How you should approach your sales funnel has changed due to the evolution of online and the explosion of Social Media. Social media has the ability to redefine how businesses interact and form relationships with current customers and potentials.

The infographic from Get satisfaction talks us through how you can feed your funnel:

So, who do people friend on Facebook? It starts out with real life actual friends, then flows on to friends of friends, businesses & then randoms!

But what is it that gets you un-friended? Am sure we’ve all been there or given our friend list a cull every couple of years. It seems being offensive is the number one reason to become someone’s un-friend along with not being well known or trying to sell someone something. For me it’s more about interaction – if people don’t interact and am going through a cull they may or may not get removed.

The stats above come from  NM Incite’s infographic which looks at why we friend and unfriend on Facebook. It also covers what social media is most used for in general. The main reasons are to keep in contact with family, be entertained, read consumer feedback, learn about products and finally, to get coupons and promotions. Check it out:

The stats all came from the State Of Social Media Report that was conducted in early 2011 and released Q3 2011.

My Open Letter to Rant about Facebook PPC

Dear Facebook,

I have been indifferent to you for most of our time together. As a medium to light user I’ve been able to ignore your frequent changes, assuming you were just going through some kind of puberty type phase, slowly shedding the pimples and baby fat. I can overlook your Tourette’s like need to shout my personal information to the world, without my permission, when you change your security settings. I even get the quest for world domination. However the buck stops when it comes to your PPC advertising platform. This is a major flaw that I just can’t overlook. It actually makes me hate you.

On the surface everything looks harmless enough. A pretty blue interface with an easy to get started suck-you-in-before-you-know-what’s-happening set up that lulls potential advertisers into a false sense of security. This will be just like AdWords we think, easy!

Unfortunately reality rears its ugly head and quickly we realize that no…this won’t be easy, this will be long and tedious and frustrating and oh so unnecessarily difficult! Why do you make it so hard to run a simple campaign? Why is your interface always buggy and only working about half the time? Why do you mess up my carefully planned campaign structures by randomly creating duplicates? Why do you make it so difficult to manage and report on budgets? Why don’t you work more seamlessly with 3^rd party management tools? And why don’t you accept destination URL’s longer than 255 characters? Do you see how much you waste my time? This is all before we even talk about Creative fatigue and the importance of rotating images frequently with constant testing!

When, upon the seemingly rare occasions, I have been lucky enough to run the gauntlet and successfully set up a campaign it seems like the results delivered have rarely been worth the time and money invested in the first place.

/End Rant/

My ongoing frustrations with the Facebook PPC platform highlights what most of us already know, that to successfully run larger scale Facebook PPC campaigns you need 3 things:

1. A good 3^rd party management tool, such as Marin, that takes a lot of the frustrating manual work out through some excellent automation features (particularly around Image rotation) and provides a great alternative to working directly within the interface.
2. Clearly defined objectives from the outset and a plan for achieving it (knowing what you want to get out of the activity is key to any advertising.)
3. A proper tracking plan to ensure effective measurement of results that will actually indicate how the campaign is performing against the objectives.

Oh and of course:

1. Patience!

This is all just my opinion though, have you had a similar experience or something quite different? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Facebook recently announced its entrance to the online “deal of the day” market with the beta launch of Facebook Check-in Deals for iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone 7. This announcement follows the recent rapid expansion of daily deal sites such as Jumponit, Spreets, Scoopon, and Google’s failed attempt to purchase Groupon, the current market leader in daily deals, for a staggering USD $6 billion.

The service is an extension of the “Deals” concept to location and immediacy due to the mobile check in nature of the service. Business users will be able to offer deals and encourage users to share discounted offers with friends and family via their Facebook network. It is now available in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK and before long will launch in Australia. From a business owner’s perspective the competitive edge Facebook Check-in Deals has over the Groupon, Spreets and Living Social types is that they offer the service free of charge and operate within a pre-existing network already being used to share, update and connect.

With the daily deals industry expected to grow in value from USD $873 million in 2010 to a whopping USD $3.93 billion by 2015 (BIA/ Kelsey research) this is a no-brainer move by Facebook. It also now provides a quick and easy way for all businesses to test the daily deals water, unique to this sector, with no commissions to pay.

So as a business where do you start and what can you do to be ready for the Facebook Check-in Deals launch in Australia?

Why should I use it?

Whether you’re a small business or a large corporation the benefits are clear,

1. Reach New Customers – There are over 200 million active Facebook Mobile users, each with an average of 130 friends and each visiting the site on average 28 times a month. Throughout the day people endorse to friends, family and colleagues their favourite places to eat in, the movie that is a must see and where you can find the best cappuccino at the lowest price in your local area. People are communicating more and more online and promoting products and services without even knowing they are doing it.
2. Encourages Brand Loyalty – Through the use of loyalty deals you encourage repeat customers, positive word of mouth, endorsement and much more. All of which lead to building deeper relationships with your consumer base.
3. Cost Effective, Scalable & Manageable – With no set up fee, or commissions to be paid back to Facebook there are no cost barriers to setting Deals up. Along with the ability to target as narrowly or widely as you like and manage the deal from within your Facebook place page it’s almost too easy.

How does it work & what type of Deals are available?

Creating a Check-in Deal

When it becomes available in Australia, business owners will be able to create deals via an easy to complete template form housed on their Facebook Places page. The Facebook Place page must be claimed in a similar fashion to the Google Places verification process and will go on to form the corner-stone of Deal activities.

What type of Deals can I create?

There are 4 types of deals available to Businesses:

• Individual Deal: This can be offered to new and existing customers if you have excess stock, wish to launch a new product or drive more people into your store.
• Friend Deal: Offers discounts for groups of up to 8 people when they check in together. This increases the word of mouth marketing and awareness of your business.
• Loyalty Deal: This focuses on rewarding your most loyal customers. These can be claimed after they have a certain number of check-ins with no fewer than two and no more than 20 check-ins. This is a useful tool to retain existing customers.
• Charity Deal: The business donates money to a charity of their choice. This adds a local community feel and is a way of offering a service that other competitors may not implement.

Facebook provides a handy Best Practices guide to businesses as well as a more indepth guide to making sure your business is ready to handle the deal. Whilst the points they list may seem obvious to most, its great to use them as a sanity check before sending any deals out into the wild.

I’ve created my Deal, what’s next?

Let Users and Facebook promote your business for you!

Whenever a user Checks-In to your business or interacts with your Facebook Page, your business can appear on users personal News Feeds, Profile Pages and there is  also the option for them to write reviews/ comments on your business page.

Check out the Official YouTube clip for more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bbsuqPoZtw

The popularity of Facebook is evident and there is an increasing trend exchange of unsolicited reviews and brand advocacy taking place online. What stands out with the Facebook Deals is the impulse element attached where businesses may capitalize on the ease of sign up via the users mobile.  Life has just been made simpler for the user and for businesses availing of this service.

Currently there is a flurry of similar online deals site available in this area grasping to get the attention and business of users. However it can be said that Facebook has already captured the hearts of users so is it a step ahead of the game already?

Learn more about Facebook Deals or download a guide for your business here: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=18846&ref=mf

The rivalry between Google and Facebook is definitely on. The world’s largest social media website published last week an official list of ad providers that developers can use to make money with their applications.

Surprisingly large providers like Amazon.com – who offers an advertising API – and Google’s well-known AdSense service are noticeably absent from the list.

Facebook has actually pointed out that the two companies are responsible for not being in the list. Google and Amazon apparently refused to agree to Facebook’s new terms of service, which explicitly prohibit them from receiving or accessing any type of personal user information from user profiles. The list has not been finalized yet so it is still possible that Google and Amazon will sign on.

However, we can have serious doubts about that. The dispute between Google and Facebook in the way of sharing data is actually a long story. In November 2010, Google released a decree to cut-off Facebook users’ ability to import their Gmail account via a provided API. This had nothing to do with user’s privacy. It was only because Facebook was not returning the favor.

The relationship between the two Internet giants has become complicated over the last few months. Especially now Facebook has established its leadership on the online display advertising market in the US. In the third quarter of 2010, Facebook had more ad impressions than Yahoo, Microsoft and Google combined, according to Comscore.

Facebook has even surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website in 2010, as reported by Hitwise. In Australia as well, the social media and search traffic are now neck and neck. In the week ending the 16th of January, social media was just 0.4% behind search, according to Hitwise.

With over 500 million users and an IPO probably coming in 2012, Facebook is now likely to focus more attention on its monetization. According to the web specialist Evan Britton, Facebook is now well positioned to build out a successful PPC network that could be a legitimate competitor of Google Adsense. All the ingredients are there: the hundreds of thousands publisher relationships, a large pool of advertisers, an appealing ad format, the technology and the experience to identify an efficient targeting strategy.

Do you think Google will sign on? Where do you see Facebook in two years? Is Google able to position on the social media landscape?

2010 has been a busy year for search engines, and it is becoming more and more important for them to provide the most relevant results, as the search volumes has been regularly increasing year on year.

Each year, there have been an increasing number of searches, more searchers, and those searchers do more searches themselves, so one thing is for sure: ranking well for key search terms is more important than ever.

Let’s have a look at the top changes search engines brought in 2010, in order for them to provide more relevant results and drive searchers to their site:

#1 Google drinks too much coffee and brings out the “caffeine” update

What does that mean for results? Where Google used to index pages and sites in regular waves, this update allowed them to update their results incrementally, meaning quicker indexing. If you are working to get your site optimised,

you will see changes quicker, whether they are positive or negative.

This caused quite a stir in the SEO business as rankings changed, pages disappeared and came back, but it quickly stabilised. People following the big Google algorithm updates will know it usually does impact the results quite a bit but it is always an intense moment!

#2 What you say online becomes a ranking factor

Social media is growing at a fast pace, Twitter is going to hit the 200 million user mark early this year, Facebook has already over 500 million users and its founder already has a biography movie after only 20 years of his life. Impossible for search engines to miss out on the opportunity to surf the social media wave and use the huge amount of content being shared to display more accurate results, so they started in 2010!

Google started by crawling Twitter feeds and links, and provided a “Real time” search option which enables us to search for tweets on specific keywords. There was also a debate trying to determine whether links from Twitter provide some benefits to the pages they link to, and some recent findings would lead to believe that engaging in the Tweetosphere has to be on the 2011 agenda. Google also detects when people share links with friends on Facebook.

Bing on the other hand created a partnership with Facebook, in order for them to be able to use “likes” from users to affect rankings for pages using the Facebook “Like” button.

But this is only the beginning, and 2011 will reveal many more social media related algorithm updates.

#3 Slow typers discover the joys of Google Instant

Late 2010, Google added the “Instant” feature, which provides results as you type, without having to hit “enter” for the results to display.

For many, it is more of a gadget than anything else, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one having noticed high search volumes for keywords that aren’t complete… For example, if you use the Google Keyword Tool, you’ll notice some keyword suggestions are keywords that aren’t complete such as “car ins” or “seo consu”.

Where this simplifies search for the user, this also impacts websites focusing on some longer tail keywords, so I would recommend keeping an eye open to how this can affect your traffic.

#4 Local results take over

Firstly, Google (again) have made 2010 a year to tackle the challenge of local results. Most queries including a location keyword (city, suburb, postcode, country) now display local results.

After launching Google Places, for every local query, they displayed a map with pins between the sponsored results and the organic results. This apparently was not good enough so they changed the display in order for the local results to look more like organic results, with a map on the top right hand side.

This means owning your business on Google places is very important, as this can provide a valuable spot on the first page of Google, if done and optimised well.

Evidence shows that Google is investing heavily in local search (Marissa Meyer, VP Search, moved to Local, trying to buy Yelp) and wants to use maps in a more efficient manner. 2011 will see some interesting evolutions on that side, that’s for sure.

Secondly, where mobile search tends to blend in with mainstream search, it is still a great platform to provide bespoke local results for mobile. Google Places has been implemented on Android and can be used as a standalone app. More generally, apps developed on mobile platforms are using GPS location to display local results for businesses such as bars, restaurants, banks and more. This is where local online presence becomes key.

#5 Love is in the air between Yahoo and Bing

2010 was the year where they decided to merge their organic results in an attempt to compete against Google in a more efficient way. Bing had been increasing its market share but was mainly taking them from Yahoo so, when the merger took place, Google remained the big winner.

In Australia, Google still has 95% market share while Bing/Yahoo have 4.5%. The remainder is shared among small search engines such as Altavista and Ask. (source: statcounter.com, as of Oct 2010)

As an onside, this merger has affected Yahoo’s Site Explorer quite a bit and as a result it seems like link popularity and saturation have been fairly inconsistent these past few months. So hopefully early 2011 will see this great toll get back on track!

#6 How quick does your website load?

If you feel like your website takes a while to load when on a broadband connection, then it probably is getting penalised in rankings, compared to other quicker to load competing websites.

Google decided 2010 was the year to start applying the rationale “I want my users to find relevant sites which don’t take too long to load too avoid user frustration”. Based on opinions from SEOs all around the world, this has quickly become a key factor to website optimisation.

Using Yslow for example, you will be able to assess your website and get to learn about “minifying”, “css sprites”, “gzipping”, “http requests” and other ways of reducing the page loading time and have a website Google will want to put on top.

I actually think this is positive from a user’s perspective, it makes web browsing so much more comfortable, and it pushes web developers to clean up their code; thus improving the standards of the web.

#7 New guys on the block

2010 has seen the appearance or the discovery of some interesting new competitors to the big G (Google). Instead of replicating, these new search engines are actually innovating how to search for websites.

The first and probably most interesting one for SEO is Blekko, launched in 2010 with an interesting concept using slashtags which Rich Skrenta explains here:

“Slashtags let all of the vertical engines that people define on Blekko live within the same search box. They also let you do a search and quickly pivot from one vertical to another.”

So if you want to shop for the item you are searching, you would type “red dress /shop”.

The most interesting one which relates to social media: the Likes slashtag. Do you want to display results that your Facebook friends liked? Simply type “kitten videos /likes” !

Other search engines generating interest are Yandex in English (biggest SE in Russia) and DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo has actually been around for a few years now, but it’s only recently that it has been getting a bit more attention.

#8 Other Google related updates worth reminding

Ever tried converting measures or currencies using Google? Or getting simple questions answered directly without having to click into a website? That’s one of the 2010 added features from Google.

Search for “20 Australian dollars in us dollars” and you’ll get the converted currency below the search box. Search for “how high is the Eiffel tower” and again, you’ll get the answer below the search box (1,063 feet for those who are curious).

Another interesting SEO related discovery is the increased likelihood of getting your website crawled thoroughly if your brand comes up in the online reputable press (such as “The Australian”). It has been discovered that the Google bot will read about the brand in an article and would then go to the brands website and crawl it extensively. So get your PR teams working and you could just see your brand gain reputation online.

#9 Youtube Videos

Youtube is the second most popular social site after Facebook in Australia, and sees 35 hours’ worth of video uploaded every minute. To put this in perspective, Hunter Walk, Youtube’s Director of product management, explains: “If we were to measure that in movie terms (assuming the average Hollywood film is around 120 minutes long), 35 hours a minute is the equivalent of over 176,000 full-length Hollywood releases every week.”

2010 is yet the biggest year for Youtube in terms of popularity, meaning having an online presence using video has never been as important.

With its improved video optimisation options such as video transcripts, 2011 will be the year to jump on the band wagon, if you haven’t already, and get some videos uploaded and fully optimised in order to make sure you are found.

Last week, Facebook announced the launch of its latest location product called Places. Similar to other location based social networking platforms such as Foursquare, Facebook Places allows people to “check-in” to an existing location or to add new locations to the platform through their smart phones.

When someone checks in at a place, for example a café or cinema, this shows up in that user’s news feed for their friends to see. Another feature is that it allows subsequent people who later visit the same location to see what their friends thought about the place or what they were doing at the time. Facebook Places goes a step further in social integration by helping to spot friends close by to your location. This gives people the opportunity to engage in spontaneous face to face meetings, and may have wider implications for local business marketing and privacy concerns.

The following video explains what Facebook Places is and what it can be used for:

How to access Facebook Places

Facebook Places is currently available in the United States on the Facebook App for iPhone.

You can also update Places through touch.facebook.com for all other smart phones that support W3 geo-location. There has yet to be news as to when it will become available in Australia.

However it has been announced that Foursquare, Yelp, Gowala and Booyah will be integrated with the Facebook Places API, which can pull information and pictures of the location where a user checks in.

Facebook Places and User Privacy

There has been mention about potential privacy issues associated with Facebook Places.  Once a user checks in to a location, the update shows up on that person’s wall and news feed by default. The bigger concern is that it also shows up in the activity stream of the checked in place.

Places give users the ability to tag friends who are with them when checking in to a location, another point of concern for privacy. However, privacy settings for Places can be customised to preference, as with other Facebook features. Allfacebook.com has come up with a four step guide on how to edit your privacy settings for Places.

Using Places for Local Businesses

The launch of Places presents another opportunity for local cafes, restaurants and brick and mortar shops to connect with customers and reward them for checking in to that location. If used and promoted well, Places can be a great marketing tool to help customer retention and repeat visits.

Local businesses can claim their location in Places through a verification process to ensure authenticity. This is done by claiming an existing Place or by creating one to allow others to check-in. Places within Facebook can be merged with a businesses’ Facebook Page to centralise the management of both entities. The advantage is also that the merged Page will be updated to include Place information such as maps and check-ins, as seen below:

Download the Facebook Places Guide for Businesses to find out more.

What do you think about Facebook Places? What other applications can you see Facebook Places used for?

Google recently took their social offering one step further when they released Google Buzz, which integrates right into Gmail. It is similar to Twitter, but has more features and is more robust. Google have had limited success with social; Orkut, their own social networking site, only gained traction in Brazil and India and numerous other social tools such as Jaiku, Dodgeball, FriendConnect, OpenSocial and Latitude, haven’t had the impact Google would have liked.

Google Buzz aggregates data from Twitter, Picasa, Google Reader, YouTube, Flickr and even your Google chat status. Facebook is currently missing from this list, but Google have announced that it’s not completely out of the question. Google Buzz automatically follows the contacts you email and chat to most frequently and photos, videos and links can be integrated into each Buzz message. There appears to be no limit to the number of characters within each message, so you no longer have to shorten your updates, or resort to textspeak, to fit within the 140 character limit.

Google Buzz connects with Picasa Web Albums and photos can be added directly to a Buzz message, either uploaded from your computer or selected from one of your existing Picasa albums. All photos added to a Buzz message are stored in your Picasa account and count toward your storage limit. As photos are shown inline with your Buzz message there’s no need to follow a link to a 3rd party site to view photos as is the case with Twitter. Adding public photos to your Picasa account will create a new Buzz message displaying the recently added photos that can then be viewed using the inbuilt full-screen viewer.

Posts and replies on Twitter are separate entries, which makes it hard to follow a conversation. Google Buzz has solved this by allowing comments directly onto the original post, overcoming the need for a separate reply. Google have also added a “like” button to each post, which is very similar to the Facebook feature added in February 2009.

The mobile version of Google Buzz allows you to tag your Buzz message with your current location. You are able to select actual places, like bars and restaurants, not just an address or a lat/long location. It is also possible to read Buzz from other people in and around the same location as yourself to discover what’s happening around you. Google also have plans to roll out a standalone version of Buzz outside of Gmail.

Already, there have been privacy concerns regarding Google Buzz. When your first enter Buzz, it automatically follows the people your most frequently email and chat to and by default this list and the list of people who follow you, are made public, so anyone can see who you most frequently email and chat to. In response to this, Google have made changes to the setup procedure so that instead of auto-following the people you most frequently contacted, you are presented with a list that you can review and confirm before continuing. Also, the option not to show who you follow and who follows you on your profile has been made more prominent, but these lists are still displayed by default.

The uptake of Google Buzz has been surprising to say the least. On February 11^th, 2 days after launching Buzz, Google announced that “tens of millions of people have checked Buzz out, creating over 9 million posts and comments. Plus, we’re seeing over 200 posts per minute from mobile phones around the world.” This is amazing considering that it was rolled out slowly.

Overall, Google Buzz is great product, it has taken the successful Twitter model, updated and expanded it and incorporated it right into Gmail and onto mobile. I don’t believe Google Buzz will pull current users away from Twitter or Facebook just yet. It may, however, entice new users who haven’t yet joined Facebook or Twitter, into micro-blogging as they do not have to sign up for a new account, join another service or get used to a new and unfamiliar interface as they can start “Buzzing” from their current Gmail account.

Finally, on June the 13th at 12.01 EDT, we will have the option of choosing our own vanity URL for our Facebook name. This will affect both personal profiles, so I’ll be able to change mine from:

http://www.facebook.com/id=654612384

to something like:

http://www.facebook.com/kate.reuvers

So the random sequence of numbers which was my URL, can now be changed to easily recognisable words. This will apparently make it easier for friends and family to find me. Excellent.

The good news for brands is that this change is not going to be limited to profiles, so pages will also be able to be named. From a branding perspective this is an opportunity that should be actioned immediately, as it will not only make your brand easier to find, but will also stop spammers from taking and trying to use your brand.

How to Name Your Page:

Naming your page is easy. Simply go to the Facebook Username page and select the username you want. According to the Facebook blog this name has to be longer than 5 alphanumberic characters in length, and the only character allowed is a full stop.

So I would personally choose either:

http://www.facebook.com/kate.reuvers or

http://www.facebook.com/katereuvers

depending on which was available. They are on a first come first serve basis so it’s important to get in quick and grab the name you’re after.

There are a few important factors to keep in mind when selecting the name for your page:

1) Choose your profile/page name carefully as this cannot be changed later down the track. 
2) Is your brand global? If so, from a usability perspective, it may be better to regionalise the names. So if I was the brand Coke, I would potentially use either http://www.facebook.com/coca.cola.australia or http://www.facebook.com/coke.australia
3) You can protect your name if it’s trademarked by visiting this page

4) If you only have a new Facebook account (as of the 31st of May) you may not be able to register your name immediately as Facebook is attempting to prevent squatters.

So set that alarm clock for June the 13th and be ready to grab your name! And if you have any questions about the Facebook Username changes check out their FAQ’s.