Displaying items by tag: Facebook insights

When Facebook announced their global pages for global brands, they opened up access to a whole range of really cool localized data. For the big brands that Unmetric serves, this is a gold mine of insights as they can finally uncover where fans are from and which country is most engaged (or in love?) with any brand in the world. We’ve also added the ability to add custom sectors so clients can create benchmarks around the brands that matter to them. There’s more innovations in the pipeline, you’ll get to know about it first on this blog.

Custom Sectors

Now you can create your very own customized sector and unleash Unmetric’s awesome analytics on the brands that matter to you. This feature enables you to group brands from any sector into a single, custom sector and get benchmark and competitive intelligence only against those brands. For example, if you compete in the fast food business, you might only want to benchmark your brand against other pizza brands or if you have a personal care product, you might only want to benchmark your performance against other female beauty products.

Now, you can analyze, benchmark and compete with the brands that matter to you in your own customized sector of brands that you’ve added. The data rich content of the Insightsand the Leader Boards section will contain information unique to the custom sector that has been created as shown below:

You can create upto 10 custom sectors, only 3 of which will be active at a time. This feature will come in handy for businesses and agencies that monitor brands from multiple sectors.

Localized Metrics:

Global brands can now know the distribution of their fan base across countries using Unmetric’s localized metrics.
This feature helps a brand to not just know the number of fans in different countries but also discover how well those fans are engaging. The chart below shows a break down of which country fans come from and how many are from each country.

You can drill down further by clicking on the bars to see the country-wise trends of key metrics like Fan Growth Rate and Number Talking About the brand as shown below:

Localized metrics helps a brand to understand its fan base across geographies and provides key market insights and helps in tailoring relevant content for their fan base.

To access these great new features, claim your 10 day free trial.

Peter is the marketing manager for Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company. He is an avid writer and blogger, gets excited by social media metrics and dreams that one day he will play for Manchester United.

Blog published with permission from Unmetric

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook announced a new feature called Graph Search. Though still in beta, Graph Search could signify a monumental shift in the way people search for information online. In this post, I’m going to explain how Graph Search works, and tell you why it will be an especially powerful tool for content marketing. 

What is Graph Search?

Graph Search has the potential to drastically alter they way we — as a society (of Facebook) — search for information on the web.

At its heart, Graph Search is a social search engine. It enables users to find information they’re seeking using their Facebook friends (and friends of friends) as a filter. Once live, Graph Search will allow users to search for queries like never before and provide more personal results. 

Answers Graph Search has (that Google doesn’t)

Here’s how Graph Search works:

Say you’re craving sushi on your first trip to Germany:

Query: “Sushi restaurants in Berlin my friends like”

Looking for a good mystery novel?

Query: “Fiction books my friends have read”

Want to host a romantic dog meet-up at a Starbucks in Brooklyn? (Starbucks might not like that too much; but let’s go with it for our purposes):

 “Single people who like Starbucks, live in Brooklyn, and have dogs”

Or say you’re having a “Girls” viewing potluck, complete with a post-episode literary analysis:

Query: “People who like “Girls” TV show, like to cook, and graduated from Yale

Here’s what I was shown when I searched for restaurants my own friends liked:

Why Graph Search is being called a “Google killer”

As you can see, Graph Search not only provides Facebook users with a deeper, more social (and potentially more creepy) search experience, one of its main drivers is to return more relevant and meaningful content for users. Quite simply, it centers around the notion that birds of a feather flock together — i.e., the idea that we like the same things our friends like. Facebook just wants to make it easier for its users to find that out.

For example, searching Google for “pizza restaurants in New Orleans” will return drastically different results than Graph Search will for “pizza my friends like in New Orleans.” You might go as far as saying Facebook’s results would be more relevant to you because pizza that your friends like is probably more important to you than the pizza place with the best SEO. Boom.

Not only does Graph Search have the potential to provide a more meaningful search experience for its users, if no one in a searcher’s network has engaged with content related to his or her query (e.g., if no one in the searcher’s network likes “pizza” on Facebook), Bing acts as a secondary search engine to reveal content from friends of friends, as well as other search results from all over the web. Boom again.

What Graph Search means for content marketers 

OK great, so what does that have to do with content marketing? In a nutshell, it meanscontent marketers need to prioritize Facebook as a primary channel in their content marketing strategies. Just like Google has, Facebook is defining and solidifying its algorithm for its own search engine. And as users rely more and more on Graph Search (especially for certain things, such as local searches, common interests, entertainment, and more), it stands to usurp or, at the very least, compete with how all of us have been searching for information online. That means showing up in Graph Search could eventually be just as important as showing up in Google. That’s right, I said it.

Bring on SEO for Facebook…

Along with the best practices we’ve accepted as the guiding principles of our content strategies, here are considerations that content marketers should prioritize in anticipation of users relying more and more on Graph Search: 

1. Aggressively grow your brand’s Facebook network: Simply showing up in Graph Search should be your first priority. This means your page is going to have to be “liked” by more and more users in order to be relevant within their own social graphs and exposed to their networks via Graph Search.

Whether this takes delegating more ad-spend to Facebook, managing more Facebook-centric campaigns and promotions, or giving your audience an even more special reason to be there, more emphasis should be placed on your Facebook page than ever before. Of course, that takes a high-level, consistent content strategy to sustain it (which leads to my second recommendation). 

2. Produce content that initiates high engagement levels: No big surprise here, right? Facebook has literally stated on its website that content with higher engagement levels will not only show up in the social arm of GraphSearch (ahead of Bing results), but also in users’ news feeds more often. We are all well aware of what creating an impactful content marketing strategy takes — knowing our audiences, creating truly compelling content designed to connect with them, and measuring what is effective and what isn’t. Repeat.

3. Focus on keyword-rich status updates: Because Bing powers the second arm of Graph Search, Facebook recommends that brand pages optimize their content (status updates, captions, etc.) with relevant keywords. So here we are back at SEO 101. Make sure your status updates correspond with the keyword strategy you’ve outlined within your content strategy. Not only will using the right keywords in your website content help you rank in Google, it will also help your brand page rank for your target terms in Graph Search. It’s one of those win-win situations.

Next steps for Graph Search & content marketing

Graph Search is still in early beta for a limited group of users, which means it will be some time before we see this feature live on our own Facebook profiles. Not to mention it will be a long while before we can see true results from this new feature. But this also means content marketers have a little time to get their content strategies in order with tactics designed to grow their presence on Facebook. In the meantime, you can keep up with news on Graph Search, sign up for the beta version, and read more about its inner workings here.

For more tips on leveraging the latest social media innovations in your content marketing efforts, read CMI Books’ “Capturing Community” by Michael Silverman. 

Camella Mendez is a content strategist with Internet Exposure, a Minneapolis digital agency that specializes in web design, development and Internet marketing strategy. For more articles like this one, follow their blog, Above The Fold, add them to your circles on Google +, or tweet them @iexposu

Article sourced with permission from Content Marketing

Competing with the iPhone in the smartphones market, and now with the world through a Guinness Record, Samsung has launched the ‘Samsung Galaxy Note II Incredible Art Piece’, an endeavour to create a digital art piece that will break the Guinness World Records title for the most artists working on the same art installation. The current world record set in April this year has 2,01,948 contributions and Samsung’s ‘Incredible art-piece’ has managed to garner 40, 343 artists so far.

And what is in it for the contributing artists? Well, the best artist wins a Galaxy Note II every week and 100 invites win you personalized merchandise. There are multiple options through which you can participate: The Facebook app ‘Incredible Art Piece’ on the Samsung Mobile India Facebook page, the specially created microsite or at a select retail mall given at the microsite. There is also a scan and email option form at the site.

About the Incredible Art Piece Facebook app

The Facebook app and the microsite have a similar design interface, except that in Facebook, you have to ‘like’ the page in order to be able to proceed. Read about the initiative and the T&Cs below, following which I liked the page and clicked the ‘proceed’ button. The app begins with taking user permissions and now displays the ‘contribute’ button.

Once you click contribute, you are welcomed with the given screen shot – an array of colourful pixels that when you hover upon, give the name and title of the contributing artist and his art piece. You can click on any of the little square pixel to see the art piece in a pop-up window.

To contribute, click on start and register with your name, email and mobile number.

Once registered, a drawing board with tools is displayed along with a demo video that shows you how to use the various tools and create your artwork. You have the usual tools available in a basic paintbox software like pencil, brush, custom shapes, themes, fonts, fill colour and stroke colour. You can play around by scaling, rotating objects and also by using the zoom in and zoom out options, you can make intricate details in your artwork. You can undo, redo, reset or delete a particular object or action too.

Click submit when you are done and there you go – you are a certified contributor in a Guinness World Record attempt for the most artists working on the same art installation!

You can contribute again, share it on your wall or download your certificate. In addition, you can also get your contribution in a personalised merchandise form if you can get 100 friends to contribute. The app has a provision to search for your friends through email.

How cool is the Incredible Art Piece?

For a smartphone that is positioned as ‘Incredibly creative’, this is an awesome campaign that aligns with the brand message and product positioning. The Incredible art piece is a cool promotion for the Samsung Galaxy Note II placing its creativity as the differentiation factor. Moreover, in addition to the prize being the product itself, contributors have the added incentive of participating in a once-in-a-lifetime Guinness World Record attempt!

The app scores well both in design and execution. Moreover, it was informative and had a clean intuitive interface. The app worked like a dream and provided for smooth navigation too. The added features of Invite and Share would help in increased visibility. However, the one thing that stands out for me is the multiple ways to contribute, as this would ensure more people can contribute to the Guinness Record attempt.

Thanks to The Incredible Art Piece, I can happily flaunt my certificate as a Guinness World Record contributor. Have you contributed yet?

About the Author: Co-Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. A student of life, art and building relationships. Love to read just about anything and strongly believe that books make a beautiful world.

Reproduced with permission from Lighthouse Insights

Indian Car Manufacturers Most Popular with Fans on Facebook while Aspirational German Brands Enjoy the Highest Fan Engagement

In the most comprehensive study of how top car brands are using Facebook in India, Audi and Tata Motors lead the sector whereas Toyota and Chevrolet are yet to make a major impact.

Download the report below

When Red Bull decided to sponsor Felix Baumgartner’s record attempt to jump from the edge of space, they probably had a good inclination that it would be a good PR stunt. A PR stunt it might have been, but it captured the imagination of people around the world – to the point where even other brands attempted to leverage the buzz. According to a report by the Telegraph, the stunt generated over $150M worth of publicity.

The story had all the right ingredients to get people talking. There was adventure, suspense, danger, technology, and of course the boundless romance of space – that final frontier as one TV show put it. The suspense built up as Felix geared up for the launch, only for the jump to be canceled at the last minute. It seemed like every media house around the world was following the story minute by minute – publicity that is hard to come by without very deep pockets. Finally, on October 14th, Felix ascended to the heavens in his specially made capsule and took one giant leap of faith.

Here’s What Happened Next

On Facebook, Red Bull has always done a brilliant job of engaging its fans. In fact, it’s currently the number one beverage on Facebook according to the Unmetric Score. However, the nature of the space jump gave them extra ammunition to reach even more people. See how the fan numbers and engaged fans jumped at the time of the launch.

Twitter was an invaluable tool for Red Bull to keep the media and waiting masses updated minute by minute. Was the jump going to go ahead? How high is Felix now? What altitude did he reach? Did he really just break the sound barrier? Every tweet was read by tens of thousands, retweeted by thousands, and picked up by the media. See the graph below to see how Red Bull’s follower growth jumped on October 13.

The space jump was a visual treat, from the futuristic capsule to the stunning panorama photos taken from the edge of space. Red Bull used YouTube to capture every moment and the final cut video has been one of the most watched videos on YouTube this month – check out the view growth rate; over 28M views and counting.

The event also had an impact on the number of subscribers to Red Bull’s page. They added over 150,000 new subscribers in just over 10 days. Most YouTube channels don’t have 150,000 subscribers in total with even heavyweight brands like Coca-Cola only tipping the scales at 85,000 subscribers.

The space jump was talked about by people, media, and brands alike. Kit Kat, whose branding is all about taking a break and finds innovative ways to take a break, opted for some event hijacking by posting this image on their Facebook page when the first jump was called off due to bad weather.

Kit Kat even proved to be dynamic enough to create their own space launch video by creating the first chocolate bar to be launched in to space. The video received attention from the mainstream media, but not on the scale of Felix’s space jump. That said, it was the most popular video Kit Kat have ever done on YouTube.

Space and human adventure still captivates the public imagination, and Red Bull scored a home run with their sponsorship of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump. With everyone talking about Red Bull, who’s going to remember the other energy drinks?

Methodology

All data has been compiled and analyzed from the Unmetric application which tracks dozens of metrics to enable brands to benchmark themselves against competitors and their industry sector. Gain access to all this data by claiming a 10 day free trial.

About the Author: I'm a data junkie, social media addict and an all round Internet geek. I love researching and analysing social media data to discover trends and insights which I can then share with others. I head up the marketing operations for Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company which provides competitive intelligence for global brands and answers the question "is that good?". Originally from England, I have lived in Chennai for the last 4 years.

Reproduced with permission from the Unmetric Blog

Here we dig in to see what is Nestlé First 1000 Days and why this Facebook community is the most engaged one.

I got to know about the Nestlé First 1000 Days Facebook community from the Social Bakers September report on the performance of Indian brands on Facebook. Nestlé First 1000 Days had topped the list of Facebook brands in terms of daily page engagement rate for the month of September, by giving a lead to an assorted list like  Shaadi, Greenpeace, Infosys, Pears, etc.

While there isn’t a magic formula for having a good engagement score, brands can always aspire to create an honest engagement with their community. Sometimes brands who topped this list were also the ones with a month-long campaign but when I visited the Nestlé First 1000 Days, I was stunned by what I saw. The community page is an active one marked with relevant discussions with parents and content is beautifully aligned with community goals. So, let’s explore!

The Concept:

The first 1000 days from a woman’s pregnancy to her child’s 2nd birthday are the most crucial period in a baby’s life. Mothers need to be educated about the right nutrition and care and that’s what seeded the site – ‘Nestlé Start Healthy Stay Healthy‘. Nestlé Start Healthy Stay Healthy, is an initiative of Nestlé in partnership with doctors to educate mothers on the importance of these first 1000 days in order to nurture a healthier generation. The campaign aims at generating awareness and educating them about right nutrition during this crucial period, which can have a direct impact on a child’s mental as well as physical ability to learn and grow.

The site has content divided into the different age group buckets like pregnancy, birth+, sitter, crawler, stander, walker, talker and toddler, with a range of topics covered under each of them. In addition, tools like Due date calendar, Baby names, Growth chart, Meal planner, etc. are also an excellent add-on.

However, the site is a static one and does not offer a two-way dialogue platform. And here is where the community page ‘Nestlé First 1000 Days’ on Facebook comes into action. The Facebook page launched this March, had started with a ‘First 1000 Days’ march in Mumbai, along with the Times Of India. The launch was marked by celebrity mothers, Konkona Sen Sharma, Tara Sharma and a few others including Maharashtra Health Minister, Suresh Shetty.

Engaging the Community:

Content is informative, simple to consume and rightly aligned with its objective. Besides, having doctors on the panel is reassuring especially when its your baby’s health concern that is being addressed. Content such as the below update builds a healthy conversation amongst the community where parents specially mothers share their methods. The page admin will then share a related article from the website that gives a detailed picture.

Content adheres to the expectations. Topics range from ‘Things to know about exercising during pregnancy’ to ‘Teaching healthy eating habits’ and ‘Understanding the emotional needs’. But, the noteworthy feature is the  page response. The page admin maintains a conversational tone along with responding to queries with resourceful links.

Ending thoughts:

The concept is a good one as with most Facebook community pages started by brands. Instead of saying how good your product is, you build a community of target consumers and get them involved in conversations, eventually building trust for your product. I’m impressed with what ‘Nestlé First 1000 Days’ is doing as the community is indeed resourceful and not a mouthpiece of the brand.

Besides, engagement is not about likes, comments and shares at the end. Real value is added through real conversations whereas most of the existing metrics for Facebook engagement rate do not factor in related conversations or focussed conversations. If you want to build and nurture a community for the long term, you need to create exclusive and helpful content  for them. You need to give them a solid incentive for being a part of your community. And Nestlé First 1000 Days seems to be doing that quite effectively. Fans are not only trusting the brand but are also seen helping other fans with their queries.

With a loyal set of brand advocates and an engaged community, the Nestlé First 1000 Days definitely scores in meeting its goals. What do you think?

About the Author: Co-Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. A student of life, art and building relationships. Love to read just about anything and strongly believe that books make a beautiful world.

Reproduced with permission from the Blog

A look at Idea Cellular’s content strategy on Facebook where the brand has weaved in the power of ideas into each type of content.

Idea Cellular, called BATATA (From Birla-Tata-AT&T) at one time, has seen a whirlwind of survival in the Indian mobile services market. As per this recent news, Idea is the top pick in a report by AnandRathi on the telecom sector and states that it will have higher earnings in the coming financial years. We do not know what’s playing on in the rapidly evolving space but we can always see what’s happening on their Facebook page.

With a 3.8 million strong community on Facebook, which is nearly similar when compared with other telecom brands, the brand has come a long way in terms of the content that goes out for its fans’ consumption.  In fact, its content is a key differentiator if one were to look at the Facebook pages of other players. I’d been watching the page for quite some time now and was really impressed with the idea behind Idea’s content strategy.

There is a set weekly pattern with every content being centred around an idea, and as they say – An idea can change your life!Every Monday fans are treated with a number from the Idea Jukebox to drive away their Monday morning blues. These are classic videos from the legends of the 60′s and 70′s, shared from YouTube. This Monday, it was ‘We are the champions’ from Queen, while last Monday it was Metallica’s Nothing else matters.

Tuesdays, there is a Idea Citizen Journalist video being shared from the CNN-IBN CJ program. These are inspiring stories where the brand tries to portray the difference that can be created by a single voice. I was particularly inspired by a woman whose CJ video got a school built in the outskirts of Delhi.

Wednesdays are dedicated to ‘App of the day‘ where the brand will share an amazing app and why is it the app of the day.

Thursdays are for watching the beautiful Idea Frames where the brand will share an amazing photo shared by a fan.

However, I love Fridays at Idea. I always look forward to the ‘Friday moviez’ that are amazing short films, sponsored by Idea. Here’s a short film based on Karma that is certain to scare the daylights out of you:

Saturdays are dedicated to Idea Super Weekends where fans can learn something interesting like how to know the worth of your stamps or how to make a mojito or an origami dinosaur. These videos have been taken from YouTube

Sundays would appeal to all sports lovers. Every Sunday, you see a mix of videos under ‘Ground Reality Voices‘ where leading cricketers talk about the changing nature of the sport.

Ending thoughts:

Digital properties are cluttered with almost all brands harping on about themselves and adding in the occasional spice with the latest controversy in town. So, this was a refreshing change though all of the stuff other than the Friday short films, have been curated from the internet. Which means fans can find these elsewhere too and might not be interested to engage with this content. Here’s a screenshot of the content from last 7 days, where we can see the engagement driven with respect to the content (data from Unmetric):

The other issue is with having a weekly pattern – this might get humdrum at one point in time . Besides, the content mainly consists of videos and photos, these are known ‘big engagement’ pullers.

Nevertheless, it is a cool thing to align the nature of your content with your brand message – An idea can change your life! What are your thoughts?

About the Author: Co-Founder and Blogger at Lighthouse Insights. A student of life, art and building relationships. Love to read just about anything and strongly believe that books make a beautiful world.

Reproduced with permission from the blog

Heineken is something of a Jupiter sized gas giant (but not full of gas, of course) when it comes to beer brands on social media. They just crossed 8m fans this month, which makes all the other beer brands look like Pluto-esque dwarf planets by comparison (although I’m at pains to point out that unlike Pluto, Bud Light, Budweiser and Carlsberg have not yet been downgraded from their current classification of being a beer). Infact, no other alcoholic brand even holds a solar sized flare to the total number of fans Heineken has

In the last 30 days, Heineken has seen its fanbase grow by over 4.3%. Even though this is somewhat off the mark of the sector average, which saw a 10.7% growth, even a 4.3% growth equates to over 330,000 new fans. Impressive by any astronomical measurement you care to use.

Heineken posts about once a day, which is a good call if you want to keep your fans happy. Unfortunately for Heineken though, most of these posts go unnoticed by the overwhelming majority, with each post barely registering a few hundred Likes or Shares. The chart below shows the average engagement score (a calculation of the number of Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions each post receives) which illustrates how well beer brands are engaging for the time period analyzed.

However, every now and then, the slumbering giant awakens and Heineken posts something that connects with a huge number of fans. The most recent example of this happened on August 24th. If 14 days of news seems like a lifetime ago to you, let me refresh your memory: Nasa’s Curiosity, the most sophisticated piece of engineering ever to be sent to another planet, touched down gracefully on Mars. Many brands celebrated this feat of engineering on their Facebook page, but none saw such stellar engagement as Heineken who were, to use an old cliché, light years ahead of the rest.

This wasn’t just a well Photoshopped image though (sorry, there really isn’t a Heineken bar on Mars, although it would be awesome if there was), there is a much larger story behind it. Curious fans who clicked the provided link to a YouTube video would understand it better. It turns out that way back in 2005, Heineken made a TV ad that was a rather clever spoof of the Spirit and Phoenix Mars Rovers landing on Mars. Instead of using complex experiments and irrefutable science to look for life, the fun loving Dutch engineer turns the rover in to a Heineken bar, complete with a pre-chilled beer (although getting water condensing on the bottle in the Martian atmosphere would be a miracle of physics) and says “let’s wait for life to find us“. Now that Curiosity has joined the other Rovers, presumably Heineken believes that there’s going to be some kind of robotic cyber party on the Red Planet.

With an engagement score of 541, it was the most popular post in the last 30 days for Heineken. Over 13,300 people shared the photo, which means that assuming each fan has at least 100 friends, a potential 1m additional people saw Heineken’s clever image. However, amongst the top beer brands in North America, it wasn’t the most popular post for the time period analyzed.

Heineken has done a fantastic job of growing their fan base and deserve recognition for keeping up their rapid growth rates. Their ability to leverage current events and use social media to connect with their customers is second to none. However, other beer brands are engaging their fans better and getting more people talking about the brand.

Note: One or two astronomy themed metaphors, puns and analogies may have crept in to this blog post. Please be kind and humor the author, who studied Aerospace Engineering, but quickly realized that writing for a living was far easier than doing finite element analysis and partial differential equations for the rest of his life.

Methodology

All data has been compiled and analyzed from the Unmetric platform which tracks dozens of metrics to enable brands to benchmark themselves against competitors and their industry sector. The time period analyzed was 2nd August 2012 to 1st September 2012. Gain access to all this data by claiming a 10 day free trial.

About the Author: I'm a data junkie, social media addict and an all round Internet geek. I love researching and analysing social media data to discover trends and insights which I can then share with others. I head up the marketing operations for Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company which provides competitive intelligence for global brands and answers the question "is that good?". Originally from England, I have lived in Chennai for the last 4 years.

Reproduced with permission from the Unmetric Blog

Demographic Data For Popular Brands in India 

I took 12 popular brands in India, some aspirational, some that you would think only appeal to older people with money and others that overwhelmingly appeal to females in the west. The male dominance is clear to see in the chart below. Based on the data below, we can draw a conclusion that Indian men like finance, talking, traveling, driving and of course drinking. Surprisingly, given their dominance across all other brands, men leave Surf Excel to the ladies. Shoppers Stop is another brand that has a much higher percentage of female fans than other Indian focused Facebook pages. 

It’s well known that Facebook overwhelmingly appeals to the younger generation in India. Older people are either not interested in engaging with brands or view the social network as a waste of time. The graph below illustrates just how much Facebook is used by younger people. People over the age of 30 are entirely missing and this could have ramifications for Facebook wanting to attract big advertisers because the age group with money to spend are simply not using the site.

It’s very interesting to see so many people ‘Liking’ brands that you would traditionally associate with an older demographic. For example, Yatra, the online travel portal has close to 70% of fans under 21. How many people under 21 are going to be booking flights and hotels? For other brands like Pepsi, MTV and KFC it’s understandable that so many fans are in the younger age bracket. ICICI is one of the stand-out brands here because it has 72% of fans in the 21-30 age range – maybe a result of all those corporate salary accounts! Vodafone too, has a high proportion of 21-30 year olds, which is unusual when compared to the rest of the telecom sector.

Given that in India, Facebook is the opium of the younger generation, it’s unsurprising that the vast majority of fans identify themselves as being single. It’s also unsurprising that so many people don’t provide their relationship status when compared with Facebook users in the West. Fans of Vodafone are more forthcoming with their relationship status and this is reflected in the higher number of single and married fans. Both Surf Excel and ICICI seem to appeal to those who society considers as settled: older and married. 

Another way in which the relationship demographics differs so much from the West is the number of people that identify themselves as being engaged. In the West it is typically 5-10% of fans, in India it is less than 1%. Again, this could be down to the vast majority of fans being young, it could also, in part, be due to the much shorter engagement periods in India compared to the West.

Trying to find the reasons why so many young people in India Like brands that are not targeted towards them would probably require a indepth study by itself. However, anecdotal evidence from the conversations I’ve had with younger people here suggest that they don’t ‘Like’ a page to engage with the brand, but more to present a certain image of themselves to their friends. Or, in other words, by ‘liking’ certain brands, it helps develop their own personal brand.

About the Author: I'm a data junkie, social media addict and an all round Internet geek. I love researching and analysing social media data to discover trends and insights which I can then share with others. I head up the marketing operations for Unmetric, the social media benchmarking company which provides competitive intelligence for global brands and answers the question "is that good?". Originally from England, I have lived in Chennai for the last 4 years.

I never thought I’d say this, but I feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg.

A recently minted billionaire. A recently married young man. The (anti) hero of an Academy Award winning movie. Creator of a verb – “I facebooked you”. And, besides Alexander the Great, likely the only person under 30 years old who can confidently say he’s changed the world.

Granted I’ve yet to see any recent photo where he looks sad and depressed but this is the dude I feel sorry for.

The media frenzy ahead of Friday’s IPO was unparalleled. 55 and a half million returns for “Facebook IPO” on Google. F**k me. Many of them taking shots at just how flimsy the “promise” of Facebook really is. That hasn’t been bolstered by breaking news that Morgan Stanley has been subpoenaed over their management of the IPO as well.

Now the sticky part – living up to the potential that a cash injection of several billion dollars is meant to unlock. C’mon now Mark, my pension was riding on Enron, Nortel and RIM, surely you’re not going to fail me?

Here’s the rub, if I had a suitcase of cash hidden under my bed – I don’t but if I did – would I be rushing out to place it on NASDAQ ticker FB or would I be off to the local casino and putting it all on black? How much faith do I have in Mark, Sheryl Sandberg and the other wunderkind at Facebook?

The case for Facebook

There’s several of course. Penetration (over 1 billion users), growth (still adding users at a respectable clip), investment by advertisers – granted not General Motors but then their pre-IPO dog & pony felt more like a desire to grab a few headlines than any meaningful departure. Then there’s the cash raised on Friday which, unless you’re Idi Amin, should be able to sustain you for a little while yet.

The case against

Their revenue streams remain advertising-supported. For all the eyeballs they attract, they’ve not yet monetized (to use that dreadful phrase) that billion+ users in any meaningful way…or in a way that any brand manager can directly correlate to replicable sales. By their own admission they don’t get mobile which will be the platform of choice for the next billion users they must conquer. They don’t have a proven case history of compelling product innovation unlike, say Google or Apple. Then there’s the market expectations that comes with the cash raised Friday. That wasn’t part of some global philanthropic gesture, those folks want returns likety-friggin-split. Lastly remember Zuckerberg himself has stated often that he considers Facebook more of a social and societal agent of change than a business. That’s not the philosophy of a die-hard capitalist is it?

So where does that leave my suitcase of cash?

Despite the slow whistling sound of air escaping from their IPO bubble, I’m not counting them out just yet.

I’m far from an expert but here’s three suggestions I have that might instil some longer term confidence.

Leveraging Big data – Besides Google, the IRS and the NSA is there anyone with more access to the most (semi) private thoughts of more consumers on the planet? Surely those data centers could be furiously running some meaningful correlations to add some depth to the meaningless phrase “engagement”

Mobile – the developing world connects via mobile – ask Nokia, HTC and Samsung. No more sheepishly saying you don’t get it. Your next tranche of ad revenues better be mobile-centric if you’re to survive.

Broader experimentation – say what you want about the Sleepy Hollow that is Google+ but their mother ship is relentlessly trying new things. Some work, some fail miserably but they’re pushing on multiple fronts. I don’t sense that commitment from FB.

I’m sure there are many of you who will poke huge holes in my argument. I welcome it. Facebook is just too pervasive a channel/tool/medium/piece of popular culture for us to not be concerned about its future.

Chime in folks.

About the Author: An insatiable curiosity is my defining characteristic. Which is probably why I got into advertising over 14 years ago. I know it aint a real job in comparison to say, a fireman or a nuclear physicist but hey. Anyway, along the way I've developed an opinion on a coupla things. This blog allows me to air a few of those opinions and thoughts. I thank you for your visit and welcome your feedback. website: http://www.hiltonbarbour.com

Reproduced with permission from his blog