mikimedia - miki devic`s posterous blog

online advertising,social media,advertising,life & more...

Posting Strategies that Encourage Engagement on Facebook

Companies that post content on their Facebook pages outside normal business hours see engagement rates that are 20% higher than average, according to new data from Facebook marketing software company Buddy Media. Buddy Media analyzed the Facebook posts and engagement rates for more than 200 clients over the course of two weeks in January and February 2010. The agency measured engagement by looking at comments and “likes,” and factored in fanbase size.

According to Buddy Media, 60% of posts were published between 10am and 4pm. However, many Facebook users prefer to log on to the site before or after work, and their engagement with company posts is higher during those times. By timing content to post when consumers are poised to be on Facebook, companies have a greater chance of being seen in a fan’s newsfeed. Additionally, the study found that engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursday and Friday than the other days of the week.

Facebook Wall Post Engagement Metrics Worldwide, Feb 2011

But that isn’t to say that marketers should only post on those days. Amy Morgan, public relations and social media manager at ConAgra Foods, is part of the team that oversees a Facebook page for Chef Boyardee’s Club Mum program targeting moms. The company posts several times a day.

“When you talk about building a community and building engagement, you need to have a consistent conversation,” Morgan said in an interview with eMarketer on February 22. “As far as Facebook, we post usually once or twice a day. It ebbs and flows, but once or twice a day is usually good.”

While the timing of posts often determines how engaged fans will be, their content is also important. Buddy Media found that shorter is better, as posts with 80 characters or less have a 27% higher engagement rate. Certain words also encourage engagement, particularly those that are instructions such as “like,” “post,” “take” and “comment,” as does asking a question at the end of a post. For the Club Mum Facebook page, Morgan said that asking fans about their children is an easy way to get them to comment on a post. She said, “It’s about making this personal and really allowing the community to help build that conversation.”

Steady Gains in Blogging by Marketers

43% of US companies will be blogging by 2012

The personal blogosphere, while it still boasts million of online journals and participants, has largely stalled in recent years. Consumer use of social media has moved more toward social networking and microblogging, which seem to have eroded the perceived usefulness of full-fledged blogs. But in the corporate world, a different picture emerges.In many studies, company use of social networks and Twitter does outpace the use of blogs, but for companies the platforms are not mutually exclusive. “Companies are finding that blogs fill a specific niche that other forms of social media do not,” said eMarketer senior analyst Paul Verna. Because of the apparent staying power of blogs in corporate settings, eMarketer forecasts continued growth in company use of blogs for marketing purposes. This year, eMarketer estimates just over one in three companies have a public-facing blog used for marketing, a proportion that will rise to 43% by 2012.

US Companies Using Blogs for Marketing Purposes, 2007-2012 (% of total)

“Studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service,” said Verna.Surveys and studies of company blog use have estimated participation in a wide range, most likely due to methodological differences and the specific companies studied. For example, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research has found lower usage among Fortune 500 companies and higher adoption among the fast-growing private companies on the Inc. 500 list.

Comparative Estimates: US Companies Using Blogs for Marketing Purposes, 2007-2010 (% of respondents)

“There is evidence that smaller companies are embracing blogging at greater rates than larger firms,” said Verna. “This might be because larger, public companies—particularly in industries such as pharma and financial services—have more legal, logistical and regulatory constraints than smaller firms.”

Heavy Twitter Users Bring Social Activity to New Heights

Daily users comment and upload content at least twice as much as average. eMarketer estimates there are 26 million monthly users of Twitter in 2010. That makes users of the microblogging service a relatively small minority of internet users, at 14.6%, and daily users are naturally even fewer in number. But their voice is disproportionately loud. According to ExactTarget, daily Twitter users are highly active across the social web. They are about three times as likely as internet users on average to upload photos, four times as likely to blog, three times as likely to post ratings and reviews, and nearly six times as likely to upload articles.

Monthly Online Social Activities, April 2010 (% of US daily Twitter users vs. general internet users)

They create, share and comment on content at high rates, making them valuable to marketers for much more than their potential influence on Twitter alone.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.” ExactTarget also explored Twitter users’ motivations for following companies and brands on the service. In a deeper drilldown into consumer sentiment than previous research has conducted, the April 2010 study supported the general findings that microbloggers have many reasons to follow brands they like. While discounts and sales are toward the top of the list, finding out news and information about the company and its products come out ahead.

Motivation to Follow a Company or Brand on Twitter, April 2010 (% of US Twitter users)

According to 360i, 75% of marketers’ tweets are informational, suggesting brands are responding to what consumers want—though they largely neglect to participate in conversations. Such deeper engagement might help them harness the power of frequent Twitter users across their other social activities as well.

‘Newspaper Of The Future’


Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack. A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.

Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”. Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on). The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together. The user interface reminds me a lot of Pulse, another great news consumption app for the iPad. Hawthorne Labs plans to expand Apollo to the iPhone, the Android platform and in the form of a general Web application at a later stage. The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes. World domination plans aside, the startup does seem to have a great team with relevant experience on their hands. The three Hawthorne Labs co-founders are Evan Reas, a self-declared ‘Stanford MBA turned Bizhacker’ and former Google News and Bing engineers Shubham Mittal (the top ranked student at IIT-Delhi and a Gold Medalist at the International Physics Olympiad) and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan (who was a Google World Code Jam finalist, twice, and has far too many ‘a’s in his name to be healthy).

Fun factoid: these guys built the app before the iPad was even released, and as soon the tablet computer hit the market they tried to provision iPads in stores to test the early versions, only to get yelled at a lot. How’s that for some bootstrappin’ persistence?


via: techcrunch.com

Europe’s biggest publisher embraces the WePad #G+J

[Germany] Billed as an iPad competitor, the WePad is not vaporware, but is in fact, The Chosen One. At least, that’s the view of some, who are hailing the WePad as the saviour of the German print publishing industry.

While Apple is still racing to the wire to secure enough media content partnerships for the iPad before its launch this week, the WePad has already bagged Europe’s biggest publisher, Gruner + Jahr.

Bernd Buchholz, CEO of Gruner + Jahr, presented the first German-born slate PC at last week’s annual press conference for his company. Unfortunately, there is only a very dark photo of this event on Facebook (see above), but you can find new professional shots on sites like Areamobile (below).

Axel Springer, publisher of Europe’s biggest newspaper BILD is also in talks to use the WePad, says the latest rumour quoted by German newswire DPA.

German magazine Stern on WePad.

But Buchholz must have jumped the gun, because the WePad’s creator Neofonie had scheduled all official announcements about the WePad’s hardware and media partnerships for April 12.

That didn’t hold Buchholz back from presenting a WePad version of Stern, one of Germany’s biggest magazines which sells 900,000 copies. Other similar versions of Gruner + Jahr magazines like Geo or Gala are in the making. They will be marketed at similar prices like their print versions and the launch date is just some months away. Apart from the text and pictures of their print issues, the WePad versions will be full of audio, video and Flash and also interwoven with the magazines’ websites.

It seems that Gruner + Jahr is not the only publisher who believes in the WePad’s success. Neofonie CEO Helmut Hoffer von Ankershoffen is “happy about the first big advance orders from companies”, he wrote on the WePad Facebook site (5,709 fans). Gruner + Jahr has officially announced a plan to license the WePad’s epaper software, that Neofonie developed on their behalf, to other publishers. The WeMagazine publishing software is platform independent and apparently works with several devices or user interfaces, including the iPad and normal computers.

The underlying strategy is clear: “We insist on our sovereignity of products and contents”, Buchholz said in his Thursday’s speech, clearly hinting at recent problems. Apple removed the Stern iPhone app in November without warning from the App Store due to objections over photo galleries featuring too much nakedness. The Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) warned that such intrusions might represent a move towards censorship.

German publishers are also disgruntled with Apple’s pricing policy. Buchholz said they need to “get in charge of pricing”. Apple’s regulations have the absurd side effect that an iPhone version of Germany’s most important news magazine, Der Spiegel, will cost more than the print version. Its price will soon jump to €3.99, after the €2.99 introductory offer is over, while the paper sells for €3.80.

Therefore Gruner + Jahr appears to be at the helm of establishing a totally competing platform to the iPad. “We are in talks with nearly all big and small German publishers, also with [our big competitors] Springer and Burda”, Buchholz said in a press conference after his speech.

Oddly, Gruner + Jahr has jumped the gun before the official April 12 event, and the WePad’s hardware spec is now getting out there. Gadget geeks have posted interesting links, such a possible WePad prototype running Windows. It also appears that the WePad will be made by OEM Pegatron, a company connected to the iPhone, ironically.

So far Neofonie isn’t very helpful on what ebooks formats will be supported. Its latest product sheet says again that the iPad uses a “proprietary Apple format for iBooks store” while, they claim, the WePad is better for supporting “all open formats, additionally premium formats”. This repeats their statement which was criticised after our latest TechCrunch post.