The good bits:

• Onsite reactions to content such as comments, ratings, poll participation, etc.
• Offsite reactions to content such as active backlinks (i.e. backlinks that are clicked), reviews (negative ones adversely affect rankings),  and more recently, social reactions such as “Tweets”, “+1s”, LinkedIn “shares” or Facebook “likes”/ “recommends”

The infographic below, created for IKEA, is a recent example of active content planned and produced by MBA.  Enjoy.

Source: The Kitchen Blog – IKEA.co.uk

Why is this happening?

The simplest answer is: you haven’t tailored your campaign for social media.

Brands (and agencies) think this means just repurposing content, or creating a tab (a separate page within the page) on Facebook. Wrong! If your content is not inherently ‘social’, adding an extra step (visiting a tab) is going to make it even less so. A tab has to have a purpose, one that is not just putting a lot of content in it (if you can just share it on the page).

So what can you do to create content, and campaigns, that perform well on Facebook and other social media channels?

1)      Learn from your audience. What do the like? What do they hate? With every post, they’re talking to you and expressing, at times quite harshly, their taste.

2)      Keep. It. Short. When’s the last time you watched a 5 minute video on Facebook?

3)      Make it fun, engaging. Don’t just ‘broadcast’ content. But ask people to tell you what they think of it.

4)      Give them something. As trivial as it might sound, people like prizes, and exclusivity. Whether it’s the chance to win what you’re promoting, the chance to be part of your ads, or something similar, this will draw attention to your content.

And then the ultimate recommendation to make things work in social channels: make it shareable. Has your content the shareability factor? Does it make people go ‘wow’ ‘hilarious’ ‘crazy’ ‘I have to share this’?

So, am I saying you shouldn’t create campaigns if they don’t tick some of the points above? No, not at all. But different channels call for different measurements of success. What works on TV, print, etc might not work at all on your social channels. If you want a social media campaign, tailor it for social media.

But if you have a great ad campaign, you should then manage your clients’ or internal expectations. If the campaign is not tailored for social, then social results shouldn’t really be part of the KPIs.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the changes:

1. Users can create a timeline. This is effectively an online scrapbook allowing us to chronicle the big moments in our lives. This will only be for users so there’s nothing for brands to implement at this stage.

2. Media is becoming a bigger part of social media. As Mark Zuckerberg suggested earlier in the year, Facebook are partnering with a swathe of media companies (from the Guardian to Spotify and Netflix) to allow people to consume content from with Facebook. You will then be able to see what your friends are watching or listening to in the new ticker (I’ll mention that in a mo). With content at the heart of Facebook moving forwards there is now a bigger emphasis on brands to make their branded content worthy of publishing. (see my previous post here)

3. As I just mentioned there is a new ticker, located in the top right corner. Having confused people for a couple of days as to its need, we can now see that this is to cope with all of the new content that we’ll be able to see in the traditional news feed. This layout will mean that people can access content while still keeping in touch with people – which is the overall aim of Facebook in the first place.

4. One key area that potentially means good things for brands is “Gestures”. Unsurprisingly, not everybody who uses Facebook likes the ‘Like’ button, both its name and what it means. As a consequence we’re going to be able to use any verb we like. So we can have ‘watch’ or ‘play’ or whatever suits our apps in place of like. This is a good thing for brands who advertise using Sponsored Stories. One of the problems with SS in the past has been when, for example, a video has launched it has been tricky to deliver much inventory as this required people to have liked your video. With ‘softer’ gestures such as ‘watch’, people will be more inclined to watch the video which will then trigger SS ads.

There are some other smaller features such as the length of updates can now be up to 5,000 characters (ten times more than the previous length), potentially removing the need for ‘Notes’, although Notes do allow us to file things into neat locations.

Of course, it’s been development season for Facebook and this comes off the back of their attack on Twitter with the Subscribe button, making Facebook a bit less friendy and more followy (http://mashable.com/2011/09/15/facebook-subscribe-users/)

If you’d like to find out more here are a few useful links:

http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebook-changes-roundup/

http://mumbrella.com.au/what-does-facebooks-facelift-mean-for-brands-58820?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mumbrella+%28mUmBRELLA%29

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/09/22/what-f8-means-for-advertisers-the-ability-to-target-users-based-on-media-consumption/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InsideFacebook+%28Inside+Facebook%29

http://mashable.com/2011/09/22/facebooks-changes-marketers/

MediaCom had a strong presence there, with people from Mediacom Beyond Advertising, Communications Planning, Investment and our Challenge and Inspire dept. attending; here are a handful of our take outs:

Facebook itself is boring, and produces no content of value It’s the people you know on Facebook who make it valuable to you, essentially you are creating your own world. This isn’t new news by any means, but it is an important point to be remembered.

Our highlights:

-          “Move fast and break things” – my personal favourite quote of the day

-          “This journey is 1% finished” – a nice reminder for anyone working in emerging media, that unfortunately, we will never be finished!

-          “Throw good away, in pursuit of great”.

-          The Hack session – everyone always enjoys getting stuck into a live brief

As I mentioned, a key area being  discussed by attendees was measurement. The Facebook guys focussed on the power of a brands Likers friends; the aim being to get your messaging interacted with by Likers, and therefore in front of their average 130 friends (delivering reach and frequency), rather than focussing so strongly just  on how many Likes you actually have.

However, with no way to measure this reach into the ecosystem, I can see why brands revert back to counting Likes…there’s still a really long way to go in terms of measuring this halo effect, putting a value against it, and in making this data available to brands; so for me, this is the major area I’d like to see Facebook working on, and delivering tangible tools / answers.

There’s loads more we could talk about but in the interests of not boring you, we won’t. If you would like to know more, as always, feel free to comment below and we’ll get back to you.

(P.s. the new subscribe button = twitter follower relationship.)