Blacktype

The new facebook page layout

Christina — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:22:10 +0000

Tonight I’ve seen a prompt on my facebook pages to try out the new page format. This brings the pages into line with the recent changes to the personal profile pages in terms of layout and visual design. Facebook gives more about their reasoning behind this in their blog post here.

From a marketing point of view there are some useful new features.

1) Posting elsewhere on facebook as your page – this makes it easier to engage with other relevant pages and individuals as a brand. Previously it was a little clunky as you had to post as yourself and tag your page.

2) Page notifications – For business owners who aren’t on facebook several times a day, this function allows page admins to be emailed when comments are posted on the page wall. If you have a very active page this would quickly become annoying but for the small business owner, a very useful feature.

3) Photos – A selection of photos appear across the top of the page in the new strip viewer. Carefully tagged photos with URLs to related content have always been good for sending traffic and now they are more prominent this can only increase the effect. The photos highlighted can be selected and fan photos don’t appear here.

On the downside, what were individual tabs are now replaced by a list of sub-pages, under the profile picture and are not as prominent, which may reduce traffic to custom FBML tabs.

The bio information that was under the profile picture has also been moved, strengthening the need for turning your profile picture into a billboard for your brand.

So you think social media is a fad?

Christina — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 13:24:30 +0000

Watch this for some astounding facts & figures:

Social media use exploding for the over 50s

Christina — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:37:41 +0000

Some interesting statistics in a new report from Mintel about internet use in the over 50s demographic:

“Almost a fifth of all Britons who visited social networks for the first time last month were aged over 55, the figures show. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 older people have logged on to sites like Facebook for the first time in the past year.”

“Almost half of female internet users over 55 regularly log on to sites like Facebook and Twitter.”

“More than a third of men and women over 55 also visited sites like YouTube to watch videos for free.”

These figures only re-inforce that all businesses & brands need a social media presence, regardless of the age demographic of your target consumers.

Athletes & the Media

Christina — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:48:36 +0000

It never ceases to amaze me how difficult athletes can be to reach for media requests. Emails, phonecalls and texts all go unanswered although strangely facebook messages seem to elicit a better response rate. I understand that they undoubtedly have busy training and competition schedules but how often do you hear professional sports people moan that they find it difficult to attract sponsors.

When an industry leading publication can’t get riders to give interviews at the World Championships, there’s something wrong! (see Horse&Hound article here)

Sporting success + media exposure = sponsorship = more money = increased chances of future success

Seems obvious doesn’t it?!

Privacy & the Web in 2010

Christina — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:02:43 +0000

Here’s a video of my talk on Privacy & the Web in 2010 from Ignite Bristol

Love to hear your feedback.

Friday Favourite – Natalie Massenet Net-A-Porter

Christina — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:08:48 +0000

For the fashionistas amongst my readers here’s a great video behind the scenes at Net-a-porter.com, one of the big e-commerce success stories of the last decade & currently valued at £350 million.

If you’re not a fashionista then treat it as inspiration for the graft that all of us entrepreneurs will be putting in over the Bank holiday!

Location, Location

Christina — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:30:22 +0000

Location based services are the new poster child of digital marketing. Facebook is rushing to add the functionality to their site in response to hot start-ups such as foursquare rolling out. But is it worth the average business getting involved? An interesting article on Masahable (click here to read in full) would lead you to think perhaps not due to the poor uptake on the service at the moment. Only 4% of the adult, Internet using population has used any kind of location-based service, and just 1% of all adults check into a location at least once a week.

By contrast, more than 11% of online adults have used Twitter, and an estimated 28% of all Internet users have signed up for Facebook (Facebook).

So my advice would be to focus on facebook & twitter at present, but keep an eye on sites such as foursquare as they grow in user-mass.

CPM Confusion

Christina — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:59:02 +0000

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding online advertising and CPM ad sales in particular.

I often hear clients say that they advertise on a particular website because it’s the largest in their sector.
This sort of strategy isn’t necessarily delivering value and to explain why we need to delve a bit deeper into how online advertising is sold.

The majority of online media sales (whether that be banner or pre-roll video ads) are made on a cost per thousand basis (CPM). This means that you pay a fixed amount to display a thousand impressions of your advert. If a site charges £50 cpm and your monthly budget with that advertiser is £500, then your advert will be shown 10,000 times (£500/£50 = 10 x 1000 impressions = 10,000).

Therefore the overall number of visitors to the website has no effect on the number of times your advert is shown.

So how then to decide where to best to advertise?

In my opinion there are 2 elements to this:

1) The overall site demographics
How does the profile of site visitors fit your customer profile or target market. Factors include age, sex, location and social grade.

2) Where are your adverts shown?
Are your adverts being displayed around the premium content of the website – in general this would be the homepage, the news section and other interesting editorial led content such as videos, articles, blogs.
Sites with large classified advert sections can have very high user statistics but do you want to pay for your advert to be displayed around other adverts?

It pays to have a careful look at the media pack and ask some relevant questions to the ad sales person about where your content will be displayed.

Ignite Bristol kicks off tomorrow

Christina — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:23:01 +0000

I’m speaking at the Bristol Ignite event tomorrow on privacy & the internet in 2010. There’s a great line-up of speakers & it promises to be a lively evening. There may be a few tickets left, check out the Ignite website.

Facebook now a major player in on-line video

Christina — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:39:01 +0000

Some very interesting data from Tubemogul about online video has been released in the last couple of days, showing that facebook is ranked #5 in top online video sites in the USA by unique viewers (based on April ’10 data). Perhaps not that surprising but it is when you consider that facebook has no real video strategy, it’s just sort of happened. Also and in some ways more importantly, advert based videos on facebook are seeing higher click-through rates than industry standards (although this is a little skewed by social gaming currency offers) & viewers are more engaged in the videos viewed on the site.

So what’s the relevance for you? If you have video content already, why isn’t it on facebook too?