Bing announced Monday that it is enhancing its Facebook ties, allowing users to tag friends in searches and post queries instantly to their timeline.
Using the Social Sidebar, searchers can gain input from those they know. This allows you to get the best of both worlds: search results, as well as input from friends, all in one place.
When you type in a query on Bing, you’re given the option of posting it on your Facebook timeline (or not).
Read more details on this feature at allfacebook.
A talk by Beyond’s Nils Mork-Ulnes and Judith Lewis at the recent Facebook Marketing Conference examined the science of sharing and the implications for Facebook marketers.
Mork-Ulnes highlighted three stats around sharing branded content on Facebook:
- 60% of people would be willing to share a product or service if given a deal/discount.
- 53% of people have used Facebook to interact with a brand.
- 36% of people liked or shared a brand page on Facebook in the last 30 days.
Mork-Ulnes provided data which indicates that fans exposed to brand content on Facebook buy more.
In tests, 2.12% of consumers that were exposed to ‘organic’ Starbucks branded content on Facebook made a purchase online or in-store compared to 1.54% who were not exposed to the content.
Read more insights on the science of sharing and the impact for Facebook Marketers at econsultancy.
Facebook is launching a recommendation bar- When you’re reading an article on a site that has implemented the Recommendations Bar, a small pop up will appear at the bottom, showing you recommended articles based on your friends’ activity.
Similar to the current Like button, if you like an article using the Recommendations Bar, the story is published on your timeline and appears in your friends’ news feed.
For readers, this means more relevant, interesting stories to read, curated by your friends’ sharing and liking.
For Facebook, it deepens sites’ reliance on their plug-ins and expands users’ reliance on Facebook even when they aren’t on the site. It could signal the start of Facebook expanding its content sharing and aggregating.
Read more details on these features at techcrunch.
While Facebook’s IPO put a spotlight on its ability to grow revenue, marketers continue to focus on how to wring better performance out of their advertising there as they are barraged with conflicting data and surveys. In the midst of this, Facebook is making some subtle changes in how marketers can measure actions on the platform that are catching some advertisers and agencies off-guard.
Although under the radar, the new conversion methodology is incredibly important for agencies and advertisers, as it will give them an entirely new way to measure the effectiveness of Facebook initiatives, and possibly eliminate a hyper-focus on outdated metrics such as Likes, CPM, CTR, and clicks. These new advancements are reminiscent of when online display advertising introduced time spent on site, ad engagement metrics, view-through attribution, and other metrics to evaluate the performance of ads that did not immediately convert.
Read more on how Facebook’s new metrics are changing the game for marketers at adage.
Some Facebook page owners are seeing a new “Report Duplicates” module that allows them to search for pages related to their own and report those that are unofficial. Facebook will review the duplicates and then re-categorize them as community pages that link back to the official fan page.
This feature, which appears in the “Edit Page/Update Info” dashboard of some Facebook pages, will help page owners address the common problem of fan-created pages being confused with official pages. Page owners who do not have the new duplicate page finder tool in their dashboard can use Facebook’s main search bar to look for related pages.
Read more details on this new feature at insidefacebook.
The rise in social media usage has lent the volume and visibility needed for widespread peer-to-peer recommendations, and consumers have always been better than marketers at influencing other consumers.
Facebook’s open graph reinforces the importance of fostering C2C sharing. With third-party action and object integration, brands can now create contextually relevant interactions across all touch points before driving traffic back to their branded Facebook page.
By giving consumers the tools to share their passions about brands, their actions and expressions can create structured stories about a wealth of consumer preferences, which are then seamlessly distributed to the Facebook timeline, news feed, and ticker for all of their friends to see. Further, the stories will remain “pinned” to the consumer’s timeline in a persistent “brand billboard” of ongoing updates, which tell the story of the relationship between the consumer and the brand.
Read more on the impact of Facebook Open Graph feature at allfacebook.
Facebook has redesigned Events so you don’t miss another party, birthday, or get-together. The site launches the Events Calendar so you can see what coming up weeks in advance, and a List view that highlights each day’s birthdays, RSVPs, and suggested events.
Calendar View
Rather than having to scroll down through each upcoming event’s title to see ones in the future as before, Calendar View lays out all your RSVPs in front of you on a set of giant grids. Events and birthdays are listed in each day’s box, and can be hovered over or clicked through for details.
List View
Here you’ll see a day-by-day summary of birthdays, events you’ve been invited to, and Suggested Events based on what your friends are attending, what’s going on at venues you check in at, and events hosted by Pages you Like.
Read more details on this feature at Techcrunch.
Members will soon be able to see exactly who has viewed each update posted to a Group, Facebook announced Wednesday. Below each post appears “Seen by” followed by a number; users can hover over the text to see who read each message and when they read it. The feature, which Facebooks calls “read receipts,” also work on mobile.
Read more details on this feature at mashable.
While several businesses that market on Facebook tend to become overly concerned with the number of likes their page has, Advertising Age found that more marketers are buying ads on Facebook to build brand awareness, not boost fan numbers.
The study shows that 45.9 percent of responders polled said building brand awareness is their No. 1 priority with regard to Facebook ads. Driving traffic to brands’ websites was the second-most important goal and fan acquisition third.
In earlier days of Facebook marketing, the goal was simple: Get as many fans as you can. But now there’s been a shift as companies try to find out how to capitalize on those likes.
Read more details on this study at allfacebook.
Facebook recently added an option for pages to make “unpublished” posts through the Pages API. Unpublished posts do not appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted with ads.
Facebook ad and page management platforms can integrate this feature to help page owners test different creative options. Previously, page owners using the self-serve ad tool or Ads API could not run page-post ads without creating a post that would also show up in fans’ feeds. Now, for instance, a business can target non-fans with an ad that includes an intro video that might not be relevant to users who have already Liked the page.
Learn more about this feature at insidefacebook.
