It’s that time of year again! Lights, carols, and last but not least, holiday shopping. For many shoppers, holiday shopping is a stressful and daunting task. So how can brands use Facebook to help their customers with this intimidating feat? Strategic uses of Ad Types, Targeting options, and Ad Placements can help ensure your customer won’t turn into The Grinch this holiday season!
Page Post Offer Ads are a must-use. Brands post an offer on their Facebook page to their current fan base and that offer can subsequently be turned into an ad for wider reach and engagement. Offers are a great way to provide an exclusive offer to reward a brand’s current fans, or as a way to acquire new fans who are likely to shop in your store. Either way, the offer is a great way to drive sales and lift engagement, making it a win-win for both brands and customers.
Sponsored Stories, an oldie-but-goody, should also be considered. Sponsored Stories are essentially messages going out to a user’s friends about their engagements with your page, app or event. Not only do Sponsored Stories help brands increase their fan base, but they also allow customers to see what brands their friends like and products they are looking to buy. Knowing what friends like can help customers think of gift ideas.
For brands looking to drive purchases offsite, Facebook Exchange is the way to go. This real-time bidding and ad-purchasing strategy within Facebook allows brands to re-target consumers who have visited their website, shopping cart, opened up an email or visited any other location where cookies can be placed by the Brand. Cookies should be placed on sites prior to Black Friday so that brands can use data collected and re-target those customers for future holiday promotions.
Custom Audience Targeting allows brands to reach a specific set of users by their email addresses, Facebook User IDs, or phone numbers. Brands can match their email and phone lists with Facebook’s user data and create ads targeted to this specific set of users. What’s great about this targeting option is that you are able to reach people who have already engaged with your brand, and thus have a high predisposition to become fans, engage with your brand further on Facebook, and ultimately, purchase your product.
For most people, the holiday season is jam-packed with visits from relatives, ski trips, and other vacations, leaving little to no time to spend sitting at a computer. So how will brands ensure that users will see their ads? Brands should make sure that their Sponsored Stories and Page Post Ads are being placed on the Mobile Newsfeed. With 600M mobile users, the mobile newsfeed is an ideal place for brands to advertise during the holidays and reach those users who are getting their social media fix at Grandma’s house by sneaking peeks on their phones.
All of these tactics can lessen the burden of holiday shopping for your best customers, leaving more time to focus on spending time with loved ones this season!
As more and more agencies chase the social concept of “Big Data,” the market has flooded with hundreds of agencies and thousands of freelancers, all shouting to the heavens that THEY have the data system that can define social. When you’re on the buying side, this can make the process of choosing a vendor incredibly stressful. They all walk into your office wearing the same suit, but each has a different way of looking at data.
To help you sift through the numbers, here are some hard and fast rules for dealing with Facebook Metrics:
Technically a five-dollar bill and a 100-dollar bill are both one sheet of paper, but they’re hardly worth the same amount. Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t value likes, shares and comments the same, so neither should you.
Raw volume of comments doesn’t mean you’re doing a good job. In fact, it can mean the exact opposite. 1,000 comments on a post can be 1,000 people telling you how much they dislike your product. Think back to high school – was it always a good thing when everyone was talking about you?
It records “liking” a page as an engagement, so when brands buy fans, their PTAT goes up like magic. This gives most clients a warm fuzzy feeling that the money they spent created more conversation. Unfortunately, any metric that is so easily bought isn’t the right measuring stick for tracking engagement. We recommend you look at what we call, “Real PTAT”, (PTAT - Daily New Likes). Consider the volume of positive comments on your page or an increase in influencers.
There are so many variables that go into putting together a good post. Tone, day, season, visual, structure… the list goes on. So offering to optimize by only one of those variables is like trying to build a house out of only paint. It’s one of the tools you need, but certainly not enough.
Instead of trying to look at these variables in a silo, we encourage you to mix and match. Don’t just look for the best day to post, but look at what kind of content performs best on those days. Do sales messages play better in the afternoon or the evening? This is the kind of matrix you should be creating to inform your posting strategy.
Now that you are armed to sift through the mound of metrics, “Big Data” beware!
In late September, brands started to sound the alarm: The reach on their page had dropped a reported 30-40% overnight. The reactions ranged from irritable to apocalyptic. Now that the dust has settled and there is a real sample to look at, Socialtyze conducted a study of brands that we felt would best reflect any Facebook algorithm changes.
Our goal was to see if Facebook was keeping its promise to simultaneously make the news feed a less spam-ridden experience AND continue to provide qualified impressions to users with a history of brand engagement. As our CEO Mateo Gutierrez pointed out in his Huffington Post article, “Facebook sees that the future of brands within Facebook is not one of amassing fans and simply publishing to them repeatedly.”
So, we set out to test whether the drop in reach resulted in an equal drop in engagement. If Facebook’s algorithm tweak was successful, engagement should only see a slight dip.
The graph above shows the evolution of reach within our database over the last few weeks. As you can clearly see, the bottom fell out during the middle of September, with a 32% drop from the previous week. This was coupled with an additional 14% drop during the following week. This is consistent with other findings and outside publications, so there were no real surprises.
However, despite the drastic drop in reach, engagement remained consistent, even showing a 3% increase the week of the algorithm tweak. It wasn’t until mid October that any significant dip took place, and even then the losses were small (just over 5%) compared to the losses in reach.
So what does this mean? It seems that Facebook, in an odd way, has done brands a favor, removing impressions to users who would have considered them a nuisance. But not to worry, they’ve kept all the fun people at the party: the clickers, the likers and the sharers!
The launch of iOS6 for Apple’s iPhone users wasn’t just a major milestone for the boys from Cupertino; it was a huge leap for Facebook developers on the mobile OS. With the upgrade, the toolbox for application artists got much larger. Here is a quick look at some of those features:
With iOS6, users can upload images and videos from their phone. Now users can participate in sweepstakes, polls and anything requiring them to contribute content, without using a desktop!
When viewing in landscape mode, the user now has the option of making the page full screen. This means better visuals and better user experiences. And with the bump in pixels on the iPhone5, this means even more screen to fill with awesomeness.
All those CSS3 filters you have been so stoked to use on the desktop are now fully capable of being translated to your phone. Want image editing power? Grab your favorite cupcake photo and with the push of a button, add sepia, super saturate, change the hue, rotate it, flip it, make it bright, deepen contrast, gray scale, blur, drop-shadow… you name it!
Cache has jumped from 5MB to 25MB! That translates to 500% more space to store app data, boosting performance for app users and allowing storage of several sessions of app items.
You can now debug your mobile web apps remotely. Just plug in your iOS device via USB and run the simulator. That way, developers can test all that JavaScript and new CSS capabilities with ease, which means less buggy web apps.
Overall this is a huge step for mobile web. Desktop power is even closer to being a reality on your iOS device!
Like most things that seem, at first, a bit peculiar, or perhaps even slightly challenging, historical context usually helps to lend some calm to the situation. When it comes to the recent changes Facebook has made to its fan page edgerank algorithms, this holds true.
In recent weeks, brands have noticed that their fan page reach has dropped precipitously due to the recent changes Facebook has made to its edgerank algorithms. While this may be initially concerning for brands, when you frame it in context of Facebook's product team history, working diligently to improve user experience, it all makes more sense.
Facebook has always developed product to a core principal: no spam. Consider the first roll out of apps within Facebook way back in the day. These were the most viral prolific little buggers in the system: everyone was poking, werewolfing and vampiring ad naseum. The Facebook experience was getting spammy. So what did they do? They dialed it all back and everyone panicked. Lo and behold, it left us with a much stronger and more thoughtful ecosystem of applications, becoming such a rich landscape that entirely new businesses have grown from it (i.e., social gaming).
More recently, we saw the emergence of social readers via the open graph. Everyone was suddenly seeing every song you listened to and every article you read! The experience was spammy. What if I didn't want to share what I was reading 24/7? So what did Facebook do? Again, they dialed it back and everyone predicted the demise of social readers. Fast forward to today: social readers are a popular high use destination within Facebook's larger ecosystem.
So how does this relate to brands and fan pages?
Facebook sees that the future of brands within Facebook is not one of amassing fans and simply publishing to them repeatedly. That is not a high value engagement. It is fundamentally spammy. So, Facebook is dialing that back too. Consider an analogy: If Facebook were a big 1 billion attendee theme park where people grouped up around the rides they liked, rode the rides, shared stories about their experiences, met their friends from times past and rekindled memories, would you want the world’s brands standing in the middle of that, vying for attention with an ever larger and louder megaphone? In that scenario, the brands would eventually drown out the intended social experience and people would simply leave. Similarly, Facebook wants its users to have a positive experience, to be able to socialize and without feeling bombarded or jockeyed between brands.
But why is this good for brands?
Returning to the theme of this post: framing things in history, remember that other big online animal that has algorithms? Google. For years they have been tweaking their algorithms to impact the SEO machine and deliver ever more accurate and relevant search results. Why would Google do this? The same reason Facebook is changing their algorithms. Google wants its users to come back. If the search results can be gamed and the same brands can dominate search results over and over again, that’s a terrible experience for an end user, and they’ll go somewhere else. When I search for ‘green laundry service, Brooklyn’, I don’t want to end up seeing the first page reading Walmart results for ‘eco laundry detergent’. But what has happened as a result of Google’s algorithm changes? Brands have had to create well-structured, high value and relevant destination sites, with good information and positive user experiences. In the end, it has proven to be a very positive experience for brands and consumers because the overall quality of the online experience has improved dramatically. Secondly, as a result of reducing spammy search engine results, Google has been able to serve up ever more relevant and therefore clicked on ads. This has been the single greatest boon for brands on the web to date.
Similarly, the changes we are seeing on Facebook are extremely positive for brands. The new Facebook for brands is a world where brands can build highly engaged, rich, thoughtful and above all else high quality connections to their fans. As I hear brands bemoan the changes, I also hear a quiet stirring of relief from the many CMOs and the like who are faced with the empty challenge of buying a million fifty cent fans and delivering a multi-day publishing strategy that amounts to nothing more than an outpouring of junk.
Brands should understand this: Social media is its own unique medium. It’s not like TV where people passively watch a show. It’s not like reading a magazine or driving in your car and seeing billboards fly by. Facebook, in particular, is a place where people share intimate stories, where revolutions are sparked, where breaking news really breaks. In this context, the challenge for brands is to thoughtfully understand your fans on a very deep level. Speak to them in ways that are relevant to the space and understand how they want to identify with your brand.
Facebook understands that the future of brands succeeding in social is predicated on the end user having a positive experience. Facebook also understands that their financial future depends on brands succeeding in social. So cheer up brands! These changes are good thing. No, they are a great thing! Connect with your fans. Know them intimately. Publish thoughtfully. Build great custom application experiences. You’ll reach your base better and the response and ROI will be more than you’d hoped for. Facebook knows this, the end user knows this and so should you.
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