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Posted on January 21, 2010
Facebook Fan Pages and Calculating ROI
BY LAUREN MAYNARD
Feelings and Marketing
In an excellent blog post this week, Brian Solis outlined his predictions for the role of a marketer in 2010. Out of eight high-level points, he made four that seemed particularly relevant to the building of strategy in a campaign:
• Listen to and engage customers one to one
• Build relationships and not campaigns
• Create experiences not impressions
• Earn media and not buy it
What he's talking about here is a set of things I hear often. Listening. Engagement. Relationships. Experiences. I'd lump these under "feelings", something that doesn't mesh well with the traditional concept of measurement and ROI.
Measuring Intangibles
Just yesterday, Facebook rolled out some changes to Fan Pages that give a helpful boost to our effort to measure these intangible feelings. Fan Page administrators will now be able to get numbers on impressions for status updates. This means that we can gauge how many people see the information placed on a page through their own news stream; it no longer requires a user to come directly to the page.
Facebook also gives us a handy impressions-to-interactions ratio which shows up as a feedback percentage.
What does this mean?
As astutely noted by our own Wendy Hofstetter, this relatively simple change could have some big impact:
• Reporting numbers on Facebook will be more accurate than the standard "pageviews" statistics previously provided.
• We can more easily compare the return on Facebook versus other more traditional media by calculating a CPM (cost-per-thousand). Most companies use CPM as a way to gauge how expensive their advertising is (that's how TV, outdoor, Radio, Magazines, etc. are purchased).
• We can begin testing what time of day is best for Facebook engagement.
• We can understand what kinds of posts (videos, quotes, etc.) get the most engagement.
Why is this important?
Brian Solis had another point in that list: Look beyond the quantity of friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, and viewers to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent.
Facebook allows brands to create meaningful interactions with consumers. At Room 214, Facebook allows us to keep our clients' fans updated with relevant information and content that the fans wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. We can solicit feedback, engage in direct conversation and create content that, if worthy, can be shared over and over again by interested parties.
That being said, a bottom line is a bottom line. Our clients need to understand how their money is being used. And we need to continue to interact with consumers in ways that produce repeat engagement, support, sharing, and evangelism. This new feature from Facebook gets us closer to creating relationships that we can quantify. It also helps us better understand what content isn't interesting; we can then refine our strategy and provide our loyal fans with things they'd prefer to hear, see and discuss.
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Posted on October 19, 2009
Best Practices: The Importance of Facebook Profile Images
BY BRANDON WHALEN
Room 214 recently did a major overhaul of all of the Travel Channel's Facebook pages. We added a poll app, Youtube functionality, a live Twitter stream, and all sorts of great new tools. However, there was one area that we could still improve upon.
After taking a look at the profile images on all seven of the Travel Channel Facebook pages, I realized that there was a way for us to improve the look and feel of our pages. Take a look at a few of the profile images that were displayed at the time:
There were a few issues with each profile image:
- The formatting was inconsistent.
- The use of Travel Channel's logo and brand style was inconsistent.
- There was room for the images to look cleaner and more official.
Why is the profile image so important?
A profile image is the most used part of any Facebook page. It is the biggest and most noticeable design element when a fan is viewing your page, and it is also appears in the news stream of every one of your fans. If you have an active fan-base on Facebook (like Travel Channel has), there are tens-of-thousands of fans who see this image everyday.
See how I improved our profile images after the break:
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Posted on October 16, 2009
Realtime Web is Coming, is your Brand on Board?
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
[Disclosure: Buzz Room is a Product of Room 214.]
What is realtime web?
The early adopter crowd has been joining in the choir filling our ears with realtime web, an way to get instant feedback and encourage participation in web applications. Not so long ago, all content on the web was old, research papers, thought out articles. When you searched, what you looked for was most relevant, tested information.
Boy, how things change, now its all about instant feedback. With tremendous adaptation of smartphones by everyone from heavyweight business users to teenagers, mobile access and easy publishing of geo/event-enabled information is more accessible than ever.
Enter Buzz Room, a way to follow live conversations and start your own. It's Room 214's premiere product to answer ever-growing need to attract the realtime web crowd.
What does Buzz Room do?
Buzz Room is a social network enabled chat room with provided commentary from keyword-based twitter feeds as well as facebook pages. In addition to pulling very relevant information from top realtime sources, it gives our clients full customization of the front end, keywords, banning of users, in-stream and in-app advertising, metrics and just a slew of other, awesome features which are in constant development.
It also allows us pull in special twitter users such as presenters or subject experts into its own tab as well as give them a premiere spot in the main stream. This allows for greater interaction as well as more relevant conversation.
Why Buzz Room?
We saw a need for a fully customizable app that our clients can drop into their web properties or large conference screens and it would seamlessly
blend in with the environment. Also as mentioned earlier, realtime web is a rapidly growing portion of the web that has seen limited adoption as a tool to drive conversation, and as pioneers in social media we saw the need to provide a marketable solution in that field. Lastly we wanted to capture the conversation and consolidate all the buzz inside one room (I can't even count the number of puns in that last sentence).
How does it work?
As some of you may know but I am one of three developers here at Room 214, other 2 being Dominic and Joe. We also just hired a full time designer, Andy, due enormous amount of need for creative work. One of the biggest things we recognized this year is the ever-growing need to have a development team inside the agency, because there is just so much opportunity to build awesome things. Every day a new API is released, new way to engage the audience is discovered and to make sense of it all, we want to create tools and apps help our clients achieve success.
Buzz Room uses Twitter OAuth to login into your twitter account so we can post on your behalf and Facebook Connect so we can do the same with facebook. This also allows us to provide very detailed usage statistics to our clients.
We also pull in Twitter keyword stream via very powerful search APIs, grab specified special users as well as pull in chatter from specified Facebook Pages. What this does is helps us fill the room with relevant, real-time content.
Check it out
You can see Buzz Room in action over at Lifetime's Project Runway page. With this and other exciting new apps we are constantly cranking out, I have no doubt this isn't the last time you hear from our development team.
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Posted on October 13, 2009
Case Study: A Facebook Story
BY WENDY HOFSTETTER
The following statistic is my new favorite conversation starter for family, friends, clients; heck, even strangers: 78% of online U.S. households are now on Facebook. It's no secret that this social media community has taken our population by storm. But this isn't about my love affair with Facebook; it's a success story for business.
Numerous brands have adopted Facebook as a way to interact with their fans and push products or services. Some do a great job and some just throw up pages with the hope that they'll be a success. We have found a way to go beyond what standard Facebook pages offer, and provide our clients with a unique Facebook experience. Here's a recent example of how we have accomplished this feat.
The Task
Take our existing Facebook pages for Travel Channel and make them more viral, more informative, more interactive, and more targeted.
How We Did It
In order to make the Travel Channel pages more viral, we took advantage of the sharing functionality accessible through Facebook's API. We built a unique left-hand sidebar for every featured tab, which enables visitors to share specific content with their friends. We also included share buttons on video and blog posts to allow users more flexibility when suggesting content.
We made these pages more informative by featuring content frequently requested by fans. In this case, that content was episode information for each show. We created a custom tab with information on when an episode would air and provided links back to TravelChannel.com for pictures, travel guides, and episode descriptions.
The pages became more interactive through our custom polling application. If you use Facebook, you know how popular polling is within the system. We took this concept and created a tab where users can tell us what they think about recent episodes. This application also provides Travel Channel with a way to gather feedback quickly from viewers.
Finally, we strategized to make Travel Channel's pages more targeted. Brands are all about gaining new fans on Facebook, but they often neglect to tell users why to become a fan. We solved this problem by creating a landing page where all non-fans would land. This tab includes a welcome message, an overview with information about the show, and a call-to-action suggesting they become a fan of the page.
The Results
It's all about meeting business objectives, so here are the results of the re-design. In addition to the four objectives I listed above, our goal was to increase traffic back to TravelChannel.com. Within one month after re-designing their show pages, traffic has increased significantly and Facebook has become a top-referring source for the site.
Do you have a Facebook success story? I'd love to hear about it!
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Posted on August 12, 2009
How can the FriendFeed team help improve Facebook?
BY BRANDON WHALEN
I am rather excited about this Facebook/FriendFeed situation. Why? I think the FriendFeed team can really improve Facebook.
Lately, Facebook has seemed to be in a transition phase (half stuck between becoming a Twitter competitor and sticking to their roots). While it is hard to say what sort of functionality they are aiming for at Facebook., they are certainly giving us a look at the future.
FriendFeed brings a lot of brain power into the mix. Now that Facebook has acquired the know-how, there are a lot of things they can be doing to improve my experience.
Include a real-time search of status messages.
Facebook needs to become more open. I want to search status messages and see what people are talking about up to the minute. This is a no-brainer.
Be my one-stop internet identity.
This means Facebook has to adopt the aggregation qualities of FriendFeed. I want to be able to connect my Facebook with my FriendFeed, my blog, and my Brightkite. I don't necessarily want to publish posts from all of those networks, but I want Facebook to recognize all of those networks as me. If someone connects with me on one network, I would like for them to be able to visit my Facebook profile and get a more complete sense of the person I am.
I want to easily link/mention my friend's profiles in my posts.
There is no easy way to reference a friend in a status update on Facebook. On Twitter this is as easy at including someone's handle. I would like to be able to type a friend's name and have it appear as a link to his profile in my status update. Even better, if Facebook would allow us to aggregate our profiles from other networks we could easily use a Twitter handle or another username to mention each other in posts. Those links could all head to our Facebook profile pages, making them much more useful and relevant.
Make Facebook less messy.
Here is where the FriendFeed team can really make improvements. In Facebook, there are so many different places to interact with other users that it gets confusing. I think it reduces the amount of quality interaction.
Let's say you see Dave's status and you want to respond. You can:
- Post a comment on his status message, but risk the annoyance of getting notifications every time a user you don't know also comments on that status update.
- Head to Dave's profile so you can comment on his wall.
- Start a chat with Dave to continue the discussion
- Send Dave a mail message
Let say you choose to post on Dave's wall and now he sees your wall post. He can:
- Comment you back on the post you put on his wall
- Head to your profile and post his response on your wall
- Start a chat with you
- Send you a mail message
Now lets say Dave is a total noob (which is the case for a lot of Facebook users). He accidentally posts his response in another status update. All of a sudden this conversation has gone from a status update, to one person's wall, to the next person's wall, back to a status update. Needless to say, the entire process has a lot of room to be simplified.
There are things I like about both sites, and by taking the strengths of both FF and FB, perhaps they can mash together a new social media super-power.
What do I like about Facebook?
Facebook is where I can find most of the people I know personally. It is less scary and more acceptable to a wide range of users because you generally connect with more people that you know in real-life. This is partially why they have been acquiring so many new users. The problem is: Facebook has not entirely kept up with the way people communicate and connect, leaving them with one foot in the past, one foot in the future, and an interface that is equally as stuck in-between.
What do I like about FriendFeed?
All of my internet identities are pulled into one convenient location that is very intuitive and easy to use. The problem is: The average user doesn't know as many people on FriendFeed and is less inclined to spend time there, even though the interface is way better.
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