FreshNetworks Blog

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There has long been a debate in social media marketing between engaging people where they are at the moment (on Facebook or Twitter for example), and bringing them together to engage on your own site (such as your own forums or online community). This is, to some extent, an unhelpful argument. There has been no clear-cut answer, and the truth is that it all depends what you are using social media for, who your audience is, and how you want to engage them. The best approach has often been to combine both – in a hub-and-spoke model where you engage both in social networks and on your own site.

Through 2011 we expect this issue to become at the same time more complicated and more simple with the continued rise of the social graph.

To date, Facebook’s social graph has been underused by brands. It’s not surprising. The concept is quite complicated, and it also challenges what we think we know about social media marketing. Including the debate about going where people are or bringing them to your site. Social graph lets you do both. At the same time.

The social graph, at its simplest, allows you to use your friends, likes and other interactions in Facebook when you are browsing other sites. To put this in practical terms – on the Amazon.com site, you can use social graph to generate recommendations of things your friends might want you to buy them. It will recommend authors a friend says they like on Facebook, or if they say they like Football it will recommend products that might appeal to them. And what’s more it will recommend things for certain friends around their birthday so you get useful advice on what to buy people when it is relevant for them.Social graph brings insight and social to the shopping experience on Amazon.com – adding value and doing something that just hasn’t been possible before.

Through 2011 we expect to see more experimentation with social graph. More brands using the data and information on Facebook to add value to a consumer’s experience on their own site. This is part of a broader trend towards distributing social across a company’s consumer journey and contact points, and even across their business. But that’s the topic for another post in this informal series on social media in 2011.

This post is part of an informal series: Social Media in 2011.

Facebook accounts for 1 in every 6 page views in the UK. It is the most popular social network in the UK, with 55% of all visits to such sites, and contributes to social networks now accounting for 11.5% of all internet visits in the UK. This data from from a recent report from Hitwise looking at use of social media and social networking sites. It shows the growing importance of social media not just as a place to engage your audience, but also as a traffic driver.

With 11.5% of all internet visits, social media sites now account for more activity online than the combined visits to Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Social media continues to increase its lead over search engines and as it does so its roles as a source of traffic is taking ever-increasing prominence. Whilst Google remains, the largest driver of traffic to UK sites, now 1 in 10 visits originates from Facebook – making the social network the second biggest driver of traffic as well as the most visited social network. It lead the pack by considerable distance – with YouTube in a distant second place.

And this figure is growing. Taking just online retail sites as an example, the Hitwise report shows that traffic from social media sites has risen by 13% in the year to September 2010 with 9.1% of visits to all online retailers now coming from social media. This supports our own experience with Jimmy Choo, where we are seeing traffic from Facebook to the ecommerce site increasing at an astonishing rate month-on-month.

So social networks are not only taking an increasingly important part of our online experience, but also a real driver of traffic. Brands should acknowledge this and build a social media strategy that acknowledges social media as a place to engage and also to drive traffic to their ecommerce or other sites. Understanding where social media plays in the ecosystem of your brand online, how your outreach on social networks, blogs and other such sites sits alongside your main site, is critical. Build a real and clear understanding of who you are engaging, where. And make sure you are capitalising on this growing and increasingly important pattern of social media sites driving real traffic. Including a true social search strategy to compete with and compliment your existing SEO strategies.

Download the Hitwise report: Getting to grips with Social Media

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.

Social networks online are fundamentally different to our offline social networks – our friends, acquaintances, colleagues and others. Offline we have distinct groups of people that we interact with in different ways, whereas online in social networks we tend to merge all of our friends into one main pool.

This great presentation from Paul Adams, head of user experience at Google, looks at how we interact offline and online and takes a sociological approach to understanding how people interact in social networks and the consequences of this. From the dangers of two groups of friends colliding to the challenges for brands in social networks, this is a great presentation and our Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week. The presentation has a lot of detail in and is worth a good look through and although these are his own findings I know from my experience studying this area that there are a lot of research papers to back up his results.

There are a few points that I think are key take always for companies looking to use social networks:

1. Social Networks are not always the best places for brands to interact. Social networks are very user centric places. All the diagrams that are in Paul Adam’s research are cantered around the user it is about their connections, their friends, their family, their swimming group etc. because of the size of the audience on social networks there is a tendency for brands to go into them and want to tell everyone about their products and services, some brands can work very well in social networks but most of the time people don’t want to be interrupted in what they are doing and there are more beneficial ways to engage.
2. The power of weak ties is decreasing. Paul Adams talks about tie strength which is based on sociological theory (see the work on Mark Granovetter on “The Strength of Weak Ties”) this theory explains the links between people in different social circles. Strong ties are the links that you have with friends and family and are thought to be most influential when a recommendation is needed. Weak ties are links that you have with people that you have an affinity to but are not in regular contact. Weak ties are important to bridge the gap between different social circles and for getting information disseminated throughout different groups on the internet. People naturally build a large network of these weak ties and the process of identifying influencers who are willing to share opinions is becoming more and more important. It’s not who you know in your network it’s how likely they are to speak about your company and be trusted.
3. People have different personalities in different areas. Everyone acts differently in different social groupings and when they are hanging out with their mates they might want to be associated with a bar or a beer or certain places but they might not want their family or co-workers knowing.

Social networks yield a high reward if companies can engage people but are a hard place for brands to get it right and are just one part of social media.

In Brazil 86% of internet users regularly use social networks and other social media sites. This places them top of the league of social media users globally, with Italy in second place (with 78% of internet users regularly using social media) and Spain in third place (77%). This data comes from the Nielsen’s study of the reach and usage of these social media sites by country which looks at the reach of social media sites in individual countries and the amount of time users spend on them.

Reach of social media in Brazil

The popularity and reach of social media in Brazil is due, in no small part, to the use of Orkut, a social network operated by Google that is incredibly popular in Brazil. In April, almost half of all users of Orkut came from Brazil and its popularity continues to grow in the country. This shows the rise of social networks beyond Facebook – which has a reach of just 26% in Brazil – and the importance for global brands of developing a social media strategy that takes into account these regional differences and the importance of different social media tools and patterns in different countries.

Social network and blog site reach by country – Top 10 (April 2010)

Source: The Nielsen Company

Social media accounts for 22% of time online

This data reveals not just the countries with the greatest reach of these social media sites, but also how long the typical user will spend on them. Overall, time on social networks and blog sites has reached 22% of all time spent on the internet. The same as one minute for every four and a half minutes spent online. Australia leads the pack here – with over seven hours per month spent on social media sites. And Japan is well below average at just less than three hours.

Time spent on sites is an interesting measure and one that needs further investigation to fully understand it. For example, in Japan people are very likely to be accessing sites on mobile devices and so are less likely to spend time browsing sites and more likely to achieve particular tasks that they are looking to do. And of course, spending a long time on a site may be an indicator of slow connections or poor design.

But even with these caveats, we are spending much more time on social networks and social media sites and the reach of these sites continues to grow. All over the world.