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Facebook adds 1 million more Arabic users

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Technology news site Arab Crunch posted some interesting Facebook statistics yesterday from InsideFacebook’s most recent Gold Report (read the ArabCrunch story here). According to InsideFacebook, Facebook’s Arabic language interface is now the fastest growing language version inthe world, growing by 18% per month. According to Spot On’s research, Facebook’s Arabic platform in the Middle East & North Africa added about 1 million new users during the past three months (accounting for about half of all new users in the region) and the momentum that the Arabic platform has is changing the Facebook demographics for countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt for ever.

Language preference of MENA Facebook users (as percentage)

Language preference of MENA Facebook users (as percentage)

As expected, the language bias for Saudi Arabia’s Facebook users has now switched from English to Arabic. During the past three months the percentage of Facebook Arabic users in Saudi Arabia has crossed the 50% mark and now stands at 53% of total users of the platform. It’s a change of a few percent, but it’s going to be increasingly important for marketers as Facebook reaches new demographics of users, perhaps previously put off by having to user its English language interface.

MENA's Top Five Facebook Arabic Users

Numbers of Facebook users by country (in millions)

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Morocco added the most new Facebook users during the past three months, with Egypt adding 641,000 new users. Egypt also added the most Arabic language users during the past three months, which accounted for 57% of its total new users added to Facebook. However, 81% of all new Saudi Facebook users were adopters of the Arabic platform. At this rate, we could well be looking at a 60:40 percent ratio of Arabic to English Facebook users in Saudi by the beginning of next year.

Overall, Facebook users in the Middle East and North Africa grew by 15% over the past three months adding some 2.2 million new Facebook users and bringing the total MENA Facebook population to 17.3 million.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:

Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users (July 2010)

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

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If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

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Posted in Facebook, General, Internet, Internet research, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, research, social media | 3 Comments »

Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Scroll down the page for survey download links

The figures in our new Media Consumption & Habits of MENA Internet Users Survey simply confirm what everyone involved in the Middle East’s growing digital marketing industry has already been talking about for the past year or two: Internet connectivity has become pervasive amongst many of our key target audiences and is now a significant part of their daily lives. The new research survey conducted by Effective Measure in conjunction with Spot On PR, underscores that the Internet opportunity is not just something that exists in the USA or Europe, its right here in the MENA region too. It’s not just a rich thing. It’s not just a youth thing. (And its not just a Facebook thing either). The Internet’s reach is now much broader than that and its influence in the Middle East and North Africa is now truly rivalling its traditional media counterparts and providing marketers with real (and highly measureable) alternatives.

Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

- MENA Internet users now spend more time browsing the Internet than they do watching TV.

MENA Internet users daily access of Internet exceeds TV

- 88% of those surveyed stated that they access the Internet daily

- 71% of those surveyed stated that they watched television daily.

- Most traditional media have peaks and troughs in attention. Radio and newspapers achieve peak share of audience in the morning. Television audiences peak in the evening. However, the Internet holds audience attention fairly consistently throughout the day and well into the night.

- 28% more respondents watched TV during peak viewing hours than when viewership is at its lowest, at 7%),

- 20% of respondents stated that they use the Internet at any time-period surveyed, peaking at 33% in the evening (just 13% higher than the lowest period).

- Predictably, 73% of the survey’s respondents cited email as the activity they most often carried out online, ranking abover all other online activities.

- Social networking and search activities followed as the next highest ranking online activities for MENA Internet users, all coming it at about 40%.

- 54% of Internet users surveyed used mobile applications daily.

- 79% of Internet users surveyed spent up to three hours per day updating their social networks. 20% spent more than three hours updating their social networks.

- Internet users were more positive to companies and brands using “Internet marketing” than they were towards companies and brands using “social media marketing”.

- Most responses to our survey showed little variance between male and female respondents. However, there were a number of notable differences between the genders in their stated experiences with social media.

Survey Downloads

Download the full survey report (PDF)

Download the press release (English, Word doc)

Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)

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Creative Commons

Media consumption & habits of MENA Internet users by Effective Measure and Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post MENA Internet users, you might like our other Internet demographics and habits surveys:

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

Sign-up for more reports

If you would like to receive reports like this by email click here to join Spot On PR’s mailing list.

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Posted in Applications, Facebook, General, Internet, Internet research, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Mobile, Newspapers, Online marketing, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, research, social media | 9 Comments »

When social media programs grow up…

Thursday, July 15th, 2010
The company's pet social media program isn't going to stay a puppy for ever!

Remember: a social media programme isn't just for Christmas!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of speaking at ‘online’ conference events and workshops recently (this will surprise nobody who knows me) and consequently meeting a lot of people who are experimenting with social media within their organisations. It’s something of a growing trend – typically, one person within an organisation has been using Facebook or Twitter, even blogging, and has come to realise that there is very real value to the organisation in ‘being there’. A lot of these people come from the communications department, although by no means all. At a recent event where I spoke to an audience of event managers, I found quite a lot of people who had responsibility for companies’ events were the drivers behind introducing social media to their organisations.

Something of a pattern has started to emerge. The enthusiast is given permission to open up a social media account because it seems harmless enough – the company’s management doesn’t ‘get’ social media and so doesn’t see any danger in letting the enthusiast play with it. The enthusiast starts out and quickly finds a ready audience of people responding, interacting and demanding information, access and insight. It all becomes hard to handle precisely because it has been successful – one person can’t keep up with the volume but has gained enough experience to see the potential for this new medium.

So they go back to their management and point out that the experiment has been a great success, customers are now talking to the company over this new medium and appreciating the new degrees of access it brings. Can we expand the programme now?

And many I talk to are right in the middle of that conversation, mired in ‘not just yet, there’s a recession on you know’ and ‘What’s the ROI?’ reactions from the management team that has allowed this thing to develop so far precisely because it has ascribed it no importance.

The trouble is that social media is a difficult habit to break. Having started engagement with customers, partners and other stakeholders online, you have set an expectation of accessibility that can only grow. These early steps are important and help to build experience and learning – but it can’t stop there. The very fact that these programmes now need additional resources and expansion shows that they’re doing something right. It’s odd, in fact, that management presented with something new that is actually working would balk at it.

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Posted in Facebook, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, social media | No Comments »

A particularly delicious cake

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

A particularly delicious cake!The promise of behavioural marketing is a wonderful thing. After hundreds of years of mass media advertising that targets broad audiences with the same advertising message (whether they like it or not), the technology is now becoming available to advertise very specific advertising offerings targeted to reach only those that are likely to be interested in them. It’s a concept that excites both advertisers and consumers, since advertisers get to market to specific consumer audiences in the most profitable way and consumers only see the ads (and other types of content) that are directly relevant to them. However, as with many good things in life, there is a price to be paid by consumers and the currency is information. As the old English proverb goes, one can’t have one’s cake and eat it.

The cake is particularly delicious one. The Internet promises to tailor its audio, video, text, links and other content specifically to suit your individual preferences. Advertising is obviously leading the charge here, by investing in campaigns that are more closely targeted to consumer needs. However, the technologies can be just as useful to provision any kind of content over the Internet. Just imagine a web site, where every story, video clip, link, recommendation or advert was exactly according to your preference, not only in terms of content, but delivery, frequency and style too. Ultimately, it has the potential to become your own personal Internet, just the way you like it and as you discover new websites and services they automatically change to suit you.

Now here’s the catch. In order for behavioural targeting to be effective, it needs to know your preferences and behaviours, and update them in real-time. This includes data on the websites you visit, what you search for and where you spend your time whilst online, plus information like what devices you use to access Internet content, via what browsers, from what locations etc. It raises a plethora of privacy issues, and does so at a time where consumer attitudes towards privacy and knowledge of privacy issues are changing rapidly. Many thought little of putting all their personal details on Facebook a year or two ago, but recent media coverage of user reactions to changes in Facebook’s privacy settings has given many Facebook users pause for thought. A year or two ago it became quite common to find out that ‘all’ your friends were suddenly on Facebook. These days it’s quite common to know someone who’s quit Facebook entirely.

A new survey undertaken by Real Opinions highlights that there is enthusiasm for behavioural targeting and concern over privacy issues in almost equal measure. Consumers appear to appreciate efforts to provide them with more relevant content, but don’t want to control access to their personal information and behaviours online. The survey found that 60% of Internet users in the UAE favoured behavioural targeting for customised advertising and Internet content over less targeted means. However, 76% of UAE Internet users would prefer that behavioural data was only collected with their express permission, given in advance. In the fullness of time, it’s likely that users will have access to more and more tools to control their level of privacy online. In the short term, the likelihood is that new technologies are going to offer opt-in/opt-out options for Internet users. In other words, you’ll need to choose whether to enjoy your cake today or save it for later.

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Posted in Content, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, social media, strategy | No Comments »

10 social media myths exposed

Monday, May 31st, 2010
You don't need a magic lamp either

You don't need a magic lamp either

To our delight, more and more Middle East brands are looking seriously at using social media in their communications and making efforts to plan, structure and invest in strategic activities. It’s no secret that Spot On PR is a big fan of social media and actively recommends that all organisations pay attention to the irreversible changes that social media are bringing to business communications. However, no two companies are the same and we have no ready-made proposals for what social media tactics organisations should use and we would caution company’s against trying to copycat as an alternative to proper planning, particularly if your organisation is a large one. Learning from others social media efforts can be extremely valuable, but not as a replacement for having your own strategy. Equally, beware of one-size-fits-all social media campaign solutions. Here are some common social media myths that are worth being aware of.

1. Social media is cheap.

It certainly can be, but as with many things in life and business, you get out of social media what you put into it. Low budget, low effort social media campaigns have their place, but success usually means more audience engagement and more engagement means that more management and resources are required. Scale is obviously a key factor in influencing costs if you already have a large audience online, don’t expect an intern with a new Twitter profile to be the best way of managing conversations, enquiries and complaints: you’re going to need to have a system in place.

2.You have to be on Facebook!

There are lots of good reasons why it might make perfect sense for your organisation to have a Facebook fan page. However, bear in mind that Facebook is littered with the inactive pages of companies that started a Facebook page because everyone else did. If you can’t think of a good reason why your customers would sign-up for your Facebook page, or what you could post on it beyond company press releases then your brand may be better off without one.

3.You have to be on ‘X’ (where X is a social media platform).

Social media platforms will come and go. Whether they make sense for your business will depend on whether your brand can engage effectively with relevant audiences on them or not. Finding out where your key audiences spend time online is a good first step for any campaign.

4. More connections = more success.

This is obviously partly true, but there are limited returns in investing in indiscriminately increasing the number of social media connections that your brand has. There are many ways of enticing social media users to connect or sign-up for pages, but real engagement is about how audiences interact with you, not passively remain connected to a page or profile they never visit. Focus on making the connections that matter.

5. You have to be ‘cool’.

Of course, everyone likes a cool brand. However, if you’re providing a business-to-business product or service, don’t expect teenage SMS-style messages to resonate with your target audiences. Communicate with your brand’s stakeholders in the way that they expected to be communicated with. Don’t translate all your communications into SMS, MSN or Twitterese!

6.You can automate everything.

Beware of “experts” telling you how to automate your whole social media campaign. Plans are good. Social media tools are good. Any tools to help with content management are good. Frameworks and policy documents are good. And you will find some time-saving practices. However, at the end of the day, people respond best when communicated with personally. If your customers, partners and other important audiences expect to communicate with a real person, don’t give them an RSS feed that SPAMs them thirty times a day instead. If you’re not continuously in dialogue (versus simply broadcasting your messages), then you’ve sort of missed the whole point of social media.

7.You have to have a blog.

A blog is a communications tool like any other. Blogs can be very useful and a provide a cost effective way of publishing information and getting feedback. However, not every business has the content or writing skills to maintain a blog to quality, and many businesses still need to cater for less Internet-savvy audiences that are more reliant on the press, broadcast media and email for their information. Invest your social media efforts where you’re going to be able to drive the best results. If a blog makes the most sense from a content, audience and a resource point of view, then blog away!

8. Social media campaigns replace advertising.

For sure, the open access to information, viral nature and sharing capabilities of social media are forcing significant changes on the world of advertising. Advertising is having to shift its focus from broadcasting brand messages to creating platforms for dialogue with consumers. However, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here! Don’t mistake resistance to advertising for resistance to irrelevant advertising. Social media hasn’t replaced email marketing either, but you’re only going to get an increasing tide of negativity if you insist on spamming your audience over and over in an effort to increase your email response rates.

9. If you have budget, you don’t need to do it yourself.

Agencies can play a pivotal role in helping your brand leverage social media platforms within the scope of your brand’s communications (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I!). By their very nature agencies gain insights into how different campaigns are implemented for different clients and so can provide useful third party advice for brands planning campaigns. Your agency should be able to help you plan, focus and manage your social media activities for maximum returns, but subcontracting the running of your social media profiles, blogs and other social media tools to your agency in their entirety is a short term fix at best. Your customers think they’re connecting with you, not your agency. Even if your campaign is heavily agency-assisted, plan on being directly involved day-t0-day.

10. It’s not all about “the conversation”.

Thanks to the Cornwall SEO blog for this one. Taking your brand onto social media should take place within a pre-defined framework that allows your brand to both promote itself and take part in conversations with key audiences. Being part of “the conversation” on any social media platform, knowing how to engage other users and being, well, social is a pre-requisite. However, being part of the conversation probably isn’t your most important objective. So, while you’re tracking your followers, conversations and social media engagement metrics, try to remember your original objectives. How many people have you reached? How many sales leads have you generated? How many customers have you engaged with? How many customer service issues have you solved? How many new visits did you drive to your website? That was the whole point, right?

Useful links (external)

Social Media Myth No. 1 “It’s about the conversation” (Cornwall SEO Blog)

Debunking Five Social Media Myths (Socialmediatoday)

4 Myths About Social Media and Business (Mashable)

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about social media campaigns, you might also like:

Are you engaging with the right fans? (May 2010)

The coolest agency in the world (February 2010)

Social media measurement (November 2009)

Social media isn’t socialist media (November 2009)

Social media takes time (November 2009)

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customer care, Customers, Facebook, General, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, SEO, Twitter, brand marketing, public relations, social media, strategy | No Comments »

Facebook bigger than newspapers? So what?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
Does this mean the death of newspapers? Not quite...

Does this mean the death of newspapers? Not quite...

The seventeen countries we included in the Middle East and Northern Africa Facebook Demographics study have widely varied news media: some, like the UAE, have strong English news components while others, like North Africa, have strong French language daily and weekly news media. When you look at the penetration of newspapers per capita in the region there are some odd anomalies that show some very different reading habits – almost a million newspapers are sold in the UAE to a population of some 5 million people, while Saudi Arabia consumes just under 1.5 million daily newspapers with a population of 28 million.

But one thing stood out for us when we looked at regional newspaper distribution with our Facebook survey in mind: today, more people are on Facebook across the region than buy newspapers.

So what?

So what? They’re both totally different media, aren’t they? We don’t get pages and pages of news from Facebook and newspapers don’t tell us what our friends are thinking and doing.

Well, yes. But consider this. If I, as an advertiser, marketer or professional communicator, want to reach a regional audience, instantly and with guaranteed reach across the MENA region – can I do that using newspapers? Perhaps yes, if I was prepared to advertise in, and try to solicit coverage in, 144 Arabic newspaper, 29 English newspapers and something like 25 French ones. You also have the additional problem of selecting consumers. If I want to advertise to, or promote to, housewives in their 30s with two kids and good household incomes, why would I want to talk to millions of newspaper readers who don’t fit that demographic?

Top five MENA Facebook markets versus the press!

Of course, online advertising and promotion can be much more targeted than that – using content to attract consumers (the right content, of course, attracting the right consumer) and using context to ensure that I put my message in front of the right people at the right time, I can use a regional platform that has the punch of every single newspaper in the region, the ability to target within that audience. Let’s not forget, with online advertising I ideally only pay for results – it’s pay per click. I also would pay to generate content that attracts my target audience and I would have to fund the time my staff give to interacting with consumers. That is likely to be a tiny fraction of the cost of advertising in over 200 newspapers.

But Facebook isn’t about news, is it?

But the comparison doesn’t work because Facebook isn’t about news, surely? Well, that’s a great point. But we can’t say where the future’s taking us. Facebook is drawing in new features, the latest set of which (the ‘like’ button and its kin) bring powerfully Twitter-like features to Facebook, allowing people to ‘feed’ content through Facebook. This adds the powerful ‘discovery’ aspect of Internet usage to Facebook – people can share content and there’s every possibility that stronger offerings based around content sharing using Facebook as a platform will come in the future. But by that time, the landgrab will be over – and the newspapers will still be wondering what hit them and where it came from.

It’s also worth considering that Facebook is just one of a number of online platforms that are coming together to provide powerful information resources. We Google when we want to find information, use Twitter (and, increasingly Facebook), Digg or other tools to ‘discover’ information – either links to interesting stories our friends share or raw news being Tweeted and Twitpicced, posted up on Youtube or hosted on Flickr or Panoramio by eyewitnesses and we use RSS feeders to keep in touch with the blogs, websites and other news resources we’re interested in.

In this environment, we’re creating our own news feeds and resources. Our own newspapers – we no longer need an editor to serve up a dish of the news and content that will suit a median of a readership of thousands of ‘averaged’ readers. In the brave new world, each reader selects the information sources he or she is interested in rather than scanning the headlines of a newspaper for the stories that interest them.

In short, the strong adoption of online media in the Middle East is starting to build a compelling case for money to shift from print to online properties.

And that’s why comparing Facebook to print newspaper sales makes perfect sense to us.

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You can find Spot On PR on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/spotonpr

Download the press release (English, Word doc)

Download the press release (Arabic, Word doc)

Want to read more?

You can read our original blog post about May 2010’s MENA Facebook Demographics and download the full report here:

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report (May 2010)

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Posted in Content, Disintermediation, Facebook, General, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, public relations, social media | No Comments »

15 Million MENA Facebook Users – Report

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Scroll down the page for survey download links

Summary

Facebook has become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East and North Africa and the platform can now claim 15 million users as of May 2010. Whilst Facebook saw strong early growth in 2008/2009 from English and French speaking users across the region, Facebook’s decision to add an Arabic interface in March 2009 has opened up access to a whole new demographic of Internet users and added 3.5 million Arabic users over the past year. Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s Facebook communities have seen the strongest growth among Arabic users during the past year with each adding 1.1 million Arabic language interface users. We soon expect the number of Arabic language Facebook users in Saudi to surpass the number of English users.

However, with the strong expectation that the weight of numbers will move from English language users to Arabic language users in a number of key MENA Facebook markets, today’s reality is that just 23% of users across the region use Facebook’s Arabic interface. So, those seeking to make the most of the Facebook platform are advised to keep up-to-date with its changing demographics.

Here are some of the key Facebook statistics covered in this report:

— There are now 15 million Facebook users in the Middle East & North Africa (this figure excludes Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey).

Top MENA Facebook Communities

— MENA’s top five Facebook country markets, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, account for 70% of all users in the region.

— 50% of MENA Facebook users have selected their primary language for using Facebook as English, with 25% preferring French and just 23% Arabic.

— Only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (compared with 56% in the USA and 52% in the UK). Only Bahrain and Lebanon Facebook communities approach gender equality with female users accounting for about 44% of total users.

— The GCC has five million Facebook users, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45% and 31% of that total respectively.

— North Africa has 7.7 million Facebook users, with Egypt accounting for 3.4 million users (or 44% of all North Africa users). Egypt has the largest Facebook community in MENA.

— Francophone countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia together account for 3.7 million French speaking Facebook users, equivalent to nearly 25% of all MENA users.

MENA Facebook Users Under The Age of 25 (By Country)

— Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen all have Facebook communities with more than 50% of users below the age of 25 years old.

— The UAE has the oldest Facebook community in MENA with 41% of users being over 30 years old, 28% being 25-29 years old and 31% being under 25 years old.

You can find Spot On PR on Facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/spotonpr

Survey Downloads

Middle East & North Africa Facebook Demographics (May 2010)

Facebook beats newspapers in MENA (Press Release, English)

Facebook beats newspapers in MENA (Press Release, Arabic)

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Creative Commons

Middle East & North Africa Facebook Demographics by Spot On Public Relations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Want to read more?

If you liked reading this post about Facebook statistics, you might also like:

Twitter & Customer Service Survey (March 2010)

Spot On PR’s MENA Twitter Demographics & User Habits Survey (2009)

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Posted in Facebook, General, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, social media | 3 Comments »

Are you engaging the right fans?

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010
Great response, but you'd expect that from your employees, wouldn't you?

They're all big fans (but you'd expect that from your staff, wouldn't you?)

As a communications and marketing agency that helps run a number of social media programs, we spend quite a lot of time looking at Middle East social media marketing campaigns from around the region. It’s still early days, but the number of brands experimenting with social media in the Middle East is growing and, as with many things in business, you can almost always learn something from someone else’s work. So, on finding a brand’s Middle East Facebook fan page with 25 comments and Likes on its last post, I’m ready to be impressed. However, being the suspicious character that I am, I start to Google and check Facebook profiles of those commenting, and soon discover that most of them seem to be directly related to the same brand (employees, distributors, ex-employees). Whether that’s a successful outcome or not ultimately depends on the Facebook page’s objectives, but perhaps it does help to illustrate that all kinds of online engagement are not equal.

It’s always been a challenge to accurately attribute response to the different marketing programmes. No matter how many reply devices, coupons and codes you include in your programs, you will always get leads that are not possible to attribute to any particular program and responses attributed to one promotion that you suspect were strongly influenced by another. Online marketing really is as good as it gets when it comes to tracking marketing campaign results and it offers a wealth of opportunities to build in mechanisms to track responses and enquiries. However, as with all measurement and metrics, online metrics are there to be abused! None more so than social media campaign metrics, which routinely include tracking the campaign’s following (fans, followers, members, subscribers etc.) and measuring the engagement with people that campaign drives by counting the number of interactions (conversations, comments, ‘Likes’, shares, retweets etc.). The reason that theses metrics are open to abuse is that there are many ways to increase both following and engagement, whilst ignoring your primary target audience completely.

Building a meaningful following is not just about the numbers

Businesses like numbers and big numbers in particular. And so it’s no surpise that what most marketing managers really want out of online campaigns is scale and reaching thousands or hundreds of thousands. There are usually good reasons for this, even if some of those reasons come from marketing strategies past. However, with the growth of the social web, online users have more and more choice in what content they consume, which platforms they use and how they spend their time online. Contacting people in high numbers is not the same as connecting with people in high numbers, and adding contacts as connections is not the same as engaging them with conversations and content. Send enough invites to enough people, particularly if you build or buy a half-decent database, and you’re going to be able to build a following. And the more people you contact the more people will sign-up. Overall, that’s a good thing, but these new followers are only really useful if they i) have an active interest in your brand and ii) if they are the consume your content and are open to interacting with your brand. A good question to ask yourself is: are you building a following that is important to your brand? 1,000 subscribers that are made up of your primary target audience and engages with your brand frequently are infinitely more valuable to your marketing effort than 10,000 subscribers that ignore you and your content.

All online engagement is not equal

If you’ve done a good job of branding and populating your blog or social media page with content, you stand a good chance of getting the benefit of the doubt from first time visitors to your page. However, it’s now very much down to how compelling your content and promotions are to what level of engagement you drive. You’ll need to be aware that different people respond in different ways to content they like. Some will comment on your page, some will share with their contacts, some will bookmark, some will import your RSS feed into their feed reader, some will send you an email, and some will recommend your brand or content to others. Therefore you’ll usually need to track more than one or two metrics. As with building an online following, online engagement is not always as simple as driving higher numbers either. For example, it’s nice to get endorsements from audiences like job seekers, employees, distributors and business partners, but if your budget has been allocated to drive customer engagement, success rather depends on how many of your interactions and endorsements are actually from your customer audiences. Getting your employees talking about your new product is one thing, getting your customers talking about it, quite another.

Being able to take a critical look at your social media results, what’s working, what’s not working and most importantly who is engaging with your campaign is key to both continuing to drive your campaign moving forwards and assessing your campaign’s ROI. Social media offers some great tools to run low cost programmes and so your expectations for a low-volume, low commitment social media programme can afford to be quite modest. However, if you’re running a more extensive, more integrated programme that demands more time, advertising spend and vendor costs, the pressure is on to deliver bigger numbers. So, it is worth taking a step back and making sure your effort is focused on driving the right numbers. It’s great to have an enthusiastic employees behind your social media programme, but if most of the response to your campaign is internal you’re probably not helping them sell much product.

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Posted in CRM, Content, Customers, Facebook, Internet, Measurement, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Online marketing, Twitter, social media | 1 Comment »

What happened to all our fans?

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Last night Facebook changed some of the terminology on Spot On PR’s Facebook page. It’s something that has been talked about for the past few weeks (see Mashable story from March) and is being rolled out across Facebook and organisation’s Facebook pages. As a result, this morning our Facebook page fans are no longer called Fans, Facebook users no longer click “Become a Fan” to join our Facebook page and the section of the Wall dedicated to Fans now says “Others”.

Spot On PR Facebook Page

Apparently this is an attempt by Facebook to provide “a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in” and lower the perceived commitment for Facebook users to follow organisation’s Facebook pages (i.e. users no longer have to consider themselves a “fan” to follow a page’s content). Having worked with technology for the past 15 years, we know that terminology isn’t always perfect the first time around, can change quite often and any new terminology takes a while to get accepted. However, we’re going to miss our fans.

We also disagree with Facebook’s decision to foist this on page owners without consultation or consent. Spot On PR is on Facebook for business networking purposes. We like the fact that we can associate with Facebook users that share similar interests and careers to ourselves and we liked the fact that becoming a fan of our Facebook page made people consider what was in it for them before joining. I like many different things and people, but I don’t want daily updates from all of them. The “Like” button now seems to attribute the same level of commitment to joining a Facebook page as it does to liking a blog post or video that you “Like” in your Facebook News Stream. That doesn’t seem right to us.

Nor does calling our fans “Others” as they are termed on the Wall of our Facebook page, which now shows tabs for “Spot On Public Relations + others”, “Just Spot On Public Relations”, or “Just others”. It seems that Facebook no longer wants us to engage and entertain our Fans, but with “Others”. In fact, it’s now not clear how page fans should be referred to. Likes? Likers? Others? Lumping fans in with “Others” is a mistake in our opinion. “Others” implies people or things unknown and that used to be the difference between our fans and the others (the old others that is, not the new others!).

Thanks to all our Facebook fans and we hope that you continue to

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Introducing social media in the Arab world

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

ODwyer Magazine - April 2010The April issue of O’Dwyer’s PR Magazine has just come out in the USA and it features a report I wrote on social media in the Middle East and North Africa. It’s a very top-level view of social media and Internet trends in the region and primarily intended as an introduction to the Arab world for social media marketers outside the region.

It’s only when starting to write a summary like this that one realises just how much there is to tell and how much Internet and media habits are changing across the region. O’Dwyer’s generously allowed my 1,400 words to write my report, but it really was a challenge trying to cram it all in!

You can read the digital edition of April’s O’Dwyer’s Magazine here:
O’Dwyer’s Magazine – April 2010

Thanks to Ben Lorica Senior Analyst at O’Reilly Research for allowing me to use their Facebook charts to illustrate my report.

Disclosure: Spot On PR also advertised in the April issue of O’Dwyer’s Magazine . We dealt with O’Dwyer’s advertising team on the advertisement and separately with O’Dwyer’s editor regarding covering the Arab world in this issue. However, as pointed out by @rupertbu on Twitter, I can’t tell you with certainty what, if any, influence our advertising had on the treatment of my editorial submission. We previewed Spot On PR’s advertisement in O’Dwyer’s to our Twitter and Facebook followers last week, but I see now that I should have mentioned our advertisement in this blogpost also. Thanks to Rupert Bumfrey for pointing this out!

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Posted in Content, Facebook, Internet, Middle East marketing, Middle east, Newspapers, Online marketing, Publishing, Twitter, public relations, social media | No Comments »

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