Unpuzzle

How social media got hundreds to the mogo zoo.

James Ethell — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 07:06:38 +0000

Unpuzzle Marketing Consultants recently helped Batemans Bay Play group with their National Playgroup Day event held at the Mogo Zoo by supporting and promoting the event to the local Batemans Bay and Eurobodalla community. Having won a grant from Playgroup NSW, Batemans Bay Playgroup wanted to host an event that would promote Playgroups in the region and bring families within the community closer together.

With an extremely limited budget and little to no resources to promote the event, we decided the best way to get people to come along was to use social media and digital marketing to spread the word and build the event. Developing a brand to promote the day was the first step as we knew that if we wanted the community to take the event seriously, they needed to be able to relate to the brand quickly.

‘A Day at the Zoo’ was born and marketing support materials were quickly developed. Knowing who was interested was essential to the organisers, so Unpuzzle developed a data capture page that enabled families to register to the event. We quickly started promoting the event through local social media channels, local newspapers, local radio and within hours of the launch, hundreds of people had registered to attend the day which guided the expectations of our client.

A Day at the Zoo was held on the 11th of March and expectations were exceeded for this inaugural event as over a thousand people registered to attend. Social media quickly and cost effectively built the audience for the event and digital channels such as electronic mail and websites enabled the organisers to communicate key information along the way.

Using social media in your business is essential in today’s digital environment. If you don’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter Account or Instagram followers then you could be missing out on communicating to potential and existing customers. Congratulations to Mogo Zoo, Playgroup Batemans Bay and all the organisers for bringing the community together for what was an amazing event. See you all next year.

If your business needs help building a social media presence, contact one of our Consultants today to find out how Unpuzzle can help your business reach thousand of new customers through social media.

Facebook Image and Design Sizes

James Ethell — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 23:26:45 +0000

Facebook Photos Size Guide / 2015

Ever tried using photos or graphics on your Facebook page? It can be frustrating. So here’s an up-to-date, unofficial guide to what’s what, what’s where, and how big.

In its early days, Facebook was all about text and links. But as it has grown up, images have become more and more important. They’re now more important for design and identity on the user interface, like your profile picture or cover photo. And it’s a great way to share photos in galleries and on the timeline. Facebook photos are now a huge part of the site’s appeal.

Working out what image sizes to use on Facebook isn’t as easy as it could be and involves some wrangling to get the result you want. Each type of image on a page, profile, and timeline has its own size and quirks. And Facebook never has been very good about making its help pages easy to find.

Making things even more fun is that Facebook changes things from time to time. Sometimes it’s a small, incremental tweak. Sometimes it’s an entire overhaul (such as when timelines were introduced and again when they were changed from two columns to one column). So it’s always a bit of a moving target. And there always seems to be a new system just around the corner.

So here’s my updated 2015 version of the unofficial guide for the sizes of Facebook photos on the various parts of the site.

Facebook’s New Layout (mid-2014)

In March 2014, Facebook announced a new layout for the timeline of business pages. As of June, most pages are being switched over. I’ve updated the information below to reflect the new layout.

The new layout brings pages in line with personal profiles. There’s a single column at the right with updates. The narrower column at left is for admin features and static information.

The new layout looks like this:

Early 2015 Tweaks

In early 2015, Facebook made a few minor tweaks to the display of links and photos on the timeline. The main change was related to a slight enlargement of the left column and corresponding reduction in the right column. So the functional image box was reduced from 504px down to 470px. Most of the other behaviors remained the same.

Facebook Cover Photo Size

The Facebook Cover Photo is the large panoramic image space at the top of the timeline.

It’s displayed at 851px wide by 315px high, like this:

The image you upload must be at least 399px wide–one that’s at least 720px wide will work best. You can upload a photo already cropped and re-sized to precisely those sizes (here’s how if you’re using Lightroom). Or you can upload a larger image, in which case you’ll be given a chance to move the image to choose the crop you’d like displayed.

You can only designate one photo as your Cover Photo. Panoramas are ideal. Simple crops also work.

And there’s nothing stopping you from assembling a collage in your imaging software, saving it as a single image file, and uploading that. Here’s an example using TurboCollage (see Creating a Photo Collage with TurboCollage for step by step instructions).

And here’s an example using Lightroom (see How to Make a Facebook Cover Photo Collage with Lightroom for step by step instructions).

If you’ve just set up a new Facebook profile or page and don’t yet have a cover photo, just click on the “Add Cover Photo” button at the top of the page where the Cover Photo will go. You’ll then get this warning popup:

Once you’ve added your photo, you can change it easily. When you’re logged in to your account and on the Timeline view, if you hover the mouse over the Cover Photo you should get a “Change Cover” button at the bottom right of the Cover Photo. Click on that and you’ll get the menu item to choose where photo comes from. You can choose from existing photos you’ve uploaded to Facebook or upload a new one. And if you decide you want to reposition or remove the photo, you can use the same menu. It looks a little something like this:

Facebook offers this advice: “To get the fastest load times for your Page, upload an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes. For images with your logo or text-based content, you may get a higher quality result by using a PNG file.”

For more information on the latter point–about using text, logos, or watermarks on images, I have a separate post on that which goes into more detail.

I also have a separate post with more detail on Facebook Cover Photo Size.

Facebook Cover Photo Gradient

In the new layout, cover photos now have a narrow gray semi-transparent gradient running along the bottom. This is something personal profiles have had for a while, but it’s now also on cover photos on business pages.

It’s presumably there because the page name, page type, and admin boxes now overlay the bottom of the cover photo (they used to be below the cover photo). Because the text is always in white, the gradient makes the text legible even against a white cover photo.

I can’t say I’m a fan, but unfortunately there’s no way to remove it.

Facebook Profile Picture Size

The Profile Image is now the smaller, square at bottom left of the header, overlapping the cover photo.

You have to upload an image at least 180px by 180px. It’s displayed at 160px by 160px. (Its “natural” size is actually resized to 168px by 168px, but it’s only displayed at 160px by 160px.) The thin white border is added automatically and there’s no way to remove it.

If you use a photo that’s not square, you have some control over which part of the image to use for the crop. When you’re logged in, hover over the profile image and choose “Edit Profile Picture” and then “Edit Thumbnail”.

You can then click on the crop lines to choose the part of the image you want to use.

Tip: If you find that your resulting profile picture, after it’s downsized in Facebook, is blurry, try uploading an image twice the size of the downsized image (that is, an image that is 320px by 320px). That should give a sharper result.

Profile Picture on the Timeline

The profile image that appears next to your name on comments and posts is the same image but is automatically scaled down to 32px by 32px.

Shared Link Thumbnails

Some things got simplified in the new layout. Shared link thumbnails didn’t.

There are different ways that Facebook displays thumbnail images with links. Ideally, you can get full-width thumbnails that are scaled to fill a box 470px by 246px. Like this:

But not every link thumbnail displays full-width. What the specific criteria are is still to be determined, but it likely has to do with whether the page you’re linking has the OpenGraph image property defined (ie. the og:image tag). It might then also depend on the size of the image and orientation, as it does with Google+.

When the thumbnail doesn’t display full-width, it goes into a small box at left. In that case, a landscape thumbnails fits in a box 155px wide.

And a portrait thumbnail fits in a box 114px high.

You also have the option of uploading a new image for the thumbnail if you don’t like the one automatically suggested from the original page. I’m still experimenting, but it appears that if you upload a new image you’re stuck with the small thumbnail even if the original suggested one was full-width.

One Photo on the Timeline

When you upload an image to the timeline, a thumbnail is generated automatically to fit within a box that is 470px by 470px. So if you want to use the maximum space allowed, upload a square photo at least 504px wide.

If you upload a landscape (horizontal) image, it will be scaled to 470px wide.

If you upload a portrait (vertical) image, it will be scaled to 470px high and flushed left with white space to its right. How much empty white you get on the sides depends on the aspect ratio of your original photos. A narrower image will result in more empty gray than a wider image.

Uploading Multiple Images to a Page Timeline

You can upload multiple photos at once to the timeline. How they’re displayed depends on how many images you’re uploading and the orientation of what I will call the primary image.

The primary image is what I’m calling the one that displays first, and it also displays larger in some of the layouts. So far as I know there’s not official name for it, but I’m going to go ahead and use primary image.

As well as displaying first, the primary image has another important role. It determines the layout you get. If you upload 3 images with a square primary image you’ll end up with a different layout than if you upload 3 images with a rectangular primary image.

The easiest way to select which image serves as the primary image is to drag it to the left in the upload dialog. In this example, the photo of the lion will become the primary image. If I want the photo of the monkey to be the primary image, I’d just drag it to the left.

In many circumstances, the order matters not just because it determines which photo is to the left or on top, but because the way that the thumbnails displays is determined by the orientation of that primary image.

2 Images With Horizontal (Landscape) Primary Image

2 Images With Vertical (Portrait) Primary Image

2 Images With Square Primary Image

3 Images With Horizontal (Landscape) Primary Image

You can mix and match the orientations of the non-primary images–they’ll still display the same.

3 Images With Vertical (Portrait) Primary Image

You can mix and match the orientations of the non-primary images–they’ll still display the same.

3 Images With Square Primary Image

You can mix and match the orientations of the non-primary images–they’ll still display the same.

4 or More Images with a Horizontal (Landscape) Primary Image

You can mix and match the orientations of the non-primary images–they’ll still display the same. If you upload 5 images or more, it displays only the first 4 images but will add an overlay to the bottom right thumbnail with the number of images that are not displayed (eg. +2 or +4, etc).

4 or More Images with a Vertical (Portrait) Primary Image

4 or More Images with a Square Primary Image

Full-Width Photos on the Timeline

The new layout that Facebook introduced in the summer of 2014 did away with the option of having a featured image span both columns. Your updates now only show in a single column, and there’s no way to make photos wider than that column

	Width	Height	Notes
Cover Photo	851px	315px
Profile Picture in Header	160px	160px	Must be uploaded at 180px by 180px
Profile Picture on Timeline	32px	32px	Same image as main Profile Picture, automatically downscaled
Shared Link Thumbnail	470px	246px	Only for full-width thumbnails. In some cases much smaller thumbnails are used.
Uploaded Timeline Photo Thumbnail	470px max	470px max

Sales Strategy

James Ethell — Fri, 14 Nov 2014 05:38:36 +0000

Providing solutions to your members needs is an essential part of your sales strategy, but how do you know if your sales efforts are increasing your bottom line?

Unpuzzle has developed and implemented a structured sales program that allows Management and Boards to track their sales efforts from leads, through to opportunities and sales.

Unpuzzle’s sales funnel gives you a clear insight into the different stages of a sale and tracks and measures every lead all the way past the sale. Tracking is essential to any sales program as it can identify where there are opportunities for improvements in the process.

Using no new software, this program enhances your existing banking program to ensure your business is taking advantage of every opportunity.

Interested in finding out more about Unpuzzle’s sales program? Contact James today on 0425 861 729.

Using Video to communicate

James Ethell — Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:12:58 +0000

Check out our recently launched YouTube channel and the two new videos we have created explaining some of our services.

This video explains the services we provide supporting Reporting Database.

This video explains segmentation and why it is important in your business.

Both videos were created using online software designed for easy use so no editing skills were necessary.

YouTube is an essential part of online marketing and drives traffic through search engine optimisation.

If you are interested in creating a YouTube channel, contact Unpuzzle today to find out how.

Setting goals for digital account opening.

James Ethell — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:04:57 +0000

How does your online branch compare to your traditional branch?

With a large number of Mutuals now offering online account and membership opening facilities, how does your business compare to the industry benchmark when it comes to virtual branch activity?

I enjoy statistics that provide you with an insight into what you should be aiming to achieve, which is why I think this is a great story from the US as it provides benchmark achievements from their Credit Unions and Banks based on their asset size.

How do you measure your online branch success vs your traditional branches?

Three essential ingredients for modern website design.

James Ethell — Tue, 27 May 2014 20:27:01 +0000

Great story on how your website should be driving two way communication with your Members.

What does it cost to acquire a new Member?

James Ethell — Sat, 17 May 2014 01:32:46 +0000

10 times more to acquire a new member than it does to retain one.

Retention is a big focus at the moment for financial institutions. Sure, it has always been important, but with marketing budgets being trimmed in this low margin market, I am seeing a lot of businesses looking within their existing customer base for growth.

Working recently in insurance, there is a huge focus on retention as household budgets also get squeezed and customers look for better value in the marketplace.

So what influences retention? Satisfaction!

The insurance industry uses satisfaction as a key measure for how likely they are to retain a customer. The same goes for all serviced based businesses, the higher your customer satisfaction score is, the lower your churn in customers. Satisfaction can be broken down into any number of categories, including product, price, service and even brand. Measuring all these elements separately, and as a whole, enables your business to understand where your opportunities for improvement are.

The Member Health Monitor measures satisfaction.

We have recently launched a new cost effective way of measuring satisfaction in your business called our Member Health Monitor. The term monitor is important, as it uses regular interactions with your customers or members to determine how your business is tracking against your goals – from their perspective.

It is important to gain the complete view of your business, and structured customer feedback completes the cycle. Doing it on a monthly basis enables closer monitoring of your activity and provides live feedback to your management team. This is how the Member Health Monitor has been developed. It looks deep into the categories of satisfaction and enables you to track your results against your peers in the industry.

Hearing the voice of your customer is essential when measuring satisfaction. We know that satisfaction has many layers. I am interested in this question…how do you hear the voice of the customer in your business?

Online Advertising

James Ethell — Thu, 01 May 2014 04:40:08 +0000

Great article that outlines 10 quick check points to see how effective your current presence is online. Point four - ”search for the word “bank” plus any of your branch towns reveals nothing about you.” is a confronting one as no results here means… you are invisible to your prospects online.

Non-profits Segments

James Ethell — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 06:21:58 +0000

See how non-profits are using segments in the US. Over 64% of nonprofits are segmenting their communications according to this article. Creating segments in Not for profit is essential for response marketing and it is interesting the ways in which the industry is approaching it. Of those not segmenting, a lack of knowledge, technological ability, and data mistrust are to blame according to the study.

What do your segments look like?

James Ethell — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 01:07:34 +0000

You may aware that you need to identify different types of members and prospects – yet unsure of the best way to identify these “member segments” or efficiently target them.

A solid segmentation strategy is key for differentiating your business from the competition. Why? Segmentation helps you better communicate the benefits of your products and services to prospects and ultimately provide better service once they become members.

At its core, segmentation is all about grouping your database records based on some characteristics like demographic information (e.g. age range) or behavior (e.g. which products they use). Further, the ability to segment members comes down to how well do you know your members and how they behave.

Members can be segmented in almost an infinite number of ways. How to best segment your members is dependent on your business goals. However, there are four common segmentation approaches:

Demographic: This is one of the most basic forms of segmentation. It involves grouping individuals according to demographic characteristics like gender, sex or marital status.
Behavioral: Behavioral segmentation groups people on the basis of their actions. For example, you might group individuals based on the products they have with your business.
Psychographic: Using psychographic segmentation involves grouping the target market based on personality characteristics and/or lifestyle.
Benefit: This form of segmentation involves grouping individuals on the basis of the benefits they are seeking in your product of service.

You can use one or more of these approaches to group your target market.

Unpuzzle marketing segments use a number of Member characteristics and behaviours to develop profiles.

Segments are Identified, Now What – This is important!

Once you have developed your segmentation strategy, you are not done. You must then begin to understand the needs of each group starting in four key areas:

Product: Do your products and services meet the needs and desires of the segment?
Place (Distribution): Are your products and services easily obtainable by the segment?
Promotion: Do your marketing efforts use the messages and right forms of media to appropriately target the segment?
Price: Does the segment perceive your products as being competitively priced?

It is important to fully leverage tools such as your banking system to capture the information that is necessary for member segmentation and targeting.

The more refined the segmentation, the better results you’ll achieve. Unpuzzle has developed 7 key segments to assist Credit Unions focus on the different groups within their membership. The business goals are essential part of the process, so the characteristics of your segments will be different depending on what those goals set out to achieve.

Take segmentation a step further and allow it drive your marketing activity. Need help? Contact us today to find out how your credit union can benefit from a co-operative approach to strategic marketing.