beautiful bytes – How the changes to Facebook will affect you

Google+ has had a huge influx of new visits

Google+ has finally been released to the public and Hitwise has estimated that the site has had a huge jump in usership as a result. Though this is understandable, the scale is quite significant. Google+ recieved around 15 million U.S. visits for the week ending Sept. 24 up from just 1.1 million the previous week.

The decision to open up Google+, coincidentally or otherwise, was released in the same week as some huge changes to Facebook.
(Image from Mashable.com)

According to Mashable, “The boost in visitors puts Google+ at number eight among most-visited social networking sites, right behind MySpace and up from number 54 the previous week.”

We’re anxiously awaiting Google+’s brand page offering, which is due to be released in the next couple of weeks (although we have heard this before …) and to see whether Google+ has the longevity needed for it to become a really important platform for charities.

Twitter geotargeting ads in UK

Over the past few months our bite size chunks of tech news have been preoccupied with Twitter’s new advertising proposition and what it will mean for charities. It has gone from a soft approach to a much harder approach and, this week, it has taken vital steps in the UK to capitalising on the amount of power users it has and the potential this has for making more versatile propositions to brands and organisations. UK brands can now target their promoted products by area. This will be a great resource saver for charities looking into Twitter’s ad promotions. Rather than casting the net nationally, a charity trying to find runners for The London Marathon need not spam all national users and will save precious advertising spend, for example. Twitter announced on it’s blog:

“UK brands can now geo-target all of our Promoted Products, making it easier to reach local users with more geographically relevant content.”

Some changes to Facebook that will affect charities

Those people who are a little bit late to the tech news party will be shocked to learn that there have been some major changes to Facebook this week. Here are a few of our ideas about how the changes will affect the third sector:

  • Changes to Open Graph data mean that Facebook will contain more verbs than the infamous Like. Users will now be able to read, watch or listen to posts. This will allow for greater ad targeting. For example, charities who want to advertise for runners for a big event could target those who have read articles like ‘how to improve your running time’ or ‘charity fun runs; why they’re amazing’ online.
  • The new profiles will require more information from users and will be a more robust look at their lives beyond images and updates. This will also improve ad targeting, giving greater specificity for small budgets or community based charities.
  • Facebook has added the ability for users to click to unmark a top story, meaning that posts will have to be interesting to stop their updates from having lower visibility. Inversely, lots of comments and likes will surface your post to the ‘Top News’ section.
  • Users can post on a Page without Liking it. Though this will certainly increase activity, it seems like a breeding ground for complaints from people who want to communicate with a Page, without wanting to publicly Like it
  • Users will be able to see activity of their friends on any Page in a seperate tab. This means that users will be able to see things that are relevant to them on the Page. This gives a social referral aspect to Pages, validating users interest in the Page and create communities of interested people.
  • Tracking is easier: some Facebook Page admins are now seeing a new tab called “Per post” in the data exports from Page Insights. This is the information that used to be below each post recording individual impressions and feedback. All of this data can now be exported so you will be able to see exactly the content that is the most and the least engaging.

We’re lucky enough to have Rosa Birch from Facebook as a speaker at today’s NFPtweetup, so if you have any questions about how the changes to the world’s most popular social networking site will affect your charity, I’m sure she’ll be more than happy to answer them.

(Image from Business Insider)

NFPtweetup 12

Tonight is the 12th NFPtweetup and we’re ridiculously excited! We’re privileged to have contributions from some really interesting speakers, including James Sadri from Greenpeace, Simon Painter from Giv2.it and the aforementioned Rosa Birch from Facebook. We’re really looking forward to catching up with old friends and meeting some new people. If you don’t have a ticket for tonights event then you can watch it streamed live on our Facebook Page, or catch up with the Storify afterwards.

See you there!

Lucy J