The grumbling is growing. Marketers are getting frustrated that fans seem not to be noticing their Facebook page updates. For some, engagement seems to be lessening since Facebook introduced the Timeline format.

This is anecdotal however. There is little data to support this now. Some surveys show increases in fan engagement. Some, like the study of 3,500 pages, done by Edgerank Checker, conclude that Timeline has had no effect on fan engagement. Since only 2% of fans ever return to a Facebook page after they have “liked” it and Facebook itself states that only an average of 17% of  pages’ fans see its updates in their newstreams, the Timeline format change should have no effect whatsoever.

According to Ederank Checker, both the control group (No Conversion) and the Pages that converted to Timeline experienced nearly identical ratios. Roughly 60% of the Pages analyzed experienced a Decrease, while roughly 40% experienced an increase. Their conclusion? The introduction of the Timeline format had no significant impact fan engagement.

Then why are we hearing these stories?

Something changed. Wait, could it be Timeline? But for profiles?

It was for me. I found the change over to the Timeline profile visually distracting. I started ignoring the news ticker and coming to Facebook only to interact in the few private groups I take part in. There was so much going on and it was so distracting I stopped paying attention to the news stream and only noticed on occasion if a friend’s name popped up.

I wonder if others have had similar reactions? An eye tracking study by SimpleUsability showed that Timeline brand page users actually find some of the new elements confusing. Brand pages don’t differ much from Timeline profiles visually. Lots of different things to look at. I wonder if other fans are feeling overwhelmed and inundated by the noise and clutter?

SimpleUsability MD Guy Redwood said it “is clear that the average user doesn’t fully understand the new layout, or interact with it in the way intended. This will likely change over time, but as the mechanics of obtaining ‘Likes’ has become more difficult for brands, they now need to drive engagement more than ever. Page editors no longer have the ability to set targeted landing tabs or applications for non-fans. In the past you could direct people onto a particular tab to encourage likes or interaction with a promotion.”

If this is true, it gets harder to use Facebook effectively as a marketing tool. Everyone agrees that the key to successful marketing on Facebook is to update with content that resonates with your fans. And to use Facebook ad campaigns to stay in front of your audience. Author and social media consultant, Brian Carter emphatically maintains that Facebook ad campaigns work–and work well– to build Facebook fan bases and keep Facebook fans aware of brand pages. His book, “The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook”, provides a thorough grounding in using Facebook for marketing and includes instruction in building and deploying effective Facebook ad campaigns.

However, Facebook ad clickthroughs are half the industry standard, which means that these same fans you are trying to stay in front of may not respond to the ads you are posting. To get their attention.

So what are marketers to do?

Well, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

One way to break through the clutter is to use imagery and video. Content moves through the social web at lightening speed but imagery grabs our attention and we can’t help but notice a compelling picture. As human beings we are drawn to other human faces (advertiser have known this for eons.) Video reaches right out and grabs us by the throat and can hold us rapt. In a study by emarketer, 60% of respondents said they would watch video previous to reading text on the same webpage. Video and imagery build subconscious connections.

Jennifer Strauss Windrum, who founded and manages the WTF (Where’s The Funding For) Lung Cancer and SMAC! (Sock Monkeys Against Cancer) Facebook pages, finds creating more visual content has helped maintain her Facebook fan interaction, although she has seen a definite decrease in response since the implementation of the Timeline format.

Julie Pippert, founder and director of Artful Media Group, confides that her secret weapon is to approach the Facebook pages she manages like Pinterest boards. She shares short punchy updates with vibrant images more frequently than longer text updates. Pippert manages to keep fan interaction going but says that it is a constant struggle.

As Miranda Miller, of Search Engine Watch, says, “You’re going to read a lot of conflicting data, ‘fact,’ and opinion. There is no magic formula. The only way to discover what works for your business is to try, test, tweak, rinse and repeat.”

Do you need help understanding how Facebook fits into your marketing? Give us a call at 419.740.1262 or shoot us an email at info@allenmireles.com. We can help.

Earlier this week, in a discussion with a local businessman about the power and benefits of social networking, I did a search in Google for my name. My site and blog came up as did my profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. No sign of my Facebook fan page. My fan page is relatively new and I use it to share information about using social media for business. I share links to the posts others have written, I ask questions often and occasionally get responses from my 324 fans. I share the rare posts from my own blog. I started my fan page deliberately so that I would have personal experience with the positives and negatives of maintaining a Facebook page for my social media consulting business.

So I searched on a former client’s name. No Facebook fan page. Yet he has a carefully tended page with thousands of fans and his page used to come early in results from a search on his name. I then searched for Coca Cola; a well known brand with an extremely popular page. No fan page. I started to ask questions, first surreptitiously and then openly. I have tweeted, emailed and posted and no one seems to have an answer. Yet. Some of my friends offer the opinion that Google has, once again, changed its algorithms and that explains it. Or have posited that the inclusion of real-time search has changed how pages come up in search now. An SEO expert explained that I needed to write my posts differently using my page name within the post so that Google would read it and include it.

That may be the answer. We’ll see. Feels a bit awkward to include that language but it’s worth trying. However, that doesn’t explain why it used to come up and now doesn’t. My fan page, Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting or http://facebook.com/amsocialmediaconsulting, shows up in a search from within Facebook. As does my former client’s and Coca Cola’s. From outside of Facebook, however, not so much. My fan page shows up on page two of a Yahoo! search on my name (it didn’t yesterday) so that’s something. But what changed? And how much does it matter?

Oh wait! A Bing search on my name yields three references to my Facebook fan page on page one of the results. Has my fan page become a victim of dueling search engines?

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? What am I missing here?

If you liked this post, please share it with your networks. Follow me on Twitter or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Creating a Facebook presence has been a popular social media marketing tactic, given Facebook’s active 300 million person user base. Contest and giveaways are effective for engaging with page fans and encouraging repeat page visits. Previously a brand could throw up a quick contest or giveaway, promote it to fans and public and award prizes without authorization from Facebook.

This is all about to change with the new promotions guidelines.

Most significantly, the new terms of service state that you must obtain prior written approval from Facebook before launching a promotion using your profile or page. Prior written approval can only be obtained from an authorized Facebook representative. You may obtain written approval from Facebook directly by submitting your request using this form or by working with an authorized 3^rd party application, which has access to an authorized Facebook representative and will obtain approval on your behalf. The form includes a field for indicating your budget range, which starts at $10,000.

Once you have obtained written approval you may only conduct your promotion using a 3^rd party application approved by Facebook, like Involver or Wildfire Interactive. You may only allow users to enter your promotion using the application’s canvas page (the place on Facebook where the application lives) or in an application box on a tab on a Facebook page.

Will the new promotions guidelines change the way business uses Facebook? Probably. Only brands with budgets of $10,000 and up will receive approval from Facebook directly and Facebook is well known for its slow response to customer service requests. While using an approved 3^rd party application is a viable tactic for some businesses and organizations, many will simply forgo the use of contests and giveaways on Facebook.

Will this drive brands away from Facebook? Probably not. Facebook will continue to grow and 300 million active users is nothing to sneeze at. However, this again underlines the importance of using social networking sites to drive traffic to your blog or website where you can promote your heart out without prior written approval.

Does this makes a fan page less attractive for a brand or business? It may. However the benefits of a Facebook profile or page are not limited to a brand’s ability to conduct special promotions. Social networking is about listening to conversations, offering value, connecting and engaging. These things have not changed. The businesses that get this will find and provide value using their Facebook pages.

Are you looking for other posts about this topic? Read Mari Smith, Nick O’Neill and Justin Smith’s Inside Facebook, for additional thoughts on the revised promotions guidelines.

Did I miss anything? I’d love to know what you think about this. Please take a moment to comment here or tweet your response.

If this post was helpful please share it with your networks.

OneCoach VP of Training and Development, Adrian Ulsh, moderated the call. Our shared objective was to provide members with a basic understanding of social media and its power as a marketing tool. We started by answering this question:

What is social media?

One definition (from Bradley Will’s Purpose Driven Social Media) states that social media is a “term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audios.”

Unofficially, social media is the conversation people are having with each other online. The term “social media” is also used to describe the many tools and sites being developed to facilitate these conversations.

Then we added a list of some of the types of social media being used today.

Social media can include (but is not limited to) the following:

• Blogs
• Social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn
• Microblogging sites like Twitter
• Social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon
• Video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo
• Social Local sites like Google Local Business Center and  Yahoo! Local
• Forums and Discussion Boards
• Text messaging (social media growth outside the U.S. is in mobile devices)

According to John Assaraf, himself a highly successful businessman who has built and sold several multimillion dollar businesses, small business owners often “don’t know what they don’t know.” This is true of entrepreneurs and social media. Almost everyone has heard the term “social media” by now. Most don’t know what it refers to or, if they do, how to use it for their business. So next we asked:

Why should you care about social media? And we answered: because it’s where your customers are.

As B.L. Ochman wrote in a post for BusinessWeek, “Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.”

The video below from the social media blog, Socialnomics, presents a short and compelling list of reasons why you should care about social media. If you haven’t already seen it, take moment and watch it. We’ll wait.

During the call Adrian and I also discussed one of the compelling reasons business owners must understand social media: customer service and customer complaints. In the past, an unhappy customer would tell 15 people, who would tell 15 people, who would tell…you get the idea. In today’s digital world people are updating their social networks from their iPhones and Blackberries. Complaints posted to YouTube, Twitter or Facebook are seen by thousands–sometimes almost immediately.

Many of us have viewed the YouTube video about United Airlines and the broken Taylor guitar. That customer complaint has been viewed 5,343, 474 times. 21,779 people have taken the time to comment. A Google search for United Airlines lists “United Breaks Guitars” as the third result on the first page. Powerful.

Social media makes it easy for anyone to say anything. Anytime they want. You need to know what is being said about your business.

We cited several other examples of customer complaints during the call but this story makes the point nicely. If you missed the video, go back to my home page and watch it. It’s short and entertaining and has been very effective.

Next we talked about how business owners are using social media marketing. Many people think using social media to build business is just for the big brands like Zappos and Dell Computer. Not so. Small and mid-size business owners all over the world are using social media marketing to:

• Generate exposure for their company
• Build their brand
• Monitor their reputations
• Manage relationships
• Increase traffic to their websites
• Build communities
• Develop qualified leads
• Create new opportunities
• Conduct market research
• Provide customer service
• Transform customers into brand evangelists
• Publicize events, new products and services
• Increase sales
• Built marketing lists (free of charge)
• Dominate local marketplaces
• Increase reach and introduce products and services to global markets

At this point we interjected a word of caution:

Social media marketing does not mean broadcasting your marketing message using social media vehicles. This is not just another marketing channel.

Social media is about:

• Listening
• Responding
• Conversing
• Adding value
• Sharing information
• Building relationships
• Recommending others
• Testing new ideas
• Being authentic and transparent

If you treat social media marketing exactly like traditional marketing you will fail miserably.

By now many of our listeners were wondering:

What is my role and where do I start?

As a business owner, one of the most important things you can do for your business today is to understand how social media works and how you can use it in your marketing efforts. OneCoach members can take part in the upcoming teleseminars and learn how to use social media in their marketing. Our next call is scheduled for Wednesday, September 9th at 11:00 AM PT. We will show you how to do one of the most important things you can do (easily, right away and for FREE) to get more traffic to your website, come up in local searches faster and provide special coupons for your customers.

Not a OneCoach member? No problem. Contact us at 1.800.971.3824 to schedule a strategy session. Let’s talk about your business objectives and how you can use social media marketing as a tool to help you achieve them. You can also find us on Twitter or join our Facebook fan page. We’d love to have you!