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

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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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Change is a constant in the social media world – in the past few months alone we’ve written about significant changes to the user interfaces for both Facebook and Google+.  The ‘odd man out’ has been Twitter – the world’s 2nd biggest social network – which to date has tended to tweak rather than make radical changes. 

Until last week that is, when the new Twitter was unveiled. 

So what’s changed?  Well, there are 2 major developments to note.

 The first is the reorganisation of profile pages into 4 main sections – Home, Connect, Discover and Me. 

The ‘Home’ page will be familiar to existing Twitter users as it hosts the timeline. But as social media is growing in importance for all kinds of media sharing, all tweets will now be expandable to show the videos and pictures related to them.  Users will also be able to ‘open’ tweets to see information about @replies and retweets for any chosen tweet.  ‘Connect’ will be the hub for notifications – information about followers, retweets and replies, as well as suggestions for accounts users might want to follow.  And ‘Me’ is the area for users to access direct messages and lists and to change settings. 

But perhaps the most significant change is the addition of the ‘Discover’ section. This is designed to help people explore Twitter and find more relevant content for them, so users will be able to view content around topics that Twitter suggests based on the stories they’ve shown interest in or select activity which shows them the topics which are popular in their community. 

The second significant development is the introduction of ‘brand’ pages  – a move which for the first time overtly differentiates business profiles from personal profiles. 

These new pages give companies more of a destination for their brands rather than just a hub for conversation, and give them greater creative control over that destination than at present.  Brands will be able to customise the page with a large header image and tagline, as well as having the ability to ‘promote’ a tweet from their timeline, which will automatically expand to show related media content such as corporate videos or images. 

Brand pages are free but have only been rolled out to 21 launch partners at present – including American Express, Coca-Cola, Heineken, Chevrolet and Disney – but by early 2012 they will be available to all businesses, both large and small. 

So what’s behind the changes?  For us, Twitter has 3 aims in mind. 

Firstly, they’re trying to make the site more user friendly and intuitive for new users, and in doing so hoping to grow their user base from its existing 300m. More users means a bigger advertising audience, and they’ll not want to be eclipsed by the fast growing Google+. 

Secondly, they’re trying to engage existing users more, particulary with features like the ‘Discover’ section – to get them to spend more time using the network, to discover new content and to share and interact with their community. Greater engagement means more inventory for advertisers and better response rates. 

Thirdly, they’re trying to create a better platform for brands to promote themselves.  Now companies can give users the key information about their brands and showcase what they want to showcase, rather than visitors just ‘listening in’ to a snippets of their conversations with their community. 

However, this is just the start. These changes are about getting a framework in place to build further developments upon so we’re sure that brand pages will allow increasing customisation in the future – perhaps in a similar way to Facebook’s tabs. Maybe ‘T-commerce’ will be on the cards one day? 

For luxury brands, Twitter now offers a much more controllable showcase for their products with more promised in the future. And if the changes do succeed in further growing audiences and engagement, then Twitter could become an even more attractive proposition.

By: Graham Painter

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There’s been a debate raging about the value of social media activity for brands in the past couple of weeks.

The spark was some recent findings by TNS, the research body responsible for Digital Life, a global survey into the online behaviour of some 72,000 consumers across 60 countries.

TNS found that the majority of consumers in digital markets did not want to engage with brands via social media and that reticence to engage was at it’s highest in the UK, where 61% of consumers stated that they did not see social media as a place to interact with brands.

The survey also dealt an apparent blow to those contemplating a F-Commerce presence, with just 1/4 of respondents in developing countries seeing social networks as a place to buy products.

TNS’s own conclusion was summed up by it Chief Development Office, Matthew Froggatt:

 ’Many brands…are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified….Misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no-one reads.’

Additional research conducted by Edge Rank Checker seemed to drive another nail into the coffin of the notion that social media was an effective tool for marketers.  The study, conducted across 5,500 Facebook pages with more than 100,000 fans in October of this year, found that the average CTR of links shared by brands was 0.14% – that’s 1 click for every 714 impressions.  This may be a lot better than Facebook advertising and slightly better than online advertising, but is rather disappointing considering that Facebook fans should be more of a qualified audience given that fact they’ve opted in to receive those posts.

So are marketers wasting their time by trying to engage with customers and prospects via social media? We don’t think so, and it’s worth going back to the research to discover some of the reasons why.

For example, going back to TNS’s Digital Life research, 61% of consumers who don’t want to interact with brands via social media implies 39% that do – and 39% of the UK’s social media users is a pretty vast potential audience. And as more brands become involved in social media and offer consumers incentives for them to engage with them in this environment, that 39% is only going to increase.

The paltry CTR’s reported also tell only part of the story. Just because a post link isn’t being clicked on doesn’t mean it isn’t making an impression, in the same way that CTR is a poor way of measuring the effectiveness of online advertising.  And links are likely to get less clicks on Facebook because it’s users usually reticent to leave the social network.

However, where these studies do add value is to inject a dose of much needed realism into the social media debate.

Marketing is about identifying relevant target audiences and then selecting the channels that are most appropriate for the audience and the brand’s message.  Some brands seem to be throwing that thinking out of the window and taking a ‘channel first’ approach, deciding that they’re going to build a large following on twitter or Facebook without thinking whether the channel is appropriate for their message or whether their genuine prospects and customers are using that channel.

The danger is that brands can build followings who aren’t really in their target market, or are communicating via a channel which is not the best for what they’re trying to achieve.

Brands also need to realise that social media isn’t free – the time their staff spend posting and replying costs money too. Although social media is an emerging channel which surely has much unrealised potential in terms of RoI, no sensible debate can be had about its value to brands unless brands acknowledge the true investment they’re making in it.

The interactive nature of social media does present brands with an opportunity to build dialogue and advocacy with a proportion of their customers and prospects. But it is not the best solution for all customers and all tasks. Brands that realise this and use it with a balanced view of what it can achieve for their organisation are those likely to get the most out of it.

By: Carla Burgess

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