Updated Facebook Promotion Guidelines

Promotions have become a core component of brand presence on Facebook. By offering a prize or experience, brands can encourage users to “Like” their pages and share the branded links with friends.

Competitions, contests and giveaways are a great way to increase your fans, increase awareness of your page and retain their interest and keep them engaged. Last week Facebook made some quite significant changes to the Facebook Promotion Guidelines (Updated: May 11th) affecting those who own and run promotions on Facebook Pages.

Facebook have also removed some specific rules with regards to running promotions to minors (13 – 17yrs). They have also provided more opportunities for previously prohibited categories: i.e. stated that there is no longer prohibition on certain types of promotions such as alcohol, diary, gambling.

View more information here over at Inside Facebook: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/17/age-residency-industry-restrictions-promotions/

We believe the reason why they are being quite significant with their changes, is their personal quest (and it makes sense) to remove themselves as middle-men between marketers and the varying laws throughout the world. We share our thoughts on the changes surrounding Facebook Promotions below: looking at what we now can’t do, can do and how to roll with the changes.

Promotions on Facebook

The main point to shout about is that Facebook no longer want you to use their mechanics i.e. like a page, like a post, send a snap as a way of entering a contest.

However section 4 in the guidelines is quite interesting, as it points out that “A like” must not be a condition of entry. Which means you could encourage “a like” to go and find out about the competition. Example: you could run the competition on your own website and give instructions on how to enter on your Facebook page. Hide the competition details on Facebook to “Fans only”. This will encourage people to like your page and will not be in breach of the guidelines.

View the Promotion Guidelines here: http://www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines.php (Date of last review: May 11, 2011)

The new guidelines make sense

The new Facebook guidelines do make perfect sense. It takes all the competition queries, complaints etc away from them and passes these back to the brand.

Scenario: Imagine if you really wanted to enter “that competition” to “Win Tickets to see Take That backstage”, you had to send in a story to say “Why you should win”. You spent “1 week working on it” and when you went to upload the entry, “Facebook went down”. You would shout at Facebook wouldn’t you rather than Take That!

So Facebook have released these new easy to read guidelines to basically say: My words:

“You can run the competitions and contests but make sure it is clear that they are nothing to do with us, as we can't handle the grief. Thanks”.

The Future for Facebook promotions

You can keep up to date with the latest happenings, guidelines by following: http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages. We also like to follow:
http://www.facebook.com/marketing for marketing solutions and inspirational ideas from other brands.


Facebook has included a very clear definition of what constitutes a promotion: “a contest, competition, sweepstakes or other similar offering,” where “by ‘contest’ or ‘competition’ (Facebook means) a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill (i.e., through judging based on specific criteria)” and “by ‘sweepstakes’ (Facebook means) a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner selected on the basis of chance.”

By no means is this is not the end of Facebook Promotions, they are simply inviting you to be more creative in your use of external applications and linking into your fans that like to live on Facebook.

Don’t abuse the Facebook mechanics

The new promotion guidelines clearly state that you must not use the Facebook mechanics as part of a contest.

This involves mechanics of any fan, uploading, commenting, or liking a page that will be judged.

Section 4: of the promotions guidelines does however encourage interaction on Facebook and indicates that actual entry has to be through an external application. View the snippet from section 4 below:

Section 4: “You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.”

Facebook Promotion Guidelines, May 2011.

So as you 'must not condition registration', this means you can use Facebook Updates to say
“Come and enter our competition here” and off your site you can tell people to join your Facebook Page for exclusive offers from your company as long as the next step is click here to enter the competition.

A few scenario examples of what you can no longer do on Facebook

1. Father's Day promotion: Upload a photo of your Dad and tell us why he is COOL!! for him to Win XY.
2. Share your snap: Please like the snap you want to win.
3. Comment on our update and tell us “why you love us” and you could win XXX.
4. Like us and in XX months, we will choose a random winner of YYYY.
Use of External Applications

The promotion guidelines state that “all promotions” on Facebook need to be run within an App that you or your digital agency have created (you keep the email addresses) or on a 3rd Party Application (such as Wildfire, Involver).

Please note that most third party apps will charge you and they often receive the email addresses, not you, so there are clear benefits of creating your own App or Canvas Page.

Find out more about Apps on Facebook here or contact us.

Be the owner of the competition

The new guidelines strongly indicate that you need to make sure you don’t make it look that Facebook are affiliated with your company / competition, via text and images and logos at the competition landing page and also be clear in the terms and conditions that Facebook is simply a channel.

Remember also re: the 'can't dos', that you are NOW not allowed to contact the WINNER on Facebook, this includes via messages, chat and wall posts. You will need to receive their email address and contact the winners off Facebook. Once you have notified them via an off Facebook channel, then you can post congratulations on your wall and thank others for entering.

How to roll with it

1. Design an App which integrates with your website competition module and Facebook or design an iFrame page and have an email opt in for the competition, or create the email opt in on your site and direct Facebook users there. We saw a great example of a competition Facebook App over at the Science Museum Facebook Page, see the image below, which shows email opt in and link to the terms and conditions.



2. Make sure you list in your Terms and Conditions that this competitions is nothing to do with Facebook

“I give permission for (name of company) to contact me using the entered details provided if I am the successful recipient of the prize. I acknowledge the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. I understand I am providing information to (name of company) and not to Facebook"

3. Notify the winner via email. Once the winner has received notification they you can broadcast their name on the FB page.

“We recently connected XX to let them know that they are the winner of YY...congratulations”

We have a new mantra in the Flashlight Search Marketing office: "when designing social media contests always consider not just the creators but the spectators and the voters too. Create a tick list on contest mechanics, web development and off site integration" This mantra especially rings true with the new FB promotion guidelines.

If you need assistance in running a competition or setting up an onsite competition module to integrate with Facebook, an iFrame app or opt-in form on your website then please give the Rocktime Sales team a call, so that they can organise this for you.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

How to Edit a PDF

Sharing Useful Content

Last month we shared with you a number of blogs which focused on local targeted search campaigns. This month is all about sharing useful content. To kick off our useful content blogs, a common question asked by our clients is "How do I edit a PDF". They may wish to update contact details, or add more prominent 'calls to action' on product PDFs. Sharing with you our advice.

Warning, as this isn't an exciting subject such as apps, gaming, social media, technical innovations, then you may get slightly bored. Alas, if you are looking for advice on "How to Edit a PDF" then we believe you will happy with he content, which contains a mix of images and video to keep you interested and engaged (hopefully).


What is a PDF?

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It’s a compact file type created by Adobe Systems and first launched in 1993, allowing users a way of creating, viewing and sharing documents electronically in a format that can be used by any computer, on any platform, with the use of a free cross-platform PDF Viewer, such as Adobe Reader. A quick look search though Google gives a fantastic example of the popularity of this file format; some 260 million PDF documents versus 45 million .doc files; a format that’s almost 10 years older (at least at the time of putting this together!)


Why use PDFs?

There are several advantages to using PDFs over simpler formats, such as word documents. The majority of us know that creating a PDF is very quick, it only takes a few clicks to create electronic versions of your files, so long as you have the appropriate software. Furthermore, PDF is very capable at compressing and compacting large files to more manageable sizes, as well as multiplatform, making files easy to send between computers and systems, with very little in the way of communication issues. Plus PDFs come up in the organic search results ie: they get cached and visited by search engine spiders.

Perhaps most importantly, a PDF is a very secure format; the ability to add watermarks, encrypt data and add passwords is only the start and the actual contents of a PDF cannot be easily modified.

On the downside, PDFs are notoriously hard to edit without specialist software. Even though at first glance it may look similar to a word document, in fact, what you’re seeing is more similar to an image of a document, like a screenshot you can interact with, making it much harder to edit and change via conventional means. However, this can be worked around.



How can I edit PDFs?

Note: this section is quite long, feel free to scan through and move to the video.

There’s a wide range of software available for editing PDFs.

Using Adobe Acrobat (or alternatively, Adobe Illustrator) to edit PDFs is a fairly simple affair, however it will only work if you have either the original authoring password, or alternatively, the PDF is not password protected. One possible problem with editing PDFs is the font, in order to edit the PDF text you must have the font used by the author installed on your computer; something easily overcome if you are the original author, but possibly something of an issue if the PDF uses an obscure font style.

If you don’t have a copy of Acrobat to hand, one of the best methods for editing PDFs involves converting them into an easier to edit format, such as a word document, or excel spreadsheet. A 'PDF to Word Converter Programme' works by interpreting a snapshot of the PDF file and converting it into a Word friendly text format. Though these programmes are getting increasingly accurate, errors can still occur and proof reading a large document could take some time. A quick search on Google turns up a variety of PDF to Word Converters, some free, others not.

PDF to Word and its respective partner website Word to PDF offer free browser based file conversion. Nitro Reader offers a fairly comprehensive package for free, although it is still in beta. Bear in mind though, that you do get what you pay for, so look around and do some research, before spending time working with a programme that might not necessarily meet your needs.

The ability to edit PDFs is also included in a few other packages online, such as Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool similar to Adobe Illustrator, which allows you to select images or chunks of text and move them around the document. Using the PDFImport Extension for OpenOffice Draw also provides a fairly comprehensive PDF editing platform, with the added bonus of supporting 'inline editing', meaning you can fix spelling mistakes and change text formatting, as well as image editing.





Good Practice when creating PDFs

Whilst we’re on the topic of PDF documents, it’s a good idea to bear the following points in mind, when you’re putting together your document for distribution online;

• Always use 'alternative text descriptions' for all images within the PDF.

• Avoid using exotic font styles for important bodies of text.

• Use 'absolute URLs' for hyperlinks to avoid 'broken links in the document.

• Use Headings and Styles to appropriately format text within your document.

• Make sure that your PDF includes 'accessibility features' so they can be ‘tagged’; a feature that makes them readable by screen readers and keeps page content in a logical reading order.

• PDFs should be made to be compatible with earlier versions of Adobe Reader.

• Where useful, it may be a good idea to include a 'document source information page' informing the reader of at least the author and the date of publication.

After following the above links, if you have a requirement to edit a PDF, but you don't feel confident editing, and that the above blows your mind, please get in touch with Rocktime Sales to see how we can help.


Author: Alice Cheetham

The Pros and Cons of Microsites

What is a Microsite?

As you may already be aware, our blog focus for May is creating useful content. We are answering questions this month such as “How to edit a PDF” among other topics. This week we are answering the question, “Do I need a microsite?”. We will begin by outlining the pros and cons of implementing, we have also outlined ‘what a microsite is’. We hope you find it useful!

Wikipedia definition of a microsite;

“A microsite, also known as a landing page, minisite or weblet, is an Internet web design term referring to an individual web page, or cluster of pages, which are meant to function as an auxiliary supplement to a primary website. The microsite's main landing page most likely has its own domain name or subdomain. This is also known as niche marketing”.

A micro site is typically between 3-10 pages. It will be focused on a solution, or client type, or promotion and provides a more personal experience.

Do I need a microsite?

A microsite is useful if you wish to target and engage with a particular niche, through Search campaigns, which may encompass Online PR, SEO, PPC, Social Media, mixture of all.
A good example of a microsite, targeting a specific audience, is from 'Signature Travel Network', who has launched a culinary travel microsite. The site is described as a one stop shop for culinary travel enthusiasts and includes strategic partners, Food Network and Bon Appetit.

View the Culinary Travel microsite here.

Retail clients regularly use Microsites for promotional purposes, the below image is Kit Kat link/partnership with Love Film (Marketing Magazine 22.3.11) to help promote their Kit Kat Pop Choc product.



Microsite content example

Within the Microsite you can offer a diversity of content in several formats, which may currently not sit well with your main site.

For example, for a hotel wishing to increase conference / meeting room bookings, they may opt for a microsite to deliver targeted content, for those looking to book a meeting room in their hotel locations.

They would need to consider what information would be useful to their niche.
What key content will enable visitors to make a booking (use images and text).
How they can speed up Call to Action on their Microsite.

Useful content:

Text: Useful information for Niche page (to include range of material, videos, downloads – see below)
Video: Running an Effective Presentation (from Affiliate).
Video: Team Building Events (from Affiliate).
PDFS: Conference Meeting Tick List (from Hotel Conference Team).
PDFS: Conference Meeting Room Brochure (from Hotel Conference Team).
PDFS : Confidence in running presentations (from Hotel conference team).
Image: Viral HTML badge for others to promote (bloggers / partners).
Social: Bookmark this page / Share this page.

Decision making content:

Text & Images: Home page: Why are you here today? Book meeting room, Browse meeting rooms; latest images from team building events (from Hotel conference team).
Images: Images of meeting rooms.
Image: Promotion banners – to also seed out to paid and free content networks.
Text : Case studies and testimonials from previous attendees.
Text: Location & Directions.

Calls to action
Function: How many seats do you require? Date? Show availability, rates, images, layout, presentation material.
Function: Book room / View room.
Function: Call us / View room.
Function: Join email list for latest offers – or follow on our social networks.
Function: Leave a testimonial.

The benefits of having a microsite

SEO benefits:
Cross pollination from Microsite to main site / associate microsite with the main site.
Increased relevancy.
Keyword rich domain name.
Link to the microsite from a Google Places account, create appropriate categories (which are limited in Google Places).

Social Media benefits:
Social share on the microsite will enable you to socially seed your microsite to a niche audience, found in social media. Social media accounts will need to be created.

Paid Search benefits:
Reduce CPC due to page relevancy “Quality score”.
Targeting to appropriate sites within your regions and industry.
The site can hold contextual advertising from Google Content network (revenue from affiliates).

Design benefits:
Tailor the microsite so it appeals to the markets target audience.
Offer promotions specific to target audience.

Commerce benefits:
Higher conversation rate, as the site may enable you to look more specialist and provide you with authority in your respective niche.
With more relevance to query, the conversion rate will increase.
Easier to remember site username.
Work with an affiliate / partner to increase reach of microsite.

THE CONS OF HAVING A MICROSITE

SEO cons
Link acquisition risks, link building for the microsite will not benefit your main site. Link building can be time consuming. We do not recommend multiple microsites to link to your main site as this could look like “link farming” – bad SEO and could get you banned from search engines.

Social media cons
It makes sense to create a specific social media account/s (Twitter/Facebook) for the microsite. This of course takes time and budget.
Commerce cons.
The site will need to be advertised to a target niche.


THINGS TO NOTE WITH MICROSITE DEVELOPMENT

• Don’t duplicate your content from the main site to the new microsite. It is bad practice for SEO.
• Design the site so that it doesn’t take up too much resource.
  

MEASUREMENT

• Review take up of microsite (online mentions and site visits and page engagement).
• Set up data capture and understand who is interested in your microsite.
• Review icons visitors click on for further microsite enhancement.
• Track the number of leads/sales by site visits.

STEPS TO TAKE

• Determine objectives; Note: keep focused on promotion opportunities and conversions and where appropriate, fun.
• Establish a time line.
• Allocate sufficient budget.
• Create the Microsite social media and content outreach plan.
• Talk to Rocktime Sales

We hope the above is useful, if you need further guidance on whether a microsite would suit your business, feel free to give the Rocktime Sales team a call.


Author: Sarah Griffiths

How can Foursquare help your business

You may remember us talking about Foursquare before; we’ve even done an introductory post on Foursquare for businesses here on the blog.

As it is operation sharing useful content on the blog this month, a couple of days ago we found this great article from Mashable on how to set up a Foursquare Special, which we just had to share with you.

How to: Set up a FourSquare Special by Lauren Drell, Mashable

We have also provided our own take on FourSquare specials for your review. Enjoy ;)

So what are the advantages of registering your business with them?

For starters, it’s a popular service, growing in numbers; in 2010 alone on their official blog, Foursquare reveals they experienced a 3400% increase in growth, and a staggering 381 million check ins.

Not only does signing your venue up on Foursquare open up a huge potential audience, but you can actively encourage visitors through Foursquare via the use of their ‘Foursquare Specials', from a Friends Special encouraging groups to a Newbie Special to encourage newcomers through your doors, there’s a wide range of potential deals to set up with the aim of encouraging people to check into your venue.

When it comes to promoting these specials, Foursquare can lend you a helping hand providing you with official window stickers, encouraging visitors to check in.


In addition to Specials, ownership of the venue on Foursquare will allow you to view a full set of real-time data about your customers. Imagine it like a real-life analytics! On your dashboard you’ll be able to see statistics such as total daily check-ins over time to viewing your most recent and frequent visitors and even whether they are broadcasting their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook.

Of course, whilst Foursquare might be one of the larger and (currently) in our opinion the best established of these services, it is by no means the only option! We’ve covered other location based marketing services as MePlease and Facebook Deals among others, in previous blog posts, both of which are more than worth a peruse. Enjoy ;)


Author: Alice Cheetham

Geek Video of the Month

As our blog focus in May, is all about sharing useful content. This months’ Geek Video of the Month goes to all the videos produced over at Lady Geek TV. The Rocktime ladies regularly check in to the site, which offers an online series of shows aimed at making technology accessible, fun and useful to women. The websites objective being to highlight the very best in smart phone apps available, the Lady Geeks state that they are "on a mission to find the right app for you".

In an interview with the Guardian, the founder of Lady Geek TV, Belinda Parmar, states;

"We put an end to the cliches and stereotypes in the tech world by helping companies understand women (beyond 'pink it and shrink it'). We offer three things: Lady Geek TV (bespoke content), Female Immersion Days (workshops on how to connect with women) and Lady Geek Panel (collective voice of powerful women in IT)."



Here’s the first episode of their web series focusing on useful apps across a range of handheld devices, if you’re interested in checking out more, then why not look into either their main site, Lady Geek TV or their YouTube account.

In extention to the above Fiona here at Rocktime, recommends you read this post from the Mobile Entertainment site, which references a new report from Lady Geek TV.

Keep up the good work girls ;)


Author: Alice Cheetham

Google get their Swag on!

This month we’re talking "local targeting" at Rocktime and it looks like we’re not the only ones. April sees the release of the Google Places Business Kit Catalogue! Google is offering free promotional materials for qualifying businesses, allowing business owners to order in a whole range of goodies, from window stickers to neon signs and fortune cookies to sugar packets; a variety of goods for a variety of business types.

The grand plan is that all of the free stuff is to be used by business owners to encourage their customers and clients to review them in Google Places. Unfortunately at the moment, it’s not quite so ‘local’ to us in the UK – currently only businesses in the US cities of Madison, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Portland and Austin are eligible, but hopefully time will tell if these Google goody bags spread in popularity! The Google Places Catalogue is just one of many indicators that Google is getting serious about Local Search!

If you’re interested in getting in on the action too, and want to know more about how Local Search can benefit you and your website then why not get in contact with the Flashlight Search Marketing Team at Rocktime and see how they can help you out.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Local Targeted Website Research

This month at Rocktime we’ve got our eye on local targeting, and April is our official “Operation Local Search Marketing” month! Local listings and local promotion sites will of course be of strongest benefit to those who wish to increase their local business reach.

Local is a pretty hot topic right now, and with good reason too as for starters, the Google Local Search Algorithm continues to evolve at a fast rate and recent reports indicate that 70% of users look for local information online first, and that 20% of all searches are location related. This month’s Geek Video was on “Google HotPot“ make sure you read the very latest (8th April 2011) news on why Google have decided to merge “HotPot” into their “Google Places” interface over at the Google Blog here.

The Google Places and HotPot merge also indicates there is much more to come with regards to reviews and recommendations within your Google Places account. Exciting times ahead!

Once you have optimised your Google Places account and devised a strategy plan for updates. You may be thinking where next? We hope that one day we will be able to say “We have a Local App for that!” however right now we haven’t. We do have a number of local directory websites that feed local search engines and we are also reviewing and engaging with local promotions sites and local social networks. Also when it comes to targeting your local market don’t forget about Geo Targeting options within paid search. It is a great feature, however our advice is for better ROI, opt for onsite local optimisation over paid-for models. You may wish to trial paid first though to review reach and potential for growth.

Having increased presence on local sites can create an environment for search engine rankings and support inclusion in a wide range of local apps and mapping software.

Local Targeted Website Research

We thought it would be interesting to find out the local targeted directory and local deal websites that the team at Rocktime use. As a team we have a 72% / 28% male/ female split, so in comparison to the UK online population as a whole which has a 52% / 48% male/female split, the results will be 20% Male biased.

Alice went round and quizzed the Rocktime staff on which local targeted sites they use and which they would consider using. A summary of the results are listed below.

If you’re interested in learning more about some of the following websites and apps, that are mentioned in the below results, we’ve talked about the majority of them previously on the Rocktime blog: such as Foursquare Deals, Facebook Deals, MePlease and Google HotPot.



As the chart shows, there’s a pretty equal mix and spread of the sites we picked out to ask about.

The ‘Other’ section entails services such as Think Local, The Best Of and Living Social to name a few. My Voucher Codes seems to be a fairly popular choice in the office, alongside the likes of globally popular sites such as Facebook.


The main finding from this research is the insight into the wide variety of local targeted websites we are using plus YELP (online Yellow Pages) and other local search engine pages were not mentioned once! The results indicate that as individuals we have not found one place yet in which to hang “our local targeted hat” with our friends. Perhaps with the developments on Google Places and the Google social share button (Google + 1) we will start to be more stream lined into where we go for local content and deals. Time will tell. We will review this again, same time next year.

Given the increasing popularity of the Local Targeting websites, it wouldn't suprise us if there's plenty more to choose from this time next year! Even now there's yet more sites popping up every month specialising in local deals and reviews, for example just last month Qype launched it's new (German) deals site, QypeDeals.

From the looks of it, here at Rocktime at least, Facebook Deals wins out over Foursquare. If you’re interested in reading more about the pros and cons between these two services then Social Media Examiner has put together a great comparison on its article Location-Based Services: Foursquare vs. Facebook Places.

If you require assistance connecting your business to local business talk to Rocktime’s Search Marketing (Flashlight) about bespoke local targeted campaigns.
We hope you found our above research of interest, we certainly did and if you would like to share with us the local targeted websites that you visit or would recommend, then feel free to post a comment below.


Authors: Sarah Griffiths & Alice Cheetham