beautiful bytes: rise of the Facebook silver surfers
This week, I get all kinds of gleeful over one quarter of Facebook users and Pinterest leads the purchasing way (with donations to follow suit?).
Facebook releases yet more new enhancements
This week, Facebook confirmed a couple of new features to their platform.
First up: featured posts. It’s effectively a sponsored post – and will appear that way to your fans (albeit discretely). Page owners can pay for any of their posts less than three days old to remain in their fans’ news feeds, increasing the opportunity for them to be seen.
The point of featured posts seems to be confusing to some and opinion has definitely been mixed – just check out the comments thread to the announcement on Mashable.
Opponents argue that you’re effectively paying for something that happens anyway i.e. fans already see your posts; others say that, with the sheer number of pages that users follow, having your post served more frequently in their news feeds increases the opportunity of them seeing it and clicking on it.
Could this be an alternative to promoting content via Facebook Ads? The advantage to this method is that, if users have banner blindness, they’ll be more drawn to your content as the promoted posts appear in the ‘natural’ news feed experience. But you know what I’m going to say: test away!
Alongside featured posts, Facebook has now enabled a scheduled posts feature for all page admins which means that you can now, well, schedule posts.
I have to admit that I was slightly underwhelmed, and surprised that this feature wasn’t already built in to pages. However, like many other community managers, I use third party services, like Hootsuite, to schedule updates, and so I can’t help feeling that this feature is arriving a little late to the party.
There are now five different Facebook administrator roles with various levels of access (very WordPress!) which should give page owners greater control over delegating tasks to team members.
Pinterest Users Nearly Twice as Likely to Purchase Than Facebook Users
A recent survey showed that Pinterest users are almost twice as likely than Facebook users to purchase an item that they have seen on their respective platforms; 33% of Facebook users have purchased something that they have seen on a friend’s wall, newsfeed or Facebook Ad versus 59% of Pinterest users that bought something they saw on Pinterest.
It’s going to be interesting to see whether charity donations follow the same example; if anyone is running a virtual gifts campaign, this would be a great campaign to test in these circumstances.
Of course, it’s not just churning out exactly the same content on each platform; as we learnt at NFPtweetup 15 this week, great content includes being considered and curated appropriately for each respective platform.
Silver surfers rising on Facebook
Some interesting research from Nielsen this week revealed that, in March, almost a quarter (and growing) of Facebook’s 900 million users were aged 50 to 64.
I’ve had many a campaign manager up in arms when we’ve suggested reaching out to older donors – with a greater propensity to donate higher value gifts – on Facebook. “But Facebook is only for young people!” So this revelation has filled me with much glee.
So where are the kids hanging out now? Interestingly enough, good old fashioned text messaging is making a comeback – perhaps the safest way to be away from the prying eyes of Mum and Dad.
Until next week
Rochelle
