FreshNetworks Blog

They’re arguably the two biggest stars on the planet and both Lady Gaga and Rihanna have famously made incredibly innovative use of social media to get real commercial advantage. But which is using social media with the greatest effect, and which is most successful at actually engaging her fans?

On Facebook, these pop queens have both built massive audiences (Rihanna and Lady Gaga have the 5^th and 6^th biggest pages respectively – only Facebook itself, Texas Hold’em Poker, Eminem, and Youtube have more fans, in case you were interested) with both hurtling towards a cool 50 million fans each.

Long hailed as the queen of social media, Lady Gaga was the first living music artist to reach 10,000,000 Facebook fans, but last year Rihanna famously  leap-frogged Lady Gaga to become the most popular woman on Facebook.

However, huge numbers of Facebook fans are one thing, but what we’re really interested is who’s audience is the most engaged? If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know this is how we really rate the success of a Facebook page. To find the answer, we turned to social analytics tool Social Bakers to find who really is on the edge of glory (Sorry – ed)

And the winner is…

Yep. You probably guessed it – it’s Lady Gaga. Ri-Ri might have the largest and fastest growing audience (her fan numbers are currently growing at a rate of 2% a month compare to Lady Gaga’s 1%) but it’s Lady Gaga who truly keeps her ‘Little Monsters’ coming back for more.

Over the last month, Lady Gaga’s fans have interacted on her page nearly a million times more than Rihanna’s fans giving her an engagement rate over twice that of her rival.

Now, we know that Lady Gaga gave away a music single to her fans as part of iTunes’ 12 Days of Christmas which definitely gave her a spike in social media buzz, but as you can see from the graph below  even without that, her engagement level is consistently around twice that of Rihanna.

Here are a few of our tips on how we think Rihanna should fight back:

Cut the number of links posted to the wall

In our experience, images and Status Updates work much better in the Facebook newsfeed than posted links which are what Rihanna’s team seem to favour. Of 41 posts in the month, Gaga posted 31 status updates and 8 photos, while Rihanna (whose team also posted 41 times) went for 23 links. And eight photos. We find across all our communities that posted links – as a rule – just don’t get the engagement rates that other post types do.

Let your fans post to your wall

Except in exceptional circumstances we would always recommend our clients let fans post to their Facebook wall. It’s much more inclusive and welcoming and gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling. Lady Gaga lets fan do it. Rihanna should do.

Be more concise

People have short attention spans and overly long status updates don’t do anybody any favours. Keep it short and sweet. Rihanna’s roughly seem to be about as twice as long as Gaga’s do – Oh na na, it’s a no-no.

Image courtesy of telecomaustralia.wordpress.com

The launch of business and brand pages for Google + has generated a lot of thought here at FreshNetworks this week.

As such, we’ve decided to create our very own FreshNetworks Google+ page. We think Google + will be a good place for us to talk about our business and share our blog  content. This is despite the fact that we’ve never had a Facebook Page (and probably never will).

Why not Facebook?

Don’t get me wrong. We LOVE Facebook brand pages (we run a number of incredibly successful Facebook pages for our clients and advise others on how to make the most of theirs). But when it came to setting up one of our own we just didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do.

Why? Well we always advise our clients to think about what they want to achieve strategically through Facebook, and as other channels like our blog and Twitter are working so well for us we didn’t want to just set up a Facebook page for the sake of it.

We also questioned if our audience really wanted to engage with us on Facebook – the average person who logs into Facebook wants to be engaged and entertained by their family, friends and their favourite brands, and so it just didn’t feel like the right place for us to have a brand presence.

So why a Google+ Page?

We decided that a Google+ page for FreshNetworks was the right move for a number of reasons, the main crux of it being that we think that Google+ is going to have a real impact on search results. Any regular reader of our blog will know that we have lots to say about the world of social media and we want to be heard. Like any B2B business (or B2C for that matter), search is a hugely important way of generating new business leads. Social search is going to become BIG news and we want in.

We also feel that Google+, as it stands at the moment, is a much better social network for B2B marketing. It might sound like a clumsy comparison and we might be proved wrong but right now Google+ feels well placed to fill the middle ground between Facebook and LinkedIn. The people who talk about our industry day in, day out are all on Google+ and the advanced segmentation tools make it perfect for business-focused social networking. That’s why we’re there. We’d love you to come and say hello and visit our Google+ page .

Image by PhotoGraham via Flickr

Every brand with a Facebook page is at risk of a social media crisis. It could arise from any number of scenarios – from ostensibly innocuous customer complaints to a huge backlash against your perceived values. A brand’s Facebook wall is now often the first stop for anyone wanting to make their fury known, and if word of that fury spreads you may find yourself on the receiving-end of a seemingly endless barrage of complaints.

Knowing how and when to respond is essential and we would always recommend a detailed crisis management plan and escalation policy as a top priority to any company using social media. It is not always appropriate for you to respond to comments online and a good crisis management plan will clearly lay out when you should respond (and how) and when you shouldn’t.

However, in addition to what you do and how your brand responds, the best brands in social media often don’t have to respond at all. Their advocates do it for them. There are always some issues and queries that you will need to respond to (specific details of their account, complaints about your service) but in many cases having other customers to respond instead of you (or as well as you) can be even more powerful.

There can be a temptation to think that only the most lauded brands such as Apple or Gucci have strong advocates, but this is not true. Every brand has advocates, people who are loyal to your brand, products, people or services and will go out of their way to tell others about this. Identifying your advocates is one task, you then need to cultivate and build relationships with them online.

Here are three tips of how you can build relationships with advocates online:

1. Involve them in your product development processes

When we work with advocates for brands, the thing they most often discuss is ideas for the brand. Things they know don’t always work in the product. Ways the product could be improved. Things they have seen that competitors and substitutes do. Advocates are often the people who have the deepest knowledge of your product and want to talk to you about it. If you make it easy for them to do this and give them access to real decision makers at your brand you will build huge social credibility with them.

2. Let them try new products first

Advocates want to try your products and will tell others about them. Whilst giving out endless freebies is not a sustainable or sensible policy, giving samples of products (especially new products) to those who advocate your brand makes sense. They will give you instant and honest feedback, will feel rewarded by getting access to product before anybody else, and will help you to spread the message about your product before its launched.

3. Get to know them

Finally, but most importantly, you need to get to know your advocates. Spend time talking to them and getting to know them so that you can have a conversation with them on a human level. On a Facebook page that we run for pet owners we know the names of our advocates dogs, we chat to them about what their dogs have done at the weekend and know when it is their birthdays. Why? Because we’re genuinely interested in them as people and as dog owners and want to get to know them. If you are to make the most of your advocates you have to be genuinely interested in them and in their lives. This kind of honesty will be clear to them and will mean that you can have a real interaction with them on a human level.

Socialbakers.com describes itself  as “the world’s fastest growing social media and digital analytics company” and claim “over 250,000 marketers as customers across all continents in over 60 countries”. We caught up with Katrina Wong, their VP of marketing to find out more about social media analytics and the future direction of one of the first companies in the world to have initial access to Facebook data.

FreshNetworks: So why do you think social media metrics are important for brands and businesses?

Katrina Wong:  Social media has completely revolutionised marketing. If you think back to the days before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., the information and feedback  a business got from its audience was via traditional market research and surveys. These were slow, costly processes. Now so much information about your target audience is available extremely fast and at your fingertips. You can get so much data and insight about your customers without much effort or work. That is super powerful.

FN: What does Socialbakers measure?

KW: We naturally look at the number of fans, number of followers, etc., but what we’re really focusing on is engagement – it’s so important to look deeper than at just the number of people on your page. It’s about what people are saying, how often are they saying it and drilling further into that.   It’s about how often people are visiting your page, how long are they staying there, how often are they saying things about your brand. It’s about the level and quality of feedback rather than being just about numbers; that’s how I think about the engagement metrics Socialbakers provides.

FN: What do you think are the most important metrics to look at in terms of engagement?

KW: I think its really important to look at a mixture of fan numbers, likes, and comments on Facebook and be able to see that on a daily or even hourly basis. Are they liking AND commenting? Are they just fans who don’t interact? It’s important to look at the relationship between these 3 metrics.

FM: Without using the tool what do you think are the best ways to measure social media?

KW: That’s really the hard part.  Facebook and the other social media platforms hold so much data and without a tool like Socialbakers, you’re really left to your own devices. You could just look at the data yourself, you can spend days on end manually counting likes, comments, retweets or whatever. You can do it, but if you want to be efficient, I’d seriously suggest using a tool or a platform like ours.

FN: Can you tell us a little bit about how Socialbakers works?

KW: We have two products. The first product we built was for analytics. This allows you to access, sort and export data very easily. One huge advantage for Socialbakers is that not only can you access the data for your company’s social media channels, you can access the data of your competitors and literally compare like with like, right there on the screen or in a printed report. Being able to monitor your competitors is powerful for a business that wants to stay ahead.  Competitive insight is unique to Socialbakers.

The second product – what we call our Engagement Builder –  is for social media campaign management. On one hand, you can manage your communication from one place – like scheduling updates – and assign responsibilities to your team members. On the other hand, you can create customisable Facebook applications for your page to engage your audience.

FN: Obviously you cover Facebook but what other platforms do you cover too?

KW: Google plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. With regards to Twitter, we can show the number of followers.  We are looking at doing what we did for Facebook and adding that to our Twitter product — we’re working on this at the moment. We’re looking at country data, other location data, popularity on Twitter, etc.

We’re looking into how we can mine data from individual accounts as an aggregate for Twitter too. We’re hoping to replicate what we’ve done for Facebook on Twitter, as well as for all of the other social media platforms.

FN: Who do you see your main competitors to be?

KW: We get asked that a lot! We’re the only company to build a solution that interfaces with all the publicly available Facebook data rather than just interfacing with a subset of data. When I think about that, there’s no other company that does that.

FN: How far back does the data go in Socialbakers?

KW: The data goes back a few years, basically as long as we’ve been monitoring and we were monitoring very early on with Facebook.

FN: Aside from the platform developments you’ve already mentioned, what does the future hold for Socialbakers?

KW: From a product perspective, we have such a close relationship with Facebook that whenever they bring out something new, we’ll be able to develop something for it and usually the first to launch. Sometimes we’re one of four companies that they work with them in this way, so we’re definitely one of the first to know about something new.  We’re lucky we have history with them and this puts us in a really great position when it comes to Facebook and leading social media analytics.

Image courtesy of inblurbs

An essential part of social media management is blogger outreach. Here are our social media management team’s top tips to ensure you reach  your target market effectively:

1. Be relevant

It might sound obvious but make sure that the bloggers you contact are actually relevant for your message. Do your research.  If you’re not sure whether something will fit, it’s probably sensible to err on the side of caution and not bother (most bloggers will probably hate emails that start “I know you never write about X, but I’ve got this product…”).

And where do you find relevant bloggers? Google is the best place to start – advanced search features allow you sort to by date, time and location, helping you find the right people who are talking about the things that matter to you.

Also check out blogrolls from the sites you know are relevant – it’s always good to know what the bloggers you’re reaching out to  are reading.

Another big recommendation from the team here at FreshNetworks is PeopleBrowsr, which can help you find bloggers by filtering via location, influence & communities to zero in on who is worth reaching out to.

2. Get to know your bloggers and build relationships

Follow your bloggers on Twitter – whether from your brand’s or company’s account or your own – and talk to them. If you’ve got something interesting to say, they’ll  listen.

Take every opportunity you can to make connections offline – such as industry events and conferences – or even think about hosting a blogger event of your own.

3. Get your message right

Don’t just send a blogger a press release and hope for the best. Tailor your message and demonstrate that you know why you’re writing to them. Which piece(s) of content on their blog were interesting or prompted you to write to them?

Write to the blogger like they’re a human being but don’t be too over-familiar. Use an open and friendly tone of voice and unless you really think it suits, don’t be too formal . Get to the point!

4. Make it easy for the blogger

You want the blogger to write something for you, so don’t make their life difficult. Attach images that they’d otherwise have to take from your website, give them accurate information, include links and make the information you’re presenting straightforward.

5. To pay or not to pay and other incentives

We’d never pay for  blog coverage and we’d never recommend a client to. Firstly, your chances of being re-blogged by others is diminished if they see that a post talking about your brand is sponsored. Secondly, bloggers’ opinions count. Surely it’s better to get coverage because they think your brand or product is cool or your message is interesting rather than having paid for it?

Of course, products for review are a different matter and a nice freebie or two can definitely keep a good blogger relationship thriving!

6. Say thanks/ show you care

Finally, say thank you. And mean it.  A quick email, a re-tweet, a link posted on Twitter – simple things to show your gratitude, show-off the coverage to your audience and (hopefully) reward the blogger with some lovely traffic back!