Facebook is currently testing out a new feature for brand pages. This feature will allow page admins to receive private messages from users. Any Facebook user will be able to send a private message to a fan page.

Facebook has just begun introducing this feature, making it only available in Asia for the time being.

If the feature proves its value, Facebook will hopefully make this new communication option available in other countries.

This feature will not be a way for brands to flood their fans with spammy communication. In fact, the social network has recently revoked admins’ ability to message their brand page fans. The new private messaging option will be an opportunity for fans to reach out directly to page administrators – only they will be able to initiate a private conversation with a brand.

Even if Facebook users have not “liked” a particular page, they will still have the ability to message the admins directly.

This new option will definitely benefit customer-centric brands, such as telecom companies, that have to respond to a lot of customer service questions and requests. Private messaging will help make those pages less cluttered. And brands will be able to deal with negative feedback outside of public space.

On the other hand, the new feature might cause the growth of brand pages might decrease, because customer-brand communication will no longer appear on public timeline and the Ticker. The organic reach of the brand page will decrease, driving less traffic of new visitors.

Another drawback of private messaging might be its availability to everyone. A lot of people (fans and non-fans) could start using it as the primary way of communication with a brand. Pages with thousands of followers might get flooded with messages from frustrated or angry clients and will have to answer each one of them individually.

While private messaging does provide a better customer service for clients, it might get overwhelming for fan page administrators and might require some extra help.

The private messaging feature will be completely optional, and if page administrators will decide not to use it, the will be able to easily opt out of it.

Recently, many social networks became more brand-focused in the last month – Google+ introduced brand pages back in November and Twitter launched a new look for company pages in the beginning of December.

Now Facebook is up to speed with everyone else. The only question is – does it care more about improving brands’ customer service or proving to Google+ and Twitter that it’s unbeatable?

Many companies are often afraid of getting into social media because it seems uncontrollable.

Social media gives your business an opportunity to increase interaction and be closer to your every-day consumer, but those conversations can be tough to control sometimes. The big challenge is crisis management: responding to negative feedback quickly and turn your customers into brand advocates.

Many people like to share their positive experience with a brand online. They tell their friends how wonderful the customer service is at company A or how great the discounts are at company B. Unfortunately, a lot more people are likely to share their negative experiences online. Social media makes it easier for an angry customer to bash your brand online and be heard (or even supported) within minutes by hundreds of people.

At the same time, social media, if done right, can be a great crisis management tool – it can help you address the issue and quickly deal with negative feedback.

Don’t be afraid of someone bad-mouthing your brand. Like I said before, the fact that people are talking about your brand (even if it’s not good) means that they care. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have spent time telling you about their bad experience and would have been off doing business with your competitors.

Today, more and more people realize that they have the power to affect how business is done. Most of them don’t publish negative feedback online just because, they usually have a purpose – to be heard.

If you spend enough time listening to what people say about your brand online, you can learn a lot about what is working and what’s not. Listening is a big part of successful crisis management. Are the buyers praising the special discounts you have just announced, or maybe a lot of them are unhappy with your customer service?

Make sure you address the complaints in a short period of time. The longer you wait, the more frustrated and angry your customers may become. Especially if the same issue has been brought up several times.

And again, don’t be afraid that someone might say bad things about your company. It happens to everyone. What will differentiate your business from others is how you handle the issue.

Have you had a situation when you had to deal with negative feedback online? How did you handle it?

This is that time of year when we begin to stress out about getting our holiday shopping done. Because our family, friends, coworkers, extended family, and bosses all have different preferences and tastes, and it always takes a while to find that perfect gift for each one.

Thankfully, the age of technology, when much of our private information is widely available for the world to see (thanks, Facebook), makes it easier for us to do holiday shopping.

Some companies made a huge push this year to make their customers’ shopping process easier and a lot less stressful.

Etsy decided to redesign their Gift Ideas for Your Friends service, connecting it with Facebook and allowing the visitors to see which gifts would better suit their family and friends based on their interests and likes on Facebook. And it does so without violating anyone’s privacy.

Once you log in, Etsy pulls up all of your Facebook friends and four gift suggestions for each, based on their interests and likes. Many are very accurate, and some I would actually consider buying. Etsy even wrote the behind the scenes post about how they made this service work. It would be interesting to see the results of this initiative and if it will increase the website’s traffic and revenue for this holiday season.

Another interesting gift shopping resource was launched by Walmart. They introduced a Facebook app called Shopycat (so, it’s like a shopping copycat? hm…), the main point of which is very similar to Etsy’s, but the gift recommendations come mainly from Walmart’s Books and Electronics departments.

Good luck with keeping your gift shopping activities in secret though, because (thanks again to Facebook privacy settings) a Shopycat-related notification to your friends will appear on the Ticker right away.

Are there any other apps that help you do your Christmas shopping?

Share on Facebook ]]> http://lockerpartner.com/2011/12/social-commerce-taking-holiday-shopping-to-another-level/feed/ 0 http://lockerpartner.com/2011/11/small-business-saturday-american-express/ http://lockerpartner.com/2011/11/small-business-saturday-american-express/#comments Fri, 25 Nov 2011 20:27:24 +0000 Katya http://lockerpartner.com/?p=2005

Millions of people right now are off shopping somewhere on Black Friday, spraying people with pepper spray and getting super awesome deals. Cyber Monday will continue the shopping tradition, bringing the craziest deals online.

Last year, another Holiday Shopping tradition was established. Sponsored by American Express, Small Business Saturday encourages shoppers to “Shop Small,” buy from local vendors and help boost the economy.

“When we all shop small, it will be huge,” says the official Small Business Saturday website, and their Facebook page already has more than 2 million likes.

The purpose of the initiative is to shift holiday shopping from major retail and technology stores on Black Friday and Cyber Monday to local mom and pop shops. Kansas City alone has hundreds of small businesses, and it will be interesting to see how many people will support the locals.

This year, with the support from Facebook, Google and Foursquare, the campaign went viral. It’s still not too late to pledge to Shop Small and encourage your social networks to do the same.

The campaign’s Facebook page lets you share the badge on your wall (and you can even tag your favorite local businesses!), or you can help get the word out on Twitter, using hashtags #SmallBusinessSaturday and #SmallBizSaturday.

Know of any local gems in your neighborhood? This is a great day to finally invite your friends to that newly opened sandwich shop down the street or that unique gifts store you’ve been wanting to visit, and show your city your support.

What businesses will you be supporting this Saturday?

After the f8 conference, Facebook decided to become even more social, letting us broadcast to our friends not only what we were doing, how we felt and where we were, but also what we were listening to. Integration with social music services (apparently not social enough already) like Rdio and Spotify let Facebook users see what their friends were listening to every hour of every day.

Not long after Facebook announced the integration, Spotify began to require a Facebook account at signup…And then automatically publish all activity to users’ Facebook profiles.

Many of us do like discovering new music, and friends’ recommendations might be an effective way to get us to listen to a specific artist. Social sharing of favorite music tracks is fun and could even benefit the music industry if approached the right way.

At first, Facebook/Spotify users were happily creating accounts, adding friends and listening to their favorite songs. Soon “social” became “intrusive.” Facebook users realized that all of their listening activity was being automatically published to their profile.

Which means that all of their guilty music pleasures like the newest album of Nickelback or Top Britney Spears Hits were being exposed to the Facebook world. That’s when Facebook vanity (”Everyone cares about everything I do”) had to take a step back and let simple privacy concerns take its place.

After integration with Facebook, Spotify (such an anticipated music listening/sharing platform at first) started to get annoying. Many users complained that there is no way to hide their shameful music tastes from the world. The company had to respond soon after the complaints started coming in, granting dainty users the option to listen to their favorite music in private mode.

So, now that the users have an option of not broadcasting their music preferences, does it mean that Spotify and Facebook are less social? Hardly. What it does mean though is that social sharing at some point could become oversharing.

We all still enjoy sharing parts of our lives with our Facebook friends (some more than others), but we want to be in control of what information we decide to make public and when. If Facebook will keep taking this control away from its users, it could harm the business in the long run.

This philosophy can apply to other businesses as well. Your customers trust you with their private information and they want to be sure you won’t share it without their consent, or at least give them an opt-out option. Don’t let them down. Unless you are a business giant like Facebook or Spotify, your customers might leave without a second thought.

Have you reviewed your privacy policy lately?

Another social network has appeared on the horizon. This one claims to be anti-Facebook in every way you can think. Or rather, UNthink.

The concept of Unthink, geared towards providing a completely advertising-free social environment where users will control their own privacy, got attention of many tech reviewers, including TechCrunch (which sent the traffic over the top, making the website unavailable for several hours on the day of launch).

It seems like people behind Unthink are trying to start a social revolution, and their YouTube commercial says it all. Even their website feels more like that of a non-profit organization fighting social injustice rather than a social network. And their covenants and deed set an even more revolutionary tone.

A few days after its launch, Unthink already topped 100,000 users. Unfortunately, I cannot prove this information myself, because the only friend I have on there is the Unthink bot, her name is Kate. Maybe the majority of users right now are the early adopters from Tampa, FL, the birthplace of the site. Or perhaps they are just the spies from Facebook, sent by the social network that got alarmed by the amount of traffic a beta version of a small startup has been getting.

Unthink is geared towards people (the unthinkers) who are tired of Facebook constantly changing their privacy settings and selling their personal information. The social network is positioning itself as the arch-nemesis of Facebook, planning to overthrow the social giant, plus many other sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Groupon.

One of the main promises of Unthink, and its principal difference, is the fact that the users are not going to be bombarded with ads. Here, you decide which brands you want to interact with and whether or not you even want to follow a business. When setting up a profile, the social network prompts you to “endorse a brand” that will sponsor your page and display their information in the iEndorse window on your page.

Even though it is doubtful that all the Facebook users will migrate to the new revolutionary network, this is a good time to think about your customers.

The fact that they follow you on Facebook is not a reason to constantly shout at them. Respect your customers’ privacy and time. Give them valuable information and listen to what they have to say. That way they won’t have an excuse to unlike your brand…or Unthink Facebook all together.

What are some other ways you can show your customers that you respect their privacy on Facebook?

New Facebook insights were unveiled last week seems to have gotten a lot of brands excited – reviewers keep praising the new “People Talking About” metric and other features that are supposed to help track your Facebook advertising campaigns.

There are several new features that definitely deserve praise, such as the breakdown of unique users by the amount of times they were reached and sources of page likes. At the same time, several features that provided a great insight into Facebook fan page history are now gone.

But let’s start with the positive. Behold, new additions to Facebook Insights:

1. “People Talking About” metric

Now, in addition to your Facebook fan page likes, users also can see how many users are “talking” about your page. That includes likes, comments, shares, mentions or check-ins. This is a great way to track fan engagement and success of your Facebook advertising campaign.

2. Page posts

The main Facebook fan page insights page now shows 500 most recent posts, with the ability to sort them by:

Date

Reach – number of unique people who saw your post

Engaged users – number of people who clicked anywhere on the post

Talking about this – number of people who are “talking” about the post (see above)

3. Overall page performance

On the top of the main Facebook Insights page you can not only see the likes and activity on your page, but also the total amount of people your content reaches weekly, including the friends of your fans and those who saw your Facebook ads or sponsored content.

4. Frequency

Under the Reach tab you can now see the breakdown of your Facebook fans by frequency. The chart shows how many times one person saw your page’s content in a given week (unfortunately, the time frame is nonadjustable). This is a good way to determine how many users your content actually reaches and adjust your Facebook advertising strategy based on that.

5. What’s missing

The time frame on the new Facebook Insights is less adjustable and can only go back 35 days maximum, which makes it difficult to measure and assess a long-term Facebook advertising campaign. Several metrics also pull the data from just a previous week without giving you the option of adjusting it.

The table on your Facebook fan page that shows 500 most recent posts by reach and engagement is lacking the time metric, which was crucial for determining the best times for fan engagement.

Overall, the new Insights provide more in-depth analytics for a Facebook fan page, geared especially towards tracking the levels of fan interaction and engagement. And with a more adjustable time frame it might become one of the more sophisticated tools to track your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Does Facebook still feel threatened by Google+?

The social media giant is in the process of releasing new updates that make it more similar to the social broadcasting feel of Twitter and Google+.

The new Subscriptions feature, introduced by the social network this week, allows users to send updates to a larger audience without creating a Fan Page.

This opt-in feature (isn’t it unusual for Facebook to make something opt-in?) allows people who are not your friends to subscribe to your updates that are public.

According to this article on Mashable LinkedIn will be revamping one of its least used features: Groups. LinkedIn is adding likes, follows and discussions. This mash-up feature set are at the core of other social networking platforms: Facebook and Twitter.

What I think those who heavily use LinkedIn enjoy about the site is its simplicity and being able to understand it without all the clutter and noise/scaryness of Facebook and Twitter. They enjoy the “set it and forget it” rather than feeling like they need to be on the site for every waking moment.

One could argue that Groups should have been killed rather than added to in order to go back to the basics. Will these changes encourage users to jump in the pool and engage in conversation on the site or will this open the door for another jobs-based social networking site like jigsaw to steal their thunder? Watch the video below to peep the new feautures and let us know what you think.