What you need to know about recent changes to two key social networks

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

The social media landscape continually evolves, and it’s hard to keep up with all the changes. Platforms and apps I know and love suddenly have new capabilities, add-ons and new wrinkles. In this new feature, “New and Improved on the Social Web,” I’ll be highlighting some of the latest changes to social media platforms, apps and tools, and commenting on their implications. Let’s start by tackling the recent changes to Delicious (social bookmarking) and Facebook.

Delicious stacks

Delicious, the social bookmarking site — acquired not long ago by the founders of YouTube — just rolled out a completely new Web interface as well as a new product, Delicious stacks. The new interface is fun and updated and brings the brand experience in line with today’s Web experience and expectations. While Delicious has always enabled users to bookmark, tag and publicly share bookmarked URLs and tags, users were not able to compile sharable topic areas. The new feature, Stacks, is Delicious’ version of publicly curated content streams. Any Delicious user may create a topic (called a stack) and add links from around the web to create a stack of the topic. Delicious users can follow stacks, share stacks with others and save individual links within others’ stacks.

With the stacks rollout, Delicious is clearly trying to be a player in the content curation trend. If this succeeds, stacks could easily compete with other curation tools such as Google Reader, scoop.it and Pearltrees.

Open commenting allowed on Facebook pages

Facebook announced a lot of upcoming changes at their F8 developer conference in September. Some of those changes are rolling out now, with implications for your organization’s page.

One of the more significant changes to your page is that any Facebook user can comment on your posts and on your wall, without Liking the page first. Just as you had previously managed your settings to allow fans to write or post content to your Facebook wall, the new permission allows “users” to do so. One note: this is a change that you can opt out of – if you allowed fans to post, the new settings automatically allow any Facebook user to post.

Potentially more people will post to your page and Like (or Subscribe to) its content because they can interact with it more easily. Ideally, more Facebook users will see your content because the increased commenting will appear in users’ newsfeeds (now called “tickers”). A user still has to Like a page for that specific page’s updates to show up in his/her ticker. On the other hand, there is less incentive to Like a page if a user just wants to post or comment. The largest implication I see is that page admins now have an even better incentive to create engaging and sharable content.

New Facebook Insights & the ‘People are Talking About’ metric

The new “People are Talking About” metric appears below your page’s Likes, on the left-hand side of the wall. It is Facebook’s attempt to benchmark and reveal how engaging your page’s content is. The PATA metric includes people who:

• like, share, or comment on a post or on the wall
• answer a question on your page
• mention your page by tagging it, or tag a photo of yours
• like or share a check-in deal, or check-in at your Facebook place

The new Facebook Insights offers a more subtle breakdown of engagement by individual post than the old Insights did. The previous individual Post Impressions metric has been replaced with multiple engagement metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This, and Virality.

According to Search Engine Land’s comprehensive summary of the new Insights:

“The goal of Pages Insights for Page admins is to understand what drives that number and how they can best engage their advocates, so that they can get a sense of how to optimize their Page content to increase the people they’re reaching with their messages. Which means that no matter the size of your Page’s audience, you can really get a good sense for which posts spread and get shared with others.”

I believe the new Insights will offer admins a more accurate sense of how engaging their pages’ content is with fans. If nonprofits are using social media to move online fans to take action, and to help the organization further its mission of changing the world, then creating more online engagement is a critical step in that path.

Related resources on Socialbrite

• Video tutorial: How to use the new Facebook Insights
• Facebook nuked the Like button, now what?
• 7 ways Facebook’s subscribe button could be a nonprofit game-changer

The post Inside the upgrades to Facebook & Delicious appeared first on Socialbrite.

Participation is the key for getting value out of your Facebook Pages

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

I‘ve been digging deep into research about Facebook fan activity lately, in preparation for a few upcoming presentations about social media return on engagement and Facebook engagement. I was delighted to find recent research about Facebook fan engagement from Michael Wu at Lithium and from comScore. Placed together, this research offers three very practical takeaways for nonprofits and brands managing Facebook fan Pages: relevant benchmarks of how deeply fans engage with Pages, the effect of fans on website visits, and how likely fans are to engage with your organization’s services or purchase items.

Basic benchmarks for measuring fan activity

1Michael Wu posits that “fan count is only the most superficial characterization of engagement, because it says nothing about the fans’ subsequent action and their interactions.” To measure the real engagement of a fan Page, Michael looked at different levels of fan engagement: active fans (who comment or post a message on a page), what fraction of posts have comments, amount of interaction among fans on a Page, and number of unique fans per conversation. From his research, he found these Page engagement benchmarks:

• The number of active fans per day (i.e. actively engaging) is about 3.45% of total page fans.
• About two-thirds of all posts do receive some activity, but it is normal to expect that around one-third will never receive comments and disappear quickly from a person’s newsfeed.
• Most Facebook fans are not very loyal to the fan Pages. Only about 30% of the active fans re-engage with the fan Page more than once (i.e. through posting).
• The probability of a fan returning to the same conversation on the fan Page is low, only about 9.6%.

If a fan never interacts with your Page’s content, then the reach of the Page will never grow, either. The more interactions, the more friends of fans will see your content. This correlates to the comScore research, next.

The role of the newsfeed

2Facebook users primarily interact with a fan Page in the newsfeed. What this means is that most fans don’t ever visit the actual fan Page. How often a fan or a friend of a fan will see your Page content within the newsfeed is determined by how often the actual post is shared, interacted with, and Liked. (See J.D. Lasica’s article for an in-depth look at how EdgeRank works.)

The new comScore report “The Power of Like” offers solid data on why fan activity with a Page is so important: reach. This report is focused on how people interact with the top 100 brands, with deeper analysis of a few large brands.

• Facebook users spend 25% of their time on Facebook interacting with their newsfeed. In May, 27 percent of engagement on Facebook.com occurred on the homepage and newsfeed, followed by profile viewing (21 percent), photo viewing (17 percent) and usage of apps and tools (10 percent).
• Facebook users are 40 to 150 times more likely to see branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the fan Page itself.
• Friends of fans is an important potential segment for organizations to reach. Friends of fans typically represent a much larger set of consumers (34 times larger, on average, for the top 100 brand pages) and may receive social media brand impressions through their Facebook friends. In the graph below, you can see that for every fan that visits Starbucks’ Facebook fan Page, 156 others see the brand Page’s updates through the newsfeed.

To reach more friends of fans, post to Facebook more frequently. Each incremental day of publishing branded content from the Facebook Page increases the reach among fans by about 2.5 percent.

Facebook fans equal website visitors

3Big implications here for nonprofits! Fans and friends of fans are much more likely to visit an organization’s website than the average Internet user. In the comScore report, for example, Bing fans are 55% more likely to visit the website and friends of Bing fans are 33% more likely to visit the website than the average Internet user. Other research shows that consumers use a combination of search and social media to research before making a purchase, and the effect of exposure of a brand to likelihood to purchase.

Interestingly, the comScore report shows that fans and friends of fans are more likely to spend more per transaction at the store and to have more frequent transactions. I believe you can reasonably assume from the data that those who Like your page are more likely to take these actions.

While Facebook engagement data from Lithium tells us a lot about how fans engage with your Page’s content, the comScore data illustrates how engaging data can potentially affect website visits, purchasing, and engagement with your organization’s services. The key, of course, is creating engaging, relevant, shareable content.

How does this data compare with your experience managing and/or interacting with a fan Page?

Resources

• Quantifying Facebook Engagement: More than Just Counting Fans and Like (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• 

Are Your Facebook Fans Real Fans? (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing (comScore)

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

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