We plotted out every team’s fan count, engagement rate (social metrics), win/loss record, average attendance, merchandise sales, and the population of the city the team plays in (real-world data), looking for correlations and patterns. Ultimately, the best metric was the ratio of average attendence to fan count, though looking at Merchandise sales and standings was also enlightening: The Yankees have the most fans by far (8,474,881). This is not surprising. They have the biggest city (pop. 8,175,133), the highest merchandise sales, and the third best record in the league (60.3%), and have been a consistenly winning team for generations.
The Nationals have the least fans (230,581), which is somewhat surprising, considering they have the fourth best record (58.5%) and a relatively big population (601,723, compared to say, St. Louis’ population of 319,294).
There is no significant difference in the frequency or quality of the posts made by the Yankees and the Nationals.
The teams with the best merchandise sales (New York and Boston) are also the two pages with the most fans, and have the best attendance-fans ratio (0.5 : 100 and 0.7 : 100, respectively; the average is 1 : 25).-With very few discrepencies, the top ten teams that sold the most merchandise correspond with the ten teams with most fans (I.e. NY is #1 in merch sales and in fans, etc.).-Teams with inflated fan counts (NY, Boston, SF, etc.) likely have many fans that don’t live where the team plays.
The ratio of Yankees fans to Mets fans (8,474,881 : 626,869) is far more extreme than the ratio of average attedance (41,570 : 27,458).Team pages do a good job of posting photos, questions, short messages, occasional contests, videos, etc. One possible area of improvement would be to focus more on posting before a game than only doing recap posts.The team with the highest engagement by far is the Dodgers, who have won 61.8% of their games this season. The teams with the next highest engagement rates, the Mets and the Angels, are not ranked as well this year (both currently at 53.6%).
There seems to be a stronger connection in the fact that two of the teams with the best engagement rates are the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Angels (37.2% and 26.8% respectively). The Mets have a 27.5% engagement rate, and it can be presumed that the Yankees’ highly inflated fan count leads to low engagement. Most of the teams with above-average engagements rates are among the larger cities in the league (LA, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Fort Worth).
There are of course, large cities with poor engagement (Toronto or San Diego, for example), but the only real standout is the smallest city in the league, Pittsburgh, with a high engagement rate.of 27.7%, the 6th highest in the league.
The Dodgers are third in merchandise sales, but other high sellers have poor engagement rates such so that the metrics don’t correlate. Boston, number 2 in merch sales is third to last in fan engagement.
We compared attendance to population, and then compared that to engagement, but data did not correlate well.
There seems to be a difference between people who go to games and people who engage on Facebook. For instance, Atlanta is a small city (pop. 420,003, the 9th smallest in the league) with high average attendance (29,852, well over the league average), and yet the team’s page has an engagement rate of 11.21%- far from remarkable. Cincinnati is another example. They have a killer attendance-population ratio (27,163 : 296,943) and has the second worst engagement in the league- 1.62%.
If you’re a data monkey and would like to see the numbers for yourself, You can check it out here. You can also check out the technology we used to get these numbers and get your free trial over at Blitzmetrics.com
Credit unions tend to have fewer fans than large national banks making higher engagement rates easier to attain. 8 of the top 10 in terms of fan count are banks.
Chase: 3,364,793 fans, Capital One: 2,556,273 fans, American Express: 2,470,220 fans
These three banks account for about 85% of the market share
Since engagement percent is calculated with fan count in the denominator, smaller pages tend to have higher engagement.
YOUR Community Credit Union with 39.01%, while TDECU has 23.89%
Banks hold the top seven spots for highest Share of Voice (% of interactions across the industry).
Citi has 22.41% SOV, BOA has 16.8% SOV although it should be noted that BOA suffers from more negative sentiment than most other banks. Wells Fargo is at 15.92% after that there is a steep decline; American Express has 8.33% SOV.
Which is better: Fan count or engagement?
Catch 22. We want to raise both!
Use sponsored stories to:
Page Like Story: Build fan base
Page Post Ad: Push good content to friends of fans.
Content:
Most of these banks heavily rely on pictures and questions that encourage users to respond. Both banks and credit unions try to show that they support their local communities by giving away scholarships or sponsoring some charitable events or functions.
The biggest difference between banks and credit unions is the more socially successful credit unions generally offer far more incentives like giveaways and other promotional strategies that are then publicized on the wall for the whole community to see. Trips to Hawaii, $1,000 giveaways every day, etc, can be very powerful tools to foster community online.
Customer Relationship Management:
Complaints, even in financial institutions that are thriving in social media, are commonplace throughout the industry.
The faster a customer service representative responds to complaints, the better.
YOUR credit union has an average response time of 21.36 minutes
Usually complaints are responded to in the first hour. Otherwise others tend to jump in and express their dissatisfaction as well.
Action:
Credit unions need more fans and banks need more interactions. The credit unions need to use ads in tandem with their giveaways to attract more fans and more account holders. Banks should take a cue from credit unions and offer better incentives for participation.
Congratulations to Veronica Stecker and Gordmans “Choose Your Outfit” app’s acceptance into the Facebook Studio Awards! In addition to managing Gordmans’ television, print, and digital marketing, Veronica maintains a blog on all things social at VeronicaStecker.com. Working with BlitzLocal, the “Choose Your Outfit” app launched on July 18th, 2011 and ran through August 19th, 2011. The interactive app allowed Facebook fans to dress a male or female avatar with Gordmans’ clothing and accessories. In order to use the “Choose Your Outfit” app, users had to fan Gordmans’ Facebook page. After a fan had chosen their outfit on the app, they received a 15% off coupon for use at any of Gordmans’ locations. Gordmans ran sponsored story Like ads and Friend of Fan ads to drive users to the “Choose Your Outfit” app. The campaign drove 10,376,388 impressions and 8,771 connections. These are great statistics, but the most telling of all was that Gordmans saw their average transaction size more than double from $32.00 to $68.00. Keep up the fantastic work Veronica! There are surely great things coming from Gordmans after the amazing “Choose Your Outfit” app and campaign.
About the Author: Travis King is Manager of Facebook Marketing at BlitzLocal.
this is a guest post by Sundeep Kapur, his website is www.emailyogi.com, he’s also a Digital Evangelist for NCR.
Year over year the amount of content available on Facebook has increased dramatically. More brands are beginning to leverage this channel and while the number of consumers on Facebook continues to grow, it is going to get harder for brands to attentively engage consumers. Here are some key points highlighted in this report.
Successful brands need to focus on increasing interaction effectiveness with their consumer base. You do this by increasing the frequency of exposure, paying close attention to what is being discussed, and focused advertising.
Interactions with consumers will occur as you post and more than 70% of the interaction occurs within the first hour. So keep up your efforts on posting more often and monitoring right after you post versus posting and “going to bed.” Also, a post with a “question” tends to drive increased interaction.
Don’t forget that advertising does work. Your engagement rate can go up by 21% to 43% by knowing what to say, when to say, and of course how you say things on Facebook.
Brands have a significant opportunity to leverage social. The key to success is to understand how much of the social data is public, how to collect the data without alienating the consumer, and how best to quickly use the data that is collected.
The BlitzLocal team attended the Facebook Mobile Hack event in NYC on January 18th and took some notes on the newest updates to the mobile platform.
Read here to see what the Facebook engineers had to say, and hear what has worked for several case studies.
Intro: Facebook Platform for Mobile
How has the web changed since the early days?
Photos!
Facebook tagging (social)
Games
Not focused on rendering the best graphics, but social aspect
200 million people playing games on Facebook Platform
The rise of mobile
Across all levels of mobile devices
350M users of Facebook mobile
Twice as engaged as desktop version
Social + Mobile
Friends, Newsfeed, search, notifications, requests, bookmarks
Photography, websites, music, communication, games, books
Web Apps (HTML5) Development: Matt Kelly & Vikas Gupta
How to facilitate sharing with friends
Problematic when sharing over different types of devices
Apps don’t exist across platforms
Hard to share content between them even if apps exist
How can Facebook fix this?
The social channels
Requests: user to user direct messaging
Make sure they are super fast! Almost real-time
News Feed: one to many sharing with friends
Posting, view on wall, view on news feed
Open Graph: Lightweight, seamless sharing
Wherever your app lives or works, Facebook distributes properly so there are no holes.
Bookmarks
m.facebook.com
Gives users a specific spot to get back to your app
Mechanism for engagement
Native facebook for iPhone
Payments
Use credits to monetize apps
Build social from the ground up
Search, login auth, directed to app
Social apps work everywhere
iPhone, laptop, android, ipad, android tablet
HTML5 works across all platforms
Native App + Open Graph: Aryeh Selekman & Christine Abernathy:
iOS and Android + Facebook platform
Open Source Native SDKs
Developer app settings
Fields to configure iOS and Android apps
Linking and app distribution works appropriately if these fields are filled out correctly
Single Sign On (SSO) login without typing
Login with facebook button
Understanding Native Distribution
If an iOS or app exists, all requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories will link directly to native app (or apple store if not installed)
On android, requests/News Feed Stories/Timeline stories wil only direct to your mobile web app
5 Best Practices
1. Build a mobile web app
HTML5: distribution on m.facebook.com on all webkit enabled touch browsers
native wrappers
take advantage of SSO capabilities
2. Implement SSO
3. Implement requests for app discoverability
Rate now, invite friends, send requests
4. Leverage existing friend graph
Promote activity and interaction
Re-engagement
Push notification through native channels to let you know your friends joined
5. Get your app on timeline
Open Graph and Mobile Apps
One API – distribution to ticker, Timeline, newsfeed
Allows you to define what people do in your application
Reading, listening, watching, etc.
4 Steps to get started using open graph
1. Define your actions and objects
2. Design your Timeline aggregations
Pictures, maps, represent actions and data that people send through
3. Markup and expose your objects
Everything represented by underlying URL
Where do objects live
4. Publish actions
Native Distribution for Mobile Apps
Case Study: PhoneGap
Pattern
Embed a chromeless browser in a native app
Create a bridge between the browser and the native code providing access to native APIs
Write a web app
Package the web app with the native code and deploy to devices
Write once debug everywhere
Take note
HTML, JS, CSS included in an app package
HTML loaded on file:// URI scheme, no cross domain request restrictions
Engineering wise, approach is simple to extend to new platforms
Support Platforms
iOS, Android, BB, webOS, Symbian, Windows Phone (mango), Samsung Bada
Mobile first!
HTML5: write native code easily, scale like an app so width is design width – no pinch zoom etc
CSS3: webkit transformations
The future
Tooling
WebGL
Facebook, Linkedin, Walmart use case
Continue polyfilling HTML5
Case Study: Washington Post Social Reader
Coding for the futures
Everything you write effects possible futures
Architect for the foreseeable futures
Short term futures
Building mobile second
Use mobile to rethink boundaries
Roll mobile learning back into the webapp
Case Study: Thuzi
Hospitality app
Social by design
Send invites, RSVPs
Share great offers with my friends
Provide reviews of the experience
Capture the moment for a special occasion (Timeline)
Local by design
Dining is a local experience
Find a local restaurant
Invite friends, redeem offers, find out what’s happening
Native by design
Want to ensure you have access to the newest native APIs
Want to have the fastest app possible
Want to guarantee formatting correctness
More choices for monetization – iAds, etc
Many existing open source libraries and blog posts and tutorials
Are not dependent upon plugins or other 3rd party series for push notifications