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.

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.

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.

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.

Twitter

Twitter can be many things to many brands. A news source, brand monitoring tool, a customer feedback and support tool, a promotional channel. However you decide twitter best fits in with your business make sure you stick to your goals.

Twitter Tips

• Don’t just broadcast. Think of twitter as a conversation
• Find the conversation – engage with like minded users using @mentions and #hashtags
• Think about how you can add value – hold competitions for your followers in exchange for content or loyalty
• Use Twitter Search to monitor mentions of your brand and competitors. You can gain valuable and actionable insight before actively engaging

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is of particular use in B2B marketing. Think about what your profile says about your business, not just you personally. Use LinkedIn to build and maintain relationships that could lead to sales.

LinkedIn Tips

• Keep your profile up-to-date and make sure your public summary contains all the information necessary for people to understand what it is your business does
• Claim your Business profile and update with the messages that you want to communicate to your audience
• Use the search to find relevant individuals in industry related groups. Contribute to these group discussions to become an authority in your field
• Find questions relevant to your industry on LinkedIn answers. Share your knowledge and connect with individuals who have expressed a need
• Research individuals for recruitment purposes

Facebook

Facebook is primarily a tool for interacting with friends and family. However, 38% of users “like” a brand page. A facebook page can be a useful B2C tool. If you give people a reason to “like” your page, you with have an active, living, realtime audience just waiting to interact with your content.

Facebook Tips

• Give people a reason to follow. Discounts, exclusive content, brand affinity and peer endorsement are all incentives for liking a brand page
• The aim is to get your content into the News stream of your audience and your audience’s friends
• Encourage interaction by sharing engaging and exciting content. Photos, videos and links are more engaging than text updates
• Use facebook ads to grow your userbase. Target your ads to your intended audience based on demographics or consumer behaviour

Foursquare

Foursquare, a geolocation app that allows users to check-in to various venues and locations from their mobile devices. A newcomer in the social media landscape but is gaining traction with users. It’s especially useful if you are a business with that relies on foot-fall, e.g. bars and shops.

Foursquare Tips

• Claim your venue. This will allow you to set up special promotions with foursquare which will be presented to users checking in nearby
• Leave tips and encourage users to leave tips on your venue

Blogs and Forums

Social media isn’t just about the broadcast tools; it’s about being involved with the conversation.

Social Media Tips

• Find the conversation and monitor influential blogs and forums. See what is being said about your business or your industry
• Don’t engage in a conversation unless you can add something of use. Comment spamming is not the way forward!
• When you do engage, consider your business messages and if possible, provide a link to your site/blog/linkedin profile for further information
• Abide by the Ackura Rules of Social media Engagement

The key to social media marketing – Influence

Listen – People want to know that their opinions are valued.
Be a voice of authority – By providing people with useful information and being knowledgeable you establish trust and credibility.
Create a Dialogue – Engaging with users and enabling them to question and discuss your content will generate conversation and prologue the relationship.
Generate awareness – People who are engaged with your content will want to share it within their networks; encourage them to become “Connections”, “Retweet” and “Like” you.
Generate Loyalty – Keep your audience informed with regular news, products or service updates.

Rules of engagement

Be active – Post content regularly but also comment on and share
other people’s content.
Be interesting – Remember the aim is to be viewed as an authority
and get links/shares to your content. Make sure to add your
own opinion or extra insight when commenting on or sharing other
people’s content.
Be humble – Social media etiquette lets every user have a voice:
Give credit for people’s content and opinion.
Be human – Avoid slogans and brochure-speak. Try to inject
content with your personality. Include profile pictures for author blog posts and LinkedIn profiles.
Be honest – Always be transparent about who you are and who you are representing. Don’t plagiarise content or bad-mouth competitors.

Facebook’s “Like” button came out a year ago and spread across the web like wildfire, so it is no surprise that Google have developed their own tool to act in a similar fashion as they have seen social recommendations becoming more and more important to how people search for what they are looking for.

Just like Facebook’s “Like” button, all the sites you “+1” will feature on the user’s personal Google profile forming a public list of recommended links, similar to that of Delicious, whose future looks uncertain and I’m sure won’t welcome this latest Google development.

The video below explains +1 in more detail

The basic idea is a good one. While searching you’re able to see what other people and friends recommend right in the search results page, and although Google have said that +1 doesn’t affect the algorithm for creating a page’s rank (for the time being anyway) it will surely affect individual users when they use Google. Sites that might sit 3rd on Google’s 1st page of results might start to see an increase in traffic because there are recommended by more people than the 1st and 2nd results. The feature also applies to Adwords, meaning that sponsored results/adverts can also be recommended.

This latest development by Google is a good step forwards but I feel it doesn’t fulfil the requirements of people using Google. Facebook’s “Like” button was designed to share information that someone finds interesting with their friends, while the +1 button acts as a recommendation for the website and this begs me to ask, “What are they recommended for?”. I might come across a website through certain keywords or a phrase and see a website that has been recommended, which is all fine as long as that recommendation came from someone who was searching for the same thing as I was. Are people recommending that site for the same search term I found it with or the product page I was deep linked into or that site in general?

Please let me know your thoughts?

Adrian Graham, a project manager for Questions said;

There are a lot of places you can go on the internet to ask questions of people who you don’t know, but there are very few places you can go to get responses from your friends.We thought that this is where we should focus.

The new Questions feature allows users to create questions with either multiple answers or the ability for receivers to add their own answers, which when publish, gets pushed out to their friends. From a friend to friends point of view this can be used for social recommendations, an example of this could be asking friends what film at the cinema they recommend seeing. Once a friend answers a question their result is shown on their own profile and pushed out to their friends, potentially spreading the questions to millions of people.

Nice feature that Facebook have added is the ability to chose a Facebook page when answering a question. An example of this is when someone creates a open question “Who is the best digital agency in the North West?”, their friends are able to add their own answer and if their choice has a Facebook page they can include that as an answer.

The improved Questions feature is more importantly available to Brand and Businesses who have a Facebook page allowing them to perform market research in an effective manor. A business can publish a question which will be pushed out to all those who are fans on Facebook, allowing them to answer and pass it onto their friends. Facebook questions could be used by a restaurant to find what people’s favourite dish is, a sports team to find the favourite player or a tourist information board to discover what people think is their best location.

It will be interesting to see how companies will use this feature and see whether it will truly develop into a strong market research tool or just a fun gimmick used every now and again to increase customer engagement.

If you want to add Facebook questions to your Facebook profile or page then follow this link.