Starting today, real-time insights will include Likes, People Talking About This, and all post metrics. These insights will be updated every 5 to 10 minutes, which is a significant improvement over the previous lagging insights many brands lamented.

Previously, many people had noticed insights delayed an average of 48 hours, spurring the creation of http://whyisfacebookinsightsnotworking.com/ by PageLever co-founders Jeff Widman and David Turner. Though real-time insights’ imminent release was announced in February, it’s now a reality.

Real-time data empowers brands to track content on a minute-by-minute basis. Why can that be powerful? Here are a few reasons we can think of:

1. The feedback loop is finally in real-time. These enhanced metrics will allow brands to be more nimble, change direction if needed, and ride organic waves of popularity before they end.
2. By tracking PTAT, brands can see what content has virality and shareability and replicate it. This will help brands more fully understand the oft-confused new metric, and in doing so, find more ways to optimize content.
3. The frame of reference for campaigns has just become much narrower. Rather than declaring “We received 290 Likes in 1 day”, marketers can now pinpoint the exact growth and decline of posts by the minute. That impressive campaign is even more so if 1 day shrinks to 13 hours!

We’ll go into more detail about what this means, how you can measure your impact in real-time, and more during next Tuesday’s Facebook Insights 201 webinar with Jeff Widman. Join us.

By now, you’ve probably heard that Facebook recently spent $1 billion to acquire the mobile photo-sharing application, Instagram. *Yawn* That’s old news.

What you probably haven’t heard is that your posts on Facebook only reach between 3% to 7.5% of your fans, according to PageLever. By understanding EdgeRank in a bit more detail, that number represents a billion reasons for you and your brand to pay attention to Instagram.

What is EdgeRank?

EdgeRank is the algorithmic ranking system Facebook uses to determine what posts will show in your fans news feed. From a brand perspective, you want your posts to be “news” so you can get more views for your content to ultimately feed that marketing funnel.

The Magnitude of Photo Sharing

What does all of this have to do with Instagram? Well, for starters, Facebook users post 250 million photos. Every. Single. Day. Concurrently, Instagram just surpassed one billion photos uploaded (nice timing, eh?).

More importantly, Facebook reports that over 425 million users access the social network from a mobile device every month and the number is expected to grow as smartphones continue to proliferate around the world.

Where Facebook is concerned (and why you should care as well), Instagram brings an active, mobile-centric base of 40 million photo-sharers. With Instagram only recently launching to the Android platform, a market that grew by over 300 million devices in 2011, the number of users, and photos, is likely to swell.

Why should your brand care?

Photos are a visceral and engaging form of content that are easy to capture and share. On a mobile device with a small screen, users are naturally scanning their feed for quick bites of interesting news or attention grabbing… photos.

As this all pertains to EdgeRank, there are a few things that are valuable to know from a brand’s perspective:

• Not all content is ranked equally: photos and videos are given greater importance
• Popular Facebook Pages have most of their engagement in the newsfeed
• Posting consistently and frequently helps
• Mobile users are active, posting ⅓ of all the content on Facebook

Would you like to learn more about how content consumption and timing play a role in your Facebook marketing? Join us this Thursday as we host Jeff Widman from PageLever for a free webinar: Facebook Insights 201.

Wide-eyed and eager, 2012 graduates will soon be making their way out into the real world. These socially savvy digital natives have got a pep in their step, a drive to learn and loyalty to boot. Oh, and they are using online paths to connect to you, prospective future employer!

A new study by Experience and Achievers surveyed nearly 8,000 soon-to-be graduates. The students’ responses suggest that they are loyal, looking for steady salaries, and looking in all the right places. Among the highlights are:

• 47.1% want to be with their company for 5-10+ years
• 54% of the respondents said that the most important qualifier is career advancement opportunities
• 51% (tied for the second most important) said they are looking for interesting, challenging work
• 40% of students are expecting a salary between $50,000-$74,999

As a business, it’s increasingly important to be online for your recruiting purposes as nearly half of the students plan on using social media to aid in the job search, according to Achievers.

At Argyle, we are a rapidly growing company and have made many new hires in the past year. Case in point, I learned of my current job with Argyle through Twitter. Just like the 87.6% of upcoming graduates plan to do, I reached out and applied directly.

So, how can you use social media as a recruiting tool?

1. Showcase your organization’s personality and company values: Be true to yourselves first and foremost, but have a little fun by sharing interesting or funny articles and give an inside look at your culture on Pinterest. Having values isn’t enough; it’s how you live them daily and how you share them with the world that matters.
2. Social media is social: Encourage prospective employees to reach out and then find ways to continue the conversation. Ensure you have the workflow and communication plans in place to handle incoming interest.
3. Be clear. Be direct: Be transparent and make it known you are recruiting!

How do you use social media in the recruiting process? Have you hired anyone you have met through social media?

As a local plug, we are thrilled to present alongside Bronto, Shoeboxed and others at The Tech Jobs under the Big Top event in Durham, coming up on April, 26th. Hope to see you there!

Full Infographic by Achievers Inc and Experience.com:

Facebook brand pages will now look more like…personal pages. We’ve already gone through the process of migrating Argyle’s brand page to the new timeline layout, and the process and results were nearly identical to when we had migrated our personal pages last year.

The biggest change for marketers is this: you are no longer allowed to use Facebook as Yet Another Ad Network. You have to be social. What does that mean?

• Marketers used to set a default tab, and then plaster a full-page promotion across it. This isn’t social media marketing–this is banner advertising. Facebook says no.
• Marketers used to “ask for the Like” everywhere they possibly could. Real people don’t do this, and it has now been disallowed in primary content areas.
• Marketers used to only interact in public, in ways that encourage virality. Real people also exchange private messages, pure 1:1 communications. Facebook now enables this.

These changes are extremely disruptive to a certain type of Facebook marketing. If your existing strategy relies heavily on custom tabs and opt-in content, you’re going to need to rethink it.

At Argyle, we encourage social media marketers to develop a personality around their brands. A good social strategy starts off with the question “If your brand were a person, who would it be?” Knowing your brand’s personality allows you to convey it succinctly and compellingly on social networks, where authenticity and personality are the best ways to connect to your audience.

These new Facebook changes force marketers to treat their brands like personalities, and to treat Facebook like a social platform, not just another ad network. We think this is great news for brands and for their customers. In fact, some top brands have already made the switch and are illustrating how powerful the new tools are.

Will the migration process be bumpy? Undoubtedly. Facebook isn’t exactly known for being brand-friendly when it makes changes like this. Many of these new features aren’t yet available in an API, so marketers won’t be able to rely on their management tool of choice for the moment. Hopefully that will change in the near future.

Everyone agrees — social commerce is the next big ecommerce revolution. But it’s certainly not happening overnight. Check out our infographic, below, to see how retailers and customers are adapting to the changing landscape. As always, feel free to embed on your own site. :)

How do you think this might change in the next six months? Let us know in the comments.