FreshNetworks Blog

The Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK has warned employers not to ask for the Facebook username and log-in details of their staff or of people who apply for jobs. That this even has to be ruled on will come as a surprise to many – I wouldn’t expect to give my employers access to my house, or to my diary or to my holiday photos. But apparently some employers in the UK (but more in the US) have been asking for this data so that they can get an understanding of a candidate before they hire them, or of an employee they have working for them.

That this is being done, or even being talked about, reinforces the negative attitude there can be to social media in many organisations and in many recruitment processes. At its worst, it is a way to spy on people and something that should be banned from all workplaces and all workplace activities. This is clearly wrong.

Rather than banning social media or turning into a tool that is used to spy on employees, organisations should be encouraging and educating them to use social media to support their work and to support the brand they work for. A more restrictive attitude to social media is most likely to lead to a lack of respect of the medium and, potentially, of the brand you work for in that medium.

For many leaders and managers, social media can feel scary and like the unknown – there are new channels and networks and tools all the time, and the chances are others in your organisation will be more knowledgeable about them. The openness and sharing that social media enables is new to us all and is very different to the way that most businesses and managers have been used to. And for many there is a real concern that social media is about chat with friends and so it is wasting time in the workplace. None of these areas should lead to restrictive policies on social media, rather they should lead to training, sharing and education so that businesses can use social media in the most effective way.

The most successful businesses, and those that are set to make the greatest advantage from social media are those with a clear programme of training and educating staff about how the brand, and how they as individuals, can use social media. Both for personal reasons and for the brand. The line between the two is drawn, employees understand how and where social media can help them at work and so understand what kind of usage is acceptable.

For example, you might not want one of your sales team to be spending an hour chatting to a friend on Facebook. You might, however, love them to spend this time building initial relationships and credibility with contacts across a target segment or sector. You equally wouldn’t want one of your concierge or front of house teams in a hotel looking at YouTube videos for an hour, you probably would like to spend downtime searching for new places and tips in their city through YouTube or Foursquare so that they can better advise your clients.

Social media can help people to do their jobs more effectively and more easily – helping you to find people, find information, find solutions and learn things. At a conference in Cambridge last week, this was summed up most effectively for me by Charles Elvin, the CEO of the Institute of Leadership & Management in the UK:

Employees need to be constantly learning to help them and to help their employer; and social media is the best way of them doing this

To make the most of this, employers need to take responsibility for training their staff. The true social business has a process of training and educating all staff about social media, how they can use it, how they should use it for work and what they should not do. They may go on to train employees about how the brand uses social media and how they can contribute.

Social media offers many great opportunities for brands and for their employees to be more efficient and do things in new ways. Most people need support and training to make the most of this and it is this that should be put in place, not restrictive policies behaviours.

Today Facebook announced that they have made improvements to their photo viewer so that users will see the best photos possible.

Changes such as high-resolution photos and full screen viewing will means that high quality photos could be viewed up to 4 times bigger than previously.

In order to view photos full screen, users simply have to click on the arrows in the top right-hand corner of the photo to expand it to the maximum size, so photos which are large enough could fill the entire screen.

Obviously, this is big news for brands, who can now share really high quality images which could fill their fans’ screens, removing any other distractions. Brands with lots of visual content such as our client Park Bench are sure to enjoy these changes.

The changes also mean that Facebook will likely allow applications to upload larger images and potentially update the image presets offered by the Graph API.

Interestingly Facebook’s introduction of a full-screen photo viewer is also another indicator of its move away from side bar advertising. When images are viewed full-screen, they block out the adverts which usually appear on the right hand side.

This suggests that Facebook may be intending to take an approach more in line with Twitter’s sponsored stories.

Last year I wrote about the social media landscape infographic, highlighting the placement of Facebook and Google as all-encompassing, central networks. Fred Cavazza has published his 2012 version, and this year’s edition has quite a bit to take in – (click the thumbnail to see the full size image).

The big three

Facebook remains the go-to network, and the arrival of OpenGraph and Timeline mean that other networks (such as Spotify) or brands, can really integrate with a user’s experience through Facebook apps.

Twitter, while it may not offer options for “playing” or “buying”, does deserve its place as a central network, with it being a significant driver of news, links and information from other networks.

The arrival of Google+ since last year’s infographic is the most obvious change – and while it’s still early days for Google’s take on social, the implications for social search mean that we’re likely to see much more of it in 2012.

Almost as many devices as networks

One addition to this year’s “landscape” is the broad range of devices that we can use to access the social web. There tends to be a strong temptation to declare each new year as “the year of mobile” or “the year of social TV”. With smartphone ownership in the UK exceeding 50% of market share, the need to make content accessible and optimised for platforms other than lap and desktops is key.

What does this landscape mean for brands?

Even though this infographic is a summary of the range of social networks out there, it really goes to show the need to have a clear social media strategy.

• Think about how to maintain consistent branding and tone-of-voice across your chosen networks.
• Really think about user-experience, especially for bespoke websites, and consider all the devices that users may connect with.
• Stay abreast of the constantly shifting landscape! This time last year Pinterest was a relatively unknown platform, today it is the new social media darling. It will be interesting to see how it fares in 2013!

In the UK, the Conservative Party and the Labour Party have been the main political rivals since the start of the 20th Century. Today they are vying to capture the hearts and minds of voters on Facebook. But how well are they doing? Here’s a nonpartisan analysis of what these two parties are doing using this social network, and what we can learn from them.

We used the  Engagement Analytics tool by Socialbakers to compare both pages. Audience size for the parties is relatively even, but the Conservatives have certainly taken a lead here.

However, at FreshNetworks we believe that the real indicator of success of a Facebook page isn’t its audience size but the level of engagement. More on that later…

1. Content strategies

Neither the Conservatives nor Labour seem to have developed the type of content strategy that we would always recommend for our clients.

In fact, it appears that both pages seem to be almost purely focussed on sharing links to blog posts and articles on their respective websites. We find that a rich mixture of content, including photos and albums, as well as short, punchy status updates and questions are great for engaging audiences. Our experience is that links shared direct to the newsfeed are often the least engaging of all Facebook post types.

2. Post frequency

Probably the biggest difference between the parties in how they use Facebook is the frequency at which they post content, and as far as we’re concerned, neither is getting quite right.

We’d say that it’s Labour who have got it most wrong however, as they are almost certainly over-sharing. Take a look at the graph above – now, we think there’s nothing wrong with posting every day if the message is right, but 11 posts in one day? Even the most ardent fan of your brand (or in this case political supporter) is going to suffer from at least mild fatigue at all those updates. In total over the three month period we monitored, Labour posted 284 times – an average of three posts a day, seven days a week.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the Conservative party who definitely seem to have a ‘less is more’ attitude to sharing content with their Facebook fans – never posting more than once in a day, and often with several days between posts. Over the same three month period they posted just 10 times.

With a proper content plan to support their social media strategies, we think both parties could probably do with meeting somewhere in the middle on post frequencies. It’s all about putting out the right content, at the right time of day for your audience, without over-sharing, but whilst maintaining an ongoing flow of conversation with your audience.

3. Engagement

So what about the all-important engagement rate?

In the UK this morning many commuters would have read a piece in The Metro about whether Pinterest is the next Facebook. This is not the first article or blog post about this, and I fear that it will not be the last. The short answer to this is ‘no’. And the longer answer is ‘no, because they are fundamentally different, non-competitive things’. But the fact that the question is asked and written about is a reminder that there is still a misconception that ‘social media’ is a single type of thing rather than a set of different, often complementary tools.

Pinterest is certainly the latest social platform that people are talking about. There’s a range of great statistics on DesignTAXI and there has been a lot of coverage about how they monetise your content. The concept is very simple – a social tool that lets you gather and share images, and sort them into collections. It offers something that really wasn’t that easy to do before online – although like many social tools it mirrors an existing offline behaviour (putting things on pinboards or in scrapbooks).

There is very little in this description that is like Facebook at all. In fact it offers a tool that is not really part of Facebook’s repertoire - in fact can you imagine creating these collections in such a simple easy way on Facebook? That’s partly why Pinterest is getting such early success (and why I expect it to continue growing). Not because it is competing with Facebook (or becoming ‘the next Facebook’). But because it offers something new and different to what was previously available in Facebook or across any other social tools.

The fact that people compare the two highlights that many consider social media tools to essentially be doing the same thing (they’re where people ‘do social media’). So if a new one comes along it must threaten the existence of the previous tools. This is a fundamentally flawed understanding.

1. Different tools do different things and we use them in different ways – Facebook is a collection of tools (a photo sharing tool, an event planning tool, a status updating tool…to name but a few). When a new tool comes along it probably adds to the mix of things we can do rather than competing directly. We all know that there are some things Twitter, or Facebook, or YouTube (or any tool) just isn’t suited for and so a gap that could be filled.
2. Our total mass of ‘doing social media’ has not peaked – If a new tool comes along it does not have to take a share of our ‘social media time’. We have not yet reached saturation, and indeed we may never as new tools will help us do other things differently or more efficiently. For any new tools to be a ‘Facebook killer’ suggests that it is going to compete for our time or attention that would previously have been dedicated to Facebook. As new tools come along that offer new things for us to do, or solve new problems, we will find time for them.
3. Our use of social tools is still maturing – Facebook is a collection of social tools, some people use all of them and others just a few. As we get used to sharing, interacting and engaging in different ways (and as the tools available catch up with how we behave anyway) we will change how we use the tools we have already signed-up for and the new ones. Maybe we’ll chat less on Facebook if we use Twitter for that, or maybe we’ll share photos more on Pinterest than we did on Facebook. Many of these decisions will be very personal and how we use these tools will be individual to each of us, the decisions we make and the people we connect with.

Pinterest, like many new social tools, is different to ones that have come before, and offers new ways of doing things. This is why it is successful and why it will continue to be so. It is not necessarily a threat to existing platforms and tools as it adds to the range of things that people can and will do online rather than competing with them. It will grow in a different way to Facebook and that is a good thing – it will have different growth strategies, the community will shape and change it to fit how they use the tool, and the monetisation model will drive different behaviours.

In fact if Pinterest were to become a Facebook it would probably be less successful as it would be trying to be something that it just isn’t at all like. Of course, there is probably one way that Pinterest probably would and should want to be like Facebook – a successful business that can command a huge value at IPO. That’s sadly not the comparison most of these pieces are making but is no doubt one that the people behind Pinterest would be happy with.