Facebook adds five new Reactions to its Like button

 

Facebook has released its range of reactions which allow you to express how you feel in detail when you respond to a post from a friend. It has extended the range of options available when you press the Like button on a post.

In addition to just ‘liking’ a post, you can express the following reactions to the post by pressing ‘Love, Ha Ha, Wow, Sad, and Angry’ icons at the bottom of the post.

In the notifications area of Facebook you can see the result of any friends’ reaction and what mood they expressed.

Instead of commenting on a friend’s post, giving them a decent conversation and engagement, you can simply press a button and let them know how you feel about their post – without telling them how you ‘really’ feel.

How shallow. How lazy.  Facebook is enabling us to spend even less time talking to our friends, and encouraging us to become ‘drive by’ commenters of our friends’ lives. It is encouraging them to interact even less than we currently do by clicking a button.

However it is grabbing more and more detailed data about how we feel and adding this to its data store. This will lead to ever more targeted advertising that will be tailored to our moods.

Reactions? Not for me Facebook

Its a clever move. Well done for adding to your advertising revenue with new targeting. I’m sure many of your 1.65 billion users will be delighted with the change.

The change will not have any effect on me however. I decided to no longer ‘like’ Facebook posts last year and my feed has changed dramatically since I made the change. I make the effort to engage properly with my Facebook friends and avoid the Like button as much as I can. I will not be unsocial on social media

I actually spend time with many of my Facebook friends. Real time, face to face time. And that’s how it will continue. That is what matters much more to me than a Ha Ha emoji and a simple click.

Facebook introduces explicit sharing for apps to reduce Feed spam

Facebook has started to restrict those annoying apps that auto-post to news feeds. Now you have to specifically share those posts that you want to share. This means that there will no longer be those annoying posts from apps such as Spotify or images from Instagram that flood your news feed. Apps now need specific, explicit  permissions in order to be shared.

The News Feed algorithm has changed to allow priority of posts that have been explicitly shared. Implicit sharing was a good idea but there were few apps that were written well enough to make engaging content in users news feeds.

The number of implicitly shared stories has declined as users have marked posts implicitly made by apps as spam. Less users marked posts as spam as implicit post visibility declined.  Apps in your news feed will only appear if they have been explicitly shared by your Facebook friends.

In a blog post Facebook explained its rationale for the change:

We’ve found that stories people choose to explicitly share from third party apps are typically more interesting and get more engagement in News Feed than stories shared from third party apps without explicit action. We’ve also heard that people often feel surprised or confused by stories that are shared without taking an explicit action. In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed over implicitly shared stories.

Developers now have the option to add dialog boxes to their apps such as the Message Dialog, or the Send to Mobile option.  The Message dialog embeds content from within a conversation thread on Facebook Messenger.

The Send to Mobile feature enables developers to encourage more app downloads.

The option adds the functionality for the mobile app to be installed when people log into the app website using Facebook credentials. 

If users request the app then the link to the app is sent to the mobile phone with a notification.

Clicking on the notification sends the user to the Apple App store or the Android Google Play store to download and install the app.

This is a good move by Facebook. Facebook is all too aware that users need to remain engaged with the Facebook page in order to see the advertising. If users are flooded with spammy apps implicitly sharing everything from the app, then users will turn away from engaging with Facebook. This could lead to a revenue drop – something which Facebook is determined to avoid.

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Important changes to the way Facebook shows you Pages updates

Page Admins  might have been concerned recently as their text posts have not been getting as much engagement as their posts with links, images, or Videos. Facebook has been running a variety of tests to encourage engagement and it has noticed that when it shows users text based posts in the news feed, other users post more updates themselves.

Facebook also noticed that users reacted differently to text only updates from Pages. When shown to users, users did not feel compelled to write more texts themselves. On Its blog Facebook said that “Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types”.

So why is Facebook playing around with what it shows you from brands and your friends? currently to get a post guaranteed to appear in another users feed, you need to promote the post.

Facebook recommends that we share links differently.  Usually we add the link to the post update in the text -  like this:

But Facebook wants us to use the share button feature embedded in many websites. So the same link using the share button looks like this:

 

Both options allow me to add my own text to the share, and both options give me the same link. But there is a fundamental difference between the two.

The share button gives Facebook much more detailed analytics that it can then use to sell on to businesses that want it.  Facebook has much greater difficulty tracking the links that we embed in our posts. Our own embeds do not give Facebook such rich information that It can share with its paying customers.

Facebook says  “We’ve found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds”.

It also recommends that you use the share button to share to give the followers of your page the best possible experience.

The challenge is, if your page does not have a Facebook Share button – then there is the risk that your carefully crafter message will not be seen by your intended audience – at all…

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+  or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Facebook’s memes and themes: Why hope and guilt makes us share

Why do we share some posts and ignore others on Facebook? How does a simple status update become a meme?

Facebook has collected a huge amount of behavioural data.  We find something interesting, share it with our friends and our key phrases for this event are watched by the data science team.

Lada Adamic and Thomas Lento from Facebook, Eytan Adar from the School of Information, EECS, University of Michigan and Pauline Ng from the Genome Institute of Singapore have been looking at how textual status updates are replicated across the social networking platform.They have published their findings in a note on the Facebook Data Science page.

Take these status updates for example:

1: The girl you just called fat? She has been starving herself & has lost over 30lbs. The boy you just called stupid? He has a learning disability & studies over 4hrs a night. The girl you just called ugly? She spends hours putting makeup on hoping people will like her. The boy you just tripped? He is abused enough at home. There’s a lot more to people than you think. Put this as your status if you’re against bullying.

2: Please copy & paste this to your status if you are constantly being asked to copy & paste something to your status by friends who copy & paste things to their status. Many people won’t copy & paste this, but my true sarcastic friends will copy & paste it because they know this was copied & pasted from a dear friend in need of more stuff to copy & paste. Thank you and don’t forget the heart ♥.

3: “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, post this as your status for the rest of the day”.

You have probably seen these status updates – or a variant of these updates on Facebook. The researchers traced 121,605 variants of status update number three and discovered 1,163 memes propagating across Facebook.

(Image from Lada Adamic Ignite NewsFoo 2011 talk)

The results are interesting – especially when similarities are drawn with evolution of genes over time compared with the evolution of memes on Facebook.

90 percent of us will copy a status update exactly as it appears when we repost it on Facebook. The other 10 percent of us will modify the text slightly. (Facebook made it harder to modify text when it introduced the share button in April 2009).

What is more interesting is that some modified text (highlighted in red above) is more “attractive” and is more likely to be shared.

“Paste if you agree”, “See how many people” and “please post this as” phrases are much more likely to be shared than phrases without this type ofinstruction in the status.

Guilt is a powerful emotion. Meme number one above tweaks our emotions and makes us feel obliged to share the post. We are told that only our real friends will actually bother to share the post. There are lots of emotional heartstring tugging here.

Unless you copy and paste this post within 5 minutes, 11 minutes, 19 minutes or you will be unlucky. Money will not come to you. You will not get your wish. Boo hoo.

Other information surfaces about the political leanings of the Facebook community. Take phrase number three and its variants. See how the variants are propagated across the Facebook network:

Variants of these phrases appeared according to the average political bias of posters (-2 very liberal, +2 very conservative).

This information gives quite an insight into the social ties we have on Facebook. We transmit interesting and relevant ideas across Facebook and our friends pick up the themes that resonate and propagate them further.

Some images that we share are visual representations of text memes – images with paragraphs of text that should be shared. We are exhorted that these images are true, or funny, or awesome or cute.

But the content has got to be interesting too. We will not copy and paste status updates unless they are emotionally relevant to us. Messages that mention our partners, children fathers and especially our mothers are much more likely to be shared.

The image of President Obama hugging his wife with the comment “Four more years” has been shared 600,000 times to date. Half of these shares were reshares.  For example, a user saw and shared the photo as the result of another user sharing the image.

Before the share button appeared in 2009, Status updates could be a maximum of 420 characters, up from 160 characters in 2008. The status update limit was increased to 5000 characters in September 2011 and then upped to over 60,000 characters in November 2011.

Remember the “Facebook will start to charge for its services” meme? This meme was copied over 5,000 times in September 2011. Parody memes too get shared across the internet. Some parodies are shared more broadly than the original meme.

Memes have been going around since before Facebook even existed. Snopes.com has collected examples of email and online scares since its inception 1995. Memes can exist for years, can resurface from time to time and evolve into completely new memes.

Next time you reach for the share link, just know you are adding to Facebook’s massive data store and propagating a (perhaps old) meme even further along the line…

Eileen Brown is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Connect with Eileen on Twitter and Google+ or contact her to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

US State Department spent $630,000 getting you to Like its Pages

The US State Department has spent around $630,000 on two marketing campaigns to increase fans of its four English Facebook pages.

It increased Facebook fans from about 100,000 to over 2 million for each of its English language pages. The campaigns also helped to increase interest in its foreign language pages which ranged from 68,000 to over 450,000 likes.

That works out at around 12.06 cents per ‘Like’.

The Department justified its advertising spend pointing to the ‘difficulty of finding a page on Facebook with a general search and the need to use ads to increase visibility’.

The four English language Facebook pages had over 2.5 million fans by March 2013, however interaction was low. Only two per cent engaged with each page on Facebook.

Posts had fewer than 100 comments or shares and most of the interaction was in the form of likes on a page.

The report noted that the bureau uses Facebook to advertise in 25 countries with the largest number of young users and the highest engagement rate.

The International Information Programs (IIP) justified its continued spending and blamed Facebook for it needing to do this. When fans do not interact with a page, then over time, posts from the page no longer appear in the users news feed – unless the page buys sponsored story ads to ensure that the post appears on the users feeds.

The Department said that the change ‘sharply reduced the value of having large numbers of marginally interested fans and
means that IIP must continually spend money on sponsored story ads or else its “reach” statistics will plummet.’

It commented that a posting on cyber censorship in March 2013 reached 234,000 Facebook users on its first day whereas only around 20,000 would have seen the post without it advertising. Its post on Women and the web was shown in 360,000 Facebook feeds instead of 27,000.

Many staff in the bureau have criticized the advertising campaigns as buying fans who have no interest in the topic and have not engaged further.

It has been recommended that the bureau directs its advertising to ‘specific public diplomacy goals’ and adopt a social media strategy that ‘clarifies the primary goals and public diplomacy priorities of its social media sites.’

Does it matter if the bureau is ‘Liked’?  With over 150 social media accounts that are uncoordinated and overlap, does the bureau need to focus on its core messaging and not its sponsored posts and like generation?

And is the US taxpayer prepared to spend over 12 cents for each ‘Like’ that the bureau receives in these economically straightened times?

Image Credit: Enoc.vt

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Your Facebook status is not as private as you thought it was

Do you REALLY trust all your friends on your Facebook feed?  Recently Facebook has added a share link to status updates. Here’s an update I posted earlier on Facebook.

You can see that it is really easy to share this text only post further.  Much further than you wanted it to if you have only sent the post to a limited number of friends in the first place.

From the help text these are the levels of sharing you can do:

• Sharing with a broad audience: Use the share menu that’s located at the top of your homepage and timeline to let others know what’s on your mind. You can update your status and share photos, videos, links and other application content. Things you share will appear as posts on your timeline, and can appear in your news feed. To control whether or not specific people have the option to view your stories, you can change the privacy settings for each piece of content you post.
• Sharing with a small group of friends: Use the Groups feature to share content with a select group of people, like family members, your soccer team or your book club.
• Sharing with an individual: You can use the share menu at the top of a friend’s timeline to write or share something on his or her timeline. Friends of your friend will also be able to view your post. If you’d like to share something privately, you can always send someone a private message.

But sharing status updates that were never originally meant to be shared with a broader audience seems wrong. Having the ability to control whether that status update can be shared

This means that anyone who reads your Facebook status update can share it with, not only their friends, but make the status update public. Anyone else can then share this further.

The Facebook privacy page does not mention that status updates that you originally thought were just for your Facebook friends, now can be shared with anyone outside of your friends and their friends.

So be careful what you put on Facebook.  It might be reaching a much greater audience than you ever intended it to…

7 tips for small businesses to improve Facebook Page engagement

There are now 15 million small and medium business pages on Facebook business. It is a great way for small businesses to connect with local customers  — but many struggle to get any real engagement with their fans.

Most Facebook pages are community or cause pages, followed by local businesses and musicians. But pages are not updating or getting engagement with their fans.

Source: Recommendly report

Recommend.ly reports that there is a low level of engagement and indeed a low level of fans clicking like on the page. 73.3 per cent of pages have less than 1000 fans and 99 per cent have less than 100,000 fans.

Source: Recommendly

SMB page owners also do not update their pages with 83.3 per cent updating their page less than 5 times per month and 79.3 per cent making no updates at all. The challenge is – if you do not update your page, then your fans will not see your update. Facebook shows updates to about 15 per cent of your fans so you need to update regularly to make sure that your post is seen.

Interestingly enough, businesses with category names such as Restaurant or Spa are more active in posting on Facebook and make more than 5 posts per month. Even so, over 50 per cent of local businesses do not have a cover picture for their page.

So what can small businesses do to improve engagement?  These 7 tips might help

• Use the promoted posts feature. 500,000 pages are now using promoted posts according to Dan Levy
• Post regularly. Politicians post over 100 updates per month according to the report.
• Take advantage of Facebook’s new look coming soon with a greater focus on photos. Share photos and upload videos which are more likely to be seen by your customers. Join the waiting list for early access to the new news feed too
• Use the scheduled post feature and post regular updates – even at times when you are busy.  Your readers will see scheduled posts, images and videos in their feeds
• Add a cover image. 63.9 per cent of all pages do not have a cover image.
• Ask questions
• If you are a politician, Actor/director or Spa, post visual content. You will get a much higher engagement rate on your page.

The most important thing is to keep going. If you despair of getting no responses and no interaction, don’t worry. Each post you make will be seen by some of your fans. you will remain in their mind, even subconsciously and they will be more likely to remember you compared to someone that does  not update their page at all.

So treat your page as a live feed advertisement of your brand. Keep it active, keep it visual.

and most importantly – keep it going…

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Who owns your content?

You don’t own your Twitter updates, you do not own your Facebook updates. If you have a wordpress.com blog, then as soon as you hit publish the content belongs to WordPress. Read the terms and conditions on your own social platform. As soon as you upload the content is no longer yours.

Although these words have come out of my brain, through my fingertips, as soon as I hit publish on this blog, it belongs to WordPress, or on my Social Business blog then ZDNet owns the content.

You own the content on Facebook. However you give Facebook the following rights:

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture)”.

Your content is also yours on Twitter but you:

“Grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)”.

Twitter and Facebook use the information that you have freely submitted. They analyse your behaviour, work out how they can best use this social data gold mine of information. Twitter has been selling access to your Tweets for some time now. Customers pay for this data to work out how best to market to you on social media and influence your buying decisions.

You do not even own your online profile on social media platforms either. You give information away hoping that the knowledge you have shared will enhance someone else’s day.

Just like this blog entry really…

Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.

Image Credit: Aturkus

Why I have social media snow stress

Over the last few days I’ve driven over 350 miles to client offices. I’ve been delivering workshops and hands on training sessions on site. Each trip has been over 50 miles from my office. I’ve crossed several counties and driven round major motorways and roads.

And I’ve been very, very stressed about each trip I’ve made.  All because of social media.

Last week, as the snow fell, Twitter lit up with the interactive snow map, produced by using the hashtag #uksnow. People send messages rating the snowfall on their area. 

Local news channels invited people to send in their photos of the snow. Websites showed abandoned cars, gritters, snowplows and people sledging and skiing in town streets.

My own Facebook feed filled with icy gardens, snowmen and white snow covered roads. My friends in the UK rushed to social media to tell their friends just how bad the snow was.

London Heathrow airport cancelled 20 per cent of its flights. I was extremely worried about driving to my client meeting in an office close to Heathrow.

Would I get there, would I have to abandon my car miles away from the office and walk? Would I have to reschedule the meeting?

I asked my Facebook friends how the snow was in each location I wanted to get to. I asked people about the driving conditions on my route. And I scanned the news for real time information.

Saturday was a stressful day watching the weather reports. On Sunday I decided to leave home early and stay with friends who lived closer to the client.  I did not want to risk the 120 mile drive early on Monday morning.  i worried about the trip all day on Sunday finally setting off early complete with emergency supplies in the car, blankets, hot drinks and a shovel.

The drive was much better than I’d imagined. Although it was snowing heavily, the gritters were out keeping the roads clear. There were no hold ups and people were driving at a sensible speed. I had no problems.

On Monday morning, I started my journey an hour earlier than I normally would do – and I arrived at the client offices an hour early on a bright sunny day. My drive home from the client gave me no problems. The greatest amount of snow was in my own driveway. Tuesday’s drive to my next event was smooth and snow free.

I had worried for days – all for nothing. And social media had fuelled my anxiety.

20 years ago, I would have got in the car and made the drive. I might have seen the TV reports, I might have called the client before I left to gauge the snow.  I certainly would not have spent days before the event worrying about the weather and poring over user generated reports.

I would have just gone out and made the journey.  I have driven in all sorts of weathers since I learned to drive.  It didn’t bother me at all – until this weekend. Social media snow stories stressed me out.

I had believed everything I read on Twitter and Facebook about the weather and I worried. Should I have depended so much on all the data I was getting? Thinking about this makes sense. The snow map is more representative of where people tweet about snow, than where snow is actually falling. 

In isolated or rural areas people might not tweet about snow as they are busy clearing it away from the roads. Not everyone in the country uses Twitter – or Facebook.

I was basing my decisions on a huge amount of data – and not making my own judgement calls on the situation. 

So will I check my social feeds the next time the UK has a dramatic fall of snow? Yes, probably. But next time, I’ll follow my own experience and hunches and I won’t be so swayed by the user generated content I see.  Next time I’ll trust my own judgement  — just like I used to. 

Social media will continue to inform me – not stress me out. And I’ll enjoy others’ images of snow – without anxiety  

Eileen is a social business and social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.

How to secure Facebook from Graph search

Facebook has introduced Graph Search and some users are concerned about what information about them will be shared outside of their Facebook friends.  With Facebook Graph Search you can now search across the whole of Facebook for complex queries. You might want to find single females in Leeds that like Xbox, or photos of single men near your location.

With Graph Search, you can look up anything shared with you on Facebook, and others can find stuff you’ve shared with them, including content set to Public. That means different people will see different results.

You can find all friends who live in the same town as you – or anyone that has their settings set to ‘Public’.  you can find restaurants your friends have been to.

As we all have different friends, we all will see different search results – even when searching for the same thing. Facebook will only display results according to the privacy setting you have made on your profile.

If you have customised your privacy settings to only display your information to only your friends, then you will not show up in search results from people who are not your friends.

If you are concerned about what information you are sharing with others it is easy to change your settings.

Go to your own profile and click the about link. You will see an edit button on the right of each section. Click on this and change the settings to make sure that only people see your details – if you want them to.

Your activity log manages your overall activity on Facebook. Have a look there to see what is shared with your friends, friends of friends and Public.

There are videos showing how Privacy works with Graph Search and how to remove a tag on Facebook which walks through common settings.

Make sure that only the people you want see the information you want to share – and secure your timeline to prevent anyone seeing your private photos, or posts.

That way appearing in Graph search will be as often as you want it to be

Eileen is a social business and social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can help your business extend its reach.