webqem blog

Facebook has announced that on March 30, all Facebook pages,including any brands and business pages, will switch over to the new Timeline Layout.

What is the Timeline Layout?

The timeline change at it’s most basic is a reorganisation of all of your brand’s Facebook posts, interactions, photos and events into a single long chronological view. This stretches back to your first interaction with Facebook and further if you have added events from your past.

When you visit a brand page in Timeline Layout, the experience becomes more personal. There is now a large ‘cover image’ at the top of the page allowing for customisation of your page to a greater extent than before. Your traditional profile picture is still used; this is square now and appears over the top of your large cover image.

Likes, photos, apps and custom pages are shown prominently below the cover image together with your brand description. You should be aware that the new layout shows very few of your apps/pages by default. How you order these is very important.

How to convert to the new timeline

Obviously new images will need to be created, both a new square profile picture and the larger cover image. Many companies are using these 2 images together creatively, with a visual connection between the two. It is important to remember, however, that your portrait image is still used in any posts you make and will appear alongside these in other’s timelines so branding and consistency is important.

The cover image is a great opportunity to show how creative you are as a company, this can be changed as often as you like. Whilst it should remain on brand it’s a perfect place for updating your page with campaign specific styling.

Before actually sending your page live with the new timeline view you will be given the opportunity to see how it looks to a consumer. Take the time to scan through the costs and if absolutely necessary remove any that you do not want to appear. Remember standard social media governance rules must apply, don’t remove anything that customers or followers have contributed to or still use.

Add depth to your timeline

The timeline change is a great opportunity to add the history of your company, update the page with milestones from your business’ past and be sure to include images and interesting facts. This will mean you have a rich and interactive timeline for users to browse through.

Update your apps & pages

Finally be sure to check old apps and pages to ensure they fit within the new layout. A benefit of this new layout is that app pages now have a lot more width to play with. Re-engineer your most popular pages to take advantage of this or ensure they are at least centered on the page.

How can we help you

We’re helping many of our clients with this transition and other aspects of their social media interaction in general. Contact us to see how we can help you.

For all you footy fans out there, we are excited to announce the launch the OPSM AFL and NRL Sponsorship Facebook game application ‘Team Colours Countdown’!

Off the back of an incredibly successful ‘Colour Match Countdown’ application, the game was repurposed to provide a competition mechanic around the OPSM sponsorship of AFL and NRL umpires and referees.

Players have the chance to win Grand Finals packages including tickets, flights and accommodation, priority seating and after parties.

webqem has been managing AdWords campaigns for a number of clients over the past four years, in financial, retail, health, and software markets.

For the last few months we have been running paid advertising campaigns at Google AdWords, Facebook and LinkedIn, observing striking differences between the three platforms. A major factor would be due to the different levels of targetting possible.

Each platform does allow a measure of targetting, as follows:

AdWords campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 20km radius around Sydney),
• by language
• by network (eg Google search, search partners, or display network partners)
• by device (eg desktops, phones with browsers, mobile carrier or operating system)
• by keyword
• by placement (for the display network)
• by demographic/gender (if available for display network)

Facebook campaigns can be targeted:

• geographically (eg 10 miles around specific cities)
• by age, gender, relationship status, language, education level, workplace, birthday
• by interest.

LinkedIn campaigns can be targeted by three of geography,company size, job function, industry, seniority, gender and age. Note that interests cannot be specified with LinkedIn.

Each platform allows bidding by CPC or CPM, and we tested both for each platform.
We compared the results of advertising a new online retail site providing hire services across the three platforms.

LinkedIn’s lack of targetting by interest or keyword left it lagging in third place, with the lowest click through rate, and by far the highest cost per click. LinkedIn’s suggested price for the demographic we targeted was over $4/click. LinkedIn visitors typically stayed on site for less than 30 seconds, and converted poorly.

Facebook provided the lowest cost-per-click – around 2/3 the cost of AdWords visitors. Facebook visitors tended to stay on site for around a minute, but only 10% came back for a return visit. They also converted very poorly. CPC advertising was clearly better than CPM advertising on Facebook for our client, with a much higher effective click through rate.

AdWords was a clear winner, with excellent click-through-rates, high pages per visit, low bounce rate, and solid conversion rate. The cost-per-click was acceptable, with the highly targeted campaign having excellent quality scores and numerous keywords with double-figure click through rates.

It does have to be said that organic traffic also performed outstandingly, with a high time on site, and double the conversion rate of the paid traffic. This was true for both Google and Yahoo, although Google provided 30 times the amount of traffic as Yahoo.

Google Adword’s ability to target an audience by keyword at a time when they are actively searching for infomation made it the best performer by a long way, for return on investment.

However as a branding platform for a new site, Facebook did provide a cost-effective method for a large number of impressions.

Here are illustrative figures from Google Analytics:

Facebook has finally come out with a search function for Facebook Business Pages.

Until recently, you had to know the actual URL, or follow a link from a Facebook page or website. Now you can go to http://www.facebook.com/directory/pages without being logged on to Facebook, and search by business name or browse by type. Facebook says pages are automatically added to the directory, although they do have a disclaimer that only a limited set of results are available to unregistered users.

The fact that you don’t have to login means that Pages can be indexed by search engines. The usual rules apply, in that links from external websites affect whether you will rank well, regardless of whether you are included on the Facebook directory. For example http://www.facebook.com/pages/wwwcostumeboxcomau/8168104555 is indexed at Google, but not yet included in the Facebook directory.

A search at Google.com for say “Barack Obama” highlights the current importance of social networking sites in search engines. Page one at Google includes dedicated pages at Wikipedia, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube. His Facebook page is on page two of Google, with his Flickr and LinkedIn profile on page three.

So if you have not yet claimed your company name at these social networking sites, you are missing out on a boost to your search engine performance, and associated traffic. We also recommend grabbing your name at these sites before someone else does, so that you can control your public image.

The downside to social networking sites is the need to maintain the content. By nature, social networking sites interact with their audience. It can be damaging to your reputation if a malicious or false statement is posted to your page, and you haven’t logged on to respond or remove the comment. And if you don’t add fresh content to your site, people won’t come back.

In saying that, it is easy to maintain content. You can import feeds from other sites you are active on, such as your WordPress blog, or YouTube. That way it looks like you are adding fresh content, and your audience keeps up with what you are up to.

You can share the responsibility for maintaining your Facebook Business Page, with nominated Facebook personal users as administrators. The viral nature of Facebook means that when others see which Pages you are a fan of, they may also become a fan.

When people become a fan of your Business page, you have the ability to send updates to their Facebook inbox, so that you can tell them about special offers.

If you are a high profile brand, you may get a name like http://www.facebook.com/pinkfloyd if you contact Facebook directly. Otherwise you end up with the standard business page naming format http://www.facebook.com/pages/webqem/17279306527 .

Facebook Ads allow you to reach a targetted audience and bring them to your Facebook Page or external website. You can choose your audience by age, gender, geography and keywords. For example if you wanted to display your ad to people in Australia over 18 who listed “skiiing” as an interest, Facebook will tell you the number of people available, and let you craft an ad.

Although it is very easy to do, if you need help, we can setup your page at Facebook and help you setup your ads.