Author Archive

If you’ve had a Facebook page for one year or more, you’ve probably noticed that getting exposure is much harder than it used to be.

Aside from being massively more crowded than years prior, Facebook’s EdgeRank (the algorithm that determines what an individual sees in their news feed) has become more complicated and specific to the tastes of individuals that it’s nearly impossible to leverage the tool if you don’t have a relevant fan base who loves to interact with and share your content.

Despite the fact that Facebook remains very secretive about their algorithm, Argle Social’s webinar last week provided answers to several key questions for marketers and gave new insight into how we should behave in regards to EdgeRank.

Three Variables That Determine EdgeRank

Facebook’s EdgeRank is determined by three variables: Affinity, Weight, & Time Decay.

1. Affinity is the relationship Facebook thinks you have with a given piece of content, according to actions you have taken in the past. In other words, the more you share, comment, ‘like’, and click on different objects, the higher it will (eventually) appear in your news feed.

2. Weight is the importance Facebook assigns to actions people take and different types of content distributed by people and companies.

Objects (content distributed):

1. Video
2. Photo
3. Link
4. Status (copy w/no video, photo, or link)

“Time decay” refers to how recent or “old” the item is. Simply put, newer items are more likely to appear in the news feed than older items. This is why posting content at times when your audience is logged in to Facebook is crucial in increasing exposure.

EdgeRank Best Practices

More generally, you should consider a few things when thinking about EdgeRank:

1. Give your brand personality. You have to be interesting to get exposure on Facbeook. Everything you put into the news feed must be compelling, entertaining, informative, or nurture the community in some way. Share exclusive content. Include lots of photos and videos. Start your own traditions. You are no longer competing against other advertisers – you are competing against people’s friends, families, dogs & cats. They have personalities, so you must too.

2. Use separate campaigns and contests. Campaigns allow you to determine what content is best and see the big picture of things in a very tactical medium. Run a 3-month campaign (no shorter) to gain new perspectives on different types of content.

3. Include calls to action. Click ‘like’ if you agree. Comment with YOUR favorite color. Share this get well graphic with a friend of yours who is sick. Be careful not to use these too often, but throwing them in every so often can give you a nice boost in interactions. What could be easier than telling them exactly what to do?

4. “Stir the hornet’s nest”, as it was referred to in the webinar. This is my personal favorite and one that can drive massive results. Pinning your fans against each other with borderline controversial content, “bubble” events, and content that pushes their buttons (a little) is one of the best ways to get people talking. Don’t make the mistake of getting political, challenging moral beliefs, or being offensive here – just don’t be afraid to put something out there that people might disagree with.

Now it’s your turn:

What EdgeRank best practices do you have to share?

This post was written by Bonfire’s Chief Strategist, Garrett Ira.

Company: Beaverton Auto Group

Social Media Team: Ryan Lewis, President, Bonfire Social Media; Garrett Ira, Community Manager, Bonfire Social Media

Campaign Length: Nine Months

Result: Facebook interactions increased 1,021%, Facebook fans increased 172%, and Facebook cost-per-fan decreased 38.2% (averages)

The Challenge

Beaverton Auto Group consists of three auto dealerships: Beaverton Nissan, Beaverton Hyundai, and Damerow Ford. A locally owned and operated company, Beaverton Auto Group was quick to realize and understand the dramatic shift to social media in an industry that has relied heavily on traditional mediums.

Each of the three brands at hand have experienced their own significant challenges during the recession and natural disasters in Japan, which caused difficulty in maintaining a consistent supply of inventory. Bonfire was appointed to launch the company into the social space to build brand awareness, increase web traffic, nurture their communities, and ultimately drive sales.

The Customer Experience

Auto dealerships aren’t exactly known for fantastic customer service, and many customers dread stepping onto the lot. So instead of simply telling everyone how great their customer service is, we showed them by displaying photos of happy customers next to their brand new cars. Not only did this provide an avenue to build trust among potential customers, but it also helped us grow a relevant fan base—one filled with existing customers and not random visitors who want nothing to do with the product. The pictures quickly became a hit, with customers often asking for their pictures to be taken before the conclusion of the sale and showing gratitude in the comments.

We also provided exceptional customer service via social channels, further contributing to our highly interactive communities.

Incentives

One of the most significant shifts in social media in 2011 was the expectation of the consumer to be rewarded for connecting with brands online. Knowing this was a key to success, we wanted to do something fun to reward our fan base but also add value and generate business for our client.

We achieved this in several ways throughout the campaign, the first of which was exclusive service specials for Facebook fans. To make this process ultra-convenient for the customer, we enabled them to download and print the coupons right from Facebook vs. making them click through to another site. We also ran an iPad 2 Giveaway as part of our “fan giveaway” value proposition.

Facebook Advertising

Most auto dealerships use their Facebook pages exclusively to advertise. Not our clients.

We advertise where it was meant to be—using Facebook ads. They allowed us to extend our campaign reach significantly while allocating our budget only to our target demographics. Throughout the campaign, the ads were the highest generator of new fan growth than any other medium.

The Results

A well-executed strategy, optimized tactics, and a focus on valuable content yielded phenomenal results over our nine month period from February–October 2011. In fact, Beaverton Hyundai now has more Facebook fans than any Hyundai dealership in the nation.

Beaverton Nissan

Facebook Fans: +183.2%

Facebook Interactions: +668.4%

Facebook Advertising Cost-Per-Fan: -53.7%

Beaverton Hyundai

Facebook Fans: +260.5%

Facebook Interactions: +1,480.6%

Facebook Advertising Cost-Per-Fan: -62.4%

Damerow Ford

Facebook Fans: +73.4%

Facebook Interactions: +914.8%

Facebook Advertising Cost-Per-Fan: +1.4%

We can’t say this very often, so listen carefully: Facebook just made a significant improvement to their platform for businesses.

We’re not talking about functionality this time, but instead about measurement. Ever since Facebook launched Insights with fan pages a few years ago, it has fallen short in a number of ways. Significant data was missing. Many calculations needed to be completed manually by individuals. The language was confusing.

Enter the new insights. While it still takes a bit of time to understand the terms (clearly they’re trying to reinvent the wheel this time around), the new Insights is much more conclusive and provides more answers to important questions for businesses. Let’s look at each page.

Important Metrics (Overview Page)

Facebook’s new measurement platform is focused primarily in 2 areas: “People Talking About This” (PTAT) and “Reach”. PTAT replaces “Monthly Active Users”, which always seemed to have a fuzzy definition among marketers. Nothing is fuzzy about PTAT, however, as it includes any action that creates a story in the news feed of the fan’s friends. This includes wall posts, likes, comments, shares, mentions, tags, event responses, photo tags, check-ins, & recommendations. Phew!

Reach is a very different metric and a bit more difficult to fully grasp. It refers to any unique person who has been exposed to your page or content on any channel, fan or not, including Facebook advertisements.

You’ll notice the Overview page provides a nice graph of correlations relating to (what they consider) your most important metrics, followed by an analysis of each metric for individual posts.

Questions Answered on the Overview Page:

Within my fan base of x fans, what is the maximum number of people I can possibly reach?

What % of my fan base shares our content with their friends?

Which type of posts draw the greatest number of shares? Which type reaches the most people?

What % of my fans click on my posts?

What effect does post volume have on PTAT and Reach?

What do my fans want to hear from me?

Likes

The Likes page is a bit like the previous Insights – it analyzes demographic information about the people who like your page, with one significant difference: it tells you where your likes came from. This is tremendously  valuable when analyzing where to spend your marketing dollars to maximize fan growth. Does you page grow organically? From referrals & partnerships? Paid search? Fortunately, this is no longer a mystery.

Questions Answered on the Likes Page:

Who are my fans?

Where did my fans come from?

Where do I need to spend my marketing budget next month?

Am I reaching my target audience?

What do I need to focus on to build a more relevant fan base?

Reach

Again, the Reach metric can be a bit misleading. This refers to the number of unique users who were logged into Facebook when your content appeared to them in any given context. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if your reach is 13 million people, that 13 million people viewed your content, retained it, and will buy from you.

Still, the metric is worth mentioning and illustrates what your page can do beyond your fan base.

Questions Answered on the Reach Page:

How many people can I reach with my given fan base?

Which activities result in the greatest reach?

How often were my fans exposed to my content more than once in a given time period?

Does Facebook consider my content as important to my fans?

What other areas of the internet bring traffic to my page?

Which tabs are most popular, both in terms of views and fan conversions?

Do I need to invest in additional Facebook tabs? Should I remove any?

Talking About This

This page is likely the most important of the 3 subpages as it offers powerful information. When someone mentions your page to their friends, it’s the closest digital equivalent to word-of-mouth marketing we have – one of the most credible ways to spread your message online.

In addition to providing demographic information about the people who share your content, it also includes a handy graph of the viral reach. This is the number of additional people who potentially viewed your content because they are friends of your fans.

Questions Answered on the Talking About This Page

Which demographic cares enough about what I’m saying to share it?

How do people share my content? (tags, share posts, etc.)

When 1 person interacts with me, how many additional people potentially see my content?

As you can see, we can finally say that Facebook has done something right when it comes to tracking relevant metrics. While these new metrics can be a bit intimidating, it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get people talking about our clients. :)

“Google+ skyrocketed to 40 million users in 2 months. It’s the Facebook killer.

I get more comments on Google+. It’s just, so much cleaner than Facebook.”

If you’re like me, you’ve read dozens, if not hundreds, of these type of statements over the last 4 months. Worse yet, step away and do a Google search for “Is Facebook Dead?”. You would think the platform disappeared overnight. People are actually starting to make these type of claims.

My intention here is not to bag on Google’s new and much-hyped platform. In fact, I love how clean and intuitive Google+ is; you don’t have advertisements, you don’t feel bombarded with messages and it isn’t inundated with spam as many other platforms are.

The issue I have is that we are running real businesses here. “Shiny Object Syndrome” isn’t allowed. Being cool and new is not enough and we can’t just bank on potential or assumptions. We have to look at the actual data or we could find ourselves investing our dollars in the wrong places and doing a serious disservice to our clients.

In MarketingChart’s latest set of social media data, we discover that Facebook is still far and away the most popular social network, both in terms of users and time spent.

As you can see, it’s not just that Facebook has 800 million users. People spend infinitely more time on the platform compared to all other web brands. When this is narrowed down ONLY to social networks, the differences are even more astonishing:

When we look at this broadly, it’s basically Facebook and everybody else. As we see “Like us On Facebook” right next to “Follow us on Twitter” everywhere we go, we often forget that a very high percentage of Twitter users don’t check back regularly despite having hundreds of millions of “users”. This isn’t the case with Facebook. Ironically, the number of active users is likely the reason people spend so much time on Facebook. You’ll probably find co-workers on LinkedIn, people who watch the same sports teams as you on Twitter, and people who share the same TV interests on YouTube. But you’ll find everyone on Facebook. Everyone.

And it doesn’t stop there. Although the market for new Facebook users has shrunk to the point where growth is nearly impossible, Facebook is still climbing in overall market share:

But let’s go back to Google+ for a brief moment. In terms of market share of visits, the platform has an extremely long way to go:

I hate to say the M-word, but it’s worth mentioning that MySpace still has them beat.

So what can we take away here? Does this mean Google+ is a dud? No. Does this mean you should re-invest everything into Facebook? Of course not.

The bottom line is, speculation is just speculation. Certainly there is reason to believe Google+ will be a big player at some point. But now? Unless you’re targeting a narrow group of early-adopters, it’s just another social network. It’s cleaner and easy to use, yes, but it doesn’t do anything Facebook can’t at this point and chances are your customers are not using it.

Everyone loves a giant killer and we’ve seen massive platforms fall in the past (tempting to use the M-word again here). Just remember to keep your focus on real data, avoid the hype, and focus your efforts where your customers actually are.

Ever since we discovered that social media was a viable tool to achieve real results in business, many companies have started seeking data to discover more about the reasons behind why people choose to follow and interact with brands on platforms originally created exclusively for individuals.

As we transitioned from traditional marketing to social, it’s tempting to ask questions about what we should do to get more fans, stay relevant, and exceed our success metrics.

After reviewing a recent study from ExactTarget, I realized we might be asking the wrong question. In a medium where customers are reluctant to allow brands to enter their bubbles, perhaps we should ask “What should we NOT do?”. It turns out that there are several reasons that people will not connects with brands online, all of which are becoming more important with every day that passes and the news feeds become more cluttered with information. Here are three reasons we can’t afford to ignore:

1. They don’t want to be bombarded with messages or ads.

“Bombarded” suggest that there is a ceiling to the amount of people and companies that your customers want to have included in their news feed. They just want the important stuff, the stuff that matters. This means they may not ‘like’ a page even if they are a regular customer of the business.

Making the choice to avoid direct promotion is a difficult one and may even be counter-intuitive for traditional marketers and salespeople. It is, however, absolutely crucial in gaining and maintaining a loyal fan base. When someone “likes” your Facebook page, think of it as the equivalent to subscribing to a magazine they love. They subscribe because the content is entertaining, informative, or beneficial in some other way. Would you subscribe to a television advertisement? How about a billboard or yellow pages ad? Of course you wouldn’t. Use Facebook advertising to advertise. Use Facebook pages to add value for your customers.

2. They don’t want companies to have access to profile information.

This one is a bit odd because “liking” a Facebook page does little to compromise personal information to the actual business. Yes, there are privacy concerns with Facebook as a platform itself, but business pages are not able to dig into profile information if the user has selected the correct privacy settings.

All of this aside, I can’t help but ask what is underneath the surface of this act of not wanting to give out information. I think it hints towards something much bigger: a lack of trust.

Trust is the single greatest factor in determining purchase behavior, creating a huge need for marketers to build trust with fans and customers. This is of course determined largely by the DNA and core values of your business, but there are certain behaviors that need to be adopted in social media to build trust – like being as responsive as possible. Simply responding to the vast majority of fans, whether the mention is positive or negative, is actually a way to build trust and also differentiate from competitors. Recent research has showed that more than 70% of companies completely ignore the customer service element of Twitter. This creates a nice advantage for companies whose streams are full of @replies, retweets, and mentions of their followers.

The bottom line here is, it’s irrelevant if we say we’re trustworthy. If we demonstrate that we’re trustworthy, however, it could mean a huge difference for our businesses. Actions speak louder than words. What level of trust do you think Starbucks and Comcast have with their customers?

3. They “don’t see the benefit of it”.

This might sound broad, but there is an important lesson for every brand in this one: make the value of your page as obvious as possible. This means you need to tell them WHY they should like your page, which forces you to be pro-active in putting them first. Why would they want to subscribe? Community? Information? Exclusive content or discounts? Whatever you’re doing for them, make it obvious. Simply adding “Like us on Facebook” in all of your communication mediums won’t get it done. “Like us on Facebook because you’ll be left out of something phenomenal” sounds a lot better.

So what can we take away here? Do a self-audit of your social media presence. Replace your sales copy with exclusive content and discounts. Get rid of your broadcasted message and ask your audience for their thoughts. Make them proud to display your logo on their profile as a business they support. Above all else, before you take action online, ask yourself “What’s in it for THEM?”.

It is never a bad thing when great work is recognized.

Bonfire was thrilled to receive a nomination for the 2011 ‘Best ROI Under 25K’ award at this year’s Social Media Awards in Portland, Oregon. We were surprised and delighted when host Daniel Baldwin called our name as the winner!

The winning campaign involved Gresham Toyota, a long-standing client and one of the top Toyota dealerships in the Pacific Northwest. In an industry known for pushy salesmen and “hard” selling, we were able to take a step back and highlight what made Gresham Toyota stand out from other dealerships: outstanding, pressure-free customer service. We built an engaged community, turned existing customers into brand advocates, and increased inbound sales calls by an impressive 600%. We were especially pleased to be receiving an award in the “Best ROI’ category, illustrating our commitment to outstanding business results for our clients. Read the full case study to learn more.

If you are ready to light the fire, contact Justin Albano, Bonfire’s Director of Business Development today at JAlbano@bonfiresmm.com.

Company: Gresham Toyota
Social Media Marketing Team: Ryan Lewis, Garrett Ira,  Doug Gabbert, General Sales manager, Gresham Toyota
Campaign Length: 3 Months
Result: Inbound sales calls from Facebook increased by 600%
Social Media Award Winner 2011 – Best ROI Category

The Challenge

Gresham Toyota is a family owned and operated auto dealership located just outside Portland, and has been one of the top Toyota dealerships in the nation since 1970.  With the latest trends in sales and marketing always on their radar, GT’s owner recognized the transition from traditional to social marketing during a very challenging period for the company; Toyota had undergone heavy criticism in the media following a series of unexpected recalls on several top models. Bonfire was appointed to launch the company into the social media space to better connect with their customers and build a business platform for GT’s future, with objectives to build brand awareness, drive web traffic, and ultimately gain new prospects.

The Solution

Other than quality products, one of GT’s strongest unique selling propositions is their commitment to an exceptional service experience. In a world of pushy, ruthless salespeople, GT has an approach that dismisses the “hard sell” and treats customers with a high level of respect. This philosophy integrated well into the social channels and was the basis for the campaign. Bonfire worked with GT to implement a series of promotions to reinforce the brand, tell customer stories, and ultimately get the phones ringing. continue