Customer Experience

By Liam Dowd - August 26th, 2014

Facebook engagement, social influence and new Instagram metrics

Social influence

In his book Influence: the psychology of persuasion, Robert B. Cialdini sets out six principles that marketers can use to influence their sales. Influence in the social space has been developing since the inception of social media. Advocacy and sentiment are now tangible components of every marketing campaign. To understand influence a handy infographic from Everreach summarises the six main principles.

Facebook engagement

A new infographic from Quintly offers some insights in how engaging Facebook actually is. Comparing the latest numbers with those of July 2013 Quintly discovered the known pattern progressions of the presented Facebook KPIs. While the average number of Facebook fans keeps growing for the listed page buckets the number of user posts declines on average.

Facebook as an interactive tool continues to evolve. Corporations using the platform for ad sales are finding Facebook is more useful as an engagement mechanism when promotions are offered.

Also, content is still king when it comes to sharing. Facebook can seem somewhat like a cul-de-sac, but when handled correctly can deliver high levels of engagement. It’s a matter of understanding your corporation’s audience and how they interact with Facebook.

New Instagram metrics

Instagram have launched a new set of analytical tools that should deliver near real-time insights into campaign performance. Being tested with Instagram’s main ad partners, the new service will be able to show metrics such as impressions, engagement and reach.

Mashable report: “The metrics are not only for advertising, but for organic posts as well. Advertisers can get a detailed view of all the ads and posts they have previously filed, which they can sort by impressions, likes and chronology. Another option lets marketers see a raw data feed, which they can use with custom data-sorting systems.”

With Jeff Kanter, product manager for Instagram stating: "The idea is to see which types of creative are working best. Our goal is to give brands the tools and insights they need to be really effective on Instagram.”

Watch this space for more detailed information on the new analytical services as they roll out to more advertisers, and become widely available to all businesses.

Social commerce to reach $15 billion by 2015

Commerce in the US is massive, but add in social media and the space is set to explode. A new infographic from Invesp.com illustrates how social media is impacting on commerce.

“The mobile shoppers who read product reviews on social media channels show a higher conversion rate – as much as 133% higher,” the site’s blog states. “On a grand scale, this conversion represents billions of dollars of business worldwide. The online population is increasing by leaps and bounds and more and more people are influenced by opinions shared on social media.

“Social media celebrities such as vloggers and serial product reviewers tend to have a huge impact on people’s perception of product quality. Businesses are noting an increased level of impact that positive and negative reviews have on purchase behaviour.”

What is clear is that social media will continue its inexorable rise to dominance of the commercial online space. Corporations though, still need to work hard to prepare themselves to take advantage of this massively lucrative opportunity. Research for instance shows that over 40% of website still don’t include a Facebook Like button!

Until next time….

The Useful Social Media team.