How Can Brands Make the Most of Facebook Fans?
July 22, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Image via Wikipedia
As common as it is, it’s probably the wrong question to ask what is the value of a fan on Facebook–that is, the people who click a “Like” button on a brand’s Facebook page. But there’s understandably a lot of interest in how to measure marketing efforts on Facebook brand pages, which are the latest obsession of brand marketers.
Facebook Insights is the social network’s dashboard for figuring out what content is working, who’s engaging with the page, and much more. The company hasn’t talked about it much in public, but David Baser, product manager for Facebook Insights, shed some light on how to measure marketing on Facebook at a research presentation today at the OMMA Metrics conference in San Francisco.
Basically, the Insights teams models the Facebook ecosystem to explain to marketers how Facebook works. It can tell marketers about customers like no other Web site, Baser said, since most of them aren’t social networks chock full of personal information offered up voluntarily.
Facebook metrics are about people, not page views or impressions. What does that mean? The Insights team talks about “actors”: Who was it who did something on your page or app? Metrics also have to be “actionable”–that is, what caused people to do various things on a page or app, such as installing an app or buying something through it?
Another key thing about Facebook Pages is that they are much more than billboards; they build communities of people who engage in conversations, both with the brand and with each other. So acquiring fans–often touted by marketers as a goal in itself (“We have 15 million fans on Facebook!”)–is only the first step. (And by the way, being a fan is very different from being a follower, as you might do on Twitter. It’s an expression of identity with that brand, so it’s potentially more meaningful.)
Brands also have to make posts on the pages engaging, he said, because that’s the only way those posts will find their way onto the news feeds of millions of friends of the people who posted something on the brand page–and then reposted or commented upon by their friends, and so on. How to do that? One way is to make sure posts really mesh with the interests of the page’s fans. Another (and here’s the pitch for Facebook advertising) is to buy Sponsored Stories, which allows marketers to pay to turn actions people take on Facebook, such as a Like of a brand, and show them in their friends’ news feeds.
Baser also provided a scrap of insight on how to measure word of mouth on Facebook, which means how many unique people said something about your brand in, say, the last week? Facebook also measures outcomes, not just sentiment–that is, what did the chatter on a brand or product or service cause in terms of specific activities? Specifically, with data from the marketers, it can measure the impact of word-of-mouth on conversions–that is, how many bought a product.
All this is catnip to marketers. But whether these kinds of metrics will supplant traditional media metrics such as reach or impressions–the metrics brand advertisers still care most about–remains uncertain. It’s tough to tell how much of Facebook’s reported $2 billion in revenues last year (likely to double this year) comes from brand advertising, but most observers think it’s still small compared with direct-response-oriented ads from the likes of Zynga, Groupon, and a raft of local advertisers.
And that’s not the only issue. As if to underscore the continuing worries by some Facebook users and privacy advocates, the conference organizers chose to play an old Police song following Baser’s presentation: “Every Breath You Take” (… “every step you take… I’ll be watching you.”) Only if Facebook, which has repeatedly run into privacy blowups, can keep the trust of its 750 million users will it be able to offer marketers the kind of unique insights they’re hoping for from the world’s largest social network.
