In March 2010, we launched the new Borough Market site. We’re really happy about the vibrancy that the site brings as well as featuring the different traders that make up the Market- it definitely whets our appetite.

We’ve blogged before about the importance about having a mobile site and the sort of features that should be included to allow the user to have the best possible experience. We put our money where our mouth is in this new mobile site for Borough Market.

People logging onto the mobile site on their phone are more likely to be on their way to the Market or already there. Therefore, we needed to make sure that there was a way for people to know what’s going on and guide themselves around.

The Market map (also on the desktop) shows the positions of traders with the handy addition of the GPS in your phone to show where you are in relation.

The mobile site allows you to search the traders by

Name

Type

Area

In the mood for some olives? Have a look under International foods. Walking from Southwark Cathedral? Search by area and see what is closest to you.

We’re really excited for people to start using it and really get immersed in the experience of the Market. Our other mobile sites have seen a massive growth and we can’t wait to see how people connect with this site.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”

Recently, we’ve been thinking about how managing social media can be a lot like this old proverb. With one modern edge: Who has time to do their own fishing?

Social media advice and management as we see them, can come in 3 forms.

Give a Man a Fish: As children we heard this proverb and we’re taught that giving the man a fish is taking the easy way out. You aren’t addressing the need you are merely putting it off for one day. In social media this would be like us giving you a basic guide on the different networks and some articles to start reading to get you up to speed. This may be enough for a good tweet here or there but it isn’t the best way to come up with a cohesive strategy in the ocean of social media.

Teach a Man to Fish: This is the ideal situation, where you give the man the knowhow and confidence for him to fish and feed himself without you. There is definitely a need to share skills when it comes to social media. It means that instead of giving you some articles, our social savvy team would spend some time immersing themselves in your company, formulate a strategy and then train you and your team to go forth and conquer the world of social. Ideally, you would then be able to keep afloat of the current trends in social media and spend time building your presence and engaging with fans.

Doing his fishing for him: This last twist to the tail is one we’ve added to convey that, in today’s modern world, many people simply don’t fish! After all, do you pop to the nearest lake or to the supermarket? This is equivalent to the 3rd option, us managing your social media accounts.

Take the man that you taught to fish- does he always have the time? Is he keeping up to date with a Field & Stream subscription? Social media changes all the time and sometimes that means using the time you’d rather spend on other work reading up on it, managing accounts and engaging with fans and followers. Having someone dedicated to your social media is the difference between being able to respond to a complaint immediately and in the right way and making a social media blunder. 

Earlier this week, a client sent us an email with some interesting observation about her organisation’s Facebook page. She had noticed that images seemed to be getting more interaction than links or text updates. Our client even did some A/B testing to try and prove it, sharing the same content at different times, once in text form and another with an image attached. We don’t need to tell you which was better received, do we?

This got us thinking about how to increase interaction on Facebook pages. Anyone can spit out update after update but if the content isn’t engaging, you simply won’t see the high interaction numbers that you’re trying to achieve. Our social team are experts at building engaging content, so we asked their advice on grabbing your followers’ attention.

Be relevant

It’s great if you’ve developed a very friendly and off-beat personality online, but kooky stories and photos of LOL Cats aren’t what your audience will be interested in. They follow you because they’re interested in you so keep your posts and links either about you and your organisation or about a similar topic.  

Have an opinion

Don’t sit on the fence! It’s fine for your organisation to have an opinion on topics that are being spoken about online. As long as it’s relevant to what you do, giving opinions or asking questions will drive conversation and encourage your followers to take part in the chat.  

Snap, snap, snap

Take as many images as you can! If you’re looking after your social media presence, don’t be afraid to be that person standing up at an event and clicking away at a camera. Photos receive more interaction than any other type of media on Facebook and with the Timeline now in place, using images creates an eye-catching, content rich page.

A great example of how much more interaction gets is from the British Museum. In these two posts they talked about their upcoming Shakespeare exhibition. There’s been over 1,200 Likes on the image and just 74 on the link. Says it all, really.

Choose your time wisely

You might have one friend who lives on Facebook, but mot people don’t. Stats show that updates on Facebook get the majority of interaction in the 80 minutes after they're shared so it’s important to post when your audience are active.

As a general rule, mid-morning and mid-afternoon are good times to post. Mondays are quiet as people are busy catching up on work but they’re likely to be browsing Facebook on Wednesday and Fridays more than any other weekday. And  finally, overlook the weekend at your peril! You might not be in work but social media is a 24/7 job so be sure to share stories and updates on Saturdays and Sundays too.

Respond

It makes us sad when we see followers being ignored on Facebook. It’s a great place for your audience to speak to you yet so many organisations completely miss comments on their page. If you don’t respond you’ll leave a bad taste and that follower is unlikely to reach out to you again. Respond and encourage further interaction by asking more questions which will bring your followers back to the page.

Borough Market encouraging further conversation on Facebook.

Follow these pretty simple tips and you’ll see the interaction on your Facebook page jump significantly. It can be time consuming, but social tools can’t be overlooked any more. They’re here to stay and if you don’t take up residency, you’re missing a huge potential audience.

(Stay with me, this is important stuff!)

You may have heard of the new EU law that has been designed to protect online privacy. It’s known by a lot of people as the Cookie Law.

Nearly every website you visit will use cookies in some form, and they’re mostly there to help give you a better experience on a site. But some people aren’t always happy for websites to store information without their permission. So the Cookie Law is to make sure that your visitors know what cookies your website is storing in their browser and what they do – giving them the choice to enable them or not.

Here’s the lowdown on cookies, and how they’re used Cookies are small files that store information in your browser about websites that you visit. They act like a piece of memory between each page or visits to help give you a better experience on a site.

They’re quite common too – most websites capture stats about visitors, using tools like Google Analytics, and most of these tools will use cookies to do so. If a website includes a feed from a social networking site such as Facebook or Twitter, then they may also use them in order to display the feeds, or related content on the site. They can also be used to display more targeted advertising, using tools like Google AdSense.

As well as using cookies for website statistics and social feeds, we use cookies on our sites to remember things like when a visitor logs in or when they add a product to their shopping basket on an e-commerce site.

Now, what do I need to do with my website? The most important thing is that you find a way to get consent from your visitors to enable cookies on their browser.

Due to the cookies that we use being un-intrusive, a requirement is that our clients’ sites have a Cookie Policy statement, informing visitors what the cookies in use on the site are. We suggest that you create it as a page within your website footer so that it appears on every page.

You can download our standard Cookie Policy statement here.

If your website includes any third-party integration, such as ticketing solutions, you should consult with them separately and include any further cookies used by them in your statement.

Some websites, which use more intrusive cookies, for example where information is sent to an advertising server in order to display targeted advertising, are advised to have an opt-in area of their site where visitors are asked to accept cookies.

We did a little celebratory dance when we launched our brand new, built-from-the-ground-up site for The Castle in Wellingborough a few weeks back. We’ve been busy working away at it for several months now, so being able to show it off is a bit like watching your child win an award at school. We’re guessing here, but you know what we mean.

When we were in the initial stages of design for The Castle, one thing was obvious to us; we’d need a simple way to showcase the different type of events that take place at the venue. These events varied from film to dance and from comedy to music, so we wanted to be sure that visitors could find what they wanted easily.

We did this by colour coding different types of events. For instance, if a visitor visited a Film page, the entire background of the site will change to a shade of teal which is the colour that is associated with the Films category. In the same way, Dance is associated with the colour grey and Music with the colour purple. This makes it simple for visitors to understand what they’re looking at and makes navigating the site a treat for the eyes.

Different colours in use on The Castle site.

One section we’re particularly proud of is the What’s On page, where we’ve created three separate ways for visitors to filter content and find what they need – by Genre, by month or a combination of both. This means that visitors can search specifically for comedy shows taking place in April or community events in July. We’re big fans of getting visitors where they want to be in as few clicks as possible and these options make doing just that much easier!

The filter system on the Whats On page.

The site fully integrates with Spektrix booking system. When updating show pages, The Castle can now add their existing Spektrix Event IDs and the system will automatically connect and allow visitors to book tickets. Bookings can also be made directly from the Calendar; want to see what’s on tonight? Hover over the date, a pop up will display what’s showing and you can go straight to the booking system right there and then.

Booking directly from the calendar.

In the four weeks after launch, we've seen the number of page visits to the site grow by over 13% compared to the pervious four weeks. Visitors are also browsing more pages on the site than before and are now spending nearly twice as long on the site. The type of visitor is changing too; returning visitors are up and now make up half of all visitors to the site.