Strategy / Tactics
Numbers behind Facebook
Some calls marketing an art. However, if you’re in the business of marketing. You’re very much into the science of marketing. At the end of the day, your accountant only cares about your numbers. Social media is no exception. As the industry matures, more numbers are becoming available. Today, we’ll look at some from the newly released report Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts: A Statistical Review by Buddy Media. In this report, Buddy Media analyzed “Likes†and comment data from over 200 clients for a period of two weeks. Here are some numbers you may find interesting:
- Posts 80 characters or less in length have 27% higher engagement rates
- Engagement rates are 3 times higher for posts that used a full-length URL
- Brands that post outside of business hours had 20% higher engagement rates
- While industry plays a role, overall, engagement rates on Thursday and Friday are 18% higher than other days of the week
- Posts that end with a question have a 15% higher engagement rate
This report reinforced some of the data we looked at from Dan Zarrella earlier this week. Post when your audience have time to engage will likely increase the success of your post.
Another interesting data from this report was around what to post to increase engagement. Questions are always good conversation starters. However, many brands also leverage Facebook to promote their offers. In these cases, this report suggests that soft sell is the way to go. Words like “event†and “winner†are well received by fans. On the other hand, words like “couponâ€, “exclusiveâ€, even “free†are not the best words to use on Facebook.
Social media marketing and Facebook marketing remains to be a world of growth and opportunities. As more marketers are becoming active in this space, we will sure gain more insights into how to best leverage these new tools.
Facebook remains king of social media
Social media marketing, like all other form of marketing, is a blend of art and science. Throughout this week, we’ll be examining a few recently released report to look at the science side of this particular discipline. Today, we’re looking at Social Media Examiner’s 2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. This is their third annual report of this kind. This year, they surveyed 3300 marketers. Of those surveyed, an overwhelming 93% indicated that they were employing social media for marketing purposes. This shows that without a doubt, social media is part of mainstream marketing.
Despite that, not everyone has the same level of experience in social media marketing. Of those surveyed, half had less than 1 year of experience. Keeping that in mind, the data not only shows the state of the industry, but it also shows where the opportunities lie.
Social media is still in its infancy in being part of the marketing mix. Currently, social media is largely leveraged to gain general exposure and increase new users. The opportunity here is that social media has the potential to be an on-going engagement with existing users. As we all know, it’s far cheaper to keep a consumer than to try to gain a new one. So, social media still has a lot of room to grow.
Facebook by far is the most popular social media tool right now. It’s also interesting to note that there is a difference between B2B and B2C marketing. LinkedIn is far more popular with the B2B marketers. This makes sense because every marketing tactic is about targeting. LinkedIn is a forum where business professionals are already at, thus making it a perfect forum for B2B marketers.
Of all the different tactics, YouTube / Video was the top area of focus, with 77% surveyed indicated that they intend to increase their efforts. This likely highlights the growth in adjacent technologies, namely smartphones.
This was followed by Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, not so surprisingly. Nevertheless, traditional digital marketing remains to be an important tool. SEO and email marketing are both areas marketers intend to continue to increase focus on. This is natural if you think about it because people are searching online for information and it takes email addresses to sign up for social media tools!
However, traditional paper marketing is likely to continue to fall out of favor with marketers. Direct mail and print ads both are areas where over 10% of those surveyed intend to lower their investment…
When to do everything
Marketing has always been a blend of art and science. The new realm of social media is no different. However, due to the newness of social media, data has been a little scarce. Last week, three new reports came out that filled the space with a lot of data. This week, we will spend some time on the takeaways from these reports.
The first one is by Dan Zarrella, Social Media Scientist at HubSpot, on the Science of Timing. Here are a few key takeaways that Dan wants everyone to know from his research:
On Twitter and Facebook:
- Late in the day and week is the most retweetable
- Tweet more
- Don’t crowd your content
- Weekends are best for Facebook sharing
On Email Marketing:
- Experiment with emailing on weekends
- Send email very early in the morning
- Send more email
- Your newest subscribers are your best
On Blogging:
- Know your audience
- Blog on weekends for comments
- Blog early in the morning for links
- Blog more frequently
With all the takeaways above, there is an underlying theme: Tailor to your audience.
- Send content to them at a time that they are available to absorb content (which is generally around early morning, lunch, or late evening, as in not during peak work hours).
- Don’t worry that you are over-marketing to them. If what you’re sending them is relevant, they wouldn’t mind getting a lot of it.
Jeannie Chan is a Brand Manager for a Fortune 500 consumer goods company. She considers herself a marketer, a traveler, and a foodie. Jeannie lives in NYC. 
