Category Archives: Social Media

7 Must-Know Facebook Insights

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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).

Why Supporting Customers is the New Marketing

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The past few weeks have been quite the whirlwind of activity. My FourSquare badges and points have been off the charts with visits to Hartford CT, Springfield MA, Brandon VT, Keene NH, Charlotte NC and Tamasee SC. This travel spree kicked off in Boston MA for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. I was invited by Sameer Patel to speak with Kristin Hersant (StrongMail) on Why Supporting Customers is the New Marketing.  Our session featured the community efforts from each of our respective companies on how unified customer experience is imperative at every touch point - sales, marketing, customer service, innovation and more. Sameer Patel, Kristin Hersant and Michele Warther In today's networked economy, customers and prospects come armed with deep insight about your products and service levels well before they are ready to buy. Whether engaging with buyers who have similar interests on Twitter, or perusing third party or branded communities, knowledge about you and your products is widely available from other customers. So they expect timely and knowledgeable insight and service, to continue to do business with you or to become new customers. To respond to this new reality, organizations require tighter connections between those on the front lines (sales, marketing, support) and those designing, building and supplying products behind the proverbial firewall. While lots of large companies have a social presence they are still struggling with the operationalization of social efforts across different departments, domestic or international. Many thanks again to Jeff Nolan. We worked with the Get Satisfaction team at the end of last year on our community re-launch and more importantly is the one who put together the presentation.

5 Key Tools for Effective Facebook Marketing

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You have a mandate to grow your presence on Facebook, but you're wrestling with the fundamentals: * How does Facebook marketing drive value? * What should it cost? * What strategies are most appropriate for your brand? * What kind of results should you expect to see and when? Last week at Webvisions, we shared the 5 key tools for effective Facebook marketing: Website integration, Pages, Ads, Apps, and Analytics. To be successful at Facebook marketing is to drive user engagement and to equip your power users to market on your behalf. Thus, smart advertisers leverage Facebook's ad and application platform to create endorsements that are kick-started with paid media and then spread virally. The takeaways from the session were: * Website Integration: Like buttons are an extremely powerful tool for marketers. They drive traffic and create audience segments that can power ad targeting. Tap Facebook's audience through smart integrations with you existing website. * Pages: Fan pages, place pages, event pages, and more offer different functionality for brands. Set up your brand presence to maximize the kind of value you need. Boost your post quality score to maximize the reach of the wall posts you publish on your pages. * Ads: How many people are in each demographic or interest category, how many fans do competitors have and why? Segment users into fans, friends of fans, and potential targets by tying in appropriate messages to each group. Image selection: Which images work and why. How to combat ad burnout and create an ad testing framework. Using connection targeting to grow the fan base quickly. * Apps: Apps are the landing pages for social campaigns. We'll discuss how to use reveal tabs and social widgets to drive fans on and off the Facebook page, with and without ads. Facebook contest rules: what is allowed and not allowed, plus which strategies drive sharing. Building your email list with Facebook Connect: collect user information without any forms. Other engagement apps: scoring, quizzes, nomination, badging, spin the wheel, face off, and others. In which situations do each of these apps perform best? * Analytics: What is the value of your Facebook fan page? How to use Facebook Insights and the Post Quality Score metric to measure engagement and troubleshoot problems. Facebook marketing in tandem with other marketing channels: how to attribute credit when there are multiple touches. Determining who are the the most influential fans and how to adjust campaigns to get more of them.

Sponsored Stories and Getting Facebook Fans For Cents

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While most Facebook ads are lucky to get a 0.050% CTR, we've observed Sponsored Stories get as high as 0.400% which equates to 18 cents fans.

There are two types of Sponsored Stories for Facebook pages:

  • A Sponsored Like (Page Like Story) which targets friends of your fans.
  • A Sponsored Post (Page Post Story), which shows messages to existing fans.

If you have merged your page and place together or just a place page, you'll have an addition option of a Sponsored Check-In (Check-In Story) will show activity at your location.

So how are Sponsored Stories different than standard Facebook Ads? We recently ran a Sponsored Like ad campaign for Gordmans. It's highly targeted against the regions where they have their 68 retail locations, a female demographic, and interest terms for bargain hunting. The Gordmans brand motto of "Something Unexpected" resonates well with this audience. Incidentally, targeting fans of JC Penney, Kohls, and other competing department stores fared better than standard marketplace ads, but not as well as the one shown here.

Webtrends > Gordmans Stats from Sponsored Stories DECONSTRUCTING THE NUMBERS This campaign drove a 0.400% CTR on the first day, which fell by 45% within 48 hours to 0.220%. Ironically, the cost per click decreased over that time period, going from 26 cents to 15 cents. Therefore the eCPM (what we pay per 1,000 times we show the ad) went from over a dollar at the start to 33 cents at the end. Two days in, this ad drove 515 clicks for $76 and gained 418 new fans. That works out to 18 cents per fan and a click-to-conversion rate of 81%. Most brands are getting fans at between $2 and $10, the former via self-serve and the latter via premium ads. Thus, 18 cents for a new fan-- a person giving your brand permission to talk to them— is a great cost of acquisition.

The fall-off in CTR is common with all Facebook advertising. Ads burn out quickly because of the frequency people check Facebook, the lack of frequency capping (Facebook is well aware of this), and advertisers who follow the "set it and forget it" model of traditional paid search. WHY DOES THIS PERFORM SO WELL? The Sponsored Like is a relatively new ad unit, so consumers are getting used to the novelty. There are more curiosity clicks, as with any new ad type. The Sponsored Likes and Posts are also featured by themselves on a page, or if there are regular ads on the page, shown above those. Thus, higher placement also contributes to the higher CTR. Facebook doesn't yet report on average position, so we can only speculate on the position as it relates to CTR. TAKE AWAYS Net net, the key to success with Facebook advertising has been leveraging the endorsement of your existing fans. People are far more likely to click on events that are associated with what their friends are doing, as we demonstrated in earlier research. Expect more ad products from Facebook that leverage the social graph— making ads more like welcome messages from friends that interruptive, irrelevant spam. Check out more stories from our customers and see what they’re doing with social marketing!