Facebook’s Pages Manager

The iPhone app at first glance didn’t seem worth the extra effort.  I already use the Facebook app to looking at my own profile and you can also access pages you administer directly from the app.  So why bother?

When viewing the pages I administer from a web browser, the information I use a lot are the Insights stats because I’m a huge stats junkie.  Specifically, the “people saw this post” is something I keep a close eye on.

Not sure if you’ve noticed but recently Facebook made a change in an effort to get us to pay to promote our posts, this number has been on a steady decline ever since.  More on this in another post.

I have been paying to promote posts for one of my clients and so far been impressed with the results.  Over the weekend, I paid to promote one of their posts and noticed on the Facebook Pages Manager app a hidden feature.

The app is quite slow and seems “jumpy” when you open it and even when you pull down to refresh.  It also seems to hang when scrolling through your timeline and this is how I found the hidden stats.

If you touch the number “reached”, it will open up the post with insight data at the bottom and an option to promote the post.

The insight data that is available through the app as far as I can tell isn’t available through the web browser or at least not all of it.

I only assume the negative feedback is the result of someone choosing to hide the ad or provides feedback using the form that opens when you click on a sponsored story/event.  I find this to be an interesting stat although I don’t think you should give it a lot of attention unless your promoted post is doing really poorly and you are receiving a lot of negative feedback.  There will always be a few that are annoyed by any advertisement they see.

The statistics that are provided through the web browser provide items that aren’t available on the mobile app for the promoted posts.  If you click on the Promoted link it will open up a popup window with the following stats.

• Page Post Likes
• Page Likes (Important)
• Comments on Page Posts
• Link Clicks
• Check-ins
• Page Post Shares
• Page Mentions
• Page Photo Views

If you do a little comparison of the numbers, they don’t match up.  These screen grabs were taken from the same post within second of each other.  The item that I pay close attention is Page Likes.  This number represents the number of new “fans” or “Likes” to your page.  This means the next time you make a post, share a picture/video, you now have a bigger audience.

You will want to look at each of the stats closely and compare them to your normal posts to determine if using promoted posts makes sense for you.  From a budgeting standpoint, I personally think it is not cost effective to use them for all your posts but on occasion you will get a good return on your investment.

It is still interesting that Facebook has choses to provide different Insights data in the mobile app versus the web browser.  I also don’t understand why the stats don’t match.  There help system online leaves a lot to be desired as well so we are left to figure it out for ourselves.  Please leave a comment below and let me know your experience or if you have questions.

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If you are planning to add Facebook “Like” buttons to your blog posts, a word of caution.  Make sure you know what taxonomy structure (category, page, tag names, etc)  you want because making changes is UGLY!

Why should you care?  I thought you’d never ask!

For those of you less technical or unfamiliar, when someone clicks the “Like” button on a blog post or anything on your website you’ve chosen to include the button, Facebook registers the URL and associates “Open Graph” data with it.  IF you decide to change the taxonomy structure of any of your website, you will lose the open graph data associated with it.  In other words, if you have a lot of popular content, which we all strive to achieve, you would lose the “Like” counts that are listed.  (see below for an example)

Currently there isn’t an easy way to resolve this issue and hopefully Facebook will address this very soon.

(Photo Source: paz.ca)

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Placing pictures in your blog posts makes for a better reading experience.  Finding images you can use for your posts isn’t always easy especially ones that are free.  The statement, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is very true.

One of my favorite quotes by George Lois in the documentary Art & Copy, “Advertising should be like poison gas”.  He was referring to the response we want to get from a reader of a printed ad, and we should strive to get the same reaction from the images we pair with our posts.  This is an opportunity to grab someone’s attention so they will connect with your words.

The images I have selected for this post came from Flickr’s Creative Commons area.  All the images in this section simply require you to give the person credit for using them by posting a link back to the original source.  If you want to take this one step further, you can sometimes contact the person to let them know you’ve used the image in a post as well.  This is really a nice gesture especially if your posts receives a lot of traffic.

Photos courtesy of: cambodia4kidsorg & thetXm

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On this evenings news, TV3 Winchester’s, Alyssa Raymond featured a story about Bright Cowork.  It is in this collaborative work space Buzonya has an “office”.  The word office is in quotes only because it isn’t what you’d typically see of an office environment in corporate America.  In my opinion, this is the best place to start a business because you are surrounded by very talented individuals with an entrepreneurial spirit.  You can read more about the story or watch the video broadcast.

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This week I completed a website for a local chorale group.

The site features a rotating image banner that uses jquery, custom contact form, and a password protected area for members of the group.  This was a fun project and I really enjoyed working with the Director, Michael Main to complete it!

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Here is the latest video I produced for notreble.com.  The voice over was provided by John Mangino.

The video was shot using a Canon HD camcorder, edited in Final Cut Pro X, and the motion graphics created using Motion 5.

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If you want to do a very quick and simple thing to help make your Facebook page look more like your brand and less like Facebook, you can change your profile picture.  I know what you are thinking, but I’ve already added a picture to my page.  Did you know you can make it a lot bigger than just what you see in the thumbnail view?  You can create a picture that is 200 x 600 pixels.  Your image doesn’t have to be the entire 600 pixels high but you will want to be sure you reserve a 150×150 pixel section somewhere for your thumbnail.

If you look at the example I’ve provided on the left, the “B” logo at the top of the image is all that shows for the thumbnail.  (See the image on the right for this example.)

The great thing about doing this, when a user visits your page you can use the extra area to show the visitor what your brand is about and make your page look nicer than the standard Facebook design.  Let’s be honest, most of us spend a lot of money branding our companies with a website and other graphical information and now you can carry that same theme over to your Facebook page.

If you think about the way people use Facebook, they typically only ever visit your page one time, and hopefully that is to click the “Like” button.  Once they’ve done this, they see what you post in their News Feed.  By customizing your profile picture, you can encourage people that visit your page to “Like” it and also tell them what type of content you will be posting.  You really want people to Like your page that will enjoy and interact with your community.  Remember, this is about having conversations with people, not trying to sell them things.

Please contact us if you would like a custom profile picture created for you or have questions, we would be happy to help!

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I have been using Google+ (plus) on and off for a week.  Here is my take on it.

• It’s brand new and everyone is trying to figure out what to do with it and how to use it or better yet, will it survive.
• Its most powerful asset is the ability to have items appear in search that your friends already like and have given their +1 approval on it.  This will take time for it to really become beneficial, but will it survive long enough?
• The news feed and the way you start following new people seems more open than Facebook and is more Twitter like with the way you place people into circles or not at all.
• The incoming stream is also very interesting.  This feature allows people to push things into your stream and then you can decide to mute them, place them into a circle, or do nothing and this content will continue to flow.

Currently I still use Facebook the most, then I’d say its a tie between time spent on Twitter and Google+.  With the lack of mobile apps and everyone already being overloaded with social communities, it makes it more difficult to weave this into your daily routine, unless, you have nothing better to do.  :)

Have you tried it out, if so what do you think?

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We just launched our custom Facebook tab that will serve as the default landing page for all new visitors to our Page.  The page content is being hosted on our website so its easy to update and maintain.  The page describes what people should expect from our community presence on Facebook.  In the very near future it will also feature an embedded YouTube video to also welcome visitors to the page.

(Warning: Geek speak follows, skip to next paragraph for all the non-techies)  The process to complete this is to create a custom Facebook application on the developer portal.  This application needs to point to the URL for the page that is hosted on your website via WordPress.  If you are not using WordPress you would need to create a static HTML page.  A page template was created and applied to the WordPress page so it would remove everything but the page content and properly format the page so it works within the 520 pixel width.  The page header, title, etc was omitted in order for it be easy to update and also display correctly once loaded inside of Facebook.

If you would like to have a custom tab for your Facebook page, please contact us for a free quote!

If you would like to view the custom Facebook page tab here is the link.

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Are you the admin of a Facebook page or maybe multiple pages?  Do you ever want to post or reply in the comments as your profile account and not as the page?  Guess what, you can!  Best of all, you can control this on a per page setting not globally.

To set this preference, go to the page you want to change, click the ‘Edit Page’ button in the top right, then click ‘Your Settings’ on the left menu.  (By default, it is set to use the page account)

Uncheck the box for ‘Posting Preferences’ and now anytime you post on this page, it will come from your profile account not the page.

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