Written on August 10th, 2011 by trickfacebookno shouts
Facebook now offers a potential solution for users who converted their profiles into pages, only to regret the decision after the fact.
As reported by Inside Facebook, Facebook has created an appeal form for users who want to reverse course on their profile-to-page migration.
As we discussed, the Facebook profile migration tool may leave users with some unintended consequences. Facebook temporarily disabled the tool last week, reportedly because of API strain.
If you are one of the users who, like me, made the ill-fated decision to use the Facebook migration tool, you can fill out this appeal form. Filling it out is not a guarantee that Facebook will be able to reverse your profile, but it is at least as start.
The form page states:
Profile to business Page migrations are meant for profiles that do not represent a person. If you have accidentally migrated your profile to a Page, you can submit your request for a reversal. Please keep in mind that we will remove your business Page if your profile is restored. We may reject any appeals that we deem to be inappropriate. Further, we may not reply to all submitted appeals.
If your appeal is approved, the newly created business page will be removed. Users can still create a new business page for themselves, however, users will need to court fans the old-fashioned way.
Since sharing my own tale of near Facebook suicide, I have heard from dozens of readers who, after suffering the same fate, are looking for reprieve.
We think it’s great that Facebook is making an effort to help users recover their personal accounts. Our advice still stands: Avoid using the migration tool unless you need to convert the page of a brand or business for terms of service reasons.
Written on May 1st, 2011 by trickfacebookno shouts
If you’re looking to boost engagement on your brand’s Facebook Page, a new report from Buddy Media has some key findings for you. The social media marketing company collected data from 200 of its clients’ Pages* over a 14-day period and found that time is an important factor in determining the success of a Facebook post. The study reveals that more often than not, a Facebook post is ill-timed — in fact, office hours could be the worst time to blast content.
“While marketers may work Monday through Friday, Facebook is humming with activity 24-hours a day, seven days a week,” says Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow. And so, brands must adapt to their consumers’ schedules in order to optimize their engagement.
Here are the findings, along with tips about when and how to make the most of a Facebook post.
Be Timely
The study found that daily Facebook engagement has three peaks: early morning (7 a.m. EST), after work (5 p.m. EST) and late at night (11 p.m. EST). Therefore, posting all of your updates during the workday means you’re missing key opportunities to engage fans at non-work hours. However, not all brands’ engagement peaks at these three times — Playboy engagement peaks in the wee hours of the morning, for example — so you must work on a case-by-case basis.
Good timing on Facebook depends on the day of the week, too. Thursday and Friday have 18% more engagement than other days of the week, suggesting that Facebook is a procrastination tool when people are itching to get out of the office. But don’t start stacking all of your Facebook updates on Thursday and Friday — the study found interesting user patterns and engagement trends throughout the week that are unique to particular industries. Below, the findings are broken down by market so that you can see where entire industries are missing the mark and where — or rather, when — there’s room for improvement.
Entertainment: Friday, Saturday and Sunday are huge, as that is when people are most inclined to see a movie or go to a concert. However, entertainment brands post twice as much content on a weekday than a Saturday or Sunday.Tip: Take advantage of the weekend.
Media: Weekends have strong engagement for media brands, but Mondays are weak. During the study period, most posts went out during the week.Tip: Avoid Monday.
Automotive: Auto brands see the most engagement on Sundays, but less than 8% of posts go out on that day.Tip: Capitalize on Sunday.
Business and Finance: Engagement peaks on Wednesday and Thursday, though this industry tends to spread its posts even on Monday through Friday.Tip: Post on Wednesday.
The findings for the retail vertical.
Retail: Sunday is a big day for engagement on the shopping and retail front, but only 5% of entertainment posts go up on Sunday. The industry’s posts lean heavily toward Friday, which has below-average engagement.Tip: Target shoppers on Sunday.
Fashion: Engagement peaks on Thursday but dips on the weekend. The industry pushes the most content on Tuesday, the day with the lowest engagement.Tip: Optimize engagement on Thursday.
Healthcare and Beauty: Like fashion — perhaps because consumers are shopping and preparing for the weekend — healthcare and beauty brands see the most engagement on Thursday. But a lot of content is posted on Mondays and Fridays, when engagement is lower.Tip: Post content on Thursday.
Food and Beverage: More than the other verticals, the food and beverage brands do a good job of spreading their posts throughout the week and weekend. But in this case, engagement peaks on Tuesday and Saturday and dips on Monday and Thursday.Tip: Target Tuesday.
Sports: Not surprisingly, especially during football season, Sunday is king for sports brands and teams on Facebook. This data is affected by the fact that Super Bowl Sunday fell during the data collection period, but Sundays remain strong during other weeks, too.Tip: Increase your post volume on Sunday.
Travel and Hospitality: The highest engagement occurs on Thursday and Friday, when the week is winding down and people are looking to escape from the office.Tip: Get these eyeballs at the end of the week.
Joe Ciarallo, Buddy Media’s director of communications, says a lot of smart brands already target their audiences when they’re most engaged. For those who don’t, Ciarallo says they should consider scheduling Facebook posts to go live during times of high engagement at night and on weekends.
Be Concise
The data indicates that the length of the post can determine engagement just as much as the time of the post. The bottom line: Keep it short and sweet. Posts with 80 characters or less — the length of a short tweet — garnered 27% more engagement than posts that were more than 80 characters. But brevity is far from a common practice — only 19% of posts in the study were shorter than 80 characters.
And while the content should be short, the URL probably shouldn’t be — posts with a full-length URL had three times the engagement of their shortened bit.ly, ow.ly and tinyurl counterparts. The reason is likely because readers want to know where the link will take them. Ciarallo says a brand-specific URL shortener, like bddy.me or on.mash, keeps a post short while also providing context.
Ask For Engagement
Words ranked in order of their effectiveness at converting Likes and comments.
If you’re looking to get Likes on a post, all you have to do is ask. Ciarallo says simple, outright instructions — “Like us if … ” — are much more effective at getting a Like than a post with a long explanation of why you should “like” something. Remember, “liking” only takes one click and then the “liked” item is syndicated on a user’s own page, so don’t be afraid to ask for the thumbs up.
The same goes for comments — outright saying “post,” “comment” or “tell us” motivates fans to engage. If you’re seeking answers, put a simple “where” or “when” or “would” question at the end of the post — you’ll get 15% more engagement than if the question is buried in the middle. Shy away from “why” questions, as they seem invasive and ask much more of a user than a “what” question, Ciarallo says.
Advice for Smaller Brands
These findings are insightful and can help brands better target their consumers, but it is important to note that the brands studied are all large and well-established. While URL shortening is a good idea for all brands, the day and time findings may not apply to businesses of all sizes within each industry.
For small businesses, it’s important to balance the data above with what you know about your own brand, based on Facebook Insights and your own experiences with your Page. “Small brands can take away some best practices from this, but remember that the data set is all large brands,” Ciarallo says. “Still, a boutique hotel owner could look at the hospitality section and see how it can help his Facebook marketing.”
He also says it’s important to realize the social marketing space is constantly evolving, and these statistics can change in a matter of months. If every brand begins to post when the engagement is high, then engagement either will increase because of the optimization, or it may decrease because there’s so much noise at the high-engagement times. Only time will tell for the long term.
“This is 200 large brands over two weeks, so it’s a large data set, but things are moving fast,” meaning your Facebook marketing program must be flexible, Ciarallo says. Though this is the first study of its kind that Buddy Media has publicly released, Ciarallo foresees future reports like this one to help brands maximize engagement in an ever-changing marketing environment.
What engagement tips have you picked up from your Facebook Page? Tell us in the comments.
Disclosure: Buddy Media is a Mashable sponsor.
*Buddy Media did not disclose which of its 600 client brands were included in the study, but the company has a lengthy roster of enterprise clients, including W Hotels, Target, American Express, Playboy and the Food Network.
Written on April 18th, 2011 by trickfacebookno shouts
With more than 600 million users, Facebook’s mobile strategy transcends the need for smartphones, as seen in a recent Dutch promotion for Renault.
In the video above, the carmaker was filmed seeking to boost its Facebook “Likes” with a push at the Amsterdam Motor Show, using RFID-enabled cards. Attendees at the show could use the cards to check in to pillars near Renault’s cars and log in to their Facebook accounts where they could “Like” various models.
Renault’s effort is one of just a handful that have used RFID to bridge Facebook’s online world with real-life experiences. Others include a Coca-Cola Amusement Park promotion in Israel last summer that let attendees update their statuses with RFID bracelets and one from Asics, which let friends and family send individualized, Facebook-derived messages to runners in the New York Marathon via a video screen.
Written on April 20th, 2010 by trickfacebookno shouts
Mayors will sometimes use their Facebook Pages to bypass local media channels or government bureaucracies in order to communicate directly with their constituencies, or provide hard-to-find information, we found recently when we looked around Facebook for mayors’ Pages. As part of our ongoing series of how government entities use Facebook, we have reviewed a range of mayors with Pages — we know that these figure prominently in elections, but what happens once the candidate becomes the official?
We looked at about a dozen such Pages to see what they were doing. For the sake of easy comparison, we only looked at the Pages of U.S. mayors, although there were several Pages for mayors in other cities around the world, such as Talisay City, The Philippines mayor Doc Eric Saratan’s Page (about 1,100 fans), as well as elsewhere, like Karachi, Pakistan Mayor Syed Mustafa Kamal (about 68,500 fans).
The Wall seemed to be the main hub of activity for most mayors — that’s where they posted the bulk of the information they shared on Facebook, as did their fans. More often than not the mayors posted news links or links to city web sites, blogs/notes and sometimes videos. Several also frequently posted notes and photos were a mainstay on most of the Pages.
Generally speaking, the mayors that used their Pages to speak specifically to their constituents in “localized” terms were the most successful, both in terms of the number of fans and the amount of interaction — and this was not limited to a city’s size. For example, Los Angeles has almost 4 million residents but Mayor Villaraigosa rarely updates his Page and consequently had a paltry 2,500 fans compared to Mayor Brown’s frequently updated Page with a fan base of 2,200 in Buffalo, New York, a city with about 271,000 residents.
Even cities with smaller bases to work with aren’t always able to maneuver fans to their Pages, as evident with Mayor Paul Lambi’s 392 fans from among about 23,800 residents in Wentzville, Missouri or Mayor Jim Byard’s 570 fans from the 32,500 residents of Prattville, Alabama. Both posted hyperlocal information regularly, Lambi going so far as to post his location, “Every Wednesday morning I meet with the City Administrator for a briefing. This morning, we’re meeting at I-Hop.”
Rather, what seemed to make or break these mayors’ Facebook Pages was the combination of genuine interactivity combined with smart promotion of this medium.
San Antonio, Texas Mayor Julián Castro, who we’re told runs the Page himself, seems to have accomplished this balance nicely, as with a city of over 1.3 million people and 3,500 fans, he had one of the largest fan Pages we saw. From what we observed on the Page, Castro managed to almost daily promote local issues like the influx of shoppers from Mexico over Easter weekend, or localize larger issues such as the Census, prompting fans to comment quite often (he occasionally comments back). There are lots of photos and videos, notes are added at regular intervals and he often shares news links on the Wall to prompt discussion.
We spoke to Christian Archer, Castro’s 2008 campaign manager and current political aid to the mayor for his Facebook Page, about how it figured in the election and how Castro now uses the Page to highlight his pet issues. Castro has been enthusiastically using different types of technology since his campaign, Archer tells us, noting not only Facebook, but also pointing to live town halls on his web site, Flip videos, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. During the campaign Castro began using his personal Facebook profile to communicate with supporters, and once elected, he created the Page and has been trying to migrate fans there ever since, Archer said.
“One of the promises we made during the campaign was (that) this Page wasn’t just going to be for the election,” Archer said, noting that Castro is the first San Antonio mayor to have a Facebook Page, although to be fair, there’ve only been two other mayors since Facebook was founded in 2004. “The percentage is still not huge that check our Facebook — it’s not going to win or lose an election — but it is vital to the people who are online.”
Castro’s Facebook Page was promoted on campaign literature and the same is being done now that it’s a part of the mayor’s official communication platform, Archer tells us; this may be one reason why Castro’s Page is much larger than others we saw. Growing the Page was important because Archer said Castro wanted the interactivity available on Facebook to constituents 24/7, allowing them to get involved without having to be activists and also because social media has become a way for the mayor to promote causes that might not draw the attention of the local media.
“A lot of this stuff will never get covered. We’re able to communicate a lot of smaller things that might not make the 6 o’clock news, but yet are still important,” Archer explained.
The amount of time and attention spent on Facebook Pages seemed to have a direct impact on the number of fans and interactions, but this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes mayors who only sporadically tended to the Page had larger followings than others who were on Facebook almost daily.
Case in point, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn constantly updated his Page but, in a city of almost 600,000 he only squeezed out 855 fans; meanwhile, Utica, New York Mayor David Roefaro added 2,000 fans from a city of 58,000 people. Lots of factors could have contributed to this difference, perhaps one Page has been around longer than the other or there are links to the Page on city web sites, but such differences are curious, nonetheless.
As previously mentioned, the quality of information on the Pages was also essential to success on Facebook. Houston Mayor Annise Parker was elected to represent 2.2 million residents and does a decent job of talking about her work on Facebook to her 4,700 fans, while Memphis Mayor A.C. Wharton’s constituency of 670,000 has awarded him about 6,300 Facebook fans. Even more interesting, Detroit’s Mayor Dave Bing was once a popular basketball player, an entrepreneur and now mayor but has just 727 fans in a city of more than 912,000 people. What’s more, Bing posts regularly and includes pertinent government documents among his photos for people to more easily access information.
There are lots of questions here that don’t yet have clear answers. Are some cities more Facebook-centric than others? Do some mayors promote their Pages more than others? Do different regions of the country feel more comfortable as fans of politicians? Are mayors just less interesting to Facebook users than a President, Governor, Congressmen or Senator? Is it just that some politicians are more beloved than others?
Facebook users currently seem less compelled to become fans of their mayors than of other politicians, for whatever reason. Some cities’ mayors don’t even bother to have Facebook Pages. New York’s Michael Bloomberg is a good example (but he does have Twitter, YouTube and Flickr). Creating a successful Facebook Page for mayors seems to be part work (updating, etc.), part promotion (including it on web sites and other official literature) and part luck (do people in your city care about mayors on Facebook?). All that said, we expect mayors, and their campaigns to do a better job figuring out how to use Facebook in the future.
Facebook now offers a potential solution for users who converted their profiles into pages, only to regret the decision after the fact.
