Commentary

Most Important Study To Date For Marketers Released by Facebook/Nielsen

by Joe Marchese , April 20, 2010

If your customers use any form of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, blogs, etc, then Facebook and Nielsen have just released a report you should read. Put another way, if you sell products or services to people or businesses, then you should read the report.

Short and sweet this week, but before I jump you over to Mashable's coverage, a few takeaways:

As you are reading this report, consider the implications not only for your Facebook strategy, but your overall digital media strategy. Facebook is by far the largest, but if you aren't already thinking about Facebook as a marketer you're probably already in trouble. Consider how this applies to all of your paid media efforts -- heck, even paid media that isn't digital.

Nothing in here should be new or frightening for marketers. In fact, most of the findings simply prove that marketers have had it right all the time: "If we can make and distribute a campaign that people talk about, we have made a good marketing campaign." The rest is up to the product.

One basis for measuring the performance of "paid media" is its ability to drive "earned media" (consumers publishing marketing message to their social graphs) -- both because earned media is highly valuable, and because using people's activity rate with your paid media channel-by-channel can be a great proxy for the quality of "paid media" you are paying for.

Creating a call-to-action increases recall. I am more likely to remember something if I had to consider an action (even if I don't take any action). Digital media is an interactive medium, so make your marketing efforts fit the medium.

Even though this report is the best I have seen to date, it still struggles to isolate the role of creative in brand lift. This would have been near-impossible to do, given that the report had to protect the privacy of individual marketers and their campaigns, but it's still something marketers should keep in mind. Earned media is good; helping to shape and encourage what people share with creative is even better.

Okay, without further ado, go read the report, and come back and let me know what your key takeaways are with comments on this post, or throw them at me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/joemarchese. And remember, sharing this on Facebook or Twitter will help people remember that not all marketing on the Internet is direct-response marketing ;-)

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2 comments about "Most Important Study To Date For Marketers Released by Facebook/Nielsen".

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Walter Sabo from HitViews, April 20, 2010 at 11:54 a.m.
The real lesson is allll of the sponsored steps we had to go through to actually down load this report on Facebook. Wow.
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Anne Hunter from comScore, April 20, 2010 at 12:59 p.m.

comScore and GroupM came out with social media ad influence on search whitepaper last October. It looked at Facebook as well as other social media vechicles such as Twitter and blogs giving a truly big picture of this market. http://www.searchfuel.com/2009/10/search-marketing-social-media-interplay/

Key findings:
- Consumers exposed to a brand’s influenced social media and paid search are 2.8x more likely to search for that brand’s products
- There was a 42-point lift in searcher penetration around brand product terms when consumers were exposed to both influenced social media and paid search compared to paid alone