Digital CPG Blog

Something I’ve noticed on our own Facebook and Twitter pages is that Facebook is more useful. In talking to other Community Managers it varies, but e-commerce brands typically find Facebook to be superior. New research backs this up.

“Using data from the sites that it powers daily deals for, ChompOn examined the conversion rate and action for deals shared on Facebook and Twitter,” reports Tech Crunch.

According to the startup, the value of a Facebook share is $14 and the value of a Tweet is $5. By comparison, ChompOn says the value of a Facebook like is $8 and the value of a Twitter Follow is $2.

“We’ve seen other data that shows the higher value of a Facebook share over a Tweet. Eventbrite recently reported that a share with Facebook friends results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales whereas a Twitter share is only worth $0.43.”

“As we wrote back then,” Tech Crunch reminds us, “Facebook and email most closely match your real friends. In the context of events, this produces better conversions. But it’s interesting to see that in terms of commerce, Facebook again provides a higher value than Twitter in terms of conversions.”

Sure is. So, where are you putting your resources?

Ad Age recently had a great interview with Virgin America’s top marketer Porter Gale. Some of the more interesting revelations were that Virgin does see a positive financial return from it’s social media efforts and why they won’t be using TV anytime soon for their marketing efforts. Read our favorite excerpts below:

Ad Age: What are you getting out of Twitter and Facebook?

Ms. Gale: We found social media is an amazing channel for us in terms of engagement with our fans and guests. We are also finding that it is a nice channel for guest service. When we have had to cancel flights due to storms we have been able to connect with people via Twitter and re-accommodate them. It has a revenue component for us that we have been able to track and can actually see when sales are closed if someone has come from Twitter or Facebook. So it’s serving a lot of functions for us.

Ad Age: Is it driving a significant amount of revenue for the airline?

Ms. Gale: It is constantly increasing in terms of the revenue that it is bringing in so we are happy about that. In particular, at one point we did a sale with Twitter called the Fly Forward, Give Back sale and they used promoted tweets to help push it. And that was actually our fifth-most successful day ever in terms of ticket sales.

Ad Age: How far do you think word-of-mouth and positive buzz can carry you before you have to start investing significantly in TV and print media?

Ms. Gale: The positive halo around our brand is amazing right now. We have increased our Net Promoter score to a number that rivals Apple. Word-of-mouth can carry us a long way, so I don’t believe we will be doing TV anytime soon, being that we are still in only local markets. We don’t have the footprint where TV makes sense for us. The other reason TV isn’t that high on our list is that a large percentage of our sales are done on our website and things we can do that can capture a person while they are on their laptop is that much closer to a sale. So I don’t see TV in our future. We, potentially, will use more print as we try to get more business travelers into the brand. Now that we have more cities and will be announcing more in the near future we become a more interesting play for business travelers. But the bulk of our buy will continue to be online, out-of-home, partnership marketing and untraditional efforts.

Do you think that CPG marketers could take the same approach or is the CPG market so entrenched in television advertising and marketing that a statement declaring Twitter and Facebook superior is way far off?

Now that we know how valuable Facebook is as platform for our customers to engage with us, let’s talk about how to manage those Facebook pages. Are you ignoring your page? eConsultancy has some thoughts for you:

A Facebook page is a commitment that local brands with 50 000+ fans often forget they have. Some forget that store, and many don’t even publish news on it. Does this mean they have changed their social media agency, or that their budget ran out?

It can be like walking in an empty store. You open the page, and the last news is coming from December 2009, more than a year ago. This is not a good sign for companies. Companies should take their fans seriously, if there are 5 000, 50 000, or 5m. They should take care of their community on Facebook.

We can see the level of commitment if we look at the top brands on Facebook, who by now are all managing their Facebook pages and branding them, except for Converse, which doesn’t even have a Facebook landing page.

The top brands on Facebook are really taking care of their pages. Four of the 10 have already upgraded to the new Facebook page layout (Red Bull, Disney, and Starbucks, Victoria Secret), which was rolled out on Thursday night, a great sign that some companies can really be flexible on social media. The dynamic approach is the right approach when it comes to marketing on Facebook.

The new Facebook page layout makes it much easier to engage with fans since you now have notifications and the layout resembles profile pages, which hopefully reminds fans that company pages have faces – and personalities – behind them. So act like it.

E-Consultancy’s best practices guide to Facebook Pages is out and includes the following tidbits:

Why do people follow brands on Facebook?

This was a multiple-choice question where more than one answer could be selected, if applicable. The most common reason was to be notified of special offers (70%). Other reasons included shopping (38%), to be follow events (38%) and to leave feedback (29%).

How many different brands do people follow?

Between two and five is the norm, though 35% of people will follow more than five brands. 13% of respondents said they followed more than 10 brands on Facebook.

How do people find a Facebook page?

People typically discover Facebook Pages via the company website, or having been recommended by a friend. Almost 60% of people have recommended a brand to friends.

I think the numbers are a bit misleading though because people also follow brands simply for the interaction. Yes, it’s great if you can have a deal, but as we see more and more companies put up Facebook pages, your content and voice will differentiate you over how low your discount can go.

Uh oh. Just  because there aren’t lines online doesn’t mean consumers are happy with their e-commerce experience. The annual ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) E-Commerce report was released from ForeSee Results last week and explains that customer satisfaction with e-commerce websites is slumping to its lowest score since 2004.

The report shows that online retail dips 3.6% to 80 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale, as customer satisfaction with smaller e-retailers suffers a major drop.  The “all others” category, which is an aggregate of smaller e-retailers and other companies not individually measured, plunges 6% to 78.

Download the full report here.

Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc., gives his fascinating take on the social web:

Rushkoff thinks branding is irrelevant in the age of the social network. He compares social networks to the original bazaars and marketplaces of the past. The bazaar was the center of commerce, gossip, political debate and more. He says that people weren’t interested in “branding” then – they were interested in exchanging factual (or supposedly factual) information.

Rushkoff gives the example of the Carl’s Jr. advertising campaign in which Paris Hilton ate a cheese burger while washing a car. Rushkoff says that even though this campaign was considered a “viral success,” sales at Carl’s Jr. actually went down while the ad was circulating. People were sharing the video on social networks, but it didn’t translate into sales for the company.

On the other hand, he says, social media has proven to be an effective medium for damage control. It’s a good way to spread information (I would add that it’s also a good way to spread misinformation). He says actual information, and not branding, is the currency of social networks.

He takes another example of corporate branding: the Keebler Elves. He says the elves were created to keep people from thinking about how Keebler cookies were actually made. He says no one is going to talk about the Keebler Elves on social media, but they might talk about the ingredients used in the cookies and whether they’re organic or what the environmental impact of the product’s packaging. In other words, people will talk about the actual product, but not the mythology.

Rushkoff says branding has no future, but products might if the people making them are willing to engage their customers honestly through social media.

Is that true? Is branding done for and what implications does that have for marketing?

Are you ready to make a good first impression? I sure hope so because new research has ”found that 26% of the time, customers never launch a mobile application they’ve download more than once. In a report titled ‘First Impressions Matter,’ Localytics detailed its findings, which includes both good news and bad.”

Want to know how to keep those who have downloaded your app opening it more than just once? Keep reading:

“As we noted late last year, mobile developers have been working to increase user retention and loyalty through a number of means in this crowded app ecosystem by using in-app purchases, subscriptions that deliver new content, notifications and app updates to encourage customers to return to their apps. At the time, however, Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship, a mobile notifications provider, said that there’s only a 5% retention rate on free apps after 30 days. In that case, the numbers from Localytics are actually better news than expected.”

Are consumers experiencing Facebook fan fatigue already? Maybe, because now it is costing more to get a consumer to “like” your brand page:

Web analytics provider Webtrends is, however, shedding some light on costs. It looked at more than 11,000 Facebook advertising campaigns which sought to drive users to ‘like‘ the advertiser’s Facebook Page and found that achieving the desired is costing marketers $1.07 per conversion. It also discovered that costs are rising. In 2009, these ads had an average CPM of 17 cents. Last year, that rose to 25 cents. At the same time, click-throughs decreased, going from .063% in 2009 to .051% in 2010.

Perhaps that is cheap for some, but only if you can actually activate your Facebook fan base. How does your brand go about that?

“The idea of turning your mobile smartphone into a mobile wallet is an appealing one. There is no device that spends as much time in our personal proximity than a mobile phone, much more than wallets,” reports Douglas Orr. Here are 5 reasons why mobile will get mainstream adoption this year:

1. Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC technology when included in your mobile phone enables a secure connection between the phone and another NFC enabled device. As a consumer you might use this to get more information about an offer on a product by tapping an NFC enabled shelf price tag (much easier than a bar code). More excitingly, you may be able to make your purchases at the check-out.

2. Apple’s iPhone 5. A simple tick of the upgrade box and your iTunes account is now an iWallet. This device is also expected to support NFC. In fact: in light of all of the patents that Apple have filed for novel uses of NFC technology to pay for everything from entertainment tickets to intelligent checkout baskets some belief that NFC and payments will be the focus of Apple’s new phone.

3. Mobile Wallets. True wallet functionality that enables small purchases is being rolled out in 2011 by a variety of operators, manufactures and others. You will be able to not only make purchases but also split a restaurant bill and transfer money to a friend in a way that is easy and fun.

4. Affordable mobile solutions for retailers. Platforms are now available that enable a technical integration with existing online solutions that are affordable, easy to implement yet secure. The transaction costs are also coming down to a level in line with other existing payment solutions. Leading players in this space to watch include PayPal, Cardinal Commerce, PayThru and Monetise.

5.VC Investment There are truly colossal sums of investment being made by VCs large and small on the mobile space. Mobile VC investment made up 34% of ALL tech venture investment in 2010, totalling $6.1bn.

Read three more reasons here. Do you think wallets will become as redundant as wristwatches? Or does the mobile market still have a ways to go?

Where will advertising be in 4 years? Take a look at Google’s fascinating predictions:

1) 50% of online ads will have video in them and be bought on a cost-per-view basis. Today, 24 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube each minute. Google Tuesday officially launched two YouTube video formats, TrueView, based on a cost-per-view advertising model after dabbling in it for nearly a year. This means advertisers only pay when consumers chose to watch the advertisement. TrueView will roll out later this year.

2) 50% of all display advertising targeted to a specific audience will rely on real-time bidding.

3) Mobile will become the No. 1 screen for advertising. The mobile screen will become the first screen that consumers go to on a variety of mobile devices.

4) Five new metrics will emerge to measure the success of ad campaigns. They will become more successful and important. Some exist already: engagement and interaction rates in rich media, video view, and impact on Web search results. Others might include sentiment analysis to measure the viral influence and the tone of consumer chatter about the brand across the Internet. Or, measure foot traffic into the store through geo-based technology.

5) 75% of ads will become socially enabled. In the long term, all ads will become social as the industry moves to an always-on communication.

6) 50% of brand campaigns will run rich media in the ads, up from 6% during the last year.

7) Display advertising will become a $50 billion industry. Google advertisers have increased the amount they spend annually with the technology company about 75% during the last year.

(via Collaborative Blog).