From the monthly archives:

March 2011

Facebook sponsored stories

March 23, 2011

in facebook

The webinar from Facebook on sponsored stories today was very straightforward, and primarily targeted at a media buying audience.

For more information and case studies please visit:
www.facebook.com/sponsoredstories
www.facebook.com/marketing

Background
Businesses are organising their marketing around people, looking for moments that people are talking about a product or service.  Word of mouth is effective but is not predictable or scalable.

With sponsored stories you can capture the stories people are talking about in the news feed.  People trust their friend’s stories and thus with sponsored stories, businesses can now do Word of Mouth marketing on scale.
Adding sponsored stories in conjunction with your ad campaign you can see what your friends like surface these social interactions and tap into their friends.

The 4 types of sponsored stories

• Page likes

• Application interactions

• Place check-ins

• Page posts (brand can feature this story by friends).

How to purchase sponsored stories

They can be booked through Facebook sales representative.

Or…

Use the ‘Advertise on Facebook’ wizard.

Very simple….

Key information

Sponsored stories should ultimately be used in conjunction with social ads.

Social ads remain the best way to put across a brand message to Facebook users.  Sponsored stories allow you to surface all the friends of a person by boosting their social activity.  Essentially they are a message from your friend rather than an advertising message.

Pricing
Sponsored stories follow the same price structure as Facebook ads.
It is an auction system, based on cost per clicks and cost per impressions.

Display
With regard to page stories, these are only visible by fans, which is one reason brands should couple sponsored stories with ads.

Up to 5 sponsored stories can show simultaneously, subject to the auctioning.  Sponsored stories will always be positioned above ads as this content is the most relevant from your friends.

Sponsored stories do not require any editing.  With regard to page posts, it will just show the latest post and will cut off long text so you have to be mindful of the character length

Reporting
Sponsored stories metrics will be reported exactly the same way as ads.

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Social engagement - Yahoo Labs’ Facebook Like Log Study

March 10, 2011

in Metrics, Social Media, facebook

Yury Lifshits and Yahoo Labs have recently released their Facebook Like Log Study and it is well worth a look into what news stories consumers engage with.

The study is an analysis of how Facebook users interacted with 100,000+ articles across some of the leading online media outposts.

Understanding content popularity; more specifically what content motivates your consumers to engage with, is an essential part of content strategy.  This study helps to illustrate the importance of demand analytics, as well as social media optimization.

Key take outs from the study are: placing more marketing effort behind the most popular stories.  Analysing and using specific words/phrases for your content e.g. news/blog posts.

There is nothing revolutionary in the study in terms of recommendations, but it is very interesting to see what methodology has been applied to the data to produce this study.

My favourite take out is “for every 1000 visits to a news story, there are 5 to 20 likes and tweets.  Next time you want to guess pageviews of your competitors, multiply their like counts by 100.”

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