Yesterday Facebook announced some changes to the way newsfeeds work, which will be implemented over the next week or so. These changes will impact the user experience and brand pages on Facebook.

Obviously the best way to understand the changes will be to play around with the new system, but in the meantime here are the two main points about the changes:

1)      Photos will be bigger. For most Facebook users sharing photos is their main activity on the site, so the new timeline will make it easier to view them

2)      Users can now narrow their newsfeeds down to focus on specific content. For example, you could ask your timeline to only show you updates from close friends, or from Pages you’ve liked, or just photos, or just music (e.g. Spotify) updates, and so on

What does this mean if you run a brand page? This is purely speculation, but I think it means you’re going to have to work harder at offering great, attention grabbing content because it’s going easier for users to ignore your page even if they’ve liked it. If users have the choice to only see updates from their friends, which is kind of why most people use Facebook in the first place, they’re going to need a really compelling reason to click on that tab which tells Facebook to show them updates from fan-pages.

If you were cynical, you could come to the conclusion that this will encourage brands to pay for more adverts on Facebook. It’s easier for people to ignore fan page status updates but paid-updates will continue to appear throughout the user’s newsfeeds, so that’s going to be a guaranteed way of reaching your audience.

It’s also worth noting that the new larger photo formatting will also apply to fan page updates and adverts, so you should consider these changes when you’re adding images to your content. You can see what the new timeline will look like and add yourself to the waiting list here.

If you’re on Twitter, there’s a good chance you use the TweetDeck app, either on your desktop or mobile device. The bad news is that Twitter has decided to discontinue the desktop and mobile versions of the TweetDeck app, and you’ll probably find that these will stop working properly over the next couple of months – the official announcement about this is on Twitter’s blog here.

The good news is that TweetDeck will continue to exist as a browser based app at: https://web.tweetdeck.com/ and this works in exactly the same way as the desktop app. Alternatively, if you use the Chrome browser, you can get a plugin that will provide the same functionality.

In theory, you could use the web version of TweetDeck through your mobile device’s browser, but that’s not going to be a happy experience for you. There are a number of alternative third party Twitter apps for all mobile platforms, but Twitter’s mobile web interface (http://mobile.twitter.com) is pretty solid so I’d recommend that.

Let’s not beat about the bush. B2B brands are boring, consumers aren’t interested in engaging with them and there’s absolutely no reason for them to have Facebook fan pages, right? Wrong – in this post I’m going to show you how some B2B companies are using Facebook in surprising ways.

Before I dive into some examples, I want to share a thought that Joe Hanley, IBM’s external comms director for EMEA, imparted to me when we were chatting about the challenges of doing PR for B2B brands. All brands, somewhere along the chain, are consumer brands.

For example, you might think you’re a B2B tech company, but if all the ATMs in a city go offline overnight because of a bug in your software and nobody can get any cash, all of a sudden you’re a consumer facing brand whether you like it or not.*

The moral of this story is that even if your day to day business does not involve dealing directly with consumers, it can pay to put the leg-work into building a channel where you can establish a degree of brand awareness and trust with a consumer audience.

Here are a few examples of B2B brands with successful Facebook pages:

GE

https://www.facebook.com/GE

GE operates in industries such as energy, aviation, healthcare, rail and financial services. Apart from the occasional light-bulb it’s highly unlikely that most consumers will ever directly buy a product from GE, but the company nevertheless has a highly engaging Facebook page with over 900,000 fans.

What GE understands well is that the science and engineering work it does is genuinely interesting to a lot of people, and the Facebook page gives ordinary consumers an inside view of that work in an engaging way. The page features quizzes, photos, graphics, facts and stats, all presented to the audience in a fun format. It works wonderfully, everything posted on the GE page gets a high level of interaction from the audience.

Maersk Line

https://www.facebook.com/MaerskLine

What could a freight shipping company have to say on Facebook? Quite a lot as it happens. The Maersk fan page provides a ton of interesting content including photography, interesting views of life at sea, infographics about global freight, and plenty more. The formula clearly works, as Maersk has attracted over 700,000 fans to its page.

If you’re interested in finding out more about what drove the company to build a Facebook presence in the first place, there’s  a great article about it here.

IBM Watson

https://www.facebook.com/ibmwatson

Since IBM sold its desktop computer business to Lenovo, there’s practically no opportunity for consumers to come into contact with the brand in their day to day lives, which means the man in the street is likely to have very little awareness of what the company does these days.

Following the success of IBM’s Watson supercomputer on the US gameshow, Jeopardy, the public was suddenly intrigued by what IBM was doing and a Facebook page provided the ideal channel to let people find out more. The page provides information about Watson, but also serves as a platform for IBM to talk more widely about the technologies it brings to bear on social issues such as healthcare and making cities more liveable.

*I should clarify, this never happened (to the best of my knowledge), but it’s a good hypothetical illustration of how B2B can very quickly become consumer.

I’ve been working in the tech industry for a long time. I started writing about this stuff in the early nineties, before the web, before mobile phones, before it was normal for people to have PCs at home.

So I’ve seen a lot of ideas come and go, but I still get impressed when things work better than I expected. My wife bought me a Kindle Paperwhite for my birthday in November – I’ve resisted ereaders so far because I just like the feel of paper books, but I admitted defeat and started using the Kindle, which I really like for a number of reasons:

• The backlight means I can read in bed without having a light on
• It’s easier to read with one hand on the train while I’m holding onto a handrail
• I can share an Amazon account with my wife so we can read each other’s books on separate Kindles
• It’s simple to get hold of new books instantly
• There’s a huge library of free classics to download
• It’s got a built in experimental browser which works with Twitter

So, fine, I was wrong, the Kindle is great. But that’s not what really impressed me. At Christmas I was given an iPad Mini – again, I’ve resisted getting a tablet because I reasoned that between my smartphone and my laptop PC I had enough devices to cover most situations. We have a Samsung Galaxy Tab which my wife uses around the house, and for letting the kids watch films or play games on long car journeys, but I didn’t really need a separate tablet for my exclusive use.

But I did find myself using the iPad more than I expected, and while I was poking around the app-store I discovered I could install a Kindle app on it which would synch with the same account I use on the Kindle device itself. It would even automatically open to the same page I was on when I last used my Kindle. Then I discovered the same app is available for my Android phone.

So now, wherever I am, I can pick up my smartphone, Kindle or iPad and continue reading my current book right from the last page I looked at. It’s a small thing, and I appreciate I’m probably a bit late to the party with this, but it’s already making an improvement to my reading habits.

These little progressions in technology almost seem to sneak by as time passes, and occasionally I’m struck by just how far things have moved on since I started writing about it all.

I’ve known about Google’s Custom Search Engine builder for a while now – it’s a handy little tool which allows you to create a mini version of Google that limits its search to a list of sites that you’ve specified. It never occurred to me that it would be useful for any kind of PR application until recently, when I needed to search for mentions of a client in UK newspapers.

The problem with doing this in a Google UK News search is that the results are noisy, because there are a lot of non-newspaper sites included in the results. Also, Google News focuses on current news, and I needed to search for mentions in older stories.

So I spent a bit of time putting together a custom search engine that includes 100+ national and local newspapers in the UK. Its main failing is that it doesn’t show the most recent news, but if you need to quickly search through archived stories, it might be useful.

Tweet? No thanks, I’d rather blow my brains out.

I’ve recently finished working on a small research project looking at how UK business leaders use social media on a personal level. My thinking behind the idea was that loads of people have published research into how brands are using social media, and that’s starting to get a bit boring, but nobody’s really looked at the people who lead those brands.

To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what we hoped to prove. Quite often with these little thought leadership projects I start with an idea that sounds like it might be intriguing and just hope that the research throws up some interest findings that we can base the report on.

So we pulled together a sample of 300 board level execs from across the FTSE 100 and looked closely at what kind of profile they had in digital media. Unfortunately the results weren’t particularly exciting:

• Less than a third of execs have a LinkedIn profile
• Just 3 percent have a Twitter profile
• Only two of the executives are bloggers
• That’s it – out of 300 execs there was no other social media activity

None of this should have been a surprise to me, but it does present a bit of a problem when you’ve committed to writing a white paper off the back of this research. The data was so sparse that it couldn’t even be used as the basis for an infographic as we’d hoped.

So what to do? We could have taken the obvious angle, shrilling that UK Executives Need to Engage With Social Media, but I wouldn’t have felt entirely comfortable with that. There are plenty of executives that have no need or desire to use social media channels – why on earth should we expect the 57 year old financial director of a mining conglomerate to be on Twitter?

The report was never meant to be about insisting, against reason, that more business people need to be using social channels. It’s not for everybody. But I think the research we carried out does serve as a kind of barometer for how many digital natives have found their way into senior positions in the FTSE. (Answer: not many.)

So, the research and white paper didn’t turn out to be the earth-shattering piece of thought leadership I was hoping for, but if you ask a lot of questions you have to expect the occasional boring answer.

"Thinking about things and having opinions" - two advanced skills you'll need to master if you want to write a blog post

As a social media specialist, the number one question I get asked is: How do I blog? I show them how WordPress works, or whatever blogging platform they’re using, explain that it’s really as simple as using a word processer, but 90% of the time they respond with: Yes, but what do I write about?

So, I’ve put together this simple guide to help PR people and other comms professionals write blog posts.

I’m going to take a leap of faith and assume that, because you’re undoubtedly a highly competent executive, you like to keep yourself informed of important developments by reading the trade media.

You might have noticed that when you read articles about events and issues in your industry that sometimes clouds of words start to form in your head. These are what experts call “opinions” or “ideas”. Try to practice thinking like this as often as possible, but be careful not to over-exert yourself.

You might like to try gentle warm-up exercises like having an opinion on something you saw on television last night. Maybe that floppy haired teenager you like got voted off the X-Factor? Maybe John Torode said something mean about Anne Widdicombe’s mango parfait on Masterchef? What kind of “thoughts” did you have when you watched the show? Did you think this was a good thing, or a bad thing, or a soul crushingly banal and facile thing?

We’re making progress, but don’t stop there! Now try to think about why these things are good or bad; how would you explain the “reasoning” behind your “opinion” to another person? What if that other person disagrees with you; how would you respond to their “argument”?

Now that you’ve practiced creating a fully formed thought in your mind, we’re ready to move to the next level.

This is the really important part; you need to find a way to get that thought out of your head and onto your computer. Social media experts use a tool called a “keyboard” to write down words that are in their minds so that the words can be shown on computer screens to other people – this takes some practice, but you can start slowly if you like.

Remember that because you are a “communications professional” people will expect the words you write to be spelled correctly and to follow the basic rules of grammar. You should attempt to write down your thoughts with style and clarity, so that it is easy for other people to read and understand what you are trying to say. If this is something you find difficult, you might consider advanced, special training, such as a GCSE English course at your local night-school.

So, now that we’ve talked about how to have an opinion about things and how to write English, you’re ready to start blogging!

If brands want to hold the attention of their audiences, a commitment to creating high value content is essential

For a recent pitch we were challenged to come up with ideas for helping the brand engage with UK attendees of an international trade show held in Germany. One of the ideas we came up with was for a “survival kit” in the form of a mobile app. The app would contain helpful information about the show itself, useful local intelligence such as places to eat/stay, public transport tips, handy German words and phrases, and so on.

The point was that by providing a genuinely useful resource which people could simply load onto their smartphones, we would be able to establish a direct communication channel with the audience. This would enable us to send them live updates, via the app, during the event and encourage them to visit the company’s stand.

The potential client’s response to this idea was “But what gives us the authority to publish content like this? Surely this is the kind of thing that the event organisers should do.”

I’m intrigued that anybody would think an organisation needs permission to create useful content. In an era when brands are looking for creative ways to catch and hold the attention of their audiences, creating high-value content is something that should be in the DNA of all businesses.

Suggesting that it’s the responsibility of another organisation to create the content your audience wants is tantamount to saying that you’re not at all interested in speaking to your market and you’d rather hand the opportunity to somebody else.