Facebook Introducing Topic Data To Help With More Targeted And Personalised Communication

A More Complete Fit

In recent days Facebook has announced through its news pages that it will be introducing a new communication product called Topic Data that will allow Facebook marketers the ability to gain a deeper understanding of their audiences' psychographic aspects such as attitudes, opinions and beliefs around the key issues and aspects that pertain to their business, with the view of being able to formulate ever more precisely matching products and services that more fully and completely meet those customer needs.

 

 

 

Historical Approach

Typically up until now by observation an online marketer could deduce by the activity about what was being shared, commented on and generally spoken about, what the respective care factor was for any given issue, topic or challenge. Certainly behaviorally based and useful but at best this represented an incomplete picture about what people thought.

Subsequently Facebook have now communicated that the new Topic Data product will be available to a specified group of pre-selected Facebook partners which one would assume would be a first phase in a plan to eventually roll it out universally to the full 1.35billion globally users at a future time when the trial phase has concluded.

How Does Topic Data Work

Essentially Topic Data will provide greater clarity and therefore insight into what your target audiences are talking about online with respect to you, your product, competitors, upcoming and launch events, matters of importance and other general activities that may all provide your marketing team with addition information on what is needed, how it should be couched to best resonate with that group of potential customers.

 

Deidentified

Perhaps most pleasing is the fact that this information will be provided in a deidentified way where the identity and personal information of the person making the comments is kept secret thereby protecting their privacy and anonymity. Of course as marketers the key for our market research regardless of whether its online or using more traditional offline methodologies of focus groups and surveys, needs to rely on the accuracy of the data but not necessarily on who is saying it.

 

Decision Making

The end result of this being that product and brand managers will again have access to another useful data source that will help them to formulate better positioning, strategy and tactical implementation.

 

As a provided example fro the news source with Topic Data:

• A business selling a hair de-frizzing product can see demographics on the people talking about humidity’s effects on their hair to better understand their target audience.
• A fashion retailer can see the clothing items its target audience is talking about to decide which products to stock.
• A brand can see how people are talking about their brand or industry to measure brand sentiment.

Ref: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/topic-data

 

Although such data has of course been available before, it may have been in numbers that were not statistically significant enough to  make meaningful business decisions.  Now utilising Topic Data, Facebook have amalgamated raw and unidentified data  from Facebook activity to provide insights on all the activity around any given topic or discussion area, which in turn provides a much more quantified perspective of what the target market is thinking. Facebook have made it clear also that the topic data provides guidance for marketers but it cannot be used to target ads directly as personal information is at no stage available.

In Partnership With Datasift

Facebook has announced also that it will partner with the Datasift organisation who operate within the data industry and will leverage their experience and technology to further develop and refine the Topic Data model and data accuracy and reliablity. 

Access

Facebook have also declared that for the time being at least, The Topic Data will only be available to a small number of Datasift’s partners in the USA and the United Kingdom. As well the resulting data will be limited to those countries as well. In time it is reasonable to expect a more refined product be made universally available to all.

If you would like to know more about any aspect of Facebook or social media, don't forget to register for any of the seven free, two hour Digital Enterprise Program workshops by signing up at this link:  http://www.vecci.org.au/business-solutions/digital-enterprise-program/workshops

By attending any of these workshops, all Australian SME's will qualify for a free four hour coaching session for their own business at a time and location of their choice.

So until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Regards,

Daniele.

 

 

Facebook Reveal New Look Right Hand Side Column Ads

As you all know I have been for some time concerned about the true value that Facebook provides those businesses that choose to promote on their platform based on the rules around it and the advertising blocking technologies that are freely available today to users who wish to use them.
However as I've also said all along we would continue to monitor any changes or improvements made by Facebook and discuss them as they happened here. On this point it has been revealed i the last week or so that Facebook will now be introducing a new ad format with the arrrival this week of the right-hand column ads.

What Are the Changes

As you can see from the Facebook blog example, the ads are more pronounced and designed to make a bigger splash in terms of impact to hopefully provide a more valuable return on investment from the businesses point of view, whist also providing better value to the reader and potential customer. On this,
Facebook clearly acknowledge the need for them to continue to refine and provide better value for the customers and users alike and this step is an obvious move in this direction.
Facebook have also sggested that initial observation has significantly higher click-through rates from users shown the new advertising design versus the previous style ad. That feedback suggests that users seeing the ads will certainly get a well targetedand impactful ad. So we certainly give that a tick.

What Will The Changes Mean

Facebook will certainly argue then that the advertisers will receive more value for their ad impressions. These ad sill also mean that users will see fewer ads on Facebook. So what will this mean to advertisers.

The inevitable result of this new format which has also been acknowledged by Facebook, that as the bidding for the space on Facebook will increase the total amount of promotional spend will inevitably also require greater promotional budget to compete at the same level. So the key question here is simply this. Is the presumed increased click through rate going to more than offset the certain increases in ad costs to provide a superior ROI? Obviously Facebook believe as they said in their own media post:
"It is our belief that the overall value delivered through this more engaging ad format will offset any potential decreases in impressions".

The true upside for Facebook of course is that they have a great ability to precisely target an audience for an advertiser based on the membership information that all users provide on joining Facebook which ticks all the segmentation criteria. Namely: demographic, geographic and psycho-graphic.
Ultimately what impact this change delivers but again we will follow it closely and monitor and incremental changes as well as anyadditional innovations facebook deliver to overcome the underlying issue of their continuing, ongoing deterioration of their orgaic reach.  Time will certainly tell.

As always to learn more about Facebook or any other form of digital or social media come long to one of the free two hour workshops of the Digital Enterprise Program and qualify for a free four hour one on one coaching session for your bussiness. Simply log on to the VECCI site and click on the link:
http://www.vecci.org.au/business-solutions/digital-enterprise-program/workshops
So until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele Lima.

Facebook Advertising: Failing to Deliver On Real Value

Those of you who know me, know that for a long time I have believed strongly in the fairness of the system adopted by Google in its' Adwords platform (namely the Pay-Per-Click or PPC system).
Simply put you pay Google every time someone sees you sponsored link and clicks on it where they are transferred to your landing page or website.

Unlike this system, Facebook adopt the Pay-Per-Impression (PPI) system which charges the advertiser not on the number of times someone clicks on your ad but rather the number of times it appears organically next to someone's news feed for example Facebook may charge you a dollar fee per 1000 impressions. This occurs regardless of whether or not anyone ever clicks on the ad. Is it just me or is this a very sweet deal for Facebook but so much for the advertiser?

Now if this wasn't bad enough I had the opportunity this week to work with leading IT and multimedia expert Trent Rebeiro  who updated me on the extent to which ad blockers are being adopted by people today.

As of this week over 15,000,000 people who use Google Chrome as their browser have installed mostly at no cost the Ad-block software extension that as the name implies, disables all your incoming ads.

Now think about this from a marketing point of view for a minute. In good faith you the advertiser are paying Facebook money for impressions that are quite often being blocked and therefore never appear. How unfair is that?

Over time and as people find out about the availability of such options I have no doubt that number of 15 million will continue to grow. So what if your target audience is one that is computer savvy and is therefore likely to include the lions share of these people on Facebook. Imagine how this will impact on your ability to efficiently target your niche here.

If this all wasn't bad enough this week I also heard that Facebook have now come out and formally admitted in a statement saying that: "We expect organic distribution of an individual page's posts to gradually decline over time, as we continually work to make sure people have a more meaningful experience on the site."  Translation: Facebook want you to pay for the right of getting your message across and it is being touted that there will be around a 40% reduction in organic reach even to your pages followers.  That's what I call a double whammy.

On the one hand Facebook want you to do more advertising but on the other hand the real effectiveness of Facbook advertising is being erroded away with the adoption of Ad blocking technology.  Memo to Facebook.  There's a reason you struggle to make money and hopefully this post will shed some light on just some of those reasons.  Please fix it soon.

So until next time, good luck and good marketing.
Regards,
Daniele.

New Facebook Email Addresses Now Available

In recent times Facebook has announced that it has updated the Facebook addresses on its site so that there is now greater consistency across the various functions of site.

As a result the address used to get to your personal timeline will be exactly the same as the one used t you email you on Facebook.

The updated addresses for people who had not already selected an email address on Facebook, whereas anyone who already had selected an email address on Facebook will not be affected.

If you want to pro-actively select an email address now you can also do so by going directly to: Facebook.com/username. ​

No doubt email continues to play and important and ongoing role that is complimentary to and supportive of all our social media efforts.

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Interest Lists Introduced By Facebook

Facebook has now introduced interest lists which can be utilised to effectively act as a feeder source for news feeds arranged by subject.

Facebook account holders are now able to group either similar pages or well known individuals into “interest lists” so that they can source selective subject based content into their news feed.

Facebook boffins will of course know that the ability to build lists of friends is a well established feature of the market leading platform. However up until now users didn't have a comparable function to assemble lists of Facebook pages.

Facebook has announced that users will soon see the “Add Interests” link in their left-hand bookmarks. With this new function any Facebook user can either join other people's lists and / or build their own lists.

Interest lists will be made up of Facebook pages, friends and subscriptions. The most popularly read piece from each area of interest would then appear in the News Feed along with a hyper-link redirecting the reader back to read other related posts.

New Facebook Business Page Formats Set to Roll Out in Late March

After rolling out the new Timeline feature recently that were done through an individual's personal profile, Facebook will extend the idea further by introducing Timeline for its Facebook Business pages. Timeline will alter the appearance of Business pages and align them with the same look of individual profiles.

Any existing Facebook Business page will gradually be transferred over to the new Timeline format by the end of March 2012.

One key change that will accompany this is that the business will now be able to put in one major piece of branding in the extended header, which will maximise their ability to better brand the page. However there are some key promotional limitations regarding what else can be articulated her in respect to special deals, product pricing and contact information.

As well there is a limit of 3 applications that can be shown on this page, with any additional apps being accessible via a 'More' button. To add greater connectivity and engagement with the page, followers will also now be able to message Business pages.

Despite all these new features, some other page features have now been removed.

The most notable of which includes the default landing tabs used to create a Welcome tab will no longer available with the new Timeline design.
However on balance, given the increased ability to connect with followers the changes on balance look to be an improvement overall. As always time will tell.

Let us know what you think.

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Recent Survey Confirms SEO is the Most Sought After Promotion for Small Businesses

The recent “merchant confidence survey” from US based lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, conducted a survey in November 2011 with 2,500 US small businesses, and has found that search engine optimization (SEO) is the most preferred marketing channel that SME's would choose if they could choose only one.

The businesses being surveyed were each asked the question: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?”

Understandably the choices included several possibilities reflecting the wide variety of choice available to businesses today including: Social media platforms, PPC, SEO, mobile and traditional advertising media. With a staggering 70%, SEO was clearly well ahead of the chasing pack of other key options.

As well it is highly significant to think that coming into 2012, “traditional media” defined as radio, TV, newspapers, magazines and direct mail, was ranked ahead of both Social Media and Paid Media, with newspapers being the highest ranked of the traditional options.

What's even more interesting is that the most common tool used amongst 70% all the respondents was Facebook. Apparently the conclusion here,is that even though SME's are using social media but to less than spectacular effect.

What we need to ask then is, is SEO more powerful or is it that we need to better educate SME's on how to effectively monetarise social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube?

What are your thoughts? Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.