1.  Don’t run it on your wall

You should read the Facebook Competition guidelines and you’ll see that you are not allowed to run the competition from the wall.  You need to run it as an application which sits on one of the tabs.

2. Don’t make the prize an iPad

If you make the prize an iPad you’ll get lots of entrants but are they actually people interested in your product or service or are they just people that want an iPad?  So consider the prize you are offering and make it relevant to your target audience.

3. Make it fun

Facebook is a very social environment so why not make your competition a bit of fun.  Fans are more likely to talk about it and share it out if it’s fun.

4. Consider the judges

You can’t use the ‘like’ facility within facebook for voting so you need to implement an alternative voting system.  We normally recommend that you use voting as the first part of the competition but then have a judging element with the top ‘x’ entrants in the competition. This is especially important for photo competitions as it’s not always the best picture that has the most votes!

5. Keep it short

It’s hard to keep momentum and interest in a competition so we generally advise to run it for less than a month.  This is not always the case but generally shorter is better.

6. Allow social sharing

Make sure you have plenty of facilities in place to allow people to share out the competition, “Like” it and also comment on it.

7. Use Facebook Ads

If you want to create additional buzz run some Facebook advertising alongside your promotional activity to drive more people to the competition.  You can even target existing fans.

Have you anything to add?

Google is making huge changes to it’s search at the moment, for example, a couple of weeks ago it made a change to US search results that effected up to 12% of all searches.  They wanted to target in on content farms which is basically websites set up to host lots of content, get lots of links and improve their search ranking results.  This change has not been rolled out in Europe yet but I’m sure it will.     Google is also personalising search results so if you are logged in to your Google account, Google will try to display you results relevant to people you network with.  They are also taking into account links shared out on twitter and this is part of it’s algorithm for working out the best content.

So why are Google making all these changes at the moment?  Social Social… Social search is where Google needs to get to.   Recently I was looking for business insurance so instead of searching for a provider on Google I thought it was more valuable to ask my social network for a recommendation.  Google is going to return me the best optimised site and the one with the most relevant links pointing to it whereas my social network is returning me a recommendation.  That is far more beneficial.

But one big problem that Google has is Facebook.  They have over 600 million active users spending, on average, 22 minutes per day on Facebook, and this will be 1 billion users before long.  But Google doesn’t have access to this conversation so Google can never be as powerful as it used to be.

So what is Edge rank?  Edge rank is the part of the formula that Facebook has released which lets us know how to get onto people’s newsfeed.    Facebook considers an item in your newsfeed as an Object.  Whenever someone interacts with this object they are creating an ‘edge’ e.g. comment on the object, like the object etc.   Facebook is trying to figure out what pieces of content is most interesting to me.  If people are interacting with content then it’s probably  more interesting so it will take that into account.    Also, if this piece of content is from a friend that you interact a lot with on Facebook then that’s probably going to be more interesting (Affinity).  Finally when this content is old it’s not as interesting as new content.    The key is to make sure you post interesting content regularly and get people to interact with it as much as possible.  That will help you move up the newsfeed.

(The science behind the Edge rank below, you will see affinity score, weight and time.  Put this together with a fancy calculation and get the result)

But surely the newsfeed is different than a Google search?  Yes it is.  However, what’s interesting is how Facebook is developing it’s algorithm in preparation for their development of their search engine.  The search facility in Facebook is pretty useless.  It’s an area that Facebook haven’t really changed that much.  Of course, for content that is interesting generally it will find you because it will stay in your newsfeed.  But what if I want to search for a hotel to say in or a restaurant to have a meal in?  Yes I could ask for recommendations but I’d much prefer to do a search on Facebook and see a list of the top places.  Top places would take into account items such as:

- What friends checked in to places and what they said

- A semantic analysis of status updates where these hotels were mentioned (i.e. facebook using a tool to figure out what people have written in normal conversation, was it positive or negative).

- Highlighted hotels that have good offers published in Facebook deals.

- Information from people currently staying in the hotel but the possibility of chatting with them directly

- Message facility for communicating with someone in the hotel here and now!

So search certainly has a role in Facebook.  Edge rank will contribute to this role but there will be many many other factors.  I think one morning we will come in there will be a major upgrade to search within Facebook and it’s bound to happen this year.

What do you think?

]]> http://www.razorcoast.com/facebook-edge-rank-versus-google-page-rank/feed 6 http://www.razorcoast.com/social-search-the-train-is-coming?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=social-search-the-train-is-coming http://www.razorcoast.com/social-search-the-train-is-coming#comments Thu, 24 Feb 2011 08:29:30 +0000 Ian Cleary http://www.razorcoast.com/?p=2498 Over the last few days Google made a significant change to it’s search algorithm. If you are now logged in to Google and perform a search it will give a strong weighting in search results to content provided by or linked to by your friends in your social graph. This could be people on Twitter, [...]]]> Over the last few days Google made a significant change to it’s search algorithm. If you are now logged in to Google and perform a search it will give a strong weighting in search results to content provided by or linked to by your friends in your social graph. This could be people on Twitter, Flickr, through blogs and other public sources of data. This personalisation of search results is a trend that is set to continue. It’s about providing search results that are more relevant to you.

RottenTomatoes is a movie review site. Recently they integrated their data with Facebook so now when you look up movie reviews it pulls information from your social graph to display more relevant results. If some of my friends rated movies that I’m searching for I start to see this information. I also see other activity on the site related to my friends. Google is taking this a step further back by personalising results directly from search.

There is only one big problem for Google and that’s the new kid on the block – Facebook. How can you implement a real social search when you don’t have access to all the conversation from the 650 million people within Facebook. This is a big hole in Google’s strategy which they cannot resolve as there’s no way Facebook will ever give them access to this.

However, Facebook do have access to all the public sites that Google has so a social search within Facebook is always going to be more powerful. At the moment the search facility within Facebook is very basic. When you search it displays results from internally within Facebook, from Bing and it is also starting to deliver results from websites sites that are tightly integrated with Facebook. Watch this area expand and grow.

If you asked anybody in Facebook what they think about how good Google’s search is they are likely to completely disagree with how this search is implemented. Google’s machines index all the content and the search results are heavily influenced by Linking from external sites. However, Facebook believes in people indexing content not machines. On Facebook if someone clicks ‘Like’ on a piece of content or ‘Recommend’ that’s an extra vote for this piece of content. Of course if they click ‘Like’ Facebook also has access to information on who this person is, who are their friends, how influential they are etc and this could all be taken into account. The ‘Like’ button is a simple but very important steps towards social search. Watch out for Facebook over the next few months delivering a major upgrade to their search which will get people really thinking about Google’s number 1 position and how it is not guaranteed any more!

Have you noticed changes in search results recently?

(Picture credit)

Here’s the best from last week.

1. Social commerce what’s fueling it’s growth

How we shop on the web is radically changing and this has huge implications for anyone that sells products or services online.  Interesting article which outlines why this is big business, well worth a read.

2. The role of the Social Strategist

Organisations have realised that social media is very important not only for selling and marketing their products and services but also for changing how they work internally as a business.  Check out Jeremiah Owyang in this very interesting post.

3. 10 ways to find info on the web without using Google

The title explains it all, do I need to say more…

4.  Hunch – Personal recommendations

A fun one, answer 20 questions and hunch will come up with some personal recommendations on magazines to read, tv shows to watch etc etc.

5. 7 principles of building a great social product

If you’re delivering any application for the web there needs to be a social element.  This interesting article will give you some tips.

That’s all for this week..  If I was to give one tip for next week it’s to really consider how social media is going to effect your business going forward because any business with any online component will be seriously effected by it and the companies that take advantage will do really well.

It’s on 8.30 to 4.30 in the Berkeley court in Dublin.  Full details on the Kerwin Rae Masterclass website.

Anybody else hear anything good about him?  Anybody else going?

Any more brands out there doing some innovative things on social media? We would love to hear from you.

1. Using News releases to boost your seo.  A great article from Hubspot.

2. Creative professionals can now display their portfolios on Linkedin.  Update from LinkedIn blog.  Handy features for people like web designers who can now show their recent work. Most people look at your profile, followed by your recommendations and then they want to see the work you completed.

3.The future buzz - 50 viral images with details on how they spread.

4. Thinking of e-mail marketing, here are 11 tools to check out.

5. Social media examiner – 14 attention grabbing tactics for launching a new blog.

Picture this week thanks to Steven De Polo

1. Facebook Friends phone numbers -  If you go to – Facebook Privacy -> Select Acccount -> Edit Friends -> Phonebook you will see a list of all your friends phone numbers.  A handy little directory.

2. Did you know you can embed your whole youtube channel into your website?  So instead of just embedding a picture why don’t you embed a channel so when you add a picture to your channel it automatically gets added to your website.

3.  20 Branded pages from Facebook – If you’re thinking of investing in Facebook make yourself stand out.

4. Hubspot B2B guide for lead generation. – Some handy tips that you can use for your own business.

5. How to rank number 1 in Facebook for any search term in 60 seconds.

6. Slide share presentation – 7 deadly sins of landing page design.

7. Free SEO toolbar for monitoring google page rank, links to the page and much more.

8. A tip – Set up Google Analytics to e-mail you on a daily basis with a PDF showing you traffic.  Also set up goal conversion so you can track visitors to conversions for key data (e.g. buy a product, sign up for newsletter etc).

Picture Credit: twid taken from flickr.

Have you found anything interesting this week you’d like to share?

You can see from the image displayed the second result of a page search is a page not on Facebook.  It was a page that is on trip advisor that has a ‘like’ button beside it that people clicked on 5 times.  This is part of what Facebook calls the open graph.  They are allowing people to like pages over the internet and now they are starting to appear in search results.

This like functionality will get deployed throughout the internet and as search gets better in Facebook a lot of people will never need to use Google search again.  So will Facebook topple Google over time?  There’s absolutely a big possibility this will happen.  So which is better, Google thrawling through content and getting computers decide which content is more important or indexing content based on real humans deciding if they like the content or not?  This user approach to indexing is similar to social booking marking (delicious, diigo etc) where users decide which content they ‘like’.

I’ll be watching this exciting space very closely as it’s going to be interesting to see what Google and Facebook’s next moves are but certainly the war has begun, there will be one winner who will dominate.  I’d prefer to be sitting in Facebook’s corner.  A people powered search is always going to beat a computer powered one.

Who do you think will be the winner in this battle?

Michael worked in an insurance company as a programmer but felt there were better opportunities so he left to start up an internet business.  He gave himself 3 months to make money and after that he was going to go back to his full time job.  3 years later, after 3 failed businesses and loosing lots of money he was still trying to get a good business off the ground.     The first venture where he started to get success from was Birthday Alarm.  A simple concept of reminding people about their friends/relatives etc birthdays with an e-card element also.  There was a key viral element to this that resulted in rapid growth.    For example, to get reminded of friends birthdays you need to find out what their birthday is through a request online and this in turn got them to sign up and get their friends birthdays.   They were getting 10,000 signups a day but when they introduced the option to import friends details from the address book they were getting 100 to 150,000 signups per day.   Michael talked about how he used to spend about 5 hours a day answering customer support queries and each query that came in about the product he would change the product so that he wouldn’t see that issue again, that was his way of delivering what the customer wanted.

Prior to bebo he registered a doman name called ringo and created a social network similar to Friendster in about 30 days.  He promoted it to 3 million members on his site birthday alarm and within 90 days of starting the business he sold it for 2 million.

In early 2005, Michael and his wife set up Bebo using funds from the sale of Ringo.  Bebo grew very rapidly and ended up with over 40 million users with Michael selling it to AOL for US$850 just 3 years after it’s inception.

Michael was asked about the future of social networking.  He sees it being around for ever more and increasing in importance each year.

His advice for entrepreneurs is to just ‘do it’.  If he looks back now he would have joined start up companies earlier, worked with smart founders, learned a lot and then set up himself.  It was a short, interesting and entertaining talk and it’s nice to see somebody so well grounded even with US$500 million in his bank account.

Did you get a chance to meet him or hear him speak at the Dublin web summit or National Science Gallery?