In A Buying Mood - Pinterest Vs Facebook

If you are selling something and planning to use social media to do so, does Facebook or Pinterest offer the best chance of delivering what you want?

New research from Bizrate Insights has found that 69% of consumers who have visited Pinterest discovered something they then purchased or wanted to purchase.  This compares to only 40% for Facebook.

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Even more compelling was the finding that 70% of consumers use Pinterest to get inspired about things to buy and 67% use this social media platform to keep track of things they like.

You may use Facebook more to maintain friendships, but Pinterest is clearly out in front when it comes to selling. Both are sites which online consumers use to connect with people who have similar styles and interests. Pinterest though is more often used as a destination for shopping inspiration, tracking, and product discovery.

It also seems that brand building is better on Pinterest than on Facebook.  Bizrate reports that:

"A greater percent (55%) of Pinterest users have engaged with retailers and brands via Pinterest, compared to the percent of Facebook users that engage retailers or brands on Facebook (48%).  But how customers engage differs for each of the two platforms.  Pinterest users are more likely to be “Creators”: adding and sharing retailer/brand related content, while Facebook users are more likely to be “Participators”: interacting with promotional activities developed by retailers and brands."

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The reach of Facebook still blitzes Pinterest but awareness of the latter is trending upwards rapidly.  36% of online consumers had heard of Pinterest in March but by August this figure had risen to 46%.

The reports data from September 2012 showed that 63% of online consumers had a Facebook account and only 15% had a Pinterest account.  Facebook is not sitting twiddling its thumbs when it comes to luring purchasers. They are testing a new feature, "collections", that lets users create wish lists of products by clicking on "want" or "collect" buttons.

PCWorld believes that the want button, if adopted permanently, could drive a lot of traffic to brands on Facebook and encourage impulse purchases.  They could be correct in this assumption and if it does it will have some serious implications for Pinterest.

But Pinterest is on the right growth projectory with a recent ComScore study putting it in the top 50 most-visited Web sites in the US for the first time, with 25 million unique visitors in the month. Ranked at 50th it still has  along way to catch Facebook which is ranked 4th in the same survey.

Related articles

• Pinterest drives more than window shopping
• Pinterest stats: does it really drive more sales than Facebook?

Why Your Brand Needs Facebook

Your Facebook site is the place that users like to interact with your brand, possibly even more so than your corporate web site.

Even though this survey from Lab42 has a small sample of 1,000 compared to the estimated 900 million Facebook users, its finding reinforce the need for a robust and well maintained Facebook page.

87% Like brands on Facebook and only 13% said they did not.  More importantly 82% felt that Facebook was great place to interact with brands and 35% of these folk felt that brands listened more to them on Facebook than elsewhere online.

Incentives remain the biggest motivation for people to follow brands on Facebook. Promotions, discounts and giveaways were the biggest motivation for 55% of respondents.  Printing off a coupon was the top way that people interact with a brand page on Facebook and 77% felt they had saved money by Liking a brand on Facebook.

Too many posts though will turn off your Followers and make them Unlike the brand page.

However the news is not all good as some products have an uphill battle to get Likes.  Adult novelty items, diet and weight loss products all are causes for embarrassment and the reason people are reticent about being associated with a brand that produces these.  Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Health and Wellness products rank third on the 'Like Embarrassment' scale.

On Pinterest

Gauri Sharma, the CEO of Lab42 says of the survey: "We feel these insights alone will spur brands to re-evaluate and question the effectiveness of marketing tactics directed at their Facebook consumers, as the findings directly challenge the notion that more likes equals more customer loyalty. For example, 46 percent have liked a brand that they have no intention of buying from, and of those, 52 percent liked a brand just to get a free item. Forty-six percent said they like brands even if they can’t afford the brand’s products.

While there’s no definitive answer of how every single brand should interact with their Facebook consumers to maximize the use of time, money and resources, we feel strongly that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in truly understanding why consumers like specific brands and if their display of ‘loyalty’ on Facebook translates to a higher lifetime value."

'Like' Chocolate? So Does Facebook

If your Facebook content strategy is to pepper your text with words such as 'Like' then you may have to think again.
According to a recent report from Sotrender, “like”, and similar call-to-action words such as “look” and “click” no longer encourage engagement as they once did.

After analysing 111 UK Facebook pages that contained 2800 different posts, across four different industries they came to the realisation that while pictures and graphics work best, there were some some words that draw a better response than others.

Among those ranked highly by Sotrender are chocolate, cream, daily, most, shop, winter, wardrobe, and today.

Other key findings include:

• Using catchy words in posts doesn't seem to increase engagement as Facebook users become 'immune' to constantly repeated phrases
• For food brands words that express emotions draw a higher response rate
• While providing links in Twitter posts works well this survey found that doing the same in Facebook drops fans’ engagement to below average

Source: Sotrender

• A picture is worth a thousand (or so) words when it comes to engaging with people on Facebook. Asking questions in posts works but an image or graphic is far more effective as the chart below shows.

Source: Sotrender

The recently introduced Timeline in Facebook has also had two beneficial effects:

• Posts now have have a longer shelf-life
• Engagement has increased for individual posts 

"80% of all comments are made in circa 8 hours and 30 minutes (2 hours more than before Timeline)" - Sotrender.

But don't fall into the trap of posting too often. Less is more, and too many posts over a short time period could well result in a loss of interest and, by extension, fans.

Related articles

• Facebook Users Like Food Pages

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• Study shows Facebook Timeline extends post lifetime, increases engagement by 13%

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The Difference Between A Brand And A Product

Brand (left)  & Product (right)

At the risk of sounding 'corny', it is still the same old cereal.

Facebook Is The New Internet, Or Is It?

For many people online in 2011 Facebook is the internet and viceversa. This as I've written previously can be problematic, as it is a closed social media platform at variance with the open philosophy of the the Net itself.

But businesses are pragmatic, they have to be, and so more and more of them are building Facebook pages in the belief that a 'like' will turn into purchase intent.

Market Sentinel puts the dampener on this belief.  They found that:

• Facebook Ads don't work for brands with small click through rates of 0.011-0.165%
• Facebook Fan Pages don't work for brands with the number of “core fans” (fans who have commented more than average for the Page) being far lower than the actual fan count. For example while Lady Gaga has 39 million plus fans, only 1,231 could be counted as "core fans".
  The core fan count is calculated by the average number of posts-per-contributing fan.
  Because of the way Facebook works a fan needs to actively participate in a brand’s Facebook Page their activity needs to be continuous, otherwise status updates for the brand will cease appearing in the fan’s Facebook stream.
• While Facebook apps should work for brands they often don't as brands are reliant upon people installing them, being prepared to share data with the brand and companies often don't provide a lead-in opportunity to purchase through the app.

Before you ditch your Facebook Business Page and revert back to paper and pencil, the above findings need to be balanced by the fact that many businesses do indeed find their Facebook Page a more than useful platform for building brand awareness and offering incentives.

A business needs to clearly define its Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) for the use of Facebook and other social media to truly determine its Return On Investment (ROI).

Fans are also a fickle bunch as this chart proves. DDB Paris and OpinionWay surveyed 1,528 Facebook users and found that 630 of them clicked the unlike link on a page; that's two out of every five.

Source: DDB

Meanwhile Facebook itself is working upon improving granularity to its “Like” concept. New buttons called “Listened,” “Read,” and “Watched" are about to be added and social commerce buttons such as “Want” will follow soon after the roll-out of the aforementioned new buttons.

And clearly unfazed by the recent debacle of MySpace, Rupert Murdoch's recent acquisition, the Wall Street Journal has just launched an app of its own.

So now within Facebook itself you can read, comment and share WSJ.com content with other Facebook users.

And you can choose which editorial content interests you most by adding or deleting the Top Editors from your preferences list. Within the app, a user has the ability to subscribe to different content, curated both by other users and by the WSJ itself.

As  Maya Baratz puts it in an interview with Niemanlab:

"You can’t rely on users coming to you anymore. WSJ is navigating the content within the app around people, making every user an editor. WSJ Social is about elevating the role of people as curators of content. When you walk into the app, you have this very curated publication"

The official press release goes further quoting Alisa Bowen, the WSJ's Digital Network general manager:

"We’re breaking the mold of using Facebook simply to drive traffic to our websites and are now creating an opportunity to engage with the Journal directly on the Facebook platform. WSJ Social creates a more integrated experience for users and innovative opportunities for advertisers." 

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• Wall Street Journal Social - Maya Baratz: I have some news to share (nextlevelofnews.com)
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.... And a set of plastic cups. IKEA's Desktop Branding

Sometimes the simplest digital branding ideas can be amongst the best.

Having lived for the past four years in a country with the Scandanavian retailer IKEA, it is easy to become reliant on the ease of redecoration at low cost.

Now that I have returned to another country where this retailer does not yet have a presence, I feel somewhat deprived (and it is not just the meatballs on the menu!). All however is not lost, as now there is a digital presence to remind me of their operation and product line.

Here's the innovative method of digital branding from IKEA.  Known for their low cost flatpack storage units they have translated these into a downloadable desktop set. The app comes from Hungarian agency Laboratory Ideas.

"From the beginning we tried to help you organize your home a better and more efficiently. The world is changing, but the challenge for us remains the same. So we created "e-folder set", a virtual version of the famous IKEA organizers."

So now you can virtually decorate your folders and screen to make it look more homely. A few clicks and you have practical, transparent shelving / storage units, where you can easily find anything.

Try it for yourself by downloading the zip file from this site.  Now I wonder what would be the result if the Subway brand was to do the same?

A Lot Of Old Soap

Omo is not a new product.  It has been hawked around households for generations but now comes a digital marketing development that positions it (literally) in a totally different sphere.

From  next week comes the reality that your soap powder can stalk you.

According to the Advertising Age, Unilever's Omo detergent is adding an unusual ingredient to its two-pound detergent box in Brazil: a GPS device that allows its promotions agency Bullet to track shoppers and follow them to their front doors.

Starting next week, consumers who buy one of the GPS-implanted detergent boxes will be surprised at home, given a pocket video camera as a prize and invited to bring their families to enjoy a day of Unilever-sponsored outdoor fun.

The promotion, called Try Something New With Omo, is in keeping with the brand's international "Dirt is Good" positioning that encourages parents to let their kids have a good time even if they get dirty.

It will be interesting to follow the campaign on the web site as this is the case of the a prize finding a consumer rather than the other way around.

Because of the high crime rate in Brazil the promoters are concerned that the lucky prize winner may not open his of her door to the team who are tasked to deliver the prize.

To avoid such an eventuality they "can remotely activate a buzzer in the detergent box so that it starts beeping. And if the team takes too long to arrive, and the consumer has already opened the box to see if she's a winner or just do laundry, she'll find, along with the GPS device and less detergent than expected, a note explaining the promotion and a phone number to call."

It begs the question though, will this lead to increased sales?  Omo's brand recognition is already high within the country where is has 80% of the detergent market

In some countries issues of privacy might prevent such an initiative, but seemingly not in Brazil. being tracked from the store to your home might not be everyone's cup of tea, or in this case, box of soap.

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TV Retains Greater Brand Trust Than Bloggers?

This recent Nielsen survey is revealing and confirms just how influential the new online social environment has become for brand recognition and development. Consumers influencing consumers is the new order of things.

Image via Wikipedia

Family and Friends are still the primary influence but social media is a close third in the queue.  It would appear though that "Influential Bloggers" are not as influential as they would have hoped with television still engendering greater brand trust.

Key findings from the Nielsen survey:

• More than 40% of consumers go online to check reviews and consumer feedback before purchasing consumer electronics.
• 60% of those going online have visited a social network, with half going back everyday according to Facebook.
• 23% of social network users expect companies to listen and respond to what is said online

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