FreshNetworks Blog

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.

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.

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.

Our Park Bench and Scratching Post Facebook apps have gone from strength to strength since their launch earlier this year, with over 7,000 pet owners making their own pet profile.

One of the challenges faced when building Facebook apps in the past has been how to make them accessible to mobile users. Whilst Facebook offers quite a good mobile interface for Pages, using and discovering apps built within Facebook has proven a challenge.

Last week Facebook made some changes to how its platform works for mobile apps, and I wanted to highlight 3 of them which I think are particularly interesting:

A new mobile and web app

Similar to Twitter’s mobile app changes back in May, Facebook has narrowed the gap between their mobile web experience and native apps on iOS (Blackberry/Android presumably coming soon). The Facebook iPad and iPhone apps now perform almost exactly the same as their m.facebook.com experience.

Bookmarks

A familiar part of the Facebook web experience, bookmarks are added on the left hand side of your home page once you’ve authorised an app. Its a handy place to keep track of the apps you use most, along with your Pages, Groups and Events. The new Facebook app and mobile web app now features the same set of information in a pop out.

If you’re a brand who uses a Facebook app to engage with your audience, keeping your app at the forefront of their mind is really important. The bookmarks overlay means you can do this as easily on someone’s mobile as you can on the desktop.

Requests

An extension to the Facebook notification system, requests are a neat way to invite your friends to join an app you’re using. You can share that you’re using an app, or prompt them to take a turn in a game. Requests are a likely to become an important tool when looking to grow the audience for your app – the equivalant of ‘sharing’ a post or image from a page.

Zynga (originally of Farmville fame) are one of the first to take advantage of this, building the Words with Friends on the new mobile platform. If you’ve previously created an account through the (rather addictive) iPhone app and connected to Facebook you’ll be able to play the game on your mobile web browser, and indeed on the Facebook desktop. You’ll get all the notifications you’re used to when someone has taken a turn, and you can start a game on your desktop and continue on your mobile browser.

By making it easier for app developers to build mobile apps within Facebook, and providing some of the social channels we’ve become familiar with on the ‘full’ Facebook experience I think Facebook has started to open its mobile audience up to even more exciting opportunities.