Engage 2011: How to Increase Your Facebook Fan Base—Maximizing Engagement with Likes and Shares

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Room: Yosemite A/Marketer Track Presenters: Dennis Yu, Webtrends and Veronica Stecker, Gordmans Description: “Get the big tips you need to know to maximize engagement with likes and shares." Facebook advertising seems complicated, with a lot of emphasis on tiny percentages and acronyms like CPC, CTR and CPC. Questions about using Facebook for marketing range from “So you have lots of fans? So what?” to concerns about privacy and ad bombardment in our personal lives. However, Facebook fans are super valuable, and that’s no secret. As Dennis Yu says, if 2010 was the year of acquiring fans, then 2011 is the year of figuring out what to do with them. Three Main Ways To Measure Facebook Fans There are three ways to measure the value of your Facebook fans:
  • Earned media—How many fans times, how often they post and how much would it cost in other media to get the same thing. When using Facebook to advertise, consider what it would cost you to get the same impression from TV or other media?
  • Lead Value—Score how hot your leads are and how active they are on your Facebook page.
  • Direct Conversion Value—Coupon redemption rates, geographic split on ads, how many fans become purchasers.
One thing that’s often overlooked in direct conversion is the “flow-over” that starts with the web, not just ends there. For example, it makes sense that people would see an ad on television and go to that company’s Facebook page, but marketers don’t generally think about people seeking out a company’s Facebook page first. That needs to change, Yu says. “There’s power in being able to track back from a purchase to see where the customer first ‘liked’ the product,” he says. Who Likes What Both Yu and fellow presenter Veronica Stecker of Gordmans agree: the main pitfall in Facebook advertising revolves around confusing the number of Facebook fans with actual engagement. Yu defines engagement as the number of likes and comments on a Facebook page divided by the total number of fans.
  • For example, in the fast food industry, McDonalds has the most fans, but Jack In The Box fans are much more engaged.
  • For hotels, Hilton has more fans than Best Western, Marriot, Holiday Inn or La Quinta. However, Hilton only has 149 fans per hotel location. Considering the amount of people who move through Hilton’s lobbies across the globe, that number should be higher and more engaged.
  • Banks perform even worse. Bank of America leads in number of fans over Wells Fargo, Sun Trust, and Key Bank, but Bank of America only has 7500 fans—less than two fans per branch.
  • For sports leagues, the NBA has more Facebook fans, but Major League Baseball fans have more engagement.
  • In shoes, Converse leads Nike, Puma, Adidas and New Balance with 11 million fans, but Converse fans are also much more active. Why? Higher resonance with Facebook users through Converse’s Chuck Taylor line.
Yu points out that “overlap” must be taken into account for brands, too. For example, Tiger Woods has more fans than Nike golf, but the two are intricately linked. Let the Fans Do the Advertising For You For businesses and brands, it costs about one or two dollars to get one Facebook fan. Some spend more, some less. (Starbucks spends about $10 per fan!) The value of these fans is that they will do your advertising for you. “Fans loading photos of your product costs you nothing!” Yu notes. And friends of your brand have friends: a huge source for new business. The average Facebook user makes 3 to 4 “likes” per day, and their friends usually take note of that. “You have existing people who love you,” Yu says, “So the genius is to get those people to reach out to their friends.” Using word of mouth as the best form of advertising? A stroke of genius, indeed.

Why Facebook Advertising Is So Misunderstood

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Our Facebook report, which was released last week stirred up some common myths about Facebook advertising. Facebook ad performance is abysmal compared to other display or pay-per-click ads CTRs may be relatively low, but what should really matter to you is your goal. If you are a direct marketer, you're probably looking at conversions and cost per conversion. If your metric is lead gen, then you might look at emails collected or new fans. If you're a brand, consider reach, engagement, and earned media. Consider that a single prominent leaderboard or LREC ad in display may get a multiple of the CTR for a text ad below the fold of a page. More ads on one page mean fewer opportunities for any one ad to get the click. Facebook has increased the number of ads per page to where there are now up to 5 ads per pageview vs only 3 before (not counting the homepage premium ads). We'd argue that the growth in ad units per page has more than outpaced an apparent decline in CTR. Targeting and depth of relationship makes comparisons apples-to-oranges We described how friend of fan ads (those with social impressions) can often garner twice the click-through rate. The same is true in the non-Facebook world for retargeting (showing ads to people who have been to your site) and branded search (people who are actually navigating vs searching). In fact, you may even compare the spectrum of a Facebook ad's performance to its older brother— email. Spam email (unwanted commercial contact) gets horrible open and click rates, while messages to a well-kept house list can get 40% opens and 50% clicks to open rates. In Facebook, a super targeted ad to your existing fans is more like and email than an ad— it's wanted messaging that is helpful, personalized, and informative. Advertisers aren't yet armed with the proper tools and training If leveraging social context is the key to great CTR as well as conversion, then the larger the social graph, the easier it is to get a friend-of-fan connection. The network effect applies. But we are just at the beginning stage of Facebook advertising, as most brands are not targeting or using the power of endorsements. A simple way to prove this— the cost of super targeted traffic is often the same as untargeted 18+ traffic, which is the default. Facebook will eventually morph into an efficient ecosystem where each niche is priced accordingly, based on market value. Right now, you can get gold at the price of sand. Market competition is starting to drive the price up Yogi Berra once said when asked why he didn’t go to a popular restaurant "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Demand on Facebook is outstripping the massive increase in supply. Considering that average display prices are $2-5 CPMs, a 30 cent CPM on Facebook for traffic that can be better targeted is as great deal at any metric applied. To reiterate the Google growth curve against what Facebook is about to experience, the 5 cent clicks in 2002 on AdWords are now 50 cents. And with smarter advertisers on Facebook, this same curve will apply. Get it while the traffic is cheap. The entire store is on sale No, Facebook doesn't compensate us to say this, nor is this a blind frenzy. Rather, the cost to build your brand's fan base or revenues is at a significant discount now, for example, as shown by Rosetta Stone and Virgin Mobile Qatar. As more metrics-based case studies come forward, especially those that show the offline impact of online efforts, the "ultraviolet" layer of influence, also called "word of mouth", becomes measurable. Until attribution is in place, Facebook marketing is educated guesswork We know that marketing channels work in tandem to influence each other. The question is how much credit to allocate to an "assist". The world of marketing measurement is nearly exclusively last click— the last click a user has gets 100% credit, while the other touchpoints along the way get zero credit. The disproportionate credit goes often to search, robbing the fact that you have a strong brand, a good product, significant word of mouth marketing, and social efforts. When these channels are properly weighted, we predict that ad rates will significantly increase. Are there other myths or misconceptions you've heard? Or other questions that you're interested in getting to the bottom of? Leave us a comment and we'll get you the answers or join us in one of our upcoming Facebook webinars.

Random Things You Might Not Know

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Did You Know . . . It is impossible to lick your elbow. Over 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow. A crocodile can't stick it's tongue out. A shrimp's heart is in their head. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond. In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand (or attempted to do so - apart from Bones). It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. Between 1937 and 1945 Heinz produced a version of Alphabetic Spaghetti especially for the German market that consisted solely of little pasta swastikas. On average, a human being will have sex more than 3,000 times and spend two weeks kissing in their lifetime. More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call. Rats and horses can't vomit. The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. if you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over million descendants. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16, 1969, make it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrial or their vehicles? In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match. Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks. In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders. Most lipstick contains fish scales. Cat's urine glows under a black-light. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.

A Look Back At Riverside Park

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This is an exerpt from the Massachusetts New Media Magazine where Susan E. Slattery recalls her last trip to "Riverside Park". Since this article was written in 1997, the park was sold again and rebranded "Six Flags New England". It was one of my favorite places as a teenager. The last time I visited Riverside was in 1977, just after the installation of its one-loop steel coaster, The Black Widow. It had looked monstrous to me then, being the first loop I'd ever seen. I didn't ride it; at that point in my life I had a poor understanding of centrifugal force and believed I'd be launched right out of my seat. I rode the classic wooden Thunderbolt instead, with its neck-jerking camel hump hills and treacherously timeworn (the paint was peeling) construction. The Thunderbolt featured the added thrill of potential carnage ascribable to complete collapse. It's 20 years later, however, and the face of Riverside has changed. Not only are the rides bigger and more spectacular, (Riverside now has five adult coasters -- including the large wood-frame Cyclone, which claims one of the steepest angles of ascent in existence), but the park is more colorful. New paint jobs abound, and things are greener. Grass and trees are making a comeback. "Riverside used to be an asphalt jungle," Sevart noted. Premier Parks bought the 170-acre theme park earlier this year from the Edward J. Carroll family, who had owned the park since shortly after the Great Depression. Premier, the fourth largest regional theme park company in the United States, owns and operates 11 parks throughout the country. In the few months since the buyout, Premier has given its newest acquisition a dramatic facelift. The company launched a three-year capital plan that has pumped $20 million into the park so far; equally large investments are planned for coming years. The biggest changes have been made right at the park's entrance plaza, where Riverside's famous 1909 M.C. Illion's carousel, with more than 70 hand-carved horses, is now the gilded centerpiece. The carousel, valued in the millions, has been restored to its original condition, and is now housed in a specially designed structure that resembles a turn-of-the-century gazebo.

Fantasty Dinner Party #4

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Here’s the challenge — if you could invite 5 people to a dinner party (not counting best friends or relatives), who would they be? What would you eat? What music would be playing? What would you talk about? Who would you invite? Considering all the options available, it took me a few minutes and I hereby deliver my list with a disclaimer — the names will probably change with time, environment and mood. Jim Lovell Ginger Lynn Charles Bukowski Eric Clapton Dr. Christian Barnard The meal: Bass Ale Buffalo Wings Sausage subs (the ballpark kind) Fries and onioin rings hostess cupcakes for dessert The music: The jukebox at the Daily Pint, each guest gets five selections at a time, my first five, if i recall correctly: I Want You - The Beatles Magic Carpet Ride - Steppenwolf I Heard It Through the Grapevine - Creedence Bad Company - Bad Company Dueces Are Wild - Aerosmith Answer the following questions: What is greatness? Define ecstasy. Explain fear. Each will describe their first sexual experience. Each will tell when and why they were happiest. Each will tell what they love about life and what they hate about it. We will cap off the night by playing truth or dare.