Only 6% of Fans Engage With a Brand’s Facebook Page

#ShareSaturday - sharing useful content from fellow digital believers. 

Big brands like to tout the number of fans they have on Facebook, but a new study suggests they may want to start focusing more on the core audience who actually engage with their Page.

On average, just 6% of fans engage with a brand’s Facebook Page via likes, comments, polls and other means, according to a study from Napkin Labs, a Facebook app developer that works with brands and agencies. Of those fans that did, the average engagement was the equivalent of less than one like over the course of the eight weeks the study was conducted.

Napkin Labs analyzed fan engagement for more than 50 brand pages, including consumer electronics companies, retailers and more, with between 200,000 to 1 million fans each. The researcher found that having more likes doesn’t necessarily mean having more engagement. In fact, the more Facebook fans a brand has, the lower the percentage of engaged fans tends to be. For example, brands with between 900,000 to 1 million fans had 60% less engagement than brands with 500,000-600,000 fans.

What really drives the engagement on a brand’s page appears to be the core group of devoted fans — or what Napkin Labs refers to as “superfans.” The study found that, on average, the engagement of each one of a brand’s 20 most engaged fans is equal to that of 75 average fans. Each month, the so-called superfan likes 10 posts, shares five pieces of content and comments once. What’s more, these fans tend to get significantly more likes and comments on their posts than average fans, which helps drive up engagement on the brand’s page even more.

“Every business has to measure what they do and make sure that it is effective. Likes can be part of that measurement, but we need to start looking beyond that a bit, and start looking in more depth at what fans are actually doing,” Riley Gibson, the co-founder and CEO of Napkin Labs, told Mashable. As part of this, Gibson argues that brands need to focus on interacting more with their existing fan base rather than just focusing on growing their numbers.

Indeed, this may become even more important soon as reports suggest that Facebook has tweaked its EdgeRank algorithm, which determines how much content from advertisers appears in a user’s news feed. As a result, some brands have reportedly seen their reach decline on Facebook. However, engaging more with devoted fans could help brands broaden their reach on the social network.

“If you can get fans involved, get them talking about the brand, the engagements of each of those fans gets pushed to their friends feeds,” Gibson said. “So you can actually build more presence in the news feed by engaging your core audience.”

Using Instagram For Your Business

#ShareSaturday - sharing useful content from fellow digital believers. 

Share your Instagram photos to your business’ fanpage and other useful places with the help of IFTTT.com.

When I first discovered IFTTT I realized it gave me an ability missing from Instagram that kept me from using it more for business purposes.
I wanted the photos I had taken with Instagram and shared on my Facebook fanpage to be saved to an album so I could do more with them. It’s great that people who are already on Instagram can Like and Share the photos but that’s a limited audience compared to the number of Fans on our Facebook Page. Instagram photos also have a limited amount of time to gain attention before they fall too far down in the stream an no one sees them again. This is why I like having Instagram photos stored in albums on Facebook. It allows for easy access and discovery of previous photos.

Another thing that will help your Instagram photos from getting lost and forgotten is the efficient use of hashtags. Hashtags are one of the main ways people search for and find photos; so you should seriously consider creating a unique hashtag for your brand, event or promotion and get others to use it, too.

1. Tags – Tagging fanpages of partners and sponsors may get them to share your photos on their business pages exposing your content to their fans.
2. Comments – Getting people to comment on Facebook increases your EdgeRank and adds to your reach. Not everyone has an Instagram account and without one they can’t leave a comment on your photo. Asking someone to join Instagram just to leave a comment on your photo creates an obstacle to get that comment and many won’t do it.
3. Location – Adding a location to a photo is basically tagging the business the photos were taken at. They will get a notification that they’ve been tagged and this may lead to some cross promotion; the location/business may now share the photo with their fans and help make your event or promotion even more successful by exposing it to a wider audience.
4. Sharing – If you use the built-in sharing feature in Instagram to post photos to your Facebook wall, your photo will only be visible or accessible to your Facebook audience for a short time. Posts are said to have a viable lifetime of merely 3 or 4 hours. After that, the level of likes, shares and comments drops off considerably. It’s said that your fans almost never go back to your Facebook page, that they see your content in their newsfeed only. If a Fan does go back to your page – how far down, or back in time do you expect him to scroll?

Read the rest on: http://inlinevision.com/blog/using-instagram-for-your-business-integrating-social-media/

Twitter timeline from 2006 until now

How to Find out if Your Social Media Manager Posseses the Right Qualities

Anybody can sell their social media services in an interview based on the knowledge they have. Knowledge is good, but it's not the number one must-have quality when it comes to managing your social media accounts.

Pro-active

Kony 2012 was one of the fastest growing campaigns on Facebook this year and it was one of the longest lasting ones. Now there's not a sign of Kony on anybody's timeline. One day is like a year in the social media world so timing is crucial. It's crazy how fast trending/popular topics become a thing of the past. If your social media manager is not pro-active there may be lost opportunities to be part of a movement #justsayin

Interest

It's called SOCIAL media not news media or information media. Whoever you hire to manage your accounts and post comments on your behalf should have a genuine interest in your company. After all, they're the ones that will be engaging online every day about your brand. The last thing you need is dry, news-like posts that nobody cares about.

 

Read Mikal E. Belicove's article for "6 Must-Have Attributes of Social Media Managers"

How will you know if they have a genuine interest? Ask them to show you their past work to see if there is a trend somewhere. Also pay attention to the questions they ask. Interest-showing-questions include:

• What have you done so far that has worked or failed? (taking advantage of trial and error)
• What are the demographics of your target audience? (creating the appropriate voice and language)
• What about your company/brand would you like to highlight?
• What events do you have coming up?  
 
"How To Choose a Social Media Agency" will give you some more of these types of questions.

These types of questions will tell you that your social media manager is planning a strategy towards successful social media management. Don't have one yet? Contact 020digitalbelievers@gmail.com for a guaranteed success in social media management for your brand at low cost.

Guaranteed to Gain Engaging Twitter Followers with 5 Simple Strategies

The social media athomosphere is the same one as at a party. Do you want to meet people and gain friends? Walk up to them, introduce yourself and talk. Why can't it be that simple for Twitter? Just as at a social event though, you don't just walk in and yell HELLO LISTEN TO ME EVERYBODY, I'M HERE! You wouldn't do that so let's not do that on Twitter either, noone will listen.

1. Be informed

Update yourself with the trending topics on Twitter. Trending topics are the most talked about subjects worldwide. Follow your competitors, your role model, whoever you want to target to be informed of what they're tweeting about. Simplified: Follow & read timeline

2. Engage

Some users follow back when they see that you've started following them, but there are some that play hard to get. Engage in your desired followers' conversations using the same hashtags they're using to reach them and other millions of users. For a more direct approach feel free to retweet their tweet with your comment and they will see it directly on their time line. Simplified: Join the conversation

3. Tweet

Oddly enough many businesses desire followers on Twitter, but they don't tweet very much. Going back to the party scenario, I don't know anybody who has gained friends by sitting in the corner and not saying a word to a single soul. With that said, make sure you tweet consistently. Create a tweet calendar if necessary to have a structured agenda of tweeting. Make sure your tweets are appealing by adding humor if applicable or connect it to a popular event. Simplified: Create the conversation

4. Use (fun) hashtags

Play around with themes depending on your business, add hashtags and encourage clients and employees to use them. For example: "Back in 1999 we used to hand write everything. Thank God for technolog #ThrowbackThursday" *Attached picture of stack of papers with handwriting on them* Simplified: no really, use (fun) hashtags

5. Call to action

Yes, users need a call to action to be compelled in to do what you want them to. You may tweet the most awesome sentence within 160 characters, but a simple "RT if you agree" can make a huge difference in how many people actually get to read it. In case you didn't know already, your followers' followers will see your tweet on their time line if only they hit that RT (retweet) button. Simplified: Tell them what to do

These are simple steps if you have a social media coordinator who monitors all of this for you. If not you probably won't have the time to dedicate to it. I offer social media services at a low cost. Feel free to contact me at 020digitalbelievers@gmail.com