As Facebook Timeline has been rolled out for individual profiles, there has been much talk about whether Timeline will also be a reality for brand Pages and when this will happen. Usually whenever new features have been rolled out for Profiles, this will eventually also be adapted to Pages, as they are of course similar in many ways.

According to Facebook (via Mashable), Timeline for Pages will NOT become a reality in the near future, as they are more focused on adjusting Timeline for profiles at the moment. However, As Facebook also wishes to make a consistent experience in both functionality and appearance, my guess is that it is a matter of time before Timeline will also be implemented for brand pages.

And what will this mean for Pages? First of all, Timeline will be a huge shift in the way we experience Pages and how content is displayed. But we also have to remember that most people view content in their Feed and not on the actual Page. So the new Timeline design will mainly have an impact on those those who are visiting a Page for the first time, maybe deciding whether to Like or not. And in those cases, to have a powerful look and feel of the page can be crucial.

With the cover photo, brands will get better opportunity to showcase their products, services or to emphasize their visual identity to the user. In general, Timeline gives more opportunities of displaying visual content as it is possible to use the entire width of the two colums. And just as in the case of individual profiles, brands would probably benefit to from going through their Timeline to decide what pieces of content to emphasize. With Timeline, it will probably also be possible to add content back in time – for instance adding photos to a previous event.

Having this said, most people engage with Pages is through the News Feed, which means that those who already Like your page would rarely or never visit your Page as they are more interested in the updates you make. So to have an impact on your fans, not much will change: it is still about creating meaningful and engaging content for your users.

Let us know if you have any input on Timeline for Pages – how do you think it will work?

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Recent comment count on Facebook brand pages is going up, just proving that now, people accept social media as an effective method of communicating with their brand and entering a conversation.

These comments can obviously be both positive and negative and can suddenly spring up in quantities if your update has a viral potential. A lot of brands on Facebook, like Coca-Cola or Disney, have a very large user base of loyal fans and in recent past they have received up to 2000 comments per post. Often in these situations, a community manager will find herself in a fix, unable to answer and respond to all of them. In such situations, we often tend to neglect the fact that every fan who has commented on the page has done so with an aim of making conversation with the brand and we resort to mass action tactics. Most importantly it is crucial not to hit the panic button and do the easy thing of deleting all the negative comments or even the entire thread.

To manage Facebook comments, here are some suggestions that I thought would be useful. The suggestions are based on a guest post by Jason Keath’s (the CEO of Social Fresh) for Mashable.

Declare commenting guidelines:
As mentioned in our earlier posts too, it is good for a brand to establish certain commenting guidelines for the fans on their page. This not only helps in controlling the comment flow, but also helps admins in moderation. Commenting guidelines also regulate the quality of content on your page and reduces unwanted comments as well as spam. Along with this, it also gives you an ability to remove comments from your page without explaining your decision for doing so.

Do not delete all negative comments:
Though its important to adhere to all the brand’s moderation guidelines, it is not advisable to remove all the negative comments. It is important for the brand to be transparent and stick to its guidelines, to live up to customer trust.

Practice worse case scenarios :
It is good to train dedicated people to handle your community as well as get some back-ups in case a crisis strikes. These employees should specifically be trained in how to handle a crisis in case there is a need to moderate and respond. Additionally, it is also good to work with some tools for community management. A lot of tools provide 24 hour support and manage workflow.

Comment overload could be periodic or regular, depending on the page. Sudden spurt in comments can effect the efficiency of the moderating team, therefore it is good to have back ups and use some tools. But it is also advisable to analyse the viability of new tools and adding full time members to your team.

So what do you think? Would you be romping up your community management tactics to accommodate comment overload?

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Did you know that the number 1 reason why people love Facebook is that it enables us to show our personality? To create an identity shows the human need for sense of community belonging and self-esteem. Social Design takes these facts into consideration, in order to bring true value to the community you aim to build.

This blog post explains what social design means for your brand’s social media presence and why it is essential when you develop applications on Facebook to increase attention and engagement among people.

The value of trust and personal relevance
With technology today, we can get answers we’re looking for right away, everywhere, at any time. When it comes to subjective questions such as “Which film should I see?” or “Which restaurant should I go to?” we turn to our community of trusted friends for recommendations. Based on our community’s feedback and input, we make emotional decisions. Social design is to create personal value by enabling interactions between people in a community.

Social Design is about human needs
It is in people’s nature to be part of communities. It is where we feel love and belonging. Through interactions within our community, we build our own identity and are able to reach self-actualization. Social Design can be compared to Marslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. We base our self-esteem on how the community sees us, which means that the community helps drive our identity. When creating a social experience, Facebook recommends in their Social Design Guidelines to take these three core elements into consideration:

• Community refers to the people we know, trust and who helps us make decisions.
• Conversations refers to the interactions we have with the people in our community.
• Identity refers to our own sense of self and how we are seen by our community.

Form your Community
Applications on Facebook aren’t social without other people. Introducting users’ friends into the application with help of social plugins automatically brings the pre established trust in a community. The more activity a user sees between the application and their friends, the more likely it is that they will interact. Further, the stronger associated emotion between the user and the community, stronger the bond and trust.

To build a community and a social product connected to your brand, you should create a clearly defined personality of your community; how it makes people feel and how it creates a sense of belonging. The personality of your community can be defined and communicated by some of the following elements:

• Values – All your content should be true to your values and believes. It is one of the core reason why people join your community.
• Benefits – People should be sure of what they gain by belonging to your community.
• Tone of Voice – People should recognise your community; the way you speak and act.

Enable Conversations
Interactions are what glue the identity and the community together. Interactions build trust. Our sense of belonging depends on how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from it.

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(R)evolution, is a series that connects you to the people, trends, and ideas defining the future of business, culture, and media. It features head honchos, who share their experiences and stories related to social media in their interview with Brian Solis. Currently the series is in its second season.

A recent episode of Revolution, which I found especially interesting, is with Bianca Buckridee, AVP of Social Media Engagement at SunTrust.

Bianca answers some very common questions, which any financial services organization operating in social media is bound to face- why would a bank need to connect with its customers on social media?

Do people talk about their finances online? And if she faced any challenges internally in getting everyone onboard with the SunTrust social media business programme?

Its clear that SunTrust has come a long way when it comes to social media, so I think it would be valuable to share some of the insights with you.

She points out that banks have to change, and deliver a service their customers demand or someone else will do so. If a bank talks about being customer centric, they should give their customers a platform to talk to them.

When going online, she realized there were a lot of conversations aimed at her bank, while SunTrust was not present on the channel to address them. Therefore, there was a need to listen and take action, which could not be done by contact centers. This made her look at social media as an option for her bank.

After staring on social media, the top management realized that the feedback was definitely an eye-opener, social media helped their brand become more customer centric and gave them an access to a huge amount of data, that would have otherwise been ignored.

It became easier to understand customer pain points and analyze their own processes, which were making their customers unhappy.

She then says a that platforms like Facebook and Twitter open their customer’s life to them and helps the bank to condition its response to the complaint. A quick look at a customer’s life may tell them about an unfortunate incident that happened in customer’s life, which might have led to him being aggressive with the bank.

On being asked if people actually like to discuss their finances online, she answered yes, but being a bank we need protect our client’s privacy. Social media does give us a platform to look at customer’s problems but we like to take it offline and discuss it further according to our clients preferred way of communication. This also makes the service more personalized.

Internal Road blocks:

One of the key issues that I often discuss with a wide range of different companies is the organizational working structure around social media. Getting everyone onboard in understanding how the world is changing and how we, as companies need to adopt these changes in our internal work streams, is often very challenging but highly interesting.

After watching the interview, I think Bianca had some very interesting learnings on this topic to share.

When being asked about the tight ropes she has been working on internally, she answered we have graduated from a closed model to an enterprise structure. She says that we are a team in which every department has a representation. People from HR, legal, and different LOBs are informed about the happenings within the social media team. They discussed the response framework with everyone. To keep up with the legal and compliance regulations, all the marketing campaigns are cross -checked with the legal team. Also to make sure that the information shared on the page is according compliance regulations, the team checks their page daily.

According to Bianca, what worked for them was the fact that they looped people in at the beginning and not the end of the process.

Another interesting concept was doing internal roadshows, which helped creating awareness in the social media department. According to her, this not only brought more people on board, but also brought new suggestions to the table.

Lastly, she says that I would see my efforts as a success if an unhappy client who complained on our Facebook wall came back to us and said that my bank actually listened to me and I am just not a number to them. While everyone today talks about ROI, to her engagement is critical.

You can see her complete interview here:

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While surfing through the net, I found an interesting campaign by Air China, using Facebook’s check-ins. Facebook places is one of the most neglected marketing channels and here it has been very effectively used.

The airline wanted to raise awareness among customers in Sweden about the fact that they flew to countries all over Asia and not just to China itself and still emerge as winners in Swedish markets.

Concept: They realised that people had already experienced Asia and one of the most evident ways to leverage that was through Asian cuisine. So Air China tied up with restaurants serving different Asian cuisines in Stockholm. The instructions were printed on the menus. The restaurants being only too happy to help out as it drove more customers into their premises.

People were asked to check-in to restaurants serving food from the countries that they flew to. All the check-ins were then added to a leaderboard on a Facebook app. Each week, whoever got more votes on the leader board got 2 tickets to Asia by Air China.

The contest gained momentum and lasted several weeks. It emerged as a win-win situation for both restaurants as well as Air China. Restaurants got more guests and Air China got more perspective customers who can speak for their brand. Personally, I feel that this was a smart campaign without any on the face sales as well as works like a lead generation mechanism.

Take a look at this video case study and do tell us how you found it :)

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Guest blog post written by Neeral Bhatt, who works as an SEO specialist for Orchidbox London. She is especially interested in online communities and social media. You can find her on Linkedin.

As mentioned in last week’s post on Mindjumpers Blog, Search Plus Your World is currently the biggest talking point in the online marketing community. In this post, I will talk about how you can maintain your site’s traffic by understanding the ways in which social media will influence your business’s rank in Google’s search engine.

The change is fundamental to users’ experiences online. When Google users search the web in the future, they will automatically be given information posted by those in their Google Circles as their top results, that is if you are logged into your Google+ account at that moment.

For example, when you search for ‘florists’, the top sites and links on the results page will be those  with mentions that your Google Plus friends have made of that topic. These social media results will appear first before public listings, ultimately affecting the way the user interacts with that page.

A number of commentators have pointed out that users may not know how to opt out of these social media-led search results, and as they are default they will affect a large number of users’ results. Therefore, businesses should think about adapting to them. But how can you use social media to make sure that your business continues to maintain a strong presence within Google’s rankings? As Google are currently discounting Facebook and Twitter results in “your world”, you inevitably have to concentrate on Google Plus.

Late in November 2011, Google Plus finally opened the doors for official brand pages on its social network. Google has already worked at removing early barriers to businesses, like the lack of multiple administrators for one account, and the network is become increasingly popular with encouraging rates of growth. You can also be assured Google are in this for the long haul, and are going to increasingly be working to build the Google Plus audience with online and offline advertising.

Here are a few tips for optimising your brand’s page to capitalise on the advent of “Search Plus Your World”:

• Get your brand into as many circles as possible

The more circles you are a part of, the higher you will get up the rankings via your mentions. Best of all, it doesn’t take months or years to break through into a high number of circles.

• Make use of inbound links

Google incentivises you to link to them by exchanging a photo from your brand in their search results for a link. Millions of quality inbound links are created in this way.

• Google brand pages are already public

Therefore, your ranking visibility isn’t limited by any privacy settings.

• Your content will be indexable

The full text of your posts, your images and videos are all made public. This is the content that you want users to +1 and link to other profiles in your circle. Google Plus also has better on-page optimisation and therefore will appear to web crawlers as complete sentences that don’t omit any words important to your message.

Search Plus Your World is already influencing the way everyone is thinking about their marketing. It is certainly going to be interesting to see what happens next.  Will you be signing your brand up?

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In January 2012, a report called ‘Global Social Media Adoption In 2011’ was published by Forrester. This report uses Forrester’s Social Technographics groupings to show how people around the world use social media. Technographic segmentation is a market research analysis tool used to identify and profile the characteristics and behaviors of consumers through the process of market segmentation. Further, companies can make use of this information for making their strategies, when operating in different parts of world.

The report is based on Consumer Technographics data in 18 countries across North America, Europe, South America, and Asia in order to examine social media behaviors around the world.

Having read through the report I thought it would be interesting to draw out different statistics to trace social media behavior of people around the globe and present some data to make companies understand the differences in social media adoption and behavior across different regions.

Regional social media adoption patterns:

Here are some brief take-aways from the report. Some interesting social media adoption trends that have been noticed, based on data collected from Consumer Technographics data in 18 countries across North America, Europe, South America, and Asia in order to examine social media behaviors around the world:

• Emerging markets like India, China, Mexico, and Brazil are in love with social media. Although overall Internet penetration in these countries is low, the consumers who are online show a high level of social media engagement.

• Social media users in the West prefer to consume rather than create. Online users in North America and Western Europe have the longest history with social media, and it shows: They have a much more passive attitude toward it.

• There’s no single picture of a European social media user. Users in different part of Europe have different social media content sharing and content creation habits.
• Japan doesn’t follow typical emerging Asian social media patterns: Some aspects of Japanese culture carry through to social media preferences: Japanese consumers have, for example, a preference for online anonymity.

The above mentioned facts are represented in form of this chart: (click to enlarge)

A look  at countries that show distinct social media behaviour: (click to enlarge)

What does this latest set of Social Technographics data mean for you?

Personally, I believe that combined with statistics, these suggestions can be quite useful for adding value to businesses. Here is a quick look:

• Move your social spending where it will have the greatest impact: Emerging markets (and some surprising Western markets) lead the world in social media adoption, while the UK and other traditionally social markets have fallen behind. If you’ve been putting all of your social efforts into the US and the UK, it’s time to shift your focus — and your budget — to the countries where users are more social.
• Don’t take a cookie-cutter approach to social media:Regional differences in social behavior require regionalized social media strategies.
• Don’t expect too much interaction from Western consumers: If you’re targeting users in Western markets, focus on giving them social content they can simply read or watch. Don’t focus your strategies — or your measurement — on interaction with your audience.
• Get ready for social on the go: Mobility and location data are starting to play a bigger role in how people use social tools. In 2011, one-third of US online users access social networking sites from their mobile phone at least monthly — and globally, more than 40% of Facebook’s users access the site through mobile devices.

From this report it becomes evident that social media has gone global, but usage patterns vary widely by country and regions, which is quite evident and well supported with data. It is a perfect read if you are looking to start working with social media at places across oceans or even within your region. Though the document is not available for individual purchase, you can contact the team for the purchase by clicking here.

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Social sharing is the backbone of social media. Every time a piece of content is sent out on a social channel, the aim is to have it shared and increase the brand’s visibility. Some even say if it doesn’t share, it isn’t there!

On our blog, we have already written about an infographic that talks about content sharing trends for the last 5 years and a study on content sharing pattern, but this infographic relates content sharing to brands as well gives some insights on who doesn’t share content on social media.

Voltier Digital & Plastick Media have put together a great infographic, with some interesting stats:

• 1000 people post to Tumblr every 60 seconds
• 2000 people check in to Foursquare every 60 seconds
• Social media accounts for 24% of all time spent online
• 250 million photos are uploaded to FB every day

Who doesn’t share content on social media?

Also interesting to note is the statistics for people who do not share content on social media.

• A look at Twitter stats shows that only 47% of Twitter accounts are active and half of the registered Twitter users follow 2 or lesser number of people.
• 11 % of Facebook accounts are inactive.

Social media and brands:

The infographic presents some great trends for social media used by brands for promotions:

• It has been noticed that 70% of adults who use social media also shop online.
• 53% of active networkers follow a brand on social media.
• 60% of those who use digital methods to research about the products they intend to buy, learned about it on social media sites.

For more statistics, here is the infographic:

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At a press event yesterday, Facebook announced that they will go ahead with the extension of the Open Graph. This entails that 60 social apps are going live on Facebook, including Foursquare, Airbnb, eBay, Runkeeper and TripAdvisor among others.

The apps are part of Facebook’s Open Graph revamp already unveiled at F8 September last year. Actions and gestures were expected to be the next tool in the Facebook arsenal after the social plugins.

This means that activities from these different apps can be included in user’s Timeline and show up on their friends’ Ticker and News Feed. The social apps are similar to the Like-button, only now you can do other activities apart from only “liking” things.

Open Graph explained

Basically Facebook’s Open Graph is the core idea of Facebook – that you are connected to friends, you can interact with each other, you can see what they like, what music they listen to and what articles they have read on the internet etc. The idea that everything can be expressed through your Facebook profile is all part of the Open Graph.

With the continuous development of the platform, Facebook keeps expanding on the functionalities and thereby also the Open Graph. When they announced their social plugins two years ago, this suddenly meant that what you liked outside of Facebook could be shown on your Facebook profile as well. With the latest extension you can also show a variety of other things on your profile.

Facebook’s idea is thus to incorporate as much of what you do in your real life into your Facebook profile, so that you can share who you are with your friends online.

Add apps

When allowing Apps to your profile, you can choose who you want to share activity with. If you feel like trying out some of the new apps, you can add them to your profile here:
https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline/apps

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SOPA and PIPA are making headlines worldwide. A lot of websites are closed or gone dark as a protest against SOPA bill introduced in Senate. The New York Times even calls it the great “Firewall of US”.

But the question is how does it affect us?

A quick look at SOPA:

• Gives the government the right to unilaterally censor foreign websites.

• Gives copyright holders the right to issue economic takedowns and bring lawsuits against website owners and operators, if those websites have features that make it possible to post infringing content.

• Makes it a felony offense to post a copyrighted song or video.

• SOPA says that a site can be shut down for a single infringing link — even if it’s a link you didn’t post.

How does it affect social media industry?

If the bill gets passed and if by any chance it comes to shutting down Facebook and YouTube even for a day, it will lead to a lot of invested resources lost for brands that have dedicated huge budgets to their social media operations.

Also, while talking about creativity, discussions and relationships on social media, such a bill could limit the content sharing a lot more than preempted right now.

Personally, I feel that people sitting behind closed doors, who might not have an imagination of how the new world works, are not the right ones to make decisions, that can have such drastic implications to both economy and innovation. Such a decision could only mean that they are not focused on the bigger picture and it would be really sad to see an “intelligent” government make such poor decisions for our future.

Well, only to reiterate passing of SOPA in my opinion would be similar to how the world have gone into a global recession because of powerful lobbying by the financial sector and bad governmental foresight.

For mass users:

Mass users might not have taken this seriously and even closing down of Wikipedia for a day might not have caught their attention. But they are sure to realize the far-reaching implications of this bill once it is passed…but can we do anything about it then? ..maybe maybe not !

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