In the last month Facebook has released two new features - Questions and Places. Questions lets you post queries to the Facebook community and Places allows you to share your location with your Facebook friends.
While neither of these functions are new to the web, they are significant because of Facebook’s size. With 500 million users, the potential audience reach for both of these features is massive.
Facebook Questions
Facebook Questions was released in beta on July 28th and although it is currently only available to a limited number of people, Facebook says it is “aiming to bring this product to all of you as quickly as we can.”
Similar to Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers, Facebook Questions allows you to ask and answer questions within the Facebook community.
To ask a question, click on the “Ask Question” button at the top of the page. You can add a poll or photos to your question. For example, if you want to know the name of a flower that you took a picture of, you can attach the photo to your question. Questions also involve tagging. Users can tag their questions with keywords so that the questions can be found by people searching for questions on specific topics. Tagging also helps Facebook determine what users to show the question to.
Your question will appear to your friends as well as to people who have expressed an interest in that topic (determined by your tags) in their Facebook profiles. In terms of companies, if you post a question under your company profile, it will appear in your fans’ News Feeds.
Facebook Questions are also integrated into Facebook Pages. This means that fans can use the new Questions tabs to ask a question to the Page’s admin and other fans.
What Facebook Questions Means for Marketers
Facebook Questions can be used similarly to how businesses use LinkedIn Answers. We’ve worked with clients who’ve had great success with LinkedIn Answers as a networking and lead generation tool.
By answering questions under your company’s Fan Page, like using the Answers feature in LinkedIn, Facebook Questions can spread your name and the company around to people who you’re not friends with. This means more chances to make connections outside of your circle and more chances to establish yourself as an authority in your field.
Again, the significance of Questions is the size of Facebook’s user base. As Lisa Barone notes
Facebook Questions has something that the other Q&A sites don’t - your mom. I know it sounds like the punch line to a bad joke, but think about it. Your mother, your second cousin and your high school flame are all on Facebook. They use the site on a regular basis to re-connect with family and stay updated on baby photos. The fact that Facebook is built on relationships with people you know in real life changes the way people use it. It alters the types of responses we’re seeing being left on questions. If you take a look at the early responses being left on Questions, you’ll notice two things:
The answers are much longer than on traditional Q&A sites.
They’re more conversational.
Questions are becoming prompts for longer conversations. As a small business owner, you’ll get a much more expanded view of how people feel about a certain topic.
You can ignore this message. I’m testing the schedule post function because there seems to be a conflict with the server time and the localization settings. Dreary, I know. Skip down and enjoy the AT&T post instead.
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
This montage of AT&T ads came from a 1993 Newsweek CD-ROM, when Newsweek thought that one day, magazines would be sent to you in CD-ROM form, sponsored with ads. It’s an interesting view of the future.
What is your business promising?
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Google Analytics can be a useful tool when reviewing your site’s usability and there are a number of ‘red flags’ to watch out for. These red flags indicate that your site is frustrating users rather than engaging them.
Bounce Rate. Bounce rate shows you how many people are landing on your site and then immediately leaving. Your bounce rate should be below 50%. If it’s not, look at your website’s entry and exit points. What pages are visitors landing on? Which ones are they leaving from? A high bounce rate usually indicates that visitors are not finding what they’re looking for or are unsure of what to do on your site. Make it clear - what should visitors be doing? Give them a reason to stay.
Pogo-sticking. Pogo-sticking is when there are a lot of pageviews but a low average time spent on the site. This indicates that visitors are searching around the site and not finding what they are looking for. Similar to a high bounce rate, look at what pages visitors are landing on and where they’re leaving. Are there clear calls to actions to direct visitors through the site? Make sure there are visual cues to lead visitors through common paths on your website.
Exit Pages. If there are pages that are consistently top exit pages, and they are not thank-you or contact pages - in other words, they should not be exit pages - you need to explore why. For example, are these top exit pages confusing? Do they have complicated forms that visitors do not want to fill out? Are pages missing clear calls to action, so visitors do not know what to do or where to go? Review the top exit pages to make them more user-friendly.
Monitoring Google Analytics is ultimately about action. You should identify the problems within your site and make calculated improvements in order to build a more usable and engaging site for your visitors.
A number of big industry players and knowledge seekers have reported recently on various aspects of search and social media.
Forrester reported in The Future of Search Marketing, there are a number of things we can expect in regards to search and social media:
* More content and ways to search
* Richer search engine interfaces and ads
* Overlap with social and mobile
* Increased automation
* Improved analytics
What does that mean in terms of maintaining and refining your search marketing and social media strategy?
1. Create shareable content
2. Make sharing easy
3. Reward engagement
4. Proactively share content
5. Encourage the mashup
1. Create shareable content
Four years ago, increasing your linkability was key because links were the main currency of the web. It was a search web vs. a social web. Today content can be retweeted, often helping content get indexed faster in search. Don’t focus only on links, focus on content people will want to share, which leads to links, likes, digs and forwards.
2. Make sharing easy
Tagging and bookmarking are only a few of the ways that people share content. Today they can “post a short link to their profile, embed a video, send out a tweet or create a hashtag for a conversation.” If you have persuasive, shareable content, make it intuitive to share with easy buttons.
3. Reward engagement
In the days of search, inbound links were golden. Today the real currency is social engagement, which ranges from comments and discussion to posting or sharing content. Overall, this is a richer linking experience. Remember to reward this behaviour by RTs, thank yous, posting additional comments and engaging with that audience.
4. Proactively share content
I’d rename this to re-purpose shareable content. If you have compelling content, don’t just post it as a blog post or newsletter article, think about how it can be shared in slides via Slideshare or in documents on Scribd or Google Docs. Perhaps there’s good video opportunities, mobile apps or whitepapers. Think multiplatform and multipurpose. 5. Encourage the mashup
“The concept of the ‘mashup’ where people take and remix your content by adding their own input and voice.” If you can inspire your audience to speak on your behalf, in their own words, the influence of the crowd goes beyond the power of your original materials. See Rohit Bhargava’s explanation of his 5 points here.
Before summer is over, think about social media optimization and search engine optimization. Revisit your search marketing and social media strategy for ways to refine and integrate the two.
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
It’s August and, albeit reluctantly, we are busying preparing for Fall. What better time than now to review your website’s usability?
Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting recently presented at the SFU Summer Publishing Workshops on usability and outlined his three golden keys to creating better online user experiences. He’s been kind enough to share them with us:
The Three Golden Keys of Usability
See Through Your Audience’s Eyes
Usability is about walking in the steps of your audience and understanding their needs and wants. Todd uses the example of Walt Disney walking around his theme park crouched down so that he could see things from a child’s height.
At Boxcar Marketing, we try to walk in the steps of our audience by creating personas. Personas are character sketches of individual audience members that outline their demographics, likes and dislikes, lifestyles, technical abilities and their needs and wants when using a site. Personas are helpful because they move you away from thinking about what the project team wants and towards what the website visitor wants.
You May Need to Give Something Up That You Love
The user experience trumps design. It doesn’t matter how mind-blowing your design is, if it gets in the way of what a user is trying to do (or what you want the user to do) it needs to go. People are busy on the web and don’t have time for flashy designs that get in their way.
Todd uses the example of Apple’s new remote. Apple loves simple design but, on their new remote, they’ve added an additional button. Todd believes that, in this case, Apple had to give up their love of simplicity for ease of use. Good designers know when to comprise.
Don’t Make People Think
Building on the ideas from Steve Krug’s book on web design and usability, Don’t Make Me Think, Todd says that your site should make it clear what you want people to do. Anticipate your users’ confusion. Make your instructions and guidelines as clear as possible. Clear calls to action need to be present throughout your site.
Steve Krug says to imagine your users are whizzing by on the freeway. This metaphor is closer to the truth of how users interact with your site than the closely scrutinized treasure map we generally believe that we’ve created and they are following.
The Reservoir of Goodwill
In Don’t Make Me Think Steve Krug talks about the reservoir of goodwill. Website visitors start out with a reservoir of goodwill. Each problem they encounter on a website lowers the level of that reservoir.
When reviewing your site’s usability, the questions to ask yourself are:
How would users see/perceive this?
Is this element needed for users to complete a task?
Are the calls to action obvious?
Overall, website usability is about designing from the users’ perspective to create the best experience possible. If a user has a good experience on your site they are more likely to return and think positively about your organization.
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
With tight budgets, companies are trying to make decisions about where and how to allocate resources. The much-lauded options for social media are ever present in the press, which pushes many to shuffle resources from search marketing to social media. But really the two should operate hand in hand.
Social media is all about content creation. Search is all about indexing content and making it easy to find.
You need a strategy for both. And, a supercharged content strategy combines search and social media to maximum effectiveness.
For example, social media search functions are increasingly important for monitoring the conversation about your industry, organization, competitors and customer conversations. Twitter’s advanced search lets users track various keyword phrases that can be filtered by language of the page, timeframe and other criteria. Monitoring the social web can inform your understanding of the language, terms and tone used by your customers. Commonly used keyword phrases can then be integrated into your blog post titles, page headings, meta descriptions and title tags—all things relevant to search engine optimization.
The feedback loop created is invaluable. Your business strategy informs your social media strategy, which informs your search strategy, which validates the assumptions made in your business strategy, allowing you to refine your messaging, audience targets, and sales pitches.
The beauty of a circle is that it has no beginning point. Your search strategy can inform your business strategy, which informs your social media strategy, which feeds back into your search strategy.
When you combine search and social media, the left hand not only knows what the right hand is doing but is able to act on it, and vice versa.
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
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