This Week's Reading Themes: SEO, Facebook, Content
Looking at my bookmarked articles from the week, I can tell I have really been focused on creating relevant and engaging content to pull consumers into brands' messages. I still love Delicious for bookmarking interesting finds across the internet every day. Looking back across the articles that I flag and tags that I create each week starts to reveal the web of where my thoughts have traveled and the areas I tend to be focusing on that week. The themes I saw in this week's bookmarked articles were:
- SEO
- Facebook Optimization
- Content Creation
All of which roll up under that umbrella of creating relevant and engaging content to pull consumers into brands' messages. Here are some details of what I learned this week and links to the articles I found most interesting.
{SEO}This Google video sums up SEO pitfalls and tricks nicely.{Facebook Optimization}I've posted here several times over the last couple of weeks that brands should be wary of relying on "likes" as a measure of Facebook success and reach to their fans. This is because most posts by pages are seen by less than 10% of their fans. And, on average, only 1% of total fans actually "engage" with the posts (like, comment, share). But, one of the articles I stumbled upon this week notes that:
"...friends of fans represent a much larger set of consumers than a brand's fans - 81 times larger, on average, for the top 1000 brand pages. The link to this extended network occurs when fans engage with your messages, thereby sharing the message with their friends."
So that 1% engagement doesn't look so bad anymore. Though it is still not great. And Facebook has done this to brands on purpose in an effort to drive revenue:
"Facebook first degraded brand content over the last year, and has now released advertising products to let companies pay to offset the changes they’ve made.""Mid-way through 2011, the company changed its approach to determining what people saw in their newsfeeds, with the result that the number of people seeing posts from brands dropped significantly – by up to 75%, in fact.""Enter Facebook’s new advertising products. Distilled down to two points, the latest advertising announcements from Facebook are: putting Page content as a core component of Facebook Ads and allowing you to reach more fans through the “Reach Generator."
All of this makes it critical that the content posted to Facebook is interesting, useful and stand-out from day one. If you are trying hard for engagement, consider posting more on Sundays: it turns out, Sunday is the most engaging day on Facebook. And if you really need people to click on your Facebook ads, you should run them in South Dakota, Tennessee and Colorado, where users click through on ads in record rates.{Content Creation}This article does a nice job of summing up the basics, step-by-step, to developing a content strategy and then executing it.You can follow all my bookmarking here.