On Social Media, Sell Your Brand, Not Your Stuff A NEW MARKETING STUDY OF FACEBOOK USERS SHOWS THAT HARDSELL TACTICS STIFLE ENGAGEMENT, AND ENGAGEMENT IS GOLD. By Lee Simmons
Off the coast of New Zealand last year, a kayaker was drifting along quietly when a seal burst from the water and slapped him in the face with a large octopus. As it happens, the trip was funded by GoPro as part of a product launch, and that sucker punch was caught on video by one of the company’s cameras. When GoPro posted the clip to Facebook, it exploded, yielding a publicity bonanza.
But what kind of content works best on social media? Opinions abound; evidence, not so much. “There’s been very little real-world research on this,” says Harikesh S. Nair, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The problem is data: Facebook could do it, but each commercial user on Facebook sees only its own metrics; there hasn’t been a way to draw general insights.
It’s a marketer’s dream: What could be better than having viewers voluntarily send your branded content to friends (and “friends”), saying, “You gotta see this!” Chasing that dream, companies today are moving more and more of their media spend to social channels. It’s a natural evolution — business goes where the buyers are, and nowadays that’s on the platforms.
So Nair, along with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon and Kartik Hosanagar of the Wharton School, hooked up with an analytics firm that gathers daily performance figures for some 800 business users of Facebook. By pooling the data for more than 100,000 posts — and using novel machinelearning techniques to characterize their content — the researchers published a paper that offers real answers that
