Facebook soon to allow users to follow specific app actions

Facebook has just rolled out a new Open Graph feature that will allow its users to follow specific actions from various Facebook applications.

Now you will not have to subscribe or be friends with the user in order to get certain actions in your news feed. You can just follow what you want.

For example, you can decide to get notified when a user pins something to Pinterest and that will be the only item in your news feed from that person. It's like subscribing to someone's news feed, yet you are in control over what parts you see based on what app you are using.

This could really help businesses that use app's. What are your views on this?

Facebook Releases Instagram Clone

Less than two months after announcing its plans to acquire photo app company Instagram for $1 billion, Facebook has released an iOS app that looks and functions almost identically to Instagram’s.

Facebook Camera, which is now available in the App Store for free, sincerely improves upon the photo capabilities offered by Facebook’s primary app for iPhone and iPod touch devices.

Like Instagram, your friends’ latest photos are displayed in a single scrolling feed. You can also now simultaneously upload multiple photos to Facebook; Facebook’s main app only allows you to upload photos one at a time. And like Instagram, the app allows you to crop, rotate and apply filters to your photos.

Interestingly, none of the app’s 15 filters were developed by the Instagram team, Facebook product manager Dirk Stoop told The New York Times. The app, the Times suggests, has been in development for much longer.

The Camera App is the second mobile app dedicated to one of Facebook’s key features. The first, a dedicated messaging app, was released last April. These apps, we feel, are smart ideas: Facebook simply has too many features and tools to bundle into a single mobile app.

It’s likely more such apps will be released this year. In an address to 200 investors leading up to Facebook’s IPO earlier this month, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that mobile is Facebook’s number-one priority.

SEO tips for Facebook Pages

As Facebook becomes an increasingly important commerce platform, brands are starting to direct users straight to their pages on the site.

Unfortunately it can be difficult to get Facebook pages to appear in the SERPs, even for larger household names.

I thought it would be useful to take a quick look at a few Facebook Page optimisation techniques, and some of the more common SEO problems on the site...

First of all, time for a quick infodump:

In 2010 “Facebook” was the single most popular search term on Google, with almost 25bn separate search requests.

During the same period, Facebook reported that its own internal search had almost doubled, accounting for around 2.5% of US searches (and we'll look at this again later).

It's not a stretch to imagine that figure increasing significantly in the future, particularly as new generations of users become more comfortable with the idea of Facebook as a search engine.

These are massive numbers by any standard, and assuming that regular users aren’t always accessing the site through search then we can reasonably guess that the already huge social network is still growing, and fast.

Despite this a 2010 survey by Brightedge.com suggested that of 200 major Fortune 500 bands on Facebook, 70% did not appear in the top 20 Google results, even for brand specific search terms.

There are a few reasons why it can be difficult to gain decent SEO traction using Facebook, but let’s start with an obvious one:

Google and Facebook hate each other.

OK, so that’s a provocative and not-quite-entirely true statement, but for the SEO in the street, it can be a frustratingly accurate one.

Despite the professional rivalry however, optimising for external search is actually fairly straightforward. Facebook releases limited data onto the external web, so initially at least you can dispense with a lot of the more complicated under the hood tinkering you take for granted with a regular site.

Let’s look at what’s out in the open:

Likes

There’s a lot of talk in social media about influence, but on Facebook, popularity counts for a lot.

How you go about getting extra ‘likes’ is an entirely different kettle of fish, but in general the usual social buzzwords apply: Relevant, regular, engaging content please.

URLs and naming conventions

The most visible element on the web. Keep it succinct and branded. It’s also worth thinking about other channels you operate on.

If your Twitter account is @GreatDonuts, don’t call your Facebook page ‘We make Great Donuts’. That may sound obvious, but it’s often overlooked.

Privacy

Not to be patronising, but there is occasionaly confusion over privacy settings and in the past I have come across a few page owners who’ve inadvertently locked their page down.

While there are cases when you only want to display content to fans, do a quick double check to make sure anyone can find you easily.

Multimedia

Unless you're a band, that's images and videos to you. I’d hope that any serious marketer would already optimise here, but it’s easy to forget to name or tag a Facebook picture properly, especially if you’re adding it using an external CMS.

Again, consistency counts.

Info and about

These are one of the most important places to put your keywords. Get a good SEO copywriter to optimise your information page.

Most visitors won’t read the information page, but it’s a good place to park some dense, keyword-heavy copy. Similarly, you’ll also want to put your brand name (or better still, a link) in the ‘about’ box.

Everything else...

Since the reintroduction of iFrames, every landing page is a separate company microsite as far as SEO goes, so make sure you’ve put aside enough time and resources to optimise everything on them.

Don’t (just) rely on being popular to generate authority. Again, consistency and attention to detail will help.

Unfortunately there is a fairly limited lifespan for most social media.

Most posts on Facebook receive around half of their ‘Likes’ in the first 90 minutes, before slowly grinding up to around 95% a day or so later, so you have a fairly small window of opportunity.

It’s also relatively hard to build a legitimate link-building campaign around a tab unless you are doing something long running and particularly awe-inspiring there, and you will also run up against UX problems.

Usually tabs won’t have optimised navigation, so directing to older content can confuse users. In addition, fresher content is generally more likely to appear in the SERPS.

As mentioned, all of these are fairly straightforward, but unfortunately that’s not the end of your SEO efforts.

Never mind the SERPS

It’s often said that Facebook is a walled garden, and the wall holds whichever side of it you are on. Facebook is now well on its way to 700M users. Another massive number, and as any social guru will tell you, one that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

Always remember that for Facebook users, being redirected to your site to purchase is often a major turn-off.

Facebook are on Facebook –they don’t want to be on your site. This has seen a lot of companies leaping into the F-commerce arena in an attempt to lower abandonment rates.

Whether you are setting up second home or considering ignoring platform instability and throwing all your eggs into Facebook’s basket, once all those searchers have found Facebook, they like to stay there.

From an SEO standpoint, this means that concentrating entirely on SERPS might not be the best tactic, instead, you may want to focus on Facebook’s internal search.

Whenever you type a search term into Facebook’s autocomplete search bar and hit enter, Facebook takes you directly to the top-ranked page.



In many cases these are determined by sheer popularity, but there are also a number of other weighting factors that can help get you into the drop-down menu that appears.

Yes, there is a ‘search more’ option, but unless they have a very specific page in mind, most users will never bother with a second click.

Optimising for Autocomplete
Again, Facebook centres its search results around personalisation, and beefs things up a bit with a learning algorithm.

It’s far from perfect, but search for ‘Pizza Hut’ once or twice, and Pizza Hut will begin appearing in your results every time you type in ‘PI’. A feature which could be especially useful for local businesses looking for repeat visits.

Again, autocomplete factors are based around user names, your history, and your friend’s history.

These are then balanced against various features and apps, and here’s where we run into trouble.

While optimisation isn’t complicated, it’s subject to change based on Facebook’s whims and there doesn't seem to be any cohesive logic behind how things are weighted, so it's probably better to optimise across the board to be on the safe side.

Let’s look at our main targets:

Pages and posts

Keywords are what matters here. When setting up a page use best practice and keep it branded and succinct. There’s little you can do about personalisation other than targeting users with a lot of friends geographically using ads.

Questions

Facebook is currently promoting Questions. They’re weighted heavily, so get you community manager asking away as often as possible.

So far, Questions don’t seem to feature in external SERPS either, so again we’re reminded of the importance of internal search and Facebook’s desire to wall its users.

Optimisation is again pretty straightforward:

1.Keywords in title and answers
2.Links in answers: You can link directly to related pages within the 'Add options' field for Questions. So far there's no real data on how this affects authority, but it's obviously beneficial to add your own or affiliate pages in here:



Groups and Apps

Groups and apps don’t appear to be hugely important to Facebook, possibly because they may conflict with the interests of branded pages. Areas to remember include:

1.You or an immediate friend is a member/user
2.Number of total ACTIVE members.
3.Keywords in the group title and content.
Oddly enough some research has suggested that Admin name might also be a factor here, particularly if there’s a keyword in the name. In other words, if your name is Johnny Axe-deodorant, your group could do well…

All these factors are pretty walled-in, so short of PPC it can be a struggle. Keep stuffing those keywords and inviting friends/employees/family pets etc...

Events

With the advent of Places check-ins, Events have become more important for general page traction but are otherwise relatively unimportant and difficult to optimise.

Various quirks in Facebook search mean that obvious factors like location or number of attendees don’t seem to have a massive effect, but it’s safest to assume that some or all of these will be indexed, especially as Places becomes increasingly important. Cover your bases and keep it simple:

1.Frontload keywords in event titles.
2.Gather as many ‘I’m attending!’ replies as you can.
Even if there’s no SEO payoff, there is some virality to be grabbed from events so it’s a useful PR tactic.

Incidentally (and please be very, very careful here), you can also directly invite users to events by email, so this could be a good way to initially build a following.

In addition to these, you might want to consider targeting Bing! more as it's now powering the internal web results and it isn't unreasonable to assume that it will be featuring Facebook results more prominantly in the future than Google, and it's always worth putting keywords into your general wall posts as a matter of course.

For the moment, optimising Facebook pages is a fairly straightforward, albeit time-consuming process. The results and effects of your efforts may be subject to change however so overall it makes sense to cover as much as possible.

Much of the on-page optimisation might charitably be called grey hat as well, with a heavy reliance on keyword stuffing, so never underestimate the importance of good copy. In addition it appears that shorter updates and titles (Under 80 characters) are more appealingto users. Make sure you have solid, optimised copy across your page, and while there is a lot of talk about influence and relevance in social media, there’s no doubting that on Facebook, sheer popularity also counts.

HOW TO: Poll Consumers on Facebook

Facebook polls and surveys can be a great way to engage your fans with questions that build loyalty or provide you with valuable feedback. Facebook is often touted for its ability to create a community, but too often brands let those online communities lie fallow on their fan pages. It’s not enough to send a stream of updates without listening to what your fans (your invaluable evangelists and consumers) have to say.

To help, we collected some simple ways to poll your consumers on Facebook, as well as a mini-list of best practices. Once you start polling, let us know what worked for you in the comments below.

---

Tools and Resources

---

Facebook Questions is the in-house poll service from Facebook. Located at the top of your wall and below your profile pic, Questions lets you customize polls in a manner of ways. You can submit an open-ended question or click on the “Add Poll Options” tab to create a custom multiple-choice poll. You can add up to three options. Pro tip: You can link those responses to groups or individuals on Facebook by tagging the name with an “@” when you start typing. This is handy if you want to drive people to your various options.

While you can’t limit your question to a specific demographic (i.e., the question is broadcast to the entire Facebook community to answer), individual Facebook Pages can ask Page-specific questions. To do this, simply click on the “Questions” tab at the top of the Page’s wall. Still stuck? Check out Facebook’s official FAQ.

Poll is an app, meaning you’ll have to allow it access to your account. Poll operates a lot like Facebook Questions (above), but it has some extra options for tracking your respondents, purchasing premium features like ad blocking, and the ability to hide header tabs. It also allows you to add more than three options to your customized questions. That may not seem like much, but Poll has attracted more than 2 million active users so far, and corporations such as ABC, 20th Century Fox, Nintendo, Pepsi and Wimbledon have used the app.

Poll for Facebook is a free service with a slew of options including the ability to include a poll title, introduction text and advanced features such as creating a custom URL and privacy options. You can specify if you want answers as multiple choice, text or a comment thread. You can modify the appearance further by using HTML tags or adding a tab to your YouTube page. Premium users can add images, too. Poll for Facebook is the most customizable and easiest to use of the available options, attracting major corporate users like the Food Network, the Baltimore Ravens and Clarins Paris to the service.

Poll Daddy Polls offer another take on customization. From the “Create a Poll Tab” you can add an image, customize multiple answers, and select where you want the poll to be posted. It’s simple and to the point, even if it has just 300,000 active users, making it relatively small when compared to its brethren.

Status Updates can be used in place of the more feature-rich polling apps discussed above. If you’re just after some quick, informal engagement with your fans, consider simply asking a question via your page status.

---

Basic Tips

---

Once you set up your poll using one of the options above, here are some simple best practices for deciding how and what to ask.

• Ask a real question. People on the Internet are great at sniffing out when you really are interested in their response and just asking a question because it’s been a while. Don’t ask questions that are just self-promotional. Something like “What product of ours do you love the most!?” isn’t going to go over well.
• Ask question you actually want answers to. In the same vein, if you’re going to ask questions, come up with something that will help your business. Try to get constructive feedback about your products or ask what your customer would like to see more of. If you’re a musician for example, try asking what kind of bonuses your fans prefer (backstage pass, free tickets, advanced orders, etc.) and then offer the highest-voted perk.
• Ask questions that are topical or relevant. This is a tricky one. Try to find memes and keywords that are both in the news and relevant to your brand. It’s one thing to poll your audience on what they think of Charlie Sheen, but they could be turned off if that has nothing to do with your business or products. Kenneth Cole gave us a pretty good example of what not to do.
• Be clear why you’re polling. Decide what you want out of your poll: Are you looking for more loyalty, honest feedback, brand exposure? Having this in mind will give you focus and make your polls more useful for your business. If you’re looking for exposure, ask yourself if your poll is something that your fans would share with their own friends. Facebook is great for spreading your message — but only if it’s a message worth spreading.

Facebook Deals – adding the ‘what’ to the where and who

Facebook Deals is the new service from Facebook. Put simply Deals puts retailer- or brand-driven promotions into the hands of customers who disclose their location by “checking in” at a venue.

Checking in is accomplished by connecting your mobile phone’s GPS location capabilities to a directory of venues’ locations. When a Facebook user gives her location, Facebook can not only connect that location to a venue (the existing Places service) but can now direct a ‘deal’ or offer to that user.

So much, so Foursquare (the location-based service that allows users to ‘check in’ to venues). Also there are echoes of Groupon, but this is no clone monster designed as a me-too service. Rather, FB Deals builds on a the growth in mobile use of Facebook, the desire of users to ‘connect’ with a brand or retail location, and the interest of retailers in connecting with those customers who are present and thinking about them.

The interest for retailers lies largely in the Facebook ecosystem, it’s “friend” focus and the analytics available. Some benefits include:

• deals can be unlocked when, for example, TWO friends are together (an example being YoSushi’s offer, that gives some free food where two friends check in to eat together. This is a means of new customer acquisition, rather than simple rewarding habitual customers for checking in)
• when customers check in the retailer can access rich information about them from their Facebook profile – gender, age, aspects of their social graph and shared information. This can supplement customer insight programmes and assist in future targeting.
• the service is, according to Facebook, free of commissions and charges to the retailer.

Joanna Shields, VP EMEA at Facebook, noted “Facebook is built around people and sharing personal experiences and Deals is a great extension of this. By bringing valuable and relevant offers to you wherever and whenever you want them, Deals delivers a powerful experience that combines technology and location in a way that a pure online or offline experience could never deliver”.

Some retailers ‘in’ on the launch include Argos, Benetton and Debenhams. Both Argos and Benetton are offering charity donations in return for checkins by customers. This could demonstrate that the back-end systems to create and manage promotions are not yet in place, or that they’re taking a ‘marketing promotions’ approach in the early stages. Debenhams have an offer for Valentine’s Day, where up to 1,000 mascaras will be given to the first 10 people in each store who check in.

Harriet Williams, Head of Digital Development at Debenhams, noted:

“With over 60 per cent of our customers active on Facebook and 164 Debenhams stores across the UK, we predict a rush of keen shoppers will be checking into our stores and checking out our deals”

The test for retailers will be the ease of management of the deals, integration with promotional engines and campaign management, eCRM integration – and not least, whether smaller retailers will get access to the scheme.

All of these questions will be answered in time, but as of today Facebook has added a further reason to spend one’s life glued to a mobile phone, and retailers have a further promotional channel to exploit.