Search Engine Optimization » Social Media

Facebook Revises Promotional Guidelines

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:24:02 +0000

Will the new promotions guidelines change the way businesses use Facebook?

Everyday more and more brands are popping up on Facebook as a way to engage their fans, but most find that simply updating a status on a business fan page from time to time may not be enough to make an impact with their online community. Because of this, many companies have opted to use these pages as a place to run contests and have seen some very positive results. Businesses find that contests are perfect for Facebook because they get fans involved and interacting with the page, and are easy to conduct and essentially free of costs. A few of the benefits of running Facebook contests include: link building, increased traffic, marketing list creation, brand awareness, user-generated content and social media buzz.

Facebook has obviously seen the value in running contests, and now wants businesses to begin paying for the applications to run them. Facebook has been posting increasingly specific guidelines throughout the past year detailing just what is and what isn’t allowed, giving them more control of how contests are facilitated on fan pages. In early November, the social networking giant posted a new set of promotional guidelines for brands, advertisers and marketers that go into much more detail. There are a lot of don’ts on this list – including things that were previously common practice to build fans and get people talking about your brand.

Here is an overview of the new guidelines:

The Basics

-You can’t ask someone to create Facebook content to enter (unless it’s through a third party application, such as Involver)

-You must have express written permission from Facebook to put on any contest

-Facebook has laid out specific industries and geographies that cannot be included – and no one under 18 can be eligible

What’s Not Allowed

-Status update contests (where someone enters by updating their status)

-Photo upload contests (where someone enters by uploading a photo)

-Become a Fan contests (where someone is automatically entered by becoming a fan of the page)

-Any kind of contest that requires commenting on or responding to items in the News Feed

-Anything that requires purchase of a product or “completion of a lengthy task”

-Contests engaging those under the age of 18

Read the full set of promotional guidelines

In response to the promotional guidelines, Facebook Expert, Justin Smith says, “By requiring all promotions to occur within applications of some kind, Facebook is both keeping the News Feed cleaner and signaling to the tools community that it wants them heavily involved in the future of marketing on Facebook.”

The Search Engines, Social Search and Buzz

Greg — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:12:47 +0000

One way to think about the search engines is that it is their job to show you the sites that have the most activity around them (buzz) given your search terms (kind of like a buzz-o-meter). This is a very challenging task given the shear size of the Internet. Google, for example looks at all of the links coming to your site, the credibility of the site they are coming from and the anchor text used in the link to you (along with where on the page the link is etc.). By ranking and summing up all of these links, the search engine can score your web site relative to others based on these off-page factors. Search engines infer buzz (and indirectly trust) by using formulas to evaluate rank who mentions you and how often.
Social media based search is basically the same concept in that they are measuring the buzz, but rather than formulas, they add the more direct component of personal evaluation. Sites are ranked for search by how they were evaluated by people who visited them. If you can trust (or develop trust for) the people who ranked the sites, then you can be more comfortable that the site is appropriate for your search and that it is trustworthy itself.
It will be very interesting to see how these two models evolve over the next couple of years to address the challenges of real-time search, image and video search and geo-targeted search.

SES San Jose 2009

Greg — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:40:22 +0000

We just returned from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose. This is our second year of taking the whole web marketing team out there. It probably is one of the best investments we make all year.
It is amazing just how rapidly this space is evolving. While social media was an important topic last year, this year it was everything. Last year, it seemed like the discussions were more about how Google would own everything and this year, in the very first panel discussion I went to, the moderator opened with ‘Is Google dead?’ It’s not and it won’t be but that really set the tone for many of the following presentations.

Along with the launch of Bing and its joining with Yahoo for search, the social media websites are starting to assert their presense. All of these present challenges to Google and the status quo. My feeling is that Google is staffed by a lot of very sharp people and like other successful companies will adapt and most likely succeed quite well.

It seemed that the Bing team was very excited about their future. I can only guess how they felt in years past where there product really wasn’t that competitive. They don’t feel that anymore. Bing is focusing on the entertainment, travel and shopping spaces initially. From the data we are seeing with our customers, it seems they are doing quite well in this area. We even have one customer where Bing is driving a higher number of visitors to a site. Last year, nobody but Google was really even on the radar for search referals.

I’ll put together a number of posts on this show. As a team, we attended over 35 presentations, panel discussions and lectures.

Are websites obsolete?

Greg — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:14:05 +0000

In short, no, but its role is changing.

Prior to the explosion of social media, a company’s web strategy revolved around its core website. The key issues were mostly related to garnering traffic and the best means to convert that traffic. Now the core website is becoming just one component, albeit one with a central hub role, in a widening circle of a company’s web presence. Blogs, micro-sites, event based sites and most importantly social sites are taking on an increasingly important role in the overall web strategy.

The home page on Coca-cola.com directs their visitors to become fans of their Facebook site. They now have over 3.5 million fans. Links to Twitter and Myspace are prominent on most every large company website. Even railroads have Twitter accounts now. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Myspace and dozens of other social networking sites are commanding a significant and rapidly growing portion of the Internet traffic. Like in the early days of search, when companies that staked out a position and continued to expand it, reaped huge benefits as traffic increased, companies must get involved in the social networks in order to preserve their position in the social realm for the future.

For example, do you have a Twitter account that covers your trademarks and brand names? How about Facebook? Will people be able to find you if they are looking for your name, or is it back to the days of URL squatters all over again?

We already have clients who receive the bulk of their traffic to their core website from Facebook referals. Today, these are mostly social or community oriented organizations that are a natural fit for this environment, but we are also seeing strong growth in referals for more traditional companies as people begin to rely on the social sites for recommending their business contacts instead of using the traditional search engines.

The role of the core website is changing again just as it has evolved from being a basic brochure to being one of the central methods for communicating with your customers. It should be an exciting ride!