Category: Social media for business

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Facebook Algorithm Likes and Dislikes

Facebook algorithm likes and dislikesFacebook may not have a dislike button but its algorithm, so to speak, does and knowing what Facebook algorithm likes and dislikes greatly influences whether your post will show on your followers wall or not.

Knowing how it works, what it likes or dislikes will go a long way to get your post seen by your audience and improve your ROI.

So, here we go, Facebook algorithm likes and dislikes:

What Facebook algorithm loves:

  • Posts with lots of comments
  • Posts with lots of likes
  • Post types with photos videos (posted to Facebook instead of linked) or status update
  • Posts that reference a trending topic but don’t abuse it
  • Posts that receive a high volume of likes, comments, or shares in a short time
  • Posts with links, there is a way Facebook prefers it done
  • Videos uploaded to Facebook (instead of just linked) with a large number of views or long viewing time
  • Posts that tag other pages
  • Posts that your friends like or comment on
  • Posts from pages that have a lot of interactions
  • Post types with a lot of interactions
  • Posts from pages that have completed profile information (about tab)
  • Posts from pages whose fan base overlaps with the fan base  of recognized quality pages
  • Original images and videos not previously referenced in the Open Graph
  • Original Links

What Facebook algorithm dislike:

  • Clickbait
  • Frequently circulated content and repeated posts (duplicate content)
  • Like-baiting now banned by Facebook
  • Posts that include spam links
  • Text-only status updates from pages (no photos or graphics)
  • Posts that are frequently hidden or reported (a sign of low quality)
  • Posts that contain the words “like, comment, or share”
  • Posts with unusual engagement patterns or schemes (a like-baiting signal)
  • Posts that are classified as memes by Facebook (memes are images withf overlayed text)
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Facebook Bans Like Gating

Facebook bans fan gatingIf you have been using the “like gating” technique it’s time to stop, as of November 4th Facebook bans like gating

If you don’t know what fan gating is, like gating is enticing your followers to like your page ot posts in exchange for freebies

Harshdeep Singh, a software engineer at Facebook, wrote in an August blog post that  people “like pages because they want to connect and hear from the businesses, not because of artificial incentives”.

The ultimate goal of Social media is to build relationships and banning the practice will force brands and organizations to create  quality content that engages their audiences and builds relationships instead of relying on technical tricks

No doubt some marketers will suffer but ultimately, building better relationship with quality content will lead to better quality likes and more engaged audiences.

In addition, social media should be a means to an end, no matter what you do you do not control the medium and one of your goals should be to get the data on followers out of the platform and into a platform you have more control over like traffic to your website or building your mailing list.  Building better relationships will help you build better quality mailing lists more engage traffic to your websites and ultimately generate more ROI

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4 Reasons Industrial Marketers Should Adopt Social Media

industrial marketersEven if studies have shown that, so far, industrial professionals have been a relatively passive social media audience, their presence and social media usage is far from negligible.

In a recent study, “2014 Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector,”  IHS GlobalSpec found that 44% of technical professionals spend more than an hour per week on social media for work-related activities.

The study indicates that technical professionals maintain social media profiles on LinkedIn (74%), Facebook (61%) and Twitter (17%).

In addition, 47% of them spend time on LinkedIn reading product or industry news while 26% research suppliers.

69% of technical professionals with a Facebook profile follow businesses or groups within their industry and 38% research or read work-related content.

These statistics are far from negligible and show that industrial marketers need to take a serious look and consider integrating social media in their marketing mix.

The return may not be immediate and as high as their other more traditional marketing initiative but the potential is there for those who get early on on the bandwagon.

  1. At a time when traditional marketing vectors are crowded and customers/prospects are bombarded with messages and ads, social media is still a relatively virgin territory in industrial markets
  2. Social media allows them to find, identify, reach influencers like industry analysts, consultants and other industry thought-leaders
  3. Through social media they can connect and build relationships with influencers
  4. Social media is the medium of choice of the new generations, reaching them is key to future growth
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Six Ways To Detect Fake LinkedIn Profiles

How_to_detect_a_fake_LinkedIn_profileBefore we look at the six ways to detect fake LinkedIn profiles, it’s important to understand the driving force behind these profiles and the main reason is spamming.

Spamming has been around for a long time, first via email and as blogs started proliferating, spammers started polluting blogs, it was only a question of time before they  started polluting social media platforms

Coming back to LinkedIn, two of the best way to get maximum exposure on LinkedIn are growing your network or participating in large, active discussion groups.  Both imply creating a profile and since spammers learn early on that to effectively spam, they needed many identities, in case they were filtered out.

Over the past few years, we have seen a rapid increase in the number of fake profiles created by spammers either joining discussion groups or asking to join users networks, they usually target large active discussion groups and/or users with large networks, especially LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) who are not too selective in growing their network and allow spammers to develop their network based on first and second degree connections.

Of course, there are a number of ways to stop them, the first one is to be selective in who you accept in your network, the second is for group owners to be more proactive in monitoring who joins their groups and to not fall into the temptation to grow the size of their group at the expense of the quality of the discussion. Continue reading “Six Ways To Detect Fake LinkedIn Profiles”

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How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn Profiles

How to report fake or misleading LinkedIn profiles has become an increasingly difficult endeavor.

How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn ProfilesIn a previous post, I wrote about how pervasive fake profiles are on LinkedIn and how difficult LinkedIn makes it to report them, for good reasons, they stopped caring a long time ago about the quality of user experience to focus on growing user numbers ( regardless of legitimacy) prior to their IPO

Another issue, when you created and think you “own” a business or brand page, is controlling who shows up as an employee on your page and that can have implications when it comes to your brand and/or reputation.  It turns out you do not control that information.

In any case, finding a way to contact what LinkedIn calls “customer service” has become a feat in itself, but the response is probably as frustrating as trying to contact them.

There is however an easier way to report a fake profile, if you look in the right place but you have to dig into the user’s profile in places you would not think about right off the bat, here are the steps Continue reading “How To Report Fake or Misleading LinkedIn Profiles”

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Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?

Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?

In the past few year we have seen Facebook cut post reach several time.  We can expect other companies to follow suit and artificially cut the organic reach of the posts brands and businesses publish on their page.

A couple of years ago Facebook announced that posts only reached 16% of a page followers, last October the average reach dropped to around 8% and it is predicted that before long, 2 to 3% reach will be the norm… Unless brands and businesses start to pay up.

You spent a lot of time, energy and invested a lot of money building a big fan base on you social media pages and now you find out that your fans are not yours but the social media company’s, they have been cutting the organic reach of your posts and now they want you to pay to reach them. It’s called “Pay for Play”.

That’s a tough awakening but not surprising, in time, most of them will become digital advertising platforms and less and less social.  The writing has been on the wall for sometime now.

These platform were not purely social, they were tools to collect information and what do you do with information, you leverage it to generate revenue and now that they are publicly traded, they are pressured to generate revenue and profit.  It’s business

Facebook has probably been the most obvious but make no mistake, it’s only the beginning, the others will follow

So what do you do? 

You don’t put all your eggs in the same basket and when I say basket, I mean social media.  As a rule, and that applies to blogs as well, you don’t build a presence focusing on a platform you do not own or control. Continue reading “Facebook Cut Posts Reach Now What?”

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Mothers With Children Under 5 Most Active on Social Media

moms with young children are often more active on social mediaA new analysis from Experian Marketing Services found that moms with children under the age of 5, are often more active on social media, more likely to shop using mobile devices and more open to engage with brands across digital touch-points than consumers at large.

Moms with young kids represent a highly active and digitally sophisticated segment of consumers who are eager to connect with brands and share their experiences through multiple platforms Continue reading “Mothers With Children Under 5 Most Active on Social Media”

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Google Plus Social Media Relevance

Google + is an interesting beast and as a platform, the question remains, what is Google Plus social media relevance?

As more and more data comes out, the question is still up in the air.  It’s not that Google is not trying, they have been shoving Google + down our throats by integrating (very poorly)successful social media properties like Blogger, Picasa, Google Places and You Tube into one platform:  Google +

In doing so Google + has shown impressive growth in terms of registered users but when it comes to social media, growing your base is only one part of the business model.  Most social media platform do so by providing a platform where users want to spend time and and share content with their friends increasing relevancy of the platform and creating an incentive for users’ friends to join.

Google failed at that part and fell back on the second option; using properties users love to use and forcing them into Google +.  It could have worked if Google had not made it more difficult to use the already successful properties and tried to make it as difficult as possible to share them in platforms other than Google +.

The result?  A recent study from Shareaholic shows that high user growth is not translating in higher use, engagement and sharing. Continue reading “Google Plus Social Media Relevance”

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How Consumers Find Websites

With the on going debate on SEO vs SEM vs Social, a recent study by Forrester Research released in July 2013 sheds some very interesting light on how consumers find websites  The study was conducted in 2012 and show the fast rise of social search

  • 54% of consumers find websites through natural search results, up from 50% in 2011 but still 7% less than in 2010
  • Social networks are the second-most preferred discovery resource, with 32% using them in 2012, up from 25% in 2011 and 18% in 2010.
  • 50% of 18-24 year old and 43% of 24 to 32 year old are using social media as their main internet discovery resource
  • Links are the third important means of website discovery, with 28% saying they found websites from links on other sites, down from 31% last year.
  • Just 18% of those surveyed said that they use ads for website discovery, an improvement from 2011, when paid search was the least popular form of website discovery, with only 8%
  • One-third of Americans are using Facebook and Twitter for discovery.

How consumers find websites

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Social Media For Business Mainly a Brand Builder

Social media for business study

Social media plays a significant role in small and medium-sized businesses’ (SMBs) marketing efforts, providing both free and paid exposure to a wide-ranging—and often receptive—audience.

Most important social media platforms for business

According to a January 2013 survey from online magazine Social Media Examiner, Facebook continues to be the most important social network for most business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers worldwide, given its enormous user base. However, for business-to-business (B2B) marketers, there is a healthy competition among other

platforms. Among these marketers, LinkedIn tied with Facebook as the most important social network, while blogging followed 10 percentage points behind.

Interestingly, while YouTube was only the most important social platform for 4% of SMBs total, it is where the greatest percentage of businesses planned to make future investments. Nearly seven out of 10 marketers said they planned to increase their use of YouTube this year.

Benefits of social media marketing

The greatest benefits of social media:

  • 89% increased exposure
  • 75% increased traffic
  • 43% increased sales.

This points to social’s role as a brand builder, first and foremost.

And even as social media may seem like old hat to many marketers by now, quite a few are relatively new to the platforms. About one-quarter of marketers said they had been working with social media for a year or less. And another 30% were 1 to 2 years into their social media marketing tenure. But SMBs have quickly caught on to how important social is as a marketing tool: 79% said they had already incorporated social media into their traditional marketing activities.

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