Facebook today made two changes that will help page owners understand the true reach of their posts. The reach metric in page insights will now include mobile data and the desktop News Feed will no longer count reach until a user scrolls and loads the page’s story, the company tells us.
Reach is the total number of people who have seen a page post within the first 28 days since it was made. Reach is counted when a post is loaded and shown in News Feed. Beginning today, mobile distribution will count toward a page’s total reach. It was previously unclear that reach data was limited to desktop only, so many pages might have been reaching more users than they had thought. However, it seems Facebook will report reach as a combined total, rather than distinguishing between desktop and mobile. Last year the social network temporarily reported whether post Likes and comments came from mobile, but that doesn’t seem to be available from the Insights API anymore.
Facebook made another change this week that will affect reach total. To improve the efficiency of News Feed, Facebook will load fewer stories at a time. When a user scrolls down the feed, more stories will load. Because reach and impressions are counted upon load, the metric previously included impressions that users might not have actually seen. Now insights should more accurately reflect what users have viewed, though it should not affect how many fans will see a page’s post in their feed.
With these changes made at the same time, it is difficult to know whether reach is likely to be higher, lower or the same as it has been in the past. The addition of mobile would make the number higher, but the News Feed change could make it lower. Whether or not these differences will balance each other out is unclear.
Source: Inside Facebook
Engaging with fans through Facebook can be extremely rewarding for a business. However, it’s important to understand that engagement is not won solely through interesting photos and asking a weekly scheduled question—it’s won through an active strategy and through focusing on the things that are more important.
Source: Social Media Today – The world’s best thinkers on social media
Facebook has redesigned its so-called “hover cards” which appear when users mouse over the names of users and pages that have upgraded to Timeline.
These hover cards now display a user’s or page’s cover photo, in addition to profile pictures. Pages associated with places have a slightly different format. In place of the profile image, there is a map thumbnail that directs users to a full Bing map when clicked.
The new eye-catching design could encourage users to click Like on pages they see in News Feed or elsewhere on the site. Hover cards allow users to learn more about and interact with items in their feeds without opening a new tab or navigating away from the page. Page owners should now consider how their cover photo appears at a smaller size. It’s also worth noting that a page’s name and info appears as a layer on top of the cover photo, which might be difficult to read on some cover photo designs.
For pages associated with places, the inclusion of Bing maps could be helpful local places of business. However, there is now a noticeable lack of logo for users to associate with a brand or trademark, which could be problematic. This can possibly be remedied by including a logo inside of the cover photo to help identify the card and page.
Used strategically, hover cards could lead to more new page Likes with a single click. The number of Likes gained “on hover” are measured in page insights, as seen in the graph below.
The previous hover card design, which still appears for users who have not converted their profiles to Timeline, can be seen below. Facebook first rolled out hover cards in 2010, inspired by Twitter. Interestingly, Twitter no longer uses this feature.
Source: Inside Facebook
“Facebook for Every Phone,” the official page for Facebook’s feature phone application has become the first page on the social network to surpass 100 million Likes, according to our PageData tracking service.
What’s more, the page only seems to have been created five months ago, and it already has more than 33 million more Likes than the No. 2 page on the social network. That would be “Facebook,” the official community page for the site. After passing 100 million Likes on Sunday, the Facebook for Every Phone page is already up to more than 101.7 million total Likes.
Facebook for Every Phone is a native mobile app compatible with more than 3,600 different Java-enabled feature phones. The growth of the app’s community page is an indication of how many of the social network’s mobile users are on feature phones. Facebook for Every Phone users are given the option to Like the page when they first log in to the app, a company spokesperson told us in April.
Based on an analysis using the Facebook ad tool, we estimate there are about 95 million active feature phone users on the social network. Facebook does not indicate whether these are monthly active users or people who have downloaded or used the app within a longer timespan.
At the Social-Loco conference in San Francisco on Monday, Facebook Head of Mobile Partnerships Emily White said that 90 percent of users in Africa use a mobile phone. Many of these are are likely to be using the Facebook for Every Phone App. India is another country with a large population of feature phone users. White said that 30 percent of users in India are now registering for the site through mobile phones, suggesting they are mobile-only users.
Mobile-only users are typically feature phone users who do not have computer access. Smartphone users tend to visit Facebook through their phones and computers. In a regulatory filing, Facebook estimated that about 83 million mobile monthly active users accessed the social network solely through its mobile apps or mobile website in March.
Facebook recently updated its feature phone app to allow users to interact with pages and check into locations. The company also added photo filter capabilities so users can make their camera phone photos black and white or sepia.
Readers can see a full list of the most popular Facebook pages on our PageData site here.
Source: Inside Facebook
Many B2B companies have been successful at generating leads from LinkedIn, but there are features of a company page that B2B marketers are just not aware of. Most B2B companies have company pages on LinkedIn where they include a keyword-stuffed paragraph or two of marketing-speak. It also shows the employees who work at the company. This is the most basic option for LinkedIn.
1. Products and Services
The first thing that you need to do is enable the Products and Services function of the company page and begin adding products and services. This is where the action happens on the company page. Recommendations aren’t given for companies. They are given for products. Several of the follow lead generating suggestions are based on areas in the product and services tab. Note that you can be flexible with the definition of what a product is. If you have a compelling ebook that is appropriate for a LinkedIn audience, add that as a product. You can direct visitors to a download page with a lead form to receive the ebook.
2. Free Banners
Want to test some new creative ideas? Want to test some landing pages? LinkedIn gives you three free banner ads at the top of the products and services page. Create images that are 640×220 pixels, upload them to your page and add a unique URL, preferably to a landing page, and you have free ads. All you need to do now is make sure you are directing traffic to your LinkedIn products and services page.
3. Personal Contacts
Prospects don’t always like filling out contact forms because they never know who is going to contact them, but what if you could show them real people, with pictures and everything, that they could connect to for more information. This personalization of contact can be set by product, so consider adding people who have a high enough profile in your business or who have a title that makes sense for the contact. This can be viewed by some prospects as a purely “for more information” request about the product or service, so product managers can be a good fit, but these are leads. Clicking on this link is someone raising their hand and expressing interest.
4. Video with Call to Action
Each product and service entry has a space to link to a YouTube video, which appears embedded on the page. Video is another way to tell the story of your products. There are many ways to include calls-to-action in a YouTube video, which should be considered for the ones on your LinkedIn page. Everything you do on this page should provide enough information for prospects to decide that your products and services should be in the consideration phase of their buying process. You need to make it easy for them to take the next step and become a lead.
5. Status Updates
Companies can share status updates with those following the company. This is different than sharing information on your personal profile. You should have a content plan for sharing on your company profile. Share a mix of third party articles, company blog posts, links to ebooks and webinars, employee information and other content appropriate for your LinkedIn audience. Cross promote LinkedIn groups and events to continue to build your audience across LinkedIn. The main thing to do for lead gen is to make sure you are providing compelling offers with calls-to-action so prospects can become leads for your B2B company.
Have you taken advantage of all the lead gen levers that LinkedIn offers on your B2B company page?
Source: Social Media B2B
Posts from Facebook pages will gain more prominence than ever in a News Feed redesign that increases the size of images and text for all posts.
User photos will appear up to two times larger in the desktop News Feed, as TechCrunch reported earlier today. We’ve confirmed with Facebook that the change applies to Facebook pages as well, eliminating the disadvantage pages had from their images being displayed smaller than those from users’ friends.
The News Feed redesign will also make four photos from an album visible at once. Previously, only three photos were included in album stories. This follows the recent redesign of the mobile feed, which similarly favors large images over the ability to view multiple posts at once. Facebook is further positioning itself as a place for storytelling through visuals, following the rise of platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. This is a move away from Twitter, which continues to be driven by text and is more efficient for following news in real time. The increased font and image size is also reminiscent of Google+.
The change, which can be seen in the image from TechCrunch below, will roll out to users over the next few days.
When Facebook increased the size of images in the desktop feed last year, it did so only for photos posted by users, not from pages. It seemed the company wanted prevent pages from putting ad-like images in the feed, but it put pages — even those that posted content fans would appreciate — at a disadvantage. See an example of how an album currently appears from a page to the right. With the redesign, pages will be able to occupy more than twice as much News Feed space as before.
As a result, pages that post photos could see a large bump in engagement. However, with the more prominent size, pages will have to make higher quality posts to avoid having users decide to hide or unlike their pages. Users could be more likely to mark a story as spam when it appears in the new size. Page owners should pay attention to the “virality” and “negative feedback” metrics in Facebook insights to track how their posts perform after the change.
The redesign also gives page owners further incentive to spend money on promoted posts, since users could be more likely to see and engage with these posts than they were when photos from pages were much smaller than other stories in their feed.
Source: Inside Facebook
