facebook

ROI, Facebook and Snapchat

According to a new survey taken in March, almost all (95.8%) of social media marketers worldwide believe that Facebook produces the best ROI out of the major social platforms. With Facebook continually adding new revenue streams, it is not a suprise marketers are using Facebook for their marketing efforts.

Snapchat, however, is at the bottom – which sort of fits into the results from L2 Think Tank. They found that brands are more hesitant when it comes to using Snapchat.
Instagram on the other hand seems to have almost every industry fully using the platform. Maybe they have not discovered yet that Snapchat allows you to create unique content in-app that may increase brand following? Interestingly enough though, posting frequency is higher on Snapchat than Instagram on a weekly basis.

By the way: I am a sucker for both.

Facebook F8

Facebook is on a roll – the rate at which it is introducing new features is mind-blowing.

Here are the main new things to watch out for:

The chatbots are coming
Through Messenger, businesses can now deliver automated customer support. Might still be a little wearisome now (like ordering flowers) but as Techcrunch wrote it is estimated that chatbots could replace the 1-800 numbers (and probably the humans behind it).
Sponsored message ads are go
Businesses can now send re-engagement messages to people who’ve already started a conversation with them on Messenger. Will be interesting to see how this works out, consumers will not want anything that is to spammy so businesses need to see what the right balance will be.
Keeping you in app
We all know that with the battle over networks everyone’s intention is to keeo you “in app” for as long as possible. So Facebook now also allows you to drop files straight from your Dropbox into Messenger (saves emailing) and have a “persistent Chat Head” at the top of your screen (Android only for now)
Instant articles
And if you haven’t had enough, then instant articles can now be used by ALL publishers. Developers get on it.

Digital in 2016

Hot off the press comes We Are Social “Digital in 2016”.

I always suck up this report on digital, social and mobile usage around the world which is seeing ever faster growth.

The key statistics for digital, social, and mobile media in 2016 are:

3.42 billion internet users, equaling 46% global penetration;
2.31 billion social media users, delivering 31% global penetration;
3.79 billion unique mobile users, representing 51% global penetration;
1.97 billion mobile social media users, equating to 27% global penetration.

This means more than half of the world’s adult population now uses the internet, and (something exciting for me) that well over one-third of the adult population uses social media at least once a month.

It is also interesting to see – just like I was telling the audience at this week’s ISPO Communication Day – social media is moving from broadcasting to being social. It is all about connecting, personalization and providing true value. This will mean a big change for us marketeers! We will need to activate our listening skills, understand what our audience truly wants and well yes…become social.

The full report can be found here:

Marketers to increase social media usage

According to emarketer, marketers are using and investing in social media more, and will continue to do so. A new report reveals that whilst Facebook and Twitter are still the preferred social networks used by US companies, Instagram is expected to gain significant traction due to its improved advertising capabilities. And I am sure European companies will soon be following suit. Either way, marketeers continue to be committed to using the social media space.

The growth continues

Summer is in full swing and we have crossed the first half year mark. Time to look at some digital stats (kindly provided by We Are Social).

Facebook is still the dominating social media platform with almost 1.5 billion users. They are adding more users every day or impressively put ‘6 new users per second’. What is interesting is that what follows Facebook are messenger platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat or Messenger. This is particular interesting development in the mobile social world. People seem to prefer chats to the conventional social networks. Ads on WhatsApp soon?

What also fascinated me is that the statistics show that 225 million people around the world used the internet for the first time in the past 12 months. According to telecommunications giant Ericsson, cellular subscriptions will continue to grow to almost 8 billion active subscribers over the next 5 years. That’ll be more than the world population. And remember: not every world citizen is connected yet!

What does that mean? As I have written here in the past, as marketers we really need to place more effort on smart mobile devices. Not only are they part of our everyday life, for many people around the world is it their “first screen”, their only device. And they use it for everything from communicating, browsing the web, watching TV to shopping. This is the place where brands need to make an impression because it is becoming more than just a channel.

Speaking of marketing, mobile and social, I really like Talenti’s new ‘Flavorize Me’ campaign that uses social media profiles to create a personalized ice cream flavour. An algorithm analyzes the key words you have in your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles, breaks those down into tastes and then into ingredients that match those. I ended up with “Marmalade Green Chili Biscuit”. Sounds very interesting. Talenti is only available in the US so unless they decide to take my personalized flavor and use it for actual production (which btw according to their website they will let me know by September 15), you will find me eating gelati in Italy this month.

Facebook’s bait and switch

Are you getting increasingly frustrated with Facebook? Because I sure am!

Already in 2012, Facebook made changes to their EdgeRank algorithm that dictates what brand content appears in follower feeds in a move to get people to pay for the promotion of their content. I remember the backlash at the time was huge. So I would have hoped that by now Facebook would have addressed the criticisms and gone back to let followers decide what they want to see and not make that decision for them. But apparently not. Nick Bilton from the New York Times blogged on Sunday that he had started to see little interaction on his Facebook page despite having over 400,000 followers. All that changed when he paid $7 to promote his columns with his followers on Facebook. Believe it or not he saw a 1000% increase. EdgeRank also has another feature that influences how often your follower sees a new post depending on how that follower has interacted with you recently, if he has found your posts interesting and how much he has engaged with you. I started to notice this worrying development in the past few weeks on the brand pages that I am managing for my customers. They also have noted a significant drop in interaction. And (even worse) so has my own timeline.

Should an algorithm really make a decision for you what posts you should see? Should a person not make that decision by blocking or unsubscribing? After all it is people who have made a decision to like or follow other people and things that are of interest to us whether we engage, like or just read. Facebook surely is overstepping a boundary here.

To me the true value of a Facebook Fanpage is that I can reach all my followers with every post. As a brand, I value the presence I have on social media channels as they also help me as a brand to engage with my community and get an understanding of my audience. But probably this is of little interest to Facebook (even if they do want the data that is created on a daily basis). What is the true value of a Facebook Fanpage if you do not get all the reach with your post or that you as a follower are not reached? Maybe as a consequence one has to really consider to build up brand audiences on other networks such as Twitter (where the timeline shows everything) or Tumblr.

Hopefully Facebook will remember their mission statement to “make the world more open”. And find a balance between revenue and entertainment in order not to become the old MySpace that in the end looked like a littered, paid content cemetery.