ethnicomm – the blog part I

Facebook is working on facial recognition. Initially, they will recognize that a face exists in a photo and provide the opportunity to identify the face and tag the person simply by typing in the name. No more having to make sure your mouse clicks on the centre of the face first – Facebook will automatically create a box around what it believes is the face. With over 100 million photos uploaded every day, I guess Facebook realized that they must make tagging faster and easier.

What does this mean for businesses? Uploading pictures of your staff and customers (with permission of course) will help spread your Fan Page across their networks. Since you’re already using social media, it is wise to strategically leverage the marketing tools that are available.

Almost every Facebook user has uploaded at least one photo. I think every Facebook fan page should have at least one photo – even if it is just of yourself!

Ever wonder how much your Facebook Fan Page is worth or what you could do to make it more engaging and effective? I just tried out vitrue’s beta Social Page Evaluator service. I’m not sure what beta signifies other than the fact that the service, terms or aesthetics may dramatically change? Google Alerts launched in 2003 and still shows beta.

The Social Page Evaluator told me that my Facebook Fan Page is currently worth $245 with a potential value of $1836. The site suggests three contributing factors to my page’s current value and “potential applicable suggestions”: Posting Frequency, Post Type and Short URL. I was not impressed by the suggestion they provided for Posting Frequency. Apparently I am either posting too often or not often enough. This is the kind of suggestions I’d expect from a politician – wishy washy, non committal…but having the appearance of taking a stand! My Post Type is good. I am making effective use of multimedia and dynamic wall posts but could do better by using wall apps – this would allow me to utilize Facebook’s “share” function and hopefully get friends of friends to become fans. The description under the Short URL section is that URLs should be short and easy to type so that it increase the chance that a visitor will click on them. I did not understand what they meant here – should I not use my bit.ly account so I can track people’s behaviour?

Three additional points could be seen by clicking on the “Other Best Practices” button. These were really good tips for the average fan page creator or owner.

1. Build an audience – drive traffic through cross-promoting on other associated official fan pages.
2. Optimize your fan page by completely filling out the profile and blurb box information.
3. Engage the fan by posting 2-3 times per day; solicit comments and respond in a timely fashion. They suggest using bit.ly as your branded URL shortener….woohoo that’s what I use!

Additional features on the site allow you to compare your fan page value with other brands; see what impact increasing your posting frequency or level of engagement will have on your page value (called fan-tasize); and track your page value over time. These features will probably be more useful once some history is collected on my fan page as well as other fan pages.

Let me know what your fan page is worth and if you feel the Social Page Evaluator is a useful tool.