Tic Toc Marketing Amazing

Free feature to extract data from Facebook timeline campaigns

This Tuesday Facebook made it allowed to run competitions directly on Page Timelines, and utilize both comments and Likes to draw winners. What Facebook has not done is to optimize for extracting data from Likes and comments.

The recents changes has made it easy to create simple promotions, says Erik Eggum CEO of Fanbooster. But it is still difficult to extract data from the Timeline campaigns. We wanted to change that.

Free feature to optimize Facebook timeline promotions.

Only three days after the sudden change in the Page Guidelines, Fanbooster launches a feature to extract data from Posts on the Timeline. using the new feature in Fanbooster, the Page admin can download a .csv-file from the Post in question. This makes it easier to follow up, draw winners and get better information about the campaigns produced using the Timeline promotions in Facebook.

The service is free and available to all Fanbooster customers.

New rules - same game

Facebook has just removed the requirement that promotions on Facebook only can be administrated through apps.

Is that good news for all brands or will it just create tons of spam?

The discussion has started.

To us, we think there are four other major aspects to this issue its important to remember.

1. More companies will do stuff. Many of them will use the free solutions available. For sure. It is likely this will be a low-entry service to get more companies going.

2. More companies doing stuff increases the risk for spam. Luckily Facebook has algorithms the make sure the best content is shown the most. We truly believe helping others, stand out and be nice is still the best long term strategy even on Facebook.

3. When more companies do stuff, more companies will spend more time on their Facebook presence. It is likely the need for tools that creates more advanced solution and optimise presence will increase.

4. As always, if you want to succeed you have to create campaigns that differs from all the others campaigns out there. Stand out and create a story that spreads. There are several solutions out there helping creating cool things fast. Fanbooster is of course one of them.

Our general thought is that this is cool! We think its a low-entry opportunity you for sure should look into. It is always a great idea to get more data on how your customers behave. So start testing with this feature as well!

In Fanbooster we have a number of solutions to create business on Facebook. We have an advanced solution for data collection to collect e-mail, phone numbers etc, you can monitor your page and benchmark it vs competitors, listen to what is being said about your brand or selected key words all over social media and create stunning and advanced Facebook apps in a glance. Ok, that was the commercial part, but the point we are trying to make is that the new feature from Facebook is just a tiny fraction of what can be done. And if everyone rush doing similar campaigns…that campaign is less likely to work. So make sure you stand out!

Oh! And by the way. A final notice. Fanbooster's main competitor is "brands doing nothing on Facebook". The news from Facebook will for sure make more brands do something…and helping us in fighting our Doing Nothing nemesis

When to publish Facebook posts

Do you know when you should post to Facebook? Is Monday a better day than Friday? What about 8am vs 11am?

Over the last coupple of months we have analysed 116.314 posts from a number of Facebook pages. This is what we found out. (Well, some of it. Contact us if you want to dig into the details.)

Background

Number of posts: 116.314
Pages from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Both B2C and B2B.
Time period: Until February 2013.

Please note the number are averages and may not be directly relevant for all pages.

Page activity

The illustrations below shows the distribution of the posts. To no suprprise, the posts are mainly published weekdsays between 8 am and 4pm.

Number of posts per day

Number of posts per hour

Day of the week
Which day to post? The table below indicates the probability of getting a like per week day. Wednesday is used as the omitted category. In other words, Wednesday = 0.
The numbers indicate how many likes a each day will get compared to Wednesday. Here, Saturday posts will generate 22,4% more likes than Wednesday posts. Saturday is 21 % better than Friday (0.224 - 0.014)
the stars (*) indicates the probability.
* 99,5 %
** 99,9 %
*** 99,99 %

Regression: Week day

Post type
The table below compare the post categories on Facebook. Here photos generate 41,0 % more likes than status updates (1,009 - 0,599)

Time of the day
The research shows that post pulished 23:00-23:15 has the highest probability of generating most likes. The graph and table belows shows the values in a 30 minutes intervall.
When creating 15 minutes intervalls (not included in this blog post) we see pretty big variotions. Some examples:

20:30-20:45 0.368
20:45-21:00 0.180
21:00-21:15 0.392

22:30-22:45 0.350
22:45-23:00 0.370
23:00-23:15 0.530
23:15-23:30 0.369
23:30-23:45 0.130

Time of the day

0:00 - 0:30	-0.344
0:30 - 1:00	0.103
1:00 - 1:30	-0.188
1:30 - 2:00	-0.882
2:00 - 2:30	-1.048
2:30 - 3:00	-0.990
3:00 - 3:30	-1.322
3:30 - 4:00	-0.252
4:00 - 4:30	-0.373
4:40 - 5:00	-0.030
5:00 - 5:30	0.233
5:30 - 6:00	-0.005
6:00 - 6:30	0.110
6:30 - 7:00	0.143
7:00 - 7:30	0.056
7:30 - 8:00	0.040
8:00 - 8:30	0.023
8:30 - 9:00	0.000
9:00 - 9:30	0.069
9:30 - 10:00	0.088
10:00 - 10:30	0.093
10:30 - 11:00	0.047
11:00 - 11:30	0.065
11:30 - 12:00	0.091
12:00 - 12:30	0.079
12:30 - 13:00	0.091
13:00 - 13:30	0.096
13:30 - 14:00	0.080
14:00 - 14:30	0.184
14:30 - 15:00	0.197
15:00 - 15:30	0.238
15:30 - 16:00	0.244
16:00 - 16:30	0.245
16:30 - 17:00	0.296
17:00 - 17:30	0.368
17:30 - 18:00	0.339
18:00 - 18:30	0.268
18:30 - 19:00	0.330
19:00 - 19:30	0.258
19:30 - 20:00	0.346
20:00 - 20:30	0.279
20:30 - 21:00	0.235
21:00 - 21:30	0.309
21:30 - 22:00	0.293
22:00 - 22:30	0.248
22:30 - 23:00	0.319
23:00 - 23:30	0.431
23:30 - 0:00	0.101

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.....