The world is certainly buzzing these days with news of the Facebook IPO announcement. With over 850 million monthly active users, Facebook has clearly established itself as a gathering place for your customers. A lot of your fans and followers are engaging with you on Facebook in meaningful ways. It should be no surprise, then, that over 7.5% of topics created in Get Satisfaction are done so via our Facebook application. Given this volume, we want to make sure that we continue to offer the best experience for you and your customers to engage in productive conversations in Facebook.
After a lot of hard work and amazing collaboration with our partners over at Involver, we’re very excited to announce several improvements to our Facebook application that are available as of today. These product updates include improved support for different community use cases, the addition of rich analytics, better wall-to-topic integration, and better conversation and recognition tools. See below for the full run-down.
Every community has a different objective.
We’re always amazed at the variety of businesses that use Get Satisfaction to engage their customers. Each one really does have something unique they’re trying to achieve with their community. Given that variety, we’ve added several features that should help you address your customer base in the way that you most need to.
Localized communities in 8 languages: Last fall, we announced support for multiple languages for our web communities. We’re happy to extend that product offering into our Facebook application as well. When you purchase a community for a particular language (e.g. Portuguese), the Facebook application tied to that community will automatically appear in your selected language.
Multi-product communities: Many Get Satisfaction communities are used to support multiple products. In fact, close to 10% of our communities have more than one product configured. For these communities, it’s important that new topics get tagged with the products they’re for so that you can route those topics to the people in your company that are most capable of helping resolve it. You now have the option in your Facebook application to 
prompt users to select a product as they are posting their topic. To use this new capability, you need to click the “Enable issue Submission by Product” checkbox in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section. Your customers will then see a list of products that they can select from when posting new topics.
Product ideation, support, issue reporting, and advocacy communities: Several companies use their Get Satisfaction communities for specific use cases such as product ideation or advocacy. In your Get Satisfaction Facebook experience, you’ve already been able to focus your customers’ on that particular use case by enabling or disabling topic types. For instance, if you wanted to focus your customers on product ideation, you might only show the “Ideas” tab. But often, communities want to focus their customers on one use case while also supporting others. For instance, they want customers primarily to focus on product ideation, 
but also allow them to offer praise as well. We’ve added the ability for you to do this by allowing you to select a default topic type for both the topic compose box and the topic browse lists. To use this feature, you’ll need to specify the “Default New Topic Tab” and “Default Recent Topics Tab” options in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section. When one of your customers first lands on your Get Satisfaction Facebook app, these topic types will be displayed by default.
Data. Data. Data.
It’s tough to manage what you’re not measuring. And with so much to manage, social media managers are notorious for being hungry for data! Historically, we haven’t offered much (if any) analytics and reporting around the actions users were taking in your Get Satisfaction Facebook app. With this release, we’re now capturing detailed action reporting in Google Analytics with drill-down capability to topic and search level data. This allows you to get some key insights into how many users are engaging you on your Get Satisfaction Facebook app, what questions they’re asking, and how much they’re engaging with other users. To take advantage of this feature, you’ll need to specify your Google Analytics tracking code in the Get Satisfaction Facebook app settings section.
Tracking all user actions: All of the key actions a user takes in your Facebook app are now tracked using Google Analytics. These include searches from the compose box, topic views from intercept search, topic posts, me-too’s, and reply posts among several others. These are all tracked using Google Analytics event tracking, so you can find them under the event tracking section of your Google Analytics dashboard. To enable this, you’ll need to enter your Google Analytics tracking code in the settings of your Get Satisfaction Facebook app.
Drill-down to details: In addition to tracking this rich level of detail with events, we also allow you to drill down into each of these events for additional detail. For instance, you’re now able to drill-down to view the actual search queries that people put in when composing new topics. Or, you can see which topic types they have been browsing through. Or, you can even see the individual topics that users are viewing. It’s an extremely rich data set, so there’s a lot to take action on!
Your customers may start on the Wall, but don’t let the conversation end there.
The average durability (or half-life) of a Facebook fan page wall post is measured in hours. For one of our communities, for example, we found it to be around roughly 7 hours. In other words, a post made on your fan page wall (by you or your customers) is only viewed and active for a matter of hours. By contrast, the durability of a topic posted in your Get Satisfaction community is measured in months or even years. For the same community just mentioned, we found activity on the topic to continue to be on the rise over 11 months later. What does that mean for you?
Basically, that means that you should be very careful in how you invest your time and resources in managing your fan page wall. When you do invest that time, you should try to ensure you’re getting the maximum leverage out of it. Rather than just respond to every wall post with a comment, you should seek out ways to extend the durability of those interactions. One way to do this is to have those interactions occur in your Get Satisfaction community as a topic rather than on your wall as Facebook comments.
Last summer, we released a feature with our partners at Involver that allowed you to create a community topic from a wall post and then automatically direct the user to that topic via a comment on the post. This was a great initial feature offering that we’ve now made even better with this new release. We now direct your users directly into your Get Satisfaction Facebook app to continue the discussion rather than linking them out to the web version of your community. When your users click on the link, they’re kept in the context of Facebook, which is critical because that’s where they first engaged you. Your customers now stay in the context of your fan page, but you get the benefit of highly durable conversations.
Advance the conversation.
The conversations between you and your customers (and amongst your customers) is at the core of every community. With this release, we’ve added several tools to help continue advancing those conversations.
Reply & comment threading: In our web community experience, users are able to comment on other users’ replies to a topic. These comments are nested underneath replies in chronological order and it’s quite easy to follow the thread of conversation. To retain the integrity of these conversations, we’ve brought this same capability to our Facebook app. Users will now be able to view the comments underneath replies. We’ve also added the ability for users in Facebook to comment on replies.
Reply starring: Similar to reply and comment threading, our web experience also allows users to recognize the contribution of others in the community by letting them star replies. With this release, users will now be able to recognize a reply as a “Good Reply” and can view how many other people have done so as well. Similar to our web experience, when a reply has been recognized by more than 3 users as a “Good Reply”, it’s highlighted at the top of the stream as one of the best responses.
Champion badging: Our Facebook app has recognized employee status for quite some time with an “Employee” badge that appeared next to a person’s name on a topic or reply. We’ve added a similar badging label in Facebook for champions that post topics or replies in your community. You’ll now see the label “Champion” next to a champion user’s topics and replies.
Let us know what you think!
As always, we’re very interested to hear what you think. Feel free to let us know in our community on the web or (even better) in our Facebook app on our fan page!
Facebook gives you the ability to customize the display name of all of your apps, including Get Satisfaction’s. When you install your Get Satisfaction Facebook app you’ll be able to choose from five different defaults, including Support, Discussion, Suggestions, Feedback, and Q&A. But you have the option to choose something that’s even more reflective of the types of interactions and engagement you want from your customers — and that’s reflective of your brand. For example, Pampers customized their app name to be “Ask Pampers” and Claro Nicaragua customized theirs to be “Consultas” (as they’re using the Spanish version of the app). You’ll have to be concise though as the app’s name will get truncated if it’s too long. So get creative and test out a few different options.
As an example, Walmart did a great job with customizing their app’s image with a “What’s on your mind?” prompt. We did something similar on our own Timeline page. The Draw Something community kept things in the true spirit of their game by drawing a simple question mark for their Get Satisfaction app. Get creative and let your customers know how and where to engage you!
Steven Pal