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5 Things You Need to Know about Facebook’s Right Hand Column Redesign

This past April, Facebook announced a complete redesign of their right hand column (RHC) ad products and as of June 24th, we’re starting to see the new layout pop up live on the site.

Now, we know what you’re thinking: Facebook has made changes in the past… What’s so special about this one and how will it affect my social campaigns?

As it turns out, unlike many of Facebook’s design updates, this release is a bit more exciting in that it allows you to draw more attention to your right hand column ads with a visual layout that’s more consistent with the those that appear in the News Feed.

As you well know, your audience engages heavily with images throughout their social experience — and the new right hand ad allows you to play into this via paid campaigns. Rather than come off as an interruption or intrusion, the new layout allows your ads to better compliment your audience’s social experience.

Here’s a look at the top 5 things you need to know about the release:

1) Bigger Share of Voice

With the new design, brands will have a bigger share of voice (SOV) on all of Facebook. Users will see only two of the larger ads on all pages including the Homepage. You will no longer need to fight as hard for clicks and will have more of your audience’s attention.

2) More Engagement for Everyone!

Facebook is reporting that they saw 3x the engagement with the new layout as compared to the previous design. As a result of obtaining more valuable real estate, the layout aims to produce more qualified clicks from a precise audience.

3) Consistent Look = Positive Perception

Previously, News Feed ads reported a significantly higher CTR compared to RHC ads. With this release, the RHC ads will resemble News Feed ads — encouraging users to have a more positive perception of the RHC ads and increased engagement.

4) The Magic Number = 1.91:1

The new ads will leverage the same aspect ratio (1.91:1) as ads within the News Feed, allowing for seamless campaign set-up, cohesive creative, and saved time. Marketers will no longer need a unique image for ads in the right-hand column. Additionally, RHC ads will be restricted to the same 20% text per photo policy that is enforced across New Feed ads.

5) Profit off of early adoption

Facebook started displaying the new Right Hand Column ad layout as of June 24th. Upon each page load, users will see either the new layout with only 2 ads in the RHC, or the older layout with multiple ads. We recommend you update your existing campaigns ASAP to take advantage of the new layout as you’ll be one of the first to grab the attention of your audience using the new look and feel. Plus, you’ll want to start collecting data/results using the new layout so you can start optimizing your campaigns accordingly.

Timing and Next Steps

Facebook is allowing advertisers a grace period before you are required to move existing RHC ads to the new format. You have until September 1st to update creative. After that date, Facebook will stop delivering all ads with outdated creative.

We are excited to see how the new design will not only drive more qualified traffic, but also help marketers drive reach in a cost-effective manner. With bigger real estate, increased engagements, and more SOV brands are almost guaranteed to see a positive ROI.

Leave us a comment and let us know how your campaigns perform in the new layout.

Questions? We’ll be watching the comments here so leave us a note and we’ll do our best to help.

Facebook News Feed Updates: What You Need To Know

January 21, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Ask any experienced Facebook marketer how to succeed on Facebook and invariably they’ll mention the News Feed. This river of stories is the core of the Facebook experience. So when Facebook tweaks the News Feed algorithm (formerly called EdgeRank), marketers need to adjust their content strategy.

Facebook just announced that starting January 21st, text posts from Pages will have a lower weighting in the News Feed algorithm.

Text status updates look like this:

Post by Forbes.

While they can include links, they don’t include photos, videos, or link previews. For example, the status update above includes a link, but no preview. The link post below includes a full link preview:

Post reach is a function of fan engagement and algorithm weighting. As a result of Facebook’s algorithm change, a link post that includes a link preview will generate more impressions-per-engagement than a simple text status update that includes a link but no preview.

Most content strategies incorporate a number of different types of posts. Some posts are focused on getting the word out. For these FYI posts, the goal is to maximize impressions/reach. When posting these, experiment with link posts instead of text status updates because that avoids the reduction in reach for text status updates. For example, take a text status update like “Our credit card processing system just passed the latest security audit,” and add a link to a webpage about credit card security.

Other posts focus on building a brand by establishing rapport with customers. These posts generally focus on driving deep engagement with your core audience—you don’t want someone to just see a status update, you want to actually generate an emotional response. Text status updates and photos are both effective at driving this deep engagement because they focus on the essence of the post without distraction. For example, if a bakery posted “Banana bread: Better with or without chocolate chips?” they will likely generate more engagement if they don’t include a link.

While it looks like a link post, this is actually a photo upload that includes a link in the caption.

Finally, some posts are focused on getting users to click through to a website. While you can put the link in either a text status update, a photo caption, or a link status update, across our customer base, link posts are already the consistent winners at driving traffic. After this change to the News Feed algorithm, we expect link posts to outperform plain text updates by an even greater margin.

Regardless of the type of post, if you put paid spend behind your posts then it’s important to monitor their performance in real-time. Don’t use advertising dollars to prop up boring content, use it to accelerate successful content. Unfortunately, no marketer can predict with 100% accuracy which posts will flop and which will succeed. So use a real-time analytics tool like Unified Now to move advertising dollars away from posts that are flopping and toward posts that are succeeding – and remember that you should make that determination within the first 24 hours.

All page audiences are different, and it’s important to figure out what works for you and your audience. Some audiences engage more with links, some with pure text. If your fan base strongly prefers text updates, you might find the extra engagement is a stronger factor than the lowered algorithmic weighting.

Infographic: CPG Advertising on Facebook

November 13, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Nearly two trillion dollars are spent on consumer packaged goods (CPG) globally each year, and smart CPG marketers have found remarkable success using Facebook to reach consumers.

Our latest infographic explores how the consumer package goods industry differs from other vertical markets on Facebook, why the mobile News Feed is key to marketing success, and how men and women differ in their interactions with CPG advertising.

Read on to learn more about what drives marketers’ CPG success.

As with all of Unified’s infographics, feel free to repost using the embed code you’ll find here.

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) Facebook Advertising Benchmarks

Benchmarking Facebook Advertising Performance Across Fourteen Different Industry Verticals

October 28, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

The Unified research team has unique access into one of the social marketing industry’s deepest data sets. One of the most common requests we receive is “Can you give us benchmarks specific to our industry? Average benchmarks aren’t useful to us because everyone in our industry [under/over] performs the average.”

When you think about it, such requests make complete sense. For example, an ad for a new movie will perform very differently than an ad for a bank.

In response to repeated requests, today we’re releasing a new report measuring Facebook ad performance across fourteen different industry verticals.

tl;dr: Want to go straight to the report? Download it here:http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

This report examines cost per impression (CPM), cost per click (CPC), and cost per like (CPL), as well as clickthrough rates (CTR).

Some highlight findings:

Ceullular & Telco advertisers acquire fans 91% cheaper than average.

Food ads are 58% more likely to be engaged with than the average Facebook ad. This is twice as high as any other vertical.

These are the industries we benchmarked:

Alcohol
Automotive
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)
Education
Electronics
Entertainment
Financial Services
Food
Gaming
Home Improvement
Consumer Web Services
Desktop Software (No games)
Cellular & Telco
Travel

Download the full report here: http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

If you’re a social marketer, one of the first questions that should spring to mind when looking at this data is, “How can I use this data to improve my campaigns?”

Use the metrics to identify where you should focus on improving. Some industries excelled at getting initial user engagement but struggled to turn those users into fans. So those industries should optimize what happens to a user after they initially engage with an ad. Some industries had a lower than average engagement rate, but those users who did engage were highly engaged. Those industries should work harder to drive that initial user response because the rest of their marketing funnel is already highly-optimized.

These verticals had lots of clicks, but relatively low percentage of clicks converted into fans:

Food
Automotive
Financial Services

Ads for these verticals had a low engagement rate, but users who clicked were very likely to convert into fans:

Cellular & Telco
Gaming
Desktop Software
Alcohol

If you’re in this group, experiment with broadening your targeting a little. Yes, the followthrough rate will probably slightly decrease, but you might be surprised to find that your ad cost decreases even faster, resulting in an overall lower cost per acqusition.

As you flip through the report, you’ll notice there’s a massive disparity between different industries. Two primary reasons for this:

First, different target markets vary in competition for users’ attention. For example, an industry that primarily markets to moms tends to have far more competition than an industry that markets to teenage girls. Moms have a lot more spending power so there’s a lot more advertisers who want to have their ad placed in front of that mom, so they bid up the prices for those ad slots. An advertiser who can make 50% more profit from a mom is happy to pay 40% more to reach moms than teenagers because that leads to a 10% profit boost.

Second, even within the industries vying for the same target market, some of those industries are more interesting to users, which means the more interesting ads will require fewer ad impressions to drive the same engagement level. For example, an ad for a popular movie generally requires fewer ad impressions to convert a user into a fan than an ad for insurance. So any ad prices that include user behavior, such as cost-per-like or cost-per-click will be lower for more interesting industries. This isn’t a bad thing—less interesting industries often have business models that make more per customer so as long as they’re making a profit on the user, those industries are happy to pay a bit more to acquire customers.

Based on our findings, these verticals are the least expensive for Facebook:

(CPM):
Consumer Electronics, Consumer Packaged Goods and Home Improvement were over 60% cheaper than average.
(CPC):
Gaming, Electronics, Entertainment, and Automotive were 20% cheaper than average.
(CPL):
Cellular/Telco, Gaming, Desktop Software, and Consumer Electronics were over 50% cheaper than average.

Similarly, these verticals were most expensive:

(CPM): Automotive and Education were over 60% more expensive than average.
(CPC): Education, Alcohol, and Home Improvement were over 40% more expensive than average.
(CPL): Education, Food, Home Improvement, and Financial Services were all over 20% more expensive than average.

Finally, there is a wide disparity between verticals based on CTR:

Food, Gaming, and Automotive were over 25% more likely to be clicked than the average Facebook ad.
Alcohol, Education, and Home Improvement had a 70% lower clickthrough rate than the average Facebook ad.

Download the full report here: http://www.unifiedsocial.com/data-study/facebook-advertising-benchmarks-industry-vertical/

If you have questions about this research, or would like to be subscribed to future research reports, please email us at research@unifiedsocial.com.

Sponsoring Facebook Posts within 24 hours results in 2.6x more virality

August 15, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Have you ever wondered whether time affects the virality of your Facebook posts?

We just released our latest free study, which compares results of Facebook posts sponsored before they’re 24 hours old versus those sponsored after 24 hours.

The results are striking:

The first 24 hours of a post’s life on Facebook are pivotal
Posts sponsored in the first 24 hours received 2.6x the viral impressions and 2.7x the engagement of posts sponsored after 48 hours

(Free download of the full study here: www.unifiedsocial.com/when-to-promote-facebook-posts/)

Why are the first 24 hours so important?

A lot of marketers have heard of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, but few realize how much it affects their Facebook ads. What follows is a slightly oversimplified explanation of the relationship between sponsoring a post and the newsfeed algorithm.

Whenever someone engages with your post, regardless of whether the original post impression was organic or paid, that engagement generally results in additional viral impressions. How many viral impressions is a function of the post’s velocity—the more engagement you get in a shorter amount of time, the greater the post’s velocity and the more viral impressions the post will receive.

On Facebook, viral impressions are directly tied to maximum post velocity—the post has to be more interesting than all the other content competing for space in that user’s newsfeed.

However, the newsfeed algorithm includes a time-decay factor, so post velocity slows as time passes. If you delay in sponsoring the post, you squander velocity.

Facebook posts have an average newsfeed life of less than 24 hours—based on my observations, most posts garner 90% of their impressions within 6-18 hours, and after that their organic velocity is greatly reduced.

A post will get the best results if it’s sponsored within the first 24 hours, ideally within the first 2-3 hours so that paid velocity and organic velocity are both peaking at the same time.

Free download of the full study here: www.unifiedsocial.com/when-to-promote-facebook-posts/

Introducing Competitive Streams: Monitor your competitors’ Facebook Pages in real-time

November 27, 2012 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Today, we’re excited to introduce Competitive Streams, the fastest way to keep eyes on your competitors’ Facebook Pages in real-time. A brand new applet built on our PageLever Nowarchitecture, Competitive Streams allows our customers to instantly identify the most engaging posts from competitors’ Facebook Pages, using our unique Relative Impact Efficiency metric.

While most Competitive Analysis tools can only look at the past, Competitive Streams pulls in the most recent posts from competitors in real-time. Great Community Managers know that timing and recency is critical, and have been asking us for monitoring tools that keep up with their need to know exactly what their competitors are publishing, right when it’s published, instead of a day later.

Relative Impact Efficiency

Of course, when you’re monitoring a few dozen competitors, it can be tough to figure out which of their dozens of posts were most successful. That’s where Relative Impact Efficiency (RIE) comes in. Relative Impact Efficiency is a measure of the effectiveness of a Facebook Page Post, relative to what that Page typically receives.

Relative Impact Efficiency is calculated using a proprietary algorithm that takes into account key engagement metrics including Likes, Comments, Shares and People Talking About This (PTAT), as well as page size and typical engagement. Because Relative Impact Efficiency is relative to the Page, and not an absolute measure, it allows you to compare the performance of Posts from Pages of different sizes and different levels of engagement.

In Competitive Streams, you can sort your stream by Relative Impact Efficiency so that the most effective posts from your competitors bubble up to the top.

Competitive Streams in Action:

Beverage Brands

Holiday Retailers

News Organizations

We’re excited to see how our customers use Competitive Streams – if you’re already usingPageLever Now, you can start adding your competitors right away by logging in, navigating to one of your Pages and clicking on the Competitive Streams applet. We’d love to hear what you think.

If you’re not yet using PageLever, go ahead and signup here – you’ll be able to try PageLever risk-free and create a Competitive Stream right away.

Fact Check: Why Mark Cuban is wrong about Facebook

November 14, 2012 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Yesterday, the internet went ablaze with yet another round of hoopla surrounding changes to Organic Reach for Pages, this time because of quotes from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban published on Read Write Web.

In the article, Cuban complains that in order for one of his companies’ Pages’ Posts to reach one million people on Facebook, his companies must pay roughly $3,000 – a sum that Cuban finds outrageous. Cuban claims to have shifted his companies’ marketing strategies to Twitter and Tumblr as the “primary” sites for the businesses he’s invested in, and rely less on Facebook.

Hey Mark Cuban, Let’s Do Some Math

Let’s use Cuban’s example – $3,000 to reach one million people:

$3,000 / 1,000,000 people = $0.003 per person

Reality Check:

Mark Cuban is complaining about having to spend less than a penny per fan.

Just 1/3rd of one cent to reach each fan of the Dallas Mavericks. In advertising terminology, where we measure “per-mille” (per-thousand), that’s a $3 per 1,000 people reached. Is it not worth $0.003 to reach a fan? Is it not worth $0.30 to reach them 100 times?

Mr. Cuban seems to be having a tough time seeing this as a bargain, so let’s connect the dots and see how it impacts the bottom-line.

Every year, the Dallas Mavericks organization has to let their fans know when single game tickets go on sale, and where to buy them online. For any NBA team, selling tickets is themost important part of making money in both the short-term and long-term.

The average price of a ticket to a Dallas Mavericks game is roughly $62.1.

Is it not worth paying $0.003 cents per fan to remind them to buy tickets? To seed a video of Dirk Nowitzki’s game winning shot (to get people to come to the game)? To tell fans where to buy the latest throwback jersey? As Ed Lover would say…

Mark Cuban, you can afford $0.003 per fan to increase Mavs home game attendance. C’mon son!

Organic Reach isn’t a fixed number!

Cuban states that having Pages reach 100% of their fans is “common sense”, and presents his case as if Facebook is putting a fixed cap on the Mavericks’ organic reach. The only change Facebook has made has been to give posts that receive lots of negative feedback less distribution in the News Feed. As we shared with TechCrunch last week, highly engaging posts that don’t get negative feedback are actually getting more reach than ever before.

Reality: You can double your organic reach without spending a dime.

Want to see this graph for your own Facebook Pages? Click here to try PageLever Now.

The graph above shows the Organic Reach of 9 different posts from the same Facebook Page. Take a look – the post represented by the grey line reached 68,768 people within the first 15 minutes of being published. By comparison, the post represented by the red line reached just 9,159 people. That’s a difference of 700%.

The lesson here is that Organic Reach is highly variable. We’ve been helping our customers reach more people through News Feed Optimization for years, and Mr. Cuban, if you’re reading this, we’ll help you too!

“Using Myspace Is Not As Crazy As You Think”

Reality: Yes, it is.

As of November 13th, MySpace has approximately 3.8 Million Monthly Active Users. By comparison, Facebook has over one billion.

Facebook has approximately 263x as many users as MySpace.

Brands don’t get to choose where people spend their time, and over one billion people have chosen to spend their time on Facebook. If Cuban chooses to focus the Dallas Mavericks’ attention on MySpace instead of Facebook, their marketing efforts will reach fewer people.

Twitter, Tumblr & MySpace

Cuban portrays Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram as paradise for brands:

“Twitter and Tumblr are both ready, willing and able to support brand activation without holding followers hostage for additional revenue. And in the ironic department, Instagram has the same friction-free reach to followers that Twitter and Tumblr have but Facebook doesn’t.”

What Cuban neglects to mention here is that neither Twitter nor Tumblr nor Instagram provide marketers with any insight into the number of people their content reaches. Literally none at all, and given the recent uproar over News Feed reach, I can’t exactly blame them – Facebook has to work tirelessly to educate marketers and advertisers about the metrics it provides.

In the absence of any data, Cuban and many others assume that they are reaching their entire audience on these networks, which is flat out wrong.

Reality: There is no utopia in social media.

No social network guarantees free, organic reach to all followers. Think about it from a user perspective for a second (something every marketer or advertiser should do more often):

Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram do not use any ranking algorithms to decide which content appears in users feeds – content is only ever sorted by recency. When you login to Twitter for the first time in 5 hours, you might scroll through the most recent 30-40 tweets, but if you’re following a few hundred people, you’re missing hundreds of tweets every day. Same with Tumblr, same with Instagram.

In practice, this means that the more people and brands that users follow on these networks, the less likely they are to see a given tweet, photo or post – there’s just too much content. This is true of every social network.

We’ve been through this before.

Experts have been writing about News Feed Optimization since 2007. But most marketers haven’t paid much attention, and until recently, assumed that they were reaching their entire audience for free. So now, instead of adapting to reality, folks like Cuban have chosen to make the same mistake on other platforms like Twitter, Tumblr and more.

When these platforms start providing analytics to brands, brands will be in for another shock. Many will get mad, point fingers like Cuban and threaten to leave.

And then we’ll do this song and dance all over again.

1 out of 5 new Facebook fans now comes from mobile–a 280% increase from May to August

October 17, 2012 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Everyone wants to know how well Facebook is doing with mobile…

…so I just measured how many new fans the average Facebook page was getting from mobile.

New Facebook fans coming from mobile jumped 2.8x between May (5%) and August (19%)

Rather than just measuring “mobile fans,” I measured “mobile-fans-per-total-fans” to make sure these numbers weren’t affected by fluctuations in overall fan growth.

At the beginning of May, it was 5%. At the end of August it was 19%. That’s an increase of 2.8x in only four months!

To restate it to be extra clear: in May, out of every 100 new fans, the average Facebook page got 5 fans from mobile. By the end of August, the average page was getting 19 out of every 100 new fans from mobile.

It’s not clear to me why this jumped so fast. I checked with Facebook, and fans who come from ads targeted at mobile are included in this, since they came from a mobile device. According to Facebook, “If they became a fan through a mobile ad, then they would fall into both buckets. It would be attributed both to ‘mobile’ and ‘ads’ in the FQL table.”

The dataset contained 500+ pages with 100K+ Facebook fans, so the results should be statistically robust. That said, this is just what we’re measuring across our customer base, and may be totally different than other pages on Facebook.

You can measure how many of your fans are coming from mobile by opening your PageLever account, going to Fans > Like Sources. Here’s an example screenshot from one of our demo pages: