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, January 2, 2010

Brand Growth on Facebook Part 2 Year End Addition

“Twenty Ten” is being called the year of social driving ROI and measurement. The year 2009 held a great deal of social experimentation with wins for Dell, BestBuy and Target all pushing exclusive discounts to their Facebook ”fans” or Twitter “followers”. (unlike calling them “buddies” in the day of instant messaging). This is UNBOUND’s 2nd series of Brand Growth on Facebook year end addition. For any marketer the truth be told that your customers online, 20% of the clickers on the internet make up 80% of the buyers. These numbers have been kicked around for some time. In a recent Forester article saying “Social Marketing will go from ‘cool’ in 2009 to ‘strategic’ in 2010” and I fully agree.

Now with social network, the ability to instantaneous broadcast to your “friends” on what you fan or tweeting out a recent discovered discount or good experience with a retailer is most likely the biggest game changer for marketers to not only harness but better understand their consumers over all passion points and product preferences. In this blog post we have compiled the Top Fan page categories based on what we call Top Brands. Top Brands are those that have links to a known brand or the actual brand themselves maintain. There are over 1.4 Million fan pages on Facebook making a very long tail where in this post we have segmented out the top 100,000 and organized them to see how the leaders in their categories are mastering the social graph. For their competitors, 2010 will be a game of catch up inserting themselves into the Social Conversation. Brands start taking advantage of social graphs. If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

On Facebook fan pages can be set with a type such as:


In the past year Facebook has greatly diversified brand sub types adding in Fashion, Other Business, Sports / Athletics. UNBOUND has done an extensive amount of cleaning the data since fan pages are user generated. We will show the “Other” category we created to assist in organizing consumer affinities.


All major brands have an Industry Type SIC Code and we have also assigned SIC codes to fan pages to enable vertical industry segmentation. From the top listings it's now each to see what industry types dominates Facebook.





Here we have highlighted the Top Ten winners for specific categories.
Games is the smallest category, however, has some of the largest fanning on Facebook.


Tapping into consumers' entertainment preferences such as TV shows and their relation to other products, services provides a brand the most comprehensive foundation for performing large scale consumer affinity analysis. By ranking these affinities aligned with the categories we reviewed here creates an in-depth consumer insight of your community as it grows.






Brand now have the ability to not only see the direct consumer reach (friend of friend) their fan base has but also the collective top affinities organized to build ultra high viral campaigns using Social Network Intelligence. (If you guessed the above affinity map links with a female consumer product you would be right)

Consumers have created over a million Facebook fan pages since Facebook opened up the fan page creation. Below is just a sample of what we call miss typed fan pages whereby the Fan page Admin selected a type. UNBOUND has taken great care in typing these into the “Other” category to produce clean affinity maps. However, this information is great value for many marketers using these Other types.


The amazing aspect of analyzing UGC Fan pages is seeing that a large set of consumers are sleep deprived, want more leisure time and desire laughter in their life.



In conclusion…… well maybe there’s not a conclusion just a big wake up call for the brands that have yet to realize social is not just some check box or insertion order but a viable way to tip the balance of getting to the hearts and minds of loyal customers making them super fans or brand beacons.



Twenty Ten will be the year brands demand better social analysis and measurement as more dollars are shifted in this not so “New Media” channel. Brands have to understand their social graphs, who are their top rank consumers, who have blogs, who is on twitter and how many of their customers are on what social networks to start maximizing their social asset.

Callan Green Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies did a great job highlighting some examples that will inspire you.

Chase McMichael @ChaseUNBOUND


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