FreshNetworks Blog

Our last post looked at Facebook’s announcement yesterday that it had reached 500 million users. A huge number but it should not be mistaken as proof that Facebook is now ubiquitous. However, Facebook’s growth is impressive both because of the size the social network and the way it has grown when alternative social networks have been less explosive.

Yesterday, I appeared on BBC News talking about exactly this issue. Amongst the many reasons why Facebook is a success (and I’m sure that an element of luck and good timing is, of course, in that mix), I explain why I think two things have made a real difference:

1. Having some really good products that have helped people and change the way they connect with people online. Most notably the photos product – by allowing an easy way for people to share photos and associate people with the photos they are in (through tags) they have created a powerful tool that many people use. In many ways Facebook is to photos what YouTube is to videos.
2. Making it really easy for people to set up their own groups. For individual users this means that their experience of Facebook is often made up of their connections and the groups of these that they are part of. It is a huge social network made up of lots of little groups. This second point is great for user created groups but adds to the reasons why Facebook is a difficult place to play for brands and is not always the answer to their social media strategy.

Below is the BBC News piece from yesterday that I am interviewed for, we’d love your thoughts on this and why you think that Facebook is such a success.

The Social Network

Facebook will today announce that it has reached 500 million users. This number is incredible, and perhaps even more impressive is the rate at which the social network is growing. Just five months ago they had 400 million users. The site’s user base has grown by 25% in less than half a year. Incredible stuff.

The problem is that huge numbers like this can stop us from examining them in more detail and acknowledging what they don’t tell us as much as what they do. It is true that Facebook usage is growing at an incredible rate and large numbers of people use the social network. But let’s not get carried away by this. In some countries, Facebook is not the most popular social network – in the Netherlands it is Hyves, in Brazil Orkut and in Russia Vkontakte. In other countries social networks are not yet the main way that people interact online – they use message boards, forums, blogs and other social media tools. And, of course, in other countries still they use of social networks is very low.

There are many comparisons made about the user base of Facebook – from how big Facebook would be as a country to how many people are joining each day. But a statistic that isn’t often cited is this:

• 93% of the world’s population is not on Facebook*

This is, of course, a slightly unhelpful statistic – it considers the whole world population whereas it might be more interesting to understand what percentage of the online population, or perhaps the population who use social media are users of Facebook. It also belies the fact that in some countries Facebook usage is very high indeed. But it is no more unhelpful than many of the statistics and comparisons being made. It does, however, shine the light on the fact that, whatever we might think and however impressive these numbers are, Facebook is not an all-encompassing social media tool. It does not reach everybody and it is not right for us to use.

Brands thinking of their social media strategy can all too easily think that Facebook is the answer. And all too often it isn’t. Everybody isn’t on Facebook and Facebook isn’t the right place for all brands to play. In fact there are often many other more suitable places. Big numbers are impressive, but they shouldn’t blind us from a sensible, business aims-led approach to using social media.

* The 93% figure uses data on the current world population from the US Census Bureau – this will no doubt have inaccuracies, but it’s more about illustrating a point than mathematical accuracy this time around!

Habbo, the world’s largest teenage online community, has recently celebrated its tenth birthday, proving that sustainable success can be achieved with online communities.

The first version of Habbo was rolled out in August 2000, followed by an English-language beta version in January 2001. Ten years on, Habbo (previously known as “Habbo Hotel”) has a staggering 176 million registered users, with 15 million unique visitors per month.  In the UK alone it reaches 15% of the total teenage audience and receives more than 1.1 million unique visitors per month.

So what lies behind Habbo’s success?

Timo Soininen, the Chief Executive of Habbo’s parent company, Sulake, has said that Habbo’s continuing success is down to keeping “the service fresh and relevant by frequently introducing new features and gaming elements, arranging engaging campaigns, enriching the virtual economy and payment models and nurturing the community.”

What Soininen seems to be saying is that the Habbo community continues to thrive because of careful, considered online community management and innovative content. Keeping up with cutting edge social and digital trends helps to keep the young audience engaged.

It’s likely that Habbo also benefits from Sulake’s expertise, as the social entertainment company often carry out in-depth market research, listening and analysis to gain insights into the the needs of its audience and to understand the type of material they will engage with. This is probably also the reason why social gaming and social entertainment is a key driver in shaping and developing the community.

Some of Habbo’s success can also be attributed to the intelligent joint marketing activities it has carried out with teen-friendly consumer brands like Cheetos, or, more recently Capri-Sun, where on-pack advertising encourages consumers to visit Habbo.co.uk where they can access ‘The Capri Sun Summer Theme Park’ branded room.

Habbo has also entered partnerships with media brands such as MTV and Myspace, helping to promote the site amongst its key target audience. And with Habbo’s own annual survey of 49,000 teenage users proving the claim that 32% of teenagers would never pay for content online, the fact that membership to Habbo is free is an additional way of enticing teenagers to sign up.

And the community continues to grow as these statistics from June 2010 show:

• 172 million avatars created
• 3 million new characters created each month
• 120 million user-created rooms
• Average user session lasts 42 minutes

Read more of our Social Media Case Studies

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

As part of the social media agency work we’re doing in the education sector, I recently ran a brainstorming session with a group of 11-15 year old students and their teachers. We were exploring and testing some ideas we have been working on, but also looking at their use of social media and social networks. These kind of sessions are critical when planning any use of social media as a brand. You need to think not as yourselves but through the eyes of the people we are trying to engage in social media otherwise there is a danger that you will develop a solution for the people planning it and not the people you want to use it.

With these 11-15 year olds this is particularly important. We cannot, and must not, translate our own use of social media and the ways we would like to be engaged online to the young people we are trying to target. They use social media very differently and will react very differently to brands online. The same is, of course, true of any consumer base – it is most likely the case that your target audience is not fairly reflected by the people you have working for you. So thinking about your audience and considering your social media strategy through their eyes is critical. You can, of course, also always learn a lot by spending time with users.

I certainly learned a lot from my time with these 11-15 year olds and thought I’d share some of these observations here. I should make a huge caveat that these observations are certainly not representative of all students of that age, and shouldn’t be taken as such. But they shine a light on how this age range is using social media and prompts further questions and reflections for us all about these social media tools and how we all use them.

1. Facebook is a personal organiser and a bragging tool

For the group we talked to, Facebook was the ultimate personal organiser. It is here that they collected the friends they met at school, at clubs outside school, on holiday or people from their family. They used Facebook as a way to keep in touch with these people, to find out what they were doing and, for many, as the main way they communicated with them. Facebook chat was used by them much more than the likes of MSN or text messages, and Facebook messages were used much more than email. Facebook was described as the place where they kept their friends and a means of talking to them.

But once they had these groups of friends, they liked to use Facebook as a bragging tool and a way of showing the affinity they had with these friends. They talked about creating groups for something they were interested in and then aiming to get all their friends to join – not to interact with each other in the group, but so that their group would get more ‘Likes’ than similar ones. They were using Facebook to amass and to showcase their social status. And their was a symbiotic nature to this – the friends who were Liking these groups were doing so with the aim of getting more pages and groups on their profile than their friends. This social status (or ‘bragging’) works both ways for these young people – those who create groups want lots of people to ‘Like’ them, and those who ‘Like’ groups want to get more things they like as badges on their profile.

These observations offer important learnings for brands looking to engage young people in Facebook. They may have lots of friends but they may not be ‘Liking’ your brand page because they want to interact with you but because they want to show their friends just how many things they ‘Like’. The key is not jut to create pages they can passively ‘Like’ but to work with their desire to gain more friends and to show their social status online as a way to engage them.

2. YouTube is for music

YouTube is, for many, their second most used search engine after Google. They use it to find content and to share content with people they know, and people they don’t know but with whom they share interests. It is a vibrant social media tool and a growing community.

There are a lot of video creators and video bloggers out there, and a lot of them are young, as a quick search of videos will show you, but for the 11-15 year olds we had in a room, YouTube was for one thing. Music. And particularly to view, and to share music videos with their friends at a time that suited them, rather than waiting for the video to be shown on MTV or another music channel. They used it as a way for them to control their own access to professional content, rather than as a way to find and connect with others online though user-generated content.

For brands the message here is clear – these young people are looking for quality content on YouTube and using as a way for them to control and manage their own viewing of it. They will share this content with all their friends on Facebook in a way that will benefit your own brand but are less likely to create content themselves or to use the videos themselves as a mechanism to talk to and to interact with peers.

3. They are not looking for reward

The final observation came when we talked about motivation and reward for engaging online. We were looking particularly at ways in which we could motivate them to take part in ongoing engagement with an issue we were working on. And one finding came through very clearly. These young people were not looking to be rewarded. At least not in the way some brands thought they might be. They didn’t want prizes, they didn’t want ‘goodie bags’ and in many cases they would not be interested in product from the brand themselves. Their needs were simple, and at the same time complex. They wanted reward that played to their existing networks and use of social media.

They were interested in recognition and things that they could use to increase their social status on sites such as Facebook. They wanted things to take away their – badges, content and other things that they could post to their wall to show what they were involved in. They wanted activities that encouraged them to create content or groups that could be ‘Liked’ on Facebook, or they wanted points that they could use to compare themselves against other people and show their friends.

One of the biggest dangers with social media is to assume that it is only exists online. We see this in the way some brands approach social media – developing a social media strategy that is focused on the tools they are going to use rather than the business aims they are going to contribute to. We also see this in the way some brands allocate budgets for their social media work – associating it with their ecommerce or digital spend can mean that they need to work harder to make sure that social media efforts integrate with what is happening offline.

This is a real shame because really social media is not about online at all. It’s about the same human interactions and collaborations that we have enjoyed offline for many many years. In fact for as long as human beings have been social animals. Technology just lets us do more of these things, in different ways and, perhaps critically, with people we don’t know, that we are not near and at different times to them. Social media just lets us do things we have always done offline in bigger and better ways. So it should be natural that we consider it as having offline implications as well as online ones. But too often we don’t.

This is a real shame. The best examples of social media, especially when looking at the ways it is used by brands, have an offline element to them. You might have an offline event where members of your online community can get together to meet and continue to share the thoughts and discussions they have online. You might get people to do things such as test a product or experience an experience offline and then talk about it in their online communities (as we saw with Virgin America). You might us content created online at an offline location. You might reward people offline for what they do in online communities online.

The options are endless and do not necessarily have to be just traditional integrated marketing campaigns. Its about things that people do and things they care about. And about letting them do these offline and online. The rise of social media for marketing is less about technology and more about brands realising the benefits of closer engagement with customers and others. Social media tools provide a great way to do this but always remember to think how you can get this engagement offline too.

As a social media agency,  FreshNetworks aims to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities, marketing and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in June.

1. Social media monitoring review 2010 – download the final report

Over the first few months of 2010 we conducted an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research. We compared how Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks, analysing over 19,000 online conversations.

Many thousands of you have already read our posts about the review and downloaded the final whitepaper. If you haven’t yet, you can find a more detailed analysis of all these tools and more in our final report – Turning Conversations into Insights: a Comparison of Social Media Monitoring Tools.

2. Why a museum is the UK’s top brand on Twitter

The Famecount dataset is, like much data, not perfect but it does highlight some surprises that we can all learn from. The brand it has as the top Twitter brand in the UK is one such surprise. Rather than the big FMCG, fashion and media firms they include in their brands ranking, the top UK brand on Twitter for them is a museum, @Tate.

There are some structural reasons why the Tate will attract followers. Twitter is great for events and experiences and a museum has lots of these. But the success and popularity of the Tate is about much more than this. It’s thanks to the way they use Twitter. In this post we look at the three simple characteristics of the way the Tate uses Twitter that all brands can learn from, and that contribute to their success.

3. The most beautiful tweet ever written (as judged by @stephenfry)

In June, Stephen Fry declared the most beautiful Tweet ever written at the Hay Festival. The winning tweet, from Marc MacKenzie, is a concise but informative tweet and perhaps is a great example of how people are using this new medium. But what makes this tweet the most beautiful ever written?

The beauty in Twitter, and in the tweets people send, is that they convey emotion, opinion, information and expression in a relatively short period, and they, broadly speaking, do so in public. Unlike other conversational forms, Twitter, even when you direct a tweet at a specific person, has a broader audience and often an audience you don’t know. And of course you only have 14o characters with which to express yourself. Marc MacKenzie’s tweet is a good example of this new medium – the audience is unclear and the tweet manages to convey information, opinion, belief and also humour. All in 140 characters.

4. The top ten brands on Facebook

Starbucks is the most popular brand on Facebook when ranked by the number of people who ‘Like’ a brand (’Fans’ as they used to be called). Over 7.5 million people like the coffee chain on Facebook, almost 2 million more than like the second most popular brand, Coca-Cola.

This data comes from Famecount which ranks brands (and people) based on the number of people who follow, like or friend them in social networks. It shows that food and drink brands are in each of the top five places, with fashion brands making up most of the remaining places in the top ten. Consumers are interested in what these brands are doing, or at least want to flag their interest in the brand or product on their own Facebook profile.

5. The problem with automated sentiment analysis

As part of our review of social media monitoring tools we compared their automated sentiment analysis with the findings of a human analyst, looking at seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. And the outcome suggests that automated sentiment analysis cannot be trusted to accurately reflect and report on the sentiment of conversations online.

In our tests when comparing with a human analyst, the tools were typically about 30% accurate at deciding if a statement was positive or negative. In one case the accuracy was as low as 7% and the best tool was still only 48% accurate when compared to a human. For any brand looking to use social media monitoring to help them interact with and respond to positive or negative comments this is disastrous. More often than not, a positive comment will be classified as negative or vice-versa. In fact no tool managed to get all the positive statements correctly classified. And no tool got all the negative statements right either. Automated sentiment does not work, and for businesses relying on it can cause problems.

There are four types of brands online, and you can distinguish between them by listening to and analysing the conversations about the brands. This is an insightful takeaway from one of the most interesting presentations at the Social Media Marketing 2010 conference in London earlier in June. The presentation from web monitoring company Synthesio presented these four types of brand, showed the nature of conversations about them online and then showed some best practice examples of how such brands can engage online.

Given that we’re a social media agency, and we’ve just published our Social Media Monitoring 2010 review , we were interested by these four types of brand. We certainly recognise some and the types and the characteristics of them. The full presentation is at the bottom of this post, but Synthesio’s four types of brands online are:

1. The Boring Brand

The boring brand does not generate spontaneous interest in it – insurance, home cleaning products and some FMCG brands can typically fall into this category. Whilst there is an average level of buzz about the brand the conversations rarely express positive or negative sentiment, presence online tends to be low and there are few long conversations about the brand.

A great example of where a typically boring brand has been turned around is Compare the Meerkat. You can also often generate interest in these brands by focusing not on the product itself but on other elements of the experience, such as the Keep Britain Biking site for Devitt Insurance.

2. The Functional Brand

Functional brands go beyond the name or image of the brand, the products they represent have to deliver a certain level of service or experience – mobile phone companies or business hotels would be typical examples. These brands have a high volume of buzz, and a relatively high proportion of these are expressing positive or negative sentiment. They also have a high presence in social media, but the conversations still tend to be more descriptive than discursive. There are typically a lot of individual comments about the brand rather than long discussions and debates online.

3. The Exciting Brand

Exciting brands are ones that people desire and that signal much about consumers who buy them. Apple would be a typical brand in this type. These brands generate a lot of buzz, although much of it is neutral in nature (people discussing the brand rather than expressing an opinion either way). The brands have high presence in social media and also tend to attract discussions between people rather than just a lot of individual comments.

The best thing for such brands to do is to find a way to nurture this enthusiasm and these conversations. The best such brands will turn these volume of conversations into positive word of mouth and value for them.

4. The Vital Brand

Vital brands are ones that concern issues you really care about, concerns and needs that are important to you. Health and environmental brands are typically in this category. They attract a lot of buzz online, although this tends not to be overly positive or negative in sentiment. There is a high presence in social media and a very high proportion of comments are discussions between people online rather than just isolated comments.

Do you recognise your brand as being one of these four? Is this a good way of segmenting brands online based on discussions about them?

There is more than you might think in common between designing social media tools and online communities and doing a triathlon. When I first took up triathlon I hadn’t a clue how it worked. I knew it involved three sports, swimming, cycling and running, in that order, but I had no idea of the logistics of transitioning from one to the other: how to set out my gear, the fastest way to transition, what to put on and in what order. It was daunting. So how did I learn? I watched others. The more races I participated in, the more I learnt and the quicker I got. As I progressed I picked up new tips, became more efficient, paired it down to what I needed to know and as a result saw my performance improving.

No longer an observer I was now an active participant.

Social interaction is pretty similar. When you are using social media tools and online communities you’re not sure what to expect, you might think it’s not for you or you may feel nervous about participating. You might start as an observer, taking a look around, see what others are saying. Then you may start to recognise familiar features and design patterns (although you might not necessarily call them this!) and you begin to formulate how you might proceed. It’s only when you find a subject that is of interest to you that you might start to actually engage and begin your social interaction journey.

So how do we make this journey easier for users? With social interaction people are no longer just consuming content they are interacting and creating it. They have a variety of ways they can do this, through blogs, forums, questions and answers, debates, ideas, and competitions. Then there are the numerous ways in which these are presented, take blogs for example, we can show the title, the date of the post, who wrote it, a content teaser (an extract of the main article), an image, social properties, such as the number of views and comments, and social actions, such as rate, comment, share, subscribe, report, like and tweet. Some blogs show all of these, some show only a few – but which are the important ones – how do we give the user enough to show that there is interaction taking place and make them in turn want to interact without swamping them with loads of data so that the user experience is not impaired?

When using and designing these features we need to ensure that the appropriate features are chosen to enable successful engagement.

Today’s Social Media Marketing 2010 conference (search for #smmuk10 on Twitter) was a great mix of theory and case studies, presentations and debates, clients and the odd social media agency. We presented on why ongoing engagement is worth more than buzz and showcased our work in the retail industry with T.M.Lewin and Jimmy Choo.

In the final session of the day, I took part in a panel discussion on trends in social media and the areas where social media marketing will develop in the next 12 to 18 months. The panel debated and sourced ideas and then used the audience to vote for the ideas that the collective wisdom of clients and agencies in the room thought were the important trends to watch. The top three trends are below (and I’m rather pleased that my suggestion about geolocation tools made it to the top spot!)

Trend 1: Geolocation tools and the convergence of online and offline experiences

We’ve written before that we think 2010 is the year of location-based social media tools and geolocation is certainly becoming a much talked about issue at conferences and with clients. At this conference we presented our own case study of CatchAChoo, the trainer-hunt we developed and ran for Jimmy Choo using Foursquare and Twitter. There is also a lot of benefit that businesses can gain from working with Foursquare and other tools as they develop (even small businesses as this case study shows).

Geolocation is an interesting development. There is a much-recounted (but rarely-cited) statistic that says that 80% of all data 0nline has a geolocational element to it. But in most cases this data isn’t used. The steady rise of smart-phones (with their in-built GPS systems) will make this data more useful to users and easier for people to add to. It’s a trend to watch and for brands to capitalise on where relevant for their social media strategy. Geolocation tools are growing, and brands can benefit hugely from them.

Trend 2: Increased focus on ROI

There was a prediction that clients will increasingly focus on (and have to prove) the value or ROI of the work they do in social media. And so they should. Brands should not be using social media unless they have a clear view of what they want to achieve – the business aims that social media can contribute to. And when they start to use social media tools they should be ruthless in their measurement of success. This is critical because it shows that brands are thinking about social media in the right way and for the right reasons. Success and ROI is rarely a measure of how many people ‘Like’ you on Facebook or how many followers you have on Twitter. Real ROI comes from showing the impact your work has had against real business aims – increased sales, reduced cost of new customer acquisition, new ideas into the business. Real needs, real measures and a real focus on ROI.T

Trend 3: Consumer resistance to brands on social media

An emerging trend, associated to the privacy debate, was thought to be increasing resistance from consumers about brands engaging with them in social media. The real trend here is a need for brands to use social media and engage people in the right way. Trying to engage people in Facebook is often not the right answer. Infact Facebook is a place where people are often talking and sharing with friends and connections and don’t want to be interrupted by a brand. Better to choose the right place to engage in the right way. If not then consumers may start to filter out brands and brand messages and exert more control over their own experiences online.

What are your thoughts on these trends? Is Geolocation the next (or current) big thing?

Starbucks is the most popular brand on Facebook when ranked by the number of people who ‘Like’ a brand (’Fans’ as they used to be called). Over 7.5 million people like the coffee chain on Facebook, almost 2 million more than like the second most popular brand, Coca-Cola.

This data comes from Famecount which ranks brands (and people) based on the number of people who follow, like or friend them in social networks. It shows that food and drink brands are in each of the top five places, with fashion brands making up most of the remaining places in the top ten. Consumers are interested in what these brands are doing, or at least want to flag their interest in the brand or product on their own Facebook profile.

The top ten brands on Facebook (Global)

*Note: figures updated where relevant to be correct as of June 10 2010

Do the number of Facebook Likes matter?

Data like this is great for understanding user behaviour in Facebook. Showing us for which brands, and for which type of brands, users are more likely to click to say that they ‘Like’ it. However, for the brand, does the number of people who like you on Facebook matter? Not always.

The number of people who like you on Facebook is not the most important measure on Facebook. A more powerful measure is the number who engage with the brand. Liking a brand is an easy step and people do it for many reasons. At one end of the engagement spectrum because they want to hear from and exchange ideas with the brand. At the other end of the spectrum because they just want this ‘Like’ recorded as a badge on their Facebook profile. They may have no intention (or indeed desire) to engage at all with the brand.

And it is this engagement number that is of more use for brands. They want people who talk to them, like their posts and images, share their content and are active advocates of the brand. This means more than just ‘Liking’ the brand but doing something with it and engaging more deeply with it in Facebook. For any brand it is typically better for it to have 1 million fans, of which 5% engage with you on a regular basis, than to have 2 million fans with less than 1% engaging.

This number also shows the value of your presence in social media. It can be relatively easy for brands to build large numbers of ‘Likes’. It is less easy to get them to actually do something and to engage with you. But it is when they do that brands get real value.

So Facebook ‘Likes’ are important for brands, but actual engagement is even more important.