Are you more likely to "like" a brand or organisation that your friends on Facebook are connected to? And are the paid advertisements equal to or more/less effective than endorsements from your friends? These are questions that marketers from across the board are asking themselves when devising their Facebook and social media strategies: What is the best approach to take, Facebook CPC or relying on "earned" mentions?
My initial response to these questions would be that because of Facebook’s social nature based on friendships and trust, I am probably going to "like" a brand which my peers connect with or recommend, as opposed to clicking a (sometimes obtrusive and more often than not, irrelevant) ad which appears on the side bar of my Facebook window. Why is this? It is because I have social history with my peers, we’ve exchanged ideas, opinions, and experiences, we know what makes each other tick. If we have common interests and I see that they have connected with a particular page on Facebook, I’m more likely to check it out. This, plus the fact that I’m quite a nosey person and it somewhat interests me to see what weird and wonderful pages my friends might connect with.
This idea is all based on personal opinion though, with no hard data, and those who wish to launch a social media strategy might want to see more concrete evidence on what works on Facebook before investing their time and money.
Nielsen, leading market performance analysts, recently teamed up with Facebook and released a report on research they undertook which goes some way in trying to provide answers to the questions surrounding paid ads vs. earned engagement. Their study examined data from more than 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brands, using the Nielsen BrandLift tool. The report looked at three types of impressions on Facebook: the Homepage Ad, the Social Impression and the Organic Impression:
- The Homepage Ad is a paid for advertisement which appears on the home page above the fold, containing an image and text along with the option for a user to "Like" them.
- A Social Impression is a Homepage Ad but with the added social context of the names of the user's friends who are connected to the brand/organisation.
- An Organic Impression is a social story that appears in a user’s News Feed when a friend has engaged or connected with a brand/organisation.
The results are interesting. You can view the full report here but I’m going to summarise the key findings for you, and they may or may not surprise. In line with my argument earlier, it seems that users of Facebook do appear to recall and engage more with a brand/organisation which a friend of theirs is associated with. Those exposed to a Facebook Homepage Ad were 10% more likely to recall a brand than the control group who were not exposed to the advertising, their awareness of the brand increased by 4% and purchase intent by 2%. When a Facebook ad included a Social Impression by a friend there was a larger increase, with 16% recall, 8% awareness and 8% in purchase intent. Just comparing these two stats shows immediately that with a friend’s endorsement a user is more likely to remember and engage with a brand or organisation.
It may not be a surprise, as we are dealing with social media and trust here, but the overall winner in terms of increasing recall, awareness and purchase intent was the Organic Impression. Users who saw a social story detailing a friend’s interaction with a brand were 30% more likely to recall it, with 13% higher awareness and an increase of 8% in purchase intent. Nielsen also took their examination of Organic Impressions one step further and noted that users exposed to Organic Impressions of a brand ten or more times showed an even higher jump in the three criteria, reinforcing the absorption of messages over a prolonged period of time.
Every brand and organisation on Facebook will dream of obtaining thousands of fans through Organic Impressions alone, but is this achievable? If they want to reach all of their targeted users that they possibly can out of Facebook’s millions, then paid advertising will have the broader reach. Building awareness and connections via Organic Impressions can take time and requires a lot of effort on creating good content on the page, things for users who are connected with the page to interact with, comment on, engage with and share with their friends.
Nielsen identify Social Impressions as the possible happy medium of having a large reach while utilising the goodness that peer engagement brings; "while you can buy a homepage ad, you can’t buy the influence that’s inherent when a consumer sees a list of their own friends featured in a social ad."
To summarise, the different forms of impressions on Facebook can be useful at different times within a social media campaign. Initially you may choose to seed the page via the paid advertising, then as your number of connections increases you might introduce the Social Impressions to these ads, and then finally, by creating good content on your page you will achieve more Organic Impressions. To me this is not entirely dissimilar to search engine optimisation and link building. You might initially start your search engine strategy by submitting your site to paid directories and by utilising PPC, but then as your site goes up in search engine rankings you might start to find that people link to your site organically as you become more visible. As with SEO, it seems that when it comes to social media and Facebook, the term "Content is King" might be the key. As with good, engaging content within either your Facebook ads or on your page itself you have the potential to make plenty of connections.
