However, Facebook announced, back in 2021, that they were going to retire the “Like” button on Pages in favour of a “Follow” button. This was then followed by an announcement that we’d be getting, er both.  But either way, the overlap between this function and the News Feed for Business Pages has been, well, pretty broken the entire time.

With the old Like functionality, adding another Page’s content to your News Feed was relatively simple: you just needed to click the three dots near to the Like button, and choose “Like as Page”.  Easy. This is how it used to look:

Then the Follow buttons appeared, but the “…as Page” option was no more. Clicking on the Follow button simply subscribed your *personal* Facebook feed to that Page. The three buttons were still there, but now, the useful “…as Page” option is lost.

Helpfully (except, in fact, not) Facebook had added a “Suggested for you” section to your actual Business Page newsfeed. How kind! Except their idea of what you should subscribe to may not overlap with yours. As a business who has clients which have nothing in common apart from coming to us for marketing advice, our version of this was as eclectic as it was completely useless. Clicking into the “see more” link just brings more of the same.

Obviously what we need here is a search option, but there isn’t one:

At this stage we did a LOT of googling, and found many tutorials, including this one being featured as an excerpt at the top of Google’s results, which claim that the only way now to add things to the News feed is to accept whatever it is that Facebook is suggesting to you.

Well, after a lot of research and button stabbing, we’re here to tell you that that is wrong. It’s not easy to find, but you CAN actually search for the Business Pages that you specifically want to follow. Here’s how.

First, you need to be within the Meta Business Suite. There are a few ways to access this, but the easiest one for this purpose is to go directly into the “News Feed” link underneath the Meta section of your left hand menu. Do NOT go into the News Feed link which is about  an inch below it, but works differently – full marks to Facebook once again for useability here.

Once you’re in, things initially look the same. Same “Suggested for you” box, so you might not bother investigating it much. BUT. Click the “see more” option and this time….. alleluia! We have a Search box.

Once you have this, you can just search as normal, and each result comes with a “Follow” button that you can use to subscribe to future content. Our guess is that this search box should have been included in the “other” News Feed version, but someone forgot about it. This is where having a way of communicating bugs to Facebook would be helpful to them as well as us but….yeah.

Anyway, that’s a morning of our lives we won’t get back. Hopefully this post will show up in Google and stop everyone else having to waste their time too

This installment is about using Competitions as a way of driving traffic to both your Pinterest boards and your website.

Competitions on Pinterest

A well thought out contest is a great way of generating excitement, re-pins, and engagement around your business.

In the early days of Pinterest there were no rules around running competitions, which lead to a huge number of “Pin to Win!” contests, where brands required users to re-pin a specific image in order to enter a competition, usually with a winner drawn at random from all entries.  These were extremely popular amongst some users, but not so popular with Pinterest – probably because it was starting to swamp other users’ feeds with content which was less “authentic” and interesting than they’d like.

In mid-2013 new guidelines were released which discouraged these kinds of competitions, but they’re by no means “illegal” on Pinterest now – you just have to be more careful.

So wait up – there are rules!

To make sure that your business stays off the Pinterest naughty step, the first thing to know before we start, is what you can’t do when setting up a Pinterest contest.

As a brief summary, the minor things Pinterest would like you to avoid are:

• implying that Pinterest is sponsoring your competition, or otherwise affiliated with it. This can include things like putting the Pinterest logo on the contest page of your website, so be careful;
• requiring pinning of specific pins, or encouraging multiple pins /likes / follows as a term of entry;
• running constant competitions.

The big no-no is requiring users to re-pin contest rules, and (slightly oddly) they also ask you not to use the “Pin it to win it” title for your contest.

As an aside, a very quick survey of current competitions shows that a large number of big brands are ignoring one or more those rules, and evidently Pinterest isn’t doing a great deal about it – have a look at some of the images below, which are all live at the time of writing!

However, our own experience suggests that the rules have at least reduced the number of poorly thought out, lazy competitions which generated a lot of low quality content, which can only be good for Pinterest and the user experience.

So even though it seems you don’t *have* to observe all the rules, being a little more creative in how your competition runs is still a good idea.

Running a great Pinterest contest

From those same regulations (they’re here if you need to check for updates), what Pinterest does encourage is to support “people discovering things that inspire them. Reward quality over quantity“.

Your challenge is to do exactly that, whilst ensuring that your brand or products are one of the inspiring things that people discover

If the way you run your contest achieves that, then what you’re actually doing is enlisting your customers to do your job. Everyone wins!

So, here are our Top Tips for making your Pinterest Contest board a happy place!

1. Don’t get too hung up on YOU. The most engaging competitions allow user entries to go beyond just one product or brand.

For example, asking people to create a board for their dream wedding (including pins for venues, clothing, decor, honeymoon or whatever they want to include) will produce much more interesting results than asking them to choose their favourite tiara out of the 10 that you make. And will be much more fun for them, too.

2. Let users be creative. We know that creative types are over-represented on Pinterest, so why squash all that talent with an overly restrictive contest?

Rather than prescribing exactly what you want people to do, invite them to freestyle a little around your brand. The task could be anything from “Show us how the brand makes you feel” to “craziest uses of our products”.  So long as their board explains the link, let them theme it however they want. You may end up with some amazing content.

3. Use a hashtag. Asking participants to add a brand hashtag to all of the images they’re using for their competition entry is the easiest way to draw attention to your business without turning the whole thing into a spamfest.

4. Cross promote your contest. To drive additional traffic, you could ask people to visit your website for the winners’ announcement, or get the competition theme from your Facebook page.

Just don’t go overboard as you risk losing users if you make it too complicated.

5. Get maximum value from contest entries. With a little luck and if you’ve managed #2, you now have some beautiful montages themed around your brand.

How about screenshotting them and taking them somewhere where stunning images are not so much part of the everyday – your Facebook page, for example, or even a feature page on your website.

6.Let the public decide! This might go a bit against the grain for some businesses, but it’s actually a very clever way of combining user research with your contest.

All you have to do is make the winning criteria something that depends on how *other* users react to a competition entry. So for example, you might award the prize to whoever gets the most followers for their competition Board. And now you know which themes and images resonate most with the public – useful, hmm?!

Initially, my eye was caught by a story about the Conservative Party spending over a hundred thousand pounds per month on various advertising and promotional activities on Facebook.

Invoices obtained by the BBC apparently show spends of £122,814 in September 2014, and £114,956 in November:

(Click the image for the full story on the BBC website).

So clearly, that’s a lot of money, but that’s not the really interesting thing about the article. Further down, a digital expert who’s quoted as currently working with the Labour Party on their online marketing, says

“I understand that the Labour party has been spending less than £10,000 a month on its own Facebook presence”.

Now, the spin provided in the article is simply that Labour spend less because they don’t have the resources that the Tories do, due to being linked with fewer (they imply) evil millionaire megalomaniacs stroking white cats in their mountain lairs. Or something.

But then I remembered something that had been very viral in my personal Facebook feed lately, and wondered if possibly the story was slightly different.

I wondered if, perhaps,  the Labour party don’t NEED to spend anything like that amount, because they’ve come up with a clever way to use Facebook which ensures that their content spreads organically, AND they are able to collect voters’ email addresses (one of the elements that there was a line item for in the Conservatives’ invoice) without any additional cost.

Maybe some of you have seen this in your Facebook feed? It’s been anonymised to protect the privacy of the originator:

Clicking on that newsfeed item takes the user to a website which looks like this:

Are you seeing how this is working, yet?

Person A publishes their “how many people have my name” result, and it appears in Person B’s feed, because they are Facebook friends.

Person B fancies getting their result, so clicks on the newsfeed item. On arrival at the website, they’re invited to hand over some minimal but important personal information*, and once they have “their” number, they are able to post that back into their own Facebook feed.

Whereupon, presumably, persons C and D notice it and decide to click and…you get the idea. Viral in its purest form.

And because it’s organic (ie, friends are sharing it with each other, voluntarily, through their news feeds) it won’t be costing a penny. There will almost certainly have been some initial spend in order to get the ball rolling – presumably where that 10k per month comes in – but unlike the Conservatives, Labour aren’t reliant on putting the pounds constantly into the top of the Facebook slot machine in order to get those all important email addresses out of the bottom.

The perfect viral storm on Facebook

All credit to the Labour party here, they have thought through every aspect of this process, and exploited the Facebook environment perfectly.

The basic concept (finding out how many people with your name are registered to vote) is simple but clearly catchy enough for many people to bother engaging with.

The website is carefully designed so that you fill in your details as quickly as possible in order to get your result.

And the graphics and text which go back into the user’s newsfeed with their result, speaks directly to the next batch of contacts (“How common is your name?“, not “I found out how common my name is” or something similar).

Impressive, right?

*re that personal information: here’s the small (really quite small) print from the bottom of that webpage. Assuming you read beyond the big red “get your number” button because, yeah, we all do, right?!

Simple, powerful, unique

If this one example isn’t enough to convince anyone out there of the kind of power that clever use of Facebook can unleash, nothing will.  Let’s look at the resources used:  A simple, one page website capable of collecting some basic information. A feed from publicly available electoral roll data. Some creativity to tap into people’s curiousity about themselves and their names. And access to the single biggest concentration of UK citizens, and their social ties, that has ever existed.

But there’s one finding that REALLY stood out for us. The number one thing that potential customers want from you on Facebook, in order to help them decide to buy. It’s not zany, amazing content. It’s not having a huge army of Likers.

What’s the most important thing about a Facebook Page for your customers?

It’s customer reviews.

Why? Before a customer has experienced what you offer, they don’t really trust you. They’d quite like to believe what you’re telling them about your amazingly comfortable rooms or your incredible cocktails, but, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you.

They need to hear it from others who don’t have anything to gain or lose from their buying decision.

When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Consumers are constantly looking to increase the amount of information they have access to before they make a decision, even a relatively small one like where to eat out at the weekend.

They can get your opening times from your website (we hope!). They might find your insights into the business helpful, and they’d certainly love a special offer or two. But the one thing they really want to know is, am I going to like this. And often the only way to predict that is to see who else likes it, too.

Get those comments rolling in

So every Page in the Local Business category automatically gets a Reviews box, whether they like it or not (and plenty don’t). Unless you’re doing a terrible job at what you do and manage to really upset a customer, though, it’s unlikely to get a huge amount of use. You need to encourage customers to use it.

There are lots of ways of doing that, but they mainly fall into two categories: incentives, and opportunism.

Incentives are easy: you offer a small gift, preferably one which is more valuable to the customer than it is costly to you, in return for them reviewing you. So for a restaurant, you might offer a free glass of wine on their next visit. A hotel could offer a room upgrade if there’s availability, to their most active reviewers. And so on.

Opportunism requires a little more thought, and is all about timing:  giving the customer something to do in “dead” time.  The last thing you want to do is rely on a customer remembering to go to your Facebook page and give a review once they’ve finished interacting with you; unless their experience is extraordinarily, life changingly good or bad they are generally going to forget about you as they walk out the door, or at least by the time they get home.

Most people these days will have a smart phone on them, most of the time. So, if you’re a restaurant, why not give them a small card with a QR code leading to your Facebook page, and a request to review their experience, while they are waiting for the bill? Likewise in a hotel reception, have a big banner next to where people queue for checkout, or put cards on the nightstands. This alone should lead to a big increase in reviews, and coupled with an incentive will skyrocket them!

So, there’s how to make sure that any potential customer visiting your Page has access to exactly what they want in order to make a buying decision. The rest of the research is below, and there are plenty more gems in there too!

That’s now changed. As of mid November 2013, Twitter has begun rolling out their advertising programme to UK based businesses with more modest budgets.

Why advertise on Twitter?

Before we look at the costs and options, it’s worth thinking about why a business might choose to pay for exposure on Twitter rather than achieving it organically – through building a large follower base or creating shareable content.

The primary reason is likely to be time. Unless you’re well-known in general (a personal or brand celebrity) or are able to produce that once-in-a-lifetime viral content, getting significant visibility on Twitter in a short space of time is very difficult. So if you have a short notice launch, want to promote something a little different for what you’re known for, or are just impatient, then paid advertising is your best option.

Rather than having to wait for your audience to build naturally, and then start retweeting your content to their social networks, paying for advertising allows you to leapfrog your tweets directly into the timelines of your target audience.

Which brings us to the second reason you might consider paying for exposure: targeting. There are a range of ways in which you can target different Twitter users in the advertising scheme, allowing you to be much more precise about the kinds of people who’ll see your tweets or account.

What’s on offer?

The Twitter advertising platform is quite sophisticated, with a good range of options. Initially, you have to decide whether you want to promote your account (as in, appearing in the “Who To Follow” area of Twitter) or individual Tweets:

You then have a choice of how to target users – basically, this defines what criteria a user has to meet before your account or tweet will be shown to them.

As you can see, there are some pretty interesting choices there.  If you’re launching a consumer architecture practise, being able to target people who engage with Grand Designs on TV could have great potential; if you’re working in the B2B sector then being able to target everyone who currently follows the Twitter account of a leading industry publication could be very useful too.

Within those targeting options, you can  further refine by geography (although this is pretty coarse for the UK currently) and even gender.

For a Promoted Tweets campaign, you then need to choose which of your past tweets you’d like to promote – or let Twitter do that automatically based on popularity.

What does Twitter advertising cost?

As an example, we set up a campaign targeting anyone who’d used the word “renovation”, in the UK.  The budgeting section is where things get interesting – because you can set very low overall budgets AND a small daily budget. That means it should be easy to keep control of what you’re spending, and run a small scale (albeit possibly not entirely representative) pilot.

Here’s a screen shot of our campaign budget settings:

The slightly less promising item here is the “spend per engagement” bid. As you can see, this is what you will actually be charged if a user interacts with your Tweet in some way; and it is generally quite hefty.  If you compare with something like Pay Per Click ads, where (if you set it up right) a user could be searching for an immediate purchase, the typical bid amounts on Twitter seem quite high to us. I guess it will partly depend on the truth of the small print that “you will never be charged more than your maximum bid, and you usually pay less”.

Any other gotchas?

Just one – there are some interesting comments about who will and won’t be eligible for the advertising programme. We’ve found that a few of our newer clients aren’t, and it seems to be just down to the overall level of activity on their accounts, plus how long the account has been established. Twitter says:

“The most successful advertisers on Twitter tend to be those who are avid Twitter users. This means they have a history of sharing exceptional content and engaging with their followers. If you are interested in advertising but your account is fairly new, be sure to complete your account’s Twitter profile and spend a few weeks familiarizing yourself with Twitter’s best practises…”

This looks like an attempt to impose some quality control and avoid the “big budget newbie with an egg avatar” taking over the world…which seems fair enough.

Where is it?

You have to register for the Advertising centre, so to get started, go to https://ads.twitter.com/ and see whether your account makes the grade!

Integrating Instagram into your social media strategy

Some helpful thoughts from Flowtown on how specifically smaller businesses might make use of Instagram. Provided you can cope with adding another channel into your mix, and have “on the ground” staff with the right mindset to produce engaging and relevant images, Instagram is well worth considering.

Facebook Reach continues to decline

Have you noticed that your Facebook post statistics are looking a bit poorly lately? We certainly have. Even taking the simple “X people saw this post” numbers which appear on each individual post, we’re seeing a fall of anything up to 70+ on the equivalent numbers from a few months back. This article from We Are Social has a lot of detailed data on the issue and some debate about what’s really going on here. As we noted earlier this week, Facebook have now launched a new option for Likers to see all of a page’s posts, but there’s no doubt that the task of getting your content in front of Likers has been getting harder recently.

Too wired to sleep?

An increasing number of us are connected to the internet almost round the clock, via our Smartphones. This is great for social media, but possibly less good for our mental and physical health. Mitch Joel’s piece on Sleeping with your Smartphone talks about the size of the problem and suggests we start observing better smartphone hygiene in bed!

And finally….

In this week’s silliest slot, a (presumed) Twitter addict appears to have named their baby Hashtag. We’re really, really hoping this is a spoof.

What exactly is Pinterest?

Basically, Pinterest is a content curation tool – it provides a great way to bring together stuff you’ve seen around the web onto themed “boards”.

It’s the virtual version of the messy pinboard we all had above our desks as students! Only now, you can share your top picks with others. There’s a built-in social aspect in that you can follow the work of people whose collections interest you, and users are able to comment on one anothers’ collected items.

As you might expect, the site itself is highly visual. The user interface is definitely a strength – it’s simple to use and a really easy on the eye, clean, modern design.

The “pinning” app that goes with it is also a cinch to use; building on the bookmarking approach of sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, you install a small browser add-on which means you can add things to your boards with one click. So, no logging in and out every time you want to post something while you’re surfing the web.

How does this translate to business?

As we mentioned, the site is very visual, and users enjoy eyecatching and attractive images. If you’re a business which trades in “beautiful” – whether that be interior design, a dressmaker or an architects’ practice, Pinterest is a great environment to showcase that. It also seems as though Pinterest has hit upon a great formula for encouraging sharing. A recent data analysis showed that 80% of items curated into users’ own boards are “re-Pins” – that is, a user picking up content from elsewhere in the Pinterest community and sharing it with their followers. This significantly eclipses share rates on any other social site.

That’s not to say that Pinterest can’t work for other types of organisation;  for example, the US Army has been using Pinterest almost as a way of telling stories about what they do. But, the sites experiencing those high levels of referral traffic currently, tend to belong to businesses such as clothing retailers (such as Asos.com), food, and home decor magazines.

Will it work for me?

If you have unlimited time and / or resources, then yes, why not! But in reality, very few of us do these days and it’s going to be a question of analysing where Pinterest sits in the lineup of return on (time) investment for you.

if you are a visual business, the high “shareability” factor means that it might be worth prioritising Pinterest over one of your other social networks and seeing if it starts to show results. However, it is still relatively small, so if you have an established Twitter or Facebook presence, your focus may be better put into that.

If your line of work  isn’t visual, then Pinterest is going to be challenging for you, as the format only allows each Pin (item) to be represented primarily by an image. So, unless you can come up with a particularly clever angle, you might be better with something like Scoopit which deals much better with text-based items.

There are a couple of other things to consider, beyond the visual issue.  There’s a strong gender bias on Pinterest, with many more female users than male, which might be relevant if you’re in a very male oriented line of business. Interestingly, that’s exactly why the Army wanted to make use of it, in order to reach more women.

There’s also a definite aspirational quality to many of the popular boards – which makes sense when you think about it. Nobody sits down and creates a mood board to help them decide on a new oil filter for the car, do they! So again, if your product or service doesn’t fit well into that category, you may struggle to get traction on the site.

Want to try it?

Pinterest is still invitation only at the time of writing, so you either need to apply for an invite or get one from a current member. We have an account, so if anyone wants an invite, just leave a note in the comments.