Facebook Insights Every Marketer Should Know

by Randall Beard    

Social media defies all manner of definition and understanding for many Marketers.  Too often, it’s like the proverbial blind men touching the elephant of social media:

• It’s for listening
• It’s about friends likes
• It’s the fans that count
• It’s Facebook
• It’s user generated content
• It’s an advertising platform
• It’s…

The list goes on and on…

What Do I Need to Know?

Sometimes, we just need some basic truths or insights about a topic to simplify it into manageable and understandable chunks that are easily digestible.  And actionable.

At a recent Marketing conference, Facebook executives talked about what Facebook is and what it isn’t.  Some of their points were simple yet compelling.  Facebook doesn’t equal social media, but it surely is the most important social media platform in the marketing world of today.

So what did they say and what should you know?

Facebook Insights Every Marketer Should Know

• Value isn’t just about the like button. Consumers who ”like” a brand or become fans on Facebook almost certainly are already fans of the brand in their non-digital life.  Diet Coke has 1.1 million fans.  And they’re just expressing their loyalty and connection to a brand that already earned their trust in the marketplace.  The brand already did the hard work.

• Fans are only valuable because they have friends.  Having a large number of likes is not an end, in and of itself.  The reason brands needfans:  to influence their friends about your brand.  For example, a brand with 500k Facebook fans could actually have a potential audience of 60M friends, should all of the fans choose to share something with their friends.  So, it’s really the friends of fans that are of most value.

• Social graph influence comes from many fans doing a little, not a few doing a lot.  Said differently, the idea that only a few people have mass influence and can drive large word of mouth is generally not true.  What really happens is that many fans influence a few friends each, versus a few influencers influencing many.  Facebook has analyzed how brand content or messaging spreads across the Facebook social graph.  And what they’ve discovered is that there is no Oprah effect- e.g. one person influencing many.

• Fans and likes drive better ad performance.  People clearly trust friends, so when ads are served with a layer of social content – e.g. Jim, Mary and 12 other of your friends are fans of Virgin America, the ads work better.  And they work better the further down the funnel you go, with the largest impact on purchase intent.

• Ads work best against light Facebook users.  This was a new insight for me and one that invites the big ”why?” question. Facebook says their data clearly shows that the same ad drives greater impact among light Facebook users versus heavy users. These light Facebook users also tend to be light TV viewers.

What Facebook has really done, to use the words of one Facebook executive, is to create the potential for ”word of mouth at scale.”

Word of mouth at scale exists because a fan of your brand can ”broadcast” his or her point of view- about your brand, customer service issues, likes, etc. to all of their friends.  And if hundreds of thousands of fans like them do the same, you have word of mouth at scale.

Which begs the question: how do I get fans talking about my brand? Well, that’s another part of the elephant- and the topic of a future blog post.

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