The Trouble with Social Content

Researchers from Psychster created social media mar­keting content in a variety of formats to see which worked best. They used the allrecipes.com and Facebook social networks, con­ducting surveys with users after they’d been exposed to the content.

First, what we might call the ‘good news’: as social media mar­keters have been telling us for the last five years, more useful, fun, non-​​pushy content is more likely to engage people than straight­for­ward advertising.

The reports says the sponsored content was a St Patrick’s Day page con­taining a video and UGC. The video men­tioned the brand spon­soring the content. ‘Give’ widgets let you create a present – like a badge or a greeting card – for friends. ‘Get’ widgets let you create similar things for your own profile page.

But there is a sig­ni­ficant caveat here. Yes, people said they’d click links on sponsored content and give/​get widgets to a greater extent than on banners, news­let­ters and non-​​interactive brand pages. But not by as much as you’d think. The ‘likely to click’ score for sponsored content is 3.3; for old fash­ioned banners it’s 2.8. That’s a 10% dif­fer­ence in impact. I suppose you might argue that it all depends on how good the content is, and how relevant it is to the site’s users: I can’t really comment on that since I haven’t seen the media used.

Sponsored content is a good thing, then, as far as getting people to click through is con­cerned. It’s good for aware­ness and improving sen­ti­ment. Unfortunately, there’s abso­lutely no cor­rel­a­tion between this and per­suading people to buy things.

Sponsored content was found to be the least suc­cessful in terms of con­verting exposure into sales. I’d imagine that this is probably down to context and the lack of any par­tic­ular call to action. If you load up a flash game – some sort of Farmville knock-​​off – and it happens to be sponsored by Corona beer, I’d wager you might think: ‘oh yes, Corona beer – that exists’. If it’s a good game, then you might think: ‘Fair play to you, Corona. Nice one.’ What you probably don’t think is ‘Right, I’m off down to the shop to buy some Corona’. [Actually, that might have been a bad example. Mmm… beer.]

Better targeted, relevant sponsored content would pre­sum­ably work better: a good example is the free recipe cards that super­mar­kets give away. If I worked for a super­market, I’d be all over allrecipes.com with my free recipes, but not with a car-​​racing game.

The big winner for brands is having a profile page with fans. The ‘with fans’ dif­fer­ence is that fan pages give users a badge that shows on their own profile. Straight brand pages without fans are just there to look at, and are not so suc­cessful. The com­mit­ment – however slight it may seem – of pub­lic­ally saying that you like a brand turns out to be a fairly strong motiv­ator to buy things from them. The report’s authors suggest that this is because people hate being seen as incon­sistent, or dis­playing cog­nitive dis­son­ance, science fans. If you’ve joined the Marmite fan page and then buy Vegemite, then that’s odd and wrong, even to you:

…once people purchase products from a brand, they report liking the brand more. But the reverse is also true – when people declare publicly that they like a brand (by putting a logo on their profile for all of their friends to see) they are more likely to buy from it.

This also explains why ‘Give’ widgets work better than ‘Get’ widgets. If you send your friend a virtual pot of Marmite, then that’s a much more public display of affinity than making one for yourself, so you’re more likely to stick to your pro­fessed tastes.

The full report is here [PDF]. via. MediaPost

picture credit: CaptPiper

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