Andy Sernovitz, shares his recommendations on how to stay safe and ethical in social media covering the latest FTC updates, the fundamentals of proper disclosure, and how to make sure your agencies and vendors comply with your standards.
The days of low cost marketing on Facebook may be counted
It’s not a coincidence that Facebook first half profits doubled to $1.6B and the trend will likely accelerate. Over the past few years Facebook has been slowly but steadily paving the way for increased profitability
For the past three or so years, most of the changes Facebook has implemented have made it made it increasingly difficult for organization and brands to put their content in front of their “Fans” or as Facebook now calls them “Likes”
It started with the structure of the wall on profiles. We first saw the wall being segregated in two sets of posts with the default view to what Facebook deemed most important to users to the last change in the past month.
The latest little known or noticed change in Facebook “Pages” has big implications. As of September 30, 2011, Facebook stopped allowing pages to communicate to their “Fans” or as Facebook calls them “Likes” via messaging.
The feature that allowed page owners or administrators to send targeted messages into users’ inboxes has been removed, officially to , and i quote : ” connect with your audience in the most effective ways possible” which is through public communication on the wall.
So Facebook says. In reality, it’s been a slow and calculated approach to remove free means of communications between pages and their followers and quoting facebook again, “using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience“.
If the past is any indication, we can expect that Facebook will find more ways to curtail free interactions between pages and users as an incentive to use paid Facebook advertising, coming around full circle, back to traditional advertising, only this time with a captive audience…. of advertisers.
Social Media 001: Page or Profile? That is the question
As more organizations get on the social media bandwagon, it becomes more and more obvious that there is some serious confusion as to what type of page they should use for their online presence.
Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook (Google has only allowed a few organization to test the Google + business accounts and is seriously enforcing their policy of not allowing businesses and organizations using personal accounts), users are confused, misinformed or uninformed about the differences between profiles and pages.
Few users read the TOSs and who can blame them, pages after pages of boring legal mumbo jumbo that would put to sleep a toddler on a sugar high.
Not knowing the differences can have costly repercussions.
Before going public, LinkedIn was notorious for enforcing its TOS, especially when it comes to organizations using personal profiles. Facebook was enforcing as well, but with the vastly higher number of users, enforcement was spottier.
One can expect that enforcement will become stricter again in the future as the companies start focusing again on quality versus quantity.
What is the big deal? You might ask.
The big deal is choosing the wrong format can be costly in many ways. Imagine logging on to your page only to find out that your account has been suspended and there is nowhere to turn to have it restored. Imagine having to do the work all over again, rebuild your network of followers, your content, earning comments and ratings.
What figure can you put on rebuilding your social media presence? What is the cost in term of time wasted, lost goodwill, lost followers?
The rule:
Generally speaking (most social media platforms use the same basic principle)
- A “profile” is a “personal profile”, a live individual, not an organization, not a company.
- A “page” in the Facebook lingo is for an organization, company, brand. Public personalities, artists, athletes… when using the account for business purpose should use the “page” versus “profile” for one good reason, they are usually doing it to promote their brand. LinkedIn has its own version of the “page”
Using the wrong format will also limit what you can do.
Due to their original design, pages and profiles have different built in tools and using a profile for a business entity can seriously limit your reach in term of communication, exposure, engagement, measurement and visibility and that’s the subject of an upcoming post.
Adobe: Organizing for Improved Customer Engagement via Social Media
Adobe’s Group Manager, Social Media, Maria Poveromo, and Senior Manager, Product Marketing Creative Suite, Jennifer Kremer, share how Adobe is using social media to connect and engage with fans in new ways.
Intel: Listening, Learning, and Changing
Intel’s Director, Social Media, Becky Brown, shares how Intel is listening, learning, and changing its engagement strategy to better connect with fans.
Goodbye Facebook Places
Less than a year after Facebook deployed “Places” to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla, Facebook is pulling the plug on Places over the next few weeks.
Despite its 750 million members, Facebook could not leverage its mass to make “places” work
Facebook Places never really got much traction compared to other self standing geolocalization platforms like Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and other niche platforms. Places though is not going the way of the dinosaurs, Facebook opted to integrate the localization feature directly in the post, on the wall.
The new feature will allow any user to tag locations in their posts. They won’t need a smart phone or be near the place for that matter. They will be able to use the feature from a computer, tablet or any other device giving them access to the internet using the “Places” icon at the bottom of the post
What does that mean for users. As Facebook changed its aim from Foursquare to Groupon with the deployment of the Facebook “Deals”, we can expect a closer integration of “Deals” with the posts and more online offers. Hopefully these offers will not clog the wall
Good news though, after the uproar on Facebook privacy settings and the bad habit Facebook had to make new features “opt-out”, Facebook seems to have listened to users and the location feature will be “opt-in”
Who knows, they may even start a new trend that will lead more companies to adopt the “opt-in” model rather that the “opt-out” model.
Twitter and your job search
Twitter and your job search
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