Simon Lilly's Blog

Friday Focus: Facebook Pages

// April 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // social media, web thoughts

If you are involved with a brand, business, band or think you’re in a line of business where you might have ‘fans’ then setting up a page on Facebook can be a very rewarding adventure. As a first step into social media it’s potentially a great way to develop an online community, but don’t assume that if you build it they will come. Once the Page is ready to go live you will need to use your full armoury of marketing channels to put up signposts to your fantastically polished Page.

Please also be aware that developing content and keeping on top of your fans questions and queries can become a full-time job, build in management and review time in your work schedule. There are some great resources below that make essential reading before you click the ‘Publish’ button…

Facebook’s very own guide – giving you background information, how to prepare and a step-by-step guide.

A handy 10 page Facebook Pages PDF (updated March 2009) also from the Facebook team that gives you an extra level of information, from Page publishing through to looking at user statistics.

Following Facebook’s recent overhaul Mashable pulled together a superb Guide for Social Media Marketers – highlighting the opportunities and challenges of setting up your first Facebook Page.

Mashable is a superb social media resource and their 5 Elements of a Successful Facebook Fan Page post really supported that position.

If you are seeking inspiration Peter Kim setup a very useful Wiki packed full of social media examples. Sort by type, find Facebook Pages and there are some good examples there.

Probably the best way of researching is to dive into Facebook itself and search for brands, most of the big boys have pages, with varying examples of how to and how not to setup a Fan Page on Facebook – Skittles, Maltesers and Innocent all offer good, simple examples.

User-Interface Tweaks and Facebook

// February 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // web thoughts

After reading the brilliantly titled $300 Million Button article over at User Interface Engineering I found myself looking at small changes on the sites I frequently use, that might make a difference to their effectiveness.

The first one I thought about was Facebook’s Login screen which they are constantly tweaking (it’s been changing over the few days I’ve been thinking about it). The login itself is a simple combination of e-mail/password, but with the addition of an optional Remember Me tick box. Recently I ticked the box and an additional option titled ‘Make Facebook my homepage’ appeared – genius I thought, they’ve detected I’m engaged by Facebook and they want to see how far they can take me. Then I thought what about people that don’t trust the Remember Me feature, but would like Facebook as their homepage? Are they missing a trick by not showing both options to everyone? Quite possibly… Or is it a case of saving homepage real estate? If it is the later, then maybe overtime they change Remember Me, for the people that don’t use it to Make Facebook my homepage?

The key point from this suggested tweak, as with the £300 Million Button article, is that on such a well used part of any site, a small change could offer a potential benefit for both you and your visitor – keep tweaking! See what works (analytics are vital here) and keep striving to improve the key parts of your website.

Facebook is without doubt changing the way a generation of users use the internet. A vast number of users begin their online journey on Facebook and explore from there, so the simple tweak suggested above could convert an even larger number of people to get instant Facebook gratification when they fire-up their web browser. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook to get a slice of the Facebook action, for a period of time the Facebook search option had two options – search Facebook or the web (with Microsoft). That second option has now disappeared, was this causing session times to drop as people left Facebook to explore the web? We can’t know for sure, but we do know it’s not there any more.

Although this change of internet entry-point is taking place for some, people still love Google, their share of search is continuing to rise (recently reported up to over 80%). Maybe Microsoft’s investment in Facebook was purely to avoid Google acquiring them? After all if Facebook and Google were to collaborate that would be a fatal blow for anyone else trying to gain market share in an environment that’s so enamoured with social media.