past 24 hours, coverage has spread across the Internet of the launch of a new feature by Facebook, one that allows businesses and brands to utilise an ‘Offers’ feature that delivers daily deals to a brand’s Page and a user’s News Feed.

The new service is a twist on the traditional Daily Deals market, particularly because it allows Facebook users to remain in direct control over the offers they see. Instead of functioning as a dedicated website like Groupon, LivingSocial and AmazonOffers, Facebook has the ability to drop targeted deals into a user’s News Feed in line with status updates, photo posts, location checkins and other more social features.

To some, it may be puzzling as to why it has been reported that Facebook launched Offers over the past couple of days. The truth is, it didn’t. The company actually announced and rolled out the feature on February 29:

Offers are a free new way for businesses to share discounts and promotions directly from a Facebook Page. They can be distributed through the News Feed or promoted as Sponsored Stories. People can redeem Offers via email or on a mobile device.

The launch was somewhat understated, maybe because Facebook’s previous attempt at brand promotion ‘Facebook Deals’ didn’t gain much traction when it launched. However, we’ve already seen a select number of businesses have already been dropping offers into Page subscriber’s feeds.

One company is UK-based online supermarket delivery service Ocado, which offered free hot cross buns to its customers:

Ocado’s deal hit on March 20, offering the traditional baked Easter treat to people who had ‘Liked’ its page. To claim it, Facebook user’s simply had to hit ‘Claim Offer’ next to the advert (whilst it was live) and a small box would pop up, stating that details of the deal would be emailed to the user’s email inbox.

In this case, those who redeemed the offer were emailed a promotion code, which could then be entered into the company’s checkout page, ensuring they would remain free.

In operation, it works almost exactly the same as Groupon and LivingSocial, placing the responsibility on the advertiser or the brand to facilitate the remainder of the deal process. Facebook serves as the delivery medium, a large one with 850 million users, driving pageviews and interest to a brand’s promotion.

What makes it different from Groupon et al?

Whilst the redemption process is similar to that of more established daily deals websites, Facebook’s ace card is that Offers are already delivered in such a way that makes it easier for them to spread virally.

Let’s look at Groupon’s deal pages and sharing platform:

Groupon hopes that if a user signs up to its daily emails or subscribes via the application, they will be directed to the deal, allowing them to ‘Buy it Now’ and, in this case, save 77% or £60 on their day out.

However, take a look at  Groupon’s recommendation system (bottom left of the image). There are three options to share the deal with friends, one is a Facebook sharing widget with the other two consisting of Twitter and Email. No doubt people will click on these buttons and share the deal with their Facebook and Twitter friends, but it’s another step in what could be an already lengthy redemption and sharing process.

On Facebook, you don’t need to visit an additional website. In fact, deals will be delivered in such a way that they will appear in between your existing News Feed updates. If a particular deal resonates with you, you hit ‘Get Offer’ and details of how to redeem your Offer are sent automatically to your email address.

Facebook’s sharing tools are seeing increased usage — we also use Facebook sharing widgets to help share articles — because no matter where you go across the web, more often than not there is an option to share a post or a webpage. The same can be said of Facebook’s own posts (which includes Offers); each post has a Share link which can be clicked to allow the quick sharing to a user’s own Timeline:

More interestingly, when a user claims an offer, a story about it will be added to their timeline. By default, the story is visible to that person’s friends, but they can change the audience of the story before they post it.

The bigger the brand, the wider the Offer can potentially spread.

Won’t it pollute the News Feed?

Facebook is a business, a company that has already successfully built a targeted advertising platform. When a service is free, users often have to expect that its owner will monetize its users or incorporate tools and services to boost its revenue streams.

Currently, Facebook Offers are only available to a select number of advertisers and they can be run at no charge to companies that are able to place them. You may argue that this could pollute the News Feed, turning you off your favourite brand.

Facebook has been clever to implement an ‘all or nothing’ scenario when it comes to viewing Offers.

The company notes:

You can hide a particular offer and all posts from a specific Page from your news feed, but there isn’t a setting that allows you to hide all offers from your news feed.

To hide an offer from your news feed, hover over the top-right corner, click the drop-down menu and choose what you’d like to hide:

• Hide story will remove the offer you’re looking at
• Hide all by will remove the offer you’re looking at, as well as all future stories from that Page

This could alarm users, because it means they have no way to mute promotions, other than to hide them individually. But what it does do is put the onus on the brand to market itself effectively and not spam its users, because if it goes all-out and posts a large number of deals in a short amount of time, fans of its Page are likely to unsubscribe and effectively drop support for that company.

Facebook isn’t only going to show Offers in the browser, they will also come to your mobile, giving it another edge over its rivals. The company has looked to make the process as simple as possible; all you do is hit the ‘Get Offer’ link and the details of the deal are sent to you via email. No lengthy terms, no bold advertising, it just merges with existing content.

Why aren’t I seeing Offers and when will I be able to redeem them?

Facebook’s official line on Offer availability is as follows:

Offers are available in beta to a limited number of local business Pages. We plan to launch offers more broadly soon.

That means that only a small number of companies are currently able to create an Offer on their official Facebook Page, at least until the company rolls the feature out to all accounts. Businesses are able to connect with their advertising managers at Facebook to request access, but the process has been intentionally limited for now.

However, given that the company recently posted the following video to its official Facebook account, it may signify that the company is ready to push ahead with its new promotional tool and roll it out to more accounts:

To ensure you see Offers from the brands you follow, you need to make sure that you are a fan of their Facebook Page. Facebook says this is the best way for you to keep updated on such deals, regardless of their plans.

Will it work?

This is the million-dollar question. Facebook users are generally somewhat resistant to change, but Offers display as normal updates and don’t appear unless the user has decided they want to follow that brand or business.

With the user in control over what he/she sees, Offers has huge potential to drive interaction between consumers and the brands they like, it’s not like Groupon which is forced to advertise any deal that is placed with it on that particular day.

If you love Nike, you can ‘Like’ the sports brand and maybe in time Offers will appear in your Timeline, giving you the chance to jump on a money-saving deal. If not, the company will still continue to post updates to its Page, driving interaction via different means.

Lots of businesses have taken to the Daily Deal market to increase sales, many have failed. Groupon is struggling to maintain its success but Facebook’s ability to display Offers in amongst existing updates means potentially millions of people will be able to see new promotions the minute they hit, spreading them wider when people redeem them.

Your Facebook friends, like your real-life friends, are a reflection of you. Facebook users should proceed with caution, especially as the defriending trend continues. Not to mention the fact that potential employers are asking job candidates for their Facebook passwords; the House GOP shot down a bill to prevent this from happening, essentially making it possible for employers to get away with super-stalking their potential employees. What are users to do aside from either shutting down their Facebook profiles completely, or cleaning them up significantly?

Monitoring service Secure.me seeks to help users gain more control over their Facebook information. It initially only seemed useful for parents who wanted to monitor their children's activities on Facebook. In light of the ever-changing Facebook privacy concerns, however, it has become clear that users need to monitor their own profiles as well.

Secure.me is free and easy to sign up for. I decided to test it out using my Facebook profile as the guinea pig. The Summary overview gives users three main analyses: privacy, profile and network.

The privacy analysis scoured my Facebook profile and returned information that already seemed obvious: The fact that I chose to share my hometown, location, education, work, bio, some family members and political views, could compromise the way people choose to view me. Listing family members seems like the riskiest thing to do: This exposes your biological family to Facebook and your social network. Yet this is exactly the type of information that Facebook encourages users to share. After all, it is the information that most easily groups and identifies us, and helps us connect with other users.

The profile analysis discovered that the words "art," "pelvis" and "tattoo" were cause for concern. Overall, the language that Secure.me identified on my profile was "positive," which is perhaps a better indicator of overall profile fitness than individual posts. The third option, network analysis, brought up nearly 100 questionable posts, all of which either had to do with politics or keywords like "idiot," "porn" (as in, food porn), or other types of profanity - which is not necessarily a bad thing, according to Secure.me.

On the whole, the service says that the mood of my friend network is positive. Every user knows their Facebook community, and what to expect from them. I don't care if my friends use profanity, so long as its tasteful. The most useful information gained from this analysis of nearly 10,000 posts was the fact that one of my Facebook friends has been posting a harmful link; it's from a virus that's posting spammy status updates that say "View today's photo of the day!" along with a link to a harmful app.

The Facebook Photo Paparazzi Effect

The most useful aspect of Secure.me is the biometric face-recognition tool. Google made this useful feature optional to users months ago. No such tool exists on Facebook. It does tell you if you've been tagged in a Facebook photo by a friend, and it gives you the option to approve tags manually before the images appear on your wall. But Facebook does not notify you if photos of you are uploaded by people who are not your Facebook friends. The good news is that if someone with which you are not Facebook friends uploads a photo of you, they won't be able to tag you - though they can write your name into the photo caption. Still, that image of you can float around Facebook, unbeknownst to you - and if you leave your house (as in, have a life), chances are people will recognize you in that photo.

I like to call this the Facebook Paparazzi Effect. Think about it: Are real-life celebrities notified when a trashy tabloid takes their photo? Of course not. And then the glossy hits the newsstands with incriminating text alongside a random photo of the celeb. Admit it: You've gazed at and even purchased these magazines. We love our celebrity gossip. In the social-networked era when everyone gets their 15 minutes of social media fame, we're all mini celebs in the eyes of our Facebook friends.

One thing I found odd about this: Secure.me only takes into account photos of you that are actually of your face. There's a culture on Facebook of tagging people in photos to let them know about something, to invite them out to dinner, to send a shoutout, or just to acknowledge them. When I tested out the biometric face-recognition tool, I also discovered a few photos in which I'd been tagged as inanimate objects: a pink flower, a printer, a lawn ornament.

Oftentimes it is the personality quirks and the language of Facebook subcultures that reveal more about a user's personality than the more obvious photos, activities and information shared. In the meantime, be selective about whom you befriend, and what types of slang you use within your Facebook subcultures. Your friends are a reflection of you.

Images via Shutterstock and Flickr user mtsofan.

Social marketing platform Roost set out to determine what types of small and mid-sized businesses rule the roost in terms of growing their social audience and remaining active in marketing.

Roost’s findings include:

• Small and mid-sized businesses involved in music, entertainment, and luxury goods had the most reach.
• The most active small and mid-sized businesses were in the medical and health industries.
• The most efficient “signal-to-noise” ratios were posted by companies in the music and broadcast media sectors.

Medical practices were the most confounding, coming in dead last out of 28 industries analyzed by Roost in terms of reach, but topping the activity list.

Other industries with similarly large gaps included:

• Music, number one, 26th in activity;
• Consumer electronics, number five versus 23, respectively;
• Hotel and hospitality, six versus 25;
• Commercial real estate, 25 versus seven;
• Fitness, 26 versus five; and
• Insurance, 27 and eight.

Google Plus started out growing faster than any social network has so far, but may not be able to compete against Facebook longer term.

The appeal is not sticking because many of the people that quickly flocked to Google Plus have made their way back to the comfort and familiarity of Facebook.

In fact, the inability to keep users engaged has some observers wondering just how long Google Plus will be able to survive.

A Closer Look At The Battle

Google Plus entered the social game at a time when competition was arguably at its fiercest. Facebook was just reported to have an estimated 750 million active users, while both Twitter and LinkedIn were making notable gains of their own.

In order to garner attention, Google would have to give users a different experience, and different is what it strived to be from the very beginning.

Even in its original beta form, Google Plus was equipped with a new friends system in Circles, a discovery engine in Sparks, and a group video chat tool in Hangouts, which recently made its way to the mobile platform.

Apparently all that wasn’t enough, as Facebook went to work with some countering of its own.

In addition to combating Circles with Smart Lists, and answering Hangouts with a Skype-powered video chat feature, Facebook rolled out some huge updates that once again made it the talk of the town.

The majority of the changes involved making the popular social platform more user-friendly, starting with the news feed.

The news feed has been designed in a manner that presents users with posts that are deemed to be most important to them, opposed to the most recent updates.

According to Facebook Engineering Manager Mark Tonkelowitz, the news feed experience is now like users having their own personal newspaper.

Despite not being embraced by the community as a whole, or at least not at first, the recent changes at Facebook have reclaimed the attention of both the general members and brands who spend their time on the site.

And while Google Plus still has some attributes that enable it to stand out, the lack of activity and return visits is a sign that users are having trouble justifying its worth in comparison to what they already have in Facebook.

Last Chance?

Google Plus is not the search giant’s first attempt at social networking.

If you recall, the company launched Google Buzz in 2010, which fizzled out due to a major privacy flaw that accompanied the initial release and the same issue the company faces today — being useful in what can be considered an overly crowded space.

Google Plus definitely has more potential than Buzz, but should it bomb, it could very well be the last shot at ever touching Facebook in the social realm.

Guest writer Aidan Hijleh is a freelance copywriter and serves as the non-profit partnership liaison for Benchmark Email.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

think reports of g+ demise may be premature