Pulling Levers Blog

What they are and how will they affect the Facebook timeline and marketers?

Facebook launched the highly anticipated “Open Graph” apps last week, announcing new partnerships with 60 app developers, with many more to come.  Open Graph apps will enable the Facebook Timeline to track a user’s activity on and offline, with these apps posting on behalf of the user.  Companies such as Pinterest, Urbanspoon and Zynga will proactively engage with a user’s timeline, once permission has been granted, and post interactions that the user has had with products, services, news outlets, recipes they’ve tried and more.

This is a huge step forward for Facebook in its goal to make the new Timeline a true record of a user’s life and times.  But what does this mean for the average user?  Well other than making it easier for users to share and interact with one another (which can be seen as a positive or a negative, depending on with whom you speak), I’m not sure that this strays much at all from the culture that Facebook has already created. 

I remember reading blogs and opinions online months ago when the concept was first announced at the f8 conference of people debating whether or not this was just another way for Facebook to exploit its users and infringe on their privacy.  In my opinion, if you are willing to post the most intimate details of your life anywhere on the internet – Facebook page or otherwise – you’re putting any personal privacy under fire. Plus, as with other apps on Facebook, you will need to give permission for these new ones to work with your timeline.

Facebook has been a little shady in the past with its privacy policies and practices, but they are quick to right themselves – even if it does usually take a severe blasting online and in the media before doing so.  Users need to be careful.  If you’re willing to spend hours of your day on Facebook posting, playing games, chatting and the like – take a few moments every once and a while to pay attention to your privacy settings and you should be fine.

What do Open Graph apps mean for online marketers?

Now going above and beyond the everyday user experience, this does have some possibly major implications for online marketers. Facebook is very aware of the advertising revenue that the site generates each year (over $3.8 billion in 2011, up from $1.86 billion in 2010 according to Emarketer Inc.), and it seems to be constantly looking for new ways its advertisers can better target its users. These Open Graph apps are the latest tool to do that.

Don’t let them fool you. Facebook has positioned itself as the #1 social networking site in the world; however it is also one of the largest advertising outlets as well.  The Open Graph apps will allow marketers to present their products and services in front of the eyes of their exact demographics as they’ve been able to do with Facebook’s intricate targeting options. The interactions with these apps will play on the same concept of the popular marketing tool known as Sponsored Stories, providing outlets for advertisers to market to users who “Like” them and their friends (who will hopefully turn in to more of those who “Like”).  The difference here is the apps will allow the sponsorship to come more directly from the friend instead of from the brand; theoretically having a more powerful effect and endorsement for people seeing these purchases and interactions.

Communities such as Pinterest that are gaining in popularity can (and will) quickly move from a cult following to a sensation. Not only are these apps great for increasing brand awareness, but with so many inbound links the advertising (and SEO) potential on these sites will increase exponentially.

You’ve heard the stats before- 800 million active users, over half of them logging on in any given day, 350 million mobile users- Facebook has become a dominant part of the online world. 

So how do businesses begin to leverage their Facebook presence?  One element to consider is a Facebook landing page. Instead of the fan page wall, the landing page can be the first thing a visitor sees when they reach your page. This allows you to control your first impression and it can help turn a visitor into a fan. Custom landing pages have been around for a little while now, but with more businesses getting involved in Facebook every day, we wanted to take a look at the basics of designing and launching a Facebook landing page.

Designing Your Landing Page

The main thing you need to remember while designing your landing page is the layout cannot be wider than 520 pixels; the height is up to you. Two best practices to incorporate into your page – include design elements from your current website and brand and include a call-to-action button near the top or use an arrow to point to the page’s like button. In Lever’s case I put a “Click The Like Button” graphic under the logo as well as the “Like Lever Interactive” text in the final paragraph. Below is another example from one of our clients (we did not design this page).

Developing Your Landing Page
Developing your landing page can range from easy to difficult depending on which method you choose and your level of understanding HTML. One of the easiest ways to develop the page is to install apps.

• Wildfire’s iFrame for Pages App is among the easiest to use and includes custom HTML and image options and Fan Gate (Like Gate) options. An example for using this app would be a landing page with one image (either upload from the app or stored on your server) that links to a page on your site.Fan Gating or Like Gating requires a user to “Like” your page before they can receive the desired content, gain access to information or enter a contest or sweepstakes.
  Difficulty Level: Low – Moderate
• Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is another free app that will add a box to your page in which you can render HTML or FBML for customization. An example for using this app would be a landing page that has three paragraphs with different keywords bolded and an image near the top. The page is coded in HTML and the image is stored on your server.
  Difficulty Level: Low – Moderate
• Facebook Developers Page  allows you to build with Open Graph and integrate your app with Facebook’s core experience. An example for using this app would be a landing page that includes a sign up form that connects directly to your company’s database.
  Difficulty Level: Moderate – High

Landing Page Options
After the landing page has been created you will need to edit some settings so this page is the first thing visitors see, instead of your wall. From your landing page click Edit Page in the upper right. Note: You will need to be logged in and an admin to edit the page.

If you’ve installed an app choose the Apps link and then the Edit Settings Link under your apps name. You can now change the title of the tab. By default Wildfire’s apps tab is labeled Welcome.

After you’ve made the change, click Manage Permissions and look for the Default Landing Tab option. Choose the name of your app and click Save Changes.

You landing page is now the first thing visitors will see if they are not already a fan. To test your new landing page, log out of your account and visit your fan page.

Studies have shown that Facebook landing pages convert better than just having the wall show first. Keep your landing page simple and show content that will intrigue your visitors. If you are running a contest or have an item you give away for free, Fan Gating is a great option to increase your Likes.  Here are some more examples to get your creative juices flowing.

Do you or your company have a Facebook landing page or did you create one after reading this post? Leave a comment below with a link to your Facebook landing page.

I’ve waited over 7 months, through a player lock-out, to watch NFL football. It is like a second Christmas in my house. My husband and I are both fans of teams different than our hometown so we usually do not get a chance to watch an entire game live.

With the announcement a couple of weeks ago that DIRECTV would be offering their NFL Sunday Ticket through PlayStation 3, both my husband and I thought “Perfect!”. We signed up and anxiously awaited opening day.  What a disappointment. Not only did it take forever to load, it stalled every minute, and looped in commercials and pre-game commentary right in the middle of plays and eventually stopped working. Obviously there were issues.

I jumped onto Twitter and found the first DIRECTV account, which is mostly about their products, but directs you to the service account for issues:

This is a great approach. They can use this account to promote shows, new products, etc. and not have it weighed down with customer service issues.

I immediately go to the @DIRECTVService account to see if I can get an update to the issue.  Unfortunately the great social media strategy on the main account is not carried over to the service account. Here is what I found:

Lots of confusing and contradictory information posted here. Let me take a moment to point out a couple of issues from a social media perspective:

• No all encompassing tweet– While this is only a snapshot, this account never made a single tweet regarding the problem, it was all directed to individual users.
• Not repeating the question or issue in tweets — While the above snapshot does not represent this well, most of the tweets (at least 80%) directed to individuals do not repeat the original issue, leaving those reading the timeline confused. Here is a great example of the timeline in a 22 inch monitor during the outage that demonstrates this issue.
• Confusing/Contradictory information — One tweet indicates a problem with a particular service, another tells a customer where to go for that service that isn’t functioning.

In reading two tweets directed to individuals I do realize there is a problem with the PS3 stream. O.k., great, they are aware, they are working on it.  I figure I would hang out and check the status.  Unfortunately it was just too painful to watch them answer various individuals, but never give a clear update to all users.

At one point the Twitter account goes dead with no responses to anyone for 30 minutes. Then sporadic answers, but with a lot of dead air in between.

Another problem with this is they are not responding to everyone. And I really can’t tell who they are responding to and not. Some are being told to call, some are being told to send in a direct message.  Not sure why some should call while others should work with the Twitter team.

But the more important question, is the social media team in touch with the customer service team?  As @DIRECTVService is telling people to call for a credit, or that there should be no issues next weekend, their customers are saying something else:

The most baffling is the PlayStation and DIRECTV social media and customer service teams where clearly not communicating. PlayStation re-tweeted from @DIRECTVService to indicate the issue was being worked on and also posted they would be refunding customers:

Unfortunately @DIRECTVService never re-tweeted PlayStation’s refunding announcement and it wasn’t until 3 hours after it was posted was it mentioned by @DIRECTService:

You can see here, the PlayStation snapshot shows the tweet was made 4 hours previously and the first acknowledgement from @DIRECTVService was 1 hour previously. In fact 2 hours previously they were still indicating for customers to contact PlayStation.

And for the icing on the cake: DIRECTV never acknowledged on Twitter what the issue was, that it has been fixed for this upcoming weekend (other than saying it “should be”), nor did they apologize for the service outage.

Lesson learned: Have your social media strategy buttoned down and following best practices BEFORE opening day, and most importantly, be prepared for a crisis.

Look for more blog posts about social media best practices over the next couple of weeks.

 

As with most Google innovations, upgrades and optimizations are always being worked on.  Google recently announced an opportunity to sign up to see and test upgrades to the +1 button.

Sign up with your Google account at the Google+ Platform Review and when you are logged into the account and visit a website utilizing the Google +1 button, you will be able to view and test the newest functionality of the +1 button.

I signed up and immediately noticed a new component of the +1 button.  Hover and confirmation bubbles now appear to show the user what will happen if the click, what happened after they click, as well as other actions (other friends that have clicked the +1 button).

Google indicates that this will serve as a reminder as to which account the user the signed into as well as that their action will be made public. In addition, you can see which people in your Google+ circles have also used the +1 button.

Remind me to tell Eileen she has to add a photo to your Google+ account!

If you were waiting to add the Google +1 button due to rumors about it slowing down the load time for your pages, Google has just tripled the speed.  We had implemented the +1 button on several client websites, and did not see a delay time in page load (confirmed with site speed in Google Analytics). However, most of these clients have optimized code overall that does not weigh down the page with too many calls out to scripts.

If you have already implemented the +1 button, you are all set, just watch it load 3x faster!

In addition to the speed increase, Google has introduced a new “snippet” to work the asynchronous analytics code that will make the +1 button even faster.  Basically, it allows your page to continue to load and appear while the browser downloads the script behind the +1 button. This way, your page does not stop loading when it hits the call to the script, they are downloaded in parallel. In order to achieve this greater speed with the async code, you will need to update your code with the new snippet.  Use Google’s +1 button configuration tool to generate the +1 button code, as well as the new async code to make it even faster.

Many people jump on Twitter, start tweeting and realize followers just do not magically appear just because someone has something to say.  Here are three quick tips for novice users to get noticed on Twitter and start gaining followers:

1. Participate in the trend

Those who know me personally know how passionate I am about football (Go Steelers!). The end of the NFL lockout is big news in my house, and something I would like to tweet to show my enthusiasm. A quick look at tweets by football players I follow and several are using the same hashmark:  #LockoutOver. (Help with hashmark).  To participate in the trend and have my tweet show up in a search, I just need to add the hashmark to my tweet, and it has the potential to seen by many more than just my followers.

2. Follow your followers, and their followers, and who they are following…

I am not saying to follow everyone that follows you, or everyone they follow, etc.  but follow those that interest you. Think of it as simple networking.  Look at who is following your followers, or who they follow. You should start to see similar trends, passions, ideas, etc.  As you branch out, you become more visible to others as well.

3. Give a link to your Twitter account any where you can

Seems simple, but I if I had a dime for every email without a signature complete with name, title, company and other pertinent information like phone number or website, that I receive I could retire. Review your email signature and include a link to your Twitter account.

Use the link or your username whenever possible, but be careful of sharing a link on forums, make sure you are following the rules of the community.  But if allowed, by all means include it.

And if you are tweeting for business, make sure to include your username on your business card.

Have fun tweeting!

I’m busy (aren’t we all!) I have three monitors at my desk, and I utilize all three. I keep TweekDeck open on one monitor in the background, with columns showing Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Generally I have a Google Analytics screen on top of it, but while sitting at my desk I will glance at TweetDeck about every hour.

In the last couple of days, I have seen posts by a couple of businesses on Facebook that I like that have taken up my whole column and more in TweetDeck. It has bothered me since it takes up the whole column and I am forced to scroll to see other posts.  Below is an example (I blurred the post to protect the innocent!):

As I sat blogging and saw the post, it made me wonder if they had a blog, or posted this information on their own website. So, I started snooping around their website and started realizing I could not remember the last time I was at their website. There was a lot of new information, products to buy, information on events, etc.

I went back through their Facebook posts and saw that in almost every instance all their information was on their posts and fans were not directed to the website. I had obviously missed a couple of Facebook posts and had not been encouraged to visit their website in any of the posts I had seen. I was missing a lot!

Obviously trying to send your fans to your website on every post isn’t feasible.  But consider the length of the post above, this is a great opportunity to provide a teaser and link to read more on a blog.  Now you have an interaction at your website, not just Facebook, and your visitors can see a lot more than just one Facebook post.  Whether it is an event or a new product, use the blog page to include links to other parts of your site.

The key is good content.  Do not just link to products on your Facebook posts, create content that fans will be willing to link to more.

The first part of developing an overall social media strategy is understanding who your audience is and what they are doing. Seems simple, right? But this is the number one mistake so many companies make. Instead of understanding where their audience is, they focus on the latest and greatest social media platform. But what if your audience isn’t on that platform yet?

Marketers take the time to develop customer profiles and use that to drive their spend of marketing budgets, but do not use the same information to determine the right social media strategy. Just like any other marketing campaign, you have to do your research first. So, where to start? Best thing to do is to gather your customer profile/demographics and use the Groundswell Profile Tool (see below). The tool uses the most recent data from Forrester’s surveys to help understand where your target demographic lies within six groups:

• Creators-Very socially active people who create content, including blogs, wikis, videos and the like. They are happy to share their experience and opinions about their passions, hobbies, love of a product or brand. They don’t just join the conversation, they create it.
• Critics-Do not assume critics in only a negative context. Critics share their opinion, both good and bad, typically writing reviews and responding to forums. They also use micro-blogging platforms like Twitter frequently.
• Collectors-It isn’t just about collecting, but sharing as well. Collectors are great at finding items and sharing them on social bookmarking sites. They are most active on Delicious, Digg and StumpleUpon. While it seems they aren’t very important since they are just sharing, they are quite savvy and tend to share only valuable information and can be seen as a power user or authority.
• Joiners-Many creators start as joiners, sharing their experience, interacting on social media sites like Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn or even message boards. They want to connect with people that have their same interest, views or passions.
• Spectators-Rather than taking an active role, spectators love to people watch. They read a lot of blogs, and generally use a feed reader. They will use micro-blogging platforms like Twitter to keep updated on news, sports, and any other passions. They want to hear others opinions on a product or a brand, and those opinions influence their decision making.
• Inactives-no surprises here, these are people that are on the Internet, but don’t participate in social media (yet!)

So, let’s play with the tool a bit. If your demographic is US women, 55+, your audience is mostly spectators. Chances are you won’t see much in conversation from them initially, but have faith that they are out there, reading, watching, and making decisions even if not responding to you directly. Very few are creators, but will voice their opinion (critics) if need be. But also marketers need to watch this segment, as it has a high inactive rate.

But, if we change the demographic to US males, 18-24, there are very few inactives with a strong mix of Joiners and Spectators as well. You’ll see a similar trend among females in the same age group. They are not only watching, contributing to the conversion, they are big creators. It isn’t about just reaching them on the “usual” social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace) it is continuing the conversation on their individual blogs or forums.

It is an easy mistake to make. You want to use the latest and greatest technology to communicate about your company or brand. Before you waste your time, make sure your audience is there.

The Google +1 button has been out for about a month, but it has become more popular than Twitter tweet buttons on major websites.

A recent BrightEdge study of 10,000 of the largest websites found a 33% increase in placement of Google’s +1 button.

The study reports Google +1 buttons are present on 4.5% of the sites reviewed which is up 3.5% in June. In comparison, Twitter’s plug-ins are present on 3.4% of the sites.

Facebook plug-ins, including like buttons, still dominate. Although the Google +1 button is growing rapidly, the Facebook like button was placed on about 50,000 websites within the first week of offering the web-wide “like” button last spring.

Need to track social engagement? Read our blog about a new social report within Google Analytics.

Need help integrating the Google +1 button in your site? Contact us for assistance.

Google has been busy diving into the social media realm. There is some debate on whether they arrived at the party too late, or just muddying the waters, but regardless, they have at least made the move to integrate their +1 buttons, as well as other social metrics into Google Analytics.

If you are using the latest version of Google Analytics tracking code (the async version), and you have added the +1 buttons to your site, Google will enable the new Social Plugin Tracking for the +1 buttons in your account. The new “Social” report will appear in your Visitors section.

Think of the social action as you would an advanced segment. It allows you to see how visitors that clicked the +1 button interact with your site, and how that might different from other social actions (if configured) or other visitors or segments. Do +1 visitors spend more time on site? View more pages? Spend more money? Convert better?

There are three reports that make up Social reporting: Engagement, Action and Pages:

• Engagement – allows you to see how social action visitors interacted with your site
• Action - shows you the total number of social actions (if configured) used on the site in one report
• Pages - compare all the pages on your site in one report to determine the where the most social actions are taking place

In addition to the Google +1 button integration, other social media actions can be included if configured. With a simple modification to the Google Analytics code by employing the “_trackSocial” method, you can now include other social actions like Tweets, Facebook “Likes.” It is similar to event tracking code.

If you are a current client of Lever Interactive and would like to set up social tracking, please contact your Account Strategist today for assistance.