Facebook – Page 8 – The Web Authority

May 13, 2014May 9, 2014

The New Facebook – Again

I’m sure that you’ve noticed that Facebook has changed its look again, for at least the one millionth time. For some who do not check in frequently it may seem like the same old look, but for those of us who are on Facebook several times a day the new look is not necessarily a better look.

Here’s what Facebook did specifically:

1. Changed what appears in your news feed – trying to make it more relevant to you personally. Unfortunately for me, my news feed now looks like a video bazaar.

2. Many videos are set to auto-play now; especially the brand or advertising videos. You won’t hear sound, just see action, until you click the video and then the sound comes on.

3. Bigger default images in the news feed. Most will fill the width of the news feed, making them hard to miss. Don’t like that old high school photo someone posted of you, oh well, it is going to be pretty hard for others to miss!

4. More current events and news will now appear in your news feed. Well at least that’s the story.

5. Content will reappear multiple times – Facebook wants to make sure you didn’t miss that important message or brand campaign!

As for me, I have noticed that my news feed appears junkier. It seems like I have too many videos and images in my news feed and few status updates of friends. In fact the status updates are lost in the jumble of Vine videos, GodVine videos (I am going to have to unsubscribe from them as Facebook is now letting them “blow up” my news feed.). I am actually finding it hard to find any content which is why I was on Facebook in the first place.

I have to say that I am looking really, really hard at the “newly revised” Twitter.

May 8, 2014May 4, 2014

Facebook Flagging Some Businesses as Spammers

Crying about your placement on Facebook.

Our experience as a user of Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter is all about the legitimacy of the experience. Are you connecting or is the business/site owner churning out content and links flooding the network without any regard for quality?

Facebook has recently announced that it is flagging and targeting in their algorithm to show less frequently in news feeds pages that are using these tactics:

Frequently repeating posts/updates or content
Asking for likes, shares, and comments (like-baiting)
Links in posts pointing to link farms or AdSense Arbitrage pages

It is already hard enough for a business to get exposure in the news feed of fans without having to revert to Facebook pay per click. It looks like Facebook is now making it that much harder by filtering out sites that are actively working to grow their Facebook base.

April 22, 2014April 20, 2014

What’s the Perfect Length for Social and Blog Content?

What’s the perfect sized blog post? How about a tweet, is 140 characters too much? Who says that a longer Facebook status update is better, is it really? In an article found online at Buffer, I’ve found what one author says is the perfect length for everything. But are those tips and suggestions right?

Below are personal recommendations on what works best for each platform based on what our own customers and readers seem to like best.

Twitter – what’s the perfect tweet length?
Although Twitter only let’s you enter in 140 characters including spaces do you ever wish you had more room? Sure but less room? Kevan Lee says the perfect tweet is 100 characters and that these short tweets get 17% more engagement. I have to say that from my experience tweets that are this short typically are teasers for videos, spam, or sharable quotes. Does that mean that you should start shortening your tweets? I say no, but make your tweets work harder by linking or pointing to something meaningful to your audience.

Facebook – what’s the perfect length for a status update?
Customers do think that more is better when it comes to paid writing on Facebook, but does more necessarily translate into more engagement? Buffer says the perfect Facebook status update is 40 characters long. Wow, that seems pretty short and hard to really even express what a link in your updates is all about. From my personal experience about 150 to 160 characters seems about best for Facebook. Facebook updates with an image or linking to a page with an image (so Facebook will show a thumbnail) seem to get the most response.

Blogging – what’s the perfect length for a blog post?
Buffer says the ideal blog post is 1,600 words. 1,600 words translates into more than three pages of a Word document. When was the last time you read this much content on one website? Unless the article was enriched with data, statistics and unique research from a highly authoritative writer and on a topic that was really important to me or about something I wanted to learn about, I have to say that the chance of having a real audience be engaged from introduction to conclusion would be pretty slim.

Recent studies have been done on how Internet and screen reading have cut the general publics attention span. Internet articles are not read like books or print articles but rather scanned. Have too much content, not enough white space, blocks of content that are more than two sentence long and you risk losing your reading audience.

My customers vote with their pocket books and our top selling blog writing levels are those at 200 to 250 words per blog post followed by 140 to 300 words per post long. I personally like blog posts that are 300 to 350 words long as this is just long enough to flesh out a topic and really have something interesting to say.

So what’s your perfect length? Just as a point of reference this post is a little over 500 words long. If it was the supposed “perfect blog post” it would be three times this long!

March 6, 2014March 2, 2014

Should You Still Post on Facebook?

Glass of Chocolate Milk with Two Straws — Make Sure You Share Long Enough on Facebook!

So many businesses are wrestling with what makes sense to them in regards to social media and specifically Facebook.1. Some have decided that it is too much trouble and that their likes and follower numbers are too hard to grow and so have abandonned Facebook entirely.

2. Some have decided that Facebook is the place they want to be and have dropped Twitter, LinkedIn, and in some cases even blogging to invest more time on Facebook.

So how can you decide if you should still post on Facebook for your business?

1. Before you drop Facebook, make a careful analysis of where you are connecting with your customers and prospects. If you are posting regularly on Facebook and you have under 80 followers after posting for 6 months to a year, you may be able to easily move out of Facebook and invest your time elsewhere. A great place to move is to a Google+ Community, starting as a member of an existing community before you spin off into one of your own making.

2. If you have 80 or more followers and you are having regular monthly follower growth, I would consider staying with Facebook and making an effort to improve your activity there both with a minimum of two updates a day and some level of follower/fan interaction such as likes, responses to posts and private messages.

3. If you just have a Facebook page and have never done regular updates I would try first for 6 months before you totally abandon Facebook.

Here’s what I’ve seen personally, with regular quality updates for over a year we took an account that had very few likes and activity into one that is growing over 20 new likes a month. As more time goes by, the follower/like numbers have started to increase from 20 to over 30 a month and are still climbing. For this client, out of all the social media platforms that they are using, Facebook is the most active, even more popular than YouTube. But, it took a while to really identify that Facebook was the place for them to be. The important take away from this is that it is important to evaluate long enough to be able to clearly discern which social media platform is best for your own business.