Planet Money on Facebook Advertising
NPR’s Planet Money podcast covers Facebook from a couple interesting sides. First an interesting story of a New Orleans pizza place wanting to do some Facebook advertising and then the second half of the show features a despicable company that sells likes to companies who have no clue why one is valuable.
Using Third Party Apps Could Have Negative Impact on Facebook Success
The tool you’re using could be hurting your company’s success on Facebook.
A recent study by EdgeRank Checker (a tool that helps measures the all important EdgeRank value) showed a precipitous drop-off when posting to your Facebook page using third party apps such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. Studying over 1 million updates from over 50,000 pages, they found that using third party tools decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan by about 80%.
EdgeRank Checker came up with four theories on the cause of the huge drop in engagement:
- Facebook penalizes third party API’s EdgeRank
- Facebook collapses multiple third party API updates into one post (see example)
- Third party updates have a high chance of being scheduled and/or automated
- Content is not optimized specifically for Facebook.
So which of these creates the negative results?
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Email Still the King of Social Sharing
Email is dead. Long live email!
We’ve been hearing that the email era is over on a monthly basis for years now. But despite overflowing inboxes, new email killers coming out all the time, and of course spam, email is still going strong. As the site share widget has become ubiquitous on the web, many sites are hiding email sharing amongst 750 other social media icons. Do so at your own peril. Email is still the most common method used to share content on the Internet.
According to a recent study conducted by AOL and Nielsen, 93% of users share content over email. Despite the trends and the growth of social powers such as Facebook and Twitter, that number is slightly higher than the 89% of study participants who shared using social networks and the 82% who use blogs. When asked what their primary sharing method was, 66% of people answered email and it was also the preferred method in every industry surveyed.
The numbers vary depending on the type of content being shared and whom a user wants to share it with. By a large margin, people prefer to share content with their friends and family and email is huge when sharing with those groups. 89% of those surveyed shared content with their friends over email and for family the number is 86%. The only category of people email isn’t a top sharing method with is the public.
(Wait… 6% of people use email to share something with the public? Stop forwarding those chain emails to everyone Mom!)
With all that data, it’s clear users prefer to share stuff via email. Why then are most sites either lumping email with everything else behind a single share icon or at most pulling out and promoting Twitter and Facebook only?
“Email to a Friend” buttons used to be everywhere but fell out of favor, possibly due to spam and the privacy concerns of submitting not just your own email but your friends’ emails too on a web form. The email share forms still have value though and web users have actually become more comfortable again sharing this information online again as sharing personal information online has been made commonplace by social networking. You can also also offer email sharing via a standard mailto: link. This allows visitors to use their own email client instead of a web form, helpful not just to those worried about privacy but also on mobile devices.
While Facebook Like and Tweet This buttons are great for encouraging conversation about your content, your visitors still also want to be able to easily share links with specific friends and family members. However implemented, it is important to encourage and enable the sharing of your site’s content via email and not just social media networks.
The stats show, reports of email’s demise were greatly exaggerated.
Does Your Facebook Page Work for Secure Users?
Facebook added the ability for users to browse using a secure connection (or https connection) back in January, but unless you were reading their blog or Mashable most users probably didn’t notice. This important feature secures the communication between your browser and Facebook’s servers as you browse the site, closing a gaping security hole that allowed anyone to easily hijack your session and pretend to be you while sitting at the coffee shop. Previously you had to dig deep into account settings to find and turn on https browsing, but recently Facebook has been promoting this feature with a large message on users’ news feeds.
This additional promotion means that more and more Facebook users will turn this setting on for their accounts. Great news… isn’t it?
Of course, better security for users is great but this change could completely break parts of your business’ Facebook page. Facebook tabs or applications that contain unsecure (non-https) content will not display to these users, and instead a large error message displays. The message gives them the option to temporarily disable secure browsing (that certainly sounds ominous) or else they can’t see this content.
Depending on what part of your page is causing the issue, the fix could be as easy as changing or adding one setting and loading an SSL certificate to the site where you’re hosting your app or external content (if you don’t already have one).
You’ve put a ton of effort into using social media as a marketing tool for your business, now make sure to take five minutes to change that setting and test your page to make sure all your fans actually get to see it.
Think Apps are All That Matters for Mobile? Think Again.
The buzz out there now is all about apps. Whether it’s for iPhone or Android, you can’t visit Yahoo.com or watch the local news without hearing all about the latest, greatest mobile app. Dedicated apps that users install from app stores have a lot of advantages and there are some out there we all can’t live without, but you can’t ignore the mobile web.
Two apps that are on most every smartphone user’s home screen are Twitter and Facebook. They’re two of the best designed apps out there and both have been in the top 25 free apps in the iTunes App Store consistently since launch. Knowing that you might think Facebook and Twitter users always take advantage of those great apps when they’re on the go, but the numbers say otherwise. Based on numbers aggregated by Luke Wroblewski, mobile usage of the top two social juggernauts continues to explode and much of it is on the mobile version of their websites:
- 50% of the more than 500 million active Facebook users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices (250M) compared to 25% a year ago (100M out of 400M). 33% of Facebook posts are sent via mobile devices. (source)
- Facebook’s top mobile client is m.facebook.com (Facebook’s mobile Web site) with 18% of total new Facebook posts. Android, iPhone, and Blackberry are next each with about 4% of total new Facebook posts. (source)
- 50% of total active Twitter users are on multiple platforms (mobile) compared to 25% a year ago. 40% of all tweets are sent via mobile. (source)
- Twitter’s top mobile client is m.twitter.com (Twitter’s mobile Web site) with 14% of total unique users. SMS is next with 8% of total unique users. Then Twitter for iPhone (8%) followed by Twitter for Blackberry (7%). (source)
For both sites, a much higher percentage of people are using the mobile website than any particular mobile app. On Twitter, even SMS is still ahead of the iPhone and Blackberry apps. Whether it’s because they’re on older phones or because they’re following links in an email or a search result (remember that links don’t open apps), it’s clear that just because you offer an app doesn’t mean your mobile web presence is any less important.
Facebook Changes Give “Likes” More Attention
This weekend Facebook made a simple but possibly very important change to the way “liked” links are displayed on users’ profile pages. They now function similar to shared links and display chronologically within the timeline with a large headline, short text description, and thumbnail image. Previously they only displayed a small text link grouped with other minor informational notices.
This change means that visitors to your website or blog who take two seconds to click the “Like” button are now prominently promoting your content on their Facebook Wall. This is a much lower barrier than the previous sharing functionality which required users to click a link, interact with a popup window, enter comments about the link, and then submit the form to share a link.
While a “Like” button takes up more space on the page than a share link, the updated functionality and ease of use mean that in most scenarios it is the preferable solution to including a share link. It completely eliminates the need to ever have both a Facebook “Like” and “Share” on the same page and may mean the end the use of the share functionality altogether.
Should Your Business Be Using Facebook Deals?
Last week Facebook held a big mobile event at their headquarters in California where they made several announcements that could potentially change the way consumers, businesses, and web developers interact with the the site while on the go. The announcement of the location based Facebook Deals platform may be the one that makes the biggest immediate impact. So, should your business be using Facebook Deals?
Yes. And start today.
Facebook Deals allows local businesses to offer discounts, freebies, and more to customers when they check in to their business with their mobile phone. Offers can be given for repeat visits, visiting with friends, or you can donate money to a worthy cause in lieu of a discount for the customer. There are many options but set up is easy and accepting coupons in store is as simple as looking at the customer’s phone.
All that sounds great, but how is that any different from any other sale or coupon you could offer? Like everything else with Facebook the deals are social. Every time a customer redeems a deal, all of their friends are notified that not only are they at your business but they’ll also find out that you’re running a special promotion right within their news feed. They can then click to learn more about the deal and about your business.
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Trending: The Luxury Treatment, Expanding Your Brand Through Social Media, Advanced Search, and More
Some scattershooting this week covering online marketing, social media branding, and the usability of advanced search. Read on to learn a little more about what I’ve been paying attention to recently.
The Luxury Treatment
eMarketer: Giving Affluents the Luxury Treatment Online
Luxury Daily: Why luxury automakers increasingly rely on iPad’s large canvas for engagement
A pair of articles on marketing to and serving affluent customers online covering web experience expectations, iPad apps, and luxury brands using (or not using) Twitter. Luxury brick and mortar stores offer intimacy and elegant product presentations and customers expect a comparable experience online. It is important that if you sell high end products or cater to a high end audience that your online presence creates an engaging experience as well.