My name is Māris Antons and digital media is what I do for living. I am fascinated by the world of digital & social media and the endless posibilities they offer both to marketers and users.
My work is my hobby and my hobby is my work. Therefore, I love to read and constantly improve my knowledge. Sometimes I form my opinion. From time to time I even want to share it. And this is exactly the place for that.
Keep in mind – your opinion matters too, so if you have something to say – leave a comment or drop me an e-mail at maris@marisantons.com!
I had heard about it, but didn’t give it too much attention until it happened with me – Facebook page notification box has been replaced by reach data of the page’s latest posts. And there’s no option to get back notifications. It looks like this:
This is bad for businesses and their customers. Let me tell you why.
It’s actually pretty simple – if you are an admin of a Facebook page, all you have to do is – start chat with anyone via that small chat box at the bottom of your browser, then open a new tab, navigate to a page you manage, choose the option “Use Facebook as [your page]”, go back to the tab where you have your chat open and send another message – your friend has received a message from your page and it’s in his/her inbox (“Other”).
This is a feature that mimics Facebook ad targeting for your page’s everyday posts. It can come in as pretty handy, when you have message which might be interesting for a limited audience or shouldn’t be seen by anyone outside of it) — for example, just people in an exact geographical location (like city or country), or speakers of one or more languages.
Not so long ago (in the middle of December) Instagram changed their “Terms of Service” which created a massive uproar between users and media. A lot of users and even brands threatened to leave the service. Some really did leave (National Geographic, for example). This wasn’t the first time Instagram was unable to please everyone.
So, I would like to point out this and some other points, which have made me thinking – how far can Instagram go and how much will its users endure. Here it goes. My list of Instagram’s wrongdoings:
Just lately* more and more of my friends have started to use Facebook more and there is one pretty interesting trend that has got me thinking about bigger things on how social networks operate — my friends are creating one FB group after another and the same happens with FB chats which are created for special occasions.
As a marketer I’m always following shifts in social media and other digital channels. I’ve always been a big fan of content marketing, but for know it seems that content marketing is and should be moving away from social networks (in this article it’s more about Facebook). Let me give you a few points to think about.
Follower number is irrelevant
This has always been a talking point - how relevant is the fan/follower count. In my opinion, its actual value is falling lower and lower.
Recently more and more advertisers in Latvia have started to put their Facebook addresses and page names on their outdoor ads. While I’m happy that social networks are becoming more important in the whole marketing hierarchy, these ads got me thinking.
- You’ll reward your fans with a special offer. A good deed goes a long way
- You’ll reach friends of your fans. As Facebook puts it: “It’s one of the most viral type of posts you can create on your page.”
- You’ll be able to measure how many of your fans are actually your potential customers. You’ll be able to correlate your online activity with offline action. That’s always good.
This is from personal experience - yesterday I saw a wall post with picture which had a special offer on it, but the copy of this wall post had different price for that offer. Since I already knew about this offer for a while, I thought that it was made even better/updated, but they hadn’t bothered to update the visual – so I went to check it out.
It turned out that the copy was wrong. I sent a message to the corresponding brand’s (they’re active on facebook, it’s an international brand) facebook page to point this out.
The response was polite, well timed (I sent the message at 5pm, got the reply at 7pm) and left a good impression. What surprised me, was one sentence (translated from Latvian): “Yes, we know about this and we already replied about this to everyone in the comments about this. We might pull the post tomorrow to publish another one - with a corrected copy.”
This made me wonder - how many brands with serious (or less serious) attitude towards social media could be out there that don’t know that it takes 30 seconds to correct the wall post’s copy (if it’s with picture) without deleting it?
So there’s how to do it. This will work for already published wall posts with pictures, galleries (wall post contain gallery descriptions - you can fix them) and if I’m not wrong, videos. Both for personal profiles and Facebook pages. This will not work with status updates.
Lets assume that you have published picture and the you notice that the copy is wrong. In the example below, the sentence next to the picture actually isn’t a mistake (this is a screenshot from page’s wall). What to do?
This is a no brainer. Every social media “expert” at any given time is ready to spill out this magical sentence: “on social media 100 friends are worth more than 1000 acquaintances” as soon as someone starts (or is about to start) bragging about the number of followers.
Why is it that talking to 100 people is better than talking to 1000 people? That makes no sense, this is marketing – we want to get the word out, we want everyone to follow us. That’s why we are launching these campaigns, which everyone will like and we’ll have pretty sweet follower numbers afterwards.
