With social media becoming an integral part of our daily lives and businesses a new breed of analytic and management tools have evolved allowing individuals and especially businesses to analyze data from social media campaigns and marketing strategies.

The question on top of every business analyst list is how well is their social campaign doing – that is quite a hard question to answer. Having 2K twitter followers and 10k facebook likes does not mean your social media campaign is successful. Analytic tools helps you to scale, measure and analyze social media interaction of your business making it easier to adjust your stategy for maximum results.

Social Analytic and Management Tools

Hootsuite



Save your time and your sanity. Improve productivity by managing all of your social networks within HootSuite. The dashboard is designed for you and your team to listen, engage and measure all from one simple interface.

Quintly



quintly is the professional social media benchmarking and analytics solution to track and compare the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter or both, our tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practice examples.

Pageviral



PageViral tracks real-time user behavior, sentiment, engagement and interaction patterns in 41 different languages.

wildfire



Whether it’s mastering our platform, creating connections with your customers, or tying your social efforts to your business objectives, we have the right resources to help you achieve your social marketing goals.Brought to you by google.

Simply Measured



Social Media Analytics, from Data to Deliverables. All your data in one place. Beautiful reports in Excel and online. Also they have a free report interface

Google Analytic



Google has a section which deals with social analyticts. Social reports help you measure the impact social media has on your business goals and conversions. Integrated web and social data provides a holistic view of your content and community.

Sprout Social



Sprout Social embrace and revel in the fact that social media is a crucial component of brand and customer relationships.Powerful Social Media Software.A management and engagement platform for social business

Buzzcapture



Buzzcapture provides quantitative as well as qualitative analyses. Our reports are often delivered periodically. Their frequency is determined in consultation with our clients. It is also possible to draw up an inventory report, such as a baseline assessment, or to restrict an analysis to a specific campaign or to the activity of your CRM team.

Social Media Analytic & Management tools fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

What you can do with a tab

1. Create a like gate
2. Create a feedback form
3. Create a poll
4. Create a competition

And much more.

Tabs are facebook apps added to pages and allows the display of customised content via an iframe. Since it’s in an iframe you can include your own logic, functions, styles etc. You are limited within the facebook page tab to a width of 810px.

A page with customised Tabs.

There are lots of Tab apps which which offers specific functions or which feeds in specific services, i.e twitter, pinterest, google+ and which you can add to your facebook page for free.

But if you are:

1. Looking to host your own tab content and do not want to rely on 3rd party Apps
2. Have clients who want their own tab without branding
3. You want your own tab icon
4. Want to know how to build your own App tab

Then this is for you.

You will need:

1. A domain name
2. A webhost which supports PHP
3. Basic html and file upload skills i.e (ftp)

Lets get started. Download the file and follow the instructions in the readme file.

The zipped download contains:

1. Setup up Instructions
2. All files/code/script needed to get your own tab up and running
3. Simple logic to customise the look and feel of your tab

If you like the script and get it working please do leave a comment!

Goodluck

Building your own custom tab for your facebook page fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

Due to changes to facebook platform I have re-released this tutorial with most up to date information.

To start off Go to

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create

Choose the correct category for your page and give it a name

This will take you to the permission admin interface here you can unpublish your page so only you the admin can see it. Once you are done just un-tick the box.You can also restrict who can see your content etc. Click save and head back to your page by clicking view page on the top left of the admin area.

A nice place to get a variety of covers to choose from ready to download and use is http://coverphotofinder.com

Remember to to click on save changes.You should now have a facebook page that is similar to below.

How to Create a facebook page – New Version fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

facebook score api for game leaderboard – An intoduction

Download Score tutorial

facebook friends autocomplete dropdown selector

Download dropdown selector

Using Javascript SDK popup dialog to post to facebook wall

Download dialog sample code

Free Fortune Cookie facebook App

Download free fortune cookie app

Download free Daily Scripture app

Download free Daily Scripture app

8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

Download Pdf

40 Ideas and Tips for Your fb business pages

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Facebook Bootcamp for PR: Build Brand and Buzz for Less

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Subscribers freebies – Download now fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

Either way they have managed, among so many to be some of the very few  to create a buzz in the social media arena

So what is Pinterest:

Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest is similar to earlier social, image bookmarking systems based on the same principle.

So where did they spring up from

Pinterest is affiliated with both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community. Founded by Ben Silbermann, of West Des Moines, Iowa, the site is currently managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors. It is one of the “fastest growing social services in the world. Read more about it here

So what is new?
I will start with what is not:

1. Bookmarking urls –  lots of social bookmarking sites exist
2. Storing, managing and sharing files –  lots of sharing sites exist

So again what is new?
Nothing –  To be blunt Pinterest is a social bookmarking and image sharing site  but they have managed to make the experience  more graphical and exciting, and you got to give them credit for that.

So with all the hype comes the critics

it is suggested  the hype is just the hype, the reason why facebook towered over most social networks like myspace and face-pic etc is their effort in re-inventing themselves, pushing technology and ideas to the limit and keeping up with what their users enjoyed most, i.e they where the first to introduce a robust developer section for people to build on top of their framework.

A testimony by a bloggers reveals that pinterest may not be all it’s hyped up to be in terms of creating leads and driving more traffic. See this article
“Is Pinterest Traffic Worthless?” by Copyblogger.

But more importantly is the copyright marvel, which they have drafted up in order to completely own  all your uploads and hold you responsible for legal fees if you do decide to challenge them on copyright infringement.

A photographer who is a lawyer puts this into perspective when she completely deleted her account after going through the small print which most of us never read

See this article
“A Lawyer Who Is Also A Photographer Just Deleted All Her Pinterest Boards Out Of Fear?” by businessinsider

Also a suspicious user on their facebook page  points this out see his comment below

Pinterest has joined the big players in social media, so they may need to clean up their act in making their terms and service as transparent and fair as possible.

Are they here to stay or another “of the moment Site” – time will tell.

As at the time of this article all facts where checked and known to be correct.
April 2012

Pinterest the new kid on the block or an online privacy nightmare fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

Ok lets talk Technical stuff

Recently i just completed a promotional campaign game for a big client based in the US. Because of the amount of users and the tight deadline,  I opted for facebook score API to build to manage the scores and boy was it as easy as i thought.

It uses POST or GET to make requests to the open graph api to retrieve and store scores. Read more about the score API here

Normally to create a leaderboad to show users score in relation to friends you have to do this:

1. Get list of all the users friends id
2. Get a list of all users id you have stored that have played i.e database or flatfile
3. Compare the two lists and retrieve the users friends with there score

Sweet yeah…… NO!

Nightmare, all it takes is multiple users with lots of friends accessing the app. The app will have to to a search and compare which can be tidious for the server if you have hundred of thousands of users  in your database. You can soften the blow by increasing the ram on the server , by implementing CDN etc

or

You can use the facebook open graph score API!.

A single call will retrieve all your friends id and will include their score as well for the current app or any particular app.

Once you post a score it also gets published to the wall of the users. You MUST request the publish_actions permission.

Your app must also be under the right category in this case you MUST choose games.

You will need a user User_Token or Oauth_Token to retrieve scores and an App Token to post scores. You can easily get this from the developers section of facebook.

The easiest way to get these for testing is to create an app and grab one from the tools section on facebook. Make sure you are logged in with your developer account then go here https://developers.facebook.com/tools/access_token

facebook allows you to generate these tokens so you can use it to test, but you may want to look into how to generate one on the fly when your app goes life.

To get started make sure you choose

Now lets do some basic call and post request.

//To retrieve the logged in user’s score, you need the user, access or oauth token.
//we using oauth_token here
$oauth_token =’XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’;
//retrieve the $facebook of current user
$facebook_id =’XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’
$getScores = file_get_contents(‘https://graph.facebook.com/’.$facebook_id.’/scores?access_token=’.$oauth_token);
$myData = json_decode($getScores, true);
$list =’

‘;
print($list);

To retrieve user and their friends score for the App you need the user, access or oauth token.

//To retrieve a users post you need the user, access or oauth token.
//we using oauth_token here
$oauth_token =’XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’;
$getScores = file_get_contents(‘https://graph.facebook.com/’.APP_ID.’/scores?access_token=’.$oauth_token);
$myData = json_decode($getScores, true);
$list = ”

“;

foreach($myData['data'] as $data){

$list +=’
• Name: ‘. $data['user']['name'].’ score: ‘.$data['score'].”;
  }
  $list += ”
  “;

print($list);

[/PHP]

You can post a score or a user by issuing an HTTP POST request to /USER_ID/scores with the app access_token as long as you have the publish_actions permission.

We are using CURL to do the post.

//Get your access and user token as defined above and store it

define(‘ACCESS_TOKEN’, ‘XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’);
define(‘USER_TOKEN’, ‘XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’);

function fbCurlRequest($graphObject, $post = false) {
$ch = curl_init();curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, “https://graph.facebook.com/”.$graphObject);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH,CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(‘Content-length: 0′));
if($post == true)
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return json_decode($data, true);
}

//facebook id of user
$facebook_id = ‘XXXXXXXXXXX’

//total points user earned
$total_points = 20;

//Use the Curl function to post the score
$post_score = fbCurlRequest($facebook_id.”/scores?score=”. $total_points .”&access_token=”.ACCESS_TOKEN, true);

This will return a variable 1 or NULL.

Check a live example here | Download the source here 

facebook score api for game leaderboard – An intoduction. fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

And Now …

Wonderful Touch Facebook

With the new design focus is veered towards achieving engagement with users other than acquiring fans. A business with 20 users who are actively engaging them is more valuable than 100 dormant fans. That being said aquiring fans is still a must for most social media strategist, and unfortunately it is still used to measure the success of some social media campaigns. Who would have thought that the like idea will trigger a new way for users to interact and businesses to engage.

Remember the functionality to like still exist with the new timeline layout, but it up to you to make it more profund.Since landing pages cannot be defined there are a couple of ways to get users to hit your like gate.

Put a like gate on all your other Tabs

Put a fangate on all your other tabs, this will encourage users to like your page once they try and view these other tabs.

Put a list of links to your other Tabs in the Basic Information Section

Put a list of all your other tabs in the about us section of your page. The about link is the first on the menu with the page layout and users are more likely to click on this when they arrive at your page. make use of the content displayed once clicked on so for example create absolute links to all your extra App tabs on the page.

These links will have the full url to the other  tabs i.e http://www.facebook.com/custom.tab.builder/app_249347133607 . The bold bit is the unique App tab id which you can retrieve from the browser address bar once the tab is clicked on. When your users click on these links in the about  section it will take them directly to the tab section on your page which if it has a fangate will prompt users to like the page before viewing more content or offers.

Promote your other tabs with posts to the timeline.

You can promote other tabs with posts to your timeline. This is useful if you decide for example to run a competition and launch a competition tab. Once users click on the link they will go to your tab and like your page. If you like you can pin such post to the top of your timeline. This will make sure it will always be the first post on your timeline, which will increase engagement for that particular tab.

Promote your facebook page externally  by pointing to a tab on the facebook page.

When promoting the facebook page externally point to a specific tab other than just the timeline. This will allow users to land on a specified tab section on your page when they arrive.

Click image above to see where it takes you.
Now you know some tips – Continue “fangating!” first stop: Tab Builder

fangate is dead with the new facebook page timeline layout…or is it? fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

We will look into changing the image of our tab.

NOTE – You must move and publish your page to the new timeline layout for this Article to apply.

If you have not done so add an app to your page in this case we are adding a custom tab builder.

http://apps.facebook.com/static-xfbml (Read how to add a custom tab here)

Once you have added it you will see the default icon at the top of your page if you cannot see it expand the icon section. Click on the Admin menu, make sure you are logged in as an admin.

Once in Admin mode, click on Manage -> Edit Page

This will take you to your page setting section , now click on Apps menu

Look for the app you want to edit its menu , In this case this will be the Custom tab builder app which we added earlier. click on Edit settings

Change the tab name if you like and click save. Click the Change link to change the tab image. This will bring up a separate browser which will allow you to upload your own image from your machine.

Upload shouldn’t take long according to your machine’s speed. If everything goes well your image should replace the default one.

Close this window and click OK. Return to your page and refresh. You should see the menu with a new name and Image. In this case a Tab name: Competition and a new image.

Hope you found this helpful.

The new facebook page timeline layout – Changing your Tab Image fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

Pages will adopt the new timeline theme as the layout and design format very shortly. This layout is similar to the profile timeline layout for profile pages. The new design  gives you more control on your content and enhances engagement with your users.

Facebook has given admin tools to preview what pages will look like in the new layout . Go to your page and click on the preview link which should be on the top part.

This will allow you to see the new features and play around with the new admin area. You can easily switch back to the old layout. Your users will not be able to see the new layout until you publish it (with the button on top of the new layout once in preview mode). If you do not adopt the new layout by publishing it, it will automatically do so by the deadline set by facebook, as at the time of writing this article  it is 31st of march 2012

So what are the big changes?

1. A more engaging interface with time, post and users activities becoming the main focus

The timeline layout shows a “in realtime” posts, comments and likes and any other engagements from users and apps on your page.

2. Bigger more profund menu, this replaces the traditional left side tab with small icons.

The menus are now at the top  and will use the app logo instead of the icon. These can finally be customised to your taste – read how to customise your tab image here

3. Custom application tabs pages will increase from 520px to 810px

You can either design to the current 520px or an expanded tab layout of up to 810px. This means all current apps you have will not be affected.

4. A Quick more engaging admin panel

You can start communicating with users via the admin Panel and also view insights on post and activities.

4. The About page is more flexible has more information in one place

Your about us page is now more relevant and has a better layout. It takes more content from your page settings , i.e mission, about, products, contact info founded by etc and displays it in one place.

4. Introduction of cover photos for pages

Your cover photo is the first thing people will see when they visit your page. Cover photo are already being used in facebook profile pages and is a picture you upload which covers the top area of your profile picture. With pages this new feature is quite useful, it will enhance branding and allow you to rally more information about your product or services.

These are a few major changes but you are best taking the facebook tour , read the documentation and play around in preview mode to have an adequate assessment of how these features will affect your existing pages when the changeover takes effect.

Need a more detailed assessment of  your own facebook business/brand page and what you need to do to prepare for the switchover. fill in the form below.

More info:
facebook tour video:
http://www.learnfacebookpages.com/ui.html

The new facebook page timeline layout – What you need to know! fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media

Why get my site affiliated with social media? If you asked 100 people that used the web “Do you have an account with  facebook, twitter or Google” –  Im sure 10 out of 10 will have an account with at least one of them. If they have an account that means they have friends and other networks.

If you are able to get 1 one interested in your services they will bring along all their connections allowing you to “socialise” with them too. Something that is probably impossible with online direct sales and marketing. View the diagram below – The traditional direct advertising to draw in customers/users to your site. Each user arrive to the site on paid adverts they have come across. Now consider the more mordern influence of social media integrated into your website. the site below have implemented the three social media APIs to there site and the reach has exploded.  
With every user that connects to your service or website via social media they automatically bring along all there friends, fans and followers. Bob from above has 3.5k twitter followers once connected to your site he tweets it out Rome has 900 friends on facebook once connected to your site he post his great discovery on his wall.

You now have 5.6k potential users from just 3 connections! yes potential users as its now up to you to find the best and most efficient way to reach all your potential users.   Now that we have looked at how social media can work on your website lets explore how best to implement it.

a) Give users an alternative login – Social media login

Most users will already have an affiliation with one of the 3 big social media so it makes perfect sence to allow them to use these social connection to register or login.

This means: They do not need to re-register on your site and you can pull the details you need from their social media connection. You can ask for more details but this can be after the account is connected and if it is necessary. There are lots of scripts and add-ons that enables social media login to your website click here for a quick list.

b) Allow users to share your content – Social media sharing

Incorporate the share functionality for each social media connection

1. Facebook like button – Allows your user to share your content on their facebook wall  (Implementation)

2. Twitter share button - Allows users to share your content on their twitter feed  (Implementation)

3. Google plus 1 button - Allows user to share your content on google plus (Implementation)

c) Make your presence known on the  social media networks

Having your presence noticeable on the social networks could be as important as having them on your website. This helps serve the users who got connected to you in the first place through either of the social media in this piece.  It is also a way of funneling or aquiring new users.

It is common practice to have a facebook precence on facebook, but having just a page is not enough you will need to design and add more life to it.  Tab Builders - allows you to add extra tabs/pages to your facebook page which can customise to your taste.  A facebook precence will allow you to connect with your facebook users i.e users can like your page, you can  post updates on new services or goods , create competitions, polls and surveys, give out discounts and much more.

With a Twitter account for your business you can tweet new messages, new services, competition and more on your tweet wall.

Google plus pages are quite new but they are not dismissible, Google pages are quite similar to facebook page as they allow you create an awareness of your business on google, post updates and share content.

Even though we have covered just three social networks,  it will be incomplete to disregard the millions of internet users who use other social connections not mentioned in this piece.

Integrating social media into your site – facebook, twitter and google+ fb-520 - Tap into Development and Marketing power of Social Media