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Occupy Insights - What Radio Can Learn About Facebook Like Pages
October 18, 2011
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To understand the overall performance of any brand, you must acquire a better understanding of how you reached, acquired and retained your audience. You must know their emotional triggers (good and bad) and care about user engagement as much as you do about audience growth.
Don’t assume you know what people want. We now have the ability to research their needs and study their habits, cultural trends and metrics.
And Facebook’s new Insights analytics enables you to tap into many of those elements.
To get started visit any “Like” page in which you have admin access. Click the Insights tab on the left side.
Once you’ve clicked Insights, you will see a metric titled “All Post Types.” This is where you’ve always had to ability to drill down to each post (or as many call “status update”) to study precisely what drove audience responses. The new part (and can I say the “kick-ass” feature) is that among the many different components, there is now “Virality” and “Talking About This.”
Rather than getting into detail of what “Virality” and “Talking About This” measures, here’s a real-time example from WRIF/Detroit, showing what it takes to increase these metrics.
The radio station tapped into an emotional trigger with their Facebook audience using content that evoked action and emotion. As you see below, where it says “148 shares,” it translates to “101.1 WRIF” being shared that many times on Facebook.
Think of the exposure it gave WRIF. It was shared 148 times, so if you go with the metric that the average Facebook user has 130 friends, you can do the math.
Everyday practices such as this allow for brands to increase mindshare.
This is about being a brand with a real social reputation; a brand that people want to talk about and share with others. And that is what Facebook is trying to show us what really matters on this social platform.
It is not about racking up Likes. It is about how many people are talking about you and sharing your brand with their audience.
Another stat to watch is the “Like Source.” This will be under the “Fans” section of Insights. Its breaks down where the initial “like” happened, and illustrates how you are acquiring your Facebook base:
Study these metrics to help you play to the strengths of the sources that are pulling people in. If you’re getting more “Likes” from the News Feed and Ticker and less from perhaps a Facebook ad, you may want to reconsider paying for “Likes” and instead, allowing your Facebook presence to grow organically.
Speaking of organically, under the “Reach” portion of Insights, you can also study the main sources for how your station reaches people in general. (Now keep in mind that this is Reach -- and not acquisition as in the example above.)
With the updated analytics, Facebook is clearly spelling out its social platform is not intended for self-indulgence, dumping daily deals, staging contests and posting “yawn producing” content on “Like” pages. They are also telling us that ignoring listeners is not a productive attitude for achieving a credible social reputation.
The key is finding the right people who can assist in meeting your radio station’s social media objectives ... and creating an “umbrella” strategy that merges management, sales and programming all on the same page, so there are less “random acts of social” and instead, strategic activities that can build brand and grow audiences.
It’s time we take maintaining the integrity of this new league of listeners seriously. There are socially savvy listeners who are chatting away right now on Facebook. Give them something to talk about.
It is to your benefit to start creating a social reputation that wins over the hearts and minds of listeners because they find your brand to be socially authentic, transparent and inclusive.
Lori Lewis collaborates with companies and teaches behaviors behind the target audience’s preferred social and digital channels, analyzes which channels meet specific goals, and how these tools integrate with campaigns to benefit the long term health of the brand and increase the bottom line. You can reach out to Lori at lori@JacobsMedia.com.
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