Social marketers at big companies (and product managers around the office…Chris) buy fake followers to gain credibility, justify their social spend, and as a vanity metric. It makes a meeting with your boss a lot easier when you can say “we gained 100 thousand followers this week”.

As an analytics-driven social media manager, I have a hard time understanding the value of fake followers. They can’t boost my engagement metrics. They can’t drive traffic to my site. They can’t engage influencers or convert into leads.

But when your competitors are buying fake fans, you may need to explain to your boss why the disparity between your account and theirs is so large, and justify the difference in quality. There are several key indicators to focus on here, which you can find within your favorite Simply Measured reports.

Are They Showing Losses?

Facebook and Twitter regularly sweep their system to delete spam accounts. While 20 million spam accounts can’t be completely eradicated overnight, these accounts are deleted frequently, and the more fake followers your competitor has, the more the deactivation is apparent. This can be a stronger indicator than growth. Look for steep drops in a single day.

Are They Seeing Spikes?

If you haven’t looked in a while, and all of a sudden your competition seems to be crushing you on social, don’t despair right away. Look for massive spikes. If there aren’t any crazy initiatives on the brand profile that appear to have driven that activity, chances are they’re not legit accounts. In this example, we compared four real competitors in an industry, and the spikes for Competitor #4 demonstrate two distinct spikes that can’t be attributed to a social campaign.

Does The Engagement Fit?

In this same competitive set, we took a look at the engagement totals and engagement percentages for each company. Competitor #4, who’d shown signs of spam fan total, their total engagement doesn’t tell a story, but their “Engagement as a Percentage of Fans” tells you what percentage of their audience is interacting with the page. Across this industry, the brand is seeing drastically lower engagement as a percentage of fans than the other brands. This means a higher percentage of their audience isn’t involved, and a good reason to believe a large chunk of them are fake.

To analyze your social profiles against your competitors, sign up for a free 14 Day Trial. For more insight, follow @SimplyMeasured on Twitter.

However, Facebook’s infamous People Talking About This (PTAT) metric puts a bit of a wrench in this equation. Typically, engagement is an aggregate measure of content interactions which give us a consistent way to compare networks, campaigns, or communities. You would think that PTAT correlates with engagement metrics, but that isn’t always the case.

If you’re adding PTAT to your social media KPIs, it’s important to know what drives PTAT and the often disconnect from engagement. Using Nike Golf’s Facebook Analytics as an example, we can clearly see how PTAT doesn’t correlate with engagement.

Why Don’t My PTAT and Engagement Trends Match?

The first place your PTAT and engagement stats diverge is in time series data.

Why? The biggest driver here comes down to the fact that PTAT is a trailing 7 day metric. This has a smoothing effect on the data as you can see above when compared to the main underlying drivers (content engagement and page likes).

Rapid Fan Growth Skews PTAT vs. Engagement

Competitive context can help expose this connection. The fastest growing page will typically be the PTAT leader instead of the engagement leader. Nike is growing fans like crazy – so their PTAT leads.

But, the engagement story is much different, as the chart below highlights.

Why? This also comes back to the definition of PTAT: “Total number of unique people who created a story of any kind about your page or on your page. This includes page likes, wall posts, mentions, and any engagement with one of your posts.” Page likes aren’t included in engagement metrics, and tell a completely different story.

PTAT Can Have an Inverse Correlation with Engagement Rate

Why? Again, this comes back to aggressive fan growth driving PTAT instead of pure engagement. Pages that grow fans like crazy but do not keep pace with engageming content, we see PTAT trend up and engagement rates fall. In these cases, PTAT can be a misleading indicator for performance.

Crushing Your PTAT Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Your Crushing Your Content

Again we can see how Nike Golf has the largest PTAT, but posts less frequently than industry average. PTAT doesn’t give you much guidance about the volume or quality of content being created.

Take-Away:

PTAT certainly has a place in your Facebook Analytics, but it’s important to keep it in context with your other engagement metrics.

To get deeper Facebook Analytics and competitive benchmarks, request a free trial of Simply Measured, and be sure to follow @simplymeasured on Twitter for more insight and analysis.

Not only are the largest companies in the world using Instagram, they’re using it well. The Instagram audience of Interbrand 100 companies dwarfs that of Interbrand companies on Pinterest.

Starbucks, Nike and MTV each have over 1 million followers on the mobile network, and aren’t wasting any time engaging with those followers. We recently profiled MTV’s social campaigns around their Movie Awards, and this study reveals the unprecedented engagement with Instagram photos surrounding the event.

To analyze your own Instagram profile (or a competitor), try our Free Instagram Report, or request a trial of our enterprise platform which offers a complete suite of social media analytics and reporting.

See how brands are performing on Instagram, and what you can learn to benefit your company or digital agency from their activity.

Since the service is still new, it can be hard for businesses to pinpoint the methods and practices used for optimization. For search marketers, this is commonly known as SEO (search engine optimization), but GSO (Graph Search Optimization) isn’t as widely understood.

By better understanding how to optimize for Graph Search, you can get a leg up on the competition.

Graph Search will rank content based on specific user-driven metrics, so these are the ones you should focus on. With The Facebook Insight Report from Simply Measured, you get access to user-specific analysis that can provide the tools for optimizing your Graph Search rankings.

Here are five key metrics to focus on while ramping up your GSO.

1. People Talking About This (PTAT): 

People Talking About This – or PTAT – has created some confusion among Facebook marketers. PTAT is a sum total of users creating stories about your page, including Likes, Shares, Mentions, Comments, and several other ways for your page to show up in a newsfeed. PTAT is a key factor in the way Graph Search will rank content. The more interaction, engagement, and exposure your page and content gets, the more likely it is to show up in a search result.

2. Engagement On Outbound Content:

Hand-in-hand with PTAT is the engagement on your outbound content, or content that you’ve created on your page. Since the goal with Graph Search will be to have your brand generated page, posts and comments show up at the top, this is an important metric to focus on. Facebook bases relevance on a number of factors, one of which is the number of “likes” your content has gotten from the searcher’s network of friends (or even, friends of friends, as a secondary level). Focus on content, stories, and comments that are garnering the most likes and overall engagement.

3. Page Fan Demographic Profile:

Your demographic metrics give you valuable insight into the type of users interacting with your brand. Cater to your market. If you’re a brand with more than one location, claim brand pages for each. Graph Search favors localized content. If your page caters to a specific location or type of clientele, your profile should be rich with content and keywords that promote this. Optimize your “About” tab to reflect this.

4. Stories On User Generated Content:

Graph Search is based on a user’s connections to friends. Stories generated by users is a very important metric in this regard. Your page and content should be sharable, and users should have an incentive to promote your brand on their own. Contests and promotions that encourage mentions of your page are a good way to gain relevance in graph searches among their connections.

5. Top Keywords From Comments:

Focusing on the keywords present in comments can provide two different sets of benefits. For one, you can cater content to the conversations people are having, and drive search relevance through engaging more thoroughly with your active audience. Secondly, if the conversations aren’t creating the content you’d like to see to drive more traffic to your page, you can focus a campaign on steering conversations back toward product or service specific topics that will help your GSO ranking.

To dig into your own Facebook Insight Metrics, sign up for a free 14 Day Trial of Simply Measured’s full suite of social analytics, and for more Facebook insight, become a fan of our Facebook fan page. While you’re there, be sure to comment about software, Excel features and social media analytics…you know…for our GSO.

]]> http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/05/06/5-facebook-metrics-for-optimizing-graph-search/feed/ 0 http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/05/03/eye-on-the-prize-social-media-contests-and-sweepstakes/ http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/05/03/eye-on-the-prize-social-media-contests-and-sweepstakes/#comments Fri, 03 May 2013 16:55:55 +0000 Kevin Shively http://simplymeasured.com/?p=163318 Yesterday, I “liked” the Facebook page of a golf brand and shared their photo with all of my friends. I can’t even tell you the name of the brand.

Within 5 minutes, four of my friends had also “liked” the page, and shared the same photo (which I’d shared because a friend of mine liked their page and shared it).

I may not remember who the brand is, but now that I’m a page fan, they can remind me who they are any time they want to.

Why’d we all get so involved with this random golf club manufacturer? The photo was advertising a free set of clubs, and a weekend at an Arizona golf resort to a random person who liked the page and shared the photo. Ten seconds of work to enter a sweepstakes none of us had much of a chance at winning, and now this company has a gang of followers with an interest in their product. Any time they want, they can reach out with future promotions, products, and offers, knowing it’ll reach us.

Sweepstakes and contests are an increasingly popular component to social media strategy. PR Week’s Tanya Lewis just released her new ebook, Eye On The Prize: How Brands are Winning with social media contests and sweepstakes. Lewis contacted us for some analytics on large brands who are running social contests and sweepstakes, and the result is a very compelling and insightful guide. Take a second to download your copy for free. You won’t regret it:

This strategy has resulted in the most successful US alcohol launch since 2005, and paved the way for Bud Light Platinum to continue growing today. How’d they do it? Together with Translation and Anheuser Busch, we took a look back at the success of the launch, highlighting the key components, lessons, and successes in this infographic.

Simply Measured can help your company track, analyze, and optimize our own campaigns. Sign up for a free 14 day trial to find out how, and follow us on Twitter for more social stories and analytics insight.

It’s become common practice for a show to casually toss a hashtag in the corner of the TV screen, but the tricky part is figuring out what comes next. The Voice and NBC have involved Twitter so heavily in the viewing experience that the end result is a fully integrated, interested, and engaged audience for advertisers and brands to reach.

“Second Screen Engagement” is a trend that’s causing advertisers and networks to re-evaluate their strategies. It’s why NBC is doubling down on the trend with Million Second Quiz and why advertisers are getting more and more involved with their campaigns.

To better understand the benefit of a second screen audience, we analyzed The Voice throughout the first month of the current season using Simply Measured’s suite of Twitter reporting tools. Take a look at how TV audiences are engaging online:

Audience Breakdown

The Voice is sitting on a mountain of Twitter Followers – 37.5 million to be exact – and while they can’t take credit for accumulating the entire audience, they can take credit for the strategy that brought it to the show. Like most reality music competitions (i.e. American Idol, The X Factor), The Voice employs a panel of celebrities, but unlike other shows, the coaches become involved in the competition. This competitive nature is most effective when fans feel involved. Enter Twitter.

Celebrity Coaches Drive Traffic

Adam Levine and Blake Shelton have been with the show since inception, but when the producers of The Voice replaced the other two hosts, they did so with a plan. Shakira and Usher aren’t only household names, they’re incredibly popular on Twitter. Shakira alone has over 20 million followers, and as a bonus, she adds a Latin audience that wasn’t as accessible last season.

The Voice doesn’t stop there. They employ singer Christina Millian as their “Social Media Correspondent”, sharing Tweets on TV and engaging with fans on Twitter.

All four of the celebrity “coaches” banter and trash talk on Twitter as well, using the various hashtags associated with specific episodes, but mainly using #TheVoice. Due to heavy promotion and interest in the show, the hashtag averages over 150 thousand mentions on weeks the show airs, which is widely thanks to conversations driven by the celebrity judges (that are also displayed on the TV screen during the show).

Strategic Timing

Tweets by the coaches are timed specifically with peak activity on show nights. This drives more of their audience into the Twitter conversation, and drastically increases the potential impressions of the show’s hashtag. Last week, the two top Tweets were by Usher and Shelton, driving higher engagement on both Monday and Tuesday (the show airs twice a week).

Coaches also drive visibility for the show’s brand profile on off days, like the example above of Shakira sharing a behind-the-scenes moment from that week’s show. The Tweet had over 3,000  Retweets and 3,000 favorites.

How Brands Fit In

During the premier episode, Victoria’s Secret aired an commercial, and immediately followed up with a brand post at the peak of traffic, capitalizing on the hashtag’s massive reach with an embedded YouTube video of the ad. In an industry based on estimated reach, the sheer potential on Twitter becomes an attractive, and easily accessible addition.

Victoria’s Secret isn’t the only brand to realize this. Sprint, another major advertising partner of the show has gotten involved by promoting the hashtag and recommending episodes of The Voice to their own audience. Ebay has driven traffic to their own site by sharing a donation by coach Adam Levine, using the hashtag.

People Magazine is among several media outlets cashing in on the hype around #TheVoice. Through partnerships with NBC, several of these media publications gain access to behind-the-scenes details. In addition to promoting in print, People has become an expert at leveraging content and excitement on Twitter.

Starbucks Thinks Big

Most impressive is the partnership that The Voice has with Starbucks, who not only advertises during the show, but also has a double shot of sweet product placement in every coach’s cup holder, and in addition to the hashtag, has partnered with @NBCTheVoice to promote their “global month of service” community service campaign.

This partnership has proven beneficial for Starbucks, who’s capitalized on the 500 thousand mentions, Retweets and replies seen by @NBCTheVoice since the show started last month.

The Benefit of Engaging Early

Like any TV show, the premier drives the highest ratings. This is the same on Twitter. The lesson for brands looking to capitalize on a show’s Twitter activity is twofold. While the audience of @NBCTheVoice had it’s peak during the first episode, there’s a greater opportunity to stand out in the crowd later in the season, reaching a more invested viewing audience. In the case of @NBCTheVoice, that audience is still 40 thousand engagements deep on peak nights, and that’s hard to ignore.

To analyze your own Twitter account, or a campaign on the network, sign up for a 14 day free trial. For more pop culture analysis and data, follow @SimplyMeasured on Twitter.

This presents some exciting possibilities for advertisers, but can also present some unique challenges.

For the most part, companies have different personnel managing their paid and social channels. As a social media manager, you have a unique opportunity to help provide crucial data for the paid search manager who owns these Twitter ads.

While the Twitter Ads dashboard recently added analytics, it can’t showcase keywords trending in your industry. Unless your goal is to blanket the Twitterverse with generic terms that will canvas users across the board (and limit the return on your investment), you can help provide valuable insight.

How? With the same analytics and reporting tools you use to measure your own performance.

Lets use Red Bull as an example to break down some different tactics that may help add value to your Twitter ad campaigns.

Step 1: Identify Key Terms

As a social media manager, tracking mentions of your brand is a valuable engagement tactic. This can also be applied to your paid campaigns. Track mentions of your brand that don’t include your @handle. Using the Simply Measured Conversation Driver report, you can now identify the top 50 keywords within all Tweets containing your brand’s name, tracking their usage over time.

In the above example, we took a look at mentions of “Red Bull” on Twitter over the last two days. The majority of this traffic was doing so in relation to a specific set of keywords surrounding their Bedroom Jam  promotion for undiscovered bands. This type of analysis can provide great insight to Red Bull’s digital ad team, who can glean a focal point (mentions of Bedroom Jam 2013, etc) and a goal for their campaign (integrating their brand properties into the conversation, gaining exposure among interested participants, and promoting their own message around the festival).

Step 2: Focus on Impact

An important practice for any paid (or social) campaign is to identify the scope of your campaign. There are a number of ways to do this, from a simple Twitter Search, to Google Trends. The goal here is to get a ballpark of the volume you can expect to see, and give you an idea of whether you should narrow or expand your targeted audience.

Twitter Search:

Twitter’s internal search is a great way to find conversation trands and topics within the Twitter ecosystem. Click on the “advanced search” option to do a more complex search of specific phrases, keywords, and topics.

Google Trends:

Google Trends can give you a long-term snapshot, as well as projections and geographic data, but the key takeaway for our purpose here is their “related terms” section that will help inform targeted keyword decisions. In Red Bull’s case, the majority of mentions also include keywords related to their racing team. This gives the brand some topics to focus on with their keyword campaign.

Step 3: Influencing the Influencers

It’s not enough to find out that the conversation you’re targeting exists. Does it exist among potential customers, clients or business partners? You’re paying for these timeline ads, so it’s important that they’re reaching the right timelines.

Identify the influencers who are talking about your targeted keyword. Are they regularly mentioning that keyword? Do they have a large following? Are they influential among their audience? These are things to focus on when determining whether or not a campaign is worth your budget.

For more insight on social analytics use cases, follow @SimplyMeasured on Twitter, or reach out today to sign up for a free 14 day trial.

We’ve been tracking #NowPlaying since the service launched, and the tug-of-war between the two services has remained neck and neck. Take a look:

Which Music Service is Winning the Shares?

After five days, 99,276 #NowPlaying Tweets have been posted linking to one of the three services that Twitter Music supports (iTunes, Spotify & Rdio). This total excludes regular Tweets using the hashtag, which is well over a million posts.

Spotify still leads the ranks, with 46,031 Tweets through Monday, but iTunes (apple.com) has won the last two days, and is close behind Spotify at 44,535. Rdio is a distant 3rd with only 8,710 shares, which is less than either Spotify or iTunes tallied during the first 24 hours.

How is iTunes Gaining Ground?

iTunes hasn’t seen the sustained use that Spotify has, but several key Tweets linking to iTunes tracks have put the service in the running. On Monday April 22nd, one Tweet received over 1,200 Retweets, amplifying iTunes exposure within the conversation.

Early Adoption

On Day 1, Spotify edged out iTunes (apple.com) plays  by less than 400 links. While it’s too soon to say, we assume Spotify holds the reigns because as a subscription service, you don’t have to purchase a single to listen to the entire thing.

Rdio is a similar service, but is younger and doesn’t have the audience that Spotify has, let alone iTunes.

Are Artists Getting Involved?

Snoop Dogg was the most popular Tweeter to share out his tunes on day one of the music service. His Tweet about his song with Miley Cyrus generated over 10 million potential impressions. Sean Kingston, Blake Shelton and Jason Derulo have also been getting involved. The #NowPlaying feature is expected to be an important promotional tool for popular artists with large Twitter followings.

Email us with questions about tracking your own campaign, and follow @SimplyMeasured on Twitter for more insight.

]]> http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/04/23/spotify-vs-itunes-which-service-is-winning-with-twitter-music/feed/ 0 http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/04/17/the-twitter-analytics-behind-americanairs-grounding/ http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/04/17/the-twitter-analytics-behind-americanairs-grounding/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:22:25 +0000 Kevin Shively http://simplymeasured.com/?p=162824 With tens of thousands of American Airlines passengers grounded by an issue with their reservation system, the @AmericanAir Twitter handle lit up with over 9,500 frustrated Tweets.

When a disaster like this happens, and a social media team sees an influx of activity, it can be almost impossible to keep up.

Here’s what American Airlines did to stay with the throngs of folks Tweeting at the ticket counter.

During the peak hour (3PM PST), @AmericanAir was getting over 2,400 inbound Tweets, and throughout the course of the day, fired off over 1,200 of their own as they raced to keep up with the traffic.

Of the Tweets @AmericanAir responded to, almost 45% heard back in under 30 minutes. Once flights were restored, the airline continued to react on Twitter well into the night.

Where were people Tweeting?

The majority of Tweets came from Dallas, which also happens to be a hub of American Airlines’ operation.  Thousands of people were stuck in the Dallas airport all day. New York, Chicago and LA joined Dallas as the cities (or more likely, specific airports) with the most Twitter traffic.

This analysis was conducted using Simply Measured’s Twitter Account and Twitter Customer Service Reports, both of which are available as part of a free 14 Day Trial.

For regular analysis of social media, PR and customer service events, be sure to follow @SimplyMeasured on Twitter.