Good.  That should have happened because analytics are important!  Below, some tips to making more out of your “new” Facebook Insights:

Get Past Total Likes

It’s easy to take metrics like People Talking About This (PTAT), Engaged Users, etc. and divide them into total Page Likes as a barometer for fan engagement levels. PTAT and Total Likes are prominently displayed next to one another on your page.  But this overstates your fan engagement, and Facebook wants you to start seeing the forest for the trees.  When grabbing reach metrics, make sure you’re looking at fans, friends of fans, and in some cases the unique visitor traffic to your page (if measuring stats at the page level.)  Engagements and stories are being created by more than just your fans, and should be measured that way.  Total Likes is important, and is just one of several metrics to use when measuring your Facebook audience.

Measure Engagement And Viral Engagement

The level of engagement with your content is the lynchpin to getting more exposure in the news feed and what better way to see that than understanding how many people interact with your content when they see it?  To get Engagement, divide Engaged Users by your Total Reach.  This will give you a % of all the unique users who potentially SAW your content that also clicked on that content in some way.

People Talking About This, a type of engagement, measures a unique user performing an action that creates a story in the engaged user’s news feed (ex – “Jane Doe just commented on Acme Brand’s post.”) Measure PTAT the same way as Engaged Users, dividing by Total Reach, to get % Viral Engagement (or “Virality” as Facebook displays it on the Insights dashboard.) Viral engagement is the more desired type of engagement in most instances, as it spreads your message through the social graph more quickly.

These metrics are helpful in understanding how well your message is resonating with the people you’re reaching.  Aim to keep engagement levels up as your fan base grows, and continue to increase the virality of your engagements by focusing on those actions that create stories, which in turn increases the distribution of your message.

Use People Talking About This For Competitive Analysis

Since PTAT is a public-facing metric, you can now take this number, divide by total Likes (I know I just advised not doing this above, but we don’t have much choice when doing competitive analysis), and trend this percentage over time for your brand and your competitors.  If you’re between 2-4% you’re on the right track (this may be higher for pages with less fans and lower for pages with more fans).  Keep an eye on this to gauge how well your message is resonating as compared to your competitors and similar brands with comparable fan levels.

Pay Attention To The Post Level

Post level metrics are the purest Insights Facebook offers for accurately measuring post content performance.  Try categorizing your post types by subject in advance, then group your posts’ performance by subject to better understand what content topics and execution tactics boost kpi’s like Engaged Users and Virality at the post level.  For example, you’re a wine brand targeting Millenials.  You may post about the properties of the wine, the brand values of the wine, lifestyle attributes of your target customers like the kind of music or food they may like, etc.  Group these posts into their respective topics, and revise your content strategy by learning how these topics generally perform by comparison.

Ultimately you’ll want to measure whatever metrics align with your objectives.  Maybe you’re looking to drive traffic to a product web site, and you want to measure reach with click through rates on sales or product announcements, or maybe your concern is awareness in which Impressions might hold more weight.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with metrics just like you would with your creative tactics.  Just remember that Facebook can, and will, manipulate and change their data and metrics whenever they want and however they want, so be sure to export and store your data regularly to avoid losing anything important.

How have you adapted to the new Insights from Facebook?

Twitter is defining itself
Twitter is an incredible platform for real-time conversation and information sharing, but what will ultimately become of Twitter remains to be seen. Last year’s Twitter predictions ran the gamut from an acquisition, to copying Facebook with a Like button equivalent, to not innovating at all.

Twitter did innovate to be sure, the latest redesign shows that, by continuing to define its position as an information sharing and discovery platform.

This may lead to more people ‘getting’ Twitter and improving active user % thus giving brands broader access to customers.  And as Facebook and Google turn their gazes at one another, Twitter seems positioned to have a very good run in 2012.

Facebook will get even more user-focused
Facebook was going to hit 1 billion users and go public, nail ecommerce, become a search engine, launch a distributed ad network and more.

Facebook will get to a billion users soon for sure, and it seems Mark Zuckerberg is focused on making that happen. As Google+ continues to gain traction and lure brands with its SEO promises, expect Facebook to respond with innovative opportunities for brands to engage with customers.  Though this won’t be ecommerce, at least not until Facebook Credits goes mainstream.

Foursquare is fantastic, but location usage isn’t
2011 industry predictions were not all that rosy for location-based services (LBS), predicting many would consolidate or get acquired, and for the most part were right on this (Gowalla met this fate).

Foursquare  recently hit 15 million users and have innovated continuously with updates, features, and new partnerships. However, Forrester just released a sobering report stating only 5% of online adults use location apps at least once a month.  It seems the space just hasn’t yet hit its stride as a scalable marketing channel.  LBS apps will continue to evolve and expand their features leveraging sales and recommendations as key drivers in an attempt to increase utility and draw more users.  With smartphone adoption on the rise and reaching nearly 50% in the US by next year, 2012 will be the year location does or doesn’t hit the big time.

Very few thought Google would get it right
There was little confidence in Google’s social media efforts, having been disappointed by Buzz, Wave, and rumblings of in-fighting causing launch delays about its much talked about social product.

Google+ did finally launch, and while some people immediately dubbed it a failure, the social network’s outcome remains to be seen. Google+ is latching on to Gmail, YouTube, and likely other Google products soon to integrate its features into Google culture, which few if any of us are immune to. If it succeeds, Google+ becomes a utility vs simply a Facebook alternative, and that’s going to help give it legs in the race to capture the ‘Interest Graph’.

Were you wise or lucky enough to nail a 2011 prediction?  What’s got you excited about 2012?

The marathon is this Sunday, November 6th. It has been a long and often painful road getting here and my anxiety at the thought of running 26.2 miles is currently mounting, but I wanted to take time out to give you some tips on how to support or track your favorite runner on race day!

The Official Mobile Spectator App
Available in the iPhone and Android marketplace for $2.99, the official mobile spectator app – powered by MapMyRun and MyCityWay - allows you to track up to 10 runners simultaneously on race day and shows you nearby points of interest along the race course including restaurants, landmarks, and more. You can also watch live streaming of the men’s and women’s pro races, as well as NBC4 New York’s live coverage.

RunKeeper Live
If you want to keep closer tabs on your runner, RunKeeper Elite broadcasts activity in real-time GPS through their application for iPhone and Android. The program also delivers stats like elevation and speed, so you can make sure your runner is on pace and know when they might need a little extra support to get over those challenging hills.

ASICS Support Your Marathoner
Sponsored by ASICS, Support Your Marathoner encourages marathon supporters to record videos, upload images, and share messages with their runners that are displayed on giant screens during the race (triggered by RFID tags the runners receive prior to their race and affix to their shoe).

Spotify Streaming
If your runner is planning to listen to music during the race (which is discouraged by NYRR, but I am probably going to do this), encourage them to use Spotify and connect it with Facebook. You’ll be able to listen to the same song at the same time as your runner so you can share that special moment as they cross the finish line while you’re both listening to “Chariots of Fire”.

The Old Fashioned Cheering Squad
If you’re close enough to be there in person, make sure you review the marathon course and coordinate with your runner exactly where you’ll be. Go in groups so your cheers can be heard loud and clear. Check the marathon spectator guide before you go and take a look at the ‘secret spots’ to have the best chance of connecting with your runner.

Make A Donation
Crowdrise is helping support thousands of runners in their efforts to raise funds for non-profits. Every donation to a runner’s cause contributes to the overall goal of raising $1 million per mile. Make a donation to your runner’s cause and show your support through charitable contribution.  I’m using the Crowdrise platform along with my teammates to raise money for Camp Interactive.

Over 40,000 people will attempt the NYC marathon this year, make sure your runner feels like one in a million!

About Camp Interactive
CI is a Bronx-based nonprofit that inspires inner-city kids to step back into nature and forward into technology. They execute their goals using a two pronged program. First, CI takes students on outward-bound style adventure trips to open their minds and enhance leadership abilities. The students are outfitted with cameras, journals, and video equipment, and they are encouraged to record their experience. Upon returning to NYC, the students create a video, edit their photos, write stories, and build a website using their experience to fuel the content. This process gives students real-world applicable technology skills and the courage and leadership to use them.

Source: BusinessInsider.com

The introduction of the Ticker, a light-touch version of the news feed for less important updates, and ‘Graph Rank’, the new algorithm supporting Edge Rank that weights news feed items using your perceived interests, were also major announcements for marketers. Other updates included new permissions for ‘frictionless’ (read: automatic) publishing of content to a user’s stream, major media partnerships with Spotify, Netflix, Washington Post, etc. and more.  Catch all the updates on TechCrunch here.

This is the beginning of Facebook’s effort to create and surface ‘stories’, bite-size engagements, actions and content that together make up who you are and how you express yourself online. Facebook indexes everything you do to create a self database, your life story. Add to that the automated publishing of your expressions, and the gap between who we say we are (cognizant actions) and whom we really are (incognizant actions) begins to close.

How Does This Affect Brand Marketers?
First impressions on how these new features will affect how brands market on Facebook:

1. This will likely make it more difficult for some marketers to engage as consumers become more cautious or careful about who and what they interact with. “Does this interaction represent who I am?” Is now a more relevant question to ask as the famous internet adage that what you do and say online lasts forever becomes visible in the TIMELINE.
2. Millions and perhaps billions more stories will now be created and fed into TIMELINES, News Feeds and Tickers. Brands are now in more competition than ever reaching consumers on Facebook, meaning loyalty, advocacy and evangelism become enormous advantages for making a customer’s TIMELINE.  That, and having the money for Sponsored Stories, which will prove to play an even more important role in reaching consumers.
3. Brands will now be in the business of building stories, going beyond the one-on-one dialogue, the comment and the Like. Brands will look to build experiences that create opportunities for customers to share and populate their TIMELINE in new and interesting ways. Applications will play a key in staying relevant on Facebook (this includes integrating apps into other platforms and sites outside the Facebook environment.)

It will be important for brands to focus on the story, and provide customers with the tools, actions and experiences that empower them to tell that story. What happens on the Page Wall will always be relevant as long as you’re making real and true connections with customers, but it’s getting those customers to then go out and create more stories through opportunities you provide (apps, buttons, etc.) that will drive success on the new Facebook.

What do you think about the new Facebook changes?

I’ve never been much of a runner. The longest race I’ve completed was 3.2 miles when I participated in the Mets 5k race to home plate in 2005, back when Shea stadium was still called Shea and I had just moved to the ‘big city’ from Iowa.  So, you know there must be a really good reason if I’m volunteering to run 26.2 miles on November 6th.

I’m supporting my favorite NYC nonprofit, CampInteractive (CI).  Camp Interactive is a Bronx-based nonprofit that inspires inner-city kids to step back into nature and forward into technology. Learn more about Camp Interactive here.

I’m pushing myself to my limits to help provide the opportunity for inner-city youth to reach theirs. I have joined TeamInteractive – a dedicated group of 20 runners – to raise money in support of CI’s mission.  You may have heard of Team Interactive last year when foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, along with team captain Usain Bolt (yes, that Usain Bolt, on the team again this year,) also ran the marathon to support Camp Interactive.

I believe in CI’s mission and I am committed to raising $5,000 to help keep these programs running. I would truly appreciate your help in reaching this goal! Every little bit counts, and on a personal level every dollar donated stokes the fire that keeps me motivated and thinking, “it’s only a 5k plus 7 more 5ks.”

What’s in it for you?  Well, in addition to being a good person and super awesome in my book, I’ll publicly thank you on my crowdrise page, this blog, on twitter and on facebook.  You’ll get so much social media love your Klout score won’t know what hit it.  If you donate $150 or more, I’ll send you one of these.

Thank you for your support and generosity, and be sure to cheer on all the Team Interactive runners on November 6th!

Donate securely through my Crowdrise page:
http://www.crowdrise.com/cimarathon2011/fundraiser/PatrickCourtney

Follow my progress here

And please spread the word! Like, tweet, share and forward this post!

Thank You!

Margot Wood – @margotwood

Pete Engle

Bob Troia – @bobtroia

Warren Ackerman – @warrenackerman

Laura Teusink

Andrew Farrell

Brad Hofbauer – @bhofbauer

To get you up to speed, “Get On The Bus” was a contest encouraging US-based travelers to Like Contiki on Facebook and create virtual buses heading to one of eight Contiki vacation destinations, fill the buses with four of their friends and campaign to get the most votes of any other bus. You can learn more about this contest at the Facebook Studio.

The campaign generated over 10 million impressions through press coverage and sharing, and millions more impressions through offline WOM and advertising that supported the contest. Contiki additionally benefited from nearly 10,000 new US-based Facebook fans and thousands of newsletter signups.

Get On The Bus was deemed a success, but even the best campaigns have challenges and lessons learned. Here are some of ours:

Don’t

Overcomplicate. Buses could be made private (invite-only) or public. Not all users understood how the Facebook invite friends feature worked, if their invites were sent, where they could be found and how to accept an invite. It goes to show that sometimes features can easily overcomplicate, even if those features are native to Facebook.

Draw It Out. The contest ran for 6 weeks, and while the application shot up to tens of thousands of active users in that time, in hindsight the same contest might have been executed with the same results with a shorter duration. The best contest is one that keeps participants on their toes and engaged in the event, so it’s important not to draw it out and lose interest from fans.

Make Rules You Can’t Enforce. It was decided prior to the launch of the contest that vote-swapping and vote-buying would not be permitted. This was more difficult to monitor or define than originally planned. Once it was discovered that participants who were caught vote-swapping/buying were being disqualified, contestants began setting each other up to look like they were breaking the rules. The intention behind the rule was good, but the varying definitions and scale of incentives and swapping was too much of a gray area to enforce accurately.

Do

Personalize The Experience. Bus creators could name their own bus and give it a story.  Bus pages pulled in passengers’ common likes and interests from Open Graph to display the music, movies, etc. the passengers on the bus liked most as well as their average age, gender breakdown, and whether they were “Party” or “Culture” travelers.

Pages also included Facebook comments and activity streams updating the latest happenings on the bus. Participants had a ball with the personalization built into the contest experience and it showed with impressive time spent metrics.

Promote Sharing. Millions of impressions were generated through pass along on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. The contest made sharing and spreading the word a core component of the campaign, and it paid off in reach and awareness numbers. The critical piece is to make sharing a natural extension of the contest, and not just a mechanism to spam friends.

Create A Sense Of Urgency. The contest leader board showed, in real-time, which buses had the most votes. Participants were glued to the leader board checking in on how their bus was doing as voting wound down, which was in turn a huge motivator to get more votes. Additionally, email notifications were sent as the contest neared its conclusion, which drove many people back to the contest to turn their campaigning into high gear.

We had a blast working on this project with Contiki, and are happy to see them getting the recognition they deserve for hosting an innovative contest like this one.  We hope these learnings can help your team execute some great Facebook contests down the road.  There are many more Dos and Don’ts, so please share yours in the comments!

After a few warnings from my Facebook friends I checked it out and searched my name.  What I found were two mailing addresses, an estimated income of over a million dollars, and that I was single.

My Spokeo profile is so much sexier than I am.

In truth I no longer live at either of those addresses, I do not make over a million dollars (I have no idea where they got that but I would love to know), and I’m engaged.  I didn’t pay for the premium version so who knows what dirt they have past the pay wall, but unless they’re displaying my social security number, credit card or bank info I can’t imagine there’s much there.

Spokeo isn’t the culprit, they’re merely showing the level of access anyone has to your information.  Delisting will fix the problem, but it’s not a solution.  There’s nothing stopping another 100 Spokeos from launching tomorrow, or Facebook from further convoluting or changing its privacy settings. People care about their privacy, but sometimes don’t realize how their information can be accessed.  For the most part we are complicit in the publicizing of our information online, and it’s just a matter of education to understand how to curtail the sharing of information you’d rather keep private.

Ironically enough I was just wrapping up this post when Mashable published an item on the 10 Facebook Privacy Settings Every User Needs to Know.

That’s a start.

Then Facebook announced they were eliminating the FBML application.  From the internal rumblings of the Affinitive development team, this presents huge opportunities.  However, there is at least one major consequence.

The elimination of both boxes and FBML apps means no more content on the left-hand column of the Wall tab (save for the native field below the profile image.)  Before this announcement, many brands used the left-hand column to place their moderation policies, guidelines, rules of the road and required legal language.  For some brands (a few of our clients included), that copy is required by their legal and compliance teams.

This content must now be pared down to the 255 character limit of the native field if you hope to keep it in the profile column.  That might work if it’s one line of legal, but a 200 word policy?  Think again.

For now, the easiest option is to place the content on the Info tab, which allows for significantly more text. Linked from the native field under the profile photo, the policy or legal language can still be referenced on the Wall tab.  If that’s not an option, try creating an additional “Our Policy” or “Legal” tab with an application so there’s a persistent navigation item referencing the required language.

Either way, if you’re a brand with a policy or legal language in the left-hand column of your Facebook page, you should discuss your options with your legal or compliance teams and find a way to adapt quickly.  Facebook is notoriously fickle, and the last thing you need is to get yourself caught in some social media red tape.

While Like might make sense as an action for objects and products, Like’s place in the lexicon of customer advocacy has remained a popular topic of discussion.  Brands have been rather perplexed as to what to call their legion of, dare we say followers.

We’ve seen brands change “Become A Fan” copy to “Like Us,” and some have taken the “Fan” copy down without a replacement.  Still others (ex 2) have kept Fan  for better or worse.

Facebook hasn’t made things any easier, populating their “Like Box” with the statement “Brand X has ### fans,” re-naming the Page wall filter from “Just Fans” to “Just Others,”  (Others?  Are we on Lost?), and providing this description in their Brand Permissions Guidelines:

“When inviting users to like your Page, say ‘like our Page’ or ‘become a fan by clicking Like on our Page.“

It seems this shift has struck a chord among consumers as well, as indicated by a recent Mashable poll which reported that ‘Become A Fan’ was more popular than ‘Like’ by nearly 2-1 among Mashable readers.

Some industry folks have summed up Like’s clumsiness in a recent tweets:

There are more serious implications under the surface of the language change, and ReadWriteWeb aptly covered  these concerns a couple months back so I won’t get into that here.

For now, you might want to consider referencing Like as it pertains to the direct action of clicking the button on the page, and perhaps try other verbs such as “Connect” for less direct calls to action (such as a link to visit the page).  Using Fan as a noun still works outside of Facebook and as a reference to users already connected to a page, but keep in mind that Facebook probably won’t be changing the Open Graph nomenclature any time soon so it’s going to be Like until it’s something else.  I didn’t think ‘Become A Fan’ was the most universally contextual phrase for pages in the first place, preferring “Connect” or “Join” or “Subscribe” as a more accurate descriptor of the result of the opt-in action and to avoid blanketing consumers as having the same brand sentiment.  But alas, if we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that they do what they “Like!”

Not only has the button changed, but the ‘#### Fans’ box now displays “#### People Like This”

We’ve also noticed that the little orange flag at the top of the page that used to let us know we were a fan has disappeared.  It is currently still being used as the Page icon on search pages, however, all ‘Become A Fan’ links have been changed to ‘Like’.

Have you noticed the change yet; any additional differences between Fan and Like that you can see?

More importantly, are you a Fan of Like?