It’s a bit late, but I’ll run through the changes and why I think facebook made them anyways. If you haven’t already, you can access your new profile via this link.

In a nutshell the new profile layout has done 4 things

1)

Neatly bundles together basic info about the user at the top of the profile.  This can include job, education, location, relationship status and birth date.

WHY? It gives users viewing the profile a simple, fast snapshot of who that person is, where they are located, how old they are and what type of relationship they are in, if any.  It works to give extremely quick personal context around that individual.

2)

Gives users faster access to the most engaging content about their friends, images. Five images now appear at the top of the profile.  These are the latest images the user was tagged in.

WHY? Again, it is an extremely fast way to understand what the individual currently looks like, who they’ve been hanging out with and essentially what they’ve been doing recently.

3)

Organizes profile information in a smarter way.  New information controls can be found on the left hand side of the profile underneath the profile pic.

WHY? It was tough for users to find personal info about a person through the old profile setup, you had to click the ‘info’ tab at the top of the page then scroll down.  The new design places this info section tab right under the most highly viewed piece of content on the profile page, the profile pic.  I think facebook did some user testing and realized more users would click on the info tab when it was placed here, rather than on the top of the page.

The information displayed on the info page is much more uniform, using images as placeholders as appose to just text.  I would expect this approach to gain more interaction than the previous design.

4)

Provide more social context between the viewer and the user who’s profile the viewer is looking at.  This is by far the coolest thing about the redesign for me.  Social context is key and facebook is just starting to expand out the possibilities that it can provide in this space.  On the right hand side of the page you’ll find info specific to you and the user you are viewing.  Information provided here includes images that both of you are tagged in, interests you both share and the amount of friends you have in common.  Some of you may remember facebook bringing out ‘friendship’ pages about a month or so ago, I believe that was a soft launch for the type of functionality around social context we are now seeing through the new profile layout.

WHY? This info is facebooks greatest strength, it’s secret sauce, it knows more about you and your real-life social network than you probably know yourself and now it’s just starting to surface that information for you to start viewing and using.  It’s THE most potent and engaging information it has about you.  It’s the reason facebook will become the next Google, it’s the reason facebook will run the web for the next 10-15 years.

Hope this gives you get a better understanding about the changes.

FYI – it’s a Richard Branson autobiography

Whoop.

There are basically 4 different ways you can update a facebook page. If you want to be successful in generating engagement on facebook, its incredibly important you understand how each of these updates vary from one another and what they should be used to do.

Text Update

How to : Write the text directly into your pages update publisher (the box at the top of the page) and hit Share.

Effect : This is the only update that will appear and remain at the top of the page, to the right of your page name after you have posted it.

Tip : Everyone who visits your page will see the wall.  Therefore they will also see your last text update (see ‘Effect’ above).  So it’s a smart strategy to have a call to action here, something short, sharp and relevant that won’t take users long to engage with – a question with 2-3 provided answers always works well.

Image Update

How to : Hit the image icon in the bottom left hand corner of the update publisher on your wall.  Now choose from one of the three options provided.

Effect : Image can be clicked in newsfeed and will bring fans into the photos section of your page.  Image updates DO NOT appear and/or remain at the top of the page.

Tip : Image updates are by far the most effective update to generate interaction with your fans, so make sure the image is as unique and eye-catching as possible.  You MUST accompany image updates with text.  Include a short call to action that encourages the user analyze or acknowledge the image then provide feedback on it.  Image updates will a smart call to action are consistently the highest engagement earners in our experience.

Link Update

How to : Hit the link icon in the bottom left hand corner of the update publisher on your wall.  Now paste the destination link into the link box provided.

Effect : Link can be clicked in the newsfeed and will take fans to the destination of the link.  Link updates DO NOT appear and/or remain at the top of the page.

Tip : Used correctly, link updates are the most powerful weapon in facebook marketing.  They basically act as an instant conduit from your fans to anywhere on the web YOU want them to go in just one click, so if you’re a business it makes sense to send them to your business website.  But be warned, the content on your website must be relevant to the fundamental reason your fans are on your page or else click through will be low and credibility will be lost. Rip out the body text of the link and only leave the title and URL as you see above, no one likes information overload and you’re update will be clicked less if its there.

Video Update (includes youtube)

How to : Hit the video icon in the bottom left hand corner of the update publisher on your wall. Now upload the video and hit Share.

How to (youtube) : Read How to on the link update article, it’s exactly the same.  NOTE, youtube videos are kept as links in your page archive, not videos.

Effect : Allows fans to view videos through the newsfeed. Video updates DO NOT appear and/or remain at the top of the page.

Tip : Remember that the majority of fans will view your video through their newsfeed, so keep it short, preferably no longer than 30 secs.  We’ve also always found that including a call to action at the end of the video increases engagement.

Hopefully this is helpful.

Heres a tip to grow your facebook page fanbase faster.

Not many people realise their are two distinctly different versions of facebooks new(ish) like button.

Primarily one distributes content.  The other connects users to pages as fans.

Both can look identical, both can appear on third party sites – however the difference is massive.

Lets call the first kind of button the ‘content driver’ button as its purpose is to drive links to content back into facebook for others to see.  I’m sure your all familiar with this version.

So lets call the second kind of button the ‘fan aquisition’ button as its purpose is to instantly connect users as fans to a facebook page.

If you’re goal is to generate new fans for your branded page via your branded third party site you should be placing the fan aquisition button somewhere prominent and above the fold on your homepage.  We’ve done this with a three pages and the result was a consistent increase in fan numbers.

It’s a tip because most people use the Like Box to do this, which does the same thing but looks clunky, takes up space and can seriously throw out the design aesthetic of a nicely built home page.  It also doesn’t convert as well compared like buttons.

Like Box

The fan aquisition button is small, unintrusive and can be placed within a home page alot more comfortably.  As its smaller and looks simpler, it is perceived by users to require less action to click, therefore the interaction levels are higher which means more clicks, which equals more fans.

Like Button (fan aquisition button)

How do you do it? Head to this page.

Once there copy the URL of your facebook page and put it into the ‘URL to Like’ box.  What you should now see to the right is a like box with the approx number of fans of your page.

Now go through the options and tailor the button to what suits you and your site.

Once you’ve tailored the button to your liking simply hit ‘Get Code’ and if you’re code illiterate like me, get someone to implement the code into your site.

The end result should see be an constant increase in overall fan growth.  Of course the rate of growth will depend on the traffic volume of the site you put the button on.

All in all though, we’ve proved several times internally through testing that this is the most effective way of increasing fan page bases on third party sites via facebooks social plugins.

If you do implement it, please let us know some results a week or so in through the comments.

Good luck!

Last night facebook released a new set of upgrades to the backend of their pages product.  Simply put, it affords page admins easier control over their pages, which according to most page admins I talk to is a welcome move forward.

I’ll run through the updated control options as they appear on the tab menu once you access the new backend.

Manage permissions

Country restrictions – It is now possible to make pages only viewable to a certain country or countries.  This is potentially a massive game changer for large multi-national companies on facebook who have several different pages of the same brand name across several different countries – if these companies set each countries brand page to only be viewable in that country, they would save alot of confusion for their users as the only page they would see is the brand page for that specific country.

Age restrictions – This is pretty straightforward. Whilst facebook had it’s own regulations in place for alcohol or gambling related age restrictions prior to the change, this option makes the process even simpler and more straightforward to implement.

Page visiblity – If you’re the secret squirrel type, this option would suit you.  It only makes the page visible to those who have administration rights to the page.  I’m out of ideas as to how this could be useful as the revamped groups offering affords the same closed community controls.

Wall tab shows – Allows you to show what default content fans see when they arrive at your page: your posts, fans post or all posts.

Wall spam filter – This is a facinating change, one that I am yet to see in action across any of our clients pages.  Instinct would presume that facebook will automatically filter out messages that have been flagged as spam elsewhere on facebook if they get posted to your wall – something that would be awesome if you’re running a highly trafficked page.  I’ll update this post when I see evidence of it working.

Default Landing Tab – Here you can choose what page new users of your page will see first.  If you’ve developed a specific FBML landing page and have created a seperate tab for it, this is where you will change the landing page to that specific tab.

Posting Ability – Allows you to choose what your fans can do on your page: Users can write posts and comments on your wall, users can add photos, users can add videos.

Delete Page – Finally, an easier way to delete a page!  I’ve known how to do it for a long time, but the amount of people that were nearly in tears because they didn’t know how to delete a page was overwhelming.  Now its super simple. Click ‘Permanently delete this page’ and you page will be permenently deleted. (or will it? i’ll leave that question to the facebook cynics out there)

Basic Information

No change here, nothing to elaborate on…

Profile Picture

This will be a great change for most newbie admins as changing the profile pic through the old settings proved quite challenging and confusing.  Here you can change the profile pic quickly and easily whilst still in the backend.

Marketing

Again, this will become an incredibly useful section for admins not 100% familiar with the old page admin layout.  It offers you four options:

Advertise on facebook – directs you through to the facebook money making factory, ie the advertising platform.  Advertising is proving to be the single most effective way to grow your page fanbase quickly.

Get a badge – Gives you the code neccessary to create a cute looking badge of your page for a third party website.  This feature is pretty redundant in my opinion as like boxes are less visually intrusive and have far more interactivity options available to them.

Add a Like Box to your website – Behind advertising, like boxes are the most effective way to drive new fans and traffic to your page.  If you haven’t already, I highly recommend adding a like box or button to a third party site that your page represents.

Send an update – I’ll play devils advocate here and say updates are a waste of time.  Please comment if you regularly check your updates, or even know where to find them.

Manage Admins

In the past this task was often difficult.  Now its super simple.  You can add and remove admins as you wish.  A tip - Remember to add admins via email, not via friends.  The majority of companies we work with give us work emails to add as admins.  Most of the time these emails aren’t the ones they use for facebook.  Get them to give you the personal emails they use for facebook and add them as admins this way.  It avoids you having to ‘friend’ them to add them as a admin. Remind them that noone will never be able to see their personal info when they do this procedure, as this is question that often pops up.

Applications

Very similar to the old backend, just with a cleaner and more functional user interface.  It will show you which applications you are currently using and will also offer up application suggestions.

Mobile

None of the options have changed but i’ll run through them quickly anyways.

With mobile email - Allows you to update page status and videos via email on your mobile.

With mobile web – Tells you how to view your page via URL – sends you through to the facebook.com/username page to set your page URL if you haven’t already.

With the iPhone – Briefs you on how to favourite pages within the iPhone.  Do this for pages you admin as it makes the updating and monitoring process of your pages 10x easier.

With text messaging – Allows you to update your page via text.

Insights + Page help

Both are self explanatory, the insights option will send you through to the insights menu, the page help option will send you through to Page help!

PAGE NAME CHANGES – Pages with fan counts under 100 fans now have the ability to change their page name.  If the page is bigger than 100 fans, bad luck.

There you have it, mudos take on the new admin backend.  Big up’s to facebook for making the changes.  What do you think of the upgrade?

I’ve read up on several hints and tips on getting the most out of facebook advertising over the past few months, so I thought I would share three simple strategies that work for mudo in this space.

#1 Use faces.

You’re obviously on the internet right now, chances are you’re on facebook right now too – so head to your newsfeed screen, start at the top of the screen then scroll down to the bottom of the page.  Take note of all the images you see as you’re scrolling down.  What type of image did you see the most? Chances are the majority of images were those of faces, thats because 95% of profile pics on fb are human faces and since roughly 70% of the images on your newsfeed are profile pics, it makes sense that these are the types of images users are most familiar and comfortable with.  Play on this familiarity, use face’s in your facebook ad images.  Users are more likely to notice your ad and are therefore more likely to engage with it, provided your copy is right.  We’ve seen increases in engagement for face images in ad’s versus product shot images with exactly the same title and copy, pretty much every time we run a campaign.

#2 Back the right horse and let it run.

When launching a new campaign, set up 3 different seperate campaign lanes (fruitclient 1, fruitclient 2, fruitclient 3) and run three slightly varied ad’s in each lane.  So in total you have 9 ad’s running through 3 different advertising lanes.  Once the ad’s are approved, let all three lanes run live for about 8 hours.   Now revisit each lane.  My bet is that only one of the 3 ad’s in each lane is bolting, the other two will only have received a fraction of impressions compared to the bolter.  Now pause the other two ad’s and let the bolter suck up all the available daily budget for that lane.  Repeat for the other 2 lanes that you have created.  What’s happening is after 2-3 hours of the campaign being live facebook analyses which ad out of the lane is performing the best, it will then favour that ad in impressions for the duration of the campaign.  If you follow this process over 3-5-7 or 10 lanes and split the entire campaign’s daily budget between these lanes you will generate a far better result in terms of CTR than only running one lane containing 7-10 ad’s.  Backing the right horse from the start will therefore improve your ROI and save you or your client money.

#3 Set a target Click Through Rate

After you have run your ad’s for the first 8 hours and backed your best performing ad’s, choose a Click Through Rate (CTR) target that you don’t want your ad’s to fall under.  This can best be calculated by looking at the current click through rate of your ad’s, they won’t get much better than what they’re sitting at about a day after launching – traditionally the CTR will decrease incrementally each day from launch.   So set a target CTR based on the launch CTR, then when your ad or ad’s fall below this CTR, swap a new advert in.  Theres a small strategy to swapping new ad’s in during a campaign.  Firstly, about 48 hours after your first ad’s are launched, analyse which is the best performing, then replicate this ad as best you can in a new lane, but be sure to include new imagery and slightly different copy.  Have the ad approved, then pause it.  When it comes time to swap the ad’s, make the new (paused) ad go live and pause the older ad – this way there is no gap in ad spend and your ad’s will constantly be exposed to your market at all times.

I implement these strategies every time I run a facebook campaign and every time they come through, hopefully they’ll work for you too.

Over the last hour facebook has either been extremely buggy or completely down.

It appears like the outage is worldwide by reviewing the latest messages on twitter.  On the 22nd of Sept facebook suffered the largest outage in its short history.  Today looks like something similar. Could the company be having real internal issues with its scalability systems? It seems so.

Hopefully its sorted soon, because as we found out during the last outage, when facebook goes down, it takes half the internet with it.

Thinking there must be more ways to make use of the fans on your branded facebook page? There is and its not about pushing content, promoting engagement or organising sweepstakes – it’s about advertising.

This post will show you how to use what seems to be a forgotten yet incredibly powerful feature of the facebook advertising platform, the ‘connected to’ button. The best thing is, employing this feature and reaping the full benefits of it only takes a few seconds to learn and understand.

You have a qualified, captive audience – use them.

Fans of your facebook page want to be there, they trust your brand and have opened themselves up to receive communication from it.   For most facebook page admins/marketers, regular page updates is where the engagement with fans starts and ends, this is simply not true.   Using the ‘connected to’ feature on facebook allows you to only advertise specific ad’s to your pages fans, the consumers you know most about, the consumer that will be most receptive to your message – the consumers that will return you the highest ROI possible.

How do I do it?

Step 1 – Access facebooks advertising suite by clicking the green ‘promote this page’ button or simply click the ‘Advertising’ link at the very bottom of the screen.

Step 2 – Begin creating your ad, make sure what you are advertising is relevant to your page fanbase and is something that they will want to know about.

Step 3 – Key Step – Targeting, before you start entering what specific age group, sex and interest’s you want to target, head down the page to the ‘connections on facebook’ section.  Here you will see three options:

- target users connected to

- target users who are not already connected to

- target users who’s friends are connected to

you want to focus on the ‘target users connected to‘ section.  Now add in the name of the page (you admin) who’s community it is you want to advertise to, almost instantly facebook should give you an estimate of how many people will be in that selected pool.

Step 4 – Start advertising.

The crucial thing to understand here is not the size of the market, it’s the quality of the market you are advertising to.  You’ve targeted them based on their connection to your brand page, so make sure the proposition you are pushing to them via ad’s matches up to the original proposition you offered them when they first encountered your page – the proposition they accepted.

Main Benefit’s of this Strategy

Generate incredibly high ROI on advertising – The market you are advertising to using this technique already know your brand and are willing to receive marketing messages from it.  For them, receiving relevant advertising from a trusted brand will likely be welcomed over most of the other noise on facebooks advertising platform.

You have the power to direct – Say your brand has a new website/microsite or online survey that has just launched, yet none of your consumers know about it.  Using this technique you can effectively drive qualified traffic to that destination for a fraction of what you have had to pay before.

Constant, qualified brand exposure – By varying your advertising daily/weekly you can expose new products/services to consumers who love your brand in an ongoing fashion.

Hopefully this small strategy will give page administrators out there another avenue which allows them to make the most of the facebook fan page communities.   It is also a great way to ’sell’ the idea of facebook advertising to others who would otherwise be skeptical on the subject.

From here, my advice to you is to give it a try and see what results you come back with, pay particular attention to the click through rate (CTR) of your ad’s, anything over 0.06% is considered solid.

See above, the bottom two rows show ad’s that were run through specific targeting without using the connected to feature.  The top row shows an ad that was run through the exact same targeting perameters, but did use the connected to feature.  Notice the dramatic rise in CTR when using the feature, it’s risen nearly 450%.  A healthier CTR means a higher ROI for advertising, also note the lower bid due to your ad targeting a selective audience, that only you have access to! Again, this contributes to a lower overall ROI.

I hope this post helps, if you do have success, or failure using this strategy I would love to know about it in the comments.

Over the past 18 months as an agency we estimate we have sent out roughly 1200 individual facebook page updates for various clients and brands across Australia and the world.  During this time we’ve noticed that small, seemingly subtle differences in how updates are written and presented can make a massive difference in terms of engagement.  So, in the first post of many, we want to share with you what we’ve come to adopt as the first 3 rules of facebook page update creation.

Rule #1 – Keep it short.

The human brain only has so much available processing power at any given time therefore it is imperitive that your message be quickly and easily digested by the brain in order for the user to engage.  If it appears too long, the brain will pass it off as too much work and quickly move onto the next update in the feed, leaving your update with no engagement.

Rule #2 – Keep it clean

When adding a link into your update do not include the actual URL in the update itself, it appears unprofessional and does a great job of confusing users.  Once the link is loaded into the update, clean up the text and copy that appears to the right, often there is too much information here, making the update too big.  Once the update is too big — see Rule #1.

Rule #3 – Take the thought process away

This is probably the most fundamental insight we have learned so far.   In taking the thought process away from users, we guarantee your updates will produce more engagement.  Instead of writing updates with open-ended questions which requires the user to muster significant brainpower in order to engage, write the update with 2 answers already supplied.  This way the user doesn’t have to think in order to engage, they quickly choose which answer suits them then submits the one word answer to the update and boom, they’ve successfully engaged.

Example

Update requiring high thought process to engage

“Our new shoes are so awesome, what do you like about them?”

Update requiring minimal thought process to engage

“Our new shoes are so awesome, what do you like about them – the colour or the design?”

Ask yourself, which one would you seem more likely to engage with?

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As mentioned above, this will become the first of many such posts in a series with an aim to share insights that we’ve learned over the past 2 years working on facebook that will hopefully help you in your facebook marketing efforts.

Rules #4, #5 and #6 will be posted shortly.

facebook has released another change of how we can view info through the newfeed.

When you hover your mouse cursor over either a friends profile name or event in the newsfeed a small popup will appear above it, giving you a small amount of extra information about the content you are highlighting.

This added functionality will no doubt further increase engagement users have with the site as the friending/attending process gets simpler.

As of 30 mins ago facebook released a new feature that will, yet again, change the way we use facebook.  We are now able to ‘like’ comments made by others in a comment thread.

Above anything, this new feature will further continue to strengthen facebooks knowledge around our own personal social graphs as it will be able to start logging the relationship strengths between a 3 person dynamic, rather than a 2 person dynamic (which was what was available before this change).  View a breakdown of this below:

.

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The three person dynamic

1) The post writer The individual who actually wrote the wall post that comments are being made on.

2) The commenter The individual who commented on the post writers post.

3) The comment liker The individual who ‘liked’ the commenters comment, on the wall post.

Using the data that this type of dynamic will produce is going to allow facebook to gain a new angle into how we associate with our friends, predominantly in terms of which groups of friends are closer than others and what content draws these groups together.

Ultimately, through this change, facebook is allowing you to express more about the social ties you have with your friends – on the flipside, they have opened up yet another channel which will allow them to better understand who you interact with and why.