Socially Analyzing: Search and Social Hawaii

Aloha! I’m totally amped up on amazing Hawaiian coffee, so I’m ready for lighting-fast typing. Dennis Yu, on Twitter @DennisYu, talks about how to effectively report social media efforts. He has just informed us that there is no PowerPoint for this presentation. He is showing us a Facebook page for Lane Bryant, a client of his. They have an update that says “Click like if you’d like to win a pair of jeans” – he’s had more than 400 clicks in the past couple minutes, more than 700 total. This is engagement.

Brands realize that once they build a voice, people bite back. In the past couple minutes, those likes on Lane Bryant went up to a thousand just as we were sitting here. He says this active fan base has taken more than a year to build; they reward awesome comments with gift certificates, too.

He asks us how we know what the right comparisons are to other brands in the social space. If you have 30 million fans, the board of a company would ask, “Great, is that making us money?” We are talking about the ROI here.

The ROI of social media almost never happens on Facebook. You see the ROI of social meda later, not when someone engages or likes something. He did some tests with major retailers and results showed ROI is almost always negative. Yet there is usually almost a 700 percent lift in other channels outside of social. Unless you set up your tests properly to identify and track or use split tests, you cannot measure the ROI.

The top of the social media funnel is engagement and the bottom is the sale. You must get them to a conversion. Many companies have several people involved in this funnel.

If you’re not as engaged with your community as you would be with your own friends, you suck as a brand on Facebook. Always interact with comments, even if it’s just a “like” for their comment. You can have people just monitoring that and doing it as soon as it comes in.

He is examining a fan of the Lane Bryant page; he is looking at her info and asking, “Do you think we can learn a little bit about her?” Laura Lippay, the MC of the sessions, asks, “Are you pulling in all that data?” Dennis: “Oh yeah.”

He is looking at the competitive portfolio of Lane Bryant on Facebook and analyzing those competitors against Lane Bryant. How much you post depends on your engagement page and what’s expected of you as a brand. Think a news profile versus a retailer. Apply different benchmarks for different brands. You can apply call center metrics to the way you manage your page.

Respond to everyone, don’t let the ball stop. Check out the top interests of your fans, you’ll know how to craft your messaging. Even if it’s just regional differences.

He’s going through a tool that he has that shows a lot of interesting data in Facebook that allows him to analyze. Laura asks where you can get the tool. Dennis says he doesn’t want to turn into a sales pitch, but it’s available.

[It’s incredible, but the likes on the Lane Bryant page just went up to more than 3,000 in the past few minutes.]

If you are not engaging, if you autotweet, you’re going to be shut down. Facebook’s EdgeRank already shuts down a ton of content that’s being posted. It used to be that the Like was the connection, but now there are a ton of different variables for ranking content in Facebook. EdgeRank is a connection between objects in Facebook. Users vote for one another when they interact.

He is showing how to use SQL in finding information about the people in Facebook. There is a ton of information you can extract from the Graph API. You can spend days spying, er, doing research on people, gathering data and then figuring out what you are going to do about it.

He is now browsing Facebook’s Open Graph, like X Games and its posts. You can write a script to pull any information you want from pages, fans, posts, etc. Then you can look people up from there. If you have information and processes with it, not the fluffy “social media is big, we need to spend time,” you can really do something with social media.

If someone tells you the best time to post to your social media accounts, you have to challenge that and figure out what the best time for your brand is.

Think about this: If you’re a marketer, how do you make your brand a verb? What verbs describe your brand? How can those verbs increase engagement? How can you attribute that engagement? How many touches does it take to drive the conversion? Attribution is a sticky exercise.

He wishes there was a secret answer for analytics for Facebook. The value of your Facebook fan is the same as the value of those emails in your list.

Time for Q&A.

Q: Dennis, how many of the Lane Bryant likes are first-time ever?
A: About 15 percent. It’s tiered interaction. First-level, second-level, etc. Showing up in the news feeds is first before you even get participation. You earn the right to do that. One out of every four or five posts are sales-y. Most is engagement. A comment from a fan is a second-level interaction.

Q: If I don’t succeed in the news feed, I can buy sponsored stories?
A: Yes, you can. Whether it’s organic or not, it’s weighted the same.

Q: Most of my clients have less than 10,000 fans and can only dream about that number. Is there any tools we can use.
A: Only way to get the data you need is from the Graph API. It’s not Google Analytics.

Jessica Lee is the founder and chief creative for bizbuzzcontent Inc., a marketing boutique that focuses on digital content strategy and professional writing services for businesses.

See Jessica's author page for links to connect on social media.