The New Rules to Getting Your Facebook Updates Noticed

You've posted your company's big product announcement to your Facebook page, but only a sliver of your fans actually see it. Why the heck is that? What factors does Facebook consider when deciding how to display your updates in people's News Feeds?

For a long time, business owners and other social-media users chalked it up to some convoluted algorithm called EdgeRank, which took into account an exhaustive list of variables including posts with pictures, links out to other websites and repetitive content.

Say goodbye to EdgeRank, folks. Facebook has a new playbook for News Feed.

"EdgeRank is a name for one of the early News Feed algorithms, that we occasionally still see used by the press to refer to all the algorithms that power News Feed," a Facebook spokesperson says. "It is not a word that we use internally because it doesn't capture how today's News Feed algorithms, which take into account a variety of social factors, work."

Because there are so many posts that users could want to see in their News Feeds -- posts from friends, businesses they like, etc. -- most people don't have enough time to see them all. So Facebook says its new algorithms "listen" to user feedback, essentially letting people decide who and what to connect with.

"When a user likes something, that tells News Feed that they want to see more of it; when they hide something, that tells News Feed to display less of that content in the future," Facebook says in an announcement today. This allows Facebook to prioritize which posts to feature in a specific user's News Feed.

Here are some of the user signals the News Feed algorithm considers when serving up posts:

• How often you interact with the friend, page or public figure (like an actor or journalist) who posted.
• The number of likes, shares and comments a post receives from the world at large and from your friends in particular.
• How much you have interacted with this type of post in the past.
• Whether or not you and other people across Facebook are hiding or reporting a given post.

For business owners, this means there is an increased emphasis on sharing posts that will get people liking, commenting and sharing more. As they do, your posts will land in their News Feeds more often.

And if people don't scroll down far enough in their News Feeds to see your company's most recent post, don't fret. Facebook announced today a new feature that allows older content to reappear at the top of a user's News Feed later on. In early tests for this new feature, Facebook says users read about 70 percent of the posts in their News Feed, up from only about 57 percent.

Facebook also announced today that it has created a new series of blog posts called News Feed FYI that will highlight major algorithm changes and explain the logic behind those changes. News Feed FYI posts will be published on the Facebook for Business blog. 

Article curated from Entrepeneur

24 Tips to Reinvent Your Brand a la Kiefer Sutherland

Not once, twice, or even three times did 24 star Kiefer Sutherland have a brush with the law. On four separate occasions, Sutherland has been arrested for driving under the influence.


Amazingly, Kiefer Sutherland’s checkered past with alcohol abuse hasn’t kept him down. It didn’t even stop tequila brand Jose Cuervo from picking him up as the poster boy for their latest ad campaign.

From television to print to social media platforms, Jose Cuervo is rolling out its ad campaign through multiple avenues, encouraging consumers to live without regrets and have a story (and shots, we’re sure). Of course, Cuervo’s “Have a Story” campaign has garnered attention for using Sutherland to promote their brand, especially given his questionable history with DUIs.

But just as Jack Bauer escaped from seemingly impossible circumstances, perhaps there’s a secret to brand reinvention as well. Similar to the mythical phoenix, there’s no reason mistakes from yesterday should limit your opportunities tomorrow. From Old Spice to Volkswagen, there’s a long history of brands that have come back from the grave. And apparently we can now add Kiefer Sutherland’s persona to that list.

Reinvent Your Brand like Jack Bauer

So in honor of the man behind Jack Bauer, here are 24 tips for reinventing your brand:

1. Acknowledge that the market has changed. From new competitors to the digital world, you’re likely no longer defined by your original vision. Only after acknowledging this change can you move forward!
2. Rethink your customer base and their needs. For instance, the restaurant market has strongly catered to Millennials despite overwhelming evidence that Baby Boomers eat out a lot more – much more. Are you targeting the right people?
3. Consider launching a new product or service to grow your market. Diversification is a powerful tool to grow your company into existing or emerging markets as long as you stay true to a solid strategy.
4. Begin investing in new marketing channels such as content marketing. We know what you’re thinking: it’s probably easier and cheaper to write your own content. But web marketing tactics must be kept in mind, which is why even the smartest businesses invest in content writing services.
5. Repurpose old content to keep the essence of your old brand while creating a new image. Did you know there are 37 ways to repurpose a single blog post?
6. Grow your influence online. It’s important to grow your clout and understand that mass media and the digital platform not only define you, but provide opportunities for your business.
7. Network as often as you can. Chances are that you’ve gotten complacent and have stopped making new business contacts. Remember what they say: your network is your net worth.
8. Be transparent. There’s a tendency for businesses to become defensive during hard times. Be outgoing and responsive instead.
9. Consider new avenues for growth. Be sure to understand the when, why and how of brand extension.
10. Redesign your website. You’ve noticed that major brands such as Google and Facebook continuously update their successful sites. Is there a secret to the madness?
11. Invest in a new logo. New times, new image, right? Major corporations and small businesses alike have all changed their logos for a newer, sleeker image.
12. Analyze your current situation – completely. What is it exactly that you want to change? Where do you want to be? Only by answering these questions can you achieve your goal.
13. Get passionate. If you’re business has struggled, you may have lost passion about quality or creativity. But now passion is more important than ever!
14. Communicate with customers. Find ways to improve your customer service and marketing. Did you know that social media doubles as both a customer service and marketing tool?
15. Solicit feedback. By understanding how you can better serve your clients, you create a better brand. An estimated 81 percent of customers say they are willing to give feedback if they know how.
16. Avoid too much hype. You might be excited about reinventing your brand, but don’t make a promise you can’t keep!
17. Change your style, and then show that change through various platforms! No, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Simply pull back the veil and use content marketing to build trust – it works.
18. Acknowledge previous mistakes.
19. Learn from previous mistakes
20. Avoid those mistakes.
21. Hire a new team for fresh excitement and energy. Not sure how to hire new team members that will mesh well and help grow the company? Here are some tips for a highly successful team interview and selection process.
22. Update your slogan. A slogan is one of the most powerful pieces of content marketing. We like to call it perfection in a sound byte.
23. Revise your mission statement. Similar to writing a bestselling novel, your brand and its values have to be fully developed before you re-launch.
24. Acknowledge that your brand’s story is ever-fluent and evolving and isn’t indicative of what tomorrow may bring.

By keeping these things in mind, you’ll ensure that your brand has the opportunity to start anew and continue reinventing itself time and time again. With a little inspiration from Kiefer Sutherland and his impressive nose-dive turnaround, you’ll enjoy growing alongside your business, and relish the incredible opportunities that growth brings!

What will you do to remake your brand? Have you taken steps toward rebranding or expanding your brand?

Article courtesy of Social Media Today

How Your Pinterest Descriptions Can Attract Customers

In her book Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business, marketing and branding expert Karen Leland provides a Pinterest roadmap that will help you drive website traffic, boost your brand and build business. In this edited excerpt, the author reveals how to write pin descriptions that draw viewers to your account.

One surefire way to optimize your pins for search and attract more traffic is by giving each one a spot-on description that includes your relevant keywords. There is a 500-character limit for descriptions, so be deliberate in what you write -- and follow these guidelines for making your descriptions count:

Provide a context. Images without descriptions leave it to the user's imagination as to why you pinned that particular item or what point you were trying to make. Granted, some images are so breathtaking that they need no explanation. However, in most cases, a clear, concise, and specific description of a pin can help pique a user's interest. Items to consider when writing a description include:

    What you specifically liked about the image
    Why you pinned the image
    What idea the image represents
    What tips you have that go along with the image
    What opinions you have about the image
    Additional information related to the image

Spell out the specifics. Images that have vague descriptions are less useful for the viewer than those that spell out the specifics. For example, let's say you have a pin showing a selection of great office gifts to give clients. A description that reads, "These are really great to give as client gifts," is less impactful than one that says, "These five gifts, all under $30, can be used by a man or a woman and are something every small-business person needs. For this reason, they make great holiday client gifts. Here's a link to where you can buy them." Now that's a useful description.

Link to your website. You can add live links to the captions below your pins simply by adding a URL to a pin's description and clicking the red "Save Pin" button. Adding a link to the description encourages people to click through and drives traffic to your website and/or blog.

Include a call to action. According to a study by Reachli.com, descriptions that contain a call to action see an 80 percent increase in engagement.

For example, let's say you've pinned an image for tax season that shows a small-business owner pulling out his hair in despair. The description explains that there are five ways a small business can avoid stress at tax time and provides a link to an article on the topic. That's a good start, but you take it one step further by encouraging viewers with a specific call to action with a simple sentence or two. Here are some suggested call-to-action phrases you can incorporate into your pin descriptions as appropriate:

    Download the free ebook.
    Read more ways to...
    To learn more...
    Sign up online.
    For more details...
    Please submit ideas and questions to...
    Call for a complimentary consultation.
    Get a free quote.
    Tell us what you think.
    Watch a video of...

Add testimonials. A good strategy for both product and service businesses is to include testimonials in your pin descriptions. For example, if you have a pin showcasing a garden your landscaping company overhauled, you might want to place a short quote from the happy homeowner in the description.

Use keywords. One important aspect of search engine optimization is the inclusion of keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. By using these sparingly and strategically in your pin descriptions, you can increase your Google rankings but also be more discoverable by users searching Pinterest for a particular topic.

Be mindful of description etiquette. Bear in mind that the description etiquette changes depending on whether the pin is yours, a repin, or sourced from somewhere on the web. Whenever you repin an image, Pinterest automatically brings the description over as well. If that description fits, fine -- you can leave it as it is or even just add a few words of your own to personalize it. However, in some cases, you may find it more advantageous to write a new description.

When pinning from a specific blog post, permalink URL, or website, avoid copying and pasting the given description verbatim to avoid copyright infringement. For example, some pinners have violated food bloggers' intellectual property by copying and pasting the blogger's recipes into the comment box. Be original and write your own descriptions, while being sure to credit and link back to the original source.
 

Article courtesy of Entrepeneuer

3 Ways Pinterest is Shaping Its Future

Pinterest once the purview of wedding planners and overachieving parents, has become one of the most popular social sharing networks, and has been taking steps to become more of a resource for businesses. And it has a plan for its growth in the months to come.

For instance, the site recently rolled out "rich pins" -- product pins, recipe pins and movie pins -- which provide information such as price, availability and locations where users can purchase items they pin from certain retailers. Today, Pinterest is going a step further with automatic notifications for users when a product they've pinned goes on sale.

And it appears these efforts are paying off. With back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons getting into full swing, many businesses are eager to get in on the rich pin action. According to the Pinterest, product pins get higher click-through rates than regular pins and include automatically updated details, like price changes.

In regard to Pinterest's roadmap for the future, engineering head Jon Jenkins discussed with TechCrunch where the company has come from and where they plan to go in the future. Jenkins was candid, explaining that "Pinterest isn't fundamentally about connecting people to other people. It's about connecting people to interests."

Here are three points from that interview that we found particularly interesting:

1. Interest Graph makes data meaningful.
The Pinterest engineering team is working on exploring new ways to connect people to their interests using deep data analysis. By building the "Interest Graph," all that data will help "identify interests through collaborative filtering, associative rule mining, natural language processing," Jenkins said.

So if a user pins a large number of hiking boots, tents and backpacks, Pinterest will deduce an interest in the outdoors and tailor recommendations and search results to better reflect that interest.

Related: Pinterest Pins Will Promote Product Pricing, Availability and Retail Location

2. Expanding workforce to grow ecommerce offerings.
Dealing with that amount of data is a challenge, of course, which is why Pinterest is aggressively hiring in the areas of machine learning, data mining, operations and infrastructure. And the company plans to bring expanded information such as can be found now with recipe and movie pins to more types of pins in the future.

Already well-known for driving traffic to ecommerce sites, Pinterest is working on ways to bring more of the shopping experience into its website and app, which could eventually become a bid for some sort of revenue share or commission.

3. Keeping business options open for future changes.
For now, though, there is no cost to businesses to use rich pins. Once a business has established itself with a verified business account on Pinterest, it can apply to get rich pins for its products, recipes or movies. There will also eventually be a Pinterest API, but don't look for it any time soon.

"We are working very closely with a very select set of partners to figure out what the API is that we should release," Jenkins explained. "We are going to work with content providers to offer extended functionality so they can understand how the content they produce is being used in the Pinterest system. Content providers want distribution. If we can help them understand what resonates they'll be happier, and pinners will be happier as well."

Article courtesy of Entrepeneuer

Does Search Produce Better Customers Than Social Media?

Social media has been an albatross for most companies. People have become accustomed to receiving discounts and deals on social networks, but discounts rarely create loyal customers and adversely impact the value of those customers.

A recent study by Custora measured the purchasing habits of 72 million online shoppers and found that customers who discovered an online retailer via organic search spent more money and shopped more frequently than customers who originated from other channels, like Facebook or Twitter. Surprisingly, in 2013, Facebook and Twitter were collectively responsible for less than one percent of customer acquisitions.

Does this mean you should give up on social media? Of course not. Your best customers are far more valuable than your average customers and they might originate from channels like social media.

If you're already investing time and money in social media, you should consider rebalancing your activities to maximize returns. For example, you may want to focus more of your social media efforts on Facebook rather than Twitter since, according to Custora, each Twitter lead produces only 75 percent of the value of a Facebook lead, and only half the value of an organic search lead.

While there's great insight in the Custora report, the findings about social are incomplete because they measure the customer's last-touch before a purchase. Social is rarely the last touch. A customer will often hear about a brand on a social network and then search for that brand online. It's not surprising, then, that search would nearly always be misleadingly credited for finding that customer.

Smart companies blend all of these channels. For example, the content on your company's blog can create search leads but also help engage and convert prospective customers on social media. On the other hand, social media can help draw customers to your blog and create conversations about your company. Few companies can effectively pursue a single channel strategy.

Remember too that social media influences how we search. Before we search for something, we might have seen references to that product or service by friends, colleagues, and other influencers. In fact, the major search engines are increasingly considering and weighting relevance, authenticity and trust when delivering search results. Social media provides an important measure of these factors. When people read compelling content, they are more likely to socially share that content. Such social sharing is an important sign of relevance, authenticity and trust, which increases the visibility of that content in search.

You can see this most clearly when searching on Google. Google knows that users are more likely to click links favored by their friends and connections. Google fine-tunes search results based on a user's social graph in Google+ and the authority of the content author. Since people are more likely to buy products and services recommended by their friends, it's not surprising that search delivers more customers who buy more often.

Organic search and social strategies are converging. It's not enough today to focus on one and ignore the other. The most successful marketers will integrate their strategies and tactics to leverage both.

What marketing channels have worked for your business?
 

Article courtesy of Entrepeneur

Facebook For Business: What You Need to Know

Facebook has a new site for businesses, providing everything from how to create a page, to best practices by industry and playbooks for creating your own campaigns.

Facebook has created a new resource, "Facebook For Business," which provides instructions and examples of how to use all the promotional and advertising tools the company offers. While the information goes across industries and company sizes, this portal was designed with the small to mid-sized business in mind.

This launch comes after yesterday's earning's announcement, which said Facebook's ad revenue was up more than 50 percent in all regions. This resource site is a way for the company to continue that momentum by making it easier for businesses of all sizes to advertise.

Here's How It Works

Facebook For Business is a way for the company to start "simplifying and streamlining the way we communicate with advertisers and the industry," according to Christina McBride, Marketing Manager on Facebook's Business Marketing Communications Team. "Previously, we've had lots of different sites, all focused on niche audiences and customer segments. We're taking a different approach with Facebook for Business as a central hub going forward for all of our updates, success stories, product information, all together in one place. Instead of starting with our products, we're focusing on what you as a business is trying to do. "

Launching today around 12 p.m. EDT, the site features a home page  has a clear call to action for creating an ad, with links that provide everything from a product overview to "success stories" and specific case studies by industry.

Clicking through to the Success Stories consolidates many of Facebook's previous case studies in one place, with filters for business size, industry, product and region. The examples are relevant to any marketers looking for inspiration, or a guide for "how to execute a campaign." An automotive marketer can see a case study playbook around launching a new vehicle, capturing people in the market for a car, increase loyalty.  The story includes the exact products the example company used, with links back to the Facebook For Business areas such as "Drive In-Store Sales."

"It's the first time we've had a presence by industry and we'll be building this out over time," said McBride. "These pages really become the source of truth about our products. We have links into the help center, but we want this to be the primary destination people go to find out about our products."

Different Approaches 

Some people want to approach marketing via "what do I want to accomplish" while others want to know "how can I take advantage of Facebook in my industry and what are the best practices?" The site provides different ways for people to approach the content, and use it to create the most effective campaigns. While everyone in the industry will have access to these best practices, it doesn't mean all campaigns will suddenly be the same. Companies bring their own content, tactics and strategies, and there's infinite room for creativity, said McBride. 

Clicking to the products page gives everything from how to create a Facebook page to using the measurement system.

Facebook has previously used its "Studio" blog to share news about features. Starting today, the Facebook for Business site will have a blog where all news updates will go, making it a one-stop location for understanding announcements and platform changes.

For companies that need even more hand-holding, Facebook For Business has one additional bonus--a "Get Help" link. As long as you have created a budget and are actively advertising on Facebook, you can get access to a representative who can walk you through the steps of getting started over the course of a few weeks

What do you think of the new Facebook For Business site? Share your feedback in the comments.

Article courtesy of Inc. Magazine

3 Benefits Pinterest's Latest Features Provide Business Accounts

Last Friday, the Pinterest blog Oh, How Pinteresting! posted a new article describing a few of the steps they’re working on to make Pinterest even more tailored to a pinner’s interests – less pins you don’t want to see and more of the ones you like. While the new changes to the site are certainly going to pique a user’s interest, they provide a series of benefits for the Pinterest for Business crowd as well.

The “Do Not Track” Feature

Enabled in specific web browsers, Pinterest now provides users the option of deciding whether or not they want to be tracked online with a Do Not Track feature. This feature works to disable cookies (and any third parties) from collecting personal information about the pinner. More often than not, few companies allow users the ability to opt out of this kind of tracking because the site itself has to acknowledge a Do Not track function first. For a business Pinterest account, the feature will work to give pinners a choice on whether or not they want to be tracked while visiting the page so that they don’t wind up having profiles of their behavior – the pages they visited, how much time was spent on each one, the number of times they went to a certain site – created by a third party. This choice won’t take away from the experience in visiting the page for a business but will ensure that the browsing behavior of the pinner is kept private.

New “Edit Home Feed” Button

For a bakery business page that pins a lot of pictures and recipes related to baked goods and subsequently follow similar pages, the new Edit Your Home Feed button ensures that your dashboard is full of Pinspiration just how you want it. Personalization is key, as is being able to build up a rapport with other Pinterest business pages. The more a business pins specific pins (like that bakery pinning cupcakes and pies), the more various types of boards containing images of cakes, muffins, and cookies will be recommended to you and your business. And if you often frequent sites that feature a Pin It button for their images for event planning purposes or beyond, Pinterest suggests personalized pins and boards from these sites to ensure that your next event is a success.

iPhone and iPad Shortcuts

Frequently pinning from your phone? There’s a recent update for that and one that Pinterest is referring to as a shortcut for pinners that allows for their pins and likes and repins to be sent a little faster than usual. Press down on the touchscreen until a menu fans out, with tiny icons allowing you to pin, like, or send the image and pick one of the three options listed from there. The site also adds that the shortcut works whether you’re on your home feed or on a different board, ensuring that your boards will never have to go a moment without staying up to date.


Article courtesy of Social Media Today