The Blog - Archive for

28 May 2010

20 Comments

9 easy steps for setting up a Facebook fan page

by Sarah Bale

With Facebook becoming more and more prevalent in the business space, we thought it would be helpful to tell you how to set up a Facebook page for your business. It does not matter if you have your own personal Facebook account or not, this is merely about using Facebook as a free platform to interact with people, listen to real time feedback, and give your company a mouthpiece to a potentially massive audience!

Getting started

To set up a fan page for your business it is advised that you set up a business account for Facebook. You are now ready to create your page!

Step 1 – Login

Log into your business account and go to create a Facebook page. If you do not have a business account yet you can go to the Facebook home page and click “create a page for a celebrity, brand or business.”

Step 2 – Create Official Page

You will now see the following page:

Select what you are creating your page for and choose from the drop down options and then give you page a name. It is important to know that you cannot change this name when you have pressed “Create Official page.” Think about how your customers would search for you on Facebook, so do not abbreviate unless people would search for you as that abbreviation. Also, try not to use words before your company name to make sure you come up on the searches.

You can then “Create Official Page!”

Step 3 – Use a strong image

You will now have a blank canvas to start filling in as you choose!

A good place to start would be with the picture. This is important because it is what people will see when they search for you. You have a maximum space of 600×200 so use this space! This will create a longer image down the left of your page and will mean it is more noticeable on the searches. You can then change your thumbnail through the edit picture button, to select exactly which bit of the picture you want to use. This will stream through onto your fan’s pages and therefore it is good to have your brand name or something very clearly associated with your brand on the thumbnail.

Step 4 – Fill in some info

You may now want to fill in some info. This is where people will go to find out more about you so it needs to tell people what you are all about. You can include things like mission statements, lists of products, when you were founded. But you can also put in links to your website/blogs/competitions whatever else you want people to see.

Step 5 – Choose your tabs

You can have 6 tabs maximum in view on your page. If you go to the plus sign you will see you have lots to choose from and you can simply drag them into whatever order you want. So, for example, you might not want ‘photos’ on the front screen because ‘links’ is more relevant. You can also create your own tabs which I will go into separately.

Step 6 – Clarify your strategy

Now you have your basic structure and you understand what Facebook is capable of, you can clarify how you want to use Facebook to get the most out of it. Do you just want a presence? Or do you want to give people a reason to like and share your pages? Do you want to be informative or do you just want to use this as a listening platform? Are you going to respond to queries and post messages on your wall? If so, how often? Who is going to be responsible for this? This is fundamental before you start adding in content and deciding how to interact on your wall.

Step 7 – Create content

Now to start adding in some content! This is the fun bit!

Make the most out of the tabs available. For example, if you have some information you want to share with your fans, top tips for example or “how to’s” you may want to use ‘notes’ to display this in a blog format. If you organise or go to events, you could upload lots of recent photos and give fans the ability to tag themselves meaning your page will be displayed on their walls (this can all be done through the ‘Edit Page’ button and then go to the correct tab).

Step 8 – Invite people

When you are happy with your content you can invite your mailing lists to join you! Send people an email asking them to join your page or if you know they are on Facebook then send them a Facebook message telling them you have arrived! Put a ‘Follow us on Facebook’ link on your website so that people can go straight to your Facebook page.

Step 9 – Spread the word

You have your page and the people you already know are your Facebook fans, now it is about spreading the word! This can be done through great content that people want to share, incentives (competitions to encourage interaction and sharing) or maybe even Facebook Ads!

It is as simple as that! When you are comfortable with your page there are loads more things you can do, create your own tabs, link in RSS feeds for your blogs, message all your fans, set up some Facebook ads! Let us know what you would most like to learn about next!

21 May 2010

0 Comments

Simpleweb take some time out to speed up

by Sarah Bale

Anyone who knows us here at Simpleweb will know that we believe in working hard and playing hard, so it will come as no surprise to you that we were fortunate enough to be able to go and experience a track day down at Keevil Airfield, Wiltshire.

The cars

We were lucky enough to have 2 cars for the day, a Westfield and a Lotus Elise both courtesy of BPC on Track.

The track of choice was an old airfield (as the name might suggest!) and there is no racing or timing allowed, just driving for the fun of it.

It was a beautifully sunny day, to the point of slight sunburn (!), and there were a number of awesome cars to get excited about on the track. Needless to say there were definitely times, namely when one of us was driving in between a Ferrari and a 911, when we were suddenly very grateful for the rule that each owner is responsible for their own car as opposed to being fully comp!

Everyone had their personal preferences, some preferred the Westfield for its speed and rawness whilst others preferred the Lotus Elise for its agility, smooth gear changes and fast acceleration, either way everyone seemed to be loving the experience!

Team Building

All morning we were driving around with the BPC on Track experts, taking it in turns to learn the route and gain a bit of confidence. After lunch (some surprisingly tasty burgers from the onsite burger van) we were able to go back out in the car but this time with each other…

Now, people often talk about team building exercises and establishing trust; falling back and catching your colleague springs to mind, but there is nothing quite like sitting in the passenger seat when you know that the person you are trusting with your life drove around a track for the first time 2 hours ago!

1 more black flag and you are out!

You are told at the start of the day about certain rules you must abide by. One of these rules relates to different coloured flags that are waved around the track to get your attention and tell you something. The flag you definitely DO NOT want to see is a black flag. This means you have done something wrong; spun the car, overtaken dangerously, whatever it is you have to come straight off the track and report back to the organisers for a telling off!

If your car gets 3 black flags then you are not allowed back on the track. We managed 2 between us, which I suppose does not sound too bad, but in that I do not think any other black flags were raised all day for anyone else, it is not great!

A Sexi surprise

As we approached the end of the day, Christos was awarded the title of best driver for the day! His prize for achieving such a title was to sit in the Marlin Sexi, whilst a professional driver raced (sorry, drove very quickly!) around the track. We watched in amazement and I think it was noticed as 2 of us were then offered a chance to have the same experience! I was one of the lucky ones and I did not say a word the whole 10 laps. It is very easy to see how people become addicted!

As you can probably tell it was a brilliant day had by all, and we could not be more grateful to Tom and Mark for taking us. We just hope next time Mark can come with us rather than being stuck in the office unable to find his drivers license!

10 May 2010

1 Comment

Email Signatures should be simple

by Mark P.

Email signatures are a no mans land of internal policy and personal preference in most businesses. There’s no real right or wrong, except that you need to be concise and make all available information readable quickly and consistently.

I’ve been playing with a couple of ideas lately. Having just moved office I thought while updating the address in my current signature I may as well update the look and feel as well.

My first attempt was this:

All of the information is clear, it looks nice with the icons and it’s consistent with the rest of our brand.

After a few weeks in the real world I found that the use of images became a problem. For some recipients they were just showing as attachments and when replying to Basecamp messages the icons were being added to the posts.

So I’ve modified the signature to the below which seems to be working nicely.

The only downside to this current layout is if the recipient uses text only emails. In which case they will not be able to click the links, however some email clients will display the link URL instead so for now this is a fair compromise.

I’m not a big fan of those “don’t print this email… be green…” footers in emails. I don’t need to be told how and when to use my printer and I won’t patronise anybody else about it either… But that’s just me!

One interesting idea I’ve noted a few people doing in their emails, is putting a summary of their latest project in the footer. I really like this, but you do need to make sure that you keep it up to date.

Email signatures are an under explored area of a businesses marketing mix. We should make a gallery of the best examples.

5 May 2010

1 Comment

Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit…or is it?

by Sarah Bale

For a week now we have been listening to the chatter on social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, by people discussing the three election candidates. With over 30,000 results we have analysed a random sample of this data (1350) for 2 different dates. Specifically, we wanted to find out the sentiment of the chatter, what people really think about the candidates, so we could start comparing. We decided the best, and most interesting, sentiments to measure would be disappointment, sarcasm, positivity and factual

The Results!

Thursday 29th April

People were 50% more likely to be sarcastic about David Cameron and Gordon Brown than Nick Clegg.
Overall positive sentiment as a percentage was 3x higher for Nick Clegg and David Cameron than for Gordon Brown.
Overall disappointment as a percentage was 3x higher for Gordon Brown than Nick Clegg.
Overall disappointment as a percentage was 2x higher for David Cameron than Nick Clegg.
Nick Clegg had only 64% of the engagement levels that Gordon Brown and David Cameron had.

Tuesday 4th May

People are being 72% more sarcastic about Nick Clegg than last week, David Cameron stayed the same, Gordon Brown 4% less sarcasm.
Gordon Brown’s positive sentiment increased 3x putting him just above David Cameron and just below Nick Clegg (positive sentiment as a percentage of sample blogs 12%:11%:13% respectively).
Overall disappointment as a percentage decreased 10% for Gordon Brown and increased 40% for Nick Clegg.
Overall disappointment as a percentage is now only 5% higher for Gordon Brown than David Cameron
Nick Clegg’s engagement has increased by 19%, 26% less than Gordon Brown and 14% less than David Cameron.
There was a 16% increase in opinions on Gordon Brown (majority of which is increase in positive sentiment)

I am sure you will agree that there is a lot to be taken from these statistics, not just generally about how sarcastic we are as a nation (!) but also specifics. We found it very interesting for example, how little Nick Clegg was talked about comparatively. Over the past week Gordon Brown has had double the amount of results across all micro blogs compared to Nick Clegg! And more of Nick Clegg’s are factual and therefore not opinion based. So whilst it may appear that there is less disappointment and more positivity – is this just because less people are interested?

Pretty Pictures

As well as the pie charts, all the data is presented in a graph format so you can see the date and amount of blogs for each candidate. Here we can compare David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s graphs below to see not only what the sentiment is for a specified number of blogs, but also the date of the blogs enabling us to see if things changed on a specific date, or if there are any trends. This is especially interesting to watch after public interviews or the TV debates to see how opinions have been influenced, and likewise could be used to watch changing sentiment after a product launch or press release.

disappointment sarcasm positivity factual

Notice in Gordon Brown’s graph how positive sentiment has increased crossing with disappointment as it decreases after his speech:

disappointment sarcasm positivity factual

How we have achieved this

We have achieved this using our new application called Sententia, which enables you to filter any news, blogs and micro blogs for specific key words, for example “Gordon Brown” might be one search, or you can be more specific and have “Gordon Brown + economy”, whatever you want. All this information is then fed back to you as a “game”, so that you are presented with individual blogs or articles and you then decide what you feel the sentiment is of that specific comment from a list of options that you have chosen. You may want to measure positive vs. negative, humorous vs. serious, skeptical vs. converted, the skies the limit!

Playing the game

This is how you play the game, you read the comment (and click onto the link if you need to read more about it to determine the sentiment) and then click on the sentiment you believe this blog displays. This result will automatically be displayed on the graph and pie chart and you will be given another comment to mark. You can view reports at any point in time and the data is pulled through randomly to enable you to do a fair sample without having to complete all of the results.

What’s the benefit?

The concept behind this application is that the english language can be hard to interpret due to our use of sarcasm, irony and humour. Therefore to give the fairest set of results possible and to show you results specific to your needs, this application requires human input. By doing this it also enables you to search for any specifics you want because you are in control of the searches and the interpretations.

You can have a number of campaigns running in line with each other at once as well. For example, as well as having campaigns on the three candidates, we have been running campaigns specifically about some of their policies to see how people feel about them and about their policies separately. You could use this feature to run campaigns about your products and about your competitors, or your online store compared to your shop, anything you want.

Conclusion

The information is out there, we believe the important step is interpretation and how this information can be used in the best possible way to fulfil all possible requirements. Whatever you want to measure online, Sententia enables you to be in control of what, who, how, and when – all from a game inspired by the Wii!