Recently, we started seeing a pattern in our customer conversations. “There’s just too much data, too many mentions” a marketer at a well-known brand confessed. An account manager at a big agency had similar issues: “It’s difficult to understand what’s important and what I should act on. I need to do this quickly, I have a lot of work on my plate. I can’t just sit around looking at mentions all day.”

With this growing avalanche of social media data, it’s no wonder marketers are feeling overwhelmed. They don’t need data, but insights, and getting them quickly is becoming critical to their day to day jobs. That’s one of the reasons why the job of Data Scientist has gained incredible popularity lately. Getting these insights is so valuable that McKinsey projects ”a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively“.

But is hiring a data scientist or a full-time analyst the only way you can understand what’s going on, in real time?

We strongly believe that software, rather than people, should contribute most to the solution. After all, social media is being integrated into the enterprise more and more, and not all marketers or customer service reps can do the analyst’s job.

uberVU Signals is our very own artificial intelligence software that automatically analyzes your brand mentions and detects the actionable conversations and events. If an influencer spreads the word about one of your products, or a story catches everyone’s attention on the web and spreads like fire, you’d most likely want to be there to assess the situation and use those insights to make informed decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly.

If you want to learn how to use Signals to get insights for your organization, join us on May 10th for the “Instant Insights” Webinar.

Companies are data rich and insight poor, considers Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group. With social sharing doubling every year and the average enterprise managing 178 social media accounts, enterprises are getting buried under an avalanche of data. But it’s not data companies need, it’s insights they can act on. Getting these insights is so valuable that McKinsey projects ”a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively“. But is hiring an expensive and rare data scientist the only way for you to understand what social data means and get the insights you really need, in real time? There has to be an easier way!

Today, we are launching uberVU Signals, a ground-breaking product for the social media industry. uberVU Signals is a set of artificial intelligence technologies that automatically extract actionable insights from the overwhelming number of social conversations that you have a hard time keeping track of. Think about it as your very own social media personal assistant, mining the data for you and just sending you a set of insights as they happen. You’re standing on a goldmine – and that’s the data flowing into your mentions streams everyday. Getting social insights from it can transform business entirely. You don’t have to mine this data yourself anymore, Signals will do the hard work for you. Here’s how it works.

Unlocking big data’s true potential

Digital trends are happening really fast, and it’s getting harder to stay on top of everything. You need to react quickly when something big is around the corner, and constantly listening to the buzz in social media is a very important first step. But there are far greater results to be achieved through intelligently delivered insights.

Our technology makes it possible for you to make decisions based on insightful solutions, for a measurable business advantage. This is a knowledge-centred approach to social media, one that allows you to go past the standard metrics like buzz volume and evolution, sentiment values or number of estimated views and extract the “signals”: topics that everyone’s talking about, industry news that are changing the market and could impact your company, people who have the ability to shift attitudes. Having all this data simply showing up in your dashboard or inboxes at the right time will make you more efficient when developing your strategy and action plans.

We detect the signals, you get all the social media love

With social media Signals, you can be immediately notified of any major opportunity or vulnerability for your brand, without the need to dig through mentions or interpret analytics. Information is extremely powerful, because it provides a record track of every important change in your market and by using it, you get an overviews of the stories, people and places that push your name to the newsstands.

Signals detects 3 types of insights right now, with dozens that are being added:

• Trending stories around your brand, product, competitors
• Influencer mentions
• Spikes and trends of any kind (more males talking about you on Twitter in German than usual)

If an influencer spreads the word about one of your products, or a story catches everyone’s attention on the web and spreads like fire, you’d most likely want to be there to assess the situation and use those insights to make informed decisions and adjust your strategy accordingly. uberVU Signals crafts actionable insights to understand who starts the valuable conversations in your community, what important events are shaping your brand reputation and who to engage with at the right time. By doing this, you’ll know exactly where to target your action and resources.

The best part of this amazing feature is that it doesn’t simply highlight changes, but it correlates them with other important KPIs, like share of voice, geolocation, top languages and anything else that’s relevant. This is to ensure you have the big picture when the next alert about your keywords will be popping on your radar.

You can instantly take action for a top story: post it directly from the widget in the dashboard, or send  it to your preferred social networks. Why wait, when you can act right away on an inside scoop you’ve found and gain social status? When it comes to spikes & bursts for analytics like language, sentiment or geolocation, you have the option of moving your attention to the stream (to check everything that people are saying right as it’s happening) or sending the event as a beautiful PDF report to your email address for later reference.

So how can you test out uberVU Signals for your own company? It’s very simple.

If you’re not an uberVU customer yet, we can personally give you a demo & a trial of Signals, already set up for your brand. You can also sign up for the Signals Webinar on the 10th of May, where we’ll be showcasing Signals and going into a lot of interesting use cases.

If you’re already an uberVU customer, you can either run the Signals Wizard from the Signals link in the left side menu (under Dashboard) or you can use Configure Stream for each stream you want Signals to be enabled on.

Signals is a very powerful addition to our social intelligence dashboard, one that will most definitely enhance your experience in social media. You can start playing with Signals right away, just log into your account and give it a spin. We’re always appreciative of your feedback and support, so please tell us what you think of this new uberVU release.

Get an in-depth walkthrough of Signals by signing up to the Signals Webinar on May 10th.

We’re very excited to launch what we believe to be a true game changer in how companies get actionable insights from social media – uberVU Signals.

You can find out more about how Signals works here, and read the press release here.

You can see Signals in action for free on May 10th by signing up to the Signals Webinar here: http://business.ubervu.com/signals-webinar/

Here are some key excerpts from the release:

“uberVU Signals gives us actionable insights, identifying the most critical conversations about our brand and industry. Its ability to instantly categorize all the data available helps us to better understand what to take immediate action on,” said Jon Bishop, Innovation & Social Communications Manager of PayPal, a long time uberVU customer. “When conversations in the marketplace are important, Signals ensures we’re the first to know so we can react faster and better. It takes the work out of monitoring social media and enables us to focus on smarter, more valuable engagement strategies.”

“Think of Signals as automation for Social Media. Has an influencer mentioned your brand or your competition? Is there a spike of negative sentiment in Los Angeles about one of your products? Has your number of Facebook fans increased dramatically today because of a news story? uberVU will show you all that and more, in real time, 24X7. Brands don’t have to waste time anymore by drilling down to look for the needle in the haystack,” said Vladimir Oane, Chief Product Officer.

As social media becomes integrated throughout different divisions of every organization – from HR to marketing, customer service to business development and more – the ability for each department to see pertinent information in real time is critical for action and decision making. With social media sharing doubling every year, brands are spending more and more time sifting through thousands of conversations in search of insights and actionable information – and trying to figure out who in the company should handle or respond to each. uberVU Signals makes it easy for brands – decreasing the risk of missing critical conversations or information in due time and automatically surfacing important information that can be routed to the appropriate function in the organization – avoiding the need to sort through huge amounts of data.

We can no longer hide from the importance of using social media, no matter how reluctant some people are. But for those that have a hard time figuring out how all this wraps up in a coherent strategy, it would be ideal if you could prove that your daily online activities actually make sense.

It’s fairly easy for web companies or small agencies to understand why social engagement does pay off, but if you’re part of  a bigger company or a traditional organization, how do you convince your boss that it’s worth investing time and money in social media? Determinining the ROI and value of social media has given headaches to marketers ever since the beginning. It’s definitely not an easy task to handle, but no matter how you choose to do it, it’s always bypassed by an important step called social media reporting.

Why should you care about social media reporting?

To make sure social media is worthwhile, you need to track your activities on a monthly basis – make that weekly, if your level of interactions is similar to that of a larger company. By gathering all the data into social media reports, you have the possibility to determine which channels are the most effective for building conversations and where exactly in the sales funnel do social media actions come up. In the end, what you’re trying to do is to gain insight into your community’s behaviour and figure out how it relates to your business goals.

“… each report serves as a benchmark for future activity.” (Brian Solis)

You’re probably already tracking your website’s traffic and measuring sales figures. So it makes sense that you would want to correlate all this with the numbers coming in from social media measurement. Especially if you’ve started employing online netwotks across all your organization, people from all departments (marketing, sales, customer support) would benefit from knowing how it all fits together and if it adds up to your overall business strategy.

How does the perfect social media report look like?

Beautiful graphs are always a big plus

A great report is a comprehensive review of your brand’s online presence and an analysis of your market & clients. Let’s take a look at what performance metrics should this flawless report contain:

The big numbers (aka quantitative metrics):

• overall number of mentions – though engagement is not measured in numbers, it’s pretty clear why you would need to know exactly how many reactions your keywords caused to assess the impact of your social media presence
• top social platforms and the conversation share for each one of them – social networks where most of the buzz comes from and where to focus your attention
• overall exposure (views) – an estimation of how many times people viewed your content or anything you shared through social media
• geolocation – the countries, regions and cities where most of the talks took place

The refined statistics (aka qualitative metrics):

• audience demographics – who are the people that are driving the conversations surrounding your name (location, gender)
• conversations evolution on the social web (graphical) and top conversations by platform and subject
• tag cloud – most important topics related to the main subject
• sentiment - so you can understand your customers’ feelings, attitudes and opinions about your brand
• gender distribution – to know who to target on your next campaign
• top influencers  – who creates most of the buzz and has the ability to change the way your business is perceived, how many people follow them

 How to boost your social media reporting

After making sure all these mandatory metrics are included in your report, you can take the time to include some other extra information than will power up your reporting:

1. You should always have the option of filtering results by a specific demographic sector, country, social networks or timeframes. But what’s even more important is cross-filtering. For example, you might need the sentiment for a specific time period, top platforms used in Asia or how many women posted on Facebook about your last campaign.

2. Another feature is the possibility of including the actual text of mentions you are interested in (for example, mentions with a specific tag) – this is very useful if you want to highlight an update that got a lot of WOM on the web – for example, this tweet from Dropbox’ CEO after Google Drive was launched sure made a lot of people smile.

3. You could also benefit from Facebook and Twitter specific metrics, like the number of new followers and unfollows, mentions, viral reach and engagement graphs. These are not details you get a hand on by simply monitoring a keyword.

4. To check out industry trends, you can track your competitors’ names and specific topics from your line of work and add them in the report about your brand name. This way, you’ll identify emerging trends and significant changes happening in your market. Engaging in topics that are important for your business and establishing yourself as a thought leader is a great use of a detailed report. A comparison feature always helps in getting the full picture of what you’re tracking.

Having the data does not equal getting the insights

A good report should provide a comprehensive approach to monitoring – you don’t have to swim through oceans of data to gain insights that you can discuss upon at the highest levels of your organization. Developing an action plan based on the most important findings should also come in handy after flipping through an awesome report.

The end purpose of reporting is to back your future plans with reliable data and help you make informed decisions – not just about social media, but about your entire organization. You should be able to see at a glance what you’ve gained using social media and where to focus your efforts from now on.

What questions should a comprehensive report answer?

Reputation: Is there an increasing interest for your products or services in a specific part of the world? Is your brand visible enough for the demographic section you’re currently targeting or should you shift your focus? What values are people associating with your brand?

Attitude: How do people feel about your brand? What’s the tone of conversations around your brand name?

Costs: Where should you invest your social media efforts? What social network do your customers prefer to use? What percentage of your marketing budget should you allocate to social media? Will social media investments contribute to an increase in sales?

Competitors: How are others in your industry using social media? Who is setting the trends? Who are the key influencers in your line of work and how could you transform them into ambassadors?

Google just launched a cloud storage service that was intended as a direct Dropbox competitor. The social conversations we registered around this topic showed a far bigger interest from men (80% compared to only 20% women). The spike in mentions is correlated to the time the announcement was made, with Twitter as the main driver for social talk.

The overall positive reactions we caught were most likely caused by the generous storage limit that Google set for Drive – 5 GB. At least when comparing it to Dropbox (which starts with a 2 GB plan), because other storage tools, like Sugarsync or Box, also offer 5 GB. Another thing that definitely helped was the PR stunts they created when news about the rumoured service started appearing on the web, developers leaked a preview about the new service prior to its launch, or an article was mistakenly posted on Google’s French blog.

Looking at the tag cloud, it’s easy to spot the main topics that people talked about in relation to this subject: the fact that it seamleassly integrates with Google Docs, Android and Google Apps; the big impact it will have on similar services: Skydrive, Box, or Dropbox, now a market leader; Mashable is nominated as a top influencer for this news; it’s also obvious that discussions about the ownership of cloud-stored files have already started.

We’ve been working on new ways to help you understand how your social media team is performing. Managing your online presence is definitely not an easy job, and it’s even harder when you have to look over the activities of an entire organization. You’ve got your support team answering questions on Twitter, your event planners posting pictures from the last conference on Facebook, marketing people promoting your services on all relevant platforms and so on. How do you handle all of this?

We developed a set of targeted, but powerful engagement metrics to help you maximize your team’s potential. You get detailed info on how many times each of your team members engaged from inside the dashboard, how quick they are to respond to queries from customers and how they’ve evolved from one week to another. What we count as engagement are actions such as replies and retweets.

Keep track of who did what in your social media team

You can use these analytics to perform a social media audit trail of your entire team or for each group. It’s basically a set of records that helps you track the activities of your team’s involvement in social media. We archive all the social media conversations that your employees engaged in using uberVU – this is important especially for bigger companies that deal with security measures and specific industry regulations (these are critical measures for financial companies or government agencies, who have to set up social media policies before joining the conversation).

By going to the General tab in Settings, you can download the entire log for your team. The data you get in the CSV file contains  a complete activity history for each message sent from the dashboard: date, login email of the sender, social account used to send the message (since you can add multiple accounts, one can post from either the company’s account, a personal one or a dedicated account for certain activities like social customer service), social platform, the actual text of the message, as well as complete data for the post it was intended as a reply to (account name, message, date).

All this information is extremely useful when you’re trying to make sure that every employee is accountable for their social media activities. Since all messages are captured in their initial form for all your employees, you can easily back up the data for social media compliance issues, keep tabs on the engagement workflow for review purposes, as well as the filter the data by any criteria in case you need to draw up activity reports.

PS. For a better grasp on what your team is doing, you can always turn to the permissions tab to define which social networks employees have access to. You can even choose which streams they’re allowed to work with.

What if we used social media as a real-time barometer of everything that’s taking place around us, in the real word? It’s already happening: public organizations, NGOs or government agencies are utilizing social media not just to spread out messages, but also to warn people of emerging natural disasters.

Social media monitoring is not yet fully-equipped to deal with events like earthquakes and tsunamis – but using a real-time monitoring tool, you can get a lot closer to developing a real-time alert & response system that can actually change the way we deal with disasters.

While monitoring social mentions on earthquakes, we noticed a massive spike in mentions on April 11th, at 10:00 GMT. Looking at the stream, we correlated this to the earthquakes that happenned on both coasts of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island. The spike can be tied to people’s panicked attempts to leave for higher grounds – the earthquake could have triggered a tsunami wave all across the Indian Ocean, mimicking a series of events that happened in 2004, in approximately the same area.  Luckily, the tsunami alert was lifted after 4 hours. Social conversations increased with 1148% in this geographical region over a period of 6 hours.

Top countries where social conversations took place (for the period of 10-12 April) are:

Since the outburst for Indonesia was far bigger than the ones for US and Japan, but the overall social media coverage was less impressive, we decided to further investigate the issue.

Moving on to April 12th, we caught important stories about earthquakes happening in the Gulf of California and western Mexico (both happened at around 22:00 GMT). However, the most powerful insights we discovered using the uberVU system where geography bursts coming from Japan (there were as much as 1987% more mentions than usual in just 1 hour, with an increase of 87% mentions in japanese). Top stories we registered came from traditional media outlets like CNN and Bloomberg (for Mexico and US news). In the case of Japan, news dissemination was handled mostly by the Japan Meteorological Agency. This could be an explanation of the fact that there were a lot more mentions in US and Japan than the ones in Indonesia.

The data we got is indicative of  the way we can use these online channels to stay up to date with hazards through instant notifications, crisis assessments and monitoring disaster effects. An emergency management program could include issuing live warnings for citizens to limit the damage suffered. For example, disaster mitigation agencies can send out evacuation orders, or embassies can use this information to give real-time travel bulletins.

We’ve updated our Facebook Analytics to reflect the new Page Insights that Facebook has introduced for Brand Pages. The default view shows the total number of interactions for the last week, but you get detailed info for each day at mouseover.

What does each of these metrics mean?

Viral reach is the number of unique people that saw your stories from their friends activities, for example if they shared, commented or liked your post, answered a question, RSVPd to an event or posted directly on your wall. The number reflects how many times were your updates seen.

People Talking about measures how much conversations you’re generating through the content you’re posting on Facebook. The interactions that make up this metric include activities shared in users’ timelines,  from posting to your wall to sharing, liking or commenting any type of content you add to your Page (posts, photos, questions, events). So this basically answers the question of how many people created a story from one of your posts.

“It’s not about the number of fans, it’s about engagement”

Why are these metrics important? In social media, there have been numerous talks about what to measure when trying to gauge your company’s ROI. The numbers of fans is, of course, important, but on the long term it’s best to focus on the engagement we drive through our interactions with them. It basically boils down to 2 questions: should we make more people click the like button or should we strive to understand what they’re interested in after they become fans?

Metrics like “Viral Reach” and “People talking about” put things into perspective. You can have less fans than a bigger business, but get more engagement from your community’s members. The metrics are a true gem for community managers who want to show their teams & bosses what they’ve been really doing for the brand. Your  ultimate goal is not getting more fans, but making sure your content reaches a larger portion of them.

Keep in mind that even people who are not yet fans can see this metric, so it’s important to try to improve your page’s activity, as this number reflects on your overall reputation – how well your community responds to updates by engaging in talks and sharing stories, and how valuable your content is.

We have also included a demographic data tab in the Analytics. What you get here is a breakdown of all the activity on your FB Page by language, country, gender and age, so it’ll be easier for you to understand your fanbase – where most of your fans are located, what’s the age group you’re most popular with. Remember you can choose who receives your updates by targeting users by location and language, so these are important analytics you can use when you decide what to post on your Facebook Timeline.

We’ve all been flooded with news about the way Pinterest’s popularity skyrocketed these past few months. And, since we’re dealing with probably the fastest growing network of recent years (though its success wasn’t as sudden as you might think), an analysis of why and how it happened seems appropriate.

Cartoon by Tom Fishburne

Shaping a world of visual culture

Platforms like Pinterest, Instagram or Tumblr are an expression of our increasing interest for a more visual type of content, one that is easier to digest and share across multiple social outlets. The viral success of memes and infographics is a clear indicator of how much we’re attracted by this type of visualizing data. Images are easier to remember than words and this leads to a quicker understanding of the information they convey – not to mention more engagement.

Pinterest is tapping into behavior that went beyond simply sharing. Susan Etlinger, Altimeter Group

On Pinterest, you can not only collect and organize all the visual reminders of things that inspire you, but it also fuels some sort of serendipitous discovery of valuable content. And that also translates to the way you relate to those collections and discoveries. Here is an interesting explanation by Semil Shah of the way Pinterest actually changes the purchasing funnel and shifts traditional search methods:

“As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running sneakers.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate (pun intended).”

What made people so infatuated about Pinterest?

A few of the reasons why Pinterest has become so appealing to adopters:

1. adding new content is very fast. Basically, through tools like the Pin It bookmarklet, there’s no need to look for share buttons, shorten URLs or open new tabs. Of course, you can use sharing plugins for other social networks as well, but Pinterest is focused on collecting interesting pieces of content, not necessarily promoting them, and putting things into boxes has never been easier.

2. user interaction is not limited by lists of friends or followers. From the homepage, you can look at content posted by pinners you follow, everything that is being posted or just view a domain of your choosing. By putting your mouse over an image, you can quickly like the content, comment on it or even repin it on your own boards – no extra steps needed. The site is entirely public, so your pins are likely to receive feedback from people that are not a part of your social graph. Reaching out to fellow Pinterest users is not interrupted by the need to follow them or request their friendship, which simplifies engagement.

3. it has a totally different approach to socialization: the platform helps people gather around ideas, not common friends or groups. The way you relate to your network of friends through shared messages is not that important here, but rather how your content reflects on other people. This is also obvious from the way content is showcased: on other networks, it’s time-sensitive and displayed in a reverse chronological order; on Pinterest we’re dealing with a carefully organized content, with an emphasis on categories and areas of interest. This gives your content a longer shelf-life than Twitter or Facebook updates.

“Consumers are compiling and sharing photos and video, like an earlier generation collected LPs and bumper stickers, as their version of defining and projecting their individual identity.” Antony Young, AdAge

4. another reason why Pinterest is so addictive is that it’s changing users’ social adventure through a great user experience – their secret was an awesome design that includes optimal use of space through a “masonry” layout and an infinite scrolling browsing style. Also note that Facebook is using these 2 “tricks” on the new Timeline. As a matter of fact, the recent revamping of the interface & board layout is a reminder of Facebook’s way of showing photo albums: bigger image at the top and a few thumbnails underneath.

The rise of visual curation

Just as the first wave of social media has transformed the consumption of information, this next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time. Om Malik, gigaom.com

All this success is most likely driven by our insatiable need of finding relevant and meaningful content across the endless ocean of information that the web currently consists of. And Pinterest, along with all the other curation tools (remember weheartit or craftgawker?), are doing a great job at organizing this informational chaos in a compelling and valuable way. It also redefines the way we relate to content – sharing information in a visual format creates more emotional responses and captures attention faster.

It’s a well-known fact that most social web users don’t create content, but rather consume it.  The fact that we have to deal with so much content has shifted our main interest from being successful content creators to thought-leaders - and Pinterest appeared at the right moment. These type of platforms have created a new type of web users – the social curators, which are just as legitimate as any other and have to power of changing the way we relate to social media.

If information discovery plays such a central role in how we make sense of the world in this new media landscape, then it is a form of creative labor in and of itself. And yet our current normative models for crediting this kind of labor are completely inadequate, if they exist at all. Maria Popova, Brainpickings.org

Is Pinterest not being fair to its user base?

However, there are 2 sides to every story: while the service gives users the tools to curate content from all over the web, the first set of rules they’ve drawn up clearly stated that users were responsible for making sure they hold the rights for pinned images. Some have even predicted Pinterest could end the same way as Napster if it lets users share protected images without permission.

What I see Pinterest doing is employing you (without pay, mind you) to amass a giant library of original content for them.  Kalliopi Monoyios, ScientificAmerican

Though you may think that artists can gain a lot from being discovered through such curation tools, the issue changes if someone else gains material compensations from their work. Even the fact that Pinterest doesn’t show ads or any other strategy of making a profit from all the traffic they get can suggest that their rules are intentionally loose, so that they can monetize content later on.

Nevertheless, copyright issues are of a crucial importance to the social network’s future success, and something had to be done. The company offered websites the option of using nopin tags to keep people from pinning their content – but this merely throws the cat in the users’ yard. As a response to copyright infringements issues, Pinterest recently updated their terms of service. They now state that you are not allowed to post content that “infringes any third party’s Intellectual Property Rights, privacy rights, publicity rights, or other personal or proprietary rights”. This means that their previous policy of avoiding self promotion is also getting a revamp, since it becomes not only acceptable, but also advisable to express yourself through your own content. Even Pinterest’s founder deleted his old account in an attempt to “remember how new Pinterest users feel”.

Will you be needing a strategy for your visual content?

Pinterest is a great service for bookmarking and curating personal interests, but since it gathered so much attention, it has also become a playground for brands to discover new ways of promoting their messages. The new type of online behavior generated by sites like Pinterest is determining marketers to create “pinnable” content, with carefully-crafted designs that are visually appealing and easy to share.

Brands have quickly flocked to the new platform, and some of them manage it pretty well. Random House Books are not only sharing books from their shop, but also literature-related tattoos, gifts or book quotes. That’s a great way of interacting with fans through emotionally-appealing content, without being too self-promotional. Another interesting method of using Pinterest is creating event-specific boards, like it happened for SXSW: from restaurants and music parties, to must-have gears and gadgets. And take a look at how The Wall Street Journal uses their account to share memorable quotes by using a custom method of creating compelling images. Even Barack Obama‘s team maintains an active Pinterest account. :)

What you need to remember is that this new platform is as social as every other, so use it for sharing valuable content and try to follow these simple rules (read the entire blogpost to understand why it’s important to always credit the original source):

A Facebook Page Like does not equal people checking out your content each time you post

It’s getting harder to get your content noticed by fans – and with Facebook’s new Timeline, making sure people see your updates becomes even more challenging. Facebook ranks everything you post through a complex algorithm that you have no control over. It’s important to know how your content is being discovered and what drives engagement so that you can draw up a successful Facebook strategy.

People don’t normally come back to your Fanpage after they’ve clicked the Like button just to check out what you’ve posted – so your brand needs to remain a top-of-mind name through the content shown in their newsfeeds. Only 16% of Facebook fans actually see content that companies post organically on the social network. Put this on top of the fact that content receives most of the attention in the first hour or so after publication, and you’ll understand why a content strategy is necessary.

How does Facebook decide how well your content performs?

1. The type of content that drives the most interaction are PHOTOS. The main reason why this could be happening is the fact that Facebook doesn’t want you to leave the platform and would rather have all the action happen on their territory. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t post links or videos, it’s just that photos are a lot easier to understand and digest, therefore they catch more interest.

2. Updating your FB page using third party apps results in posts that are less visible than if you posted them manually. Also, automating your status updates is not desirable, since now updates from the same APIs get collapsed into a single story. Could this be a sign that Facebook doesn’t want you posting from social media management tools? If you use a management tool, chances are that you’re posting updates on multiple platforms at the same time or that you’re scheduling them – and that means less engagement on the platform itself.

3. Less is more: The frequency of your posts should be moderate, which means no flooding people’s newsfeeds with your updates every hour (nobody wants to be considered spammy), but at the same time you need to make sure you stay on their radar – so at least 2 or 3 posts per day should do the trick.  It’s probably even better if you get your fans used to a schedule, for example, starting every week with a “tips and tricks” type of material, or each day with a significant photo. Also, it seems like status updates perform better if they don’t contain more than 80 characters. Once again, quality trumps quantity, so make sure what you post is relevant to your followers.

4. Ask questions – it’s the most clear call to action you can find. Even fill in the blanks type of updates work, as long as you give people the chance to post simple answers.

5. It’s better to use full links instead of shortened ones. This tactic increases interaction, because it’s easier for users to see what the posted content is and they’ll be more likely to click on the link.

And remember – the more your content is shared, the more exposure time it gets, which increases your visibility in people’s newsfeeds. Fans mentioning your brand’s name are another great asset for your awareness level, especially since the new timeline displays these mentions in a highlighted box, making sure people know who of their friends have previously interacted with you.