Optimising your web pages for being shared on facebook

Sharing links on Facebook is a growth activity. Is your website optimised for it?

Have you noticed when you share a link on Facebook, you can choose a thumbnail image. Facebook get the list of images by scanning the URL you want to share for any images that are placed on the page. Sometimes that works well, other times it doesn’t pick the image you want.

How would you like to be able to choose what image is selected as the thumbnail for your page when it’s shared?

Facebook’s page of advice on how to best format your page for sharing on their site

http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php – recommends putting in the head are of the html document something like the following:

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Missing the point about Pepsi’s Before you Score App?

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Lots of vitriol being poured out about Pepsico’s AMP UP Before You Score branded app (see Twitter search results to the left) and this Mashable piece.

Most of the opinion (most of which is just people retweeting) is overwhelmingly negative, but then how many people of these people have actually tried it out?

I did, and this app has its tongue placed very firmly in its cheek. Would a branded app supporting a fairly bland energy drink have got this much coverage or attention if it didn’t pose as misogynistic?

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Flipper invites you to dinner

It’s Friday, time for a light-hearted post with this example of cultural differences. This is a brand of ‘fish with paprika in oil’ I saw in a Tesco supermarket in Slovakia. Something about it seemed not quite right. When you think about though, dolphins eat fish, they’re intelligent friendly creatures, why wouldn’t they offer to share some with you?

Maybe it’s the fixation the West has with dolphin friendly tuna (with good reason) that means this would be a branding error in some countries, but passes without notice in others. As a land-locked country Slovakia in general doesn’t pay much attention to issues like marine conservation. If the manufacturers tried exporting this product to the UK they might see some resistance though.

Is paid search the height of responsibility?

In response to The Irresponsible Marketer

Having just read Mitch Joel’s latest post, I was going to post this as a comment, then when I got to writing it and it grew to longer than would be polite, or even that readable, as a comment.

To paraphrase, Mitch is saying that marketers should put as much as they can into search marketing, spending “whatever is left over for your more general branding campaigns”. Now I’m sure that Mitch is trying to seed a discussion rather than truly believing that we should give up on all other kinds of marketing efforts to concentrate on the low-hanging fruit and maximising our Adwords spend and hiring SEO experts..

What about cumulative effects?

I think this is a perfect case for ‘with, not instead of’, to quote Mitch again. Paid search, and to almost the same extent, well done SEO/content marketing efforts are eminently trackable. But what drove that search? Reading this post I immediately thought of David Ogilvy’s belief that a consumer needs to see a message multiple times before they act on it (though as he was head of an ad agency, one might question the number of exposures required). Read the rest of this entry »

Advertising Smarts

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Window writing, sometimes it’s right but the Jury’s out on this one

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Earlier this month the Jury’s Inns hotel group opened their first property in Prague. It’s in a busy spot, opposite a metro interchange station, just on the border of Prague 1, the centre of the city.

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