Bye Bye Facebook offers and Facebook questions

13 Jun

You might have heard the news: Facebook announced that they are going to streamline their ad product portfolio. These changes will be done in the beginning of July 2013. For everybody having to do with Facebook ads these are good news, as it will be easier to explain and manage the different advertising formats. For instance, you´ll probably agree that most marketers and even a lot of people responsible for a company´s Facebook presence don´t know what Sponsored Stories are.

So Facebook is doing something smart: Switch focus from the ad products towards the advertiser´s business goals. Instead of trying to explain different ad products over and over again, like the sponsored stories – get rid of them and/or integrate them in all ad products. For the Sponsored Stories, they will simply be integrated in all ad products, as Facebook knows that social context in ads does work well.

New Facebook Ad look

Two Facebook product changes deserve some more attention:

Facebook is closing down the Question feature and the Online Offers. Closing down the Question features doesn´t come as a big surprise, as it hasn´t been available for private profiles for a couple of months.

But when I first heard about the cancellation of the Facebook Offer product I got really confused. Reading again, I realized it is just the ONLINE Offer ad which goes away. Facebook explains that Facebook pages are anyway mostly using Page Post Links in order to promote a discount which people can claim online.

The Facebook Offer ad which allows Facebook Pages to create offers with discounts or product samples to be claimed in an offline store will still be available! For now at least.

The Online Facebook Offer will be no more:

Facebook Online Offer ad

This Facebook Offer Page Post stays:

Facebook Offer Page Post

Facebook Offer Page Post

 

Added 13th of June:

As reported by insidefacebook.com Facebook is also cancelling the ad product Facebook Sponsored Results in the beginning of July 2013.

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Pinterest Profiles for Businesses

15 Nov

This will make a lot of companies happy: Pinterest is providing profiles for businesses!

As always on Pinterest, things are easy to understand and quick to accomplish. For the Pinterest user, the business profile looks very much like the private profile.

The only thing I haven´t found yet is how to connect the existing Facebook Page to the Pinterest profile and it doesn´t let me choose Swedish as the profile´s language. Feels like there might be a chance that both things could work soon.

Nice work, Pinterest!

Pinterest company profile

Oh, How Pinteresting!, New Tools for Businesses in the Pinterest Community.

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1 billion people using Facebook

4 Oct

Congratulations Facebook!
Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has reached 1,000,000,000 active monthly Facebook users. What a truly historic moment on the 4th of October 2012; what a crazy number for a social platform:

1,000,000,000

Who would have thought that back in 2004 when Facebook reached 1 million members?!

Interview with Mark Zuckerberg at TechCrunch

12 Sep

Watch the first interview with Mark Zuckerberg after Facebook´s IPO. Mark is talking about the huge importance of mobile and the open graph. He says there will be no Facebook phone (thank you, Mark) and he admits that search has potential and that Facebook has not really done much there yet. Personally, I think it is still hard to find brand pages or apps via Facebook´s search, so I am often using Google search with the keywords “brand name Facebook” in order to find Facebook pages which kind of zucks ;-)

You can watch the full interview with Mark at TechCrunch September 2012 here at Ustream:
http://ustre.am/:1Ikj2

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Social media cartoon by marketoonist – Love it!

20 Aug

I was laughing tears… You can find the original image on http://tomfishburne.com/2012/03/pinterest-marketing.html.

Thank you Marketoonist for allowing blogs to share this awesome content!

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Reach vs Engagement in social media

19 Jul

These days there is a lot of discussion around fan engagement on Facebook pages, how to increase engagement and how to measure engagement.

From a viral perspective, some kind of engagement is needed; for example a comment, a share, a like or a post. When people engage, social media platforms create stories which are then visible to these people´s friends. That´s where it is getting viral and what defines it as “earned media”. More engagement even helps a post to get more visibility in people´s news feeds when they become part of the  ”Top Stories”.

Now we all know that people are lazy and rather consume than create, in other words rather read news than writing them or engaging with it. I have just read that as a rule of thumb, only 1 % of all users create new content, 9 % modify existing content, and 90 percent consume existing content. (Source: McKinsey, “Turning Buzz into Gold”). If that is true for all all groups, then isn´t engagement over-rated and partly artificial, in forcing people to engage instead of simply presenting them inspiring or interesting content?  I am wondering if the increased amount of Facebook posts, which are primarily created to get shares and likes, really delivers interesting content for all the passive readers?

On the other hand, a study provided by Tomorrow Focus media in Germany says that almost 67% of people who follow a company read its posts and 30% share experiences they have had with that company on the companies page (I guess with companies page it means company´s Facebook page; but it is anyway a general number for all social media, not only Facebook).

to be continued

 

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Study: Social media usage in Germany

18 Jul

Here is an interesting study “Social media effects 2012″ provided by Tomorrow focus, about the social media usage in Germany (the study is in German). You can find it on slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/fullscreen/tomorrowfocus/social-media-effects-2012/11

Come on, my German family, fellows and friends: Where are you? I am dying to see you on Facebook!

Emarketer.com has also covered it and the article is in English:

social media usage in Gemany 2012

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009199&ecid=a6506033675d47f881651943c21c5ed4

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Social media´s growing importance in news consumption

12 Jul

News consumption is in my opinion one of the most interesting topics within social media.

A glimpse back: How often have we not asked the question “Have you heard that….?” Between co-workers and friends, face-to-face or on the phone. Remembering my dad running around at our holiday destination trying to find a German newspaper (and a good excuse reading the “BILD-Zeitung”, because no other newspaper was available). And back in the 70s and 80s when the whole family would sit in front of the TV at five to eight, looking at a clock filling the screen and looking how the seconds were running closer and closer to 8 0´clock when it was  time for the news. Then a loud “Gong” and a very serious looking man (I think it was mostly men) would read the news.

And then the next morning the regional print newspaper and that was all we needed… we thought

Things have changed as we know and as the brand new Digital Report study from April 2012 by Reuters Institute shows: Download or read the full study “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2012″ here.

So what is the role of social media in today´s news consumption?

Online news sources

Asking people which of the outlined online news sources one has used in the last week,  36% of US user name social media and blogs. For users in the UK, Germany, Denmark and France this number is only 20 % on average. I think it is interesting that the Scandinavian country Denmark is peaking at 23%. Might that be an indication for Sweden?

Online sources for news

How do people find news online?

When Reuters Institute ask how people find news online, 51% of the respondents in the UK said they would browse a news website or mobile site and 20% would find the news via a social network like Facebook or Twitter and 30% from a general search engine (Facebook versus Google?)

How people find news online

Search or social media?

Overall, search is still more important for finding news than Facebook and Twitter, but if one looks at the usage in different age groups, there is an amazing gap between generations.

Google versus Facebook

An amazing 43% of people between age 16-24 are finding news online through social media, compared to only 25% via search engines!

The numbers for respondents over age 45: Only 11% via social media and 33% via search.

A spontaneous thought: Are younger people at a risk for a “tunnel view” when consuming news from friends or sources they follow? Because you normally friend or follow people, brands and organizations you already feel connected with, how possible is it to get a broader picture of the world, economics, politics, etc.? 

How people participate online with news

People engage with news in different ways, for instance you can vote in an online poll or comment on a news story. It is surprising how big the difference is between the US and Europe!

Digital news participation, commenting, sharing, polls

Sharing news links

As Facebook is the largest social media platform where people connect and share, it doesn´t come as a surprise that this is by far the largest platform people are using for sharing news links. When we look at the age group 16-24, the according number is 71% that are using Facebook in order to share links to news.ZUE

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U.S. Consumers Receptive to Social Media Appearing on Their TV Screens, According to Accenture Study

20 Apr

Accenture Newsroom: U.S. Consumers Receptive to Social Media Appearing on Their TV Screens, According to Accenture Study.

“Social media is showing signs of connecting with TV viewers as nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of U.S. consumers surveyed recall seeing social media symbols such as Facebook “Likes” while watching television, according to an Accenture (NYSE: ACN) study. Moreover, one in three viewers (33 percent) have interacted with social media after seeing a social media symbol on their TV screen.”

Tool for making perfect images for Facebook timeline

3 Apr

Tool for Facebok timeine images

I  really like this simple, yet useful tool which the Facebook agency SkandNet has released today. It helps you through the process of producing the main images needed for the Facebook page and Facebook timeline.

I went through the whole process and I found it pretty straight-forward. Upload an image, choose auto-resize or manual crop, maybe a background color and -  tata: a zip folder with your images in good quality and perfect size is created, which your download and then just up-load on to your Facebook page.

I like!

Here is the link to the tool: www.skandnet.com/timeline

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