Archives December 2013

It’s hard as a business to understand how to navigate your customer’s feedback online – whether it’s negative or positive.  Many of my clients are paralyzed when left to respond to posts or comments on their page and when it’s negative feedback – all hell usually breaks loose internally.

Business owners need to understand how best to respond to these types of social scenarios and Facebook recently unveiled the 6 trends they found after a full day dedicated to Compassion-focused research.

Facebook’s 4th Compassion Research Day was held Thursday December 5th at their Menlo Park, Calif. HQ.

Here’s what was on the agenda:

• What happens around the world when somebody uses emoticons,
• The things they learned about how teens navigate cyber-bullying as well as suggested tools to support them.
• Providing tools to veteran users and affiliation.
• What does and does not work in what they learned about difficult status updates.

In this event, the compassion team discovered six important trends, while working with researchers from from Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, Yale’s Center for Emotional Intelligence, Stanford University, Northeastern University, Claremont McKenna University, as well as other institutions.

Prior to the introduction of the six trends, Facebook said that:

Conflicts, as well as other challenges in relationships are impossible to avoid, in both online and offline situations. As these are the realities of life, researchers are now beginning to discover how non-verbal rules in human interaction affect attitudes and behavior online.

Facebook, while working with top researchers studying the science of emotion, is now digging into how conflict affects users’ lives on the web – transcending language, culture values and social norms on how they define as respectful behavior.

…the six trends were:

1. Users can create a safer, more respectful online environment.
   In situations in which Facebook’s community standards are not violated, but people are still unsatisfied, Facebook will suggest utilizing messaging tools and engaging more to pro-active conversations. According to Facebook, 85% of the time users are asked to remove photos that other users find embarrassing, 65% of message recipients feels positive, and 25 percent feels neutral.
2. People accept feedback graciously.
   About 63% Facebook users reacted positively on messages about the controversial posts they made. 62% said that they have no issues on being asked to delete posts of concern.
3. Most people do not mean to offend others.
   Only 1 out of 10 users who are asked to remove a post update admitted that they made it such to provoke others or get a message across.
4. People will use the tools offered to them, if they are effective.
   Facebook’s team said that when they began to implement solutions to help alerting users about controversial content, it only provided a blank message box to fill in, with just 20% users would send a ticket. Now, about 3.9 million conversations weekly are being facilitated using updated tools.
5. Emoticons help people express themselves better online.
   Facebook reported that users uses emoticons with “impressive levels of accuracy”. This is especially helpful to people from South America and North Africa.
6. Approaching an old problem with new tools:
   The social network mentioned its Bullying Prevention Hub, as well as “new contextual resources are the heart of the Facebook product.”

Watch the event presentation here:

As a company, business or brand: have you encountered an uncomfortable situation on Facebook? How did you handle it?

Does Reach matter to you?  I know I’ve seen a pretty steep decrease in my fan reach since the new announcement.  But, just as I told a group that I presented to last week – Facebook is a Marathon not a Sprint and if you’re doing it right – engaging your audience and being consistent with your posting plan, you don’t really need to worry.

After Facebook released this PDF report, they became more straightforward that marketers will have to start paying to play if they want to be seen in the newsfeed.

Facebook’s filtering algorithm, also known as EdgeRank aims to show more of what users care the most about and less of what they are not interested in.

The result: expect a slow decline in the organic distribution of business Pages’ posts as Facebook continues to work towards more relevant user experience on the site. Your posts will have greater chances of showing-up organically in your fan’s (as well as their friends’) news feeds if it is relevant to them and they are engaging The Facebook News Feed is evolving now into what we call a personalized newsletter. It simply means that Facebook gives priority to a brand’s posts if the fans and their friends engage more on the content the Page publishes: the number of likes, shares and comments.

According to Ignite Social Media, “Facebook once said that brand posts reach approximately 16% of their fans. That number is no longer achievable for many brands, and our analysis shows that roughly 2.5% is now more likely for standard posts on large pages. So, a year ago a brand could expect to reach 16 out of 100 fans and now that brand is lucky if they get 3 out of 100. Chilling news for brand pages who have invested resources to “build” a large following of fans.”

As a test, Facebook guru Jon Loomer did some experimenting. Of the 373 stories loaded in his timeline, it was distributed as follows:

• 239 Stories from Friends (64.1%)
• 106 Organic Stories from Pages (28.4%)
• 25 Ads (6.7%)
• 3 Stories from Lists (0.8%)

Read more about the results of his experiment here…

How will this change affect business owners?

Of course, getting people to pay for something they had for free before can make some people angry or worse – make them steer clear of Facebook marketing altogether.

One claim is that there will come a time that brands can no longer be seen in the News Feed without paying for ads. As of now this is not the case since in the experiment, 28.4% of the contents are organically from Pages.

Another concern is that Facebook is trying to prevent brands from being shown to people who are actually following their posts. However, Jon discusses in his post that if you are engaged with brands, you’ll still see their posts.  He mentions brands he follows such as Mashable, TechCrunch are still showing in his News Feed.

Obviously, Facebook makes their own rules as their platform is free to users and we all know they need to make their shareholders happy.

So what does this mean for business owners and their pages?  Here are some tips you can follow to ensure you get the best reach possible:

1. Post Consistently – a general rule of thumb is 2x per day
2. Get to know your fans – ask questions to get them engaged
3. Run Ads – try running some ads and see how it impacts your organic reach.  Who knows, you might just like running ads and see some great results

I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments if you’re seeing a decline in your reach (and if you are about reach at all!)

Do you struggle with finding interesting content for your Facebook page?  This is the NUMBER ONE issue my clients are having with their Facebook content strategies.

It’s hard (not to mention time consuming) trying to find interesting content to write each day but it’s proving even more difficult to find the right content to share that is relevant to their fans.

The Facebook News Feed is placed on the center of the home page for a good reason: to highlight what your friends are doing –especially the links they share.

News links increase the relevance of the post and the more links are shared – the better as far as Facebook is concerned.

As a matter of fact, more people are now tuning in to Facebook for stories about things they care about; from live news coverage, to Miss Universe, to sports scores, to the latest meme images and inspirational quotes.

It was reported in October that Facebook’s average referral traffic to media sites has increased over 170%, which was 3x more than the previous year. Facebook has enhanced the newsfeed with more controls and the #hashtag to help you keep track of the topics that matter and are relevant to your page.

Facebook is using an algorithm (known to some as Edge Rank) to determine which stories matter, which includes the number of likes, comments, who posted it as well as the type of post (whether it is a photo, video, or a status update). It enables people to discuss and share what’s happening. With the algorithm, Facebook focuses more on what makes high-quality content, particularly when it comes to mobile.

But why does Facebook need to sort out stories and why do they determine which stories get “bumped” in your newsfeed? Why don’t they just serve up everything to our newsfeed? It is because of relevance. They want to give people a better user experience by just showing what people want to see. In the near future, the News Feed will be able to determine the difference between high-quality articles from any mediocre content hosted outside Facebook. This means that the News Feed will give more prominence for valuable news related links and articles over other types of content.

How to find stories to share for your Facebook Business Page?

1. Log-in to your Facebook account and switch As Your Page
   
2. Like and follow as many people/page relevant to your niche. Include reputable news and media sites.
3. While posting as the page admin, click on Home. There you will see what companies, brands and the people you follow are talking about.
4. Select the stories you want to share. You can share it at that time, or better yet, pre-schedule to post at a later date (this helps you get more posts ready for later!)

Facebook just launched – Similar To – which is a simple feature that appears under a post on your page.

To make the News Feed more suitable to people’s interests, Facebook is now suggesting articles or posts that are “similar.” Once you click on the post, about three more articles similar to what you have read will show up beneath the post feed. This will help you discover more content you may find interesting and shareable on your own Facebook Page timeline. You will never have to miss out on the topics you care about.

See it in action here:

The key to all of this is to know that Facebook’s research shows that people prefer links to quality articles or news vs. just an image or meme and they will start showing more of this type of content in people’s newsfeeds so take note and start created AND sharing this type of content.

You should see an increase in your reach of your fan page if you start following these rules.

I’d love to hear in the comments below this post if you guys have seen a drop in your reach with these recent changes.