One of the joys of our relationship with Facebook is that we get to ask LOTS of questions about stuff our clients want and occasionally our account managers give us the answers we want…

As a university or college you will want to setup individual places for each of your campuses but want them to sit under your main university/college Facebook identity. This way your students can check-in to their individual campus, but be part of the organisation as a whole.

Right now, this is simply not available. But today one of wonderful account managers said…

“We are working on a solution that will allow you to create a parent-child relationship for your existing Places on Facebook. I will let you know as soon as this solution is available.”

This may not seem like much. But we know this will make a MASSIVE difference to all of our education clients.

And, as soon as we know – you will know…

Is it nerdy to say, this is exciting…? Maybe.

Google Adwords is the biggest pay per click advertising platform online and is used by thousands of businesses worldwide to promote products and services to millions of individuals and businesses. It is both cost effective and targeted as you only pay for those ads that are clicked on and choose the keywords your ads are shown against.

Although Adwords is widely used by every business sector I have found companies wishing to recruit new employees are not utilising it for this function. I can’t help but feel companies are missing this opportunity to attract candidates to their internal career site. The job boards are certainly using Adwords. For example if you type “Sales jobs” into Google, you’re likely to see Sales Target (a niche sales job board in the results.) A massive benefit of using Adwords to promote your job is their geo-targeting feature. This means you can set your ads to only be displayed to people in specific areas.

For example let’s say you were looking to recruit in the London area, Adwords will show you a map of the UK, you can then select London on the map. You can also choose multiple locations to show your ad if you are looking to recruit in different locations as you can see below.

Adwords Geotargeting Feature

One of the big benefits of choosing specific locations to show your ads is that only geographically relevant candidates will see them. This should make your advertising more effective and cheaper as you will not be paying for irrelevant clicks from people not in the right geographic location for your advertised job. Adwords will show your job ad against any keyword you choose as long as you bid high enough for each click.

If you were to advertise for a sales job in London it would be sensible to bid against “Sales jobs London” and other obvious search terms candidates might use to find roles.You should try to be clever with your keyword choices. Why not bid against your competitors.

For example Tesco could bid for the keyword “Sainsbury jobs” and when this or similar searches were entered into Google Tesco’s recruitment ads would be shown.

Also bidding for industry based keywords will help attract the best candidates.

For Example a Web Design firm may want to bid on “new media jobs”. Many jobs now require specific skills and qualifications. We’ve been advertising for a person with a CIM qualification for one of our clients.

They may wish to bid on “CIM marketing jobs” and other related keywords It is also crucial that you choose the right landing page for your ad as the ad copy and landing page copy have to match. I will include more information on this in my step by step guide on how to set up a recruitment ad for Google Adwords which will be up on our blog in the next couple of weeks.

These are just some of the ways to attract candidates using a system like Adwords. Although you will have to pay for every click, you are likely spend a lot less than if you were to hire a traditional recruitment agency and can build your own candidate pool from the candidates that come through to your career page.

Millions of people use Google search every day and it is a resource that is heavily underutilised by employers when advertising for their roles.

The main reason for this is a lack of technical knowledge of the Adwords system and also creative knowledge on how to attract the best candidates by using the right copy and keywords. Hopefully I’ll be able to shed some light for you on both these points in forthcoming posts. In the meantime set up an Adwords account and have an explore.

Google released its search engine update ‘Panda’ worldwide back in April but the impact of the changes are only becoming apparent now. The main objective of the update was to demote websites in search results that scrape or duplicate content from other sites.  This update was released to improve the quality of search results for Google users by giving those websites that do produce regular original content higher search rankings.

The impact of these algorithm changes has now become clear for the content scrapers of the recruitment world, job aggregators. As these websites sole aim is to duplicate jobs from other websites they are now finding their website traffic from Google drop substantially.

A year ago if you were to make a common job search on Google like ”sales manager jobs London” it would result in seeing the first page filled with results from check4jobs.com, workhound.co.uk, jobs.trovit.co.uk, indeed.co.uk or one of the many other aggregators. As can be seen by the below search this is no longer the case:

Not only is the ‘Panda’ update negatively affecting the job aggregators but also those hundreds of UK recruitment agencies that are paying them to get their jobs found on Google. As Google’s algorithm change only demotes those sites that are actively copying content from other sites, the original job posts on recruitment agency sites are not being negatively affected. Although this is the case, the majority of recruitment websites are not optimised or don’t have high enough PageRank to show on Page 1 in organic search results for the majority of popular job search terms.

Ongoing SEO and Google Pay per Click advertising are more crucial than ever before to get your jobs found by your potential candidates.  If you would like to find out how Net Natives can help your recruitment site get found on Google or would like more information on how the ‘Panda’ update is impacting job aggregators get in touch.

Here at Net Natives, we like to keep up to date with any social media developments, so when Google announced its latest social network Google+ we thought we’d take a look. Google+ is the third attempt by Google to take on Facebook after the failures of Google Wave and Google Buzz. At the moment Google+ is in limited BETA with users only being able to join if invited by a Google+ user. Google often does this to test its new services before opening them up to the rest of the public. Google has attempted to take elements from both Facebook and Twitter and combine them into one network. For example it is possible to share photos, video chat with friends and micro message (a feature very similar to Twitter).

Google has suggested there are at present 10 million users, which, in comparison to Facebook’s 750 million users is a drop in the ocean. The question we have asked is can  Google+ be utilised by Colleges to engage with potential and current students. Here are our thoughts:

1. Google+ at the moment does not allow organisations to create profiles on the platform; it is only available for individual users. This severely limits how colleges can use the platform. Saying this Google has announced that they will be introducing business profiles to the service in the near future although details of what the functionality will be is limited.
2. Users of the service need to already have a Google account to join the service. The question you need to ask is how many of your students have Google accounts and how many will be willing to set one up just to join Google+.
3. Users who use Google+ can recommend content directly through Google’s search engine. This recommended content can then be seen by the friends of a user. This integration could be very exciting if users get on board.
4. The “Circles” feature on Google+ enables users to organise contacts (friends, colleagues etc.) into groups for sharing content and engagement. If this feature was used in a similar way for college profiles on the network it would mean a college could organise those users who like your college profile into specific groups that then could be communicated with. For example a college could organise “fans” by course or society.
5. The “Hangouts” feature on Google+ offers users group video chat (with a maximum of 10 people participating in a single Hangout at any point of time). This could be very useful for colleges if they wanted to organise Q&As with the College Principal or conduct course interviews. Whether this feature would be included for organisations is yet to be seen.
6. Google+ is very much in its infancy and will need to be able to offer users something that Facebook doesn’t already for them to want to use it. With over half of the UK population on Facebook and 10 million users aged 14-18 on Facebook in the UK alone it has its work cut out to attract users. Facebook already offers a very developed solution for organisations with Facebook Pages and Facebook Advertising.

These are just our initial thoughts and as the network develops (if it does) we will be here to provide the education sector with advice on how they can use it to engage with potential and current students. In the meantime have a look at this useful infographic we’ve found that compares the features of Facebook and Google+ as it stands. If you would like to have a chat with us about how we can help you utilise Facebook or the possibilities of Google+ for your college get in touch.

Over the past few months Net Natives has seen like-for-like increases in the cost of Facebook advertising. We always strive to achieve the best possible results for our clients and after consulting with our account managers at Facebook regarding this topic we are able to share this interesting response:

“Recently, we pushed out changes to our optimization algorithm that affected a large percentage of advertisers. These changes have led to some advertisers seeing reduced delivery and a higher CPC.”

It seems we were right to look deeper into the figures. A recent study conducted by TBG Digital found that Facebook advertising rates increased by 74% in the last year!

This increase can be put down to both the increase in popularity of Facebook as an advertising platform and the changes Facebook has made to its bidding algorithm.

This is not a negative but merely the zeitgeist with social marketing as a whole. As clients see better returns on their investment through social marketing they spend more with that method. We are now seeing some evidence of this shift from traditional search advertising on engines to Facebook (5% of online search advertising is now spent on Facebook). So in order to achieve the same results as a year ago advertisers will have to raise their spend in accordance.

Net Natives has been running Facebook advertising campaigns for a multitude of clients for over 3 years and using our knowledge, expertise and specialist tools we are striving to ensure our clients are as insulated as possible from these cost rises. For more information on how we are making Facebook advertising work for our clients please get in touch.

Great, you realise the best way to promote yourself/company/service/product/job is with online or social advertising. But why spend all of that time and effort (or get us to do it for you) and then fall at the final hurdle by not getting that person (let’s call them  a “click”, as every click costs!) to do what you want to do?

You need to make sure that your advert takes that click to a place where they can buy/apply or contact you for whatever it is you want to promote.

There are subtle differences between getting someone to land and convert on a Facebook Page than there are driving traffic to a destination on your site and you need to test and check to make sure you are getting the best return for your campaigns. But there are also plenty of common sense best practice no matter which type of campaign you are running.

As an agency, we should know what we are talking about, so, using one of our own landing pages as an example, here are some quick pointers to help you get the most of your online marketing campaigns.

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Landing Page

1. Always include a Unique Selling Point

It is important that your audience understands why you are different. Think about what makes your proposition unique from the competition. We always recommend having this unique selling point as the primary or secondary header on the page.  Always remember to keep it short and informative.

The Unique Selling Point

2. Have a Testimonial

It is important to show potential customers that you already have some that use your service and actually enjoy using it. Include a testimonial on your page and make it sure it’s a real one as you will be asked.

a Testimonial

3. Add Share Buttons To Make Your Landing Page Social

Social sharing is not just about building Facebook Pages By adding effective social share buttons (particularly Facebook “Likes”) you can dramatically increase views, reducing your cost of conversion as socially viral views will not come out of your advertising budget.



4. Show What You Have To Offer “In Context”

You should always show your audience an example of your product/ service in context of use. This way your visitor will see what it’s actually like to use your service or own your product . We have used a video which contains an actual example of a Facebook ad on a user’s profile but you can use a variety of formats including text and images. Be creative!

Context of Use

5. Always Include a Request for Information

The object of every landing page is to gather information on your audience so that you can get them to complete an action. Make your form simple to understand and unthreatening. Also always include a “How did you hear about us?” field. Knowing how your audience found you will help you understand where to focus your marketing spend.

The Request for Information

6. The Call To Action

This is a fundamental feature of a successful landing page. This is the statement that instructs your visitor to take an action. It can take the form of a button or a link to an email. Ensure it is obvious and instructs the visitor on what clicking it will actually do. This will deter time wasters.

7. Bullet Point the Main Features of your Product/Service

You should always bullet point the main features and benefits of your product/ service. No one will use you if they don’t understand how using you will benefit them. Keep the features easy to understand and definite. Whaetver you do, DON’T WAFFLE!

The Features

8. Use an Eye Catching Image

Most people have short attention spans when they are surfing the web. This why it is so important to grab their attention using an image. This can be a diagram outlining how your product/ service works, a chart comparing your company with others or, like we’ve done, some quick stats relating to your offering.  Be imaginative with this and you’ll find people stay on your landing page for longer.

The Eye Catcher

9. The Additional Choice

As long as your subtle, a landing page can be a great opportunity to cross sell complementary services/ products. You have to be careful not to confuse the user with too much choice. We always recommend having an link to an informational blog post or PR release that gives more information on your other services without being overtly sales related.

The Additional Choice

Making simple changes to your landing page can really improve results. We have provided consultancy on hundreds of landing pages for our clients and  if you would like our advice on how to improve yours or ways to get releavnt visitors to your page please get in touch.

Continuing our support of the education sector and in partnership with the AoC, our MD, Steve will be speaking at the AoC Annual Communications Conference 0n the 17th of March in Birmingham. Steve will be speaking about social media marketing at the break out session with Stewart Potter.  Come and say hello!

Confirmed speakers include:

• Steve Evans, Managing Director, Net Natives
• Stuart Potter, Marketing and Communications Manager, ACER
• Kim Catcheside, Assoicate Director, Champollion (Previous Education and Social Policy Correspondent for the BBC)
• Graham Jones, Internet Psychologist and President of The Professional Speaking Association
• Nigel Morgan, Managing Director, Morgan PR
• Emma Ridgeon, Internal Communications Consultant

In the mean time have a look at our blog post on engaging with NEETS using Facebook and get a Free Facebook advertising audit for your College. Hope to see you there!

Whether you want to or not, your Facebook Page will automatically be “upgraded” to the new style on March 10th. Before the deadline, you can already migrate across to the style which we have done for our R&D FB page Social Natives.

It further highlights and strengthens Facebook’s resolve to provide a platform for its 13 million users aged 16-24 and Educational Institutions rather than being just a‘social network’ (man, I bet they hate that film title for all sorts of reasons, not least for pigeon-holing them as a social network!).

The changes are fundamentally a shift in how an educational institution can interact with the rest of Facebook, increasing brand awareness and a more transparent student communication tool.

Facebook has also announced the introduction of iframe tabs for pages. This is a huge change to the way Pages are built and managed and will almost certainly affect you.

We build Facebook Pages for clients and have run Facebook advertising campaigns for multiple education providers, so we’ve been pretty hot on checking this one out…

What’s interesting is that if you search on any of the big brands on Facebook, e.g. Coca-cola (who have connection engagement the size of a medium size country, 23.5 million connections), none of them have yet made that transition. We are all trying to figure it out…

We’ve had a week to think about it and play around so here are our thoughts. If you have any questions, get in touch.

Login as Page or Profile

You can now login as a Page, enabling you to interact with the rest of Facebook as your brand (as opposed to as a user). When logged in as a Page, you can comment and like content on other Pages as a Page.

This is a great development for Admins as it allows for clearer student engagement. The ability to ‘Like’ and ‘comment’ on other Education Pages offers a great opportunity to quickly engage with other businesses, such as schools, student unions and local businesses who have a presence on Facebook and increase your institution’s exposure.

Below is a screenshot of how to change the login from a personal user to logging in a Facebook page.

New layout now mirrors user profiles

Pages now have the same layout as User Profiles. This has various impacts on your Education Page….

Here’s a quick snapshot of the changes:

Removing navigation tabs on the header, replacing with side tabs

This is a fundamental change in layout and also strategy of Facebook. Whilst you can still select your Page’s default landing page, by making the navigation less prominent the focus of engagement will be reinforced through the wall. From a user point of view, this means, you need to effectively define your side tabs to make it clear for the users where you want them to go and what you want them to do, as their eyes will be less likely to be drawn to the left than they would to the top. This also means closer focus on the calls to action for each page that relates to your Facebook advertising.

Images at the top

You now have photos and information about your institution at the top (where tabs were located). These rotate and will be picked at random on each hit. This could cause problems, but can also have promotional advantages. We have images that relate to our product lines here, and we’ve also added a caption linking back to the corresponding Facebook tab/website page. This represents a great opportunity for further promotion of your institute’s courses and information.

More relevance

Facebook Pages now have an “Everyone” filter on the wall that displays content in order of relevance. Content that a user’s friends have interacted with, followed by posts that have received the most feedback are displayed – with the most relevant content at the top.

Moderation

Facebook has also introduced a Moderation Blocklist (finally!) where comments containing specific profanity can be marked as spam. This is especially useful considering the new relevance sorting. This feature allows for basic moderation. Not sure this is going to be detailed enough for an educational institute, of course, we offer more in-depth Facebook Page moderation. Get in touch to find out how we’d moderate your institute’s page.

News Feed

When logged in as a Page, you can view a News Feed that displays “Top News” or “Most Recent” activity from other Pages you’ve liked. And as in Profile mode, you can also comment on and like any content in the news feed (you will not see any activity from your Facebook friends – only Pages). This can help you keep a track of other company Facebook pages as well as your own pages (if you have more than one). You can also comment on posts here as your institute.

Viewing recent Page activity

In Page mode, you’ll notice that the updates icons look very similar to those on a user screen This is very similar to user profiles although instead of seeing your new friends you can see your new page connections and instead of seeing user updates you will only see page updates. This makes it easier to keep a track of any new activity and allows you to engage with your audience quicker.
Facebook pages to be made in iFrames instead of FBML.

Facebook pages to be made in iFrames instead of FBML.

Bespoke Facebook tabs are to to only be made in iFrames instead of FBML (Facebook Markup Language). Facebook is retiring FBML from the 11t of March 2011. IFrames are far more customisable than the old FBML format. Get in touch to find out how this affects your Facebook Page.
This new page update generally make Facebook pages easier to manage and improves the ability for Page Admins to effectively engage with their audience. The design changes also make pages more attractive and easier to use for Facebook users. But, as I said at the start of the piece, the rationale behind this is to strengthen Facebook’s resolve to be a platform rather than just a “network”.

Get your Education Page built professionally today with Net Natives. Click here to contact us.

As well as presenting at the AoC Annual Communications Conference, we’ve been advising and supporting our education clients on  engaging the disengaged using social advertising.

How can you market to the disaffected and disengaged? How can you “sell” education and work training to those who have deliberately opted out of the system?

As social marketing partner to FE Colleges, Net Natives’ tools and expertise, render Facebook advertising to a relevant potential students. We build campaigns segmented by age, gender, location and interests, delivering 1000s of interested school leavers and adult learners for each Colleges. We’ve proven that effective social advertising easily the most relevant and cost effective form of targeted advertising for student enrolment.

Promoting to NEETS isn’t so simple. But, Facebook IS where NEETS spend their time online.

This is an example of just one of the many types of ads you should be creating for your campaign

You need to utilise effective Facebook advertising within your marketing strategies. Here are some top tips for using Facebook advertising to promote to NEETS

• Be Bold – create interesting copy that will stand out to a disaffected audience
• Be Specific – don’t waste clicks or spend, be clear in the advertising that you want to target this audience, NOT generic potential students
• Be Lateral - think what may grab their attention, appeal to a sense of fun – without being patronising
• Be Targeted – although your user will not define themselves, know their demographic and interests and promote accordingly
• Be Creative – think about your community partners. Can you promote your college’s course in partnership with the Prince’s Trust, business or local sports community?
• Be Diverse – do not just make one advert and hope it works, it won’t. Make sure that you create multiple ad variations.  Use different images and ad copy. This will enable you to see which messages work with your audience as well as ensuring NEETS don’t get bored of seeing the same advert
• Be Social – Facebook advertising is “interruption marketing” – try not to direct your advertising away to another environment, away from social, where you are in danger of losing their interest. Build effective landing destinations within your College Facebook page. Adhere to landing page best practice  - our top tip guide will help
• Be Direct – Keep the calls to action simple, no long forms, work out what are your most important contact details (email, phone), make it easy for the user to submit their details
• Be Consistent – make sure that your landing pages reflect the tone of your advertising. If you are promoting in partnership with a community partner’s promotion (e.g. the Prince’s Trust), use their imagery and content as well as your own
• Be Respectful – make sure you have an auto-response email set up for every person who submits information with a thank you note, clearly establishing next steps for engagement. Make sure you ALWAYS fulfill your promised next steps for engagement
• Be Social (again) – make sure that one of your calls to action is to encourage “likes” of either your Facebook page or just the content on that page. This is the “nirvana” marketing call to action on Facebook. Once one of NEETS like your page/campaign, virally all of their friends will see they have done this. You can also then target their friends with social recommendation advertising on Facebook

Finally, test, test and test again. Constantly review your advertising campaign throughout your period. Review which messages are working and focus your spend on the successful advertising. Learn what works and use that knowledge. For more best practice tips read our top tips for Facebook advertising.

Hope you found this useful, really interested in your feedback and sharing any knowledge for the benefit of the sector. Net Natives continue to support the FE Sector and our MD, Steve will be speaking at the AoC conference this March. We also support the College Marketing Network and are available to provide free workshops on social media best practice.

For more information, contact us.

As previously mentioned in this blog post, analysing your Facebook ad campaigns by looking at referrer URLs does not always provide the most accurate picture. For this reason, Natives add unique paramaters to your landing page URLs to help you easilly and quickly identify a Natives’ Facebook advertising campaign in Google Analytics. Here’s some more information on how this works.

Let’s take the example landing page of http://www.netnatives.co.uk Once we’ve finished with it it will look like this:

http://www.netnatives.co.uk/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium
=ads&utm_campaign=Natives%2BFB%2BCampaign&netnatives=dd5t89

This may look complex but it will actually make seeing the results of your advertising campaign a lot simpler in Google Analytics.

In the words of MC Hammer, let’s “break it down”…

Campaign Source

In Google Analytics if you go to Traffic Sources and click on All Traffic Sources, you’l be able to see all the referring sites to your own website.

To make it clear which traffic is coming from your facebook ads we add the paramater

?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=ads

to your landing page URL highlighted in blue below.

http://www.netnatives.co.uk/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=ads&utm_campaign=
Natives%2BFB%2BCampaign&netnatives=dd5t89

This makes it easy to see the traffic from your Natives’ Facebook ad campaign as the source “facebook” and the medium “ads” will be clearly listed.

Campaign Name

If you have more than one campaign with us don’t fret, we also identify the individual campaign using the below paramater

&utm_campaign=Natives%2BFB%2BCampaign

seen here highlited in blue in the landing page URL. The actual campaign name is Natives FB Campaign. We can label your campaign with any name you like.

http://www.netnatives.co.uk/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=ads
&utm_campaign=Natives%2BFB%2BCampaign&netnatives=dd5t89

In Google Analytics if you go to Traffic Sources and click on Campaigns, you’l be able to see all the individual Facebook campaigns we are running and the page views from those campaigns.

2 example Natives’ Facebook ad campaigns can be seen below.

We realise that the paramaters themselves look complicated. Building these URLs is all part of our unique service. All you have to worry about is logging into Google analytics and seeing your campaigns deliver valuable traffic to your website.

If you have any other questions on how we make your unique URLs or want us to talk you through how to see your Facebook ad campaign stats in Google Analytics please get in touch.