Month: August 2012

Driving with your eyes closed (PDF Whitepaper)

There’s something crazy going on in the world of Facebook marketing. There are thousands of people at brands and agencies working on Facebook Pages – generating content, managing communities, reporting to clients, managing teams. Entirely new businesses and departments have been founded to manage and grow companies’ social presence. Millions of people reached, and billions of impressions. And yet, most decisions are made on the basis of instinct alone. At the same companies, everyone else is judged quantitatively, using data. Search and display advertising. Finance. Even something as subjective as creative is subject to consumer surveys about brand recognition and sentiment. For these teams, it’s clear what success looks like, because it’s measured. But what does success look like for a Facebook Page? What does failure look like? When new hires are made, how is their work judged, and how do they demonstrate the impact of what they’ve achieved to their bosses and clients? How does the CEO know what’s working and what to invest in next? We think everyone managing Facebook Pages can benefit from actionable analytics, and the benefits are even greater for large teams and organizations. You probably already get it and see the benefits, but it’s not always easy to push everyone else to realize what they’re missing and convince them to do the right thing. To help you out, we put together this whitepaper to help explain how actionable data makes each person in the organization’s job easier. Sure, we’re biased, but we’ve witnessed first-hand how analytics drive companies towards the fast build, measure and learn cycle that’s essential to Facebook marketing.

Introduction

Facebook analytics didn’t used to be important, but they are now. In the early years of Facebook Pages, interns, new hires, and whoever was young and tech savvy managed brands’ social presence. They trusted their instincts about what was working and might work, and others rarely asked for reporting or accountability – sometimes the CEO or client would ask about how many Likes their Page had, but that was about it. These new people, with titles like “community manager” or “social media specialist” floated in-between PR, in-house marketing, account management – no one knew where to put them, or what questions to ask. With no one asking questions, and a huge first-mover advantage, there wasn’t a meaningful need for analytics for Facebook Pages. Fast-forward to 2012, and after five years of Facebook Pages, brands and agencies are starting to develop teams and departments dedicated to social. There’s finally some leadership and clients are demanding more. At the same time, Facebook marketing is getting harder, with more Pages and Apps competing for space in users News Feeds, and an increasing percentage of impressions happening on mobile devices. But despite the industry maturing, there’s still a huge problem — most companies don’t have any way to quantify success or failure on Facebook. The people who used to work in their own silo now have expectations, management to report to, clients that are asking more advanced questions, but decisions are still being made on the basis of intuition. Agencies and brands trust recent graduates to reach millions of people, but don’t give them the tools to get a competitive edge. CEOs push social marketing initiatives, but don’t have access to data to inform their decisions. Account managers don’t have tools to demonstrate success to their clients. Everyone, not just the person who is hands-on, needs analytics to succeed. We think the value of analytics grows exponentially as teams and companies grow, and there’s a place for analytics at every role in an organization. The better your team, the more they’ll thrive with meaningful and actionable goals defined by metrics and analytics. Let’s break down a few scenarios of how analytics help each person at a brand or agency succeed. At PageLever, we’ve seen this happen time and time again. As soon as brands and agencies make room for metrics next to intuition, it’s suddenly easy to identify and quantify success and failure, and take action right away.


The New Hire

“My boss said I’m in charge of managing this Facebook Page. I guess I’ll start Googling how to do that.”

Nearly everyone we’ve ever talked to who has been tasked with managing a Facebook Page has had to figure it out themselves. They turn to blogs, forums and Q&A sites to ask: “What type of content should I post most often?” “I heard that I should only post once a day, otherwise people will unlike the Page. Is that true?” “I saw another Page post a 1000-word message along with an image. Does this actually work?” Unfortunately, the flaw of blogs, forums and Q&A sites is that every Facebook Page is different. There is no magic bullet answer to read online, and what works for one Page is often terrible advice for another. There’s really no other industry where it’s acceptable to hire a new person, put them in a position where they can reach thousands of current and prospective customers, and have them rely on their ability to search for answers on Google to decide how to speak to this audience. Analytics are a learning tool for new hires. They show what has worked in the past and empower them to test new ideas and validate them with data. Giving new hires access to great analytics tools helps them demonstrate real, measurable success, which is crucial to employee retention and validating them as part of the team.


The Executive

“Social is integrated into everything we do, but I can’t see how well we’re actually doing.”

Nearly every business is now making social marketing and social media a focus. By this time, most CEOs have dealt with a few social media crises — an accidental tweet, a particularly loud and unhappy customer, or any short burst of customer outrage. Monitoring and sentiment analysis tools play into this fear and worry about what people are saying about the brand. But many executives are rarely exposed to the more meaningful, often positive metrics that show the long-term benefits of Facebook marketing. We think a big part of this is that most executives don’t have access to simple, actionable data. They can either get the full firehose or nothing. With this choice, it usually ends up being nothing ­— CEOs and VPs are busy people. The executive team deserves an executive summary of Facebook data, not just about a specific Page, but performance as a whole. How can we expect executives to be visionary and make smart investments in Facebook marketing if they don’t have access to data to inform their decisions?


The Director

“We need to hire another person, but I can’t justify the expense.”

Great community managers and social media experts are getting expensive. Look at any job board these days, and everyone is trying to hire for a postion that interns used to fill just a few years ago. Most directors we talk to wish they could hire a bigger team to develop richer social content and experiences, instead of spending all day posting, moderating and monitoring. But this is a qualitative argument, and business demands quantitative answers to questions like: Will a new hire help us to reach more people? Will a new hire help us get new business? Is Facebook really a big enough marketing channel for us to invest more in? Analytics help demonstrate how much is at stake, how much work goes into managing and growing a great Facebook Page, and where the pain points are that having an extra person would solve. Each organization tends to have a different social metric to justify new hires, based on the nature of their business. For some, like Pages representing retail brands, the metric is response time. How quickly are we responding to customer service issues coming in through Facebook and Twitter? For others, it’s about content. If there were more content, how much more frequently could we reach our audience? If we were able to increase the quality and virality of our content, how much more exposure could we get through people sharing it?


The Client

“How do I hold our agency accountable? Are they helping us make a big impact, or just following the herd?”

If you’re looking for outside help managing and growing your Facebook Pages, setting goals and expectations is essential if you want to get your money’s worth. While it’s the agency’s job to optimize for efficiency and scale, it’s your job to stay on them and make sure they’re getting you results. Too often, clients get burned by agencies who offload Facebook Pages to an intern, knowing that as long as something gets posted everyday, they’re off the hook. It’s time to start asking questions like: We talked through strategy last month — how do I look back and know if it’s actually working? We want to stand out and be different – are we making an impact on Facebook, or just following the same playbook that every other Page does? Since we hired you, how many more people are we reaching on Facebook every month? Are we getting negative feedback? How many people unlike us each week? How many friends of fans are we reaching, and how much conversation does this generate? Are we succeeding in getting people to talk about us? Relationships with agencies and consultants are built on trust, but have to be backed up by results that are clear and measurable. Up-to-date data should be easily accessible to clients and go beyond vanity metrics. Don’t get blinded by success theater – hold your partners accountable using data, so that you’re the one in the driver’s seat setting a high bar for goals and expectations.


The Creative

“Facebook is such a small format, it’s tough to tell what works.”

The creative director wanted a billboard, but has to work with a thumbnail image on Facebook. Yesterday she was working on a takeover campaign for ESPN, filled with animations and interactive content. Today she’s trying to come up with a campaign that can be squeezed down and still capture attention on an iPhone. And her deadline is tomorrow ­— the Page needs a steady stream of content, not the next big idea. While the industry has had time to develop best practices for creative in digital and interactive marketing, Facebook is relatively new and still changing rapidly. There aren’t rules and rubrics for what does or doesn’t work, and what worked six months ago may not work today. Creative people need data to focus their imagination on what works. At PageLever, we’ve seen lots of visually stunning images and videos fail on Facebook. Work that looks great and succeeds at capturing attention, but isn’t social and doesn’t drive users to take the next step of adding comments and sharing with their friends. Most often, this happens because the content was made in a bubble, and no one told the creative department what was already working on Facebook. By giving the copywriters and art directors the ability to understand which content already works, and allowing them to quickly test and validate ideas, it becomes easier to consistently generate social content that not only looks great, but fits with the user experience of the News Feed and Timeline.


The Account Manager

“My client asks for a report every week. I can’t keep up.”

Facebook has made life hard for account managers. The platform is always changing, regularly adding new features and creating new opportunities for marketers. As Pages and ads become more sophisticated, the need for efficient reporting tools will continue to grow. Most account managers can already automatically generate reports for search and display campaigns that are tailored to their clients needs, but they’re left in the dark when it comes to Facebook. Meanwhile, clients want to know exactly what is going on with their Page, asking questions like: How many new Likes did our Page get last week? How much of our audience are we reaching? Are the people we’re reaching on Facebook the same people we’re selling product to? A great Facebook analytics tool allows account mangers to choose exactly what metrics their clients can access, save the time of manually generating reports in Excel, and make clients smile. At PageLever, we’ve met many incredibly bright account managers who are bogged down making data look pretty, when they could be taking on new accounts and spending time with their clients. It’s time to give account managers the tools they deserve, so that they can do their job and make sure clients are confident, happy, and most importantly, renew their contract next year.


Summary

Analytics are for everyone.

Analytics aren’t just for the end-user. While only one person might be hands-on with a Facebook Page, many more people are responsible for the health and success of the organization. Metrics and data help people make smart decisions all the way up the chain of command. Use analytics to make your case internally. Facebook is such a new platform that it’s not always easy to justify new hires or pull time away from expensive designers and developers. But numbers don’t lie, and can help you argue for the resources you need to do great work. Set quantiative goals that augment your qualitative instincts. It’s essential to understand what success looks like on Facebook, in order to replicate it. Qualitative judgements are great for coming up with hypothesis, but they’re only proven once validated by data. Build, measure and learn. Every amazing Facebook marketing team runs small experiments in order to test their ideas at a small scale, and then uses metrics to understand which aspects worked. Was it the call to action? The image? The timing? Then they take this learning and go bigger, backed by the confidence of knowing that their ideas have already seen initial success.

How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Despite Facebook’s News Feed algorithm (Often referred to as EdgeRank) that matches content with relevant users, plus the recent introduction of Page Post Targeting, it can still be challenging for Facebook Pages to reach their most important fans.

The definition of an “important” fan is different for every Page – for some, it’s the target demographic that is more likely to purchase the business’ product. For other Pages, like fashion and apparel brands, it might be the most influential consumers, whose tastes spread to a wider audience. These audiences can be defined by any parameters that are accessible in Facebook’s Self-serve advertising tool – demographics, precise interests, connections to other apps and pages, etc.

At PageLever we call these subsets of a Page’s audience the “target audience” – the portion of the Page’s audience that is most important to reach, because not all fans are created equal.

When a Page posts to all its fans, only a percentage of the total fans see the given post. Of these fans, an even smaller percentage are in the target audience. A post that reaches 10,000 fans might only be reaching a few hundred fans in the target audience. This is where many large Pages struggle to see ROI.

However, with a surprisingly small amount of money spent on Sponsored Page Post Stories, this is a completely solvable issue.

When used well, Sponsored Page Post Stories ensure that a Page’s content reaches fans in the target audience far more often than fans outside the target.

Let’s walk through how to create a Sponsored Page Post targeted to a specific subset of a Page’s audience:


1. Create a new Facebook Ad

sponsoredpagepostfacebookadstep1 How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Create a new ad, select the Page you want to promote, and select the radio button “A Specific Post on Your Page” – then, instead of selecting a specific post, check the box to “Keep my ad up-to date by automatically promoting my most recent post” – this ensures that the content that you’re promoting is current, and eliminates the complexity of creating a new ad for each post. Larger Pages, or those appealing to multiple target audiences may want to run individual ads for each post.


2. Select Targeting Parameters

Just like any other Facebook Ad, you’ll want to define who you’re targeting – here’s where you’ll define who is in your target audience. This could be defined simply by age and gender, or it could be focused around a set of precise or broad interests – maybe small business owners are your target, or maybe you want to target only your fans who like the Pages of your competitors, to ensure they don’t switch.

Fans in your target audience are likely to be friends with similar people, with similar interests – small business owners tend to know others small business owners. This creates a chain reaction – as the users you’re targeting engage with your content, their actions will make your post more likely to be seen organically by other fans in the target audience, because of how Facebook’s News Feed algorithms work.

Make sure to choose to show the ad only to users who already like your Page:

Screen Shot 2012 08 17 at 10.43.18 AM How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed


3. Use the Power Editor make your ads appear only in the News Feed

Facebook’s Power Editor is the secret weapon for making this happen. Only the Power Editor allows you to choose whether ads are displayed in the News Feed – this isn’t possible in the self-serve ad tool.

If you haven’t used the Power Editor before, make sure to read Facebook’s documentation – the process of downloading and uploading data is different from the Self-Serve Ad Tool.

Once you’ve downloaded data from your Account, click on the ad that you just created, and select the “Placements” tab. Here, you’ll be able to choose to show your ad in all placements, on Desktop Only (News Feed and elsewhere) or News Feed only:

Screen Shot 2012 08 17 at 10.16.27 AM How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed


4. Be patient and reap the benefits

The click-through-rate (CTR) of ads in the News Feed is significantly higher than elsewhere, particularly for Page Post Sponsored Stories (the type of ad you just created). However, there is less ad inventory in the News Feed than in the sidebar – if the target audience you’re trying to reach is just 10,000 people, don’t expect to reach them all in one week. We’ve found that Page Post Sponsored Stories work best as an “always-on” solution.

The beauty of Page Post Sponsored Stories is that they amplify the posts that you create – if you post great content that engages your target audience, your click-through-rate (CTR) will be high, and your CPC will be lower. Facebook ads, when used best, augment organic distribution of great content.

Questions? Already running Sponsored Page Post Ads? We’d love to hear from you, drop us a note in the comments section below.

How to Educate Bosses, Colleagues and Clients about Facebook Marketing (PDF Whitepaper)

facebook marketing lifecycle featured image How to Educate Bosses, Colleagues and Clients about Facebook Marketing (PDF Whitepaper)

Getting bosses, colleagues and clients to understand Facebook Marketing is hard. Really hard. The success of a Facebook Page is measured in cycles, rather than the short burst campaigns that dominate agencies – the same client who approves a $500,000 budget for the media team won’t spend $5,000 on content development for Facebook, and asks you questions about Facebook ROI. If that sounds familiar, we feel your pain. To help you out, we put together a PDF that breaks down why Facebook is different, and explains how audience, reach, engagement and growth work together in what we call the Facebook Marketing Lifecycle. We tried to keep it short, since everyone is busy, but here’s a few additional talking points to arm yourself with next time:

“Pages that optimize for the content lifecycle on Facebook reach 2x, 3x or even 4x more of their audience organically.”

“When Pages post content, it only reaches a subset of their audience, so these unqualified fans are essentially “taking up space” and wasting valuable impressions – instead of reaching the target audience, the brand’s message reaches people who will never convert.”

“Overtime, if a Page consistently succeeds at driving their target audience to engage through these three channels, Facebook displays a higher percentage of that Page’s content organically. Put simply, Facebook incentivizes great content.”

Enjoy!

 

 


Introduction

For marketers, one of the most powerful aspects of Facebook is the ability to precisely measure each stage of how content is consumed and shared – whereas even sophisticated digital marketing of the past decade has often relied on estimation and imprecise audience tracking, Facebook’s value proposition to marketers and advertisers is precision in targeting and measurement.

Facebook is still a relatively young company though, and the industry of Facebook marketing even younger – to many agencies and brands, the dynamics of engagement on Facebook look like an overwhelming flurry of activity, and success looks like a stroke of luck.

There is, however, a distinct and measurable lifecycle to how content reaches fans of Facebook Pages, is amplified by paid spend and viral reach, and defines and grows a Page’s audience.

At PageLever, we’ve seen our brand and agency customers reach millions more consumers by measuring and understanding this lifecycle.

Too often obscured by the “vanity metrics” of Page Likes and audience growth, Pages that optimize for the content lifecycle on Facebook reach 2x, 3x or even 4x more of their audience organically than the average Page. The equivalent spend, in terms of Facebook Ads, that would be necessary to reach that same audience reaches into six or even seven figures for large Pages. The incentives to optimize both content and timing are at an all-time high, and the first step towards optimization is to understand the lifecycle of Facebook Pages.

For Facebook Pages, success is measured in cycles, rather than the short burst campaigns that have dominated marketing in the past.

We’ve defined four distinct stages of this cycle – audience, visibility, engagement and growth. Each stage directly depends on the one before it – there can be no engagement without visibility, because content has to be seen before it can be consumed and shared. An outstanding marketing team uses data to determine the weakest stages first, because they understand that the success of their Page hinges upon full circle execution.


Audience

Every brand has at least one target audience for their products, defined most clearly by demographic, geographic and interest data. While the parameters of this audience are well defined, overall size is usually at best an estimate.

By contrast, a brand’s audience on Facebook can be clearly measured by the number of people who like their Page(s). This leads many to assume that, because fans opted-in to liking the Page, they are potential customers and part of the target audience.

We’ve found that for most brands, there is a discrepancy between target audience and Facebook audience. There are two primary causes:

Poorly targeted paid spend. Over the past three years, many brands and agencies have, either themselves or through 3rd-parties, spent money on Sponsored Stories to acquire new Likes, in an attempt to appear large and successful to competitors, clients and bosses. Often referred to as “unqualified likes”, many of the fans acquired through these campaigns are outside of the Page’s target audience, sometimes in emerging countries where the company does no business.

Inactivity or perverse incentive structure. Let’s face it, reaching a brand’s target audience, that actually converts into paying customers, is challenging. The more expensive the product, the bigger the challenge. Many companies that under-invested in Facebook Pages, particularly in 2009 and 2010, attracted millions of fans outside their target demographic – from aspirational window-shoppers to kids who liked Pages to enter their free iPad giveaway.

When Pages post content, it only reaches a subset of their audience, so these unqualified fans are essentially “taking up space” and wasting valuable impressions – instead of reaching the target audience, the brand’s message reaches people who will never convert.

Instead of just looking at audience growth in terms of likes, we encourage our customers to use demographics to compare their Facebook audience against their target audience, and set goals for growth only within the target. After all, for a company selling luxury cars, 15 year-old fans in Indonesia won’t drive growth, but reaching just 3% more middle-aged fans in the USA could make a big impact.


Visibility

Three primary components determine the reach of a Page’s content:

Organic Distribution. Only a percentage of a Facebook Page’s fans see any given post organically, but not only can this percentage can vary greatly, it can be dramatically increased by understanding how it is calculated. Facebook uses relevancy algorithms to determine what content appears in a given user’s News Feed. Often referred to as “Edgerank”, these algorithms score content based on the user’s affinity and previous interactions with the Page – comments, likes, shares and clicks.

Paid Spend (Facebook Ads). At PageLever, we believe the most effective use of paid spend is amplification of page posts and Sponsored Stories. Let’s say we’re looking at Mercedes Benz Facebook Page – fans in affluent zip codes, age 40-60, are 10x, maybe even 100x more valuable to the company than the rest of their fans. By using paid spend to amplify reach, Pages can ensure that their content is seen by their most valuable fans.

Viral Reach. When a Facebook user sees a story about a friend liking, commenting or sharing a Page’s content, this counts as Viral Reach – the number of unique people who saw the Page’s content through a story published by a friend. Viral Reach represents the “snowball effect” that sticky, sharable content has, and is one of the strongest signals of successful content

Overtime, if a Page consistently succeeds at driving their target audience to engage through these three channels, Facebook displays a higher percentage of that Page’s content organically. Put simply, Facebook incentivizes great content.

Facebook incentivizes great content, but the but defining “great content” requires detailed analytics – for example, one of our customers, MTV India, discovered that when they posted photos as albums, instead of individually, over 1200% more people clicked on them, causing Facebook to show their content to a greater percentage of their audience. In a competitive landscape, discoveries like this, driven by analytics, represent massive competitive advantages.


Engagement

It’s easy to create and curate content that your audience will consume, but clicks and views don’t generate stories on Facebook – only when a user is engaged enough to like, comment or share content are stories generated in the user’s friends’ News Feeds, and in the lifecycle of content on Facebook, the viral reach from stories is a key driver of organic growth.

At its core, driving engagement is about optimizing content for user action, and this requires community managers to shift away from asking, “Is this interesting to our audience?” and start asking questions like, “Will this video drive our audience to share with their friends?”

For many Pages, there are clear, measurable signals that their content is being consumed, but few stories are being generates through comments, likes and shares. Then, seemingly at random, some posts will take off and are shared hundreds of times. How do you use data to determine why that particular post drove more engagement than the past 10 combined?

Take the guesswork out of content development. Facebook has become too important a marketing channel to allow Community Managers to operate on instincts alone. Managers and directors need data too – clear and meaningful analytics are critical to assessing the performance of Community Managers.

Test, analyze, optimize. As a startup, we follow a fast build, measure, learn cycle ourselves, and it’s our goal to enable our customers to do the same with the Facebook Pages they’re responsible for. We believe in marketing based on the scientific method – create a hypothesis, test it, measure results, and optimize content accordingly.

Can you identify not only which individual pieces of content perform best, but which types of content, or subject matters generate the most stories? All marketers should be measuring which content drives the most engagement, and adapt their content strategy accordingly.


Growth

Instinctually, many of us are wired to look to growth as the first and only metric for Facebook Pages. Nearly everyone involved in social media marketing is under pressure for “more likes” from clients, peers and managers with little hands-on experience.

Smart marketers and leaders know that growth is only one of many metrics, and our smartest customers, with the best performing Facebook Pages, spend their time thinking about targeted growth, asking questions like:

Where is our growth coming from? For most Pages, the majority of new fans do not come from the Timeline – they come from stories that appear in users News Feeds or Ticker. For brands with a strong web presence or blog, a significant number of likes may come from the Like Box or button.

Is this growth within our target audience? Growth feels great, but it’s only meaningful to a business if the new fans might convert and become customers. Breaking down growth by age, gender and location leads to a better understanding of growth quality.

Where are the surprises in the demographics of audience growth? We’ve seen our customers make all kinds of interesting discoveries, like finding latent demand for their product in a country halfway around the world, all by looking at demographic data and asking, why do so many people in this country like our Page?

When executed well, over time this lifecycle compounds – with a larger audience comes increased reach, with increased reach comes more engagement, with engagement comes growth, and with growth comes a larger audience. Whether you’re on the brand, agency or consultant side, you’re probably already seeing this cycle in action to some degree. At PageLever, we think great analytics can accelerate and refine this cycle by helping individuals and teams understand what works, so they can create better, more targeted content.


Summary

The terminology around Facebook marketing is new and different. Instead of impressions and clicks, words like reach, stories and consumptions take center stage. While they sound similar, it is essential to understand these definitions and develop a vocabulary for talking about Facebook Pages.

Facebook marketing is based on a lifecycle that is always on. Whereas digital marketing is based on campaigns that last a specific period of time, Facebook marketing is best understood as a lifecycle where consistent content and optimization drives growth, engagement and reach within a target audience. When executed well, the impact of Facebook Pages is far greater than any single campaign can deliver.

Set goals for each stage of the lifecycle. Drive your team to focus on measurable achievements, rather than intuition or generic engagement. The most important stage to focus on should be the one where you are currently weakest, because it is a roadblock for each of the other stages in the lifecycle.

Full circle measurement is essential. The impact of a Facebook Page is far greater than simply the sum of its posts, or its total number of likes. Many brands and agencies still use tools that only measure one or two stages of the lifecycle – maybe you already measure growth & engagement, but not reach or audience. The most successful Pages measure all four stages.

 

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