I love Odwalla products. They taste good and at least I think they are better for me than drinking yet another Diet Coke.

Here is a short video letter to Odwalla where we quickly explore a major hole in their Facebook strategy that we discovered using Watchtower.

Summary: They have got to start posting on the weekends!

Looks like you’re enjoying an extra 2.5 million interactions this month thanks to that NFC Championship win. The extra interactions brought your engagement rate up from a somewhat respectable 0.70% to a whopping 1.59%.

You’re approaching the Super Bowl and Facebook Page dominance, but there are still a few areas where you can improve. Most notably the timing of your content. Take a look at the graph below.

Your fans love to engage with your content when you post it between 11pm – 4am EST, but these are some of your lowest volume posting times. Instead you post mostly at 1pm and 2pm EST and experience some of your page’s lowest average engagement per post.

You’re also posting a lot on Sunday (a given) and doing very well. But your second best day, Saturday, has gotten the fewest amount of posts in the last 30 days. What gives? People are gearing up for gameday and you’re leaving them hanging.

We would never suggest posting only at one time, but we also can’t argue against the preferences of your fan base.

This data was compiled and analyzed by Pandemic Labs, using their proprietary Facebook analytics software, Watchtower.

Good luck on Sunday!

From www.dane101.com

Election time is here, and Pandemic Labs is marking the occasion with some good ol’ fashioned data.

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve been on a real data kick lately; that’s what having a tool like Watchtower will do to you.

If you’ve missed some of our other infographics, check them out here.

So we decided to compare the Facebook presences of our two Presidential Candidates and see how they stack up. The results are below. Have we correctly predicted the winner of the election? We’ll just have to wait and see.

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Because the PR & Marketing departments are typically where social media campaigns tend to be managed, I’ll use the familiar terms of paid, owned and earned to contextualize how you should go about running a successful fan acquisition campaign on Facebook. If your brand places social media in the hands of the Sales team, you might replace these with terms like “calls”, “qualified leads” or “pipe-line”.

Start thinking about your Facebook Fans as your owned audience. Sure, you might pay for them; but rather than rent them (as you do with traditional advertising), once they opt in, you can consider that audience owned. Your messages can reach them in perpetuity, as long as you’re creative, non-obtrusive and provide them with value.

Begin with geography. Where are your target customers? If you’re DIRECTV, the list is long. If you’re “Joe’s Boston Bar & Grille”, it’s not. List out 10 places to start. Facebook Ads can target down to postal codes, or the radius around a major metropolitan area. They can also be as broad as states/provinces, or whole countries. Remember that many Facebook users list the big city they are closest to as their location (the field that Facebook polls when serving ads). Targeting to a granular level like postal code might not be the right move. Consider targeting the major metropolitan area closest to your target audience (e.g. Madison, Wisconsin) and then checking the option to serve ads to Facebook users within a certain radius of that location.

Next, consider affinities. What are your target Facebook Fans already connected to on Facebook? In the first installment in this series, you were asked to list 10 of these things. If you’re DIRECTV, this list might include things like XFinity, Breaking Bad, or The Suite Life On Deck. If you’re “Joe’s Boston Bar & Grille”, it might be the Red Sox, Northeastern University, or Nantucket. It’s crucial that you explore what’s already on Facebook for your target audience to Like. List out topics/places/brands that are relevant to them; you want those people to make up your owned audience.

Once your fan acquisition ads are up and running, there’s no better way to acquire more Fans than by running fan acquisition ads that target Friends of Fans. Set up a separate Facebook Ad that targets Friends of Fans by geography only. That is, if I see an ad for DIRECTV because I’m in Boston and Like Breaking Bad on Facebook, my friends that don’t Like Breaking Bad – but live in Boston – might still be interested in DIRECTV. These people are a mix of paid and earned audience members. Once they Like you on Facebook, they’ve moved into the owned category.

Keep in mind that these tactics address only fan acquisition. In the next installment of this series, I’ll focus on what you can do with Facebook Ads to engage your owned audience, once you’ve got them.

Let’s get something out of the way: there is no static measure or definition of engagement. The word is amorphous, and inherently resistant to a hardline definition. Anyone that tells you that Engagement = X+Y with a  dash of Z mixed in is either deluded or deceitful. The definition cannot be static, by virtue of the varying metrics of success placed on a social media campaign by the brand running it.

In the past hour, while doing my daily blog crawl for news & notes, I’ve come across FIVE articles that address “Facebook Engagement” or “Driving Twitter Engagements” or “Pinning for Success”. All of them lost me within the first two lines of text. I’m done with articles that start out telling me “Social Media is here to stay!” or that “People are 10 Trillion times more likely to engage with PHOTOS on Facebook”. Really? This is still news?

You know why social media isn’t going anywhere? Because neither did the Internet. It makes life easier. Things happen quickly. Businesses can invest less and get more return. You know why photos work better than anything else on Facebook? Because people love pictures more than they love words. We are drawn to bright, colorful & evocative images. Beautiful sunsets? Sure. Beautiful people? Check. Beautiful ANYthing that doesn’t involve me having to read a lot of text in my Newsfeed? Like.

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There is a fundamental misnomer attached to the paid placements employed by brands on Facebook. The platform itself has contributed healthily to this misnomer’s errant drift into the lingua franca of social media managers the world over. Facebook Ads, as they are called, do little to live up to the name. The problem is a bifurcated one of what I’ll call New Puppy Syndrome and an almost-global misunderstanding of how to make Facebook’s paid placements actually work.

First consider this: no-one is on Facebook to connect with your brand. People are on Facebook to connect with other Facebookers. Those might be long-lost friends, classmates from days-of-old, co-workers and even the person sitting across the room from them. No-one is on Facebook because they are dying to know what Starbucks has to say, or because they simply must have more Target in their lives. This isn’t a guess, nor is it an opinion. This is fact. This is truth. Pandemic Labs’ own proprietary analytics tool – Watchtower – maps Facebook user behavior down to individual hours of the day. The hours people are most actively engaging on Facebook don’t correlate with peak shopping hours or flash-sale dates. Nope. They correlate with things like “breakfast” and “the weekend” or “after the kids are asleep”.

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There are fundamental drivers of every human action. Many people are aware of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but there are other theories about our innate motivations as well, such as William Glasser’s ‘Choice Theory’. I’d venture a bet that 95% of readers have encountered one of these lists at least once in their lives. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, in almost all lists of the basic human needs there is a need called “Love/Belonging”, the need that is fulfilled by acceptance of family, friends, and society at large.

This need to be accepted and respected by others is powerful and universal. We all feel it, and now social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare have thrown us all quite a curve ball in terms of what must occur for us to feel fulfilled in this area. As a result, what was once a genuine effort to fulfill our need for love/belonging has mutated into the most widespread and deep-seated epidemic of narcissism the world has ever seen.

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