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8th October, 2012

The word algorithm is one that most PR professionals will be aware of. Google’s method for determining search rankings is as secret as it is alluring for those looking to gain more search prominence.

But there is another algorithm out there that is far less famous, but equally important. It’s called EdgeRank and it is what Facebook uses to determine the stories that show up in a user’s newsfeed.

The Facebook newsfeed is the key to success for Facebook marketing. It’s the place where every single Facebook user spends most of their time.

Yes, that’s right, Facebook users will hardly ever visit your Facebook page, they consume your posts through their newsfeed.

Tough time getting through?

Another very important point to note, and one that many marketers still fail to realise, is that the vast majority of posts never actually make it into someone’s timeline.

Conservative estimates suggest that only 16% of your fans, on average, will actually receive any particular post you send them.

So how do you increase that percentage? The answer is simple: improve your EdgeRank.

Introducing EdgeRank

Facebook understands there is a massive problem with information overload on the platform. It knows that we make a lot of connections on Facebook – some of them we really care about, others less so. It therefore makes sense that we would want to receive updates from those friends (and brands) that we really care about rather than long-lost school friends we haven’t seen in years or brands we ‘liked’ in order to get a freebie or enter a competition.

EdgeRank attempts to solve that problem and it does it in quite a sophisticated way.

Every single ‘update’ that you might see in your newsfeed on Facebook is called an ‘edge’ (hence EdgeRank). An edge could be a status update, a song you listen to on Spotify or a picture upload.

Much in the same way that Google wants to help you find the information you care about, EdgeRank helps Facebook show you the edges that matter most to you.

There are three elements that make up EdgeRank – affinity, weight and decay.

It’s worth looking at each of these in more detail.

Affinity

This element attempts to work out how much you care about the person or brand that is sending you an edge. You’ve probably noticed how, if you snoop on someone’s profile, you’ll probably get more of their updates in your newsfeed over the next few days or weeks.

But you don’t just have to visit a Page to affect affinity. Simply liking a post, leaving a comment or sharing an update can raise affinity levels.

That’s why, for a brand, getting a like or a share isn’t just good for engagement, it’s vital in ensuring more of your posts will get through to that fan in future. It’s a vote of support.

The great thing about affinity (if you can get it) is that it’s self-fulfilling. The more affinity you get, the more of your posts will appear to in future and the more interaction (and therefore affinity) you’ll be able to achieve.

Weight

This is all about the types of edges that appear in your newsfeed. Facebook understands that a picture will generally have more interest to you than a Spotify update. Therefore it assigns different weightings to different pieces of content. There’s no definitive list here, but it is fair to assume that links, photos and videos have more EdgeRank than other pieces of content.

As with all algorithms, there is no one size that fits all. Some users will show more interest in photos and therefore Facebook will show them more photos in their newsfeed. So just putting videos in every post won’t necessarily be successful. Having a regular stream of these three pieces of content is the best advice for success here.

Decay

This is all about timeliness. In simple terms, something that is more recent is more likely to show up in someone’s newsfeed.

Content, content, content

What is perhaps most interesting about all of this is that, while big flashy campaigns might do a good job of increasing the number of fans you have, it’s only the ongoing community management stuff that will actually work when it comes to increasing EdgeRank.

Good quality content on a regular basis is the only way to tick the box when it comes to affinity, weight and decay. And it’s only by ticking these boxes that your future updates will be seen.

None of this is rocket silence, but how many brands are really paying attention to it?

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continue reading: Facebook EdgeRank – what is it and why is it important for PR?...

3rd July, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about Enterprise Social Networks recently, and so should you if the figures about the potential size of the market over the next few years are to be believed ($6.4bn by 2016).

The news that Yammer has been acquired by Microsoft for $1.2bn therefore shouldn’t come as any surprise. Sure, it is a big sum, but I think this is a smart move by Microsoft. Whether the same can be said for Yammer is another question. Can Microsoft harness the power of ESNing? Time will tell and it is a subject for another post.

That’s because, long before the deal went through, I was thinking about the potential of a Twitter/Yammer tie up. It might seem strange at first but bear with me.

Is the idea of one unified profile to join work and personal social networking that ridiculous?

As a big user of Twitter and working for a company that uses Yammer, I often find myself dithering between whether to post on Twitter or Yammer or both. Sure, sometimes posts are clearly more appropriate or relevant for public or private-work but surely there would be some benefit in having a unified experience for both?

Clearly Yammer and Twitter won’t happen. But there are plenty of other options out there should Twitter consider this a wise move and, given its ‘finding a business model’ difficulties, maybe getting enterprises on board (and paying) through ESN, especially given the sums mentioned above, isn’t such a bad idea?

continue reading: Twitter + Yammer? What could have been…...

19th April, 2012
12th February, 2012

“If the mainstream media are unable to address news stories that are freely available elsewhere, we will look increasingly irrelevant”

Paul Dacre, Mail Editor at the Leveson Inquiry

This week, the FA sacked their manager Fabio Capello. Pretty big news.

And, when browsing some of the coverage, I was suddenly struck by the role that Twitter played in the reporting of the story. It was as though every article or news broadcast pulled in comments that someone football-related had made on Twitter upon hearing the resignation.

I know this is nothing new, the number of news articles that are almost entirely based on a tweet is soaring by the day. It’s a fascinating change to the status quo.

In the pre-Twitter days, journalists would get comments directly from sources and they would then reveal these comments to their audiences through articles or VTs.

Today, these comments are made directly to the public with the ‘celebrity’ in question often having a audience of tens of thousands themselves. The traditional media are therefore left to report on the tweet itself, even though many readers might have already already seen it.

It’s not hard to see how this marginalises traditional media.

And again, yes, none of this is new.

Twitter – the enemy or the solution?

But it is perhaps more interesting in light of some of the leaks this week from Sky and the BBC concerning the way their journalists use social services like Twitter.

Now, despite the extent of the fascist enforcement you believe these two media corporations are engaging in, these reports seems to be pretty telling.

There is not but a little irony hidden away here. For these are not easy times for traditional media outlets. Journalists with swathes of Twitter followers and enthusiastic communities can be a massive benefit. But it is not hard to see how the money-people and those who live and breathe on page views might think differently.

For those of us that work in PR, this dichotomy is nothing new. It’s perfectly conceivable now for a brand to have a bigger social community that the journalists that it has sought to influence over the last however-many-years.

And that’s a pretty liberating possibility.

I’m off to an event tomorrow at Social Media Week London entitled “Twitter, the Butterfly Effect and the Future of Journalism” and I’m sure it will touch on some of these themes.

It’s a tough time for traditional media. But I can’t help thinking that laying down rules isn’t necessarily the answer. The status quo won’t work IMHO.

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continue reading: Twitter + the media = the beginning of the end?...

27th October, 2011

As you may have picked up already today, we have released our second report investigating how some of the UK’s leading technology companies are using social media. You can download it here.

For the second year in a row, we found that UK technology companies are missing out on the potential of social media by not being social and failing to use these new channels to engage with their audiences.

Only 31% of brands with a Facebook account used it to engage with users and, of those that used Twitter, only 14% of tweets were replies and retweets. When it came to the companies that had a blog, only 20% received comments and only one company took the trouble to reply to comments received.

In the study, we took the 2010 Deloitte Fast Tech 50 – a list of the UK’s 50 fastest growing technology companies and benchmarked their social media activity.

Facebook for B2B is on the rise

One of the most interesting findings this year was that the use of Facebook amongst B2B companies has skyrocketed in the last 12 months with 70% of B2B companies on the platform compared to just 40% previously. Linkedin was still the most popular network used overall (92%), followed by Twitter (80%). YouTube remained the least popular for the second year running (44%). Despite the increase in adoption, most companies were still only using these channels for ‘push’ marketing techniques with 65% of companies with a Facebook page using it for one way communications and 96% of blogs simply broadcasting article and news content without inviting responses.

B2B v B2C

As might be expected, B2C brands in the study were far more likely to engage with users than B2B companies. Of the B2C companies with a Facebook page, 63% used it to engage with consumers compared to just 22% of B2B companies. And, while the percentage of B2B tweets that were replies was only 7%, B2C rated much higher (35%).

Tech companies were also still failing to effectively integrate social media channels with their website. Only 58% of companies in the study had social media links on their homepage despite over 90% of companies having at least one social media site. Half of companies linked Twitter from their homepage, but only 14% linked to a YouTube page or blog.

It’s no longer whether you use it, it’s how you use it

This matches what we’ve found in the last year when speaking to tech companies about social media PR. Whereas a few years ago much of the conversation was about whether tech brands should be using social media. These days, most companies know that they have to get in on the social media act, but are still unsure how to go about it. I predict we’ll see further maturing over the next year, so when version three of the report comes along, maybe we’ll finally see companies using social to be social.

Download ‘How social are you?‘

Originally posted here.

continue reading: If you’re going to use social media, make sure you use it to be social!...

23rd September, 2011

True to form, yesterday Facebook rolled out a whole host of new features at its F8 developer conference. The pick of the bunch was a new timeline (see what mine looks like on the right) and closer integration with music and media services. The latter will now be integrated into the platform through social apps.

A central part of this last development is that anything you do on these services – I’ve installed Spotify and the Guardian so far – will be automatically shared on your Facebook profile and through the new Facebook Ticker. This means every track you listen to, every article you read will be shared. The service is opt-out, so most of what you do will be shared automatically.

Selective v. forced sharing

Selective sharing – where you decide what you want to share with others – is how it has always been on the web and there is a lot to commend about this approach. But for Zuckerberg, it is clearly not enough. And, while social media cheerleaders will happily be pumping every Spotify track and Yahoo News article they read in front of their poor friends/subscribers/fans, I suspect the vast majority of Facebook users will be less enthusiastic.

Forced – or what Zuckerberg calls ‘frictionless’ – sharing will bring about a stream of consciousness, pulling in everything you do on the web.

I think there are a number of key problems with this approach that might come back to bite Zuckerberg in the arse:

  • Information overload – an obvious one here, but the increase in the amount of content will merely add to the sense of information overload. Will Facebook’s algorithms be able to effectively pick out the gems (in your eyes) from the tosh?
  • Privacy – Privacy has often been an issue for Facebook and the reason for this seems to lie in the fact that Zuckerberg’s vision – where everything should be seen by everyone – is at odds with what most users want and also how the site was initially constructed. It’s not hard to see how these latest feature changes make privacy harder and harder to control…
  • Lack of curation – but perhaps the most important issue I have with all this is the lack of curation, the lack of quality control. Some of the stuff I listen to on Spotify is awful. After a few seconds I regret listening to it and move onto something else. But my fans on Facebook won’t necessarily know that. Sharing works best for me when people I am linked up with identify something they think is great and actively make a decision to share it with others. This new forced sharing approach seems to overlook this fundamental process. And that is something that, for me, makes sharing less useful.

continue reading: Facebook’s risky new approach to (forced) sharing...

22nd September, 2011

Yesterday Google officially rolled Google+ out to the public at large.

And then today, anyone that visits the Google homepage will see a little blue arrow animation pointing them to the Google+ tab on the navigation bar. There is also a link under the search box encouraging searchers to join the network.

Ever since Google+ launched I’ve felt that, if the company put its full weight behind it, then social domination could be theirs.

Google is used for over 400 billion searches a day. Go figure.

This is the first step, I expect more to come….

continue reading: This is why Google+ could rule the world...

20th September, 2011

I’m almost bored of Facebook announcements. There have been so many over the last few weeks it is easy to lose count.

And, if you believe the reports out today, at the company’s F8 Developer conference on Thursday, we are set to see a barrage of new features and tweaks that will move the goalposts yet again.

On the one hand, it is great to see a company like Facebook innovating. I’ve often thought Facebook was slower than some of its competitors to roll out new features. But, much like London buses, this is clearly not the case anymore!

Facebook seriously risks confusing its users. Constant changes to the user interface will be met with mixed reactions (humans just don’t like change, fact), but changes to the fabric of the social network (e.g. subscribe buttons) could be far more serious.

Some of the most effective online businesses out there are the ones that are so simple to use that everything just seems to ‘make sense’. Facebook doesn’t fall into this camp and by adding complexity to complexity, it stands to alienate even its most loyal user base.

Forced to innovate?

Some will claim that Facebook’s ramped up efforts in recent weeks have been a direct response to the beta launch of Google+ (and future-proofing ahead of the Google’s public launch of the service, expected shortly) and a response to continued growth and development over at Twitter.

The changes at Facebook have been so wide ranging that I don’t think they can all be put down to a competitor response, but some developments have possibly been rolled out sooner than initially intended to start the fight back.

Users, users, users

With nearly a billion users, there is clearly no need to start sounding the warning bells yet. Facebook’s key strength still lies in the fact that it has by far the most users and the most active users of any social network out there.

The danger is that by constantly fiddling with the platform, users become confused about what the platform is for and how they should use it.

Too big to fail? Possibly. Too complicated to be useful? We’ll see…

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continue reading: Is Facebook losing focus?...

16th September, 2011

I do wonder if the guys at Facebook, Twitter and Google have slept at all in the last few months. Only hours ago, in a blog about Twitter’s new analytics product, I mentioned that we are living through an intriguing battle as the three pretenders to the throne compete for supremacy. And for those of us working in the social media PR space, it is truly fascinating.

So I guess it should come as no surprise to find that, today, Facebook has unveiled another landmark change that could alter the way we all use the social network.

Introducing the subscribe button

At a basic level, Facebook’s new ‘subscribe’ button let’s users follow the public updates of anyone on the network without actually being friends with them. As Facebook states in the blog post announcing the service, in the past, users “couldn’t hear directly from people [they're] interested in but don’t know personally—like journalists, artists and political figures.”

Sound familiar? Yes, that’s right, the subscribe button is essentially the equivalent of the follow button on Twitter; Facebook is moving to a more asynchronous model. And, as with Twitter, the number of people ‘subscribing’ to your feed will be displayed on your profile.

There is additional functionality too. When viewing a friend’s profile, the subscribe button will allow you to set certain preferences which will control the updates you get from that person in your news feed. Settings include ‘all updates’, ‘most updates’ and ‘important updates’.

You can enable the subscribe option here.

Public v. private

When Facebook announced the changes to posting updates last month (the addition of privacy settings and location features), it was clear that it was encouraging users to make more of their posts public. This latest move seems to confirm that.

So on the one hand, this could encourage more people to make more of their posts public, but it could also encourage users to think more carefully about their privacy on the network; an issue that Facebook has struggled with in the past.

What does this mean for brands?

Another important question is whether this will have any effect on the ‘Pages’ feature that Facebook has created for companies or businesses.

The simple answer is no, it won’t.

The subscribe feature won’t be available on Pages and is really designed for individuals such as celebrities, journalists or politicians – individuals that have driven a lot of the success Twitter has achieved in recent years.

Facebook has created a handy little table – see right – that lets you see which feature is most appropriate for what you need.

Overly complex?

However, handy tables aside, I can’t help but think we are being bombarded by new Facebook features at the moment. Only yesterday, Facebook rolled out smart lists (incidentally a really nice feature) and it seems that every time I log onto the service, something has changed.

Of course, the subscribe button is totally optional. Facebook will function in exactly the same way that it always has. And one of my concerns with subscribe and with some of the other features that Facebook has introduced recently is that they risk over complicating the network. One of the reasons I believe Twitter has been so successful is that it is so simple to use. Facebook could potentially do with bearing this in mind.

But if Facebook gets it right and if users start embracing these new features, then it could be a good strategic move for the network. Whatever happens, those of us involved in social media PR will be watching how these changes are used very closely. I wonder what tomorrow will bring…

continue reading: Facebook launches a subscribe button & changes the social game again...

14th September, 2011

Could this be the moment socially-enabled companies and agencies of all types have been waiting for? Very possibly.

Twitter has finally unveiled an official analytics tool – Twitter Web Analytics.

As I have blogged about on many occasions, an official analytics product from Twitter makes so much sense and surely could/will be a key part of the long-promised corporate or paid for accounts the social network has hinted at on many occasions.

So what has Twitter actually revealed? According to the official blog post:

Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

Twitter reveals that the product – which will be rolled out to a select few this week – will incorporate the following features:

  • See how Twitter content is being shared around the web
  • Track the amount of traffic from Twitter to a company’s website – including clicks per tweets
  • Measure the effectiveness of ‘official’ Twitter buttons
  • An API allowing third party analytics tools to incorporate this data

Interestingly, the focus here isn’t on content you share through a Twitter account, it’s on how content on your website has been shared, whether or not you share it through your account. It also provides you with a stream of tweets that reference your content, allowing you to easily reply to or take action based on activity.

The blog post reveals that the rest of us should have access to this feature in the “next few weeks”.

Generally, this is a move that should be welcomed. As a tech PR, I have been hoping for some sort of analytics product for ages. Sure, there have been third party tools that claim to do this to differing levels or success and/or accuracy and there are also various different Google analytics hacks that can help provide certain insights. But an official product that can make the most of the entire Twitter firehose is very exciting.

The product was announced at Techcrunch’s Disrupt conference and the publisher has some interesting detail to add on how Twitter analytics will actually work:

When you log in to your designated account, you’ll see a number of metrics including how many Tweets (this includes Tweets of all kinds), across the network include links to your publisher site as well as the number of clicks. You’ll also be able to see the weekly, daily and monthly number of clicks from any Tweet sent from the site via a Tweet button.

…Twitter will also show you all the Tweets that were sent from the Tweet button on your site, as well as any Tweet that was sent with an inbound link to your site. From the analytics platform you can retweet these Tweets as well as respond to these users.Another extremely useful feature is the ability to see the top links by day, week and month by Tweets and clicks. Users can also add more than one website to a dashboard, and sub-domains as well. Additionally, Twitter will show users what the average number of clicks Tweets received within given time periods and well as the percent of Tweets that were generated using the Tweet button.

You can see the full video of the announcement below.

The social media battle is on?

We’re going through an interesting phase in the whole social media sphere at the moment. The launch of Google+ has put the cat amongst the pigeons with Facebook rolling out a series of ‘anything you can do, I can do better’ features over the last few weeks. And Twitter itself announced some impressive user figures this week too.

We are reaching a point at which these social media giants realise now is the time for them to push for supremacy and, while I believe there is plenty of space for co-habitation, that doesn’t stop these networks from competing for users and column inches.

The fact that Facebook has provided an insight/analytics product for some time is a case in point here. Again, as I have blogged about on several occasions, businesses remain the golden bullet for many social networks when it comes to monetisation. The rumours that Twitter was languishing in no-mans’s land for a time seems to hold some sway. But since Dick Costolo took over late last year, the company seems to have assumed greater commercial, marketing and product savvy.

So is this the start of a greater focus on providing the millions of businesses that use Twitter on a daily basis with greater tools to help them succeed on social media? As a tech PR, I hope so.

 

Originally posted at EML Wildfire Tech PR

continue reading: Finally! Twitter unveils analytics tool...