Vitrue has selected Optimal as an integration partner to offer media buying services to its Facebook page management clients. The release and program was covered on InsideFacebook, here.
We’re excited to work together with Vitrue: our ad buying software and data analytics platform are a great complement to their page-based management services. We look forward to great success together!
PRESS RELEASE (http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/optimal-inc-launches-free-optimal-index-track-value-facebook-brand-audiences-1655671.htm)
May 10, 2012 12:46 ETZ
Optimal, Inc. Launches Free Optimal Index to Track the Value of Facebook Brand Audiences
Announcing a Global, Quantitative Model to Objectively Value Audience Investments on the Facebook Platform
SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – May 10, 2012) – Optimal, Inc., the creators of optim.al, the leading social media advertising and audience data platform, today announced the launch of the Optimal Index, available immediately for free at http://optimalsocial.com. The Optimal Index is an independent valuation tool, arming consumers, marketers and agencies with a quantifiable approach to determine the relative value of a brand’s current audience on the Facebook platform.
The Optimal Index ranks thousands of leading brands and products on the Facebook platform today, utilizing a wholly transparent and unbiased formula which incorporates fan counts, engagement statistics and global fan distribution to determine an audience’s relative value. Since the buzz and engagement around brands — and the number of fans — are constantly in flux, the Optimal Index updates its rankings on a daily basis.
“Bigger isn’t always better. Smart companies are moving away from simply acquiring Facebook fans with no regard as to who they are and where they live. Major brands who want to be successful in social media must focus on taking their existing customers and true brand advocates and connecting to them at scale. The ‘People Talking About This’ metric makes it clear how important brand engagement is on the platform,” said Rob Leathern, founder and CEO, Optimal, Inc. “The Optimal Index now provides a scorecard that combines size and engagement rate, with the global weighted-average cost per click metric for each brand, clearly highlighting the most valuable brand user bases.”
The Optimal Index is dynamic and changes daily based on fan counts, distribution of fans by country and engagement statistics. The inaugural Optimal Index Top 20 for May 10, 2012 is provided here:
Marketers can also discover similar consumers, new audience segments, and gather competitive insights with the Keyword Expander tool that is integrated into thehttp://optimalsocial.com site. Advertisers and market researchers can profile their own and their competitors’ social audiences, see top-level demographics and discover related interests and affinities. All of Optimal’s tools are geared toward improving a brand’s investment on the Facebook advertising platform.
About Optimal, Inc.
Optimal, Inc. provides unparalleled audience data to help marketers manage and optimize their social advertising campaigns, all in real-time. The company is a member of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program. The company’s ad management platform, optim.al, provides robust technology integration with Facebook and other social media platforms. optim.al’s rich audience insights help advertisers intelligently shape their media buying and audience research efforts. The company is based in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Palo Alto. For more information, please visit http://optim.al.
Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.
PR Contact:
Jessica Cheney
Atomic PR for Optimal
415-593-1400
Email Contact
While growth in the United States has slowed tremendously for Facebook (flat to slightly down in the last quarter through end of March 2012), a three-year trend is instructive. During the time from April 1st 2009 to April 1st 2012, Facebook added over 96 million users in the United States (+161%). The optimal growth rate of course is for Brazil with 10879% growth from only 402k to over 43.7 million! Here’s the overall figures for your reading pleasure.
Here at Optimal we looked at the Facebook audience growth numbers for Q1 2012, and Brazil and India have done it again, with gains of 9 million and 4.4 million users respectively over the quarter. Japan is another very big growth story with 1.7mm/27.7% growth over the quarter. Here are the top gainers by country from the end of 2011 to the end of Q1 2012:
Looking at it by biggest growth rate from the end of 2011, (for a gain of at least 30,000 users) you’ll see some of the same names but some big growth rates for many middle-eastern countries.
by Rob Leathern, CEO
I previously had the good fortune to be involved in syndicated and custom market research, as an analyst and director with both Jupiter Research (now part of Forrester) and Nielsen NetRatings. Thereafter I was able to work as a marketer and entrepreneur in data-rich environments deploying millions of advertising dollars per month at companies like NexTag. These days I’m running a company which created ad optimization and management software called optim.al. The biggest trend I’ve seen over the last two years is undoubtedly the convergence between marketing/advertising and market research, and here are some thoughts on how and why this is happening:
Why would I spend $5,000 on a focus group to tell me what people who eat/drink/visit/shave with my product also buy, do or feel, when I can now spend $50 to look at that data 20 different ways based on previously expressed social data that doesn’t have the survey-related bias, all with a population 1,000 times larger? Even if the data from the survey were better (it’s not!), could it really be 100 times better?
Have you ever had a TV show you loved that was suddenly canceled, or had a very awkward ending to it (e.g. I really liked the TV show “Kings” as did many other people according to this) For a long time, Nielsen has essentially dictated what we see on television based on the viewing behavior of 5,000 US households and a larger number tracking what they watched in diaries during time periods known as “Sweeps”. That sample is now more electronic (over 25,000) and does take DVR watching into account, but it still faces significant criticism. The inevitable transition is underway from panels to addressable users so that if you measure people who live in certain zipcodes who are watching something, you can alter the ad message to just those specific people. On the other hand, a panel provides hints but does nothing relative to the ability to actually change the message. You’ll have to find another way to then go and apply your insights to this audience. This is why we are saddled as marketers with a lot of insights tied to big heterogeneous groups like “18 to 24 year old women” or “55-plus men in the Chicago DMA” (Designated Market Area). Sample sizes are small which means insights are not statistically significant at a resolution you’d actually care about – so for the Chicago DMA, we’re talking about [PDF ] the third-largest DMA (“Designated Market Area”) in the country with over 3.5 million TV households, but if you look at a 25,000 person sample we’re talking about 762 panelists. That’s a 3.6% margin of error just at that level, let alone slicing that specific audience any other way. If you’re a Fortune 1000 CEO and your market research department sits in a different building from the guys who make the ads and do the marketing, you’re in trouble. Addressable is a word you’re going to hear a lot more this year and next, because it changes everything and when you’re worrying less about sample sizes… you can actually measure things that matter!
Maybe I spend another $50 buying ads on Facebook asking the people who use my competitors’ products some survey questions. It’s easier than ever to target people with specific interests, backgrounds or demographics and get a quick read on your brand. And when I say everyone is in market research I really mean, everyone, not just the marketing team. A smart, aggressive person in the sales department can now do their own wildcat research, all with a few clicks of a mouse.
Facebook has over 850 million users using it. Ever try to buy a billboard in downtown Jakarta, Indonesia? Well, neither have I but I have to figure it’s not a simple endeavor. Here’s a neat trick for you – nobody knows those 300 Facebook fans you have for your Santa Monica coffee shop aren’t in LA. If you care only about increasing that number, buy some fans who live elsewhere just like the Romans used to buy an audience for their triumphs and celebrations (as my high-school Latin teacher, Mrs. Nel would have said – “you want to be like the Romans, don’t you?”). It’s not going to help your business but it’s better than looking like you don’t have any fans. Before you do, though, read number 5!
It’s about quality, not quantity. Your fan count is not necessarily going to help you sell anything. You need to make sure the people that you’re talking to really are engaging with your brand, that they’re learning about your product, and if they’re existing customers, that they’re getting a chance to talk you up and spread the word with their friends.
If pharma companies can do studies that don’t work out and not have to tell people about them, so can you. If you test something and it doesn’t work, so what? Facebook’s new brand page layout doesn’t penalize you for have 100 different tabs. Just choose the top 3 ones to promote, the top 12 overall and then switch up what you want to highlight at different times. Buy ads and send them to these tabs and pages. Facebook brand pages are bigger now too – no more squashed 520-pixel wide content necessary.
I remember my friends asking me what the heck I was doing when I went to work at this little company called LinkedIn back in 2005, and what “social networks” meant. They know I’m a bit of an early adopter, so when my friends see “Rob likes BRANDNAME” on Facebook or elsewhere, they’re typically not going to pay it much notice. On the other hand, if they see other friends like, buy or redeem something, they’re going to pay attention. We’ve seen response rates on ads with social context in Facebook jump dramatically when we can help the advertiser crunch the data to find those areas of consumer critical mass, where their audience is likely to be concentrated and have multiple people shown to be users of the service already. Social proof matters. Combining social graph and interest graph analysis is crucial.
You figured out liking? Now forget about liking altogether. New things are coming like “read”, “write”, “buy”, “listen”, “snack”, “watch” and “redeem”. These actions will have far more texture to allow brands and marketers figure out what’s consumers are doing, and create surprising and delighting experiences for them around these actions. Especially on their mobile phones!
The good news is that unless your competitors are spending their own money in test marketing your products (there are a few people doing this, but it’s fairly uncommon) you’re the only one who truly knows what’s going to work for your brand. That knowledge combined with all the new data, and ways to interact with users is a powerful combo which means that Brands who experiment, test and look closely at all the data that’s not theirs AND do a great job of mining their own insights are going to win and dominate their market segments.
Brands can certainly do much cooler stuff than I can, because they have real money and spending $10,000 upfront on online research that could affect a $10 million advertising campaign seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do. The title for this piece came from an ad campaign I ran on Facebook in one afternoon spending $100 targeted to people interested in marketing and advertising. Funnily enough one of the titles was not approved by Facebook, probably because it was deemed to attach a negative connotation to their platform, so I used it as the subtitle of this piece – 10 Reasons Brands Can No Longer Ignore Facebook. A good performer but a (statistically) significant distance behind the winning title was: Facebook and the Death and Rebirth of Market Research.
Finally, remember that the same tactics which companies can now use to find and learn more about new customers, can also be employed to hire the right people – with the right mindset – to help make this new marketing revolution happen!
