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.

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.

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:

.

.

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.

Heyy,

So i’ve been reading alot recently about data portability, in particular Googles Opensocial plans, plans that involve facebook….but facebook currently wants nothing to do with it. Why?

Data portability when it occurs on a large scale, will be a paradigm shift, one that i see being pivotal in the future direction of the social web.

Lets have it from both sides…

Google/Open social
Ok, so Google wants to do the honorable thing by opening up all the social network(s) data so that users can easily transport their personal data into other social networks or Applications.
It has been the next ‘big step’ in social media for a wee while now, the problem was always getting the right social networks on board. Google thought it had this problem covered 3 weeks ago when facebook agreed to come on board. That came unstuck 3-4 days later when Mr Zuckerberg decided facebook was opting out.

facebook
The question for facebook here is, what is our business? Its simple, facebooks business is information. The platform they own allows millions of people around the world to create/trade/share/discuss information with their friends. So what happens if you allow that information to be freely moved around the internet, away from facebook? Would facebook be losing eyeballs or creating new ones?

Its not an easy answer, one that i and facebook execs (im guessing) are currently trying to figure out.

heres the 200 words or less version of my answer to date….

if facebook decides to push ahead without the use of opensocial and create their own data portability ring, users will either ditch facebook because they cant transport their data to places opensocial can, or stick vehemently with facebook as it is where the bulk of their personal data is stored and see it to be too hard to recreate that data with google and opensocial.

So the power is with the user (as it should be). If a majority of users stick with facebook after they announce plans to manage their own data portability, facebook wins in a big way. In a big way i mean ‘the next google’.
facebook still wins if they decide to join opensocial, but they will, from that point on, forever be under the google umbrella…..and i dont think Mark Zuckerberg likes umbrellas.