Facebook Gestures: Bringing better insight to the Social Business?

FROM: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/feeds/facebook-gestures-bringing-better-insight-to-the-social-business/4514

By Eileen Brown | January 18, 2012, 2:04pm PST

Summary: Facebook is unveiling new features of its Open Graph applications and adding Gestures to applications. But will this extra information bring more insights to businesses?

Facebook is unveiling new features to its Open Graph applications.  AllthingsD reported that Facebook will be announcing the new features at a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, Pacific Time.

In addition to the ‘Like’ button you will soon be able to ‘Own’, ‘Want’, ‘Buy’ and ‘Install’.  Developers will be able to add other actions within an app provided they are Simple, Genuine and non-abusive.

Frictionless sharing has already allowed applications to take advantage of the ‘Read’ option. The Washington Post and the Guardian Facebook app shares news articles you have read on your ticker.

Articles read by your friends also appear on the Facebook ticker, prompting further reads and increasing the popularity of the news item.

But will this extra information bring more insight to businesses with a Facebook page?

Brands already know how many fans like their page. They know whether their campaigns are getting more engagement. Analytics show user engagement with their ‘Talking about this’ figure on a page.

Will adding verbs enhance the social interaction? Perhaps adding verbs such as ‘Dislike’ might give valuable feedback to brands.

Love it or hate it?

The yeast extract spread, Marmite which is a similar product to Vegemite, could capitalise on having a ‘Dislike’ button on their Facebook page.

This could prove once and for all that more people love the savoury spread than hate Marmite.

Marmite centres its marketing campaign around strong opinions. You either love it or you hate it.

Adding extra gestures to a page might also be open to criticism or abuse.

If a situation arises there is huge potential for escalation by the community and page fans. Ragu’s campaign video which featured Mom cooks criticising Dads got several Dads ‘piping hot and bothered’.

Imagine if Ragu had a ‘Dislike’ button on their site during that campaign. They would have had a great opportunity to take early action — before it escalated.

I think that with the current low level of Facebook fan engagement for business pages, brands have work to do as Facebook starts approving Open Graph Actions this month.

But will the changes bring the extra page engagement that marketers want?

Measuring Customer Service Impact on Social Media – Now for Facebook

FROM: http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2012/01/measuring-customer-service-impact-on-social-media-now-for-facebook/

January 18, 2012 by Libby

How to Measure Your Customer Service on Facebook

Recently we launched the Customer Service Impact Report for Twitter that provides metrics for the converging worlds of customer service and marketing. Today we are announcing the launch of the Customer Service Impact Report for Facebook. This report continues down the path of providing data to the departments that are responsible for excellent customer service. This report answers many of the same questions as the Twitter report, but this time from the perspective of your Facebook data.

Let’s walk through the key questions you can answer with this report, using data from the Home Depot Fan Page as a case study.

1. How do you respond?

As with the Twitter report, you can now have a better understanding of how well your brand responds to your fans and determine what opportunities for improvement exist.




You can also benchmark against your goals and find what opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction and brand reputation by continuing to improve upon how you engage with your customers when they engage with you.

 

2. When are you reacting to and engaging with Facebook activity?

It is also important to understand when you are responding to activity on your page. Do you take a long time to respond or do you promptly engage back? Do your findings align with your social media strategy? With this data you will be able to answer these questions, find areas for improvement and track your success going forward.

 

3. How much are you engaging with your fans?

You also need to know how deeply you are engaging with your fans. Do you respond once and consider it done? Or perhaps you are getting into full conversations with your fans. From this report you can monitor what is happening and determine if you need to adjust your strategy.

Just like with the Twitter version, you can run this report for your competitor’s Facebook page. This gives you the chance to see how you perform against each other and determine if they are setting different standards than you. All of which can help you set your customer service strategies and goals going forward.

Want to try it out for yourself? If you’re a Simply Measured customer, just log in to your account and it will be available for any of your Facebook dashboards. Not a Simply Measured customer yet? Then sign up for a Free Trial today!

Which Facebook Pages Are Growing The Fastest? New Stats Service Tells You

FROM: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/which_facebook_pages_are_growing_the_fastest.php

By Richard MacManus / January 15, 2012 7:38 PM

Ever wondered which musician has the fastest growing Facebook Page? Or what TV series? A new beta service called SocialMedia-live is tracking the growth rate of 38 million Facebook Pages, with 2 million of those available to view. It has statistics on total number of likes, fan growth, interesting newcomers and male/female breakdown. These statistics are categorized and users can create comparison graphs. The bad news is that there is no apparent search function.

The answer to the first question, by the way, is Adele, who gained 175,000 followers over the last 24 hours (at time of writing). Adele's popularity on Facebook is mainly due to her female fans; 62% are female and 38% male. The fastest growing TV show is Mob Wives, perhaps thanks to the current "swear jar sweepstakes" promotion on its Facebook Page. This type of data is useful, albeit limited at this point.

A sister site called Likes Matter offers a real-time view of Facebook Page growth rates. There I discovered that Eminem's Facebook Page is currently attracting about 35-40 new likes every minute.

The main site, the awkwardly named SocialMedia-live, updates Facebook Page data on 90,000 "big players" every 10 minutes - including Eminem, Coca Cola, YouTube and other very popular brands. A further 1.8 million "medium-sized pages" are updated every 12 hours. The other 36 million or so "little pages" are refreshed every 5 days.

There's a special page for "Hip Fanpages," those Facebook Pages "that have distinguished themselves in terms of layout, navigational ease, interactive fanpage features, etc." Current members include Adidas Originals, Snooki, Livestrong, Star Wars and a German comedian named Linda P. That last pick is a clue that SocialMedia-live hails from Germany.

There are some useful comparison tools, too. Below is a chart comparing the growth of Adele, Jennifer Lopez and Katy Perry over the past 90 days. We can see that the popularity of Adele's Facebook Page spiked in January of this year. She has about 12.6 million fans at time of writing. Meanwhile Lopez is growing faster than Perry. Although note that Perry has more fans than Adele and Lopez combined. She has 37.6 million fans, while Lopez has 8 million. A likely explanation is that Perry is much nearer to peak popularity on Facebook than either Adele or Lopez. Growth rate could also be affected by when the fan pages were started. So, as always, take these statistics with a grain of the proverbial salt.

The big thing missing from SocialMedia-live is search. I could find no way to get statistics about our own ReadWriteWeb Facebook Page, for example. There also seems to be no easy access to the 36 million or so "little pages." Both of those issues severely limits the usefulness of the site for marketers, who would be a prime audience for this data.

But this is a beta site, so we hope it will expand over time. For now, if you're interested in finding out how fast certain brands are growing their Facebook Page fan bases, then SocialMedia-live offers an interesting set of statistics.

Crawling facebook with R

FROM: http://www.r-bloggers.com/crawling-facebook-with-r/

January 15, 2012

By romain francois

 

(This article was first published on Romain Francois, Professional R Enthusiast - Tag - R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

So, let's crawl some data out of facebook using R. Don't get too excited though, this is just a weekend whatif project. Anyway, so for example, I want to download some photos where I'm tagged.

First, we need an access token from facebook. I don't know how to get this programmatically, so let's get one manually, log on to facebook and then go to the Graph API Explorer

Grab the access token and save it into a variable in R

access_token <- "************..."

Now we need to study the graph api to figure out the url we need to build to do what we want to do, e.g. here we want "me/photos". I've wrapped this into an R function:

And then we can use it:

That's it, I told you it was not that exciting, but it was still worth playing with ...

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on his blog: Romain Francois, Professional R Enthusiast - Tag - R.

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R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials on topics such as: visualization (ggplot2, Boxplots, maps, animation), programming (RStudio, Sweave, LaTeX, SQL, Eclipse, git, hadoop, Web Scraping) statistics (regression, PCA, time series,ecdf, trading) and more...

Facebook Upgrades Insights Analytics Tool

FROM: http://www.business2community.com/facebook/facebook-upgrades-insights-analytics-tool-0116738

By Allison Russo, Published January 15, 2012

 

Marketers should be adept at demonstrating the value of online marketing efforts to their client or company. Tools like Google Analytics and Compete.com provide excellent ways to measure and report, in-depth, on company website traffic and the effectiveness of an online strategy. However, tools for measuring social media marketing success have only had capacity to report on very basic statistics (# of likes, shares, comments, etc.)…until now.

Last month, Facebook rolled out an upgraded version of their Insights analytics tool for business pages, providing a comprehensive look into your pages’ reach and many additional metrics to support your Facebook marketing efforts. Below is a summary of some key elements of the Insights revamp:

1. Measuring Facebook Reach: In addition to “Total Likes,” which has always been available, Insights now also reports three additional statistics to define your pages overall reach on Facebook:

Friends of Fans: This metric identifies the total number of people your page could be exposed to, if each of your fans shares content from your page on their own account.

People Talking about This: This metric identifies the number of unique people who have shared content from your page on their account in the past week.

Weekly Total Reach: This metric identifies the number of people that have seen the content that your fans have shared on their own pages.

2. Influence of Post Frequency: This graph is an excellent way to analyze correlations between the frequency of posts and how that influences fans. The purple dots below represent posts to your page; the bigger the dot, the higher frequency of posts that day. If you look at the graph, you will notice that on January 4th (with an average sized purple dot), the “People Talking about This” and “Weekly Total Reach” numbers went up. Conversely, in late December (a larger purple dot, meaning more posts), the “People Talking about This” and “Weekly Total Reach” metrics aren’t as high. Based on this information, marketers can deduce that frequency in content is not what influences their fans. It is more likely, in this case, that their fans are influenced by the subject matter of the content.

3. Engagement and “Virality” of Posts: The graph below displays every post made on your page, alongside a few important new metrics:

Reach: This metric identifies the number of people who have seen the post.

Engaged Users: This metric identifies the number of people who have clicked on the post.

Talking about This: See #1.

Virality: This metric identifies the percentage of people who have shared your post, out of the total number of unique people who have seen it.

By reviewing these metrics for each individual post, a marketer can learn what types of posts are resonating with their audiences and make decisions about future posts, based on that knowledge.

What do you think of these new tools? Will the newly upgraded Facebook Insights be taken into account when planning your Facebook strategy?

Use Facebook’s Targeted Ads to Find Out How Many People Are Into Kinky Sex in Any Workplace

FROM: http://gawker.com/5875937/heres-how-many-facebook-employees-are-into-kinky-sex-according-to-facebook

BY Adrian Chen Jan 13, 2012 4:45 PM

Today I was playing around on Facebook's advertising interface, and found myself learning a little more than I want to know about Facebook's employees. Facebook is happy to tell prospective advertisers how many of its own workers are into kinky sex stuff. (40, FYI.)

You probably know that Facebook makes its money from letting advertisers precisely target users based on what they put in their Facebook profiles. Using Facebook's ad interface, you can target, for example, only male graduates of Dartmouth who live in New York and who have expressed interest in kickboxing and Harry Potter. Facebook's targeted ads make privacy advocates nervous, since they can do things like out individual gay users.

They can also shed light on the sexual practices of a whole company. To help advertisers, Facebook offers an estimate of the number of users that fall under the specific criteria selected. Unlike a normal Facebook search, this estimate includes people who have made their profiles private, since everyone sees ads regardless of their privacy settings. As you can see, Facebook says about 40 people who work for Facebook are into the, uh, non-traditional sexual practices I chose to target. Not bad for a company of 3,000 employees. (Of course, many people on Facebook claim to work at the company but don't, so a lot of these probably aren't employees. But that doesn't stop Facebook from claiming to sell access to 40 kinky Facebook employees.)

So, log in to Facebook, click on create an ad, and see what you can find out for yourself by targeting different organizations and interests. You can learn all sorts of interesting stuff. (Works best with large corporations, churches, or colleges):

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Megachurch pastor Jay Osteen recently called homosexuality a "sin." But he might want to know a few dozen members of his flock at Lakewood Church are openly gay men.

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Palestinian activists might use it to argue New York Times employees demonstrate a pro-israel bias.

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Incoming BYU freshmen will be interested to learn just how boring the next four years will be.

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A surprising number of employees of World Wrestling Entertainment have the musical taste of 13-year-old girls.

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And Coca-Cola may want to institute an anti-Pepsi progrom.

 

Google Obtains IBM Technology for Assessing Social Users' Interests

FROM: http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2012/01/google-obtains-ibm-technology.php

By Scott M. Fulton, III / January 5, 2012 6:30 PM / 2 Comments

Among a handful of patents transferred last December 31 from IBM's portfolio to that of Google, as first discovered by Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea, is a system for processing text compiled by users of social networks, and ascertaining their common interests. We've already seen the rise of tools such as Radian6 for ascertaining social net users' individual interests; this new technology, which received a U.S. patent only one year ago, would judge what concepts they share with one another.

The goal of this technology, as IBM originally stated, is to literally to filter out irrelevant links to articles that may not pertain to users' search intentions. What we don't know yet is whether Google intends to use this technology, or simply keep others from using it first.

"Many Internet users make frequent searches for information, such as product reviews, hotels and travel destinations, and the like, as well as for on-line services such as shopping sites. Such Internet users are typically inundated with meaningless results for each on-line search," states the Background paragraph for U.S. Patent #7,865,592, entitled, "Using Semantic Networks to Develop a Social Network." "Search engines have made searching easier, but a user often needs to sort through irrelevant results and irrelevant Web pages before finding a desired piece of information or a desired shopping site. Thus, even with all of the access to information that an Internet user has at his/her disposal today, many users elect to asking for advice from a friend or acquaintance before beginning a search. However, an Internet user might not know who to turn to for information about a specific subject."

To understand the patent, you have to think of a "social network" not in terms of a site or a service or a company, like Google+ or Facebook, but rather as a mathematical construct that's on the same order of a "semantic network." It's through semantic networks that Google assesses the context to which search terms belong. An article may appear to relate to the search criteria because it contains multiple instances of the search terms. But a semantic network analyzes the common context of terms in the criteria and the documents being searched, to see if there's a more solid bond of relationship than mere pattern matching.

The "social network" that IBM engineers were working toward is also a mathematical construct - specifically, an arrangement of related people whose posts to social networks include concepts that may belong to the same semantic network. The flowcharts excerpted here from the IBM patent (now Google's) present a rough order of events in which social links are established between users whose semantic networks have assessed similarities.

Although the patent doesn't say so as directly as the intentions outlined in its Background paragraph, the idea here is to do a kind of "StackOverflow.com-like" operation in advance, if you will: Find a user within a social scenario who may have already answered the question, rate that answer according to its assessed relevance, and present it as a solution to the search.

Google has already stated that it is leveraging data from Google+ users to present potentially more relevant search results for Google+ users than it would for Google search users not logged into Google+. If Google were to put this former IBM patent to use, it could convert the search process for Google+ users into a more conversational system - into a kind of dialog where people's existing answers respond to questions that come up in the future.

A New Way to Calculate What Facebook is Worth to Your Business

FROM:
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-roi/a-new-way-to-calculate-what-facebook-is-worth-to-your-business/

May 23rd, 2011 @ 01:00 am › Jay Baer

You’re trying to accomplish the same things on Facebook that you are in email, aren’t you? You want to keep your business top-of-mind among people that are already aware of you, and encourage those people to buy again and tell their friends.

The number of Facebook “likes” you’ve accumulated is akin to your email list. The number of impressions your Facebook musings receive (findable in your Facebook Insights report) is akin to your email open rate. The number of thumb ups and comments on your musings is your Facebook feedback rate, which is statistically similar to click-through rate in email.

I’ve been thinking about the mechanical and psychological similarities between email and Facebook for quite a while, and some additional thoughts on these similarities can be found here.

But, until being inspired by a recent issue of AdAge (whose coverage of social media has gotten vastly better in the past 18 months), I’d never thought about valuing Facebook interactions within an email framework.

Valuing Facebook Through an Email Prism

Almost every company has some sort of email newsletter, and that communication channel has a cost associated with it, comprised of fees paid to send the email using a company like ExactTarget (client); fees or staff time needed to design email newsletters; analysis time; and probably some business rules and marketing time to think through sequencing, offers, subject lines, etc.

You can easily determine what that program costs your company on a per email basis, and what the equivalent “value” of your Facebook impressions are, based on your email investment. (download the spreadsheet below to help you calculate)

FOR THE SPREADSHEEt
http://www.slideshare.net/jaybaer/facebook-valuation-worksheet-convince-and-convert/download

Facebook Statistics Portal ZoomSphere Debuts

From: http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-statistics-portal-zoomsphere-debuts-2011-12

For those who can’t get enough statistics on the most popular Facebook pages, another stats portal has entered the scene in the form of ZoomSphere.

ZoomSphere, from Czech mobile app developer MicroMedia, does not provide anything revolutionary in terms of Facebook page rankings, offering information available from several other sources across the Web, including our site.

The portal allows users to sort data by country, and by top gainers on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, as well as to compare two pages and use metrics other than likes, such as talking about this.

ZoomSphere also offers tools for managing the statistics of multiple Facebook pages, as well as forum discussions with social media professionals, and Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn are tracked, as well.

BillingViews Introduces the Facebook Success Index for the Communications Industry

From: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/12/27/prweb9061665.DTL

Index measures global communications operators' success at engaging customers through Facebook; Telus, Vodafone Italy, Orange Jordan, Claro, and DiGi Malaysia among industry leaders

Chicago, IL (PRWEB) December 27, 2011

The practice of engaging customers through Facebook is only in its earliest stages, but it's already clear that the social medium has great potential for customer interaction. BillingViews (www.billingviews.com) has introduced its Facebook Success Index as way to establish benchmarks for communications operators and determine industry leaders in this important, emerging area. The Facebook Success Index is part of BillingViews' ongoing series on Social CRM.

The simplest measure of a company's level of customer engagement is the number of "likes" it has garnered. The Facebook Success index uses this metric as an initial way to measure operators, both in terms of total likes, and in terms of likes as a percentage of their total subscriber base. Likes are the best, most publicly visible, and non-proprietary measure of overall customer engagement via Facebook.

According to the BillingViews Facebook Success Index, the communications industry's leaders include Telus; Vodafone operating companies in Italy, Portugal, Egypt and the UK; Orange Polska and Morocco; America Movil's Claro; DiGi Malaysia; AT&T; and Verizon Wireless. Industry-wide, average total Facebook likes approach 206,000, while the average likes as a percentage of total subscribers is just 1.5%. Industry leaders in each category have garnered more than 1 million likes and achieved better than 5% respectively. Of the 72 operators evaluated, only 12 exceed industry averages in both categories.

Among "small footprint" operators - those with fewer than 5 million subscribers - index leaders include Orange Jordan; Vodafone Czech Republic, Ireland, and Greece; Telenor Serbia and Norway; O2 Slovakia and Czech Republic; and Singtel Singapore.

"The BillingViews Facebook Success Index provides benchmarks for the communications industry, allows us to measure operators against their peers, and gives us a chance to identify and reward industry leaders for their achievements in using Facebook as a customer interaction channel," says Ed Finegold, editor and producer for BillingViews. "We are also continuing to evaluate individual operators' Facebook efforts and define best practices for Social CRM," Finegold says.

About BillingViews
BillingViews is the global home for billing, payments, revenue assurance and CRM expertise and intelligence in the communications and media industries. Its goal is to facilitate dialogue among executive level decision makers and the greater communications and media IT marketplace through focused, data-driven research and publications. BillingViews content is available free at www.billingviews.com.