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."

Upwardly Mobile Shopping & Constant Chatter

Pre-purchasing behaviour has changed over time thanks largely to the impact of technology, social media and increasingly, mobile devices.

But bricks and mortar remain important to your potential customers; the majority (90%) like to know that there is a physical store somewhere.

Nearly half use their smartphone to source for information including selecting which shops they wish to frequent. At the very least they look up and compare prices on a store's mobile site.

One in three have made a purchase using their mobile device in the past 6 months.

Adding Live Chat to the marketing mix has also worked well for many retailers.  What was initially seen as something of a fad now has some true and identifiable value, according to a recent study that reveals online shopper attitudes, opinions, and behaviors relative to live chat.

The survey of UK and US respondents found that:

• Live chat has reached a tipping point of adoption
• Multi-faceted nature of chat, combined with efficiency and control, puts chatters on the path to fandom
• While live chat fans are highly desirable, frequent chatters demand special attention
• Live chat in the UK is on the rise – both in terms of adoption and favorability
• For online merchants to get the most from chat, they have to treat it as a distinct communication channel

The study was conducted online using a third party opt-in panel, 75% of which were located in the United States and 25% in the UK. Those surveyed totaled 2,027. Respondents lived in the US or UK, spent in excess of $250USD per year online, and shopped at least monthly.

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Should Your SEO Guru Vacate Their Throne?

If you have been religiously over-hyping your keyword content in the hope of getting a higher search ranking then Google's recent's pronouncements should be of concern.

Google is working on making SEO matter less important, or to put it another way less time consulting.  To quote Mike Cutts, Distinguished Engineer, Google Inc, at a recent SXSW session:

"The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level. So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

This statement has made more than a few people nervous; will Google come down hard on sites that are using SEO Optimisation techniques?  The answer is probably yes for those who go overboard building up their keyword density.  On the plus side, those who are newbies in the web site publishing world will have a greater chance of search visibility.

The fact remains that search still remains a vital consideration as this infographic shows.  While social media works best for promoting brand awareness and interactivity, search works best for local business visibility and most importantly, lead generation.

Less is More

And if you are relying on the tried and true engagement through email then the outlook just got a little bleaker.  Recent research shows that that global email deliverability declined by 6% to 76.5% in the second half of 2011.  According to the report this is due to more stringent ISP filtering and deteriorating sender reputations.

The old adage that less is more seem to hold true as an increased volume of emails contributed to the fall in delivery rates. The more 'stuff' we get in the inbox the more likely we are to flag messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. In the Asia Pacific region for example only 67% of email reached its intended inbox destination.

Source: Return Path

All communications need to focus on quality content, not quantity. In addition, to improve email pick up rates the following should happen:

• Adjust the frequency of your mailings sending our fewer but with more interesting and engaging content. It is also advisable to have someone coordinating this activity so that various departments or individuals aren't sending out separate and divergent email to the same subscriber database.
• Clean up you email data base and target content to audience. Relevance is a key factor in getting your email opened.
• Aim to build your reputation through whatever channels you choose as being 'the definitive source'

Users are now getting more savvy in their message filtering.  Return Path also conducted another study in the latter half of 2011 which showed that 93% of Gmail subscribers now have priority inbox set up but  21% of mail arriving through the Gmail system is delivered straight to the spam folder.

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Eggs In Social Media Baskets

Is Social Media worth the cost?  Social media is a two-way communication medium and use it effectively businesses need to invest in listening capabilities that capture the activities of their existing or potential customers online.

This more often than not means a subscribing to a specialist engagement dashboard / console, such as Radian6 ($US600 per month - video below), and employing dedicated staff to monitor the Buzz and respond.



Radian6 Promo

Recent research of 10,000 online shoppers by ForeSee Results suggests that the ROI (Return On Investment) for more traditional forms of advertising is better than social media.

As the methodology of this survey is not fully explained it would wise not to take these results at face value.  They do however provide a contrary view to the usual social media argument. Not everyone has achieved success through their social media strategies and some of these results could help explain why.

Forsee results found that more visits to retail / ecommerce websites are influenced by more traditional marketing tactics than social media. Promotional emails (19%), search engine results (8%), and Internet advertising (7%), all had more influence.

UK Respondents

US Respondents

In an earlier post I talked about the importance of email - "email remains a potent weapon in the digital marketing arsenal".  This study would seem to bear this out.

Customers and prospects prefer to receive email communications and according to the study, a very small  8% of online shoppers responded that social media was their preferred way to interact with a retailer.

 Even though just 8% said social media was their preferred method, more than half of all respondents indicated that they would be willing to connect using some form of social media.

Facebook was a clear winner (40%) while Twitter registered only a 4% preference

The other thing to remember  is that many businesses still don't know how to use social media effectively to promote their brand or online offering.  Social media awareness varies greatly between countries.

If customers are not used to finding social media options embedded in a web site and/or used by a company, then it is hardly surprising that they show a preference towards the tried and true email, website and snail mail.

I certainly would not right off social media on the strength of this study but it is a reality check.

At a recent roundtable conducted by a UK agency, MyClicks.org.uk,

"the majority of the participants, around 75%, were satisfied with their use of social media tools, including social networks, online video, blogs and podcasts. Around 30% stated that social media would be a key element in their communication strategy when preparing 2011 budgets, with the remainder preparing to continuing to ramp-up their presence using these channels to a greater or lesser extent."

Related articles

• Study Shows Social Media Impact Lags Search and Email (marketingpilgrim.com)
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Social Australians And Positive Koreans

Image via Wikipedia

I have written before about the need to change the mindset that many CEO's have about the effectiveness of their corporate web site.

The belief that "we build it and they will come" simply does not hold water any more. The term "web site" in itself is very 1990's.

It is the "network" that should be referred to, as the principle of engagement and personal interaction is paramount in building the brand and online buzz.

Being online where your market is should be the primary goal. The principal focus now should be on social media and any corporate web site should also have social media capability.

Nielsen reports that social media now dominates Asia Pacific internet usage:

"Social media usage has seen unprecedented growth in Asia Pacific in the past year and is now one of the most critical trends in the online sector."

The survey found that three of the seven biggest global online brands are social media sites – Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube.

Close to three quarters of the world’s Internet population (74%) have now visited a social networking/blogging site, and Internet users are spending an average of almost six hours per month on social media sites. "

Some Key Findings:

• Koreans are most likely to relay positive comments in any review while the Chinese are most likely to to focus on the negative
• The Koreans are one of the most social engaged in the world
• The Japanese are the world's most avid bloggers and the percentage of twitter users in Japan now surpasses the States
• The Chinese admire grass root celebrities and track them.  The bulletin board is still a dominant platform
• Social media games are big in China and drive new users to to sign on.
• In India Facebook is rapidly making up ground on Orkut as the platform of choice for social networking

But it is the Australians who are the worlds most socially engaged .  Their focus is communities of interest, which explains why 62% of Aussies visited a forum or message board in 2009.  The professional network platform LinkedIn experienced 99% growth in a single year

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Me, Me Me - Just How Well Are Your Sites Connected?

Substantial sums are invested in web sites and social media.  But just how effective is the inter-connectivity of your sites?

As the aim is to drive traffic from one to the other, building search rankings and the Buzz, this intelligence is important.

Google's Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers.  It measures site connectivity and shows:

• your other sites that are connected to the URLs you entered.  These are known as "me" links. 
• a 'Score' column that demonstrates how well-linked each is - green for fully linked, red for just one.
• 'Possible connections' -  a list of other sites that link to your URLs with 'me' links.

Try also the My Connections application.  It shows the list of web URLs that are connected to the ones you entered. The first section lists all contacts you've linked to. Below that is a list of all contacts who have linked to you, using relationships like 'friend', 'kin' or 'colleague'.

The Big E

Image via Wikipedia

Right from the early days of the web building engagement with a brand has been one of the most important things to strive for.

The sites of a decade ago used simple but effective devices to capture and hold users; competitions and web cams to name but two.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. In the 1950' when organised dances were still the rage there used to a competition called the Lucky Spot .  When the music stopped the couple nearest to a predefined marking on the dance floor won a prize.

We once used the same principle with a web cam to run online competitions and to build a membership database.

With the development of the semantic web users now have far more sophisticated expectations, although the quantum change is that they expect the web information to come to them, rather than the old way of having to make repeat visits to a site to glean information and stay informed.

Companies that persist with the old idea of "build a site and they will come" do so at their peril. The new reality is that users may come once and if they see content they like, they expect to be able to subscribe to its news feed or embed it in their own sites or blog.

From this moment forward they stay engaged with your brand from afar, only returning to a site when an item captures their interest.

The importance of RSS: No web site should be released unless it has RSS subscription options  for each page or content topic. This RSS can then be used to push content virally to multiple channels simultaneously.

Digital strategy demands a sophisticated approach to user engagement.  Companies must embrace the idea of having as much brand presence on other (third party sites) as as on their own.

To truly engage you need to be where the market is and to be using the tools that the target segment employs.

Engagement also needs to occur in other digital dimensions. Leading brand conversations through blogs, driving traffic from social media platforms to your content, to name but two.

Ultimately though your brand proposition  and online worth depends on content. The old adage of "if you don't have something good to say, don't say it", still applies.

Just being online because the opposition is there is entirely counter productive.  To build engagement your communications and digital channel strategy must be carefully thought through.  Resource needs to be allocated and not just for the build phase of the project.

Having an online presence is just the beginning; it is not an end in itself.  Engagement will only build if you have quality content and provide the tools to interact.

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