At its core, mediafeedia is a content management system for Facebook that allows you to manage your business pages, schedule posts and interact with your customers. But it also provides a powerful tool for creating, delivering and tracking special offers through Facebook. That means you can create a special offer landing tab for your business page, collect opt-in email addresses when people sign up for your promotion, and then seamlessly import them into MailChimp once the user confirms opt-in.

I recently read an interesting post by Andrew Blakeley, who tackled a one-week challenge to like every brand that asked him to (on Facebook of course). The experiment was borne out of the frustration that brands and marketers seem to be constantly asking us to find them on Facebook, yet they rarely offer a reason for us to do so.

In fact, Blakely found that only 10 of 46 brands across a whole spectrum of industries, both on and offline, offered a reason to like them. He goes on to say, “In 2011 it’s more or less a given that your brand can be found on Facebook, and consumers know that. What they don’t know is why they should bother.”

mediafeediaOFFERS wants to help bridge the disconnect by giving you the means to grow your Facebook audience through page likes and opt-in email. So not only will your customers see your content in their newsfeed on Facebook, you’ve also established the basis for engaging with them through email by offering a special incentive. If you’re looking for a way to kickstart your email marketing program, mediafeediaOFFERS is a great place to start.

Still not convinced? Read how Squeeze Bar in Charleston grew to over 1,000 fans and 400 new customers after implementing a mediafeediaOFFERS tab on their Facebook page. That’s an impressive 40% response rate, and it translates into measurable ROI.

To create a special offer tab on Facebook, mediafeedia charges $99 for setup and then a monthly fee, starting at $9.99 per month. But because we really like this integration and think you will too, the first 500 users to sign-up for mediafeediaOFFERS and synchronize it with MailChimp will have the setup fee waived. (You can use mediafeedia as a content management system for Facebook free of charge.)

If you’re a business with a Facebook page, mediafeediaOFFERS can help you take your marketing efforts to the next level. We’d love to hear how you’re using this integration in the comments below.

To help clear things up, we called Jeff from PageLever. His site provides really cool Facebook Analytics to all kinds of businesses, so he’s in a position to have a uniquely informed perspective.

Jeff was boarding a plane as we spoke (the life of a busy man, er, businessman), so our conversation isn’t something I can just cut and paste. However, he did provide a lot of solid insights that I want to pass along.

Open Graph

You’ve probably heard this term discussed in various blogs and videos, but what is Open Graph and how do you use it?

The answer to the first question is simpler than you might think. Open Graph is just a way to connect the friends people have with the things people like. The underlying assumption is that what your friends are a better measure of your interests than, say, your demographic.

To start using Open Graph, just add Facebook’s Like button to your webpage, videos, songs, restaurant menu, or just about anything online. For all I know, you can QR code a Like button on physical objects as well. As people “Like” the object, they strengthen their relationship to you as a company. If they comment on and share your object, they strengthen that relationship even more.

You’re not limited to the Like button, by the way. There are all kinds of social plugins you can associate with your content. Some plugins enable comments, while others focus on finding connections between friends and content. Personally, I think some of these plugins make your website look as cluttered as my facebook page, but they each encourage a different type of engagement with your fans.  Keep that in mind, because it’s very important.

Edge Rank

So great, you’ve integrated with Open Graph, and you’ve targeted the content you want your fans to engage with. Now, how do you optimize this experience? Jeff had a lot to say about this (it’s what he does), so let’s dig in.

First of all, Edge Rank is the algorithm Facebook uses to determine what content, updates, posts, and suggestions to show Facebook users on their wall. Much like Gmail’s Priority Inbox, Edge Rank looks at the salience of an item to determine placement. In other words, Facebook will only show your posts to engaged fans.

If a Facebook user isn’t a fan of your company, they won’t see your posts on their wall. If they’re a fan but not sufficiently engaged, they won’t see your posts. In fact, you can have an engaged fan who happens to be slightly more engaged with a lot of other content, and they still may not see your posts. It’s all about the rank.  Facebook is a middle-man between your content and their users. Remember, Facebook’s goal is to promote Facebook, not you.  So how does Edge Rank work?

Time Decay

The math itself is a mystery, but we know the basics. Edge Rank has three main elements. Let’s start with time decay. Over the course of time, possibly just hours, everything you share on Facebook becomes less and less visible to your fans. There’s really nothing you can do about this, so you might find that you need to post several times a day to stay relevant.

Affinity Score

The next element in Edge Rank is the Affinity Score. This measures the relationship between a particular fan and a particular content author. This is why no one can honestly tell you what your Edge Rank is. Each fan is going to have their own Affinity Score based on how many times they’ve Liked, commented, and shared your content. Oh, and remember when I told you there were different plugins? This is where it becomes important.

All actions were not created equal. Likes, comments, and sharing don’t all count the same. While we don’t have the exact equation, just keep in mind that Facebook is looking for engagement. I would imagine that comments and sharing count more the Likes and page visits, but that’s just a guess.

From what I can tell, Affinity is a one-way street. You can’t artificially increase the Affinity Score between you and your fans by visiting or commenting on their pages. On the other hand, if you can get them to revisit your page, the effect will be profound. Apparently most fans only visit your Facebook Page once.  Revisits are rare, so if you can get a fan to come back, you’re way ahead of the game.

Native Edge Score

This brings us to the final element in Edge Rank. I’m talking about the Native Edge Score. It turns out that some kinds of content are worth more than others. It’s easy to speculate that content with video and images is worth more than text-only posts, but Jeff assures me it’s technically a mystery. The way he explains it, photos and videos are just naturally more compelling than plain text. They come with an intrinsic social weight that is difficult to distinguish from any native score Facebook assigns.

That being said, you may not care about the philosophical nuances. The fact is, photos and videos should play a key element in your quest for Facebook domination. When I asked Jeff about the salience of videos, he confirmed they were rather hit-or-miss. The ones that make it big often get shared over and over, and that’s incredibly good. However, there are far more videos that were just good attempts. I guess a certain amount of luck is involved.

Focus

With all this subjective scoring, it can be easy to think Edge Rank is out of your hands. Fortunately, Jeff has tons of data on how effective brands use Facebook.  He had a few suggestions for marketers to focus on.

Visibility

The number one thing you can do is to encourage users to take action. You can do this directly by asking for likes and comments, but you can also create the kind of content that compels people to respond. This is an area where your creativity is definitely going to be rewarded.

Another cool way to increase visibility is to encourage connection between your fans. Getting your fans to Friend each other has a multiplying effect on the actions each fan takes. Think of your content like infectious laughter. People tend to laugh more in groups than when they’re all alone, so if your fans can see each other and talk to each other, that laughter is going to spread very quickly.

Growth

Fans beget fans. Starting out, you might struggle to get each new Facebook fan, but you’ve got to persevere. Jeff said the largest organic source for new fans is the list of Facebook Suggestions found on every user’s home page. The more fans you have, the more likely you are to be suggested to the friends of those fans. There’s a tipping point here, and with enough determination, you’ll make it.

Your Fan Page

Your fan page can sit around and collect dust, or it can actually do some work for you. Your fan page should have a singular focus. It needs to create engagement. A great way to do this is to segment your page into two tabs.

The first tab will be your landing page. Make this look nice, but keep the bulk of the content away. The landing page should focus on Likes. Everyone who visits should immediately see your brand and a Like button. I mentioned this before, but revisits are rare, so this might be your only chance to get that Like. Make the most of it.

Your second tab should focus on deeper engagement. This is where you put your content, your contests, your requests for feedback, and all that jazz. Get fans involved with your company on a more meaningful level than the Like. Remember, if you’re not focused on engagement, you become less relevant and less visible to your fans.

Does It Work?

The value of a Facebook page is that it lies somewhere between Twitter and email. The social network is a powerful tool for customers and companies, but the messages you can send have to be concise and focused. Email is more forgiving, more persistent, and allows for greater depth in your message than other social media outlets. Despite what Facebook says, I believe Open Graph encourages, possibly even requires, email. The two are complimentary.

The truth is, I’ve been fairly skeptical about the concept of branding and marketing solely through Facebook. Then I read an article about Chris “Drama” Ptaff and his company Young & Reckless. Drama specifically says, “We don’t do print ads, we don’t do commercials. We haven’t even considered that because our reach is so much better with social-media outlets.”

That’s a powerful endorsement, and it obviously works for them.

I asked Jeff if he thought social media was truly for the young, or if focusing all your marketing energy there was just reckless (I’m sorry, it’s been a long post). He said the effectiveness of Facebook stems from the social salience of the product and the marketing. It’s the difference between having a website that plays music and a website that lets you play music for your friends. Ultimately age isn’t the barrier. If you can add to the social experience your customers are already having, you “get it.”

There’s been a lot of good commentary on the scope and impact Facebook Messages will have on the email using community.  That’s a big community, by the way, and it happens to include my mom.  Bless her heart, she signed up for Facebook last week, and now I have to explain that email, chats, and text messages aren’t separate things anymore.  It was difficult enough explaining the difference to begin with! For our MailChimp users, I thought I’d go into a little more detail.

First and foremost, you need to know Facebook isn’t offering a robust email service.  They specialize in person-to-person communication, and it helps if both people are Facebook users.  If you take that away, the connection between email, chat, and SMS becomes less significant.  What you’re left with is a click heavy interface with an intentionally limited set of options that contains all of your communication behind a series of drop-down menus.  Whew!  So what does this mean for your subscribers?

Can they receive your campaigns?

Say an @facebook.com user signs up for your newsletter. The first thing you’ll do is send a confirmation email, but wait. If they don’t have “Everyone” set in their privacy settings, your confirmation will be dropped.  Yes, dropped.  That means it won’t show up in the inbox or the spam folder, but it won’t bounce either.  You and your subscriber are just out of luck.

This privacy setting can have a big effect on your open rates.

Okay, the privacy thing wasn’t an issue, and we got that first email through the door. At this point, they can change their privacy setting to “Friends Only,” and your campaigns will still get delivered.  Awesome! That’s great news for you and privacy geeks like myself, but I should pass on one warning.

Your emails are tracked and grouped by the reply-to address.  If you switch to a new address, you’re starting a whole new thread inside Facebook Messages.  That means new reply-to addresses are susceptible to privacy updates, so always be consistent. Otherwise, you might discover Facebook is dropping a lot of your emails.

All the emails you send are grouped into a single thread. These groups are separated by the "reply-to" address, but they appear under your "from" name.

Will they see your email?

Messages from bulk senders and other non-friends go to a special directory called “Other.”  As mentioned earlier, emails are grouped by the reply-to address with new emails appearing at the bottom.  When a subscriber clicks on your thread, they’re automatically taken to your latest email.  However, they’re looking at the plain-text version.  Clicking an “Expand” link brings up the html version, but we need to take a special look at these plain-text previews.

On the left is how your emails look after the subscriber enters your thread. They have to click the "Expand" link in order to see the HTML version on the right.

You can’t ignore the plain-text version of your campaigns.  There are certain content elements that cause Facebook Messages to cut the visible portion of your plain-text campaign.  Remember, we can’t count opens unless they expand the html version, so you’ll want to play around with this preview.   So what are the cut-off signals?

• Underscores (e.g. _HEADER_)
• Numbers separated by spaces (e.g. Sep 21, 2010 03:05 pm)
• I did a lot of testing, but that doesn’t mean I caught everything.  Please comment if you find something new!

By the way, these cut-off signals also apply to text-only campaigns.  Instead of an “Expand” link, there is a “Show Hidden Text” link that appears in a completely different spot on the preview.  Odd? Regardless, if you care about presentation, this is an important feature to keep in mind.

This side-by-side comparison shows the effect a date can have on the email preview. On the left, the date read "Jun 13, 2011 08:00 am." On the right, I removed the spaces to make it "Jun 12,201108:00 am."

Deliverability

Facebook’s policies toward bulk email senders can be summed up very simply: “Facebook only accepts bulk mail from highly reputable sources and does not offer support for any issues encountered.“  This may sound harsh, but it isn’t uncommon.  It means the best thing we can do to ensure delivery is to maintain our IP reputation.  That’s something we already do, and it’s why you’ll hear us talk again and again about permission based lists, double opt-in confirmation, and engagement.

The truth is, no one knows if Facebook Messages has a future or not.  Right now, MailChimp users don’t seem to have noticed.  We send 1.5 billion emails a month and see less than 10 thousand @facebook.com addresses in that time.  Of course, things could change at any moment.  Like a giant hovering its foot over your house, you really shouldn’t ignore Facebook.

Here’s what the old archive bar looked like:

What is this Facebook Send Button?

So what’s this Facebook Send button (“Share” button on the campaign archive page) and why would you want to use it? When you click the Like button, it posts content to your Facebook wall and all of your friends can see it in their newsfeeds. With the Send/Share button, you can share your email campaign with a specific Facebook group, just a few friends, or even just one person. Think of the Send/Share button as a more targeted, more intimate way of sharing content.

When you share something via the Send/Share button, the message will include a link to the archived version of your email campaign, along with the title (your subject line), image, and short description of the link.

Facebook Send Merge Tag

You can also add the Send button to your campaign, just as you would the Like button. The merge tag to use is

* |FACEBOOK:SEND| * (without the extra spaces)

Here’s how it’ll appear in your campaign:

Related Links:

• Can my recipients Like specific links or images in my campaign?
• Using the RSSITEM:SHARE merge tag to allow your subscribers to share a specific link from your RSS-to-email campaign
• v5.9 Updates and the return of Social Pro

If you recall, in MailChimp v5.3 we added the ability to include Facebook comments in your MailChimp campaign so that you can keep the conversation going with your subscribers after you hit the send button.

And when your subscribers comment on your email, they have the option to post a link to their comment to their wall– a great way to help socially spread the word about your campaign.

For now it looks like the updated commenting system is only available on Facebook and not third-party sites, but I’d expect that to change sometime in the future. As is generally the case with Facebook, there isn’t a timetable as to when it might happen. Rest assured though that the MailChimp/Facebook comments integration will be upgraded as to reflect these improvements as soon as they’re available.

Subscribers can comment on your MailChimp campaigns

When you click the “reply” link, we’ll take you to the campaign archive page…

and the comments dialog box will open automatically:

Replying to comment on the archive page

At the very top, you’ll see that we’ve added the actual comment you’re replying to.

FACEBOOK:LIKE:URL - Imagine you’re sending an email about your ski shop’s end of summer sale. You can now manually code a like button for each individual item that you’re advertising and allow people to Like those overalls or ski goggles specifically.

This will also work if you want to allow someone to Like (become a Fan of) your business page. URL here should be the link (including http://) to the item/article/page being Liked.

If you want to use this same logic for the individual articles in an RSS campaign, you can do that too. Just use RSSITEM:LIKE instead. More on that below.

TWITTER:TWEET – In early August Twitter created a Tweet Button to make sharing content around the web one-click simple. We’ve added the button to the top of all our blog posts, and now you can add it to your emails with this simple merge tag. Think of TWITTER:TWEET as a Tweet This button for your entire email campaign.

As an aside, it’s important to note that Twitter will turn your campaign-archive.com link into one that’s shortened with t.co when share via this button.

GOOGLE:BUZZ – Similar to Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s Tweet Button, we wanted to give people the option of sharing links via Google Buzz. Adding the GOOGLE:BUZZ merge tag will allow your readers to easily share your campaign archive link via Buzz.

RSS Campaigns

RSSITEM:LIKE – This merge tag allows you to create a Facebook Like button for each item in your RSS campaign, and the Like will link specifically to an individual item or article.

RSSITEM:BUZZ – Create a Google Buzz share button for each item in your RSS campaign that will allow the individual article to be shared directly to Google Buzz.

RSSITEM:TWITTER – Create a Tweet button for each individual item in your RSS campaign that will allow the individual article to be easily shared via Twitter.

Twitter

|TWITTER:TWEET:[$url=http://blog.mailchimp.com,$text=i heart mailchimp]| - Use this syntax to set the both the URL you want your tweet to link to, as well as the text of the tweet, as you want it to appear on Twitter.

This will only work at the campaign level, so not for individual items.

Facebook

FACEBOOK:COMMENTS – allows you to add Facebook comments to your email. Read all about it here.

FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL – will return a URL to your Profile on Facebook so that you can build a link to it. For example:

< a href=”*| FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL |*”>my profile< /a> (extra spaces added here so it’ll appear properly in the RSS-to-email version of our blog updates)

FACEBOOK:PROFILEURL:pagename – will return a URL to your Fan Page on Facebook so that you can build a link to it. You can either use the pagename (in bold)– in our case, http://facebook.com/mailchimp– or you can use the ID# if you haven’t set a custom URL for your page. Still confused? Here’s some additional information from our Knowledge Base.

Google Buzz

|GOOGLE:BUZZ:[$url=http://blog.mailchimp.com,$text=i heart mailchimp]| - Use this syntax to set the both the URL you want your post to link to, as well as the text of the post, as you want it to appear on Google Buzz.

Again, this will only work at the full campaign level, so it’s not available for individual items within your email.

Video

Since it doesn’t work to put video inside of your HTML emails, we’ve created video merge tags. They’ll automagically generate a screenshot of your video that links over to the location where the video is hosted online.

With the max_width attribute, you can now set how wide you want the screenshot to be and we’ll scale things appropriately. (Remember, you want to keep your email templates under 600px wide because of email client limitations and preview panes.) So for example, if you want to link to a bunch of videos in the right hand column of your email, you’d use YOUTUBE:xxxx:120. That’ll make sure the video screenshots are only 120px wide and won’t break your template. Video merge tags are currently available for YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv and Vzaar.

YOUTUBE:id:max_width

VIMEO:id:max_width

BLIPTV:id:max_width

VZAAR:id:max_width

The video ID consists of letters and numbers, dependent on the service provider. It is present in the URL of the site, found at the top of the browser window. Occasionally, the video ID will be presented within a long URL. If this is the case, the video ID ends before a question mark, as seen in the YouTube and Blip.tv examples. To use the merge tags, simply copy the video ID into the tag.

For example, whenever I send our MailChimp newsletters, I usually get a couple dozen replies and I reply back to every single one of them. Sometimes, the conversation gets really interesting and it’s a shame that all our subscribers can’t join in.

So in our upcoming v5.3 upgrade, we’re adding Facebook Comments functionality to MailChimp campaigns. This way, you can keep the conversation going with your subscribers after you’ve hit the send button.

Here’s how it works…

Let’s say you’re an artist (the awesome Chet Phillips, to be exact). You could sign in to MailChimp and use our AutoConnect template for Etsy, to automagically¹ pull in your latest work.

In your campaign setup screen, make sure you check “allow comments:”

Then, just insert our new Facebook Comments merge tag into your campaign like this:

When your subscribers get your newsletter, it looks like this…

And when they click the comments button, we take them to your campaign archive page with the Facebook comments window open:

From here, your subscribers can log in to Facebook and comment.

What’s nice is the checkbox option to post their comment to their Facebook profile:

which is an excellent way for them to spread the word about your newsletter to the friends in their network.

They can also see comments from other subscribers within this window, and if they want, comment to each other:

As people comment on your newsletter, you’ll receive email notifications from MailChimp.

Comment Stats

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could track all those comments inside MailChimp? Boosh. Open up your campaign’s social stats in MailChimp, scroll down to the Facebook stats section, and you’ll see all comments about your campaign:

The nerds in the lab also wanted to tinker with sentiment analysis, so you’ll see little frowny or smiley icons next to each comment, plus the overall sentiment.  Note that if you don’t like a comment, you can delete it from this screen, and your other subscribers won’t see it on your campaign archive.

If you want, you can try sending a campaign with the comments merge tag only to your recipients who are on Facebook. Just use our Social Pro add-on like this:

Or, you could create a small “round table” of your highly engaged customers. Just build a segment using our influence, engagement, and social criteria:

Turn your newsletters into conversation starters

If you’ve ever ended your newsletters with a request for feedback, like “Let me know what you think” or “what do you guys recommend for…” you’ll love this feature. Your subscribers can share their expertise and opinion with the rest of your community, instead of just your inbox. It’s also a great way to answer common questions. How many times have you sent an email to people, and had to reply back with the same answer over and over to a bunch of recipients? I’ve received great questions from customers, and knew that others on my list would benefit from the answer too. By adding Facebook comments to your emails, hitting the “send” button doesn’t mean the discussion is over. For your community, it’s just beginning.

Facebook comments, along with MailChimp Faces, are coming to MailChimp when we launch v5.3 in just a few days.

Related:

• Add a MailChimp newsletter signup form to your Facebook page
• MailChimp brings the Facebook “Like” button to email marketing
• MailChimp Launches Social Pro addon

In days gone by, Liking something on Facebook was a big commitment because it meant you were becoming a Fan of a particular person or product. Sharing was less of a pledge of allegiance because it enabled you to endorse content without becoming a Fan. In recent months though, that paradigm has flipped.

Facebook unveiled a number of significant alterations to their platform at the f8 conference in April 2010. Some of the most notable announcements were the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins. With these two changes, Facebook decreased the barriers to entry for integrating social functionality with your site or email campaigns, essentially making it a plug-and-play process.

So by making the Like button ubiquitous across the web, Liking something has shifted from being a huge commitment, to being more of a hat tip. It’s a casual way to show your interest in a site, article, brand or email campaign.

On the other hand, Sharing requires both a greater time commitment and a greater reputation commitment. Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy for Edison Reserach, describes Sharing as an act of curation.

Facebook’s “Share” feature allows active users to curate media – in fact, the sharing interface practically compels it by presenting sharers with that big empty box in which they not only post the “what” – the compelling link, the funny video – but the “why.” Facebook’s sharing feature allows curators to add value to what they share, and in fact create content of their own around shared items.

I suspect that there is a nascent dichotomy emerging here, between the type of Facebook user who chooses to Like content, versus the user who Shares it. By including both options (when we can remember to actually insert the tags) in our newsletter, we’re giving different types of users the opportunity to interact with our content in the way they find the most personally compelling. There are some people who will think that our content is worth sharing with their network of friends, so they share. There are others who wouldn’t necessarily share something with their friends (because their friends aren’t email designers, or email marketers), but they want to give props. So they press Like. It just so happens that when they Like something it shows up in their news feed on Facebook, and then curious friends can go see what it’s all about.

We’re happy to report that early last week we pushed a change to the Facebook app that will automatically scale your MailChimp signup form to fit the new custom tab dimensions. There’s no need to reinstall the app or alter your signup form from within MailChimp so no worries, mates!