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.

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.