Manage Facebook brand pages and got an iPhone? This one’s for you. Facebook is reportedly in the process of rolling out a brand spanking new Pages Manager app exclusively for iPhone users.

Facebook seems to be keeping its cards close to its chest on this one. Not much is known other than admins will have more options and more control over posting content to and monitoring and engaging on their pages. Most excitingly, it will provide easy access to your Facebook Insights.

With Pages Manager, you’ll be notified when there’s been new activity, post and respond to comments and track the number of people sharing your page and being exposed to your brand. No wonder it’s being described by Facebook as “A new app … to help you keep up with your Page and connect with your audience in one place.”

The apple intelligence geeks at 9to5Mac got their paws on some sneaky screenshots. Here’s one, but check the rest out here.

The Pages Manager app is currently being tested in New Zealand and is soon to hit the US. As soon as the app reaches these shores and we can give it a whirl ourselves, we’ll be writing about it, so keep checking back. If you need some more convincing as to why this is good news, get in touch! O1273 734 640 or hello@netnatives.com.

Google Places have just announced some important changes for businesses with multiple locations which make use of the bulk listing management tool.

These changes are based on feedback from real users and are claimed to make it easier for businesses to manage and edit their locations.

What you’ll now be able to do:

• Edit one or more of your listings’ data at once
• Search through your listings filtering by specific information, or for listings with errors
• Upload new listings using a data file or adding them individually within the interface
• Provide feedback for improvements to the new interface via the “Give Feedback” link

From now on, users will be automatically redirected to the new interface whenever they click to upload or edit a data file, via the Google Places Dashboard, or by visiting https://places.google.com/manage directly.

Check out this video if you’re a new user and this one if you’re a dab hand at multiple Google listings, then have a look at our previous post about Google Listings and see why they’re so important. You can also see Google’s original post here.

We’ve come across a brilliant blog by social media guru Jeff Bullas on the lifespan of updates on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. This is really important stuff now we are all published authors and are able to send content out into the online ether at the click of a button. It’s likely you have been lulled into a false sense of security by the ease in which we can post to social platforms, but make sure you don’t get complacent. The marketing drive doesn’t stop after writing.

In his argument for a better appreciation and understanding of social sharing, Jeff dissects the length of time for which updates remain visible on Facebook and Twitter feeds, and gets a bit scientific by discussing their “half life” – the point that a link receives half the number of clicks it ever will. The half life for Facebook posts is just 70 minutes and tweets only 5, so it’s vital that you put in some serious marketing effort and publish your update more than once.

To make sure your update doesn’t drown beneath a tidal wave of fresher-by-seconds posts, here are some useful tips to think about when writing for social platforms:

• Post it, tweet it, post it again and tweet a couple more times. Use both Facebook and Twitter to optimise the lifespan of your content, and use them throughout the day
• Always remember that social media platforms have no pool of content that will catch your posts and save them for a rainy day. They simply provide a screenshot of the most current updates and these will disappear as time goes on
• Don’t underestimate the sharing potential of these sites. Aren’t we all only six connections away from everyone in the world? With social sharing that figure is already changing, and it’s your fans and followers who will circulate your information across the globe and ask for nothing in return. Your job is to ensure they see it and read it

This is free advertising at its most social. Take the opportunity to build a solid fan base of some of the internet’s most powerful distributors of information – and remember to thank them.

For some excellent graphs and extra stats about uploading videos to YouTube, check out Jeff Bullas’ original article here. To find out more about how you can use Facebook and Twitter to market your business and drive traffic through to your web pages, get in touch. Call us on 01273 734640 or drop us an email: hello@netnatives.com.

Facebook has just unveiled an update to its mobile news feed, viewable on either the mobile version of the site or the iPhone and Android Facebook apps.

Images will now display up to 3x larger, and individual posts will fill the whole width of the screen, according to Facebook’s announcement yesterday. Check out these images below to see it in action…

BEFORE - old style

AFTER - the new format

So what does this mean for marketers? Well, it again reinforces the importance of the use of images in your posts. It’s what we keep saying; images are awesome in social media.

A lot of Facebook use comes from a mobile device (500m active mobile users per month!) so you really need to be thinking about this fact when you’re posting.

Images on the desktop site only take up a small area of the screen, whereas mobile they take up a much larger proportion. This is a great chance to really catch a users attention.

Time to get creative!

Images can be e-flyers (basically mini posters of something you are promoting), they can be funny memes, or just something that supports the text you are posting.

Make sure you are using quality images regularly within your posting strategy – don’t be the boring line of text overlooked by your fans – be the eye-catching picture they can’t help but look at!

“Why would I panic?” you might ask. Well, from the end of the month, the European Law mandates that website owners have to make sure websites are compliant to the new “Cookie Law.” The rule used to be that if you used cookies to store information, you had to tell users how these were then used and how they could opt out. This information was usually shown in websites’ privacy policies, giving users the option of opting out if they preferred that this information not be stored.

With the new law, you have to be far more explicit about how you capture and use cookies on your website. And in certain cases, the website visitor has to consent to the use of cookies before entering the website.

But don’t start sticking up opt in barriers just yet, you may not need to…

We advise you think of cookies as split into two groups of “essential” and “non-essential”. Essential cookies are those used to remember important pieces of information which are then either used in the functionality or monitoring of a website. In the majority of websites, Analytics cookies are the only cookies deemed “essential”. Non-essential cookies are used for a variety of purposes, but the most common are remarketing and webpage personalisation.

First things first: it is really important to carry out a cookie audit of your site to find out which cookies you are actually using. Then you know what you are dealing with and what you need to do next.  Of course, if you would like us to conduct a cookie audit on your website, please get in touch.

Natives’ Notes for “Essential” Cookies (basically, Analytics cookies)

• If a cookie is used to remember essential details rather than to glean information for marketing purposes. We’re following the line from the UK’s Government Digital Service who have said on their own blog, “analytics are essential to our “continual improvement” approach to developing digital public services, which is critical to delivering the government’s digital by default agenda.” There’s no clear consensus on what is determined as essential – the ICO deems analytics cookies are “non-essential” – but we think that you can’t go wrong by following the Government’s direction on this issue.

• For more information on the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) on Analytics cookies, it’s issued guidance to public sector websites as well as a blog post which both refer to analytics cookies as ‘minimally intrusive’ and ‘essential’
• The GDS has also made reference to the ICO’s guidelines, declaring “it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals. Provided clear information is given about their activities we are highly unlikely to prioritise first party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any consideration of regulatory action.”
• In simple language, what all this means is that the ICO is incredibly unlikely to take action on cookies used for Google Analytics

Natives’ Notes for “Non-essential” Cookies

• If you are using cookies for non-essential purposes such as remarketing or to personalise a page to the user, we recommend that you have a “Cookie & Privacy Policy” (more details below), as well as a very clear opt-in notification on any page where “non-essential” cookies are stored
• Econsultancy have a good article outlining 3 examples of opt-in bars and pop-ups
• The ICO’s own website has an opt-in notification on its homepage (see screenshot below)
• We particularly like CIVIC’s plug-in, although there are many others out there

Click the image to see this on ICO's website

So what should you do?

• It is likely that you will already have a “Privacy Policy” somewhere on your site. if not, get one!
• We strongly recommend that you rename this to a clearly labeled and prominent “Cookie & Privacy Policy” – one that is visible around the site and not just on the homepage
• We would also recommend that you provide links for users to opt out of using cookies if they wish. For Google, the link to opt out is here. If you are only using cookies for “essential” reasons, such as Google Analytics, then this approach will suffice
• If you do have “non essential” cookies on your website we would recommend you have an opt-in notification on the pages where there are non-essential cookies

As previously outlined, if you run Google Remarketing with Net Natives then from the 26^th May any page where remarketing code is used will require opt-in from your website visitors. This law will NOT , however, affect any Facebook or Google Search/Display campaigns run with us.

We hope this has cleared up all things cookie-related, but if you would like a cookie audit or any other guidance on what you need to know about the new cookie law please get in touch.

Oh and the final point should go to Dave Evans from the ICO (the government organisation enforcing the law), “enforcement actions are likely to be in the form of negotiations. If people listen to our advice and are prepared to take steps towards compliance there shouldn’t be a problem.” This means that even after the deadline is in place, there will still be time to make improvements to your site. Phew.

We hope by now that you know of our social media partnership with the Association of Colleges! We are now incredibly pleased to announce that The Fostering Network and the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF) would also like to work with us and pick our recruiting-through-social-media brains.

Aside from the fact that we are lovely people to work with, The Fostering Network and BAAF particularly want to use our expert knowledge of recruiting into the corporate sector and the great work we have done with job boards.

Remember what we did for G4S and their London 2012 Olympics recruitment campaign? Take another look here.

And what about the incredible Facebook app for Guardian Jobs? Remind yourself here.

We’ll kick-start our partnership with both groups by designing their Facebook pages and creating some wonderfully bespoke apps. We’re really excited about these ongoing projects and can’t wait to begin working with people who do such great work.

If you’d like to find out any more about these partnerships and how we are going to help The Fostering Network and BAAF recruit carers through social media, please give us a call now on 01273 734 640.

Facebook have added yet another useful functionality that will aid many types of businessses.

Simply called Offers they are a special post type that bears a resemblance to a Facebook advert and allows you to promote something of your choice like a coupon.

You add a square pic, a title, terms and conditions, how many of the offer, and an expiry date.

Then when users see this, they can just click the “Get Offer” link. Facebook sends them an email and they can print it or display the “voucher” to your business whatever way you see fit.

It’s nice to have an official channel to run an offer that doesn’t rely on any 3rd party plug ins, and puts some extra power into the hands of the page admin.

With the news feed being such a competitive area now, we’d recommend trying out offers to see if you can increase your own brands exposure!

If your page is eligible for Offers, then you will see a yellow offers icon above the normal posting box on your timeline. We aren’t at this stage sure what businesses Facebook will allow to use them as they are only just being rolled out.

Get creative with your offers

So you can pretty much offer whatever you want. It will take a fairly standard format (bit like an ad) so other than the photo, it’s all about the text.

So you could do a straight discount, such as a % off a fee.

Colleges, for example, could could use it as an event, maybe consider the offer an “invitation” and use it to promote an open day.

I did one today for a club night, offering discounted entry. It seems to be working as we have had people claim the offer already.

Not sure how these objects are weighted in news feed priority when compared to images, video etc, but we will keep all our eyes peeled and update you with any other nuggets of information.

Find us on Facebook or Twitter if you want to know any more!

Facebook are due to update the size of page profile pictures on April 26th.

The new size will be 160 x 160 pixels, will sit 23 pixels in from the left, and 210 pixels down from the top of the page.

This larger image size is a welcome change and continues the trend of Facebook’s very image-conscious Timeline layout. It’s great to have more opportunities to visually represent yourself on the platform – they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so a slightly larger picture is probably worth a few more, right?

Remember, the profile picture is the visual representation of your page all over Facebook, so don’t get over-excited with the extra space – keep it eye catching and a good representative of your brand. We’d recommend a logo or something else that really sums you up.

Got a question about anything to do with the Facebook Timeline design? Email us if so.

We can’t wait to wax lyrical about geo-location mapping and what it’s done for Central Sussex’s Facebook website!

Central Sussex came to us with a very simple brief. They wanted to attract and engage both past and present students in a social environment – and knew Facebook was the best channel through which to target their audience. “Not a problem!” we said. “We can do this with our eyes closed! But check out this extra trick up our sleeve…”

The Challenge?

We wanted to make it easier for Facebook users to find out exactly where the College is in relation to their present location through some innovative and interactive Facebook magic that we couldn’t wait to play with.

What did Net Natives do?

Have a look at the “find us” tab on Central Sussex’s Facebook website. Here, users can enter their post code and get real-time directions to their College campus of choice.

Alternatively, users can get the app to do the hard work for them and click “GET MY LOCATION”. The app will track down the user from their IP address and deliver directions from this point. Amazing.

We also did for Central Sussex everything you’d expect from the Facebook experts: five navigational tabs including the all-important “find us” function plus these:

• a “home” section with a dynamic course search function
• an “open evenings” section detailing important upcoming information events
• a “jobs” section providing information about latest vacancies and apprenticeships
• a “downloads” section where prospective students can get their hands on prospectuses and guides to College life

These pages are updated by live feeds from the College’s website, and the “Get in touch” contact form captures important data from each user.

The Result?

Central Sussex College can add multiple interactive map locations into their Facebook website. Through the social CMS, they can also add and change current or postcode interactive directions. Those who may be having difficulty in finding the College can get their route planned out for them with just a few clicks, making the whole experience that much easier both on Facebook and in the real world.

Take a look at what we did here, and get in touch to find out more about geo-location mapping (we want to talk about it!) – give us a ring on 01273 734640.

A guest post for Education Futurology by Gemma Knott,  157 Group

As the further education and skills landscape changes with increasing emphasis on the importance of equipping individuals to make more informed choices, 157 Group has teamed up with Net Natives to create something truly unique, accessible and practical.

With funding from the Skills Funding Agency, we are working with key stakeholders to launch a fully interactive website which serves as a portal of information to ensure individuals have the advice and guidance they need to progress with skills.

We are launching the website at The Times Festival of Education at Wellington College on 23^rd June where flyers will be handed out to signpost people to the site.

We have high ambitions for this one-of-a-kind website and it is only just the beginning of a campaign to follow which aims to raise the profile of the further education and skills sector; ensuring that users are fully aware of not just the wide range of provision available but the support and pastoral care to make your future happens. With so many policy changes and challenges now is the right time to create a resource which acts as a ‘one-stop-shop’ for prospective learners.

The website will be creative, stimulating and most importantly, accessible to all with its own branding. It will include all the tools required to help users make choices about their next step into education and skills. Whether you wish to earn while you learn, up-skill or even re-skill the site will direct you to the wealth of information available across the sector.

One of the recurring themes throughout the website will be progression into employment. Working closely with expert careers advisers from the National Careers Service, we will ensure the website is created to give the user a clearer idea of how to climb the ladder into skilled employment.

So that is all for now…we will keep you posted on the exciting developments to come!

Gemma Knott

157 Group
www.157group.co.uk

No doubt most of our college/university followers are more than aware of the upcoming Adult Learners Week, but we wanted to lay out a few key points and ideas for you, to make sure you make the absolute most out of all the publicity around it, and also to get involved for the good of everyone!

What is it?

In their own words, “Adult Learners’ Week is the UK’s largest annual festival of learning; inspiring thousands of people each year to discover how learning can change their lives.
Through thousands of events and award ceremonies, Adult Learners’ Week celebrates all kinds of learners and promotes the benefits of every type of learning.”

It is taking place nationally from Saturday 12th – Friday 18th May inclusive.

Get involved and recruit new students

ALW are very keen to work with you! Colleges can host events to showcase learning opportunities and can also link them up to the themes that ALW have come up with, these being:

• Learning through Art and Culture
• Learning with your Family
• CommunityLearning for Health
• Learning through Sport and Leisure
• Learning through Technology and Innovation
• Learning for Work
• Learning about your World

ALW have provided a host of resources including a branding kit, events calendar and posters all for free and also you can buy promo materials such as pens and balloons for a very reasonable cost. It’s a great opportunity to co-brand your college with a nationally recognised cause! Also, you have the support of one their Regional Co-ordinators who can help you out with the planning of your Adult Learners Week event.

We would recommend you try and get something in place now, and use this as a great way to market to some new adult learners. We conducted a Facebook insights analysis of 21 UK colleges we work with and found a surprisingly high percentage of visits to their page came from an adult learner demographic.

Support your event with Facebook advertising

Once you have your event planned and set up, why not get on the case with some highly targeted Facebook advertising? It is possible to select people according to very narrow criteria including their age, location and interests, and reach them in their own home.

A busy event with a good atmosphere will help build a good reputation for your college so it is worth advertising properly, and will hopefully get you many new enrolling students.

Keep your finger on the pulse

• Make sure to follow @niace on Twitter
• Also search for the hashtag #ALW12 to see what people are saying about it
• Visit their website

If you want some help with your advertising, just give us a call on 01273 783847 or email hello@netnatives.co.uk and we will have a chat with you.

From today Facebook are rolling out an email service whereby your username becomes your @facebook.com email address, and people can message directly to your inbox from a standard email client.

Facebook profile with message prompting about email

The feature is not entirely new – users have had the option to set this up for quite some time but once this rolls out, everyone will have a Facebook email address.

The key thing with this update is that the users Timeline and Email will effectively be the same thing – the Facebook username. So we would be netnatives@facebook.com because our Timeline address is www.facebook.com/netnatives

Messaging your Fans

Assuming this all gets rolled out to brands, this might be the much-wanted “message all our fans” solution.

Admittedly, with a bit of work.

It wouldn’t be too hard to start logging the usernames of your new and existing Likes into a spreadsheet and using these as a mailing list. As far as we know, this would be possible, as you can’t actually hide your Timeline address, it displays in the bar at the top of the browser when someone visits a users page.

Spamtastic

The potential downside of this is spam. If it is possible to harvest these email addresses then Facebook have created a spammers heaven. No doubt little robot programs will collect peoples usernames and we will receive all sorts of offers we didn’t actually want.

Problem is, it is either an open and public system like email is, or it is not. If it IS, and anyone can email you, then spam will happen. If NOT, then will it really be as convenient as it is being cracked up to be?

It will be very interesting to see what kind of safeguards Facebook put in place to make sure we are a) able to receive all the messages we want but b) without paying the price in spam. Will we have to “allow” certain email addresses etc, or will there be a spam filter?

Interesting…

On 11th April 2012, Facebook launched a new type of group aimed specifically at education institutions, boldly displaying the tagline “See What’s Happening Around Campus”.

The aim of the new groups is for Facebook to create communities around schools where students and faculty members can share ideas, files, interests and more.

Currently this is only available to selected institutions in the USA but we are looking forward to it being rolled out here, on the assumption that it will be.

Groups within a community

The new groups (which can be created by users or admins) are only accessible if you are part of the “community” group – the over-arching main school group which you have to join first. You can only do so if you have a valid email address for the institution.

They are a nod to Facebook’s original inception, which was based on the idea of “Networks” – you had to be part of a network to join it. These were initially based on college/uni membership but then expanded to include geographical areas, before being abandoned.

Using groups to organise your students

Groups work in a similar way to Google+ circles. Much like normal Facebook groups, students will be able to join/be invited into groups that reflect their position and interests within the institution. Harvard University for example has 3 groups visible on their main page, as you can see below:

It will be a top way for educational institutions to post selectively to groups of students without bothering others and can be used as an adjunct to mailing lists… let’s face it, a lot of students check their Facebook a lot more frequently than their email!

Students can explore and find groups via a menu that will be at the top of the screen showing them recommended groups, friends groups and all groups. Also they can create their own groups very simply and invite their peers to join them.

Getting Connected

According to Facebook’s own information on the subject, the key things users will be able to do are:

• “Find groups for your classes, clubs, and more”
  As far as we are aware both members and admins can create groups within the networks, so we are hoping there will be some kind of “officiating” feature (much like Twitter’s Blue Tick for verified accounts) so that it will be easy to distinguish fan groups from official ones. There is great scope for collaborative learning with students working together on projects, and also enhancing their involvement in extra curricular activities.
• “Post files like lecture notes or assignments”
  Apparently users can upload files of up to 25 meg. This will be a great way for lecturers to disseminate notes and assignments in the social environment – provided that Facebook put a decent system in place. We’re hoping for a nice folder/sub folder navigation system so that files can be stored in a sensible and permanent way, not just within posts.
• “Easily message other students and teachers”
  Members of the groups will be able to find and message each other by default regardless of whether they are “friends” on the Facebook platform or not. We would assume that there will be some kind of opt-out for this, as Facebook does usually put privacy options in place for people who don’t wish to get involved in certain features of the site. However if a user does not want to interact with members of the group, one would have to question the benefit of actually being in it!

Existing Groups & Pages

A lot of educational institutions will have set up their own groups for classes, faculties etc but these at the present time cannot be migrated into the new format and require a brand new start.

The role of the all-important Facebook Page should remain unchanged and be the go-to for a schools main Facebook presence. For marketing purposes you really need the rich, branded experience that a page provides, and it can be used to provide links to the groups, but we would consider groups are more a “tool” to use in conjunction with the page. Groups for schools won’t be any good for marketing to new students for example, as you need to already be at the school to join the group!

A Net Natives Facebook page for Cambridge Regional College

We will post more info on the new Groups for Schools feature when we have been able to have a play with it… until then email alex@netnatives.co.uk if you have any questions.

Recruiting foster carers is important to you. We know this. That’s why we’ve brought our skills and expertise to the sector to help you achieve more for less. Read on to find out why you should be using social marketing as part of your next recruitment campaign.

The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames in south west London is one of the smallest local authorities in London. The council’s fostering team recruit and train foster carers and match them with children who need a new family and a safe and supportive place to stay.

The hard workers at Kingston Council know they provide a fantastic service to its borough, so they contacted the Natives for help in spreading the word about their great work.

The Challenge?

Kingston’s brief was simple: they wanted to increase the number of foster carers in the borough to look after a growing number of children coming into care. We needed to ensure greater numbers of people were aware of Kingston’s fostering network and point them in the right direction to find out more.

What did Net Natives do?

Initially, Kingston trialled a small Facebook ad service with us and directed the responses to their website. The result was three enquiries. Encouraged by the response, they decided to launch a full campaign for a further two months which included advertising across Facebook and Google, with a shiny new Facebook website and response form created within the Facebook platform, to act as the landing destination for the ads.

Enquiries increased markedly. Kingston’s Facebook website gave users the opportunity to view photos, enquire directly about fostering opportunities and register with the council, using a contact form embedded within the site. Potential carers now had a quick and easy method of obtaining further information and registering their interest in fostering within the borough, all within the social environment.

The Result?

Within the first month of Kingston’s full campaign going live they had received 13 enquiries through the contact form on their Facebook website, with an additional increase in enquiries via their website. We thoroughly enjoy working with Kingston and knowing we are helping a fantastic organisation continue to place children in safe environments.

“After running a small test campaign with Net Natives we were encouraged by the response. As a result we are now running full monthly campaigns across Google and Facebook and are starting to see an increasing number of enquiries through the Facebook site that they built for us. It’s been a step by step process but Net Natives is tailoring our campaign as we go to help us achieve the results we are looking for.”

For more information about how we can help you recruit foster carers through social media, Get in touch.

Any business can try Facebook advertising. Facebook make it easy to create an ad and publish it to their users. That’s the problem, as lots of businesses who try Facebook advertising don’t use it again. On the other hand spending on Facebook has skyrocketed in the last year because organisations who can access the right expertise and tools to optimise their campaigns have harnessed its power.

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 effective Facebook Advertising and create laser targeted campaigns, with account managers working every day monitoring these campaigns to make sure the successful results promised are achieved.

• Facebook is not Google; social is not search – Although your advertising can be incredibly targeted, you must remember that Facebook is billboard advertising. Your users are not searching for your service, so you need to be imaginative. But this means that you are reaching your potential carers at the earliest stage in their decision making 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. Have a direct call to action that will encourage the user to click on your add ‘find out more’ or click for more info.’
• Test multiple images, titles and ad copy – Because of the Facebook advertising interface, most businesses doing it for themselves will make a singular ad and just put it 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. Not only will this allow you to find out what your audience responds to but it will also improve the longevity and effectiveness of your ads as your audience will be seeing many different ads and won’t get bored as quickly. And of course it means you are getting the maximum return for investment because you are only paying for ads that work!
• Everyone needs an individual campaign – everyone responds differently, tailor your ads to each demographic that 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 recruiting for foster or adoption carers then make sure you have “Enquire Now!”or a similar appropriate call to action 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 separate targeting. For example we will have an ad aimed at a female between the ages of 36-45 living in Manchester as an example. We will also have another ad aimed at a male aged of 36-45 who lives in Manchester. 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. This means that this is a more cost-efficient method which is all the more important with widespread budget cuts affecting the public sector. Ideally we would recommend not only using different targeting on each ad but also simultaneously trialing 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 (the number of times the ad is displayed) 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 will regularly pause ads if they are not gaining 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 – remember 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 that the landing page people come to when they click on your ad relates to the advert and 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.

A lot of organisations 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 people to find you and looks more professional on marketing materials and increases the authenticity of your brand.

For example:

www.facebook.com/netnatives

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

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: Hertfordshire County Council’s fostering department set their username to hertfordshirefostering. You can view their Facebook page by going to www.facebook.com/hertfordshirefostering

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 please get in touch.

30,485,180 people used Facebook in the UK last month. Of those users, 26,960,820 are aged 18 and over. How many of these people could be interested in fostering and/or adoption and will take to Facebook to find out more or perhaps they are already engaged and wish to share their experience?

Anyone can build a basic Facebook Page. Below is a guide on how to do it. However, if you want a Page that will enhance your online presence and add value to your service whilst acting as a great platform for engagement then contact us.

Bit of a minefield isn’t it? As a Natives’ insight we suggest that you choose ‘company, organisation or institution’. The reason being that you can give a lovely introduction to all those that see your page in an ‘about us’ sort of way once your page has been created.

From the drop down menu, you then select exactly what sort of local business you are. If you can’t find an exact option then just choose the one that’s most relevant. We suggest a ‘Community organisation’.

Next, you have to choose your Page name. It could be the name of your organisation, the service that you offer or a lateral page related to the social platform.

Click ‘Get started’.

Congratulations – you have now created your page!

You’ll now be given a guided tour by Facebook around your new page giving you tips of how to begin promoting and editing your page. The two most noticeable pieces of content are the profile picture and Timeline cover picture. Use your organisation’s logo as the profile picture and a picture of a recent event, your organisation’s team, or a colourful and vibrant image or photo that will draw attention to your page once it is visited.

Now you’re set!

Now you have your basic Facebook Page. But if you are looking to increase engagement, enquiries and leads, you’ll need a fully functioning, branded Facebook Website. You’ll probably want to speak to the experts.

Have a look here to see the great work that we did for Hertfordshire County Council’s fostering and adoption department.

Contact us today to reach out to potential adoption and foster carers with a fully branded and functional Facebook Website.

Great, you realise that the best way to promote your fostering and/or adoption organisation is with online or social advertising. But why spend all of that time and effort and then fall at the final hurdle by not getting that potential carer (let’s call them a “click”, as every click costs!) to get in contact?

3. Add Share Buttons To Make Your Landing Page Social

Social sharing is not just about building Facebook Websites. 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 service in context of use. This way your visitor will see what it’s actually like to foster or adopt with you. We recommend that you use a variety of formats including text and images. Be creative!

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. 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.

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 Service

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

8. Use an Eye-Catching Image

Most people have short attention spans when they are surfing the web. This is why it is so important to grab their attention using an image. This can be a diagram outlining how you work, 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.

9. The Additional Choice

As long as you’re subtle, a landing page can be a great opportunity to promote other activities, but be careful not to confuse the user with too much choice. We always recommend having a link to an informational blog post or PR release that gives more information on your other services that your organisation provides.

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

If you’re a College running a subsidiary business such as a salon, cafe or restaurant, this blog post was written for you.

Picture the scene: someone requires a service, which you provide. They will now search online for relevant companies in their area, and your College’s business should be one of the first that appear. Try a search now for the service you offer and your location – are you there?

97% of people search for local businesses online. If your company is not appearing in the relevant searches, you are missing the opportunity to broadcast your services free of charge to your local potential customers. Make this a priority as part of your SEO strategy; the first seven local listings are displayed before organic listings even start.

Take, for example, one of the local colleges here in Brighton. They run a beauty salon which provides low-cost hair and cosmetic services throughout the year. The salon allows consumers to enjoy a professional treatment for a fraction of the cost and allows students to build on their experience as they work towards their qualifications. It’s a great service, but you won’t find it organically by searching for salons in Brighton.

To get you started establishing your Google Listings, we are providing our Best Practice Tips for Colleges to help you ensure your subsidiary businesses are visible online. If you run a cafe, restaurant, hair salon or anything similar, think of it as a separate part of your College and as a business that needs to be advertised.

Net Natives’ Best Practices for Google Listings:

1. Treat it as free, simple advertising: your business will appear in searches including your service and your location.
2. Go to www.google.com/places and log in with your Google account. We recommend you use a generic email address so more than one person can edit the listing if needed.
3. Make sure you have a 100% completion rate. Google favours businesses that complete the form and tick all the boxes.
4. Include the right category types. You can include up to five industries to categorise your business, so use these to catch as many people as possible in their searches.
5. Describe your business. You can be detailed but keep to the 200-word limit, and make sure it sells your company and your service
6. Then, verify your business. Google Local Business Centre (GLBC) will send you a pin number so you can authenticate your listing. Once this is verified, your Local Business Centre listing will go live.

Use these points as your initial checklist when setting up your listing. For more Natives expertise on juicy things like link building, multiple listings and real time updates, make sure you get in touch! Give us a call on 01273 734 640 to hear us wax lyrical about Google Local Business Centre Listings.

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, can be an incredibly effective way of gaining critical hits and publicity for your company or business website. Everyone seems to have a theory on the secret of gaining a high ranking on Google search results, but Google have recently attempted to dispel the myths by pointing out the 5 most common mistakes companies and organisations make when attempting to gain high SEO. Here they are, straight from the horse’s mouth…

1. No Value Proposition

You must make your website and business compelling. This is a pretty basic point and one which applies to everything within marketing, not just SEO. What is it about your site that makes users want to click and read from a list of search results? Make sure your site clearly outlines what your value proposition is; if your college runs unique adult learning courses make sure this appears in the initial text on the search results, or if your recruitment agency recently won an award make a song and dance about it to encourage users to go to your site.

2. A Segmented Approach

Be sure that that your entire online strategy is wholly aligned with your business or company’s larger goals and ensure every department of the organisation is communicating to benefit your SEO. Every part of your site should also be geared towards any other marketing strategies you have on the boil. If your college has a poster campaign advertising an upcoming open day including keywords and a website address, make sure your site is optimised for the words used on the poster so that you get the maximum benefit from your marketing campaign. As a recruitment agency, if you advertise a featured job in print with a QR code, make sure the link works effectively so that people can get to it on the website quickly and easily.

3. Time-consuming Workarounds

Instead of lengthy technical workarounds, build your organisation’s pages using Google’s webmaster best practice guidelines and subscribe to the Webmaster Central Blog to keep up-to-date with Google best practices.

4. Caught In SEO Trends

Your aim should be to target your company’s website at the user, so in the case of colleges and recruitment agencies, aim directly at job hunters and prospective students rather than chasing trends in Search Engine algorithms to gain a high search rank. It’s the quality of your content that will win people over in the end, not how high you appear in the search results. Or, to put it another way, there’s no point in appearing high up in the search results and getting lots of clicks if you lose possible students or the perfect candidate due to poor website content.

5. Slow Iteration

Iteration is the act of repeating a process usually with the aim of approaching a desired goal, target or result. This means planning ahead and keeping up with the improvements and changes that Google regularly make to their search parameters and design. If your business is fast at iteration you will be able to integrate these developments into your site as quickly as possible.

Google outlines 5 steps for effective iteration below:

• Define metrics for success
• Implement improvements
• Measure impact
• Create new improvements
• Prioritise improvements based on market and personnel
• Repeat

They also followed these points with a shortlist of best practices for SEO:

• Do something cool
• Include relevant keywords in your copy but don’t overdo it
• Be smart about your tags and site structure
• Sign up for e-mail forwarding in Webmaster tools
• Attract buzz and natural links, votes, +1s, follows
• Stay fresh and relevant (social media sites, accessible on new devices e.g. smart phones)

If you want to see the original video from Google, you can watch it here:

For more information on how to make sure your website is as informative and user-friendly as possible (and how to make sure it’s seen), get in touch! Call 01273 734 640 or drop us an email: hello@netnatives.co.uk.

A College is not just a centre for learning, it’s also a community that brings together like-minded people in a creative environment. This means there is huge potential for a massive online audience waiting to be informed of open days, events and the various services and courses on offer at your college. We know that huge numbers of students tend to spend their spare time on Facebook, and they’re probably discussing your college at some point during that time. But how do you harness this untapped publicity power source? Leave it to Net Natives to show you how!

Cambridge Regional College approached us with this very problem: how to attract and engage past and present students in a social environment. Having just invested in a massive new redevelopment, the College wanted to get the word out there about the fantastic new facilities they had on offer.

The Challenge?

Cambridge Regional wanted a Facebook website that would reflect the variety of courses and services they had to offer to prospective and current students. This meant creating a Facebook website from scratch that would be easy to navigate as well as containing a forum for students to discuss the college. They wanted to encourage new applicants and pique their interest by providing a space to highlight the successes of existing students.

What did Net Natives do?

After talking with the College about their requirements we got to work creating a website that was tailored to their specific needs. We gave visitors to the website the immediate ability to search the many different courses the College has to offer, whether it’s full-time or part-time. Since the College wanted to encourage social interaction on theirwebsite, we provided the ability to ask questions and see them displayed publicly.

We also created a competition to encourage visitor interaction and participation, and those all-important previous student success stories were given dedicated space within the College Life page.

The Result?

Cambridge Regional now has the means to interact and discuss the College with a huge number of students at the same time. The Facebook website has also hugely increased their coverage with prospective students; in one week, their ‘likes’ have increased to 35 and the number of people ‘talking about’ the College has increased by over 2,000% to217.

This proves that students are discussing their educational home within the social environment – and that it’s crucial to see what is being said and engage with those users.

Yesterday’s first Facebook marketers’ event heralded the announcement of several new features. These are of massive importance for businesses and organisations that are trying to engage and convert within the Facebook environment. It’s been a long night and we are all really excited about the opportunities.

We will run a series of blog posts about the practicalities of what to do with your brand on Facebook later, from cover photo through to timeline tactics. As a digital agency that manages millions of Facebook adverts per week and the genius behind a social CMS that powers over 70 brand pages, we will also inform you specifically about the best use of apps/tabs and ads.

But I wanted to highlight some thoughts on what these announcements actually mean for business before we go into the nitty gritty…

1. Facebook means business. With these new features, Facebook is finally setting its stake into the ground as a business tool. On critical mass and time spent alone, there is no other “environment” to match the opportunities Facebook offers for reach, engagement and conversion for businesses.
2. Facebook favours the big brand. Like Google, which prioritises big names in search results, Facebook’s new features are predominantly focused on the major brands. This is why the examples and partners highlighted yesterday were the big global companies (see the list of pages already adopting the new techniques http://adage.com/article/digital/meet-coolest-facebook-brand-timelines-coke-espn-ford/233015/)
3. Facebook’s “mission control” is all about timeline engagement, so your course of action with the new timeline needs to be about leveraging your engagement with your “fans”. This flows through the functionality of the new administration features through to the timeline features and the new advertising options.
4. But what if no one likes me? These changes are all well and good for major B2C brands, but if you are a college, council or have a recruitment brand that just needs to highlight or promote your message in the environment where your audience will be, you need to focus on alternative strategies for promotion.
5. Tabs/apps are “the important content”. Applications that attract, convert, register, etc will have an increasing importance. Facebook highlighted these key marketing tools as “the important content” within the platform, assigning them a larger dedicated space. This will mean more opportunities for promotion in the key retail space.
6. Landing tabs are dead, the apps that are micro sites now reign. With the default URL landing destination always being the brand’s timeline page, simple “like-gating” pages are now redundant. The only way to attract and convert without liking is through robust Facebook websites which are feature-rich and which have navigation within the app itself, creating an effective micro-site within the Facebook environment.
7. Mobile is here. The new layout of the apps and the way in which they are built means that the mobile experience will be much richer, particularly in the ability to embed sponsored stories into a newsfeed which would then lead to an in-Facebook mobile app.
8. Transparency is key. You can now view the insights of other pages beyond just likes. This can be an incredible opportunity for competing colleges and brands.
9. Advertising is going to get harder. Unless you have strong brand engagement, the new advertising features are going to make it harder for you to reach your audience, unless you get creative and run multi-variate campaigns each and every time.
10. Agencies will have to be smarter. This is the end of the stick-an-ad-up-and-hope-it-works style agency. Agencies will have to work with clients on more creative briefs and be closer with the brand pages to promote relevant content.

All in all it is an exciting time. We will be sending out specific posts about how this affects tabs, top tips on cover photos and what to do before you convert your page by the 30^th March deadline.

If you want to find out more about how this will affect you, get in touch with us at enquiries@netnatives.com.

Here is the IAB’s own site with examples of best practice principles: www.youronlinechoices.com

Here are some great sites we like - http://www.cookielaw.org/ – (DISCLAIMER – THIS IS THE NATIVES FAVOURED APPROACH)

http://www.predictiveintent.com/2012/02/cookie-law-solutions/

We have spoken to our account managers at Google and below is their advice regarding cookies for online advertising:

“Until the 27 individual EU countries have completed drafting and finalizing the law for their respective countries, we will not know the full scope & implications of the new rules.

We can’t give you legal advice or endorse any particular compliance approach, but you might look at:

The advice that the UK government has given to its webmasters. http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/03/19/its-not-about-cookies-its-about-privacy/ ”

We’ve also drafted a “Privacy and Cookie Policy” we would recommend any organisation uses on their site:

The policy is:

We may remarket your information. Remarketing is a way for us to connect with users, based upon your past interactions with the [ORGANISATION NAME] website. Third-party marketing vendors may be hired by [ORGANISATION NAME] to perform remarketing services. As a result, third-party vendors, including Google, may show [ORGANISATION NAME] ads on sites on the internet. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to [ORGANISATION NAME]‘s website.

To opt out of customized Google Display Network ads click here. To find out more about how Google uses any data it collects please visit http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html.

Any information collected is used only for remarketing purposes and will not be used by them for any other purpose.

We would also recommend you take a good look at your website and check what data files are placed on user terminals and why they are in place. You might need to take a comprehensive audit of your website to see which cookies are strictly necessary and if they really need consent. Your audit should include finding out the high and low privacy intrusive pages on your site. Your finding could be presented in a way of a summary of findings, detailed findings against intrusive pages, data privacy risks and technologies to be implemented. Its a good idea to take this opportunity to do any tidying up of your web pages and stop any cookies that are unnecessary or old.

Therefore its important to see how intrusive your cookies are and consider changes in how you use them. Some of  what you find may even help users to keep their data safe. Try to use technologies to improve your site  and always make it clear when you are doing something intrusive. The more privacy intrusive your activity is, you will need to give it more priority to getting consent from the user. You should focus your efforts on complying appropriately to the new cookie law by providing accurate information and offering your user a choice.

Review your privacy policy and make sure it is consistently in compliance with the new cookie law and that it will be subject to any ongoing amendments. Make sure your privacy  policy is clear and as soon as you have the correct measures in place to comply with the law so we can do our job in making sure your campaigns are the best they can be!

The UK law restricting cookies from websites will come into effect on 25th May 2012, giving websites a year to comply with the new act. This gives you time to gradually phase in the right approach to recognise user’s online privacy concerns. The UK government has updated the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in response to the EU Directive to enforce the law.

Cookies are used for a variety of things but are generally used by third-parties to analyse our browsing habits and are useful for us to remember log-in details on different websites. Most importantly the use of tracking cookies is what the EU law wants to raise awareness of, by requiring websites to inform and gain users absolute consent for cookies to give web users more control over their online privacy.

Settings within Microsoft IE9 and Mozilla Firefox already offer to protect users from sites that collect and keep browser data. Whilst Google Chrome is still working at integrating a non-tracking service into their browser. This new rule on cookies will be challenging but it is needed to be brought into place to give consumers more freedom in about what companies know about them. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is in charge of implementing the law and will be looking for a solution over the year for both online businesses and web users.

The Old Cookie Law

The former rule on using cookies to store information was that you had to tell users how you use cookies and how they can opt out. This information is usually shown in website’s privacy policies giving users the possible option of opting out.

This rule is set out in the Regulation 6 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR):

6. (1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not use an electronic communications network to store information, or to gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.

(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment -
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and
(b) is given the opportunity to refuse the storage of or access to that information

The New Cookie Law!

The new law now requires that cookies can only be placed on machines where the user has given their consent.

6 (1) Subject to paragraph (4), a person shall not store or gain access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements of paragraph (2) are met.
(2) The requirements are that the subscriber or user of that terminal equipment–
(a) is provided with clear and comprehensive information about the purposes of the storage of, or access to, that information; and
(b) has given his or her consent.
(3) Where an electronic communications network is used by the same person to store or access information in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user on more than one occasion, it is sufficient for
the purposes of this regulation that the requirements of paragraph (2) are met in respect of the initial use.
“(3A) For the purposes of paragraph (2), consent may be signified by a subscriber who amends or sets controls on the internet browser which the subscriber uses or by using another application or programme to signify consent.
(4) Paragraph (1) shall not apply to the technical storage of, or access to, information–
(a) for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network; or
(b) where such storage or access is strictly necessary for the provision of an information society service requested by the subscriber or user.

There is a narrow exception to this change in law if what you are doing is absolutely necessary for a website or service requested by the user. For example a cookie used by a retailer to ensure a user has chosen products they wish to purchase and clicks to ‘add to basket’ for the site to remember what the user has bought. The exception to this type of activity will need to be interpreted narrowly to comply with what is “strictly necessary” to limit the range of activity for the cookie to strictly relate to the service requested by the user.

If cookies are placed before a user has an opportunity to give consent, then you are not compliant with the the new cookie law! The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) will fine website owners up to £500,000 for any serious breaches in this law.  So be sure to make a distinction between ‘opt-in’ and ‘informed consent’ in your policy. Why not take a look at our best practices in how to comply with the new law here >>>

http://www.facebook.com/shrewsburycollege

Shrewsbury College provides a wide range of apprenticeships, GCSE and A Level courses and HE programmes to its current students, and like any other college aims to ensure as many young people as possible know about the study paths available to them.

Potential students won’t necessarily end up on your website when assessing their options. So how do you target these individuals who are online but not affiliated with your College yet?

The Challenge?

Shrewsbury’s brief was simple: promote their courses and advice days to school leavers. They knew this demographic was likely to spend much of its time on Facebook, so they wanted to get the College firmly established on the popular social media platform.

The Natives got swiftly to work creating a Facebook Website to reflect the College’s brand in a more social sensitive manner. That’s what we Natives are best at!

What did Net Natives do?

Shrewsbury College’s new Facebook website shares information on advice days, courses and their latest news with existing and potential students.

We wanted to bring those who want to share their thoughts about the College together through interactive comments. This can be found under Shrewsbury’s news, where users can share their comments to let their friends and family how they feel about the college.

We are particularly proud of the “Click here to beat the queues” enquiry form for the Advice Days: a pop-up form allowing potential advice day attendees to select the event of their choice and secure themselves a place!
These were some great functionalities we enjoyed doing. We understand capturing the right information is important and that interaction is key.

The Result?

Shrewsbury College are now able to effectively engage with their target audience through their preferred medium of Facebook. The college can promote their advice days and capture specific information regarding what subject they are interested in and even where they are from.

It’s another thumbs up for the Natives!

There have been various rumours about Facebook making some big changes from February 29th, so we thought we would confirm what we know, and let you in on some of our thoughts about the implications to Facebook advertisers…

Facebook adverts body text cut to 90 characters

You might have heard a bit of banter in the social media world about the size of Facebook adverts getting cut down.  These rumours are true. Net Natives have had concrete proof, confirmation from our Facebook account manager, and it goes a little something like this…

“We are reducing the character count from 135 to 90 for body text in ads created on or after February 29th.”

So there you go, straight from the horses mouth, so to speak. Adverts reduced in text space by about 1/3!

Facebook want to be able to show more adverts, so shrinking the size of them seems an obvious way to do so. So far, only the ad copy is affected and there is no change to the images you use.

What does all this mean for you then?

More than ever before, advertisers on Facebook need to adopt both a scientific and creative approach to achieve success. Best practice is more important than ever and as well as doing all the right things, you need to be sure you are putting together a great, eye catching advert that your target audience won’t be able to help clicking on!

A few of the key points are listed below…

• Stand out from the crowd – With Facebook displaying up to 7 ads, yours must stand out amongst the other 6 and be the one to engage the user! You are effectively “in competition” with up to another 6 ads, so the quality of adverts now needs to be even higher.
• Even more specific targeting – The ad must be targeted even more specifically, to avoid “wasting clicks” on uninterested users (and wasting budget!).
• Use LOTS of variations of ads – It’s not enough to make just one ad that you think will work. How do you know if there might have been a better one? Simple: you make lots, and compare their performance against each other (we do hundreds per ad campaign!) – delete the poorer performing ads and allocate budget to the best ones – this ensures your money is spent on the most effective adverts.
• Mix both ad types – most people use the “pay per click” option – but it’s possible that paying for impressions as well as “cost per click” could work well with this environment.
• Long company names will struggle – One difficulty will be where the company name in itself is very long – it will become very tricky to get any decent amount of text in when the name takes up a large proportion of the available characters! Whilst there is no foolproof way around this, we would advise creating a very large number of adverts and comparing their effectiveness against each other; some with the name in the image, for example, others with a logo, call to action in the image, standard image, etc.

As well as the confirmed change from February 29^th, a couple of other changes which we are expecting to start seeing on Facebook are:

Featured Stories

Facebook is now beginning to roll out a new type of advert, which goes directly into the news feed. If you like a page, you might start seeing their ads appear in your general news feed (marked as “featured”), along with your friends updates. This will be a great new way to promote engagement with your page and ensure you are reaching as many of your fans as possible, without the same space constraints as the standard Facebook ad.

Mobile Ads

Facebook are likely to start featuring ads on its mobile platform, possibly as early as March. The small screen size of mobile devices means there won’t be space at the side of the screen to feature ads, so they are most likely to appear as stories within the news feed too.

More info coming soon from Net Natives

So that’s the lowdown on the upcoming changes. It’s going to be challenging to work with these new rules, but we love a challenge! We’re on it already actually – we are currently split-testing ALL our campaigns with 90 character limits before the deadline, so that we can see what difference the ad length change will have for YOU. We’ll publish this info as soon as we have put it together, but in the meantime get in touch with us if you want to know anything more about the upcoming changes.

Ben Verinder of the AoC on the importance of measurement and diagnostics in education marketing…

In a recent Association of Colleges Briefing for members we published a list of (hopefully) useful links to organisations specialising in studying the evaluation and measurement of communications. We did so as a response to a steady growth in requests for advice from College PR and marketing teams on meaningful metrics and targets.

This is an encouraging trend – professional communicators make decisions based on real facts (rather than, say, the media consumption habits of the Chair of Governors’ wife). Measurement allows a team to understand what worked and what did not and to demonstrate the contribution of communication channels to corporate goals. The first is central to continuous improvement, the second to what Westminster Council’s communications team calls ‘boardroom credibility’. (Talking of Westminster Council, they may be having a bit of reputational trouble with parking but they’re in fifth gear when it comes to evaluation.)

Less encouraging are the difficulties that too many College communicators face in attempting to measure and demonstrate impact. Some find themselves stuck in the budget bus-lane: funding won’t stretch to digital, social or traditional media monitoring tools or to reputation measurement any more sophisticated than student satisfaction surveys, and so the circuit of underinvestment continues. Without these tools it is very difficult to demonstrate impact and successfully negotiate for increased capacity.

So we see marketing departments without access to the Google analytics data of their websites, PR officers who have no idea of the audience reach of target media, communications directors unable to measure corporate reputation among key publics and thus demonstrate the result of (or, often, the need for) a PR campaign.  If they can’t measure the impact of their work, how can the finance director understand what they are driving at?

For other teams, there’s a deep, dark pothole separating corporate and communications planning. Sometimes this a reflection of the qualifications of the senior manager overseeing  communications; in our 2007 and 2010 studies of College communications, two-thirds of those looking after the public relations portfolio did not possess a public relations qualification. Sometimes it’s a reflection of what is called the ‘encroachment’ of marketing over other communications functions. In the same study, 70% of respondents said they have a marketing plan, but no PR or communications plan. Yet their College corporate objectives can only be achieved with the support of internal or corporate communications – whether it’s improving employee engagement, building the College reputation among key publics vital to a planning application (through social media, perhaps) or dealing with an emerging crisis. To put it another way, if your organisation doesn’t care about or understand your route-map then you are unlikely to be asked to take the driving seat.

For teams struggling with challenges like these, there is some good news. Firstly, take solace in the fact that you are not alone. More usefully, there’s a growth in sources of advice on low cost effective measurement and evaluation – including some specialist free-to-access blogs and social media groups. In some regions Colleges and other public sector bodies are tentatively sharing monitoring services. AoC regularly negotiates member discounts on media monitoring products too. For some Colleges, the outlook for professional communications has been transformed by the arrival of a senior manager with the right professional qualifications who can drive their agenda at board level. Sometimes training and development within the team – whether it’s a CIPR or PRCA or CIM course – is the best motor for change.

Whatever a team’s situation  – and here I must apologise for driving the idioms a lap too far – graduating from Sunday driver to racing ace generally involves focussing less on the usual tactics and PR ‘stunts’ and more on diagnostics and longer-term strategy.

One of the highlights of this week for us has been the excellent social media campaign for National Apprenticeships Week which ran from 6th-10th February.

Centered around social media giant Twitter, the National Apprenticeships Service used different “themes” for each day of the week, such as; the benefits of doing apprenticeships, thank you messages, and how people got their dream job via the scheme.

People were encouraged to tweet @apprenticeships with their experiences/thoughts about the scheme according to the day’s themes and to use the hashtag #NAW2012 (hashtags are a way of giving a tweet a “topic” – you are saying “my tweet is about #NAW2012 and I want people to know that and be able to search for it”.

The Results

• Almost 3,000 mentions on Twitter
• Trended in top 10 UK topics on Monday
• Over 500 related events around the UK celebrating apprenticeships
• 135,000 hits to website in 5 days
• Massive press interest nationally

We were really pleased to see such an important issue really ignite people’s passion on social networking sites – we all love sharing funny stuff, or things about ourselves/our own interests, but it’s always refreshing to see something that benefits the nation, people and economy having such a presence in the social media sphere. Top job NAS! Looking forward to next year…

It’s great when you see a major brand pushing forward with some really fun new ideas, and we were particularly impressed by Heinz recent “get well soup” campaign.

Visit the Heinz Soup Facebook page and you’ll land on a custom tab featuring the promotion.

The idea is that you can order custom soup cans, with a friend/loved ones name printed on the label, for just £1.99. Bargain!

Apart from being a great bit of fun, here’s what we like about the campaign:

• Already a much loved comfort food amongst the ill, the “Get Well Soon” soup idea strongly reinforces the brand message that you should eat Heinz soup when you’re poorly
• It also associates the brand with the idea of being thoughtful, and love/friendship – positive attributes to associate any brand with!
• You have to “like” the page to access the order form – great example of giving a worthwhile incentive to like a page
• The order form collects some useful detail including postal and email address, and has an opt-in mailing list checkbox
• The app features a gallery for users to specifically share soup-related stories, in addition to the Facebook wall. This is being used too, showing users are very engaged with the idea
• Considering they are actually selling the cans, up to 500 a day, they may be making almost £1000 a day on the sale of these soups. This will at least reduce the costs of the promotion!

So – well done to all at Heinz. Great idea, great execution. A great example of using social media to amplify your brand message.

We loved this infographic, not just for its cute graphics but also because it is one of the best “beginner” examples of how to actually get up and running on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is one of the biggest social networking sites, and it occupies a niche in that it is just about business connections. Nothing to do with friends, holiday photos, relationships… just professional contacts.

Follow this guide and before you can say YES SERGEANT you will be linking away on the web’s most useful professional networking site… click on the image below to see it in its full-size glory.

Thank you to Mindflash for producing this top bit of content!

Want some help with getting LinkedIn really working for your business, or doing a professional advertising campaign on there? Send us an email or call 01273 734640.

You’ve probably heard of URL shorteners. People use them on Twitter all the time, to shorten space-wasting long web addresses into more manageable ones so they can actually fit in some other text!

Google has just launched its own one and we’d suggest you start using it right now. The reason?

Google’s URL shortener tells you how many people have clicked, where from, and it’s free to use

You just go to goo.gl and put in the URL you want shortened, and then it generates the short random link. You’ll then have a table below of all the URLs you’ve shortened, complete with stats on how many times the link has been clicked.

goo.gl in action!

Then click “details” and you’ll get to see what site the click came from (Facebook, Twitter, your site) and various other nuggets of info. If you are logged in to a Google account, all these details are recorded and you can see your past links stats (great for re-using them too).

Whilst engagement (likes/comments/shares/retweets/mentions) are all important, and often used as a measure of effectiveness – these don’t take into account the “dark figure” – those shadowy characters who are reading your content, but not interacting with it in any public way.

The "dark figure" of social media

This information is really valuable to marketers as it gives you a whole new insight into your fan/follower behaviour that “engagement” itself does not reveal.

Start using it today, and let us know what you think of it! Hopefully you will get a few nice surprises.

My band all love social media (hence me doing this job) and we’re always looking for fun ways to get our audience interacting with us. We’re doing alright – currently we have over 20,000 likes and a “talking about” of 1,666… not bad!

We’ve done loads of competitions and giveaways, encouraging shares/likes etc, but this most recent effort left us quite tickled.

What could be so good about this status, I hear you ask… well, the answer to that, is nothing but bare-faced cheek!

http://www.facebook.com/105132402861803/posts/309666289075079

So that’s over 1000 likes on a single status, with that status effectively being about… nothing.

I guess the main point of this post is – don’t be afraid to have a bit of fun. Amuse your fans and be a bit human! As important a marketing tool as Facebook is, sometimes you’ll get the best results by not taking it too seriously.

Happy posting

Don’t know your API from your “Lurker”? Never fear, inspired by the ultimate list from hubspot, here are Net Natives’ very own list of all the social media terms. You’ll find a bunch of useful links here as well as some key terms explained – happy reading!

AddThis – This is a simple and free way to share content from your website on popular social networks. It has built in analytics so you can see what is most popular, and what is being said about it.

Application Programming Interface (API) – Means that a website/app allows others to interact with it. Twitter has an API – that’s how you get loads of programs that can run it for you!

Analytics – Measuring, collecting and analysing web data to create a picture of web usage, such as visits to a website, which pages are popular, where are visits coming from .

Algorithm – Set of formulas a computer uses to carry out a function. You don’t need to know the details but you will hear the term e.g. “Google has changed it’s search algorithm”

Avatar – An image that represents you online. Not used as much as before as the term “profile picture” is big with Facebook, but it’s still a relevant term on many sites.

“Beyond the Wall” strategy – Not everyone will “like” you! A good “Beyond the wall” strategy involves creating destinations within Facebook that don’t rely on “like” as the sole marketing call to action. Apps/custom tabs and more.

Bitly – Free service to shorten those lengthy web addresses so you can squeeze them into shorter posts!

Blog – From the words “web log”, a blog is a series of posts about a certain topic. Think of it like a mini online magazine. This can be someones life, food, a business, education, anything! Anyone can do one and many huge corporations have them, even Facebook!

Blogger – Googles own blog making site. Also a term for someone who writes a blog!

Blog Talk Radio – Online service where users can host and stream their own online radio show.

BoardReader – This allows you to search the web for keywords but only searching posts within discussion forums. Helps you to find mentions you may not otherwise see!

Bookmarking – Saving web pages you find interesting in one central location so you can easily access them. Many sites facilitate social sharing too – try www.delicious.com

Chat – Communication in real-time over the internet – the term usually refers to text-based services. Can be group or one on one, and more modern versions include video/audio. AKA “instant messaging”

Circles – Custom groups of Google+ users that you can make, and share selectively with. You can make circles for colleagues, friends, family, courses, anything.

Collective Intelligence – An emerging trend in social media; a shared intelligence that emerges from collaboration and interaction.

Comment – A reply by a user on a social platform, usually in reaction to a post, video or image. One of the key factors in Engagement in social media.

Connections on LinkedIn – Their equivalent of friends on Facebook. The key difference being they are business contacts, not personal.

Delicious – Online bookmarking service to keep your favourite web pages and share with others

Digg – Social news site, members can submit and vote for articles, the most popular go on the front page and get the most exposure, helping to drive viral spread

Ebook – A book published digitally, most often in as a PDF. Used frequently in marketing, often giving out good free content in exchange for marketing information such as email address.

Eventbrite – Advertise your events with this website and sell tickets if you want. Free for free events.

Facebook – The largest social media website in the world with over 800 million users. Connect with friends and share everything from photos to music tastes. Massively important in advertising.

Flickr – Online photo sharing community. Budding photographers, professionals and the general public can share photos via groups, posts and more.

Followers – People who are following your tweets on Twitter

Forums – Internet message boards, one of the oldest types of social web experience. Usually built into a website with some kind of common theme. Less popular nowadays due to users commenting on Facebook etc.

#FollowFriday (#FF) – On Fridays on Twitter, a lot of users post usernames of their recommendations of who to follow, along with the hashtag #FollowFriday or #FF.

FourSquare – A location based networking site. Users can connect with people based on proximity, show where they have been and so on. Not unsimilar to Facebook places.

Friends – The people you are friends with on Facebook! For some people, these are real friends only. Others may include acquaintances, and even strangers, it’s up to you!

Google+ – One of the newer social media networks. Google+ is deeply integrated into search on the main Google site, and enables some clever selective sharing.

Google Docs – An online document editing suite, free, and enables collaboration and sharing between multiple users

Google Reader – Pull through the content from a variety of blogs and RSS feeds and put it into one place for your convenience. No more flicking between news sites!

Gowalla - Another location based networking site. Users can connect with people based on proximity, show where they have been and so on. Not

Gumtree – A free classified site. Not social as such, but very popular and there are paid advertising opportunities via the platform.

Hangout – A free video conferencing feature on Google+

Hashtag (#) – A way of saying outright what the “topic” of a tweet is. If you want your tweet to be “about” the TV show LOST, you could put #Lost. This differentiates it from a more casual mention.

Hootsuite – Manage multiple social media platforms with this great web-based software. Schedule updates, monitor keywords and more! Free basic version.

Inside Facebook – Website all about new Facebook developments, tips and tricks etc.

Instagram – iPhone photo sharing app, that shares content to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Has funky photo effects built in for retro camera fun!

Instant Messaging (IM) – Communication in real-time over the internet – the term usually refers to text-based services. Can be group or one on one, and more modern versions include video/audio. AKA “chat”

Klout – A website service that measures “social influence” – how important you are in social media!

Last.fm – A social music website. Users “scrobble” their music tastes (let their computer send info to the web) and it produces charts of most popular artists, songs etc, and users can interact with each other and artists.

Lifecasting – Broadcasting a continual stream of a persons life via social media!

Like – Users on Facebook can click “like” on a post, publicly declaring their approval of something. Other people see that someone has done this and hence helps promote spreading. The more likes something has, the more prominent Facebook will place it in peoples news feeds.

Link Building – Strategy to get more links pointing to your website, to increase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). A popular way of this is to use blogging sites (your own, or others) to do so.

LinkedIn – A social network based on business contacts, aimed at enhancing your career rather than popularity. Used for online CVs, job applications, advertising and more nowadays, very important.

LinkedIn Today – A social news service provided within linked in, and by email. Based on sharing popularity of stories within the site.

Lurker – Someone who views social content (forums, facebook etc) but does not usually interact with it. Just because no-one comments – doesn’t mean no-one is reading!

Mashable – Heavyweights in the blogging world. One of the leaders in technology and news, they have a special social media section too.

Meme – A repeating thought or idea that features on the internet. Various hashtags could be memes, as could “I can haz cheezburger?” from Lolcats.

@mention - Users direct messages publicly at each other on Twitter by writing the @ symbol followed by the username(s) of people you are addressing

Monitoring – Actively searching for mentions of a certain thing online. Usually, you, your competitors, or your specialist area. Achieved via searches on various sites, and can be automated with software such as Hootsuite.

MySpace – Once the king of social media, until its crown was stolen by Facebook. Originally very innovative and still a relevant platform for music and film. Part owned by Justin Timberlake!

News Feed – A list of what is going on within a given site, where you can see updates by your connections/friends/people you follow. Often the default “home” page of the site once you have logged in.

Net Natives – That’s us! We are digital marketing experts specialising in the education sector, amongst other things; clients include CERN, The Guardian and G4S Olympics 2012, as well as over 70 college/universities.

“On The Wall” strategy – Our term to refer to your social content strategy for your Facebook wall, i.e. what you are posting, why, who for, etc. Important to have an “on the wall” and a “beyond the wall” strategy in place.

Permalink – A permanent web address, often ascribed to a blog article, and made SEO friendly where possible

Podcast – A non-live media stream, most commonly audio. May be a radio show, comedy, anything really.

Posterous – Post to multiple social media platforms, just by sending an email!

Places – Function on Facebook where people can interact with Pages via their physical location – allows people to “check-in” and share where they are, and tag photos based on where they were taken, let businesses show up on maps, and much more.

Real-time search – Search that displays brand new results without a delay, so will pick up emerging up-to-date articles.

Reddit – Like Digg, another social news site based on submission, comments, sharing.

Retweet – Where a Twitter user decides to share your original tweet with their own followers. This helps to “get your name out there”. Only happens if your content is decent!

RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) – A standard format to output frequently updated content such as blogs and newsletters. This is then interpretted by an RSS reader for you to see it. Means you can pull content from many places without you having to visit them!

RSS Reader – A piece of software that displays RSS Feeds for you to read. Such as Google Reader.

Scribd – Online service to convert documents into a web viewable format for easier sharing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – The process of improving your website so that it ranks higher in search results and hence gets more traffic

Seesmic – Social media client for web and mobile so you can post to multiple sites and keep up to date

Sentiment – Social “attitude” towards something e.g. a company. Can be positive or negative.

Skype – instant messaging and voice calling program. Popular due to enabling international voice chat over the net for free assuming you have a broadband connection.

Slideshare – Upload presentations online and share on social networks

Social Media – Media which is intended for distribution via social channels – turning communication from a one-way to a two way street

Social Media Examiner – great news blog website about social media, does a newsletter too

Stumbleupon – A website to find interesting content on the web. Ideal for sharing to promote engagement.

Timeline (Facebook) – The new (2011-12) version of a profile – best described as a “scrapbook of your life”. Can be navigated by year, location and gives a rich experience compared to previous profile designs.

Timeline (Twitter) – The news feed showing who is tweeting what, organised chronologically

Trend – When a topic or word becomes popular, it is “trending”. Twitter displays trending topics in its own Trend section; Facebook increases exposure to stories the more popular they are.

Tumblr – A blogging site for users to share thoughts, ideas and media about any subject

Tweepz – A search engine to find relevant Twitter users to interact with

Tweetdeck – Another great web/mobile app to post across different social media networks

Twitter – Micro-blogging site where users share 140-character long messages to their “followers”.

Twitter Chat – Using #hashtags to denote the topic, may be one off or regular and often to coincide with events such as a conference. Allows unconnected users to all converge on a central theme.

Twitter Search – On Twitter you can search real time to see what people are saying that very moment about a topic

UStream – Service to stream live videos. Great to promote events, competitions etc.

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) – The tech term for a “web address”

Video Blog – Like a mini TV show but published via the internet, usually around a central theme. Rising in popularity due to easy mobile access, connection speed etc.

Vimeo – Video sharing site. Like YouTube but does not allow commercial content.

Viral – The term for when something gets spread from person to person at an impressive rate (typically funny videos etc) – spreading like a virus is the analogy.

Webinar – An way of doing an online meeting, often to demonstrate software or techniques by sharing a computer screen over the net. Multiple users can participate.

Wiki – A type of website that is editable by multiple people to allow collaboration and collective knowledge

Wikipedia – The most famous Wiki, an encyclopaedia for the whole world updating daily by thousands of people in all areas of expertise.

WordPress – A blog software that can be used standalone to write a blog or within a website as a CMS.

Yelp – Once the Yellow Pages, Yelp allows for users to recommend/review businesses

YouTube – The biggest video sharing site. Great for serious searches and also time wasting!

“So what?” you may ask. Well, the one thing that they all have in common, is that they are Net Natives clients! Find out how our innovative social media technology and marketing is helping these clients win these nominations below…

G4S London 2012

Net Natives utilised innovative recruitment practices to attract security staff for G4S Olympics 2012, delivering a marketing campaign across online and social channels including a content strategy for engagement within Facebook.

Social channels and conversation tracking were researched to identify best return for candidates, and a branded Facebook page (able to render apps, FAQ’s, with content management system) focused on “applications” rather than “likes”; keeping applications within Facebook, increasing viral visibility and engagement.

Targeted online adverts on relevant forums built 3,800 connections to the new page. We provided content strategy achieving a “talking about this” of 652, and a social reach of 1.5 million. Our advertising accounted for the majority of candidate traffic to the campaign, and the Facebook page has become the focus for enquiries and feedback.

READ THE CASE STUDY

Guardian Jobs

Net Natives have built a Facebook application that enables users to search jobs published on the Guardian Jobs site. Guardian Jobs are able to leverage their high facebook fan base (around 300k fans across all pages), and jobs app functionality.

The launch of this app follows the success of the Guardian’s Facebook app which has been installed by more than 4 million users. Guardian Jobs is responding to increased client demand for Social Media recruitment advertising opportunities. The app has been developed complete with a Content Management System meaning that advertisers have the opportunity to appear in jobs search pages specific to industry sectors as featured advertisers.

READ THE CASE STUDY

CERN

People at CERN are part of immense scientific discoveries, answering some of life’smost complex questions. History is being made so recruiting the top minds in the world is a priority. CERN’s new Facebook Recruitment Website and Engagement Application enables candidates to explore what it is like to work at CERN and has resulted in increased quality and conversion of job applications.

Our Facebook Brand Strategy enabled CERN to consolidate 65,000 Facebook fansonto its new, official identity, giving CERN control over its online brand presence andengagement. Our Social Media Content Strategy resulted in CERN doubling the sizeand relevance of its job audience.

READ THE CASE STUDY

Forget all the controversy over paying for votes (that don’t count!) in television competitions. That’s old news. We’re talking about the “classic” phone-in – the public’s opportunity to have their few minutes of fame and give their opinions to the masses.

• What do you most hate about roadworks?
• Have you ever had a cowboy builder?
• Should celebrities diet?

It’s always interesting to hear other peoples views – and even more so when we disagree with them! It’s always been the charm of these shows (This Morning, The Wright Stuff) and here at Net Natives we think we can draw some inspiration here for how to use our Facebook wall or Twitter.

Get that “phone” to RING!

We know how important engagement is… it’s pretty much THE benchmark to look at to see how well you are doing on social media. The more engaged your users are, the more connected they are to your brand. Plus, like breeds like – high engagement means more people will get to see your content, as it will gain higher newsfeed priority, more shares/retweets and so on.

Here’s the big secret…. (drum roll)

The way to get your engagement up is to post content that will entice people to comment!

Yes that sounds simple, and to be honest, it is.

Questions, wacky statements, images/video, competitions, polls, you name it.

Imagine your Facebook wall is a phone, and you want it to RING. And you want it to ring ALL DAY, with interested, engaged users commenting/liking/tweeting away on the other end! Imagine that phone EVERY time you post on Facebook or Twitter, and do your absolute best to get it going.

PEOPLE LIKE TO BE HEARD – SO GIVE THEM A VOICE!

Of course, there are limits

Just be sensible. We’re not suggesting you turn your wall into a one-man jokeathon or spend all day asking for opinions on things that are nothing to do with your business, or even worse, completely put your foot in it and mention a topic that you really don’t want to associate with yourselves.

But there is a lot of scope for you to have a bit of fun. Films/Tv/Music/games/food. Find ways you can link to these topics that are at least tenuously relevant. Here’s an example, the type of thing I’d put, to crowbar a famous celebrity into a status:

“So, you’re on a desert island. On your own. You’re allowed to have access to either Facebook or Twitter… which would you take? Which can’t you do without and why?”

You get the idea. It’s all just about having fun and starting a chat. And then, keep it going!

Just keep that “phone” ringing, and you’ll never look back…

“This Morning” would be proud

NET NATIVES are experts in “on the wall” social media content strategy and can help YOU get the best results with your Facebook engagement. EMAIL US or give us a ring on 01273 783 847 to find out more about what we can do for you!

Facebook just announced another really cool little feature.

It’s now possible to almost “eavesdrop” on people music listening, thanks to the new “Listen with…” function they have attached to music apps such as Spotify.

Don’t panic – you won’t get caught out for your secret Spice Girls habit (probably), as far as we know you have to enable this in your music player. But it’s undoubtedly going to lead to the discovery of lots of new music for people. The success of sites like Last.fm do go to show that people enjoy being educated in terms of songs!

All you have to do is watch the chat sidebar, and you will see “Listen With” links come up, denoted by a musical note next to their name. Then just click the link in the pop-up window. Hey presto, you are now following their music choice – you’ve got your own personal DJ. You can chat with them too, so you could make requests as well!

Adverts on Spotify

This could be good news for advertisers on Spotify, if they are targeting their ads against music genre or location. Any technology that means additional like-minded people are exposed to your advertising can only be a good thing!

What if this approach goes on to video?

We can see some big potential here. You know those massive viral videos like the fairly recent Old Spice advert? They spread fast, but imagine how fast they could spread if people started watching them together LIVE.

Presently, vids go viral by more deliberate shares, but the potential for staggeringly fast spread would be HUGE if somehow YouTube was integrated in the same way and you could see what your friends were watching, and join them live.

Advertisers – watch out for this one!

We promised  our good friends at the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS) to let you know all about the exciting things that are happening as part of National Apprenticeship Week (NAW) this year.

NAW is now in it’s 5th year, and aims to make sure all eyes are on apprenticeships by raising its profile for parents, employers, the media, teachers and individuals. The 2012 event runs from 6th-10th February and is featuring social media as an important part of its strategy.

They’ve planned different “themes” for each day of the week; the focus will shift daily, including the benefits of doing apprenticeships, thank you messages, and how people got their dream job via the scheme.

Check out the full details of the promotion, and how YOU can get involved, on the link below…

http://www.apprenticeships.org.uk/Awards/Apprenticeship-Week-2012/Social-media.aspx

Images are all over printed media, and they’re all over the web too. Yet not everyone uses images to the best effect on their Facebook pages! We’re not talking about apps, nor profile pictures here. We mean actually using images as PART of your wall posts. Trust me, images can REALLY help you with getting your content out there… just read the rest of this article to find out how.

Why you should use images in your Facebook wall posts

1. Images make your posts stand out
   http://mashable.com/2011/12/14/eyetracking-facebook-brand-pages/ Peoples eyes are drawn to images on the page so you might as well take advantage of this and get people’s attention!
2. Use the images to help tell your story
   If you are writing a post about online CVs – use a pic of someone searching jobs online (screenshot of your website being browsed!) – if it’s about paper CVs, have a pic of a paper CV on a desk, for example. Make it easy for the user to see what the post is about.
3. Images make your page wall generally “look better”
   Nothing technical here but a wall with lots of colourful attractive images simply looks better than a bland one covered in text! Images also help to break up your posts and separate them better on the page.
4. Facebook shows more posts that feature images
   The Edgerank formula prioritises “rich” content – you are more likely to reach your fans if you post images in your updates
5. Posting a link (which shows a preview thumbnail image) is not the same as posting an image deliberately
   Thumbnail link images will usually be small – and Facebook treats it as a link rather than specific image content – so you may not get as many views!
6. More likes/comments = even MORE likes/comments
   And again this is another factor that Facebook uses to decide what to show in News Feed. People who have commented/liked in the past will be more likely to be shown your future content – you can build on your own success this way.

What to do

1. Get GOOD images
   These might be images you already own/created as a company – or you can find them on the web, or take them yourself! Make sure the pics are a decent size so they are worth looking at.
2. Click on “Upload Photo” and follow instructions
   
   
3. Put in whatever text you want in your update  - THIS INCLUDES LINKS!
   Put whatever other content and links in now. You need to put links in AFTER the photo, otherwise the preview will be of the link, not the picture you have chosen to share. You can see in the below picture how there is a nice big image and then the text (blue) link appears in the post, without hijacking the whole post preview!
    

4. That’s it
   Sit back and wait for results. But be sure to monitor your efforts – view your page Facebook Insights to see how well different post types are performing, or just look on your wall to get a rough idea!

We hope you have enjoyed these tips and found them useful… comments welcome here and on Twitter/Facebook

The future of messaging

In the last week Facebook have started introducing a Private Messaging function for Pages.

So far the feature has only been made available for some users in Asia, but it’s likely this will be rolled out to everyone eventually. When you get it, the “Message” icon appears at the top right of the page, much like it does on a standard profile.

If I’m honest, I can’t see why they didn’t introduce private messages straight away. It does seem like an obvious thing to include!

One-way communication only

Before you marketing types get all excited – this isn’t going to be the new email marketing sensation of 2012. Sorry.

All communication has to be fan-initiated – you can reply to them, but they have to start it off.

We don’t know at this stage whether you can initiate new outbound messages to fans who have previously messaged you, or if you are just tied to the one message thread they have started.

Dealing with complaints or sensitive questions

It happens from time to time; a customer will be hacked off about something and want to tell the world about it – via your Facebook wall!

This is never ideal, and worst case scenario this can cause a big public debate. Whilst we aren’t saying complaints should be “hidden” – it’s much more professional to take these topics “off-wall” and enable you to sort things out privately, and hopefully, amicably.

Private messages will make this way easier for you to do (just reply saying “send us a PM and we’ll be happy to find out.. etc”) or maybe the customer will just write a PM in the first place and save all the bother? Not everyone likes public communication after all.

Organise interviews/appointments/bookings

This will depend on the nature of your business obviously. But there’s loads of scope for businesses to use this channel to do things that are very much a part of your everyday work, but not appropriate for public airing.

Colleges and Employers could arrange and confirm interviews… health services could book and confirm appointments. The list goes on and on!

It looks like PMs could help further cement Facebook’s position as one of the most important communications tools we use in our daily lives. The convenience of being able to do this sort of thing within Facebook can only be a good thing for the average user.

How does this affect your Page’s Edgerank?

Your posts make their way into people’s News Feeds partly based on your “affinity” to the user… this is influenced by them liking/commenting on your page posts in the past. People writing on your wall increases their affinity, and other people who comment on other peoples public posts also get an increased affinity.

We don’t yet know if sending a PM would count in the same way, i.e. if messaging helps increase infinity just the same as liking a post. But we’d hope so! Otherwise we can see lots of pages wanting to disable the feature (you can opt-out in the settings)

Lowered virality

If people are less inclined to start up conversations on your wall, there’s also the chance that some really lively discussions just won’t happen, and you won’t get the bonus of Facebook’s social nature.

It’s not about Edgerank here – it’s about how people see stuff their friends are doing on Ticker and in the News Feed. (“Gazz and 2 of your friends wrote on Net Natives wall”).

Facebook is all about the social – it would be a shame for too much to happen behind closed doors!

So what do you think of the new feature?

One word for you – Timeline – and now Facebook have started rolling it out to everyone.

Timeline is a MASSIVE leap in the design of a Facebook profile, and I’m already seeing loads of people raving/complaining about it. It’s a little hard to use at first, and some people object to the way your friends can just navigate their way through your life by year, but there’s no denying it adds a much richer user experience.

MAKE THE MOST OF THIS TO INCREASE YOUR FACEBOOK PAGE ENGAGEMENT!

• People will be sitting around on their computer adding new photos and fiddling with Timeline’s new features – you’ve got a captive audience sat there tinkering away – it’s an ideal time to get your Facebook presence noticed!
• Discuss timeline – ask fans to post pictures of their cool new header, perhaps offer a prize for the best (maybe they could feature your brand?!). Remember, topical issues will get people talking – and them interacting with you now means they are more likely to see your updates in future as they will be prioritised by Facebook

Just a little food for thought there, let us know how you get on!

More nuggets of wisdom from us on Facebook & Twitter – Like and Follow us to stay up to date

“…Net Natives were the obvious partner of choice and haven’t failed to deliver.”

As a huge security firm, Wimbledon can only mean one thing – a great opportunity to showcase your expertise in delivering secure event management. An event like Wimbledon requires a huge team working away behind the scenes, so you might wonder how best to speedily recruit new members. It goes without saying that we Natives always have the answer.

G4S came to Net Natives for our help with their Facebook site. Take a look at what we did for their Facebook presence here. They were also gearing themselves up for Wimbledon so we said, let us help out with that too! They needed to increase their recruits – so we needed to target candidates with the vacancies they’d be most interested in.

What did Net Natives do?

Our intensive two week Facebook advertising campaign involved the creation of over 500 variations of advertising, each specifically targeted at potential candidates by their relevant interests, locality, employment and age range, meaning G4S would receive responses from only the perfect candidates.

As always, we constantly tested and optimised the campaign to make sure we were only displaying the right advert, to the right people, at the right time (clever, eh!).

The Result?

The Wimbledon targeted advertising campaign was a great success – the adverts were seen over 1.3 million times by the desired demographic with nearly 1,300 quality responses! Not only did G4S recruit, it also increased engagement on its Facebook job page, generating nearly 20% more likes than all other traffic sources. So what did G4S have to say about our fantastic service?

“With the launch of our Facebook recruiting strategy, G4S demonstrated our committed to developing a joined up approach to using social media…It was extremely important to find a partner that could deliver on this, Net Natives were the obvious partner of choice and haven’t failed to deliver.”

“Net Natives have helped us gain better control of our identity on Facebook…”

When you’re one of the UK’s leading universities, you can forgive your students for getting a bit excited on Facebook and creating an endless number of pages celebrating your institution. It’s important though to present a clean, unified front to your online audience – so how do you go about assimilating your various Facebook pages into one comprehensive portal? The Natives will always have the answer.

The Challenge?

The University of Glasgow came to Net Natives with a simple request: to consolidate the vast number of unofficial pages headed up by the University’s name into one all-encompassing site. Every Facebook user who had stated their affiliation with one of these rogue pages would need to be connected to the new, official one. Let us at it, we said!

What did Net Natives do?

We put into action our Facebook Brand Strategy, consolidating the University’s fans across Facebook and seamlessly migrating them onto the new website.

The University then said, “but what should we have on our page?” So we provided our Content Strategy Consultancy too. We shared our knowledge about what content works on Facebook sites, leading to maximised engagement between University and fans.

The Result?

The University’s official page now has over 22,000 likes – a true reflection of the University’s fanbase. The University has full control over their Facebook presence, and can see exactly what is being said. Another success for the Natives.

“Thanks to their understanding of social media, Net Natives have helped us gain better control of our identity on Facebook and we are now able to directly engage with over 20,000 ‘fans’ who were originally connected to unofficial Facebook pages for University of Glasgow.”

“We enjoy working with the Natives team and appreciate their professionalism and expertise.”

As a College, when you provide a huge number of specialised and vocational courses, it’s crucial that these opportunities are known about by your target demographic. So, when the vast majority of this demographic spends a lot of their time online, your next step is to work out how you can harness the power of Facebook and Google and get your ads seen by your online audience. How do you do this? Gather round, folks.

Sparsholt and Andover Colleges merged in 2007, establishing a much wider selection of course programmes available to their students. The College came to us for help in increasing awareness of this sparkling array of courses on offer, so of course we jumped right in.

The Challenge?

Sparsholt and Andover knew their target demographic spent much of their time on the internet. The challenge was to make use of this knowledge and make sure the people who the College most wanted to see apply to their courses actually knew about them. We needed to provide targeted Facebook advertising and improve the College’s ad rating on Google.

What did Net Natives do?

We threw ourselves into the College’s summer advertising campaign. With a combination of Google ads and targeted Facebook advertising, we improved the online visibility of the College’s courses and made sure our ads were seen by the most relevant people. We tailored the adverts to the users who would see them, and carefully monitored the campaign so we knew which adverts worked best.

The Result?

Andover’s ads across Google and Facebook gained them over 1,800 responses, while Sparsholt’s attracted over 1,700. But that’s just numbers. What we can really impress you with is that these adverts had the lowest cost per response – for what the College paid, that’s an extremely impressive result – much more so than advertising in your local rag.

“Net Natives came on board to advertise for our summer campaign, using an integrated approach of Google PPC and Facebook advertising. We were really pleased with the results. They were thorough in their keyword research, closely monitoring the terms which were getting us the best traffic for the lowest CPC and managed the allocation between the two platforms effectively. We enjoy working with the Natives team and appreciate their professionalism and expertise.”

“We are very impressed with what Net Natives have done for us. An 84.71% increase in visitors is a great thing for our website, and we would highly recommend Net Natives.”

Now that jobseekers conduct the vast majority of their hunt online, it’s crucial that they see your advert in their search results. With over 24 million searches containing the phrase “jobs”, how do you make sure your vacancies appear on the first page of candidates’ searches?

Goodman Masson is the largest Independent Financial Recruiter in the UK, and has been recruiting professionally-qualified accountant and other finance professionals for over 18 years. They came to us to see how we could help them get found by their dream candidates.

The Challenge?

Goodman Masson wanted their jobs to display under the search terms that candidates were searching for online.  Net Natives wanted to do two things: increase the number of optimised, indexable pages displaying in search results, and make sure that, through Google advertising, they were appearing to the right people. Take a look at our report on Google advertising here.

What did Net Natives do?

Our Search Engine Optimisation service started with developing individual pages for each job post, indexing each of the job listings and being clever with page titles and descriptions. The Net Natives magic enabled all future job posts on Goodman Masson to be dynamically optimised, providing high search engine listings for individual pages which ultimately led to a huge increase in application numbers.

The Result?

Our SEO and Google advertising services worked a treat. By getting clever with more relevant descriptions and using negative key words to remove irrelevant search terms, we were able to deliver great results for Goodman Masson’s job postings on Google: 348 applications, 2,786 job views, and nearly 85% more visitors to the site. We even got them that crucial top ranking in Google Ads!

“We are very impressed with what Net Natives have done for us. An 84.71% increase in visitors is a great thing for our website, and we would highly recommend Net Natives.”

“CERN is a scientific organisation that’s trying to understand the science behind the universe – Net Natives is the company that understands the science behind Facebook. They understand the metrics, the branding, the algorithms and most importantly they understand both the customer & the target audience. Our people here love what Net Natives have achieved for us and creating engagement via Facebook has now become an integral part of our daily job in recruitment” Head of Recruitment, CERN.

The Challenge?

It seems that everyone has now heard of, and has an opinion about, CERN and their pioneering experiments. This made the management of their employer brand within Facebook and ability to focus on quality not quantity approaches almost as hard as trying to find the Higgs Boson Particle. By far their biggest exposure, but greatest opportunity, lay in the user generated communities which had been created on the Facebook platform. This engaged community numbered over 50,000; all wanting to enter the conversation with CERN. Many willing and expertly able to be involved in some way.

What did Net Natives Do?

After consultation with CERN, we established the relevance of a Facebook specific strategy. As a Facebook agency, we then worked with the platform to consolidate the various CERN identities, to create one official Facebook page, www.facebook.com/CERN. Marrying this with a relevant social media content strategy and training (an “On the Wall” Strategy) that we developed for their communications team, that was informative and engaging.

We then turned our attention to their recruitment strategy. Obviously, recruitment is not built on “Likes”, but with variety of relevant and quality applications, regardless of the channel. Net Natives call this, “Beyond the Wall”. Through our unique Social Content Management System (SCMS), we built a multi layered recruitment site. One that had the full functionality of their existing career site, but which respected and worked in the social environment.  www.facebook.com/CERNjobs.

The Result?

CERN are now in control of their identity on Facebook, controlling and engaging with their connections. Their main page is now a primary resource for ongoing comment about CERN and their Facebook page doubled in connections within 2 months, with a vast increase in relevant applications through the platform and one of the principle recruitment communications channels for existing and potential employees.

“CERN is a scientific organisation that’s trying to understand the science behind the universe – Net Natives is the company that understands the science behind Facebook. They understand the metrics, the branding, the algorithms and most importantly they understand both the customer & the target audience. Our people here love what Net Natives have achieved for us and creating engagement via Facebook has now become an integral part of our daily job in recruitment.” – Head of Recruitment at CERN.

So finally Twitter have announced that they are going to be doing something a bit different for brands… they have just announced the upcoming launch of “Brand Pages”, following in the footsteps of Google+ who recently announced theirs.

In this video you can see a couple of clips of the new brand pages, and also see some of the other changes to the user experience.

Brands basically get a big header image, and the ability to promote a tweet to the top, acting sort of like a welcome message and enabling them to control the first thing their users see.

But the question on everyone’s lips is “Will I need to set up a new profile, or does Twitter let us convert the current one?”. There was a lot of disgruntled users having to start afresh when Facebook introduced pages and wanted businesses moving away from groups, for example.

Brand pages will be beta tested on a few big brands first so you can expect to start seeing them fairly soon.

So what events have shaped the social media landscape this year? We put our pretty little heads together and here’s what we came up with…

Facebook & The Open Graph

It’s a term you may have heard but probably haven’t looked into – basically the Open Graph refers to the way Facebook integrates with the rest of the web, and it’s own content. The clever folks at Facebook HQ have now added a new idea called “gestures” – where rather than just things being “like”able, developers can use whatever words they want to describe how a person is interacting with something.

There are already apps that do this – once you’ve allowed them permission. The Guardian app will share what you have “read” on your profile and in peoples news feeds. Music app Spotify  can publish what you have “listened” to. We’re in the early stages of these social apps, but expect to see a lot more of these in the coming months!

Net Natives did some quality work in the latter part of this year for the European Parliament – we produced an app where users could “vote for” and “submit” photo entries in order to have the chance to win a holiday – check it out HERE

We predict there will be a big place for these in education – for collaborative learning for example. Users will be able to share what they are working on, what they are learning/have learned, and who they are studying with.

Timeline – and will brands get it?

The Facebook profile has changed a LOT since it’s inception. What was once just a few words and a photo has evolved almost beyond comprehension, and the best is yet to come.

Facebook recently revealed “Timeline” – a complete overhaul of the profile design. The “wall” is now like a scrapbook of your whole life – you can even navigate it by year! And it has a space for a lovely big picture at the top… nice.

There is no confirmation yet – but we’re pretty hopeful that Facebook will integrate the Timeline into it’s brand pages. This will mean you can tell the story of your college’s history in a way never before possible. Showcase your awards, alumni, and events for the world to see.

We wrote an in-depth article on implications of Timeline for Colleges that you can check out HERE

Google + Launches Brand Pages

Google+, the internet giants own social network, just unveiled their dedicated brand pages, enabling your business to build a presence on their network. Whilst it has been criticised for being a bit rushed, there are a few interesting features that we really liked.

• Circles – user made custom lists to view and share with. You could create circles for adult learners, staff and subject groups, and use these to find or provide the right content to the right users.
• Hangouts – basically casual video chat but fully integrated to the platform. This could be great for small seminars & tutorials, Q&A’s, interviews etc.
• Great search integration – search a business name preceeded by a + sign on normal Google search engine and their Google+ page will come right up.

More on Google+ HERE

Twitter Launch Brand Pages too!

So finally Twitter have announced that they are going to be doing something a bit different for brands… they have just announced the upcoming launch of “Brand Pages”, following in the footsteps of Google+ who recently announced theirs.

In this video you can see a couple of clips of the new brand pages, and also see some of the other changes to the user experience.

Brands basically get a big header image, and the ability to promote a tweet to the top, acting sort of like a welcome message and enabling them to control the first thing their users see.

But the question on everyone’s lips is “Will I need to set up a new profile, or does Twitter let us convert the current one?”. There was a lot of disgruntled users having to start afresh when Facebook introduced pages and wanted businesses moving away from groups, for example.

Brand pages will be beta tested on a few big brands first so you can expect to start seeing them fairly soon.

LinkedIn continues to grow

LinkedIn recently went public with an IPO and this is a clear indication of the growth of the platform as an employer engagement tool. We will be releasing a white paper on LinkedIn in Jan/Feb 2012 so EMAIL US if you’d like to get hold of it when it comes out!

So Here’s to a Great Year…

What will 2012 bring for social media? Will a new platform emerge? Will Google+ continue to ruffle Facebook’s feathers? Will Twitter go crazy for advertising?

Get on our LinkedIn group Education Futurology and stay right up to date!

Want to know how well your Facebook efforts are going in comparison to your competitors? Now’s your chance…

Net Natives are always busy cruising around the net picking up useful information for you! We then put it together in big documents and look at it intently whilst stroking our chins

Get the idea with our table comparing some of the biggest colleges in the UK - 157 Group.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LEAGUE TABLE

Well done AGAIN to Vision West Notts for topping the table for 3 months in a row – getting a great level of engagement despite not having the biggest number of likes – quality not quantity there, well done!

Also a big shout out to Bedford College – who have managed to jump up a staggering 22 PLACES by following the goodness & advice of Net Natives, taking social engagement to the next level.

WANT SOME INFO?

Email alex@netnatives.co.uk and we will send a league table just for you, featuring all the colleges in your region – this useful data will not only show you where you rank, but also help you see what is working well for other colleges!

Aren’t we nice to you?

With Christmas and the much welcomed time off fast approaching – don’t let your social media efforts lose their momentum. People are online loads more over the holidays, so make sure you are getting your voice heard and don’t go silent!

Multiple Admins

It’s really important to make sure your Facebook Page / Twitter or any other platforms you are using have more than one person who can share content, and respond to messages.  This is especially important in the event of public complaints on your wall, or inappropriate spam.

To add more admins to your Facebook Page, just go to it, click “Edit Page”, then “Manage Admins”. Easiest way is to put in the email address of the person who you want to add (needs to be the one they use for their Facebook profile).

Get Mobile

Most of us have smartphones such as iPhone, Blackberry or Android devices – so the days of depending on your desktop computer are over! Did you know there are FREE apps you can install on your phone that will give you a friendly nudge when someone mentions you or adds a comment to your page? These apps allow you to reply there and then too! Which one to use is very much down to personal preference.

We would recommend either Seesmic Mobile (Android, iPhone, Windows 7 mobile) or Hootsuite Mobile (Android, Blackberry, iPhone).  Personally I prefer Seesmic, as it’s a bit more user friendly – but Hootsuite does have the facility to Schedule posts (see next section).

Schedule your posts to happen automatically!

If you know you’re going to be off work, or the department is closed – you don’t have to log on from home to keep your social media presence alive! Clever apps (mobile and on computer) can do this all for you, you just put in what you want and when – and at the specified time your tweet/post will be published!

We’d recommend using Hootsuite – you don’t have to install anything (it’s a website) and it has tons of features in addition to scheduling posts (such as monitoring for keywords). Plus it’s free for a basic account. Remember you can get a mobile version of it too so you can schedule posts on the go!

Best Posting Practice

Especially if you are posting when your students are off – keep it FUN! They probably won’t want to hear too much formal stuff when they are busy stuffing their faces with mince pies and going out with friends.

Maybe share some funny videos or websites (there are loads such as Elf Yourself where you can put your head on a dancing elf!). Also StumbleUpon is a great site that finds you great content in various categories.

You want to be encouraging comments and likes as much as possible on Facebook – the more of these you get, the more likely that your users are going to see your content in the future (this is determined by Facebook’s Edgerank Algorithm).

Make your posts “likeable” and interactive, use rich media such as video where possible, and post regularly – try to do one a day. Remember – you can schedule them now so no excuse not to!

Net Natives are experts on Social Media Strategy and and Advertising have worked with over 70 FE clients to date.

If you’d like to find out more about how we can help YOU – email ben@netnatives.co.uk or call 01273 783 847

"How the hell am I gonna advertise now?"

That’s a frightening thought for people like us in the digital marketing industry.

We’ve got so used to being able to deliver highly targeted advertising, in a fraction of a second, to thousands of people – that sometimes it can be taken for granted.

Let’s picture a parallel universe where for some reason Facebook and Google (& the whole internet!) never existed… what would you be doing? Here are a few of the likely candidates…

Flyers, Leaflets & Posters?

Time to get hands-on

Flyers & leaflets come in all shapes and sizes, and may incorporate added benefits such as doubling up as a discount voucher.

They have the advantage of being pocket sized and (hopefully) kept for later. Posters are great for being seen by multiple people. Also you can find places to put them; displays in your foyer, local businesses, tourist information and so on.

Unfortunately, they tend to need someone to hand them out or stick them up, which may involve standing outside in the cold/wet and being shunned by passersby who often look at you as if you are trying to hand them a dead rat! Plus in some places you will need a licence (costs money) and there can be big fines for unauthorised flyering/posting.

Yellow Pages & other directories?

J.R. Hartley used it... Did you?

Contrary to their Christmas advert, the function of a Yellow Pages book was not the kissing of taller girls – at the peak of its popularity it was the biggest telephone listings directory available, both in size and popularity!

For a fee, companies could get themselves listed in either text or display ads and hope that someone looked them up. Much like Google however, this kind of advertising relied on the fact that people were ALREADY searching for you – no good if for grabbing people’s attention from cold.

(Check out this nostalgic video showing Yellow Pages when it was the real king of search)

Radio Advertising?

Radio advertising... don't touch that dial!

This is how most commercial radio stations make their money. Radio advertisements started airing in the 1920′s so there has been 90 years of practice with this medium!

Radio has the distinct advantage of its intrusive nature – many workplaces have radio on in the background for example, so there’s a chance of your ad just popping up to unsuspecting (and hopefully, interested!) ears.

However it’s very hard to target ads effectively – you have to choose the right station/show/time for the demographic you are aiming at and there’s no way to fine-tune it any more than that. It has the disadvantage of being quite expensive due both to the cost of broadcasting and the creation of the advert in the first place too.

Magazines & Newspapers?

Now where's that Horoscope...

Having ads printed in newspapers and magazines is still a very common technique today.

They can be a great way of getting into people’s hands, with the blanket popularity of free publications such as Metro and local equivalents, and on the other hand, the niche readership associated with specific magazines. Ads can be ripped/cut out and kept, and used as discount vouchers/reminders. Also magazines do tend to lie around for some time (doctor’s surgeries!) and therefore your advert might have a decent shelf-life too.

Again, though, this is a costly advertising technique (especially if you want to choose where in the mag the ad appears) and a lot of people will skip advert heavy sections in newspapers to get to the next section they are interested in. Also getting to your target audience is tricky – even with a huge readership, it’s hard to be certain what percentage of that number would be receptive to your ad.

Billboard/Outdoor Advertising?

This is a plain billboard as an example - they look better with an ad on them!

Time to think BIG. Buses, walls, tube stations. Thousands of pairs of eyes will see your advertising in all its glory every day. Get a great advert and there will be a lot of motorists and pedestrians with achy necks!

You might get some bargains here and there – but if you want the premium space – you’ll be paying a premium price. There’s also not really any way to target your audience other than geographically, and the cost of producing large, high quality artwork is high, both in design and printing, let alone hiring the space.

Television?

We'd rather watch ads than reality TV!

TV is one of the richest types of media widely available, as the advertiser can present their brand and reinforce its message through both sound AND vision.

Most people have TVs and although some people pop off to put the kettle on during adverts, a lot of people won’t – so you’re getting a captive audience. You can target people according to the type of programs they watch… you’ll notice a big difference in advert types from a weekday morning to a Saturday evening, for example!

TV advertising is the most expensive type of advertising – just like with radio, but with much higher costs for producing an advert (some high quality ads are almost cinematic!) and very high fees to air the ad.

But Luckily – Facebook & Google DO Exist!

The internet... let's drink to that!

Don’t get us wrong – we aren’t knocking any of the above techniques. They are all staple techniques in a marketing professional’s arsenal, and used to great success every day. A marketing campaign should encompass as many avenues as possible to reach the widest audience possible.

However we are a digital marketing agency – and we LOVE how we can create super-complex advertising campaigns, targeting demographics that just would not be possible otherwise. Unlike the more traditional channels – we can provide in depth statistics about which demographics respond best to your ad, what is the most effective copy/image and lots more.

This in-depth data means we can determine which of your advert creatives are the most effective – this allows us to allocate your budget in the most effective way possible, and this information can then be used to inform your more traditional (non digital) campaigns!

An advert needs to be seen multiple times in order to be most effective – and a digital campaign (where you are charged for clicks only, not for views of the ad) is ideal in terms of providing an inexpensive way to achieve this. Getting the same result using TV for example, would cost a hell of a lot more!

Want to find out more about doing a fully customised ad campaign with Net Natives?

Do it now - Email ben@netnatives.co.uk or call 01273 783 847 today

Facebook have just unveiled their new Insights control panel.

And we’d have to say, we are actually loving this.

New metrics such as “virality” (how likely a user is to share a post), user friendly graphs, ability to rank post types against each other, and lots lots more. This is really going to let you delve deep into what works most effectively for your brand, far more so than before.

Facebook have even been kind enough to provide an official 20 minute interactive course on how to use Insights to market effectively!

The course is a must-watch – check it out here: http://www.learnpageinsights.com/ui.html

Thanks for reading… to find out more about effective marketing on Facebook, email gazz@netnatives.co.uk and we’ll be happy to have a chat with you

Want to know how socially adept you are compared to your competitors?

Net Natives have reviewed EVERY Facebook page for EVERY college here in the UK – and waved our magic social media wands to figure out which colleges have the best engagement on their walls! It’s a bit of a monster white paper but if you want to know where you stand against your competitors in your region, then we can get that out to you!

This is great not only to see where you currently rank, but also means you can identify the best performing colleges and see what they are doing so well!

Just send an email to alex@netnatives.co.uk and we will send your list!

In the meantime, to see how the colleges of the 157 Group have performed over the last couple of months, have a look at their Facebook engagement league table that we created… HERE

Well done to Vision West Notts for coming top of the table for TWO months in a row! A small, but well engaged Facebook audience.

We came across a fascinating little (well, big!) infographic showing the history of e-learning, and we felt it was only appropriate to share this with you.

Some pretty amazing statistics to be found in it, some of our favourites include:

• There are 3 million online-only students in the US
• The Open University has 250,000 students
• The first online school was in 1989
• London School of Business & Finance delivered a course entirely through a Facebook app!

Click on the image below to view the infographic

Discuss the future of education with us, and other like minded professionals on our LinkedIn group Education Futurology

This Christmas no doubt you will be online enjoying a variety of “festivities” – shopping, stressing, searching, chatting, organising, moaning, and sharing.  And guess what? Lots of people will be online doing EXACTLY the same thing! For these reasons, Christmas is Facebook’s busiest time. Your students and potential students are going to be on there A LOT.

PLUS they will be on retail sites like Gumtree, Friday-Ad and Yell. Wouldn’t it be great if your brand was ever present, reminding and cajoling them throughout this busy time?

What are you going to say? Would you be:

1. Reminding parents of would-be students in your area of the quality of your college – promote awards, results, press and the like.
2. Keeping warm your enrolling students – minimise drop-off by reinforcing the benefits of enrolling to YOUR college.
3. Promoting your college as  THE place of choice in your area for your final placements.
4. Advertising adult courses – taking advantage of people wanting to learn new skills as part of their New Year’s resolutions!
5. Raising Brand awareness – keeping your college on people’s minds throughout the festive season

Let Net Natives bring you a little Christmas cheer and give us an email on steve@netnatives.co.uk or give us a buzz on 01273 734640 and we’ll get the message out.

Noticed some changes to one of my Twitter accounts today. Quite big ones in fact…

Gone is the retweet section – replaced with an “activity” tab.

The activity tab is like a mini news feed stalker-heaven of who followed who, favourited what, and retweeted who/what. Twitter says, “‘It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place”.

It’s certainly true that it will highlight some users and tweets you probably wouldn’t have seen, so that could be good for building followers and finding new content.

Judging from some of the comments I’ve seen, quite a few users are unhappy about this and consider it quite intrusive. Then again, people say this kind of stuff about Facebook all the time and end up getting used to it pretty quickly!

Current retweets now live in the @mentions section, however I haven’t yet seen a way of seeing a history of my retweets, who retweeted me. Which is sad news, as I enjoy spending quiet nights in re-reading them to make myself feel more popular

As a lot of Twitter users are very interested in their number of retweets, it seems a bit daft for twitter to remove/hide this feature, but we shall see how that all pans out.

Despite these changes to the Twitter site, my retweets still all seem to show up in Hootsuite, so hopefully it will stay that way!

Twitter is rolling this out gradually apparently, so if you don’t see it straight away don’t worry… your time will come.

Here’s some pictures of the new bits… happy tweeting

Google+ went live a few months back and is Googles third attempt at getting involved in the Social Media arena, with recent reports suggesting as many as 40,000,000 users have signed up so far.

This week they have now have added the ability to create Pages to represent brands & businesses. So here we are going to give you a quick explanation of how it works, what’s good, and what isn’t…

Google+  Overview

(For more info direct from Google, go here.)

Essentially Google+ is based around the concept of “circles” – mini networks you create and name, and assign individuals to once you connect with them.

Putting someone in a circle simply means:

1. You’ll be able to see their updates in your Stream
2. You can post selectively to their circle(s) if you wish
3. They don’t have to add you to one of their circles if they don’t want

…and vice verca.

Getting Started

First set up a Google+personal account – either use an existing Google account or your own email (do it here).

Next on the home page, scroll down on the right and click “Create a Google Plus Page”. Now set it up in exactly the same way as your profile. Select the category “Company, Institution or Organisation”, then the subcategory “Education and Schools”. Then just add images, info and perhaps video; choose good content that best represents your college.

BEING your Page on Google+

From the home page – just click on the downwards arrow next to your name where is says “1 page” – and then select your page. You will now be using Google+ as if you actually are the brand (almost the same as Facebook’s “Use Facebook as Page” function).

What’s Good

• Create Circles to Segment Your Audience
  Once people have added you to a circle, you are free to then add them to whatever custom circles you like. So you could create circles for adult learners, or age 16-19 for example. This is one of Google+ most powerful and useful features – you can post selectively to these circles in just one click!
• Hangouts – conference video chat for up to 10 people. We think there’s a definite future for this in collaborative learning. Maybe using official pages to host seminars and offer support sessions. Some could be student led, others may be led by official staff. Video conferencing is nothing new – but the direct integration of it in Google+ is pretty exciting!
  
  
• Your “about” section is in editable rich text - You can use bullets, links, underlined, italic & bold text throughout, which gives you a lot more formatting options than Facebooks info page.
  
   

• Clean design (plain white) - This means your graphics get a LOT of impact – it’s a lot easier to showcase some nice photos/images when you have a clutter-free environment! Check out the Marvel Comics page:
• Enhanced Google search – if users type +whateverbrandname into normal Google search – the Google+ site will come up in the suggested results as you type! Try typing +marvel in and see how far you get before it suggests you the Google+ site! This could be very effective in terms of driving people to your Google+ page.

And now the Bad News…

We at Net Natives would have to say we reckon this feels like a bit of a rush-job from Google.  They put a lot of time and effort into the initial product launch, but the brand pages feel a bit thrown-together. There are some glaring omissions and we can only hope that these are addressed soon and that Google+ can then become a powerful platform for educational institutions.

• No custom URLs - You get a fairly ugly web address at the moment consisting of a string of random numbers, that presently cannot be changed.
• You can only add people to circles once they’ve added you – Unless your students have put you in a circle, you’re out of luck. So any promotion must really highlight the need for students to put you in one, or they will not see your updates, and the whole selective-posting power of Google+ is lost!
• Enhanced Search will take a while – We think it will be a long while until people are that taken with Google+ that they will be typing + symbols into Google. So how useful this search feature is, remains to be seen.
• Can’t integrate with Twitter/Facebook etc yet – Personal profiles on Google+ can take advantage of integrating content from Facebook/Twitter and cross posting for a cohesive presence. At the moment – there is no such feature for brand pages.

It’s VERY early days for Google+, and probably a good time to get involved and start learning the platform ahead of the competition. Provided it continues to succeed, we envision they will introduce advertising and loads of other features, so why not start building a strong presence now?

Net Natives will shortly be developing our own series of Google+ pages for clients. Want to know more? ask steve@netnatives.co.uk

Be sure to join “EDUCATION FUTUROLOGY” on LinkedIn – to discuss all things education and social media! JOIN NOW

So what do you think of Google+?

It’s like a jungle out there!!! Facebook is cluttered with loads of duplicate and unofficial pages.  They’re common because anyone can create a Facebook page.

You can’t control these pages. You can’t answer students queries on these pages. You can’t represent your college the way you need to.  These pages sit there, silently hoovering up fans that should have been connected to your REAL page!

• Unofficial pages may show up first in search
• They may have more fans than your real one
• Students might like them instead of you

Net Natives can help you.

By identifying, claiming and merging these pages on behalf of over 40 colleges we were able to increase their overall combined likes by over 100,000 new fans.   That’s an increase of approximately 300% between them!

Once we have done it, you’ll be able to:

• Control your entire Facebook presence
• Maximise your likes
• Moderate inappropriate content
• Better understand your audience

To have this process managed and professionally delivered by Net Natives will only cost you just £500+VAT, and the process normally takes around 7 days.

Check out the below testimonial from one of our many happy clients, and to take advantage of this offer emailBen@netnatives.co.uk or call             01273 783847       today.

“1,027 of our students were wrongly connecting with an unofficial facebook page, which was under our name but we had no control over. We tried to merge this to our official facebook page ourselves but had a horrific time and ended up deleting our official page! That’s when we called in Net Natives who managed to not only re-instate our lost page (and all the fans) but successfully merge ALL of the unofficial pages set up under our brand. We now have a total of 1,927 fans and the ability to manage our brand effectively on Facebook. Thank you Natives!”

When someone is looking at your wall, one consistent thing is that they can always see your profile picture, and the 5 photos along the top (photostream). So it’s a great idea to make the most of this prime retail space!

Here’s a quick Net Natives how-to guide…

Profile Picture

A little known fact is that a Facebook Profile Picture (the main one on the top left of your page) is allowed maximum dimensions of 540 pixels high by 180 pixels wide. Check this out…

• Calls to action – use this space to entice people to like your page. Or download your course guide. Or fill in your enquiries form
• Promote special events – got an open day? Feature it here
• Strongly branded images – choose great images that make your college look great

The Photostream

This is nothing new, but we still find it pretty astonishing how many people miss out on the opportunity of using the Photostream (the 5 image spaces at the top of their Facebook Pages) effectively. Here, a college has used the images to good effect, highlighting their graduates:

Key Facts

• 5 rectangular image spaces directly below the LIKE button and Page title
• 97 x 68 pixels display size
• By default, the displayed images are the 5 most recently tagged photos by you
• Clickable, and open up into the full size image
• They are ordered randomly each time you view the page

Having quality images up sounds obvious, but it is often overlooked and unmanaged. Basically you want strongly branded pictures. Logos, building, happy students/customers/fans. Anything that reinforces your brand values and identity.

Using them Properly

1. Use this space as free advertising - Promote events or special offers you have upcoming. Create eye catching images that are calls to action as well. Think of them as flyers on your Facebook page!
2. Caption your photos with links – Put in links to your website, mailing list and so on. Make them a strong call-to-action, such as “Download our FREE course guide from our website!”.
3. Get interactive –  If you have group pictures, encourage people to tag themselves and friends in them, and share, to promote engagement on your wall.
4. Get the shape right – Facebook displays rectangles with chopped off borders 97×67 thumbnails. So upload LANDSCAPE images, don’t position items too close to the edge. Make writing large if applicable.

Below is a guide to how to get the images you want on the page. You can’t upload a photo to these spaces directly; instead the process is a tad convoluted and a little bit random at points!

Adding & Removing Images

You’ll probably have photos there already assuming you have photos on your profile.

• If you upload a new photo, it will automatically go into the Photostream

• Photos where you tag yourself get priority in the Photostream. Add more pictures by going to your photo albums and tagging your page in the desired photos.

• Click X on image top right to remove it. The next one in most recent album will take its place

• If you keep removing images until you run out of photos – then you will end up with blanks. This will probably not happen if you have previously uploaded thousands of photos!

• If it isn’t playing ball (and sometimes it doesn’t!) then to force it to feature you’re most recently tagged photos (plus most recent uploads if there are less than 5 tagged photos) then click EDIT PAGE, then PROFILE PICTURE, then at the bottom UNHIDE

Complicated… yes. Essential… definitely! Give us a shout if you need some help! Email steve@netnatives.co.uk or give us a call on 01273 783 847

“The Net Natives Facebook service has proved to be the most cost effective, targeted advertising medium we could have imagined.”

As school-leavers turn to the internet to gauge the options available to them post GCSEs, how can the further education sector use social media to fully advertise their courses and attract these potential students?

The College of West Anglia is one of the largest and most successful providers of education and training in the Eastern Region, with campuses in King’s Lynn, Isle, Wisbech and Cambridge. The objective of their campaign was to increase the number of attendees to their November open days, with a limited budget.

The Challenge?

The College wanted to target their Facebook campaign at school-leavers, aged between 15 and 16, who were considering their options after their exams. If these students were properly aware of the courses on offer to them, the College knew they’d see a vast increase in the numbers at their open days.

What did Net Natives do?

We first designed multiple adverts with varying copy and images. With this range of text and visual, we could see which combinations worked best and were able to ensure the same advert did not appear to the same users. We were then able to monitor demographic information, such as the age and gender of the users who clicked on the ads.

By specifically targeting Facebook users of school-leaving age in the Eastern region, we could guarantee that the College’s ads were only seen by those who were most likely to consider attending an open day. The College knew that the people behind the responses were the ones they most wanted to attract.

The Result?

Cheaper than running an advert in the local newspaper, the campaign delivered over 800 responses and was seen by the demographic more than 2.5 million times. Its initial length of two weeks was extended for a further month due to its success, gaining the maximum number of attendees for the upcoming open days and providing the College with their social media partners of choice.

“Facebook is where our students spend all of their time, making it the obvious choice for promoting our open days. The problem for us was how to create and manage Facebook advertising campaigns that work. The Net Natives Facebook service has proved to be the most cost effective, targeted advertising medium we could have imagined.”

” …couldn’t be happier with the way our website is ranking now.”

Your page rank on Google hugely affects how many people look at your site. So how do you make sure it appears at the top of searches again and again?

This is what Boardriders Guide wanted to know. They’d found that their pages were not being displayed well amongst search engine rankings, and came to us for our advice on how to improve these rankings as well as how they could improve their current site.

Our help was also sought with Boardriders’ PPC campaigns. They were looking for a better ROI – and of course we had a few tricks up our sleeves to help.

The Challenge?

We needed to find out why the Boardriders Guide site was performing so poorly in Google searches, and then use our keyword knowhow to increase the number of visitors to the site. We do make it sound easy, don’t we?

What did Net Natives do?

Net Natives conducted a full technical audit, determining that a combination of indexing issues, broken page links and tagging issues were to blame for poor search engine rankings and irrelevant search terms.

We then researched and recommended suitable content management systems and provided consultancy on the migrating of the existing site from the previous content management system to a new one, substantially increasing SEO rankings.

Our PPC consultancy involved a review of their current PPC campaigns. We provided a comprehensive SEM audit on their websites, including a benchmark of key words used by themselves and their key competitors to compare the success and cost of PPC campaigns. Boardriders could then bid on the key words and phrases they weren’t already using. The consultancy included best practice, campaign and CPC guidelines, as well as recommendations for future search terms, giving them real competitive advantage.

The Result?

We think the lovely feedback from Boardriders speaks for itself:

“Net Natives provided us with a fantastic SEM consultancy report, providing us with some great insight about what terms and descriptions are going to rank us highly on search engines. It’s always great to find out what other companies similar to us are doing, and has given us a great opportunity to remain competitive.

“When we approached Net Natives advice about our SEO, we had no idea of the extent of the damage. Net Natives have been excellent about identifying and rectifying the issues, and couldn’t be happier with the way our website is ranking now. Thanks Net Natives!”

“I love working with Net Natives, they’re efficient, informative, professional and fun to work alongside!”

One of the greatest freedoms of Facebook is that anyone can create anything (within reason). While this is great for online democracy, it does mean that your brand’s name can appear at the top of any number of unofficial Facebook pages. How do you ensure the integrity of your brand is preserved on Facebook whilst retaining your existing fans?

This is the problem South Thames College faced. After attending our free Social Media Workshop, they were amazed at the potential of using Facebook to recruit new students and jumped straight in, using our Facebook Advertising Service. Once we had piqued their interested in advertising, the next stage was to build them an officiated Facebook page.

The Challenge?

South Thames wanted to see a greater number of applications to their courses, as well as an official, all-encompassing Facebook page over which they had full rights.

Although there was great engagement on the College’s Facebook page already, they only had 64 fans. We went on to discover 15 different Facebook pages for South Thames College, including community pages and unofficial pages. We needed to give South Thames College full control over their Facebook presence.

What did Net Natives do?

We provided targeted Facebook advertising, with overwhelming results: for their summer courses, South Thames received 760 responses, out of which they had 140 actual course applications!

Our social brand strategy meant we could consolidate all pages affiliated with the College into one official, College-approved page. We created a self-contained branded Facebook page, incorporating links to course details, social media buttons and a bespoke Q&A section within the Facebook page. We also built an incorporated ‘ask a question’ form – a great way to interact with potential applicants.

The Result?

We increased the number of applications for the advertised programme tenfold, and the number of connections on the College’s new Facebook page increased by 729% overnight!

“I love working with Net Natives, they’re efficient, informative, professional and fun to work alongside. They’ve come up with some really creative ideas with solid calls to action that have brought our Facebook page to life, increasing our fans from 64 to nearly 1000 overnight! They really know their stuff and have delivered on everything we asked for and more. I would thoroughly recommend Net Natives to anyone!”

“Great Job! We would highly recommend Net Natives!”

When you’ve been at the forefront of graduate recruitment for 15 years, how do you ensure that you are still being seen by the best candidates – and that they will then go on to apply?

This is what Milkround wanted to know. As a pioneering digital service launched in 1997, Milkround became the first choice among recruiters for finding the UK’s best students and graduates. They asked us what we could do for them to make the best use of Facebook, and we were only too happy to help.

The Challenge?

When Milkround approached Net Natives, two key objectives were on the agenda: to increase the number of quality applications through Milkround’s website, and to increase the number of successful Milkround applicants by another 5%. We needed to tidy up the application process and improve the calibre of the candidates being asked to apply.

What did Net Natives do?

Where to start? Well first of all, Net Natives began to implement a registration strategy, including initial consultancy regarding the current website. By streamlining the application process and ensuring a high search engine presence through online and social advertising, Net Natives were able to increase the number of visits to the website through relevant search terms and increase the number of successful Milkround applications by making the application process simpler for the user.

Our Facebook advertising both generated more awareness of their website and targeted the perfect graduates across the country. A combination of 190 variations of advertising, aimed at students graduating from the top proportion of universities, meant that each user saw a university-targeted ad specifically tailored to the details on their page. We are so good.

Milkround were so impressed that they asked us to give them some help with their actual Facebook site. We created a fully-integrated, bespoke page, complete with an inbuilt job search, live job feed and external links to their website. Check it out here.

The Result?

The Facebook ad campaign was a huge success! The adverts were seen over 3.3 million times, by the very students that Milkround wanted to target. By tailoring the advertisements carefully using age, University and education criteria, Milkround knew that the new visitors to their site were exactly right.

The Milkround Facebook page is now an interactive, user-friendly environment designed to attract and retain Milkround’s perfect candidates.

“At Milkround.com finding the best opportunities for graduates is intrinsic to what we do. By using Net Native’s expertise we have been able to reach even more people using their extensive PPC knowledge, Facebook advertising and through our great new Facebook page! Great Job! We would highly recommend Net Natives!”

“We are already appearing on page 1 of Google for jobs that were never listed before”

- GRB

Client Background

The Graduate Recruitment Bureau is one of the UK’s leading graduate recruitment agencies, specialising in placing graduates in graduate jobs. Their jobs were being posted to their website but were not being picked up by the search engines, drastically reducing relevant traffic coming directly to their site.

Needs of the Client

Our client told us…”We want each of the jobs we post on our website to be found on PAGE 1 of Google. We want this to happen automatically when we load them up onto our website. But don’t want to make fundamental changes to our current website. Oh and we only want to pay a one off cost.”

Net Natives Solution:

“Native’s Job Page Optimisation”

It’s fundamental that every job page on GRB’s site was being indexed by Google and was represented on the searchengine for the most relevant keywords for the graduates’ job searches. The search results had to be clear and attractive to candidates at point of search to attract clicks. Our solution was our “Natives’ job page optimisation” service. We provided GRB with full SEO logic and instructions so every job page on the GRB website was individually optimised for the correct keywords. This includess perfectly formatted and keyword rich URLs, title tags, description tags and H1 tags in particular. The Natives’ job page optimisation service is unique as our logic ensures that all current and future jobs will be optimised correctly without any manual work done by the person uploading the job.

If you are interested how SEO can help you and your business, call us for a chat!

What They Said

“Net Natives did a fantastic job in identifying the core elements which we were missing in our SEO strategy. We know that the results from SEO work is never an instant thing however we are already appearing on page 1 of Google for jobs that were never listed before which is fantastic.”

- GRB

“Net Natives were great at understanding our needs, and provided us with an amazing, bespoke Facebook page and advertising campaign. We’d love to work with Net Natives again!”

When you know your key demographic spends most of their web-surfing time on Facebook, you should be wondering how you can make your brand as visible as possible to as many Facebook-users as possible.

Graduate Fasttrack is a London-based, young and innovative boutique recruitment consultancy, specialising in placing only the most competent, determined and ambitious graduates into high profile sales and recruitment positions throughout the UK. These graduates do the vast majority of their job-hunting online, so Graduate Fasttrack got in touch with the Natives to see how we could enable the search to take place on Facebook.

The Challenge?

It was particularly important for the Graduate Fasttrack page to encourage user engagement. The interaction between Graduate Fasttrack and its users is intrinsic to its success, so we wanted to focus our strategy on achieving that objective.

What did Net Natives do?

Net Natives sought to create a unique social identity that was different from the corporate one. We built a comprehensive, integrated Facebook site with engaging wall posts and content to encourage relevant users to connect and interact. The page incorporated a corporate re-brand, user connection incentives and calls-to-action, establishing Graduate Fasttrack’s Facebook presence and moving their services into the social networking arena.

We knew it wasn’t enough to simply create the Facebook page. We wanted as many people as possible to see it! So we created a variety of Facebook advertisements targeted at 20-25 year olds, who would then be directed to a comprehensive Facebook page with real career insights, a newsletter sign-up functionality and external links to the Graduate Fasttrack website.

The Result?

By targeting and adjusting the adverts to optimise response rates, the ad increased the Facebook page’s connections by an impressive 62.5%, totalling over 1.8 million initial ad views on people’s Facebook screens! Graduate Fasttrack is now vastly more visible to those who should be getting involved, and the company can now properly connect with these potential candidates.

“Net Natives were great at understanding our needs, and provided us with an amazing, bespoke Facebook page and advertising campaign. We’d love to work with Net Natives again!”

“We are very impressed with what Net Natives have done for us. An 84.71% increase in visitors is a great thing for our website, and would highly recommend Net Natives.”

Appearing high up in Google searches is just one thing we can help you with. We can also make sure your adverts on Google are seen by as many people as possible – and make them enticing enough to get the clicks.

Goodman Masson came to us with one simple request: to get more traffic to their website. We unveiled our Search Engine Optimisation skills along with our Google Advertising expertise, and of course, Goodman Masson wanted it all. See what SEO magic we weaved here, and read on for our Google advertising report.

The Challenge?

Goodman Masson wanted a better response from their Google ads. They wanted their ads to be seen even more by their candidates, and for the people behind the clicks to be of the highest calibre.

What did Net Natives do?

Net Natives used targeted Google advertising to increase relevant candidate traffic to view and apply for Goodman Masson’s Treasury and Product Control Jobs. The ads were shown not only on Google but also across the Google Display Network, massively increasing the ads’ audience.

The Result?

Our targeted advertising service, coupled with the SEO work, resulted in 348 relevant applications for Goodman Masson’s advertised jobs, after the jobs had been viewed nearly 3000 times. This was a 68.75% increase in applications while our campaign was live. The ads across the Google Display Network gained nearly 1,000 responses, and the number of unique visitors to the Goodman Masson site went up to 3,557! Impressive, eh?

Client Background

As one of the largest colleges in the country, The City of Bristol College boasts over 30,000 students, and a wide variety of courses for all types of students.  With 8 faculties offering over 1,000 full and part-time day and evening courses, the College offers the widest choice of programmes in the area. Courses offered include provision in all 15 subject sector areas and at all levels – from pre-entry through to higher education.

Needs of the Client

It was the task of Net Natives to undertake a number of separate campaigns, to promote open days, Health Therapy courses and NEET’s in particular, to encourage attendance to open days and to increase further enquiries about the wide variety of courses on offer.

Net Natives Solution:
Targeted Campaign for the NEET Audience

In response to the requirements of the City of Bristol College, Net Natives targeted their NEET Facebook campaign in particular at individuals who are not currently in education, employment or training, aged 16-24 and living in and around the Bristol area. By designing multiple adverts with varying copy and images targeted to this demographic, it was possible to determine which combinations worked, monitor their effectiveness and ensure that Facebook users didn’t tire of seeing the same advert. It was especially important to create specific copy for the NEET audience.

The Results

The City of Bristol College was of course provided with an end of campaign report, detailing the amount of clicks, impressions and demographics for the advertisements used. This campaign saw the Facebook ads displayed over 2.8 million times and received a substantial amount of clicks from users looking to find out more about the college.

“We are more than happy with our Facebook page build. It’s perfectly branded, intuitive, and has provided us with another key way of attracting candidates!”

Caterer.com

Client Background

Caterer.com is the UK’s leading hospitality recruitment website – the biggest resource for hotel, restaurant, pub / bar and contract catering jobs.  Caterer.com carries more hospitality jobs than all their competitors combined and over 500,000 hospitality professionals visit the site every month.  The site is part of Totaljobs Group Ltd, the UK’s largest and fastest growing online recruitment company.

Needs of the Client

Caterer.com needed to reflect the quality of their main website experience on Facebook.  The standard features of a Facebook Page nowhere near provide enough tools for such a dynamic website so they needed a way of getting all their current job vacancies on there and capable of being searched for.

Net Natives Solution

As part of our Facebook service at Net Natives, we created Caterer.com a fully branded Facebook page, which included a number of key tabs focusing on company details, contact details and even a number of live job boards and a Job Search box!

By keeping consistent with the websites corporate branding and imagery, Caterer.com were able to make their page truly individual and informative. By using calls to action and external links to the Caterer.com website, users are encouraged to engage with the page and connect with both the Facebook group and the company website.

“Net Natives’ provided us with a fantastic SEM consultancy report”

- The Boardriders Guide

Client Background

The Boardriders Guide has grown from humble beginnings as a mail order catalogue, to become one of the UK’s largest and most established surf, skate and snow websites.

Needs of the Client

Boardriders.com came to Net Natives as they weren’t getting the most from their current PPC campaigns.  They were looking for a better ROI, and of course Net Natives had a few tricks up our sleeves to help them with this.  Using clever PPC keywords and terms, it is possible to really get a substantial amount of visitors to the site, and more importantly, visitors who will purchase products!

Net Natives Solution

We reviewed their current PPC campaigns and provided a comprehensive SEM audit on their websites, including a benchmark of key words used by themselves and their key competitors to compare the success and cost of PPC campaigns. By doing this, Boardriders could bid on key words and phrases they weren’t already bidding on! Net Natives conducted full PPC consultancy including best practice, campaign and CPC guidelines, and recommendations for future search terms, giving them competitive advantage.

If you would like to find out more about our Search Engine Marketing services, feel free to contact us and find out what we can do for you.

What They Said

“Net Natives’ provided us with a fantastic SEM consultancy report, providing us with some great insight about what terms and descriptions are going to rank us highly on search engines. It’s always great to find out what other companies similar to us are doing, and has given us a great opportunity to remain competitive.”

“When we approached Net Natives’ advice about our SEO, we had no idea of the extent of the damage. Net Natives have been excellent about identifying and rectifying the issues, and couldn’t be happier with the way our website is ranking now. Thanks Net Natives!”

“By using [Net Natives’] expertise we have improved our site from a technical point of view and can directly attribute better and more relevant search traffic as a result of their great work.”

When the bulk of research into recruitment, training and consultancy solutions is done online, how do you ensure your services are being seen by as many prospective clients as possible?

This is what the Synergy Group needed to know in their bid to increase traffic to their website through relevant “organic searches” on Google and the major search engines, ensuring it appeared higher up in results lists. They also wanted to improve their internal understanding of how search engines work through effective training and documentation.

The Challenge?

Our brief was to focus on making sure candidates found the right page on the Synergy site for their job search. We needed to pinpoint the technical factors that were affecting how Synergy’s website ranked on the different search engines, with best practice implementation recommendations.

What did Net Natives do?

Here comes the technical bit. We embarked on a Technical Audit for the Synergy website with advice as to how best structure the site for search engines. After this came the link-building – to gain a higher page rank on Google, you need credible links pointing back to your site.

We also undertook Keyword Research to ensure that the most searched-upon terms related to the relevant web pages, using this information to track effectiveness against competitors and making sure each page was correctly rendered using the relevant terms and structure.

So what does all this boil down to?

The Result?

Our hard work meant we vastly improved Synergy’s link profile, using different techniques to provide a list of relevant, high-quality sites that could link back to their site. Our recommendations ensured Synergy’s website was optimised around relevant keywords, writing properly-formatted and keyword-rich title, description and H1 tags for their main pages.

Whilst Synergy is still in the process of implementing our recommendations, we’ve proven that even the small changes can make a difference. As well as growing from page rank 4 to 5 within an incredibly short period of time, our work has dramatically increased their relevant traffic and candidate conversion rates. So much so, they kindly said the following…

“Search Natives extensive knowledge of recruitment SEO has provided us with the tools to affect our website’s search rankings. By using their expertise we have improved our site from a technical point of view and can directly attribute better and more relevant search traffic as a result of their great work.”

“This is information and your recommendations are gold to us. Thank you.”

In today’s connected and transparently social world, how do you identify and manage negative PR?

This is what the global market leading Financial Trader training and coaching company Knowledge To Action needed to know when they were exposed to a considerable amount of discussion on the Internet in forums, message boards and social sites.

The Challenge?

Knowledge To Action knew they had a poor reputation, the top organic search terms were all related to negative PR, but how exposed and how they should best deal with this feedback was an anathema to them. They needed to know how bad and how deep were the negative comments and how to respond.

What did Net Natives do?

First we used our tools and understanding of the framework and nature of forums, blogs, social media and online sites to identify the where, whys and whats for the negative comments. We then created an audit of exposure to scope and understand the landscape.

We then came up with relevant solutions to identify, address and engage with the comments based on our detailed recommendations.

The Result?

Whilst we can never stop disgruntled customers, we were able to highlight the reasons for the negativity, provide strategies for engagement and reduce the poor PR.

From our recommendations, there is now a sustainable strategy for ongoing engagement, a dedicated complaints procedure and positive top 2 organic listing in Google for their search term.

“It’s great to have all of the Havering College unofficial pages all under our official page. We can now connect to all of the people who have associated themselves with us, which is very important for our social media strategy.”

When your staff and students are so enthusiastic about their College, it can be hard to keep track of the vast number of various Facebook pages all bearing the College’s name. How do you go about bringing these unregulated pages into a singular manageable one, fully owned by your brand?

This is what one of our favourite clients asked us. Havering College were so impressed with our previous success advertising their apprenticeships, they came to us for help with their Facebook site.

The College had already embraced Facebook as a means of promoting themselves and communicating with their potential students, and approached Net Natives to create an official Facebook page, making their online presence stronger and more unified.

The Challenge?

Whilst Havering College had already built a great page, staff and students at the college had also created a number of unofficial, community and Check-In pages. A massive total of 31 unofficial pages were found on Facebook, over which Havering College had no control.

Appreciating the need to take ownership of their brand, Havering College decided to use Net Natives’ Brand Strategy service, to acquire all Havering College pages, and ensure the migration of all fans to the official one. This would allow the College to build connections with those who had become affiliated with the unofficial pages and also give them the power monitor content and comments.

What did Net Natives do?

Our Facebook Brand Strategy facilitates the migration of fans attached to unofficial Facebook pages to the official one, resulting in a clean brand identity online. It ensures that when people affiliate themselves to what they believe to be your page, they are on the official one, and not a duplicate.

The Result?

By migrating the fans of all 31 pages onto the main page, the official page’s connections increased from 655 to 1,216, an impressive 86% increase! Have a look at it here. Havering College gained the ability to engage with a much wider audience of fans and to ensure they had full control over their presence on Facebook.

“It’s great to have all of the Havering College unofficial pages all under our official page. We can now connect to all of the people who have associated themselves with us, which is very important for our social media strategy.”

“Having Net Natives merge our unofficial pages could easily be one of the key factors in us getting the success we want with our 5th album – we were able to suddenly appear in the news feeds of people who had all but forgotten us, and who are now interacting with us all the time. Our page just keeps growing and getting busier and busier… thanks Natives, you rock!”

Client Background

InMe are an English alternative rock band based in Brentwood, Essex, who have to date released 4 highly successful studio albums, spawning a number of Top 40 UK singles and years of touring and playing great shows and festivals around the UK, Europe and the world.

Needs of the Client

InMe had already embraced Facebook as a means of promoting themselves and communicating with their fans, but approached Net Natives to really make their page grow further. Whilst InMe had already built a great page, their many fans had created a considerable amount of unofficial fan and community pages, which the band had no ownership or control over content. The band had been trying (without success) for almost a year to try and claim these pages from Facebook as their own (and gain access to the fans that were rightfully theirs) but had not been able to do so. Then they called Net Natives after seeing a blog entry on our Facebook Page Merge service.

Net Natives Solution

We have a close working relationship with Facebook due to the amount of advertising work we do with the platform, and this allows us to be able to perform certain tasks that the average user cannot.  One such service is that we are able to authenticate (get Facebook to recognise it as “real”) the main page of a brand, and merge all imposters into this one!

Results - Successful Acquisition of 11,710 Fans

Within 5 days, InMe were delighted to see that their Facebook presence had increased DRAMATICALLY.  By merging the numerous pages, the official page’s connections increased from 5258 to an amazing 16968, an impressive 223% increase… wow!

At the time of writing, InMe’s Facebook page is up to 19,185 Fans and you’d be hard pressed to find a more committed, engaged and loyal bunch of fans as theirs.

http://www.intcorp.com/

“Net Natives expertise in targeted and social media advertising was intrinsic to the success of this campaign, and we would love to work with them again.”

- Amris

Client Background

As an industry pioneer, Amris offer some of the most powerful, intuitive and easy-to-use online attraction, sourcing and selection solutions available for online recruitment, and have worked with some very large companies including Wetherspoon, Harveys & BMA.

Needs of the Client

Amris sought to employ a talented senior PHP developer to join their team and wanted to use social media in the forefront of their recruitment strategy, to ensure attracting the best possible candidates.

Net Natives solution

Net Natives provided a great opportunity to use social media as a means of attracting some perfect candidates for the job vacancy.  We recommended the use of both Facebook and LinkedIn as platforms for advertising their position, identified a target demographic and designed multiple adverts with different copy and images in order to determine which variations were most successful for Amris. The most successful variations on the advert were then promoted further to optimise the campaigns effectiveness.

In order to ensure a high level of relevant responses from the advert, Net Natives targeted individuals with a registered experience of web design on Facebook, and with relevant PHP experience on LinkedIn. By using a variety of Net Natives expertise, Amris were able to benefit from the comprehensive targeting and social media expertise of the Net Natives team for their campaign.

We thought it would be interesting to see how some of the bigger colleges rank against each other on Facebook.  Of course, there’s no definitive all-encompassing score, so what we did was took a simple measurement of the “engagement rate” of all the members of the 157 Group and put them into a convenient league table for you.

The engagement rate is a percentage and is worked out by the following simple calculation:

Engagement rate =

Talking about ÷ Number of likes

Here’s how the results came out…

(Colleges with “n/a” did not have an official facebook page presence that we could use to measure our score)

First, a disclaimer: We are not claiming that this statistic shows a college to be necessarily “better”  - because it does not take into account the frequency or detail of each interaction, so for example it will not reflect a frequently commenting individual.  However it is a useful benchmark as it is telling you what proportion of your users are reacting to the content you post in some way.

REMEMBER – Social media is a two-way process and in order to maintain a great relationship with your users, you want to be engaging them as much as possible so that they remain interested in your content and you as a brand.

Try working out your own engagement rate, and keep a note of it each month.  Then, have a go at getting that number to creep up… just keep it fresh, keep it fun, keep it interesting and see what works for YOU and your audience.

WANT TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ENGAGING YOUR AUDIENCE ON FACEBOOK?
Email gazz@netnatives.co.uk to request some more info.

In the meantime, read THIS WHITEPAPER about Facebook Insights for 21 UK colleges – some top tips in there for you!

Happy engaging…

So… we’ve been looking at lots and lots of numbers over the last few days.  Net Natives have been busy analysing Facebook Insights data for over 20 colleges, a number of which belong to the 157 Group, and others being smaller colleges.  The result is a unique White Paper detailing the interesting results in areas such as user demographics, engagement rate and content.

We wanted to share a little (but useful) nugget of information with you, that we unearthed when we were investigating some trends we found in the data…

Colleges without Facebook links on their website home page are losing traffic.

It’s as simple as that.  The colleges getting the most external links to their Facebook from their own site have prominent, graphic Facebook links on their home page and are benefitting from hundreds of visits to their Facebook page.

There are colleges without a Facebook link on their site – and they are missing out on all these extra visits.  Some are getting no traffic coming from their main website! Clearly a wasted opportunity. If you’ve gone to the trouble of building a good website you might as well maximise it’s potential.

It’s not rocket science… with any college website – you just can’t guarantee repeat traffic, and some prospective students may only visit once. But as you will know, Facebook is massively popular with 50% of users returning daily, so it’s mega important to try and get users connecting with you on your Facebook from the beginning, on that very first visit.

And that’s not very likely to happen if you don’t have a decent link to your Facebook Page on your website!

The Net Natives 2-Step Plan…

• Have a big Facebook logo link on your home page, in an obvious place where it can’t be missed!
• Enjoy the extra visits to your Facebook page.

At Net Natives we recognise the importance of the Internet in influencing the public of what they think about your company. Employees joining in and helping share your company and direction through blogging and interaction in social media is a good thing, as long as you are within in the guidelines of your social media privacy policy.

Companies should be committed to supporting your right to interact knowledgeably and socially in the blogosphere and on the Internet through blogging and interaction in social media. Ford Motor shows us great example of their policy which fully outlines the core guidelines.

A good social media policy will help you open up a respectful and knowledgeable interaction with everyone on the Internet. They also protect the privacy, confidentiality, and interests of your company and current and potential products, employees, partners, customers, and competitors.

What’s your social media privacy policy?

September/October 2011

“Net Natives really understood our needs and achieved maximumreturn on our marketing spend.”

As a college, you are constantly trying to ensure as many young people in your area aspossible are enrolled with you and are developing into well-educated adults. You are also aware of the number of disengaged young people who have slipped through the net, andare now at a loss. So how do you reach out to this section of society which most needs it?

The Challenge?

Filton College provides courses in South Gloucestershire and Bristol for local, regional,national and international learners, educating approximately 12,000 students from theage of 14 to adulthood. They had some very specific criteria for the demographic thatthey wanted to target. The College wanted to target their local NEETs (Not in Education,Employment or Training) in the 16-22 age group, with the aim of promoting their veryclever initiative to get young people studying and working.

What did Net Natives do?

Being the daring and expert bunch we are for the education sector we took to this challengewith verve! We built a variety of Facebook advertising campaigns, which on averageconsisted of 80 individual adverts that we could test, track and optimise to over 149,000Facebook users who matched their geographic and demographic profiling.

Our Facebook advertising experts then closely managed the campaign night and day (okay,just day) to ensure we were pushing the adverts which were gaining the lowest cost-per-click and gaining the highest click-through-rate.

The Result?

Due to our ever diligent team, we were able to ensure that their adverts were displayeda phenomenal 23 million times in total. Net Natives are responsible for a massive 165applications – an amazing third of the total from less than 20% of Filton’s campaign spend!

Filton College were so impressed with our efforts that they had the following very kindwords to say about us:

“We continue to be impressed with the success of the work Net Natives perform for ourmarketing goals. Over the past 5 months Net Natives have been helping us attract NEETs inour area and we have seen an incredible 165 (33%) of our 500 total applicants generatedby them. And what makes this even more impressive is that these results have come fromless than 20% of our total spend, across all the channels we have been using. Net Nativeshave come up trumps again and achieved beyond our expectation of return from ourmarketing spend”.

To find out what we can do for your next event or just to have a chat about all things social media, get in touch with ben@netnatives.co.uk

Social media analysts Klout recently published a list of the Top 10 colleges ranked by their influence.  Klout originally just measured Twitter influence but can now incorporate Facebook Pages, YouTube and a variety of other platforms.

We don’t know if they compared non US colleges or not to get these scores (as they are all American institutions), but these are an interesting starting point for any of you who are looking to build a bigger Twitter influence and would like to see how some top Tweeters are going about it.

Net Natives will shortly be producing a Newsletter which will feature a leaderboard of the UK’s most engaging Colleges, based on Facebook activity. If you want to find out about this at the first opportunity, then email hello@netnatives.co.uk and like/follow our Facebook and Twitter

You can click on the Klout links above to access and see the breakdown of scores once you have signed in, but for now, just get clicking on the links below and follow the Top 10 on Twitter!  See if you agree with Klout in terms of their influence and how they go about things. They are all undeniably popular Tweeters, but what do you think of their content?

1. Texas A&M University – http://twitter.com/#!/TAMU
2. University of Wisconsin-Madison http://twitter.com/#!/UWMadison
3. Harvard University – http://twitter.com/#!/HARVARD
4. University of Oklahoma – http://twitter.com/#!/UofOklahoma
5. Stanford University – http://twitter.com/#!/Stanford
6. Indiana University Bloomington – http://twitter.com/#!/IUBloomington
7. Syracuse University – http://twitter.com/#!/SyracuseU
8. University of California – http://twitter.com/#!/Cal
9. Louisiana State University – http://twitter.com/#!/lsu
10. Marquette University – http://twitter.com/#!/MarquetteU

(A Net Natives Speculation)

By now you may well have heard of the new Facebook Timeline feature. It’s a super revamp of the classic profile and is much more content-rich, allowing you to navigate by year/month, area, and so on.  For the users, it’s undoubtedly going to add to the whole Facebook experience.

At this stage – it is NOT known which features, if any, Facebook will be implementing. But nevertheless we are excited about the potential changes and benefits that are to be gained if they do.

After I got it set up on my profile today, I had a good old fiddle and a bit of a think about how some of it’s key aspects could be used to help build stronger engagement and perception of your business.  Here is what I thought…

Much Stronger Visual Branding

 

Timeline allows you to upload a large picture of your choosing to act as the header of your profile.  The displayed picture is 851×315 pixels, but you can upload a larger photo and drag it around to view just the area that you wish (like the way you edit a profile picture thumbnail image).

In terms of prime real-estate for advertising your brand, the Cover image area is almost 3 times as large as the current Page Profile image, and a much better shape congruent with a more typical website layout. This large space allows a lot more scope for advertising than the previous image, as well as having a strong visual branding.

You would want to include:

• Company logo
• Website URL
• Attractive images to catch the eye
• Key promotions & Calls to Action (Be sure to join our mailing list for offers! etc)

Achievements, Milestones & History

A feature that I love is the ability to just go back in your own timeline and put in things you missed! So if I got a 25m swimming certificate when I was 10 (YES!) then I can navigate back to that year, and put a photo of it up and write about it.

For a college or similar institution, the possibilities are endless. Think of how Apple’s timeline would look, for example. The company was founded on April 1st 1976, so that would be their first entry.  The most recent would be the sad loss of Steve Jobs, and in between would be all the great stuff they did such as the iPhone, iTunes and so on. All the key milestones in their company history can be added now and interested parties can easily access it.

• You could add in when a new Principal started work, or when a lecturer retired.
• You could post up exam results for each year
• Any awards the college receieved
• Press cuttings & interviews
• Old photos of the institution
• Footage of special events (videos of concerts you put on etc)

The new timeline, when applied to Pages, will allow you to add engaging, rich content which is organised in a sensible, life-relevant way.

Currently, your fans can only interact with your recent status updates unless they are prepared to do some pretty hardcore scrolling and clicking on “show older posts”. Even then they can only move in reverse chronological order with no way to skip a section.

Interaction is key – and by giving your users a history of interesting and fun things to interact with, you would be able to grow your fanbase and increase your prominence in News Feed compared to your competitors.

Promote Your Favourite Content

Facebook has long had the ability to hide unwanted stories on your news feed.  However the new Timeline gives you even more options.

• Hide or delete it entirely with the pencil icon
• If you want to strongly feature it – click on the star and it goes the full width!

Once you click on the star, this is how it appears – lovely full width:

This feature is ideal for really showcasing a current posting and making it stand out. Got an Open Day coming up? Use the maximum space that you can to promote it.  Make it obvious which posts are important, and make the experience of browsing your Timeline easy for the user.

Favourite Icons

Currently pages are limited to rather tiny icons and text links appearing underneath the main profile picture. These link to the Facebook classic apps such as Wall & Info, and also to any custom tabs you have added. Like this:

However on the new Timeline they are much larger graphical links. If Facebook does implement timeline on Pages, and the developer is able to add these larger custom icons, then it would be another great space to really highlight what it is your are trying to promote via your custom tabs. Here’s how they look on the new Timeline:

• Find out about our next Open Day
• Download our Course Guide
• Email Us
• Read testimonials from Students

On the personal profile Timeline, you can select what apps are represented in the boxes.  This feature will be great for Pages however as it stands, it only shows 4 of these links on a profile and then has a “more” button – so if it remained like that then you would need to think carefully about what the most important things to showcase were.

Getting all Geographical

One of the coolest features, thought probably not the most useful, is the Maps integration. For a while now you have been able to tag location in your posts, and now that this can be added to photos/posts retrospectively, the Map application shows you where you where, and when.

If this was implemented, it would only be relevant to certain types of Page (colleges don’t tend to go off travelling the world!) but you could perhaps use it in terms of Open Days and any other kind of event where the college is represented officially in a different environment. In terms of the user, having your college listed as a Place is also very important – so that other users can see it pop up the map and this might drive traffic towards your official page.

The Future

Presently, it’s a waiting game. We don’t know to what extent Facebook intend to implement the Timeline feature for Pages. We feel the most likely & immediately useful changes would be:

• Adding the Cover Image
• Navigate by date to view history
• Featuring posts

What do you think?

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.

After the fundamental announcements at Facebook’s f8 conference, all owners of pages that have custom app on their Facebook pages received this timely reminder

“Upgrade Your App to OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS by October 1st…all apps on Facebook need to support OAuth 2.0 and HTTPS to make the platform more secure.”

This basically means that if your page’s apps don’t adhere to Facebook’s standard then they won’t be supported. In Facebook’s own words, they “will no longer work”

It feels like the “millenium bug” all over again… except this time it may actually happen.

YOUR Facebook could die

All About Security

Facebook apps (custom page tabs, games and any non-standard Facebook stuff) live within a magic window in the website called the “canvas” (the middle bit basically). It’s a thing called an iFrame – which allows a webpage to pull through another one inside itself.

Up until now, your custom content could be just a standard web document – http://www.yourwebsite.com/yourpage.html etc.

From October 1st, any content being pulled through MUST (I repeat, MUST) come from a secure server. A web document coming from a secure server has the prefix https:// and has an SSL Certificate – this ensures that communication between the server and your browser are secure. It stops people spying on you and nicking your information basically!

According to Facebook, this is not optional. You now HAVE to have it.  So if you are hosting your own app/page and you don’t have this set up on your server, then your custom page could well go down.

Only Affects Custom Pages/Apps

Note: It’s not going to be your whole Facebook that goes down – your wall etc will be undamaged, but any clever bits you’ve added on will be doomed if you haven’t made the necessary preparations.

What can you do?

1. If you are hosting your own apps on your own server or with a webmaster – get in touch with them immediately and see if your server is already set up with https://  If not, get them to sort it pronto! You need to then edit the Facebook app canvas URL to pull this through.
2. If you are using a third party provider within Facebook – sit tight and cross your fingers! We don’t know which ones will be unchanged and which ones might go down.
3. If you want a Facebook app/page built that will be secure, engaging, and professional – then contact us

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.

When I’m not busy writing about Social Media, one of the other main things I do is promote club and live music events in a local venue.  I’ve been doing this part-time for almost 10 years now and I still love it – though nowadays I’m more excited by the behind the scenes stuff than swanning around trying to look cool… honest!

So yesterday I had to go to the University of Brighton Freshers Fair and represent my nights. If you’ve ever been to a Freshers Fair (which I’m betting most of you have), then you will know it is a manic free-for-all of students trying to get loads of goodies – reminiscent of the classic Argos advert where loads of hands are grabbing at the catalogue. Some of the biggest companies around can be found there enticing the new students, including players such as Vodafone & Domino’s Pizza (I got a pre-loaded 1Gb memory stick loaded with music & some free pizza, so thanks guys!).

Last year Freshers Fair didn’t go quite as well for us – we just had a higgledy piggledy table of flyers and posters and no real strategy other than “trying to get people to sign up to our mailing list”.  We didn’t benefit anywhere near as much as we could have from the thousands of new party-minded students – so this time I worked out a much better strategy, and here is what we did.

So our goals were to:

• Show students who we are & what we do
• Have them sign up to our mailing list
• Get them to Like the venue on Facebook

The first point was pretty easy and just a matter of making sure we had the appropriate print materials and loads of cool branded freebies – we had frisbees with maps on, events listings flyers, sunglasses, energy drinks and lots of other fun stuff. So every person that came over asking for an energy drink – the minimum they were leaving with was a listings flyer and a verbal description of the venue from yours truly.

But very few of them got away that easily…

We had created two very powerful incentives and made them very easy for students to do. AND WE MADE TWO MASSIVE BANNERS about them!

• Mailing List Signup
  “Guys! Tell you what – pop your email address in this box & I’ll give you a discount card now, that normally costs money and gets you cheaper drinks EVERY NIGHT.”
  
• Like us on Facebook
  “Right, all you have to do is either like “The Pav Tav” on your smart phone now, or you can use this laptop here and log in to like it straight away – and I’ll give you a voucher now for a FREE burger AND a free pint!”

We made good use of our promotional items whilst getting people to Like our Facebook and sign up to the mailing list.  We could easily throw in an energy drink or other freebie to seal the deal!

We got hundreds of Facebook likes in just a few hours – and the same with email subscribers.

Plus all these students got given flyers and told about the venue – and we gave them free stuff which makes us seem nice! (which we are)

The Bottom Line

So that’s how we did it within the context of a venue for booze loving freshers. But we think there is scope for a lot more.

Example: Applying these ideas in the Further Education setting

Setting up your incentives

Picture the scene – you’re a college/university and you want to attract potential students to your page so that you can engage them with interesting content and hopefully get them to enrol.

First, work out what you can offer. If you have a promotional budget you could produce giveaways such as branded key rings, stationary, USB memory sticks, or anything else you can get your hands on.  Another option is to look at what discounts you could offer within your institution – can you give a voucher for a discounted haircut? A cheap or free meal voucher in the restaurant? This will vary from college to college but we imagine there will be scope for everyone to be creative and make an enticing incentive.

Using your incentives

Think about opportunities that arise within the course of your day to day business.

Do you have a general reception desk that potential students might come to and might ask for information? If so, 1) ask if they have a smartphone, 2) tell them the incentive if they like you, 3) get them to show you it has been liked, 4) give them the incentive. That’s 30 seconds work. As we said, you can have a separate incentive for mailing list. You could also have a netbook/tablet that they could use to log in to Facebook if they don’t have a smart phone.

Another massive opportunity would be Open Days, or any kind of Careers Fair you might be in attendance at. Get down there with your vouchers, giveaways or whatever you’ve got, and get yourself some likes there and then.

Happy bribing… let us know if YOU have any ideas or success using this.

Facebook unveiled some revolutionary changes this week, with some of the more profound ones making their debut at yesterdays F8 Conference.  Today, Net Natives have mostly been drinking coffee and pondering how all these updates are going to change things. Here are some of our preliminary thoughts on:

1. Posting Without Liking You
2. Timelines
3. Gestures
4. Social Collaboration
5. Advertising

1.  Posting without Liking You

People can now write on YOUR page without having to like you first! Here’s four key points to remember…

1. Calls to action even more important
   People aren’t obliged to like you – the days of “fan gating” landing pages are OVER (hurrah)!), so don’t bother just having a page which relies purely on getting people to like you. It is still very important to maintain a core audience who want to engage with your brand, so LIKES remain important, but are no longer the core driver. so it’s important to give them as many other (tempting) options as you can. Pages will now have more casual users just browsing them than ever before – so you really need to make an effort to coax them in. Colleges for example should ensure they are using a landing page featuring relevant downloads (prospectus etc), enquiries form, mailing list sign up, photo gallery and so on. Something like this from Farnborough College which has a focus on the like but with multiple alternative calls to action.
2. Make your wall content even more engaging
   You can get your content out to people who hadn’t liked you – provided they engage with you.  Edgerank (the way Facebook decides what content to show in the newsfeed) means the more that people interact with you, and the better your content, the more likely people will see you in their news feed.  This is now independent of whether someone has committed to “like” you – and will open up a much wider potential audience if you do it right.
3. Being the voice of your brand
   At any time, any number of non-likers could be sat on the sidelines, asking questions, commenting on what you share. This is your chance to sell yourself to potentially new fans. Get it right and you may gain further likes/sales/fans/enrolments, always paint your brand in a consistent and interesting manner.
4. The art of moderation
   ANYONE can post on YOUR wall. Whether this is to respond to comments or to remove them if they are offensive, further vigilance is going to be a necessity as the opportunities for Facebook “trolls” have now increased massively.

2. Timelines and how they can be used to enhance Pages

User profiles now have a “Timeline” – effectively a scrapbook of a persons life.  It shows more things the more recent they are, showing less the further back you go, apart from highlights.  The list is populated in reverse chronicle order.  A link on the right allows you to navigate through the years with just a click.

Now whilst Facebook has NOT explicitly stated whether this will be available for Pages – we think it’s almost inevitable that this feature will be rolled out.

At the moment you have an “on the wall” strategy for engagement – and a “behind the wall” strategy for attraction.  The timeline will add to this and act as an organic, dynamic “About Us” page – a new “within the wall” area, if you will.

3. Gestures – New Verbs other than “like”

Facebook have now introduced verbs.  For the last year it has been possible to “like” pretty much any entity (noun, effectively) – this year Facebook has introduced the ability to use other verbs.

“Before we added nouns so you could ‘like’ anything you wanted. This year we’re adding verbs. Now you don’t have to ‘like’ a book, you can say you ‘read it’. Now you don’t have to like a movie, you can say you ‘watched it’” – Mark Zuckerberg

These new “gestures” (as Facebook calls them) offer business users a whole new way of getting their fans to interact with them.  Facebook showcased some news apps that have already been created . They automatically share what a user has “read” and make this viewable by their friends in news feed. The friend then just clicks on the interaction and is taken to the app where they can view the article. Massive viral potential.
This is BIG news for the education sector, for example.  Colleges can ensure that their e-prospectus is seen by people Ticker/Newsfeed/Timeline as having been “read”, helping to promote the brand further.

4. Social Collaboration

With the new Gestures allowing a plethora of interactions, new apps could open up new ways of learning and doing business.  People will be able to share, within the Facebook platform, what they are working on, what they are learning/have learned, and who they are studying with, for example.  We expect a wave of new apps embracing these ideas; if you think about the actions, the apps will follow.  New Facebook will likely be key in bringing about collaboration in many new areas.

5. Advertising

Some of the biggest implications for you as a business is the accuracy with which you will be able to target new customers/students/employees/users… Gestures will allow you to target, for example, people who are currently reading a certain article. This ultra targeted, granular approach will make the Facebook platform more powerful than ever before for advertising.

However – this will require great expertise.  To make the most of this will require ad campaigns to be more creative than ever, targeting people on multiple complex factors which are changing from minute to minute.

We can’t wait to get our teeth stuck into this!

Twitter is on fire at the moment with lots of people trending with #newfacebook, and as usual it’s an entertaining read.  From my personal use of Facebook it’s a certainty that any change in the platform will be met with fierce resistance in the form of status updates, followed by the creation of pointless groups boldly demanding that Facebook be returned to it’s previous state.

One of the biggest changes today is the addition of “Ticker” – a LIVE mini news feed that sits directly above the chat sidebar.  People see updates on what their friends are doing in real-time and by hovering over any activity, this can be commented on/liked etc in a convenient pop up box.

It appears to be fairly chronological and unbiased in it’s updates, looking at mine I am seeing people appear in it that I don’t tend to see in my News Feed (I always had mine set to top news setting). These aren’t people I had hidden or anything like that – just people whose updates were not as… um… interesting.
So here are a few key facts and observations from us at Net Natives

• No Hiding
  Facebook have declared that “You can’t close Ticker”; though you can make it a bit smaller, you will still be seeing live updates scrolling through.  No doubt some users will manage to hide it somehow but there isn’t an official way presently. This is a pretty intrusive change and I’m already seeing people fretting about this.
• Distracting
  I literally can’t stop looking at it. It’s almost hypnotic, and I am pretty sure that’s exactly what Facebook intended.  The eye is drawn to movement, as I’m sure you know, and every little scroll steals my eye away from whatever I was looking at before and takes it right up to that corner.  Then I forget where I was looking in the first place, and continue staring blankly.
• Friends not Pages – for now
  Ticker appears to be associated with Friends activity rather than Pages at the moment. I’ve watched mine for ages and haven’t seen one update from a Page, though these are appearing in News Feed still. Given how fast Facebook is changing lately, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this appear soon.  Though Page updates aren’t showing, updates about friends newly liking a Page and so on, are appearing.
• The inescapable News Feed
  As Facebook made this almost unhideable – there is some good potential here for brands. Users are now forced to have this on screen and hence when someone Likes your page, this will show in Ticker.  Especially if Facebook start featuring Page updates, this is going to be a great opportunity. At this time, if this negates some of the relevance of the Edgeranks forumula, remains to be seen.
• And just on a fun note – Ticker it sounds a bit like/rhymes with Twitter
  Everyone else is saying that Facebook is copying Twitter, so we’ll jump on the band wagon

When considering your social media policy (read our guide for some more information), think about the community standards Facebook created to encourage “correct behaviour” in users.

http://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/

Facebook is a global community where millions of people connect with each other. Each of these people represents unique opinions, ideals and cultural values. Out of consideration for this diversity, we work to foster an environment where everyone can openly discuss issues and express their views, while respecting the rights of others.

Facebook just went live with some changes to both profile controls and how sharing works. Users have a multitude of new options to play with – but what are the implications for YOU as a business using the Facebook platform to promote your brand? And how helpful is it for a business to understand the ever-changing Facebook user experience?  Here’s the Net Natives lowdown…

Tag people they are with
Users can click the friends icon on the share box and select friends. There’s no need for the @ symbol either. Shared content with tagged friends will appear in that friends news feeds and might be seen by their friends.
Post content that users will WANT to share with their friends. It’s the ideal way to get your content out there to fresh faces. People like to be the first to share a great joke, image, video. So take advantage of this fact.

Show where they are (or were)
It is now possible for a user to select a location, and attach this to anything they share… without the need to have to be there. No need to physically “check in” from the physical location on a mobile device – users can tag a location right from their desktop PC, retrospectively, currently or in the future! Location tagging can be for a Place (eg. a bar, shop) and also a Town/City. It is possible for users to turn this whole feature off if they don’t like it.

If your business is appropriate for having a Facebook Place – then make sure it is set up! Colleges, Bars, Shops and any other businesses where a facebook user might physically visit should utilise this. It lets friends see what their friends have been doing… and knowing that a friend is already using a business is great word-of-mouth advertising, and free!

Change privacy settings on-the-fly
As a user shares content, they are able to choose who is able to see it. Everyone, Friends, or custom (friends of their choosing). Sharing content selectively via the Facebook News Feed is new. Letting selected friends know about something has only been previously possible with messages, but messages are viewed as more “intrusive” than status updates.

We don’t think this is going to be a massive change but predict that there will be a few things shared that otherwise might not have been because users can leave out friends that they know won’t want to hear about it. Businesses could take advantage with wording like “Why not share this discount with some of your best friends?” and highlight the personal nature of the recommendation rather than the slightly spammier “invite all friends” approach. Remember, ENGAGEMENT is key in making sure that your content is seen by Facebook users, so anything inviting comments & sharing is great! Check out our blog on Edgerank to learn more.

Review new tags
Users will have the chance to reject or approve photo tags or being tagged in a post. This feature can be switched on in the “Manage How Tags Work” section.

It’s not uncommon for pubs and clubs to use photographers to help build awareness of their venue or event. The photographer snaps happy punters and the photo will often contain a watermark logo/website or similar so that it’s very clear where the photo comes from. Also posting photo content helps to get you into peoples news feeds – see our article on Edgerank. Then the photos are shared and hey presto, new people get to see the brand when the photos crop up in news feeds. This change means people could choose not to accept these photo tags (in the past they just had to delete them). So make sure your photos are nice if that’s what you are doing! Whilst the feature does not appear to be available for Facebook Pages yet, if that feature is brought in at some point, it would help brands avoid negative publicity by vetting comments by so-called internet “trolls” who for some reason amuse themselves by writing derogatory or offensive things online.

Change privacy settings for existing posts
Users are now able to change share settings retrospectively. Most of us have shared something with everyone and then wished we hadn’t? Probably whilst intoxicated… anyway users can now go back and limit who can see it (to select friends for example), whereas previously they’d have just had to delete it (or lump it!).

We don’t think this is going to be a landmark change really for businesses. It’s hard to think of many implications – even if the post was pertaining to your brand – by the time a post is getting old, it isn’t likely to get seen anyway. This is more a case of Facebook being seen to rival Google+ for the amount of control on privacy. Whethere the function is useful is another matter!

Custom sharing of profile information
Much like when a user shares some content, there is now the option next to profile items (e.g. Hometown) to choose to share with Everyone, Friends or a custom group of user-defined people.  Facebook Pages don’t get to know a great deal about their users because they are restricted to a rather limited profile when looking at a standard personal account from the Page’s perspective. But this change might mean there is even less for us to see. However, information about overall user demographics is easily accessible via the “Insights” section on the right hand side of any page you administrate.

“View Profile As”
Next to the Edit Profile link is a “View Profile As” option… users can now view their profile as if they are someone else, e.g. a stranger, a connected friend and so on. Saves them having to borrow a friends user ID to check no one can see their private stuff!

Final Thoughts from Net Natives

Phew. So that’s it in a rather social nutshell. This is clearly an enhancement in privacy control and will enable much more targetted sharing for the user; no doubt many users will welcome these changes. However, whether users overall embrace this fine tuning, rather than see it as a sequence of extra clicks they didn’t previously have to even think about, remains to be seen. Whilst some of the changes really don’t affect us businesses as users of the Facebook Platform – we do need to have our fingers on the pulse and know what the user is experiencing from their end! It’s all well and good putting an advert on Facebook, making a fancy user experience, and all manner of other things, but if we don’t know what the users overall experience of the platform is, we might miss the boat. Bottom line – Facebook takes up a whole browser screen. Our bit (pages, ads etc) takes up only a portion. So make sure you know what’s going on people… there’s a whole screen out there!

Yesterday I got a pretty intriguing message on Facebook chat from a friend:

“Have you noticed that Page Updates are now showing up in the normal messages inbox?”

And no, I hadn’t. And REALLY?!

I quizzed my friend on this immediately. He was kind enough to send me a screen shot proving beyond reasonable doubt that he did indeed have a message, from a Page, in his normal inbox.

I was pretty excited by this point. One of the Facebook pages I manage (for my band) has over 18,000 Likes and we are working on an album… the idea of being able to contact all of these people directly was pretty exciting. I considered doing a victory lap around the office but changed my mind pretty quickly.

Being able to get into your fans inbox is a feature that has been missing (and wanted by many) for a long time. Facebook gave us the ability to “update” fans – but anyone well versed in the use of Pages will know that these updates are not seen. They go into a separate messages subfolder, now called “other”, which no-one really looks at – because they know it is just full of spam! Or they don’t even know it is there.

I like to think of myself as a bit of a social scientist so I decided to conduct a highly complex experiment…. so I sent an update. I also got one of the other Net Natives to like the band, to double check.  I sent a little message to let fans know what was going on with the new album. If it worked, this was going to be pretty awesome.

I waited, eagerly checking my inbox. Nothing came. Then still nothing. But THEN – after about ten minutes – in my normal inbox I see a message from the band. YES! At this point I am proper excited and start pointing out this fact to my co-Natives.

Then I had a slight sinking feeling… what if I only see the updates in this way because I am an ADMIN of the page?  So experiment number two had to commence. My colleague had already Liked the page, but wasn’t admin. Had she got the message like I had?

This morning when I went back into work I had an email saying she had received the message (finally) – but it was in the “other” folder. Disappointing!

From my insanely complex mailout experiment I have drawn the following conclusions…

1) Updates sent from Facebook pages unfortunately still go into the “other” sub folder
2) … unless you are a Page admin, in which case it goes into your main inbox.

I guess if you really think about it, it’s a bit of a grey area how good it would ACTUALLY be if Facebook did implement this feature. Sure, for marketing professionals this would be a pretty awesome development.  BUT for the end user – it’s opening the door to a potentially relentless barrage of emails and “don’t forget to visit our Page…” messages blah blah blah.

My inbox is already overspilling with event-related messages and spam from fake profiles promoting & falsely hyping local club nights, bands etc.  If pages actually get the ability to do this, then the signal to noise ratio in the inbox will mean a lot more messages get overlooked because the user won’t be able to see the forest for the trees!

Do we REALLY want to add another spam avenue into Facebook? Answers on a postcard please.

It’s fairly safe to say that if you are reading this, you are already familiar with the Facebook News Feed…  it’s the first thing you see once you have logged in, occupying the largest portion of the screen. Essentially, it is a constantly updating list of the things that people in your friendship network are posting. But you probably knew that already right?

What you may NOT know, however, is how this list is actually created. Why do you see some things, and not others? Marketing professionals have had an idea about how this works for quite some time, but recently Facebook revealed some very interesting details about the algorithm used to put the News Feed together, shedding some welcome light on this much speculated topic.

Not all posts are created equal

At the top of the News Feed on the right hand side are two options – “Top Stories” or “Most Recent”.  On the default setting of “Top Stories”, Facebook attempts to show you content that it believes is going to be the most relevant and interesting to you in terms of the brands and people that you have liked and friended. “Most Recent” is simply a chronological list of updates by your brands/friends, much like a timeline on Twitter.

Top Stories is default for a reason, and this isn’t really that surprising – people want to see content that interests them, not just an unadulterated list of who’s going where, and who’s cooking what! This has massive implications for any brands seeking to use the Facebook platform for engaging with their consumers.  Simply because – if you don’t get into the “Top Stories” – your content is not likely to be seen.

Facebook decides what content to display on your News Feed by using an algorithm called EdgeRank. When you publish an object into the News Feed (such as a status update, video or photo share)  and someone interacts with it, Facebook calls this interaction an “Edge”… Edge’s are created when someone comments on your status, likes your photo, and so on.

You need your EdgeRank score to be as good as possible in order for you to maximise your chances of appearing in your potential fans/customers/friends news feeds! It’s as simple as that. Don’t let your updates be left alone in the dark whilst your competitors ones shine out in YOUR potential customers newsfeeds….

What you can do

There are three main known factors included in the EdgeRank algorithm; and we’ve provided a few simple tried-and-tested actions you can take to tweak them…

1. Affinity

This refers to the level of engagement that users already have for your Facebook page.  If a user is regularly engaging with your brand, by commenting your posts, liking them, sharing your content and so on – then they would have a higher Affinity score than a user who seldom (or never) engages with your Facebook activity. It’s also essential to note that affinity is a one way process!!! It’s about how the user interacts with you – not how you interact with them. You could like everything another page posted but if they aren’t doing the same back to you, the affinity score will still be low, and you aren’t enhancing your chances of appearing in that user’s news feed. However – if you comment on a post and this comment initiates that user/brand to comment back – then you will have increased affinity.

ACTION: Comment on the activity of fans and brands wherever you can, and try to take the opportunity to invite a response. Both on your page/content AND on their pages/content. It is this response from the end-user that is KEY in getting your content into their News Feed.

2. Edge Weight

Facebook assigns “weight” to Edges pertaining to certain types of content, and to the way in which a user interacts with it. When posting content, it’s often better to post objects which are known to be highly weighted – although there is currently no definitive list, it is safe to say that video and photo links are higher weighted than a simple text status update.
In terms of interacting WITH your content, and creating Edges – if a user comments (rather than just likes) your content, then to that user that piece of content will gain a higher Edge Weight score, and future content is more likely to end up in their News Feed. It is also worth noting that if a user frequently comments upon photos rather than videos, photo’s will be more likely to appear in their News Feeds.

ACTION: Attach higher weighted content such as video or photo’s to your posts where possible, and mix it up a bit (one day do video, one day do pics). And as with Affinity, encourage comments/feedback – if you can turn a “like” into a comment then that user will have both increased Affinity AND your Edge Weight score!

3. Recency

This is the simplest of all the factors in the EdgeRank formula. The older a post is – the lower it’s score – and hence the less likely to appear in News Feeds. This factor decreases regardless of the other two criteria. Therefore even if you post something that attracts hundreds of likes/comments initially – a few days later it won’t be any more likely to show up.

ACTION: Post quality content regularly! Don’t assume your great previous content continues to appear – it doesn’t. Take note of what generated interest, and post something new – following our guidelines above.

We hope you found that all useful, feedback welcomed on www.facebook.com/netnatives (we want a high EdgeRank score too you know!)

Net Natives are pleased to announce an exclusive partnership with Broadbean, the UK’s leading job posting software provider. If you are a Broadbean client you can now get a Branded Facebook Business Page from Net Natives and can use Broadbean’s complementary Facebook recruitment app to post your jobs directly to your page.

But, whether you are a Broadbean client or not, you need to make sure you are leveraging the social network where you clients and candidates spend their time.

“One of our best investments in Social Media.” CBS Butler

Below is the Press Release that has been reprinted in the Recruiter Magazine and OnRec

Broadbean Technology, the global leader in candidate sourcing technology has announced a partnership with Net Natives, aimed at helping their clients extend reach and drive candidate conversion on Facebook, the UK’s most popular social networking site.

As the UK’s leading Facebook recruitment advertising agency, Net Natives has worked with a range of staffing companies and corporate employers to fully integrate Facebook and social recruiting into their ongoing recruitment strategy.

The addition of Net Natives’ Facebook page design expertise and display advertising technology further strengthen Broadbean’s Facebook recruiting application, which is used by thousands of Broadbean users.

The partnership enables two distinct offerings:-

- Net Natives’ range of Facebook business page design packages, including full corporate branding – all fully integrated with the Broadbean app and with improved candidate conversion functionality.

- Through Net Natives, the provision of extremely targeted advertising campaigns will promote jobs and your recruitment brand to the right jobseekers.

Broadbean’s Marketing Director Ricky Wheeler commented, “In the past 18 months, there has been significant uptake across our client base of every social recruiting tool we have developed. Broadbean and Net Natives have worked together for years and, as the requirement for strategic social recruitment marketing increases and our services further align, formalising a partnership was an obvious step forward”.

Steve Evans, Managing Director at Net Natives commented “Having a Facebook recruiting strategy should now be a fundamental part of any recruiter’s DNA, but it’s rarely executed well . Our partnership with Broadbean makes social recruiting through Facebook simple and effective. Thrilled with a partnership that is such fantastic news for the recruitment industry.”

If you want to find out more, contact Steve on 01273 783 846 or steve@netnatives.co.uk

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.

Facebook will be implementing a new parent-child management structure for Places that will allow corporations and organisations to administer all the Places Pages of the local instances of their organisation as well as their main Facebook page.

For colleges and other education establishments, this will mean they can have individual campus Place Pages that current and potential students can check into that will then sit under the College’s main Facebook Page.

There are 4 new changes to Facebook Pages and Places which are:

1.  Campus Locations Tab

There will be a new Locations Tab in the left hand menu on your Facebook Page. The Locations Tab will automatically load the nearest campus for each user. It will allow students to search for locations by postcode. The tab can be moved up or down, or removed altogether.

2. Linking Your Places Pages to Your Main College Page

You will be able to include a link on each Place Page back to your main College Facebook Page making the link between your main page and each of your campus pages easier.

3. Check-in Aggregation

All check-ins made at your different college locations will be included in one aggregated figure on your main College Facebook Page.

4. Mass Places Management

The admins of the main College Facebook Page will automatically have admin access to their subsidiary Facebook Place Pages. This will allow for improved monitoring and control of the various Facebook Places by the relevant college staff.

Of course, we will be incorporating this feature into all our College Facebook Pages and can provide full training on how to utilise this new functionality when it is released . If you would like advice on using this on feature on your page please get in touch, email alex@netnatives.co.uk or call Alex on 01273 783 851.

An Introduction to Sponsored Stories

We all know the biggest influencers in our lives are friends and family. So in advertising the power of seeing recommendations and ‘following a trend’ is extremely effective.

Most friends want to go to the same college as each other, so why not advertise your college courses & open days to your colleges Facebook fans’ friends? The added bonus of featuring their friends” recommendation in the ad will influence their them to respond to your advert and ultimately become a student at your college!

Here’s how it works:

All content is displayed on your fans news feeds, however, when you create a sponsored story it is also displayed on the right hand side of their profile.

There are currently 3 types of sponsored stories:

1.    Page Like Stories

These ads promote your Facebook page to the friends of your Facebook page fans. They include the friend who likes the page in the ad.

2.    Page Post Stories

These ads promote your latest page wall post and can only be seen by the fans of your page. When you make a new post these ads will change automatically, keeping your fans up to date with all your news.

3.    Page Post Like Stories

These ads promote your wall posts to fans of your page and their connections. They include the fan who likes the post in the ad.

Sponsored Stories are an effective way of spreading the good work of your college, if you would like any social media advice, information about tagging your college on Facebook or if you would like us to run Sponsored Stories for your College then please get in touch.