We Are Social’s Christmas Cracker
Here’s the Christmas edition of our Monday Mashup, and unlike me, perhaps a little lighter than usual…
Facebook more popular than Google on Christmas Day
Social media as a whole may have been bigger than search since May, but it took until Christmas day for Facebook on it’s own to match-up to Google here in the UK:
US online ad spend surpasses newspapers
Meanwhile, US online ad spend has surpassed that of newspapers. And this is no temporary blip – as Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer says “It’s something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point”.
McKinsey says social media pays off
McKinsey recently surveyed 3,249 executives and found that “the Web 2.0 use of these companies is significantly improving their reported performance”. Highlights include:
- 63% of panellists said emerging technologies had yielded greater marketing effectiveness, providing median growth of 20% for awareness, 15% for consideration and 10% for both conversation and loyalty
- 50% cited enhanced customer satisfaction
- 25% agreed they were able to bring goods to market more quickly and increase the number of successful launches, recording typical improvements of 20% and 15% respectively
- 24% of firms using consumer-facing Web 2.0 techniques said revenues had risen (10% higher than the average)
A.T. Kearney finds brands are socially awkward
While McKinsey have been measuring the benefits of social media, their rivals at A.T. Kearney have been looking at what brands are doing wrong, finding that:
Disney, Gucci, McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, American Express and Sony— allow only company initiated conversation [on their Facebook pages]; that is, the company can “post” or initiate conversations on the brand’s “wall,” but consumers can only reply to the company. Perhaps more alarming when you consider the interactive nature of Facebook, we found that only one of the Interbrand Top 50 routed fans to an unfiltered Facebook wall, while the other 44 initially choose to show consumers and fans a filtered selection of company posts only.
A certain irony exists: These world-class brands are using their ostensibly hip Facebook profiles to showcase traditional, time-honored and digitally irrelevant one-way communication (from the company to the consumer), while hiding actual communication from consumers behind a digital curtain.
89 percent of consumer replies on company Facebook sites went unanswered. Gucci, for example, did not respond to a single consumer reply within the past three months, while only 11 companies responded to more than one consumer. The notable exception was Philips, which had the highest response rate (nine). Only 15 percent of company responses invited further conversation, although 17 percent managed to address the consumer by name.
As they point out, being unresponsive or unengaging translates to “anti-social networking” and is not a winning strategy.
Time and resource are biggest issue for social media marketers
Which segues nicely into a report from eMarketer looking at what marketers think the biggest mistakes they’ve made in social media are:
Facebook launches news feed filters and improved page insights
This week Facebook launched improved Facebook page insights as well as a new way for people to filter their news feed:
Facebook launches TripAdvisor instant personalisation
This week Facebook launched a new ‘Instant Personalization’ integration with travel planning site TripAdvisor. When users who are signed into Facebook visit the site, they’ll see a map of cities their friends have visited, a list of which cities have been visited by the most friends, and recent reviews and site activity by friends.
The perils of a mistaken DM on Twitter
This week former England cricketer Andrew ‘Freddie’ Flintoff learnt the hard way when he mistakenly posted a message with his phone number on Twitter as a public update that was intended as a direct message. He has now been forced to change his phone number after receiving thousands of unsolicited calls from fans.