Conversations matter
“Consumers don’t want to be buddies with your brand!” Rohit brings us marketers back down to earth. “In most cases, consumers don’t want conversations with companies, they want something completely different,” he continued. The message that social media is all about conversations may have been a bit too well received. The word ‘conversation’ is a flat term and more is not necessarily better. A good conversation is valuable but cannot be quantified. Here too, we must be careful that our search for ROI does not degenerate into a proliferation of meaningless conversations. Being social is also knowing when to be quiet. Or as Rohit says: “The real secret to building trust is using likeability to build deeper connections, instead of just focusing on having more conversations”.
chad_wittman_aboutAlso EdgerankChecker (Facebook statistics tool with 550K+ connected pages) founder Chad Wittman was one of the big international names present at the congress. I followed his break-out session which was about monitoring competition on Facebook. According to Chad, competition on Facebook is mainly about the Newsfeed and your Facebook competitors are often not your real-life competitors. Facebook users follow ('like') an average of 40 pages but thanks to the EdgeRank formula, messages only reach 12% of your fans! This means that your messages compete with the posts of other pages. If the affinity with your fans is insufficient or the content is not good enough, you will lose the competition and the message will not reach the newsfeed of your fans, which in turn has a direct negative effect on the reach of your next post.
'Lady Gaga Nike's Biggest Competitor'glauumartinss-lady-gaga-nike-shoes-Favim.com-174177
Chad also recommends studying the so-called 'Fan Overlap'. An example of a fan overlap is the latvia phone number list fact that 30% of Nike fans are also fans of Lady Gaga. The Fan Overlap between both pages is therefore 30%. This makes Lady Gaga a direct competitor of Nike. After all, they both fight for a spot in the news overview. Of the people who are fans of Adidas or Nike, only 15% are fans of both pages. Here the Fan Overlap is therefore 15%. The conclusion is that Lady Gaga is a bigger Facebook competitor for Nike than Adidas in this case!
To beat the competition on Facebook and increase the reach of your posts, Chad says you need to learn from the #wins & #fails of overlapping pages. What kind of content works for them? Does it match your page? What days do they post? Are there gaps in this schedule where the number of competing posts is lower? Although the 'Fan Overlap' idea is interesting, we can't do anything with it today. It is not possible to find out which other pages your fans are connected to. Chad is currently building a new service for this problem, which will tell you the top 5 overlapping pages for $20 per page. By the way, this only concerns 'on fire' pages, as you can read on FanOverlap.com, which in my opinion makes it less interesting for smaller pages and local businesses. My advice for now is to traditionally follow your normal competitors and answer the same questions for yourself as above.
“Facebook without EdgeRank no success”
After the break-out sessions, Chad gave another keynote that mainly focused on how EdgeRank works and how you can respond to this as a fan page. For example, the average fan page only reaches 12% of its fans per message. However, brands that cleverly respond to EdgeRank achieve a reach of 40%. An interesting insight that Chad also gave was that Facebook still artificially gives the messages an 'boost' for this 12% reach. He learned this himself from an ex-Facebook developer. This developer also told Chad how Facebook tested with an unfiltered news overview (so without EdgeRank). This test was not successful, many people appeared to drop out and could no longer keep up with the flow of content.
Facebook Statistics Q3 2013
Hans Maltha of Yes2Web presented their research into Facebook statistics in 2013. Thanks to their statistics tool Fanrise (formerly PageMonitor), Yes2Web has a lot of data available from connected pages. No less than 110,000! A nice data mine with which they made the following presentation.
'A Facebook Marketing conference in 2014 too'
Through Peter Minkjan of Likeconomics I have heard that there will be another Facebook Marketing Congress in 2014. Even the dates are known: June 9 & 10. I have already reserved a spot in my agenda!