Four major retailers have closed their storefronts on Facebook over the past year: Gap, J.C. Penny, Nordstrom and Gamestop. The reason? Fans have bought close to nothing.

Facebook shops close - no reason to be alarmed

Strange? Not really. Like I commented on this Simply Zesty blogpost, Facebook is a social thing. When you are in a pub talking, you are not in a shopping mood either. Facebook will never make it as an e-commerce platform, but that is not really a problem because instead it will be (and already is) an endorser which gets people to talk about and share things. And this rather than buy (right now right there).

On top, like it or not, nobody is visiting the pages itself because all the action is happening inside the newsfeed/ticker. That’s where you need to be present with your brand, not inside a tab on your Facebook page which only few people will visit anyhow once they ’liked’ your brand page. Where companies should put their efforts in is creating ways to do effectively datamine on the platform. But this needs some clever and constant communication and approaches which you can’t do via standalone tabs.

Lots of companies based on social commerce will not be able surviving on the long term due to this. Social commerce does not mean implanting your store on Facebook, it means socializing your store itself. Facebook commerces also need to understand that people are there to enjoy life, not spend money (except for gaming).

Twitter is rolling out its self-service ad platform next month through a partnership with American Express to get access to over 10,000 small and medium sized businesses. It’s not the first time that American Express is reaching out to social media. Earlier last year American Express launched a deal with Foursquare so that card members across the USA could start discover exclusive specials on the check-in service.

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

However, there it’s more than just that. Twitter needs to broaden its revenue streams, quickly. And this is a way to do so.

The 10,000 businesses that will be able to register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis. Those who sign up receive $100 in advertising credits to put towards bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts.

The self service platform allows advertisers to make electronic payments instead of being invoiced by Twitter’s sales team. Which basically was just impossible to handle on the long run, automatization still is king, and it kinda surprises me that Twitter didn’t realize this earlier. Currently Twitter has 3,000 advertisers and it now hopes to attract the smaller business into its pond.

I’m kinda sceptic though if Twitter is the way to go for advertising for most of these small businesses. Twitter is pre-dominantly mobile – and although mobile is becoming mature very quickly most business simply don’t have websites or ordering pages which are optimized for mobile use. It’s exactly the same problem which Google’s Adwords program is facing. Most advertisers just don’t have mobile friendly websites crushing much of the possible return.

I would have expected Twitter to join hands with companies facilitating the mobile usage of websites, creating forms etc which are easy to handle on mobiles (not those ugly designed mobile Google templates).

Monetize outbound links

Twitter to open up self-service ad platform - why not use Skimlinks?

But, is Twitter really checking into the right corner when it comes to monetizing their network? Why not leverage that what its users share the most: links. Unlike the bigger social media platforms, most smaller social hubs have embraced such companies like Skimlinks who monetize links posted by members on forums etc. In other words, they monetize the outbound traffic. Just recently Skimlinks got some extra attention because Pinterest is also using it (some journalists made a big fuzz about it, we still wonder why because Pinterest is a free service).

Anyhow, how does it work? A script ‘translates’ every link on your forum or blog and turns it into an affiliated link. Anno 2012 Skimlinks aggregates more than 17,000 merchants across 27 networks internationally which gives web publishers lots of opportunities to monetize traffic. Of course the merchants already active via Skimlinks might be less pleased to see that their social media traffic via Pinterest and co will now be less free, but also here: a free lunch doesn’t exist. On the other hand advertisors will only pay based on CPA and it will show even more what platforms are monetizing the best.

All in all, it’s quite a frictionless way of getting that massive outbound traffic monetized. So, Twitter, creating extra commercial promoted tweets might just not be the perfect option to get your service monetized.

Not with Facebook

Note though that Facebook has blocked all of  the Skimlinks generated links. For some odd reason Facebook never thought about using the service. When I talked about this to people at Facebook’s Dublin office last year they didn’t even know the service existed, and instead informed me that they would be blocking it. A pity. Or is Facebook working on a similar service?

If there is a prize to be given to a campaign that raises awareness for a disease on social media, than this Alzheimer’s disease Facebook campaign surely will win. The app called “Sort Me Out” is steadily reaching more and more people on Facebook and this after first being launched in December last year on Facebook (and Twitter). Created by the Grey Group Singapore and its sister company Yolk for the Alzheimer’s Disease Association (ADA) Singapore it has as purpose to create public awareness about Alzheimer’s and show what it feels like having the disease.

When a Facebook user logs in to accept the app, it launches and gives the appearance of initializing the sorting out process of the user’s content. Then slowly the app starts to erase content like wall posts, friends list, personal profile and finally photos.

An ingenious campaign.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. There is no cure for the disease, which worsens as it progresses, and eventually leads to death. Most often, it is diagnosed in people over 65 years of age. Alzheimer’s is predicted to affect 1 in 85 people globally by 2050.

Below are the screenshots we got to see.

Continue reading “Alzheimer’s disease goes viral on Facebook” »

Facebook recently changed the way you can moderate your Facebook page by adding a major improvement, or rather re-instating a feature: the option to ban people. For those who have one or more internet trolls having a go on their pages, this is more than welcome. Previously this option was only available if you actually were able finding the member by scrolling through the hundreds of pages of your Facebook likers. Right now, you can just click delete on the offensive comment and either just delete the comment or delete and ban the user as well.

You can now (again) ban people on your Facebook page

Good to know, admins do not need to give a reason to ban users. Also, keep in mind that banning a person only prevents them from posting or commenting as Facebook allows banned people to re-like a page. They can still not post or comment though. This is rather logical, you don’t prevent people from visiting your public website either.

With the Facebook mobile app still being a very tough experience, as an admin you can’t do the banning via the Facebook mobile app. You (or another admin on the page) will need to do it from a real computer. If it really gets out of hand you can access your page from your phone’s browser in the desktop emulation mode (if you have an Android phone, the Dolphin browser lets you do that).

If you banned the wrong person, simply click “like this” under the number of people who like your page and then click “See Likes” (upper right on the insights page) then choose “banned” from the drop down in the upper left.

Happy hunting!

As it seems, there are Facebook users who are jealous of the money-stream that Mark Zuckerberg’s company Facebook has been able generating in the past few months and years. The fact that nothing comes for free never came up in those people’s head. But this aside. The people who left Facebook for Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ (as if these companies make no money out of your data) have flocked together on the website, im-not-on-facebook.com. And the site is… selling mugs and t-shirts. Oooh, selling, that isn’t right is it?  So far the anti-capitalist rhetoric in practice.

How a site against the 'money grabbing' Facebook is making quite some money itself on the back of Facebook

Frankly, it smells a bit parasite like, using a company’s name to say you don’t like that very company because it earns money on your data and then selling mugs and t-shirts holding the Facebook trademarked on it. As it seems the site also caters to people who think that their Facebook friends can’t compete with real life friends. Now that must have been a tough nut to crack… Or as a colleague pointed out, who would even ‘like’ such people.

Let’s see how long they can keep that up using the name Facebook in their url.

While Facebook is being hyped for their upcoming IPO, another hype is in the pipeline: the introduction of mobile advertisements on Facebook.

Facebook set to launch mobile advertising in the next weeks - but with a bad app

Cool, but isn’t advertising all about offering a good experience? And that is exactly what the mobile apps of Facebook surely are not. Both the Android and iOS versions show a pretty low responsiveness when being used, crash a lot and are simple not really user-friendly. And the worst thing about it is that it’s equally slow on Wifi, 3G and E networks.

And it gets worse over time. I remember that the first version of the Facebook app was sluggish as well but surely not in the way it is now.

It’s no wonder that most – if not all – of my relatives no longer use the Facebook app but instead the stand alone Facebook messenger app which is way faster than the actual Facebook app. That message box is actually one of the primary reasons why many people use Facebook on their smartphones. The rest has simply become useless since the apps are pretty horrible for mobile use.

Therefor I’m not that sure if displaying ‘featured stories’ in the news feed, similar to how Twitter advertise on their main site, will have a big impact on the company’s revenue stream. Because it’s exactly because of the really bad user experience that I, and many others, have stopped using that newsfeed altogether on a smartphone. You’d almost think that it’s because they want to push their HTML5 mobile version of the platform that the rest of the apps have to stay behind.

In that perspective the statement by Facebook to potential investors that “the lack of ‘meaningful revenue’ from mobile devices, used by half of  the 800 million users, could negatively affect the revenue intake as more and more users turn to smartphones instead of PCs to connect with friends” could well have a very negative outcome.

High time that Facebook starts cleaning up that mess first before it should start monetizing it. Then again, the upcoming overhyped IPO – I wouldn’t buy Facebook shares right now – is pushing Facebook to increase its revenue, and quickly.

Don't push your readers into 'liking' you this way

Some websites do whatever they can to make you like them on Facebook. Even if it means destroying the readability of the website itself.

Here’s an example which I found on the Canadian website, immigrer.com. When you visit the website you get a Facebook like pop up in an overlayer which you cannot click out. The only way to pass this hurdle is by liking the page OR by waiting – you won’t believe it – 30 seconds! Note that the screenshot shows 20 seconds because I first couldn’t believe this was actually happening.

‘Luckily’ enough, the whole thing is capped per browser session, but as a negative user experience it can really count.

30 seconds is an eternity if you are browsing the web – and it strikes me as odd that Google ranks this website constantly at the number 1 spot for various keyword researches. Google is always full of the ‘experience’ on a website, but this looks like a very bad experience. On top I’d like to see the bounce rate, which must be enormous.

On the whole it displays a desperate attempt to get people to connect to a page on Facebook. Is it effective? I doubt it. The people who click on the like button will be annoyed that they have to do it and won’t be your most loyal fans.

A perfect example of how not to use social media even when technically everything is possible.

Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?

Many SEO gurus have wondered whether social media links are taken into account by search engines AND if they can increase your search rankings. Well, too bad if you never bothered too much about social media when being an SEO professional, because the Googles and Bings of this world do take them into account and they can increase your search rankings.

That’s a B.I.G. B.O.M.B. drop, for many.

On the whole, search engines such as Google and Bing consider social media links to be very interesting indications as to whether a link should be given some extra (social) value or not (aka ‘link juice’). That they are being considered is theoretically not really logical – I agree – since most, if not all, social media links are ‘not followed’. However, from a semantic side it would make no sense taking that specific ‘rel’ into consideration when evaluating links which are (re)tweeted or shared.

Especially in the case of Twitter, you can expect its firehoze to affect real time (news) search results. It’s still unclear how Google does this since they no longer have a deal with Twitter to tap into their tweet firehoze, but the fact is that they do use Twitter in their search rankings. As far as sharing links on Facebook and retweeting links on Twitter, there will be link juice passed on if there is a lot of sharing and retweeting happening. And that is a massive change for many in the SEO industry who up until now contented themselves with onsite and off site SEO/linkbuilding.

Continue reading “Do social media links increase your Google rankings ?” »

Our colleagues from Likeable Media just published a case study on a Facebook campaign they finished for their client University Medical. University Medical and the Likeable Media team worked together to develop a strategy around the AcneFree product line Facebook page launch.

The plan ? To build an AcneFree community and raise awareness of the brand by offering free samples of the new AcneFree Therapeutic Sulfur Mask and making the deal as shareable as possible. The latter to promote organic growth for the fan page because there was only a limited budget to get the first ‘likes’, which meant that further growth had to come from the shares and likes from that first wave.

Continue reading “Facebook case study: AcneFree sampling” »