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.

Facebook - It’s time to put up or shut up (and some tips on how to put up)

Recent changes to Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm has got a lot of people up in arms. Yet again, the social sky is falling. And yet again, I’m here to be the voice of reason.

I was lucky enough the other week to be in a room with some of the Facebook global team where the change to the algorithm was discussed so here’s my take on it all.

Alot of people are saying the change in algorithm combined with the introduction of promoted posts is designed to make brands spend more on paid media to prop up Facebooks revenue and share price. News flash. Brands always did have to spend money on paid media in order to build and maintain successful community.

Facebook say the main reason for the algorithm change is to ensure peoples newsfeeds are filled with the most interesting and relevant content for them. This makes sense - they have a billion customers that they need to keep happy. We’ve all missed that important/exciting status update from a friend because our newsfeed is full of posts from brands that we liked years ago, no longer interact with but are too lazy to unlike.

The impact of this change which was made on 20^th September has been significant for those pages that aren’t supported with paid media spend. In some instances we’ve seen reach per status update drop by as much as 24 percentage points. For those pages that are supported by always on paid media, the impact has been minimal.
The good news is engagement rates – particularly virality – have doubled, if not tripled. This makes sense – if Facebook is showing status updates to less people, but those people are the ones most likely to engage, then of course engagement rates will increase.

What Facebook have done is nothing new. Take search as an example. You can put a lot of resource into SEO and use organic search to reach a small group of people who are likely to engage with your brand and not spend a cent on media. Or you can extend your search strategy using media budget to by paid search placements which extend your reach to a much broader – but arguably less interested – audience knowing that at least some of them will engage.

Facebook is no different. Focus on your conversation strategy and you’ll engage with a small group of brand loyalists. Invest in paid media and you’ll extend your reach to a broader, but less engaged, audience.

There are plenty of articles out there on how brands should respond to these changes. Here’s what I think:

1.    Differentiate between reach and engagement. Your conversation calendar drives engagement, your paid media drives reach and growth. If you aren’t supporting your page with paid media, you shouldn’t have reach or growth KPIs.

2.    Engagement is now critical. If you can't support your page with paid media, then you will need to build interactivity (like, comment, share, vote) into your status updates. This will ensure those you are reaching remain engaged, and when you hit that sweet spot with a post that gets great interaction rates your reach will extend to your wider fanbase.

3.    Treat your Facebook page like paid search. Have an always on media budget and upweight when you are in campaign. Buy reach through promoted posts and sponsored stories - but stick to targeting fans only and don't promote every single status update. Just pick the ones that are most important, engaging and on-brand - and make sure they encourage interaction.

4.    Consider your conversation calendar as your engagement strategy. Don’t just turn to building an app for everything. Think about whether you can use interactive conversation to achieve your objectives, or put your app development budget into creating other forms of content.

5.    Integrate your conversation calendar and your paid media schedule. If these are managed by two different people, tell them to get together regularly and plan how one can support the other to deliver the best possible result for the brand.

Brands have had it pretty good on Facebook. They’ve been able to build substantial communities of consumers and been able to engage with them like never before without huge investment. As result the playing field has been leveled - small brands can be just as powerful as their bigger competitors. 

So if brands want to continue to harness the power of Facebook, it’s time to put up. Put up the time. Put up the effort. And put up resources – both human and financial – that are needed to make this channel a success.

Wake Up - Its 2012

The team at Blackberry Australia have learned a very valuable lesson this week. Their Wake Up Australia  teaser campaign generated such a high level of interest and intrigue that they had to out themselves over a week before their big reveal – which is still set for 7 May (countdown clock still ticking down).

It seems they planned three week teaser campaign. Three weeks! That’s, like, a lifetime in the digital world. According to my five minutes on Google - in three weeks:

-          14.7 million people join Facebook

-          1.8 million hours of video are uploaded to YouTube

-          2 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube

-          3.7 billion tweets are tweeted

-          151 million photos are uploaded to Flickr

-          1.7 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook

In the age of social networking news travels fast. Very fast. And we would all do well to remember this when planning campaigns and activations even if they aren’t strictly digital.

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.