Tag Archives: facebook Blog

Facebook’s Newsfeed

Businesses have gone to great lengths to set up Facebook ‘pages’ and get ‘Likes’ to expose prospects and customers to their goods and services. Such is what marketing is all about. But understanding how to use these devices to get consistent results can be daunting. In this new realm of marketing, we have little control, or so it seems. The following article from TechCrunch illuminates the workings of Facebook’s Newsfeed — the stream of posts users see when they’re on the service.

Understanding how the Facebook algorithm handles content helps us produce more valuable posts, which will then be shown to the people we want to reach. The article also references a section that will be updated whenever they change the algorithm. The last few paragraphs provide simple guidelines for creating content that performs well and gains greater reach to help achieve business goals.

The best tactics for appearing prominently in the News Feed end up being quite straight-forward: share things that are interesting, authentic, and resonate with your audience. That typically means visually compelling media, funny or emotional content, and important news that’s fascinating to a wide audience … [People] just want to be stimulated. Do that, and Facebook will share what you have to say.

Read full article: http://tcrn.ch/2cfw5B3

The Power of Big Data

Tech companies are just scratching the surface of what they can do with Big Data. An enlightening article describes some of the power that comes with recording the daily lives and activities of hundreds of millions of people. In a 2012 experiment, Facebook learned how it could alter its users’ moods. Google routinely runs about 20,000 experiments per year involving users. Facebook even discovered that it could motivate people to get out and vote — not inconsequential given that they can filter out individuals’ political persuasion. That experiment involved over 60 million people! Where else but online can such a large sample size be assembled — and without having to let the subjects know they’re being tested.

Facebook and much of the rest of the web are thriving petri dishes of social contact, and many social science researchers believe that by analyzing our behavior online, they may be able to figure out why and how ideas spread through groups, how we form our political views and what persuades us to act on them, and even why and how people fall in love.

We should expect researchers to start figuring out much more about human behavior, given the magnitude of data available and the power derived from such knowledge. It makes one wonder what interesting things they’re looking at right now that remain undisclosed.

Read full article: http://nyti.ms/1z86m1O

Retail on Facebook: Is “F-commerce” All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

There’s been nothing but hype around Facebook’s upcoming IPO. Hundreds of millions of users, mountains of personal data, brands dying to repurpose their ad dollars online. This is going to be huge! Isn’t it?

Facebook is great as a social network for communicating with friends and family or customers if you’re a business. I use it every day for those purposes. I’d like to check and reset my privacy settings whenever FB changes things, which is often, but they make it so difficult you’d be hardpressed to call it user-friendly. I suppose most people aren’t as concerned about such things as I am. But if they’re not, they’re just falling aimlessly into FB’s data trap.

And then there’s the matter of how bloated the app has become. It’s more like using MS Word now than a cool social tool. Who can understand all the features? Do I subscribe, follow, post, or write a story? Why is the button I tapped yesterday gone today? And why do posts always seem to disappear? Do ordinary people understand any of this? Maybe this obscurity works to FB’s advantage, keeping their users in the dark while capturing more and more of their personal information as they blithely use the site.

Anyway, as a business, people don’t go to FB to shop — they go to connect. Yes, they learn a lot from their friends’ recommendations and get exposed to new products. And brands do a good job of chatting up (if not completely annoying) customers, placing sales and specials in the newsfeed with links back to their sites. But how is ‘F-commerce’ doing? Well, many brands have opened up storefronts on FB itself, but some are closing them just as quickly. According to a recent article,

“There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop, but it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Apparently, FB’s offer to let us connect and communicate with friends isn’t going to automatically turn into a commerce goldmine. Is this a surprise? People go to FB to talk, not buy. Maybe buying things is actually a lot easier and better on Amazon or Google after all. Of course, with almost a billion eyeballs on the site, advertising might be the real goldmine.

Read full article:  http://linkd.in/y5rcW7

Facebook’s Emergence as a Video Platform

Social phenomenon Facebook is now climbing the ladder as a video delivery service, according to a recent article on ClickZ:

“As traffic to Facebook continues to grow, the social network is beginning to emerge as an important stakeholder in the online video space. According to online measurement firm comScore, the number of users viewing video on the site has been growing consistently over the past twelve months, and it could end the year with the second greatest reach of all online video providers in the U.S., second only to YouTube owner Google.

Data from comScore’s Video Metrix service suggests the number of unique U.S. users viewing video content on Facebook has grown from 13.3 million in April 2009 to 41.3 million in April 2010, representing year-over-year growth of almost 211 percent.”

One of the disruptive effects of Facebook is that people are using the service instead of other websites they’ve typically used in the past for functions such as email, IM, photo sharing, and now video sharing. FB’s next step is to find a way to “monetize” this activity.

Read full article: http://www.clickz.com/3640570

Why Facebook Can’t Be Google

Facebook’s recent privacy policy woes stem from a fundamental flaw in understanding its own platform, as an excellent post by blogger Adam Fields points out. Though phenomenally popular, FB needs a business model. Their hope, like Google’s, is to leverage the data they accumulate from their huge base of users to make money selling advertising. However, these users expect they can trust FB to keep their data private — or at least to use it only in ways they approve. Additionally, users want control over the data they provide, and they want those controls to be easy to use and stable in the sense that the privacy policy doesn’t change every few months.

The fact that FB wants to make users’ data more publicly available, and therefore more valuable to advertisers, forms the basis of the conflict they’ve created with their users. The crux is that FB’s data is social while Google’s is public, and public data is more useful when more people know about it. Social data, however, inherently has much less reach because its purpose is not for widespread consumption but to serve a limited social circle.

From Fields’ post:

“Social sharing isn’t the same as public sharing. When I write something in a public forum, I want as many people as possible to read it. In that kind of forum, Google can make more money if more people see it, as can Facebook (which is why Facebook is trying to turn its entire platform into a more public one). This is at odds with what the users want for social, which is controlled sharing among a very small group. There is certainly an aspect of making new friends and extending one’s social circle outwards, but the object here is generally to share only inside that circle. People tend to resist being forced or coerced by the platform to share more widely.”

Hijacking user data appears to be a bad strategy for FB unless it can persuade users to give up their current ideas about privacy. And just as FB can never be Google, Google will find it difficult to become a social platform like FB because the nature of the data at the heart of each platform is different.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/bOnk5t

Three Important SEO Factors

In the current web economy, SEO (search engine optimization) and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and the like) are all the rage. Justifiably so. But for the most part, the interest is for the wrong reasons, ie: many tend to think they are free or cheap ways of making money on the Internet. Yes, it can be more affordable than traditional marketing, but it’s far from free! Indeed, a solid commitment of time and finances is required for success in these venues, just as it is in any other worthwhile arena.

Still, there are many things that a website owner can do to improve their search rankings — if not become “number one on Google,” as the spam pitches promise. And some of the easiest techniques to implement can also provide significant results. That’s the point of the following article from ClickZ.com, which shares three simple but effective SEO tips that you can use right away.

1: Use Your Key Phrase in Your Title

2: Use the Target Key Phrase in the Body Copy

3: Cross Link Your Pages Using the Target Key Phrases

Sound interesting? Check out the entire article for details, try the techniques, and see how your site does on Google over the next several weeks.

Full article: http://www.clickz.com/3636405

Why Is Facebook Important?

The Facebook phenomenon continues. According to a recent ClickZ.com report, FB’s unique visitors in January 2010, at a total of 133.6MM, was second only to the mighty Google. Indeed, throughout 2009 FB’s unique visitors climbed at a record pace through June, then leveled somewhat, but rose nonetheless through the remainder of the year to surpass Yahoo (132MM unique visitors in Jan 2010) and pull up snugly behind Google (147.8MM). (ref: http://www.clickz.com/3636533)

Why is this important? The numbers above represent people who are using FB every day. These are not merely people who signed up and have dormant accounts. What’s even more interesting is the amount of time these active users spend on the site. “Data from Nielsen says that U.S. Facebook users now spend an average of seven hours per month on the site. In January, the time spent on Facebook grew by nearly 10 percent in one month. Meanwhile, the average time spent on Google (GOOG) dropped 17 percent to around an hour and a half.” (ref: http://bit.ly/aETMUK)

What are people spending all that time on Facebook doing? They build their networks, connect with friends and family, keep in touch, etc. But much more importantly, they use the site to do things that they formerly did on several other sites or with the software on their desktop computers, including chat, commerce, posting photos and videos, and even email. Why go to other sites when almost everything you need, and all the people you want to share things with, are on FB?

Which brings up the final point: With upwards of 300MM people registered, FB is reaching a tipping point. Odds are more likely than ever that if you want to find/connect/communicate with someone, you’ll find them on Facebook. And where the people are is where the markets are.

Markets are moving online. Now that people are readily available on Facebook, businesses will be moving with them. But “going on Facebook” requires learning the values, rules, behavior, and mores first. Businesses that successfully do this will find they have the best advertising possible — the only advertising that will succeed in the not-too-distant future — word of mouth ( “word of mouse?”). With everyone connected, we’ll see our customers become our sales forces since they’ll be swift to tell others the story about how well we’re serving them.