To Spread Your Brand On Facebook, Don’t Target Your Fans–Target Their Friends

Forget Facebook fans; brands need to target the friends of fans. That’s the takeaway of Social Essentials, a new service provided by ComScore, with help from Facebook. The service offers unprecedented insights into the influence of brands through social media, complete with detailed credit card behavior that can link web browsing patterns to purchase decisions.

ComScore recently released a white paper based on the data that shows why brands should focus more on the friends of their fans, and engage the most hardcore users with interactions that will ripple throughout their network’s newsfeed. The data was collected through a massive survey of privacy-flouting Facebookers who volunteered to have their complete Internet behavior vigorously tracked. Here’s the key stat, as far as marketers are concerned: A meager 16% of company messages reach users in a given week, largely because the Facebook newsfeed usually only displays popular posts and few fans go to the brand’s page on a regular basis.

The solution is to reach friends of fans through messages that are shareable, and promotions that require voting, checking in, or other interactivity.

“Friends of fans represent about the most untapped potential in Facebook marketing,” says ComScore VP of Marketing Solutions, Graham Mudd. For example, Starbucks’s impressive 23 million fans pales in comparison to the number of friends of those same fans: 670 million. In other words, for popular brands, the friends of fans represents “a very large proportion of the Facebook universe.”

ComScore’s research finds a high degree of similarity between the tastes of friends. As a result, brand impressions of friends account for nearly double of what can be achieved from marketing to fans alone (except in Southwest’s case, where friends were only about 25% more):

In other words, it’s smart to pamper power users. For example, Twitter evangelist and Ultimate Fighting Champtionship CEO Dana White credits hardcore bloggers for the success of his once underdog sports organization. Taking note of this kind of strategy, the White House has recently started courting influential social media users in the political arena. Brands can expect exponentially increasing returns from targeting friends of fans up until about the 10 million-fan mark.

Thanks to a large swath of purchasing information, ComScore can also track how much more likely fans are to actually spend money on certain products. Correlation data shows an 8% purchasing jump from fans of Starbucks, compared to the average buyer.

The white paper does acknowledge that “at least a portion of these differences reflect the pre-existing preferences of these consumers,” meaning that at least some of these caffeine-craving purchases would have been made regardless of Facebook fandom.

However, there is good reason to believe that the psychological mechanism of clicking “like” probably steers more latte-happy fans through Starbucks’s doors. Mudd tells Fast Company that future iterations of the product will be able to determine the causal effect of fan pages–for a premium consulting fee.

The service will, in the future, be able to track what kinds of products users are purchasing, what they were doing before and after seeing messages, and even what type of credit card was used–making it easier to conjure up savvy promotions that scintillate the particular pressure points of Facebook users.

Follow Greg Ferenstein on Twitter and Google+. Also, follow Fast Company on Twitter.

[Image: Flickr user WebWizzard]

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comScore Social Essentials™ Enables Brands to Quantify Social Media …

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Breakthrough Measurement Capability Reports Social Media Reach, Frequency and GRPs

Ties Brand Exposure to Demographic and Behavioral Attributes to Understand the Value of Social Media Marketing

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RESTON, Va., July 26, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today announced the global launch of Social Essentials™, a new social media measurement platform that helps brands quantify social media brand impressions and incorporate them into a measurement of the marketing mix. Social Essentials provides a range of insights that help brands evaluate their audiences across social media channels and how their behaviors may be affected by brand exposure and/or brand affinity. The first installment of this service provides global reporting and analysis of audiences exposed to brand messages over Facebook, while subsequent releases will incorporate findings for additional social media channels, including Twitter.

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“While understanding social media commands a considerable portion of marketers’ attention today, many express frustration with the challenge of quantifying the marketing impact of this channel,” said Linda Boland Abraham, comScore CMO and EVP of Global Product Development. “comScore Social Essentials offers an innovative solution to this problem by quantifying paid, earned and owned social media brand impressions so that brands can measure the audiences being reached and evaluate their attributes and resulting behaviors. This capability also enables brands to calculate social media reach, frequency and GRPs so they have the metrics they need to incorporate social media impressions into the marketing mix, and ultimately determine their social media ROI.”

comScore Social Essentials includes the following insights and capabilities:

• The number of fans and friends of fans reached with paid, earned and owned social media brand impressions along with the total number of brand exposures.
• The ability to compute traditional media planning metrics such as reach, frequency and GRPs for social media brand impressions.
• The demographic composition of fans and friends exposed to social media brand impressions.
• The online behavior and brand engagement of these fan and friend segments.
• Competitive intelligence on other brands’ social media audiences, including demographic and behavioral comparisons and audience overlap
• The behavioral impact of exposure to social media messages, marketing and advertising campaigns

Understanding the Value of Fans and Followers

Social media is one of the most complex marketing channels, with marketers needing ways to quantify the impact of their social media efforts and ultimately determine their return on investment. comScore Social Essentials represents a unique solution that enables marketers to tie brand exposure within social media channels to engagement with that brand. Brands can gain visibility into the value of users exposed to their messaging, measured by whether they are more likely to visit a branded website or conduct a trademark search, consume digital media content or make online or in-store purchases.

“Even as social media has forged a new paradigm in the way marketing messages travel through networks, the ability to quantify this activity and understand its impact has thus far proven difficult,” said Lise Brende, Director of Marketing Analytics for Bing MSN of Microsoft. “comScore Social Essentials represents the first social marketing measurement capability we’ve seen that enables brands to understand social media impressions and the corresponding attributes and behaviors of those reached. This new service represents a significant breakthrough in social media measurement that will finally help marketers understand the value of their social media investment.”

comScore Releases Social Essentials™ White Paper for Prospective Clients

In conjunction with this announcement, comScore and Facebook have also released a complimentary white paper demonstrating the various applications of the Social Essentials tool using Facebook Fan audience data for Starbucks, Southwest Airlines and Microsoft Bing. To download a copy of the white paper, please visit the following link: www.comscore.com/Like

comScore Social Essentials is optimally designed for brands with at least 500,000 Facebook fans. Brands interested in subscribing to Social Essentials can contact comScore at learnmore@comscore.com.

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, including, but not limited to, expectations regarding the impact and benefits to comScore of the comScore Social Essentials™, financial or otherwise. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially, including, but not limited to: the features and characteristics of the products, the rate of development of the digital marketing intelligence, Internet advertising and e-Commerce markets; the growth of the Internet as a medium for commerce, content, advertising and communications; and the acceptance of new products and methodologies by the industry, including existing and prospective clients.

For a detailed discussion of these and other risk factors, please refer to comScore’s most recent respective Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Annual Reports on Form 10-K and from time to time other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”), which are available on the SEC’s Web site (http://www.sec.gov).

Stockholders of comScore are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date such statements are made. comScore does not undertake any obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements to reflect events, circumstances or new information after the date of this press release, or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

SOURCE comScore, Inc.

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