Nothing is certain but death and Facebook algorithm changes

Yes that’s right – the algorithm has changed again. But unlike the changes made in September 2012 this round of changes has flown under the radar – perhaps overshadowed by the way more exciting (and easy to understand) announcement that pages can now run competitions without requiring a third party app.

That’s not to say that there isn’t still a place for the good ol’ app – which this infographic from allfacebook outlines really clearly. And of course there is still the minor issue of the law and the need to provide terms, conditions and privacy statements.

But I digress. The algorithm changes have flown under the radar because they are largely beneficial for most brand pages.

Previously Edgerank was based on three factors – affinity, weight and time decay – that determined whether any one status update would be seen by any one person. That’s now changed and there are reportedly a myriad of factors that are now taken into consideration. Two of the main ones being talked about are Last Actor and Story Bumping.

Last Actor looks at the last 50 interactions you’ve had on Facebook, then gives new posts from those people or brand pages priority on your newsfeed. Pages who post frequently will be rewarded – and those that are targeting the most active demographics need to post more frequently to stay visible.

But it’s not just about quantity. Facebook will also assess the quality of your post and demote content that is ‘engagement baiting’ just to get likes. Brands will need to come up with something better than ‘like this if you like fluffy kittens’ and the world will be a better place for it. Facebook haven’t quite said how they will do this, but brands that thrive on this type of content can expect to see engagement rates drop away.

The second factor – Story Bumping – works like this. If a page you regularly interact with posts some content and it’s getting good interaction, but you’ve found something more interesting to do than log onto Facebook every couple of hours causing that post to slip down your newsfeed – then don’t despair! Facebook will bump that post back up your newsfeed, givi

ng you a second chance to see content that it thinks you want to engage with. This is good news for brands – particularly those that still insist on posting status updates during business hours when only half of their fanbase is actually online.

There are many other factors that matter now. Anyone noticed Facebook prompting you to update sections on your info page? Yep, that’s taken into account too.

So how will these changes impact on brand page performance? We’ll probably never know because Facebook coincidentally rolled out their new insights platform just before the algorithm change. Virality no longer exists and has instead been replaced with the more all-encompassing ‘Engagement Rate’.

“What’s the difference?” I hear you ask. Quite a lot.

Virality took only the highest quality interactions – those that resulted in a story being created which shared your content with their friends – as being worth counting. All other interactions – usually called ‘other clicks’ in the exportable report – weren’t deemed valuable enough to include. Hence the rise of all those ‘like this if’ posts – unless people engaged in a certain way, they weren’t counted.

Image courtesy of Inside Facebook

The new Engagement Rate – defined as “the percentage of people who liked, comments, shared or clicked on your post after having seen it” is broader, but more worthwhile. If someone clicks on a link through to your competition app (oh, except we don’t need them anymore) or another piece of content you wanted to share – that wouldn’t have been included in virality, but is included in the engagement rate. Someone clicking on an image you have shared because they want to see it in more detail is counted as engagement, but wouldn’t have been included in the old virality metric.

The sound of page admins around the world patting themselves on the backs for a job well done last month was deafening (I wonder how many truthfully explained the reasons for the better results in their reports). But with all the changes Facebook are rolling out, they’ll still need to work hard to make sure Facebook continues to deliver results for their clients.

Why big isn't always better

Something Justin Flitter said at the recent Social Media and Mobile Apps conference got me thinking about the way brands approach social media.

What he suggested was:  in the real world our best friendships are made up of many lightweight interactions - and that brands who truly want to build a friendship with their fans might be more successful if they acted the same way.

Think about it like this. Say you made two new friends today. One of them you will only see once over the next three months spending a long weekend hanging out together. The other you hear from every other day – a quick text, a coffee or perhaps they comment on something you posted on facebook. Which person do you think you’ll have the better relationship with?

Now apply this to a brand:

Brand A puts a lot of time and effort into creating a whiz-bang new app – it’s cool and fun so you download it, but after a while the novelty wears off.  Brand B has a twitter account where they regularly share links to interesting and useful content. Which brand do you think you’ll have the better relationship with?

Delivering big ideas and big results is what every agency (and some clients) aspire to – but it shouldn’t be at the expense of doing the day-to-day well. 

In fact there is no reason why a successful social activation has to be big. At the same conference Mike Wilson from .99 explained how hard it is for agencies – and corporates – to pull together a truly integrated idea. When this does happen those involved deserve every award they win, but in the meantime go for something smaller and more perfectly formed.

Lots of small but clever interactions could deliver better engagement that one big all-singing, all-dancing, here-for-a-good-time-not-for-a-long-time activation. 

A lot of time, money and resource can go into creating a video which gives just one – or if you are lucky 2 – status updates to Facebook. It might be really clever and engaging, but once that status update is posted you’re back to wondering what to do with the other 364 days of the year on your conversation calendar.

Does social connectivity equal influence?

Last night I had the privilege of seeing @danielberkal present Project Butterfly – a study into the “effect learning about how sociable people interact in the real world has on the online space”. The purpose of this study is to help brands - and the agencies that work for them - understand “how highly sociable people work” and how “this knowledge can be used to build online social communities that act more naturally”.

All interesting stuff. I’m no market researcher, but the way this study has been conducted is groundbreaking and worthy of every award won to date.

My reason for being there was to understand the connection between sociability and influence, in particular:

-          Does real world influence translate to the digital world; and

-          Are those who are socially connected online, influential?

While the study wasn’t designed to answer these questions, it did offer some interesting and applicable insights.

In the real world Social Butterflies are those who can bend social conventions, but in a good way. They are experts at initiating friendships, but also at maintaining them. They’re interesting, interested and genuinely curious about everyone and everything.

We all know one: they’re the organizer, the one who keeps in touch even just to say Hi. They’re resourceful and will hook you up with anything you need. And they’re happiest when everyone around them is having a good time.

But are they influential? My guess is yes based on three findings from the study: Social Butterflies are early adopters, decisive and the kind of people you turn to for advice.

What they are not is digitally prolific. Their online presence is likely to be built around maintaining one-on-one connections rather than broadcasting clever one-liners to the world, making it near on impossible for brands to identify them using standard ‘connectedness’ metrics. And even if we could identify them, it seems unlikely they would use digital tools to exert their influence.

Instead brands have tended to consider those who are socially connected and highly vocal in the digital world as ‘influential’. Not anymore. According to this study these ‘hyperconnected’ people are delusional self-promoters who need external validation to make themselves whole. They crave attention and use the internet to overcome their social awkwardness.

While they initiate lots of connections, they have no interest in maintaining them. It’s a one way conversation – usually about themselves – which their audience soon loses interest in.

But are they influential? For me the jury is still out.

If the number of people losing interest is less than the number of new connections being made then surely they could maintain their influence – if indeed they had any in the first place.

And if I buy into their online persona by liking or following them because what they offer is interesting, entertaining or useful to me, then do I care who they really are IRL?

Heck, there are many celebrities out there with a million plus followers who don’t even write their own tweets so maybe it’s not just the highly connected that are living a fantasy life online….

So many unanswered questions, but as someone who works with brands seeking to influence in the digital space there were some definite learnings:

-          True influence is about quality and frequency, not quantity

-          Getting someone to tweet or post a status update on your behalf is not the same as influencing.

-          Brands who implement ‘influencer programs’ need to look beyond the digital world.

The Butterfly project is an utterly fascinating body of work, and I would encourage anyone who has the opportunity see this presented in person to grab it with both hands. Thank you @danielberkal for a truly thought-provoking evening.

Five things I learned at Ad Tech Sydney

This year I thought AdTech Sydney was good. Not brilliant. Just good. Good because the things I heard there confirmed my thinking – something which is important when you are working in a small and isolated market like New Zealand. And good because organisations seem to have gotten over themselves and are happy to share what they are up to in the social space – the good, the bad and the downright ugly.

So here goes - the five key learnings I took from Ad Tech were:

1.       Brand stories need to be cohesive even when fragmented:  according to Jeff Julian from www.monkeysac.com your consumers won’t see your campaign in its entirety, or – for that matter – as a story at all. They’ll dip in and out piecing the story together based on their own media touchpoints and social connections and most likely in a different order from that intended by the creative or media agency.

Making sure you have the right creative assets for each channel is critical. It never was acceptable to treat your TVC as a piece of video content, or cut up your magazine ads to create an online banner, but in today’s social environment it’s unforgiveable.  

Ensuring each channel stays true to the creative vision will enable your message to be received when consumed in a fragmented way. And if you do need channel selection take priority over creative vision ensure you understand why this decision is being made.

2.       When it comes to Social Media, timing is everything: Andreas Panayi of FTI Consulting (www.fticonsulting.com) presented a study of how 144 businesses operate in the social space. While 83% of businesses had social policy in place only 56% had a plan in place to manage issues breaking or escalating in the social space.

Scary – especially given 38% of social media crisis arise due to poor brand experiences, influencer relations, community censorship or just a plain and simple failure to respond – things that are completely within the brands control.

If you are managing a social presence, then ensure you have license to respond quickly. With 38% of crisis breaking on either Twitter or Facebook – even the slightest delay can be the difference between resolution and escalation. Which brings me to the next thing I learned…   

3.       The jury is still out on who manages social media: the answer to this is “it depends”. Speaker Ben Kimber (@benkimber) felt strongly that all social media activity should be managed in house – particularly if there was customer service involved. Yeah – like that’s never been outsourced before.

To me the more decisive factor is resource. If you need to be in the social space but can’t resource this internally, then outsource you must.

And what about brands that are more about experience than customer service? Coke, Lynx, Skittles to name just a few. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that their agencies are pretty heavily involved in their social presence.

4.       Socially enable everything: put as much focus on creating discoverable content as you do on finding ways to deliver content. How the content is found and consumed is what gives it power. Information sent – and so endorsed – by a friend, or discovered yourself through search, will always have more credibility than something you see in an ad – even if it is the same content.

Rob Norman (@robnorman) of http://www.groupm.com/ also made the point that the conversion rates from reach to engagement are so low that it’s absolutely critical for brands to work harder at turning engagement into advocacy.

5.       Life’s a game, play it: Create a game with a sense of purpose and before you know it you’ll have your customers doing exactly what you want them to do – and enjoying the experience to boot. They don’t have to be ‘gamers’ to take part - a good game can appeal to even the most conservative audience. An example of this is www.mint.com – gamifying your finances – or “Epic Win” (http://www.rexbox.co.uk/epicwin/) which turns your everyday to do list into a game.

According to @chriserb from www.easports.com, get it right and the rewards for your business are significant – increased engagement and loyalty and a lower propensity to shop around.

Looking through my notes, this list could have been so much longer – so stay tuned for more from AdTech over the coming weeks.

Stories are In, Tabs are Out

By now everyone will be aware that by the end of this month Facebook will be rolling out some major changes across all brand pages.

So just what are these changes and what do they mean for people managing brand pages?

Layout – All brand pages will soon adopt the new timeline layout that has already been rolled out across our personal profile pages. These changes seem to be about offering more options to convey the brand’s identity with the ability to load a larger cover image across the top of the page, and the ability to load retrospective company milestones to the timeline ie. company ‘birth’ date or key product launches.

There are also a number of cool new features that have been introduced to the wall, my favourite being the ability to ‘pin’ an important wallpost to the top of your wall so that key wallposts maintain premium positioning on the wall. You can also highlight certain important wallposts along your timeline to span the full width of your wall which could be used to highlight a certain milestone or successful campaign. Primarily it will be potential new fans who are considering liking the page, who will benefit from these new features, rather than existing fans who tend to do most of their interaction with brands from within their own news feeds.

Page Tabs – One of the biggest changes for me is the death of the default homepage tab. I can no longer set a tab or application as my default homepage, which was useful during a campaign when using a promo tab or launching an application. This is where the new wallpost features ie. ‘pinned posts’ will become very handy. Obviously you will still be able to direct ads straight to a tab or app’s unique URL, but it can no longer be the first port of call for new visitors finding their way to your page by other means. This was done possibly to discourage the practice of fan-gating entry to a page.

In addition, tabs and apps will no longer be given prominence down the left-hand menu of a page. These will instead display along the top right-hand side of a brand page, where four customisable icons will represent the four key tabs for a brand page, with the rest to feature within a dropdown menu.

Why the reduced emphasis on apps and tabs? There seems to be an attempt to move away from anything that draws people away from the wall, where most social interaction happens between fans and brands, bringing the focus back to brand ‘stories’.

Messaging - Another feature that will help brands to manage the conversations on their wall is the ability for fans to message pages directly. This allows the opportunity for pages to take certain conversations - of maybe a more customer service nature - offline, and will also help to minimise timeline ‘clutter’.

Overall the changes seem promising, pushing pages to focus more on creating and sharing great content that people are going to want to share and interact with. Now that the page designs have been standardised, it will be great content that will help your brand page to stand out, without any fan gates or apps to hide behind.

The Sky is Falling....

And in breaking news:

“ComScore Study finds 31% of Display Ads Never Seen”

“UH, OH! Facebook Pages Only Reach 17% Of Fans”

Crikey, I thought over my morning cuppa. We are all doomed. Or are we? Let’s break it down:

The only real new news here is the ‘31%’ in the headline. We all know that a percentage of ads are never seen and that’s ok because there are lots of perfectly relevant reasons for this. We all know CPC media buys deliver squillions of impressions and no-one really expects that every single one of them will be seen. Because the buy is based on clicks, wastage isn’t an issue.

As for ad impressions being delivered outside of geographic areas – well duh. We all know that ad serving isn’t an exact science and that some networks aren’t that rigorous with their targeting.

At the end of the day, if you want a guarantee that your ads will be seen (as much as there is a guarantee) then you need to pay for premium placements in contextually relevant environments. Media Planning 101 is to ensure you have the right mix of high reach/low cost placements which deliver cost effectiveness and premium, contextually relevant placements that deliver awareness and give the campaign a presence. The split is different for each brand/campaign, but a good starting point is 60/40 (and which way round that goes will depend on whether your objectives are awareness or response).

Anyhoo – its all a bit of a moot point as the real story behind this is ComScore’s announcement that they have launched a new “Validated Campaign Essentials” report which in a nutshell reports back on campaign wastage.

So on to the headline that Facebook pages only reach 17% of fans. If some of the brand pages I ‘like’ are anything to go by, this is also no surprise. For a start, some of the “content” they offer is so offputting I have ended up in the -5% propensity to buy category more than once. Secondly – the sheer volume of content appearing on my wall in any 24 hour period is overwhelming. And I don’t even have that many friends.

If you are managing a brand page on Facebook it’s essential to have an always on media budget set aside to support the page outside of wider campaign activity. Your campaign budgets should be used primarily to grow connections so that your always on budget can be used to build engagement through judicious and clever use of the sponsored stories product.

What I loved about the blog was the insight into a reporting metric we could all do with keeping an eye on – “average post visibility”. I’ll be adding this to our reporting metrics from here on in. And we could all do with keeping the “Tips for Solving Facebook Post Visibility Problems” close at hand.

So, I can get on with my work today in the safe knowledge that the sky is in fact not falling. Not today at least.

Cell Phones, Social Media, Teenagers, OMG!!!

Some pretty crazy statistics which have just come out of the US, via Flowtown, re mobile phone usage among teenagers. Key findings from the research as follows:

* 75% of all teenagers in the US now have a mobile phone
* 35% of all teenagers send over 100 text messages a day (!!!)

While these findings are US based its worth acknowledging these results in the context of mobile phone penetration (all ages):

*106% mobile phone penetration in NZ
*87% mobile phone penetration in US

Its funny how cell phones (as a bona fide form of media) have become a 'life tool'. In the same way that you wouldn't leave the house without your wallet or your keys, you wouldnt leave the house without your cell phone.

Another piece of research which I stumbled across whilst browsing Digital Buzz Blog was around Mobile Phones and their influence on Social Media.

Key findings:

* 25% or more than 100 million Facebook users access from a mobile phone, and those who do, are more than twice as active on social networks compared to people accessing from a computer.
* The 35-54 age bracket is the most active mobile social user. Alot of resource is going into these studies, with strong evidence suggesting that the use of social media, and particualry Facebook, is really in the realm of an older demographic. This should be a bit of a slap in the face to a lot of big corporates who continue to view Facebook and social media as only for teenagers.

Thats all for now...

Social Media not just for the Kids

It seems the bright young things have finally discovered an application suitable for older Internet users – although I’m not sure the founders of Twitter quite had that in mind when the idea was first scribbled on a notepad way back in 2000.

In New Zealand Twitter has grown from a base of 9,000 users in December last year to 151,000 in the latest June data released by ComScore. The growth in users is no surprise. News of the plane crash on the Hudson broken by tweets from people actually on the flight certainly had the wow factor. Then there was Obama’s presidential campaign, the race between Oprah and Ashton Kucher to see who could be first to gain 1 million followers and the news of Michael Jackson’s collapse - broken by TMZ using Twitter. So the attraction to Twitter is understandable.

What is surprising is the demographic profile of Twitter users. Since March this year, ComScore has reported over half of Twitter users in NZ are aged 35+. And since April this year there has been significant growth in the 55+ age bracket – from none in April to 21,000 in June. And this isn’t just a New Zealand trend.

We’ve seen growth across the entire social networking category in the older age groups. And while they may have only joined a social media network to spy on the kids, it seems they’ve not just crashed the party, they’ve started their own right upstairs and tweeted all their friends an invite.

So why are the older demographics so keen on Twitter? For a start, the technology is simple and easy to understand, and there’s no need to post personal information and family photos for the world to see. Then there’s the content which can actually be quite useful – serious news from reputable sources and industry news and views from key personalities. Indeed, for the majority of users the real value is in the content that can be received, not in the content that can be sent.

Whatever it is, it seems that what is attracting the older audiences is exactly what is repelling the younger ones, and if this is the case Twitter could very well have a goldmine so long as whoever figures out how to monetise it does it well.