Archive for Social Media

Diminishing Marginal Returns Of Social Media

At the head of most social media marketing strategies is “get more fans, friends and followers.” If left unchecked, that metric for more fans, friends and followers can be a runaway train that leads to methods that are detrimental to the channel. When quantity of fans is more important than quality, it creates a path to diminishing marginal returns. Content gets impersonal and spammy and people stop caring. Diminishing marginal returns means that in a production process, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower per-unit returns. Each additional tweet, post, and update produces less attention, less action and less return.
Good social marketing starts with a cause, bad social marketing starts with a goal. Focusing on a goal rather than a cause means:

  • A constant flow of bleeding-edge content instead of thoughtful analysis of what has already been said. This is risky because there is always the threat of someone else being just a little more bleeding-edge.
  • A veneer of community but not really enough time to make connections – you need more followers! There comes a point when followers don’t feel like they are a part of anything special.
  • Increasing deals, offers and fan-only sales that drive transactions but not loyalty.

Diminishing Marginal Returns Of Social Media

Social marketing that values quantity over quality feels manipulative rather than inspiring and the the number of those you offend, or turn off forever, keep increasing as a result – which in turn, speeds up the need for more spam-like methods to juice the numbers. The center of your social media strategy should be your purpose. When it feels like the content is speaking at you, rather than for you, it’s time to rethink what the point of social media is.

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January 9, 2012 · Filed under Social Media

Facebook Growth Rate Versus Churn Rate

Churn rate is the fraction of subscribers in any period who fail to remain engaged with the company. If the rate of growth ((total likes – new likes)/new likes) exceeds the churn rate (unlikes/total likes), the fan page will grow. Analyzing the causation of these events isn’t always easy with the metrics that Facebook provides. You do know what you post and how often, so using that data along with the growth rate and churn rate you can see which posts are leading to growth or attrition. In this chart the green bar represents a post, the higher the bar the more posts in that one day.

There is definitely a relationship between posts and attrition as you can see the blue line jumps when ever people see a post show up in their feed. And you can get a sense of which posts lead to the most growth. In this case the three posts on 8/9 were promotional based which drove so much growth. And churn rose on 8/28 – 8/29 where two posts a day on two consecutive days had editorial content that must not have resonated or may have been too frequent.
You can download this data from your own Facebook page in the Insights section. All you need is the Lifetime Total Likes, Daily New Likes and Daily Unlikes.

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November 23, 2011 · Filed under Social Media

A Flowchart For Sharing Content

Are you about to fire off that blog post/tweet/status update? Put your idea through this flowchart and see if it is share-worthy before pushing the publish button. Most campaigns live and die according to their propensity to be shared, how does yours stack up?

Flowchart For Sharing Content

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November 1, 2011 · Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Media

Facebook Marketing Dashboard Download

Facebook has some pretty cool metrics for Pages that you can access from the insights tool. This can be navigated to by clicking Ads & Pages on the homepage’s left sidebar, then Pages on the Ads Manager left sidebar. From there, click on insights and you can export data about traffic, Likes, and interactions from your Fan Page using the “Export” button in the top right corner.

I made this marketing dashboard below using that data from Facebook Insights and a few metrics from Google Analytics. (The numbers are all fictional so don’t read into them too much).
The purpose of this dashboard is to visualize Facebook’s impact on the business’s website in terms of revenue and measure the quality of the content posted on the Facebook page.

Facebook Marketing Dashboard

Click for larger view

The top left graph shows total number of Likes with a line graph over the top of it showing total number of visits to the site from Facebook. Do more Likes equate to more visits to your site? You would need to get visits data from Google Analytics to put this together.
The next chart over shows total amount of revenue from Facebook. Revenue may not be the goal of your site for Facebook, maybe its leads generated or email and RSS subscriptions. Whatever it is, you should try to quantify some kind of outcome as a result of your efforts on Facebook. More Likes of your page should be a means to an end, not the end itself.
The bottom left chart shows daily stream impressions (amount of impressions your status updates have had in your fan’s news feeds) with a line over it showing a percentage of attrition – meaning number of people un-liking you. It’s important to be posting good content that people would want and at the same time not post it so frequently that it burns people out. In my example you can see a correlation between frequency of impressions and the number of un-likes. You can also see that number of un-likes has decreased and looks like it is still decreasing which is a sign that the frequency and quality is getting closer to the sweet spot.
The last chart shows the amount of interaction the fans have with the page in terms of Likes and comments on a daily basis. Again, this is a good way to monitor the quality of your Facebook page’s content.
So there you have it, my take on a marketing dashboard for Facebook. It doesn’t include anything having to do with Facebook ads, I think I’ll tackle that dashboard next. Let me know what you think, and if you’re interested, click this link to download the Facebook Marketing Dashboard in Excel.

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December 9, 2010 · Filed under Internet Marketing, Social Media

How Brands Can Start The Conversation In Social Media

“Join the conversation” is a big buzzword these days for telling brands they need to start using social media. The idea is that there are already a lot of people out there talking about you so you’d better start being a part of what they are saying so you can overcome concerns or right wrongs and inaccuracies. To do this you set up alerts in Google and search for your brand name on Twitter and then jump in when you can. I think that just as much effort should be put into starting the conversation as joining it.
Here are my three ideas for the kinds of conversations that brands or companies can have with their fans:
1. Conversation centered on your product or service.
  • Enhance memory with fun product centered quizzes and facts
  • Add to credibility with customer testimonials or industry wards.
  • Reveal hidden attributes by asking the customer how they use the product and then share that with the community.
  • Hold your customer’s attention with stories of your product in action written by those who use it day to day.
  • Influence preferences by making the product more interactive and vivid.

2. Conversation centered on what the interests of your customers.

  • To do this, brainstorm 3 main interests that your customers are into that doesn’t have to do with your product. Maybe its gardening, traveling and raising kids. Put yourself in the head of your customers and find interesting content done by gardening blogs, talk about it and link to it. Invite your fans to submit their summer vacation plans. Write tips on best ways to keep kids safe at playgrounds. Remember, you’re not trying to write about these things and then secretly inject your brand name in the background somewhere or mention how your product is great when you’re gardening, traveling and raising kids. You’re just starting a conversation with your like-minded fans on subjects you are mutually interested in.
3. Conversation centered on the customer.
  • One on one dialogs with customers about their questions and needs, open up their questions for the community to answer and discuss.
  • Make customers famous by featuring their posts about your product and highlight their images submitted to you.
  • Shout-outs and props given to fans who do something cool or note-worthy.

Any more ideas on conversation starters for brands? Leave em’ in the comments.

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March 6, 2010 · Filed under Social Media

Social Media Flow Chart: Blog vs. Facebook vs. Twitter

This flowchart is from my Social Media Strategy eBook. Getting your blog, Facebook and Twitter to work together is a challenge. I think deciding where an idea should go (and just as important, where it shouldn’t go) can be difficult. That’s why I put together this flow chart for deciding on whether your your idea should be blogged, Facebooked or Tweeted. You’ll notice the arrows going from the blog to Facebook to twitter; these mean that what gets posted on your blog can be posted on Facebook which in turn can also be tweeted. Doing the reverse is a bad idea (ever been annoyed by a ton of someone’s tweets in your Facebook news feed?). I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any…

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January 26, 2010 · Filed under Social Media