Fresh Thoughts

Practical insights on digital marketing, social media strategy, content marketing, and analytics.

The Ultimate Guide To Facebook Pages For Business

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

The End of Organic Reach and What to Do About It

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Facebook News Feed Update: Slow Pages Penalized

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

How Much Content Is Too Much in 2016?

By John Maver · · Content Marketing

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 ...

How to set up the Facebook Pixel for Retargeting

By John Maver · · Social Advertising

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 ...

What the Heck Are Facebook Reactions?

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

What the Heck Is Facebook Audience Optimization?

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

The 10 Types of Periscope Users

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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 ...

Why You Should Be Using Native Video on Facebook

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Boosting Brand Awareness with Influencers

By John Maver · · Brand Advocacy

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 ...

Facebook's War on Fake Likes for Facebook Pages

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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 ...

How the Facebook News Feed Works in 2015

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

How To Drive Engagement With The New YouTube Cards

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

3 Reasons Nobody Clicks On Your Social Media Links

By John Maver · · Content Marketing

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 ...

Using Intent for Social Media Marketing

By John Maver · · Social Advertising

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 ...

Are Facebook Users Ignoring Your Content?

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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 ...

How much do Brand Advocates matter?

By John Maver · · Brand Advocacy

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 ...

First look at Facebook's New News Feed

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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)

Brand Advocate Type 2 - The Brand Insider

By John Maver · · Brand Advocacy

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 Importance of Brand Advocacy

By John Maver · · Brand Advocacy

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 ...

Slides from my Facebook Open Graph presentation

By John Maver · · Thought Labs News

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 ...

Should Your Company be on Twitter?

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Social Media Overwhelm - Don't Build a Ghost Town

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Facebook begins promoting Facebook Pages

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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 ...

Catching The Social Media Virus

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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

Do you know The Twitter Secret?

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

Long ago, 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 ...

Facebook to enhance branded Pages for businesses

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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. ...

Personal Brands benefit companies

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Social Media is a commitment, not a campaign

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Don't wait for the Tipping Point. Get Ready Now!

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Social Media brings ROI in the current environment

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Summary of MassTLC unConference - part 1

By John Maver · · Social Strategy and Tactics

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 ...

Facebook publishes Pages directory

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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 ...

How to create a Bebo application using PHP 5

By John Maver · · Programming

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 ...

Bebo application platform is turned off!

By John Maver · · Programming

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 ...

Dealing with MySQL Too Many Connections error

By John Maver · · Programming

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 ...

Introduction to the Facebook Data Store API

By John Maver · · Programming

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 ...

Facebook releases the Profile clean up tool

By John Maver · · Social Media News

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”.

Aleuromedia is fantastic

By John Maver · · Thought Labs News

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 ...