Engagement on Social Networks Top Priority for Marketers

Top priorities in 2010 according to senior marketers worldwide (% of respondents)

“Senior marketers reported that social networks and applications were their biggest priority for 2010, followed closely by digital infrastructure. While social media marketing looks set to stay top of mind, a majority of respondents considered a range of digital activities at least “important,” with only games failing to inspire widespread interest.”

Read the full article here.

What You Learn By Analyzing 600k Facebook Pages

Sysmos, an enterprise social media analytics company, hired 100,000 monkeys working at 50,000 desks (2 per desk) in order to analyze 600,000 Facebook pages. Just joking about the desk thing – each monkey got their own desk.

 

The massive primate effort resulted in some very interesting findings, which I’ve highlighted below in no particular order.

• Michael Jackson is the most popular page on Facebook, with 10 million fans; he is followed by actor Vin Diesel (7 million) and U.S. president Barack Obama (6.9 million).
• On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.
• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page. (Where “owner-generated content” means things like photos, videos, and links posted by the page’s administrators.)
• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (photos, videos) as the average Facebook page.
• On an average Facebook Page, the administrators create one wall post every 15.7 days. Among pages with more than one million fans, one wall post is created for every 16.1 days. This suggests that wall post frequency does not correlate with a page’s popularity.
• Overall, the most popular “category” for Facebook pages is “non-profits”, while “celebrities”, “music”, and “products” are the most popular categories among pages with more than one million fans.

I think these findings are directionally interesting, but for most businesses, 1m fans is an unlikely goal.  It is interesting to see that the average days between posts is around 15 – this seems far too long (half a month!).

I find that the value of Facebook to a business rests in the comfort and familiarity that many now have with the platform and layout, making it easier to navigate certain Facebook Fan pages than the actual website! Therefore, if businesses can successfully get clients to FAN their pages, it’s a powerful communications tool, but one that must not be abused. Also, be truthful and humble about your brand’s strength and signal in the market.

NIELSEN BLOG: When Making a New Purchase, Where Do You Find the Best Information?

From the Nielsen blog.