There’s been a debate raging about the value of social media activity for brands in the past couple of weeks.

The spark was some recent findings by TNS, the research body responsible for Digital Life, a global survey into the online behaviour of some 72,000 consumers across 60 countries.

TNS found that the majority of consumers in digital markets did not want to engage with brands via social media and that reticence to engage was at it’s highest in the UK, where 61% of consumers stated that they did not see social media as a place to interact with brands.

The survey also dealt an apparent blow to those contemplating a F-Commerce presence, with just 1/4 of respondents in developing countries seeing social networks as a place to buy products.

TNS’s own conclusion was summed up by it Chief Development Office, Matthew Froggatt:

 ’Many brands…are failing to understand that these spaces belong to the consumer and brand presence needs to be proportionate and justified….Misguided digital strategies are generating mountains of digital waste, from friendless Facebook accounts to blogs no-one reads.’

Additional research conducted by Edge Rank Checker seemed to drive another nail into the coffin of the notion that social media was an effective tool for marketers.  The study, conducted across 5,500 Facebook pages with more than 100,000 fans in October of this year, found that the average CTR of links shared by brands was 0.14% – that’s 1 click for every 714 impressions.  This may be a lot better than Facebook advertising and slightly better than online advertising, but is rather disappointing considering that Facebook fans should be more of a qualified audience given that fact they’ve opted in to receive those posts.

So are marketers wasting their time by trying to engage with customers and prospects via social media? We don’t think so, and it’s worth going back to the research to discover some of the reasons why.

For example, going back to TNS’s Digital Life research, 61% of consumers who don’t want to interact with brands via social media implies 39% that do – and 39% of the UK’s social media users is a pretty vast potential audience. And as more brands become involved in social media and offer consumers incentives for them to engage with them in this environment, that 39% is only going to increase.

The paltry CTR’s reported also tell only part of the story. Just because a post link isn’t being clicked on doesn’t mean it isn’t making an impression, in the same way that CTR is a poor way of measuring the effectiveness of online advertising.  And links are likely to get less clicks on Facebook because it’s users usually reticent to leave the social network.

However, where these studies do add value is to inject a dose of much needed realism into the social media debate.

Marketing is about identifying relevant target audiences and then selecting the channels that are most appropriate for the audience and the brand’s message.  Some brands seem to be throwing that thinking out of the window and taking a ‘channel first’ approach, deciding that they’re going to build a large following on twitter or Facebook without thinking whether the channel is appropriate for their message or whether their genuine prospects and customers are using that channel.

The danger is that brands can build followings who aren’t really in their target market, or are communicating via a channel which is not the best for what they’re trying to achieve.

Brands also need to realise that social media isn’t free – the time their staff spend posting and replying costs money too. Although social media is an emerging channel which surely has much unrealised potential in terms of RoI, no sensible debate can be had about its value to brands unless brands acknowledge the true investment they’re making in it.

The interactive nature of social media does present brands with an opportunity to build dialogue and advocacy with a proportion of their customers and prospects. But it is not the best solution for all customers and all tasks. Brands that realise this and use it with a balanced view of what it can achieve for their organisation are those likely to get the most out of it.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »

Lost in all the excitement over timelines and tickers have been 2 small but significant announcements from Facebook in recent weeks.

The first relates to a complete overhaul of Facebook Insights, the tool that page owners use to judge the success of their page.

For starters, three new metrics have joined the familiar count of overall ‘Likes’ at the top of the Insights page.  These are:

Friends of Fans – a count of all the friends on Facebook of your current fans, taking into account any mutual friends that those fans might have.  It’s a good way for brands to understand what the viral reach of their Facebook campaign could be, whether that be an ad campaign like Sponsored Stories or a viral content campaign.

People Talking About This – this is the number of people who have engaged with a page over the past week. In this case, engagement is defined as Facebook users liking the page, RSVP’ing to an event, commenting on or sharing a post, tagging the page in an update or in a photo or posting to the page’s wall.

Weekly Total Reach – this is the number of people who have seen any page content or ads pointing to the page over the past 7 days.

All of this information is useful at a macro level but it’s the next level of detail down that makes the new Facebook Insights really interesting – the performance of individual page posts.

For the most recent 500 posts to their pages, marketers will be able to see:

- The Reach of that post – the number of people that saw it.

- The Engagement level – the number of people that clicked on that post, including those that viewed videos or pictures.

- The volume of people that Talked About the post – the number of Facebook users who actively engaged with the post, including liking, commenting, sharing, tagging or RSVP’ing.

- The ‘Virality’ of the post – a new metric which will soon enter marketers’ lexicons, ‘Virality’ is merely an expression of the number of people who have ‘Talked About’ a post as a percentage of the ‘Reach’ of that post.

 

 

These new metrics mean that not only will marketers fully understand what proportion of their fan base is seeing their posts, they’ll also understand how much impact those posts are having, and what sort of impact.

By reviewing and analyzing this data, marketers will be understand better what sort of content their fans like to consume and what sort of content their fans like to interact with and pass on to their friends.

In addition, a new ‘arms race’ will begin amongst rival brands as the ‘People Talking About’ metric will also be viewable by any Facebook user who visits a fan page, published below the number of page ‘Likes’. Rival brands will be vying with each other not only for popularity but for talkability.

At present, the new Insights is available by clicking a link at the top of the existing Insights page.

The second significant development is the introduction of a new ad format – the Premium Ad Unit.  In a similar way to promoted tweets on Twitter, brands can turn a page post – be that a message or a video – into an ad.

Echoing the highly successful ‘Sponsored Stories’ format, if a Facebook user’s friend has ‘liked’ the brand advertising, the ad will expand to incorporate that information in addition to the post information.

At present, the new format is only available via Facebook’s direct sales team but we expect it to be popular with advertisers because it combines the advertiser’s message with a social element. It also a larger format ad format which will display on the right hand side of a user’s homepage with no other ads present – hence attracting more attention from users.

When you consider the major changes announced at the f8 conference alongside these recently announced innovations, there’s certainly much for Facebook marketers to consider in the coming weeks.

But for us, the key learning is that brands shouldn’t just focus on building a following amongst their target audiences, they need to have strategies to engage those users, to get conversations going about their brands, in order to recruit new fans and new customers, be that via engaging posts or social advertising.

And as Facebook wants an increasingly engaged user base to boost ad inventory and to sell premium ad formats, it’s doing all in its power to ensure brands have the tools to play their part.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »

If one thing has been constant in Facebook’s short history it’s that the world’s pre-eminent social network is always changing – and change was on the agenda again at Facebook’s recent f8 developer conference.

However, this year’s changes were focused on one goal – dwell time.

With 800m users and growing, Facebook’s leadership team have clearly moved their focus from growth to finding ways of keeping users on the site for as long as possible. As any online publishers will tell you,  people doing more and spending longer on a site means more ad inventory to sell, and more ad inventory means more revenue.

So what changes is Facebook implementing and what opportunities will they create for premium and luxury brands? Let’s go through them in turn:

‘Timelines’

Users’ existing profiles are being replaced with ’Timelines’. 

The new timeline is designed to make available a user’s full history of interaction on Facebook - status updates,  photos posted, apps used and places visited (via Facebook Places).  A user’s timeline will be created automatically by Facebook but they will have the ability to add their own content to to ‘fill out’ their new profile – all the way back to their birth if they so desire.

From a user’s perspective, the change will allow people to create more personalised and deeper profiles that better reflect their own personalities and histories. From Facebook’s perspective, the fact that users will be adjusting their timelines and investigating their friends’ timeslines will mean more time spent on the site. And, of course, all the additional content that’s added by users personalising their timelines will be invaluable to advertisers looking to more precisely target their advertising offerings. 

At present, timelines are only being rolled out to individual users but there have been hints that the change could be introduced to brand pages too in the future. This raises interesting possibilities for premium and luxury brands in particular, offering them an ideal opportunity to explain more of their ‘back story’  and heritage to potential fans.

‘Facebook Gestures’

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the ‘Like’ button, Facebook has acknowledged that it’s not appropriate for all occasions. So partners and developers will soon be able customise the button to include any verb that is appropriate.

So instead of ‘Like’ing, Facebook users could be ‘Read’ing (newspaper or magazine articles or books), ‘Listen’ing’ (to music) or ‘Watch’ing (TV or movies). 

The introduction of more relevant verbs for social sharing buttons could see an explosion in their usage - potentially annoying for friends who’ll see more of this sort of activity in their newsfeeds but further excellent data for premium and luxury advertisers when defining audiences for their advertising.

More sharing means more peer influencing – buying books that friends are reading or downloading music that others are listening to. And there’s also the opportunity for brands to more overtly grease the wheels of social commerce – for example, by adding ‘Want’ buttons to sites so users can build up their own wishlists of products for special occasions or birthdays. In addition, these greater opportunities for user and brand interaction will create more relevant content for the sponsored stories ad format - giving brands greater opportunty to effectively ’spread the word’ virally to the friends of their fans.

Media Partnerships

One way to get users to spend more time on your site is to give them less reasons to leave it. Facebook has done exactly that by signing up a raft of media partners so users can watch TV (on Hulu), listen to music (on Spotify) and read the news (on the Guardian or The Indie) without having to leave the site.

The benefit of this innovation is not just in the extra time Facebook users will spend on the site but all the extra data that will be gathered on users media preferences and the way they interact with that media. The movies people watch, the music they listen to and the articles they read can tell advertisers alot about whether a particular user is of the correct profile for their product, allowing Facebook advertising to become even more targeted.

The Ticker

Facebook has recognised that the more interactive that users become with the service, the more their friends newsfeeds will become clogged up with information which isn’t that important or interesting – like a friend’s progress in Farmville, for example.

So all of this ‘background information’, particularly interactions with apps, will migrate to a ‘ticker’ – a real time rolling feed of what a user’s Facebook friends are doing at that very moment.

Of course, the fact that it’s real time gives users the opportunity to do things together. As interactions with Facebook’s new media partners will be shared via the ‘ticker’, friends could listen to music or watch movies together, using the chat feature to compare notes as they go.

And premium and luxury brands could create apps to leverage this oportunity for real time interaction – allowing friends to go on virtual shopping trips together for example. 

 

For premium and luxury advertisers, there’s much to welcome about the changes that Facebook have introduced.  They’ll be more inventory available, at least in the short term, and a richer pool of user data to mine to more precisely target advertising offerings.

But they’ll also be more opportunities for brands to engage with users, and greater rewards for brands that seize those opportunities. 

Just as Facebook has changed it’s emphasis from building a following to deeper interaction with its users, so brands will be rewarded for changing their strategy too – from a focus on ‘Likes’ to a focus on meaningful engagement. The challenge will be in dreaming up ways to more deeply interact with fans – to become part of of their daily experience of Facebook. To fail risks becoming an irrelevance on the world’s leading social network, and as Facebook grows and dominates more of its users time online, that’s not a place that many brands will want to go.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »

If 2 years ago, fashion marketers had been asked which brands they expected to be leading the social media revolution transforming fashion marketing, it’s unlikely they’d have named Oscar de la Renta.

With limited marketing resources and with a signature product, the $5,000 cocktail dress, which was inaccessible to many, the family-owned fashion house seemed to be an unlikely candidate as a social media innovator.

But that’s exactly what they’ve become. With over 220,000 fans on Facebook and 85,000 Twitter followers, the brand punches way above it’s weight in social media circles, and their story should act as an inspiration for small and medium-sized fashion brands looking to leverage the power of social media to promote their own businesses.

Here are the 5 social media lessons that all fashion brands can learn from Oscar de la Renta’s approach:

Keep Innovating to Stay Ahead of Your Rivals

Back in June 2010, Oscar de la Renta was one of the first fashion brands to livestream it’s runway show . Livestreaming a show wasn’t necessarily an innovation itself at the time – a handful of fashion rivals were doing the same – but whilst rivals were streaming their shows via their own sites, with no opportunity to interact or share, ODLR encouraged a dialogue between audience and designer by allowing viewers to post questions and comments via Facebook and Twitter.

By this year, interactive livestreaming of fashion shows had become mainstream, but in the latest round of catwalk shows, ODLR pushed the boundaries of interactivity further again.  By using the hashtag #odrlive, the brand allowed viewers of both the livestream and of the actual show to share their photographs with the virtual audience. This crowdsourcing exercise resulted in over 1000 photo uploads, creating a kaleidoscopic backdrop to the live feed of the runway show on Tumblr.

By staying one step ahead, ODLR positioned itself as an innovator (no bad thing in the fashion world), reaped the benefit of all the column inches of coverage those innovations bring and kept it’s users interested and engaged.

Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

Social media is a relatively new channel for fashion brands – we tend to forget that it was only a few years ago that brand pages were initially introduced – so brands should still be prepared to experiment, and learn the lessons from those experiments.

When, in April of this year, ODLR decide to launch their first fragrance in 10 years, they choose Facebook as the sole vehicle for their sampling campaign ahead of the launch. Their pioneering approach was rewarded with 25,000 sample requests in 3 days – creating valuable demand and buzz for their new product for a very small investment.

In this case, their experiment was a success but it wouldn’t have mattered if the promotion had fallen flat on its face. The key is, they were prepared to try something new and gained important learnings from the process. Without experimentation, brands will learn little about what will really motivate and engage their followers.

Be Transparent

The success of the OscarPRGirl, the Twitter and Tumblr alter-ego of ODLR Director of Communications Erika Bearman, is in her transparency.

Not only does she let her followers have a peek behind the scenes of the fashion house but a peek into her fashion centric existence in New York.

People relate to people better than they do to brands, and OscarPRGirl’s ‘realness’ is a strong factor behind her success.

Aim to Engage, Not Just to Build a Following

ODLR’s social media focus is on engagement, not follower numbers.

Their reasoning is that the more time their fans spend talking about Oscar de la Renta, the less time they spend talking about rival brands. And those conversations are not just between the brand and its followers, but between their followers and their friends, building awareness of the brand virally.

It would be a mistake to build a huge social media following if you didn’t then do enough to get those followers talking about your brand but it’s exactly that mistake that many fashion brands are making.

See Social as an Opportunity to Expand Your Business

If ODLR had purely seen social media as a means to sell more $5,000 cocktail dresses, the likelihood is that they’d have been disappointed. But they’ve come to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr as a means to learn and expand their business.

Their success on Facebook in particular has encouraged them to plan the introduction of an f-commerce store  with products available at more accessible pricepoints. Their social media experiment has also opened their eyes to their many fans overseas and the benefits of making their brand more accessible internationally.

So by coming to the channel with an open mind, ODLR has unearthed new commercial opportunities which would have remained dormant if they hadn’t been prepared to experiment with social media.

 

As Oscar de la Renta has demonstrated, social media success in the fashion industry is about being innovative, being transparent, being engaging and keeping an open mind, not necessarily deep pockets or access to expert thinking.

If all fashion brands keep in mind the mantras that have driven Oscar de la Renta ’s social media success to date, then they too can reap the benefits that this emerging channel can bring.

By: Carla Burgess

Posted in Online, Social Networking | No Comments »