like button Archives - Mike Dixon's Blog

Actionable Social Analytics isn’t that hard!

I have seen many blog posts recently regarding the importance of social media integration and how easy it is. A few lines of code here for a Facebook Like button, a few pieces there for a @follow Twitter button there and so on. But what happens after that? Just leave it there and wait for the traffic?

I’m not seeing many resources out there for more advanced tracking of social media plug-ins and integration which is a real shame as there is so much you can track and measure to work out the effectiveness of your implementation and it will allow you to iteratively improve your integration and get more out of social networks in the long run.

Firstly, I do not see the point of just implementing social media plug-ins into your site because that’s what everyone else does. Facebook gets a lot of information sent back to their servers about your users when they view pages on your site that contain a like button. So any implementation needs to be of actual benefit to you as well as Facebook.

You need to have a strategy. What is is that you are trying to achieve? Do you want to drive awareness through word of mouth? Page impressions? Unique users? Sales? Do you want to be putting effort in to talking to your users directly through an official Facebook page or Twitter account or through installing Facebook comments on your article pages?

There are so many options and ways to integrate social media into your site to achieve so many different goals that by integrating them all without proper and effective tracking results in you not knowing what has caused any sort of uplift in your KPIs.

This blog post hopes to offer insight into a few techniques that can be applied to your social media integration and will be focussed towards the Use of Google Analytics – although similar techniques are available for the likes of Adobe’s SiteCatalyst but you will probably need to talk to your Account Manager about it and get some help implementing the concepts.

The main issue is that without more advanced tracking of your social media integration, you just see referrals from Facebook or Twitter, not whether traffic came to your site from a user clicking a Like button, a wall post or a Tweet that a member of staff posted on the official Facebook page or on Twitter or a wall post or Tweet that a user made.

It is really important to differentiate between these so you understand what’s working for you so that you can focus your efforts in the right places rather that trying to do everything averagely.

Tracking The Facebook Like Button

The Facebook Like button is a really smart piece of functionality. It’s relatively simple to integrate into your site, is immediately recognisable and users *hopefully* know what happens when they press it. If you use Google Analytics, there is a nice little tool available to you to help track urls, the URL Builder – http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

This quickly allows you to generate the bits at the end of a URL to track what users do once they arrive on your site. Follow the instructions and you will end up with something like this:

http://www.mike-dixon.com/?utm_source=article-id&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=fb-like

By adding these tokens at the end of the url in your Facebook Like code, when a user clicks the Like button, it is this url that will appear in the user’s Facebook profile and friend feeds. You can do the same for the Twitter widgets and many others – just make sure that you amend the tokens to reflect the widgets that you are using.

Tracking editorial wall posts

Similarly to the above, if you have an official page for your brand, service, web site or product use a similar method to the above. Use the URL Builder http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578 to generate your tokens and use this new URL to post on your wall.

Example: http://www.mike-dixon.com/?utm_source=article-id&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=wall-post

This will then allow you to start differentiating between two different ways of driving traffic to your site from Facebook. So rather than just looking at your referral list and just seeing ‘facebook.com’, you can look at your Campaign reports and see specifically what is working best for you.

Once you have a benchmark of data, you can start tweaking your implementation of the Like button and the wording used on your Wall posts to start to optimise your efforts. If you decide that you want to start split testing your implementations, you can tweak the tokens for each instance being tested so you can compare the advantages of both.

You could also look at auto-posting versus manual posting and see which works best.

Gut feel does go a long way, but having actual acitonable data goes much further when asking for more resource or setting/achieving realistic targets.

And finally…

This is all about trying to use existing tools to give you more granular data for you to make better decisions. Rather than trying to implement a Social Media strategy blindly, you can really start to get granular data and make some actionable decisions.

Interesting piece on personal data held by Facebook

I do think that this needs to be taken with a slight pinch of salt, but if its accurate then it will be really interesting to see how this pans out.

In essence, the user requested their personal data from Facebook which eventually arrived and when printed amounted to 1200 pages of A4.

In addition, there was quite a bit missing and when he requested this data, Facebook replied stating that the law only applies to data that is not too onerous to extract – therefore, that the effort of retrieving this data was ‘disproportionate’ to the request.

As much as I enjoy Facebook, I am started to be increasingly concerned over how much data they actually collect and whether I am comfortable with that.

Facebook Registration – Breaking down the registration barriers

Recently Facebook announced a new social plugin called Registration. Registration allows web sites to integrate a sign up form via an iframe or fbml that is hosted by Facebook.

I am working on a project that requires registration and we have decided to try this out so a lot of what you see in this post is first-hand experience of how it works.

This form can be customised to include bespoke fields that you may want to collect. By default it does not ask for a password for example, but that is easily added. Similarly, if you wanted to add in check boxes, free text boxes, options etc they are all simple additions.

Check out the Custom Fields example on the Facebook Registration page. When a user arrives at the registration form and are logged into Facebook, any compatible fields are pre-filled in therefore reducing the need to fill out copious amounts of data about themselves. This will help to reduce the barrier to entry for many users who are often put off by registration forms.

If a user doesn’t want to pre-populate the form with their Facebook data, they can remove this from the form by clicking on the [x] next to their name and photo on the form.

So what happens to the user’s data?

If a user is logged into Facebook and is filling out the form, any extra data that is compatible with Facebook is added to their Facebook profile. In the Custom Fields example on the Facebook Registration page, if you click on the text box for Current Location, a pre-ticked check box appears which says ‘Save this to my Facebook Profile’.

As a site owner, you can disable this for any custom fields that you add to the form by adding in the no-submit function to the integration.

If a user does not have a Facebook account, they are not automatically signed up.

Submitting the form

When a user submits the form, you can do some form validation before Facebook processed the form and returns the user data to you as json – a lightweight text-based open standard designed for human-readable data interchange (Wikipedia). The registration plugin can also do this over SSL which we would recommend as best practice for security reasons.

There are some issues currently with the validation – namely that if a form fails validation it can sometimes not run the validation a second time. I’m sure that there are ways around this – by doing your checks server side – which we are still investigating.

Once you have the data returned to you as json, the website needs to process that data and store it.

Key feature

You may think that the pre-filling of personal data would be the killer app for this product. Whilst it is a pretty important feature, my personal favourite feature is it shows any of your friends that have already registered on the site – giving users social proof that the site is worth registering for and that they are not doing this blindly. Giving further incentive to users to register.

The end?

Nope! Once you have the data stored in your database the web site still needs to handle things like logging in, profile pages,editing of profiles, forgot passwords etc.

Final thoughts

The Facebook Registration plugin is definitely a step in the right direction for Facebook. For them, it allows further integration of their platform into external websites as well as gathering further incremental information about their users.

For the websites, it takes out a big chunk of development that would be required to create a new registration system. It also reduces barriers to entry by having the form pre-filled in most cases so therefore converting non-registered users to registered users should be easier.

It will be interesting to see where Facebook goes with this. Whether they will extend the Facebook Connect product to help with editing locally stored profile information and profile pages.

I do think that this is one of the bets plugins that Facebook has released and its still early days.

I’ll post updates as and when I have them.

Closing the Viral Loop – Beyond the Facebook Like Button

Most web pages that you visit nowadays contain a version of the Facebook Like Button.

Most web site owners assume that users know exactly what the like button is for, but what is it for? What exactly can be done with it?

In its most basic form, when a user likes a piece of content it appears on their Facebook Wall for all of their friends to see.

I suppose that the hope of web site owners is that the user’s friends will see this and then send users back to this piece of content. This concept is known as ‘Social Proof’ – where you are more likely to do something if one of your friends deems it ok to do so.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof for more information on this.

So I can see why those who like to show off what they like to their friends would want to do this, but what about those users who are more passive in their consumption of media.

There is a rule that states that, with social media, 90% of passively consume media, 9% interact with content and 1% create the content. If we use YouTube as an example, that means that 90% of users watch videos, 9% comment on those videos and 1% actually upload the content.

If this is the case for the like button, only 9% or 10% of users actually use the like button. How do we engage with that 90% of passive internet users?

My suggestion would be looking to close the viral loop.

Closing the Viral Loop

I believe that users would be more likely to click the Facebook Like button if they knew what was going to happen and that they were going to get something in return from it.

Web site owners are asking users to be active on their pages, to help promote that content to users without asking for anything in return. This is a very lazy way to try to grow traffic.

What steps could be used to make the clicking of the Like button more attractive to users?

Firstly, box out the like button and tell them what it will do. ‘Do you like this story? if so, click the like button.’

If users are liking your site versus a piece of content and if they click like, they will receive updates straight to their Facebook news feed – tell them! This would appeal to their passive consumption.

‘By clicking the like button, you will receive content updates to your Facebook wall so you don’t need to keep checking back on our site.’

The Open Graph – closing the viral loop

This is where the most interesting bit comes into play.

If a site has been more sophisticated with their integration and also integrated the Open Graph at the article level, users could actually be liking a product, an actor, a musician etc.

If this is the case, then I believe that closing the viral loop becomes extremely important.

If a user is on a music news web site, such as www.nme.com, and they are on the Black Eyed Peas artist page – http://www.nme.com/artists/the-black-eyed-peas – and they click like, they should receive updates from NME every time that there is new content posted up about the Black Eyed Peas.

At the moment, there is no incentive to Like the Black Eyed Peas – not unless the user is just that passionate about the band.

There is also no call to action. Just a plain old tiny Like button.

If the like button had a call to action and had its content feed for Black Eyed Peas set up correctly, it would be much more appealing for users to click.

‘Click like to get updates from NME every time we post new content on the Black Eyed Peas’

This would be the same on all sites across the Internet and I would argue that this would result in many more users engaging with the Like button.