FreshNetworks Blog

On 13th July Facebook will be launching new Pages and Places functionality to enhance the existing parent-child Page structure.

Facebook will be adding mass management features to help businesses, in particular global brands, establish a more localized presence on Facebook, making it easier to manage multiple locations in a more scalable way.

The new features will appear automatically in all existing parent-child set ups, and the admin functionality will be available via the Pages API.

The 5 new changes to Facebook Pages and Places are as follows:

1. Locations tab

A new Locations tab will appear on the main parent Page. The Locations tab will automatically load nearby locations for a user, and it allows someone to search for locations by zip or postcode. The tab can be moved up or down, or removed altogether.

2. Parent-child linking

Facebook will add a link below the name of each child Place Page that links back to the main parent Page. This will help tie together multiple store locations to a main brand Page.

3. Check-in aggregation

All check-ins from child Places will be included in a parent Page’s overall check-in number.

4. Mass Places management

All parent Page admins will automatically have admin access to their child Places. The parent Page will appear as an admin on every child Place and only the parent Page will be able to remove themselves as an admin from a child Place.

5. New Pages API features

You will be able to edit multiple Places at once using new features in the API, including ‘wall settings’ (you will be able to set a default landing tab, set up an open or closed wall, allow fans to post photos, etc.), ‘custom tabs’ (you will be able to add or remove these), and ‘Check-in Deals’ (you can create/edit Check-in Deals for individual locations). You will still be able to use the Page publishing feature in the API to localize your posts at scale.

It will be interesting to see if this influences how Global brands use Facebook moving forward. Is it better to have seperate pages for each location or just have one main page. What are your thoughts on this?

Online community moderation company Community 102 recently published an interesting infographic which looked at how different age groups interact online across the social web.

Key takeaways include:

• When it comes to age distribution across the social web, the most active age range is 35-44 year olds (25%) in comparison to just 9% of 18-24 year olds.
• The highest majority of Facebook users are aged between 18-25 (29%) while on Twitter the highest majority of users are 26-34 year olds  (30%).
• The average LinkedIn user is 44 years old.
• The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
• The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
• 26% of Millenials (people born between 1978 and 1994, so aged 16-32, and the first generation to be “raised” on the internet) access social networks at least once a day. Millenials also spend an average of 23 minutes online every day.

How different age groups interact across the social web

We’ve already talked about how Arla foods brand Lurpack is using social media to share good food and now it seems that another Arla brand, Cravendale, is using social media as a way of increasing brand awareness.

Cravendale, the UK’s number one branded fresh milk, will be giving away 200 bottles of milk every Friday from 1st July until October in what’s being termed “Free Milk Friday”.

Each week 100 Cravendale Facebook fans and 100 @Cravendale Twitter followers are in with a chance of winning a free one-litre carton of Cravendale milk.

To take part in Free Milk Friday Twitter followers need to wait for a competiton related tweet to be issued on a Friday morning and to then retweet it, with winners selected at random.

To enter on Facebook, Cravendale’s Facebook page will show a special ‘tab’ every Friday and the first 100 fans to click on it to be given a voucher for free milk.

The campaign seems to be about extending reach, as well as perhaps helping Cravendale brand managers hit their sample targets, and it will be interesting to see if  if Cravendale has thought about how they’re going to aqcuire new likes and retweets over time as the campaign is set to run for 3 months.

Even more interesting will be what, if anything, they do to retain the interest of any new fans and followers once the campaign is over.

Google+'s features - Home, Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Photos and Huddle

It’s too early to tell whether or not Google+, the company’s challenger to Facebook, will find success. Google’s Documents and Apps have seen widespread use, yet other services have struggled, like Wave. Early feedback suggests that from a user perspective, Google+ is getting some things right, but is not yet a solid package or a true rival to Facebook or Twitter.

The plus

Its real USP is ‘Circles’, which is a way of quickly and easily managing those you follow and then targeting those groups with content. This is a fantastic addition to friend/follower management and is something Facebook users have needed for years. It’s also potentially one of its biggest problems: if Facebook reacts quickly and introduces better peer management and targeting, then Circles ceases to be a differentiator.

Beyond Circles, it’s also promoting group video chat (‘Hangouts’) and topic browsing (‘Sparks’). Personally, I like Sparks. It works for me in the same way Bing does, i.e “let me browse but yes, give me that initial spark”. Hangouts is a great feature for those who like video chats. But I’m not sure it’s enough to take audience from, say, Skype. Google has fantastic voice recognition facilities for its mobile services. It would have been great, for example,  to support Hangouts with automatic voice transcription for the hard of hearing or for business meetings.

…and the minus?

It’s therefore going to be an uphill climb. Google hasn’t done itself any favours with its staggered approach to release. It worked for Gmail because people were looking for a great, free e-mail service and its central features did not rely on who or how many people you knew. Google+, however, requires you to have friends who are also using Google+. I have 300 friends on Facebook who are constantly chatting with me and giving me content to explore. Why should I go to Google+ to interact with 20 people?

If they want to succeed, then from a user perspective they really need to offer more of what the other networks don’t have (and a killer could have been decent cloud storage and streaming) and they need to make it easy for users to aggregate. Something as simple as grabbing contact e-mails from your Facebook friends en masse would have instantly made this more interesting. Why not allow me to connect using Twitter and Facebook to pull in feeds from both? Google could have made Google+ something I want as my homepage, my one-stop shop to the internet. They could have reinvented the internet portal – something Microsoft has been trying for years with MSN but failing because of poor application.

The value for brands?

As for brands, I don’t think there’s anything in this for them in the short term. Longer term I think brand engagement will be in the form of specialised search and content advertising (eg through ‘Sparks’ or interspersed through the stream). There’s a lot of white space that would be perfect for advertising. On top of that, Engadget found references to game sharing in the background code, suggesting that there’s much more to come that users and brands can do.

Perhaps that’s the central benefit Google will try to sell? ‘Come to Google+. We have ads, but it’s not nearly as invasive or pervasive as on Facebook!’

What a busy quarter we’ve had here at FreshNetworks . As a proudly independent social media agency we’re pleased to say that we’re continuing to strengthen our client portfolio.

Some of the highlights from this quater include helping Telefónica Europe, otherwise known as O2 to its customers, develop a consistent strategy for using social media across multiple European markets.

Our consultancy team created a social media strategy to provide clear guidelines and policies for all Telefónica Europe businesses to operate within, while still allowing each individual market a degree of flexibility. This includes developing an analytical framework for measuring success from all social media activity across five major markets, and, as a result, we’re now Telefónica Europe’s retained social media agency for all Group-sponsored social media projects and programmes.

We also helped fashion retailer Topshop launch ‘Wish You Were At Topshop’ – a Summer holiday themed digital campaign at its London, New York, Dublin, Manchester and Liverpool stores.

Using  technology developed by our in-house tech team, we enabled shoppers to create their own digital ‘Wish You Were At Topshop’ postcard. As well as getting a printed copy of the postcard, customers could upload their perfected image straight onto Topshop’s gallery, as well as their own Facebook page, allowing them to share the photo with friends both on and offline. We’re proud to have helped Topshop become the first in the industry to work with Instagram.

Helping Hodder & Stoughton launch the latest James Bond adventure, Carte Blanche, written by Jeffery Deaver, was also a highlight for us. Using a mix of clues and questions in social media and in the real world Bond fans were challenged to to solve a series of cryptic clues for the chance of winning a chauffeur-driven ride in a new Bentley Continental GT  (the car driven by Bond in Carte Blanche) an overnight stay for 2 in the five star Lanesborough Hotel in London, an exclusive copy of Carte Blanche a day before the rest of the world and the chance to meet Carte Blanche author Jeffery Deaver to discuss, first-hand, the details of the book. Much to the delight of the male members of our team, they also got to meet beautiful bond girl Chesca Miles.

Aside from our client wins we’ve been out and about helping businesses understand that value of social media. Charlie, Matt, and Helen have spoken at no less than 14 different conferences and events this quarter, including the Financial Services Forum, the European Customer Experience World and Internet World, and we also ran our own Financial Services roundtable event for senior level decesion makers of some of the biggest financial services brands in the world.

Picking up yet another award for ‘best social media strategy’ at The Drum Marketing Awards helped to highlight how much we’re continuing to  grow and develop as a team. In fact,  we’re expanding and as a result we’re currently looking to hire a Group Account Director, an Account Director, Account Managers, Social Media Managers and a Social Media Executive. So if you fancy working for a busy, fast growing social media agency why not drop us a line.

So as we start on the first day of Q3 we look forward to working with some exciting new retail, FMCG and financial services clients, as well as continuing our relationship with existing ones.