Facebook are getting ready for their IPO (Initial public offering) where the company will be valued at around 100 billion US dollars and lots of their employees will make a lot of cash!  As usual with these IPO’s none of them will be able to cash in for at least 6 months.  Because of the IPO there will be more pressure on Facebook to generate more income so they are testing out all sorts of different advertisement options.  One of these is called the reach generator which currently is not available to you unless you have a very large number of fans.

On average only 12% of your Fans see updates you put on your Facebook business page.  Facebook has an algorithm that works out what content is interesting to your fans and strips out everything else. So if you are wondering why you are not getting much interaction on any offers you have or interesting status updates this might be the problem.

But soon you may be able to solve this problem.  This is where ‘Reach Generator‘ comes in.  Reach Generator is an advertising tool that Facebook provides where you pay a fee based on the number of fans you have and Facebook will guarantee that at least 50% of your fans will see your updates each week and 75% each month.

Have you considered how you could use Facebook Timeline in a way to further promote your business?

Companies are starting to really think about how to use them creatively and it’s making them a lot more interesting.

Check out 5 examples below of some cool things that companies are doing:

1. Consistent branding with cover photo and applications

The following is nicely designed and pretty cool.  Nice the way the application icons are consistent with the colors used as part of the spotify brand.

2. Innovative use of Milestones

CocaCola have gone back through the years and added some funky milestones which helps you understand the history of Coca-Cola.  It makes the timeline really interesting.  Think about the history you have as a brand, how can you turn this into a story?

3.Highlighting some great pictures…

You can now highlight pictures so they appear the full width of the screen.  I liked how Subway used this to show off one of their big sandwiches

4.  Let your fans created your cover photo.

A great idea from Verizon.  They are running a competition where fans submit a photo of spring and the winners get featured on their cover photo!

5. Finding clues on your timeline

A cool idea from redbull for their scavenger hunt where content participants find the answers to clues on the timeline.  A great way of getting people to spend more time on the timeline!

Have you seen any good creative uses of timeline for brand pages?

Google Consumer Surveys

Google have released a really handy tool for running online surveys called Google consumer surveys.  It’s easy enough to put together surveys using tools such as surveymonkey.com but the harder part is getting people to complete them.  If you send out a survey to 50 people you’ll be lucky if you get 5 to complete them.

This is is where Google consumer surveys fits in.  This allows you to create a survey, select your target audience and pay based on responses.  Google will use it’s network of websites to find relevant people to fill out the survey.  You can select people based on geography, age, profile or you can select people based on them filling out a pre-screening question.  In my case I was only interested in digital marketing professionals so I had an initial question to see if I was dealing with digital marketing professionals and then after this the survey question was displayed.
The costs to run the survey vary but it’s based on response.  For the survey without the pre-screening question I was getting a rate of 10 cents per response.  With the pre-screening question it was 50 cents per response.

Well worth checking out if you want to run an online survey and you want quick and guaranteed responses!

1.  Bufferapp – When you are browsing the web and come across interesting content you may not want to share it all at once.  So what you do is click the buffer button and buffer will create tweets based on the article and schedule them at appropriate times for delivery.  A really handy tool.

2. SocialBro – A very useful twitter analytics tool.  Filter by number of followers, find the people that are not tweeting, filter by language, find out who you are following that are not following you back, send a tweet automatically to new followers etc.

3. Vizify – Find out your top followers, how often your tweets were retweeted, geographic impact and much  more.

4. Hootsuite - I’m sure you’re using this already but just in case you’re not!  It’s a very comprehensive tool and more features are added all the time.

Any other good ones to add?

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?

One of the major changes is the addition of applications which allow you to read news, listen to music and watch movies within Facebook.  Facebook have partnered up with some key companies to allow them provide this functionality directly within Facebook and these applications are tightly integrated with Facebook making sure there is a big social element to these.

I believe that this is a big step forward for Facebook and we will see many more partnerships in these and other industries and this will make Facebook much more compelling to use.  The Facebook platform will continue to expand and will become the main application development platform for Social applications.   It makes perfect sense to develop on top of social technology already built that brings 800 million people with it!

Here are some highlights of some of the other functionality.

Facebook completely changed your profile so it now becomes a time line of events showing you a story of your life through Facebook.

Instead of just liking something you can now indicate you are watching something, reading something etc. Also this is taken out of your newsfeed and put into a rolling ticker. The newsfeed will be reserved for more interesting things. Have a look at the ticker relating to music and movies:

During Mark’s speech he talked a lot about Applications.  This is where the future growth of Facebook will come from.  Facebook will build out it’s platform allowing a whole new set of applications to be built on top of the existing platform. For example, Spotify, an online music subscription service, have built a spotify app that will sit within Facebook where users can listen to music, share what they are listening to and then listen to what their friends are listening to.  Music is social in it’s nature so it makes perfect sense that you explore new music through your friends within Facebook.  Similarly with a partnership with Netflix, you can watch video within Facebook, share out what you’re watching and watch what your friends are watching.  These partnerships are hugely important because it’s start of a whole new breed of social applications running within Facebook.

Watch out for more partnerships in other areas to be announced over the next few months.  It’s very exciting times ahead for Facebook.  Well done for Mark and his team for pushing the boundaries and keeping us on our toes.

a). Facebook are moving away from people checking in locations and instead when you are putting in a status update you can associate the update with a location.  We hear lots of talk about Foursquare for checking in to places but it’s still relatively small.  The problem is that people don’t want to be checking in to places all the time.  I think adding a location onto a place as part of your status update is a better way to go.  As you are specifying your updates there is still potential of offering deals based on your location.  Facebook are giving up on daily deals probably because they can see the problems that Groupon are starting to run into. Groupon are still loosing money (over 100 million per quarter) and running out of cash.

b). Google + have the concept of Circles where you group people and then you can share and discuss with people based on your circles.  Facebook do have groups which are set up for discussion purposes but some people just want to group their friend lists.  Quite often your friend list contains business people that you are connected with but you may not want to share everything with.  Facebook have ‘lists’ for a long time which allows you to group friends but the functionality is cumbersome and hidden.  Facebook have made the first step into making this more useful by allowing you to filter your newsfeed by these groups.  So I can now set up a list of business people and view a newsfeed of all these items.

C). Facebook have also reconsidered privacy and have realised that it is important to people and most Facebook users don’t understand what is shared out and to who when they send a status update.  When you are sending out a status update the default is ‘public’.  This means that it is made available outside of Facebook.  Try out Openbook and do a search based on status updates and you’ll be surprised about what you find.  Now when you are sharing out your update you can specify if the update is a public update, for friends only or set up custom settings.

D).  On you status updates you are able to tag someone in the update by specifying an ‘@’ symbol and then typing in their name.  This now has got a bit easier because now when you send out an update you can also specify who you want to share with for that particular update.

Watch out for more updates coming soon.  I can certainly see them changing Facebook Edgerank which works out what data is published to your newsfeed.  You will also have much more control over what is in your newsfeed.  Stay tuned…

At the moment this functionality is under used and is very valuable.  When you swop over to using Facebook as a page you are given a newsfeed.  This newsfeed will show you news items related to any pages your business page is a fan of.  When you see these updates you can then start interacting with them through your newsfeed.

Another benefit of using this functionality is that you start receiving notifications about interactions on the business page.  If you look at the top of the newsfeed you will see the notifications.  If someone becomes a fan of the business page, enters a comment etc, you will see this in the notifications.

So you should try out this functionality if you haven’t already.  Well worth it, any further tips to add?

A Social business is a business that has incorporated social technologies as a core part of what they do on a day to day basis within their organisation.  It can touch every department and effects every customer.

Social Media marketing is using social software to market your business better.  You might use Facebook to market to consumers or LinkedIn to market to other businesses.  This is a big, growing and evolving area but it’s a small part of the pie.  Social Business is about making major changes to how your business operates.  You will change your hiring practices, change how you manage your staff, change how you communicate with your customers and partners, change how to develop your products and much more.

At the presentation Jeff talked about the natural collaborative nature of people.   People like to communicate, work together in teams and help each other.  But this was more difficult online years ago as the tools were not really readily available to everyone.  Now we have these powerful tools at our finger tips to use internally within our workplace and externally working with customers, partners etc.

Jeff also talked about e-mail as a primary communication vehicle has it’s flaws.  A lot of useful information in e-mails is locked up in people’s inboxes and not shared.  It is   much better practice to discuss interesting topics through a forum or a blog so at least this information is available to lots of people.  By the way e-mail will disappear in the next 5 to 10 years, ask anybody under the age of 16 if they use e-mail?  They will say yes because they register with an e-mail provider to get an e-mail address for their social network of choice, they don’t actually use e-mail.

IBM have adopted social business practices in a big way internally for their own organisation. They also sell social software and provide social business consultancy.  Jeff talked about being able to find the right people with the right answers within the organisation with a few searches through their social networks.  He talked about being able to simultaneously update and share documents through their internal wiki’s and link up with relevant people within the organisation.  It’s actually difficult to understand how a large organisation such as IBM worked efficiently without social business software.

Social Business is a term will you hear a lot more of, it will become more familiar to you than Social Media.  Organisations that don’t adopt social business strategies will continue to struggle with ineffective communication, lack of innovation and poor staff performance.  For organisations that do adopt social business strategies some will fail to really understand what it’s really about and make ineffective changes to their work practices.  However, there will be many organisations that will adopt social business strategies that will make them a more open, collaborative, innovative and agile organisation that will absolutely thrive in this world.  They are the ones to watch out for. But that’s just my opinion, what’s yours?

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?

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