FreshNetworks Blog

Last year both Heineken and Carlsberg declared their intention to increase their marketing spend and so we thought it would be interesting to use analytics tool socialbakers to look at how both brands have fared in terms of their Facebook engagement strategy for the last quarter of this year (for the period 1st September – 13th December 2011).

1. Fans

At face value Heineken is leading the way in terms of fans with 4,740,759 fans, while Carlsberg only has 231,641 fans, giving Heineken 4,509,117 more fans than Carlsberg.

In fact, in just over three months Heineken’s fans grew by a massive 2,098,504 with a steady, average fan growth of 20,178 fans per day.

2. Engagement

As anyone who has read our blog before knows, we’re all about real engagement on Facebook rather than the number of fans and so it’s interesting to look at both Carlsberg and Heineken in terms of engagement levels.

Using Facebook’s “Talking About” metric, during the last 3 months significantly more people were “Talking about” Heineken over Carlsberg. In fact, the number of people talking about Carlsberg daily has been consistently low at an average of only around 2,500 people per day.

As the chart below shows, the peak on 25th November and then subsequent decline in the number of people talking about Heineken was probably due to people interacting with Heineken’s Thanksgiving post, as well as the fact that Incubus, an American rock band, had to cancel their performance at the the Heineken music hall in Amsterdam on this day.

As for Carlsberg’s low people talking about rate, this could attributed to a lack of posts from the page admin. The Carlsberg page admin has only posted content 42 times in just over three months. But while Heineken has posted double this amount, the amount of content used by both brands is lower than that of Coca-Cola and Pepsi’s Facebook engagement strategyand Heineken only really posted multiple times per day on 13th November in response to customer enquires about tickets for a performance at Heineken Green Spheres in Dublin (though this is a good example of using social media for customer service).

However, what is interesting to note is that when you look at both Heineken and Carlsberg’s Facebook pages in relation to their average engagement rate over time in the last three months it seems as if Carlsberg, at the start of the quater, had a higher average engagement rate than Heineken.

As you can see, there is a massive dip in the engagement rate on Carlsberg’s page around 7th October which they never quite recover from. This coincides with the day that Carlsberg announced it was rolling out the next stage of its marketing campaign for the UEFA Euro 2012 tournament on Facebook and so it could be that people started engaging with Carlsberg Football Facebook page to the detriment of engagement levels on the main Carlsberg page itself.

However, with Heineken’s average engagement rate decreasing and Carlsberg’s levels potentially looking as though it could increase again over time, it will be interesting to track both brands in terms of their Facebook engagement strategy over the coming months.

Last week we held a senior executive round table event at Claridges and one of the topics of discussion was about the proposed European Union (EU) directive on data privacy and the potential impact of this on social media.

As current EU data laws were created in 1995, before the rise of Facebook and other social networking sites, the EU has proposed a new directive on data privacy which is due to come into place in January 2012.

In essence, European politicians are seeking to simplify the EU Data Protection Directive in order to give businesses within the EU only  “one law” with  “one data protection authority”. Proposed changes to the data law aim to unify the existing legislation of each EU Member State, making it easier for businesses to transfer data.

According to Reuters, EU officials expect the draft legislation to be ready early next year (as early as January 2012) but it could take up to 18 months for the bill to become law, meaning that businesses will still have to  comply with disparate laws and often conflicting decisions made by data protection authorities (DPAs) in each of the 27 Member States.

The main changes to the proposed EU directive on data privacy that could affect the commercial use of social media largely revolve around data ownership. The directive places the control of data in the hands of individuals in order to foster a greater sense of trust with customers through transparent data processing. With this in mind, businesses must obtain explicit, specific consent from individuals and detail how this information will be used by them and any third parties.

Other changes to the proposed EU directive that could affect social media are:

• Increased data portability – it will be simpler to transfer data to alternative service providers.
• The ‘right to be forgotten’- the directive proposes to instate the ‘right to be forgotten’ so that an individual can request the deletion of data.
• Compelled disclosure –  data controllers will be obliged to notify those individuals concerned and the relevant DPA of any data breach as and when it is discovered.
• A ‘one-stop-shop’ – one law and a single DPA for each business to be determined by the Member State (ie, country) in which the business has its main operations.
• Abolish processing – the directive will dispense with the general requirement to notify DPAs of data processing.

While Mark Zuckerberg has managed to appease the Federal Trade Commission in the USA by agreeing to get permission from users before exposing more of their data, as well as allowing external audits of his privacy systems, he still has a long way to go in the EU, particularly with regards to Germany and their strong opinion about data privacy, so it will be interesting to see the how Facebook itself is treating data by the time this directive comes in to play.

By now we all know that social media can help put our customers at the heart of our business.

With this in mind, Lauren Carlson from Software Advice recently pinned down Brian Solis to discuss his definition of engagement.

Solis responded with what he calls the six rules of engagement: value, efficiency, trust, consistency, relevance and control. Let’s take a look at this to see how they can be applied as part of your engagement strategy:

1. Value

Consumers want to feel valued by the companies they do business with. Feeling valued translates to knowing that the company or brand will go above and beyond to meet your needs.

How to achieve this: Use social media to help you stay in touch with your customers in a personal way. In the “old days” this would be making a phone call, and there’s nothing worng with doing that today too, but you should also try to respond directly to tweets and other comments on social channels. You could also set up a loyalty program to reward return business, or offer discounts through social media channels to your most loyal customers to help them feel valued.

2. Efficiency

With the rise of new technology, particularly mobile, processes that used to be long and laborious are now happening much more quickly. Because of this, customers expect the same level of expediency when dealing with businesses.

How to achieve this: Consider how efficient your site is for mobile access and mobile purchasing. Also, instead of using call centers to deal with customer queries and concerns, think about using Twitter, Facebook or a live chat module for real-time support.

3.Trust

Consumers need to be confident in the credibility of your business and the product, actions and services that you deliver. With the rise of social media customers are trusting brand messages less and are turning to the advice of friends, peers and “people like them” to make their decesions.

How to achieve this: It’s been said time and again but be honest and transparent in all communications, across whatever channel. If a company builds trust through honesty and transparency, their customers will feel more confident to recommend the company or brand to others through social media. Don’t bombard your audience with your own brand messages and agenda; listen to what people are saying about you and join in the conversation in a natural, organic way to gain their trust.

4. Consistency

It is common for companies to offer multiple channels for communication with their customers. Offering multiple channels is a good thing, however there is no value unless the service you provide is consistent across each one.

How to achieve this: Don’t offer something you can’t deliver on. It is more valuable to have three consistent channels as opposed to six fickle ones that do not really engage with your customers. There is no point having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile just to have what you believe is a presence on there, if your customers are posting and commenting and getting no response or interaction.

5. Relevance

Many companies use social media as another means of advertising. They essentially spam social media profiles, blogs and marketing emails with product-centric information. However, that’s not what the consumer wants – engagement needs to be relevant.

How to achieve this: When potential and existing customers visit your blog, Twitter, Facebook page etc, they want to find information that is interesting and focused on their needs. Use social media monitoring to listen to what your customers are saying and identify your influencers or people who form part of your target audience. Engage with these people on their terms and only interact with them if you have a relevant message, or something of value, to offer them.

6. Control

We have heard over and over again that the customer is in control. But the idea of control is two-fold. It is clear that customers want a sense of control in that they want to choose the channel they communicate on, and they want the ability to opt in and out of specific engagements. In other words, they want an experience that gives them the sense of control.

How to achieve this: This is an interesting analysis of the word control. It puts the onus back on the businesses to still control the customer experience as a whole; it’s just that now, with the rise of social media, the customer can choose where and when they want to interact with a brand, if at all.  What Solis seems to be suggesting is that businesses should gain consumer insight and design an experience that provides the user the choice to interact with you or not (so ‘control’ in that sense of the word). Look at your key customer touchpoints to see where social media can add real value to your business.

Having already looked at the Facebook engagement and content strategy of two large rival consumer brands (Unilever’s AXE v P&G’s Old Spice) we thought it would be interesting to use social analytics tool Socialbakers to look at the engagement levels for another two rival consumer giants – Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

1. Fans

At face value, Coca-Cola has 29,368,850 more fans than Pepsi. Coca-Cola’s fan total stands at a whopping 35,454,838:

During October Coca-cola’s fans grew by 1,020,439  and Pepsi’s only grew by 188,349.

2. Engagement

We’ve always believed in building real engagement rather than “likes” or fans and so, to us,  the really interesting analysis comes when looking at the activity of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in terms of engagement.

Using Facebook’s “Talking About” metric, during October significantly more people were “Talking about” Coca-Cola instead of Pepsi:

While the people “Talking About” metric  seems to be fairly consistent for Pepsi, the increase and subsequent peak in people “Talking About” for Coca-Cola on 29th October could be because tickets for the Coca-Cola sponsored NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway  went on sale on Saturday October 29th.

However, even though more people were “Talking About” Coca-cola during October, in terms of other engagement metrics is appears as though Pepsi has the advantage:

Pepsi has an average engagement rate of 0.06% versus Coca-Cola’s 0.04%.  What’s more,  Pepsi has a total of 180,050 interactions (posts and comments) to Coca-Cola’s 117,964, again proving their higher engagement levels. Part of the reason behind this is that Pepsi used a lot of pictures and images to engage with its audience during October, rather than just links and text, thereby helping to generate a lot of interactions with the page.

Also, throughout October, Coca-cola made 21 posts, while Pepsi bordered on almost three times the activity with 53 posts, often posting twice daily. Updating and refreshing content on a regular basis is likely to have helped with Pepsi’s engagement rate.

So it seems that although Coca-cola has the more ‘famous’ Facebook page, with by far the most number of fans, in terms of engagement during October it seems that Pepsi is the winner.

It would be interesting to track this trend over a longer period of time than just a month to get a real understanding of the levels of engagement on each page.

A new report by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) claims that China could become the world’s most valuable e-commerce market within four years.

BCG claim that for the foreseeable future another 30 million Chinese people will go online to shop for the first time and by 2015 they will each be spending $1,000 a year—about what Americans spend online now.

BCG has also calculated that e-commerce could rise from 3.3% of China’s retail sales today to 7.4% by 2015. This is not just because the government subsidised high speed internet aids online shopping, but also because China’s has an expensive, inefficient ‘bricks-and-mortar‘ retail ecosystem and so a quarter of Chinese shoppers seek products online because they are not physically available in-store.

The rise in value of  e-commerce in China could also impact the social commerce market as Chinese e-shoppers are big users of social media.

As Chinese shoppers are somewhat reticent to trust sellers or advertising messages they turn to online customer reviews to form their opinions and according to BCG, over 40% of Chinese online shoppers read and post product reviews online. This is twice as likely as American online shoppers and four times as likely as Indians.

So what should retailers do to take advantage of the growing social and e-commerce market space in China?

Aside from considering the value of an e-commerce presence in Chinese, brands would do well to secure their presence on sites like Sina Weibo – a Chinese social networking site with over 200 million registered users – or other Chinese social networking sites like Tencent WeiBo or Ren Ren.

Retailers may also want to think about how to start engaging Chinese audiences online, not just in terms of where to engage them, but how to engage them in the context of a wider brand and social media strategy.

And as China is accountable for a large share of  share of mobile social media revenue at the moment, it seems that China could lead to some interesting new online revenue streams in terms of both e-commere and social commerce, as well as mobile shopping.

You can read the full BCG report here.