CHAPTER 2
FACEBOOK RECON
Reconnaissance is at the center of a guerrilla’s Facebook marketing strategy. The first step in a recon exercise is intelligence gathering: Facebook trends and statistics, user and usage patterns, and so on. Due to the huge interest in Facebook, it is not difficult to find useful and timely data. Facebook’s official website offers a general summary, while there are specialized research groups that focus on Facebook data such as www.socialbakers.com and www.insidefacebook.com.
You know you need to know your enemy first. But how do you get started? To help you jumpstart your recon process, we have shared our list on what we think are the five best used sources for general trends and statistics on Facebook. To make it even sweeter for you, we have also shared our observations about the various sources, collated in a little table for easy reference. And if you are still undecided on where to start your intelligence gathering, we recommend that you start with the first source on our list, and then work your way down the list.
Table 2: Our List Of Five Best Used Sources for Facebook
Gathering intelligence alone, however, does not make an effective recon exercise. What really matters is how we guerrillas make use of the intelligence gathered to figure out what’s in it for our business: i.e., make meaningful conclusions from data. This is akin to having sufficient ammo for your weapons when launching an attack.
Now, this is where the going gets tough. The truth is, no one can tell you upfront what data is meaningful and what is not for your business. And it would be a fool’s errand for us to try and make detailed conclusions for every business, since every business is different, with its own unique needs. And to be honest, no one will feel hard-pressed to make that final conclusion for you – not Facebook nor Google nor some other social media consultant or expert – well, at least not for free.
We may not be able to tell you what would or would not be meaningful for your business, but we can show you how we have made use of general data to get a sense of the magnitude of Facebook’s influence on brand awareness or information sharing, and to get tips on to carry out an effective Facebook marketing campaign. This is the objective of any recon exercise.
Figure 1: Current active Facebook Users
Source: Facebook Official Statistics; www.internetworldstats.com
To show you what we mean, let’s start with some basics statistics, and work our way from there.
Let’s first work through these general trends in Figure 1 to draw some general conclusions:
1. Facebook is fastest growing social media tool — ever
Facebook is undeniably the world’s leading social media tool – ever. It currently has a staggering following of some 950 million active users. That’s 950,000,000 in numerals – no other social media comes close. To give you a sense of the scale, let’s take a look at how this number compares with the total number of Internet users in the world. As of December 2010, there are more than 2 billion Internet users worldwide (source: International Telecommunication Union, ITU). This roughly works out to mean 37% of all Internet users are Facebook users. That’s a pretty high following, and this trend is unprecedented in the history of website usage. In terms of website popularity, Facebook consistently ranks among the Top Ten Most Visited Websites on the Internet alongside other website giants such as Google, YouTube, Yahoo! and Wikipedia.
You could argue that the measure of Facebook’s popularity in terms of the volume of users is, at best, cursory. What is more telling about these Facebook figures is that the number of Facebook users has been growing at an astounding pace. Here’s a quick snapshot of Facebook’s growth: by the end of the year in which it was launched (2004), Facebook had close to one million active users. Three years later in 2007, the number of active users rose to 50 million. (Even search engine Google took a longer time to hit 50 million users.) At the start of last year, 2010, there were 337 million registered users. In year 2010, there were 7.9 new Facebook registrations in every second, which meant that by the end of the year 2010, the number of users rose by 74% to 585 million. And its growth does not seem to be stopping anytime soon. In just three months of year 2012 (March to June 2012), the number of users surpassed the 900 million mark – that’s a record of eight straight years of incredible, double-digit growth, measured in millions, no less.
But this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s more on what we can learn from these statistics:
2. Frequent opportunities to connect with customers
In Figure 1, we highlighted that half of the 955 million current active Facebook users (defined as a user who returns to log on to Facebook within a month), close to half of them log on to their Facebook account every day. So when we guerrillas get excited, it isn’t just the fast-growing numbers that makes us guerrillas excited. What makes us guerrillas sit up, is that many Facebook users are active users – users log in every day: around 522 million users. What’s more, there are some 543 million users who access Facebook through mobile devices such as their smart phones, and these users are twice as active as non mobile users. There is great potential for further growth by mobile users. When we first started writing this book a year ago, the number of such users around 200 million – that was about a year ago!
What this means is that your customers are on Facebook each and every day, connecting with friends, looking for information, sharing stories and photographs, and so on. This means that we guerrillas have many opportunities to connect and engage our customers with our brands, each and every day, at any given point in time – perhaps as often as once a day.
Seen from a marketing point of view, this also means that we guerrillas would want to have fresh and authentic input available as often as possible to engage our target audience – something that was not necessary in conventional static advertisements.
Now, which other marketing tool provides you with this same opportunity?
Figure 2: User Age and Top Brands
*Source: www.thenextweb.com
3. Why engaging a young audience is useful
The majority of Facebook users are between the age of 13 and 34 (72.5%). Does age matter, and would this be considered good or bad news for a Guerrilla Facebook Marketer? It can go both ways. It’s like giving a solider a hand grenade. Applied well, a hand grenade can carry out what it was meant to do. Handled wrongly, and it can backfire.
As we see it, there are two broad advantages of engaging a young audience:
1. We get a chance to grow our brand presence as our Facebook customers grow
2. We get a chance to keep our brands relevant to future generations
Since Facebook centers on relationship building, there’s no time like the present to start the brand awareness building process, as well as to start building up a loyal fan base for our businesses. We like the idea of growing with our customers on Facebook – we see it as a way of infiltrating our target customers in a meaningful way in the long run.
We have deliberately presented information about the Top Ten Brands on Facebook vis-à-vis age profiles of Facebook users to help you make some connections between seemingly random pieces of information.
What we have observed is that a Facebook marketing strategy can help keep brands relevant to the next generation of consumers in the long run, when run well. Brands with more than a century of history are still making it a priority to remain relevant to the youth of today. Take a moment to consider this co-relation: despite the seemingly youngish population dominating Facebook, long-standing brands – notably Coca Cola (dates back to 1886), Oreo (1912), and Disney (1923) stand on par with “newer” brands such as Red Bull (1987), Starbucks (1971), Victoria’s Secret (1977) and iTunes (2003) as Facebook’s Top Ten Brands in 2010. Could this be the result of coincidence, or the result of a deliberate strategy by these brands to secure relevance to future generations of consumers?
The third and final point we want to make about the age profiling of Facebook is pretty obvious, but is sometimes glossed over. Percentages don’t really matter when it comes to Facebook users. Simply because there are so many Facebook users, it does not really matter even if your target age group makes up less than 1% of the 955 million users, or accounts for the majority 72.5%. You are still going to reach out to a sizable audience who is willing to connect and listen to you. Don’t just take our word for it – do the math for yourself.
Figure 3: Top Ten Countries
*Source: www.socialbakers.com
4. Instant global reach
The dawn of Internet marketing has opened up instant global reach to many businesses, and Facebook is definitely one of them. Outside the US, both European and Asian countries feature equally in the top ten list, with one in every four users on Facebook based outside the US. This being said, we will readily admit that the attraction of instant global reach by Facebook no longer holds the same enticement as it did some 15 years ago. In fact, many marketers today assume that instant global reach as a given, considering the other web-based marketing options such as emails, blogs and websites. Still, we decided that it would be useful to highlight Facebook’s global reach, and more importantly, to have this data on hand for your convenience.
If you are after data on a specific country, continent or city, we recommend you check out www.socialbakers.com – there are 213 countries listed on that website. This is by far the most extensive we have come across. The data is available on a weekly, monthly and six-monthly basis.
One general point we have observed about the profiling of users across countries is that the profiles can change from month to month. Users in the USA have consistently ranked #1 since Facebook was founded in 2004, with a significant portion of users residing in and around New York City. Not that nationality or country of origin matters all the time, since one can choose to connect locally with those who matter, or connect to hundreds on global scale, depending on business needs.
Figure 4: Friends and the “Like” Button
*source: www.facebook.com
No recon of Facebook would be complete without mention of Facebook’s signature functions, namely the Friend function and the ubiquitous “Like” button. The fact that it is no secret that many know how the “Like” button is clicked on 6 times per day per user tells us something powerful – many different interest groups have their eyes on the little “Like” function.
5. The multiplier effect of “Like”
As marketers, we know and recognize the value of viva voce recommendations. Traditionally, word of mouth recommendations are made in person and are passed from one person to another. Its pace of passing on information is limited to the pace at which a person passes on the information to another, in other words, slowly. But technology - in particular the Internet and emails - has accelerated the rate in which word of mouth recommendations are passed on – information today can be virally passed on to hundreds and thousands with a simple click of a button within a short period of time.
Facebook users are not just logging on to Facebook to connect with friends. They are also logging in to find out what else is out there – according to their friends, that is. Research has shown that Facebook users between the ages of 13-34 are more likely to spend more time on social media like Facebook than on traditional media like TV, radio or newspapers for information, news, updates, reviews and discussions. They are also more likely to trust their friends’ recommendations and reviews. Since this has a direct impact on brand awareness, it therefore becomes important for us to understand how information is passed on in Facebook.
Facebook has many marketing weapons we particularly like, of which the “Like” function (pun intended) gets our two thumbs up. In Facebook, when users come across something that they like, be it a service or product, they can choose to share it with their friends by a simple click of the “Like” option. When they do so, their preferences can in turn be seen by all their friends instantly on their newsfeed page, triggering off what we describe as the multiplier “Like” effect. Some Facebook experts describe this as information going “viral”. This is the basis of a viral marketing campaign.
If numbers convince you more than our words, here’s the math to get a sense of the speed and scale at which the “Like” effect spreads in Facebook. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. On average, one “Like” recommendation can be potentially viewed by another 130 friends within seconds of its posting, and in turn can be viewed by friends’ friends, and so on. This multiplier effect of “Like” is one of the unique selling points about marketing on Facebook – no matter how you choose to interpret what users mean when they click on the “Like” button. Can you see why the “Like” function is one of our favorites?
Facebook itself also keeps a tight watch on the “Likes” of their users. The information gathered about “Likes” is undoubtedly sought after by developers, marketers and businesses the world over, and we discuss this further as one of the guerrilla Facebook marketing weapons in Chapter 4.
Word of mouth recommendations via Facebook keep getting better for guerrilla marketers. In addition to the “Like” option, friends can post their comments or start discussions on their profile pages in response to “Likes” – such conversation starters also serve to pass information quickly from user to user. For instance, the two most discussed products on Facebook in 2010 were the iPad and the iPhone 4 – some 25 million posts, comments, reviews and Likes were recorded for these two products. In the same year, Apple surpassed Microsoft in terms of market capitalization. This is a coincidence, or the result of a deliberate marketing strategy?
Even the strongest critics of Facebook cannot deny the unsurpassed supremacy Facebook has when it comes to passing on information. As guerrillas, we like it too – very much indeed.
Figure 5: Page Interactions and Apps Installation
*Source: www.allfacebook.com
6. Plenty of choice for users, plenty of work for marketers
With over 900 million pages, groups, events and community pages, there’s plenty of choice for a user, considering that on average, a Facebook user connects with 80 of them (which is a lot). What this also means for us guerrillas is that we certainly have our work cut out for us.
So when we choose to build relationships with our customers on Facebook by holding meaningful and authentic conversations, this requires work over a period of time, since relationships seldom happen overnight. This also means we need to be prepared to channel sufficient resources to stay updated and relevant when we choose to launch a Facebook marketing campaign. Here’s some food for thought if you are exploring the option of carrying out a Facebook marketing campaign: there usually is a direct correlation between poor Fan response and unmatched resources when carrying out a Facebook marketing campaign.
There is a plus side to the idea of having community pages and groups for like-minded interests. Facebook users sign up to connect with like-minded people on such pages. This means that when you engage your customers on Facebook, you are engaging with like-minded individuals who have chosen to connect with your brand. This gathering of like-minded people marks a significant shift in the way we carry out ad campaigns in the Facebook era. Gone are the days when the objective of marketing campaigns was to attract attention. These days, marketing campaigns need to be content driven – if the content is useful, thoughtful, sincere and consistent, there will naturally be a following. And the following will consist of people who like your brand. Your followers will provide you with instant feedback as they talk about their likes and respond to your advertisements and other marketing strategies. For example, in a 2010 survey conducted by social media consultant ExactTarget, 40% of their respondents indicated that they clicked on the “Like” button to receive discounts and promotions. That is a telling sign: if you offer something tangible for your target audience in return for their response, say a discount or a promotion, you are more likely to solicit a response and increase your chance of converting readers into consumers.
7. The power of apps
To date, the most popular applications (apps) on Facebook are dominated by game developers, mobile application providers (e.g. Facebook for iPhone, BlackBerry, android), and reviews (e.g. yelp, reviews). For more detailed information, we like the data provided by www.allfacebook.com that tracks 1,500 apps on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. If you just want a complete list of apps, www.insidefacebook.com claims to have the most updated list. There is a more detailed discussion on apps as a weapon in Chapter 4.
Why are we interested in apps? At a basic level, apps provide a way for marketers to gain information about its users. This is because users need to volunteer some data about themselves, in order to install an app on Facebook. The fact that there are 20 million apps installed each day is a sure indication of a user’s willingness to volunteer data in exchange for a service. The popularity of apps also provides us with an indication of what users are using Facebook for. Need we add that the data gained from volunteered data is a minefield for marketers all around the world?
Introducing . . . Analytic Tools
As marketers, we are understandably fixated on finding out what our customers want. What do our customers want, and how do we get that information? Facebook has a unique culture that has a strong emphasis on data analysis, advertisement optimization and target audience. It is a culture we guerrillas strongly identify with. To this end, there are a couple of useful analytic tools one can use. These analytic tools help marketers gain better real-time insight that can help customer identification and profiling. These analytical tools will be discussed in detail in the later chapters of this book, but since we are on the topic of data analysis, we thought it best to first make mention of it here.
|
Facebook Recon: 1. Facebook is fastest growing social media tool—ever 2. Frequent opportunities to connect with customers 3. Why engaging a young audience is useful 4. Instant global reach 5. The multiplier effect of “Like” 6. Plenty of choice for users, plenty of work for marketers 7. The power of apps
|
