My 15 Minutes of Fame: How Brands Can Optimize Social Strategies with Analytics

The following is an excerpt from “How Brands Can Optimize Social Strategies with Analytics” an exclusive whitepaper brought to you by Oracle. Download the complete whitepaper to learn from a recent Facebook survey that investigated the demographics of Facebook fans; how fans are acquired, discover pages, and engage; and best practices on how brands can optimize social strategies.

Introduction

If you have 100,000 fans but all you know about them is that they appear to like your brand, you might be in trouble. Extracting data out of your social media efforts and analyzing it helps you pin down who cares about your brand, how they are interacting with your brand through Facebook, and how to get fans to not just like but love your brand. Analytics is the way to understand what drives your fans so they can move from passive likes to active engagement.

Getting to Your Page

Not everyone navigates to a brand’s Facebook page through Facebook. How users get to your page matters. Knowing which sources of discovery are and aren’t effective informs you as to where and how your efforts to promote the page to potential fans should be channeled. Perhaps your Facebook link on your Website’s home page is not being properly placed or utilized. Or maybe your YouTube pages aren’t driving content because there’s no link to your page.

Google is, not surprisingly, the leading source for brand referrals. 81 percent of brands had users referred to their Facebook pages monthly through Google, even excluding international Google search sites. Bing generates 47 percent of referrals, Yahoo! generates 38 percent, Twitter generates 20 percent, and YouTube comes in at 11 percent.

Impression Source

Most fans (79 percent, in fact) get content directly from the brand, as opposed to a viral source. Another 20 percent get their content from paid advertisements. Don’t count on a viral strategy to distribute your message. The production of consistent, quality, and relevant content will pay higher dividends than swinging for the fences in a misguided attempt to “go viral.”

Figure 4. Most fans are getting content directly from the brand.

What Fans Want to See

Deliver the content your fans want to see. Of the half-a-million brand posts reviewed, 51 percent were links, but as Figure 5 below shows, fans are more likely to engage with status posts than any other post type. Additionally, photo posts lead to more clicks on the post. Overall, fans tend to be less engaged with links than status or photo posts.

Figure 5. Fans are more likely to engage with status posts or photo posts than links.

How Fans Engage

Understanding how fans engage is another important step before you develop your social marketing strategy. Fans are significantly more likely to “like” a brand’s post than to share it or comment on it. Also, people are seven times more likely to engage with a post than to post negative feedback on it.

Figure 6. Fans are significantly more likely to like a brand’s post than to comment on it or share it.

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