Nudge is a London based social media agency. We produce pages, utilities and games on social networks for brands, clients and digital agencies.
I spoke briefly at last night’s London Facebook Developer Garage in the new City University Venue. Thanks to all of you who braved the inclement weather and made the journey.
I especially enjoyed Scot MacVicar’s (rather technical) talk about the Facebook infrastructure. My favorite stat: Facebook serves 1.2 million photos per second. Wow.
Here are the slides from my usual monthly Facebook Platform update:
Facebook is far from perfection, but Nudge has come up with a way to help you identify where the perfection is on the platform. Search For Perfect Facebook application is a social search engine that finds what is perfect on your profile: anything that contains the word perfect or has been tagged with the word perfect appears as the top of the search engine results. Would it be about a drink from Starbucks or a crazy video from a friend, you see what people around you consider as perfect.
Behind the application is Sam Talbot, who launched Search For Perfect with the idea of “highlight the truly awesome, the truly fantastic and in the end perfect!” Matthew Long, Senior Developer at Nudge, details the functioning of the application: “It is recreating the home page in another form by filtering out stories that aren’t “perfect”. Search results are associated with like and comments functionalities within the application itself and are pulling in external blog postings and videos.”
For Toby Beresford, our Commercial Director, this application underlines the promising future of social search but also offers opportunities for brands to use application for contests. Whatever the future holds in store for Search for Perfect (and it sounds quite promising), it helps to know that perfection is now one click away.
As the social media marketing snowball grows, it is becoming increasingly important for brands of all shapes and sizes to not only have a Facebook page, but also to ensure that page maximises its fan base in as many ways as possible.
The issue with fan pages is that they can be a double edged sword. If you look after them then they will become an effective and important part of a company’s marketing strategy - not only do they provide a core customer base in which to market, but they can also give invaluable feedback from customers and enable a way for brands to converse with them in an informal, friendly way which is unique to Facebook.
However, if the page is allowed to grow stagnant, this can be detrimental to the brand, as potential customers coming to the page would associate uninteresting, out-of-date content with the rest of the company in question.
So what techniques can we use to give fan pages the best chance of recruiting the largest amount of fans available? Well, here are a few pointers:
Populate with relevant, interesting content
There is absolutely no point in setting up a page and then using it to spam however many fans you may have with boring promotions that will not engage people in the slightest. The only effect this will have is to actually decrease the fan base - no-one wants their newsfeed cluttered up with irrelevant, pushy marketing promotions. Another tactic that brings about the opposite effect to which it originally intended is the automatic news update, such as an RSS feed. Facebook users generally don’t appreciate syndicated feeds - organic, humanly updated content is far more popular.
Instead, brands need to think about what would garner attention and add value for their fans. This could be anything related to their company or the industry in general, information that would be useful, interesting or just funny. Ideally the content would be good enough to encourage people to share with other friends and initiate some virality. The better the content, the more fans you’ll get onto your page.
Update regularly, but don’t overdo it
Brands need to ensure that not only is there decent content on their page, but that the content is frequently added to. The idea is to get fans visiting your page habitually, getting them used to looking at new content and commenting / interacting with it. If this doesn’t happen, interactions will drop fast, fan numbers will grind to a halt and momentum will be lost. It takes a lot to get the ball rolling again, so it is imperative that this practice is kept up.
On the other side of the coin, pages that are updated too often run the risk of annoying fans by clogging up their news feed, even if the content is good enough to be included on the page. In such cases, fans would be tempted to de-fan the page in order to remove this irritation. Therefore a balance needs to be found so that both extremes are avoided.
Take part in the conversation
So, you’ve got a healthy stream of people coming to your page and posting up comments, thoughts and questions. Now what? To take your fan page to another level, respond to them. Facebook users love it when a brand engages with its consumers - communication is what social networking is all about and this method of interaction gives a modern, real and more human face to the brand. It’ll encourage fans to visit the page far more regularly, give them another reason to invite their own friends to became fans of the page and add a feel good factor to the whole experience.
Questions can be answered, criticisms can be responded to and company news can be mentioned - customers will be given the impression (rightly hopefully!), that the brand does care and is listening.
There are many more tips and tricks that can be employed to push a fan page into the stratosphere, but if I carried on I’d be here forever. However these are a few standard methods that should really give your page a helping hand. Get in touch with your thoughts!
One of the most common questions we get asked by clients is whether they can implement a social media campaign created for one social network site across other sites in exactly the same form. In an ideal world this would be the case, but unfortunately in the real world of social networks it simply won’t work.
As with any industry, each business that forms it varies – they appeal to diverse demographics, offer a different type of product and invariably form a unique brand identity and culture. Exactly the same principles apply to the world of social networking. Each site has its own ethos and way of communicating – an effectively designed campaign for one site would often be completely inappropriate for inclusion in another.
Successful campaigns need to take into account and understand who the site members are and how they behave, their motivations and desires, ultimately ensuring that they match these up with their marketing messages and whatever it is that this audience is required to do in order to get involved with the promotion.
In short, brands need to view each social network as a separate entity and ensure they fit in with the traditions of the site in question. Just as you wouldn’t give the same flavour ice-cream to every individual that came into your shop, each version of one particular campaign will need to be adjusted for every individual site on which you choose to market.
If it were a country, you understand. Facebook is now growing at a rate of 3 to 400,000 users per day, and in recent weeks that figure has doubled. It’s now enjoying the presence of 250 million active users. That’s equivalent to all of Indonesia. Or three Germanys.
This level of popularity has spawned Facebook: The Movie. Without wanting to veer too much into the territory of Perez Hilton or Harry Knowles, The Social Network is set to be an adaptation of the Ben Mezrich’s sleazy Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, which itself has not even been released yet. There’s some big-name talent behind the production, with a script by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing, Studio 60 and A Few Good Men fame. David Fincher, director of Se7en, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Zodiac is set to direct. Keep your eyes peeled!
There’s been a big change in social networking this month, as Facebook now provides the option to do something pretty much every other social networking site in the world has been doing for a long time – give yourself a username! This will undoubtedly lead to a shift in the way that Facebook and its users operate, as it’s now a good deal simpler to link directly to your page or profile.
Those friend-hungry folks out there can now aggressively up their friend count with ease. It’s all being done with security and copyright in mind, however, as Facebook are attempting to ensure no abuse of their system and usernames are set in stone once they’ve been chosen. Pick wisely, as LadyGaGaLover2009 might not sound so cool in 6 months!
It’s now much easier to increase your businesses exposure, too, with a tidier and more memorable web address providing an easier path for Facebook users (and Google searches) to reach your content and brand. Whereas prior to this launch the address of your company’s Facebook page would’ve been a garbled mess of letters and numbers (unless you had a nice large ad-spend, in which case vanity URL’s were specially available), it’ll now be the more business-card friendly facebook.com/yourcompanynamehere. The myriad of benefits this offers are obvious, and it’s another big step towards making Facebook the unifying outlet for social networking and brand exposure. Expect to see Facebook URLs springing up on billboards, the side of busses, film trailers and magazines over the next few months.
On a somewhat similar note, Twitter now offer ‘Verified Accounts’, in essence ensuring users that the tweets they are reading are the real deal, from the horses mouth, and adding another level of confidence and security to those 140 characters.
This month sees the launch of Rockclix, the social application giving you a great starting point to explore the U.K’s alternative music scene. Nudge helped out in an advisory capacity last month.
The Rockclix app gives the user definitive event listings, photo gallery and videos of indie, rock and alternative music events across the U.K.
If you’re a gig goer and are keen to see what events are on near you then Rockclix will provide all the events and post pictures and videos of the event. Rockclix’s team of Photographers are currently capturing their initial events so watch out for your face on one of the Rockclix’s photo albums soon!
The app also provides great exposure and distribution for promoters in the alternative music scene who can add their events/flyers, pictures and upload videos.
Rockclix has also had support from Radio 1 DJ Fearne Cotton (http://tiny.cc/9Y1GM) spotted sporting a very cool Rockclix T-shirt (see photo).
For more info on this project please contact info@rockclix.com .
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