Facebook explains best practices for media organizations
Facebook made a big splash last week by unveiling its new Facebook + Media page. The page focuses on the best practices that Facebook’s relatively new media team has compiled after working with a number of large media companies over the past few months.
In a stroke of good timing, two members of the Facebook media team were scheduled to speak at the San Francisco Hacks/Hackers meetup last week. So in addition to the official announcement and the launch of the media page, I was among a group of journalists and programmers who got a deeper explanation from the two presenters:
- Justin Osofsky, head of Facebook’s media and content partnerships.
- Matt Kelly, an engineer who has worked with dozens of outside partners.
Osofsky started by running through some of Facebook’s metrics, which are astonishing, even though I’ve heard many of them before. 500 million active users. 50 percent visit every day. Average user spends 6 hours and 43 minutes on the site each month.
“Facebook is rapidly reaching a scale that we think can be really useful to media companies,” Osofsky said.
No kidding.
From the company’s view, its goal is to allow people to connect to other people and things as a way to express themselves. But what Facebook is finding is that mixing the content of a site with the content recommended by someone’s friends is a powerful combination.
“So we recently formed a media team,” Osofsky said. “We wanted to see how can we create value for our media partners.”
Osofksy listed three things media companies want:
- They want to increase the amount of traffic to their site.
- They want to make the site more engaging.
- They want better customer insights.
At the recent f8 developer’s conference, Facebook launched a number of products, the most publicized of which has been the ability to place the “Like” button on sites across the Web. In working closely with media partners such as ABC News and CNN, they developed a series of best practices that incorporate those new tools that had dramatic impacts on referral traffic and engagement.
There were three main things the Facebook media team recommends:
1. Use the Facebook platform to drive more traffic to your site, implement the “Like” button.
When someone clicks Like, it automatically adds that topic or Web page to their profile (something I didn’t know). And it makes it discoverable through Facebook search. So far, 350,000 sites have implemented the Like button.
Put the Like button near visually engaging content. And if you enable the feature that shows people’s faces, you get substantially higher click through rates.
2. Focus on the type of content that appeals to Facebook users. That includes calls to action, or content that asks questions. And if you publish what Osofsky called “touching stories” you see two to three times as many clicks on the Like button. Also, stories about passionate debates, controversial new laws, or sports games wins.
3. Focus on the time of day (something I think most Web folks were aware of). Peak Internet traffic tends to be around 9 a.m. when folks are coming to work and turning on their computers. But there is also a surge of Facebook traffic after midnight when a night owl crowd logs on. These are good times to push links into the streams of people who are connected to your site through clicking the Like buttons.
Osofsky then turned to talking about building engagement. And here, the Facebook team had several more recommendations for “best practices”:
1. Implement the activity and recommendations plugins. And place them above the fold on your site. “When your friends see what you like, there is something uniquely engaging about it,” Osofsky said. (See Cnn.com for an example).
2. Use the livestream plugin for live events. At the World cup, ESPN3 added this to its video live stream and 1.5 million status updates were published during the games through these plugins. “It creates a much more engaging experience,” Osofsky said.
3. Expand the types and numbers of Facebook fan pages you have. For instance, The New York Times has its main page. But they’ve also taken it to the next level by creating topic pages for things like the Haiti Earthquake. “Creating timely, focused pages can have 10 times the engagement,” Osofsky said. “There’s more engagement because they’re a focused audience.”
4. Use Facebook’s expanded search API to find out what the buzz and discussion is on Facebook. (My note: Facebook’s search has always been weak, and somewhat closed. Osofsky seemed to be saying that Facebook search is now as open as Twitter search, but I haven’t been able to get it to work on that level. So if anyone does use it to follow topics or keywords, let me know).
5. Leverage Facebook Insights. The fan pages now have an expanded insights page that compile a lot of demographic data about the visitors. Osofsky noted that many media sites might have a standard demographic for their official site, but might find they’re engaging a far different demographic on Facebook. (My note: There was some grumbling in the audience that night about just how useful the new insights really are and how much actionable information they really provide.. I’ve just started playing with it, so, we’ll see.)
Next up was Kelly, who gave the more technical presntation. Translation, a good chunk quickly started going over my head. But I did get a couple of interesting tidbits here.
First, if you want to get a peak behind the Facebook API programming curtain, try typing https://graph.facebook.com/yourusername
So Kelly’s is:
Mine is:
https://graph.facebook.com/chrisobrien68
This shows you something like this:
{
“id”: “777069195”,
“name”: “Chris O’Brien”,
“first_name”: “Chris”,
“last_name”: “O’Brien”,
“link”: “http://www.facebook.com/chrisobrien68",
“gender”: “male”,
“locale”: “en_US”
}
That’s the core of your API. From there, if you add things like /photos or /videos to the URL, you can access those items from someone’s feed. That’s the way a programmer would set up an application to pull those items.
Also, when you had the “Like” button to a web site (as opposed to a single article), it will automatically generate a “dark” fan page. That means it’s a fan page only visible to the administrator. Once someone “Likes” your site, they are connected to this “dark” page. When you publish content to this “dark” page, it goes into that user’s stream. But when they click on that link, they go directly to your site, never seeing this “dark” page. Think of it as a kind of administrative dashboard.
This gets a bit confusing because then you probably also still need to have a public fan page. In which case, people would need to Like you in a couple of different places, and you have two pages to manage. I discussed this with one of the Facebook media team members after the talk, and he acknowledged they were trying to figure out how to unify the two pages.
Finally, the issue with all of this is capacity. If you get all these widgets in places, and all these fan pages running, you still have to essentially manually broadcast your content to each. In a large media organization, that can quickly become a huge job. The Facebook folks said they were working on ways to automate that, and there are apparently some folks who have written scrips to deal with this problem.
At the end of the presentation, Osofsky noted that much of the media-related focus for Facebook was new. And he stressed they were looking for a lot of feedback and wanted to have a “valuable conversation” about how Facebook could help the media.
I’ve already been using some of these suggestions on the new version of this site, so I’ll share more of my experience here. In the meantime, if you’ve been using any of the new tools and practices, please share your experience. What’s worked and what hasn’t worked in terms of optimizing Facebook for your news organization?
Finally, there was extended digression at the meetup about whether Facebook should have a disklike button that went on way too long. But Scott Rosenberg has already weighed in on this, so I’ll nod my head in agreement with him and leave it at that.
You can also check out Poynter’s summary of Facebook’s media best practices here.
