Rains Media

New Facebook News Feed – 3 Things for Page Managers

JP — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 16:48:13 +0000

Uh oh. Facebook changed the News feed again. Sending Marketers in a panic everywhere, the changes to the Facebook News feed were released Thursday and they are, well, expected. This change isn’t drastic for users of tablet applications and mobile apps that have used the black left hand navigation bar for some time, replacing the somewhat cleaner but clunkier existing white navigation. Where the change is dramatic is decentralization, content and implications for the brand reach.

Decentralization

Facebook’s newest change allows users to navigate from a selection of options rather than one, busier News Feed. This will help the User experience in that they dictate the categories of information seen. This was their intent in some of the last News Feed modifications, however, users simply didn’t change their content settings or really make much use of the Close Friends option. The idea is for users to read the News Feed similarly to a News Paper. With the growth of their older demographics and negative growth of teenagers, this is in line with where Facebook is headed.

Here are the categories:

Top News (Major stories of each section)
All Friends
Following (for pages)
Photos (see: Instagram)
Games, Music (two separate tabs but not worthy of their own bullets on my page)
Groups
Close Friends

For Page Managers, this means slightly less visibility overall. Where you can win is in the photo section. Friends usually have a lot of photos, but pages generally have even more, and they can dominate the Photo section.

Content

With the added emphasis to photos and videos, its pretty clear where our focus as page mangers will have to be. Yes, the focus has always been on content, but this is even more crucial now. Many top brands are already embracing this, by providing content directly into photos, allowing for more clicks and eventually a higher Edge Rank.

Here we have the Lakers Facebook page, they are sharing a photo that most people can read the majority of the information but many people will click to expand to read the smaller font.

Albums have also been redesigned, rewarding pages who upload multiple pictures. This shouldn’t be a major change for some brands who often posted collage pictures in order to enhance media clicks. Having 5+ photos will likely be a good target for brands, engaging users and ultimately increasing their visibility.

Brand Reach

With these changes to a News Paper type experience, the All Friends section is likely to be a hit with users, much the same as the photo section (see: Why Facebook bought Instagram) however, where we may lose our traction as brands is in the Pages section. While I’d like to think that users love my brands (who doesn’t), the reality is, many of them only “Like” my brand (see what I did there?).

As Page Manager’s I see that there will be two choices, either invest more into visual content, or invest more into ads. Without one of these two mechanisms, I’d be willing to bet that your post views will decrease overall. Facebook is under increasing pressure to sell more ads, and these new changes force the brand’s hand in many cases to get in front of users by paying for it.

There is also a not-so-insignificant undertone in all of this, content is moving towards a more chronological approach, based on the early signs. Brands will need to be more conscious of when they are posting and less conscious of how often they are posting. Matching posts with Facebook’s peak times will be essential for maximum Edge Rank reach and achieving your goals.

In summary, what can you do to stay current with the changes?

Post more photos, MANY, more photos!
Update your Instagram account, merging of the two services can be on the horizon.
Invest more into in-house content generation.
Update your Cover Photo weekly (this photo will get much more traffic with the new changes, use it!)

Brand Touch Points

JP — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 02:41:20 +0000

Early today, I gave a presentation about using social media throughout the sales process. Our sales process, in Education, is a long one; over the course of 8-10 months, our sales people visit prospects face to face and introduce our brand to them. As this process moves forward, I was considering that there are very few brand touch points. Going over the course of the 8-10 months, I’ve found only 10-15 times where the prospect interacts with either our brand or our sales people.

As we move forward, we’re aiming to use social media to close those gaps in communication and hopefully increase those touch points to a point where prospects engage with us twice as often. The key here is using the sales person who visited that prospect to develop a personal connection immediately. While this seems obvious, maintaining that connection through the process is very important, as our competitors are trying to establish the same thing – a connection.

While this connection becomes personal, it also becomes more efficient. Throughout the process, the prospects have many questions, and they struggle along the way to find the answers to their questions. They end up sending an email with many questions or large questions that take our staff hours to answer, this can all be avoided by increasing the amount of touch points and predictive info pushing over our social channels – answer their questions before they have them.

Of course, all of these things are the basics and seem obvious, but the execution is where the plan goes from idea to success. It’s our job as a resource team in marketing to fuel and follow up on the execution, and to incentivize the sales peoples’s behaviour. It’s our job to make sure we get results.

As you head into your next planning session, plan to execute and more importantly, execute the plan.

Becoming a Social Media Guru in 60 minutes

JP — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 14:29:01 +0000

This presentation, slightly modified from another deck I use, was delivered to 4th year Marketing students at Laurentian University in Sudbury. Here’s an overview of the presentation:

Trends

What are social marketers doing today?
Which channels are they using, or considering?

Metrics

How can you measure your success?
How can you measure your success AND explain it to your CEO?

Best Practices

What is everyone wishing they were doing

Defining Your Success on Twitter: Ornithology 2.0

JP — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 13:43:45 +0000

Defining your success on twitter from Jean-Paul Rains was a presentation delivered to the #PSEWEB conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

With nearly all PSE institutions on Twitter, we’ve established that it is important to have a presence. That presence has differing levels of dedicated resources, different goals and varying measures of success. Like Ornithology, this presentation will cover the study of behaviours, effectiveness, and measurements of PSE Twitter presences.

Defining your success on Twitter can be difficult, even more difficult when trying to explain it to someone who is Twilliterate. If being on Twitter is merely a way for your organization to check a box, that’s fine. But, if you are interested in taking that check box and turning it into an easily attained performance measure, this presentation is for you.

Like any dedicated birdwatcher, we took a look at some of the more successful Canadian PSE Twitter accounts and aimed to find commonalities in their behaviours and how that translated to their successes.

Finally, after searching for ways to define success from # of followers, % breakdowns of interactions to 3rd party measurements, we take a look at the different ways (free!) for you to measure your success.

Look past your number of followers and turn that check box into a CEO friendly success story.

Twitter: The new church basement

JP — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 00:16:08 +0000

First of all, I’m a numbers guy. When I saw a post from Fraser Strategies saying that my former MP had left Twitter, I wanted to crunch the numbers.

The NDP member of parliament for Timmins-James Bay, Charlie Angus, had in fact, left Twitter. I’m not disappointed in Angus, or his advisors, but I am disappointed for the 4,441 (and growing!) of us who followed him on Twitter. Here are a few numbers on what this means.

4,441 : followers on Twitter

54 : people he was following on Twitter

81,957 : population of the Timmins-James Bay riding

246,275.67 : square kilometers in the riding

24 : number of people he visited during a 90 minute town hall meeting

Expanding on some of these numbers, if Angus is to allow his constituents to ask him questions directly, in groups of 24 participants, it would take him roughly 3,415 visits. In 90 minute meetings, working 12 hour days, it would take him roughly 426 days to meet with these constituents.

Now, I commend Angus for joining Twitter and representing his constituents and especially, for the awareness he built through Twitter for the residents in Attawapiskat. However, the irony in his leaving Twitter,I will leave as fodder for the Twitterverse.

Finally, for anyone participating in Twitter, it serves as a reminder that Twitter is not a megaphone on top of a hill, it’s a really big church basement.

Smoke Signals and Messaging.

JP — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 15:22:44 +0000

Most recently I sat in the vast ocean of audience that was listening to a keynote from @JesseHirsh CBC’s national correspondant in technology, thinking to myself what Social Media consists of for the audience.

Jesse mentioned that “Social Media” really began with smoke signals, this dates back to ancient china when soldiers would send smoke signals to alert their countrymen over 750 kilometers away. This was really significant to me. Every time I face clients who are apprehensive about “social media” I’m of the view that this fear is really fear of the unknown. However, this media is already “known” to them, it’s merely an extension of their current communication strategy. The tools have changed but the game is the same.

If you believe in Marshal Mcluhan’s “the medium is the message” then the message may be different, however the goal is the same. The real change is in the tools, much as the evolution from radio, to television to internet, all of these mediums have relied on similar content. The most important thing we can teach is the tools.

Our mission should be to build the confidence in clients that they already have message, and that we can transform that message to fit the new mediums.

Social Media isn’t about followers, or fans, or click-through rates, it’s about building relationships with your network. Once that network is built on trust and value, then you can start looking at the numbers.

Those numbers are the measure of success but can only exist if you understand the reason behind the smoke signals.

Measuring your Twitter Klout

JP — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:17:16 +0000

Recently, when asked by a client how they could properly measure their success versus competitors on Twitter, I defaulted to my typical answer, but then thought it out a little more.

Initially I thought of Klout.com or Kred.com. After my cursory view of both the client and their competitor I noticed that, although the client had a much more thought out content strategy, the competitor scored higher on Klout and Kred.

After my first look, this made me think of the obvious issues that already exist in measuring Twitter success (I have reluctantly relied on these sites). Of course, they provide at least some input on the matter; they have ever improving analytics of true reach and amplification. However I have yet to see a site be able to provide a strong measurement reflecting content effectiveness.

It is my hope that Klout, while integrated with Facebook, may be able to integrate with link shortening applications to measure engagement and click throughs on content. The actual consumption of the content can be easy to measure if you own the short links however it is quite difficult to know whether or not your RTs are being read or not. Most will contend that these will receive more RTs, however that’s likely an assumption of consumption.

No matter how you slice it, we are currently missing a big piece of the analytical pie on Twitter. The question is, which service will fill the gap first?

4 Wishes for Online Marketing in 2012

JP — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:28:06 +0000

5 Wishes I hold as a consumer for 2012

Increased personalization : we delete or do not open the majority of newsletters we are included on simply because they aren’t relevant to us. I’m not saying writing my name in the Subject line or first line of an email gets marketers any gold stars, but when I receive a message from an organization which carefully tagged my interests – I care.
Less is more : moving away from the theory of sending X number of messages per week and instead having a content strategy that gives flexibility for timely messages and doesn’t look to “fill dead air”.
Ground-level use of presumed relevancy : while Google and Facebook use this as the core of any user experience, I would love to see major online brands start to use this to form their user experiences. I think of websites that produce high levels of content, have many users and diverse interests. For example, the NFL has 32 teams and threads of fans that dislike seeing positive news about each other. While many of them will let you identify a favorite team, few of them center your user experience around it.
Elimination of ”Find us on Facebook” : every consumer knows you’re on Facebook – give them a reason to visit, not a challenge in finding you.

Holiday Cheer

JP — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:42:32 +0000

In this season of holiday cheer, social media brings us a chance to communicate with those far and wide. However, its really important to remember that people are getting overwhelmed with the traditional holiday greetings. Where is the innovation?

The most valued greetings are those you remember, and you remember those that are unique. Your warm picture by a fireplace, or in your back yard. This year I tried something new and sent out Holiday Cards via YouTube private link to friends and family, it was a personalized message wishing them happy holidays and giving them a small annecdote that is relevant to our friendship.

This isn’t earth-shattering, new or really innovative but it does show you care a whole lot more than if you send off a picture of your family photo with the title “Happy Holidays” to your contact list.

I hope you discover some gems these holidays.

Social Media and HR

JP — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:32:42 +0000

Social media and HR

View more presentations from Jean-Paul Rains.

This presentation was given to the Sudbury Human Resources Professionals Association in November of 2011. Rooted in providing an understand of social media, an overview of the implications within Human Resources and tools to better leverage social media within talent recruitment and others.