Engagement leads to trust, which leads to results

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations and NGOs on Facebook.

Facebook is about friendships. It’s about reconnecting with old friends and keeping up with close friends.

Facebook is not about buying things or getting the lowest price. There are already websites for that, like Amazon and eBay.

Facebook is relational, it’s not transactional.

In their new book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” authors Beth Kanter and Katie Payne talk about the “ladder of engagement” as a way to visualize how nonprofits move people in stages from awareness to action.

The diagram at top might be called the “Facebook Ladder of Donor Engagement.” Keep in mind that his diagram is just one way to represent how donors relate to your nonprofit or organization on Facebook.

Interactions increase as trust goes up

You’ll notice two data points:

1Trust and affinity: As people become aware of your organization and interact with you at different levels of commitment, trust and affinity increase (or decrease if you’re not trustworthy or likable).

2Audience size: Similar to the sales funnel model popular in the for-profit world, audience sizes very become smaller at each stage of the game.

In this diagram, each step represents an action someone can take on Facebook to express their relationship with a cause, but it may look very different for your nonprofit.

Tell us: What does this ladder look like for your organization?

The post The Facebook ladder of engagement appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, anyone with a Facebook page.

Network for Good hosted a free webinar the other day where I presented 27 Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Facebook Page.

According to a recent survey by NTEN, 89 percent of nonprofits today use Facebook to expand awareness around their cause and to grow their fan base. One challenge that many nonprofits face is keeping fans interested and engaged after they like their page. (Remember, most people who Like your page never see it again — unless it turns up in their news feed.)

Above are the slides from the webinar. Some of the things you’ll learn:

• The three most important pillars of your content strategy
• Three shocking facts about every Facebook Page
• The best times during the day to post content
• Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm defined and why you should care
• What types of content get more exposure in news feeds
• How to post links in a page story
• How to use photos to spark engagement
• How to use questions to spark conversations
• How to use closed and open questions to spark conversations
• And lots more

If you want to hear the 60-minute recording, download it here. You can check out the SlideShare presentation above or download it as a PDF.

Related

• 19 ways to engage your nonprofit’s Facebook fans (Socialbrite)

The post 27 ways to increase engagement on your Facebook page appeared first on Socialbrite.

If you want to increase pages views and site engagement, it’s critical that you create a more social experience when people visit your website.

For example, when people view an article from your blog, they can see which of their friends have already read that article. They also can share content on your site with their Facebook friends.

Gigya published data showing that Web users spend 50 percent more time on websites that use Facebook social plug-ins. They also view twice as many pages.

Use social plug-ins to increase engagement

As you can see in the bar graph above, users spend most of their time commenting, which, according to Giya, “allows them to share opinions on content and interact with other users – including those from their social graph.”

This makes sense when you remember that people are busier today than ever before, but still want to converse with their friends on topics they care about.

Increase page views with social plug-ins

They also found that page views more than doubled for sites that use social plug-ins. Again, commenting and sharing were the two biggest activities.

What does all this mean for your website?

The more pages people view on your site, the more chances you have to convert them into an email subscriber or donor.

View your website as a fishing net. Web visitors either keep swimming on by your site or get caught in your net — subscribe to your email newsletter, etc. Social plug-ins encourage these fish to swim around a bit more, giving you more chances at catching them!

Which Facebook social plug-ins should you use?

Putting your organization’s goals aside for a moment, and viewing the data above, it’s safe to say that you should at least be implementing Facebook’s Like Button and Comments plug-in. For instance:

• Like Button: When a user clicks the Like button, a news story publishes to his or her News Feed, and this story includes a link back to the content on your site. If your site offers a lot of content that users can like individually (such as in a blog), you’ll invariably increase referral traffic from Facebook to your site.
• Comments: This plug-in allows you to add a comment box to your website content so that Facebook users can enter their comments, which can automatically be published to their Facebook News Feed. These republished comments also include a link back to the comments on your site.

Facebook has excellent tutorials on installing these plug-ins, and if you use WordPress, all you need is to install a few plug-ins. The plugins I use are Facebook Like and Send and Disqus for comments (users can log in with Twitter or Google in addition to Facebook).

Have you installed Facebook social plugins on your site?

The post Use Facebook to increase engagement on your site appeared first on Socialbrite.

Video tutorial on the new way to create custom tabs

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, Web publishers, individuals.

Your Facebook Page is up and running, but you want to entice newcomers to become fans. The best way to do that to direct visitors to your custom Welcome page rather than to your Wall as the default landing page for people who are not yet fans.

If you’re with a small nonprofit and have a little HTML knowledge, you can create custom tabs using an application called Static HTML:iframe tabs. (Facebook replaced FBML with support for iFrames earlier this year.)

The video above shows you how to create a simple tab with fan-only content using Static HTML.

Design is key

Remember that just because you know HTML doesn’t mean that you’ll create an effective custom tab.
Design wins over code any day. For example, the Dog Bless You Facebook Page has created an extremely effective welcome tab with just one line of code (an image).

Do you have a custom Welcome Page for your Facebook Page? How’s it working out?

The post How to create a custom Welcome Page on Facebook appeared first on Socialbrite.

Find out how Facebook can help your nonprofit increase engagement

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, marketing professionals, bloggers, individuals.

Ilove the new Facebook Insights. Unlike so many other changes that Facebook has sprung unexpectedly on us, the new Insights is a welcome change. I think it is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. If I sound gushy, well, I am. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. As I’ve written before, if your page cannot ultimately move people to take action, then your organization is wasting its time with Facebook. Online engagement is how it begins.

Know how engaging your content really is

Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page’s content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. No longer do we have to count up Likes, fan posts to walls, and comments on posts, and pull together the online engagement percentage. And what’s more, we can dive deep, very deep, by post. By who is seeing the posts, and where. By how the content is being shared, and what type of content is being shared. That’s just the beginning. The Facebook metric that matters now is engagement. Here are but three examples of how Facebook is highlighting engagement.

Likes vs. PTAT (People Talking About This)

Think about the bold statement Facebook is making when it shows this publicly on every Facebook page, for all to note:

In one glance, which number is more important? With simplicity and sharpness, Facebook turned the Like numbers game into a “how many really care” numbers game. Brilliant.

Engagement by post

You can also drill down by post. New Insights is designed to help you understand which posts created the most Reach (impressions, who saw it), or highest number of Engaged Users (who clicked on it), or highest number of those who Talked About This (Liked, shared it, commented on a post). The old Insights offered a blanket number of impressions and feedback percentage by wall post, which merely offered a sense of reach and interest. A post like this one (below), which 2,200+ Facebook users could have seen, only had 56 clicks on it and 9 users who commented or Liked the post. The real engagement metric on this post is 56. And nine people who were really engaged.

What types of posts are the most engaging? Figure that out and improve your PTAT score (People Talking About This). Go get ’em!

Understanding how your content engages people

I also love that you can tell which of the wall posts took off due to either organic, paid or viral traffic. Look at those posts, figure out what happened there, and create more content like that. Understand the difference between the posts that “go viral” and those that are seen because of organic traffic. Greater reach ultimately will attract new fans and people Talking About your page and posts.

So this is the future of measurement. Thank goodness. Facebook has made the first move in this direction. It’s is a great start.

Twitter, YouTube, Google+, you’re next.

Related

• How to use the new Facebook Insights (John Haydon in Socialbrite)

• Guide to social media metrics — social influence measurements, social media ROI, stats to measure on Facebook and Twitter, metrics and analytics tools & more

• How to understand Daily Active Users in Facebook Insights

The post Get deep into engagement with the new Facebook Insights appeared first on Socialbrite.

The upgraded Facebook metric tool explained in plain English

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, individuals.

Two weeks ago, Facebook launched a completely new version of Facebook Page Insights along with several new metrics.

Some of the new metrics include:

• People Talking About This – This is the number of people who engage with your Page and includes users who have liked your Page, commented on or shared a post from your Page, answered a Question you’ve asked on your Page, or tagged your Page in an update or in a photo. This also includes Facebook users who’ve responded to an event on your Page.
• Friends of Fans – This is the total number of friends all your fans have.
• Reach – The number of people who have seen content associated with your Page.
• Virality – The percent of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it.”

How to access Insights on your Facebook Page

You can access your Facebook Page Insights directly under your Facebook Page’s main image in the sidebar (FYI – this tab can only be viewed by Page admins).

When you click on the Insights icon (see image above), you’ll go directly to an overview of analytics for your Facebook page. You’ll also notice that three sub-tabs have appeared in the sidebar: “Fans,” “Reach” and “Talking About This.”

Making sense of your Page overview

The first tab you’ll see when you click on Insights is an overview of your Page. This tab shows you the day-to-day information you need to know as a page administrator.

What do those four numbers at the top mean?

Those four numbers at the very top of this page are the most current snapshot of your page. Following is the definition for each number:

• Total Likes – Total likes is simply the number of people who have liked your Facebook Page up until yesterday.
• Friends of Fans – Friends of fans is the total number of friends that all of your Facebook fans have, taking mutual friends into account. This number is more useful if you are running a Facebook Sponsored Like Story because it would be the total number of people who could see that ad. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.
• People Talking About This – This is the number of people who engaged with your Page over the past seven days and includes users who liked your Page, commented on or shared a post from your Page, answered a Question you’ve asked on your Page, or tagged your Page in an update or in a photo. This also includes Facebook users who’ve responded to an event on your Page. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.
• Weekly Total Reach – This is the number of people who have seen any content associated with your Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page) over the past seven days. The percent increase or decrease next to this number is a comparison with the previous seven-day period.

Underneath these four numbers you’ll see a graph with rolling weekly numbers for “Talking About This” and “Weekly Total Reach” for the past month. You’ll also see dots for each day that you’ve posted to your page (dot size indicates the number of posts for that day).

What does the Page Posts information mean?

Under the graph you’ll see a spreadsheet of your most recent page updates, with information about how Facebook users engaged with that content. Each column can be sorted, and you can even filter by post type at the top left of this spreadsheet (click on “All Post Types” at the top right of the spreadsheet to filter).

Following is the definition for each column:

• Date – The date that your post was published.
• Post – The type of post (post, photo, video, link, platform post) and excerpt.
• Reach – The number of people who saw that update, or the number of times that update was displayed.
• Engaged Users – The number of people who have clicked anywhere on your Post.
• Talking About This – The number of people who have created a story from your Post (see what this includes at the beginning of this article).
• Virality – The number of people your post reached who “talked about it” (Talking about this divided by Reach).

When you click on each number in this report, a small chart will pop up with more detail. These will be covered later this week (subscribe so you don’t miss out!)

What do the Fans, Reach & Talking About This tabs tell me?

• The “Fans” tab displays the same type of information that was displayed in the old Facebook Insights reports. You’ll see demographic info about your fans, how many people have liked your page, how many people have unliked your page, as well as a list of your top sources for fans.
• The “Reach” tab shows you information about who saw any content about your Page. This will include both fans and non-fans.
• The “Talking About This” tab shows you who created a story about your Page.

Do you like the new Insights?

The post How to use the new Facebook Insights appeared first on Socialbrite.

How a few simple changes can make your Facebook Page more visible & engaging to fans

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, community managers, marketing professionals, NGOs, businesses, brands.

What is your nonprofit doing to engage with your Facebook fans? I put that question to attendees during a talk I gave recently at a gathering of New York nonprofit organizations — and heard about some great practices:

• Planned Parenthood was able to move its Facebook fans to successfully defend the organization against legislative attacks.

• MASA Israel found that including a media image (photo or video) with every wall post update increased wall post engagement. MASA Israel also developed a successful Facebook application that streamlines the program enrollment decision-making process.

• The Partnership at Drugfree.org held a successful Facebook wall chat, most recently with the actress Melissa Gilbert.

The importance of the newsfeed

At the event, convened by my colleagues Michelle Perrault and Seth Giammanco at Minds On Design Lab, I talked about how to ramp up your Facebook engagement. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices and ideas for designing Facebook Page, and how to measure engagement and ROE (return on engagement).

Most fans never visit a Page but instead rely on the Page’s content to show up in their newsfeeds. A recent ComScore study reports that “Facebook users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the Fan Page itself.” However, the problem is that not all content will show up in the Top News section of the newsfeed, which is the default newsfeed setting.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank that dictates which content will be featured prominently in an individual’s newsfeed. (See J.D. Lasica’s explanation of how EdgeRank works.) EdgeRank takes into account three factors: how recent was the content published (on a site, on a Facebook Page), how much interaction did the piece of content create and how regularly the individual interacts with that organization or brand. Thus, if an organization publishes a video to its Page, and no one Likes or comments on it, the video may never show up in the Top News newsfeed of someone’s home page. However, if an individual often Likes, shares or comments on that organization’s content, there is a higher likelihood that the video will show up as part of the Top News.

Setting goals is important

A recent Idealware study on the use of Facebook reveals that nonprofit organizations that set Facebook goals felt that goal-setting correlated with success on Facebook. In particular, organizations that had the most success with their Facebook page set goals of driving constituents to action and attracting particular kinds of constituents. A recent Hubspot report of Facebook brand pages reveals that businesses with 501-1,000 Facebook fans saw 3.5 times the amount of website traffic than Pages with fewer than 25 fans.

Designing Facebook Engagement

Creating Facebook Page engagement is challenging, which is why it is so important to help your fans engage through good Page design. There are four elements to good Facebook Page design:

• creating a welcoming portal with a custom welcome Page

• identifying what the main conversation within the Page will be about

• offering unique content to your Fans (found only on Facebook), and

• creating a content calendar for your Facebook Page.

In addition, you can design your calls to action for a higher return on engagement, as shown by this study by the PR firm 22Squared.

Practicing engagement

The slide deck from my presentation offers some good practices for creating more engagement, taken from a variety of sources. Ideas include posting five days a week, what time of day to post and which days of the week garner the highest engagement.

Measuring Facebook engagement

The last section of the presentation covers thinking about how to measure Facebook engagement, including mapping goals to actions and setting deeper benchmarking goals. The slide below from the presentation demonstrates this approach to Facebook measurement and quantifying return on engagement.

How are you using Facebook to create engagement? Please share your experiences.

Related

• Nonprofits: Are your Facebook fans engaged? (Socialbrite)

• Four-part series on how to use Facebook strategically (Socialmedia.biz)

• Tutorials on how to use Facebook well (Socialbrite)

The post Tricks to ramp up your nonprofit’s Facebook Page appeared first on Socialbrite.