May 16th, 2012 by Nhat Pham.
What is Insights?
Facebook Insights is a built-in utility on Facebook that uses graphs and charts to show such page statistics as likes, page views, reach, virility, and engagement. Insights is available to owners (and administrators) of Facebook Pages, not user accounts, and the page must have at least 30 likes before it can be used. Insights is meant to be used to keep tabs on how many visits and likes your page gets, how they are interacting with your page, and provide stats that allow trial-and-error posting and engagement that can be used to optimize your page.
How do I find Insights?
Your Insights are relatively easy to find, first of all you will see a button that says “Message” to the right of where your page name and profile picture are. There will be a downward facing arrow to the right of this button, click that and a drop-down box will appear. Within this drop-down box, click “View Insights”.
How to Read Insights
When you first see the Insights page, you will notice a number of metrics that are not always readily understandable. Here are their definitions in plain English.
Total Likes – Simply put, the number of people that have liked your page. This stat seems to be counted up until the previous day, so likes on the current day won’t be shown yet.
Friends of Fans – This is the total number of friends that all of your Facebook friends have, including mutual friends.
People Talking About This – The number of people that engage with your page over the last 7 days. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.
Weekly Total Reach – This metric represents the number of people that have seen any content associated with your page over the past 7 days. This includes Ads and Sponsored Stories pointing to your page.
Below these four metrics you will see a graph for the past 7 days that features numbers for “Talking About This” and “Weekly Total Reach” in line graph form. At the bottom of the same graph you will see dots or “Bubbles” representing “Posts” which represent how many posts you made on your page on that day; larger bubbles mean more posts.
Understanding Page Posts Information
Scrolling down farther below the graph, you will see a spreadsheet of page updates, most recent first, and other information about how Facebook users have interacted with your page. The columns can be sorted by clicking the appropriate heading and you can filter them by clicking the drop-down box labeled “All Post Types” on the top left of this section.
There are even more definitions for this area of Insights, and these definitions represent each column.
Date – The date that the post in question was published.
Post – An icon representing the type of post published (post, photo, video, link, platform post) as well as a short excerpt of the post.
Reach – The number of people who saw the post, or the number of times it was displayed.
Engaged Users – The number of people that clicked somewhere on your posts.
Talking About This – The number of people who have “created a story” from your post. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.
Virility – The number of people that your post has reached that are also included in the “Talking About This’ metric. (Talking About This divided by Reach).
The Likes Tab
Near the top of the page, there are tabs labeled “Overview”, “Likes”, “Reach”, and “Talking About This”. The previous section of this article has been about just the “Overview” tab. The following three tabs simply contain more detailed data about the stats already shown in “Overview”, but we will touch on them anyway, starting with “Likes”
The First section of the Likes tab is labeled “Gender and Age” and is quite self-explanatory, it simply breaks down the Likes your page received based on the demographic metrics of Gender and Age. The top row represents how many females Liked the page (out of 100 percent) and the bottom row stands for Males (again, out of 100 percent).
This section is further broken down into a bar graph with six age groups: 13 – 17, 18 – 24, 25 – 34, 35 – 44, 45 – 54 and 55 and up. This section starts at age 13 because Facebook’s Terms of Service does not allow Facebook users that are under age 13. Again, like the gender percentages, the age stats are ‘out of 100 percent’.
The next section of the Likes tab is “Countries, Cities and Languages” and this section is extremely simple. There are three columns; Countries, Cities and Languages, and these columns simply have a vertical list of either countries, cities or languages that people who have liked your page live in or speak.
The final section of this tab is “Where Your Likes Came From”, and this consists of a simple line graph with two metrics on it: On Page and Timeline. These basically mean whether the likes occurred on a page outside of Facebook, or on the Timeline where, likely, the page was shared. The Line graph shows how many of each type of like you got by day.
The Reach Tab
The reach tab is almost identical to the Likes tab except that the stats and metrics contained within it revolve around the reach that the page has gained rather than simply the likes that people have given.
The previous two images are much like the images in the Likes section, but the next graph is totally new. This graph shows how people were “Reached” by your page and the frequency of this happening.
And a simple line graph much like the “Likes” tab.
The Talking About This Tab
The last tab features stats that are related to the previously-mentioned “Talking About This” definition. This definition, as a refresher is “The number of people who have “created a story” from your post. This includes actions such as: Posting on your page wall, Likes, Comments, Shares, Answers a question, Responds to an event, Mentions your page, Tags your page in a photo, Checks in at your place or Recommends your place.”
A difference on this tab is that the first two graphs will not calculate unless your page is being talked about by at least 30 people.
The section immediately following these two graphs, however, works just fine even below the 30 people. This section includes two line graphs, one that shows the number of unique people “Talking About This” and the other that shows the viral reach of the people “Talking About This”.
This concludes the main overview of Facebook Insights. As a note, this overview was done after several updates to Insights as well as after the Timeline upgrade to Facebook. I have no doubt that Facebook will continue adding additional features and metrics to Insights so stay tuned for an updated guide should this happen in the near future.
May 8th, 2012 by Nhat Pham.
OVERVIEW
YouTube is a massive video-sharing site in which users can view, upload and share videos with the rest of the internet. Due to the massive number of views and viral nature that videos can obtain, YouTube video marketing is incredibly useful for business owners wanting to build their brand. Furthermore, since the site is free, there is no overhead cost other than that needed to create the original content that will be used in marketing materials.
Front Page
When you first sign in to YouTube you will be faced with a screen much like the one below.
As you can see, the front page is arranged in several columns and blocks that have specific tasks. The top block, stretching horizontally across the page is shared by the other Google services and includes login buttons, a search bar, and options to edit your profile. The next block down is taken up by a Spider-Man advertisement and showcases exactly where ads will be displayed on this page in the future. The left box is dedicated to filtering the videos offered by the other two columns, for instance, you can search for trending videos or input your own channels for quick updates on your favorite uploaders. The center column is the Subscription column, and any channels you have subscribed to will end up here in chronological order, much like a Google+ or Facebook stream. The final, right-most column is dedicated to ‘Recommended’ videos which YouTube will suggest to you based on what videos you have watched, liked and searched for in the past.
Video Page
Once you select a video from the front page or a link elsewhere on the internet, you will be brought to the page belonging to that video. Here you will notice a few differences and similarities to the front page.
Like the Front Page, the video page retains the same top horizontal bar that includes profile settings, the search bar and login widgets. Below that are the two main columns, the left-most one is much wider than the right one is due to the fact that it has to accommodate the width of the video. In this same column are the like/dislike buttons, video views, share button, video description and, farther down, the user comments. If you were to click the square second-to-the-right on the video pane (black background, white shape) the video would expand and the right column would be pushed down below the video. Speaking of the right column, this, like on the Front Page, is where recommended content appears using the same logic as the recommended videos on that page.
Video Player
Now to zoom in a bit on the video player itself, which you will see in embedded videos regardless of whether you are on YouTube or not.
As you can see, the YouTube video player is relatively simple and minimal, besides the big viewing area, there are only a handful of buttons in the viewer at all. First of all, starting on the far left is the start stop button which does what you would think it does, start or pause playback of the video. Next to that is the audio button, a single click of this button will mute the video, but if you hover over the button, a volume slider will show up to give you more control over how loud the video is. Directly next to the volume slider is the video time information; this shows how far into the video the playback is, and how long the full video is, in this case it is six minutes and seventeen seconds long.
Across the video player is a small gear icon that, when clicked, shows you a range of video quality levels you can choose from, in this case there is auto, 240p, 360p, 480p and 720p. Remember, the quality of the video may increase, but the amount of data transferred will also increase, meaning longer load times depending on your connection. Immediately to the right of the video quality icon is a small clock icon that when clicked tags the current video as “Watch Later”, this is in order to help you return to videos that perhaps you didn’t finish when you found them. Finally, the three last icons are the video size icons, the left-most icon that looks like a simple rectangle is used by default on YouTube, so if you want a bigger view of your content, you must click one of the next two buttons. The similar, but slightly larger rectangular shape is the “Expand” button, which spreads the video out and pushes the recommendations pane out of the way to make the video bigger. The final rectangular shape with missing straights is the full-screen button which causes the video to fill your entire screen, keeping its aspect ratio of course, and hiding its player buttons when the mouse is not moving.
YouTube is one of those sites that has many different functions that the common visitor doesn’t usually see, so keep poking at the interface that it offers, there are always new functions and videos to find.
May 1st, 2012 by Nhat Pham.
Should you be thinking of starting your own website, or have one already, you may have noticed that your viewership is starting off a tad slow. This is natural, you need to flesh out your site and the content it provides to build trust and notice. There are, however, ways of speeding this up by getting Google and other search engines to notice your site closer to the top of their results pages. This is referred to as SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, and can help you supplement your posts and content in order for your site to gain notoriety.
- Produce Quality Content – Few things are more important to the value of a website than the quality of the content. If you were to use every other SEO trick known to man yet produced sub par content, you would essentially be getting a lot of visits on a mediocre site, and that’s not really your goal is it? Besides, quality content speaks for itself and will encourage return visits simply for having been useful.
- Optimize Your Code – Since your website will be crawled by Google’s (and other search engines) spiders, make sure that your website is coded neatly. One way to ensure your code is clean is to validate it using the free World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Validator. Web pages that pass the validation are considered to be healthy and spider-able by Google and other search engines. While you are at it, you may want to go ahead and validate your CSS too. As a quick task while you are in your code anyway, you may as well create a Sitemap to help the search engines find all of your pages as well.
- Choose Domains Wisely – Since Google and other search engines search by keywords, among other criteria, the title or domain name of a website has a lot of sway on where that site shows up in searches. Do a quick Google search about anything and see how many search results included your search terms in the URL. This is why domain choice is so important to SEO, whatever the website is called will have a direct effect on where Google (or another search engine) places it.
- Use Keywords Wisely – Within your site, whether it be in the meta tags in your website’s code or within a plugin or control pane in WordPress or Joomla, you need to set up your keywords at some point and there is a very important thing to remember here, DON’T SPAM KEYWORDS. This may have been a tactic in years past, but as such, it has gained the attention of Google who has taken measures to eliminate this strategy such that if you use too many keywords, perhaps 20 or so, you will be marked as spam and given a worse rank on Google than you otherwise would have. Besides not stuffing keywords, you should give thought to what sort of content you create and what the most appropriate keywords for your site would be.
- Include Ways to Share- When you produce original, high-quality content; people should be able to pass along the message easily. To this end we want to add some of the useful Social Media buttons and other methods of sharing to our site. When a user views/reads and likes your article/video they may want to share it to Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc but if there are no share buttons for these networks you may have just lost some valuable hits, +1′s, Likes and Tweets which are all very relevant in SEO today.
These are just some of the ways you can use SEO to give your site some more views to help jump-start its growth. There are many other methods, some useful, some antiquated, some obsolete, the way search engines work changes all the time so make sure to keep a look out for new happenings in the world of SEO.
