The Facebook Sessions

• The giant shift onto social (23% in 1 year)
• Why 36% of Facebooks Fans buy more
• How to get Fans
• Ways companies can use all this data in real-time to guide product development and marketing strategy

We had the chance to spend the afternoon at an event hosted by Webtrends around Facebook marketing tactics.  The presenter, Justin Kistner (@justinkistner), did a great job of pulling research numbers together to guide digital strategy.

Perhaps the most cited graph of the afternoon was this:

Chart from Webtrends Social Commerce Whitepaper.

That 'thud' you see was a 23% drop in visits in 1 year. That's an incredible shift in online behavior - so where did everybody go?

Facebook.

One of the speakers characterized the shift above as the end of the Google era. While Search is still important, many marketers here at Internet Week are muttering about PPC advertising being expensive and not delivering the results it once did. The opportunity for reaching consumers and having better engagement lies in the Facebook Fan arena. (Note: apologies in advance if we goofed any of the numbers from Webtrends - Brett and I cross-checked our notes for this post but could have easily fubbed a figure).

Here's the juicy data for reasons why Fans matter:

• 84% of Fans are already existing customers
• 83% want exlusivitity (think offers, benefits, possibly a gaming layer?)
• 36% buy more often after becoming a fan
• Coke has 270,000 site visitors to its main site. It has 22,700,000 Fans on Facebook.

How to get Fans:

1. Brand Invite/Ad - 75% of Fans connect this way
2. Friends recommending - 59%
3. Search - 49%

What drives Fan engagement?

• 2-3X increase in the the number of interactions driven by posts on emotional or touching stories versus just vanilla type updates
• 1.5 - 2X increase in engagement via debates and simple questions

Paid Ads on Facebook

• Sending visitors to a Facebook Asset (Fan page, Events Page) gets 50% better performance versus sending the user to your website
  • Takeaway: when users get on Facebook they don't want to leave. Don't try and change this behavior but rather embrace it and get your development team building custom tabs and thinking through the experience.
• Average acquisition cost for a Fan is around $1.07.
• CTR falls dramatically after just 3 days
  • Takeaway: A successful paid campaign requires constant care and feeding. Consider pulsing and also alternating with paid search for results.

Upcoming Trends

'Likes' will continue to become critical for the consumer web. While B2B remains to be a bit of a grey area on FB, the social graph dictates we look to those we know and trust for recommendations (no big surprise there). If I see that you've recently bought a book on Amazon about web design trends and you're one of my design buddies, I'll probably click over and add that to my Wishlist.

How Would a Company Use All This?

When we did the redesign and updates for Pacific Outdoor Equipment (POE), we integrated the Like button for all their products. The opportunity now exists for POE to not only use this engagement to generate buzz but to also cross-reference 'Liked' products with sales data and get better forecasting figures. All of which can be fed back into the product development cycle in pretty close to real-time. On the marketing front, you can plug all this into your PR efforts and site analytics and clearly identify which products are really taking off.

User personas still rule.

Coming up tomorrow: Tips on Email from TechStars, Death of Cookies, Getting Users, and History of Conversations.