FACEBOOK INSIGHTS OVERVIEW

As of December 15, 2011 current Facebook Insights will no longer be updated or supported (the “old” data will even be deleted in early 2012). Facebook Brand Page metrics will now come from the new engagement-based analytics, released at F8 this year. This Facebook Insights POV will review the major changes to the way brands can track Facebook efforts and provide implications of each.

• Engagement becomes an even more important variable in the somewhat mysterious Facebook newsfeed algorithms.
• Facebook has adjusted the way it tracks and reports on your page and content to better focus on this shift.
• Smart marketers will use this new data to optimize content publishing for maximum engagement and resulting buzz

THE (NEW) MAIN DASHBOARD

Total Likes: The number of unique users that Like the page. (Fans)

Friends of Fans: The number of unique users that are friends with the users that currently like the page. (Total potential reach)

People Talking About This: The number of unique users that have created a story (spread the word) about the page through Likes (of the page or content), comments, shares, wall posts, photo tags, etc. Stories are created through the various types of Facebook engagement that will become more diverse when more “actions” (read, ate, ran, etc.) are allowed to be incorporated into more apps.

Weekly Total Reach: The number of unique users who have seen content within a seven day date range. This number includes Ads and Sponsored stories.

Effects on Social Marketing: Growing new page Likes via organic means via current fans has always a brand goal. Friends of Fans and People Talking About This help quantify that goal; however the emphasis on sharing and interaction with posts provide new opportunities for brands to connect with users. When brands focus campaigns on Word of Mouth, they are now provided a calculable metric.

INDIVIDUAL POST METRICS

Say goodbye to Impressions and Feedback. Their successors are Reach and Virality, respectively. Joined by the metrics Engaged Users and Talking About This, brands can further analyze individual pieces of content, optimizing their content calendars for reach and gather insights on what makes content spreadable on Facebook. Also notable: These new post performance metrics only graph the first 28 days after a post’s publication. However, you can can all historical data via a data export.

Reach: The number of unique users that have seen a specific post. More on this in a moment.

Engaged Users: The number of users who have clicked on a specific post.*

Talking About This: The number of unique users that created a story about the page through Likes (of the page or content), comments, shares, wall posts, photo tags, etc. *

Virality: The percentage of users (from the Reach) that created a story about the post.

*Engaged Users includes users who click on a specific post. This does not necessarily mean the user commented, liked or interacted with the post.

Effects on Social Marketing: The previously missing metric, Engaged Users, bridges Reach and Talking About This. Feedback Score was based solely on Likes and Comments on pieces of content. However it overlooked what Engaged Users now addresses: the users who took the time to read and engage with the comment but did not interact further. In addition, Virality provides a metric to assess which posts resonated most with users. After all, how many users read specific blog posts but do not leave comments on the thread?

REACH

Facebook breaks Reach down into 3 categories: Organic, Paid and Viral. Pages can now decipher where most of their engagement comes from. Overall this alters how brands must view their content. At first glance, it appears the new algorithm adversely affects Impressions. But in exchange, it provides useable insights that help identify which content is innately spreadable.

Organic: The unique users that saw page content from their News Feed, the Ticker or visited the page. These users are being served content directly from the brand or opting to view the content from the page.

Paid: The unique users that viewed page content from a Facebook ad or Sponsored Story.

Viral: The unique users that viewed content from a story published by a friend.

REACH AND FREQUENCY

Facebook also expands on reach via the paired, “old school” metrics of Reach and Frequency, sortable by All Page Content,Your Posts and Shares by Others.

EXPECTED CHANGE:

Major changes in the Facebook algorithm redefine the standard for content visibility. There appears to be a significant drop from the change in Impressions to Reach. In initial sample testing over several posts, it appears the average difference is approximately – 77%.

Conversely, there is an increase in the Feedback/Virality Score. In the old Insights, posts fought for a rating of 0.10% or higher. Now these numbers are significantly higher. Again based on initial sampling over several posts, from the initial data it is an approximate increase of 312%

Effects on Social Marketing: Brands will now have a better understanding of “engageable” content. As the brand collects data over time, posts that have high readability versus high comment and likes will make themselves apparent. Again, this helps the brand optimize and craft their future content calendars and strategy.

LIKE SOURCES

This reflects the number of times your page was liked, broken down by where the like happened; a useful tool to track the effectiveness of your (possible) multiple Like Button locations and mobile apps/sites.

Remember, Facebook Likes can come from on and off Facebook.

DEEP INFO (OR TMI?)

Although not visible via Facebook’s primary Insights dashboard, a very, very in-depth look at brand page statistics is available for download (one would hope a newer query-based interface would make for easy cross-tabulating of variables). A sample of the ways marketers can slice data:

Daily, weekly or monthly breakdowns of each metric – further broken down by location or another variable – examples include:

• Daily breakdown of users who liked your page from their mobile
• Monthly (28 days worth) number of people who saw your page posts via a story from a friend
• Weekly number of impressions of stories published by a friend about your page by story type
• The number of people your page reached broken down by how many times people saw any content about your page

Insights go as far as a noting the daily top referring external domains which send traffic to your page – broken down by site – in total, over 1,000 columns of data are available.

CONCLUSION

Overall, the new Insights help brands focus on one thing: Post Engagement. It is counter balance to the aggregated News Feed. Only relevant, engaging content will get prime placement at the top of a user’s feed. Insights provides the necessary tools to optimize in order to secure that location.

“Advertising on the web is less about hitting someone with a message… it’s about engagement.” -Mark Zuckerberg

What are your thoughts on the changes to Facebook Insights? Continue the conversation in the comments, on Facebook or on Twitter @searchshots.

What makes people share? What makes YOU share (or ‘Like’)?

As Google+ surpasses 50 million users, Facebook pushes out over 750 million, and Twitter reaches over 100 million active users, we must consider the end consumer’s motivation to share content throughout these networks.

As marketers hoping to capitalize on the growth of these networks, we have to improve our understanding of the fundamental motives behind consumer’s behaviors within them. The following post examines several theories on this topic, but please, add your own color and tell us: what makes YOU share?

Extending Your Own Credibility by Borrowing the Credibility of Others

Most of us follow people we admire, trust, or respect as thought leaders within our own industry, whether that industry is marketing, architecture, medical, financial, automotive, entertainment, etc. Most likely, we strive to be more like these people, to have the respect of our industry, with the greater intention of moving it forward. So why do we share so much content from these mentors: on behalf of ourselves or for the behalf of the creator?

Maybe this is the transitive property of “borrowed” online trust:

Affirmation of Personal Tastes

Why do people share or like content from brands or content within the entertainment vertical (where a great majority of share content comes from)? Receiving a ‘like’ to your own personal beliefs is the new feeling of “YAY, I received a real letter in the mail.” When you share this type of content, a part of you secretly (or not so secretly) hopes that others feel the same, that they affirm your own beliefs. Before social networks, we could only attain this affirmation from the few people within our physical circle that we felt comfortable sharing it with. However, we can now passively pass on our beliefs with a level of transparency that has never before existed. Our posts on this matter will either fall upon silence or they’ll be met with a shared understanding amongst our peers. If you don’t believe that still matters, recall your days in high school. Affirmation of our own beliefs is a great, morale and confidence boosting attribute of social networking.  Likes are confidence boosters.

Call for Interaction

The opening quote from the movie Crash sums this up perfectly, sans its negative connotation:

“In any real city, you walk, you brush past people, and people bump into you. In L.A, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.”

In the Information Age, data moves fast. Our personal lives, however, move even faster. We are constantly bombarded by what is immediately in front of us, and maintaining relationships from the past or with those we don’t see any more becomes more and more difficult. At times, we may comment on or ‘like’ content that these people share in order to strike up a conversation, in hopes of rebuilding what we feel we may have lost.

It may take just one ‘like’ to break the ice and build the relationship anew. Think about the last time someone meaningful from your past, that you hadn’t spoken to recently, liked something you posted on Facebook. Did that ‘like’ entice you to respond? Did you at least recall off-Facebook memories of that person? Many would gawk at the idea that something so simple, within the confines of “online”, could have such meaning, but that’s the era we live in now. A simple ‘like’ can be powerful.

Invent or Alter Your Perception

Most people know who they are, but they also understand who they’d like to be. In the environment of a social network, we are given the opportunity to reposition our perception:  who we are to our network vs. who we’d like to be. Developing your personal brand is a hot topic these days, and what you share, what you put your name against, is a powerful tool to create this brand. Go ahead, try it out: connect with other coworkers on Google+, Facebook or Twitter, and especially LinkedIN. Some you may already know well, but for those you don’t, what is your perception of them after reading their posts, their shares, and their +1’s? Chances are, your perception of them is pretty close to the perception they are hoping to create. In an environment where we have more interaction with acquaintances than real connections, we all have this same level of control:

…if we utilize it.

These days it seems like you, me and our neighbor’s pet are all on Facebook. Facebook is certainly changing how we interact with each other and the world. We have digital records of college, weddings, birthdays, kids growing up and all other special occasions. Where these things used to be physical albums, now they are public and digital. Facebook has become the repository of our life’s memories.

Today, social media strategies are considered an integral part of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Brands and their marketing execs understand that social is the place they need to be – that’s where their consumers are. If you look up any big brand on Facebook, they will be there. As a consumer, we almost expect that any legitimate brand will have a Facebook page. Arguably, social media strategies are the most widely talked about, publicized and coolest/controversial digital strategies out there.

Social media is here to stay, with the percentage of social networking users increasing every year. Social media is important and there aren’t many people who will deny that, but… why Facebook? If you compare Facebook to other sites by the sheer number of unique visitors, you see that Facebook blows other social networks out of the water.

In the comScore media metrix, which measures the top online properties, Facebook ranked 4^th in the U.S, not to mention the top-ranking social network. For the marketers out there, Facebook ranked at the 10^th largest ad display network in the U.S.

 Simply put Facebook is hot right now.

Investing into a social media strategy seems like a good idea but there’s a slight issue:

Do current brand strategies resonate with Facebook users? There is a disconnect between the perceptions of what interactions between Facebook users and the brand actually mean.

Brands hope that Facebook users will buy their products, become an advocate, or for friends of friends, to become customers’ advocates. Facebook users, on the other hand, may be much less enthusiastic about the potential meaning of any particular action taken on the social network.

Within Facebook, the most popular way that users engage with a brand is through the “like” feature. In fact, 84% of users engage with a brand’s posts on Facebook through the “like” button. There is also data that suggests that Facebook likes will influence shoppers to purchase. In a study done by eMarketer on a sample size of 1,202 people, 35% of people said that seeing Facebook likes on a product would increase the likelihood that they will buy the product. 83% of users who have already liked a brand have also clicked the like button on the brand’s page. From a brand perspective, this sounds pretty phenomenal. Brands are interacting with their customers directly through the “like” function; thereby developing a relationship with them and gaining users who are now fans of the brand.

Or so it might seem.

According to one study, less than 42% of users actually found that the “like” meant that they were actual fans of the brand, while 58% of users perceived a “like” to mean that they were only subscribing to the brand with an expectation of special perks. A “like” may not even mean that much, 37% of people in the same study said that it meant nothing to them. In other words, a “like” doesn’t mean that the user is now a fan of the brand.

In addition to lackluster interest, some people have negative perceptions of the Facebook “like.” The graph below shows that people don’t want brands interfering with their lives or the lives of their friends. The largest reason people have not liked a brand is that they don’t want to be bombarded with messages or ads.

With these statistics, you might start to think that the social networking giant doesn’t provide as much value to the brand.

Now, I’ve given you a lot of reasons why a Facebook “like” isn’t all that it seems to be. However, you have to remember Mugatu and that Facebook is hot right now! Social media still has a lot of potential than can be tapped into with the right strategy. Brands have to give Facebook users content and utility that is more than just throwing advertising dollars into media strategies that give users negative perceptions or make them apathetic to their ads. Brands have to provide entertaining content and utility to the user where the brand becomes the backseat.

“Another example is from Orangina in Europe. Its slogan is “We’re the original.” It created an app that tells you who the first 10 people were you became friends with on Facebook. That’s cool. Occasionally, you’ll get a message from Orangina in your newsfeed suggesting a purchase of Orangina on a hot day. It offers a reason to enjoy Orangina rather than a 20% off promotion. Perhaps you’ll “like” Orangina because you have a reason to.”

-eMarketer

Facebook has a lot of potential, as we can see in digital and social trends, and people are still trying to figure out how to best utilize it. At the same time, we are getting there, to a point where brands are effectively communicating with their consumers by providing real value.

The Foundational Approach to Facebook CPC Ads

Executing for a Single Interaction

When developing a foundational Facebook media plan, you need to incorporate the needs of the client request and a desired goal into the strategy.  A project brief and planning session can help create the framework of the campaign and answer questions, such as:

• Target audience (demographics:  M (25-49), educated, in GEO, with certain behaviors)
• Product information (price, seasonality, use cases)
• Goal (build a fan base, drive conversions on a website)

With this information you devise a marketing plan as usual, while utilizing Facebook’s vast amounts of targeting options to create detailed audience segments and match the right messaging to these segments.  By segmenting your audiences clearly in Facebook (or via a management tool like Marin’s Facebook Management Solution), you can efficiently manage and optimize your segments easily and:

• Measure performance by audience including location, age, likes & interests
• Filter new ads by targeting criteria
• Create automated bidding strategies by segment to desired goal

The execution of a foundational Facebook CPC ads campaign is to support a relevant set of placements for a SINGLE interaction. (Search Marketing minded approach).

Executing on Paid & Social Synergies

Executing for a Series of Interactions

To effectively target different segments that may have different goals (engagement vs. conversion) at different stages of a purchase cycle (or seasonality), you can build a more complex plan that feeds off and builds from its own momentum.    Unlike the foundational Facebook campaign that drives to a single desired action, this approach incorporates a series of consumer interactions.

It all starts with a Facebook ad with the goal of driving Fans and “Likes”.  This is where Paid & Social Media collide and can do powerful things together.  The Facebook CPC ads in a more intricate model take the consumer mindset and social interaction stage into account to drive a multi-stage cycle.

Introducing the Facebook “Like” Cycle

Facebook ads have a lot of opportunity to reach, communicate and interact with audiences within its own social environment, or cycle.  Break out of the mold of thinking of simply the foundation but applying a more complex and dynamic campaign execution that speaks to consumers at different stages of their brand engagement.

Let’s break down each segment further and discuss the possible consumer mindset within each:

1. AWARENESS:  Build a Fan Base

This might be the most obvious but could also be shortsighted and capped of its extended benefits.  Serving Facebook CPC ads (Sponsored Stories Ads, CPC ads or Video ads) to increase traffic, are valid ad types to make consumers aware of your Brand.  The capability of directly “Like”ing your brand fuels your Fan base that is not only a pool of loyal customers that can develop and share positive sentiments of your brand, but those positive sentiments can then be turned into your Sponsored Stories ads in your campaign.

Additionally, adding “Fans” to your brand’s Facebook page has more value than just counting the #s of likes.  Driving Facebook Likes can also benefit your SEO program as “Likes are the new Links.”  Further value are mentioned in the next segments of the “Like” Cycle.

2.  dWOM:  Facebook Interaction and Engagement

As the Fan base to your Facebook page grows the fans will inevitably voice their opinions and interact with the fan page.  The positive sentiments and stories (even simple “Likes”) can become Sponsored Stories ads that will show to a Fans’ Facebook Friends which acts like Digital Word of Mouth (dWOM).  This ad type brings a new power to online advertising as it integrates dWOM into its copy that it isn’t surprising to hear Facebook claims Sponsored Stories ads “perform twice as well in engaging users” compared to standard CPC ads on the network.

Facebook recently announced at AdWeek its belief in Facebook WOM and belief “that word-of-mouth conversations among friends are the most influential for getting a brand’s message across.”  They went on to cite comScore research “showing that fans and friends-of-fans of a Page are more likely to visit a store, website, and even purchase a product or service.”  For instance, “Fans and friends-of-fans of Starbucks spend 8% more in stores than the average Starbucks customer and transact 11% more frequently”.  (Source: Fast Company: Oct 3, 2011)

3. ACTION:   Convert Your Audiences

Now that you have an established (and growing) Facebook Fan Base and built out audience segments to target with Facebook you can run a Facebook CPC ads campaign with a direct response message that leads the consumer to a desired action.  This campaign can build off the momentum of the first 2 cycle segments that drove Fans and inspired Engagement with the brand to build demographic targeting segments.

4. CRM:  Consumer Retention

As you continue to build the fan base and loyal customers, you need to retain them and continue the conversation and build further loyalty.  From here you have access to the Fans through creating a Facebook email strategy or implement contests and promotions on Facebook.  Additionally, Sponsored Stories ads can be run throughout the year to not only drive new Fans or “Likes” but also to leverage positive sentiments and push those stories and wall posts to Friends of Friends as a Digital Word of Mouth (DWOM) campaign.

Conclusion:

Executing for a Series of Interactions:

The PPC Ads Facebook “Like” Cycle has the ability to continuously evolve, grow and drive results for your Brand.  The “Like” Cycle requires executing placements for a SERIES of interactions that aren’t easily identified in advance, but if planned for strategically can result in more sales.

It is a complex ecosystem that takes the basics of targeting, buying and optimizing to a new level of campaigning that is dynamic, complex and potentially more rewarding.  With Facebook’s movement of viewing the act of online Sharing as an indication of Value, it is a testament of the “Like” Cycle and how marketers should adapt to this new model.

Think through your own Brand’s campaign and how the “Like” Cycle fits your Brand’s needs.

Caveats:

* People can enter the cycle at any moment, not necessarily at #1.

**This cycle has many “legs” to it and doesn’t fully represent Social Media’s engagement and interaction experiences and benefits

***This cycle is a depiction of the number of ways to reach, engage and retain customers through Facebook ads and interactions.  We realize this cycle is not perfect or one size fits all.

It is my theory that human beings are inherently self-obsessed and in need of constant attention.

For years, people had to call or meet up with friends to update them on the latest happenings in their lives.  As lives became busy and distances grew, that evolved to emails sent to friends.  A circle of friends was limited to 20, maybe 30 people.

But that wasn’t enough.  We wanted more friends, more attention.

Enter Facebook.

At first, it was great.  It brought long lost friends together, reunited families across the world, allowed young men to gaze at bikini pictures of young women they barely knew.

But then it got worse.

There came a point where it basically allowed people to broadcast to the world what only their Toto used to know.

Just ate a ham and cheese? Why not tell Facebook about it.  Caught your bus on time?  Facebook would want to know. You favorite baseball team just won one of 162 regular season games? Facebook’s gotta know.  Went to work on a Monday just like everyone else?  You get the point.

If there was an inane, vapid comment popping up in your brain, you had a medium to broadcast it.  What was worse was that there were people commenting on those posts, encouraging and enabling that behavior.

Enter Google+, the anti-Facebook.  Social networkers weary of the Hyde Park podium that is Facebook rejoiced.

Ah, circles.  Circles, where you could create little groups of friends and post information that was relevant just to those friends.

Did your team just win a cricket match?  Celebrate with your “Cricket Fanz” circle.  Found out about a job opening at your company? Help out your buddies in the “9.2% of My Friends” circle.  Just won the lottery?  Oh, what the hell, post it to everyone.

But it didn’t work.  Man’s inherent need for unwarranted attention and self-importance came in the way.

In my three weeks of using Google+, I have seen it become yet another extension of Facebook.  In an absolutely unscientific survey of my stream, 85% of the posts are still sent to the “Public”.  Even “Limited” posts are addressed to over 50 people.

Could circles already be dead?

I hope not, because I think it’s an idea Facebook was never able to figure out (or maybe didn’t want to figure out).  It could be that people are still warming up to the idea and we will see more use of it in the near future.

Until then, I look forward to the day I will have only relevant content in my stream.  Sorry, friend-who-just-saw-a-puppy-and-decided-to-post-a-picture-of-it, I really don’t care.

Are you having similar experiences? Will Google+ ultimately succeed? Click the link to vote!

As a continuation to the post Moments of Truth to Equity Clicks, let’s start thinking about the Multiplicity Factor of Pageviews for Digital Branding.

Maybe we’ve been thinking about pageviews all wrong, or at least not giving them enough credit. The measurement of “time on site” has been used often to evaluate branding campaigns, but many marketers are beginning to move away from that metric.

Maybe a pageview can deliver the same message, or more messages, in an even more impactful manner than print insertions. To that end, you don’t hear of print advertising being measured in “time on page” or “time before page flip” (read: sarcasm). You read flowcharts and see insertions by campaign by publication by weeks, months, and quarters. The placement of these print insertions throughout the publication also plays a vital part in delivering your branded message. To make a rough comparison, digital pageviews are print insertions within the publications that your brand owns.

Think about and compare the consumer’s experience with these two mediums (visualized below).

During section A, a consumer is exposed to an offline television spot or print ad. If only section A existed, the brand experience and delivered messages would stop here until the television spot aired again (frequency).

However, sections B, C, and D illustrate how digital can augment the brand experience and extend the equity chain.

Section B, the connection from offline to online, can take on many different forms: Display Media, Paid Search, Organic Search, Facebook ads, etc. Search can create a bridge for offline mediums or it can start the journey.

In section C, we see the multiplicity factor of pageviews for your brand. This section can act as three additional uninterrupted insertions.

Lastly, section D is where your excellent brand experience pays off even more. Your consumer shares their experience with friends, family, colleagues, and more. This stretches your marketing dollars and expands your brand’s reach. Summed up from the movie The Social Network, “The question is, ‘Who are they going to send it to?’”

The actions taken in sections B – D are also consumer driven and engaged, while section A is much more passive.

This process of digital branding presents numerous points to be discussed, but these four should help frame your brand’s thought process for digital branding:

1. The Power of Sequential Delivery

Let’s examine the flow of a theoretical magazine.

Starbucks, CONTENT, McCafe, CONTENT, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks. You are Starbucks.

You have to contend with quite a bit of noise between your messages.

Now imagine this process as a consumer browses online (with a heavy dose of multitasking).

Facebook, Bank of America, Facebook, Facebook, Email, Yahoo News, Email, Facebook, Google…

Now begins the power of sequential delivery with an engaged consumer (and why none of this is linear).

Starbucks (Search Ad), Starbucks (Landing Page), Starbucks (Pageview 2), Starbucks (Pageview 3), Starbucks (Pageview 4).

If you have a good content strategist and user experience lead on your team, you can make these five insertions into an advertising masterpiece and leverage the power of sequential delivery.

Moreover, ever watch a P&G-sponsored event or Guiding Light? It would seem that over 80% of these ad inventories are spots for P&G products. From a corporate point of view, this ability to leverage synergies among numerous brands’ target consumers offers a unique opportunity to maximize R&F (reach and frequency) across the P&G portfolio, while driving down holistic costs.

2. The Psychology of Consumer-Driven Actions

Passive or engaged. Is the bond between consumer and brand stronger when the consumer clicks through their own journey and drives the experience or when a consumer is being shouted at? Yes, that’s an extremely biased way of asking that question, but the answer also seems quite obvious. Think about your days at school, sitting in a classroom. Many have always performed with the “If I write it, I’ll remember it” strategy. The visual, or photographic, memory stems from an engaged student taking physical actions to remember information, feelings, and experiences that are relevant to them. Or, that are perceived to be relevant in the future, i.e. final exams.

The same holds true for your consumer. Put your brand’s offering into a relevant context for your consumers, and allow them to create their own experience with a unique set of feelings. This will help facilitate better recall for your brand at time of purchase.

3. Take your brand 20% and let your consumers take it the next 80%

While watching NYC blizzard coverage on CNN from the comfort of my Kentucky home over the Holidays, one of the broadcasters made an excellent point about the cleanup. He encouraged each and every person to do just a little shoveling and snow clearing around their sidewalks and street drains to ensure melting snow did not create floods or ice. His rationale was that NYC has a few thousand workers on the cleanup, but there are millions of people living here who can each do just a little to help flip the situation for the better.

This same philosophy works in marketing communications, too. You have a few advertising mediums and a handful of ad variations within each trying to reach millions of consumers. Meanwhile, what if the millions of consumers begin communicating these messages on behalf of your brand? Not only will this add a meaningful layer to your marketing communications, it will also elevate your brand’s reach to levels that you can’t grasp within scarce budgets.

4. The Poor Man’s ROI

These days, we’re all poor. We have developed a new competency: The Scarcity Mindset. It’s been said that recessions drive innovation because creativity is an absolute necessity needed to stay afloat in the economy. This time, in the age of measurability, we have developed a new type of innovation within analytics, one that mandates “ask not what your marketing dollars can do for your brand, ask what your consumer can do for your marketing dollars.”

For example, let’s say Starbucks received 39,684 likes from their website alone. How can we formulate a model to calculate the ROI of this? Consider the following:

# of likes or shares

Average # of friends for Facebook user

Show rate of your friends’ likes in activity feeds

Average CPC (and CTR) or simply CPM of ads on Facebook

Example:

39,684 likes  x  400 friends  x  50%  x  $5 CPM = $39,684.

Using this example, the math works out to conclude the value of a like is a perfect $1.

The more friends a user has or the higher the show rate for a given user’s network increases the value of a like, assuming CPM remains constant. This is the incremental value to your advertising, which can be modeled further to deliver the incremental value to your business (once media mix modeling catches up, that is).

Digital branding should focus on augmenting the brand experience to create a longer equity chain. Marketers and media planners must start thinking forwardly and resist the temptation to simply weight marketing mixes heavily in Section A. Use the bridge mediums… the grass is always greener on the other side.

In the US, online advertising spend has tripled over the past five years, due in part to increased targeting capabilities.  Agencies and client-side advertisers have access to a wide array of tools, which allow them to specifically target their chosen demographics in unprecedented ways.  But every advancement comes with its own hiccups and the question of ethics often surmounts.

What would you do if you knew a certain picture would increase your click-through rates twofold?

Or let’s say you are able to figure out the religion of your targets. Do you use it to your advantage?

Has user targeting become the new pop-up?

When advertisers target too specifically, use weird bearded men in financial ads, or introduce interesting interactivity (such as the “tickle the fat kid” ad) … well… it’s just plain creepy. With the media recently focusing its attention on the quality and legitimacy of search results, will we see more efforts to clean up the internet advertising world?  Or, will it just get more interesting?

And, when we say interesting, we mean…

Advertisers using the self-service ad tool for Facebook can now show friends who have liked the brand’s post(s) in the ad unit itself. In order to take advantage of this you must be targeting ads to your Facebook fan page and the new ad format is brought to you by the activity of your friends. When comparing against the Facebook Beacon incident of 2007, we don’t see a huge difference between the ads. But with a few hundred million more users and improved privacy settings, Facebook feels it is time to bring these back out.

Below are two examples of what the ads look like and how to align your customers with your marketing goals.

Another ad upgrade is that advertisers can now easily direct traffic to custom tabs. This will allow for better A/B testing to drive more efficient Cost Per Likes. Depending how advanced your site is, you can test between Events, your Wall, Photos or even custom tabs. Razorfish has built dozens of custom tabs, such as our in-app shopping experience for JCPenney. We’ve also partnered with some great developers like Buddy Media and Wildfire. These customized apps can increase engagement through surveys, contents, games, video and more. Before focusing on driving traffic to your page, find out what your customer wants!

Below is an example of how easy it is to pick a landing page. In order to execute landing page testing for each tab, you will need to create a new group per page, since you are only allowed one ad per group per page.

These new features keep users within the Facebook ecosystem, while giving them more relevant information about what their friends and family enjoy. As consumers spend more time on the Facebook site vs. being driven somewhere else, we expect conversion tracking and social CRM to evolve. If advertisers create more experiences for users to buy, sign up, and interact with their brand right on their Facebook page, profit synergies can only increase with earned and owned media alike.

Zuckerberg struck again on Sunday night, making his second career appearance on one of the top-rated news programs in America, 60 Minutes.  Aside from the onslaught of investigative questions from Lesley Stahl, Zuckerberg found time to introduce Facebook’s User Profile Redesign. The new profile format immediately informs visitors of a profile page who that person is, but this change means that users will be encouraged to provide even more data about themselves. Surprised, right?

This article from Josh Costine goes into depth about the Facebook display changes and how they improve the accuracy of Facebook’s growing data set. Marketers use this data set to target Facebook users who are most interested in the product they are advertising. Key to this ever-growing targeting pool is the newly designed Profile Info Summary. The “Summary” is the first thing that catches your eye on a profile page, as it is right beneath your name and above your most recent photos. It provides a quick rundown of your job, your school, your current location, your relationship status, the languages you speak, your hometown, and your birth date. Costine explains, “It’s therefore in Facebook’s interest for users to provide and keep current this information. Prompts for users to enter absent information and the increased visibility of these fields to a user and their friends should ensure this.” Costine goes on to provide further information regarding the User Profile Redesign. However, no aspect of the New Facebook Profile is more important to marketers than the Info Summary, as it will prompt users to reveal more about themselves.

On a side note, the 60 Minutes interview was very entertaining. You should watch it here if you missed it. Zuckerberg seems as composed and confident as ever. He preaches the growing importance of “social” in every decision that an individual makes, from buying groceries to watching television. He answers all questions as honestly as possible… for him. Which leaves the general public with only one question: Who wins in a fight? Andy Rooney or Mark Zuckerberg? Let the argument begin…

A month ago, sniffling from office germs, I sat down to watch Funny People, the 2009 Judd Apatow comedy featuring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan. The most interesting part of the two hours I could sit through was George Simmon’s/Adam Sandler’s performance at a Myspace corporate event. This was enthralling to me because I hadn’t thought about MySpace since I shut down my profile last December.

Back in 2006, I couldn’t decide between MySpace and Facebook. MySpace was customizable and catered to music lovers. Facebook was rigid in design and seemed to focus more on relationships, whether it be with people or the things we love. Today, computers and mobile phones are saturated with more exciting choices – we tweet with Twitter, check in with Foursquare, kvetch on Yelp and, well…facebook with Facebook. Consumers make sure they’re dedicating time to managing personality extensions that are worth their while.

Take a look at interest in MySpace over the past few years:

This scathing little article, written back in October 2009, succinctly describes MySpace’s current presence. In “Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail,” Kyle James writes that “it will never be the same beast that claimed over 75% of the market.” Other disruptors have prevailed in the social media battleground because they continued to innovate and listen to consumers, while figuring out sustainability.

Dan Reisinger reports in his CNet blog, The Digital Home: “’We’ve been clear that MySpace is a problem,’ News Corp. President and COO Chase Carey said yesterday during [a call with analysts]. ‘The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable. Our current management did not create these losses but they know we have to address them.’” Over the past two months, MySpace rolled out a spiffy new logo and a site redesign, catered toward Gen Y, and now claims to be a “social entertainment platform.”

Is anyone even paying attention? Is there hope?