When Eric Jackson of Jackson Kayak first came to me, his dilemma was a simple. He had a great story to tell and an awesome product, but felt their social presence was a ways behind the competition. So with that, Eric and his team handed over the reigns and tasked us with building creative campaigns to reach the base they knew was there, and to grow their audience. So we put our heads down and got to work.

The results were outstanding. In just three short months Jackson separated themselves from the pack and now has a larger fan base than any other kayak manufacture. We put together a deck highlighting our journey, the results, and best practices.

Here are eight actionable steps you can take towards building a stronger presence on Facebook.

1. You aren’t reaching your fans

Most pages aren’t reaching a very high percentage of their fans. If you already have a decent fan base, focus on reaching them before you shift your focus to growing your audience. *Maybe slip in how to measure the percentage of fans you are reaching? (Unique organics / fans)

2. How do you reach more fans

Facebook has an algorithm called edgerank that hides a significant portion of your updates from your fans. In order to increase visibility, you simply need to increase engagement.

Ways to do that:

Caption Contest
Multiple Choice
Fill-in-the-blank
Inspirational Quotes

*Use photos in status updates. Not only does visual content naturally do well, edgerank prefers it.

3. Be creative and think outside the box

Use the cover photo spot. Ask users to upload their photos in a specific category. They are consciously (or subconsciously) participating in an ego contest. For Jackson Kayak, once we posted the finalists, folks would scramble to rack up likes by sharing and tagging. We’ve done this with quite a few clients and it has been a very successful growth campaign. On the outset we planned it as an engagement campaign, but what we didn’t expect was the tagging. Tagging sends a direct notification to people and their curiosity takes them back to our FB page. In order to interact with the photo they are tagged in, they have to like the fan page. You get the picture. (pun intended)

4. Once you engage, your numbers will increase

But are they the right numbers? Make sure you know the right metrics to look for, and that those numbers are helping you reach your goals. Do you want to increase website traffic, sales?

5. Make sure your fans are consuming your content

So you know how many fans you have, you know how many you are reaching, you know how many you are engaging. But do you know how many people are consuming your content?

IMO one of the most overlooked metrics is consumptions.

6. Consumptions = success

This means your status updates are not only engaging, but people are actually interested in what you are sharing with them. This is also usually a good indicator of web referrals.

7. Growing your audience

How much does a fan cost? It’s very hard to say, though some have tried to come up with an average. The better question is how much is a fan worth? Only you know that – but once you get your base engaged and consuming, you should have a better idea.

8. Sweepstakes

Lots of pages do them. The biggest reason is they are cost effective in relation to advertising. But they are only beneficial if you can attract the right kind of fan. iPad’s are awesome, but do they gel with your brand?

Make sure you incentivize the share.

Take it up a notch. What is something that you have that fans can’t get anywhere else? We had Eric Jackson – one of the biggest superstars in the sport. We not only gave away a kayak, we gave away a trip to paddle with EJ for the day. Boom goes the dynamite!

Need help implementing your strategy? Drop us a line, we would love to connect.

With Buddy Media, Vitrue and Involver already acquired, it was only time before Wildfire was snatched up. Buddy Media went for $800 million and Vitrue for $300 million. Wildfire went for $250 million. It currently has about 350 employees and is located in Redwood City, CA.

Google wrote the following regarding the acquisition:

In a complex and changing landscape, businesses want to manage and measure these efforts in an integrated way. We’ve been working towards this end for some time. For example, Google Analytics helps businesses measure the contribution of hundreds of social sites; our Admeld service has helped to serve ads in Facebook developers’ social apps; and our DoubleClick platform enables clients to run and measure ads across social websites. On Google+, brands use services like Vitrue, Buddy Media and others to manage their pages, with many more to come.

With Wildfire, we’re looking forward to creating new opportunities for our clients to engage with people across all social services. We believe that better content and more seamless solutions will help unlock the full potential of the web for people and businesses.

InsideFacebook’s Brittany Darwell notes that “Google was reportedly interested in Buddy Media, but that company sold to Salesforce. Now with Wildfire, Google gets a popular platform and large sales team…Unlike Buddy Media, Wildfire doesn’t have access to the Facebook Ads API, but it’s unclear to what degree Google was interested in that aspect of the platform.”

Congrats from BrandGlue to the entire team at Wildfire. We’re excited to see more great social products and continued great customer service!

Facebook has launched a new way for you to stalk your friends: a recommendations bar. When you’re on a popular news site and reading a recently found article in your newsfeed, a box will pop-up showing you recently read articles by your friends.

“As a person reads an article, a small pop-up surfaces at the bottom of the screen highlighting recommended articles and prompting them to like the page. Recommendations are based on content that friends have explicitly liked and shared in your app or website.”

Facebook’s Jeffrey Spehar writes that “ In early tests, sites are seeing 3x the click through on the stories it recommends than through the Recommendation Box.” While it is great for the website to make it as sticky as possible, will this new box touch on privacy concerns?

Ed Oswald from PCWorld voices some of these concerns. “Since there’s no way to control what type of content is shared, except to not share or like it altogether, your personal reading habits will be on display for all your friends. Who knows–what you’re reading might reveal things about yourself that you’re not necessarily willing to share with the world.”

It might be time to keep an eye (pun intended) on what you read in the future, particularly if you are Facebook friends with your boss.

Timeline for Brand Pages

Well, we knew this was coming. We just weren’t sure exactly what it would look like and when it was coming. We have been researching the changes all day and how it will impact social strategy. We’ll first walk you through a few of the basics, followed by our take on the changes and how they will affect you.

Some of the basics:

• All fan pages have until March 30th to adapt to the new Timeline. Everyone will automatically be switched over on that day.
• Apps and campaigns are now found within a “box” under the cover photo, giving tabs even less prominence then they already had.
• The welcome tab, or fan-gate, has been removed.
• A new cover photo will need to be put up for each fan page.
• We can now ‘pin’ a post to the top of the fan page wall, for up to 7 days. This highlights the particular post and will be seen first by anyone who comes back to the fan page wall.
• Starred posts and Milestones help specific posts be highlighted, though not pinned to the top of the fan page wall.
• There is a new admin interface, enabling you, as an admin, to see what is going on in analytics and posts quickly and easily.

How has our engagement philosophy changed due to the release of Timeline?

Suffice to say, it hasn’t! Facebook’s Product Director, Gokul Rajaram, told Mashable that, “The goal is to make Pages more social and more engaging.” While that might be the goal, we disagree that it will be the outcome. Less than 1% of users ever return to your page after the initial visit. That’s a fact. We can prove this by looking up the number of people who go directly to your fan page wall each day. Facebook can change the way pages look, but as long as there is a newsfeed, they can’t change the behavior of users.

While designers are elated with the change, our focus remains unchanged. Other agencies and social managers are clamoring to create the most awesome cover photo. BrandGlue, as always, has its nose down in the data, searching for ways to help you more effectively reach your audience.

Now don’t get us wrong; you should certainly work to create aesthetically pleasing cover art and leverage the new changes in any and every way you can! However, we believe that at the end of the day, the brands that are focused on creating interesting, relevant, and engaging content will be the most successful on Facebook and actually reach their fans.

When the Phoenix Suns came to us, it was off-season. And not only was it off-season, but the NBA lockout was fast approaching. Usually we have a few months to rock our client’s fan pages, but this time, we had 30 days. We had to work fast. We set some goals, the main over-arching one being to “Test multiple factors in relation to Facebook visibility”. Here’s what we learned:

1. Your Fans Don’t Come Back to Your Page

It’s true. Whether you are the local downtown coffee shop with 500 fans, or the Phoenix
Suns with 500,000 fans, only a very small percentage of fans ever come back to your page. Don’t believe us? Check out your pageviews from logged-in users and compare that to your total number of fans. During our study, the Suns returned an average of 800 fans per day. That’s a minuscule .16%. Ouch.

The take away? Don’t give up on Facebook, just understand how people use it. Of the Suns fans who interacted with the page, over 98.2% interacted straight from their newsfeed. They did this without ever visiting the actual fan page.

This isn’t to single the Suns out. We’ve seen similar numbers on other client’s pages. So pour your time and energy into reaching your fans via their newsfeed, treating your fan page like a micro-site or supper imposing the web onto social usually ends up being a waste of time.

2. Measure the Percentage of Folks Seeing Your Content

Many of us tend to look at impressions as one of the holy grails of status updates. We watch this number like a hawk, our emotions often corresponding to their rise and fall. There should be counseling for this.

For definition sake, every time someone sees your status updates, it counts as an impression. Impressions usually are a good way to gage social reach. However, keep in mind that they can be deceiving. An impression is attributed every time a status update is rendered in a browser. This means that a single user can rack up multiple impressions. Instead of thinking you’re reaching ten people, you’re actually only reaching two people at a rate of five times in one day. That’s why we always look at unique impressions. We want to see the number of actual people we’re reaching.

In order to get a good baseline for our study, we measured the Sun’s unique impressions per day, which was averaging out at 42,000. By the end of the study, the Suns were reaching 14,500 more fans each day, a 34% increase. We definitely went out for drinks after work that day. See case study here. 

3. More Engagement Today Means More Eyeballs Tomorrow

Heard of EdgeRank? Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to pick and choose which stories to show in fan’s newsfeeds. This algorithm ranks stories from least-interesting to most-interesting to a Facebook fan. That’s why you see all the Facebook interactions from your fiance, but not your ex–that is if you’re still even friend’s with your ex.

When a fan or a fan’s friends have shared/commented/liked/clicked on previous status updates from a fan page, Facebook’s algorithm says, “This fan is interested in this content. Let’s show them future content from this fan page.”

Your new goal? Get your fans to share/comment/like/click on your status updates!

More engagement today means you’ll rank higher in the algorithm and get more eyeballs to see your content tomorrow. And no, Facebook’s algorithm doesn’t talk. At least as far as we know.

During the thirty days we worked with the Phoenix Suns, their engagement levels increased by 167% for likes and 473% for comments on status updates. More fans were sharing/commenting/liking/clicking on status updates than ever before. This helped to bump up their unique impressions by 34% and grow their fan page by 36,000 fans.

So, how did we do it? I thought you’d never ask.

While the newsfeed algorithm is pretty complicated and constantly evolving, there are a few definite factors we can point to. The following tips contributed heavily to our success:

Tip 1: Simplicity is Sweet

While it wasn’t easy to keep status updates short, and in some instances it was impossible, we found that the shorter the status update, the more engagement it got. During our month long study, two of the top three most engaging status updates were less than sixty characters. Take that, Twitter!

The reason for this is simple: Fans don’t come to Facebook to read blog-like status updates about your latest win. They want to scan their newsfeed, see a short, easy to read post about your win, click like or comment, and then move on to look at the latest pictures from their friends. Don’t believe me? Think about how you use Facebook. Do you regularly read long status updates by brands? Yeah, me neither. Besides, the data proves it.

Tip 2: Ask Your Fans to Engage

While this might seem like a no-brainer, time and time again brands don’t take advantage of this. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve explained this to the community manager of a fan page and a week later they go right back to posting information-only status updates.

Instead of making a bland statement about a picture, video, or blog link, we specifically asked Suns fans to react to a certain aspect of the content. We asked them to to fill in the blank, select from multiple choice, or to simply ‘like’ the update. The top engagement-performing post for the Suns was one where we simply asked fans who their all-time favorite Suns player was. The number of replies? Off the charts! 3,268 to be exact.

Tip 3: Use Rich Media

We all love pictures, right? As the saying goes, they’re worth a thousand words. We found that when we attached a picture or a video to a status update, engagement increased substantially. The reasons for this is two-fold: The algorithm gives a higher ‘Edge’ score to rich media, in particular video and picture content. The other reason is that it’s simply more enticing when your fans come across it in their newsfeeds. I mean, who doesn’t want to see a picture of Steve Nash sinking a 3-pointer?

Tip 4: Posting frequency is key

Have you ever been a fan of a page that posts content five to six times a day? I have. The word that first comes to mind is annoying. We encourage most of our client’s to only push out content once a day. However, each audience is different. Since the Suns have such a large fan base, posting twice a day worked well for them. If you see spikes in users unsubscribing, then you are most likely posting too much or you need to evaluate the type of content you’re pushing out.

These specific tactics, coupled with BrandGlue’s secret sauce (one of our client’s calls us “The Facebook whisperers”), led to 2.1 million more impressions in just thirty days–and this was during the off-season! We were able to get the Suns content seen by 14,000 new unique fans EACH day–not only seen by these folks, but they also engaged with what they saw.

We encourage you to take these tips and apply them to your fan page. Remember that Facebook is constantly changing the algorithm, keeping us marketers and community manager’s on our toes! Different brands have a wide range of audiences. Understand your demographic and try different types of status updates. If you continue to evolve your strategy, taking into account the day-to-day shifts Facebook makes to the algorithm and using the tips we listed, you will see results.

Photo credit: Humor-articles.com

For marketers, the holidays represent a time to engage fans even more than normal. You can practically push out any status update with the word “Christmas” in it and you’ll get more comments and likes than usual.

But wait, is this true?

I decided to dig into the data from some of BrandGlue’s clients and see if the accepted idea that posting over the holidays got higher engagement for these specific fan pages.

For my study, I looked at 3 fan pages, ranging in size from 130k fans to 5k fans. I took the averages from the entire year for:

• Comments
• Likes
• Impressions
• Overall engagement percentage

I then looked at the following holidays and compared the averages (for the above data points) from the entire year against the averages for these specific days:

Thanksgiving, Veteran’s Day, Halloween, 4th of July, Father’s Day, Memorial Day, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve and Day, Christmas Eve and Day.

For my study, I only counted holidays that the specific fan page pushed out content that was related to the holiday. If it was non-related, I didn’t count the engagement for that day. Please note that for holidays, the majority of push-outs had a “Like this” call-to-action.

The below graph shows the increases (or decreases) in percentages when comparing the holidays to the rest of the year. For example, the 130k fan page saw a 198% increase in likes, but a -70% decrease in comments for holiday posts.

Thoughts? Do you get more comments, likes and impressions when you post on holidays?

Social media case studies have gotten more and more buzz (and ensuing negativity) as marketers have sought to prove the value of a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. Afterall, who doesn’t want to show how their Facebook ad spend or hiring of a social media agency moved the bottom line? Every CMO (rightfully) wants to know.

But before we start pushing numbers out there and drawing correlations, we have to get down and dirty with the data. Did the spike in new fans actually produce more sales? Does more likes and comments actually mean your Facebook fans are telling their friends about you? The answer is that we often don’t truly know.

Jay Baer recently wrote a great post about the dangerous addiction we have to social media case studies and how we’re often pushing irrelevant data that does not prove the point we want it to make. Bottom line? Marketers are desperate to show the value of social media. They know it’s in there somewhere. But that desperation is no excuse for poor, inaccurate case studies.

That’s why we decided to do our own social media case study. We’d take the data, crunch the numbers, ask every hard question we could think of, and put actionable steps to the outcomes. 10 of them in fact. And we’d do it with a non-traditional fan page, one that has a a B2B audience. Follow the excitement via #B2BFacebook.

Thanks to Eloqua for their fan page and awesome collaboration, PageLever for their handy graphs and data, JESS3 for their amazing creativity and mad design skills, and Mint.com for the use of their welcome tab.

Most case studies focus solely on the number of new fans and the rise in comments and likes. While these are important, we wanted to look at the bigger picture. To name a few, we crunched the data for:

• Referral traffic
• Unsubscribes
• 3rd party publishers
• Types of status updates. 

We asked the hard questions, cut out the correlations we couldn’t prove, and added real value by giving tips and tricks that are measurable.  Check it out, implement for your fan page, and let us know in the comments how the 10 tips impacted the data for your fan page.

In the bit of spare time I have at BrandGlue, I like to work with nonprofits. Having lived overseas for a year in Zambia doing HIV/AIDS prevention work, I have a passion to keep investing in organizations that are making an impact, such as the International Justice Mission.

The first question I always get asked is, “So, is social media worth it?” Nonprofits, especially smaller ones, are often strapped for manpower and resources (so let’s get out and volunteer!).

I’m not gonna lie. I’ve bluntly told a few nonprofits that they shouldn’t invest in social media. They didn’t have the manpower to keep up a consistent presence and the return they’d get wasn’t worth it. The thing is, if you’re going to do social media, you need to do it well. There is no point in creating a Facebook fan page that you never update or a Twitter account that has less than ten tweets (unless you just want to have place holders). Bottom line: it looks bad.

So, in response to their initial question, I ask about the following things:

• Goals & Objectives
• Manpower
• Time
• Resources (mainly financial)

I’m really not, at that point, focusing on the how-to of social media. I’m focusing on the “is it worth it”. 10 times out of 10, this relates to donations and fundraising in some shape or form.

Check out this infographic by Craiglist founder, Craig Newmark. The data shows two important things:

1. You don’t have to be a top revenue-producing nonprofit to do social media well.

2. Social media is about awareness and engagement, not money.

For some nonprofits, having a fan page and Twitter account wouldn’t take too much time. Post an update a day and respond to folks. If you’re focused and don’t start looking at your friend’s recent wedding pictures, you can accomplish this in an hour. No joke.

Some nonprofits will need to have a sole person or a team dedicated to these channels.  Smaller nonprofits tend to throw the social media role to an intern, or tack it onto their (one) front desk person’s job description. While this isn’t always a bad thing, often those people move on quickly from a nonprofit, sending the organization back to square one and scrambling to find a replacement. I’d much rather the dedicated social media person be a long-term employee’s job. Things change so fast in this realm that you can’t afford to re-train folks every six months. That initial person will be adding to their training in six months anyway, due to the changes that are always coming down the pike, but at least they will have the background and knowledge already established.

Once it’s been established that 1) social media will add value and 2) the nonprofit can do it well, then, and only then, do I move forward into training.

If you’re a social media community manager, than you most likely have heard about the 80/20 rule. It’s a hard rule to follow, let alone get it right. Let me explain first what it is, then how to accomplish it.

Really, it’s quite simple. All of the content pushed out on your Facebook fan page should fall into roughly two categories:

1. Content directly related to your brand and product and is self-promotional.

2. Content indirectly related to your brand and product and adds value to your fans, thus building loyalty.

Let me explain a bit further. By directly relates, I’m referring to:

• Product pushes
• Coupons
• The latest news from your development team
• Ticket sales
• Holiday-related status updates that push your product

Here are some examples of what I call direct product pushes:

The indirect content pushes are a bit different, mostly because it’s such a wide category. These could be anything from:

• Current national or local events
• Holidays
• Funny pictures
• Pop culture
• Quotes

Let me give you some examples of indirect content pushes:

For most marketers and social media community managers, it’s easy to get direct product pushes right. We’re good at that! It’s the indirect ones that get us. I can’t emphasize enough though how important they are. They should make up 80% of your content. Why? Because they are the status updates upon which you build your community. They bring the social into “social media”. Time and again they get the most comments, likes and shares. They drive engagement and help you relate to your fans, even if your product is beeswax.

So try it out! Tomorrow, post a status update on your fan page that is completely indirect. Have it be about the upcoming holidays, but don’t sell anything. See who’s traveling the farthest for Thanksgiving or who likes dark turkey meat over white. While some marketers think this is trival and not worthwhile (I know, because I’ve practically had to fight some people to get them to try this type of content), I can promise you that it will build your community and be some of the highest engagement posts yet.

Don’t believe me? Try it for a week. Let the data speak for itself. Then respond in the comments with your findings.

Facebook recently released a new feature that allows fans to write recommendations to the lower right of the wall of a fan page. Note the example below from PhotoBiz.com via InsideFacebook. At times Facebook gives this option directly to new fans, asking them to write their Recommendation upon liking the page, but this has been known to be sporadic and not always happen. The Recommendations are then kept in a widget on the lower right of the fan page. If one of your friends has written a recommendation, the widget will be called Recommendations from Friends. Otherwise, it is simply titled Recommendations.

This new feature is only available for fan pages that list a physical address. You can input your address by going to Edit Page and then selecting Basic Information from the list on the left.

It is easy to manage the recommendations as an admin of the fan page. You have the ability to hide recommendations so they don’t appear in the widget, though that recommendation will still be seen by friends of the recommendation writer.

I see this new feature as a great way for brands to further their public identity and immediately showcase what folks think about them, particularly to new fans who come to the fan page to like it. Current fans will have to be directed back to the wall of the fan page to read what’s been said and then write their own recommendation. This can be done quite simply with a picture that has a clear call to action arrow and directs folks to the widget.

Do you currently use the Recommend this Place widget on your fan page? If so, do you like it? Share your thoughts in the comments.