Social Media: How many fans really view your post

As social media platforms like Facebook are being used by advertisers to reach millions of users, it is critical to accurately represent the impact of posts/comments on Facebook.

Yes, there are 750MM+ unique users on Facebook, but not all of them are active at any given time. Thus, when a comment or post is pushed on your company/brand's Facebook page, not all of your Fans see/interact with them or have the opportunity to see/view them.

According to sources at Facebook, only 5-15% of the fans view the post in their newsfeed. So, if you have 100K fans, only 5-15K of those fans will actually view your post.

The main reason for this dramatic drop off is the fast moving news feed. Typically, a post is active only for about 30-45 minutes.

Also, the EdgeRank algorithm that Facebook uses keeps into account the Affinity, Weight, and Time to pick the stories/post that appears in a user's news feed. So, the more a user or fan interacts with a brand's facebook page and the more fresh/updated the posts are, the more changes of the posts to show up in fan's newsfeed.

It is estimated that this percentage is even low for Twitter as it is even fast moving. Typically, 5-7% is considered as industry norm for Twitter posts or Tweets.

So, please be careful in representing the opportunity to see/view impressions.

If you have 100MM fans and your brand posts a story on Facebook – approximately 5-15MM users will view the post.

Launching an Mobile App and Keeping it alive

Most of the major marketers already have a mobile device app or are working on getting one live soon. The marketers should think very seriously on why they want to launch an application on the mobile devices. Does it fit the overall strategy of the campaign, brand. How will they be able to maintain it?

Most of the successful applications like Fandango, Facebook, Chipotle, and Amazon have provided a medium for users to utilize the mobile web in their day to day life. For example: Fandango, Chipotle and Amazon have made e-commerce easy. They have literally provided transactions on users fingertips. This shows how mobile devices are helping drive mobile commerce or mobile retailing. Facebook, as most of you know has exploded in terms of the user base with the mobile technology – revolution in social networking.

One more important point to think about before launching an application is how the application will survive in this world of new applications launching every day. Like any other marketing program – the mobile application also needs to be kept upto date, refreshed with new features, content etc. If the user is going to go through the exact same experience multiple times, the chances of the user re-visiting the application are slim. Even if it is a mobile commerce application, the user feedback needs to be addressed in a very pro-active fashion.

Measuring Reach of Paid Advertising on Facebook

As social media programs are getting more and more popular, it is important to understand how to measure the effect of the paid advertising. In this post, I will like to talk about the basic concept of reach, as ad exposure or reach is the first step in the game of placing ads.

Typical, Facebook campaigns are done to increase the fan base of a particular page or brand. In these campaigns, there are three types of ad impressions placed on Facebook:

1. Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" of the particular brand
   
2. Earned/Paid Media – Paid ads with the message of "Become a Fan" but with the social element showing a blurb with the name of a few of your friends who are fans of the particular brand. Since, these ads have the social component these are classified within the earned media category as well.
   
3. Earned Media – These are the instances of ads which show the list of friends who are fans of the brand and have a link below "Become a Fan". Since, the advertiser didn't pay for these impressions, these types of ads or impressions are termed as Earned Media.
   

Thus, measuring reach from all these impressions is not an easy task. It is impossible to measure it using third party ad servers like DoubleClick as the Earned Media is not served via any ad servers. It will be interesting to find out if Facebook can provide information on the number "Earned Media" impressions served for a particular brand. The next step will be to provide the number of unique impressions seen by each user; this will be the reach from the earned media impressions.

Another way of estimating this reach is based on the number of users who become fans from the paid media. On an average, each user might have 50 friends (this is not an accurate number, just for calculation purposes) thus, if a campaign generated 200 fans, the additional impressions generated will be 200*50 = 10,000. However, then some of the users who are exposed to these 10,000 impressions will become fans, thus generating more earned media. Thus, it is a cycle which goes on – beauty of social media. A good estimate will be to use 3 iterations in social environment like Facebook.

A recent study by Facebook and Nielsen shows that the Earned media impressions are the most impactful in driving awareness, ad recall and also purchase intent. Thus, it is very critical to drive these impressions. Though less in volume, these are the ones which have the biggest bang for the buck.

Social Media

The key objectives of Social Media are to listen, answer consumer's questions, embrace the thoughts and respond.

Respond to convert the negative sentiment into positive. React fast enough to negate any crisis like the McAfee anti-virus situation, a few days ago. McAfee reacted really fast by apologizing for the issue that helped control a negative impact on their brand. Do not wait like Dell, a few years ago when the battery explosion issue was out in social networks. Dell responded by saying it is a single isolated incident but then in a few days, the entire internet was full of complaints.

Embrace your user's opinions and then present it to the world, like Microsoft. Microsoft is utilizing this strategy in the "Windows 7 was my idea" campaign.

Each of the above mentioned tactic probably needs to use a different platform – Facebook, Twitter, Consumer forums, Review sites etc.

How to measure the impact of social media activities?

Some of the key metrics (monitored over time) that can be used to measure the impact of social media are:

1. Brand mentions vs. competitors
   
2. Brand attribute mentions with the brand
   
3. Sentiment
   
4. Correlate the changes in mentions or brand attributes to media/PR efforts
   

There are a few tools in the industry which can help gather the above metrics like Radian6, Nielsen Buzz. These tools might have additional widgets, reports which can provide additional insights about your brand.

Mobile Analytics: iPhone

I just installed the latest iPhone update yesterday and I am so excited with the new application. There is a lot to measure about this new application, a few metrics that I can think of are:

1. How many iPhone users started the install and how many actually completed it (the update takes about 1.5 to 2 hours, so it would be great to measure the completion rate)
2. Drilling down the consumer flow, the next thing to track would be how many users installed the applications
a. Frequency (1-3, 2-6, 7-10, 10+ applications)
b. Paid applications
c. Free applications
d. Applications by category
3. There are some “Westin” ads specially within the NY Times application, so measuring the Click-through rate on these ads would be a good metric to track

This new application has just changed the use of this product and obviously the sales of this product should go up dramatically as there were a lot of applications missing like Games, Mobile Banking (Bank of America), Newspapers (NYT), Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace)

The engagement with each of the above application would also be a good measure of how consumers are interacting with these applications.