John Maver
Quickly Create Social Videos from Your Blog Posts with Adobe Spark
12 min read
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, generating 1,200% more shares than text and images combined, so being able to ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Quickly Create Social Videos from Your Blog Posts with Content Samurai
13 min read
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, generating 1,200% more shares than text and images combined, so being able to ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Quickly Create Social Videos from Your Blog Posts with Lumen5
13 min read
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, generating 1,200% more shares than text and images combined, so being able to ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Pages For Business
6 min read
Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Page Your Customers ARE on Facebook According to Facebook's latest stats, there are over 2 billion people who are active each month on Facebook across the globe. Of that, over 1.4 billion people log in daily for an average of 20 minutes ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
The End of Organic Reach and What to Do About It
4 min read
Since Facebook announced their latest News Feed change in January, there has been a lot of debate about what it means for organic reach and for Facebook Pages in general. This post highlights some of the best insights and takeaways from around the web.
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
What the Heck Is the January Facebook News Feed Change?
3 min read
"What the Heck is...?" is our series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking. Making Social Relevant Again Facebook just announced their latest change to the News Feed, and this time it is a return ...
In
Social Media News
How To Build An Effective Digital Marketing Team
4 min read
Most of digital marketing success begins before you craft your first blog post or publish your first tweet. The most critical part is your team and the environment they work in.
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Facebook News Feed Update: Slow Pages Penalized
2 min read
As the Facebook News Feed continues to be optimized to produce a better user experience, paying attention to these updates is critical to ensure your carefully crafted Facebook posts are seen and engaged with.
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
How to Create a Semi-Automated Table of Contents in PowerPoint
6 min read
Sometimes you get so used to a feature in one application, you expect it to be the there in all the other applications you use, especially when the applications are in the same suite, like Microsoft Office. In Microsoft Word, it is trivial to create a Table of Contents - ...
In
Analytics
How to Add Captions to Facebook Canvas Videos
2 min read
Since videos in the Facebook News Feed automatically start playing muted, captions can be critical to getting users to watch and engage with your content. In a recent update, Facebook has started auto-generating captions for videos posted to Facebook Pages and used in ads. ...
In
Social Advertising
Generating Trackable URLs for Retargeting Campaigns
8 min read
How well you are able to track the success of your retargeting campaigns depends a lot on how you set them up. Because these campaigns can have so many ad variations, it makes a lot of sense to try to standardize on a system. In this post, I will walk through a system we ...
In
Social Advertising,
Retargeting
Creating Image Variations for Retargeting in Photoshop
6 min read
One of the requirements for creating images for a retargeting campaign is to build each ad in the most popular display formats. For display ads, there is 160x600, 728x90, 300x250, 320x50, 300x600, and 970x250. For Facebook, there is thankfully just 600x315. However, an ...
In
Social Advertising,
Retargeting
How to Set up the AdRoll SmartPixel for Retargeting
4 min read
AdRoll provides an easy-to-use interface to control multi-platform retargeting - they support display ads around the web, Facebook and Instagram (in beta). Just like setting up the Facebook Pixel for retargeting, you will need to add the AdRoll SmartPixel to your website to ...
In
Social Advertising,
Retargeting
Planning Retargeting Campaigns with Objectives, Audience, and Trigger Pages
6 min read
Before you start setting up a retargeting campaign, it is important to lay out the main objective, the audience you will be targeting, and the pages they will visit to trigger the retargeting ads. This post will walk through examples of each of these three planning pieces.
In
Social Advertising,
Retargeting
How Much Content Is Too Much in 2016?
4 min read
How much content is too much? In our previous post on the right amount of content to produce, we looked at data from Moz and HubSpot and the answer was as much as you can write consistently with quality. But that was all the way back in 2015, so what is the right answer ...
In
Content Marketing
Unmet Expectations are Driving Your Followers Away
6 min read
Every "brand" is, by definition, just a collection of ideas and expectations in the eyes of the consumer. Companies try hard to craft how people think about their brands through the products and services they offer, the marketing they use, and the actions they take as a ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
How to set up the Facebook Pixel for Retargeting
12 min read
Every retargeting campaign needs a trigger - a way to know which people to target based on an action they have taken. With most retargeting platforms, this is done by adding a tracking pixel to your website. Facebook is no exception - they have created the aptly-name ...
In
Social Advertising,
Retargeting
What the Heck Are Facebook Reactions?
6 min read
The release of Facebook Reactions is huge news because it is a huge change - extending the Like button with 5 new emotions. These reactions enable users to express their opinion quickly, both positively and negatively, but what does it mean for brands and how can you take ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Should Your Brand Have Multiple Facebook Pages or Just One?
5 min read
While some brands are still focused on building a community with one page, many others are creating multiple pages based on topics, location, or audience. Which is the best option for your page?
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
What the Heck Is Facebook Audience Optimization?
8 min read
Content marketing is all about getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Often, the posts we write are on topics that relate to subsets of our followers, providing solutions to specific sets of problems that they have. With Facebook constantly working ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
What the Heck Are the New 'First View' Ads from Twitter?
1 min read
"What the Heck is...?" is our series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking. Twitter just started rolling out a great new feature for brands looking to increase exposure and engagement on Twitter ...
In
Social Media News
Facebook Basics: How to Target Great Facebook Posts [SlideShare]
2 min read
We've build a great deck with key thoughts from our eBook - Facebook Basics - How to Target Great Facebook Posts. Check it out below:
In
Facebook Basics
How To Create Great Branded Video Content People Will Actually Watch
2 min read
With all the content vying for people's attention, how can you create something that people actually will want to watch, and still have it promote your brand? Ziploc seems to have found the answer in its Little Beasts series of webisodes.
In
Content Marketing
How to Prevent Your Mobile Twitter Images From Being Cropped
2 min read
There is nothing more irritating than spending time to create a great post image, only to see it get trampled by the formatting quicks of the social platforms on mobile. To keep that from happening, we have created another Photoshop template to use, just like our great ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
A Simple Checklist for Creating Great Content and Blog Posts
4 min read
These days, we all need to create a lot of content. Great blog posts aren't often written on the first try, but with a little effort before and after you write, they can get a lot better. Often, the piece I started isn't the one I ended up with. This could be because I ...
In
Content Marketing
Facebook Basics: How to Write Great Facebook Posts [SlideShare]
2 min read
We've build a great deck with key thoughts from our eBook - Facebook Basics - How to Write Great Facebook Posts. Check it out below:
In
Facebook Basics
The 10 Types of Periscope Users
1 min read
Periscope says they now has over 10 million accounts who are watching over 40 years of video each day! Hannah Jane Parkison at The Guardian has spent the time to categorize the Periscope broadcasters according to the video you are likely to see from them. Funny
In
Social Media News
How Much Content Is Too Much for Content Marketing?
7 min read
Content marketing obviously depends on having something to publish, but how much content should you actually be producing? A recent experiment run by Hubspot and Moz tested just that and they got some interesting results.
In
Content Marketing
Why You Should Be Using Native Video on Facebook
3 min read
Recent changes to the Facebook News Feed algorithm mean that the advantages of using native video on Facebook truly outweigh the inconvenience of supporting yet another video channel. Here are the details:
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
How to use Audience Insights on Facebook and Twitter
5 min read
Knowing your audience is the first step in creating great communities and getting better engagement on your social media posts. However, you likely have two different audiences - the one you want and the one you already have. These two audiences can begin to differ for a ...
In
Analytics
Boosting Brand Awareness with Influencers
2 min read
In The Difference Between an Influencer and a Brand Advocate, I said that Influencers are better used for spreading brand awareness, as long as you can find a way to mesh your product with their interests. Recently, Snickers seems to have found a way to do just that in ...
In
Brand Advocacy
March Organic Reach Declines to 2.6% for Facebook Pages
1 min read
Reach for Facebook Pages continues to decline, hitting 2.6% on average, and a very low 2.6% for Facebook Pages with more than 1 million fans, according to Locowise.
In
Social Media News
Facebook's War on Fake Likes for Facebook Pages
2 min read
Everyone, including Facebook, hates fake likes. While a higher Total Fans vanity metric may seem nice, each fake Fan actually can decrease your organic and paid reach. Thankfully, Facebook has been cracking down harder over the past several months and the results are ...
In
Social Media News
3 Tips to Increase Twitter Engagement
2 min read
The AddThis team did an analysis of what was most effective in their last 90 days of tweets and came up with the following 3 lessons:
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
How the Facebook News Feed Works in 2015
7 min read
At Facebook's recent F8 conference, they gave a talk on how the News Feed works. Although we have covered individual changes in the past ( What The Heck is The August News Feed Change?, What The Heck is The March New Feed Change? ), it is a great time to review the Facebook ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
The Difference Between An Influencer and a Brand Advocate
3 min read
In previous posts, we have talked about the importance of Brand Advocacy and the 3 types of Brand Advocates. However, there is often some confusion when people hear the term "Influencer" about whether it means the same thing as a Brand Advocate. Let's explore the ...
In
Brand Advocacy
How To Drive Engagement With The New YouTube Cards
6 min read
YouTube annotations have long provided brands a way to increase the interactivity of their social videos. However, the huge problem was that they didn't work on mobile devices ( currently supplying over half of all YouTube views. ) Thankfully, YouTube released "Cards" as a ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
3 Reasons Nobody Clicks On Your Social Media Links
3 min read
Content marketing is king today - we have to create great content to offer value to our readers and to satisfy Google's new search engine requirements. But, it often turns out that the content we are creating is never actually read by those it is intended for. Instead, it ...
In
Content Marketing
Using Intent for Social Media Marketing
2 min read
A Twitter user tweets "I love this latte", a Facebook user comments on a post from Car & Driver Magazine, and a Pinterestuser pins their 5th wedding dress. Each of these actions may establish an "intent" to buy a certain product or type of product. And targeting intents ...
In
Social Advertising
This Week in Social: Facebook Videos, Valuable Posts, and Teens on Social
3 min read
Here are some of the key things you should know from the world of social media this week:
In
Social Media News
Designing Mobile-Friendly Cover Images for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
3 min read
Making a Cover Image for Facebook Pages, Twitter Profiles, or Google+ Accounts that look great on the desktop is pretty routine now, but that desktop cover image doesn't look the same at all for mobile viewers. Cover Images can make a huge difference in social media ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
How much do Facebook Cover Images Matter for Facebook Pages?
5 min read
With the transition of Facebook Pages from destinations to becoming publishers in the News Feed, how much does the Facebook Cover Image still matter?
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
What the Heck Is Facebook's Atlas and People-Based Marketing?
4 min read
Facebook just launched Atlas, a platform that it believes will fix many of the problems with today's cookie-based advertising methods. They describe it as a shift to "people-based marketing". In this post, I will describe how things work today and how Facebook's Atlas ...
In
Social Advertising
Is Facebook about to kill off organic reach for brands?
2 min read
Posts by Adweek and Valleywag today are saying that Facebook is throttling down the already very low organic reach of Facebook Pages down to 1 or 2 percent. This follows on the heels of previous drops in organic reach over the last year. This is a huge drop from the 16% of ...
In
Social Media News
What the Heck Is the March Facebook Page Layout Change?
4 min read
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking.
In
Social Media News
What the Heck Is the March Facebook News Feed Change?
3 min read
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking.
In
Social Media News
Are Facebook Users Ignoring Your Content?
1 min read
Brands on Facebook really have to work hard to engage their fans. After creating posts with content and images that are both engaging and meet business goals, it can be frustrating to find out that Facebook is only showing that content to a very small percentage of fans. ...
In
Social Media News
What the Heck Is the August Facebook News Feed Change?
2 min read
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking. What is "High Quality" Content? Facebook just announced a new change to the New Feed - a focus on showing more ...
In
Social Media News
How much do Brand Advocates matter?
3 min read
Today, I read through a great slide deck put together by the Weiden+Kennedy agency called "How to (not) Fail." It is 110 slides long, and goes through several thought provoking points. I definitely recommend you read through it. The one that stuck with me is about the ...
In
Brand Advocacy
First look at Facebook's New News Feed
2 min read
UPDATED. Facebook's new News Feed will begin a very slow rollout today. The biggest changes focus on much larger pictures, consistency across devices, and multiple new feeds. (And also bigger ads)
In
Social Media News
Brand Advocate Type 2 - The Brand Insider
5 min read
So far, I have covered the importance of brand advocates, the three types of brand advocates, and gone into detail about the first type - the Casual Recommender. Now, I will introduce the second type - the Brand Insider.
In
Brand Advocacy
Three Types of Brand Advocates and The Casual Recommender
4 min read
In my last post, I wrote about the importance of a brand advocacy program. Brand advocates can be a great blessing for a company to really connect with users and multiply the effectiveness of their communication and campaigns. However, not all advocates are the same. In ...
In
Brand Advocacy
The Importance of Brand Advocacy
3 min read
We see fans on TV all the time. Turn the channel to a football game and the camera will soon cut to screaming people with painted faces, big foam hands and jerseys with team logos. There are fans in the workplace as well, talking about the last game or comparing stats of ...
In
Brand Advocacy
John Maver and Cappy Popp to Present Facebook: Beyond The Basics Workshop at SES Toronto 2011
0 min read
John Maver and Cappy Popp will be holding a workshop on "Facebook: Beyond The Basics" at SES Toronto 2011 on June 14, 2011.
In
Thought Labs News
Slides from my Facebook Open Graph presentation
1 min read
Last week, Jaime Tedford and I talked about the Facebook Open Graph and how businesses could benefit from it. It was well attended, with lots of great questions from the audience. Here are the slides we used:
In
Thought Labs News
MITX Panel Summary - Everything You Need to Know About Facebook Connect
6 min read
Today, I was part of a panel discussion on Facebook Connect . Here is a quick summary and key points:
In
Thought Labs News
Our book, Essential Facebook Development, has been released
2 min read
Our book, Essential Facebook Development, is now available.
In
Thought Labs News
Should Your Company be on Twitter?
2 min read
Twitter is very popular now - getting mentions on daytime talk shows, spurring celebrity competitions, and even receiving governmental uptime requests. People and companies are jumping on to the service because everyone else is. But should they be?
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Social Media Overwhelm - Don't Build a Ghost Town
2 min read
Kate, from the Other Side Group wrote a blog post about Keeping Social Media Social. She said that people can get to a state with social media where they subscribe to a large number of people, but filter out everyone but a select few to compensate for the information ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Facebook begins promoting Facebook Pages
1 min read
Facebook is constantly tweaking their layout and feature set, with the increasing the sharing of relevant information among friends. Recently, Facebook changed a few things about Facebook Pages for brands to make them more viral and more authentic.
In
Social Media News
Catching The Social Media Virus
1 min read
The chance of coming down with a virus depends on a number of things how many people are exposing you to it whether you have seen it before how much energy is put into fighting it
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Do you know The Twitter Secret?
1 min read
Late last year, Twitter was abuzz with people talking about The Twitter Secret. Only some knew it, and they weren't telling unless you followed them, paid them, etc. It turned out to be nothing more than a bug at twitter.com that allowed sending Direct Messages longer than ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Facebook to enhance branded Pages for businesses
1 min read
Inside Facebook has the details about an upcoming update to Facebook's Pages feature. This is great news for businesses, as the changes will put Pages on par with the recent user Profile changes. Most notably:
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Most Top Retailers have branded Facebook Pages, do you?
3 min read
In a May 2008 study and October 2008 follow up, Rosetta found that 59% of the top 100 retailers have created branded Facebook Pages. This number is up from 30% in the May study. Companies are moving to Facebook because that is where their customers are. Facebook continues ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Personal Brands benefit companies
1 min read
Jerimiah Owyang posted a new article on Personal Brands. In it, he talks about how some companies fear personal brands because the people might get recruited once they develop themselves. Jeremiah details how companies respond to this risk - by either rejecting it outright ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Social Media is a commitment, not a campaign
1 min read
At the New Marketing Summit yesterday, someone said "Social Media is a commitment, not a campaign". This has been said over and over again in books like Groundswell, at conferences, and in countless blog posts. But the majority of businesses still act as if they can dip ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Don't wait for the Tipping Point. Get Ready Now!
0 min read
Gary Vaynerchuck just did a quick ustream talk in response to a comment he received via Twitter. The comment by @CreativeEmbassy said that companies are waiting for the tipping point before moving into Social Media. Gary's response was that it will be too late then. The ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Social Media brings ROI in the current environment
1 min read
Gary Vaynerchuck's post - You Down With ROI?…Yeah You Know Me - says that it isn't the social media companies that will be affected by the current financial environment, it is the traditional media companies like radio, newspapers and magazines. Spending large amounts on ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Summary of MassTLC unConference - part 1
5 min read
Yesterday, I attended a conference put on by MassTLC called the Innovation unConference. It was probably the most interesting conference I have ever attended for a few reasons. First, the unConference format was very interesting. The day started with a brief overview of how ...
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
Summary of MassTLC Sales and Marketing and Social Media Roundtable
2 min read
Yesterday, I attended a conference put on by both the Sales and Marketing and Social Media Clusters of MassTLC. The panelists were:
In
Social Strategy and Tactics
John Maver's slides from GSP East - Introduction to Bebo Development Workshop
0 min read
In
Programming
Case Study - A Facebook Page for Fitness Together Middleton
7 min read
Overview and Objectives Fitness Together Middleton (FT Middleton) launched a dynamic Facebook Page created by Thought Labs to help increase their membership and their member's usage of facilities and offerings. FT Middleton, located in Middleton, MA, is a franchise of ...
In
Thought Labs News
Facebook publishes Pages directory
1 min read
Finding pages on Facebook has always been difficult - if you knew the exact term, you could find a business, but there was no listing anywhere. As of last night, Facebook published an alphabetical listing of pages at https://www.facebook.com/directory/pages/.
In
Social Media News
How to create a Bebo application using PHP 5
15 min read
Introduction I have been answering a lot of email requests for how to get started with a Bebo application. Since applications can be written in any language that supports interaction with the Bebo REST API, developers have a lot of choices in how they build their ...
In
Programming
A brief example of how to use fb:ref on Facebook or sn:ref on Bebo
1 min read
fb:ref is a way to set a placeholder on a bunch of user profiles, and then update it across all those profiles with a single call. It makes sense to use when you have data or images that would need to be updated occasionally, but are not specific to the current viewing ...
In
Programming
Bebo platform is still down, but some new features coming
0 min read
Bebo is still working on fixing performance problems, and the applications are still down. In a blog post today, the Bebo developers talked about some features that they will be releasing in the near future.
In
Programming
Bebo application platform is turned off!
0 min read
Bebo posted this today: Bebo is slow. Sorry! It's been growing a lot recently and we're not quite keeping up with the demand. Even though apps has nothing to do with the problem, we turned off apps temporarily to help reduce the load. We're working hard on a permanent fix ...
In
Programming
Dealing with MySQL Too Many Connections error
2 min read
Doorbell on Bebo is growing steadily, despite some randomness in the Bebo platform uptime. One side effect of its popularity was a new error – Too Many Connections. Here is a quick overview of the cause and a solution.
In
Programming
Introduction to the Facebook Data Store API
5 min read
Facebook released the Data Store API Beta a few months ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to try it out until recently. There are many blog posts discussing the merits of its implementation, but I felt it would be useful to post a quick how-to guide to using it. The Data Store ...
In
Programming
A quick Flash sound player to use on Facebook and Bebo
5 min read
For Doorbell on Bebo, I needed an easy way to play an arbitrary doorbell ring. Previously, I had been creating individual .swf files for each ring, and then using the
tag to put them on the page. I was using an AJAX callback to add them when the user clicked a ...
In
Programming
Facebook releases the Profile clean up tool
1 min read
When I got to my Profile box today, the message at the top was that I could clean up my profile by moving the applications that I had at the bottom of the page to an “extended section”.
In
Social Media News
Hidden Facebook API feature - Preload FQL
0 min read
I happened across this today as I was going through the Facebook developer forums.
In
Programming
Migrating a Facebook application to Bebo
1 min read
Recently, we created a Bebo version of our Doorbell application for Facebook.
In
Programming
Review of Inner Circle - lets him Get Closer on Facebook
0 min read
In
Thought Labs News
Aleuromedia is fantastic
1 min read
I have had the opportunity to work with the folks at Aleuromedia in the past few weeks on some of our tougher Inner Circle UI workflow issues. They immediately understood the problem and recommended simple concrete actions we could take to immediately resolve it. This comes ...
In
Thought Labs News
Another great review of Inner Circle - Managing Facebook Friends
0 min read
In
Thought Labs News
Great review of Inner Circle - like Facebook 2.0
0 min read
In
Thought Labs News
Inner Circle keeps your Facebook News Feed from being hijacked
1 min read
The “How Robert Scoble Hijacked My Facebook News Feed” post by Dare Obasanjo a few days ago talked about the repercussions of adding a high-volume content provider like Robert Scoble as a friend on Facebook. Scoble posts many links and videos, joins a lot of groups, and is ...
In
Thought Labs News
First Review of Inner Circle
0 min read
Mike from Blue Dot posted a very nice review of the Circles and Feeds aspects of Inner Circle.
In
Thought Labs News