This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
Most top brands operate in many regions and countries, and their users speak many different languages. Often, when this is the case, brands will have different Facebook Pages for different countries or languages; this way, wall posts will be very relevant to the audience. Other brands may elect to have a single global Page and either publish multiple versions of a wall post in various languages, or try to fit multiple versions of a wall post into one update. Neither solution is ideal. In the first, you splinter your total social footprint, and, as a result, you splinter the community. In the second, your wall posts may not be relevant to a large percentage of your fans (and will become noise), or you may be watering down your message by attempting to create multilingual posts with only 420 characters, the limit for wall posts.
Towards the end of last year, Facebook unveiled a major feature for Brand Pages: geo-targeted publishing. This allows Community Managers to compose a wall post in English, and post it only to fans with their language setting on English (US). Or compose a post in Spanish, and post it only to users who have their language setting on Spanish (Spain). This creates a best-of-both-worlds scenario for brands and Community Managers.
Two brands that have been doing an exceptional job geo-targeting are Garage andDynamite, which are – by no coincidence – both part of the Canadian apparel company Groupe Dynamite. Because both brands operate across Canada, they are aware that some users will be visiting their Facebook Page from Quebec, and therefore, be French-speakers. When the Dynamite fan’s language is set to English, they are met with this wall content:
- Dynamite Facebook: English
Posted in tactics by .
Feb 11
23
Facebook and Changing the World
As we have all heard, read, and experienced by now, the Middle East is in complete turmoil; seemingly more so than in recent memory. I certainly do not follow world news as much as I should, so we’re not going into a diatribe about the past three months of unrest. Instead, I just wanted to state the obvious: that change – the drastic kind of change alters peoples’ futures, creates new governments and religions, and allows people to be born into lives that are better than those who came before them – has always been brought about by people, through media. Sounds ridiculously obvious, and it is.
At the beginning of history, people exchanged ideas verbally, communicated through paintings on walls, and then on stone tablets with chisel and hammer. Then, paper transformed the process of idea exchange; pages of ink could be strung together and arguments could be passed around more easily. Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, allowed for authors to distribute hundreds of thousands of copies of their ideas and work within their lifetimes, and quite literally altered history forever. Less than two hundred years after the invention, Bacon summed it up, saying that the press had “changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world.”
Posted in technology by .
As you know, every once in a while we throw in a review of a stand-out book that may or may not have anything to do with social media, search optimization, marketing, or even business, in general. Buy-In, by John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead, however, is one of the most valuable business books I’ve read in years (thanks again @digitalv). The short book is based on the principle that any proposal will only come up against resistance in four forms
- Confusion
- Fear-mongering
- Death by Delay
- Ridicule or Character Assassination
These four strategies of attack exist independent of motive. That is to say, it doesn’t matter why the person wants to submarine your idea or proposal; they could do it because the success of your proposal means the reallocation of resources away from them, because they genuinely believe holes in the proposal exist, or simply because they don’t like you as a person. None of this matters, however, because the responses for each attack do not change based on the attacker’s motive.
Posted in book reviews by .
Feb 11
11
Engaging Social Content – Home Depot
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
By this point, you’ve built out your brand’s social media garden, linked the plots together, and created a rich soil of base content. Now before we can cultivate the crowdsourced insights, user-generated content, and organic brand engagement and evangelism from our social media garden, we must nourish the seeds with compelling brand content. How do we create the daily nutrients that lead to a successful social media harvest? By understanding the three elements at play: our audience, our brand, and social content.
As a Community Manager, if you’re wondering where to start, then you will find creative direction in answering two questions. The first is “Who is my audience?” and the second is “Why are they here?” with “here” being your Facebook Page, Twitter feed, YouTube Channel, etc.
For Home Depot, their audience is a broad swath of do-it-yourself’ers, and it only takes a glance at the brand’s value prop to answer the second question: “You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.” Home Depot’s first layer of daily content needs to focus on home improvement DIY jobs. These can take the form of checklists, advice nuggets, how-to video segments, etc.
Posted in tactics by .
Feb 11
8
Social Media Week NYC – Tuesday
Just finishing up a long day in NYC for Social Media Week; saw some awesome presentations and panels, met some very cool people, got two new foursquare badges, and certainly looking forward to getting back to the office tomorrow to get to all the work that has piled up in my absence.
It is always a tricky task planning your itinerary for these conferences. Do I go to an event super relevant to my job, where I know exactly what everyone is saying, and where I’ll probably only glean one or two bits of juicy information; or do I go to some events that sound really interesting, but where I know only a little about what is being discussed, and therefore learn much more on a broad, absorbing level? We went with a mix of both today, but in general, I tend to lean towards the latter. Overall, some important insights and learnings from today during the three events that I attended.
Posted in events by .
Jan 11
6
Social Landscape Review: Q4 2010
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
The fourth quarter of 2010 was rife with change in the social space. Let’s take some time to look back at what the last three months have brought.
October
- Facebook Groups – Historically, with only 5% of users building out Lists, Facebook needed to solve privacy and relevancy problems in a new way. The October 7th release of Facebook Groups took aim at both, allowing users to build out organic groups of connections to share specific sets of information with. Because users can tag each other into their Group, much like photo tagging, each action resulted in a more relevant experience for everyone, rather than building a List of friends that would then exist in a vacuum.
- Facebook-Bing Partnership - While Bing isn’t threatening Google’s search dominance any time soon, the relationship between Facebook and Microsoft is significant. Within Bing search results, you’ll see friends of yours who have marked items in their interests on their Facebook profile. Whatever you’re searching for on Bing, the idea is that the results will be more relevant if they’re tied to your social graph.
- Twitter Promoted Accounts – When users follow an account on Twitter, they are presented with other accounts that are similar to the one that they just followed. Now, brands will be able to purchase the marquee spot on that list, reserved for Twitter’s Promoted Accounts. For those roughly 40 advertisers, including video game manufacturers and movie studios, Promoted Accounts may have a large impact on their Twitter presence; for now, however, the feature is still too new for most brands to leverage.
- Facebook Friendship Pages - This new feature on the Facebook platform is one that attempts to strengthen ties between connections using data that already exists. Friendship Pages are essentially an amalgamation of the digital exchanges and common interests that you’ve had with another user over time. If anything, Friendship Pages create a stronger link architecture across the global social graph.
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This post originally appears on Jeff Gibbard’s Social Media Philanthropy Blog.
Because much of the content on a Facebook Page is dynamic and being pulled in using frames, and therefore not necessarily being read or indexed by search engines, it‟s essential to maximize the effectiveness of the areas of your page that search engine spiders can read. There are two ways to make your Facebook content more effective: focus on the areas that are readable by engine spiders, and make those areas more findable for those spiders. By keeping both of those objectives in mind, you‟ll be making every piece of content on your Facebook page work harder to bring qualified traffic to your page. Let’s analyze the popular Levi’s Facebook Page.
Tab: Wall
Anything that you post to your own wall will be included in the page‟s source code and available for indexing by search engines. This is important because you have full control over the copy that you post on your wall; everything from the actual status update, to the title of the photo album or video, to the snippet that auto-populates in your post when you attach a link, should all be written primarily for your audience, and secondarily for search engines. Whenever possible, maximize the effectiveness of your content by using relevant keywords in your copy to help search engines understand what the content is about and increase the likelihood of mapping your content to the desired keyword. For example, in this post, it may have made sense to include “Levi‟s jeans” instead of simply “Levi‟s” so that we‟re clearly telling the search engines what this post is about:
Posted in seo social networks by .
Optimize what is being indexed (in green), don’t focus on what isn’t (in red). For the original post, see Facebook and SEO: Where To Focus [Levi's].
Wall:
Posted in seo social networks by .
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
The Internet is no longer a series of tubes; it’s a vast social experience that allows people to communicate and interact with one another while simultaneously absorbing and creating content. While links and keyword-rich copy are still the building blocks of search relevancy on the Web, Facebook is the hub for social relevancy. When a website can harness a user’s social graph, it makes the content that is being delivered that much more socially relevant.
On December 16th, Facebook unveiled its new Registration Tool, giving websites another option for social connectivity, alongside Instant Personalization and Facebook Connect (aka Single Sign-On). All that the Registration Tool does is populate a registration form with data from your Facebook profile; sounds simple right? With registration forms, simple is the name of the game. Each additional click results in user drop-off, so the fewer clicks, the better. In beta tests, FriendFeed increased signups by 300% after implementing Facebook’s Registration Tool.
Posted in social networks by .
Oct 10
22
Facebook Groups: A Places Play?
This post originally appears on the Stuzo Insights Blog.
The October 7th announcement of Facebook Groups, which also introduced two other features, was initially met with a mixed reaction, as people tried to understand why Facebook was creating a feature that would replace the value of another feature (Lists) but would share the name of a third feature (old Groups). In short, Groups solves a set of problems: privacy, information overload, relevancy, and virality.
Posted in social networks by .
Jed Singer – Socialight Media
Jed Singer is an Engagement Associate at Stuzo in Center City Philadelphia. The views and comments in the Socialight Media Blog are those of Jed Singer and not necessarily those of Stuzo.