Facebook’s Timeline for Pages: how does it affect your FB strategy?
The roll-out last week of the new Timeline for Facebook Pages call for a revived approach to how brands use Facebook.
To recap, a quick overview of the most important changes.
What's gone:
Left-side menu with Tabs
Tabs no longer appear in a left-side menu. Applications and tabs appear as “favorites” beneath cover photo as thumbnails. You select four to display.
Deal with reduced tab visibility by using fewer but better Facebook apps focusing on the 2-3 apps that can be visible ‘above the fold’ on your page.
Default landing tabs
Overcome the inability to set default landing tabs for apps (such as a splash page app) with more Facebook advertising to guide people to your Facebook apps.
What's changed:
New sizes for visuals
- Branded cover photo: 851x315 pixels
- profile pic: 125X125 pixels
- Tab apps and content: 810 pixel width
- App icons: 111×74 pixels
What's new:
Cover photo
The branded cover photo allows for maximum creativity. Rethink how you present yourself on Facebook. Be careful not to break Facebook's terms: cover photos cannot contain price or promotional information, contact info, calls to action or references to any Facebook features like ‘Like’ or ‘Share’.
Private messages from your fans
Fans and non-fans alike can send a direct, private message to the Page. This feature can be disabled.
Use private messages between brand and user to deal with any support enquiries. It could de-clutter your Timeline from support inquiries, but be careful not to frustrate your Fans by not answering their requests in time.
Pinned and starred posts
Feature priority content by using the new ‘pin’ feature that allows a post to remain at the top of your page for 7 days.
Pinned posts keep important stories at the top of the highlights feed for up to 7 days.
Page posts can also be ‘starred’. Starring makes a post go full width across the highlights feed to prominently feature the story.
Timeline
Timeline, not only adds the date but also automatically inserts geo-targeted posts for fans in that country/city. Publish the life story of your business of your through milestone events in a timeline.
According to Social@Ogilvy, the brand world will soon be divided into those who fully "adopt" Timeline, and those who simply "migrate" their old strategy and ways of working to the new feature set. Brands looking to adopt must consider and prepare for the hidden implications of Timeline - reallocation of resources, increased creative involvement, a reset of content process, the new profile of community managers and more.
Check out their most recent Slideshare presentation for a summary of the Pages changes and the hidden implications of Facebook Timeline for brands.
Social media in Belgium: who’s got the biggest audience?
Curious about the audience size of some of the most popular social media platforms in Belgium?
You can use Google's Doubleclick Ad Planner for that.
To illustrate:
Facebook is obviously the biggest social media platform:
- 74,8% reach in Belgium
- 6,1M unique visitors a month
- 8.6B pageviews a month
Second is LinkedIn:
- 11,2% reach in Belgium
- 920K unique visitors a month
- 26M pageviews a month
Third is French video sharing service website Dailymotion:
- 10% reach in Belgium
- 820K unique visitors a month
- 16M pageviews a month
Still trying to find a way to include YouTube, Picasa en Google Plus numbers into the Media Plan tool - any help is welcome!
What is Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This?’
From ‘People Talking About This’ defined @ InsideFacebook.com:
People Talking About This is the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period. On Facebook, stories are items that display in News Feed. Users create stories when they:
- like a page
- post on the page wall
- like a post
- comment on a post
- share a post
- answer a question
- RSVP to a page’s event
- mention the page in a post
- tag the page in a photo
- check in at a place
- share a check-in deal
- like a check-in deal
- write a recommendation
Whenever a person takes one of these actions, it counts toward People Talking About This.
AddThis: Facebook most often used to share content
AddThis is a widely used social bookmarking service. They've recently published an infographic with some of the most striking trends in sharing over 2011.
Timeline of the most shared events in 2011
Some highlights:
- Facebook makes up 52.1% of sharing on the web
- Twitter makes up 13.5% of sharing (still less than email, print and favorites) but grows 576.9%. In Japan, Twitter makes up 52% of sharing.
- Tumblr sharing grows by 1299.5% and is accelerating
- Address bar sharing creates 1600% viral lift.
ComScore: In Belgium 93% of online population uses social media
In their annual report global management firm comScore released some striking stats on the penetration and usage of social media platforms throughout the world.
Regardless of how open or closed a society may be, it is safe to assume that more than half of local online populations are engaging in online social networking, making the practice comparatively ubiquitous around the world.
In Europe, for example, 98% of the online population in the U.K. is active on social networks.
Further reading:
- It’s a Social World: Top 10 Need-to-Knows About Social Networking and Where It’s Headed @ comscore.com
- ComScore’s 2011 Social Report: Facebook Leading, Microblogging Growing, World Connecting @ techcrunch.com
Top 10 Belgian Google+ Pages
Czech tech start-up ZoomSphere just published detailed statistics for major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn. They also compile the rankings of the most popular sites for each country. It's still too early to draw any conclusions - especially if being "circled" by a few hundred Google+ users already lands you in the Belgian Top10. But it's interesting to see how mainly geeky topics get most attention on Google+.
By the way: if you're on Google+, make sure to check out Conversity.be Google+ Page, sharing information, best practices and news about businesses and organisations on Google+.
Google+ Belgian Top 10 pages
Source: ZoomSphere - local social statistics for Belgium.
- Mobile internet provider Mobile Vikings
- Community based Linux Enterprise Computing Centos
- Daily electro, industrial music news magazine Side-Line Magazine
- United Nations Information Centre Pretoria (in South Africa)
- Open source content management framework Drupal
- Site francophone d'information en BelgiqueLesoir.be
- Travels, pictures and experiences website TravelWithUs.be
- Terminal based IRC client for UNIX systems Irssi
- iPhone info site belgium-iphone.lesoir.be
- caregraphic // graphiste web & print
Facebook Belgian Top 10 pages
For the sake of completion: ZoomSphere also has a top 10 of Belgian Facebook Pages. I left out Ferrero Rocher (is Italian) and MPokora from the list (he's French). And here, too, Jean-Claude Van Damme is the top Belgian brand on Facebook in terms of Likes.
- Actor/director Jean-Claude Van Damme
- I Love Techno festival
- Cartoon character TinTin
- Shoppingville.be's Shoppen Page
- Tomorrowland festival
- Brewery Stella Artois
- Jewellery/watches Ice Watch
- Stand-up comedian Philippe Geubels
- Actor and comedian Benoît Poelvoorde
- D&B producer and dj Netsky
Study: Facebook friends are your age and from where you live
There are currently 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. The Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano just published a study of how these friends' age distribute. In short: Facebook users tend to have friends of about the same age, a pattern that holds true even for users aged 60.
Chart from Marketingscharts.com:
Data from the study indicates that Facebook friends are also very locally clustered, with 84% of all connections being between users in the same country.
Also from the research: the median friend count on Facebook is 100, while the average friend count is 190 - which is awfully close to Dunbar's number.
5 Belgian Facebook Pages worth looking at
Sometimes it's hard to distinguish whether a Fan Page is linked to a Belgian company, product or service. But based on our own metrics, these are the Top Pop charts for today.
Most liked Belgian page: Tomorrowland
Tomorrowland is a Belgian outdoor dancing event (festival) organised every year in the Flemish town of Boom since 2005. This year's edition was from 22nd to 24 July. Over two months later after the event, Tomorrowland's Facebook Page is relatively speaking the most lively page of this moment with a daily change of over 1,000 new Likes and an impressive total of 273,240 fans. It's Tickets iFrame tab, however, is no longer accessible for most Facebook users because it's using a http connection instead, which got depreciated by Facebook recently over (safer) https connection.
It will be interesting to see how an event like Tomorrowland will keep its Fans' attention up until the next edition in July 2012, but so far they're doing a really good job.
Belgian page with the least growth: Van Vlees En Bloed
Van Vlees en Bloed was a Flemish television series, broadcasted at één between 1 January and 12 February 2009. The last Wall Post at the Van Vlees En Bloed's Facebook Page (a picture from the cast) was posted during that period, at 23 January 2009. Although the Page still has a whopping 118,462 fans, the amount of daily likes for this Page has dropped significantly over the past few weeks and months.
If a TV series becomes popular, unofficial Facebook Pages will pop up and force the TV Channel to either start their own or take over the grassroots one. But even for Van Vlees En Bloed, the "long tail" of a tv series clashes with Facebook's EdgeRank algorhythm. If a Facebook Page doesn't keep updating, it falls off the radar of its fans.
Belgian breakthrough page: BASE Belgium
BASE is a telephony services and broadband internet brand operated by KPN Group Belgium. Although in sheer numbers BASE Belgium's Facebook Page's posts does not receive a lot of likes, it does see a consistent 1% daily growth in its amount of "likes". BASE Belgium's Facebook Page got launched in April 2011 and currently has 6,834 fans.
Most popular non-branded Belgian Facebook Page: Shoppen
The Facebook Page Shoppen (the Dutch verb for "shopping") is one of Belgium's most popular Facebook Pages that is not linked to a brand (whether it's a personal brand, or a product/service). It is linked to fashion, beauty and lifestyle site/blog http://www.shoppingville.be and offers a mix of Dutch and English spoken pointers to its partners' content outside Facebook - mostly e-commerce sites that sell fashion brands.
And the most engaged fans belong to... JCVD
Although the "Muscles From Brussels" does have an international fan base, Jean-Claude Van Damme's Facebook Page still holds the number one spot in the Belgian Fan Page hitparade. Not only does he have the largest fan base (865,928 fans and counting!) they're among the most active ones, too. His most recent post against animal cruelty got over 3,000 Likes.
Facebook for business: traffic to site most prominent KPI
Custom fan page designers Pagemodo conducted a survey among small business owners who were using Facebook as a marketing and revenue generation channel. The results show that, while only half of respondents use Facebook, a significant number of users report increased revenue as a result.
Highlights from the survey:
- 47% of SME owners said their Facebook pages are pushing a significant amount of traffic to their websites.
- 48% reported that a portion of the traffic converts into customers.
Businesses that use Facebook for business engage in the following activities:
Social is gaining share in referrals
From Study Gives Insight Into Content Discovery Trends Across the Web’s Leading Publishers @ blog.outbrain.com:
Currently, search methods [...] send the largest slice of referral traffic to content. Links from publisher sites make up 31% of referral traffic to content pages [...], portal homepages (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com) account for 17% of traffic, and finally, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Fark.com, reddit, Digg) send 11% of traffic to content pages.
What kind of content do people share online?
This infograph says it all:
Download a high-res PDF of the report: Content Discovery and Engagement Report, Q1 2011 (.pdf)