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12 Examples of Vine in Action

Posted by Tom Edwards on March 18th, 2013 at 10:41 pm

By now you have most likely heard through the grapevine (last "vine" pun I promise) about Twitter's new Vine app and it's many pros & cons. Many call Vine the Instagram of video as it goes beyond static images by allowing for 6 seconds of context tied to pictures, motion & sound in the form of looping videos optimized to be shared.

Twitter launched Vine on January 24th, 2013 and it has not left the top 20 in the app store since launch. Vine's six second video loops are quick, lightweight pieces of content that are ideal for social sharing. Initially launched via a mobile app for iOS (Android app in development) this high-level version of an animated gif is quick & easy to capture. Just point your device, touch the screen and the app records up to 6 seconds allowing for starts & stops.
According to Tech Crunch, Vine (2.8% penetration) has taken an early lead over the likes of Viddy (0.5) & Socialcam (0.2). There is significant opportunity tied to short form video assets & social sharing as the same article referenced that 98% of overly active users shared photos whereas only 4% shared video.
With the recent changes... Read more

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Posted in Emerging Platforms, Social Media | No Comments »

Big Changes to Facebook's News Feed What Brands & Agencies Need to Know

Posted by Tom Edwards on March 7th, 2013 at 9:09 pm

Today Facebook held an event to announce the first major change to the Facebook News Feed in six years. The theme reinforced by the Facebook team was reduction of clutter by providing more choice and control over the content and stories users will see in their feeds.

"From the beginning, our goal with News Feed was different from any other social service was trying to provide... You should be able to share any content that you want. Status updates, links, photos, etc... You should be able to share with any audience that you want, publicly, with the world, with just friends, or privately" - Mark Zuckerberg

Here are feature highlights from today's announcement:
The newly designed newsfeed will start rolling out in limited rollouts today with a focus on a "mobile first" design.

The new design is heavily reliant on the ability to segment content by feed type allowing for more control:

All Friends will showcase everything your friends are sharing. This feed will highlight friend content and add a "facepile" type of overlay to the side of the story to show who has shared the content. Social connectivity is highlighted as the intersection of timeline & the newsfeed becomes more pervasive with the inclusion... Read more

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Posted in Opinions, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Evolution of the Newsfeed

Posted by Tom Edwards on February 13th, 2013 at 6:29 am

Recently I met with one of my local Facebook team members as we were partnering on a client initiative and our conversation sparked an interesting thought about the future of newsfeed publishing and how brands should be thinking about maximizing their publishing strategies as Facebook's platform continues to evolve.
I have recently written a number of posts on the subject of Facebook publishing from the intersection of Paid & Owned, the importance of visual storytelling and best practices for optimizing content. All of these topics are relevant to this conversation and further frame the importance of the following statement:
"Everything happens in the newsfeed vs brand pages"

This was an incredibly simple statement that all of us who publish on behalf of brands sometimes take for granted. The numbers definitely back up the statement with 115 billion impressions served daily via desktop and 65 billion newsfeed impressions served daily via mobile.
Think about your own behavior when it comes to interacting with brand related content on Facebook. How often are you clicking through to a brands page to consume their content? This divide is even better visualized when it comes to users mobile interactions?
Where do you consume brand messages on the desktop?

This becomes even... Read more

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Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Facebook SEO Comes to Life as Graph Search Launches

Posted by Tom Edwards on January 16th, 2013 at 10:35 am

Recently Facebook announced one of the biggest changes to their search feature to date with the limited beta release of Graph Search. Mark Zuckerberg stated Graph Search would become the third pillar of the Facebook experience in addition to the News Feed and Timeline. This post will review the features of Graph Search while also outlining what it all means.
Here is the official announcement from Facebook

The creation of Graph Search is reflective of the current direction of social which is the inevitable convergence of social and search. With so much information being created and limited alignment between traditional search and the social graph, Graph Search could be a key bridge to a new type of search behavior based on relevant and timely socially curated content.
Example of Bing Facebook integration which applied social as an additive to traditional search. Graph Search takes the inverse approach of searching inside of Facebook.

When you begin to dig into the initial information about Graph Search, it is not intended to be a true web search engine like Google or Bing, but an engine that will search out information across all of Facebook and provide personalized answers to queries about people, photos, places & interests.

Here are... Read more

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Posted in Emerging Platforms, Media Planning & Buying, Search, Social Media, Word of Mouth | 2 Comments »

Recent Changes to EdgeRank Impact Organic Brand Reach

Posted by Tom Edwards on October 26th, 2012 at 6:06 am

On September 20th, 2012 Facebook rolled out a significant change to their EdgeRank algorithm. This change directly impacted the organic reach of brand pages on Facebook. According to initial reports, this change has potentially impacted organic reach for brand pages with a decrease per post upwards of 50%.

After the initial announcements, instead of simply reporting what the changes were, I wanted to see what a month's worth of data would look like to truly gauge the impact that our brands are seeing. Prior to jumping into the results, let's quickly recap how we got to this point.
WHY THE CHANGE?
Here is a quote from Facebook's Q2 earnings call... "Feed quality is crucial in order to not turn off users" - Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is laser-focused on making sure the integrity of a users newsfeed stays as relevant as possible. With billions of pieces of content being shared, and brands trying to drive organic engagement through content, Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm serves as the overarching authority of what content ultimately gets surfaced to an individual user. Here is a previous post outlining EdgeRank.

Facebook also strives to maintain an 80/20 mix with 80% of the content coming from relevant organic content and the other... Read more

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Posted in Social Media | 3 Comments »

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