8 facebook marketing insights a marketer should have

This post is rather long, so feel free to jump straight to the section that interests you

1. Facebook users upload pictures – a lot of them
2. Facebook users post more and more videos
3. Facebook users don’t understand the privacy settings
4. Facebook users spend time stalking – not only interacting
5. Facebook users notice EVERYTHING about their friends
6. Facebook users don’t comment on 3rd party sites, but do comment within facebook
7. Facebook users via smart phones are the real addicts
8. Facebook users keep a clean inbox

1. Facebook users upload pictures like mad

We all have digital cameras, and they are used more than ever before. Especially the girls use digital cameras when socializing. The digital camera makes out an essential part of the handbag content for many girls. Guys don’t use handbags, and don’t have a digital camera with them at all times, but remember that millions of facebook users carry a mobile phone with them that is capable of taking pictures.
Uploading pictures is dead easy and people can select which ones look good and which ones do not. That makes it good content to upload as the ‘not so good’ pictures can be deselected from the pictures that will be uploaded. Video on the other hand is more complicated. Chances that the video shot with the digital camera or mobile phone is ‘perfect’ tends to be very low unless it is being edited. Editing video is tedious and not everyone knows how to do it. For that reason, pictures continue to be the media of choice when people share ‘self-made’ content on facebook. Having said that, many facebook users prefer to watch videos, because it is easy – you don’t need to do anything except for watching and listening. That leads to the next point.

2. Facebook users post more and more videos on their wall

People are lazy and reading a 750 word article to its full is simply not something that your average facebook users does…it will take time and the reader needs to ‘make an effort’. With video, all you need to do is watch and listen…much easier. That is why we see more and more videos from sources such as youtube posted on facebook. Facebook realizes this and includes a screenshot, title and description of video links that stem from youtube, vimeo etc.

3. Facebook privacy

The majority of people on facebook do not understand the facebook privacy settings. Without being fully aware of it, people are sharing content with thousands and thousands of people they don’t know. This is great for stalking and great for facebook as you spend more time on the site…yeah it’s their butter and bread. As an advertiser, this is a great news as chances that facebook users will fall onto your content is higher.

4. Stalking on facebook

People might not always post and comment on much stuff, but they sure look at content. If you really want to find out stuff about other people (especially relationship targets) – facebook is where you want to be. Also, don’t forget that when people use facebook chat, they are online. Just try and see who is always online and then go to their profile and look at their activity – you’ll see what I mean.

5. Facebook friends’ engagement is being checked out

This point is very close to the last one. Think of a time when you meet someone on your night out and they say: ‘I saw that photo of you on facebook from XYZ’s birthday. Was it a good party?’ and bla bla bla. They saw it; they had interest; but they didn’t comment. I am sure this has happened to you before. So remember – no comments doesn’t mean people don’t see it and also doesn’t mean that people don’t care.

6. Comments on facebook posts

If you post a link to a blog post or a video, you are likely to see that people will not post their comments (if any) on the page of the content, but on facebook itself. People are tired of registering to comment (even though it often isn’t necessary, people still think it is) – they rather comment on the place they became aware of the content. Also, not everyone wants to share their comments with the entire internet – by commenting on facebook, they can stay in their comfort zone (remember that most facebook users don’t understand the privacy settings).

7. Facebook on smart phones

Facebook is available via smart phones. The users that access facebook via smartphones tend to be comparable with crack addicts. Note, that a smart phone is a great way to use facebook if it is blocked at the workplace. Finally, iphones can view youtube videos and not facebook videos – so if you post videos, it is a good idea to use youtube.

8. Clean facebook inbox

Only friends and groups can reach the facebook user’s inbox. Likelihood that the stuff in the inbox is of value to the user is high. People know this and read the stuff that gets to their inbox. Many marketers see this as very powerful and create profiles rather than fan pages. What they forget, is that profiles is limited to 5000 ‘friends’ and you have no reporting on the demographics (sex, geographical location etc). Furthermore, remember that you don’t want to spam people on facebook – it has no long term value. If you are not careful, you will be removed quicker than you know.

Conclusion

Facebook has 350 million users, so don’t generalize about what you just read. You might agree to some points and not to others. At the end of the day, only facebook themselves really know how users use their platform and I am not sure they will share that kind of information with us to the extend that we would like.

Just take the points I illustrated and think about them next time you try and target people on facebook with your marketing efforts.

So…this article breaks several things I said. It’s over 750 words long and it is text rather than video. If you read this, I think you might be the exception to the rule. I know that you are probably not an ‘average facebook user’, but more likely a marketer whose job is to gain knowledge around this subject, but I still dare to say that video will work better for a post of this size. As a result, I will post a video with the same content a month from now. I will then share the view numbers of this post and the video with you, and we can see what communication method worked the best. Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on twitter and/or subscribe to our rss feed below and you will be notified when we have the data.

Luxembourg related sites only please mister google

Finding what you are looking for on the internet by using google is not always easy in small countries. Luxembourg is a good example. Let’s have a closer look.

>> Scenario: I am a french-speaker who lives in Luxembourg and I want to look at car insurance prices online <<

First Try: I go to google and search for ‘assurance voiture’ (car insurance in french). Only 2 of the first 10 google results are actually linking to sites that are suited for Luxembourg residents. All other results are made for the french market only. If we look closer at these two sites that are relevant for Luxembourg residents, we will see that they are both .lu web sites.

Second Try: I make the same search in google, but this time I add site:.lu to my search criteria – this tells google to only look for sites that have the Luxembourg top level domain .lu. The search therefore looks like this: ‘assurance voiture site:.lu’. Look at the results now – every result relates to Luxembourg and is suitable for Luxembourg residents that are looking for car insurance.

Note that it is not always the case that ‘site:.lu’ will give you better results. You can also have .com .net etc sites that targets Luxembourg. When using site:.lu, all other top level domains are ruled out by google as you ask google to only look for .lu sites. I hope that makes sense to you.

You will find that as your search criteria gets closer to something you can buy online, you will get more non-Luxembourg related results. This is because companies that sell online optimize their websites so that they are better indexed in google. This is also called ‘search engine optimization’ or ‘SEO’. As Luxembourg is such a small market, sites from larger neighboring countries can sometimes dominate the search results you get. So next time you get search results that don’t relate to Luxembourg, try to add site:.lu. You might find what you are looking for quicker.

SEO Example from Real Life: How being on top of search engines can make you leader in your offline business

As Luxair was playing crazy again with their prices, I decided to catch the train from Luxembourg to Frankfurt at 42€ rather than catching the Luxair flight at 330€. I will not get too much into that now… I will write a separate post on Luxair and their retarded pricing policies another time. Right now I want to share my hotel experience in the Frankfurt Airport area.

As all I need is a clean place to sleep before I catch my morning flight to San Francisco, I google’d ‘preiswert frankfurt airport hotel’. I google in German, as an English search will just give me the large portals and hotel chains that are either over priced or leaves me browsing hotel portals for ages. I find ‘Motel-One’ as the first organic result.

When clicking through, I get a nice clean website that tells me what I want to know and doesn’t over-inform me with all kinds of irrelevant crap. So perfect, this is what I need – I go ahead and reserve my room without entering information that is none of their business anyway (such as what flight I will be taking from the airport etc).

At the airport, a shuttle bus picks me up (free of charge) to take me to the hotel. It is a 10 minute drive that takes me to an ‘office village’ close to frankfurt airport. I can’t help but see lots (and I mean lots) of ‘to let’ banners on the office buildings in the area. Definitely not much activity going on here…The shuttle bus drops me off just outside the ‘Motel One’. Across the street is a similar hotel called ‘B&B Hotel’. Same size, same concept, same ‘49€ per night’ advertising outside. The only difference: all the lights are off on the floors of the B&B Hotel. In short – the hotel is empty. Motel One on the other hand has lights in the rooms on all 6 floors and there are people in the lobby. I enter with the feeling that I made a good choice…

Being the internet geek that I am, it is very important for me to have internet access. The friendly staff at reception informs me that there is free internet in the lobby, and at 12€ for 24 hours (or 4€ per individual hour) I can have wireless access in my room. I of course take the flat rate option. 12€ is a lot of money to access the internet for 24 hours, but compared to other European hotels, this is a fair price. When I go outside to smoke, I notice that there are many people in the lobby on their laptops benefiting from the free internet access there. Each of them are having a drink and some even a sandwich as well.

So now to the conclusion. In my eyes this experience is a very strong illustration of the power of good online marketing. We have a hotel in an area that expected lots of business from nearby office buildings. As the offices are all unoccupied, the hotels will not get any business from there. The B&B Hotel is suffering from this, while Motel One has invested in Search Engine Optimization that brings them business because they are on the first page of google results for good generic search phrases. It doesn’t stop here! Because Motel-One’s customers find the hotel via the internet, chances are quite high that these are people who spend their time online. The hotel understands this, and give people two options. Either have internet in your room and pay for it, or come to the lobby and use it for free. The hotel then banks on people buying drinks and/or food when they are using the internet in the lobby. So not only does Motel One have more customers than its competitor – they are also generating additional income by providing internet access and/or food & drinks. Great work Motel One – back to the drawing board B&B Hotel.
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