One Facebook Fan = 20 Visits. You don’t say.
Marketing land was abuzz this week with the unveiling of new Hitwise survey data that revealed that in the retail sector, each facebook fan drove an additional twenty visits to the site of a brand. Social Media devotees rejoiced! At last something tangible to show for all that fan building, and from a source as trusted as Hitwise.
But hang on, there’s a few things which you need to understand before you run into the boardroom requesting a larger Social Media budget.
1. It draws inference from tenuous methodology.
To quote from Robin Goad’s blog post:
“We took the top 100 retailers ranked in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category and benchmarked visits to those websites against the number of fans those brands had on their Facebook page. We then also looked at the propensity for people to search for those retail brands after a visit to Facebook using our Search Sequence tool.”
Basically they are looking at a list of brands and saying, how many fans so they have? Now, let’s look at how much traffic they have and draw some inference. Is it surprising that the brand with most visits overall will generally have the most fans?
2. It is pretty shaky to assume visits = revenue. And you don’t have to these days.
Hitwise are a little restricted in what they track. It’s all about traffic flows, traffic profiling and market share – and that’s great when you need that. But with web analytics tracking now very commonplace, there’s no reason why brands shouldn’t know how many sales are coming directly from their facebook posts. Just pop a query string on there and voila you can monitor post click behaviour versus another traffic driver like display or PPC. Why try to justify building a loyal community of repeat customers on the basis of the rather uninspiring ‘visit’ or ‘frequency’ when you could just express the value in conversions and revenue?
3. If the information surprises you, panic.
If you couldn’t have figured out yourself that making someone a fan on facebook will encourage them to visit your site more often through prompts appearing in their newsfeed and more generally building an interactive relationship and staying front-of-mind, you should rethink whether marketing is the industry for you!!
4. The timing is rather convenient
Experian are launching a cost-per-acquisition service for gathering facebook fans. How timely then, that they spit out some tenuous data claiming to ‘finally solve the riddle of ROI from Facebook’, which it doesn’t in the slightest. This also means that those big black holes in the methodology probably involved some rounding up.
5. It’s different for every brand
The incremental visits created by fan growth will be different for every sector, every brand. Depending on if it is high frequency brand (retail) or low frequency (automotive) if your strategy is exclusive time sensitive offers (lastminute.com) or engagement and front-of-mind maintenance (domino’s) etc etc. It’s really dangerous to generalise and say if ‘If I recruit a fan that’s 20 more visits this year’. Evolved marketing is about benchmarking against yourself and your prior performance, it’s about continuous improvement. Don’t look at the other guy too much, it can lead you astray.
6. Remember it’s visits, not visitors
As such this means Facebook fan page marketing falls into the retention category, it’s about driving frequency and yield from existing customers. What would be really interesting to look at would be Facebook’s ability to generate new customers and acquisition through recommendation and word of mouth. Overlooking this understates the importance of making someone a fan. Not only will they visit more often, they will refer friends and highlight your brand in their friends newsfeed, be that organically or through sponsored stories.
Conclusion
All in all I found the announcement pretty ‘so what’ and not especially convincing. There are much better ways to demonstrate the value of your Social Media activities. Think about actual ROI tracking and also work to understand both the retention and acquisition benefits of turning a customer into a fan. That said I do think Hitwise is a fine tool and they have some smart people over there, but this foray into Social Media hasn’t left me all that impressed.
Im not sure what you are disagreeing with here.
On the one hand you appear to dismiss Hitwise’s methodology (and actually are guilty of a strawman argument) whilst then agreeing that facebook is a great dsriver of traffic.
All Hitwise have tried to do is put a number on it. They admit that this varies depending on the vertical so your point about it being different for every brand is already covered.
The only thing you are right about is the ‘convenient’ timing with the release of their Facebook fan acquisition product with techlightenment. But its logically flawed to criticise the data just because they are creating a buzz!
Hi John thanks for your comment. I’m not really disagreeing with anything – I am saying that these findings are not as interesting/new as they are made out to be. Hence the title ‘you don’t say’.
Yes I agree with Hitwise that Facebook is a great source of traffic but that doesn’t mean that I have to approve hitwise methodology. I can agree with someone that coke is a popular soft drink, but if they reached that conclusion by surveying 4 people then I would find their methodology to reach that conclusion inadequate – but I would still agree with the conclusion as a fact. I think if you read the original hitwise blog post you will see that it is they who have constructed a straw man. I have not had to over simplify their methodology before attacking it because they themselves offered so little detail on their methodology.
My point about it being different for every brand is not aimed at HW but at marketers who have gobbled up the headline and conveniently dropped the ‘vertical’ caveat. Plus I am saying it is different for brands within verticals even – which is different to them just saying it is different for different verticals.
Overall as I say I am not attacking the data per se, but more to highlight to marketers that this announcement isn’t actually all that interesting nor surprising if you dissect it, for the reasons I state.
Thanks again for your comments.
You have good points there, so I always check your blog, it seems that you are an expert in this field. keep up the good work, My friend recommended your blog.
Simply email me a copy to approve before publication, at ianjamesmac@gmail.com. Thanks for your comment.
thanks this is just what i was looking object of! i am bookmarking this any longer
Well put from an important blogger