BlackRock Explains Its Sponsored Update Success

One of the best things a company can do is show its customers how other customers are using its products. Have you ever seen the GoPro videos?

Even though Twitter, Facebook and YouTube aren’t business-to-business platforms, I wish they’d support the financial services user group, as LinkedIn does. Most social stuff does not come naturally to finserv marketers, and the world isn’t necessarily waiting for socially shared financial content. A little help can go a long way in maximizing what can be large budgets and promising careers.

While we wait for the others to step up with specialized training, LinkedIn continues on its merry way producing events (such as FinanceConnect happening this week in New York and today online), ebooks (see The Sophisticated Finance Marketer Vol. 2: Balancing Real-Time News with Planned Editorial Content) and Webinars.

The latest of the Webinars—How BlackRock Became A Sponsored Updates Superstar—was held yesterday afternoon. I've embedded the 57-minute presentation below.

This isn’t all benevolence on LinkedIn’s part, of course. In its earnings announcement last week, the firm reported that Sponsored Updates, its primary content marketing product, account for more than 40% of its overall Marketing Solutions revenue of $119 million.

That’s a big improvement for the quarter (although Marketing Solutions revenue overall was down from the fourth quarter of 2014), helped along by the growing content consumption on LinkedIn and the acquisition and integration of Bizo. Despite LinkedIn’s legacy as a job-hunters site, there’s eight times more engagement with content on the site than with jobs, according to yesterday’s Webinar moderator Senior Global Product Marketing Manager Selin Tyler.

But this slide from the LinkedIn Market Opportunity deck (this link opens a PDF) will give you an idea of how LinkedIn sizes the opportunity. There’s more to go.

Content That Serves A Purpose

In this space, LinkedIn is marketers’ top social focus, largely because that’s what the majority of financial advisors are paying attention to. Every mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm can establish a LinkedIn company page, post organic updates to it and hope to build followers and engagement. And, that will go so far. Those with a promotional budget can access LinkedIn’s sponsored updates for greater, targeted reach and visibility.

What can be expected of a sponsored update program? LinkedIn asked none other than BlackRock, one of its pioneering firms in the program since 2013, to sit for a Q&A.

I recommend this discussion to you not for its support of a LinkedIn product but for the insights provided on how to “craft” (a word used often) and manage content created for a purpose. It’s obvious that presenters Ann Hynek, managing editor of the BlackRock blog, and Lorin Suslow, social media marketing strategist in charge of the LinkedIn paid media program, have thought every detail through. Whether you’re a sponsored update advertiser or an organic update publisher, you’re likely to benefit from this discussion. My takeaways follow.

Planning

BlackRock sponsored updates are sourced from the BlackRock blog, which is by far the most prolific blog in the industry (and the most aggressive about seeking comments—see this post). Its focus is on investor education, retirement and pending market events that support BlackRock’s objective of raising retail awareness. Products are typically not mentioned.

Sometimes within firms, there can be tension between the editorial function of a blog and the needs of those in advertising. Suslow described a content planning collaboration that optimizes what’s needed for marketing. In addition to delivering on educational goals, content created needs to support the BlackRock and iShares brand themes. She looks at the available evergreen content and the planned content and performs a gap analysis, the result of which may require going back to Hynek and the blog contributors with additional requests.

Last year’s campaigns performed at four times the benchmark, Suslow said, due to the quality and variety of content offered via the sponsored updates.

Targeting

BlackRock’s best-performing sponsored update, shown below, produced 10 times the average CTR. I should say that I cobbled this screenshot together based on the organic update I found in BlackRock’s feed from November 2014. I’m not the audience BlackRock would have been targeting. What firm wouldn’t have been happy with the number of organic likes and comments shown on this update?

Such engagement is a function of reach and, to some extent, the number of followers. BlackRock uses sponsored updates to amp up both. The precision targeting available to target financial advisors and other professionals and/or people in key life stages are what drives the engagement “much higher” than on the organic updates, Suslow said.

Next up for BlackRock: Suslow said the firm soon will be using LinkedIn’s new Lead Accelerator. Lead Accelerator is a remarketing-like product using LinkedIn display and social ads, including sponsored updates, to nurture BlackRock Website visitors as they traverse the Web.

The Composition Of An Update

Pay attention to these marketers’ comments on the consideration given to each element of the update, and the continual adjustment, including A/B testing, involved. When something’s not working, they say, 90% of the time it’s the headline that needs help. It’s the content just 10% of the time, often involving updates that mention product.

Analytics

Suslow says she checks on the program’s performance twice a day. LinkedIn-provided analytics include impressions (is the target audience large enough?), engagement rate (a measure of campaign health and ad content health) and performance relative to the update benchmark. Each post is ranked as a strong performer, viral performer or poor performer.

Given that the updates all link to BlackRock’s blog, Web analytics are no doubt part of the performance analysis, although nothing was shared about that. I also would have liked to have learned about their analysis of likes, comments and shares, and the effect of influencers on virality.

Engagement Leaders And Popular Topics

Toward the end of the hour, program moderator Tyler walked through a few slides showing the best-performing sponsored updates of the quarter.

OppenheimerFunds, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch were among the leaders, ranked by engagement rate.

She also shared a list of topics producing the most engagement (clicks+likes+comments+shares) among financial advisors in the first quarter of 2015.

A First Look At Fund Website Benchmarking Data

Digital marketing success isn’t defined in terms of Website traffic. There’s so much else to consider.

However, benchmarking data on the overall level and composition of your site traffic vis-à-vis your competition can be useful. You’re appealing to the same broad audiences, and their behavior on related sites should have some meaning for you.

This is a follow-up to last October’s post about the return of benchmarking to Google Analytics. Now there's data to analyze! Here's a first look at it.

The graphs below reflect 12 months of activity (April 15, 2014-April 15, 2015) on 426 fund Websites whose firms have opted in to share anonymized data to enable benchmarking.

The sites are grouped by number of daily sessions, and the data in the graphs are based on three groups: 0-99 daily sessions (sample=377), 100-499 daily sessions (sample=29) and 500-999 daily sessions (sample=20). Google doesn't yet have a large enough sample to report on fund sites with 1,000 daily sessions and more.

All data can be found in your Google Analytics account. Just go to Audience/Benchmarking. I looked at data at the Funds level (including mutual funds, exchange-traded funds [ETFs] and hedge funds), exported in Excel spreadsheets to be able to work with it.

This is more real (not based on user panels but on actual data that Google is collecting on sites) and more granular (most free benchmarking services stop at Finance or Investing in general, which includes brokerage sites).

Still, the benchmarking will be even more useful:

• When mutual fund and ETF site benchmarking data is able to be reported separately. That can’t happen until a sufficient number of properties agree to contribute data. If your firm hasn't yet opted in, you might want to consider. More on that in my previous post.
• When some category inconsistencies are addressed. Google has no trouble recognizing direct, search (organic and paid), referral and even social traffic. But if site publishers aren’t using tracking code to distinguish between display and email traffic, Google may mis-categorize it as direct traffic data. You’ll see below that Google benchmarking data is being reported for paid search, other paid traffic sources and email for the less trafficked sites but not for the most trafficked sites.
• When you isolate your own peer group and delve in. I’m presenting the three groups together to get a high level sense of fund company Website traffic in 2015. Compare your site's traffic to your peer group and you’ll learn more.

A Few Takeaways

1. Overall, it looks as if the most that a fund site can hope for are a couple of minutes of the visitors’ time and a couple of pages viewed. This data suggests—let me amend that—makes the argument for easy-to-find content on sites that anticipate the task-oriented visitor. They come, they get, they go. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

2. Finally, we have data on the contribution being made by social efforts and by email—two areas that there is great interest and investment in.

In fact, see the growth in the total number of sessions driven by social in the most recent 12-month period over the previous period. Benchmarking data is available only from August 28, 2013, so the earlier period comparison is from 8/28/2013-4/14/2014, eight months versus 12.

3. Direct traffic (a reflection of brand awareness and product familiarity), organic search (a measure of content availability, quality and accessibility) and referral links drive the better trafficked Websites. Less trafficked sites rely on paid search, other advertising and organic search.

4. There’s a difference in the traffic sourced by each channel: Direct traffic, organic search and referrals lead to more longer-duration sessions, with more pages viewed.

5. Just about one out of four visitors to fund sites comes from non-desktop devices (e.g., tablets or smartphones). This is a remarkable change that has undeniable implications for sites created for desktop use.  

6. Desktop sessions last longer than mobile sessions, which is to be expected. But, there isn’t a big difference in the number of pages viewed across devices. Here too, it’s few pages across the board.

Drilling into your firm’s analytics will help you understand whether this is a good or bad thing. It’s good if you can see that visitors are immediately finding what they need and then moving on. Not so good if the short visits point to visitors—even more frustrated because they're on smaller screens and possibly on the go—who give up.

An Over-The-Shoulder Look At Advisor Sites

Out of curiosity, I also looked at the benchmarking data of sites that are in the Financial Planning & Management category, which together represent about 6,800 Web properties. Nine out of 10 of these attract fewer than 100 daily sessions. Google reports data on sites attracting as many as 10,000-99,999 sessions.

Make no mistake about it—many financial advisors are turning to the same content marketing and paid search tactics that asset manager sites use to build awareness and drive interest. I spotted certified financial planner Jeff Rose ranking for "Roth IRA" searches back in 2010, and more advisors have gotten more serious about inbound marketing since. (In fact, see FMG Suite’s 2015 Inbound Marketing award winners—there are some impressive marketers on that list of financial advisors.)

Few advisory firms may enjoy the brand recognition of your firms or the marketing budgets. The benchmarking data gives us an idea of the organic search strength among financial planning sites.

And there's more—but I'll leave the rest for you to explore.

Will Notifications Help Re-Engage Your Mobile Web Users?

By now, asset management marketing has demonstrated its ability to create campaigns capable of driving traffic to Websites. Subscription to the firm’s updates, whether via email, social or RSS, has been less consistently successful. And that’s a shame: time-sensitive messages, fresh Web content and new functionality in many instances languish, waiting to be discovered.

Wouldn’t you love to be more proactive about reminding people to make a return visit? Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to reach out and park a notification right then and there on an advisor’s browser or smartphone home screen?

Easy, tiger. The good news is that now you can. Web push notifications enable visitors to a site to opt in for notifications from the site. Once a user has opted in, he or she can leave the site, and notifications will be sent, even when the browser is closed.

The bad news? There really isn’t any, except to acknowledge that these are early days and Web notifications on a large scale are untested. But it's not too early for you to include notifications on your firm’s digital roadmap. (I wrote a blog post to the same effect three years ago, which may really have been too early. In retrospect, I'm happy that practically no one read it.)

The difference-maker is that, as of this month, the Chrome browser now enables notifications. That's important because Chrome browser users make up about 53% of desktop traffic.

Web browser notifications have been available for a few years on Safari, the Mac browser used by 5% of desktop traffic (see the CNN example below), and they’re heading to Firefox, too.

Implementation Questions

The technology has been delivered in the latest version of Chrome (version 42, beta), and Google has named Beyond the Rack, eBay, Facebook, FanSided, Pinterest, Product Hunt and VICE News as sites where you can expect to see Web notifications in coming weeks.

Still, there are lots of questions that remain to be answered about the implementation. See the issues raised by these posts alone: Push Notifications Come To Chrome and Android and Push notifications via Chrome are great, but complicate things a bit.

If developers haven't quite figured everything out yet, it may come as no surprise that a marketers' guide to Chrome notification best practices has yet to emerge.

To see how Web notifications work, here’s a video explanation courtesy of Roost. Roost is a notification service provider (in business since 2013) whose Website has some of the most best informational resources that I’ve found.   

Roost Web Push - How it Works from Roost on Vimeo.

Toward An Equally Meaningful Relationship

User familiarity with notifications has been building for a while now, thanks to Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ notifications, among others, on the Web. Mobile app notifications have become obnoxious to me, I'll admit. Frequently, the last step in the app download process is a request to send notifications—that’s something I habitually swat away.

But there’s a case to be made for paying attention to the notification “channel.”

At one point, it was believed that the Web would lose both traffic and engagement to mobile apps, as was articulated in a 2010 Wired article, “The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet.” In fact, last year comScore reported that mobile users spend the majority of their total digital media time in apps, not on the Web.

Closest to home, Market Strategies International in December 2014 predicted that financial advisor mobile app use was "set to explode." Almost one in five advisors uses mobile apps more than Websites, according to that research.

Chrome's support for notifications is Google’s attempt to bring the mobile Web to parity with the capabilities of apps.

These are the opening paragraphs of its blog post Monday:

“With low friction access to content, the mobile web provides a great discovery experience for users and unparalleled reach for developers. Unfortunately, once users discover an experience they love, it is hard for them to build a deep meaningful relationship since websites lack the rich engaging capabilities of native apps such as push notifications and home screen icons.

"To take advantage of these engaging mobile capabilities, some developers build native apps, but users are often reluctant to spend the time and effort required to download and install them, despite the benefits. As a result, developers have needed to decide between the engagement potential of a native app and the reach potential of the mobile web.” 

A TechCrunch post published this week goes further, arguing that notifications are the next platform and will be “the starting point (or 'front door') for all of the interactions on your phone.”

I found this especially interesting and remembered the now legendary quote: “If the news is important, it will find me.” This was attributed to a college student in a focus group in 2008, and it's been cited in presentations and other works ever since.  

Expecting an asset manager Website to pull people to it is increasingly unrealistic, I’m starting to believe, given today's reliance on mobile devices. Push needs to work harder.

The mobile world that “started out as a pull-driven model—discovery and access was/is largely driven by a combination of the app store and the ‘grid of apps’” is evolving toward "engagement defined by push-driven notifications that eliminate the need to even go into the app,” wrote TechCrunch contributor Anish Acharya.

It's not much of a leap to wonder whether we're heading toward a time when notifications eliminate the need to go to a Website or—perish the thought—open an email. Notifications could be that important.

Early Thoughts

Here are a few notes I’ve had, thinking about the implications for mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firm planning.

• The notification capability available in asset manager mobile apps has been underleveraged to date; few apps ask to send notifications and those that do barely use it. My guess is that there’s no strategy in place.

• Those who opt in to your notifications—loyalists likely—will be demonstrating a level of trust that you’d hate to abuse.

It will not fly to just port existing notifications over to this new mode. Consideration of notifications will need to involve a holistic review of what’s worthy. What’s understood as notifications that are delivered today via email are not what you’d barge in on a browsing session to deliver.

The opportunity deserves its own review and could tap information and data not even being communicated today. Enabling technology, governance, content, frequency, timing, etc. all are conversations to be had.

And, Web notifications aren’t the only reason to make this investment in time and brainpower—eventually you’re going to need to get attention on wearables.   

• What’s encouraging is that people appear to be open to financial services notifications on mobile devices. Financial services iOS mobile notifications have one of the highest opt-in rates (55%) and financial services/utilities notifications on mobile devices enjoy the top engagement rates, according to consumer data reported by Kahuna.

• The most effective notifications will be distinguished by their relevance, with logged-in users receiving the most segmented, even personalized notifications. This can’t happen overnight, as many firms are experiencing this year, last year and next with their marketing automation initiatives aimed at financial advisors.

There’s very little information available online yet to describe exactly how Web notification personalization works. I was signed into Chrome with my Google account, which explains why I received a Roost notification on my Chrome-enabled Android. But can a notification-sending Website tap into the signed-on data that Google has? Can the response find its way into a CRM to marry up with customer data?

Watch this Roost video to get a sense of the analytics and CRM integrations you might want.

Finally, here's a related but much less complicated Chrome enhancement: The beta Chrome For Android also now supports “Add To Homescreen” icons for sites that are mobile-optimized. Code can now be added to Websites to display Add to Homescreen banners to encourage visitors to add shortcuts to their phones’ homescreens. This, too, should help re-engagement.

7 Examples Of How Context Matters For Mutual Fund, ETF Marketers

You can’t control the U.S. mail. If your large cap growth promotion happens to arrive at a financial advisor’s office on a day when the stock market is tanking, well, that’s how it is. Shake it off—you didn’t know, how could you? Looks like that piece is not going to work as well as you’d hoped.

And, that pretty much sums up the powerlessness of a direct mail marketer. Moving on…

Communicating online is less forgiving. Digital marketers are assumed to have control of their online communications including not just the What but the When and even the Where and the How.

Add to this mix the fact that financial advisors are not just reachable online but also more knowable online. This heightens expectations that communications are relevant and appropriate.

The context of what's being communicated is an increasingly important factor to consider in the planning and execution of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketing. 

“Context” is a concept that’s open for interpretation, and I’ll admit to taking some liberties below. But let’s start out right, with a definition, courtesy of an ebook from StrongView, Context Changes Everything.

StrongView explains context “as a combination of the consumer’s [client’s] disposition and situation, coupled with the business’s disposition and situation.”

Disposition refers to the essence of who a consumer is and includes demographic and behavioral data. Situation refers to dimensions that are constantly changing—location, social setting, sentiment and needs, for example.

“The relevance of a firm’s interactions is related directly to its understanding of customer context,” StrongView writes.

One of my favorite non-asset management examples: Do you remember when NetFlix accidentally released Season 3 of House of Cards in mid-February? Boston residents thought that was by design, as a consolation as Boston braced for another blizzard. Think of the goodwill engendered if that had been the intention. 

If you don't already, I’d encourage you and your team to begin to pay attention to context. Who knows how the Apple Watch is going to rock content marketers’ world, starting with tomorrow's pre-orders. But it seems a safe guess that “wearable” content delivery will make context-awareness even more important.

To urge you along, I offer the following list of how context can make a difference. It’s in no particular order and in a slightly different tone. I’ve let myself go snarkier than usual to make obvious to you the need for alertness on the part of marketers, supported by enabling technology including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation and Web, email and social analytics. Opportunities abound for relevant communicators. This is a partial, random list—surely, you can think of more?

What Not To Do

1. Overestimate The Compelling Value Of That PDF

Send a blast email with a link to a PDF at a time of day when you'd reasonably expect most recipients to be checking their email on smartphones. Do you communicate across multiple time zones? Right, well, you could stagger the email sends by location, drawing on regional information no doubt extractable from your CRM. It is more work. How important are those PDF opens to you?

1A. Burn Through Your New List

Use your hard-fought-for list of conference emails to email attendees while the conference is underway. Please don't. They won’t read your introductory message then, and all you've done is waste an opportunity. Conference attendees are battling to stay on top of their business emails, yours will be one they’ll be happy to quickly dispose of. Choose your time and message wisely.

2. Play Hide-And-Seek With People Who Are Already Stressed

Move your tax-related content from one place on the Website to another in the months between January and April. Oh, and don’t sweat the details about trying to map redirects to every single (likely Google-indexed) page. Are you trying to incur the wrath of your clients and the people who answer the phone lines at your firm?

The graphic below is excerpted from a Google Finance Trends infographic (link opens a PDF) that reports that tax-related searches are starting earlier in the year, and that more are happening on mobile devices. Plan your enhancements for during the off-season.

3. Dawdle With The News

Twitter is all about what’s happening now or maybe in the last 24 hours. A February tweet announcing the availability of your 12/31 communications is going to impress no one. That’s not what Twitter is for, I wouldn’t bother.

Did you see the number of firms that jumped on the Lipper award announcements last week? InvestmentNews published this list immediately after the evening ceremony March 31 and quite a few firms took to Twitter the very next day. Looks like Thornburg needed a full day but imagine how that ginormous image looked in a tweet stream.

TIAA-CREF employees celebrate the firm’s 2015 #LipperAward for Best Overall Large Fund Group, three years running. pic.twitter.com/27pV2A43I8

— TIAA-CREF (@TC_Talks) April 1, 2015

Thornburg wins two 2015 Lipper Fund Awards! Read about it here: http://t.co/pVz1IzY9hN pic.twitter.com/ZX3TrEyNhR

— Thornburg Funds (@ThornburgFunds) April 2, 2015

That’s the way to do it. If your announcement is still working its way through your process, I’d say that ship has sailed on Twitter—the news was so last week. (Your timely addressing of bad news would be expected, too, but let's save that for another list, another day.)

Off-topic but I also really like TIAA-CREF’s use of its Twitter header image to promote its Lipper dominance. Where is it written that asset managers need to use a moody photograph of their headquarters as their Twitter image and never ever change it?  

4. Advertise 24/7 If You Can Help It

Pay for broad match AdWords searches all day and all night. Unless you are convinced that financial advisors are looking for solutions in the wee hours, I have one word for you: dayparting. Let the non-advisor (most likely) night owls amuse themselves with organic search results or run up some other firm's pay-per-click budget.

5. Get Caught Sleeping At The Wheel

Release a blog post on your firm’s philanthropy (or whatever) on the day the Fed raises interest rates for the first time in seven years. Throw your body in front of this if you have to.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a blog contributor offering a reaction post that day, don’t publish anything. It’s better to say nothing than to reach your blog subscribers—on a day when they’ll be paying extra attention to what you contact them about—with something that suggests that your team is either on autopilot or blissfully unaware.  

6. Just Stroll In There Like It's 1999

Fail to train your wholesalers how to check for LinkedIn profiles and updates (including links to blog posts), tweets and Facebook updates prior to calling on advisors. Advisors research their clients (and vendors) and you can be certain that they expect others to be doing the same due diligence on them. I may have mentioned this before.

7. Lump Everybody Together

Track and report on your Web visitors as one homogenous group, as if desktop, table and mobile sessions all yield the same experience. As if all visitors regardless of device have the same motivations or needs. 

If you were to segment the traffic, you would see some eye-opening differences.

Note: Blane Warrene, co-founder of Arkovi Social Media Archiving, now financial technology speaker and advisor and editor at large of TheDigitalFA, and I discussed the state of asset manager marketing on Blane’s Digital Well podcast last week. Blane is fun to talk to and it’s a freewheeling discussion (what was supposed to be 30 minutes turned into 40). If you check it out, here’s hoping there will be something in it for you.

Before You Go All-In On Facebook

“We’re starting to think more seriously about Facebook…”

I’ve heard this more than a few times from firms over the last six months. Typically, the firm has excelled with something else social (e.g., blog, Twitter account or LinkedIn company page) and believes it’s ready for something more challenging while potentially more rewarding.

The size of the social network itself (890 million daily active users in December 2014), its 2014 surge and the engagement potential all make Facebook impossible to ignore if you’re a marketer in 2015.

Mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) marketers absolutely should consider participation (beyond the base camps many have already set up) on Facebook for their own strategies. Not knowing what your business or marketing objectives are, not knowing what your client composition is, not knowing what your content and other resources are, etc., I can’t go much further than this.

…Except to encourage you to temper your enthusiasm by drilling into Facebook’s sensational traffic and engagement numbers. Financial services, let alone business-to-business organizations, cannot expect the same pick-up that other industries famously experience.

For some level-setting, let’s first take a broad look at social media and financial services. Afterward, we’ll zero in on Facebook.

10 Finserv Brands Dominate

There’s no shortage of ebooks and whitepapers about social media and financial services, but this Shareablee presentation delivered at a State of Financial Services Webinar in late November is distinguished by the data it presents. Unfortunately, the Webinar isn’t available on-demand.

Shareablee takes care to report financial services subsegments, noting that the lowest percentage (61%) of Investment Products & Services brands have social presences. Banking, insurance, loans and even payment services brands are more active. Data quoted is from January through October 2014. Note that LinkedIn isn't a platform included in this report. The annotations on the following slides are from me.

Within Shareablee's Investment Products & Services brands category are diversified firms and brokerages that are probably beyond your competitive set. They command the greatest share of voice.

Here’s the sobering slide: The top 10 brands dominate, representing 66% of all activity. If you’ve been successful, by your standards, with anything in social media, you are to be congratulated. It’s not easy to make an impact.

Next check out the Shareablee slide of Facebook sharing in particular. Despite all the hoopla about Facebook in 2014 and despite the pick-up of insurance and banking content, note the so-so sharing of investment product/service content.

This gets to the core content challenge of asset manager posts on Facebook. If you are not a Fidelity or Vanguard, if you don't sponsor community outreach programs (e.g., charitable benefits or sporting events), if you're new to engaging with a community and if the bulk of what you have to post is investment strategy and market insights, let’s be realistic about how much sharing your repurposed posts are going to get. How comfortable is a suit and tie at a barbecue?  

Minor digression: Before we leave the Shareablee deck, see the slide that shows the types of posts that people engage with. Across all financial services segments—but especially investment products and services—it’s photos! If you make just one tweak to your social strategy in all of 2015, please let it be to post more images.  

Does Facebook Drive Traffic?

Why take on another social network and especially Facebook? To drive both brand awareness and Website traffic. So, does Facebook drive traffic? All of the above was a prelude to encouraging Facebook-aspirants to watch the following Whiteboard Friday video, published on The Moz Blog last week. A transcript is also available on the page. 

It’s an engaging 17 minutes but if you’re short on time, here are a few highlights.

4:00: The Moz’s Rand Fishkin says the average page per visit of a Facebook visitor is about 1. “It tends to be the case that when you're in that Facebook feed, you're just trying to consume content, and you might see something, but you're unlikely to browse around the rest of the Website from which it came.” 

This compares to the average 3-5 pages consumed by people who arrive directly on your site and to Google search-sourced visits (2-2.5 pages on average). Obviously, you’ll want check your analytics to see how your various traffic sources perform.

6:48: But, Fishkin notes, “Facebook's likes and shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tend to perform well in search. So, if we can nail that, if we understand what kinds of content get spread socially on the Web and engage people on the social Web, we tend to also perform well in the kind of content we create for search engines.”

7:38: Fishkin begins his top 10 tips for Facebook optimization. 

8:56: A social referral/introduction may lead to subsequent Website exploration. Here's a brief discussion of setting up analytics to track future visits from social referrals, and see this post for more.

12:43: Fishkin discusses limitations on the reach of brand content, a relatively recent adjustment Facebook made to dim the effect of what had been overwhelming brand content. The objective is to enable personal content, typically valued by users more, to resurface.

14:27: Facebook is difficult to "game" nowadays but it is still possible to “game human psychology,” says Fishkin. “If you can find the angles that people care about, that they're vocal about, that they get engaged, excited, angry, passionate, of any emotional variety about those things, that's how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook,” he says. Don't produce that kind of content yet? You'll need to.

If Facebook is a frontier you aim to settle in 2015, I'm rooting for you. Of course, an asset manager can succeed on Facebook. Just do your preparation, make sure you understand the level of new effort required, including some level of advertising spending, and be sure to track your results/effectiveness.