Pinterest users create a number of pin boards for categories such as interior design, food, fashion and as they discover things they like they can “Pin It” to one or more of their boards. This is nothing special in the social bookmarking field, but Pinterest’s heavy emphasis on imagery has seen it become popular amongst women, who are interested in fashion and other aspects of retail.

Since September Pinterest has seen its user base increase fourfold, resulting in 7.51 million new visitors in December and in a single week (Dec 10-17th) it received 11 million return visits. This obviously resulted in the amount of traffic Pinterest was referring to other sites increased substantially

Brands that were early to use the service, such as Nordstrom, have used Pinterest as an online catalogue where other users can re-pin their favourite clothes items and outfits to share with their friends, while always linking back to their online store. More apparel brands are odopting this strategy help users share their favourite clothes.

This is  a trend that is likely to come across the pond as more and more people become aware of Pinterest in the UK, but unfortunately you will have to wait for an invite. You can add yourself to the waiting list here.

Below is an infographic about Pinterest potentially becoming a social commerce game changer, made by Monetate.

Social interactions are hugely influential on travel customers when they are looking a sorting out a holiday/trip, with recommendations from friends having more weight than a piece of advertising. This can also be thought of as your customers influencing their friends and effectively becoming ambassadors to your brand.

For the travel industry, the local aspect of SoLoMo is obviously important due to customers wanting to know information about where they are going or wanting to discover information once they are at the physical location. 1 in 3 searches done from mobile phones in 2011 had local intent, meaning that people are looking for information from their immediate area.

Back in September we said the 26% of the western population had a smartphone and that the number of people owning them was increasing by 3% each month. New predictions suggest that percentage of people owning smartphones will go beyond 50% in 2012. Add the fact that the mobile phone is one of the few personal possession that travel customers take on their holidays, you now have an extremely strong reason to engage with your customers on mobile devices.

As we look into 2012 and beyond we can see that travel customers are accessing information and sharing their experiences in real time from their location aware smartphones and tablets.

SoLoMo Strategy

Mobile websites and applications need to be robust, cater for all sizes of smartphone screens and have clear navigation. It is also important to has cross channel consistency because it is likely that visitors to your website might of been on your desktop site or seen your social media presence and will expect to navigate around your mobile site in a similar fashion to the desktop and for it to have the same aesthetics.

For local, the most important action is to make sure that all the location information about your hotels, attractions or destinations are correct. Without correct local information any strategy you implement will be immediately ineffective. Once all the geo-location information is correct then, thanks to location aware devices, your mobile website or application can access the user’s location in order to provide then with the most relevant information for their area. This could take the form of showing the user where your nearest hotel is, information about the local area or public transport information.

With a robust mobile website that can provide location based information the next step would be to integrate social functionality to allow users to easily share the information they have found or use services like Facebook connect to create a more personal mobile experience. Social media integration can go further than just sharing experiences, it can help users to ask for recommendations from their friends through the likes of Facebook and Twitter, rate a product.

Although we’ve talked briefly about SoLoMo as a whole package, they can also easily exist separately and paired together in order to achieve your business objectives. If you would like to discuss SoLoMo in more depth and how it can work for your organisation then please get in touch.

With the latest update, page admins now have access to information on the number of people talking about their content, their weekly reach and the virality of the content they create. Below are the explanations of the new features provided by the New Facebook Page Insights tutorial:

People Talking About This and Weekly Total Reach
People Talking About This is the number of unique people who have created content about your page on Facebook in the past week. The more people that talk about your page, the more distribution it will get. The number of people that have seen your message is displayed in Weekly Total Reach.

Virality
Virality measures how likely a person is to share something about your posts with their friends. This is a great indicator of the kind of posts your audience responds to.

These extra features provide Facebook Page admins with knowledge on what their fans find interesting to the point at which they believe the content is worth sharing with their friends. With this knowledge future updates can be tailored a certain way to achieve objectives. To start with though it’s down to experimenting to discover what your fans engage with.

As of the 15th December 2011 the old Insights tool will stop collecting data, but thankfully all your page information is already being collected for you in the new Pages Insights. If you would like to keep the old data collected by Facebook before the switch over to the new Insights then you will need to export it because all the old data will be deleted on 15 February 2012. The export process is relatively simple. Just use the “View Old Insights” link on the right hand side of your page. From here you can choose the date range of the data you would like to export and the file format.

To discuss how these new Insight features can give you a more in depth knowledge of what your fans are interested in the please feel free to get in touch.

KMP Digitata’s Facebook Page

My first impression of the Google+ pages is rather an underwhelming one and I’m left questioning why we waited so long for this update. On the surface the new Google+ pages don’t appear to be any different from profile accounts and then after I played around with the new pages I also found out that the functionality isn’t that different either.

Here is a list of differences between Google+ Profiles and Pages from Google:

• Pages can’t add people to circles until the page is added first or mentioned.
• Pages can be made for a variety of different entities whereas profiles can only be made for people.
• The default privacy setting for elements on your page profile is public.
• Pages have the +1 button.
• Pages can’t +1 other pages, nor can they +1 stuff on the Web.
• Pages can’t play games.
• Pages don’t have the option to share to ‘Extended circles’.
• Pages don’t receive notifications via email, text, or in the Google bar.
• Pages can’t hangout on a mobile device.
• Local pages have special fields that help people find the business’ physical location.

So the majority of differences is that Google+ Pages are restricted from using many of the Google+ functions but on the other hand they have a +1 button. It makes me wonder what has been done over the past few months and I can only hope that Google has a lot more up their sleeves for Google+ Pages.

Something I would like to see in the near future is the ability to customize the pages, much like how Google allow companies to do fun and exciting things with their YouTube Pages. Even just the ability to change the background would be welcome!

A feature that Facebook has that Google+ Pages desperately needs is the functionality to have multiple admins managing the page. As well as this we are again left frustrated by not having vanity URLs. Surely this isn’t too much to ask!

A nice feature Google have included is called Google+ Direct connect where users can search for Pages from their search box by adding a + at the start of their search to view the Google+ Page and the company or brand logo is shown in the drop down. Although this is a nice feature I’m unsure whether it will change how people search. Instead it would be better to have the logo appear without the need for the + or for the Google+ Page to appear in a promoted location somewhere in the SERPS, with some of it’s latest updates (this would involve being a verified account or more likely coming at a cost).

There is bound to be more on the way…..there has to be if brands are to embrace Google+.

View the KMP Digitata Google+ Page

Here we look at what’s been done, what we suspect might happen and what it all means for brands.

Update to OpenGraph vocabulary

A update to the OpenGraph system means that the current “Like” system could be ready for a major change. The current system of liking a page or a product is a good one keeping up to date about what you’re interested in and then sharing with peer but it didn’t always fit with certain products. The latest update will bring new vocabulary that will allow people to interact with content more creatively by not being restricted to just “Like”. In the future brands will be able to define the verb and the noun before their product or brand, making it possible to create activity updates such as:

• KMP Digitata “read” a “Book”
• KMP Digitata “Watched” a “Movie”
• KMP Digitata “Designed” a “Website”

So for a company that is about to launch a product they can let people announce that they “want” it, for example “KMP Digitata wants an iPhone5″,  and then once the product is launched the Facebook user can update their activity to “has” or “owns”. With the information this feature would provide brands can create focused updates targeted towards those who want and those who have the product. To those who “want” the product, updates can be targeted towards them containing information to entice them to purchase or special offers, whereas people who “own” wouldn’t be shown those updates and instead could be shown updates about the latest developments or fun things being done with the product.

Updated News Feed Structure

The news feed on users home screen now consists of multiple feeds. For a brands their updates still appear in the main feed but those who rely on the appearance of friends “Liking” a page in order to achieve more fans will be disappointed to hear that “Likes” no longer appear in the feed and instead appears in the Friends Activity ticker in the top right mean that the updates are buried deeper and harder to find. Although it means “Like” update will be a lot less visible we are believers that if you rely on the Like feature to attract more fans then your strategy is flawed and instead you should be actively engaging your fans to get them talking and truly sharing your news.

Although activity updates now appear in the top right of the home screen Facebook now recognises when multiple people are doing the same thing and promotes that activity to the top of the news feed. An example of this would be if a number of friends were listening to the same album or mentioning a movie, then it will now feature at the top of the news feed.

Focus on Engagement

The change to how Facebook promotes popular activities is a shift from trying to get more people on Facebook to trying to get people engaging with each other and the brands they are interested in. No longer will the focus be on how many people “Like” your page but instead it will be about how engaged your fans are with you. If you have 100,000 fans but only 1% of them actively comment or share your news then you will be less likely to be promoted in the news feeds then another brand that might only have 20,000 fans but 80% of which engage with them regularly.

Potential of Timeline

Timeline is designed to create an individual’s life story through their Facebook profile, where they are able to identify key points in their life, for an example of what Timeline is then watch the video below;

There was no official word on how Timeline will fit into Brand pages just yet, but if the design is applied to pages then brands will have the opportunity to express themselves creatively and create a page that features updates as usual but also build an engaging story to how the brand got to where they are now. A good example of how it could be used is by Coca-Cola who could set their brand designs over the past 125 years as a key point and so their Timeline would feature large images of each new design.

Increased Advertising Space

Facebook has played around with its measurement metrics to provide marketers with a larger premium ad format that although it’s not too noticeable to the end user it does provide more space for adverts. With this extra space Facebook will apply a similar system as the Sponsored Stories feature, so that adverts will display friends who have engaged with the brand presented. This will add validity to your Facebook adverts because people will see that their friends have also chosen to click on the advert or engage with the brand another way.

The demise of the Discussions Tab

Facebook alerted Page owners about the removal of the discussions tabs with a message saying “The best way to encourage conversation and feedback is through posts and comments on your wall” despite AppData showing that there are 22 million monthly discussion users.
The problem with removing the Discussions Tab to focus on the wall is that the wall doesn’t provide the functionality to group comments around a single topic or archive them. Facebook did comment about the issues though, saying “We’ve removed these tabs for now as we work on tools to help you moderate and filter content. Our goal is to help you can manage everything from one powerful place. Stay tuned”. Whether this means that discussions could return in another form or if the wall will receive new functionality we can’t be sure just yet but we are keeping a close eye on it.

What are your thoughts on these latest updates for brands? Leave us a comment below or tweets us at @KMPDigitata.

It is important to stay ahead of the curve to get the most out of your Facebook strategy. If you would like to discuss anything above or your digital strategy on a whole then please get in touch.

F-Commerce can be broken into three categories:

• On-Site F-Commerce – This consists of adding Facebook functionality to your existing E-Commerce website that allows your customers to rate your products then share with their peers.
• In-Store – You can provide Facebook enhanced retail by integrating systems such as Facebook deals with check-ins.
• Facebook Stores – More and more brands are now creating stores on their Facebook brand pages. We will focus on these for the rest of this article.

It is argued that Facebook has become the best place to go to find out what friends and peers recommend, so it makes sense for brands to provide people with the ability to view and purchase products from within Facebook itself. Here are the 5 key reasons why it is the correct time to get involved with F-Commerce;

1. With over 600 million users, Facebook is the biggest shopping centre in the world, all that it is lacking are the stores. The creation of a storefront on your brand’s Facebook page (or a new page entirely, eg Coca-Cola Store) is a low barrier of entry.
2. “Build it and they will come” doesn’t apply in the digital world. For this reason it is important to be where the majority of your customers are, and that is most likely Facebook. 77% of adults in the UK are now actively on Facebook, with 37.4 million live accounts. “Fish where the fish are” should be your new mantra.
3. As social media continues to expand an overwhelming number of people are now exposed more to brands through their news feeds as opposed to more traditional methods. It is best practise to provide potential customers with the most direct link to a product from advertising, this can be achieved easily with a Facebook store.
4. E-Commerce is dominated by the likes of Amazon but it is unfeasible to the likes of them to open their own Facebook store due to the size of their product range. For this reason F-Commerce is more suited for targeted products based on what your fans like, making the Facebook shopping experience unique for each individual where it’s like going to a shopping centre full of only shops they’re interested in.
5. Facebook credits are Facebook’s own digital currency that can be bought as gifts as well as purchased with debit/credit cards and along with Facebook you would be able to create a more socially engaging retail experience. Facebook credits are used to purchase virtual products and content, for example extra in-game content for games like FarmVille.

There are some great examples of how brands are using F-Commerce generate new revenue streams. Below are two examples of Facebook stores that are built differently but both provide Facebook users with easy access to merchandise:

Dexter Facebook Store

The TV show Dexter has a range of merchandise on their Facebook page. The store is built upon an application with its own shopping basket and checkout/payment system. Fans of the Dexter page receive updates and announcements of exclusive offers only available to their Facebook fans, all of which drive traffic to their store and increase sharing.

Old Spice Facebook Store

Another example of a Facebook store, but designed a different way is on the Old Spice Facebook page which displays their merchandise but instead links through to each product listing on their own website.

Media Streaming on Facebook pages

The 3rd type of Facebook store or F-Commerce system available is one that uses Facebook Credits and does not require 3rd party applications or links to an external site. An example of how this is being used is a streaming service done by Warner Bros where Facebook credits can be used to watch Batman: The Dark Knight directly from their Facebook page. As Facebook Credits become more popular this option will become more widely used due to its ease of implementation, but it will be at a cost with Facebook taking 30% of transactions.

As Managers and Directors are demanding to see ROI from Facebook activity could driving traffic to a Facebook commerce application be the answer? Although it is still in its infancy with companies experimenting with how best to use F-Commerce, the most successful social media marketing strategies and initiatives belong to those who get into developments early and get a head start on their competition.

When it comes to looking into F-Commerce there are plenty of options as to how to approach it and it is important to choose the method that is best suited for both you and your customers. To discuss your options for utilising F-Commerce or your digital strategy as a whole then please get in touch.

Circles on Google+ was one of my favourite features, with a quick way to filter my news feed and the actual creation of a Circle was quite enjoyable due to the fun animations and the ease of doing it. Although it’s obvious that Facebook have just taken the Circles concept and applied it to their own system, when the feature hugely benefits the overall experience it’s hard to grumble at the people at Facebook for doing it. Facebook had the basic functionality before with the user able to create groups of people but the process of creating these groups was labourious and time consuming, but thankfully with this update the process has been streamlined and made alot easier.

I have quite a lot of friends on Facebook and it might sound harsh but a lot of the time I’m not interested in what they have to say but at the same time I don’t want to delete as friends or remove them from my news feed entirely. Now thanks to the List feature I can filter them out and instead occasionally look at what conversations are going on when I want to.

Just like Circles, Facebook Lists are anonymous so your friends won’t know what lists they are placed in, which will avoid any potential awkward arguments about being put into the “Boring” list.

Facebook has automatically created some basic lists based on your personal information to get you started, such as your education, work place and the area you live in. For example the lists created for me were my High School, College, University, KMP Digitata and Manchester Area.

In the battle for Social Media supremacy it’s quite an aggressive move by Facebook because people are less likely to move over to Google+ now that the functionality with posting options are the same. It will be interesting to see how Google responds to this recent flourish of updates by Facebook.

While scrolling down my morning news feed I received a comment and so clicked on the little global notification at the top of my screen. After reading what my friend had sent me something didn’t quite feel right. An update launched today by Facebook now means that the top navigation is now locked at the top of the screen and scrolls down with you, meaning we now have quick access to the most important features.

Although it’s not a huge redesign or a new feature, for me it’s one of the most welcome changes Facebook has made. This update isn’t anything original though with Google+ and Twitter already having it. It also brings a question as to whether Facebook will soon drop the pop notification box in the bottom left now that they are easily accessible at the top of the screen (I’ve checked and it still appears).

This change also inspired us to sniff around to see if anything else had changed, and we discovered one more…

The another change we found, which might of come out today (but I’m not sure), is when you choose to “Like” a page you now get the option to add a comment to your “Like” so that, when it shows up on your friend’s news feed, there’s more than just “Daniel Ashcroft likes KMP Digitata”. This is a nice move by Facebook because I myself have become blind to what my friends “Like” in my news feed, but with this update I might be more inclined to have a look at their recommendation if they include a short explanation as to why they like it.

Facebook is always making small updates and changes, some good and some bad, but personally I really like these 2 and I look forward to seeing more. What are your thoughts on these changes? Leave us a comment below or tweets us @KMPDigitata.

Control

The main argument for creating your own community is the increased control you will enjoy over the environment. Relying on third party tools that are constantly updating elements of their service can be a tricky business. Facebook is notorious for moving the goalposts without providing a great deal of notice. Just ask those brands who spent considerable time and money in developing Facebook apps when they were first launched only for Facebook to gradually phase out the prominence of these apps both in terms of profile page real estate and the ability to get into the newsfeed. Then there are all the various tweaks, adjustments and relaunches of the developer platforms, which usually happen as we are just about to launch a client Facebook project (paranoid, moi?). Most recently Facebook changed the width of the tabs used to deliver custom content and functionality. If you’re lucky, you can still see the odd brand page that has fallen foul of this change and has a chunk taken out of the right hand side of the tab content.

With your own branded social community you can work without the shackles and build whatever functionality you like. Here are a few key areas that this can be advantageous over, for example, a facebook page.

Moderation

Although it is possible to remove comments from a Facebook page wall, moderation certainly isn’t made easy. Our pals over at Tempero understand this only too well as they manage moderation for large brands on a daily basis.

Imagine that each time you publish a wall comment, within one hour, 600 people post a response and 10 to 15% of those are inappropriate, offensive, spam or downright rude.  Then imagine people are doing the same on your discussion area, your photos, videos — or any other area you’ve allowed them to interact. Clearing the latest content is your best plan of attack, but what happens when an older posts picks up attention for some reason?  You then have the issue of having to hunt around your now frenetic Facebook page for new posts, any one of which could be a reputation or legal nightmare waiting to happen.

There are many tools that aid community moderation by providing functionality such as moderation tools, swearing and spam filters, the option of pre/post/reactive moderation… none of which is possible in facebook.

*Update*

Facebook now provides a simple spam filter on company pages. The filter also picks up on certain swear words although this seems to be only American meaning English slang does not get flagged.

Content Promotion

Who decides which of the content added to your Facebook page gets priority? Certainly not the page owner. Facebook cares not a jot if you would rather push images or video, there is no concept of content tagging or “sticky” posts.

Messages

When on your facebook page, what other messages are your users seeing? You don’t know and never will. It’s quite possible that a competitor is advertising to your community via Facebook ads. On your own platform, you control the real estate giving you more opportunity to offer related services or promote the messages you want to promote.

User Journeys

Facebook and Twitter user journeys are designed around the news feed. Most page visits are prompted by the owner of the page publishing content then that content being shared or commented on by followers and their friends. With a limitation on design there is also a limitation on how well you can guide the user through a journey. There might be a link that leads the user offsite and into a different journey but then you’re taking them away from the community.

Useable Content

Content such as photos and videos uploaded to a Facebook page belongs to the users. As the owner of that page you are no more able to use that content than if you were to have found it on another site – unless you expressly ask the user who uploaded it of course. In your own environment it is possible to get users to agree that you can use uploaded content in a marketing capacity as part of your terms an conditions. You need to be transparent about this and be sensitive to the wishes of your community but if you are running a community with a heavy emphasis on photos, this can be a rich source of images for you.

Containment

One topic that constantly rears its head in regards to social media is metrics. How do you quantify success and track your return on investment and engagement? Most third party tools will have some form of analytics but if everything is in one place it’s much easier to keep track of what’s going on, define your performance indicators and set your targets. All this makes it easier to define and calculate your ROI.

Some considerations

The “build it and they will come” theory does not apply to social media. Building your own community is not easy and there are some things you should consider when doing so.

Freedom of Voice

Don’t stifle your users. If they can’t say it on your official environment, they will go elsewhere to do so. If you have moderation, be clear what the rules are. Don’t delete or ignore posts that you see as negative.

Your business goals

Make sure you’re undertaking this activity for the right reasons. You should only go to the trouble of creating a community if you are going to benefit from it. Does the strategy line up with your overall business goals? It shouldn’t need to be said but you’d be surprised how many brands want to do “something cool and social” for the sake of the zeitgeist without thinking things though.

Ownership and privacy issues

Who owns the content, you or your users? It’s understandable you want to use the content uploaded to your site but be sensitive to your users’ wishes. Are users aware of your T&Cs? Are you aware of their wishes?

Make things easy

Integrate with the APIs of established networks as much as possible. Don’t make your users upload content twice. Allow two way publication of photos, video to existing social tools. If you force users to choose whether to place their efforts in creating and publishing content on your site or on their existing social networks, guess which they will choose (hint: not yours).

Use open authentication to allow users to sign up with existing profiles, no one likes remembering umpteen different usernames and passwords. Likewise, if they create a profile using their Facebook or twitter accounts, pull in profile information from their existing profiles.

A case in point – Trek America Live

KMP Digitata created Trek America Live for TrekAmerica, part of the TUI Travel group. The brief was to provide a platform for past, present and future trekkers to discuss their trips, allow them to make contact with travellers before embarking on their trips and let them share blogs, pictures and videos with friends and family as they travelled. The full case study is available and the community is off to a great start. TrekAmerica are delighted with the platform – especially with the flexibility of content display that allows them to group content around destinations.

Not wanting to build an isolated site, we allow users to publish photos they upload to Trek America live to Facebook and also pull in photos they already have in Facebook. More integration with sites such as Flickr is in the pipeline and TrekAmerica Live will continue to be developed to match the needs of both the community and the brand.

Read more about KMP Digitata and TrekAmerica Live

Download the case study

TravelMole.com is the first online community for the Travel and Tourism Industry, established in 1998 and has developed into one of the largest online travel communities. This year’s UK Tourism Web Awards was TravelMole’s eighth awards ceremony. The purpose of the awards is to reward and promote examples of the best websites in the UK travel industry and to hold them up high as shining examples.

Some big names in the Travel industry attended the ceremony in London on Wednesday, such as Emirates, Jet2 and Eurostar. It was Trek America that won the hotly contested “Best use of Social Media” with Trek America Live because it was recognised that social media sat at the heart of the company’s marketing and that it all stemmed from the Social Media Portal where past, current and future Trekkers are able to share their experience and advice with one another.

It’s great to see Trek America being rewarded for putting their faith into the ambitious Trek America Live project that has generated outstanding ROI and keeps going from strength to strength. We now look forward to working on future award winning projects, so watch this space.