The other day, I was on Kodak’s Facebook Page, and saw this gem of a Facebook question: “What do you like to get/give for Father’s Day?”. While its an innocent question to begin with, their Social Media Manager left it open to users to enter their own…
You’d think people would be mature enough to enter something relevant… but, not so much. The top answers were “My Dad is Dead” and “A new Kodak Community Manager who doesn’t leave the Poll options wide open”.
At least to give Kodak some credit, they didn’t take down the poll after these unfortanate answers were added — but, conversley, they didn’t actually even comment on it. I guess to them, it was better to ignore it, than get involved. Afterall, it would probably just call out the stupidity.
Social media lets anyone do almost anything — think twice before leaving the polling open for anyone to add anything. Personally, I like to offer 4-5 choices, and then “other (share in comments)”. This makes it much more manageable, where you can reply to a particular person’s concerns/comments, as well as, delete things that are beyond out of line.
The other day, I was logging into my Facebook account, and I came across something interesting. When I enter the wrong password, not only does Facebook give me the “wrong password, idiot” screen, but also likes to rub it in a bit more by sending me an email instantly saying “Sorry you’ve been having trouble logging in…”
While I’m sure the email itself may be useful for those who genuinely forget the password, could they at least wait a minute before sending it? Without even giving me the chance to enter my password a second time, and to try again to get in, the email is already in my inbox. Trigger happy?
I’m sure I’m not the only one whose mistyped my password at least once, so why not give me some breathing room. Say, if I enter it three times incorrectly, send the email. Or, if I don’t get in within five minutes, send me an email. But not instantly — its just another email to delete out of my inbox.
Below is an example of the email I’m talking about — The underlining concept of the email itself is great, but the instant execution is flawed at best.
The other day, a colleague pointed something out to me that brands like Starbucks and Pepsi don’t have any ads on their Facebook Pages, while smaller brands do. What gives?
My first reaction is that as brands achieve stardom (and enjoy millions and millions of fans) Facebook gives them a break and kills ads from showing up. This helps reduce any distraction from the main brand, and eliminates the possibility of competitive ads from appearing.
Now, this seems pretty fair to me – after all, Starbucks, for example, has invested heavily in building a Facebook presence — which in turn, helps build the overall user experience for Facebook. On the flip side of the coin, this decision would also cost Facebook money, in missed revenue opportunities (after all, they’re missing out on serving ads to any of the 20+ million fans who visit Starbucks’ page, for example)
Now the question is — and I couldn’t find anything on this — what is the threshold for ads to disappear?
Starbucks and Pepsi with 20.5 and 3.5 million fans, respectively, have no right hand side advertisements appearing. While Photoshop, with 1.9 million fans, does.
After observing this, it makes me wonder if its based off a pre-set threshold of fans (reach the magic number, and the ads disappear), brand advertising spend levels (assuming Pepsi and Starbucks buys ads on Facebook), or something else all together?
And, is it something that lesser brands (say with less than 1 million fans) could pay for the privilege of — can I offer to pay $XX,XXX+ for an ‘add free’ environment for my brand?
Someones always got to push the limits on Facebook… and today’s winner was Conan O’Brien. From what I gather, he spent an hour “hosting his show” on Facebook, to his 1.5 million fans.
Sounds like a smart idea — but rather than sharing a live video stream, he posted status updates… again and again, and again and then some more, non stop.
Now, this could go either way — either be incredibly annoying, or insanley brilliant. Annoying, well, because they took over their fan’s news feed. Brilliant, because for every ‘like’ or comment one of their fans would post, means ANOTHER group of friends would be exposed to CoCo and his show.
My first impression was that people would unlike the page en mass. When I first noticed it, they had 1,523,043 fans… by the end of the episode, they dropped to 1,522,047 — a loss of just under a thousand?
I’m guessing they lost a bunch more, but for every unlike, they probably picked up 5 more likes, simply because of the viral aspect of Facebook.
And on top of that, I suspect CoCo will pick up some additional exposure somewhere on broadcast news and blogs.
The only real question I had at the end of it, is why didn’t this trip some sort of Facebook alert, to freeze his account after the 50th post, all a minute apart? (I counted 96 in total…)
All in all — I’d rank this one as a clever use of Facebook. Though, I don’t think every brand could pull it off.
With the Canadian election underway, I ‘liked’ all of the major parties on Facebook to see what they’re doing to leverage social media. For the most part, I’ve been unimpressed…
When the USA had their presidential election, there was a much more active outreach through social media. In Canada, much like Canadian politics… we’re boring! Everything’s been safe — almost too safe, for such an innovative medium, but I digress.
What has caught my attention, isn’t WHAT the parties are posting, but HOW. In particular, how the NDP is dealing with a bilingual country. Rather than targeting users based off their language (which is dead easy to do…), they post everything twice, within minutes of each other: Once in English, and once in French.
Why? Who knows…
Here’s my advice. Work under the assumption, that whoever “Likes” you on Facebook, is viewing Facebook in their preferred language. With that, target them accordingly… here’s how:
- Below the status update box, select the ‘Everything’ drop down.
- From here, a popover window will appear — simply start typing in the language you’re speaking in, and hit ‘Okay’. You’ll have to do this twice, to target those speaking English, and those speaking French — but it will leave the page much less cluttered, and not double message the fan base (ultimately reducing ‘unlikes’).
And while we’re at it… the political campaigns can take it one step further…
- Go Beyond French and English: With Facebook, you can target any language, so why be restricted by just French and English? Open it up to even more languages, using the same steps as above.
- Add Some Branding: The party leaders all have their own Facebook Fan pages, but none of them have any party branding on their profile picture — sure, they have branding on the Party pages, but not their own. This is a missed opportunity in terms of further tying themselves in with their party.
- Add in a Welcome Page: Give me a reason to ‘Like’ the page (and make it clear, via a giant arrow on where to click), along with links to your YouTube, Twitter, Email and Website.
- Thank Me for Liking You: Provide an exclusive ‘welcome’ video to whoever likes the page. Its fairly simply to do, and will help guide the fan on what they can do to help the campaign further.
- Integrate an Email Capture Form: Try to collect an email address at every turn — this gives you another way to reach out and share your messaging with supporters. Don’t just rely on Facebook, look for engagement on every medium.
- Make it a Conversation: Most of the post are simply “telling” us things… how about asking us something once in a while? (eg: what’s our take on healthcare)
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Hi, I'm Dave. I'm an online marketer in Vancouver.
