Archive for the ‘DanZarrella.com, Social & Viral Marketing Scientist’ Category
April 22nd, 2010 | 
Author: Continuing my series of Facebook sharing data (if you’re curious about my methodology, read the first post), I looked at articles that had the word “video” in their titles.
It turns out that those stories that indicated they contained videos were shared more than the average story on Facebook, while they were actually shared less than the average story on Twitter. This is likely because the Facebook platform makes it easy to embed multimedia content into updates while Twitter does not.
The takeaway here? Facebook may be a better platform for your videos to go viral than Twitter.
And again, if you have any other datapoints you’d like to see, please let me know. I’m really excited about my new Facebook analysis capabilities and I’ve got a ton more stuff planned for you.
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Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
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When I started posting my new series of Facebook data points, one of the most requested graphs was the days of the week (and times of day, which is coming soon) that are best to publish on to get lots of Facebook shares. What I found when I looked at days of the week is at first a little unexpected, but upon further thought fairly logical.
While I found less articles posted on the weekends (notice the gray bars at the bottom of the graph which indicate volume of URLs analyzed for each day), those stories that were published on the weekends tended to be shared on Facebook more, on average, than stories that were published during the week. The reasons for this probably include the fact that more than half of companies in the US block Facebook, so people can only use the social network at home, on the weekends. Additionally, the mainstream Facebook audience does not use Facebook for work.
The takeaway? If you want your article to be shared on Facebook by your readers, try posting it over the weekend.
For information on my methodology, start with this post. For this data point I’m using over 5000 stories and “average” is the interquartile mean which is less sensitive to outliers. The 0% line indicates the average number of “shares” stories from each site in my study get, when the line is above 0% it means that stories on that day are shared more than the average, and when it is below, they’re shared less. If you’re curious why it appears most of the stories in the data set are above average, this is because of the difference in the volume of published stories on various days.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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More new Facebook data, continuing this series.
The next Facebook sharing data point I analyzed is the presence of numbers (in digit form, 1 through 9) in titles. In a wide range of marketing arenas digits have been shown to perform very well. They tend to help conversion rates in the form of prices and on social news sites like Digg “Top 10″ style posts have always done well.
The difference isn’t huge but according to my data, articles with digits in their titles tend to be shared more on Facebook than stories without digits. I found that most articles in my data set didn’t use numbers in their titles, and you can see the scale of difference in volumes in the gray bars at the bottom of the chart.
For details on my methodology start with this post, then read the bottom of this post.
And if you’re going to be at SXSW this weekend, make sure you find me and say hello, I’ll have a few copies of my book to giveaway and a couple of ways for you to win an iPad.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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If you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the title of this post will ring a bell.
I first began to formulate this framework as a model for understanding how ReTweets work (If you’re interested in my Science of ReTweets study, check out my live webinar Friday). But I think the concept extends far beond just Twitter in fact, it is a framework for understanding criteria required for an individual to share any kind of content. Each of these criteria has a corresponding action we as marketers can take to increase the contagiousness of our content and ideas.
As you can see there are three criteria and together they form a funnel of decreasing volumes, like a sales conversion rate funnel.
- A person must be exposed to your content to ever have a chance of spreading it. This means they have to be following you on Twitter, fans of your page on Facebook, on your email list etc.
- The person must become aware of your specific piece of content before they can spread it. They have to read your Tweet or open your email.
- That person must be motivated by something (generally in the content itself) to want to share it with their contacts.
Every piece of content, social network and campaign has vastly different conversion rates at each step of this process but, to understand the scales involved, it helps to visualize a hypothetical set of percentages. The gray boxes on the left of the graphic above represent assumed numbers: if you email 900 people and 20% of them notice and open the email and then 10% of those readers are forward it to a friend, your email was shared 18 times.
At each step we can change the numbers in our favor:
- Increase the number of people exposed to your content by building your reach. Get more email subscribers or Twitter followers.
- Create attention grabbing content. Do lots of testing on your subject lines to increase open rates.
- Include powerful viral calls to action.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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I’m pleased and honored to be able to tell you that over the next year, I’ll be serving on a new committee organized by Boston City Council President Mike Ross: Citizens’ Committee on Boston’s Future. The committee’s mission is spelled out in a recent press release:
The first-of-its-kind committee will be chaired by Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, and will meet four times in 2010 to discuss how Boston can attract and retain the skilled labor workforce that will enable our city to compete in the 21st century.
I want to tap your brains, what ideas do you have? We have a wealth of smart, tech-savvy people (like you guys) in Boston and it’s time to start putting our money where our mouth is to make Boston a seriously leading-edge place. How can Boston become a more innovative city?
The Hashtag for the committee will be #FutureBOS, so if you want to tweet your ideas, use that.
The list of committee members reads like a who’s-who of Boston innovators:
- Klare Allen Environmental Activist and Boston Housing Authority Resident
- George “Chip” Greenidge Executive Director of National Black College Alliance & The GREATEST MINDS
- Pat Johnson President, College Democrats of Massachusetts Chairman of Governor Patrick’s Statewide Youth Council
- Bryan Koop Senior Vice President, Boston Properties
- Ted Landsmark President and CEO, Boston Architectural College
- Barbara Lynch Restaurant Owner
- Jill Medvedow Director, Institute of Contemporary Art
- Diane Paulus Artistic Director, American Repertory Theater
- Rocio Saenz President, SEIU Local 615
- Kairos Shen, Ex Officio Director of Planning, Boston Redevelopment Authority
- Greg Bialecki, Ex Officio Secretary, MA Housing and Economic Development
The first meeting will be held April 7th, from 4 to 6pm at the Skywalk Observatory at the top of the Prudential Building, so if you have any interest in how the city can leverage web and social media technologies to make Boston a more innovative place, be sure to attend if you can.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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As you may or may not know, I’ve been working on a book for a while. Well, its finally done and in-stock on Amazon and should be in stores this week. The whole process has been very exciting and a lot of work (I had a ton of help from a great editor, Laurel as well as a whole bunch of other people who are mentioned in the back of the book).
The book is a very tactical, hands-on introduction to a wide range of social media marketing technologies, platforms, sites and opportunities. It’s a little different from the social media science stuff I do here on my blog, but it is based on real data and best practices as much as possible.
I’d like to ask you guys for two favors. One, if you like my work, buy a copy (or a few hundred). But even better, if you have a blog, email me a few questions for an interview post and I promise I’ll get back to you right away.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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I’ll give a free copy of my book, “The Social Media Marketing Book” to five random people who ReTweet this post today, Monday November 30th. Each time you Tweet a link to this post you’ll be entered. Its as easy as clicking the green ReTweet button.
For winners in the US I’ll send you a printed copy of my book, for international folks, it’ll be an ebook version.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
.
Tomorrow at 2pm EST I’ll be doing a live, free webinar about the science of social media marketing. I’ll be talking about history, psychology, statistics and memetics and I’m really excited about it. Its free and will be awesome. register here to attend.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
.
IRL
One of the most powerful potentials of social media is for it to not only connect people online, but facilitate connections offline as well. 2010 will see an increase in location aware apps and games that blur the line between the web and the real work with technologies like Four Square and augmented reality. Driving this will be continued interest in and improvement of mobile web technologies like smart phones and netbooks. The real world will be important again.
Micro-Targeting and Personalization
Everyone actively engaging in social networking is sharing a ton of data about themselves and in 2010 companies will leverage this information in increasingly sophisticated ways. Micro-targeting and personalization will take advantage of information on individual people to deliver highly customized messaging and content to small and smaller segments. Opinion mining technologies will begin to mature, allowing researchers to utilize the entire social web as a global focus group for any brand, product, service or idea.
Small Business Social Media Marketing
In 2010 small businesses will continue to realize the high bang-to-buck ratio of social media marketing and will get into it like never before. Social media is a great equalizer in that it allows small companies to compete more effectively with large ones. They’ll take a strong do-it-yourself stance and will demand accountability and effective analytics.
The Real Time Web
We’ve been hearing about the emergence of a real time web for a while now, but 2010 is the year when it will really come into its own bolstered by advances in mobile technology, micro-content production and the recent integration of Twitter with Bing and Google. Traditional link popularity search is too slow so it will be augmented or replaced by instant real time based search. Trend spotting will happen minutes or hours after some new fad starts, rather than days, weeks or months. And you’ll hear about breaking news faster than ever before.
I also contributed my predictions to TrendsSpotting’s 2010 social media influencers predictions. You can see the slideshow of a bunch of great thought leader’s ideas below.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
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After I first launched the Twitter psychological profiling tool TweetPsych, some of the most common feedback I got was that it was hard to understand the results. So I designed a new reporting mechanism and design to solve that problem. The new TweetPsych uses “meta dimensions” which are combination of related factors from the two linguistic algorithms (RID and LIWC) the application uses. Each of these comes with a description and is represented on a bar graph. Each user’s profile is compared against the average user and the report explains which dimensions occur more or less frequently than the average.
I also launched a new feature for the site. TweetPsych for Lists allows you to do the same kind of psychological profiling, but of entire lists. Curious to know what the inside of Zappo’s employees’ heads looks like? Here you go.
If you have other ideas on how to make TweetPsych even better, let me know.
Buy The Social Media Marketing Book here.
Download the Science of ReTweets Report here.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter
.
