All posts by Don Skinner

How Facebook’s New Page Update Affects the Education Sector

February 24, 2011 | Comments (0)

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.

Social Advertising for NEETs; Engaging the Disengaged

February 18, 2011 | Comments (1)

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.

Improving Google Analytics for Facebook Advertising Tracking Using Unique Paramaters

February 16, 2011 | Comments (2)

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.

Why are there sometimes discrepancies between Facebook figures and Google Analytics?

February 16, 2011 | Comments (1)

Recently, one of our valued clients reported seeing a difference between the number of clicks from their Facebook advertising campaign and their Google Analytics. Strange? So we investigated and this is what we found…

1. Differing statistics or Methodologies

In our Facebook Ad reports we report clicks. Many third party reporting packages including Google Analytics report visits or page views, which may not correspond directly to Facebook’s click tracking. Additionally, some third party reporting packages require that the user’s browser have cookies, Javascript, and/or images enabled in order to record statistics, which may result in undercounting relative to the clicks reported through Facebook. Statistics measured at daily intervals may be based on different time zones. Google Analytics documentation related to this issue can be found here.

When our ads link directly to the site you’re advertising, and you’re tracking ad “clicks” by looking at page visits with “facebook.com” as the source, your statistics can be significantly different than our reports. In general, analysing your Facebook ad campaigns by looking at referrer URLs does not provide the most accurate picture, and we encourage our clients to implement a different solution.

There are a variety of ways to make your website analytics more accurate than relying on referrer URLs. We link your Facebook Ads to unique URLs that are only used for your Facebook ad campaigns by adding unique identifying parameters to your landing page URLs. Find out how we do this here.

2. Incorrectly implemented third-party reporting

We ask all our clients to check their third-party tracking is implemented correctly. We strongly recommend installing and using Google Analytics as your third party tracking solution.

3. Facebook Advertising click quality measures

Facebook has measures in place to reduce invalid clicks and may filter out some clicks and impressions. This may result in Google Analytics and other third-party tracking packages overcounting relative to the clicks reported by Facebook. Facebook may invalidate repetitive or incomplete clicks, and cap the number of times any user can see or click on your ad in a day to ensure you get the most from your ad campaign.

We are committed to providing acurate and in-depth stats to all our Facebook advertising clients. If you would like more information on how we add unique indentifying paramaters to your landing page URLs, read our latest blog post. If you have any other queries on how we build and manage our Facebook advertising campaigns, please get in touch.

Facebook Business Page Upgrade – How it Affects You

February 15, 2011 | Comments (1)

Whether you want to or not, your Facebook Business 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 600 million users and businesses 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 a business can interact with the rest of Facebook, increasing brand awareness and a more transparent customer communication tool.

Facebook has 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.

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 and here are our thoughts. If you have any questions, get in touch.

Login as Page or Profile – You can now choose between being logged in as a Profile or logged in as a Page. When logged in as a Page, you can comment and like content on other Pages as a Page. A single username and password is all that’s required for both modes.Below is a screenshot of how to change the login from a personal user to logging in a Facebook page.

This is a great development for Page Admins as it allows for clearer customer engagement, especially if there are multiple Page Admins for one business page. The ability to like and comment on other business pages presents a great opportunity to quickly engage with other businesses who have a presence on Facebook and increase your businesses exposure.

New layout now mirrors user profiles - Pages now have the same layout as User Profiles. This has various impacts on your business page….

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 business page’s default landing page, by making the navigation less prominent the focus of engagement will be reinforced through the wall. From a user experience 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, 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.

You can feature your favourite pages on the left, in our case we have all the Facebook Pages we have built although if you have more than one company Facebook Page you could have them in this area.

You now have photos and information about your organisation at the top (where tabs were located). These are rotating and will be picked at random on each hit. For business this could cause problems, but can also have promotional advantages. We have images that relate to our product lines here. You can also add a caption linking back to the corresponding Facebook page or your website. This represents a great opportunity for further promotion of your products streams. There is a Facebook advert rendered at the bottom of each photo, which is a clever increase in the reach of effective Facebook advertising.

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 a business, of course, we offer more in-depth Facebook Page moderation. Get in touch to find out how we’d moderate your business page.

Pages now have their own News Feed

Viewing recent Page activity

Facebook pages to be made in iFrames instead of FBML.

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”.

We’d love to know your thoughts…

Net Natives supporting The College Marketing Network

February 4, 2011 | Comments (0)

Net Natives are pleased to continue to support the Further Education sector. Following on from the success of our various social media advertising campaigns for FE Colleges, our MD, Steve will be presenting a workshop on social media strategy and best practice methodology to various colleges on 24th February.

The event is free for members. If you are interested in attending, please contact the College Marketing Network for more details http://www.m-network.org

R1 Thursday 24^th February, Newcastle under Lyme College

10.15am Arrival, registration and coffee for a 10.45am start.

Speakers to include:

Steve Evans, Net Natives, on social media strategy and use of new media;
Rachel Till, Newcastle under Lyme College, on the challenges of new build and rebranding;
James McCracken, Stockport College, on HE and part-time prospectuses and the future for these publications.
Rowena Knight, Media Relations Executive, North Warwickshire & Hinckley College, on the PR campaign which won Silver for the college in the 2010 FE First Awards.
Other suggested topics for this meeting so far are internal communications and PR campaigns.Lunch will be provided at 12.30pm and the day will end around 3pm.

Get a Unique Domain for Your Facebook Business Page

January 19, 2011 | Comments (0)

A lot of companies don’t know this but any business which has a Facebook page can have a unique URL for their page. This makes it easier for customers to find you and looks more professional on business cards, marketing materials etc.

For example:

www.facebook.com/socialnatives

The only caveat from Facebook is that your page must have at least 25 fans.

To set up a personalised URL for your Facebook page you will need to be logged into the Facebook account where you are the administrator of the page.

Once logged in go, to this link www.facebook.com/username

You will see the below box on the page. Select the appropriate page from the dropdown and follow the instructions.

Once you set your username you cannot change it so make sure that it is correct before confirming. Once it is set you will be able to go directly to the personalised domain to view your page.

For example: Britishmedicaljobs.com set their username to britishmedicaljobs. You can view their Facebook page by going to www.facebook.com/britishmedicaljobs

Read our blog post on how to promote your Facebook page.

If you haven’t got a Facebook page why not get us to make you one?

If you need help getting to that magic 25 fan mark, why not try the Natives’ Facebook advertising service.

If you have any other questions on any of our services then get in touch.

11 Top tips to make Facebook advertising work

December 15, 2010 | Comments (4)

28 million over 18 year olds used Facebook last month, all can be targeted with effective advertising based on their age, gender, location, job titles, education, interests, you name it. So why isn’t it more popular as an advertising medium?

Any business can try Facebook advertising. Facebook make it easy to create an ad and publish it to their users.

That’s the problem, 4 out of 5 businesses who try Facebook advertising don’t use it again. On the other hand spending on Facebook has risen 10 fold in the last year. This growth is largely companies that can afford to spend a lot of money using Facebook and can afford the best tools for optimising their campaigns.

If you take the time to understand how people use Facebook and carefully monitor your advertising campaign you too can yield excellent results. Net Natives have developed our own tools for Facebook advertising and create Facebook advertising campaigns for multiple clients, with account managers working every day monitoring these campaigns to make sure they are successful for the client.

Here are our tips on getting Facebook advertising to work for your business:

Facebook is not Google; social is not search – Although your advertising can be incredibly targeted, you must remember that this Facebook is billboard advertising. Your users are not searching for your product or service, so you need to be imaginative. But this means that you are reaching your customers at the earliest stage in the buying cycle.
Be bold – Because this is display advertising and you are trying to interrupt their social conversation, you need ads which they will take notice of. Use colourful images and use concise direct language. Try not to use marketing speak, your users will appreciate this and will be more likely to click on your ads.
Test Multiple images, titles and ad copy – Because of the Facebook advertising interface, most businesses will make 1 ad and just put them live on Facebook. We would recommend testing many different images and different ad copy and combining these to see which actually work. This way you will end up with a lot more ads live on Facebook. This will not only allow you to find out what your audience responds to but also will improve the longevity of your ads as your audience will be seeing many different ads and won’t get bored as quickly. As an example of what works, Net Natives create 300 ads per campaign.
Everyone needs an individual campaign – everyone responds differently, tailor your ads to each demographic you are trying to reach
Be lateral when you research your demographic – think of alternative demographic groups beyond age and location. For example, we create ads based on lateral interests which will resonate with the user’s profile
Have a call to action in every ad - Give Facebook users a reason to click on your ads. For example if you are advertising a job make sure you have “Apply Now!” at the end of your ad copy.
Use both generic and specific targeting for your campaigns – We always run a broad targeted campaign married with smaller highly specific, targeted campaigns for each of our clients. We find this greatly improves the CTR (Clickthrough Rate) of their ads.
Assign different targeting options to individual ads – To help monitor who clicks on our ads we actually individually create each ad with seperate targeting. For example we will have an ad aimed at a male between the ages of 18-24 who lives in London. We will also have another ad aimed at a female aged of 18-24 who lives in London. By being very specific with every ad we can stop ads that don’t perform and can tell our clients which demographics have been unsuccessful. Ideally we would recommend not only using different targeting on each ad but also simultaneously trialling different images, titles and copy. This will mean you end up with hundreds of ads in each campaign but it is by far the best way to structure and monitor an advertising campaign on Facebook.
Closely Monitor your Clickthrough Rate - Your Clickthrough Rate is calculated by dividing the number of impressions of a specific ad by the number of times the ad gets clicked. If your CTR begins to decrease, you may want to consider targeting a different target group or switching your advertisement. All advertisements will eventually lose their effectiveness. Your ability to stop them before this point will determine how long your campaign will be successful for.
Don’t be afraid to stop ads running – We are constantly pausing ads that don’t gain impressions or clicks. If an ad is not working pause it as it will mean more budget for those ads that do receive clicks.
Take your audience to a relevant destination – you are interrupting a social conversation with a relevant advert based on their profile that will resonate; don’t ruin all of that hard work, by not creating the right destination. Make sure your landing page relates to the advert, adheres to standard online advertising practices (this is a whole other topic, but feel free to ask us if you have any questions).

These are just some of the techniques the Natives use, coupled with our in-house social advertising tools, to make Facebook work for our clients. If you would like any more advice or would just like us to take care of the whole process for you please Get in Touch.

Page 1 of Google – Flat Fee SEO

November 12, 2010 | Comments (0)

“ Natives’ extensive knowledge of SEO has provided us with the tools to affect our website’s search rankings.”

The Synergy Group

As you are reading this blog, someone right now is looking for something and they’re using a search engine (say, Google) to find it. They’ll be typing in the words or phrase they think will give them the right result and, if your site is built properly with the right number of websites linking back to this page, they’ll find that something on your page. Just the thing they were looking for .

This, in its simplest terms, is SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. If you want to know more about SEO, have a look at our guide to SEO here.

If you know anything about us Net Natives, you’ll know we believe in making things simple.

We have some fantastic case studies and testimonials for the great work our dedicated SEO division, Search Natives, has delivered with our team of SEO pros.

And we now have a seriously simple, but incredibly effective proposition that will get you on your way to page 1 of the search engines. We strip out all of the SEO mumbo jumbo and keep it transparently uncomplicated. We do the research into your things and how people would search for them and then make sure your site will get found:

Click me to see me full size

Why make it complicated? That’s why we have a simple cost of £499 and we’ll optimise your site. Get you found. Not bad, eh…

If you would like us to give your site a complementary SEO health check or would like more information on our Flat Fee SEO service please get in touch.

Top tips for promoting your Facebook page

November 8, 2010 | Comments (2)

So you have a new Facebook page? Good, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a special one made by us – like one of these beauties. If not, we’re sure it’s lovely and good you are there. Now how do you get people to notice you and engage with your site? Of course, there’s clever Facebook advertising, but here’s some simple techniques you need to get traffic onto your Facebook page…

Use your friends, clients and colleagues contacts – let them know and get them to like
Ensure all staff have a link to “like” the page in their email signature
Ensure the Facebook logo is prominent on your website
Twitter – refer all your twitter followers to your Facebook page and prompt them to “like” it and remind them every once in a while
Promote the Facebook page on relevant staff member’s Linked In profiles
The Facebook (and Twitter) logos should appear prominently on all off line print work (brochures, advertising)
Use Facebook Like buttons (but use them properly!)

These are the simplest ideas, if you have any more, please add them or if you want more ideas – get in touch

All posts by Don Skinner

How Facebook’s New Page Update Affects the Education Sector

Social Advertising for NEETs; Engaging the Disengaged

Improving Google Analytics for Facebook Advertising Tracking Using Unique Paramaters

Why are there sometimes discrepancies between Facebook figures and Google Analytics?

Facebook Business Page Upgrade – How it Affects You

Net Natives supporting The College Marketing Network

11 Top tips to make Facebook advertising work

Page 1 of Google – Flat Fee SEO

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