Tic Toc Marketing Amazing

Webinar with Facebook's Head of SMB marketing

Did you miss Felicity McCarthy’s webinar yesterday? Here’s a short summary:

Facebook allows you to connect to people who matter to you, whether they are family or colleagues. People also care about companies and organizations. And vice versa – companies care about people.

In UK 33 million users are active on Facebook – about 66% of them daily. 27 million use the mobile app or interface. Here’s a couple of cool observations:

- The reach on Facebook is twice the reach on TV-commercials. Daily.

- In UK, Facebook gives twice the ROI of newspaper- and magazine ads.

In UK, 61% of all Facebook users are connected to at least one business Page. Think about what this number is using Facebook 1,1 billion users instead of UK’s 33 million.

People want to connect and support their local businesses. As a business, it is important that you add value to this support.

Facebook allows you grow your reach at every step of the sales-cycle. Every impression gives you the possibility to be top-of-mind when someone wonders where to have lunch, or buy his or her next TV.

Key factors:

- Find your target, and add value for them

- Be on Facebook. Or, not only be there, but share your passion on Facebook.

- How are you going to change the world?

- Share stories about your customers and showcase your products also allowing feedback.

Finish your Page:

- Fill in all About-info (location, opening hours etc)

- Use a profile picture that represents your company

- Use a Cover photo that represents your companies values

- Claim your Facebook username

Top tips:

- Be short and sweet

- Use eye catching images and videos

- Be quick and relevant. If It happens today – post it today.

- Plan your posts, and be consistent. Once a week, twice a week, every day, whatever suits you. But be consistent.

- Don’t wait till over the weekend. Post via mobile if you have to.

Find your customers:

How to get more customers? Fans who care?
Facebook allows growing companies with limited budgets to reach more people.

- Use targeting functions

- Create creative ads worth strong call-to-action and “exclusivity”

- Vary your ads (at least 4 of each)

- Monitor and change

Maintain relations:

Your fans Likes, Shares and interactions drives your Word of Mouth, by creating a story on their own Facebook timeline. Be engaging, ask for feedback. Their honest opinions will boost your reach.

- Promote your posts to reach more

- Use Facebook offers

- Sponsored stories

- High-quality content

- Lead-capture by apps

- Measure. Measure. Measure.

Facebook #hashtags = Consistency

Last night, Facebook announced that hashtags are officially coming to Facebook. These are the little "#" signs you see on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+. In theory, the hashtags will be able to give you a better chance of search engine optimization of the content you have on Facebook.

As an example: if a marketer use a hashtag on a ad on TV or any other form of marketing-material - the target group would be redirected to Twitter when searching for it. Now - the target-group can be lead onto Facebook property. Zuckerberg encourages advertisers and marketers to start using the hashtags already. I mean that hashtags across all your digital profiles will increase the consistency in your campaigns. All the hashtags you use on another platform you link to Facebook, will now be clickable. I really can't wait to see how Facebook will categorize these hashtags visually.

Despite the fact that I'm super-stoked about hashtags - I do have a few doubts. What if brands drive the "social" out of "social media"? What if Facebook becomes another marketplace? Who knows? We might even get "suggested hashtags" when writing keywords linked to a brand or product? The champagne is being popped at the advertisers place, but the users will be served a bucket of warm, sweaty beer.

I hate warm beer. We are initially on Facebook to interact, and communicate with our friends. We do reach brands. We do interact with brands through campaigns that catch our interest. So the marketer still needs to keep making an effort to get my attention.

Still - I believe this might actually work out. To make it work as a brand or a business, you need a good and solid strategic foundation, and work with a throughout good consistency when it comes to what you communicate. Considering your digital media profiles, as well as your traditional marketing.

Happy hashtagging!

System Updates May

As always we have many system updates and bug fixes implemented during the last month. Here goes the summary for the updates in May.

Picture Contest: Width & Vote Button

Picture Contest:
Title & Description: The Title & description variables are now available across all Picture Contest fields.

Vote Button: We had many requests for this functionality. You can now customize the vote button text and put in a word in any language.

Flexible Width Size: We got a lot of feedback that users would like the width of the picture contest to be more flexible and allow more sizes than 810px. The width can now be customized via a setting called 'Picture Contest Width' and a text box for the user to input the width in px format.

Image Placeholder Centered: All images when uploaded had a default left aligned placing. The same has been changed so as to allow images to all be center aligned.

Video Gallery:
We have tweaked the widget a bit to now ensure when it pulls videos from the source all the latest and newest videos will always appear first.

Form Thank You Popup

Form Widget:
The form widget thank you popup now comes in 2 sizes - Big (790px) & Small (520px) to ensure it renders in the best possible format and fits the design of your tab.

Multi editor:
The multi editor now has an option to view an edit in HTML

Some quick bug fixes:

- Ensured the landing tab (tab-in-tab) short link was not replacing the app mobile link- Fixed the Registration widget to direct users backs to the app. - Instagram widget does not repeat images and also ensures the last pictures in the list are shown.

That's all from us folks.....

System Updates April

As the month of April rolled in and out, we at Fanbooster have been busy giving the system a couple of updates. As always we love sharing the stuff we have done for the month & hopefully you keep finding these updates useful.

Here is a summary of the updates for the month of April.

Number Field In Form

Number Field in the Form widget: The form widget now has a new addition to its field options. The number only field means, when used the field will only accept an input if it is all numeric.When alphabets are used the user will be notified to correct the same. For eg. this field would work well as mobile number field.

Shares: From time to time Facebook has a habit of changing Share Api's and their functionalities. We did a system maintenance on all the share options across the system to ensure they all work in the same manner. Also all widget shares will now have the ability to have an image link.

FB.st redirect Page: We got a lot of user feedback that a more simple Fb.st redirect page was the way to go. We then updated this to keep it neat & simple, allowing the clicks to be purely focused on the content a user is clicking to see.

Tab-in-Tab Short URL

Tab -in - Tab Short URL for Mobile: You can now generate a mobile friendly short URL for any of your tabs within tabs. This will enable you to guide the user from mobile or desktop specifically to the tab of your choice, when the link is clicked.

Picture Contest: A few tweaks were made to the picture contest. The images uploaded from the preview (front end & back end) now use the text that is defined by the user. This enables both like feeds to use the configured custom title & description.

That's all from us for now & till the next update .....

Facebook Home: What is means for advertisers

Facebook just had a press release about Facebook Home. Our summary below. If you want to see the event you may find it here (when available from Livestream).

Summary for the lazy ones

Facebook want to turn your phone into a newsfeed called Facebook Home.
Other operating systems to come.
Some Android users may Download Facebook home 12.april
No need to change anything for advertisers, really. Just create great content.
Ads to Facebook Home will not be available at the launch, but maybe later.

Bottom line:

For now, don't worry about anything than your content.

Geek summary

Well. A bit more geeky, at least.

From apps to news feed

Today our mobile life spins around apps (browsers are also an app). Facebook is the by far most used app in time spent.

Top apps in time spent

Facebook thinks our life should spin around people, not apps. For that reason, Facebook launches Facebook Home, a layer that connects the apps on your phone in a different way.

The main news are the gui, the home screen, and the chat heads,

The home screen

The home screen will be like your newsfeed. Stories passing by

Read more, comment, like and share directly from the home screen
Options from the home screen will be messaging, Facebook or see your apps

Apps available one click away from the home screen

Chat heads: Fight for messaging

Messaging will always be available from the home screen from Chat heads. Click a head no matter which app you are in and you will see the dialogue.

Platforms and operating system

Facebook will not make a Facebook phone. They will not stick to Android only, but is launching on Android now (because Android is more open, of course).

Tablets to come in some months. Other OSs also later.

HTC will be the first phone with "HTC First". A phone sold in US with the telco AT&T. Other operators to come.

What does it mean for advertisers?

If Facebook succeeds, the status updates are even more important. They take control of the home screen for the users of Facebook Home.
Your content will be even more important. The content will be the hub.
Facebook willl bring ads to coverfeed eventually, but they’re not their at launch. There’s also no video stuff, no group stories.
No changes needed at all for now.

Facebook changes: all apps to sandbox mode

Earlier today Facebook announced a change to how new apps are created.

All apps created from today will start from in sandbox mode. The main reason for the change is that Facebook wants apps to be tested before they go live. This is what Facebook writes on their blog:

Starting today, all newly created apps will be in "sandbox mode" by default. This hides your app for people not listed as admins, developers or testers, so you can build your app without worrying about other people accessing it. When you are ready to take your app live, sandbox mode can be toggled off in the basic settings area of the App Dashboard.