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!

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.

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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Last Friday I had the privilege of presenting at The Ad Club’s inaugural “Under the Dome” event. And we all know there’s nothing people would rather do at 9am on Friday than talk about the behavioral patterns and neuroscience behind Pandemic Labs’ strategy for Facebook Engagement. Especially when it means they have to throw their whole playbook out the window!

The presentation was a component of our ongoing Science of Social series. (We put out a great infographic a couple weeks ago, in case you missed it). Some people think we’re exaggerating the “science” part of our new series, but as anyone who attended on Friday will tell you, there’s more science here than you can shake a stick at. Continue reading »