FreshNetworks Blog

February was a busy month in social media: Pinterest rocketed in popularity so much that some are (wrongly) calling it “the next Facebook”, while Facebook itself announced the roll-out of Timeline for brand pages. Here’s a few other things that have caught our eye this month, which you may have missed:

Twitter sentiment analysis heats up

• Twitter and UK based data technology company Datasift came to an agreement to release tweets going back two years. Until now, marketers have only been allowed to see tweets from up to 30 days ago. Datasift will be taking in about 250 million tweets every 24 hours and analysing them for sentiment, location and influence. The effect of this arrangement to access the Twitter archive has led to concerns about privacy, as well as conjecture that it could be a step towards being able to predict future events.

• And speaking of predicting the future, HP and Organic took advantage of this month’s Oscars to play with some real time sentiment analysis. Similar to XFactorTracker from Professor Noreena Hertz, The Awards Meter used language analysis to monitor Twitter during the run up to the Oscars and ranked nominees according to popular or negative opinion on Twitter. At FreshNetworks we believe that you can’t necessarily take sentiment analysis at face value – automated tools need deeper analysis and understanding of the tool’s inherent biases to really dig in for insights.  However, simple tools like the Awards Meter do hint at how useful it can be to look at social media for viewing overall trends and, and are a great way to demonstrate the technology.

Social influencers are the new darlings of social media

• PeerIndex, the social influence company has released a service targeted towards people who are ranked highly in specific subjects to offer them related discounts. Essentially a free sampling service, ‘PeerPerks’ aims to differentiate itself by ensuring that free samples only go to people who are really influencers in their product fields – with the aim being that if they then talk about the products in their social circles, the uptake will be much greater. As Ian Carrington, mobile sales director at Google UK said during Social Media Week, consumers are 300% more likely to buy something when it is recommended by a friend, so it will be interesting to see whether PeerPerks takes off.

• And as we’re involved with Park Bench, a community for dog owners, we like to keep a handle on the non-human influencers in social media too – and with almost 3.5 million fans, Boo is possibly the most famous dog on the planet. Interestingly, it looks like even he is now endorsing products in social media with the recent mention on his Facebook page of a new American Apparel hoodie. Will other brands be jumping on the Boo bandwagon?

In the UK this morning many commuters would have read a piece in The Metro about whether Pinterest is the next Facebook. This is not the first article or blog post about this, and I fear that it will not be the last. The short answer to this is ‘no’. And the longer answer is ‘no, because they are fundamentally different, non-competitive things’. But the fact that the question is asked and written about is a reminder that there is still a misconception that ‘social media’ is a single type of thing rather than a set of different, often complementary tools.

Pinterest is certainly the latest social platform that people are talking about. There’s a range of great statistics on DesignTAXI and there has been a lot of coverage about how they monetise your content. The concept is very simple – a social tool that lets you gather and share images, and sort them into collections. It offers something that really wasn’t that easy to do before online – although like many social tools it mirrors an existing offline behaviour (putting things on pinboards or in scrapbooks).

There is very little in this description that is like Facebook at all. In fact it offers a tool that is not really part of Facebook’s repertoire - in fact can you imagine creating these collections in such a simple easy way on Facebook? That’s partly why Pinterest is getting such early success (and why I expect it to continue growing). Not because it is competing with Facebook (or becoming ‘the next Facebook’). But because it offers something new and different to what was previously available in Facebook or across any other social tools.

The fact that people compare the two highlights that many consider social media tools to essentially be doing the same thing (they’re where people ‘do social media’). So if a new one comes along it must threaten the existence of the previous tools. This is a fundamentally flawed understanding.

1. Different tools do different things and we use them in different ways – Facebook is a collection of tools (a photo sharing tool, an event planning tool, a status updating tool…to name but a few). When a new tool comes along it probably adds to the mix of things we can do rather than competing directly. We all know that there are some things Twitter, or Facebook, or YouTube (or any tool) just isn’t suited for and so a gap that could be filled.
2. Our total mass of ‘doing social media’ has not peaked – If a new tool comes along it does not have to take a share of our ‘social media time’. We have not yet reached saturation, and indeed we may never as new tools will help us do other things differently or more efficiently. For any new tools to be a ‘Facebook killer’ suggests that it is going to compete for our time or attention that would previously have been dedicated to Facebook. As new tools come along that offer new things for us to do, or solve new problems, we will find time for them.
3. Our use of social tools is still maturing – Facebook is a collection of social tools, some people use all of them and others just a few. As we get used to sharing, interacting and engaging in different ways (and as the tools available catch up with how we behave anyway) we will change how we use the tools we have already signed-up for and the new ones. Maybe we’ll chat less on Facebook if we use Twitter for that, or maybe we’ll share photos more on Pinterest than we did on Facebook. Many of these decisions will be very personal and how we use these tools will be individual to each of us, the decisions we make and the people we connect with.

Pinterest, like many new social tools, is different to ones that have come before, and offers new ways of doing things. This is why it is successful and why it will continue to be so. It is not necessarily a threat to existing platforms and tools as it adds to the range of things that people can and will do online rather than competing with them. It will grow in a different way to Facebook and that is a good thing – it will have different growth strategies, the community will shape and change it to fit how they use the tool, and the monetisation model will drive different behaviours.

In fact if Pinterest were to become a Facebook it would probably be less successful as it would be trying to be something that it just isn’t at all like. Of course, there is probably one way that Pinterest probably would and should want to be like Facebook – a successful business that can command a huge value at IPO. That’s sadly not the comparison most of these pieces are making but is no doubt one that the people behind Pinterest would be happy with.

A simple social graph

The social graph is not a new thing. The concept has been spoken about since at least the 1960s and is simply a way of representing (drawing) all the connections between people. Imagine a small island community of three people with no links to the outside world; you could represent this community as a social graph – showing all three connected to each other. As well as people we might add on other things – places, events, animals – and so use a social graph to show the connections between all of these objects rather than just between people.

The concept of the social graph is not a new thing, and it is not unique to social media. But what social networks do provide is a systematised way of storing these objects and these connections. Facebook is currently the largest social graph in the world but any social network builds a social graph based on what you tell them about yourself, who you connect to and the actions you do.

An example of Facebook, the biggest social graph

Facebook, for example, knows who you are friends with (and who they are friends with). It knows when you and a friend are connected by an event (that you both attend) or by a photo (that you are both in), or by a film (that you both ‘Like’), or by some music (that you have both listened to on Spotify). It then stores this data in a systemised way and so has structured data on you, your life and the way all of the things around you connect. Think of it as a mass of data that can be used to help to define an individual. And Facebook gives brands access to this through their ‘Open Graph’ API.

Benefits for Facebook

For Facebook the benefits of building and storing these social graphs is obvious – the more they know about an individual, the more they can tailor and personalise their experience and the more useful Facebook becomes to them. They can use this data to monetise the network – mainly by selling targeted advertising. They currently earn almost $1.20 a year from every individual Facebook member, and the more data they collect the better then can personalise the experience and the more they can earn. Finally, the quicker they build an individual’s social graph, and the more information they capture in it, the bigger the barrier they build to others being able to come in and compete with them.

Benefits for Facebook members

For the individual members of Facebook there are benefits too. Whilst personalisation can be difficult to get right, there is no doubt that a personlised experience can be much more useful to an individual than a more generic one. It helps you suggest things that they might actually want to read, things you might actually be interested in, and even show you adverts for things you might actually want to buy. The more data you share with Facebook, the better they can personalise your experience and more useful you will find it. Of course, you need to remember to be informed about what you choose to share and why.

Benefits for brands

It is probably fair to say that brands so far have not taken the most advantage of the social graph. Partly this is because many are still experimenting with social media and many think of it just as a way to engage and build their own communities and networks, rather than exploring the pure data benefits that they can get. But applied correctly, brands can use this data to provide a better targeted and more personalised service, and even to help shape products themselves. Whether you are Amazon, using Facebook’s social graph to help you choose products for your friends’ birthdays, or KLM using Facebook and LinkedIn social graphs to help you choose who to sit next to on the plane, there are opportunities across sectors and audience types. In fact the biggest barrier to brands using the social graph effectively is their own creativity and ability to explore how the data they can get from social graphs (including Facebook) can help your business. And the biggest opportunity is to explore ways that data from these social graphs can be combined with a brands own proprietary data to build a bespoke data set that can let you develop products and personalise services for customers.

All brands should be exploring and understanding the different social graphs out there (including Facebook’s) and the data that these can offer. Social media is much more than just a means of communicating to and engaging with people. In fact the possibilities that this kind of data offers can often be much more interesting.

Over the past few months, activity on the social network Pinterest has exploded.

Pinterest is focused on the lifestyles of its members and encourages them to create different virtual pinboards onto which they can ‘pin’ things they like.

From September to December 2011, unique visitors to pinterest.com increased by a staggering 429% and over 3.3.million people have signed up to the website so far. In fact, it’s recently been announced that Pinterest has more than 11 million monthly visitors, making it the fastest website to surpass the 10 million mark.

The value of Pinterest to brands?

The demographics of Pinterest are particularly interesting for brands – an impressive 80% of users are women, and 55% of these are aged between 25 to 44.

So what does this suggest? Well, if you’re a brand targeting this demographic, you might want to start thinking about whether you should be on Pinterest.

Interestingly, Pinterest states in its terms and conditions that it is not a platform for self-promotion, but an online space for members to share their lifestyle, tastes and interests.

This means that (as with any social media platform) if you’re considering creating a Pinterest account for your brand, it’s worth putting a lot of thought into it beforehand, as part of an overall social media strategy. Whilst it might be okay to have a board dedicated to your current collection, the idea is that you will curate a wider selection of images and videos which tell the story behind your brand. You shouldn’t just be pushing product, but showing the lifestyle which is associated with that product.

How brands can use Pinterest

So for example, if you are a stationery company, you could have boards dedicated to doodles, great calligraphy or fun origami as well as those showcasing your best products. These do not have to come from you, but are just a curated collection of images which are already out there on the web.

The fact that Pinterest doesn’t have to be so focused on your brand may be intimidating for some – especially if you don’t have a concrete idea about who your target demographic is or what you’re trying to communicate to your customers. However, it also provides a lot of scope for some really fun social media marketing. Indeed, Pinterest even allows you to have other people contributing to your boards, which means that members can create user-generated fan content for your account if you wish.

With the freedom to use fresh content which isn’t necessarily generated from your design team, you can really investigate the different personalities of your brand. That could be anything from a pinboard dedicated to your employees favourite things, to one exploring where your products are made. Let your imagination go wild and dig deep into which niches your brand could become a Pinterest expert on.

Finally, don’t forget what your brand Pinterest account is ultimately there for. Whether you’re wanting to encourage online sales of your product or just looking to experiment, make sure you drive users back to your website and track the results. After all, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

Image via Wikipedia

According to research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, we think that 25% of tweets are not worth reading. The study found that, when asked to rate tweets by people they follow, only 36% of tweets were marked favourably, 25% were marked less favourably and the balance (39%) received no strong feeling either way. Press coverage of this study has invariably interpreted this to mean that up to a quarter of what we say on Twitter is a waste of time (see the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph coverage of the research).

The research itself asked users to self-nominate themselves to take part and, in exchange for having their own tweets rated, we asked to rate samples of tweets from people they follow. As with much academic research, this does take them out of their normal context when using Twitter but the results are interesting and informative. Maybe not for the interpretation that is taken by some of those reporting on it, but for what it tells us about how we use Twitter. Or perhaps how it reinforces what we should already know.

People are not interested in everything that people say on Twitter. They are not even interested in everything that the people they choose to follow say. There should be nothing surprising or controversial about this. It is fairly normal in all our social interactions that we are more interested in some things and less interested in others. I’m mainly surprised that we are uninterested in only 25% of things that people we follow say on Twitter.

Twitter is a classic social network. People who use it by following people (rather than by following hashtags or search strings) make a choice about who to follow based on who they are, what they say in their biography and perhaps some of their tweets at the time that we choose to follow them. I am unlikely to share everything in common with them – I may be interested in their tweets about BBC Question Time on a Thursday, for example, but less interested in their Tweets about the Super Bowl. I am unlikely to find you interesting all the time. And that’s nothing personal. And nothing unusual.

So as a reader I am unlikely to find everything that anybody says on Twitter interesting – I mentally filter out what I want to read and what I don’t want to read. If I really don’t want to read things on a certain topic, I can always filter it out with Tweetdeck or the like.

Just as readers are not necessarily interested in reading everything, those who write tweets are not necessarily writing them to be read. There is a clear disconnect between the person writing the tweets and the people reading them. The writer is not (in most cases) thinking about who will be reading it and why. They are just saying something. Saying it because they want to. That in itself is motivation and on the rare occasion that a tweet will be retweeted or responded to they will get further gratification.

So we are not interested in everything even our closest friends say (probably true in real life and on Twitter). And people are often writing on Twitter for the act of writing something and not necessrily composing it for specific audience or a specific reaction. Given that most people follow a collection of people with many different interests, some of whom they know and some of whom they don’t, it surprises me that only 1 in 4 tweets that we see are not of interest to us. This study certainly doesn’t show that those Tweets are a waste of time.