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Category: Social Media Strategy (page 3 of 3)

Sponsoring Facebook Posts within 24 hours results in 2.6x more virality

Have you ever wondered whether time affects the virality of your Facebook posts?

We just released our latest free study, which compares results of Facebook posts sponsored before they’re 24 hours old versus those sponsored after 24 hours.

The results are striking:

The first 24 hours of a post’s life on Facebook are pivotal
Posts sponsored in the first 24 hours received 2.6x the viral impressions and 2.7x the engagement of posts sponsored after 48 hours

(Free download of the full study here: www.unifiedsocial.com/when-to-promote-facebook-posts/)

Why are the first 24 hours so important?

A lot of marketers have heard of Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm, but few realize how much it affects their Facebook ads. What follows is a slightly oversimplified explanation of the relationship between sponsoring a post and the newsfeed algorithm.

Whenever someone engages with your post, regardless of whether the original post impression was organic or paid, that engagement generally results in additional viral impressions. How many viral impressions is a function of the post’s velocity—the more engagement you get in a shorter amount of time, the greater the post’s velocity and the more viral impressions the post will receive.

On Facebook, viral impressions are directly tied to maximum post velocity—the post has to be more interesting than all the other content competing for space in that user’s newsfeed.

However, the newsfeed algorithm includes a time-decay factor, so post velocity slows as time passes. If you delay in sponsoring the post, you squander velocity.

Facebook posts have an average newsfeed life of less than 24 hours—based on my observations, most posts garner 90% of their impressions within 6-18 hours, and after that their organic velocity is greatly reduced.

A post will get the best results if it’s sponsored within the first 24 hours, ideally within the first 2-3 hours so that paid velocity and organic velocity are both peaking at the same time.

Free download of the full study here: www.unifiedsocial.com/when-to-promote-facebook-posts/

What’s the social calculus of comments? (And why should you care?)

June 3, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

We recently had the opportunity to present at the DataWeek Disqus Summit. Here’s a recap of our presentation, led by awe.sm’s Fred McIntyre and Disqus’ Ro Gupta.

The term “social media analytics” is thrown around frequently, but publishers and marketers still struggle to find meaningful, actionable insights into how social media drives actual business results. Fortunately, awe.sm can help.

For an example of the kind of useful findings that performance analytics can reveal, we analyzed commenting and sharing data collected by Disqus, which powers commenting on over 2.5 million websites, and awe.sm. Our findings revealed a huge opportunity for content publishers and their community managers.

The publisher funnel

Marketers are familiar with the concept of a sales funnel, but it applies to content publishers, too. Think of visits at the top of the funnel, pageviews the next level down, then engagement (comments) and amplification (organic sharing).

Filling the top of the funnel by acquiring traffic and increasing pageviews is a discipline unto itself. But we were interested in whether page engagement and amplification at the bottom of the funnel can help broaden the funnel’s top. Also, how are commenting and sharing behavior related to one another?

Both Sides of the Table Comment Section

When a website uses awe.sm’s earned-media measurement, we track every individual share of its content by site visitors: not just where it’s shared, but how many clicks it drives back to the site, and what on-site events take place after that. As we announced back in July, among the specific goals we can track is Disqus-powered commenting — i.e., which comments came from visitors driven by each Tweet, Pin, or Like?

One website that benefits from this visibility is Both Sides of the Table, the blog of venture capitalist (and awe.sm board member) Mark Suster. Mark gave us permission to explore the sharing and commenting on recent posts to see what we could learn, and the results didn’t disappoint.

Let’s scrutinize a single conversation.

In the beginning was the Tweet…

A few weeks back, Mark published this Tweet to over 125,000 followers:

The Tweet brought 777 clicks to his post, and resulted in 3978 pageviews (!), 5 new social followers, 13 comments on the original post or elsewhere on his blog, and 8 re-shares — social posts made by individuals who either clicked share buttons on the blog, or copied a page’s tracking link out of the address bar and pasted it into their own social workflow.

Here’s one of the shares, to a LinkedIn group for doing business in British Columbia:

This LinkedIn post drove 122 clicks back to Mark’s blog, 156 pageviews, an additional Twitter follower, and this Disqus comment:

… which led to another LinkedIn post. That post drove 5 more clicks and additional pageviews.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a Tweet to a blog post, which led to viewing another blog post, which led to comments and a LinkedIn post, which sent more pageviews and comments on the blog, which led to another LinkedIn post…

…and remember, this is just a single conversation path.

For more highly-trafficked blog posts, it’s easy to amass thousands of nodes, four or more generations deep. The quantity of available data, potentially the relationship between every comment, every social share, and every pageview, is — wait for it… — awesome.

Consider that these conversations already were taking place, without being attributed or adequately understood, and it’s possible to grasp what’s possible for the first time by using a closed-loop system to connect all the social dots.

This level of visibility makes it possible to identify which conversations drive visits and pageviews, which social posts create value, and, ultimately, the ROI of each share.

What can we learn?

When we analyzed social posts, pageviews, comments, and organic sharing across a larger data set, we found two striking conclusions:

Commenters — visitors who leave at least one Disqus comment on a site’s content — are 23% more likely to share site content to a social network than non-commenters.
Those commenters’ social posts receive 80% more clicks per post than shares of this same content by non-commenters.

In our view, it’s not surprising that people who engage with content in its comment section aremore likely to share the content on social networks, too. Having something to say about a given article is a good predictor for your inclination to share it with others.

It’s somewhat more surprising that these commenters are also more effective sharers. We’ll leave exploring the explanations for this (do people who comment also have more social followers?; do they write more compelling Tweets?…) for another time.

Regardless, these figures quantify the relationship between engagement and amplification, and raise a huge opportunity for publishers and community managers.

Now that we know that conversations drive amplification, and now that it’s possible to identify which conversations and participants are most influential at driving amplification, you’re equipped with a powerful tool for optimizing conversations, nurturing influencers, and increasing traffic and pageviews.

What you do with this knowledge is up to you, but collecting it should be your top priority.

*Originally published on awe.sm blog

How the Bones Brigade tweeted their way to 6-figure sales

January 28, 2013 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

One of the coolest things about working at awe.sm (in addition to the team, and the view :D ) is seeing all the exciting things our customers are doing with our platform. That’s especially true of our friends at Topspin Media, who have made us a part of projects for some of our team’s favorite artists, like the Beastie Boys, Yeasayer, and in Tilly‘s case, Kreayshawn ;-). But for several of us, having what we’ve built be an integral part of the amazing and amazingly successful direct-to-fan release of the Bones Brigade documentary made our jobs cool to our 12 year-old selves.

Personal satisfaction aside, this project and the data that the filmmakers and Topspin will be sharing at Sundance this week are nothing short of a revolution in film distribution. If you’re into the business of content, you should read more about the overall release on Topspin’s blog. The quick summary is that through an innovative combination of viral marketing, well-designed windowing, and creatively tiered pricing the producers were able to build an email list from 0 to more than 46,000 fans in just 2 months and ultimately make nearly 4 times the money they were offered in a conventional distribution deal.

Sharing drove 10% of the total revenue from the release. And thanks to deep awe.sm integration excellently implemented by the experts at The Uprising Creative, we tracked the value generated by each individual Tweet and Facebook post. Measuring the ROI of sharing is what awe.sm was built to do, and we have fascinating data on conversions from sharing across our hundreds of customers. But the unprecedented transparency of the Bones Brigade filmmakers is allowing us for the first time to publicly share some of the incredible insights we deliver our customers everyday.

Topspin’s strategy was to use the existing fan-bases of the Bones Brigade members, including Tony Hawk’s 4.2m Facebook fans and 3.3m Twitter followers, to get the word out to the core most passionate fans first and then encourage those fans to spread the message to their friends. This approach was extremely successful in driving a significant volume of high-value traffic with an average value of $1.59 per visit ($2.11 per visit from sharing by the cast and $1.21 per visit from sharing by ordinary fans). Being able to track the value of each share and the relationships between shares gives you visibility into the mechanics of how and why sharing is effective and not just the end results. This is essential to understanding the patterns of success and how to replicate them.

Here are some of the most interesting patterns we observed in the Bones Brigade sharing data:

Fans were more than 7 times as likely to share to Facebook than to Twitter (87.8% of fans shared to Facebook vs 12.2% to Twitter);
The value per visit from a fan’s Facebook share was more than 2 times higher than that from a fan’s Twitter share ($1.29/visit from Facebook vs $0.60 from Twitter);
Sharing by the cast (i.e. “Celebrities”) was roughly even to both Facebook and Twitter but drove 82.0% of revenues from shares to Twitter and 18.0% from Facebook;
However, the value per visit from the cast’s shares to Facebook and Twitter was roughly equal ($1.93/visit from Facebook vs $2.07/visit from Twitter);
Sharing by the cast to Twitter drove more than twice as many visits per share as Facebook and more than 2.5 times the visits per fan/follower (1.10% eCTR for Facebook vs 2.82% eCTR for Twitter).

This stark contrast between the performance of sharing by celebrities vs ordinary fans across Facebook and Twitter demonstrates several underlying (and somewhat related) phenomena:

Normal people primarily use Twitter to discover content and Facebook to share it with friends – The overwhelming volume of fan sharing to Facebook (87.8%) clearly demonstrates that most people do not view Twitter as an important personal sharing channel, but the fact that Twitter was still able to drive 40.3% of the traffic and 47.3% of the revenue (primarily from celebrity sharing) shows that there is still a significant audience discovering and consuming content through Twitter despite their lack of sharing;
Twitter is a network of loose ties and Facebook is a network of strong ties – Visits driven by celebrities had roughly equivalent value across Facebook and Twitter while visits driven by regular fans were more than twice as valuable on Facebook than on Twitter, which demonstrates that consumers have tighter connections with and are more swayed by the recommendations of their friends on Facebook than by the non-celebrities they follow on Twitter;
Twitter followers are more likely to click than Facebook fans – Whether it’s an impact of NewsFeed Optimization or just a side-effect of the fact that normal people are primarily using Facebook to share with and consume from their friends and family, the numbers show that celebrity sharing to Twitter is driving over 2.5 times more visits per follower than sharing to Facebook is driving visits per fan with a roughly equal value per visit.

We’ll be taking a deeper look at each of these topics in upcoming blog posts. So follow @Unified on Twitter to learn more about this amazing campaign.

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

June 23, 2011 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1, part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow Button, Facebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance as a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up :D ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm :D ) and CrowdBooster.
Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied toreal conversion tracking.
Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to info@awe.sm. And please follow @Unified on Twitter so we can practice what we preach .

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

February 7, 2009 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

I just read a great post over on Mashable, that I wanted to share here:

Presenting: 10 of the Smartest Big Brands in Social Media

While this is ostensibly a post about large national/global brands, I found the underlying lessons from these examples to be potentially useful to *anyone* seeking to use social media to build brand equity. You should definitely go read the original post for the full details on each campaign, but here’s my take on the important lessons from each one:

Blendtec Blends it on YouTube – Creativity is king; advertising is just content someone is willing to pay for you to watch, it doesn’t *have* to be annoying and uninteresting
Burger King and the Sacrifice Facebook Application – People like to have fun
Starbucks Asks for Your Advice – Making your customers feel like they’re part of the process builds brand loyalty through a sense of co-ownership
Sun Microsystems and the CEO blog – Kill them with transparency (a variation on my dad’s old adage: ‘kill them with kindness’); disarm your critics by giving them a voice and answering them back
IBM With Lots of Blogs – Content = Authority; as long as it’s quality content (and on-brand), more *is* better on the Internet — it gives you higher search engine ranking and it doesn’t hurt to be the first thing a prospective customer finds when they do research on your area of interest/expertise (what do you think this blog is all about? )
Zappos on Twitter – A company (not just a brand) can have a personality in the Internet age, and it is defined by its employees; being accessible and relatable reminds your customers that there are real people behind your brand, and that tends to make them like you more (unless those real people really suck )
Comcast on Twitter too – Empower your community manager to address customers needs; Frank from Comcast doesn’t just spew marketing platitudes into the Twittersphere, he actually helps customers in need (Corollary: if you have an unempowered community manager fronting for your brand, he/she is bound to get slaughtered and likely do more harm to brand equity than good)
Ford and Social Media PR – Bad press doesn’t go away on the Internet; it’s not like the conventional media world in which all you need to do is weather *this* news cycle – that disparaging blog post will be popping up in searches for your brand for the rest of your life and beyond, so you’d better get out there and address it
Graco Uses Pictures on Flickr – *Every* customer should be writing a testimonial; make it so easy and fun for your customers to show their brand loyalty that it’s a no-brainer for them
Dell Doing it Everywhere – Social media isn’t media; this isn’t an ad buy you make selectively based on demographics and vertical content, it’s a horizontal platform for customer engagement comprised of many different elements — you may not have the time or resources to be everywhere, but take the time to craft a campaign in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

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Category: Social Media Strategy (page 3 of 3)

Sponsoring Facebook Posts within 24 hours results in 2.6x more virality

What’s the social calculus of comments? (And why should you care?)

The publisher funnel

Both Sides of the Table Comment Section

In the beginning was the Tweet…

What can we learn?

Watch the geographic spread of viral sharing

How the Bones Brigade tweeted their way to 6-figure sales

After Twitter pulls content from LinkedIn, referrals to FB pages spike 1000%

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

The PEO media model for the rest of us

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

Why the agencies get the big bucks

10 Smart Brands using Social Media

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