Anyone who reads my blog regularly knows I’m a statistics person. I like to learn the lay of the land before diving straight in. If you feel the same way and find yourself considering social advertising as a means for getting Facebook fans or attracting more people to your website, here are a few pieces I stumbled on recently that might help you along the way.
A recent Webtrends whitepaper called Facebook Revenue: Ads for Fans caught my eye so I gave it a look. If you read one whitepaper today, this should be the one. Here are some of my favorite findings from their study:
- 75% of Facebook users have Liked a specific page because of an invitation or ad. 59 percent became fans via word of mouth. 49 percent Like a page after using search functionality.
- College educated Facebook fans are twice as likely to click on ads if they see a friend’s name or face in the ad. This makes sponsored stories incredibly effective amongst college-educated target audiences.
- Research supports the notion that “the older we get the more we click.” Facebook fans with the highest click through rate tend to be between the ages of 55 and 64.
- The words “percent off,” “coupon,” and “sale” are generally turn-off’s for customers, generally attracting lower-than-normal rates of fan engagement.
- As you can see in the graph below, there’s a strong inverse relation between cost per click (CPC) and click through rates (CTR). Companies in sectors with a low socialability index (e.g. healthcare) generally see lower engagement and higher costs per click. What does this matter? It means you’ll have to work harder to get people to talk about a financial services brand than a blog, for example, but in both cases targeting will help narrow down a specific user base.
Another social media advertising analysis also caught my eye. You can use these kinds of statistics to understand the space and inform your ad buys. Some of my favorite findings are below:
- Facebook is leaving its display ad competitors in the dust and widening the gap as it pulls in more revenue in display ads than any other social network.
- Although LinkedIn has captured the most geographically diverse social media advertising dollars, Forrester predicts Twitter will earn more ad revenue than LinkedIn by 2014.