Despite being announced at the f8 Developers’ Conference in September, Facebook’s new timelines – a new way to present profiles from birth until the present – didn’t start to roll out in earnest until December.  However, the momentum of those changes gathered pace with the announcement of the release of 60 new timeline apps last week.

With the new apps, offered by the likes of travel review site TripAdvisor, the recipe network Foodily and film review site Rotten Tomatoes - people will be able to personalise their timelines dependent on their interests.  And once the user has loaded the app and decided what they’re going to share with who, their timelines will automatically be updated with their activity in that app in real time.

The potential rewards for brands are obvious. As apps are used, they create a constant stream of viral marketing messages that appear in friends newsfeeds and tickers.  Spotify’s music app is a prime example – one of Facebook’s original timeline partners, the music streaming site has netted an estimated 7m new subscribers since its launch. And Facebook announced with the release of these new apps that the door is now open for any brand to develop and submit their own app.

Even if brands don’t create their own apps, there may well be benefits to using existing apps for marketing purposes if they have an established Facebook audience.  Private galleries might share, or encourage visitors to share, their collections on art sharing app Artfinder,  food brands might create and share their own recipes on Foodily etc.

In addition to this development, Facebook has also announced the rollout of a new form of advertising – Featured Stories.  Featured Stories will work in the same way as Sponsored Stories – the ads will only appear to those people who’s Facebook friends have interacted with the advertiser.  But Featured Stories will appear, clearly flagged, in the friends’ newsfeeds rather than in one of the advertisng slots on the right hand side of the screen.

Featured Stories will be carefully rationed, at least at first, to one per newsfeed per day but it will be interesting to see what impact they have on click thru rates.  Featured Stories also open up the possibility of advertising to Facebook’s growing market of mobile users, although mobile users won’t be included in the initial roll out.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »

Google’s social network, Google+, has been making headlines over the past few weeks.

Firstly, the integration of personalized search results with public search results was announced with the introduction of Google’s ‘Search Plus Your World.’ Then, last week, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google+, launched just 7 months ago, had already reached 90m users.

So are Google, Twitter et al on the wane and should marketer’s be switching their focus to Google+?  There are plenty of reasons to justify such a view. But first, let’s look at how Google has integrated personalized results from Google+ into its search results.

With the roll out of  ’Search Plus Your World’, users who are logged into Google will not only see the ‘public’ search results from people they don’t know, but relevant content – posts, videos and photos – that has been made public or shared with them by their Google+ connections.  Those results will be clearly flagged as personal and can be switched off at any time using a simple toggle.

In addition, for those signed in, Google+ profiles will be part of the search query box. So those looking for people will find their search box populated with people with the same/similar names from their Google+ network or similar people who they might be interested in following.

Finally, when conducting searches, signed in Google users will find Google+ people profiles and pages related to that particular search delivered alongside their search results. These results may appear irrespective of whether the searcher is signed into Google, although if they are,  those profiles can be added to their Google+ network directly from the search results page without needing to switch to Google+ first.

 These 3 changes make a social network a 10th the size of Facebook leap in importance, and here’s why.

The benefits of creating a Google+ page, growing its following and creating search optimised content that others share  suddenly becomes more important for brands because of the integration with that great business driver for premium and luxury brands – search.

The more Google+ followers a brand has, the more likely that brand’s content is going to be shared and the more likely that content will appear in the personalised searches of those followers and their connections, driving more traffic to the brand’s site. And the more content that brand creates on its area of specialism and shares with its followers, the more likely it  makes it that the brand’s Google+ profile will appear in the recommended people and pages profiles within a Google search – increasing its Google+ following and its potential network of sharers and their connections.

An active and popular Google+ presence has the potential to become a key plank of search strategy. And as search is a more proven business driver for premium and luxury brands than social media, there is potentially a more direct link between social media activity and commercial returns than has been proven to date on Facebook or Twitter.

So should brands be prioritising Google+ at the expense of their Facebook and Twitter profiles?  Not yet, and that’s for 2 key reasons.

Firstly, marketers need to be where their consumers are and at present their consumers are much more likely to be on Facebook and (to a much lesser extent) on Twitter. The success of these new ideas depends very much on how consumers react to personalized search and whether enough are attracted by the benefits to create Google+ accounts and use them as their primary profile for connecting and sharing.  Google+ is growing fast but a proportion of its 90m users will have signed up because they’re using other Google services such as gmail rather than because their aiming to use it as their primary social network.

Secondly, this may be part of a game Google is playing with Facebook to increase its access to Facebook social graph data to enhance it’s own search results. Or indeed Google may be forced to integrate more of Facebook’s and Twitter’s social graph results into its search by antitrust legislators concerned at the extent to which Google is promoting its own product.  If Facebook is happy to supply more of its data to Google to fuel social search results, and Google is happy to integrate that data, then the reasoning for a Google + presence becomes less strong.

Our advice wouldn’t be to ‘wait and see’, however.  As we’ve advised in the past, we think brands should be setting up Google+ brand pages and beginning to post content optimised for search, even if re-purposed from existing Facebook and or Twitter posts. They should also integrate Google sharing buttons on their sites if they haven’t already.

Then, they need to watch their follower stats and natural search traffic carefully and use that as a guide to how Google+ is impacting their business. If Google+ does take off as a result of these new developments, it’s going to pay off most handsomely for those brands that aren’t playing catch up.

By: Graham Painter

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Dream Systems Media have just released an infographic containing a digest of essential social media facts compiled by AdAge (below).

We’ll let you digest them for yourself but we thought we’d pick out some of the highlights for you:

Facebook

 - B2C Facebook results are 30% above average on Sundays – but most brands only post Monday to Friday.

 - 77% of Facebook users said they interact with brands primarily through reading posts and updates, 17% by sharing experiences and news stories with others and 13% post updates about brands they like – a good benchmark for your own Facebook engagement levels.

 - 95% of Facebook wall posts are not answered by brands – brands aren’t leveraging one of the key assets of Facebook, the ability to have conversations with their customers.

 - 56% of consumers said they are more likely to recommend a brand to a friend after becoming a fan on Facebook – a commercial justification for brands to be participating in social media.

 - The 2 primary reasons brands are ‘liked’ are because the user is a customer (58%) or because they want to receive discounts and promotions (57%).

Twitter

 - 34%  of marketers have generated leads using Twitter and 20% have closed deals using Twitter – although it would be interesting to see sector specific figures.

 - Twitter updates that include verbs have a 2% higher shareability than the average tweet.

 - 40% of Twitter users don’t tweet, they just ‘listen’ – so many of those followers who look ‘inactive’ are probably ‘active’ after all.

Other

 - More people globally own mobile phones than toothbrushes!

By: Graham Painter

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