3 Studies Show Facebook’s Marketing Potential

Facebook is hot. There’s no question that Facbeook has a large audience. But what does this mean for marketers and business owners?

Here are three recent Facebook-related studies that answer these very questions by examining how much time Facebook users invest in the platform, if Facebook ads are effective and other Facebook trends among online merchants.
#1: One-Third of Online Time Spent on Facebook Among U.S. Users

According to recent findings by market researcher Morpace, U.S. Facebook users are on the site for 1 of every 3 minutes of time spent online. Users 18 to 34 years old spend the most time on the site per week (8.5 hours out of 22.4 spent online). Users 55 and older spend an average of 4.6 hours per week on Facebook.

The study also explored Facebook activity by ethnicity. According to the results, Asians were the heaviest users of Facebook. As a group, they devoted the most of their Internet time per week to Facebook (39.6%). African Americans were the second heaviest users at 35.1%. Hispanics spent the least amount of time on Facebook (31.7%).

One of the most interesting stats from this study showed that Facebook users making at least $100,000 annually spent the most time on Facebook and on the web as a whole. This is valuable information for companies selling products and services online.
#2: Facebook Ads Most Effective On User Profile Pages

Facebook users spend more time looking at ads on their own Facebook profiles than they do on news feed pages (their homepages), found a new report by Mulley Communications. Specifically, the study found that 71% of users looked at advertisements on their profile pages, while only 31% of users looked at advertisements on the news feed page.

In addition, 53% of users pay attention to page updates in their news feed wall, which may explain why they mostly ignore ads on their pages.

#3: Online Merchants Loving Facebook ‘Likes’

There’s been a lot of discussion about retailers extending the power of Facebook to their sites. Website conversion company SeeWhy found that 35% of ecommerce online marketers have implemented Facebook’s “Like” plugin, while 33% plan to do so in the near future.

The second most popular Facebook social plugin was the login application, as 18% reported they had implemented it and 15% said they plan to do so in the future. The login plugin allows consumers to skip the registration step and login directly from the merchant’s site. This allows conversion to be simple and quick, which is a huge advantage for the merchant.

Facebook social plugins have been getting a lot of attention from online merchants because they can drive traffic back to their own sites without having to build an entire ecommerce site into their Facebook page. Although 26% of respondents said they plan to build ecommerce applications on Facebook itself, 67% said they plan to use Facebook to actually drive traffic to their sites.

In addition, 44% said they plan to use Facebook applications in place of microsites for launches and specific promotions.

Quotes Of Note

It’s not what happens in life that’s important, it’s how you deal with what happens that counts. 

This just occurred to me when we had a hard drive fail on an important  client shoot. Fortunately, we always backup to three different sources...so,  after the heart attack, we were able to salvage the expensive shoot.
I'm sure I'm not the one who first spoke  these words, but the message is clear: 
Backup, Backup, then Backup again!

Facebook Video as Your Secret Weapon to Gain Fans

Video is a preferred medium not only by Facebook fans, but by the news feed algorithm as well. Whenever a non-fan watches your videos, a button pops up in the top left corner suggesting he/she ‘Like’ your Facebook page. To take advantage of this feature though, you’ll have to upload the video file onto the Video Tab inside Facebook (not link to a YouTube video). This is a tactic used by Intel's social media strategists.

When non-fans view your videos on Facebook, they will see the Like button for your Facebook page in the upper left corner of the video screen. This feature is a great tool to gain exposure and recruit new fans. Just be sure your video is of professional quality and contains great content!

5 New Studies Show Facebook a Marketing Powerhouse

From Amy Porterfield/Social Media Examiner

When you hear that Facebook is yanking Yahoo from its ranks and inching up on Google’s traffic throne, you can’t help but pay attention.

And if you work for a business or own one, it’s likely that social media marketing is on your radar.  More and more marketing dollars are beginning to shift toward social media marketing and this trend only continues to climb.

Here are 5 studies that show how Facebook is undoubtedly a leading online social contender and a key tool that is continually changing the landscape of online engagement and fan loyalty.

#1: Average American Spent 7 hours on Facebook in January

According to recent findings by Nielson Company, Facebook has officially become a favorite pastime for many (but we’ve known that for a while now!).  However, the findings are pretty astounding when you really break it down:

The average time users spend on Facebook is 7 hours per month (a 10% increase).  To put that into perspective, Yahoo! is in second place, but with only 2 hours 28 minutes per month. The fact that people are spending more than 4 hours extra on Facebook compared to leading sites like Yahoo! and Google is information marketers should note when creating their social media campaigns.

This chart shows the breakdown of user time spent on the major sites:

#2: 44% of Social Sharing on the Web Is Driven by Facebook

With the surge of social networking over the past year, we have seen social traffic begin to rival search traffic—and the major players, including Google, are paying close attention to this trend.

TechCrunch recently looked into the services on the web that drive the most sharing and reached out to Gigya for some stats.   What’s Gigya?  Gigya is a company that powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including major players like ABC.com and Reuters. As TechCrunch explains, “Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network.”

Based on Gigya’s data, here’s the distribution of shared items on the web:

• Facebook: 44%
• Twitter: 29%
• Yahoo: 18%
• MySpace: 9%

This pie chart, courtesy of TechCrunch, shows the breakdown of social sharing on 4 major sites:

In addition, some other interesting stats from Gigya include:

For share of authentication via news sites, Facebook took 31% while Google was close behind with 30% and Yahoo at 25%.

With entertainment sites, Facebook was the major leader with 52% (Google was second with 17%, Yahoo with 15% and Twitter at 11%).

As we have seen with the popularity of social sites, people like to share links with multiple people at one time, versus just one-on-one via email. Because real results are strongly tied to the amount of online traffic you’re able to generate, it’s important to break down the sources of this traffic when considering where to spend your time and marketing dollars.  These stats shed light on where the action is really happening.

#3: Facebook Yanks Number 2 Spot From Yahoo

According to a Compete.com report, there has been a changing of the guard in the online world. Facebook has surpassed Yahoo, now taking its place as the number-two most popular site in the U.S.  Facebook drew nearly 134 million unique visitors in January 2010.Google overtook Yahoo as number one and never looked back. Is Facebook’s next conquest the Google traffic throne?” According to the site, “It’s been two full years since we’ve seen a shakeup at the top—In February 2008,

Here’s a great chart that shows Facebook’s climb to the coveted #2 spot:

But as we all know, the real dollars are in the engagement—and Compete.com says it best: “Facebook is second to none.” In January, 11.6% of all time spent online was spent on Facebook (compared to 4.25% for Yahoo and 4.1% for Google).  Facebook is in it to win, to say the least!

#4: “Faking It” on Facebook Is Rarer Than Previously Imagined

The findings from a recent research study conducted by the journal Psychological Science, show that instead of “faking it” online, people are much more likely to reveal their true selves online and not the idealized image of who they want to be.

A largely held assumption (supported by analysis) suggests online profiles are less than truthful when looking at true personalities of the users, and the researchers in this study set out to test that hypothesis. “There has been no research on the most fundamental question about OSN (online social networking sites) profiles,” notes the report. “Do they convey accurate impressions of profile owners?”

The conclusion of the report was very surprising to most. The report states, “These results suggest that people are not using their OSN profiles to promote an idealized virtual identity. Instead, OSNs might be an efficient medium for expressing and communicating real personality, which may help explain their popularity.”

The study focused on both MySpace and Facebook; however, the popular site Read Write Webbecause it only allows the use of your legal name and due to its long-standing privacy controls, Facebook “provided its users with a sense of safety, security and comfort—they could be themselves—their real selves, flaws and all, without the world watching.” stated that the “real personality” results were more likely to been seen on Facebook than other social sites. They pointed out that

#5: Facebook Boosts Sales and Customer Loyalty

The Harvard Business Review recently featured a new study from Utpal Dholakia and Emily Durham of Rice University.  For their study, they asked the question, “How much do businesses really influence consumers when they launch pages on the site to attract ‘fans’ and pepper them with messages and offers?”

To gauge the effectiveness of Facebook fan pages, the study used one company’s page to measure the effect on customer behavior. For the experiment, the researchers partnered with Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain. They first emailed over 13,000 customers from their mailing list to gather store evaluations and information on shopping behavior. Then they launched the fan page and invited the mailing list to the page.  Over the course of three months, the company “updated its page several times a week with pictures of goodies, news about contests and promotions, links to favorable reviews, and introductions to DG employees.”

Three months after that, they resurveyed the fans and here’s the overall result: Facebook changed customer behavior for the better.

Those who had replied to both surveys and had become fans stood out as their best customers. Here’s the breakdown of the findings of their new fans:

• Store visits per month increased after people became fans.
• The new fans generated more positive word of mouth than nonfans.
• They went to DG 20% more often than nonfans.
• Fans gave the store the highest share of their overall dining-out dollars.
• They were the most likely to recommend DG to friends and had the highest average Net Promoter Score—75, compared with 53 for Facebook users who were not fans and 66 for customers not on Facebook.
• DG fans also reported significantly greater emotional attachment to DG—3.4 on a 4-point scale, compared with 3.0 for other customers.
• Fans were the most likely to say they chose DG over other establishments whenever possible.

“We must be cautious in interpreting the study’s results,” Dholakia said. “The fact that only about 5% of the firm’s 13,000 customers became Facebook fans within three months indicates that Facebook fan pages may work best as niche marketing programs targeted to customers who regularly use Facebook. Social media marketing must be employed judiciously with other types of marketing programs.”

But overall, Dholakia stated that the results indicate that Facebook fan pages offer an effective and low-cost way of social media marketing.

Madison Avenue Eager To Get On Board With Social Media

Recently in The Wall Street Journal: 

As more and more advertising dollars flow into social media, some Madison Avenue firms are seeking to grab a piece of the action. But it will be a tough fight as the space is overrun with companies seeking to own the segment, from start-ups to public-relations firms.

Universal McCann, the media-buying firm owned by Interpublic Group of Cos., is bolstering its social-media offering by launching a practice this week called Rally. The division will help marketers develop campaigns, track online chatter about their brands and measure how those campaigns perform. Headed by Heidi Browning, a former MySpace executive, Rally will house several new social-media hires. MySpace, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.

Publicis Groupe's digital umbrella organization, Vivaki, says it also will open a social-media consulting practice by the end of the year. The new group will pool Publicis' social-media tools and experts and use them to beef up the social-media practices that many of Publicis' agencies have already established. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy officer at Vivaki, says he is willing to use his mergers-and-acquisitions budget to bolster the practice if needed.

The push to form a more formidable presence in social-media advertising is being fueled by the increasing number of marketers who are eager to figure out how they can use sites such as Facebook Inc., which has almost 500 million users, and Twitter, with more than 120 million registered users, as a marketing weapon.

"Social media is now part of all our clients' plans; we can't not be in this space," says Matt Seiler, chief executive of Universal McCann.

Ad spending on social networks world-wide is expected to rise 14% this year to $2.5 billion, according to research firm eMarketer. Although social media represents only a fraction of the $55 billion online-ad market, it is one of the fastest-growing segments.

Some corporations have taken a hands-on role in crafting their efforts: PepsiCo Inc.'s Gatorade, for example, recently created its "Mission Control Center," which is set up like a broadcast-television control room and is charged with monitoring the sports drink around the clock across social-media networks.

But as marketers look to make bigger commitments, they are increasingly seeking experts to navigate the burgeoning space.

Earlier this year, Chrysler Group LLC tapped New Media Strategies, a unit of publisher Meredith Corp., to handle its social-media tasks. In March Kraft Foods Inc. hired 360i, a digital ad agency owned by Japan's largest ad company, Dentsu Inc. The agency has been tasked with monitoring the social-media sites for some of its brands such as Oreo and Jell-O. It also develops campaigns. The agency recently created the "World's Fan of the Week" promotion that appears on Oreo's Facebook page.

Microsoft Corp. is currently searching for a social-media firm to handle duties for its Xbox videogame system, work that is now handled by several of Xbox's agencies, according to people familiar with the matter. Asset-management firm State Street Corp. also has begun looking at firms. A spokeswoman for Microsoft declined to comment.

"We have talked to some PR firms that appear to have established valid expertise over the years, and we are also interested in the new social-media firms that are bubbling up," says Hannah Grove, State Street's head of global marketing.

Creative ad agencies, digital ad firms, social-media boutiques, public-relations outfits and publishing companies are all clambering to get on board.

What You’re Missing By Measuring Social Media ROI Online

BrandSavant/Tom Webster

The short answer is: a lot. If your social media efforts are strictly tied to tweeting out coupon codes, then you have a pretty direct and reliable measure of the efficacy of your efforts: simple conversion. For the rest of us (and, that’s pretty much 99% of us), online measures are not going to capture the full impact and value of social media for your organization. There are lots of smart folks in social media monitoring and sentiment analysis trying to crack the ROI nut, trust me – but mining unstructured data alone will never truly quantify the value of online engagement to offline sales.

For instance, Southwest Airlines (SWA) has a notable presence in social media, particularly with their Twitter account at @southwestair. A lot of people talk about them online, and a lot of the chatter about SWA (particularly in comparison to some of their U.S. competitors) is positive. Buying air travel, however, is not a spur-of-the-moment decision for most people (myself excluded ) There is likely to be considerable distance between the point of influence – being favorably predisposed to SWA through their social media interaction – and the point of purchase. In the intervening time, SWA is also likely to run some kind of sale or promotion, and while it may have been that promotion that actually prompted the purchase, it may also have been Southwest’s online behavior that put them into the purchaser’s consideration set.

See where I am going with this? If the offline sale gets the “credit” for conversion, the efforts expended in social media – however important – get little or none. Parsing out the impact of cross-channel media on purchase behavior is a bit of rocket surgery, but well within the purview of a competent CMO – provided, of course, the right inputs are available. If you are only measuring your social media efforts by mining unstructured online data (monitoring, sentiment analysis, etc), then you may be capturing enough to track reputation, or the health of your brand on the social web, but you aren’t tracking enough to make the connection to purchase behavior, particularly in longer sales cycles.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be monitoring or mining this data online; it’s an essential input to the process. You do, however, need to augment it with offline inquiries. This may mean commissioning additional online or offline research projects (depending on where your transactions actually happen), or perhaps adding a few social media indicators into the data you already collect, but the bottom line is that this isn’t really a mystery. It’s done every day by marketing departments all over the world, for other channels and media.

Here’s what prompted me to go down this particular rathole today: I am currently working on a project to measure the impact of a campaign that will target visitors to minor league ballparks across America. The campaign, which has a variety of components, hasn’t run yet, but we are measuring today, in the actual ballparks, before a single tweet, billboard or radio ad has begun. By conducting offline pre-engagement measures at those ballparks, we can sample the fans and develop a reliable baseline for our client. Later, after the campaign has run, we’ll conduct the exact same measures, in the exact same way. Our client will know precisely what worked and what didn’t work (online and offline), because we will have the apples-to-apples, before-and-after analysis to determine what components were successful, and what aspects didn’t perform.

Pretty easy stuff, really: measure before, measure during, and measure after. Measure online, but also measure offline. Works for out-of-home media, works for TV and it will work just fine to quantify the value of your Twitter account. Mining online data can give you a snapshot of what people think about your brand or product on the social web, and tracking this data might even give you a sense of how these perceptions change over time. For most brands, however, the actual behavior change occurs elsewhere. It might happen in an Amazon shopping cart, at a car dealer, or even at a local ballpark. When you can sync your online monitoring efforts with offline measures, one calibrates the other – and the true ROI of social media can be measured, understood and appreciated. For our friends in the social media space, that is what we want for you.

Social Networking Use Will Reach All-Time High in 2014

From Social Media Examiner 

 

In eMarketer’s recent report, “Social Network Demographics and Usage“, it was estimated that 127 million people (57.5% of Internet users) will visit a social networking site at least once a month in 2010.

They attributed the steady rise since 2009 as due in part to the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook. Not only is the number of users growing quickly, but also the audience demographics continue to widen from just teens and young adults. In 2010, they estimated that 59.2% of adult Internet users will visit social networks monthly, up from 52.4% in 2009.

“The connections and interactions that social networking makes possible didn’t even exist a few short years ago,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report. “Status updating, commenting and sharing openly are all activities that will not go away.”

The estimates outlined in the report show a steady rise by 2014.  Two-thirds of all Internet users (164.9 million people) will be using social networks on a regular basis.  Two age groups stand out the most:  In 2014, 56.8% of 55- to 64-year-old Internet users will visit social networks regularly (34.3% in 2009).  In addition, 37.9% of seniors 65 and up will be social network users (14.1% in 2009).

These two graphs show the steady rise in social networking use by 2014.