Welcome to my blog on Content Intelligence and Engagement Performance; I have spent years in collaboration, messaging and social space developing advanced technologies to improve the consumer experience and lead generation. Was inducted into the Viral Hall of Fame by Marketing Sherpa as well as other industry awards. Join me in the conversation.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Social Brand Growth: Part 1

I have worked up a 3 part series on Social Brand Growth. Enabling database marketing companies the ability to truly appeal to the customers with relevance and communicate with your audience through social intelligence.


Social networks have changed the dynamic between businesses and consumers from two-dimensional to multi-dimensional. This shift occurred because social networks have allowed brands to become active listeners and participants in broader conversations that consumers with common affinities.



Going beyond antiquated marketing campaigns to create true, meaningful social interactions with consumers is not an easy task. Regardless of whether companies decide to outsource their social network efforts or manage those efforts in-house, UNBOUND Technologies' SNI (Social Network Intelligence) technology platform is a fundamental step that will enable data base marketing companies, email service providers and any marketing or sales organization to take full advantage of these rapidly emerging opportunities in social media.


The Growth of Social Networks

As most already know, a social networking friend is anyone who associates with another user. A friend can be a close acquaintance or a stranger, with whom the user shares some affinity, including jobs, music, movies, television or fashion. Social networks have experienced significant growth in recent years. 48 percent of American adults have either a MySpace or Facebook page. (1) 16 percent of these adults update their page at least once a day. (2) 74 percent of online users from 18 to 34 years of age have a Facebook or Myspace page.(3) MySpace brought social networking into the mainstream but it has been surpassed by Facebook. As of 2009, 19 percent of Google's unique visitors are referred by Facebook. (4) This suggests that Facebook may actually overtake Google in terms of number of unique visitors between 2011 and 2012. (5)

MySpace was the first social network to allow companies to create fan pages that users can join as friends. MySpace fan pages are not cheap: prices start at close to $100,000. Facebook followed suit, albeit with its own spin, offering both free fan pages and fee-based fan pages that can attract a significant amount of followers. For example, the Facebook fan page for actor Vin Diesel grew to 3.8 million followers in just a few months. In comparison, Coca Cola's Facebook fan page has 3.4 million fans. Facebook now boast more than a million fan pages with over 60 thousand that are consider top page having a /brandname over just a name and id.
Now Twitter houses massive consumer brand affinity , whereby, consumers “Follow” a brand Twitter feed and every major brand you can think of has a Facebook Fan page. What does this all mean?



For starters is creating a wealth of Social Intelligence never before seen enabling marketers to be smarter than ever before. The ability to truly understand their direct consumers as well as friends of their consumers and possible influencer is a major game changer in conversation induced marketing.


Marketers tapping into their social conversation is priority number one and reaching the right audience and affective composition is a driving force of these brand page going main stream. Utilizing UNBOUND's SNI platform enable the visualization of paid brand fan pages on Facebook.



As the chart illustrates, the growth of companies using the /brandname URL grew from 805 to 3301 from December 2008 to June 2009. Figure 2 provides a detailed breakdown of the friend growth of popular brand fan pages from December 2008 to April 2009. Now with Facebook opening up to any page owner that has over 5000 fans and had a page for over a year this has grown to an impressive 67K brand pages.

1. http://www.kenradio.com/content/view/1861/1/
2. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_04_16.pdf
3. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91395307068
4. http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-facebook-could-kill-google-analyst-2009-3?mtcCampaign=7662
5. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/compete-facebook-us-traffic-nearing-google-yahoo/
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