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As of January 2011, Facebook has more than 500 million active users and that figure grows everyday. Therefore, it’s more important than ever for brands and organisations to have a strong presence on a dedicated Facebook page.
However, with more companies realising this potential and setting up their own pages, it’s also important that yours stands out among the rest, whether this be with strong branding, compelling content, a unique offering or deals and giveaways.
Social media consultant and blogger Chris Brogan recently asked his readers which Facebook pages they feel stand out the most and are particularly compelling.
He collected together some of the best examples, including:
Last year Ignite Social Media also compiled a list of the top 50 branded Facebook pages which included big organisations, such as Starbucks and Coca Cola.
Here at Codastar, we’ve been helping our clients make the most of their Facebook presence for some time. From our experiences and the examples above, we think that there are several key factors to consider which will ensure a brand maximises the potential of Facebook:
Content
For users to feel compelled to visit the page and return, there needs to be regularly updated content. The popularity of services such as YouTube and Flickr also means that users expect different kinds of content, including text as well as images and video. This can be achieved by including videos and images in updates as well as setting up dedicated tabs.
Branding
There may not be much freedom to change the core elements of a Facebook page, but there are plenty of opportunities to add logos and stick to brand guidelines, as well as being creative with FBML (Facebook Markup Language).
Offers and Promotions
Brands don’t have to have offers and promotions on their page to be successful, but it’s certainly something that appeals to many users and shows a joined up and integrated approach between online and offline communications.
Staying within Facebook
One of the main points that Brogan picked out from the examples he saw, was that people don’t like being directed to external pages or ecommerce sites. Instead users prefer to navigate around Facebook, which is an important consideration in the customer journey.
Internal Understanding
Setting up a Facebook page is one thing, but it’s important that whichever team or individual is in charge understands its purpose, whether that be as a hub for promotions or a customer service channel. This also means understanding the tone of the language and possibly setting up some social media guidelines to make sure nothing goes wrong in the future.
To see our Facebook page portfolio, then please click here.
All images via Facebook.
This week the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) launched a Social Media Guide that will offer advice about how to make the most of social media and leverage it into current online activity. The guide will certainly be useful for brands, organisations and individuals alike that understand the benefits of social media but are unsure how to take their first steps.
Back in November 2010, the ISBA claimed there were many challenges for organisations venturing into the social media space and highlighted problems such as control over message, regulation and ROI. This new guide appears to have been made in response to many of these issues, exploring the best ways to operate online as well as identifying some of the pitfalls.
ISBA’s Consultancy Manager, Christina Nilsson, said, “in the last 24 months, many members have approached us for advice on social media from strategy development to finding the right agency to work with and from these conversations it has become apparent that the rules of social media as a marketing discipline are not always clear cut.
“We therefore wanted to produce some ‘top tips’ to social, explaining in more depth how it works, how it can add value to brands and the key things to consider when producing a strategy.”
The guide will include the basics of using platforms like Twitter and Facebook, as well as looking deeper at strategy and planning.
The ISBA’s new guide will be very useful for organisations and agencies that are comfortable with online advertising, but have not yet tried their hand at social media. Many agencies that we speak to often don’t differentiate between marketing, advertising and social media online, when in fact a different approach does need to be considered for each element.
For more information or to request a guide then visit the ISBA website.
Image via ISBA.
This week, our Web Design and Consultancy skills were called into action when we got a call from Recro Debt Management in Bushey. With the motto that there is “life after debt”, their client-facing financial service is exactly the sort of business that we love to support.
Recro’s key selling points are that they offer a transparent, ethical, and jargon-free approach to debt managment – and this had to come across clearly in their website. Through discussion with Barry Mitchel, we were able to propose an efficient and relevant online strategy with a design that echoed their brand values of freedom and approachability.
HTML is short for Hyper Text Markup Language and it’s the language developers use to construct web pages. HTML allows us to create structured documents by using many different tags that code and format all kinds of files, like text, sound and graphics.
HTML5 is the next major revision to the way HTML works and will have many new functions. These changes will not only benefit those that build web pages, but Internet users as well, creating a richer online experience.
Some of the new attributes that HTML5 offers include:
Canvas element, which can render any kind of graphic or photo without the need for extra plugins.
Video element, which allows videos to be shared across platforms without the need for plugins like Quicktime.
Offline web applications, allows users to access documents, pages and applications even when they have no network connection.
There is a growing debate among the developer communities about whether the new features of HTML5 will deem Flash redundant. Adobe Flash allows developers to add animation, video and other kinds of interactive media to web pages. It’s often used for things like games and adverts that need good quality content and moving images.
Recently, there have been a few cases in which online companies have moved their loyalties from Flash over to HTML5. For example Scribd, a document sharing website spent years developing Flash but ditched the platform in favour of HTML5 back in 2010.
On O’Reilly Radar, Adobe’s Duane Nickull said there’s still a great deal of overlap between both Flash and HTML5 and both have their advantages. For instance, he said that it’s good HTML5 has a specified video tag, but yet it points a browser at a video source and expects it to work, whereas flash detects bandwith and processing capabilities. He’s bound to favour Flash over anything else, but did suggest that those building web pages need to decide which would work better for their specific needs, he added, “Adobe’s strategy is to ensure we deliver the tools that give developers choice. We love Flash and we love HTML and its peripheral technologies.”
You may certainly find developers want to adopt different technologies or overlap them depending on what their client is looking for.
However, it’s important to note that Apple devices are not ready-made to support Flash. Therefore, there may be more of a preference towards HTML5 when it comes to creating rich content that’ll work on iPads and iPhones. On the Apple website, Steve Jobs explains that HTML5 is preferred because it’s much more open than the likes of Flash.
You need to be aware of these changes and how they will impact on the way you use the Internet to display, store and promote content in the future. There’s certainly a lot of debate, but it does seem like more products and developers are favouring the use of HTML5 over any of its competitors. Although some developers may prefer the Flash platform for certain tasks and web builds, it’s important you deliver the best online experience as possible.
Image via w3.org.
Whether you want to outreach your products and services to particular bloggers, or just want to see who’s out there talking about you, it’s important you know how to look for blogs and then how to judge if they’re relevant.
There are countless ways of finding blogs, whether it be through someone’s Twitter page, forums or communities. However, there are various tools that are set up specifically to help you search through many different kinds of blogs.
You can use Google to look for blogs, as many do come up when you conduct a normal search. However, Google Blog Search is made so you can specifically search through blogs and not other sites. It works in the same way as you’d search on Google, enter your term in the search bar or click through to Advanced Blog Search and specify exact phrases, locations and time periods.
Social Mention is a real-time social media search engine. It tells you where your search term has been mentioned across blogs, microblogs and video channels, such as Vimeo and YouTube. Like Google Blog Search, there’s also an Advanced Search option, allowing you to drill deeper into your results. Social Mention also gives you extra data, such as how many average mentions there are of your search term per day and how many different authors have produced content about it.
Technorati is the first blog search engine and has more than a million blogs indexed, allowing you to search through them for particular types of blogs as well as specific search terms.
Now you’ve found the blogs and posts that mention your search terms, how do you find out if this particular blogger is important and relevant to you?
Well, there are many tools available online that claim to know ‘authority’, ‘influence’ and ‘sentiment’, but in practice they may not be able to deliver on their promises as these are subjective and require a certain amount of human analysis.
You should also remember that just because a blog may not be really popular, it can still be important. Sometimes it could be more beneficial for you to talk with a blogger who has five or six dedicated subscribers than one which has thousands of readers but who don’t pay much attention to the content.
There are several tools available that can help you to assess whether a blog is going to be important to you, but nothing beats putting the time in, reading the content and getting a good idea of the blogger and their topics.
Google Page Rank is one of the metrics Google uses to determine where particular sites sit in search results. There are various Google Page Rank Checkers and the higher the rank, the more important Google deems this site to be. Google uses thousands of different metrics to find out a website’s Page Rank, including how many incoming links the site has and where these come from.
Technorati Authority is a ranking system devised by Technorati which claims to measure a site’s “standing and influence in the blogosphere”. Again, it’s based on a number of different metrics, including the site’s linking behaviour and influence within a specific category. Technorati Rank is then a site’s ranking among the Technorati Authority of all other sites, so 1 would be the highest rank.
Alexa is a company that has collected lots of data about websites, blogs and social networks. If you input a site into Alexa Site Search, you can see a lot of information about it, including how many incoming links it has and an indication of how much traffic it gets. You can also find out a site’s Alexa Ranking, which works in the same way as Technorati, 1 being the highest.
Although sites like Alexa tell you how many incoming links a site has, you can also use the Yahoo search page to find out more information about who’s linking to sites. In the normal Yahoo search bar type “link:[theURL]” and it will tell you how many inbound links this page has as well as where these links come from.
There are endless other services and platforms that enable you to find content across the Internet and judge whether it’s relevant to you. Some other useful tools are PostRank and Radian6.
Images via Google, Social Mention, Technorati, Alexa
Social commerce is basically the use of social networks like Facebook and YouTube to talk about and ultimately sell products. It can include many different things, such as customer ratings and reviews, referrals and social shopping tools.
The term has been used for several years within the online industries but only in the past year or so have we seen many brands and platforms really make the most of social commerce in order to drive sales.
Here are some of our favourite examples:
The Twitter stream @DellOutlet run by Dell details lots of online shopping deals every week. Customers are able to click on the links and are taken directly to the product with a special promotional code.
Skin-care brand Dove has been one of the first few brands to try f-commerce, which means commerce on Facebook. The brand has set up a store-front as part of its Facebook page.
This is a similar strategy to make-up brand Max Factor which has recently set up a Facebook Boutique with the help of Amazon.
Mattel gives users the opportunity to use its “Shop Together” functionality which allows people, regardless of location, to share their shopping experiences online, allowing them to chat about products along the way.
Groupon is an online platform that lets users “group purchase” products or services in their local area. This is great for small, local businesses but has also been used by big brands, such as Gap and and The Body Shop.
French Connection’s YouTique is the first online store to operate through the YouTube platform. Users can click on products as stylists talk about them in the videos in order to purchase them.
Even though it’s still in the early stages, social commerce is already proving to be successful for many different types of brands. It makes perfect sense to give users the ability to purchase what they’ve been talking about on a social network through the social network itself. This is also likely to mean there’s a higher chance users will make the purchase as they’re not having to click-through to lots of other sites in the process.
To read more about the latest developments in social commerce and what they could mean for your brand, we recommend having a look at Social Commerce Today.
Images via Facebook, DellOutlet, Mattel, Groupon and YouTube.
Last week, Facebook announced a number of changes to the design and functionality of Facebook pages. Although not all of these updates will be available until the beginning of March, it’s important that brands and organisations are aware of the changes and how they will affect the way they use Facebook and interact with users.
After selecting “Use Facebook as a Page” admins will be able to use their page like they do their personal profile. This means you’ll be able to “Like” and comment on content and other pages as the brand instead of as yourself. This will help businesses to spread their brand across the Facebook platform even more, making personal connections between “brand and user” instead of “admin and user” which will be a more convincing and beneficial interaction.
By interacting in this way, pages have their very own news feed which consists of posts based on pages they have “Liked”. This means that pages can curate their own list of other important Facebook pages for all admins to see and consume.
There have also been changes made to the way Facebook pages look. Just like personal profiles, the new updates include a photo strip of recently uploaded and tagged photo content at the top of the page. This will make the Facebook pages look slicker and more aligned to the way personal profiles behave. It will also give businesses a better way to showcase their work as users won’t need to search within photo albums, the content is already on display.
We’ve spoken to many different businesses about introducing Facebook into their online activity and many of our clients have dedicated Facebook pages. So, we know some of the things that clients have been asking for and more than anything the ability to behave as a company page instead of an individual is something that has cropped up time and time again, so it’s great to see Facebook responding to some of these widespread issues.
Here at Codastar, we’re excited about the updates and believe that with this added functionality pages can extend their reach even more than before and drive a higher level engagement between businesses and users.
To read more about the changes and what they’ll mean for the way you run your business then visit Pages on Facebook.
All Facebook page admins will receive an email in the next few weeks before the pages are changed automatically on the 10th of March. It’s important to be aware that if you have the opportunity to change to the new layout before then, you can’t change it back.
All images via Codastar Design’s Facebook page.