How close can you get to your Facebook fans?
From The Anatomy of a Fan by socialmediagraphics.posterous.com:
Not all fans, so it appears, are equal. An overview:
From The Facebook Fan Engagement Spectrum @ moontoast.com:
At the highest level fan count (Liking a page) is not a good metric for engagement. Community engagement (likes and comments) on average sits around 3%. To increase interaction with the fan, utilize different types of content to drive conversations that deepen the relationship with the community and drive potential fans to superfans.
Women Click More, Men Like More
Facebook marketing agency Social Code correlated click-through rate data from Facebook Ads with age and gender information of the audience that viewed the ad.
Key highlights from the report:
- Older Facebook users are nine percent less likely to click the Like button on an advertisement. They are relatively newer to the platform, so for them the ads have less social context. Men over 50 years old have an 11 percent lower Like rate than younger males and a nine percent lower Like rate than people from all age groups.
- Younger Facebook users are more comfortable using the like button than older users. Facebook users over the age of 50 are 28.2 percent more likely to click an advertisement than 18 to 29 year-old users.
- Women are 11% more likely to click on an ad than men. Women age 50 and older are even more likely to click advertisements, at a rate of 31.2 percent higher than young adults
- Men are 2.2 percent more likely to click on the Like button than women. Men over 50 years old have an 11 percent lower like rate than younger males, and a nine percent lower like rate than people from all age groups.
Further reading:
- STUDY: Women Click More Facebook Ads Than Men @ allfacebook.com
- Older Facebook Users Click More, Like Less @ marketingcharts.com
Google+: what are the marketing implications?
If you only remember one thing about this excellent overview of Google+ features and ambitions, let is be this:
With Google+ acting as the social layer across all of its products and services, and as more users turn to it as a go-to social network for sharing and discovering content, Google will gain access to a social layer of user data to help draw a more comprehensive picture of users. Google has traditionally helped brand marketers target users based on needs and intentions, but they’ve fallen behind social networks like Facebook in targeting based on interests and identities. With Google+, the search giant looks to provide brands with the ability to provide targeted advertising to users based on needs, identities, interests, and network attributes that compose user profiles. The granular, segmented data that Google will provide may allow for much more accurate targeting, but it is also sure to bring up privacy concerns among users.
So what is the most important implication for marketing professionals?
With Google+ as the foundation, Google aims to truly create a convergence point for SoLoMo (social, local, and mobile). Google has put a good bit of thought into catering its mobile version of Google+ to stay true to the inherent tenets of the mobile experience. For instance, Huddle is a feature unique to the mobile Google+ experience that allows users to group-message each other. The mobile version also provides check-in functionality (tapping into existing Google Places data), and may also suggest offers and deals by way of Google Latitude.
What's next?
Watch what Ford, MTV, Mashable and Dell will be doing on Google+. There aren't any brand pages yet, but these four brands are included in a beta group testing business solutions on top of Google+.
64 ideas to activate your Facebook fans
Facebook Marketing Strategies infographic from socialmedialonlineclasses.com:
Special offers/deals top reason why people follow brands
From "Here is why people follow a brand", an infographic by Fastgush:
The majority of consumers who engage with a brand in the digital space - whether by parcipating in a contest or by "liking" a brand on Facebook - tend not only to purchase the products, but also make recommendations to their friends and family.
Twitter, e-mail, Facebook most likely to drive purchasing
BuySellAds.com compiled an interesting infographic based on (mainly U.S. based) reports by PEW Internet, Razorfish, eMarketer, ExactTarget, mashable and edisonresearch.
According to these numbers, e-mail is still a succesfull channel to drive sales, with Twitter and Facebook next:
Further reading:
- Twitter Follower Versus Facebook Fan: Who’s More Valuable? @ blog.buysellads.com
- Twitter vs Facebook: where the brand loyalty is [infographic] @ blog.buysellads.com
Most Facebook Pages reach only 3%-7.5% of their fans
Social analytics company PageLever came out with a study last month that proves how content posted on your Facebook Page has to fight its way to its Fans' NewsFeeds.
Some data from the report:
Key take-aways:
- Spend energy on newsfeed content rather than custom tabs. As a page grows from 10,000 to one million fans, pageviews drop 12x faster than impressions.
- Post at least once a day to get more unique impressions per fan.
- The larger you get, the more Facebook promotes your page in NewsFeeds. Facebook ranks Pages with more fans higher in the search results, and features them more often in "Suggestions".
Further reading:
- How we measured that most pages reach only 3%-7.5% of their fans - PageLever
- SHOCKER: 3% To 7.5% Of Fans See Your Page’s Posts - AllFacebook
- Popular Facebook Pages Have Fewer Unique Page Views Per Fan, Most Engagement is in the News Feed - InsideFacebook
- Report: Only 3% to 7.5% of Fans View Posts From A Facebook Page - SearchEngineLand
- New Study: Only 7.5 Percent of Fans See Your Facebook Page Posts - Marketing Pilgrim
10 social media tools, and a Social Media Map
- socialeye.com (Overdrive Interactive's own tool) is an end to end social media management and reporting platform that allows you to manage, schedule, approve, publish and moderate your social media messaging (tweets, Facebook posts, etc.) from a single and secure environment, and optimize your social media marketing ROI with powerful tracking and dashboards that report social connections (fans and followers) social site traffic and actual leads and revenue.
- tweetdeck.com (acquired by Twitter) allows you to use Twitter as your social dashboard.
- ubersocial.com, a popular Twitter app for Blackberry and iPhone.
- cotweet.com is a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution that helps companies of all sizes engage, track and analyze conversations about their brands across the most popular and influential social communities today, Twitter and Facebook.
- hootsuite.com allows you to monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter using the HootSuite dashboard.
- radian6.com (acquired by Salesforce.com) is a complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web.
- telligent.com, social community software for the enterprise.
- socialmedia.alterian.com allow you to monitor brands, identify key communities and influencers, address customer service issues, conduct unbiased research, and generate new sales leads
- buzzient.com provides a next-generation solution for social media analytics and integration of this valuable content with enterprise applications
- klout.com: The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure how many people you influence (True Reach), how much you influence them (Amplification), and how influential they are (Network Score).
Any tools missing from this list, besides the obvious Engagor?
More where this came from, in Overdrive Interactive's Social Media Map:
Your blog as the center of your social media solar system
In Content Marketing Institute's recent B2B Content Marketing report [.pdf], blogging was the 6th most popular content choice, behind social media, articles, in-person events, enewsletters and case studies. But of even greater interest is the report’s discovery of a “confidence gap”: only 40% of their respondents rated blogs as effective, while a considerable 60% said it was “less effective/ineffective. ”
What it is
Shorthand for “Weblog, the blog offers an easy way to present brief chunks of frequently refreshed Web content. Backed with easy-to-use technologies for syndication (e.g. RSS), comments and trackbacks, blogs are often the blazing centers of social media solar systems that can incorporate sophisticated SEO strategies and community-building campaigns.
3 key play points:
- Encourage conversations: even “bad” comments can be an opportunity for developing good customer relations.
- Be a good netizen: participate on other blogs as well as your own. Develop a Top 15 hit list where you need to be “hanging out. ”
- Loosen up. Authenticity trumps perfection when connecting with readers.
More where this came from:
Further reading:
- 10 Blogging Tips for Beginners and Experts @ junta42.com
- Content Marketing Playbook 2011 @ contentmarketinginstitute.com (.pdf)
Forrester: the Age of the Consumer
From Forrester's Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer Report [.pdf]:
We’re about to enter a new era that Forrester calls the age of the customer. [...] One by one, every corporate investment has been commoditized. Now every company can tap into global factories and global supply chains. After huge IT investments, companies are realizing that the Internet cloud provides all of the computing resources they need. Brand, manufacturing, distribution, and IT are all table stakes. The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology fueled disruption — an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. In this age, companies that thrive, like Best Buy, IBM, and Amazon, are those that tilt their budgets toward customer knowledge and relationships.
Here's how technology fuels customer disruption in a number of industries:
The solution?
Marketers will have to learn the difference between customer-possessed and customer obsessed.
The simplest way to become customer-obsessed is to give the customer exactly what she wants — but as Henry Ford noted, that would have meant giving people “a faster horse.” Instead, companies will need to combine their own insights with the latent desires of customers. Look for a growth in the kind of communities that companies like hotelier IHG and Godiva Chocolatier are building, where loyal customers collaborate with corporate innovators to design the next generation of products.