Further tips for improving your Facebook EdgeRank

In May we wrote a post on how to improve your brand’s Facebook EdgeRank (You can read that here). However, with many brands still unsure of what exactly it is and how vital it can be we have now outlined additional top tips to boost your Facebook EdgeRank.

There are now more than 750 million Facebook users. 50% of these users log on to Facebook on any given day and the average user has 130 friends. These statistics mean that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for friends and brands to gain a place on users’ News Feeds.

Optimising your Facebook EdgeRank – the unique algorithm which decides what posts appear in your Fans’ ‘Top News’ stream – is therefore becoming increasingly vital.

This algorithm ranks posts based on three main factors: affinity, weight and timing. The higher your ranking for these factors, the more likely your posts will be visible on a Fan’s ‘Top News’ feed.

Though there is no way to officially identify your EdgeRank score, using Facebook’s Insights tool is vital in gaining an understanding of how you are doing and how well you are interacting with your Fans. Insights can tell you how many active monthly users you have in relation to your overall likes. This will give you a clear indication of how high your EdgeRank is.

To put it simply, EdgeRank is all about engagement. EdgeRank is weighted so activities that require higher levels of user engagement get a higher score than those activities that don’t. For example you may want to consider asking an open ended question. This means the higher your engagement level with Fans, the higher your EdgeRank score will be.

Here are our Dos (and a Don’t) on how to increase engagement within Facebook and boost your EdgeRank:

DO:

Run a poll or competition

A good competition or poll not only drives interest in your Page but also increases engagement. They’re fun and actively ask users to interact with your content, increasing the number of ‘edges’ it receives. By building up excitement as the competition comes to a climax you can really build an engaged and receptive audience who are incentivised to interact with you.

Post videos

In our previous post on EdgeRank we recommended using rich media to stand out from your competition – but it’s a point that bears repeating. Videos rank highly compared to other ‘objects’ such as status updates. Not only this, when done correctly they are also easy to digest for the audience, are eye-catching on the page and can succinctly get your message across in an entertaining way. If you create your own videos this is a great opportunity to leverage already existing content you have on YouTube.

Ask questions

Another great tip is to phrase your Facebook post as a question. People generally won’t respond unless they are invited to, so this is a highly effective way of increasing engagement on your Facebook Wall. Social media is about conversations after all! What’s more, ask them questions that are brand relevant and you can gain insights into how your brand can better meet your audience’s needs.

Use links to share content

Social media is all about sharing. Posting links to interesting and relevant content produces a thumbnail for your post (helping it to standout) and also encourages people to click and share the information. You can use this to your brands advantage by driving traffic back to your site or social presences such as Twitter or Flickr for example.  There is also another benefit – creating links that direct to your other sites optimises your brand for search, meaning that it is easier for your audience to find you. This approach of sharing links not only helps with EdgeRank but also boosts SEO to increase your visibility amongst fans and non-fans.

Engage with your fans

It’s important to remember that when you Post it doesn’t mean your work is done. If someone responds to your Post take the opportunity to engage them in conversation. (This must be done in a timely manner and you should only respond if you can add value). This helps to build up a relationship and shows them that they are a valued member of your community. It’s also a virtuous circle as it will encourage more people to engage with your Page – in turn increasing your EdgeRank.

And finally

DON’T:

Autopost

Using tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck might seem efficient but it’s important to remember that, when it comes to EdgeRank, manual posts have more weight than posts automated through apps.

Your audience can tell which posts are automated or have been specifically written for Twitter (e.g. featuring hashtags) and which have been personalised – and for this reason autoposts do not produce as much engagement. Autoposts also have a tendency to disappear from your Fans’ News Feeds more quickly.

Why should you care about EdgeRank?

Optimising your EdgeRank means that your brand is found on your audience’s News Feed – and you are part of an exclusive and trusted club. You are able to talk to your audience every day, build greater engagement and you are ideally positioned to create deep, meaningful and long-lasting relationships with them. Understanding the benefits of Facebook EdgeRank and implementing our strategic insights can help create an engaged community, gain a trusted and receptive customer base and, ultimately, maximise your ROI.

How to monetise your Facebook presence

Social networks are becoming increasingly business minded. Facebook has always been a platform that has been aware of the commercial possibilities that it offers – and throughout the last year it has added features that show an understanding of the needs and interests of brands across industries.

The emergence of Facebook Deals, Facebook Credits and Facebook Commerce are all evidence of the platform’s willingness to offer brands opportunities to monetise their presence on Facebook:

Facebook Deals The launch of Facebook Deals is part of a growing trend where consumers increasingly use their mobiles instead of credit cards. It lets users ‘check in’ to venues via the Places feature on the Facebook mobile app. For example, through Deals, the first 30,000 Facebook users to check in at Starbucks stores in the UK could claim a free coffee. In this way, Facebook Deals provides brands and retailers with the opportunity to give fans offers and promotions directly when they Check-In near their store using their phones.

The benefits are clear:  brands can use Facebook Deals as a virtual loyalty card or coupon system. Since its  launch in January 2011, it has attracted a host of big name brands such as the aforementioned Starbucks, Argos and O2.

However it can also benefit smaller businesses, who sometimes find it difficult to see the benefits of having a Facebook presence. Deals provides them with a scalable, manageable, low cost way to offer discounts and encourage people to visit their store.

Facebook Commerce There’s a real feeling among a lot of people in the industry that F-commerce, as it has been named, is the second online commerce revolution. You can now rent films, book plane tickets, make donations to charities, purchase clothes and even buy Tomato Sauce – all through branded Facebook Store tabs.

The rise of F-commerce has transformed Facebook Pages, allowing brands to not only engage with fans but also sell to them. Brands can create a store within a Facebook tab, creating a retail environment that never takes the user away from Facebook. This provides brands with a huge captive audience.

Alternatively brands can utilise ‘Facebook-Facilitated On-Site Selling’which allows them to use a social plug-in to bring the Facebook experience to their websites. Using Facebook’s Open Graph API to retrieve the Likes and interests of the user also means brands can tailor their website to the user’s interests.

Facebook Credits On July 1st 2011 Facebook Credits became the mandatory virtual currency for buying virtual goods in games and apps on Facebook. And, even though Facebook seems to be content working at this level at the moment, the growth potential of Facebook Credits is huge.  It has already been used by brands like the BBC to pay for content.

The next step in Facebook Credits’ growth could be to embed a ‘Buy with Facebook’ button on every online retailer’s website so Credits becomes the currency to be used across the entire web, providing a fully integrated e-commerce solution.

Facebook monetisation – the bottom line A crucial part of any brand’s business strategy is obviously to monetise their social spaces. It also makes complete sense – it allows you to take your company to where your customers are.

There are more than 30 million people on Facebook in the UK alone (out of a global potential of over 700 million). The rise of monetisation opportunities such as Facebook Deals and F-Commerce means Facebook now provides a tangible difference to a business’ bottom line.

How to proactively manage your reputation online using brand ambassadors

As you will be aware, the reputation of a brand takes years of careful and meticulous development and maintenance – but it can all be lost in mere minutes. That’s why having a proactive reputation management programme in place is vital, both offline and online.

Online your company’s brand personality is communicated through many channels – your corporate website along with your social presence such as your Facebook Page, Twitter account, LinkedIn, Flickr and YouTube channels. Increasingly these are the first places that people will go to find information about your company, especially if a news story has just broken about your business.

Brands must therefore take a highly flexible approach to proactively manage their online reputation. Planning is key – there must be a comprehensive reputation management strategy in place and brands have to be ready for challenges as they occur, it’s no use simply being reactive and constantly fire fighting issues.

How to communicate your brand messages

Brand values and USPs must be powerfully and effectively communicated through these channels so your audience can receive and understand the messages you want them to know  about your brand. It’s also important to remember that your online presence is more than outward communication. Brands must be able to create multi-way dialogue between themselves and consumers so that these platforms boost and broaden your brand messages. This can be amplified by using brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors encapsulate and embody the vision and ethos of your brand. They help build a community who care about the brand they represent.  As well as acting as a diplomat for your brand, showcasing the product or service you offer in the best way possible.

Influential brand ambassadors can encompass internal stakeholders right through to passionate commentators. Each audience segment has enormous potential for influencing their peers and ensuring your brand’s success.

Social media and brand ambassadors

Social media provides the perfect channels for brand ambassadors to encourage brand advocacy. While ‘real people’ talking about brands is not a new marketing technique, social media has made consumers’ voices louder and more relevant than ever. People use social channels such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook everyday to make recommendations about brands – so creating a virtual community of brand ambassadors ensures your brand is authentically promoted by trusted individuals.

Peer-to-peer communication has been proven to be much more effective than traditional communications in influencing brand consideration and purchase. It’s therefore crucial that brands leverage the powerful voices of their brand advocates online. This not only drives sales but also creates a network of people who can engage with your audience and defend your brand’s reputation if it faces any challenges.

Nurturing brand ambassadors

Whether you are trying to create an internal or an external communications plan the end result is the same – to build up the reputation of your brand and what it offers. However, each campaign requires a different strategy. The key to any successful brand ambassador programme is to effectively harness the passion shown by these people and empower them to share their views. This is a complex task which requires dedication and a thorough understanding of engagement models and user behaviour. As well as understanding how to comply with the legal and ethical framework within your target market.

Creating brand advocates is different from gaining re-tweets or Facebook ‘Likes’. It is an extensive process based on analysing and identifying your most important audience groups, what they need from you and how you will engage with them. The next step is nurturing a long lasting relationship with influencers who actively connect with your brand. Forward thinking brands will take this a step further and leverage powerful networks of prominent influencers who speak directly to the target audience you are trying to reach.

Finding people who are potential Brand Ambassadors is the first step. It’s essential they are a good fit and have a respected presence online. This is achieved through analysing demographic data, online reach and content relevancy. From the very first time you contact an influencer this must be a very personal experience – sending out a mass email is not the way to create individual relationships.

Once you have identified and contacted your potential ambassadors, you must work hard to create a relationship with them. Engage them in conversations and nurture your connection with them. The end goal is to build real passion and engagement around your brand. Taking such a proactive approach to reputation management, rather than being reactive all the time, is good practice. It ensures that if you want to launch a new product or service or if a crisis hits, you have an existing community already in place.  An example of an existing network of influencers would be Brandvocacy – agency:2’s brand ambassador platform. Brandvocacy programmes can be activated in a timely and scalable manner for any organisation to amplify your brand messages.

More than this, through creating content and having it shared across the web, social media is increasingly influencing search and SEO. So, combining the power of your fans’ conversations online, together with the reach of your own messages on branded social channels, will have a big impact on your search results.

Brand ambassadors – powerful and trusted voices

The result of all this hard work is an extremely powerful voice for your brand which is well worth the time that it takes to foster these relationships. Businesses now have the power to engage online communities in new ways and leverage the power of these groups to create relationships with their audience. Brand ambassadors provide trusted, personal and, therefore, highly effective messages that engage audiences.

As social media’s influence continues to grow and grow, brand ambassadors have become a key part of a brand’s communication strategy. It is therefore imperative to leverage the voice of passionate influencers to promote your brand. They provide a unique way to humanise and personalise your brand, extend the reach of your message and help you to create a positive brand story that will resonate powerfully with your target audience.

This post was originally published on the Social Media Week blog.

Building communities or bubbles?

The increasing personalisation of the web has been heralded as a great leap forward – it offers a personalised online experience, using search history and cookies to provide online users with highly relevant content that has been customised just for them. The effects of this can already be seen with social media and search now giving users a streamlined experience based on their unique interests.

However, this positive view has been challenged. According to a fascinating extract from ‘The Filter Bubble’ by Eli Pariser in the Guardian article at the weekend, “the race to know as much as possible about you has become the central battle of the era for internet giants like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.”

He argues this is creating a blinkered view of the world based on narrow interests and just your own personal tastes.  These ‘internet giants’ are ‘prediction engines’ who look at your online activity and try to create a personalised experience which they feel reflects these interests and ‘Likes’. From Facebook’s newsfeed to retargeted ads this is happening throughout the web:

• Facebook: Facebook’s EdgeRank uses the information that Facebook has on users to provide a personalised newsfeed based on how often they interact with certain people and Pages (read our post on ‘Top 5 Tips for improving your Facebook EdgeRank’ here). With personalised news feeds becoming a primary news source for many people this will have a big effect on the news they receive.
• Google: Google use 57 signals – from where you log in from to what your searched history – to try to predict what kinds of sites you’d like. To put it simply, there is no set Google search any more – it is all based on that user’s unique activity.
• Amazon: the online retailer sells billions of dollars by using its algorithms to predict what each customer is interested in and putting it on their own personal homepage.
• Retargeting: cookies allow businesses to store and track information such as age, location, passwords and other personal data. They can then embed this data and target the user with personalised, relevant content and ads. This is why if you search for a pair of shoes you will see the same shoes in banner ads as you browse the web.

The main problem of all this customisation to Pariser is that “As a consumer, it’s hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikable. But what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. What I seem to like may not be what I actually want, let alone what I need to know to be an informed member of my community or country.”  Furthermore, he also states that you create your own vacuum where “more and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”

While Pariser puts forward an interesting argument and articulates it very well, personalisation has always been the holy grail of the internet. As Yahoo Vice President Tapan Bhat has stated: “The future of the web is about personalisation.  It’s about weaving the web together in a way that is smart and personalised for the user.”

This is the point. Providing the user with a personalised online experience makes it more relevant, more efficient and, therefore, more enjoyable. It is certainly a much better experience than the previous scattergun approach where adverts bore no relation to what the user was interested in.

Of course, there needs to be a balance between this and presenting people with an unknowingly self-serving version of the internet which presents to you views which you already hold. However, if this balance is achieved then social media and search can provide an incredibly useful and powerful way to find what you want in an environment in which people can contribute, interact and shape the conversation themselves.

Twitter growth – enhances search, adds ‘Follow’ button and photo sharing service

There has been a flurry of activity at Twitter recently. Last month it spent $40 million on desktop app TweetDeck which represents 13% of its user base. This week things have been moving on at an even greater pace. The micro blogging service has launched its ‘Follow’ button, a new version of Twitter search and has also revealed details about its own photo sharing app which will be rolled out within the next couple of weeks. This is all a part of Twitter’s movement towards a stronger social graph with more connections and greater usability.

Here’s a more detailed look into each element of these developments:

Twitter Search

With Twitter search serving an average of 1.6 billion queries per day it was vital that they enhanced their search functionality. Twitter says its new version of search will deliver more relevant Tweets when you search for something or click on a trending topic. Not only this, it will also show you related photos and videos on the results page.

This new version is a ground-up rewrite of their whole search infrastructure with the aim of making the results as personally relevant as possible. “Our ranking function accesses the social graph and uses knowledge about the relationship between the searcher and the author of a Tweet during ranking,” the company explained. This means that Twitter’s search index will now incorporate dynamic information such as information about the searcher and how users’ interact with tweets.

In addition to this if you access Twitter using the newest version of Firefox, you can type a #hashtag or @username into the address bar to take you directly to a search results page – for example you could type #bing or someone’s profile page like @bbcapprentice.

Twitter Follow button

Twitter’s ‘Follow’ button, their equivalent of the Facebook ‘Like’ button, allows users to follow Twitter accounts directly from an external website with a single click. With a prominent tweet button already in place the launch of the ‘Follow’ button helps Twitter further grow its social reach and makes Twitter’s reach even more accessible, which can only help grow its users.

More than 50 sites including AOL, The Wall Street Journal and MTV have already added the ‘Follow’ button. The use of the button by these brands means that Twitter is gaining more reach on the social graph. You can also see the profile and latest Tweets of the account you want to follow by clicking the username next to the button.

Twitter photo and video sharing service

Having left photos and videos to third-party services like Twitpic and Yfrog, Twitter has now partnered with Photobucket to launch its own photo and video sharing service. This week Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told the D9 Conference that “A native photo sharing experience will be rolled out to 100% of users over the next couple of weeks.” This will allow Tweeters to upload a photo and attach it to their tweet directly from Twitter.

The service means that photos and videos will be directly connected to tweets. They will be viewable on Twitter without having to leave the site (unlike, say, Twitpic). Costolo also said Twitter will “surface the most popular videos and tweets” in a new section of the homepage. You’ll also soon be able to easily do all this from its official mobile apps.

Twitter’s advertising model

Add to this Costolo’s words on advertiser’s performance on Twitter and there is much to be excited about for the micro-blogging service. Costolo presented the example of an ad run by Volkswagen for the new VW Beetle. He said the promoted tweet for the campaign had an engagement rate of 52%. “These are amazing statistics that marketers just can’t believe when they first hear them…So the business is working phenomenally well.”

Twitter had been projecting to have around 100 advertisers by the end of last year. It managed to sign up with 150 and in 2011 they have 600-650 advertisers. It will be interesting to see how this grows as the platform matures although Costolo noted that “We’re in no hurry to go make sure [that we jam Twitter up with ads]. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Opinion Piece: Freedom comes with responsibility

Sharon Baker, Co-Founder at agency:2

The views expressed are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of agency:2.

I may be unpopular within social media circles but I’m going to say this… I think it’s wrong that people can tweet about a famous football player. I think it’s wrong that on my Facebook feed today I was told countless times who the footballer was who had taken out a super injunction to protect his name. I think by citing parliamentary privilege to overturn a law simply because 75,000 Twitter users had already done so, MP John Hemming has set a very dangerous precedent.

Why? Because I believe that we need a legal system in a democracy which holds people accountable and regulates online spaces. When we don’t have law the result is anarchy, injustices and people power that becomes lawless. There are plenty of examples in recent history which show what happens when people follow the masses without thinking of what they are doing. With Twitter based in California there is also the question of which law is being followed?

Whatever you think about the footballer’s actions in taking out the injunction and attempting to sue Twitter users (and I believe this was an (unpopular) mistake) the law is in place and needs to be respected. While I do think that social media users should embrace their right to talk about what they want I also believe that the users and the owners of these sites have to have some responsibility to society and must take this into account before they tweet or update their status. The fact that Jemima Khan and Gabby Logan were also, incorrectly, named just goes to prove this.

Using the Wikipedia model could be the way forward. Wikipedia allows a user to have access to incredibly important information. It’s free; it’s accurate and is hugely popular. Wikipedia works because individuals take it upon themselves to make sure that what is posted is factual and accurate. The Wikipedia foundation has been developed to ensure it’s self-regulated. This causes people to think before writing and allows moderation that everyone supports because they believe in the community and the dissemination of accurate information. Maybe this is a model that could be replicated around other social media networks?

Popular networks have a responsibility to their societies. As for the law on super injunctions I’ll leave this to the lawyers – who hopefully still have some say in our democratic society.

New media – Bre.ad

What is Bre.ad?

Bre.ad is a URL shortener which focuses on allowing people to share ‘slices’ from their life and ‘toasting’ it.

It shortens links, syncs to Twitter and Facebook, and provides click analytics data. Its unique selling point is that it helps users promote brands, interests and charities through a full-page interface. Bre.ad has reinvented the future of URL shortening by turning it into a promotional tool.

When you click on a Bre.ad link, you aren’t immediately taken to the webpage it directs to. Instead, you are taken to a web page created by the person who originally shortened the link.   These pages are called ‘toasts’ and can be used to promote anything from a brand message to a charity you support.  Bre.ad will pick one of their ‘toasts’ at random and display it for 5 seconds before showing the requested domain.

Who will use Bre.ad and why?

While Bre.ad isn’t public yet, Lady Gaga, The North Face® and a host of other brands already have ‘toast’ pages. Bre.ad even offers an Explore function that lets you see which brands, causes and profiles are the most popular.

However, the creators of Br.ead claim that the service is not about showing people adverts. Rather it is a highly personal service which adds to the overall user experience.  Each time you click on a Bre.ad link, you will be shown a personal recommendation from the Bre.ad link creator. The idea is that every ‘toast’ you see has been specifically selected – and has been chosen as it is relevant to the destination URL which you are being sent through to.

Bre.ad founder Alan Chan has stated that people have causes they want to promote, whether it’s their company or a charity they are passionate in supporting. The aim of Bre.ad, then, is that it is a simple and effective way for them to display this passion.

The Future

Bre.ad’s closed beta launches in the next few weeks and it will be interesting to see which brands attempt to leverage ‘toasts’ to push relevant brand messages. It is a great tool to allow people to share their favourite brands and causes and should prove to be a great way for brands and influencers to share something without disrupting the user experience. Indeed, Bre.ad would argue that they are adding to the user experience as ‘toasts’ will be based on the URL you are being directed through to.

Promotional tools like this one could prove to be the future of web advertising. At agency:2 we especially like the way the ‘toasts’ are presented as clear, attractive images and can certainly see the potential for brands to use Bre.ad to connect with their loyal fans.

The power of online word-of-mouth marketing

As social media specialists we understand the importance of online word of mouth marketing.

 

Word of mouth communications has always been an extremely effective tool for spreading messages quickly and influencing purchase decisions. In the age of social media it has become even more powerful. Social media has opened up online word of mouth marketing, changing it from a one-to-one to a one-to-many form of communication.

By utilising influencer outreach programmes brands can now reach large but highly targeted audiences on social channels – and know that their messages are being communicated by respected brand ambassadors.

Maximising word of mouth – Brandvocacy, the brand ambassador network

Brandvocacy is our established brand ambassador network, optimising word of mouth communications through influencer outreach.

As social media becomes more and more prominent and consumers increasingly seek opinions from trusted peers and opinion formers the need to engage with these people within social spaces has grown. This is where Brandvocacy’s influencer outreach comes in.

We use our network of trusted and passionate brand ambassadors to communicate brand and product messages through social spaces to a receptive audience. By creating these virtual communities and segmenting them into niche tribes we ensure the greatest relevancy for the audience and for our clients’ brands.

Adherence to the ethical and legal principles of our industry is also key to the success of Brandvocacy. To us it’s imperative that all communications are open and transparent. This means each and every Brandvocacy campaign is always clearly shown as ‘sponsored’  branded posts. For example, all blog posts are marked as a ‘Sponsored Post’. This focus on ethics and transparency ensures that Brandvocacy benefits brands, influencers and the online community as a whole.

Social media has revolutionised online word of mouth marketing. People use social channels such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook everyday to make recommendations about brands – Brandvocacy ensures the client’s brand is front of mind with your audience.

Top 5 Tips for improving your Facebook EdgeRank

Ever wondered why your brand’s Facebook Page is not receiving as many Likes and comments as you hoped for? It could well be that many of your Fans have not even seen your post due to Facebook’s EdgeRank system. EdgeRank is Facebook’s unique algorithm which decides what posts appear in the ‘Top News’ stream, the default Page when you log on to Facebook.

Nobody outside Facebook completely understands the unique (and top secret) factors that enable a post to be positioned at the top of the ‘Top News’ results page.  It is, however, largely based on three main factors: affinity, weight and timing. When these factors are combined they have the ability to push content to the News Feed’s ‘Top News’ page.

EdgeRank, then, challenges brands to produce appealing and engaging content in order to ensure they are seen above other brands. Here are our Top 5 tips on how to optimise your content so that it will appear on the ‘Top News’ page:

1. Encourage audience engagement

EdgeRank is weighted so that activities that require higher levels of user engagement get a higher score than those that don’t. So, instead of just aiming for Likes, brands need to get people to comment on, and share, their content.

If brands want increased fan participation they need to provide something that people want to engage with. With social media you are fighting for people’s hard earned attention – brands must offer content that is worth their audience’s time.  As with all social media it is about having relevant conversations. You must ask questions and not just push out content and hope that people will respond. It has been proven that posts which include a clear and simple call to action achieve higher engagement levels.

So: make your posts fun, timely and engaging and ask your Fans to join in with you (for example, through asking for user generated content, product feedback or running competitions). You’ll be surprised how many will enthusiastically do so.

2. Personalise your brand on Facebook

It’s important to remember that, when it comes to EdgeRank, manual posts have more weight than posts automated through apps.  More than this, your Facebook Page needs to be human and personalised. You must develop a relationship with your audience: be ready to thank them for their replies and for sharing their opinions with you.

Each social platform demands a bespoke tone of voice and content strategy – this is vital when it comes to engaging with your fans on Facebook. They can tell which posts are automated or those that have been written for Twitter (e.g. featuring hashtags) and which have been personalised – and for this reason auto posts do not produce as much engagement.

Efficiency and timesaving is important in the social sphere but when it leads to a decrease in engagement it simply isn’t worth it.  Show your fans you care enough to personalise each post and respond to their queries and opinions.

3. Stand out with rich media

With so many brands on Facebook it can be easy for your brand messages to get lost in a sea of content. Videos and photos are a way to ensure that your content stands out – plus, this type of rich media always performs well on Facebook. People love rich media content – videos and photos are much more immediate and, in many instances, more interesting than lengthy text updates which means people are more likely to engage with them. This engagement means that your posts will appear in the ‘Top News’ of your Fans’ News Feed.

Depending upon the brand, sometimes text based status updates aren’t engaging enough to push your posts into the ‘Top News’ Feed. Videos and photos are more likely to grab people’s attention and they also seem to be a favoured by the News Feed algorithm, carrying a high weight score that will influence EdgeRank.

Use these videos to increase engagement. Don’t just push out this content, ask people what they think and contextualise it with a question. Getting people to comment will then add a highly weighted interaction score and build affinity with new users.

4. Timing is the key

Social media is all about timing, in all its senses. With the need for brands to publish content that naturally creates discussions and that people will have an opinion about, making it timely is crucial. The more time-relevant the post the more effective it will be in engaging people and drawing responses from them. This could be seen recently in the UK with so many brands citing the Royal Wedding in their posts.

Facebook is also a fantastic way to drive promotion of time-sensitive campaigns. If there is a deal being run or you want to count down to the close of a competition, Facebook is an ideal platform to successfully engage. As timing and relevancy is so central to the EdgeRank algorithm, posts that contain content relating to this kind of promotion will have greater success in appearing in the News Feed.

Timing in another way is also crucial. You need to understand the best times to post – analyse the responses on your Page and leverage these insights to post at the best possible time. Knowing the optimum frequency of these posts is also crucial. You don’t want to overwhelm your fans with too many posts.

5. Use the data

Brands need to take advantage of Facebook Insights in order to understand their audience and what content they are interested in. Facebook provides a range of data that will highlight what works and what doesn’t. Analyse the average number of comments and Likes for your posts and look out for trends. These insights can be used to construct a messaging plan that will maximise engagement.

It is important to keep a constant eye on what is happening and tweak messages to make sure all content is optimised.  Use the insights provided to make the most of the topics that consistently do well – and drop the ones that never perform. It sounds obvious but you’d be amazed by how many big brands push out the same content that gets little or no engagement.

Originally posted on Social Media Week’s blog.

New media: Storify

This week Storify became available to all. The site allows users to create their own story by dragging and dropping content found on social media channels including Tweets, audioboo recordings, photographs from Flickr and YouTube videos. This can then be embedded onto a news website or blog page.

It is essentially a publishing platform that has been built specifically for the social Web, allowing people to turn social media posts into compelling stories. Storify essentially lets anybody become a news curator.  It has been claimed by some that Storify sits somewhere between blogging and journalism and in this way could transform the way people put blog posts together or even how some online publications curate the news.

Who will use it and why?

Even in private beta, with an invitation required, the site became so popular that the brand name became used as a verb, with people asking someone to “Storify” an event or social media conversation. In the 8 months since its launch more than 5,000 sites, including The New York Times, the BBC and The Guardian have embedded Storify stories, and the stories have gained more than 13 million views, with March 2011 seeing 4.2 million views on its own.

It’s clear that this is a platform that has been enthusiastically taken on board by bloggers, PR professionals, journalists and major news organisations. It’s not hard to see why. This is because the tool is so much simpler and easy to use than traditional blogging platforms. By cutting and pasting social media content you can produce stunning rich media stories.

The future

With this initial success the big question remains: will it go mainstream? Now that Storify has gone public the site needs to decide exactly who their target market is. They have already stated that “This is still very much the beginning of our journey. Here at Storify, we have a lot more work ahead of us to realize our vision of a publishing platform built for the social Web.”

Events in the Middle East have shown how important social media can be with Twitter and Facebook at the heart of popular uprisings across the region. Al-Jazeera English has acknowledged this influence by launching The Stream. Storify is similar in its ideas to The Stream, which incorporates Twitter, Facebook and YouTube posts into its 30 minute show. The plan is to create a seamless presence between the web community and the programme.

It will be extremely interesting to see if Storify gets adopted by the mainstream in the same way. It needs to be recognised as the place to go when major events occur. Indeed, the single day with the most views came in March when the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan with more than half a million views of its articles. It’s clear that Storify must position themselves as the site to use when major events happen.

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