Nested Comments are currently a "work-in-progress"
Facebook rolled out yet another change in the last couple of weeks which enables nested replies.
My understanding was that the new feature was only being rolled out to pages with over 10,000 fans, however I was offered it last week so clicked the "like" button. Beware that it doesn't really work on mobile but on the desktop version it is potentially a useful feature for posts with multiple comments and responses.
If you haven't seen the above notification then go to Edit Page and Manage Permissions. From there tick "Replies".
Now I can totally see the sense of nested replies in that people can easily respond directly to comments without the need for an @name before the comment and the resultant scroll up the page to read the original…
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March 26, 2013
Tips and examples for creating effective Facebook brand apps
Facebook applications can be a great way to increase a company’s fans’ tie to their social presence, while simultaneously delivering valuable user and customer data. For a large number of brands, apps can be essential to their healthy Facebook presence in order to add value to their growing fan base through online sales, personalisation mechanisms, incentives and competitions and more.
For the majority of brands though, producing their own apps is not essential, nor should they be. If you are perhaps thinking of a Facebook app for your brand I am not trying to convince you otherwise. If your current of future Apps work by definition because they have a function and output for the user that supports the brand, aids user discovery and interest and adds value to them as a consumer, then it's going to be a good investment of time.…
New feature offers to find similar audiences based on existing customer profiles
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook Announcement
This new feature from Facebook for advertisers promises more relevant ads through extending the custom or Similar Audience targeting feature to now include what it calls “lookalike audiences.”
Advertisers will be able to upload their customer profiles, referenced by emails or phone numbers, and then Facebook will automagically target a similar profile of Facebook users based on similar interests, demographic data or location. Inside Facebook has a few examples of companies using Lookalike Audiences who have seen sizeable improvements in cost-per-acquisition through this approach.
We had a discussion on this new Facebook Ad targeting feature in our Answers forum recently when this was first announced. There seemed some enthusiasm for it.
Marie Page said:
“I’ve been looking at custom audiences recently and am planning on using…
Better mobile support and a richer use of imagery
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook 7th March announcement
Our commentary on Facebook’s latest update
At Smart Insights we aim to only cover the major updates to Facebook that are likely to have a big impact on marketers using Facebook. It’s now around around a year since we covered the marketing implications of the new Timeline - still worth checking to see whether you are using all of the 9 features we cover to the maximum.
We weren’t expecting this update to be as significant since it doesn't directly relate to company pages, with rumours suggested it would cover the Newsfeed, so would have an impact on advertising and visibility of updates from company pages.
As always Facebook’s design team faced a delicate balance between increasing average ad revenue per user against improvement to usability and experience.…
A briefing on Facebook Page Post Targeting Enhanced advertising feature
Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting is a relatively new Facebook feature (officially referred to as “Page Post Targeting Enhanced”) that enables pages to deliver more relevant messaging to their Facebook fans.
In short, Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting increases the targeting accuracy of posts by increasing the types of posts segments a community manager can target. Previously, pages could only deliver “one-size-fits-all” posts, or segment posts against locations or languages.
The more robust segmentation criteria allows pages to segment their posts to their audience’s newsfeed using additional criteria, including:
Age
Education
Gender
Workplace
Interests
Language and Location
Relationship Status
Marketing Implications
The low barrier to development and deployment of segmented messaging using this tool allows for micro-segmented, personalized message deployment at scale. This has the potential to dramatically increase your Page engagement rate. As such, Facebook Newsfeed HyperTargeting lends itself naturally to integration within your Social…
A briefing on the Facebook Exchange (FBX)
Most social media marketers largely relied on the Facebook MarketPlace Ads to reach out to the billions of Facebook users each month. Although they were relatively effective in marketing, Facebook saw the need of introducing a better and more reliable social advertising option - The Facebook Exchange, otherwise popularly referred to as FBX.
FBX is a system where Facebook sells high quality inventory ads through an auction to many marketing bidders (Real Time Bidding). It significantly helps marketers reach out to the valuable consumers on Facebook.
FBX enables advertisers to serve tracking cookies on users' browsers as they visit advertiser or publisher sites and then retarget those users with relevant ads once they enter Facebook, often for remarketing, i.e. to remind them about a retailer site they have visited for example.
…
An experiment to assess what drives organic Reach on Facebook? Likes, Comments or Shares?
I wrote recently about some comparisons I had drawn between different types of post on Facebook with a view to drawing conclusions about the most effective content types on Facebook.
Continuing on a similar theme I've been experimenting this week with two similar posts. One resulted in lots of Shares and Likes but only 1 Comment vs another with lots of Comments (and half the number of Likes and Shares).
Here are the post, they were both classified by Facebook identically (both were Photos - recently downgraded by Facebook in its new variant of the Edgerank algorithm) and both were posted at a similar time of day. The image on the right (with the highest Reach) was posted first. If anything its high success would have driven a higher organic audience for the subsequent post (on the left)…
My experiences in allocating online ad budgets between PPC, Sponsored Stories, Promoted Posts and Facebook Ads
According to a recent Search Engine Land post, some Google customers are abandoning PPC due in part to rising keyword prices. It's an interesting post, and it claims that the majority of PPC companies are, in fact, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises - SMBs in the US).
The final 2012 financial results reported for Google published on January 22nd 2013 show some evidence for reduced competition in that although paid clicks have increased overall globally, CPC has declined significantly, suggesting reduce competition for bidding or fewer advertisers in some markets:
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 24% over the fourth quarter of 2011 and increased approximately 9% over the third quarter of 2012.
Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related…
A briefing on the opportunities and limitations of Graph Search to prepare businesses for Facebook’s new breakthrough social search tool
By Carlton Jefferis
You will have been hard-pushed to avoid news this week that Facebook launched Graph Search, a major new feature which Mark Zuckerburg hailed “the third pillar of Facebook” after News Feed and Timeline.
This overview introduces the basics of Graph Search and looks at what it could mean to digital marketers and businesses. Over the coming weeks I’ll cover this feature in more detail as further information emerges from Facebook and from those with early access to the US beta release.
What is a Facebook Graph Search?
Graph Search is not a competitor to Google as some of the newspaper headlines may suggest. Instead it's a completely new concept in performing a search on Facebook. It’s not about finding links to…
A case study of using social media in higher education
In this post I will give a summary of a detailed analysis of some findings from a brief audit Carlton Jefferis and I have recently carried out when pitching for some social media consultancy for the University of Hertfordshire. I hope you find the insights shared useful and in addition to comments and advice throughout you'll also find some great creative ideas for content which can work in other sectors too.
Multiple audiences, multiple departments, multiple platforms
The first thing we notice is that the University utilises many different social media platforms and within each has multiple accounts to reflect different Schools/Departments. The question is, does this lead to a silo-ed, somewhat inconsistent approach or is it necessary?
A University has to juggle messages to multiple audiences - students, prospective students (UK and…
