Sysmos, an enterprise social media analytics company, hired 100,000 monkeys working at 50,000 desks (2 per desk) in order to analyze 600,000 Facebook pages. Just joking about the desk thing – each monkey got their own desk.
The massive primate effort resulted in some very interesting findings, which I’ve highlighted below in no particular order.
Michael Jackson is the most popular page on Facebook, with 10 million fans; he is followed by actor Vin Diesel (7 million) and U.S. president Barack Obama (6.9 million).
On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.
Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page. (Where “owner-generated content” means things like photos, videos, and links posted by the page’s administrators.)
Pages with more than one million fans have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (photos, videos) as the average Facebook page.
On an average Facebook Page, the administrators create one wall post every 15.7 days. Among pages with more than one million fans, one wall post is created for every 16.1 days. This suggests that wall post frequency does not correlate with a page’s popularity.
Overall, the most popular “category” for Facebook pages is “non-profits”, while “celebrities”, “music”, and “products” are the most popular categories among pages with more than one million fans.
I think these findings are directionally interesting, but for most businesses, 1m fans is an unlikely goal. It is interesting to see that the average days between posts is around 15 – this seems far too long (half a month!).
I find that the value of Facebook to a business rests in the comfort and familiarity that many now have with the platform and layout, making it easier to navigate certain Facebook Fan pages than the actual website! Therefore, if businesses can successfully get clients to FAN their pages, it’s a powerful communications tool, but one that must not be abused. Also, be truthful and humble about your brand’s strength and signal in the market.
Social networks in Asia are particularly strong. Facebook has made significant gains in region at the expense of Friendster – who still uses Friendster?????
Facebook has more than doubled its share in region to become the leading Social Network Asia Pacific.
Baidu Space the leading CN social network, though numerous other challengers exist.
Almost all networks have seen shrinking reach, with Myspace and Friendster seeing some of the largest losses.
From their site, PeopleBrowsr is a data mine and social search engine for real time conversations. They’ve built a set of applications sitting on the data mine to monitor your brand, identify your audience, analyze tweets sentiment, filter the buzz, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously. Anyone use them and have feedback?
The best type of advertising bar none is word-of-mouth. The second best is PERCEIVED word of mouth which Facebook has been working on for quite some time by allowing users to see certain preferences and actions of their friends. IKEA took advantage of this for a creative ad campaign to promote a new store.
The idea was simple: 1.) upload pictures of IKEA showrooms, 2.) the first person to tag themselves on the various products in each picture, won the product they tagged.
The result was some serious tagging and even more serious advertising exposure for Ikea. Instead of people just looking at a banner with furniture, the users promoted IKEA themselves through their behaviors, drawing their networks of friends into the competition essentially via word of mouth.
View the actual photo album they uploaded on the profile page created for this campaign – personal page of store manager Gordon Gustavsson.
Crucial to this initiative is to realize that IKEA committed to the idea through their willingness to give away product. This adds up; here’s some quick figures to consider:
11 images uploaded for people to win items
estimated TOTAL retail cost of products in each image: $10k USD
estimated ACTUAL cost of product: $4k (shot in the dark)
Total cost: 11 images x $3k USD = $44k USD
This certainly puts the campaign in perspective. Granted, we also don’t know what marketing budget they planned for this store opening for which this could be a pittance. Either way though, it demonstrates real commitment on IKEA”s part to offer a tangible and valuable carrot for users which no doubt influenced the success of the campaign.
A growing number of big marketers have circumvented the middleman and launched their own mainstream media and entertainment properties. Red Bull, Quiksilver and more recently J&J, P&G and Walmart have all ventured into this space with success. The revolutionary development that has moved these brands direct competition for audiences with traditional media companies. It’s all about the content baby!
Some very useful and informative data for anyone interested in the digital landscape in Asia Pacific. I’ll be posting snippets in the coming weeks to share with you as well.
Summary of Key Findings:
Asia Pacific is the dominant regional audience and will be critical in global Internet competition.
Web penetration will continue to increase in emerging markets within Asia, and even in markets where web usage is well-established, increased broadband adoption will drive additional consumption.
Though Yahoo!, Google, MSN and other U.S. brands currently lead the Top Property rankings in this region, there are a host of local sites that are already carving out regional niches, and are poised to take market share.
So as I prepare to leave the corporate world (hopefully forever), obviously the most pressing question I’m struggling with is what will replace my crappy blackberry. I currently have an old beatup blackberry (8707v) and a God-awful plan because my company has issues with being on an intelligent or efficient smartphone plan, but that’s another post. Anyways, it has gotten me through some rough patches and definitely saved my butt a few times so I will miss it and the times we had – sigh.
But I’m THRILLED to be moving into the modern era and get me a smart phone that the rest of the connected world is actually using. I believe I’ll take a break from RIM for a while so am now considering the iPhone or an Android phone. In Hong Kong, the primary offering is the HTC Hero though I will likely hold out until a new version with Android 2.0 hits the market. Anyone know when that will be???
I found this video from Dogfight to be useful and sway me towards an Android phone. Long-story short, the “open-ness” of the Hero and the re-engineered focus on connectivity across networks certainly makes the Hero a contender to iPhone, though the initial versions of Android (“cupcake” and “donut“) fell a tad short of the iPhone experience. The early reviews of the Android 2.0 OS suggest a much better user experience and hence, a bloody rematch where Android phones may emerge victorious.
Google’s Chrome OS, amazingly simple and consequently unimaginably powerful, is poised to change the hardware and software landscape dramatically.
(Light-bulb moment: 9:00)
Combine Google’s search dominance, the massive waves they’re making with Droid in the mobile space, the countless terrabytes of data they own on user behavior, and soon their very real alternate offering to the soon to be formerly dominant Microsoft, and you have an entity with incredible power and reach into just about anything with a plug.
This leaves all of us asking the obvious question – is there anything Google can NOT do????
A good friend of mine were discussing this very topic on the summer. We concluded that it would be completely feasible (and likely efficient) for a city to contract the management of their traffic lights to Google for the purpose of optimized traffic signals to alleviate congestion, assist during emergencies etc. I nominate Los Angeles as the first city in need of this new Google product, which I’ll call “(Actual) Traffic Optimizer”
Stranger than fiction huh? Yah, just like a computer with only a browser.
Beware of pig poo falling from the sky….
Ken Burgin recently wrote an article that appeared in Hotel News Resource that includes some very useful tips for small businesss in the F&B industry considering using social media. I believe some of the biggest opportunities for social media use are with those businesses that consistently require selling of new units, be it plates of pasta, drinks, tickets or rooms. This is one of the reasons why the Hotel industry has moved so quickly into this space after numerous large names like MGM (their Twitter, their Facebook) have found success.
Here are some highlights of particular importance that I wanted to share:
The Facebook Page should be as good as the website. Make sure to include your logo obviously, plenty of photos, videos/commercials if you have them, and invite customers and staff to join – this is a great marketing opportunity. Promote it on menus, signs, customer feedback form and even vehicles.
Don’t mention the competitors. Better to say nothing than make negative comments. Everyone knows you’re better – leave it at that.
Make sure content is fresh, not stale. It’s not a good look if the last update was 3 months ago. Many businesses now have weekly social media updates handled by a specific person (not the boss)
I would be curious what good old Gordon would say regarding restaurant marketing. Probably something to the effect of focusing on the food, which goes without saying. If you’re food (or product) is awful, no amount of social marketing will make it any better. But I know there are plenty of businesses out there with great products that simply need a little help getting the word out – social media is PERFECT for that.
Moonlight Marketing educates clients how to effectively use social media applications like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs to connect with, engage and grow their customer base.
