Facebook Places
Facebook Places was announced August 19th and is currently only available in the US. Similar to Foursquare and Gowilla, you share your location by checking in to where you are by using your smartphone.
What’s All the Excitement Over Location-Based Apps?
Imagine you are driving down the road and you pass by Starbucks. If you are carrying your phone with you, then services with location based technology have the potential to send you a coupon at the exact moment you are passing by that store. Would that be valuable to you as a consumer? Yes. Would that be valuable to you as a marketer? Absolutely. In both instances, the consumer and marketer are allowed communication at the most optimized moment - right before a potential purchase.
Places is meant to be used on a smartphone but can also be used from your laptop or iPod. To use Places, go to the Places tab on the iPhone app or, if you’re not using it from a smartphone, go to touch.facebook.com. The first time you use it, you’ll be asked if Facebook is allowed to access your location, click “Allow” and then you’ll be brought into Places. From here you can share your location, see where your friends are (if they’re checking in with Places) and find places near you.
Your check-ins will appear on your profile, in your friends’ news feeds and in that location’s activity stream.
While you’re checking in, you can also check your friends in. If they haven’t used Places before, they will have to approve the check-in before it appears in their newsfeed. Next time they’re in Facebook, they’ll be asked to allow or deny the check-in.
There have been privacy concerns over friends being able to check-in others in as well as who can see your check-ins. If you’re concerned, here’s how to opt out of Places.
Places for Business
Companies can now use Places to claim the location of their business. Your location can be added to Places by you or another Facebook user but needs to be verified by uploading an official document, like your business license. If another Facebook user adds your location to Places, you can go to the Place Page and click on “Is this Place Page your business?”, claim the location and verify it. Facebook users can like your Place Page and you can post updates to fans, as well as update your company’s information.
Although Place Pages are currently independent of your Fan Page, Place Pages are meant to eventually replace Fan Pages.
How To Use Facebook Places in Your Marketing:
Offer special discounts or promotions to people who check-in to your business with Facebook Places.
Generate word of mouth. Encourage users to post reviews or share information about your business through Facebook while they are checked-in and about give discounts to those that do. People’s networks tend to be bigger on Facebook than other location-sharing sites so there’s more opportunity with Facebook Places for word of mouth to spread.
Encourage customer loyalty by giving fans special discounts every certain number of check-ins.
Advertising. Soon Places will allow marketers to target people who check-in with relevant advertising. Places is built into Facebook’s advertising platform so you can choose to show ads to Facebook users who have checked into specific locations. If you’re interested in advertising, Facebook has a Places for Advertisers FAQ.
For more information about Facebook Places, Mashable has an extensive Facebook Places Guide.
While both Facebook Questions and Places are still in the early stages, it will be interesting to see whether or not they take off within the Facebook community. Facebook Questions has the potential to be an effective networking and lead generation tool and Places may be bring location sharing into the mainstream. What’s your opinion about these new features?
Posted by Crissy | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
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 | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
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