The State of Mobile Development
When you discuss mobile strategy with most folks, almost all of them equate a mobile strategy with launching an iPhone application. The iPhone has had a huge cultural impact and has changed the way we think about mobile. However, the reality is that the iPhone has more mindshare than it does market share, and there is a lot more to mobile than the iPhone. In a recent post, Fred Wilson includes a chart from comScore breaking down the market share for major mobile platforms.
The takeaways from this are that RIM (Blackberry) is still the biggest player in the mobile market and that Google’s Android platform is growing rapidly. Apple has a steady 25% of the smartphone market, and won’t see a jump until it is available on carriers beyond ATT.
As you think about mobile, you should keep an eye on these numbers and develop a strategy that gets your content in front of the most eyeballs possible.
Facebook as Predictor of the 2010 Elections
A few days ago Facebook released a study that showed that in most cases the candidate with the most Facebook fans won the election. Specifically, they wrote:
“The Facebook political team’s initial snapshot of 98 House races shows that 74% of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests. In the Senate, our initial snapshot of 19 races shows that 81% of candidates with the most Facebook fans won their contests.”
Folks a lot smarter than I am have deftly pointed out the problems with the concept that you can predict election results based on the number of Facebook fans. We have no idea how many of the fans actually live in the district of the politicians they are fans of. Tea Party and colorful folks tend to attract more fans that more straightforward candidates. Etc. Etc.
However, I did want to add one small point to the discussion. For politicians in lower profile races (Congress in particular), the number of Facebook hands is more an indication of how hard they have worked to recruit fans than it is of voter enthusiasm.
These fans don’t just appear out of the blue – campaigns work hard to actively build their fan base using a variety of tactics. Do they have a prominent Facebook link on their site? Do they include their Facebook address in email communication? Do they post compelling content? Do they run Facebook ads in an effort to promote their page?
Politicians with national profiles can simply put a Facebook page up and watch the numbers grow. But your run-of-the-mill Congressional candidate has to work to grow their supporter base. If you put in the time and spend some money you can make your numbers go up. If you don’t, your numbers will stay pretty flat unless you are a sensation like Christine O’Donnell or Sharon Angle.
Ten tips for getting more out of your Facebook updates
In addition to building great websites, we (The Bivings Group) help clients manage their online campaigns on an ongoing basis. Helping our clients create and maintain compelling Facebook pages for their organization, cause or business is an increasingly large part of this work.
Based on a lot of trial and error, following are some quick tips for making your Facebook updates more compelling.
(1) Keep your updates short. Mostly, you should be brief because people are typically scanning through updates in their news feed quickly and skip over items that are too verbose. More practically, if you go over 320 characters you’ll see a little “more” button pop up at the bottom of your update which very few people will click on (see example from WWF below). I would try to keep updates to under 200 characters, and never go over 320.
(2) Don’t post too often. On Twitter, posting 10+ times a day is accepted and can actually help you build a following. For a Facebook page, that is way too much content and will lead to people tuning you out. I’d suggest posting 1-5 updates a day, with 2-3 being the sweet spot.
(3) Be strategic about the time of day you post. A recent study shows that Facebook usage spikes at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET. Try to post your updates during those times to ensure that your users actually see your post.
(4) Show some personality. When you are running a Facebook page for a brand or organization, it is easy to fall into writing updates that are cold and distant. Writing like an actual living, breathing person will increase your effectiveness. Zappos and Bonobos are examples of brands that do this well.
(5) Post updates that encourage interaction. Ask open-ended questions. Run informal polls. Posting these kinds of updates will encourage comments and help build your relationship with your user base.
(6) Interact with your base. If people take the time to comment on your update, you should take the time to respond and/or thank them. Work to build relationships.
(7) Post photos and videos. Updates that include multimedia content tend to attract more comments and likes than straight text updates.
(8) Try to embed content whenever possible. In our experience, updates that are primarily links to external sites tend to attract less interaction than ones where the full update is within Facebook. So it is smart to try to embed the content within Facebook whenever possible. What does this mean? Don’t link to a photo on Flickr, upload it to Facebook. Don’t link to a YouTube video, post it as a video in Facebook. Instead of linking to your blog post, consider importing it as a note so users can read the whole thing right there. Sometimes you have to post a link out, but the more you can keep the content self contained in Facebook the higher your interaction rate will be.
(9) Give your Facebook followers some goodies. Lots of big brands give special coupons and deals to their Facebook fans. Make this concept your own. Raffle off a book or t-shirt. Release some news exclusively on Facebook. Do things to make your fans feel special and to give new folks an incentive for “liking” your page.
(10) Experiment and adjust. The audience for each page is unique. Try a bunch of different things and see what works and what doesn’t. Use Facebook insights to see how you are doing.
Top Newspapers Ranked by Twitter Followers
Jeremy Porter from Journalistics has a post up where he breaks down the top 25 newspapers as measured by Twitter followers. Below are the top 5 accounts, according to his research.
- @nytimes – 2,668,948
- @wsj – 464,591
- @washingtonpost – 204,514
- @latimes – 83,335
- @usatoday – 72,929
We’ve covered this ground a bit ourselves in the past, so I found his post both interesting and troubling.
First the interesting part.
He finds the New York Times now has more Twitter followers than print subscribers. Wow.
Also, while I think he missed some newspapers and accounts, the dominance of the New York Times on Twitter is hard to dispute. In addition to the main New York Times account he lists, the NYT has a variety of other topic specific accounts that have well over 100,000 followers each. Brand still matters, and the Old Gray Lady’s brand still has some life.
On the troubling side, the methodology here is really flawed and this list should be taken as entirely anecdotal. All he has done is found the main Twitter accounts of major newspapers and listed the number of followers. This ranking methodology doesn’t take into account the many, many different Twitter strategies being employed by newspapers and media in general.
Lots of newspapers don’t really promote an overall Twitter feed and instead push topic specific feeds that attract tons of followers. Lots of papers have chosen to promote the accounts of individual reporters and columnists instead of accounts for the paper themselves.
So you can’t really measure how a newspaper is using Twitter by looking at a single, central account. To perform a meaningful study, you’d really need to look at the potentially hundreds of different accounts that make up a newspapers Twitter universe. Hopefully someone will take on that larger research project at some point so we can get some meaningful data on how newspaper are using Twitter.
Optimizing Your Web Program with A/B Testing
A big message we try to deliver to our clients is that the launch of your new website is the beginning of the project, not the end. Your web program is an ongoing campaign, not a finite process like the production of a print brochure. For your web program to reach its potential, you should enter into a cycle of experimentation and optimization based on results.
An important tool in improving your website after it is launched is A/B testing, which involves changing variables on a web page in an effort to measure the impact on response rates. Let me give you a real world example. The Barack Obama website has a landing page (screenshot below) that encourages folks to sign up for their email list. You see this page the first time you visit www.barackobama.com and if you click on a link to the site from online ads. From visiting the site often over the last few years, I can tell you that they are constantly optimizing the page to improve response rates.
To A/B test this page, you first need to identify the variables that are in play. The variables are generally a combination of message (photos, wording) and geekier stuff like the physical placement of elements on the page. Here are the important variables I can identify on the page above.
- The picture that is used.
- The placement of the sign up box.
- The language used to encourage you to sign up – “Join the President”.
- The language used on the sign up bottom – “Get Started.”
To maximize the number of sign ups this page attracts, you would create a variety of versions with different variable combinations. Use different photos. Move the location of the sign up. Change the language on the button from “Get Started” to “Join Us.” Experiment with the “Join the President” text. You would be shocked at how much all these little variables can change the percentage of people that fill out the form to give you their email.
After experimenting for a a few weeks with a few different options, commit to the version of the page that has the highest conversion rates (in this case it would be the percentage of users who give you their email). Revisit in a few months to see if things have changed. All of this is made pretty simple using Google Optimizer.
The great thing about the web is that concrete metrics are readily available. You should use that data to constantly improve your website. By using tactics like A/B testing to continually optimize, you can go a long ways toward insuring that you get the most out of your investment in your web program.