Small acts of good take place on Facebook every day. From returning mementos to Joplin tornado victims to locating loved ones after the Japanese tsunami, Facebook users have found creative ways to use the power of the social network to help others in need.

This new initiative, introduced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on May 1, will enable users to share their organ donor status and to register to become a donor.

Social Media Response

As Radian6 reported, the response has been overwhelming. With over 43,500 social media mentions in the first three days following the announcement, the sentiment around the organ donation feature was very positive.

Over 76 percent of the social media chatter following the announcement was positive, with people praising the social media king — and Mark Zuckerberg — for their forward thinking, calling it a “game changer” in the world of social media and encouraging users to register.

Of course, as with everything, there are those who oppose this Facebook feature. Some say that one’s organ donor status is too personal to share in such a public forum. Others suggest that this feature, while a good step, isn’t enough and that Facebook can do more.

Along with providing Facebook with positive publicity, organ donation has also become “trendy” and is seeing — for lack of a better phrase — new life. There has been a significant spike in registrants and, according to Donate Life America, online donor registries saw a 23-fold surge in the days following Zuckerberg’s announcement.

Will it work?

Your Facebook timeline can serve as a platform for virtual peer pressure. As you see your friends checking in to restaurants, posting pictures of experiences and listening to certain bands, you are more inclined to do the same.

Facebook is leveraging that peer pressure to do good. If you see that your friends, family, coworkers, colleagues, etc., are organ donors, you might be more likely to declare your status or register.

Only time will tell how this feature will pan out — how many new organ donors will register because of it and how many lives will be saved. But one thing is clear — this new addition to Facebook has opened the door for many new social media uses.

Who knows what will be next (recognition for donating blood, logging volunteer hours, or registering to vote?), but it will certainly be interesting to see if this theme — social media saving the world — translates onto other platforms and causes.

Interested in sharing your organ donor status with your Facebook community?

1. Click “Life Event” at the top of your timeline.
2. Select Health and Wellness
3. Select Organ Donor.
4. Select your audience and click save.

Though the platform is still quite young, what we do know is that it has a proven track record of referring traffic back to websites. For this reason alone, many businesses are taking the plunge and signing up. Organizations such as Real Simple Magazine, Whole Foods, and Scholastic have done a great job of leveraging Pinterest’s demographics and expanding popularity to benefit their brands.

One low-cost way to make a high-impact splash on Pinterest is by hosting a contest.

Source: blogs.creativememories.com

When developing a Pinterest contest, it’s important to make the value clear. Users are easily persuaded to repin a post, but the more incentive you can give the better. And get creative! Pinterest is still establishing itself, so users have the unique opportunity to become a trendsetter in this new platform.

Here’s a look at two contests that are being executed very effectively. 

Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary Vaynerchuk, wine retail owner and social media guru, has come up with an easy way to promote his product and his expertise with very little cost to him.

Every so often, Gary will pin one of his favorite bottles of wine and encourage others to repin his post. After a few days, he will randomly select one person who repinned his post and will send that lucky person a bottle of the wine.

Result: thousands of people are exposed to his wine and his brand, and he only has to give away one bottle of wine. Nice work, Gary.

Better Homes and Gardens

Better Homes and Gardens is putting up a lot more collateral, but they are also asking more of their followers.

In order to participate in the contest, users must create a board on Pinterest called “My Better Homes and Gardens Dream Home” and pin at least 10 images from bhg.com, explaining how they would fit into a dream home. Then, the users submit the board’s URL on Facebook for a chance to win $5,000.

This contest is more involved than Gary’s, but there is the opportunity to reap a much greater reward.

Ultimately, both of these contests do an excellent job of expanding the company’s brand and referring potential customers to their websites. For Gary Vaynerchuk and Better Homes and Gardens, the rewards that the contests bring are well worth the cost.

Pinterest’s uses will continue to evolve as the platform’s popularity grows. These two examples give you just a taste of how early adopters have been able to utilize the new social network. With Pinterest really starting to take off, now is your chance to get creative and establish your own Pinterest contest!

Interested in how Pinterest can be used for your business? Give our Digital Division Director a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.

Adapted from image from http://www.mysecuritysign.com/

LinkedIn may be the king of lead generation for B2B companies using social media. But according to Inside View, Facebook has also generated leads for 41% of B2B companies that use it. We’ve certainly seen it work for our clients. Intuitively, it doesn’t make any sense. How did Facebook become such a powerful lead generation tool for B2B companies?

After all, when you log on to Facebook, you’re thinking about posting a birthday message to a friend or uploading pictures from your family vacation. But that’s when something very interesting — and incredibly powerful — happens.

You don’t log off.

You check your newsfeed to see what your friends have been posting. You scan through a photo album of your newborn niece. And you click through to articles that catch your attention.

You loiter.

And that’s the opportunity for B2B (and B2C) companies to share their insights and expertise, and perhaps lure you to their website or blog.

So how big is Facebook’s loitering “problem”? Huge.

In fact, comScore reports that 1 out of every 7 minutes spent online is spent on Facebook.

The average user spends nearly 8 hours per month on Facebook, while the average LinkedIn user spends just 17 minutes. (I’m betting that 8 hours is far below the average time readers of this blog log on Facebook each month.)

In total, Americans spend 53 billion minutes on Facebook every month. That’s 164x more time than Americans spend on LinkedIn (325 million minutes), according to Nielsen.

B2B marketers have learned that those billions of hours spent on Facebook mean billions of opportunities to build and strengthen relationships with clients, partners, and industry leaders. They also know that there’s a decent chance you’re logged onto Facebook at work, and that your time spent on the social network might be a little easier to justify (to yourself and your boss) if you happened to stumble across a white paper or an idea to help improve your business.

There are many reasons that Facebook has become an effective lead generation tool, but I believe the “loitering theory” is the most important.

What do you think makes Facebook such a successful platform for B2B marketing?

Note: I was inspired to write this post while reading Jeff Cohen and Kipp Bodnar’s The B2B Social Media Book. If you haven’t picked it up already, I encourage you to do so!

Want to chat about generating leads through Facebook? Give me a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. I’d love to have a conversation with you.

Much like the platforms, the uses for social media are always evolving. Long gone are the days when Facebook was just used to connect with friends. Now, Facebook is used for everything from lead generation to customer service to gaming.

Source: http://dev.thecomet.com/

One trend that I’ve noticed lately is that of social grieving. We saw it with Michael Jackson and Steve Jobs and, most recently, Whitney Houston. When news breaks of a noteworthy death or tragedy, our first instinct is to grab our smartphones and head straight to social media.

Why Social Media?

When we experience grief or injustice, many of us venture beyond our traditional support system of friends and family to seek out others with similar feelings. This is not a new phenomenon; but what is new is the opportunity to connect with others and share our emotions online. For many, simply sending a tweet or updating a Facebook status may help the grief to subside and the healing process to begin.

The idea of grieving in such a social setting may cause discomfort for some, who believe that mourning requires a sense of solemnity that social media can’t accommodate. But anyone online the day that Michael Jackson died knows that there are tens of millions of Americans who feel otherwise.

With celebrities, social media usage goes beyond expressing grief. It gives us a chance to thank them for how they’ve shaped our lives — how you can’t hear “Billie Jean” without attempting the Moonwalk, or see the Apple symbol without remembering your first computer, or hear “I Will Always Love You” without automatically reaching for the Kleenex.

After the deaths of Jobs and Houston, tweeps used Twitter hashtags as a way to pay their final respects. #ThankYouSteve was used to give people a chance to reflect on how Steve Jobs and Apple changed their lives. #DearWhitney allowed fans to “talk” to Houston about the lasting impact of her music.

Many obituaries posted online also offer the opportunities for mourners to sign the virtual guestbook. Like the hashtags, this feature allows us to record our memories online and connect with others who are also mourning, even for non-celebrities.

Case Study: Trayvon Martin

Since Trayvon Martin’s death on February 26, #hoodies, #wewantjustice and #Trayvon have found their place on the list of Twitter’s trending topics. Millions of tweets have included “Trayvon Martin.” Thousands of photos of mourners in hoodies have been uploaded to social media. Countless Facebook groups seeking justice for Trayvon have been created.

Think back for a moment to the 1992 verdict in the Rodney King trial. Protestors took to the streets to express their outrage, and Los Angeles soon was overcome by rioting and looting.

It’s seems like a stretch to argue that we could have avoided the 1992 riots if we’d had access to Facebook and Twitter. But isn’t it possible that at least some individuals would have chosen to stay home and vent their frustration online?

In this digital age, rather than taking to the streets in mourning or protest, people are taking to the Web. This is a more peaceful version of the same protest, but no less effective.

Somehow, social media provides mourners with a cathartic experience. Reading other people’s Tweets or Facebook posts seems to make it easier to work through these times of grief. Connecting with others who are experiencing the same thing can help the mourning process, bringing about closure and peace.

An online community, while slightly unorthodox, is a community nonetheless, and for many, it is one that provides the support and comfort that they seek in a difficult time.

As social media continues to grow and evolve, we’ll likely begin seeing it used in a number of different and unexpected ways. Social grieving may be just the beginning.

Try as they might, parents won’t be able to keep their kids off Facebook forever. Photo source: http://blog.socialshield.com/

There’s a new rite of passage for American children. You turn 13, and you get a Facebook account.

It’s a frightening prospect for millions of parents, many of whom fall into one of two camps:

• Parents who are already on Facebook and are concerned about privacy and security.
• Parents who aren’t on Facebook and have no idea what’s involved.

So what do you do when your child asks you for permission to get on Facebook?

I recently held a workshop on this topic for parents of sixth graders in our church, and here are some of the best practices we discussed.

1. Get on there first. I know, I know. You’ve been avoiding Facebook for half a decade and simply do not have the time. The tough lesson here is that the single best thing you can do to understand the platform is to explore it for yourself. Otherwise, you’ll be relying on your child’s understanding of Facebook to set the ground rules. Not convinced? At the very least, study up on the basics.
2. Let it happen on your terms. When one child gets on, all her friends will want to follow suit — even if they’re not yet 13. Make it clear that you will decide when your child is ready to join a social network, and that when it happens, you will be a part of the process.
3. Be hands-on in the beginning. When your child is ready to join, sit down with him and help create the account. Carefully select the privacy settings together. Get his login and password or have him “friend” you, so that you can monitor how he’s using the platform and coach him along the way.
4. Be present, but don’t hover. There’s a delicate balance you’ll need to maintain — it’s fine to check in on your child’s page regularly, but if you comment on her posts frequently, that’s a sure-fire way to get un-friended or lose her trust.
5. Set boundaries. Anyone who’s on Facebook will tell you — social media can be addicting. Set clear expectations about when and where children can interact online (e.g., no phones at the dinner table or no Internet use in your room after bedtime.) Don’t be afraid to take away Facebook privileges for poor grades or behavior. Make sure you’re setting a good example for your child to follow.
6. Help your child stay safe. In addition to the dangers of account hijacking, phony contests, and identify theft, children also may encounter bullies or predators online. Make sure you child knows:
   • Never accept friend requests from strangers.
   • Never agree to meet someone you only know online in the real world.
   • Do not open links to contests, promotions, or videos, unless you’re sure the source is legitimate. Many scams will appear to be shared by people you know.
   • Do not allow apps permission to access your personal information.

   As an added precaution, it’s always a good idea to keep your home computer in a family area and employ Internet filters.

7. Coach your child on what’s appropriate. “Keeping it clean” online is perhaps the most difficult lesson to impart to children. They must learn that everything that is posted online is public and permanent. Facebook’s new Timeline format has made it easier than ever to view every embarrassing post, photo, and comment. What your daughter posts today will be viewed by college admissions officers, employers, and clients in the future. Remind her that once it’s online, it can never truly be taken back.
8. Watch out for warning signs. You’ve reinforced how important it is for your child to be polite online, but you can count on him encountering people who are downright cruel. For a child with a fragile ego, this can be devastating. Social media “rewards” audacious, outlandish behavior, thus exposing children to emotional danger. Case in point: The epidemic of young girls posting YouTube videos of themselves, asking the world, “Am I pretty or ugly?”
9. Know your kid. Every child is different. You understand better than anyone what guidance your child will need and how he will respond. Adapt these suggestions to best suit your family.

Is your teenager already on Facebook? What advice would you give to other parents?

Want to chat more about introducing young people to social media? Give me a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. I’d love to have a conversation with you.

Measure Your Success on YouTube. Source: justinesimard.com

YouTube Analytics give you hard data that help you assess how your channel and videos are performing. These metrics will show everything from the total number of views to traffic sources and comments.

As you begin to find your YouTube footing, these analytics can serve as your measuring tape, helping you judge what’s working, identify what isn’t and see where you can improve. 

Analytics to Watch

Views: You created a YouTube channel because you want people to watch your videos. If you find that your views are leveling off or declining over time, try promoting the video on your Facebook or Twitter page.

Traffic Sources: This metric will let you know how people are coming across your videos. Are they finding them organically by searching within Google or YouTube? Are the videos being suggested to them from the YouTube algorithm? Or are users clicking through links you post to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Identifying what sources are providing the most referrals to your channel will help you better promote the videos.

Subscribers: On YouTube, a subscriber is akin to a “Like” on Facebook or a “Follower” on Twitter or LinkedIn, and can sometimes be even more powerful. Subscribers are notified via email and prompted to watch whenever your channel uploads a new video. This metric will not only tell you the total number of subscribers your channel has, but it will also indicate the total number of subscribers gained and lost.

Comments: This analytic gives you an idea of how engaged your network is. Receiving loads of comments is great, but the work doesn’t end there. Make sure that you don’t focus so much on the number of comments you’re getting and instead focus on trying to engage with as many commenters as possible.

What Is Success?

Similar to the LinkedIn metrics, you can only determine success once you’ve decided what you hope to gain from a YouTube presence. An increase in views leads to expanded reach of your business. An influx in subscribers could indicate lead generation or an increased customer base. And — the ever important but difficult to quantify metric — increased social engagement can be measured by comments and traffic sources.

Figure out what you want to gain from YouTube and set realistic, measurable goals. X number of channel views this month. X percent increase in subscribers, etc. When it comes to assessing these goals and measuring your success, YouTube Analytics will serve as an invaluable tool.

Interested in learning more about the role social media could play in your business? Give Matt Ferraguto, our Digital Division Director, a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.

What is the Facebook Insights Dashboard?

Think of the Insights Dashboard as your page’s progress report. You can track user growth, demographics and interactions with your posts and page. By understanding this information, you can target your content to best suit your audience and identify the best times of day and days of the week to post.

What kinds of information will I be able to see?

The Insights Dashboard will provide you with two types of information:

• Interaction insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).
• User insights: Total page Likes, or number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes. Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.

What should I pay the most attention to?

Here at Eckel & Vaughan we send monthly reports to our partners that highlight key info and updates from each social media account. Here are the metrics we pay the most attention to:

New Likes:

• Simply put, this shows you how many new fans your page earned. This is a great way to track growth and to quantify your efforts. Of course, Likes alone do not make a page successful.

Post Views and Interactions:

• Take Likes to a whole new level. More than just tracking the number of people who like your page as a whole, “Interactions” allow you to actually see how people are interacting with content on your page. Post views track how many times your posts were viewed in a given time period. Interactions track how many times people interacted with your posts by either liking or commenting on them. As the saying goes, content is king, so you want to make sure you’re posting top-shelf content on your page. By monitoring post views and interactions you can troubleshoot different kinds of posts and see which ones get the most (or fewest) interactions and views.

User Demographics — Gender and Age:

• The demographics feature provides you with information about your fans. We focus on a graph that breaks down users by gender and age group like this:

Getting to know your audience can enable you to better cater your posts to them. In the example above, we see that the majority of fans for this particular page are women, spread fairly evenly across a wide age range.

To conclude:

Simply creating a Facebook page and posting away is not going to get you the best results. Social media tools such as Facebook are about forming relationships, and as in any relationship, listening is as (if not more) important as talking. To best listen to your fans, you have to see what they are reading and responding to, and you have to know who they are. Facebook Insights allows you to do this … so go do it!

Interested in learning more about the role social media could play in your business? Give Matt Ferraguto, our Digital Division Director, a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.

What will change?

Profile Picture: Facebook’s current page format accepts profile photos of practically any size. In the new format, all profile photos must be square images, at least 180 x 180 pixels in size. Non-square photos will appear cropped or distorted.

Recommendation: Use a simple image, preferably your logo, as your profile picture. This image will shrink to a thumbnail size when attached to a post, so keep the image clean and ensure that all text is readable.

Cover Photo: Pages now have the opportunity to upload a cover photo or image, the large banner that appears at the top of the page. The dimensions of the cover photo are 850 x 315 pixels.

Recommendation: Use this photo to introduce fans to your brand, showcase an upcoming event, or promote a new product. You may crop an existing high-quality photo or ask your designer to create something new and visually appealing. Avoid reusing your logo if you’ve used that as your profile photo.

Source: www.facebook.com/cocacola

Pinning Posts: You now have the option to “pin” posts to the top of your timeline for up to one week. This will allow you to keep important posts at the top of your page rather than having to repost them.

Recommendation: We recommend using this feature if you are running a promotion, introducing a new product or promoting an upcoming event. It is important to keep posting content even while a post is pinned to keep your timeline fresh.

Custom Tabs:  Your tabs will continue to exist, but they will be affected by the new format. Rather than being called tabs, they are now referred to as “Apps” and they can no longer be used to welcome first-time visitors, or “fan gate.”

Recommendation: If you’ve already got tabs – keep them. You can still link to them from posts or other social media properties and use them as a landing page for Facebook ads. If you are considering making new tabs, take advantage of the larger size (810 pixels wide) and use them as a way to give visitors a look into your brand or a promotion you’re running. You may select your top two tabs/apps to appear on the home page.

Business Milestones: You now have the opportunity to place milestones in your company’s history.

Recommendation: Place markers on your timeline for significant events such as your founding or the launch of a new product. This is a great way to provide fans with a virtual history of your business. Don’t get overzealous with these. Keep your milestones to the really important ones.

There you have it – everything you need to know to make the most of the new Facebook Timeline. So what are you waiting for? Get to it!

To download this one-pager, click here!

Two invaluable tools to help you answer that question are Google Analytics and LinkedIn Page Statistics. Use Google Analytics to determine exactly how many of your website’s visitors came directly from LinkedIn, how long they stayed, and whether they converted. This post will focus on LinkedIn’s Page Statistics platform, your one-stop-shop for all things metric when it comes to your company’s LinkedIn presence.

Source: programsuccess.wordpress.com

LinkedIn Page Statistics will enable you to get a sense of how many people are seeing your page, how your page compares to pages of similar organizations, and how your products and services are performing.

Statistics to Watch

Number of Followers: Followers are those who have checked out your page and have decided your company and your updates are worth keeping an eye on. For most people, clicking the “follow” button is a more deliberate act than “liking” a brand or product on Facebook; so consider each new follower a victory.

Page Views: Simply put, you want people looking at your page. You are able to click through the various tabs (All Page Views, Overview, Careers, Products & Services) to see which area of your page is acquiring the most views. This will also help you to identify the sections of your page that need sprucing up.

Unique Visitors: Along with wanting views, you want to ensure that new people are continuing to visit your page. You aim to maintain a solid fan base that will consistently visit your site, but you will also want that fan base to grow. An increase in Unique Visitors means that you are reaching out to new users and attracting them to your page, and that is a good thing.

Clicks Products & Services: This metric will give you insight into how your visitors are responding to your products and services. Not seeing as many clicks as you’d like? Try making the Products & Services page more engaging by updating the language or including catchy images.

What Is Success?

Success on LinkedIn can be determined by a number of different measurements. First, you must decide what you want to get out of LinkedIn. If you’re looking to expand your reach, number of followers or page views may be your barometer of choice. Hoping to generate leads or sell products? Focus on the clicks and recommendations on your Products & Services pages. Looking to source great talent for your business? Pay attention to the way your job posts are performing and consider upgrading to a Silver or Gold Careers page. Interested in the success of a LinkedIn ad campaign? Compare metrics before and during the campaign to see if your views, visitors and clicks are increasing.

And remember, charts and tables only give you a brief glimpse into the success of your page. To continue the success, you must remain engaged on all of your social networks. Continue the conversation with your networks, and your business will show the same great results the next time (and every time) you check your analytics.

Interested in learning more about the role social media could play in your business? Give Matt Ferraguto, our Digital Division Director, a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.

You’ve seen these before. Perhaps it was a nicely branded Welcome tab that shows up before you “like” a company’s page. Or perhaps it was a tab highlighting a new product, service, or contest. These custom tabs are great ways to engage your fans while continuing to promote your business.

Source: http://videoconferencecenter.org/

The Nuts and Bolts of a Great Facebook Tab

Facebook users will not settle for a tacky clip art tab. It needs to be done well or not done at all. SmartBlogs breaks down a great Facebook tab into five key components: purpose, viewpoint, branding, incentives, and timeliness. These elements will ensure that your tab mirrors your company’s look and feel and helps to achieve your business objectives.

Tab Types

There are dozens of different types of tabs you can develop for your Facebook page. Here are four of the most popular tab formats:

Welcome Tab: A Welcome tab should act as the front porch to your Facebook page. As a fan gate, it will be the first thing users see when they visit your page, so it must be inviting, engaging, and consistent with your brand. It’s also your opportunity to demonstrate the value of joining your Facebook community more clearly than the content on your Wall ever could.

Integrated Tab: This is a way to host your company’s blog (shameless plug), YouTube channel, Twitter feed, etc., on your Facebook page. This works to promote connectivity among your social networks while providing your Facebook fans with further insight into how you think and do business. It may also be the push your users need to “follow” you on Twitter, subscribe to your channel on YouTube, or bookmark your blog.

Promotional Tab: This tab allows you to thank your fans by providing them discounts on your products. Check out this example from Oreo. This type of tab is ideal if you’ve just launched a product and want to encourage your fans to try it. You can drive traffic to the tab through a Facebook ad campaign or by posting links in your news feed.

Contest Tab: Creating a tab around a contest is a great way to draw people to your Facebook page. Whether the prize is a gift card, an iPad, or cold hard cash, people love to win contests. A contest tab enables you to easily track all entrants as they enter information directly in the tab. It will also keep those entrants coming back to your page to continue entering and to find out if they’ve won.

Facebook Tab Creation Tools

You can expect to pay a designer and Web developer thousands of dollars to create and maintain a Facebook tab. For a big, intricate project, this may be your best bet. But, if you’re going for the less expensive, DIY approach, here are some solutions for you.

1. Build the tab in Facebook. You can create basic tabs in Facebook by logging in as a Facebook developer. This foolproof process will allow you to create basic tabs for your page for free.

2. Use a paid service. There are countless apps that will help you build attractive and functional tabs for your page, including Wildfire and ShortStack. Most of these services come with tiered pricing options — the more you pay, the more capabilities you receive. Paying for these services will allow you more control over design elements and may include features such as the tracking of tab analytics.

Now that you’re an expert on Facebook tabs, what are you waiting for? Get started on creating your own custom tabs today.

Interested in learning more about the role social media could play in your business? Give Matt Ferraguto, our Digital Division Director, a call at 919-858-6914 or shoot us an email. We’d love to have a conversation with you.