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.
Foursquare is the star social media network of 2010. This is a mobile check-in application game based on location: each time you check in at a place (e.g. a bar or a restaurant), you earn points that you will use to compete with your friends. Moreover you can leave notes about the place, get badges based on your activity and even become mayor of a spot if you have the highest number of check-ins.
Foursquare is also useful for small businesses as it offers details on the people checking in at the place but also enable the owners to offer special offers using the platform. As an example the restaurant Hummus Bro offers a 2-4-1 deal to the mayor of the place. At the moment there are 200,000 users on the platform, a check every second and Foursquare is growing so quickly that Yelp is feeling the threat.
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.
So, lots of industry furore over the way Skittles gave control to the masses and social-mediarized™ 90% of their website.
Now you can do it too in less than a minute - behold my own personalised version of the Skittles site, make yours at Skittlr.com. Include Twitter searches, Facebook, Flickr, anything you like really - who needs a social media agency?
Over a period of time I’ve identified the following distinct classifications of people using Twitter - which group are you in?
Celebrity Stalker
There’s a surprising amount of celebs and public figures ‘embracing the Tweet’. Updates range from bleary-eyed getting out of bed habits to well-constructed PR snippets, and can often be a voyeuristically personal view into their world. Highlights include Jonathan Ross, Darth Vader and Stephen Fry. Should keep you busy until the next issue of Heat.
Microblogger
Everything is put down in a tweet, no matter how mundane or worthless. Potential offenders are usually hitting 30+ posts a day. Great stuff for the Celebrity Stalkers to lap up.
Industry Groupie
All your Twitter friends are in the same industry as you, Twitter is used solely as a networking and information gathering/sharing tool. People in this category tweet as a way of life, meeting new people in the same field, quickly gathering followers with similar work-interests as themselves. Often encroaching on the ‘Link Sharer’ type…
Link Sharer
Your tweets mostly consist of links, either from the web or others Twitter feeds. You have a mild to severe competitive streak and need to be the first in your network to present ‘the cool link’ before anyone else.
Pure Follower
Not really bothered about tweeting yourself, but more than happy to follow along with updates from others. Pure Followers are information sponges, often exceling at pub quizes. Not to be confused with the Celebrity Stalker.
Boredom Buster
Tweeting-time reserved for when you’re bored, and can’t think of anything else to play with on your phone. Example situations: waiting for the other half outsde a changing room, using public transport, waiting for a mate at a gig. Typical tweet frequency: one every couple of months.
Investigator
A popular category; basically you’re a two-post wonder. Those two posts went something like this: “YESSSS! I’m on Twitter!” followed very shortly by “I’m eating a sandwich”. And then nothing. Ever. Many start out this way, excited to see what the fuss is about, but then experience feelings of confusion about what to do next, leading to Twitter Abandonment. Twitter could do with better handholding features for new starters - big fat links to useful search tools, perhaps some categorised examples of people you might find worthy of following based on your interests etc.
Which of the above am I? Probably a three way split between Link Sharer, Industry Groupie, and Celebrity Stalker.
I presented a short presentation at last night’s London Facebook Developer Garage.
The Garage was definitely one of the best in recent memory - lots of people, great speakers, interesting questions. You can find out more at the London Facebook Developer Garage site.
The key Facebook changes this month were:
The slides are below:
Those who think that Facebook is just for giving that friend a poke and sharing photos of last weekend’s party might not expect the more serious possibilities that Facebook might offer. With tens of thousands of Facebook apps created by 3rd party developers, it isn’t amazing to see some of them being dedicated to online collaboration. We picked a few of the most interesting ones for you to highlight.
Although FaceBook now offers their own in-built chat, it’s not the handiest way of communicating to a group of friends or colleagues. In comes the Chat Rooms application, which allows you to start group conversations within Facebook. So why have your meeting through a third party tool where you have to explain how to get the application to work when you can just invite your friends to a chat right inside Facebook?!
Having a tough time getting your team on the same page? MyOffice lets you quickly and easily collaborate with your colleagues, partners, or clients on one or multiple projects. Allowing you to organize events, schedule meetings, discuss ideas, and much more. This online collaboration suite is fully integrated in Facebook and ideal for companies, organizations, and other individuals in the need to organize a group of people.
Even students (the original target audience for Facebook) can find their fair share of online collaboration applications. A few of them stood out, one of which is the Study Groups application which has most of the standard collaboration features of other applications but offers clear distinction between teachers and students.
Just as with normal collaboration suites like Huddle, student collaboration suites have also been around since well before Facebook. The most popular platform used at universities and schools is probably Blackboard. With the introduction of Blackboard Sync you can now sync between Facebook and Blackboard, allowing you to get updates on anything that happens within Blackboard without leaving Facebook.
Yesterday LinkedIn launched their own application platform. And there is some good news for those who already have existing applications on other sites, as they have decided to go for the open standard of the OpenSocial application framework. In other words: if you already have applications on MySpace, Ning, or Bebo you can easily port your existing apps to the LinkedIn.
And with that, LinkedIn is probably a network where any application can reach a whole new user base, as it definitely is the place where people come to do serious business. One of the first few applications to jump aboard is London based Huddle who integrated their online collaboration tool straight into LinkedIn.
Clearly, OpenSocial applications on LinkedIn are an opportunity to reach a different kind of consumer, and more importantly get in contact directly with other businesses. Current companies that have already joined the LinkedIn application directory are Amazon, SlideShare, Google, Wordpress, and a few more.
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