Corporate Eye

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Susan Gunelius

Susan Gunelius

Brand Reach on Facebook Increased in 2013

facebook iphone desktopThere are over 1 billion Facebook users around the world, and while the number of users continues to increase, there are concerns about the future of Facebook among the marketing community.

New accounts are being created, but many of these accounts are second accounts for existing users who want to keep some of their content out of their personally-identifiable Facebook Profiles. Furthermore, growth is slowing as Facebook becomes a mature product with deep existing penetration in its market. Finally, many people, particularly within the teen demographic, claim they are using Facebook less frequently or leaving Facebook completely.

With these concerns in mind, Socialbakers conducted a study to determine the reach of brand content on Facebook by age group. For each age group, the company took a sample of 960 million Facebook Page Fans for 1,847 brand Facebook Pages from January to December of 2013. Using the data collected, Socialbakers found that brand reach on Facebook in 2013 was up in all age groups except the 13-17-year old demographic. Here are the findings:

  • Age 13-17: Brand reach on Facebook fluctuated significantly during 2013 but ended up in December almost equal to where it was in January.
  • Age 18-24: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 39%.
  • Age 25-34: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 56%.
  • Age 35-44: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 64%.
  • Age 45-54: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 69%.
  • Age 55-64: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 71%.
  • Age 65 and up: Brand reach on Facebook increased by 74%.

Taking a look at the statistics above, brand reach actually increased more for older Facebook users than younger users in 2013. Research would need to be done to determine precisely why that happened, but it’s safe to assume that overall usage of Facebook by older people increased in 2013 thereby increasing brand reach to these audiences.

The data tells us that teens have not abandoned Facebook. Even if they claim to abhor Facebook, they’re still using it. Today, teens and every other demographic are using multiple social tools on multiple devices and usage will undoubtedly start to shift to other platforms in time, but don’t expect a huge exodus from Facebook in the near future. For now, it’s perfectly safe for companies to invest in marketing their brands on Facebook to reach any age group—even the fickle and often elusive teen demographic.

Image: Sam Michel

5 Social Media Marketing KPIs You Shoud Track for Your Brand

social media marketing kpi tracking spreadsheetAre your social media marketing investments driving the results you need? Executives will demand that you prove your budget investments are working, but do you know what you should track to get that evidence?

While follower numbers and number of times content is shared can help you build your case, they don’t tell enough of the story. You need to translate those numbers into something meaningful to your executive team if you want to hold onto your marketing budget dollars.

You need to quantify the return on investment for your social media marketing tactics just as you do for traditional marketing initiatives. While social media marketing metrics are far from perfect today, you can collect the necessary data to support your current and future social media marketing spending.

Below are five key performance indicators (KPIs), you should start tracking right now. Executives understand and value this type of performance information, and it could make the difference between getting your next marketing budget approved or denied. These KPIs are in addition to the ones discussed above—growth in followers and shares—and growth in link click-throughs.

1. High Quality Lead Generation

Are your social media marketing initiatives bringing in quality leads? Track the number of leads from social media, the number of those leads that actually became buying customers, and the revenue brought in by those customers. Set KPIs to increase the number of quality leads by a specific percentage as well as to increase the purchase value per customer.

2. Sales Volume and Revenue Growth

The most important metric to executives is revenue. Therefore, all of your social media marketing initiatives that require part of your marketing budget dollars, should be measurable. Track the number of sales generated from social media as well as the revenues derived from those sales. Set a KPI to increase both numbers by a specific percentage.

3. Brand Sentiment

Brand sentiment is calculated by tracking the number of positive brand mentions across the social web compared to negative brand mentions. Set a KPI goal to increase positive brand sentiment by a specific percentage.

4. Customer Loyalty and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Of course, customer loyalty can be measured by tracking the path a customer took before making a purchase. If that path started with social media, then you can measure the customer’s loyalty over time. However, another critical aspect of customer loyalty when it comes to social media is the positive word-of-mouth marketing that loyal brand advocates spread online. Identify your best customers who are vocal across social media and set a KPI to increase their advocacy (through a growing number of positive online conversations and sharing about the brand) by a specific percentage.

5. Customer Engagement

Customer engagement relates to how customers interact directly with your brand using social media. Track frequency, duration, and quality of engagements and set a KPI to increase all three metrics across the board.

What social media marketing KPIs do you find most useful in building your case for a social media marketing budget to executives? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: lustfish

5 Statistics that Define the Digital Marketing Landscape in 2014

statistics graphAccording to an infographic created by Bell Pottinger Wired (shown below), online retail sales in the United Kingdom are expected to increase by 10% each year through 2017. This growth isn’t unique to the U.K. Across the globe, online and mobile sales are on the rise, and the digital marketing landscape is changing to match that shift in consumer buying behaviors.

Using the statistics from the infographic, there appear to be five areas that brand marketers are prioritizing in their digital marketing plans in 2014 and beyond:

1. Mobile

We’ve reached the point in history where marketers need to develop “mobile-always” strategies and tactics. Mobile web browsing is on pace to grow by 50% this year, and 87% of connected devices will be smartphones and tablets in 2014.

2. Video

Visual marketing assets are increasing in value exponentially, and 86% of brands will add video to their websites this year. In fact, many brand marketers will prioritize video over social media in 2014. By 2017, the online video audience will reach 1.5 billion people, and approximately, “two-thirds of the world’s data will be video.”

3. Social Media

Brands need to be where their target audiences are, and that place continues to be social networking sites. In 2014, one in two brand marketers plan to increase their social media marketing budgets to reach the growing audience of social network users, which is expected to grow by 26% by 2015.

4. Content

Content is still considered one of the biggest marketing opportunities for brands, and 73% of business-to-business content marketers are increasing their content production and publishing in 2014 according to the data in the infographic. In fact, infographics will continue to grow in popularity in 2014. This year, 51% of B2B marketers will use infographics (up from 38% last year). Bell Pottinger Wired notes that infographics are the largest growing content marketing tactic this year.

5. PPC

Despite concerns related to pay-per-click advertising click fraud, it’s still one of the most popular digital marketing tactics. In fact, nearly three out of four (72%) of digital advertisers plan to increase their PPC spending this year.

digital marketing statistics 2014 infographic

Do these digital marketing statistics match with your brand’s digital marketing landscape in 2014? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Wagner Magni

Crowdsourcing for Brand Marketing on Pinterest

Your employees don’t have to do all of the work in executing your social media marketing and content marketing plans. As you build your band of brand advocates who are loyal to your brand and drive word-of-mouth marketing to their own audiences, each one of those brand advocates is a brand marketing opportunity.

Don’t ignore your vocal brand advocates. Embrace them by reaching out and connecting personally. As you build a relationship with them, which deepens their emotional connection to your brand, you can crowdsource brand marketing from them. One of the most visual and interactive ways to leverage your brand advocates for social media marketing and content marketing is through Pinterest.

Crowdsource Pins on Your Pinterest Boards by Inviting Guest Pinners

Did you know that you can invite Pinterest users to pin content to any of the boards in your brand’s Pinterest profile? Just navigate to the board that you want to crowdsource images for, click the Edit Board button, and enter the names or email addresses of the people you want to invite in the Who Can Pin? field. Click the Invite button, and your invitation is on its way! Keep in mind, invitations can only be sent to other Pinterest users and you need to be following Pinterest users or one of their Pinterest boards to be able to invite them to pin content to one of your boards.

Encourage People to Pin Content to Your Pinterest Pin Boards

When another Pinterest user receives your invitation, they can choose to accept it or decline it. Boost the number of acceptances you get by emailing invitees directly or sending them messages through Twitter or Facebook before you send the invitation with a personal note explaining why you value them so much that you’re going to invite them to pin content to your boards.

Set Pinning Guidelines but Don’t Be Too Demanding

Keep in mind, you need to monitor your boards to ensure invited pinners are pinning appropriate content. It’s a good idea to give them some guidelines, but don’t make your guidelines so detailed and strict that they become intimidating or frustrating to Pinterest users. You need to give pinners flexibility, or they’ll be too afraid to pin anything to your boards.

Don’t Ignore the Social Media Law of Reciprocity

Finally, be sure to continually acknowledge active invited pinners. Reward their loyalty and make sure they always know how much you appreciate them. Furthermore, don’t forget that social media is a land of expected reciprocity. You need to spend time sharing, liking, and commenting on your invited pinners’ boards and social media profiles in order to reap the biggest rewards from crowdsourcing for brand marketing on Pinterest.

Image: Dave Dyet

Does Your Brand Website Need Live Chat?

live chatAdding a live chat feature to your website can improve customer service and reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. While not every customer that visits your brand website will want to use a live chat feature, there are many who will look for it. They’ll expect that they’ll be given multiple choices to get the help they need, and they’ll want the freedom to choose their preferred method for getting answers to their questions within the timeframe they require.

Research from LivePerson revealed that not including a live chat function on your brand website can cause far-reaching and long-lasting negative results. Here are some of the highlights from the survey of 6,000 consumers across the globe who shared what they expect from brand websites:

  • Online consumers won’t wait longer than 76 seconds to get help.
  • 88% believe that having a live chat improves their experience on a brand website.
  • 60% are more likely to complete an online purchase if they can get help from a real person via a live chat during the purchase process.
  • 41% would prefer to get help via live chat when they’re in the process of making a purchase on a brand website over any other customer service option.
  • 50% of online consumers want brand website purchase issues resolved in a single transaction.
  • 77% of online consumers want things done as quickly as possible when they’re on a brand website.
  • 78% of online consumers will return to a brand website (which means increased loyalty) if their needs are met in a simple and efficient way.

Furthermore, LivePerson identified three key stops along the online purchase path that are critical moments where brands must provide adequate help: when consumers have a question about a specific product or purchase (42%), when they have a problem completing an online purchase (35%), and when they have a post-purchase question (35%). Live chat is just one more way to meet the demand for customer service in a manner that more consumers are becoming comfortable with and actively using every day.

The trick to successfully implement a live chat feature on your website is to make it easily accessible without being intrusive. Automated pop-up live chat windows could annoy consumers so much that they’ll leave your brand website entirely. However, effectively placed links and messages that make it easy for a customer to open a live chat at anytime (particularly during those times that research shows they most often seek help) can significantly improve customer service, completed purchases, and loyalty.

Offer options and let consumers decide how they want to interact with your brand. Every customer service opportunity is a direct or indirect marketing opportunity, so let consumers control their buying experience, including choosing to communicate with your brand representatives via live chat.

Image: Flavio Takemoto

Which is the Social Media Brand Leader?

social media apps icons smartphone mobileFacebook has the most users around the world, but is it really the social media brand leader? In recent years, Facebook has rolled out a number of features that make the brand seem like a market follower, not a market leader. Instead, Twitter seems to be the social media brand that competitors want to emulate.

Facebook’s “follower” behavior brought Twitter features like @mentions and hashtags to the biggest social network, and now, Facebook has launched trending topics—another well-known Twitter feature. Facebook isn’t the only social media brand emulating Twitter. Last week, Tumblr rolled out @mentions, too.

Of course, these features are becoming more generic as more social media sites add them to their platforms. Adding a + sign before a Google+ user’s name to mention them in a post and including an @mention with an Instagram post (owned by Facebook) are just two more examples of Twitter features going mainstream.

As social media becomes more mature, we’re seeing more copying and less innovation. It’s a normal cycle, and until one of the current players in the marketplace launches a new feature that shakes up the industry (or a new player enters the market with something truly innovative), we’re likely to continue seeing this type of copying and improving (with the actual usefulness of the improvements up for debate and fairly subjective) among the leading brands.

Today, Twitter seems to be positioned as the market leader from an “under the hood” perspective. However, it’s not the market leader based on market share. In the long term, which will be more important? If you look at a brand growth story like Google’s history, the “under the hood” perspective is the one that matters, but tackling a Facebook audience of 1 billion people is a tough hill to climb.

In technology, innovation is the key to survival, and copying is a strategy that will end up failing in time. Which social media brand will be the leader a year from now? Two years from now? Five years from now? Or will there be a completely new group of social media brand leaders before the decade is over?

If recent trends continue, the social media industry is wide open for a new market leader.

Image: Jason Howie