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.
To succeed in social media you must engage your fans and build relationships that go deeper than a transaction. Facebook gives you a chance to humanize your brand and makes it easy to educate and entertain your customers. If done correctly, your fans will become your advocates spreading not only awareness, but endorsement as well. This is called Engagement marketing and it is one of the most powerful ways to build interest and brand loyalty in your products. Think about it, how much more likely are you to see a movie a friend recommended rather than one that is just advertised on TV? So how do you fuel engagement marketing? The best way to learn is from others who have already done it, in this case, that would be Niche Modern, a company that specializes in modern lighting fixtures and lamps.
Niche Modern recognized the chance to connect with fans and replicate their in person customer service skills by engaging fans on their wall and building a vibrant community of loyal supporters. Of course it’s easy to engage with fans when they’re stroking your ego but what about customers who are disgruntled? Niche Modern responds by empathizing with them and then doing whatever they can to resolve the issue and then leaving the post on the wall. This shows the community that they care about their customers experience and will do everything in their power to rectify any grievances.
How do you post engaging content? There is no magic bullet to produce engaging or viral content, if there was, everyone would be doing it. That said here are some tips: pictures and videos generally work better than just words, ask questions that encourage your fans to respond, post exclusive offers and understand your fans with Facebook Insights. With your posts be succinct, 100-250 characters is a good rule of thumb. Post at least twice a week, creating a content calendar will help.If you’re just posting to your wall less than 16% of your fans are going to see the post but with page post ads that number can shoot to 70-80% of your fans and can be done on a shoestring budget.
Use ads to find fans. Entice them by showing them value and targeting the people that are most likely to be interested instead of just blasting your message across Facebook to everybody. A combination of Facebook ads and Sponsored Stories as well as Page Post ads, to keep your current fans engaged, will be the most beneficial strategy for attracting fans and keeping them coming back. The ads may find the people but it’s the social component that will clinch the like.
You don’t need to be some conglomerate or multinational corporation to excel at engagement marketing; anybody can do it. A vivacious Facebook community offers a variety of tangible benefits: people are 51% more likely to buy a product after liking them on Facebook, fans report visiting and purchasing an average of 2x more than non-fans, more in-store traffic can be generated with exclusive Facebook coupons, you will have a new feedback channel to poll customers, you will have increased participation in promotions. Ultimately engagement marketing boils down to four steps: build a Facebook page, connect to fans with ads, engage fans with quality content, and influence the friends of your fans. Although the ROI may be difficult to quantify, if done correctly the end result will pay off in spades for a long time to come.
The hashtag #GRAMMY received over 7.0 million mentions through Twitter this year while its counterpart #OSCAR received only 1.9 million mentions with 633,874 users tweeting about this during the show.
Adele was mentioned over 3.8 million times on Twitter, and spiked at over 700,000 mentions at one given time. That tops any Actor/Actress Mentioned at the Academy Awards, with Brad Pitt being the most talked about actor (62,025 mentions) and Meryl Streep most talked about actress (38,202 mentions).
As you might expect, the Oscars generated the most buzz at the end with over 125,000 mentions per 5 minutes during the announcement of Best Actress (Meryl Streep), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin mentioned 64,000 times), and Best Picture (The Artist). Most mentions were directed at “The Artist” – the first silent film to win an Academy Award since 1929.
The Grammy awards generated the most attention during Adele’s performances, award speeches, and a performance by Rihanna that generated over 700,000 tweets. Comparing that to the Academy Awards, no single celebrity could match any of the Grammy traffic, even as Oscar traffic is still very timid.
Though the awards themselves may not have generated much talk during the show, the Academy may make up through the memes now spreading around the Internet. These moments include the Angelina Jolie Leg-bomb now being photo-shopped across the world into famous pictures, The Robert Downey Jr. Tebowing, and Sasha Baron Cohen dropping the supposed ashes of deposed dictator Kim Jong Il onto the unsuspecting Ryan Seacrest (326 Tweets).
Social TV sites such as GetGlue did help pull in the Oscar ratings creating an extra 60,000,000 impressions across Facebook and Twitter, but is unclear whether this helped or deterred conversations.
As an advertiser, one has to think hard about next year’s awards show season and where to start placing budgets. Crowd sentiment played a factor at The Grammy Music Awards, where Adele – the top mention and new Social Media favorite – had recently overcome vocal surgery. Many tweets were sent because of the inspiration they gave; unfortunately there were no such stars at this year’s Academy Awards. Best advice for advertisers; keep track of the stars rising and falling. If there is a star about to undergo major surgery or a big life changing event who also is up for an award, you can bet it will generate a huge amount of traffic when the award is announced. Also, look next year for the Oscars to be brought to online viewing, as this will also play a huge factor in viewership and interaction.
As Billy Crystal put it best, “There is nothing Americans enjoy more than watching millionaires giving each other Golden Statues.”
About the Author:
Andrew Corliss Facebook Analyst for Blitzlocal. Graduated from the University of Northern Colorado in 2011 specializing in Marketing and Analytics. He has worked on a variety of projects in advertising and brings his wealth of experience and knowledge to BlitzLocal.
Sources: http://z6mag.com/arts-entertainment/oscars-2012-social-media-guide-on-twitter-news-coverage-165870.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2012/02/oscars-2012-ranks-as-second-most-popular-event-in-social-media.html
http://www.socialmediadelivered.com/2012/02/23/and-the-oscar-goes-to-social-media/
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/02/27/tweetreach-reveals-twitters-oscar-buzz-over-2-million-tweets-with-a-spike-of-18718-in-one-minute/
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.
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