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Effects of the Facebook News Feed Redesign for Brand Pages

Friday, November 6th, 2009

There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about the recent changes Facebook has put into place surrounding the home page news feed.  As of October 23rd, Facebook re-introduced the “pre-filtered” news feed which has been missing since March 2009, when the real-time live feed was introduced.  Users now have a choice to view the pre-filtered “news feed” or the real-time, un-filtered “live feed.”

So, what does this mean for managers of brand pages?

Because the pre-filtered news feed is the default option for all users, it means less fans are going to see your posts, by default.  How much less?  By analyzing customer data collected in Vitrue’s SRM (Social Relationship Manager) application suite, we’ve determined that, on average, there are approximately 57% less interactions and 30% less clicks on wall posts.  By interactions we mean likes and comments. This analysis compared multiple categories of posts from the 3 weeks prior to the change versus one week after the change and covered multiple Vitrue clients.

Effects of the Facebook News Feed Redesign

Why is this happening?

According to many industry insiders, including Justin Smith @ Inside Facebook, the algorithm which determines the content included in an individual user’s pre-filtered news feed takes into account the following:

- How many people (and especially your friends) comment on and like stories from Pages you’re a fan of
- Which Pages you visit frequently
- Which Pages you interact with frequently

With this change, it appears Facebook is adopting an “earned placement model” similar to Google search, at least with regards to this new default pre-filtered view.  Users that like the real-time “live feed” view can always change to it very easily and leave that as their default, but it’s likely a significant portion of users will continue to use the default served up to them by Facebook (as demonstrated by the 57% reduction in interactions measured by Vitrue SRM).

Another interesting element is that pages you frequently visit and interact with are more likely to appear again in your news feed.  This makes sense that your news feed would have items Facebook “thinks” are more relevant for you, but it also means Facebook is encouraging brand pages to have fans to visit their brand page instead of leaving Facebook for external sources through wall posts. There is also what appears to be a “Catch-22″ when it comes to earning more engagement on a wall post to earn placement in the pre-filtered news feed.  How do you get engagement on a wall post if users never see it in the first place in order to engage with it?

So, what do I do now?

All this is definitely encouraging page owners to create higher quality content which begs to be engaged with, which will keep users coming back for more interactions and more page visits, within the Facebook ecosystem.   How do you know what’s higher quality content? Facebook has a generic “post quality” rating they introduced this year which is a directional indicator of all of your posts.  But if you’re looking for more detailed information, the Vitrue SRM provides comprehensive information on click-throughs, comments, likes and moderation capabilities to analyze each post in detail.

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Posted by Chad Estes in Facebook, Social Media Measurement, Vitrue Social Relationship Manager | 9 Comments »

Status Tagging From Facebook – Why it Matters for Brands

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Earlier this week, Facebook announced that status tagging was opened up to all users.

The new tagging features make it easy for a user to link to any friend, page, group or event by using the @ function and choosing from a provided list (drop down determined by your friends, pages, groups and event).

The new functionality is powerful and I wanted to break down the opportunity for brands in particular.

As a user, a post now becomes more interactive when I call out a brand by using the @ symbol before their name.  By using the @ symbol, the brand name is then automatically hyperlinked to their page, making it easy for my friends to navigate to it.

Facebook Status Tagging User Example

Facebook Status Tagging User Example

Your post then appears in the feed of all your friends and is also posted on the brand wall:

Facebook Status Tagging User Comment on Brand Wall

Facebook Status Tagging User Comment on Brand Wall

Result for brands: Now much easier way for a fan to talk to a brand without having to go to the brand page and still provides the same viral benefits by sending the comment to my friends.

Additionally, as Inside Facebook cites, “Page managers will now have a major new channel for tracking comments and feedback about their brand or business. Until today, brands have been able to track posts and comments made on their Facebook Page directly by fans, as well as search public comments made by Facebook users through Facebook’s new real time search. However, starting today, all @ tags will appear on the wall of the Page as well, even though users never visited the Page. That’s a big deal for Page administrators hoping to gain more insight into how they’re being talked about inside Facebook.”

We are excited about the new tagging feature and how brands will incorporate this new functionality in the way they engage and listen to their most passionate consumers.

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Posted by Chad Estes in Facebook, Facebook Best Practices from Vitrue, Vitrue | No Comments »

To Tweet or not to Tweet, via Facebook

Friday, August 21st, 2009

The Facebook world is abuzz with the news yesterday that Facebook has released it’s first official Twitter application which allows page admins to integrate with a Twitter account to automatically publish from Facebook to Twitter.  Options allow posts from status updates, photos, links, notes and events.

While the thought of broadcasting your Facebook updates via a more public medium of Twitter is exciting to many marketers and page owners, serious brands should think carefully about how to use this feature before they jump in head first.

First and foremost, Facebook status updates allow 420 characters while Twitter only allows 140 characters.  Facebook is no dummy and has built in automatic truncation which creates a link back to a dedicated Facebook page to show the entire message. This makes sense, but for some, this redirection might appear out of context when not coupled with the rest of your brand page.

Facebook status update as seen from a Twitter link

Facebook status update as seen from a Twitter link

In addition, truncated messages and other links are automatically pushed through bit.ly which makes all of it’s click through data public for the world to see.  Do major brands really want to share their click through data with the world?  Probably not, and many of them may not realize that’s what is happening with bit.ly.

You probably saw last week, Vitrue announced the release of our Social Relationship Manager application suite, allowing brands to post professionally formatted link for both FB and TW, coupled with private click through data. As a company, we are comprised of marketing technologists and focus exclusively on providing brands solutions to help you obtain your social marketing objectives. Simply put, the SRM is built for marketers, BY marketers.

So, I’m not saying that major brands shouldn’t use this new Twitter application from Facebook.  I’m saying it should be tested properly with careful consideration as to how it fits your overall communication strategy.  At the end of the day, updates to Facebook fans and updates to Twitter followers are NOT the same, in many ways.

Think of it this way: does a TV commercial automatically translate to a radio commercial?  Not quite.

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Posted by Chad Estes in Vitrue | No Comments »

Facebook Best Practice Series from Vitrue: Page Features

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

In our last blog post in this series we covered our recommendations on best practices for executing wall posts for your brand in Facebook.  Today we’ll cover some key thoughts on how to structure your Facebook public profile and which features are expected by users today.

  1. Balanced Info. How much information and how many tabs should you have on your Facebook page?  Just ask Goldilocks.  You want enough information to keep your users engaged but not so much it’s information overload.

    Example of Effective Tab Structure

    Example of Effective Tab Structure

  2. Boxes are so 2008. When Facebook launched major updates to Facebook pages a few months ago, a lot of the original content was relegated to the “Boxes” tab just like it was for personal profiles.  Things were starting to get cluttered and disorienting on personal and brand pages, which is most likely why the switch was made.  You can tell which brands haven’t updated their pages when you see a bunch of info on the Boxes tab, aka, the bucket of left over information from the days of infinite scrolling.  Users expect intuitively named tabs so they know where they are going when browsing your page – not a bunch of random stuff in a Boxes tab.
  3. Vanity URLs. As most know by now, Facebook is now offering vanity URLs that help with recall and ultimately SEO (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/vitrue).  Check out our earlier blog post for details.
  4. Exclusive Fan Offers.  With a little know-how you can easily give special offers only to your Facebook fans.  They love this kind of stuff.  At Vitrue, we do this all the time for our clients. It’s a very powerful and simple way to build your fan-base.
  5. Custom Apps. Many brands develop custom Facebook solutions to engage with their customers on a level beyond the standard Facebook features to help differentiate from the competition.  In many cases these custom solutions provide key viral discovery components, which share activities with friends via news feeds and notifications.  These features help spread the word and keep users coming back for repeat visits.

If you’re new to setting up your public profile (e.g. brand page) to Facebook then don’t try to do everything at once.  Build out a schedule for yourself and enable features as you become comfortable and can get a handle on how much effort is required for maintaining interaction with your fans.  And remember, we’re well beyond web 2.0 and you want to keep things nice and clean so users can find what they are looking for easy breezy.

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Posted by Chad Estes in Facebook, Facebook Best Practices from Vitrue, Vitrue | No Comments »

Facebook Best Practices Series from Vitrue: Wall Posts

Friday, June 5th, 2009

As Facebook continues to evolve, we wanted to launch a series of posts designed to provide thoughts on how to best manage your brand on Facebook. We will be looking at a variety of topics ranging from compelling page features, to applications that work, to metrics that matter to keeping and engaging fans. Today’s post will cover some insights on how most effectively to post to your wall.

As many already know, a few months ago Facebook launched several enhancements to brand pages (aka public profiles).  The most dramatic change allows a brand’s wall posts to appear in a user’s home page stream, which opened up a whole new avenue to connect and interact with consumers.  Facebook brand pages also got a structural makeover which now incorporates a tabbed structure similar to personal profiles.

Here are some tips to make sure you’re resonating with your fans when posting to your wall and not annoying them to death:

1.  Social media is a more informal landscape than traditional media where users expect to interact and communicate with brands on a more personal level.  So your communication should be more personal too.  Balance promotional offers with conversation. Don’t just use wall posts to shove promotion after promotion down their throats or they will likely turn away.

2.  Yes, Facebook is more informal and laid back but that doesn’t give you a license to be sloppy.  Take time with your posts to make sure they are formatted properly and links are clearly distinguished and shortened where possible (i.e tinyurls).

3.  Your fans may absolutely LOVE your brand, but that doesn’t mean they want to get a phone call from you 5 times a day.  That’s worse than a needy girlfriend/boyfriend.  Try to limit your wall posts to around 3 times a day max. Every brand will vary but the point is – find a healthy balance.

4.  Keep in mind that a user’s home page stream is live and real time information and the very bottom of it is only about an hour old.  So, make sure to post when people are checking Facebook (typically first thing in the morning, just before or after lunch and in the evening). Create a schedule just like you would for any media.

5.  Want your fans to help spread your message to their friends?  Of course you do!  That’s where the handy Facebook “share” function comes into play, which is automatically included on every wall post using the Facebook “links” app.  Use it as often as possible.

Facebook comment example MGM Grand
Facebook comment example MGM Grand

6.  Remember, users are here to interact with your brand, so do your best to respond to user comments and wall posts.  9 times out of 10 they will love you for it and tell all their friends how cool it was to get a response.

Of course, this is just a subset of things you can do on Facebook to market your brand and interact with your customers using your wall.

What have you found to work most effectively when posting to your wall on Facebook?

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Posted by Chad Estes in Facebook Best Practices from Vitrue, Vitrue | 1 Comment »

Does social value translate to overall brand value?

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Many people question if a brand’s marketing efforts in social media are going to deliver results.  That’s a good question, but what kind of results?  Brands use marketing to accomplish a number of different objectives from brand awareness to direct response sales.  There’s also general brand loyalty and customer retention to consider.

Interbrand developed its own method for valuating the best global brands and it does so on an annual basis.  The result is a ranking of the 100 most “valuable” brands, which includes the likes of Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft.  Vitrue also released its own list, The Vitrue 100, which is a ranking of the 100 most “social” brands.

We thought it would be very interesting to do a thorough comparison  of the two lists to see if social value translates into overall brand value.  After all – doesn’t a brand want people talking about their brand and products?  Isn’t that why big brands spend millions on Super Bowl commercials, so people will talk about their brand and eventually buy their products as a result of those discussions?

Some interesting findings were discovered from our comparison of the 2008 rankings of the Vitrue 100 and the Interbrand 100:

  1. 68% of the Interbrand 25 are also in the Vitrue 100.  Key examples include Coca-Cola (Interbrand #1 and Vitrue #22); Microsoft (Interbrand #3 and Vitrue #11); Apple (Interbrand #24 and Vitrue #3)
  2. Some key brands with a large percentage change in Interbrand’s ranking from 2007 are ranked highly in the Vitrue 100.  For example, BlackBerry wasn’t even on Interbrand’s list in 2007 but jumped into spot #73 in 2008 and sits at #20 on the Vitrue 100.  Could their recent social activity be playing a part in the brand’s overall value?
  3. A number of brands have VERY similar ranking on both lists, further demonstrating a correlation between the two lists:
  • Disney = Interbrand #9 and Vitrue #4
  • Honda = Interbrand #20 and Vitrue #25
  • Pepsi = Interbrand #26 and Vitrue #30
  • Volkswagen = Interbrand #53 and Vitrue #58
  • Porsche = Interbrand #75 and Vitrue #74
  • BP = Interbrand #84 and Vitrue #86

So to answer the original question, “Does social value translate to overall brand value?”  The answer is YES!

Just ask Aaron Strout, who heard about the Vitrue 100 and compared the Interbrand (retail) rank and Vitrue rank of Best Buy in his MediaPost blog update noting that “[being social] does play a key role behind the prestigious “most valuable brand” ranking.”

While social activity does not represent the entire picture of a brand’s overall perception in the marketplace or overall value, it’s already become an extremely important component.  Purchase decisions on many products and services in today’s market are largely driven by personal recommendations rather than traditional forms of advertising and marketing.

According to a Forrester Media & Marketing Survey, “83% of online consumers turn to friends or acquaintances” regarding purchase decisions.  This holds true for me personally too.  I’m in the market for a new SUV and have received great feedback from friends on Facebook, which is influencing my decision far more than commercials on TV.

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Posted by Chad Estes in Social Media Index, Social Media Measurement, Vitrue | 4 Comments »