Facebook Radio Report Card 1/25/12

Here are some observations and data from monitoring the Facebook posts of 14 selected stations.

This week the News Feed for the stations came up with:

• 157 posts dating back 60 hours that's up from the 85 posts we had last week. 
• Types of Posts
• Station Liners - Plugs for contests, music features, etc - 16 or 10%
• Questions - "Are you watching American Idol" etc -48 or 30%
• News/Info - Links to Videos, funny Pictures or News facts - 74 or 47%
• Personality Posts - 'On my 2nd cup of Coffee need more'  - 14 or 9%
• Music News - Posts on upcoming releases, artist news -- 4 or 3%
• Top 5 Posts with most Likes
• 652 - A pic of Limp Biscuit - Pillsbury Dough can breaks - also 139 comments and 141 shares
• 285 - Paterno dies - news in Pittsburgh 
• 262 - Penguins win #500 in Pittsburgh
• 258 - Go Pats in Boston
• 229 - German gets 110,000 tax refund in error.
• Top 5 Posts with most Comments
• 196 - Stars you've seen or movies filmed in our city
• 163 - Pick superbowl in Pittsburgh
• 139 - Pic of Limp Biscuit
• 125 - Taco Bell for Breakfast
• 94- What did you do this weekend

Sports really picks up a lot more content this past week with the Superbowl teams all set.  There wasn't much on the Oscar nominations and no posts on political issues.  Remember we have Rock, AC, Country and CHR stations in this mix.  Rock stations had the most active and highest number of posts this week.   By the way the pic of the Limp Biscuit just in case you wanted to know:   

Facebook Radio Report Card 1/18/12

So what does Radio's overall Facebook Presence look like?

How are we using the social network?

What are we posting and what is working?

All of these are questions I'm sure everyone is asking as they decide how much effort and time Facebook is worth.  To get a picture I built a Facebook Page that only I can access and it is tracking 14 stations in Rock, CHR, Country, and AC formats to get a picture of what is posted each week and what the audience reaction in  Likes and Comments is.

Let's take a look at Wednesday 1/18/12 with an analysis taken around 10a Eastern.   The tracking on my Newsfeed here goes back to Sunday posts - so around 60 hours.   Here are some tracking facts:

• There were 85 posts in the News Feed - that's an average of 6 posts per station in the roughly 2 day period - so maybe 3-4 posts a day on the average.  

• Here is a rundown of the type of posts in the News Feed:
• Station Liners - Plugs for contests, music features, etc - 27 or 32%
• Questions - "Are you watching American Idol" etc - 12 or 14%
• News/Info - Links to Videos, funny Pictures or News facts - 30 or 35%
• Personality Posts - 'On my 2nd cup of Coffee need more'  - 8 or 9%
• Music News - Posts on upcoming releases, artist news -- 8 or 9%

• Top 5 reaction posts: 
• Station Contest - Trip to Hawaii in LA - 152 Likes
• News - Justin Bieber goes Brunette 155 Likes and 80 comments
• News - Kholhe K's ex gets cheers at Lakers Game in LA - 436 Like
• News - Pop bands logos in Heavy/Death Metal Fonts - 184 Like, 61 Comment, 38 Shares
• Question - State wants to ban PJs in Public - 70 Likes and 185 Comments

I tried to pick stations that did a fair amount of postings and had big Like numbers.   The big markets like LA, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, and Philly are there but there are some smaller markets like Madison and Grand Rapids.   I plan on adding to the panel now that we have a trial run out there and track more of the content.  Of course I can't track all the metrics that are available to the Admin users at the stations, but we can at least see the Likes, Comments and Shares to get a basic picture.  If you have any suggestions on stations to add or other types of posts to track let me know via email- dlange210@att.net or with comments below.  Thanks.

Overall when you just look at a News Feed of Radio Brands it's a strange mix of posts.  The biggest reactions here are mostly for News and Questions.  The Station Liners really didn't do much in likes or comments unless they were contests that forced the audience to Facebook to win.  The most reactions came from the active evening personalities and their posts with Questions and News/web bits.  Is there a real strategy here to focus on the types of posts that get reaction or are we just throwing posts out there?

The other fact here was the lack of interaction from the Personalities in their posts.  Once they put it up there they rarely came back in to keep the conversation going or react to the audience.  

Social Networks Too Much Activity?

The reality of interacting with your audience on Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook is that you can go un-noticed pretty quickly.

Right now Facebook claims over 800 million active users with around 50% of them logging on in any given day.  The average Facebook user has 130 friends and in an average day more than 250 million photos are uploaded everyday.  

In the Twitter world there are over a billion tweets posted every week.  Twitter users welcomed in 2012 with over 16,000 tweets per second on New Years Eve last weekend!!

While some grumbled at the changes from the Facebook F8 conference last fall to the News Feed - face it something had to be done.  We are all drowning in the posts from our friends and also from the many celebrities, movies, TV shows, Radio stations, products, stores, and political pages and Twitter accounts we follow.   

When I look at my news feed with around 500 friends and maybe 30 brands/personality pages I'm linked to I end up with around 20 posts an hour during the day. My full news feed page maybe covers 2-3 hours.  In Twitter it can move even faster.  Of course every week I add new friends and followers so in a year these numbers will climb a lot. 

Also keep in mind that Facebook IS filtering what hits my news feed.  They are looking at my past interaction (reading, linking, sharing, or commenting) with each of my friends and brand likes and deciding who is important.  They are also looking at what is posted by each of my friends/brands and deciding if it might be interesting to me on a long list of priorities.  Just as Google looks at my search history and sorts out what might be the best sites for me Facebook is also doing that for what appears on my News Feed.   

So now you are getting set to do some posts on your station's Facebook page or hit the Twitter button.  Is your message going to breakthrough?  Or are you just wasting your time?  

To get better at interacting with the audience on Social Media you need some feedback.   Yes some metrics or statistics or ratings that tell you what the audience is doing with your interaction.  And you need to develop a strategy behind the data to make sure what you post or tweet has a chance.  The other challenge is that the listener's News Feed is filling up every minute with more stuff and even with good content you can fall off the feed before they even see it.  

Some have taken to posting all the time to stay on the news feed, but remember that you don't want to become the 'evil' spam-master of Facebook.  Yes, the News Feed filter also looks for 'spam' and filters it out.  We also have the ultimate goal of getting the audience to interact with the ultimate source here - the broadcast signal.  Perhaps down the road we'll be important enough in the Social Media Web to make all our dollars from the digital side, but for now (and probably forever) we need to get them to tune in or stream in.  

The key is getting good feedback.  Know how many people saw your post, how many hit any links, looked at the pic, rolled the video, commented, shared and also who they are.   You can get most of this info if you have a Facebook analytic program, although many programs can be hard to read or navigate. Even bigger than just having the data you need to keep track of what worked and what didn't.  Once you have this data - now you have a chance to build a strategy to become more effective.   But, we have to hurry - next New Year there will probably be 50,000 tweets a second and we'll have 500 Facebook friends to keep up with and 5 times the posts we have today.   

The Personalization Bubble

As we work in our Broadcasting world and the ever increasing Social Media and Web world that we interact and build our audience's with there are some important lessons here in this presentation by Eli Pariser at a recent TED conference.

His thought here is that in our web and digital world we are living in such a personalized bubble that is filtered constantly analyzing everything we read, share, click on, and interact with that we can end up living in our own world.  Very interesting thought - and the more you think about it - very true.

We come from Broadcasting where the only filter is - changing the channel to another station.  It does give the audience a community.   Eli's view here is that in the Personalized web world we could be turning into individualists.

The other thought to take away is 'how to work and interact in the individualistic world the audience is building - with the help of the Social Media sites and Search Engines.

No Time For Social Media?

Just what the programming team needed, another task to accomplish.   Chances are your brand is trying to  keep up with the audience and the community while you seem to have fewer players on the team than you ever imagined a few years ago.

Now you've made the dive into Social Media in addition to your web site and of course keeping the content hot out of the speakers.  The Facebook Page and the Twitter worlds need attention if you are going to build and interact with your listeners.   Having just 2,000 likes when your on-air cume is 100,000 doesn't make Facebook very effective.   Just posting some pics on the page and pushing the air staff to 'post some stuff' won't help you develop a conversation with the audience or build the size of your fans in either Twitter or Facebook.   It has to be topical, entertaining, unique and clever if it's going to have an impact on the audience.  Obvious self promotion can be a big problem in building you brand - this audience is pretty marketing savvy and doesn't enjoy boring tricks.

The key to making Facebook and Twitter work is having an organization or a system so you can start to get a view of what is working and what is not.  Just like we have Selector to help us play the HITS more often and control the music  you need to have some kind of system to manage the posts on Facebook and Twitter.  Having a system that also makes it easy to create in is also a big plus.  Being able to post videos, pics, audio, flash, links, and with a system that is simple for everyone to grasp.  You can't spend hours messing around with training or complex computer systems.

We also need to know what is working and what is being ignored or damages our brand.  Just as we used charts, sales, call out, research and requests to get a picture of the music we play we need data here on how the audience interacts with the posts.

Then there is monitoring the pages.  Keeping the language under control, making sure no one is spamming you and your audience and also being able to follow up on any questions or complaints from the fans.  You can't spend your life with Facebook on your screen 24/7 to be the site police.

Lastly you have to use all the features of the page.   Making up contests, building tab pages, linking the stream, promoting events, directing them to the website, adding them to your database, and biggest of all getting them to listen to the station more.   You also have to do all of this within Facebook's rules.  Forgetting to use their contest rules and follow their regulations can cost you your page and all of it's fans.

Opps almost forgot you also have to keep up with the Facebook and even Twitter news feed scoring systems.  Appearing on your fan's news feeds with the new system of top stories is even harder than it was.  You have to have relevant, vibrant and topical content to get in their club today.  The only way to improve is to keep an eye on your progress and measure what is working and not working.  You need constant feedback to keep up.

To get all of this you'll need a lot of sources.  There are publishers and some include some analytics.   Facebook also tells you some facts about how the fans are using your pages in their metrics.  You can go to your graphic/web team to try and get help designing Tab pages for contests etc.   Facebook does some monitoring for you, but it may not keep your team from needing to watch the page.  Lots of jumping around for the facts here.

Then, of course, you have to manage the team.  Teach them how to use all these tools and how to entertain the audience in a medium that nearly everyone is still learning about.   It's also a world where Facebook or Twitter can change the rules at anytime or one where new tactics can pop up and change the game quickly.

The big brands are hiring whole teams to manage their Social Media presence.    Look at the Gatorade Social Media HQ!!!

There are programs to help you get it all organized.  There are system developing here, if you want to know more contact me.   dlange210@att.net