New Concepts in Facebook Marketing

What is the difference between a Tab and a Fan Page? How is the Social Graph different from Open Graph? Marketers ask us these questions all the time and with help from folks at Facebook, we put together a Glossary to help you master the newest Facebook marketing concepts. We hope you find it useful!

Glossary

Actions and Action Response “AR”
There are a variety of actions within Facebook Ads or Pages including when a user clicks “Like”, “RSVP” or selects a custom action. Another way to think of actions is to think of the traditional “Call-to-Action” like click, call or download. AR stands for “Action Response.” It is the percentage of users exposed to an ad, who also complete an action. Think “Response Rate.”

Activity Log
Activity log is a new admin control on Facebook Pages. It can be found under the “Manage” button at the top of the admin panel. View all your Page posts from the activity log, even the ones you’ve chosen to hide. Use the drop-down menu to filter your stories by type or by year. You can also star, hide, delete stories and change the date of a post so that it appears on your Page timeline with a more accurate time stamp.

Ads and Stories
Advertising options include Sponsored Stories as well as typical online advertising or “Ads” which consist of an image, ad copy and a title. Sponsored Stories are considered the evolution of “Ads” and provide additional exposure in the News Feed, which is where the majority of Facebook fans spend their time.

Applications or “apps”
In 2007, Facebook launched applications, which spawned popular games like “Farmville” and additional interactivity not found in the core Facebook application. Today, marketers are focused on expanding their Pages through tabs, which are now called “Views.” Behind the scenes on Facebook, the task of adding a new Tab or View to a Fan Page is actually adding a “Facebook App” to a Page. Your custom views will likely show up in the drop-down menu on your Facebook Fan Page.

CPC
Cost per click (CPC) advertising allows you to specify a certain amount that you are willing to pay each time a user clicks on your ad. Many CPC advertisers are more interested in driving conversions and have goals such as fan acquisition, application installation, or leading off Facebook.

CPM
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) advertising allows you to specify how much you are willing to pay for 1000 impressions (views) of your ad. Most CPM advertisers are more focused on ensuring that their ad is seen often, rather than on having people click on their ads. These advertisers are also often more focused on spreading brand awareness than accruing immediate conversions.

Fan Page
A Fan Page serves as a primary location for businesses to market themselves on Facebook and are referred to simply as “Pages.” Pages have many similarities with personal Facebook Profile Pages, but they differ in that Pages present additional administrative and marketing capabilities.

Fans and “CPF”
Fans are customers and prospects that “Like” your Facebook Fan Page.  Many marketers concerned with growing their fan base calculate their CPF or “Cost Per Fan” as a way to measure success. Studies show that more than 75% of fans are already customers or past customers of a brand, so capturing fans may not be as important as converting them to a subscriber list or “igniting” them to share information about your brand or service.

Gears
ExactTarget Gears are designed to help marketers interact with Facebook fans in highly relevant ways. Additionally, they allow marketers to glean important personal and aggregated analytics. Examples of Gears include forms, YouTube Videos, Flickr Images, and Facebook “Like.” ExactTarget SocialPages includes drag and drop “Gears” that make it easy for marketers to build out their Facebook Tabs on their Pages.

Gestures
Gestures are new apps or Actions that mirror real-life actions like “Drank, “Read,” “Watched,” or “Ate,” instead of just “Liked.”

Insights
Marketers monitor Page and Application activity using Facebook Insights. It tracks user activity within Pages and Applications and provides baseline analytics capabilities.

Milestones
Milestones are story types that mark important events like store openings and product launches. From the Activity log, you can change your post date and add relevant content for dates in the past. This ensures you are able to mark important milestones and keep content relevant and fresh.

News Feed
This is where most Facebook users spend their time and is the center of activity on Facebook. “Stories” from friends are aggregated and updated in real-time. Algorithms based on engagement and recency determine when and where a story shows up in a user’s news feed.  And now, through Premium on Facebook, advertisers can place sponsored stories in a customer’s feed.

Offers
Marketers can now create an offer or promotion and deliver it as a story on the Facebook Page. Since it is on a Facebook Page, fans can claim it easily and share it with their friends.  

Open Graph
Open Graph allows your prospects and customers to log in to any site or application using their Facebook account. Since over 800 million people already have a Facebook account, it makes it very simple for users to log in, increasing engagement and overall list growth.

Pages or “Fan Pages”
A Fan Page serves as a primary location for businesses to market themselves on Facebook. Pages have many similarities with personal Facebook Profile Pages, but they differ in that Pages present additional administrative and marketing capabilities.

People Talking about This
“People Talking About This” is a Facebook Insights metric that calculates total number of people sharing, commenting, etc. about your page over a 7-day rolling period. 

Pinning
Pinning is a new way for brands to highlight their most important or relevant content on their Facebook Page.  Marketers can now anchor the most important story to the top of your Page for up to seven days.

Premium on Facebook
One hundred billion impressions across over 500 million people read the Facebook News Feed. Premium on Facebook allows marketers to create content or ”stories” that appear in News Feeds across desktop and mobile devices. Premium stories also appear on the log-out experience (37 million logout every day) and right hand side of the users homepage.

Reach Generator
Reach Generator takes one of your posts and moves it to the top of the homepage to get extra distribution.  Over dozens of studies, Facebook has found that fans are twice as valuable as the general population. Little stories get featured every day on the Facebook home page to ensure you are able to reach more than 75% of your fans.

Social Context
Social Context is a metric that enables marketers to further optimize their ad campaigns. Facebook often talks of “igniting the graph” which means increasing the social context of your ads – or the percentage of your ad’s impressions where at least one friend liked the ad.

Social Graph
The Social Graph describes the public web and the interconnectedness of people. Marketers and developers can create better campaigns and better applications when they know who is connected to who, and can display content to friends of friends. Various APIs are available to access and leverage this information.

Social Plugins
Social plugins are extensions of the Facebook platform and enable marketers to see what their fan base is doing across the broader web. They are unique in that they DO NOT share data with the third-party sites on which they appear.

“Starring “ a Story
Starring a story can be handled through the Activity Log. This enables marketers to enlarge a story so that it gets more attention.

Stories
Facebook refers to all content – whether created by a user, or re-purposed from a web site as a “story.” Even 140 character” updates are considered “stories.” Sponsored Stories let your target audience know when their friends engage with your business, app, place, page or game. Since people are most interested in what their friends care about, Sponsored Stories help you build word-of-mouth naturally and reach far more people.

Tabs or “Views”
Tabs are the old way of navigating to different views on a Facebook Page. With the new design, your fans will see four views or “tabs” at once. As a marketer, you can rearrange these views, but Photos will always remain the first view. Additional views can be accessed from a drop-down menu. These views or tabs provide interactivity within Facebook Pages and can be created with ExactTaget SocialPages

Timeline
Timeline is the controversial new look and feel of personal profiles. It makes a Facebook profile page look more like a personal web page, and displays their profile in a timeline format so friends can see what time a story occurred.  

Trend
Trends are used across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook shows what is trending when multiple users are sharing the same link or discussing the same topic. This information is useful to marketers because it indicates what’s the most interesting or relevant content at that moment.

Views
With the new Page design, your fans will see four views or “tabs” at once. As a marketer, you can rearrange these views, but Photos will always remain the first view. Additional views can be accessed from a drop-down menu. These views provide interactivity within Facebook Pages and can be created with ExactTaget SocialPages.

This is one of the many blog posts we’ll provide to help you integrate social media with your email marketing.  If you are looking to optimize your Facebook Presence make sure to check out our latest Field Guide for Facebook Marketing for the low down!  And don't forget to  Like us on Facebook!