Month: November 2011

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Social Engagement? It’s The Timing Stupid!

I have recently read a very interesting report on the timing of engagement for social media. Specifically, what time of the day and what days of the week appear to be important for connecting with Twitter and Facebook users. You can read the full article and see the graphs on this web page.

After reading the article, I made some pretty sweeping changes to the times we post our updates for clients on both Twitter and Facebook. Not only that, but we are going to monitor and then report back – did changing our update times really improve the level of engagement both in actions on Facebook and follower growth on Twitter. It should be an interesting new white paper! We are following sixteen client sites for our report, so although this is a small group, the insights will be very interesting.

Based on the report this is what we personally are doing:

For Twitter, we are posting at 6 a.m., 11 a.m., noon, 6 p.m.,  and 9 p.m.

For Facebook, we are posting at noon and 7 p.m.

We are planning on doing further testing for Facebook on increasing the number of status updates as it now appears with the change in the Facebook news feed that Business Page updates may be lost in the noise with just one or two updates a day.

Pretty interesting stuff! I’ll make sure to post a link to my report and share my findings as we get more data.

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The Truth on Affiliates for AdWords and Organic Placement

I was asked this question recently:

“Writing for healthcare websites is one of my specialties. An owner of a start-up company in the field wants me to work for him part-time. The company is an affiliate site and makes money from a third party whenever somebody fills out a form at his website. Is it worth my time and effort? Will this site make money?”

That’s an interesting question. Google has long had a “hate” relationship with affiliate sites both organically and on Google AdWords. In fact Google will only show one site, either the parent site or one of the many affiliate sites on a search query for Google AdWords. The key penatly appears to be a duplicate content both in the organic and paid search arena.

The truth is that it is very hard for a website to place when it is an affiliate site both organically and in AdWords. The only way an affiliate site will rank is if the look and feel of the site is very different from the parent site AND the content is different from the parent site. Unfortunately, this is typically not the case. So, do I recommend investing time and money in affiliate websites and investing in promoting them with Google AdWords? No I don’t.

If you are thinking of investing in an affiliate online business. Be very cautious, you may spend a lot of money and find out that Google is simply filtering out your site from the results both organically and in paid searches.

 

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Google is Now Indexing Facebook Comments

Don’t get too scared yet as Facebook probably will not allow this for long, but all the Facebook comments from your wall and from websites using the Facebook comment widget can cause your comments to appear in the Google index.

“This is not something that Facebook have actively introduced, but rather is a change brought about by Google and the way in which they index comments. Now when you comment both within Facebook and on a third party site, that comment is now crawlable by Google, leading to it being indexed on the search engine.”

This change to how comments are used and appear in Facebook has been done this past year to allow a more viral exchange or information within Facebook and Google has recently grabbed the content. To read more information, I suggest you read these two articles: Two important changes coming to Facebook Comments and Facebook adds ‘subscribe’ feature to comments. Both give more information about this important change and one that may be able to be leveraged for now for search placement.

Of important note is also the change on Facebook, clearly driven by Google+ to allow others to subscribe to your news feed if you have allowed this setting even if they are not your friends. This is particularly concerning for parents and those that really do not want to share their status updates with the world.

“Facebook is also letting people subscribe to news feeds of users they’re not friends with. Upon doing so, they will see the public updates the person has shared on their profile. And like with friends, users will be able to determine how many of those updates they will see in their news feed.” Read the full article.

With some of these important changes that Facebook has made in the recent months, it is now more important than ever to review your own account privacy settings and that of your children to assure that you are clear on what is being shared with the public and what is not to be shared. On my own personal profile, which I had locked down to friends only, the default button is Public meaning that by not changing the button for each status update or at the minimum making sure it is set to Friends, I unknowingly had been publishing my personal status updates publicly. Make sure you check as well. There are some things I just really don’t want to share with Google or the wider world on Facebook.

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Facebook Nails Small Businesses With News Feed Changes

Are you finding that your fan engagement has dropped on Facebook? If you have under 1,000 fans most likely your activity has dropped or come to a crashing  halt on your Facebook Business Page. Why? This study may shed some interesting insight in regards to what is happening to the traffic on your Facebook Business Page.

“Pages with less than 1,000 fans saw a decrease in engagement. Pages with more than 1,000 fans saw a steady increase in engagement, right up to Pages with over 100,000 fans, which saw a 27.8% increase in the rate of engagement.”

“When you consider how the news feed now works, with the vast amount of content and updates being shared, it is evident why the number of fans will become more important. You need a higher number to increase the chances of your content being found.” Read the full article and see the graphs.

Facebook made sweeping changes on September 30th and again on October 31st to how it distributes your business content to fans, and the shake down in the month of October was dramatic.

“The study from Edgerank Checker has found  that over a sample of over 5,800 random Pages, 82% experienced a reduction in the amount of impressions on the Page.”

Yikes, that is scary. Your content, that you are working so hard to create for Facebook users, is getting lost in the noise. It appears that a standard two updates a day that many were using (to prevent spamming readers) in this new world on Facebook, will mean that your message gets lost in the shuffle.

As businesses and brands react to this new world, many are turning to Facebook advertising and Facebook sponsored stories to get the exposure they want. It will be interesting to see just where these changes Facebook is making will take us in the weeks and months to come. I personally am predicting a strong push from Facebook to move businesses into their pay per click program.