Abstract In this paper it is described why social media in general can be useful for companies to measure the effect of their use of social media. To advice the case company, LoveMyHome, on a social media strategy, an analysis of LoveMyHome’s Facebook presence is presented. This analysis show that there is room for improvement in their Facebook strategy, but also points out that a lot of what they are doing is done well. Furthermore an analysis of the Facebook wall of two competing companies (Mydeco and Roomsketcher) is performed. These findings show different approaches to Facebook user engagement. Roomsketcher play a very active role in engaging with their users, whilst Mydeco use a more passive strategy. Taking these findings and theory on the subject into consideration, a future course for LoveMyHome’s and the two competitor’s Facebook presence is discussed. Furthermore it is discussed how well Facebook presence can be tracked and what the implications of this has had on the results.
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Table of contents
Abstract........................................................................................................................................................ 2 Table of contents ........................................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................ 4 Research Question...................................................................................................................................... 4 Theoretical Framework ............................................................................................................................. 5 Previously Related Work .......................................................................................................................... 6 Methodology............................................................................................................................................... 6 Client ........................................................................................................................................................ 6 Research Focus ....................................................................................................................................... 7 Data Selection ......................................................................................................................................... 7 LoveMyHome ..................................................................................................................................... 7 Competitors ........................................................................................................................................ 8 Method..................................................................................................................................................... 8 Results.......................................................................................................................................................... 9 About LoveMyHome............................................................................................................................. 9 Social Media Strategy ........................................................................................................................ 9 Traffic to Website ............................................................................................................................. 11 Facebook Clicks ................................................................................................................................ 12 Comparative Analysis ......................................................................................................................... 13 Case Presentation ............................................................................................................................. 13 Activity on FB walls ......................................................................................................................... 14 User engagement .............................................................................................................................. 15 Discussion ................................................................................................................................................. 19 Closing remarks ................................................................................................................................... 21 Reference ................................................................................................................................................... 22 Appendix ................................................................................................................................................... 22 Figure list ................................................................................................................................................... 22
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Introduction Within the field of e-business new marketing opportunities has evolved, and at the same time technology has a dramatic influence on every stage of the consumer decision-making process. Especially social media has been applauded for having a substantial effect on companies approach on acquisition, brand awareness, purchase behavior, and postpurchase communication. Companies have discovered how social media contains an interactive framework that in a greater way, allows companies to build engaging relationship with their customer. This can be done in a more efficient way than with more traditional media. When used properly, social media can be a great tool to help businesses reach out to the new potential customers and engage with the existing customers, but without measuring the feedback from specific campaigns, companies are not able to evaluate their work in an applicable way (Sponder, 2011, p.19). A direct consequence of the social media revolution is also the increase of accessible social data. Sponder emphasizes that companies should not just make “report factories” or count their success by counting Facebook fans, but they should rather turn data into meaningful and actionable insights (Sponder, 2011). But one thing is theory; another is using this theory in practice. Our client, LoveMyHome, is well aware of this, and has established a FB presence with a goal in mind. With their FB presence they aim to generate traffic to the website and build sustainable relationships with users that will use their interior design tool on a regular basis, and thereby create a need for interior design product sellers to have LMS’s tool on their website. Since the field of social media is still evolving, there is not a defined set of rules on how to engage with customers. Furthermore, the most efficient social media strategy differentiates from company to company, depending on the conditions in the line of business. However, doing social media analytics is not just for understanding why and how customers engage with a company, but also for listening and measuring what is going on with the competitors. Companies can benefit from mimicking their competitors “activities” if it has proved to be an efficient approach to engage the customer and avoid making the same mistakes as their competitors. By combining situation analysis of the client with a comparative Facebook analysis, we will investigate what the competitor’s communities love about them, so we can understand how our case company differentiates and where they can tweak their strategies with an aim of increasing the engagement-conversation rate.
Research Question In order to stay focused and dig deep, a research question was formulated based on these needs of our client. With this paper we aim to find answers to following questions: • How does LoveMyHome engage with users on Facebook and what are the implications of this? •
How do RoomSketcher and Mydeco engage with users on their Facebook walls and how can LoveMyHome benefit from these insights?
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Theoretical Framework As mentioned above, there is a great potential in social media marketing. The reason for this is that social media utilize the word-of-mouth method that has been used for a long time in the offline world (Larson, 2005), where people recommended products to each other when they me. The social network (and the internet) removes this demographic need of being physically close to the other person and makes it easier to reach potential customers that would have been difficult to reach because of this. And when combining that with the increased amount of product information being researched online instead of physical stores (Larson, 2005), the recommendation of a friend becomes valuable for companies. It is therefore very important to get fans on the company’s social network site and utilize this word-of-mouth method. Getting fans on a product fan page is not enough to utilize the full potential of a FB fan page. To do this, it is also very important to get activity on the fan page. This activity includes actions such as creating posts, likes and comments, but also users who just see the content posted on the FB page but don’t interact with it. According to Chaffey there are several kinds of users that range from inactive users to creators. The 90-9-1 principle states that 90% of the users only click on something and do not like or comment on it, 9% like, and only 1% comment (Nielsen, 2006). This means that there is a large audience of what Chaffey call “spectators” that only view content rather than interact with it. This means that the FB posts work as a one way communication with these users rather than creating interaction (Forrester Research. This one-way communication is also important, as it works more like traditional commercials and it can add something to the product experience as well, like how it was made or how other people have used it, without people having to “like” it. So just because there is not a lot of “Liking” it does not necessarily mean that the post is unnoticed. There are several approaches that try to create a successful social network relationship with the consumer. Larson suggests that it is important to create a place where people can see content that interests them, and not only product information (Larson, 2005). That could be a competition that will gain them a prize or an interesting video, so they will visit the product page on their own initiative. Sponder emphasizes the need for creating “influencers” that share their experience with others (Sponder, 2011, p. 97-99), and thereby create a form of viral marketing in the sense that they are not paid by the company for sharing the ‘commercial’. This works because we are much more interested in what our friends buy or look at than what some anonymous person buy or see (Leskovec, 2007). Viral marketing has proven to be very powerful when it is successful, and therefore have a big potential when used in connection with traditional marketing. Watts identify social media to have the potential to create a “big seed” which means that they started out with passing it directly on to a lot people instead of traditionally only to a few people (Watts, 2007). To explore how well is working it is relevant to make measurements on the hard numbers of how many views, etc. but also listen in the sense of analyze what happens with the interaction going. Despite this huge potential growth in customers there is only limited research on how measure and listen to all this. It is therefore necessary to draw on authors like Sponder who focus more on stating problematics within the field of measuring and listening rather than giving guides to do it. Our methods of measuring and listening are therefore based on these guidelines rather than on actual theory, which will be described further in the methods section. We will however, loosely draw inspiration from fundamental theory of the field, as mentioned in the introduction.
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Previously Related Work Our client’s goal of this social media analysis is to measure how their Facebook presence is creating value for the company, and to find out how they can improve this value. This goal is similar to various other companies, and it is therefore relevant to look at other case analysis that have been trying to do the same and learn what works and what does not. By having previous work to compare our work to, we are able to avoid common mistakes and therefore have a stronger focus and structure in the analysis. A relevant case is the Complex Media Network case which sought to analyze what content that was most relevant to their audience across the social graph on their network (Sponder, 2011, p.151). This was measured by, which content was being interacted with the most, which other content users were interacting around and, overall click-rate and consumer engagement with the business content. Complex Media stated two goals: drive traffic back to the website, and find and engage influencers connecting with Complex, and thereby increase the overall content shares and click-through rate. This is similar to LoveMyHome’s primary goal of being on facebook to redirect users to the webpage. What LMH can learn from this case is that it needs to identify what types of content that are most interesting for their fans and utilize them more. Another relevant case is The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center hospital. They wanted to create a social platform for the survivors and people being treated for cancer where they can discuss their experiences (Sponder, 2011, p. 208). Like many others they had a hard time measuring how effective their campaign was. They therefore set up four goals and decided to use Alterian SM2. This gave them the ability to get a sense of how well they were doing but also be able to convey this information to their management. They were therefore able to find the weak spots in their campaign and modify it with great success. LMH basically has the same problem of not having a proper sense of how well things are going and not being able to convey to the management. It is therefore important for LMH to create information that is easily conveyed to the management.
Methodology In this section it we argue why we choose the client, which the research focus is relevant, how we selected the data and which methodological approach we decided to address our research question with.
Client The main reason for choosing LoveMyHome as a client, were that one of the authors, Louise, is the FB manager of LoveMyHome (LMH). This enables us to get access to a greater amount of data, higher degree of control and inside knowledge about the company in which we could not otherwise have access to. Second the industry of 3D interior design tools is based on a relative modern technology, where it is natural for the different e-business to be use Social Media, which makes this case exiting to investigate. Furthermore LMH use of social media analytics has been used a limited degree and this was a great opportunity for learn about the potential of these tools, in order to gain actionable insights by listening and measuring on a regular basis.
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Research Focus When analyzing businesses it necessary to acknowledge that social media marketing is only a part of a larger context in which influence all the small pieces in it. When analyzing a company it is optimal to do this with a holistic perspective and be aware of the various components company’s entire business model. This paper though choose to go into depth with social media analytics while being aware of the fact that social media is only a fragmentation of a larger entirety. Furthermore this paper focus on how LMH can benefit from FB with an aim of providing recommendations on which future social media strategies to choose. When choosing a social media strategy, having a high return of investment (ROI) is crucial. In order to make a sound conclusion for the future strategies, one must look into the past. To recommend future prospects, it was evident to evaluate our client’s current market FB position. We have chosen to investigate the potential for LMH on FB through a comparative analysis of the FB walls and thereby putting the metrics into a market context, which makes the data more tangible and usable (Sponder, 2011, p.170). Simultaneously it is valuable for a newly arrived FB manager, to use this strategic marketing framework, to identify strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors, with the aim of creating more effective marketing strategies. This analysis provides strategic context to identify opportunities. This is supported by Chaffey: “Benchmarking of competitors online services and strategy is a key part of planning activity and should also occur on an ongoing basis in order to respond to the new marketing approaches” (Chaffey, 2009, p. 426).
Data Selection LoveMyHome When analyzing LMH it is necessary to take into consideration that LMH’s profile and activity, has been developed and increased through the spring of 2011. Instead of looking at all content from the FB pages, we have chosen a time interval of three months that dates from August 1th to October 31th. There are several reasons for this. First of all on 1st of August 2011 LMH launched the Wonderwall competition, which by the end got more than 1.100 likes shared on about 20 designs and thereby has created a more than on average for us to analyze. This competition ended on the 30th of September, so in August and September there was an increased amount of content on FB created by LMH compared to earlier. Second, it is interesting from the client’s point of view to get an evaluation of a campaign in which the spend money on developing. Third, we chose a period from before we started to manually analyze the pages so we would corrupt the data set ourselves. It is worth mention that the data-set on LMH is still limited given LMH’s early position in the pilot stage, so the presented results has to be viewed with precautions. This makes it complicated to draw any solid conclusions from it. Combined with a comparative analysis, it is however enough to identify some possible trends and to look at what kind of FB strategy that will work for LMH. Another more specific problem with the data is the measurement of viral reach where Louise, has posted LHM content from her personal profile. Since the company is already using Google analytics it seems natural to analyze main tendencies through Google Analytics. This enables us to extract some of data on traffic from FB, which otherwise could not be accessible. Given that LMH is using Facebook Insights to quickly evaluate current activities we also have access to this. Providing pattern recognition and more detailed information Pagelever is also used in the analysis. However, insights from social media analytics tools cannot stand alone, but have to be combined with human analysis, which seeks to find qualitative explanations on quantitative tendencies. It is
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evident for good social media analysis to understand the perspective and complex context form which the data is extracted from. Our data thereby contain a mix of both qualitative measures and quantitative measures. Competitors We have chosen to analyze Mydeco and Roomsketcher’s FB pages because these two competitors offer some of the same services as LMH. Furthermore they both have an active FB wall where they engage with their users. The comparative analysis is limited to the data from the FB wall of two competitors during the period mentioned above (1st of August to 31st of October). To perform the comparative analysis we have primarily use an add-in for Microsoft Excel called NextAnalytics. This tool is able to download all the activity that has taken place on a wall, and provides a few statistics itself. The main reason for choosing this tool is its ability to download all the raw data from the wall and present it in a data sheet. This gives us the option to select the relevant data ourselves. We found that this not possible in most tools on the market, and the tools that had this option did not offer it in their trial version. Taking a deeper dive into looking at user engagement is done by using metrics to produce some numbers representing user engagement. To look at the user engagement during the period we have developed a formula for user engagement of our own, the RUE-index (Real User Engagement). This index focuses on giving a real picture of the user activity on the page. This is done by only taking into account the activity that is actually generated by the users. A lot of the tools on the market for FB user engagement analysis do not do so. It is a substantial problem that they do not distinguish between a comment coming from a user or from the page itself. This will in many cases give a wrong picture of the actual user engagement of a FB page. To address the hypothesis that there is a difference between posting a post on the wall, posting a comment and just liking a post (cf. 90-9-1), we have taking this into account in our index in the following way: User-likes (least amount of time committed) = multiplier of 1 User-comments (moderate amount of time committed) = multiplier of 3 User-posts (highest amount of time committed) = multiplier of 5 To put this in relation to the number of fans for a given page, we divide by the number of fans. Notice that all numbers put into the following equation are daily numbers: ∗ 1 + ∗ 3 + ∗ 5 ∗ 1000 = ! " $
Method We have sought to organize our data according to Sponder who states “It’s all about organizing those conversations in a structure that allows us to slice and dice, drill down and see the big picture of how these conversations are interconnected into one holistic view� (Sponder, 2011, p. 35). He continues with “Transform the information from unstructured to a structured and meaningful form (Sponder, 2011, p. 37). In relation to this, Murdough emphasizes that it is an important rule to focus on just a few metrics for each objective so the process should force the prioritization of only key measures (Murdough, 2009, p.95). To effectively explore this, we had to make a structured research process through Gaurav Mishra’s “Six-step social media delivery process� model and how it divided the process into
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six parts (Sponder, 2011, p. 160, see Appendix 1). By using this structure, it meant that we had a much greater idea of how far we were in the process, and were able to see where in the analysis we needed more data/work. We did however alter the model a bit, to make it fit more with our understanding. We believe that the “insight delivery” is a poor category to use since its content is more fit for other categories later in the process. The presenting of insight is part of the consulting category and enabling the clients to monitor real time information is something they should do after the consulting and solution delivery to track how they are doing. We have therefore chosen to discard this category and divide its content as mentioned before. After taking these reservations, we have used the model with success. By starting with the crawling and mining, it enabled us to get an idea of what kind of data we had to work with and therefore determine how much we needed for a comparative analysis and where we needed to put in the most work. By separating the data crawling and mining from the analysis, we were also able to use automated tools to do the crawling and mining, giving us much more time to focus on the remaining steps. This paper is to function as the as the consulting step of the model, where the analysis is present and it is shown how the case company can benefit from it. This will also show how the company can use the tools to generate graphs that show how the progress in the social media world.
Results In the following a presentation of our findings related to the 3 cases will be addressed. Since LMH is our client we have conducted a thorough situation analysis of LMH’s FB presence. Furthermore we have conducted a comparative analysis focusing on Roomsketcher and Mydeco’s FB walls in order to draw on these findings to make recommendations for LMH’s future FB strategy.
About LoveMyHome LMH was launched late in 2010 and offers a free 3D interior design tool, which enables users to decorate, furnish and model their home through a drag-and-drop functionality. Their key product is a decorator tool, which enables consumers to mix and match branded products. The innovative 3D browser-based technology aims to revolutionize the shopping experience for consumers, allowing them to browse, compare and buy products from different top quality and specialist retailers. LMH wants their customers to discover products through trusted referrals and recommendations, rather than searching for it online. In relation to this, LMH is dependent on attracting an active customer base, which spend substantial amount of time decorating with design products since it is LMH’s B2B-customers the revenue stream of this business is founded on. This is why establishing an engage community on FB is evident activity in the business plan. LMH’s website had in the measured period more than 17.000 visits, which in average spend 3 min. on the website (Appendix 2). The bounce-rate on the entire website was 34% coming from all traffic source (Appendix 2). Bounce-rate represents the percentage of visitors, who enter and leave the website rather than continue viewing other sub-pages within the website. Looking at users coming, to the website, from the FB platform, it shows that they have a bounce rate of 45%, which indicates that the visitors expectation is not met (Appendix 3). This paper seeks to help LMH decrease the bounce-rate and increase the average time spend on the page. Social Media Strategy LMH has both a product page and an application, whereas the latter enable the visitors to use the interior design tool directly through FB. It is the product page that we analyze. At
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the beginning of the research period LMH had 2.323 likes and the page in the measured period had almost 12.600 post views (Appendix A-B). The goal of being on FB is primarily to generate traffic to the website and convert them into users of the tool. In the given period FB delivered 1.459 page visits to the website (Appendix 4). This is actually only about 5% of the total page views on LMH’s website. LMH aims globally which can also be seen in their FB fan demographic, where only 7% at the 1st of August (9% as of 31th of October) of the users are from Denmark (Appendix 5A). Denmark, however, is more of a test ground for trying out the product. Because of this global goal, LMH started out with launching an international campaign, which could explain the large amount of international users. The target user group for LMH was women between 18 and 45, but 58% of the FB page users are men as of 1st of August (56% as of 31th of October) (Appendix 5). This majority of male users could be explained by the fact that LMH is a very new company founded by the men, and they have probably linked LMH to a lot of their friends who are not necessarily a part of their target group. LMH wants to build sustainable relationships with their users. This is done by motivating them to become loyal and highly engaged users, who create content to the website. The challenge in this is to listen and understand the customers. Using Google Analytics and FB insights, the content manager is monitoring and measuring effects of campaign and statistics of traffic, but this is not done on a regular basis due to limited resources. Since the launch of the LMH FB page in the spring of 2011, LMH has experimented with different approaches. LMH is though still in an early phase and is focusing its resources on creating a profile and finding the right kind of approach to attract the target group. Social media marketing is not a high priority in LMH, which the budget allocated to FB also indicates. Besides the content manager spending in average 5 hours pr. week on FB, no specific post in the budget it allocated to social media presences. On the other hand it seems that the management possesses a willingness to spend more money on this in future budgets, if the value proposition from the communication department is strong enough. LMH has e.g. recently experimented with FB ads and has just launched a Christmas calendar on FB. It is though worth mentioned that they spend a have one employee dedicated to Search Engine Marketing (SEM). LMH is what Murdough would define as in the “deployment phase”, which is described in his 5-step social media measurement process model (See figure XX, Murdough, 2009. p.94). It seems that they almost skipped the “Definition” and “Design” phases. Murdough states that it is crucial to evaluate the previous steps in order to reach the “Optimization” phase. This paper aims to contribute to this iteration by delivering pragmatic and actionable insights to LMH, in which they can use to fore-fill their goal of being on FB.
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Figure1: This model illustrates the 5-step social media measurement process model developed by Murdough (2009)
Traffic to Website
Figure 2: This graph shows the amount of traffic from Facebook to LoveMyHome.com.
The graph in Figure 2 combines the user activity on FB with traffic from FB to the website, which is an important metric for LMH, given that it is their main goal of being on FB. The most significant peak in this graph is on the 31st of August and 1st of September. This is most likely because of a short experiment with FB ads which promoted the Wonderwall competition. This add was only shown to a carefully chosen segment within the target group, who were interested in interior design or wall art related FB pages. The ad generated 190 unique website visitors in two days at a cost pr. click of 3,88 DKK (Appendix 6). Since these visitors are interested in interior design, they have a higher chance of turning into
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engaged users and thereby have a high value as influencers for LMH. The day after the FB campaign ended, various new designs were submitted to the competition. It is therefore likely that there is a correlation between the ad and increased designs. One of the members (who is very active on FB) has actually become an influencer for LMH. Her engagement in LMH and her production of content on FB has been recognized by LMH to be of great value to the company. The second largest peak in traffic from FB to the website was observed on the 28th of September, which is two days before the competition ended (see Figure 2). Given that the amount of votes were significantly increased during last few days of the competition, it is likely that participants have encouraged their friends to visit the competition page to vote for their designs at the last moment. This might explain the deviation on 86 unique website visits on 28th of September. Furthermore it was observed that there was a significant peak on the 5-7th of August (63 and 77 unique website visits). Encouraged by the FB manager, we found digital breadcrumbs of postings referring to the website’s competition page, on various FB competition pages e.g. konkurrencelisten and FB konkurrencer, on the same dates as the peak in traffic from FB. This indicates a possible correlation between increased FB visitors and postings on competition pages. Facebook Clicks
Figure 3: Facebook activity measured by created post, likes and comments.
In the previous section we compared the traffic from FB to the activity on FB measured by created post, likes and comments. As mentioned in the theoretical framework, there are several “Spectators� who do not leave trace in the form of likes or comments on the FB page (Nielsen, 2006). With Pagelever, though, it was possible to extract data on how many times a visitor has clicked on content produced by LMH on FB, e.g. post, videos, photos and links. The highest click deviation was on the 9th of August (see figure xx). On this day LMH published a post on their FB wall containing three pictures of the prices in the competition. In the comment box to each photo there was a link to the competition page. This post only generated 4 likes and 1 comment, but reached 53 unique clicks viewed Figure 3 (187 in total). However only 7 users actually clicked one of the links to the competition page (Appendix 7).
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This indicates that most of the users just looked at the photos and did not click the link below the image. This could probably have been prevented by letting a click on the picture link directly to the competition page or having link directly in the post. In relation to the competition, on the 30th of September, there were 25 unique clicks viewed in see Figure 3 (125 clicks on total). This was the day the competition ended, where it is natural for participants to visit the competition page in order to find out who won the competition. Another peak was observed on the 21st of September with 20 unique clicks (79 in total). This is most likely explained by the two posts made by LMH on the FB page (see Figure 3). On average LHM publish posts once or twice pr. week but on this day two posts was actually published. One of the two posts was a link to a blog post made on lovemyhome.net. In September LMH collaborated with an artist on writing this blogpost about bringing art into context through the LMH tool. It was observed on the artist’s cooperative FB page, that she had published posts where she encourage her fans to read the LMH’s website blog post and try to decorate with her paintings in the interior design tool. Even though it is not possible to track if her posting created traffic from FB, it was noticed that the blog on the 22th and 23th experienced the second highest visits (Appendix 8). This makes her a valuable influencer for LMH. This contains a possibility to reach a wider audience while improving social interactions with loyal customers. The same tendency was observed on the 17th of October, where the same weblog post was posted on yayart’s facebook page and kunstklubben facebook page, which might explains why the website blog experience increased viewings. It is conspicuous that there is a peak on the 18th of October with a total of 157 clicks but only 7 unique clicks (see Figure 3). This day there is a post by a user with a following conversation between an user and LMH.
Comparative Analysis In following we perform an analysis of the activity on Mydeco and Roomsketcher’s (and LMH’s) FB-walls. First we present the companies and provide an overview of the activity and end up using our own index to discover relevant information. Case Presentation RoomSketcher Roomsketcher is a Norwegian based company that offers a 3D tool for home design, which offers almost the same functionality as LMH. They offer a paid high resolution tool for professional use as well as a free tool for private use with a little lower resolution. This means that they are targeting both businesses and private users. They used to be targeting primarily Norwegian users, but international users started using the tool as well, making them a possible competitor to LMH. Roomsketcher has a very ‘stripped’ FB page, not including any extra tabs other than a permanent link to their homepage and a link to their twitter profile. Mydeco Mydeco.com is the UK's largest home ware and interior design website and like LMH they offer a 3D room planner. Besides this, they also provide an overview of styles and trends related to interior design. Mydeco’s community features on their website include the ability to subscribe to the activities of members of the site, joining groups based on interests, creating, commenting, and subscribing to user blogs, and participating in contests to design the best and most creative rooms. Furthermore Mydeco has a web shop selling a wide range of goods, ranging from sofas to cutlery. What make the case relevant to LMH, however, is its
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tools for interior design, as well as its community. On their FB page they have a lot of different subpages, amongst others, web shop, competition pages and live stream. Overview This short overview shows that Roomsketcher is the case most similar to LMH, since the aim of their FB presence seems to be somewhat the same - getting users to use their tool on their website. This is also one of Mydeco’s objectives, but not the main objective since this must be to get users to spend money in their web shop. Activity on FB walls Since we do not have access to the development of the number of fans during the period, we have decided to use the number of fans on 31st of October for all three FB pages. This is done in order to be able to compare the FB pages during the period. The number of fans for the three pages as of 31st of October is (Appendix 9): • Roomsketcher - 13.044 • Mydeco - 13.491 • LoveMyHome - 2.323 To get an overview we start by taking a look at the activity on the FB walls of the three case companies during the three month period from 1st of August 2011 to 31st of October 2011 (see Figure 4). This shows that Roomsketcher has the most active FB wall with 97 posts, 177 comments and 470 likes during the selected time period. Looking at the wall of Mydeco its shows that there were 44 posts, 90 comments and 310 likes. Last, the wall of LMH has 17 posts, 25 comments and 31 likes during the period. These numbers do not tell the whole story though.
Figure 4: Graph that illustrates LMH’s, Mydeco’s and Roomsketcher’s posts, comments and likes.
To get a better understanding of how the companies interact with their users we have to take a closer look at what these numbers are made up of. Next we will take a look at what portion of these posts and comments are created by the FB page itself and by the users. This is vital for understanding where the activity on the wall actually comes from. Taking a closer look at Roomsketcher, we found that they are responsible for 63 % of the posts on their wall, while the remaining 37 % were posted by users (See Figure 5). With 61 posts published by themselves during the time period it shows that they are very active in posting to their wall. Taking a look at the comments on the page, it shows that with 53% they are actually responsible for more than half of the 177 comments. This indicates that
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they are playing a very active role in engaging with their users, rather than just having a one-way communication strategy. When looking at Mydeco we found that they are responsible for less than half of the posts on their wall with only 48% of the posts being published by themselves (see figure 5). Of the 90 comments during the period they are responsible for 14 % of these meaning that the users are responsible for most of the comments with 86%. With only 21 wall posts and 13 comments by the page during the period they are not as active as Roomsketcher. This indicates that they most likely have a strategy of one-way communication rather than interacting with their users. Compared to this, LMH are responsible for 13 posts on their wall, equal to 76% of the total amount of posts (See Figure 5). Furthermore they have posted 52% of the 25 comments themselves. These ratios are actually quite similar to the ones of Roomsketcher, and showing that they interact with their users a lot. The low amount of comments is probably due to the fact that they have fewer fans. A large portion of the comments being posted by LMH show that they are very willing to engage with their users actively on the wall.
Figure 5: Graph that illustrates LMH’s, Mydeco’s and Roomsketcher’s “shares” of posts and comments.
The numbers mentioned in the above paragraph show that the strategies for use of FB differ from company to company. Where Mydeco seems to be using it more as a tool for one-way communication, both Roomsketcher and LMH seems to have a wish to interact with their users. User engagement Using the RUE-index, introduced in the methodology-section, we will take a closer look at the user engagement across the three FB pages walls. We start by looking at the average RUE-index for the time period, remembering that this index is built to measure only user engagement on a Facebook wall. This shows that Roomsketcher has the highest average RUE-score with 7,5 whilst Mydeco has 5,2 and LMH scores 4,1 (see figure 6). However, these numbers do not take into account
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how much effort the companies have put into their FB wall, nor do they tell if the activity is spread out over the period. They only state how active the users are in average over the period as a whole. To take an even closer look at the activities on the FB walls, we will take a look at the daily RUE-score during the period. This is done in order to be able to see peaks in the daily RUE-score and use this information to find out what caused the high score. This new information can then be used to give advice on what creates user engagement.
Figure 6: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for LMH, Mydeco and Roomsketcher during the period.
Taking a closer look at Mydeco, we see that their RUE-score is very stable during the most of the period, except from two dates in the beginning of the period (see figure 7). On the 4th of August they score 89,7 on the RUE-index. To explore this peak we take a look at the FB page and find that on the 4th of August Mydeco posted a competition, where users could win a sofa by sharing and liking the link (to mydeco.com) in the post. This one posts generated 25 comments and 65 likes, which is a lot compared to the cumulative activity on the wall during the three month period. Two days later, on the 6th of August, they scored 76,3 by posting a picture of an old chair and asked if anyone could find a suitable alternative. Furthermore, they promised a small gift to the one, who would come up with the best alternative. This post generated 34 comments and 15 likes. These two posts show two different, yet similar, ways of getting the users to engage with their FB wall. In the first case it is a competition where they get users to spread the word about their FB page using a fairly large price. In the second case they engage with users by asking them for help, giving them an opportunity to win a small price. These two posts actually stood for more than half of the comments on the FB wall during the three month period, so it actually seems a bit strange that they do not use these kinds of posts more often, since they really seem to be a good way of engaging their users. Furthermore, it is important to notice that a lot of the posts posted by users of the FB wall are actually businesses posting links to their own products or websites and interior designer blogs posting links to their blog or to competitions they are participating in. This actually shows that a lot of the user activity on Mydeco’s FB wall is actually coming from businesses, and similar, that tries to benefit from the easy access to a large amount of people interested in interior design.
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Figure 7: Graph that illustrates the daily RUE-Index for Mydeco.
Taking a closer look at the RUE-index for Roomsketcher during the period, we find that their RUE-score in general is a lot more stable than Mydeco. However, there are a few peaks in activity worth taking a closer look at. The first peak is a three day period from the 7-9th of September. In this period Roomsketcher scores a RUE-rating of between 23 and 33,7(see figure 8). The three day peak is a very good example of the typical way Roomsketcher engages with its users on FB. Each of these three days Roomsketcher has posted one post containing a link to a user project on their website. These posts have generated respectively 6, 14 and 11 likes and one of them has led to 1 user comment. This shows that this type of posts generate some response from the users, indicating that they find the content posted interesting. What really drive the RUE-index up during these three days are posts of users. During these three days there are 7 user posts. Of these user posts two are questions to get help with the tool, four are users posting their designs after getting help with the tool and one is just a manifestation from a user liking the tool. What is noteworthy is that Roomsketcher answer the users questions very fast (within a few hours) and they actually follow up by asking the users if the help provided solved their problem and encourage them to put up their final designs on the FB page. When the users posted their designs Roomsketcher again replied to their posts quickly, praising their designs. The second peak appears on the 26th of September. This day Roomsketcher scores 46 on the RUE-index. This day they posted a link to an interior designer blog which generated 1 one like. The post responsible for the peak is Roomsketcher posting on their wall that they added 5 new pictures to an album with good user designs. This posting generated 55 likes and 1 comment. This indicates that the users of the page like looking at other users design e.g. to get inspiration for their own designs using the tool. The third and last noteworthy peak in Roomsketchers takes place on the 28th of October. This day Roomsketcher posted twice on their wall. One post to tell the users that the website was down, and another to tell them it was back up again. These two posts generated 6 user comments and 5 likes. Furthermore three users posted a question regarding use of the tool. Again Roomsketcher replied fast and encouraged the users to share their design. The overall numbers and findings for Roomsketcher show that they play a very active role in engaging with their users. It also shows that they are very active in getting their users to contribute to creating content for their FB page.
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Figure 8: Graph that illustrates the daily RUE-Index for Roomsketcher.
When looking at the RUE-index for LoveMyHome, especially one peak is interesting. On the 19th of October LoveMyHome scores 99 on the RUE-index (see figure XX). This is actually due to a post from a user the day before. The user asked when a new competition would start. The day after, on the 19th of October, LMH responded and talked with the user using comments. The user ended up promising to create 5 interior designs for blog posts on LMH’s blog. The rest of the RUE score comes from a user asking a question related to the tool and commenting on her own post before LMH responded on the 20th of October.
Figure 9: Graph that illustrates the daily RUE-Index for LMH.
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Discussion Performing this analysis of LMH and two of their competitors has provided a big insight in social media analytics in general. Even though there was a limited amount of data at hand, it was possible to extract usable knowledge which can provide a foundation for giving relevant advice to our case company, LMH. In the process of selecting which tools to use, we have tried using a lot of different tools. We ended up using Facebook Insights, Pagelever and Google Analytics for analyzing the FB presence of LMH. Having administrator access to LMHs Facebook page, these tools provided us with good indications of where to take a closer look at the activity on LMH’s FB page. However it is important to notice that after a software update, Pagelever, in some cases, delivered different results than before the update. Having the FB administrator of LMH as part of the research-team also gave us access to a lot of information on the LMH’s goals and thoughts behind their social media strategy. This full access to data and information enabled us to find the explanations for some of the trends, that we would not have been accessible otherwise. When selecting the tool for the comparative analysis, we explored a wide range of tools, but found that none of them provided us with the information we needed, because they needed administrator access to the FB page. Our research focus required a tool that could provide us with a user engagement rating that took into consideration that some FB pages have a very high level of direct contact with their users. When experimenting with the regular tools, we found that this direct user contact was present with our two comparative FB walls in which we were researching. This high level of direct engagement with the users using comments led to many of the engagement ratings showing that they had a very low level of engagement with their users, which we easily could see was not the case just by looking at the FB walls. To solve this problem we looked for a tool that could provide us with very detailed data which would enable us to calculate our own version of a FB engagement rating taking the above mentioned into consideration. At last we found the tool that provided us with this functionality: Next Analytics. This process of finding the right tool pointed out to us that a lot of the tools on the marked have inadequacies. A general problem was that it was complicated to identify what data the different ratings where based on. This could be a potential problem for many companies using these tools, since many tools only provide the users with the final ratings. Not knowing what these ratings contain opens up for misinterpretations of the data provided by the tools. Furthermore, analysts should also take into considerations that “Manually reviewing every social comment that includes a brand is not only physically impractical, but it would also introduce human interpretation bias“ (Murdough, 2009, p.97). If data that is not objective enough it will potentially contributes to a biased and therefore invalid data analysis, that can cause decisions to made on the wrong bases and have crucial consequences. Since social media are becoming a more and more evident part of modern business, this could lead to companies missing out on opportunities or even harm their relationship to the customers. In relation to this Murdough states “A lot of excitement and optimism surround the potential of social media for marketers-after all, that is where attractive audience segments are starting to amass - but just like any marketing medium, measurement is a critical component for success”(Murdough, 2009, p.94). What Murdough emphasize is that these social media analytics is the key of uncovering the potentials of social media. Our analysis also though concludes that these regular tools can potentially provide a quick overview of the activity on
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a FB wall. However, it should be noted that this overview is prone to errors of on interpreting the data right and should therefore not be used with caution. In correlation, Murdough states “In turn, social media can seem very challenging, and at times even impossible, to measure with regard to its effects” (Murdough, 2009, p.94). Sponder agrees with Murdough and emphasizes that social media analytic tool has a great value in extracting information that would not otherwise be accessed. He introduce the term “ultra violet data” where he compares this type of data with ultraviolet light, which we normally cannot see, but it is still present (Sponder, 2009, p.197). Various components of social media data may contain ultra violet data and that data exist, but they are not being captured properly for use in a social media analytics. The human aspect of utilizing a social media analytic tool is therefore important in order to uncover this kind of data probably. Taking a closer look at our findings related to LMH, we found the bounce rate for users coming from a link FB to the website is higher than it is for users coming from all other sites. This could be explained by various factors. One is that the users coming from FB might have a tendency to bounce because they click on a link they meet out of context, which can potentially contributes to an experience where they are not getting their expectations met when they click the link on FB. Another factor might be the fact that a great portion of the users coming from other sites, where is a larger gathering of users with a natural interest of interior design, and where LMH intended to go to the page or that the SEO of LoveMyHome is good. In relation to this it was found that there is a mismatch between the target demographics of the fan group on FB and the actual target group. There might be a correlation between low feedback on the content produced and fans who is not interested in what interior design, given that there is no motivation for them to comment, like or even click on LMH posts. From the short experience with the segment-specific FB ads, LMH found that they were able to attract engage users with a genuine interest of interior design, who potentially could have a high value for LMH. Our findings actually indicate that LMH actually tries to engage with their potential influencers, encouraging them to contribute to creating content. This creates basis for the possibility to being capable of attracting the right kind of users, who has a substantial value for LMH in relation to creating “seeds” (Watts, 2007). If LMH succeed in converting websites visitors or FB fans into super users, it become relevant to discuss the fan value. In relation this Sponder suggest a formula for how to calculate how much a fan is worth, but it is skeptical what this number actual describes (Sponder, 2011, p. 86). Furthermore we found indications that a blog post co-written with an artist (potential influencer) generated more traffic to the website. This shows that LMH recognizes the importance and the potential of having user who are influencers at the same time. In the light of Sponders theory that “Opinion leaders” were directly involved in the dissemination of information and distribution of that information to the masses”, this is efficient approach in which LMH should continue (Sponder, 2011, p. 98). In relation to this, Sponder discusses examples of monitoring platforms that claims that they can be used to find influencers and rank such as Radian6 and Sysomos. As Sponder mentions, the measurement on influencers are not accurate enough. Furthermore, a person’s indirect influence on a topic or situation is not directly measureable with the online platforms currency on the market (Sponder, 2011, p.103). He describes it very precisely: “My fundamental belief is that influence and social media ROI can be fully tracked, but the right formulas and the data to populate the formulas have not been developed or standardized to the extent they are useful to business” (Sponder, 2011, p.102). What Sponder is pointing out is that there is a fundamental mismatch between outputs of social monitoring platforms and useable list of
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individuals that marketers like LMH are interested in. Second it takes considerable amount of work to filter and translate any monitoring output. We also found that the Wonderwall competition led to increased activity on the FB page and increased traffic to the website. This indicates that the users of LMH’s FB page are receptive to this kind of user engagement. Looking at the results from the analysis of Mydeco and Roomsketcher, we found that there is a big difference in the way these two companies use their FB page. Mydeco seems to have a more passive strategy than Roomsketcher. Mydeco only post a third of the amount of posts and do in general not engage closely with their users. On the contrary Roomsketcher plays a very active role on their FB page engaging with their users every time they have an opportunity to do so. This is also expressed by the fact that they are very fast to reply to users questions and comments. Furthermore Roomsketcher also encourage their users to posts their design, made using the tool, to the FB page on many occasions. This is a good way of getting users to create content for the FB page relevant to Roomsketcher. Another good example of Roomsketcher using user-created content, to generate activity on their FB page, is the post of the 26th of September with new pictures to an album with user-created designs. The most interesting finding derived from the Mydeco FB page is their two posts in the beginning of the time period. The competition where the users can win a Sofa by reposting the competition link is a very effective way of creating awareness their FB presence. It is not sure that most users gained by a competition as the one mentioned are valuable to Mydeco since a certain amount of the user just participate in the contest without engaging further with the FB page, however it is as mentioned a good way of creating general awareness of their FB page. In the other post generating a lot of activity they asked their users for help to find a certain chair. This seemed to be interesting for a fair amount of users, and it has to be noticed that they promised the user providing the best help a small present.
Closing remarks Drawing on our findings, we find that LMH should start by focusing more on the two first phases of 5-step social media measurement process model since it seems that they lack of focus in their social media strategy and use of social media analytics (Murdough, 2009). We recommend LMH to be formulating a more precise success criterion with their existence on FB, but more important is formulating concrete social media goals and metric. It is our belief that they should continue their current posting activity on FB, but be more aware of answering faster and posting more of the web sites designed interior design. This includes intensifying their current FB relationship with their engage users. However, in order get a higher feedback on the produced content, they should make an effort in attracting the right type of fan on FB. The right type of fan group will be more interested in the content that LMH published on FB. This is an important aspect since they will potentially have a higher level amount of “creators� cf. the principle of 90-9-1 and have a higher chance of become influencers, which our finding found was a key component in succeeding on FB. Our findings also indicates that users, should both be more encouraged to create content since this will potentially contributes to an efficient viral effect. Inspired by Mydeco and Roomsketcher, we recommend that they both tries to acquire new users and maintain the relationship with loyal users through competitions that require the users to convert into fans and share information about the competition. All these activities should be conducted in relation to the 5-step social media measurement process model, where it is always important to evaluate executed campaigns and optimize
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(phase 5) the current social media strategy based on this social media analytics. When LMH have gone through all five phases, the process of going through concept (1), define (2), design (3), deploy (4) and then optimize (5) this iterative process starts all over again.
Reference Chaffey., D. (2009). E-Business and E-Commerce Management: Strategy, Implementation and Practice (4th Edition), Pearson education limited Larson,. (2005). The Rise of Viral Marketing through the New Media of Social Media Faculty Publications and Presentations: digitalcommons.liberty.edu, MKT7001-11 1. Leskovec, (2007). The dynamics of viral marketing, ACM Transactions on the Web Murdough, C. (2009). Social Media Measurement: It’s Not Impossible, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 10(1), http://www.jiad.org/article127. Nielsen,. J. (2006). Participation Inequality: Encouraging more users to produce, Alertbox 9.10.06, useit.com Sponder., M. (2011). Social Media Analytics: Effective Tools for Building, Interpreting, and Using Metrics, McGraw Hill Watts, D., Peretti, J., & Frumin, M. (2007). Viral marketing for the real world, Harvard Business Review
Appendix Appendix 1 - Six-step social media delivery process Appendix 2 - Google analytics, Page visits Appendix 3 - Google analytics, Facebook traffic Appendix 4 - Facebook insights, Overview Appendix 5 - Pagelever, Demographics Appendix 6 - Facebook Add Report Appendix 7 - Competition visits Appendix 8 - Blog visitors Appendix 9 - Number of Facebook fans
Figure list Figure: 1. This model shows the 5-step social media measurement process model developed by Murdough. Figure 2: This graphics combines the traffic development to the website and the Facebook activity. Figure 3: Facebook activity measured by created post, likes and comments. Figure 4: Graph that illustrates the difference between LMH, Mydeco and Roomsketchers
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posts, comments and likes. Figure 5: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for LMH, Mydeco and Roomsketcher. Figure 6: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for LMH, Mydeco and Roomsketcher. Figure 7: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for Mydeco. Figure 8: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for Roomsketcher. Figure 9: Graph that illustrates the average RUE-Index for LMH.
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Appendix 1
Six-step social media delivery process
Sponder, 2009, p. 160
Appendix 2 Google analytics - Page visits
Appendix 3 - Facebook traffic to the website Source: Google analytics
Appendix 4 - Facebook insights A
B
C
D
E
F
E
Appendix 5 Pagelever - Demographics A - LoveMyHome始s Facebook page status per 1st of August
B - LoveMyHome始s Facebook page status per 31st of Oktober
Appendix 6 Facebook Add Report
Appendix 7 - Competition visit URL: http://www.lovemyhome.net/competition.aspx
Appendix 8 Blog visits URL: http://www.lovemyhome.net/blog.aspx
Appendix 9 Number of Facebook fans