Oct 11
22
Social Landscape Review: Q3 2011
This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory.
Now that we’ve had some time to absorb the changes in the space during Q3, let’s take a look back at the big announcements, compare the new landscape to the changes from the second quarter, and project what will have the most impact for Q4 of 2011. In a sentence, Facebook’s f8 developer conference contained more sweeping changes to the largest social platform (now 800 million users) since its launch in 2004.
Posted in social media marketing by .
Jul 11
31
Social Landscape Review: Q2 2011
This post originally appears on the Dachis Group Collaboratory; check out the Collaboratory for the full Quarterly Review.
While the majority of notable first quarter 2011 changes in the social space originated from Facebook – from the launch of Facebook Deals and Questions to the shift from FBML to iFrame – this past quarter’s shifts were more balanced across the landscape, and as the months progressed from Spring to Summer, the changes got more dramatic, with the climax occurring in the final days of June. Let’s take a look back at the social landscape from Q2 2011 so we can paint a picture of what Q3 has in store.
Posted in social networks by .
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights blog.
There are some massive brand presences on Facebook, especially in the CPG snack category. People love connecting with their favorite brands on Facebook, and snack foods can be some of the nearest and dearest to our hearts. Therefore, we need to make sure that our fans love interacting with our Page as much as they love unwrapping a pack of M&Ms. This week, we’re looking at the second half of our list taking a look at the insights we can draw. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 also!
Without further adieu, here are the top 20 snack brands on Facebook, based on community size (data collected on 4/4/11):
Posted in strategy by .
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights blog.
Yesterday, we took a look at the top five snack brands on Facebook and identified some things that the biggest pages were doing right. This week, let’s look at what the next five brands are doing, and what they might improve on. People love connecting with their favorite brands on Facebook, and snack foods can be some of the nearest and dearest to our hearts. Therefore, we need to make sure that our fans love interacting with our Page as much as they love unwrapping a pack of M&Ms. What are Reese’s, 5 Gum, Kit Kat, Lay’s, and M&Ms doing well today, and what’s the main takeaway from these five brands that we can implement in our social strategy and presence management.
Here are the top 20 snack brands on Facebook, based on size of owned media (again, data collected on 4/4/11) with 6 through 10 highlighted:
Posted in strategy by .
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights blog.
There are some massive brand presences on Facebook, especially in the CPG snack vertical. Let’s take a look at the top 20 of those brands’ pages to see if we can connect the dots to find causes and conditions for their success in the social space. In this post, we’ll focus on the top five pages, and identify one key takeaway for you to put into practice.
Without further adieu, here are the top 20 snack brands on Facebook, based on size of owned media (data collected on 4/4/11):
Posted in strategy by .
May 11
6
New Facebook Share Button
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights blog.
With the April 25th roll-out of updated Group features, the largest was that of the Send button, which now allows you to share content from across the web with specific groups of people. The Send social object is an evolution in sharing and the social web in that it’s extremely flexible. In the past, you could email an article to one or two individuals’ email addresses; then with the advent of Web 2.0, you could share content across entire networks. You could blast the product that you were checking out to your entire Twitter network, Digg an article, or post news to your Facebook feed for all of your friends to see. The Like object then allowed us to keep better track of what was being shared and what people were interested in; the Levi’s Friend Store always comes to mind as the Like button trailblazer.
Posted in tactics by .
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights blog.
We’ve taken a look at how brands are using both Twitter and YouTube for Customer Service, and continuing our Customer Service Month, this week we’ll analyze how the best are helping their consumers on the Facebook Wall. More so than the other social channels, Facebook is most susceptible to damaging comments from non-fans, fans, and former fans. On Twitter, inflammatory or disparaging comments made by users aren’t visible to everyone that follows the brand, only to that user’s followers; thus minimizing the damage. On YouTube, users can comment on existing brand videos, isolating negative comments, or post their own videos, which are as powerful as their channel’s viewership. On the Facebook Wall, however, any and all negative comments appear in a collective, and therefore amplified environment, and users can Like and comment on one another’s negative posts.
While we won’t only be looking at negative comments and complaints, they are certainly the most dangerous for brands on Facebook. How can they be mitigated? By being responsive, practicing certain customer service basics, and incorporating some of the below tactics into your social customer service strategy, you will have your Facebook fans singing your praises on the Wall for everyone else to see. Positivity breeds positivity.
Posted in tactics by .
Apr 11
15
YouTube for Customer Service
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
As they say, a picture is worth a thousand tweets; therefore, videos are exponentially more effective in conveying your message. Videos are more engaging; videos offer more context; videos are highly shareable/viral (e.g. “you have to see this clip of the cat falling off the sofa!” etc.). That said, how do brands decide where to house their video channel, what do they do with the channel to provide value for their consumers, and how do they create and maintain momentum for their channel to build owned media and amplify earned media?
The first question – where should a brand host their video – isn’t much of a debate. YouTube has remained consistently over 100% annual growth since launched in 2005, and the engagement numbers are staggering. Over 35 hours of video are uploaded per minute (the equivalent of about 25,000 feature-films uploaded per day); there are 2 billion video views per day; and the average person spends roughly 15 minutes on YouTube per day. It’s also easy to customize your channel, plug into the YouTube API for cross-channel social initiatives, and draw insights from built-in channel analytics.
Posted in tactics by .
Apr 11
14
Social Landscape Review: Q1 2011
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog
After many shifts in the social landscape during the fourth quarter, Q1 proved active but provided few monumental changes. Let’s take some time to look back at what the last three months have brought to the social media space.
January
- Facebook Deals Internationally – On the last day of January, Facebook launched deals in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, exposing the feature to more than 114.6 million new users. For the Canada launch, a number of top Facebook brands premiered Deals nationwide, including Indigo, H&M, Dynamite, Garage, Joe Fresh, Town Shoes, and TELUS. Places and Deals have a symbiotic relationship, as Deals is dependent on Places, and Places is made more compelling by Deals; the greater the penetration of Deals among brands, the more active users will become with Places.
- Foursquare Ambassador Program – Late in 2010, foursquare launched a beta initiative called the Ambassador Program where super users could sign their favorite businesses up for specials using the free Merchant Platform. The response from users was enormous, and in January, foursquare expanded the Ambassador Program, opening registration to all users. Something for brands to keep in mind while they formulate their social strategy is that while Facebook Places & Deals and foursquare Venues & Specials operate similarly on the front end for users, the processes that businesses must go through to register their locations and set up consumer-facing incentives is drastically different.
Posted in social networks by .
Mar 11
27
Facebook Ads – Best Practices
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog
At Stuzo, we build custom large-scale consumer experiences that are designed to engage, drive participation, and really Wow! our clients’ users. And while we offer many services around day-to-day community participation on both the strategic and tactical levels, we don’t get a chance to work closely with our clients’ media-spend strategy. That said, because the paid media portion of the social strategy plays such an important role in the success of the large-scale consumer experiences, we have a library of best practices associated with advertising on Facebook. Below, you’ll find tips on targeting, copy & creative, landing pages, and more, but in reality, the below is simply a framework for you to build into. There are no Facebook Ad best practices for specifically what imagery to use, exactly what words to include in the call-to-action, and precisely how much to spend; you will discover all of these things (and more) with extensive Facebook Ad multivariate testing.
Testing is absolutely imperative for the success of a Facebook Ad campaign. Take a scientific approach when testing, meaning try to only adjust one variable at a time to truly see the causality associated with the tweak. Create a campaign that has five ads with nearly-identical copy, but use five different images. In the beginning, make them drastically different, figure out which type of image is getting the highest CTR, and then refine the ads so that they still have different images, but all are of the same high-performing image type. Lather, rinse, repeat.
As mentioned above, Facebook Ads are a primary method of driving users to either your Facebook Page or directly to your Facebook campaign, and that paid media can really spark acquisition, engagement, virality, and uptick of a social campaign on your Page. Are the Facebook Wall, a custom tab, or a Facebook application your only landing page options? Yes and no. Obviously you can direct the user to any destination you’d like, but as a best practice, we always want to keep the user within the Facebook environment. This isn’t AdWords where users are searching for answers or are ready to purchase; a more likely scenario is that your user is looking for photos from a friend’s most recent Caribbean cruise, and doesn’t want to have their social browsing experience interrupted by being bounced to a brand site, ecommerce site, or even social microsite.
Posted in tactics by .
Jed Singer – Socialight Media
Jed Singer is an Engagement Associate at Stuzo in Center City Philadelphia. The views and comments in the Socialight Media Blog are those of Jed Singer and not necessarily those of Stuzo.