Experian Marketing Services

Among the top 10 terms, the top two terms stayed the same with facebook the top search term and “youtube” ranked at number two. The search term “craigslist” moved up from the fourth spot in 2011 to the third spot in 2012. “Facebook login” was the fourth most-searched term in 2012, followed by “facebook.com” and “yahoo.” The search term “amazon” moved into the top 10 terms for the first time. Analysis of the search terms revealed that social networking–related terms dominated the results, accounting for 6.03 percent of the top 50 searches. This is an increase of 44 percent compared with 2011.

When combined, common search terms for Facebook — e.g., facebook and facebook.com — accounted for 5.84 percent of all searches in the United States among the top 50 terms, which represents a 27 percent increase compared with 2011. YouTube terms accounted for 1.67 percent, representing a 23 percent increase compared with 2011. Google terms (including YouTube) accounted for 1.91 percent — an increase of 20 percent compared with 2011. Yahoo terms accounted for 0.79 percent — an increase of 34 percent compared with 2011.

“Navigational searches continue to dominate the top search results as users continue to visit their favorite sites via search engines instead of directly entering a web address into their browsers URL bar,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services. “Single-word searches grew 16 percent in 2012 as a result of continued reliance on search engine’s suggested results. Other top 2012 searches reflected the ongoing infatuation with celebrities online.”

Other highlights include:

• The top 50 search terms accounted for more than 12 percent of all Internet searches in 2012 – representing a 30 increase compared to 2011.
• New terms that entered the top 50 search terms for 2012 included: backpage, cool math games, fox news, pinterest and pof – an acronym for Plenty of Fish, the top visited dating site in the US.
• The search terms yahoo and ebay have appeared among the top 10 since this ranking was started in 2006.

Top-visited websites in 2012

Facebook was the top-visited Website for the third year and accounted for 79.1 billion total US visits between in 2012. Google.com ranked second, with 78.5 billion total US visits — followed by YouTube (25.9 billion), Yahoo! Mail (22.2 billion) and Yahoo! (20.8 billion). eBay ranked in the top 10 for the first time since 2009.

The combination of Google properties accounted for 109.3 billion total. Facebook properties accounted for 79.1 billion total US visits, and Yahoo! properties accounted for 76.5 billion total visits. The top 10 Websites accounted for 276.3 billion total US visits or 32 percent of all U.S. Internet visits in 2012, which was slightly up compared with 2011.

Top public figure searches – Whitney Houston was the 196th most popular overall search term in the United States in 2012:

1. Whitney Houston (196)
2. Justin Beiber (242)
3. Kim Kardashian (291)
4. Nicki Minaj (371)
5. Bobbi Kristina (397)
6. Miley Cyrus (432)

Movies Titles – the top five searches from within the Movies category:

1. Breaking Dawn – Part 2
2. Magic Mike
3. The Dark Knight Rises
4. Prometheus
5. Dark Shadows

Music – the top five searched for artists/bands:

1. One Direction
2. Taylor Swift
3. Justin Beiber
4. Beyonce
5. Zac Brown Band

Branded Destinations – the top five search terms:

1. Disney World
2. Great Wolf Lodge
3. Disneyland
4. Hershey Park
5. Universal Studios Orlando

Top TV show searches – the top five primetime show searches from the Television category:

1. American Idol
2. Dancing with the Stars
3. The Voice
4. The Bachelor
5. South Park

Sports – The top searched-for athletes were Tiger Woods, Tim Tebow and Peyton Manning. The top searched for sports team was the Dallas Cowboys.

News and Media – The top non-celebrity search topics among News and Media sites in 2012 were hurricane sandy, iPhone5, election results and George Zimmerman.

If you are interested in more top 2012 data visits and fastest-moving searches, visit: the online trends page

• These new ads are a great way for companies who have apps to promote them to a wider base and do it in the Newsfeed on mobile which has proven very effective – this isn’t just for game developers, it can be for any company that has an app they would like to promote
• The ads are “social” and include info on how many of a user’s friends have installed the app, as well as the rating of the app
• ‘Install Now’ link directs to app store page with one-click install button
• App developers who have struggled with adoption and/or monetization now have a great way to promote their apps on mobile devices where the apps are being installed

Why is mobile advertising so important on Facebook? Let’s review the stats:

-    Conversion rates are up to 3x higher on mobile vs desktop ads

-    CPCs (cost per click) ~50% lower for mobile ads vs desktop

-    CPFs (cost per fan) up to 6x lower on mobile vs desktop

-    Initial results for Mobile App Install Ads have been impressive

Worried that Newsfeeds will now be cluttered with these ads? With Facebook’s massive reach, inventory constraints have not been a problem. Thus far, Facebook has proven to take all measures necessary to protect the user experience while finding new ways to monetize their products and help the greater ecosystem at the same time.

Alchemy Social, a part of Experian Marketing Services, launched this product in our Ad Manager tool the day it was announced publicly by Facebook. Contact us at info@alchemysocial.com with any questions about Facebook’s mobile ads.

Last week Facebook formally launched “Custom Audience” ads. The company also announced that Experian’s Alchemy Social was named as a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, the highest distinction of excellence Facebook has ever offered to marketing developers.

These two announcements particularly hit home with Experian Marketing Services’ Rachel Bergman, CEO of Alchemy Social, who is hosting Experian CheetahMail’s webinar this week, titled Email + Facebook = Like.  Immediately following the Facebook announcements, we were able to grab Rachel for a quick Q&A to chat about how Experian CheetahMail clients, and email marketers in general, can leverage Facebook’s Custom Audiences.

Q1: Rachel, why are you so passionate about this topic?

A1: I’m in a pretty unique position, having overseen the Experian CheetahMail business for several years, having been in email marketing for 12 years and now running Experian’s Alchemy Social. When I started in this new role about 6 months ago, Facebook changed the game pretty significantly by introducing Sponsored Stories that allow marketers to turn their Facebook ads into relationship-driven marketing. Although this was really exciting for advertisers, I knew it wasn’t going to change the way email marketers ran their programs. The connection just wasn’t there. With Facebook’s new announcement on Custom Audiences, they’ve taken a huge leap forward. This has happened very quickly. Now, email marketing and Facebook ad targeting have a clear link and I can’t wait for clients to start exploring all the opportunities this brings.

Q2: Can you tell us, exactly what is Facebook Custom Audiences?

A2: Custom Audiences allows you to target Facebook ads to specific individuals, allowing you to reach the exact audience you want to target. Specifically, you can take any file of email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user ID’s, and Experian CheetahMail will make that file available in Alchemy Social to target Facebook ads to the individuals that match that file. Your file is hashed at CheetahMail and sent to Facebook, so that no personal data about the individual is shared with a third party.

Q3: How do you think marketers will use Custom Audiences to enhance their email programs?

A3: The possibilities are endless for how you can use this new functionality, but here are some ideas that we think will be the most popular:

- Amplify the reach of each of your email campaigns by targeting your subscribers with Facebook ads. We all know that it oftentimes takes more than one impression to get a customer to engage – why not get that impression soon after your email is sent and drive traffic back to your current promotion?!

- Reach specific email addresses, via Facebook advertising, that you know have not received your message via email (e.g. non-openers/inactives or previous bounces).

- Retarget email addresses that have or have not completed specific actions in an email (e.g. a click on a specific link, a purchase of a category or specific product) with highly dynamic and relevant Facebook advertising.

- Retarget to website visitors that have or have not completed specific actions on your website with highly dynamic and relevant Facebook advertising. Note that this is a cookie-based match and you may be able to reach more visitors this way than with traditional email remarketing messages.

- Target Facebook ads specifically to individuals in your customer database that you have a phone number for, but not email address. Try to get them to engage and drive them to a landing page where they can opt-in for email communications.

- Launch a compelling campaign to all of your email subscribers to get them to become fans of your brand. You are able to exclude current fans from your Custom Audience after your file is loaded. How great is this? You can now run a targeted campaign on Facebook to convert all of your loyal customers to be fans on Facebook without wasting any impressions on current fans or other Facebook users who do not already have such a strong affinity with your brand.

Q4: You weren’t kidding, there are a lot of options! Can you tell us about targeting inactives? Why do you think this is so important?

A4: I’m glad you asked since I’m really excited about this. It’s no secret that email marketers have a huge challenge with reengagement and reactivation. Email is such a profitable channel, and the minute an email address is lost, it can be lost for good. Many companies have been forced to segment out a percentage of their email lists that they can no longer mail to due to “inactivity.” This is a huge loss! Now, with Custom Audiences, email marketers have a new channel to reach these inactives online. We see this as a huge opportunity – with every email marketer testing this, and ultimately making it part of their overall program.

Q5: What do you think is unique about Experian Marketing Services’ Custom Audiences offering?

A5: We are the only company that brings together the largest email marketing services provider in the world and one of the largest social advertising platforms in a completely seamless way – that’s really powerful! We can manage the process end-to-end for our clients so that they can make reaching their email audience on Facebook part of their everyday program, with no additional heavy lifting. It also doesn’t hurt that we are obsessed with our clients and always do everything we can to make sure their marketing programs are successful.

Q6: Some clients may have heard of The Facebook Exchange. Can you explain how this is different from Custom Audiences?

A6: The Facebook Exchange, or FBX, is equally as exciting and allows clients to target Facebook ads to visitors of their website who or have not completed specific actions (e.g. a visitor who placed an item in a shopping cart, but did not convert). The results of these highly targeted and timely campaigns have been yielding excellent results over the past couple of months while the program has been in Beta. This is technically how we will help clients re-build remarketing programs they have in email on Facebook, but our clients will work with us in a similar way to how we work with them on Audiences – so the difference between the products is not as important. The major difference is that The Facebook Exchange relies on a cookie match from the client website to Facebook, not an email match. Thus, we will not be sending files back-and-forth with this product. The match will be made by Facebook when the user goes to Facebook after coming to the client’s site. I see this as a great opportunity to potentially reach a larger audience with remarketing messages.

Q7: How can email marketers get started, especially with the holidays coming on so fast?

A7: First, attend our webinar,  Email + Facebook = Like  If you are an Experian CheetahMail client, you can then contact your Account Manager or a member of your account team and we can talk you through, step-by-step, how to start leveraging this new functionality. We have this functionality ready today and it’s that easy. There is a huge opportunity with Custom Audiences and this year’s holiday campaigns to increase overall campaign ROI.

Rachel Bergman leads the Alchemy Social business globally for Experian. For the last decade, Rachel has overseen Experian CheetahMail’s explosive growth and built one of the most highly regarded client services organizations in the world. Driven by “customer obsession,” Rachel has been in digital marketing since the beginning of her career. Rachel lives in New York with her husband and two children and has a BA with Honors in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University.

You can reach Rachel directly at rachel.bergman@experian.com or follow her on twitter at @rachelbergman

Key take-aways:
Facebook is the top social network displayed or promoted in email, followed by Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest respectively.

On average, emails promoting Pinterest get 24.7% more unique clicks than other non-social-promotion emails. The new kid on the block creates a lot of buzz in email. Check out this case study for specifics on how Ballard Designs boosts engagement with Pinterest.

Unique open rates for Twitter “follow-us” mailings are 9.5% higher than those for other mailings.

60% of brands that sent emails with “Facebook” in the subject line averaged a 27% increase in traffic to their website from Facebook the week following deployment.

First, it is imperative to determine what lies in the “social silo” that will impact other channels. For example, data-driven profiles, plus segmentation and models of highly engaged high value Facebook fans, can be used in all channels. We know that all fans are not high value, but high value customers are often fans — and socially active. So it’s important to be able to leverage social intelligence in customer marketing strategy and plans, thereby making the intelligence actionable for improved program results.

So what’s the best way to do this?

Let’s look at a Facebook roadmap for social intelligence:

Leverage Open Graph in Facebook with offers to encourage fans and customers to connect, not just to increase the number of fans, but to gather opt-in data. Make a compelling offer in customer emails, on your website or on your Facebook page. (Make sure the privacy policy and the permissions you display cover as much data as possible.)

Once you collect this valuable information don’t just file it somewhere. Treat it as a valuable feed of customer information. Using email or other collected data, link the Facebook information to your customer, compiled demographics, attitudinal, and behavioral data.

• Flag this insight within your customer database so that you have a more complete view of your customers.
• Understand which social connectors are prospects, leads or existing customers.

Create profiles and add to models and segmentation frameworks.

This roadmap allows you to use social intelligence anywhere in your marketing programs across all channels for activities like:

• Developing marketing tactics for prospects, leads and customers.
• Targeting high-value social customers with tailored offers and messaging.
• Creating campaigns in the social space targeted to higher value fans.
• Adjusting campaign messaging in all channels.

Since social activity is very dynamic, you’ll want to manage the Open Graph opportunity on an ongoing basis, rotating offers and placement. And remember you can offer a discount, for example, but a sweepstakes or other offer aligned with your brand can also be extremely effective. The data you gather gives you a dynamic portrait of your most engaged customers. You can use it for more refined and effective marketing investments. You might also want to leverage a marketing services partner with linkage, quality data and analytic expertise to get started.

The payoff…

For the social team:

• A clear, data-driven picture of your brand’s most engaged fans, leading to smarter social display ads and campaigns.
• A way to communicate clearly to marketing colleagues about the social customer ¾ beyond likes, posts and sentiments.

For the CMO:

• An understanding of the types of customers invested in social media helps calibrate marketing spend.
• A sound way to evaluate social media investment.
• A more complete picture of customer behavior.

For other marketing teams:

• A valuable customer attribute that can be used to help refine segmentation and targeting strategies.
• Clear understanding of how to target customer segments and which channels are likely to be most effective.

Knocking down the “social silo” is necessary to gather compelling data that’s useful in every marketing channel AND to be able to improve the customer experience. Building social intelligence is a key activity to keep in step with today’s dynamic customer, and to make sure your marketing is relevant and timely.

Big hitters aside how are the rest of the Olympic athletes doing in harnessing Facebook to increase fan engagement and build excitement during the games? The chart below shows how 400+ pages associated with Olympic athletes, teams and sports are performing (these are pages listed on Facebook’s own Olympic page – facebook.com/pages/olympics). We have plotted the number of fans each page has against the level of engagement for the page over the last week (using Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This’ metric – which provides a measure of number of new fans and people engaging with the page in the past week).

The tables below show the top 30 most popular posts (based on likes and comments) on the official TeamGB and US Olympic Team Facebook pages.

In the left hand chart we show all of these pages, and the true giants dominate the picture with many more millions of fans and hundreds of thousands more people engaging with them than the vast majority of other athletes and Olympic pages. Track athletics take second place to football stars such as Beckham (20 million fans) and Neymar Jr (6 million fans), US NBA basketball players (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Pau Gassol), and Tennis pros (Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal) who rank as the biggest players on Facebook. Usain Bolt has more fans than any other track athletics star (7 million fans), with swimmer Michael Phelps running a close second (5 million fans). By showing page size against the level of engagement (People Talking About This) one can immediately see where pages are receiving a disproportionate amount of engagement and excitement given the size of their fan base (i.e. those that are further up and to the left in the chart). Team GB and the US Olympic Team fan pages are both successfully creating engagement at levels above what you would normally expect for a page of their size. As we drill into the smaller pages (see the scatter chart on the right – which shows the detail for smaller pages), we also see that both the Japanese and Australian Olympic Teams – whilst smaller, are also driving engagement levels above other Fan pages of similar sizes. These national team pages appear to be hubs of conversation for fans in each country – perhaps not surprising given the number of athletes and events who do not have acitve pages themselves, or may have several, including unofficial pages which can cause confusion for even the most ardent supporter. Furthermore, most athletes have locked down the ability for fans to post stories on their pages, and instead fans interact by liking or commenting what Usain and others have to say in their posts – whereas on the Team pages, fans can generate their own posts and kick off new stories and conversations with their network. Team GB posts 15-25 times a day – and so far the double gold for rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning have been the most popular with 80 thousand likes per post. In contrast, the Team US posts more sparingly between 2 and 4 times per day focusing on their medal wins – with posts about Phelps’s 4x200m freestyle, which made him the most decorated Olympian of all time grabbing almost 200 thousand likes.

Whilst the US Olympic team’s page (2.3 million fans) is far bigger than Team GB’s (373 thousand fans) – Team GB has been the most successful with these games so far (again not surprisingly being on home soil) – growing almost five fold since the beginning of July (and over three times in just the past week), and the US Olympic Team’s page has grown by 8%. As we can see in the chart below, whilst GB still have a fair way to go to catch up in terms of fans, in terms of engagement (People Talking About), the GB and US team pages are neck and neck with almost quarter of a million people engaging with each page in the past week. Traffic to the official Team GB site also increased by 150 per cent in the last week

Teams aside, many athletes do manage to leverage Facebook to create and share in the excitement of their fans, and although many of the most prominent ones are outside of the track or pool – Bolt and Phelps are worldwide sensations with many millions of Facebook fans, and it will be interesting to see whether the games generate a million more fans with new audiences or whether they have reached saturation. In Great Britain, until the eve of the games Tom Daley and Jessica Ennis – two much more local stars had similarly sized fan bases of about 100 thousand fans. Tom’s page has since soared to close to half a million fans, growing by almost 3 times in the past week, and the level of engagement is greater than many of the biggest athletes on Facebook.

Tom regularly updates his Facebook status via his mobile in the run up to and following events – posting every day during July. When Daley and teammate Pete Waterfield missed out on their synchronised medal, he quickly posted to Facebook as to being “#gutted so sorry to everyone” – generating 120 thousand likes and 10 thousand comments from fans – mostly expressing their pride and wishing him luck for his individual event (see word cloud below of top words in the comments appearing on that post). His strong fan base also rallied with 170 thousand likes when he posted back in May for a fundraising night in memory of his late father. When we cut this with Experian Hitwise data we see that during the past weekend Tom Daley was the most searched for athlete by the UK internet population and searches for him tripled between Sunday and Monday. On Monday in particular Tom Daley featured in 1 in every 300 UK internet searches with 7% of searches including the word ‘twitter’. Finally 1 in every 17 searches for Twitter included the words ‘tom daley’.

In contrast, the history making Phelps has a much more laid back approach to Facebook, posting every couple of days in the run up to the games – he hasn’t yet updated his profile since the opening weekend of the games – presumably too busy on Twitter and competing – when he posted a congratulations to Ryan Lochte on his performance and was self deprecating about his own performance, garnering a good but by no means legendary 100+ thousand likes. UK online searches did increase by 467% for Phelps at the back end of last week.

We will be watching how engagement on Facebook evolves over the coming weeks and whether national team and sports pages and others manage to retain engagement once the games are over.

NOTE ON DATA IN CHARTS: There are some variations between data presented in the charts due to variations in timing of when Facebook data is available for different metrics – and in some cases we have updated live data from pages to provide the most up to date view.

86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction

None of the marketers in the room were surprised to hear Rob say that social media has become increasingly mainstream, though it was interesting to learn that according to Forrester, 86% of U.S. online adults are taking part in at least some form of social interaction.

This was good news for the marketers in attendance, many of whom are in the retail and travel industries, and all of whom are increasingly turning to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to promote their brands.

Also not surprising was Rob’s breakdown of challenges that marketers face, the biggest of which is creating a single view of customers across channels – picked by 50% of respondents in a recent Forrester survey. Not surprisingly, according to Rob, organizational silos contribute heavily to creating this challenge.

Measuring results was chosen by 45% of respondents, 39% cited improving expertise in new channels (i.e., social and mobile), 37% picked capturing customer insight to drive decision-making and 33% said managing data quality.

Smart cross-channel campaign management is critical to solving all of the above challenges and Rob had these thoughts on the topic:

• Campaign management applications are needed to enable more customer-centric approaches, but core CCCM capabilities are now quite mature
• Integrations, customizations and licenses are expensive and this sometimes prevent firms from incorporating campaign management applications
• Marketers need more support in social, mobile and local, but often native social listening, mobile push notifications and location-based communications are poorly supported or absent from the mix
• Marketers are asking for more help from their vendors as they often have the right vision and an interesting perspective. The vendors’ biggest challenge is simply a matter of moving fast enough to satisfy clients’ needs

Ultimately, Rob’s advice to marketers for getting to optimized cross-channel campaign management was this:

• Map your customer’s journey across key touch points
• Look for opportunities to integrate data and automate operations
• Create a 3-5 year technology strategy and implementation roadmap
• Prove ROI in high-value interactions – quick wins make it easier to get funding

• For the first time, last year’s Cyber Monday beat Thanksgiving Day as the busiest online shopping day of the year
• Facebook and Pinterest were the top traffic sources to the Experian Marketing Services Retail 500
• Pinterest visitors most often went to etsy.com and amazon.com from the pinterest.com site
• Dynamic content in emails can drive up to a 70% lift in open rates
• Tying web, email and in-store promotions together enhances the shopping experience and improves sales

The bottom line is that marketers need to understand where there customers are, when they are there, and what they are doing. Armed with that knowledge, you can deliver personalized and targeted holiday messages that are sure to make this shopping season merry and bright (and profitable!). View the webinar to learn more.

These lessons have taken some time to be adopted in the expanding world of digital marketing. From broadcast emails to placing banner ads to capture  eyeballs, the metrics have gravitated towards something new, including actions, conversion, click-throughs and even amount of purchase. Different companies, and even internal groups within companies, use different metrics to determine success. The metrics can be proactive based on strategy, or reactive based on other internal or external factors. Sometimes the approach is forced by competitive pressure, in other cases by the need  to track performance against broader objectives such as budgets or margins. As businesses become more used to the digital arena, segmentation and profiling play an increasingly important role in targeted campaigns.

Enter the new frontier of social marketing. Many questions arise for marketers, generating much discussion in industry groups and conferences: Which platform should I use? Which metrics should be tracked? What is the ROI? What does it drive? Also growing in complexity is the issue of revenue attribution in a multi-channel marketing world, and the role social media campaigns play in overall results. All valid questions, but a big challenge is that many seem to be forgetting a very fundamental question in marketing, regardless of channel, and that is: exactly who we are targeting? What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

What is the difference between the 10 or 10,000 people who ”Like” your Facebook page or follow you on Twitter?

This is an important question because it raises the issue of relevancy. Look at the marketing efforts in other channels. Do we show the same ad on all channels? What about print ads in magazines? Is every customer or prospect sent the same piece of direct mail? The same offer? How about email? Even web pages are providing different experiences to different visitors based on what we know about them, including something as simple as a winter clothing offer that’s based on the IP address of the customer. It’s clear that marketing efforts are becoming more finely tuned and targeted.

One key strength of social media marketing is the ability to engage an audience, though this can be marginalized due to the one size fits all approach for social engagement efforts. The troubling question is: At what point does this approach become irrelevant noise or social spam? If I have one page for customers to like, in an attempt to speak to all of them I may not be speaking to any of them. The only case in which all messages are relevant to all the fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter is if they are essentially alike because I have a very narrow product offering. Let me describe the issue with social spam using a simple example. A national clothing retailer has customers who differ by age, gender and geographical regions. At the most basic level, the factors that segment the customers would be:

1. Gender: 2 groups – male and female
2. Region: 4 groups – West, East, Central and South
3. Age: 3 groups -18-25, 26-34, 35-44

Potentially there are 24 different segments of audience (2x4x3 = 24). It is late Fall and if the retailer is sharing updates once daily on its Facebook page, how often will it post something that is relevant to a 19 year old male living on the West Coast? Say the posting on Monday is for light Fall jackets targeted for teenage girls on the West Coast. Tuesday it is for heavier jackets targeted for 30-something males in the colder East Coast, Wednesday the message is for 35-44 age women in South for accessories, and so on.

At what point should that message targeted to a 19 year old male living in the West Coast show up? Until that message is delivered, the other messages might be seen as irrelevant noise or even be considered social spam. By attempting to engage fans and customers the retailer could be sending the wrong signals ¾ i.e., you are just a number. How long until this customer/target/fan stops paying attention due to irrelevant messaging day after day? It takes one simple click to stop seeing all or most of the retailer’s updates thereby losing the attention of someone who at one time was interested enough to like the retailer’s Facebook page.

So what is the answer? We have to go back to the basic principles of marketing. A social strategy has to be targeted and customized. We must be able to answer basic questions like: Who is our ideal customer? How much do we know about this person, and what is or is not of interest to them? This will help fine tune all aspects of our social channel efforts, segmentation and, eventually, drive strong results.

Profiling and segmentation are critical. We don’t send the same direct mailer or email, or offer the same landing page to all customers, so why force them to the same feed on a social media channel? The answer is to have more specific feeds, whether it’s pages, accounts or albums. The good news is that the right information is available to be able to segment. This includes all kinds of syndicated consumer information, as well as information available specifically in the social channel itself. There are many views and approaches to calculating the value of a “Like” on Facebook or a follower on Twitter, but regardless of how the value is calculated, the more specific your messaging is to the customer the higher the value will be. Remember the channel or tool may provide additional capabilities but the fundamentals have to be followed to make the best use of any channel.

However, as time went on and Facebook and Twitter began to dominate the social space, a shift began in the kinds of things people were talking about. As Facebook evolved and started offering “fan pages” where someone could create a page on something or someone they really liked, a new idea was born: Businesses now had a social venue that allowed them to brand themselves in a social space and best of all, get instant reader feedback.

“Listening” became a corporate norm, and with it hundreds of vendors and software solutions were created to form an entirely new industry. With all of this information available for businesses to gather feedback, it was essential to understand what people were saying about their brands. And, brands needed to determine how and/or whether or not to respond to negative or positive comments. Today, most businesses have mastered the listening phase of the social revolution and taken advantage of the multitudes of software solutions that are available to help them react to and monitor what consumers are saying. But how does one respond effectively and also isolate subpopulations of negative consumers against a broader positive consumer base?

If someone posts about relaxing with a glass of wine, an organization can find out what the consumer’s wine brand or taste preference is.  Also, if someone posts about a new membership club they joined, an organization can determine if this caused others to follow suit.

This is where we are at today. Businesses are now realizing that just listening to what is being said about a certain topic, product, service or brand and responding to everyone in the same way isn’t as effective as they had hoped. So what’s a marketer to do? They profile their social consumer to understand key differences between those that are high-value and loyal brand advocates versus those that are low-value, negative consumers. By combining social data with traditional data, a brand can now understand their consumers across social media and other online and offline channels. If someone posts about relaxing with a glass of wine, an organization can find out what the consumer’s wine brand or taste preference is.  Also, if someone posts about a new membership club they joined, an organization can determine if this caused others to follow suit. This allows marketers to see if social media has any correlation in customer loyalty or consumer purchasing patterns. With this next evolution in social media marketing, brands are now able to make even more sense out of the vast amount of social data that exists in the social sphere. Once a brand understands more about the specific segments of consumers that are socially active, it’s time to move on to “publishing,” the final phase of social marketing.

With profiling, publishing becomes far more effective and efficient and a brand no longer has to blast everyone with the same social messaging.

When publishing, a brand has the opportunity to reach out to its consumers in a smart, targeted way. Utilizing the information learned in the listening and profiling phase, brands can target certain messages or ads to specific sub-segments of consumers. For example, if a brand’s high-value, socially active segment has been recently complaining about a new product line, the brand can take corrective action and target the individuals that fit into that segment with messaging similar to, “We’ve heard you and now we are working to make things better.” Whereas, if a brand’s low-value, non-socially engaged segment is complaining about a service, a brand may just want to send them a coupon or “sorry” message. With profiling, publishing becomes far more effective and efficient and a brand no longer has to blast everyone with the same social messaging.

Listening, profiling and publishing all work in harmony to provide the most impactful social marketing communication. Each one alone has its value, but together the three are worth more than the sum of the parts. As brands grow and continue to evolve their social communication, these three phases need to become more interconnected in the overall marketing plan.

Register for this webinar titled Harnessing Social Media for Accelerated Multi-Channel Performance  on June 21^st and find out how to get started. May The Force be with You!