7 Must-Know Facebook Insights

Sometimes it is the obvious tips that are the most powerful and frequently overlooked. At our recent Facebook Sessions seminar series, many of our customers and partners shared their Facebook stories along with their tips. Dennis Yu provided some key insights for brands that are looking to take their strategy to the next level, so if you missed the session here are the key takeaways from his presentation:
  • 84% of new Facebook fans are your existing customers: Knowing this, how does that affect your strategy to acquire more fans or nurture folks who have become fans of your page? Instead of selling the brand proposition, why not harvest your existing brand power? Most non-fans are not fans of your page because they aren’t ever presented with the opportunity to hit “like”. Sponsored like stories, a newer ad unit from Facebook, allows you to do this effectively and often at a cost per fan of less than 50 cents.
  • What’s a fan worth? You have a million fans — so what? Are you looking to make an investment on Facebook, but want to be smart about it? You can read articles that say a fan is worth $xx but the value of your fans is simply how much incremental revenue your fans generate. That’s easy to say, but hard to measure. Ask yourself what your email program is worth. The answer is based on how well you market against that list and how big your list is.
  • Build consensus via a dashboard: What gets measured, gets managed. If all you’re looking at is your fan count, as opposed to the quality of fans, then you will naturally go after more fans, however junky. Put up a dashboard (we can help build one) that everyone can rally around and that will help educate coworkers in the process. A competitive dashboard is a good start—here’s an example of Dominos vs. Papa Johns.

  • Engage via the wall, sell via ads: EdgeRank, Facebook’s algorithm to determine whether you show up in your fans’ News Feeds, looks at how engaging you are—whether people are liking and commenting on your wall—to determine whether you deserve to show up. Don’t assume that just because you posted it, all your fans will automatically see it. We see brands with news feed coverage ratios of less than 10%, while some folks (entertainment and pro sports) can be well over 90%.Calculate yours by looking at how many impressions you are getting per post and dividing by your fan base. 50% is a good target. If you’re under, potential reasons are non-engaging content (not asking questions), a stale user base (too many contests), posting at the wrong times, or over-posting (fatigue or too many product-related postings). Sell via ads, not the wall.
  • Your Facebook lead should be a brand strategist, not a geek: Yes, there are technical components, but the heart of Facebook strategy is connecting to what your brand represents in the real world. What is it that gets your real world fans excited? Why do they go with you versus a competitor? How do you amplify this message so that you equip your brand advocates to spread the word? Don’t hire a fresh college grad to manage your Facebook in isolation and treat your wall like a complaints board. Take a higher level view that is an extension of the brand message you have in other marketing channels. It takes a senior leader to bring folks together.
  • Go local or go home: Many of the brands in the audience have retail presences. That means Facebook created Place Pages for users to check-in and leave comments. Are you actively monitoring these pages? Did you know that Facebook automatically creates the locations without your knowledge? That means your fans are commenting and checking-in without you, so you better go claim these pages, set up monitoring, and loop in your customer care folks (the people who answer your phone and email). If you’re advanced, you might train up franchisees and store managers on how to respond to complaints and questions. Claim your Google Places while you’re at it.
  • You own strategy, but agencies can own execution: Agencies want to say they can do social—but spending money with Facebook to buy a lot of impressions doesn’t equal a strategy. Nor does building cool-looking apps and contests. Someone else can install the plumbing for your new house, but you must be the architect that provides the design. Software can help, but cannot replace expertise, which is in short supply. There is no silver bullet here. Agencies and even Facebook themselves will encourage you to spend more money. Our most common complaint from clients is “But Facebook told us that…” to which we say “Are you talking to someone in sales?”. Nothing wrong with talking to a rep from Google or Facebook—you should just know if they have a quota to hit and make sure to consider that bias. Incidentally, we believe that advertising is a necessary tactic to kick-start a new page — content and apps alone won’t drive traffic.
Once you have your strategy, which is how you get your existing fans to rave about you in such a way that their friends are pulled into the conversation; then and only then should you engage in Facebook marketing. Armed with these techniques and measurable goals, you can then build ad campaigns that drive users to engagement apps on your page. It’s true that you can build an app in less than 5 minutes, no technical expertise required (and no credit card if you’re just testing).

Engaging the Mobile Experience: Effective Mobile Measurement Strategies

2011 finally the “year of mobile?” Or just the year people stop declaring it's the year of mobile? From mobile devices like the iPad, Droid, and Blackberry to mobile sites like FourSquare and mocoSpace to apps like Pandora and Facebook Mobile to mobile advertising platforms like iAd, to a myriad of other devices connecting and delivering ads, content, and compelling user experiences to mobile web and mobile applications, many questions remain unanswered. Can a brand rely on mobile measurement? What are the obstacles when measuring mobile? Does mobile panel measurement make sense when you can measure the device directly? What tools are the best? How are successful companies measuring mobile? Can you optimize a mobile experience? Experts living and breathing mobile every day will educate and inform you about what to do and how to effectively measure and drive insights from your mobile channel. Get the answers to these questions from the recent OMMA Metrics panel with Eric Rickson and hosted by Bob Page of eBay

Top Tips For Optimising Your Online Presence

It can be fairly straightforward today to create an online presence for your company and this can even be done overnight (albeit in a simple manner), but what is more challenging to digital marketers is making the most of their online presence and using it to increase revenue and build brand awareness. Here are a few of my top tips to help your company get the best results it can: The Customer Most importantly, remember that websites are all about enhancing the customer experience so that customers engage more effectively with your brand. View all visitors to your website as customers (regardless of what you sell) and ensure you have the necessary services in place to make them happy. The best way to do this is to live test different strategies to see the real-time results. This way you can effectively see what works and what doesn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Competitors It’s also important to consider what your competitors are doing online. Take a look at their online presence (such as website, Twitter, smartphone app, eBay store, Facebook, mobile site) and channels they are using to push their brand and sales. Take note of what you think works well or doesn’t work well and why. Also, analyse the channels that are being used and identify how well they engage with the customer. Be App Savvy With the rise in smartphone apps, it is easy to get distracted and dive head first into the ‘cool’ channels such as building an all-singing all-dancing app. But often it is more important – and cheaper – to concentrate on other online areas first. There is no point building an expensive app and then having a poor online presence elsewhere because the app can end up being a burden. Mobile websites can be a more important resource than apps depending on your industry. For example, increasing numbers of web users are banking online, but it’s no good having a smartphone app allowing customers to check their account balance if the counterpart mobile site isn’t accessible enough to allow user-friendly money transfers. Analyse Web and mobile analytics are essential to monitor the success of new and existing channels. It sounds obvious, but there is no point in having an online strategy if you don’t monitor it. There is plenty of insightful data out there and it’s important to make the most it by analysing what the data reveals about visitor habits. This data will tell you a lot about what areas you need to improve, add or promote, and just how customers are engaging with your brand. Decide on a Social Media Strategy It can be too easy to set up numerous accounts across numerous networks and leave them to go stale or only update them occasionally. Think about how you will use Twitter as a marketing tool. Will you use Twitter primarily as a marketing tool, or will it be used for sales and customer service too? Also, investigate the best ways for your company to make the most of social commerce – an area which is set to be a rapid grower in 2011. Stay Ahead of the Game Finally, don’t forget that online channels are continually changing. Don’t assume that one update here and there once a year is enough. Regularly track how your online strategy is faring and explore any new developments that might be relevant. [This was originally published on Fourth Source. Colette Wade is the Marketing Director, Webtrends EMEA and Australasia. -- Ed] For more on Webtrends Optimize, our testing, targeting and site optimization solution visit our product site or review some of our other posts on optimization. Any other topics you want to see covered here or a burning question you’ve got. Let us know!

Ask Yourself: Is the World Simple or Complicated?

The new age of digital marketing is messier than anyone might ever admit. New channels, technologies and connection points pop up daily, not to mention our culture’s reaction them. (Remember when MySpace was REALLY cool?) And as your digital team sprints to keep up, the question becomes, how do you plan for the unpredictability and ever-present change? How do you embrace the sense-and-respond, viral pace? How do you empower far-flung parts of your organization, and encourage their educated risk-taking? Our CEO Alex Yoder at a recent OMMA Metrics event talks about apps, the future and ask that you participate personally.