In April, the top 10 brands that displayed the most growth based on their Optimal Index value are:

1. Coca-Cola
2. Samsung Mobile
3. MTV
4. Target Baby
5. Old Navy
6. Starbucks
7. JC Penny
8. Nike Football
9. Nickelodeon
10. Kohl’s

In March, a lot of movement occurred around the Easter holiday, as several brands published creative and endearing posts that resulted in high levels of engagement. Marketers followed a similar pattern in April– creating posts to coincide with other holidays like Earth Day. Check out this post from April’s biggest mover, Coca-Cola – which generated over 7,000 likes and 700 shares:

Samsung Mobile utilized landscapes and stunning visuals to create viral posts that showcased its products, and generated a significant number of ‘Likes’.

 

We have also been tracking brands in terms of overall fan-count.  It’s no surprise that a number of these brands led the list for Optimal Index value growth, as many of these fans were acquired using compelling content. The top 10 brands with the greatest change in fan count for April are:

1. Snickers
2. JC Penny
3. Coca-Cola
4. Samsung Mobile
5. Vodafone Zoozoos
6. Dafiti
7. YouTube
8. Oral-B
9. Facebook
10. Blackberry

Snickers topped this ranking, while simultaneously launching a new product, Snickers Bites, which was teased over the course of the month. Check out the build-up:

Snickers timed their product launch alongside the NFL draft, creating interesting content that appealed to football fans.

Brands have consistently demonstrated high levels of growth and have the highest overall Optimal index values are:

1. Walmart
2. Coca-Cola
3. Pepsi
4. Disney
5. ForAmerica
6. Louis Vuitton
7. Intel
8. BlackBerry
9. Caress
10. Zumba Fitness

As mentioned in previous months, Walmart not only does a great job of creating heartwarming content that resonates with families, but also provides a highly customized approach to social interaction.

As we move into May, be prepared to see lots of great posts about Mothers’ Day and warm weather!

Optimal Analytics tracks what brands are doing in social media primarily across Facebook and Twitter but also on emerging platforms like Tumblr. Of the 10,600+ brands we examine on a daily basis (see optimalsocial.com/portfolios for more on these across 100 sectors), we see about 2,400 (just less than 25%) have a tumblr presence.

However, 25% of these are mostly empty and many appear to be brands squatting on their own names and planning to get to it later when they have time, perhaps. About 588 of these brand pages have fewer than 10 items of lifetime activity. Some brands like Pepsi are quite active, though the activity levels ebb and flow quite a bit, but others are far less so. The mean number of total engagements per brand on tumblr is 224 but the median is just two. Tumblr hasn’t yet figured out how to get users to engage with brands, yet, and it doesn’t seem that users are falling over themselves to engage with brands.

Tumblr’s content distribution model still needs to be sorted out, in order for brands to truly achieve viral distribution and authentic connections with consumers. We will see how Yahoo! plans to address that, or not – since it sounds like initially they’re going to let it continue to evolve somewhat under its own steam. It’s clear from the data though that tumblr is extremely nascent for brands, demographics aside.

Social advertising and analytics company Optimal, Inc. has launched Optimal Analytics, an audience analytics dashboard for demographic and engagement statistics, as well as competitive analysis across sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

 

The tool looks at historical engagement data for top brands and daily interactions among millions of demographic and interest-based segments to give marketers key insights about their competitors and target audience. Marketers can get daily or weekly emails about the most engaging content from competitors or visit the tool directly to generate new consumer insights or build lookalike audiences for ad targeting.”

Interested in exploring Optimal Analytics? Get started by setting up a free brand tracking report! 

Learn more by clicking here to view our different tools and subscription plans.

Known as one of the strongest forms of targeting available in digital media, FBX helps marketers reach users on Facebook who have demonstrated interest through browsing behavior. By targeting users in a timely and contextually relevant manner, FBX can effectively drive sales, improve customer engagement, and promote brand awareness.

Likewise, the News Feed is one of the most valuable destinations on Facebook, especially with Facebook’s commitment towards bringing bigger and more compelling stories to users.  Ads in the News Feed have historically resulted in some of the strongest metrics compared with other locations.

The combination of two of the most potent advertising features gives marketers more power and flexibility to make an impression on potential customers and drive business results.

Understanding FBX in the News Feed

Ads in the News Feed are Page Post Link Ads.  To develop them, keep in mind the following specifications:

• 500 characters of allotted text, anything beyond that will be truncated
• Attached links contain an image, title, and the domain in the body text
• Depending on the length of the body text, 2 to 3 lines can be filled within the ad
• Images should be 90 x 90 pixels

In general, FBX is easy to integrate, highly effective, and should be an essential component all digital media campaigns.  Because FBX in the News Feed is relatively new and strategies are still being tested, marketers should be aware of the following:

• Start Early: Your opportunity size is only as large as your FBX segment size.  To grow this pool of users, work with an Ads API partner like Optimal to deploy your FBX pixels into product pages that have a high level of traffic.

• Bid High: The News Feed is an extremely competitive location, making ‘win’ rates lower than FBX in the right hand side. To achieve delivery, we recommend that marketers bid aggressively (in the -teens dollar CPM range), and work their way downwards.

• Take Advantage of Virality: Page Post Ad engagement, such as ‘likes’ or ‘comments’ result in viral impressions of that Page Post in their friends’ News Feeds. This means that user interactions with FBX ads in the News Feed turn your paid media into earned content – at no additional cost.

• Utilize the Space: News Feed CTR’s can be up to 10x higher than standard Facebook ads. Make sure your creative renders properly, so that you don’t miss out on any opportunities.  Creative guidelines still follow the same policies, meaning that images must contain less than 20% text.

Optimal clients interested in learning more should contact their respective account managers for additional tips and details.  For all other users, we are working to release this capability into our self-service platform next week.  

Contact us to find out more!

From a monetization standpoint, Facebook’s mobile advertising effort brought in approximately $375 million in revenue, and accounted for 30% of the company’s advertising revenue for this quarter – compared to 23% during the first quarter of 2012.

Facebook mobile usage indicates one of many emerging opportunities for marketers to connect with their target audiences in compelling ways. In this quarter alone, a noticeable shift has occurred, with advertising products that are increasingly focused on intent and solutions-based advertising, and further strive to meet defined objectives and generate specific user behaviors.  For example, the introduction of several innovative new products, including Facebook Partner Categories and Cost-Per-Action Bidding, provide more diversified and narrow targeting capabilities.

As one of the few Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers to obtain badges across multiple categories – and the only PMD to offer self-service FBX retargeting – we are excited to continue focusing our efforts on creating tools that drive greater return across mobile, desktop, and beyond.

While CPA bidding makes it easier for advertisers to create goal-driven campaigns, there is no guarantee that delivery or interaction will occur. Therefore, it’s crucial that brands continue to implement a diversified approach and encourage engagement through precise targeting and a combination of CPA, CPM, and CPC campaigns.  By doing so, marketers can create more effective campaigns to meet their business objectives and bring value to consumers.

If you are interested in learning more about CPA bidding, please let us know!

In recent weeks, Facebook made significant strides to equip advertisers with new resources to perform Direct Response Advertising, campaigns created to drive measurable and distinct action between consumers and brands on Facebook. The introduction of Facebook Partner categories and now the ability to buy ads on a Cost Per Action (CPA) basis, signals great opportunities for marketers to set and meet objectives through the social network.

Cost Per Action bidding, which is currently available only through Ads API partners, allows marketers to design campaigns that deliver distinct audience actions (‘Offer Claims’, ‘Page Likes’, or ‘Link Opens’) and only pay when this specified activity occurs through a user’s engagement with an ad. This model provides marketers with another means to achieve specific goals, and additional flexibility that supplements CPC and CPM bidding options.

Although Cost Per Action bidding takes a step towards reducing the gap between ad-delivery and engagement metrics, there is no guarantee that interaction will actually occur – only that advertisers will pay when the specified activity takes place. Thus, it’s incredibly important that brands continue to implement a diversified approach that will encourage engagement through multiple channels and well-defined targeting.

By utilizing a combination of CPA, CPM, and CPC, brands can create effective campaigns that meet their business objectives and connect relevant content with potential customers and influencers.

Contact us if you’re interested in learning more about Cost Per Action bidding and different targeting strategies that can enhance your campaign performance.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Precise targeting and relevant content are essential for businesses that seek to achieve strong returns on advertising investments and create better experiences for users.  Optimal’s latest update to its self-service advertising platform further enhances targeting capabilities through the integration of Facebook’s recently released Partner Categories, along with Unpublished Post Creation and Dynamic Creative Optimization.

These new features bring increased precision and a more seamless execution to the campaign generation process, further establishing Optimal as a complete solution for building, delivering, and reporting on Facebook ads.

Facebook Partner Categories

The integration of Facebook Partner Categories into Optimal empowers marketers with over 500 unique targeting categories based on online and offline user purchasing data.  With these categories, advertisers can target potential customers based upon specific actions such as “Facebook users who have made purchases for banking services”.

Utilizing Partner Categories within Optimal enables marketers to AND additional layers of data and logic (including Open Graph targeting)—resulting in more refined targeting segments. For example, marketers could target users that are heavy buyers of diet foods, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and are interested in Zumba Fitness on Facebook. Early tests by Optimal customers have shown a 4x performance lift utilizing Partner Categories.  Learn more about Partner Categories by viewing our webinar on this topic.

Unpublished Post Creation

Sharing relevant content is critical for brands seeking to drive awareness on Facebook.  With this latest release, marketers can improve their content’s relevance by creating Unpublished Posts (formerly known as “Dark Posts”) that are not publicly viewable on their Facebook brand page. Instead, Unpublished Posts can be targeted to niche audience segments, allowing marketers to design experiments where they send a similar creative to different segments and measure performance.

With Optimal Page & Post Manager, users can now view an aggregated history of post performance metrics, and use this data to easily create both public and Unpublished Posts.

Dynamic Creative Optimization

Every brand faces the arduous task of creating individualized messaging that connects each of its products with their many unique types of potential customers, and to be able to efficiently deliver that content to only the people who matter. With Optimal, this process just became much more intuitive.

Using a Facebook Exchange Retargeting pixel, Optimal’s platform identifies different consumers based upon the types of products that they have been looking at online. Product images, pricing, descriptions and targeting are compiled in Optimal’s backend system to prepare ad combinations. These dynamic ads are then delivered on Facebook to these interested users.

Through Dynamic Creative Optimization marketers are able to save time, while still ensuring relevant delivery of content, by automating the creation of all the potential product variations across a brand. Contact us to learn more about utilizing this feature in self-service mode.

Default Rule Templates & Sharing

Managing and optimizing campaigns to drive fan acquisition, engagement or sales has never been easier.  To streamline this process, Optimal designed 22 default rule templates based on client feedback and our managed services team’s best practices. Default rules fall into three categories:

• Campaigns & Ads
• -Automatically pause ads, campaigns, and initiatives based on Cost Per Action thresholds
• -Optimize CPC Bids and Budgets based on campaign metrics
• -Set daily and lifetime spend caps to ensure smoother campaign delivery and prevent overages
• Pages & Posts
• -Customize Optimal’s award winning News Feed Promoter to promote your best performing content based on engagement, shares, or virality

Together, these tools come together to create one of the most comprehensive social-advertising offerings on the market. If you are interested in learning more about any of these updates, please contact us.

This webinar is part of an ongoing series where the advertising experts at Optimal come together with other industry leaders to discuss recent trends around social media marketing. Tune in every Wednesday at 10:30 AM Pacific, where you can have your questions answered live and learn about the latest social news.