FreshNetworks Blog

Lady Gaga - Monster Ball (Photo credit: Kimi Kagami)

It seems simple when you hear it, but one of the most interesting examples of social media data I have read about recently comes from Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, at last week’s Wired 2012 event. Using social data from Spotify to help to design the set-list for a gig. Simple, effective and the kind of personalisation that is only available with widespread social sharing.

As Carter puts it:

I can sit down with the guy from Spotify, and he shows me this spike on Fridays as people listen to Gaga before going to the clubs. When I go to South Africa I know to include this song in this set, because I know that’s a fan favourite, and also to take this song out. We’ve never had a direct relationship with an audience. When someone buys a CD we used to count them as a fan, but we never knew if they hated the CD and threw it out the window.

So simple it’s obvious – look at which tracks are popular and which are less popular in the area around a gig and then play back to the audience what they want to hear. You could then go a step further to introduce new tracks based on these data patterns – introduce new content into the set based on what people already enjoy listening to, and leave out new tracks they might be less keen on.

This kind of personalisation is clever and could be used much more. It is not based on an individual’s social data but on looking for trends and patterns among a group of the population.

Looking at the data people leave behind from the actions they do in social media (what they say, do, listen to, watch) presents a huge opportunity for many brands and products. And if you layer in data that only you have (eg purchase history) you can produce an even more powerful data set.

Brands need to start understanding the data they have, and the data they can learn about their customers through social media. Only then can we start to be more creative about how we are using this data. And only then will we see more examples of something as simple, and as sensible as how Lady Gaga personalises her gigs.

They’re arguably the two biggest stars on the planet and both Lady Gaga and Rihanna have famously made incredibly innovative use of social media to get real commercial advantage. But which is using social media with the greatest effect, and which is most successful at actually engaging her fans?

On Facebook, these pop queens have both built massive audiences (Rihanna and Lady Gaga have the 5^th and 6^th biggest pages respectively – only Facebook itself, Texas Hold’em Poker, Eminem, and Youtube have more fans, in case you were interested) with both hurtling towards a cool 50 million fans each.

Long hailed as the queen of social media, Lady Gaga was the first living music artist to reach 10,000,000 Facebook fans, but last year Rihanna famously  leap-frogged Lady Gaga to become the most popular woman on Facebook.

However, huge numbers of Facebook fans are one thing, but what we’re really interested is who’s audience is the most engaged? If you’ve read this blog before you’ll know this is how we really rate the success of a Facebook page. To find the answer, we turned to social analytics tool Social Bakers to find who really is on the edge of glory (Sorry – ed)

And the winner is…

Yep. You probably guessed it – it’s Lady Gaga. Ri-Ri might have the largest and fastest growing audience (her fan numbers are currently growing at a rate of 2% a month compare to Lady Gaga’s 1%) but it’s Lady Gaga who truly keeps her ‘Little Monsters’ coming back for more.

Over the last month, Lady Gaga’s fans have interacted on her page nearly a million times more than Rihanna’s fans giving her an engagement rate over twice that of her rival.

Now, we know that Lady Gaga gave away a music single to her fans as part of iTunes’ 12 Days of Christmas which definitely gave her a spike in social media buzz, but as you can see from the graph below  even without that, her engagement level is consistently around twice that of Rihanna.

Here are a few of our tips on how we think Rihanna should fight back:

Cut the number of links posted to the wall

In our experience, images and Status Updates work much better in the Facebook newsfeed than posted links which are what Rihanna’s team seem to favour. Of 41 posts in the month, Gaga posted 31 status updates and 8 photos, while Rihanna (whose team also posted 41 times) went for 23 links. And eight photos. We find across all our communities that posted links – as a rule – just don’t get the engagement rates that other post types do.

Let your fans post to your wall

Except in exceptional circumstances we would always recommend our clients let fans post to their Facebook wall. It’s much more inclusive and welcoming and gives people a nice warm fuzzy feeling. Lady Gaga lets fan do it. Rihanna should do.

Be more concise

People have short attention spans and overly long status updates don’t do anybody any favours. Keep it short and sweet. Rihanna’s roughly seem to be about as twice as long as Gaga’s do – Oh na na, it’s a no-no.