The web is turning more social.  But what does that actually mean.

Everyone’s jumping on facebook because they believe it’s ‘the’ social platform to be on.

Truth is, facebook is the catalyst, not the platform.  You’re website’s the platform.

Facebook wants us as marketers to embrace the information it has about consumers and use it to create more personalized experiences for our consumers through our brands online.

It started with facebook platform.  Brands used applications to reach consumers and get them interacting with their brand.  Then pages came out, this product allows us to group our consumers together and message them via a broadcast model.

Now we’ve got open graph, which (granted) has been around for nearly 1.5 years, but is only now starting to bear fruit in the way we can and should use it.

Open graph allows any third party site to gain access to consumers personal data by asking for them via permissions.  The amount we can do with this data opens up a plethora of possibilities, the foremost being personalization.

We can use this data to build branded experiences around the consumer themselves, not the other way around.

Some of you may see this as old news, but I’ve struggled to find blog posts, articles or any written literature that talks to this topic plainly – so this way my 5min attempt to sum it up.

Great examples are of open graph in action include Samsungs mrknowitall and Mashable when you sign in via facebook.

Personalization is the way forward for the web and facebook is the way we, as marketers are going to be able to plan, create and implement strategies that have personalization as it’s core.

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.

Yesterday it was reported that facebook has dropped the need for page owners to get written permission from a facebook representative to run a promotion or competition through their page.

This is huge news.  Below is a press release facebook sent out to several media outlets on Monday afternoon – see below.

We have some exciting updates regarding the administration of Promotions, Sweepstakes and Contests on Facebook that will help to streamline the process and make your lives a bit easier:

1. We no longer require prior written Facebook approval to administer a promotion on Facebook.
2. We no longer require a minimum media spend investment to support the promotion.

This means that you are not required to have a media campaign on Facebook to run a promotion, nor do you need to ask for approval on the contest T&Cs from the Facebook team. Please note that all promotions are still subject to our Promotion Guidelines (http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php) and Facebook Platform Policies (http://developers.facebook.com/policy/), and that brands are responsible for ensuring that all contests fall within those guidelines.

Note that last point, ‘all promotions are still subject to our Promotion Guidelines’.  So it still seems you have to play by the rules and are just as likely to be warned or shut down if you are caught breaking them.

The reason given for the original setup, whereby a facebook representative approved each promotion was seen by some to be a blatant push for marketing dollars, as a you couldn’t really see a facebook representative if you hadn’t dumped over 10k worth of ad spend into the platform.  But facebooks explanation seems more straightforward.  Apparently they just didn’t have the manpower to monitor all the promotions happening on the platform. Hence the reason for this latest change comes because facebook now believes it has the staff numbers necessary to monitor most if not all marketing activity happening on facebook.

As you can see below, the guidelines – http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php – have not yet been changed, but will be soon.

UPDATE – facebook has now changed the written guidelines to represent the changes explained above.

SUPRÉ’s facebook page surpassed the 250,000 fan mark not so long ago.

For those of you unfamiliar with the background of the page – we asked our client, SUPRÉ, to start a page and in June 09′ it launched.

The entire strategy we pitched and were to use was completely unproven and untested, as most new strategies are in social – thankfully the strategy was right.  In the 17 months since we’ve gone through a roller coaster of awesomeness, from humble beginnings with 500 fans and updates that generated 30 user interactions, to 250k fans and updates that regularly hit over 2500 interactions.

In this post I’m just going to share some fundamental stats and if there is sufficient interest, I will aim to write 2 posts a week till the end of the year going into the detail of how this strategy has evolved into a monster and how the page operates on a daily and weekly basis.

You’ll notice I’m using both the old and new insights suites, I like both for different practical reasons.

Total fan numbers

Note the tipping point around June / July.  Note this was not due to advertising, we have not actively advertised for fans since Feb this year.  I’ll write about around this next week.

Active Users

Around half the fan base are actively engaged each month and over 30,000 are actively engaged each day.

Interaction

The page is averaging around 1,400 likes and 1,400 comments per page update.  Note the similarities in levels for both modes of engagement, this is part of an intentional content creation strategy which I’ll go over in the coming weeks.

Media Consumption

Currently the page generates roughly 4,500 photo views per day.  Again this is strategic, 80% of the viewed photos are from fans themselves.

This graph is a bit skewed as we launched a large campaign recently, hence the spike.  Prior to this the page was generating around 2,500 logged in page views per day and 1,750 unique page views per day.

As I said earlier, this is an intro post.  I’ll be committing to writing a series of 8 posts over the coming 5 weeks focusing on sharing what we’ve learned in building this page.

Hope you enjoy!

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?

—

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.

“Noone wants to be advertised to through facebook, it’s a place to connect and share with my friends & family, why would I want a brand in that space? It’s disruptive and it doesn’t work.”

Advertising - is a form of communication intended to persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners) to take some action.

Disruption – is the (usually deliberate or intended) interruption of normal work or practice.

Advertising has always been disruptive. It is primarily designed to interrupt you from your normal everyday activities and pursuade you to take some action. The constructs of traditional mass media (print, TV, radio) have always facilitated this model of advertising, the advert or message is always pre-packaged, aimed and broadcast at a pre-determined group of consumers, mostly via generic fields such as age, sex and location. It interrupts these consumers whilst they are watching TV, reading the newspaper, sitting at a bus stop or listening to the radio. It’s forced, it’s a push of content towards consumers. Whether they like it or not, they’re still going to be fed the message.

Along comes something like facebook. It’s a place to connect, share, interact and keep up to date with things happening in your world. It’s also a place where you can become connected to non living entities like brands, common interest groups or companies.

YOU decide to be connected to these things.

If you have an affinity with a brand, you fan them. You are then connected with them. You have given that brand explicit permission to have access into your social graph, you are effectively welcoming that brands message into your social world, because you find it relevant to you.

If the brand is smart, they will understand and respect your social space, grateful for the personal access you have granted them and send you information that interests you, is relevant to you and can help improve your life in a helpful, meaningful way.

Understand that this approach is still, very much, advertising. The brand still needs to sell products and make money. It still needs to pursuade an audience to take action.

The thing that doesn’t need to apply to advertising anymore, the part that is irrelevant now, is disruption.