Colin’s Sandbox

For most marketing search engine marketing is a common marketing technique and entire business united have been established to focus on search.   The most popular tool being Google and in a distant second the Microsoft Bing/live tools.   Facebook search on the other hand is a much different beast and much more difficult to market against.   In order to optimize we need to understand the Facebook Search function.

The key component to understand with Facebook search is the interaction relationship.  This means that content that the user has interacted with in the past will appear first and may appear in the auto-complete if they have Fan, Joined or Bookmarked the content.

Facebook search then will  display search results based on your friends involvement with content.  This means that individuals, groups, pages, or applications which your friends have interacted with appear at the top.  The next considertation is your network(s) and content types with more people from your network will be assigned priority.  Facebook has indicated they will removing networks but this logic is likely to be replace with geographic filters.

The next concept to understand is that Facebook assigns a priorty to different content types, assuming you have equal friend interactions or no friend interactions.  The priority is generally:

1. Individual user profiles
2. Facebook Pages
3. Facebook Groups
4. Facebook Applications
5. Facebook Events
6. Friend Facebook Posts
7. Everyone’s Facebook Posts

After these internal Facebook content types Web Search results will be presented from the Microsoft Bing search results.

The other major different between Facebook and other search tools is the keyword matching.  The matching seems to be much more strict that other tools and partial keyword matching is very poor.

Across all content types the depth of search seems to limited to the content title.    This is probably the most important tool for Facebook search marketing.  Creating an effective title can increase your placement in search.  Without partial keyword matching a long title will be difficult to match with user keyword and keyword stuff has limited impact because the title on most content sources is limited.

The other important consideration, especially when combined with paid advertising is to get maximum coverage across networks ( geographic, schools and employers ) and across as many friend clusters as possible.   Facebook allows for a number of geographic targeting options and good distribution here can help with Facebook search results.

Since Facebook launched Facebook Pages in 2007 alot clients have asked how their page is
performing.

Sysomos provides tools for measuring and comparing brand performance among across social media and yesterday released a report on Facebook Pages here:

http://www.sysomos.com/insidefacebook/

The report includes the Top 5 pages in each of the Facebook Page categories and includes a comparison between the different categories in terms of overall number of Facebook Fans.  The main advantage that a Facebook offers is the ability to communicate with your “Fan” based using the Facebook Page wall and update channel.   Facebook Pages can also be used with Facebook Applications to provide additional functionality and the basis for more interactive campaigns.

One of the more interesting aspects of the report is the owner generated content and fan generated content.   I believe the ratio between these is a great indicator of the level of interaction your achieving with your Fan base.  It also shows the impact of mass in social media with larger pages ( over 1 Million Fans ) having a much greater Owner to Fan content ratio.

Ebay has released a very cool map/video of Black Friday transactions on their website, you can see it here:

http://www.ebayholiday.com/black-friday

If your not familar with Black Friday, its a mainly US phenomia where retailers enter into the “Black” for the year with the beginning of the Christmas holiday shopping. Most retailers offer significant discounts to get people shopping, and it seems that this trend matchs well with Ebay Transactions online.

Of particular interest is the number of Transactions that appear on the East Coast. Ebay original started as on the West Coast but it would appear to be much more widely penetrated across the East Coast of the US or prehaps East Coast retailers are more aggressive with their Black Friday sales/discounts…

Note: This post can also be found on refreshclassifieds.com

As most of you know I’ve been working for the last few months at Ascentum and we’ve been working towards a new website. Yesterday we launched new Ascentum.com website, which was a switch from Ascentum.ca and an older CMS system that didn’t feature many social media functions.

The new site Ascentum.com is also supported by a Facebook Page, Twitter Account and Youtube Channel.

• hmmm, considering Movember… Its a great cause but I don't think I could deal with Stache… #
• Do kids not smash pumpkins anymore? I haven't seen a single smashed pumpkin all day… Just saying, wasn't tempted to smash any myself… #
• At the Toronto Innovation Showcase in City Hall Council Chambers, its the calm before the storm… #opendatato #
• I don't know the future of government but I'm not convinced that its happening right now in council chambers #

• Great time at Facebook Garage Montreal tonight, thanks again to all the organizers and speakers! #
• Just saw the best Mimi-Mouse costume… #
• Really impressed with Twitter Lists, very simple and smart implementation… #
• If there were points for bad uniforms the Habs would already be losing… Go Leafs! #
• #trick or #treat #
• Even Don Cherry's suit looks better than the Hab uniforms… #

Facebook revealed their roadmap yesterday and it includes a number of changes for developers.  Inside Facebook has a create summer here.

I think the biggest change is the consolidation of communications into the Facebook inbox.  Facebook Invites and Notifications are going away and communication will be divided into Inbox communication and Email.  It looks like both channels will feature an opt-in requirement, making app to user communications very challenging in the future.

I think the consolidation of communication is probably a good thing.  Everytime I see a screenshot of someone’s Homepage I always see hundreds of ignored invites and notifications.  I don’t know that the new system will fix that but it should allow users to find these types of communications centrally.

The other change is around the placement of Bookmarked Applications.  It looks like these will be moving from the task bar to right side bar where the feed filters are located now.  Its not clear where the feed filters will be going or how often they are used ( I suspect they are not being used effectively ).

All of these represent another UI change for users though and Facebook has indicated they want to roll-out the changes by the end of the year.  As always it will be interesting to see the reaction from users to these changes…

Facebook released some interface changes last night.  They appear to be:

• New Group Page design with Tab Interface and strong wall presence.  This makes groups now very similar to Facebook Pages.
• Addition of a LiveFeed option to the Homepage.   This works similar to the Newsfeed but doesn’t allow the same type of content filtering and the Newsfeed doesn’t seem to update as often.
• Remove Feature Items, the featured items from the right hand side have been removed.  These were kind of random in any case.
• Friend Suggest now suggests contacting friends with incomplete or low-Facebook profile usage

The changes are all relatively small but the most significant is probably the LiveFeed addition and it seems users will be defaulting to this in most cases.

For years now Google has dominated the search marketing field.  Its Pagerank algorithm attempts to find content that is the most relevant to the keywords being search.  In most cases this means placing a greater emphasis on older more established content and ignoring the newer content.  This has worked well for most content types except for breaking news and trending items.  When Michael Jackson died a search for “Michael Jackson” was more likely to bring up fan pages than articles around his death.

Enter Twitter and Facebook, for trending topics the social networks have an advantage in that they can see trending topics developing in real-time.  And yesterday they announced a partnership with Bing to power its real-time search component.  This should provide Bing with an advantage in the real-time search market.  Its not clear how big the real-time market is as compared to the more traditional search market that Google dominates.

Its will be interesting to see if Marketers start to place a greated emphasis on purchasing keywords based on real-time trends that be associated with their brands.  The search engines are already well equipped with bid based pricing models to handle real-time price fluctuations in keywords.

One Degree announced yesterday that they are stopping production on their site.  I’ve been a long time reading and even contributed some articles a few years ago and it looks like they’re committing to keeping the site up as an archive for now.

I’d really like to thank Kate and Rose for all the time and effort that went into maintaining the site.   They’ve done a great job of since taking over from Ken.