To Spread Your Brand On Facebook, Don't Target Your Fans. Forget Facebook fans; brands need to target the friends of fans.
That's the takeaway of Social Essentials, a new service provided by ComScore, with help from Facebook. The service offers unprecedented insights into the influence of brands through social media, complete with detailed credit card behavior that can link web browsing patterns to purchase decisions. ComScore recently released a white paper based on the data that shows why brands should focus more on the friends of their fans, and engage the most hardcore users with interactions that will ripple throughout their network's newsfeed.
The data was collected through a massive survey of privacy-flouting Facebookers who volunteered to have their complete Internet behavior vigorously tracked. The solution is to reach friends of fans through messages that are shareable, and promotions that require voting, checking in, or other interactivity. Hearsay Social Adds Integrated Social Campaigns, $18M in Funding. Hearsay Social is expanding the functionality of its corporate social media management platform and has raised $18 million in funding to do it.
The service, which launched in February, is unique because it provides franchises and businesses with local chapters the ability to monitor and manage social media across the entire organization. State Farm, 24 Hour Fitness, Farmers Insurance Group and others use it to help their local agents and locations engage with their customers via social media while adhering to corporate and government guidelines. On Thursday, Hearsay has launched three new features for its platform, including: HOW TO: Utilize Social Data More Effectively. Nate Elliott is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, where he helps interactive marketers around the world develop the strategies and tactics that make them successful, and then helps them measure the results.
You can follow him on Twitter at @nate_elliott. Last year, American consumers posted more than a billion opinions about products and services online, according to data collected by my company. With peer influence playing such a prominent role in consumers’ purchase decisions, it’s no surprise many interactive marketers are tapping into that influence via viral marketing programs and influencer outreach. However, the vast majority of marketers ignore the staggering volume of social data all this influence creates. And those who do study social data typically use it for the wrong reason: to measure the brand impact of their marketing campaigns.