Marketingeasy Internet Marketing Explained » Social Media Optimization

The Tale of the brand Manager at the Digital Shop

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:28:55 +0000

A Brand Manager walked into a shop and was looking at the stuff in the store.

While he was there another customer walked in and said to the shopkeeper, “I’ll have that digital shop please”.

Can I have that Digital Shop please?

The shopkeeper nodded, went over and gave him a full digital shop. He wrote a contract, gave to the lawyers, and then handed it to the customer, saying, “That’ll be A$5000″. The customer paid and walked out with his digital shop.

Startled, the Brand Manager went over to the shopkeeper and said, “That was a very expensive digital shop. Most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did that one cost SO much?” The shopkeeper answered, “Ah, that agency can do Facebook updates very fast, very cool Flash Websites, funny tweets, well worth the money.”

The tourist looked at the agency in the far corner. “That one’s even more expensive – $10,000! What does it do?”
-” Oh, that one’s a Social Media dedicated agency; they can manage your Social Media strategy, Risk Mitigation, Customer Service integration to Social communication – it can even save you from an online crisis. All the really useful stuff,” said the shopkeeper.

The Brand Manager looked around for a little longer and saw a third agency in another corner. The price tag around his neck read $50,000. He gasped to the shopkeeper, “That one costs more than all the others put together! What on earth does he do?”

The shopkeeper shrugged and said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t actually seen him do anything, but he says he’s a Social Media consultant.”

Social Media – How to influence in Social Media Communication

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:31:00 +0000

If you are employing Social Media in your marketing arsenal, you don’t just want your say to be supplementary to the discussion; you want your voice to be heard, repeated, shared and appreciated—and your message to be powerful and influential.
This is a presentation I’ve created for one of our clients at The Online Circle and I’m sharing here with you.

Persuasion in Social Media

View more presentations from The Online Circle

Feel free to download and use it with attribution
Cheers
Lucio

Lots of friends on Facebook? Think again.

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:43:15 +0000

Having friends only brings benefits.

The more the best!

However there is a limit.

A study at Oxford University compared the size of the human brain, specifically the Neocortex, the area responsible for conscious thought, with other primates. Researchers crossed this information with data about the social organisation of each species over time, and have come to the conclusion that 150 is the maximum of friends a person can have.

For you to maintain a friendship with someone, you need to memorise information about that person (e.g.name and details of her character), which are triggered when you interact. For some reason, the brain does not contain data on more than 150 people. The relationships that go beyond this number will inevitably be more casual rather than friendship.
Other researchers went further and found that, within this group of 150, there are a series of concentric circles of friendship: 5, 15, 50 and 150 people, each with different characteristics.

Finite Circle
The brain contains no more than 150 friends, divided into groups.

Intimate group
5 friends – is the intimate, with whom you speak more – and would not hesitate to call at dawn or call to borrow money. For Aristotle, 5 was the maximum number of true friends.

Group of empathy
15 friends – people are very important to you – if any of them died tomorrow, you’d be very upset. This group may include people from work or friends of friends.

Typical number
50 friends – is the number of friendships maintained by most people, and also the average size of early human groups .

Limit
150 friends – Maximum that the brain can handle at once. These are the people whose names, faces and features you can memorise and trigger if necessary. The curious thing is that these circles had been mentioned by philosophers such as Confucius, Plato and Aristotle – and are also present in various forms of human organisation. In classical philosophy, 5 were already considered the maximum number of close friends that anyone could have.

Apart from football and footy (here in Australia) , 12 to 15 people is the amount of players in most sports. Fifty was the average number of people hunting in primitive communities (as the Aborigines here).

But even with so many practical examples, no one can explain why our friendships limit is 150 people.

So, next time you find someone with more than 150 “friends” on Facebook or Google+, think again.

Cheers

Lucio

The secret to Facebook Engagement

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:02:32 +0000

What most Facebook Fan Pages have in common?

Their lack of understanding of how Facebook for business really works.

It’s not a matter of collecting numbers of fans, but it is about building your piece of Owned Media and making sure your company’s social media friendship actually means something.

As noted by Adage few months ago,

Companies have spent millions gathering fans on their Facebook pages and being “liked” all across the web. But what started as a volume play — call it Facebook marketing 1.0 — is shifting.

Increasingly, it’s not so much how many people are liking your brand, but who those people are and how many are engaging with you once you’ve got them.

Stop, think and tell me, what you really thinks is best the best out of the 2 scenarios?

1) 100,000 fans and only 1,000 are engaging with you over the week

2) 10,000 fans and having 1,000 engage with you

If you picked number 1 option, stop reading now.

If you picked number 2, let’s move on.

How do I increase my exposure and engagement on Facebook?

Most of conversation for Facebook Business pages happens on the News Feed rather than the page itself.

To get a optimum number of exposure to your current fan base you want to make sure you show on their NewsFeed.

If you want to appear on the the Facebook NewsFeed of your fan base you need to work on the Edge Rank of you Facebook Fan Page.

What is Facebook EdgeRank and how can I get it better?

from Social Media Examiner:

Facebook looks at everything published as “objects.”

These can be status updates, links, photos, video or anything else that can be shared on Facebook.

Every object receives a ranking (EdgeRank), which determines if it will show in your personal newsfeed. Objects with a high EdgeRank appear in your “Top News” feed. Objects with a low EdgeRank will not.

Overall, EdgeRank is based on three factors:

Affinity, weight and relevancy.

When multiplied together, they have the ability to push your content to the New Feed’s ‘Top News,’ where fans will be able to see what your brand has to say.

An image with dozens of Comments will have a higher affinity score than a status update with a few ‘Likes.’

In addition, and object’s relevancy will help determine how high it will appear within the ‘Top News.’ Any item that appears within the News Feed — such as a status update or video — is called an object, and any action taken on the object — such as a ‘Like’ or Comment — is called an edge.”

If you want to boost your Facebook EdgeRank and get audiences engaged, there are some tips from WebProNews and www.socialmediaexaminer.com:

Ask questions – Publish Objects That Encourage Interaction
Post games and trivia
Create a Forum for discussion (use Polls)
Interact with fan engagement
Incorporate wall sapplets (polls, coupons, etc.)
Incorporate relevant photos
Relate to current events
Incorporate videos
Post content for time-sensitive campaigns
Include links within posts
Be explicit in your posts

One last tip, I’ve been noticing that Facebook prefers images rather than videos and videos rather than simple updates, can’t confirm…

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

What’s the average for Likes and Comments for Facebook Pages?

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Wed, 18 May 2011 06:10:51 +0000

Probably one of the most common tactical questions I’ve got asked when giving presentation is what’s the average/benchmarking for numbers of Likes and Comments for Facebook Pages?

Growing a base of Facebook fans is often a major objective for social media marketers (check our breakdown of Media approach ).

As fan bases grow, the danger increases that the larger community will be less close-knit and engaged than before. Link-sharing solutions provider Visibli analysed Facebook pages with at least 100,000 “likes” and found that for brands and media organizations, pages with more fans received fewer “likes” on each individual post. Engagement went down as the number of people involved went up.

Although numbers can vary depending on a series of facts (engagement history, industry segment, identity, season, etc) below you can find the average number of “likes” and comments per post (considering pages with more than 100k fans).

Average of likes and comments for Facebook

Hope it helps

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro

Facebook for business – Dummies guide to Facebook Send Button

Luis Fernando Tinoco — Mon, 16 May 2011 04:27:14 +0000

The just released Facebook Send button is a great example of how to lower the sharing barrier to help your business tap into the digital word-of-mouth.

Learn what it means and how to implement and benefit from Facebook Send Button

Learn what it means and how to implement and benefit from Facebook Send button

Over Sharing is now very much a thing of 2010. After the proliferation of Facebook Like buttons and Share icons all over the web, the natural consequence was a sharing overload and most of us not keeping up with the pace of new links and notifications on our Facebook page. Welcome to the era of Selective Sharing.

Like most people, I have clicked Like or Share too many times in the past, only to a few moments later check my Facebook page and realize that a lot of my friends were doing the same.

So, in the best spirit of “Don’t do to others what you don’t want others do to you”, I stopped sharing completely or slipped into a very selective mode of sharing very few items. Now, we all have a new and sensible tool to deal with that (and your business can help by providing users with this tool): the Facebook Send button.

The Send plug-in is the evolution of the old “send via e-mail” tool.

It can be used on any third-party website as a stand-alone button or next to the Like button. It allow users to send a link to the page together with a short message either as a post to the feed of one of their Facebook Groups, as a Message to specific Facebook friends, or as an email to entered addresses.

In other words, instead of broadcasting everything to all our friends all the time, we can now pick and choose some of them from our list or groups.

Here is how it looks like as a standalone version:

If your website already relies on Social Media share icons to drive traffic and purchases, the new Send button will lower the sharing barrier and can be a deal breaker to increase sharing conversions.

If your website is still not tapping into the digital word-of-mouth of social plug-ins, the Send button could be the final argument to get started with your Social Media facilitator

Confused with too many share actions and plug-ins for Facebook? Get a crash course with our quick guide to Facebook tools for your site.

Ready to implement the Send button?

Ready to implement the Facebook Send button?

Here is how:

Send can be used as a standalone button for a site or paired with a Like button. It is best used on internal pages such as product and special offer pages, blog posts, article pages, media pages such as photos, videos or audio pages or even on sign up pages like subscriptions or newsletter signups. It is not so effective on your site’s home page or on pages that are too generic and the recipient of the message won’t know exactly what was shared.

Case 1 – Standalone button

The implementation of the standalone Send button is very simple. All you have to do is drop two lines of code where you want the button to appear. The code to display the button above on this page is as simple as:

To use it for your site, you simply have to modify the URL in red. Or you can use the code generator at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/send/

Case 2 – Like button upgrade

If you already have Facebook Connect and/or a Like button active for your website and you want to upgrade it to the combined Like/Send button widget, all you need to do is add and argument send=”true” to the Like button code, so it looks something like that:

Case 3 – Combined version from scratch

Finally, if you are starting from zero and want the combined Like/Send button widget, you will need to setup a Facebook Application to get an Application ID and make a few more changes to your website.

Plug-ins for popular Content Management Systems such as WordPress are starting to appear, but if you want to do the manual integration yourself, start by visiting the URL below and follow the documentation from there:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Cheers

Fernando Tinoco

Senior Developer – The Online Circle

Social Media Strategy – Would you spare some change?

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:47:37 +0000

I’ve been pretty involved with Fair Trade in Australia. One of my clients Cadbury Dairy Milk Australia is one of the most prominent brand involved and supporting Fair Trade and its benefits (good one Cadbury ).

During my researches I stumbled upon a great concept in promoting Fairtrade and some smarts in Social Media by Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.

Introducing the Fair Tweet

Ben & Jerry’s is asking users to donate their spare Twitter characters in honor of World Fair Trade Day on May 14.

Earlier this week, Ben & Jerry’s launched a Twitter application that squeezes a message and link about World Fair Trade Day in the leftover characters of one’s tweets — i.e., if your tweet is 30 characters, the remaining 110 will contain a message about World Fair Trade Day and a link to more information.

Smart Social Media pick up

Cheers

Lucio Ribeiro