The middle of the sales funnel is where social media advertising has the biggest impact, according to a recent report from Convertro and AOL Platforms.
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The report was based on an analysis using Convertro's multi-touch attribution technology of 500 million clicks, 15 million conversions, and three billion impressions that occurred in 1Q14.
In aggregate, social media ranked slightly ahead of display ads in driving conversions, but behind both affiliate marketing and email, the analysis found.
However, both social media and display advertising were found to significantly influence the middle of the path to purchase—defined in the report as after the initial interaction but before conversion (essentially, the awareness and research phase).
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Below, additional key findings from the report.
Performance by Social Network
Social media platforms vary widely in where they impact the path the purchase, and how much, according to the analysis.
YouTube was the most effective network in introducing new products and driving sales for the events examined, followed by Facebook.
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Paid vs. Organic
Marketers who spent on social channels registered a nearly 25% lift in conversions compared with purely organic social efforts (2.82% average conversion rate vs. 2.26%).
Conversions on Twitter increased significantly with paid spends (1.45% average conversion with organic tweets compared with 3.85% for promoted tweets).
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Impact by Product Type
The impact of social media advertising varied by product category, the analysis found. For example, paid social media was effective for both introducing products and driving conversions in the subscription and heath/beauty categories, but had little impact in the food/beverage and apparel/accessories categories (where organic social had a far greater impact).
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About the research: The report was based on an analysis using Convertro's multi-touch attribution technology of 500 million clicks, 15 million conversions, and three billion impressions that occurred in 1Q14.
COMMENTARY: In a Facebook for Business post dated November 14, 2014, Facebook dropped a bombshell when they announced a change that will impact the prominence of particular types of self-promotional organic content within the newsfeed of advertiser from pages.
This all came about when Facebook conducted a survey of users concerning their reaction to the type of content appearing in their newsfeed. This is what Facebook said that survey revealed:
"As part of an ongoing survey we asked hundreds of thousands of people how they feel about the content in their News Feeds. People told us they wanted to see more stories from friends and Pages they care about, and less promotional content."
After listening to this user feedback, Facebook concluded that users don’t want to see promotional content in their newsfeed. As a result, less of it will be appearing within the news feed.
It should be noted that this applies to organic content (earned media) only, not ads (paid media). Facebook defines any of the following as being promotional:
- Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
- Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
- Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads
Here’s one example of a post that Facebook says qualified as being too promotional:
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This post would have been fine if Tiger Therapy hadn’t promoted the sale of their DVD.
Here’s another example from Facebook:
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In this case, Bunny Puzzle Cube’s only goal is to sell their product and get the user to install their app. Clearly promotional, and the type of post that Facebook says users want to see less of.
Facebook made it clear that brands that choose to post promotional content “should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time.” That’s very strong language.
Even so, Facebook claims that while the brands that post “a lot” of promotional content will take a big hit to distribution, “the majority of Pages will not be impacted by this change.” This is interesting because most brands post some form of promotional content.
On April 21, 2015 Facebook product manager Max Eulenstein and user experience researcher Lauren Scissors announced that the newsfeed had been updated to show you content that matters to you the most.
Facebook's News Feed algorithm change aims to give users "the right mix" of content based on their connections — friends, businesses, organizations, public figures and other types of accounts — [their] interests and what matters to them the most, the company wrote in its blog. This is all based on feedback the social network gathered from users to improve their News Feed experience.
There are three parts to the update:
- Promote friends' posts. News Feed will promote a user's friends' posts — everything from status updates to photos, videos and links — by placing them higher up on the screen so they will be harder to miss. These posts will supersede those by Pages, groups and other accounts, giving the latter less visibility.
- Less irrelevant content. Previously, posts that friends have liked or commented on also appeared throughout News Feed. Users have said that they don't care about seeing these posts, so this content will now be placed lower in the News Feed, if at all.
- Additional posts. To make News Feed more diverse, Facebook prevented multiple posts by the same account from appearing on News Feed. This is no longer the case, so now more of a user's friends' posts will show up on that person's feed, further displacing posts by business Pages and other accounts.
For many businesses, the question is whether these changes will greatly impact their posts and Page performance. Facebook says this will "vary considerably" based on your followers and posting activity, but that post reach and referral traffic may "potentially decline."
Facebook advises Page owners to keep posting content that resonates with their audience. Recommendations include:
- Make sure to post quality content on a consistent basis. Facebook suggests scheduling posts for optimum visibility, such as when most of your followers are online and when you have major announcements and events.
- Highly target posts based on your type of message and demographics, such as gender, age, location, interests and other factors.
- Keep it fresh with new and timely content, and then test to see what performs best and makes for more successful campaigns.
- Use Facebook Ads to promote exclusive discounts and promotions
Facebook's emphasis that advertisers pay for advertising appearing within the newsfeed did not answer the question whether this advertising would actually produce results. This has been the enigma among social media marketers since I have been covering social media. This new study by Convertro might provide an answer: Social media has a postive impact on conversions. However, this still requires qualification. The ads must must connect with brand fans, create an element of trust, provide a call-to-action, and provide value to the Facebook consumer in order to drive traffic to a brands website where they hope to covert that traffic into revenues.
Affiliate marketing and email continue to convert more consumers into buyers, so social media marketers should study why this is happening, and design their Facebook newsfeed ads to incorporate those attributes into their ads.
Courtesy of an article dated September 17, 2014 appearing in MarketingProfs, an article dated November 14, 2014 appearing in Jon Loomer, an article dated April 23, 2015 appearing in Forbes, and an article dated April 21, 2015 appearing in Facebook Newsroom
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