Peer-to-Peer Engagement, Influencer Tracking, and Deep Analytics

1. three must
haves for
facebook
success

2. 2
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3. 1
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So you’ve got pages, fans, and likes. Now what?
Your brand, like many, likely struggles with deriving value
from your Facebook investments. What’s a fan worth? A like?
What do you really even know about your Facebook fans? And
how can you create something of lasting value from such an
enormous, yet so fleeting a channel?
Everything about Facebook is so enticing, yet just beyond
our grasp. It’s free. It’s huge. We find many thousands of our
customers there. They “like” us. They tell us what they want,
need, and wish for on our Facebook page walls. It seems the
perfect social media engagement platform.
Yet with each status update, each positive comment, every
customer inquiry, and all the ingenious product ideas we
see disappearing from the Facebook wall every hour, we find
ourselves wondering what we’re doing there at all. What good
is Facebook as a platform for social customer engagement
unless we can engage our social customers in ways that
make real sense for our customers and drives real business
outcomes for the brand?
The first thing to remember is that as an online social
network the Facebook platform wasn’t built for social
customer engagement. It lacks many of the essentials
needed to pursue a successful social strategy—data capture,
for one. But the good news is you can turn Facebook into a
vibrant social customer online community with the addition of
just a few key must-haves.
Peer-to-Peer Engagement
Peer-to-peer engagement is one of the most important types
of social customer engagement because messages carried
from peer-to-peer have more influence. Eileen Brown of
the Social Customer explains the reason why peer-to-peer
engagement works so well quite simply: “We tend to identify
more strongly with people like us. We love those who are like
ourselves. We identify with them.”1
An excellent way to start getting value from your Facebook
pages right away is to give them a customer experience that
includes interaction with each other. Enabling your own fans to
spread your messages and answer each other’s questions adds
enormous trust and credibility to your Facebook presence.
“Start by creating an environment that encourages peer-to-
peer interactions”, says Altimeter Group Partner and Principal
Analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, “Ask fans to respond to each other,
showcase fan contributions, and recognize top contributors.”2
Harnessing the crowd’s energy and fulfilling customer need is
what social customer marketing is all about. Harnessing the
crowd’s energy to fulfill customer need is what peer-to-peer
engagement is all about. Peer-to-peer engagement—enabling
your Facebook fans to help each other—with question and
answer applications, community moderation, and rank and
reputation features makes immediate sense and can even
scale to a full-blown social support solution. It gives customers
value when they get there—they can search for and find useful
information. And it drives real business value for the brand—
less support calls means less support costs.

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Influencer Tracking
Not only must your Facebook fans engage with each other, they
must recognize and trust each other in order for customer
community dynamics to spark. The 90-9-1 Principle holds
that content creators are just 1% of your audience, so it’s
important for the rest to know who they are and what they
bring to the table.
But first, we as marketers need to know who these key
influencers are so we can amplify their voices. Who are they?
What social attributes do they have that help us identify, track,
and motivate their activities?
Dr. Michael Wu, Lithium Principal Scientist, spells out 6
key factors of social media influence: credibility, bandwidth,
relevance, timing, alignment, and confidence. Those of your
fans that are credible, have large social networks (bandwidth),
and very importantly send the right messages at the right
time in the right channel to the right people are those
you want to cultivate. If any one of these factors is absent,
influence doesn’t happen. A true social media influencer
doesn’t just have thousands of Facebook friends. They have
an area of expertise relevant to your offering that gives them
credibility and they have social media savvy—they know which
messages will resonate within their social network.
Finding these key influencers, motivating them, helping
them along is critical to Facebook success. Rewarding your
fans publicly for their contributions—elevating their status,
featuring their content, giving them additional privileges—is
a sure fire way to discover who among your fans are your key
influencers—your brand superfans.
influence tracker model #90.9.1

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Deep Analytics
We all realize that quantifying the value of Facebook
engagement means customer intelligence—data, and lots
of it. In order to determine whether your investments in
Facebook are worthwhile, some measure of quantitative
analytics is essential.
In the absence of real Facebook data, we are forced to fall
back on proxies to assign value—counting likes and fans. But
as Forrester Sr. Analyst, Augie Ray, points out in the ROI of
Social Media Marketing, using proxies to weigh the value of
social media efforts has a number of nagging drawbacks.
Just counting likes and fans not only fails to measure the true
business value of the channel, but measures it incorrectly and
gets in the way of achieving our objectives.
What should you know about your Facebook fans? Everything.
Not only how many fans you have, but how many actually
return, what percentage are active, how deep are their
conversation threads, how many unique fans engage in each
conversation, how quickly they respond to your messages
and each other’s, and how many actually return—as well as
whether or not they return to the same conversation threads.
Only when you have deep insight into how engaged your
Facebook fans are will you have the ability to assign
quantitative value to your social success on Facebook.
Conclusion
A sound social strategy for your Facebook pages means
moving beyond counting fans and likes. It means leveling
up, outfitting your Facebook presence with a more oomph,
and showing up on Facebook like you mean it. Enabling
peer-to-peer engagement will bring immediate value to
your Facebook fans by letting them interact with and help
each other. Right away, they’ll discover a new and vibrant
community feel to your Facebook pages. Finding and
cultivating your influencers will get you more power out of
the channel by amplifying the most credible social voices
you can harness. Lastly, instituting a system of quantitative
measurement with deep analytics will give you a true
measurement of the business value of the Facebook channel
so you can make informed decisions about what really works.
resources
1 http://thesocialcustomer.com/eileenb/38681/online-peer-influence-and-its-
effect-engagement
2 http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2010/07/27/altimeter-report-the-8-
success-criteria-for-facebook-page-marketing/