ROI

What do you Want from your Facebook Page?

by David Lee King on November 28, 2012

looking closer at Facebook PagesThinking a bit more about my last post on using Facebook ads to actively seek out new fans … Why try to get more fans in the first place?

Another way to ask that – What exactly do you want from a Facebook Page?

Here’s a list of 5 things libraries might want out of a Facebook Page. These five things are a happy convergence of stuff Facebook is good at, and stuff that libraries (and other organizations) might find useful, too. See what you think, and add to my list!

Five things a Facebook Page is good for:

  1. Visibility – the more we interact, the more we are “seen” in Facebook. Which means that more people see our posts about library stuff.
  2. Listening – we share, but we also listen to our customers. They say stuff about us on Facebook! Some good stuff, some bad stuff. It’s a place to answer questions, to field complaints, and to actively ask for input. For free.
  3. Advocacy – this one’s huge, and should be a constant. Share good stuff about the library, and point out when we see customers saying good stuff about us.
  4. Purposeful Engagement – why gather a crowd if you don’t ask them to do anything? We should be including Calls to Action in our Facebook Posts, on specific things we want our customers to actually do. That might mean Liking the page, or it might mean attending a movie at the library. We need to start asking … and then measuring results.
  5. Conversions – Doing that Purposeful Engagement thing in #4 can lead to “conversions.” What’s a conversion? Simply stated, a conversion in social media is when your ask turns into their action. For example, if you ask Facebook Page visitors to register for an event at the library (and supply a link to the registration form), and 20 people actually click the link and fill out the form, that equals 20 conversions. Conversions can be measured and improved upon. But the important point here – you WANT conversions. You want to drive your Facebook Page visitors and fans to actually DO something – to interact with and engage your library. Conversions provides a way to measure that interaction.

Those are my five things … What are yours?

Photo by Flood

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Taking a Stab at Facebook Page ROI

by David Lee King on November 20, 2012

FacebookRecently, both the CEO and the Marketing Director at my library asked about the ROI of paying for Facebook Page ads. They asked because we recently ran two months worth of a Facebook ad, and wanted to know what the ad actually accomplished.

First of all, a bit of background on that ad. We created a simple ad that focused on getting more Likes on our library’s Facebook Page (Ben Bizzle at Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library helped us with that as part of his research on Facebook Page ads). The ad was shown to people with Facebook accounts who had friends that had already Liked us.

So now, back to the question – What was the ROI of our experiment? There are two ways to look at ROI in this case. There’s the simple “Did it work” ROI, and there’s the “What’s really going on here” way to look at it. Let’s look at both:

Facebook Ads ROI – the simple version:

Goal – Our goal with this ad was to gain more Facebook fans. did we achieve that at a good price?

Spent – $591 ($10 a day for approx 2 months)
Gained – 2642 fans – averaged about 40 fans a day.
ROI – $0.22 per fan. Pretty cheap!

Facebook ads ROI – the “what’s really going on” version:

Ok, so we spent spent about $600 and gained 2642 more fans. Big deal. What’s the real ROI for that? What can you do with 2642 more Facebook fans? Here’s my thinking on that:

More eyeballs – this is important because of how Facebook works. On average, about 16% of your Facebook fans see a single post. So more Facebook fans = more people seeing your post (even if the average stays the same).

If national statistics are an ok guide, about 54% of our community, age 13 and up, have a Facebook account. That means we have the potential to reach over half of our community through Facebook … for free or cheap. That’s huge, so paying $0.22 per fan to get there seems to be a small price to pay for the added benefit of being able to share the good stuff of the library with more people in our community.

Better listening tools – Also important. Consistent interaction gets us active fans willing to talk back. Having more fans gets us the potential to have more interaction and feedback, since we are engaging a larger audience.

Better advocacy channel – this one’s simple. People say good stuff about the library. In Facebook, those posts spread. Again, more people (hopefully) equals more people saying good stuff about us.

So that’s what I’m thinking anyway. Eyeballs, listening, and advocacy. More fans = more of each (or at least the potential to have more of each).

Help me out – what am I missing?

FB Hand image by birgerking

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Turning Strangers into Friends

by David Lee King on September 13, 2011

The Thank You Economy

I just read The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk. Good read. Here’s an interesting thought I got out of it that relates to libraries.

On page 53, he writes about Nielson conducting a study on what drives consumer trust. 70% of people said they turn to family and friends for advice when making purchasing decisions.

Then Gary says this: “The ROI of your relationship with your mother is going to be much higher than that of the one you have with a good friend. Both, however, are more valuable than the one you have with an acquaintance, which trumps the relationship you have with a stranger. Without social media, you and your customer are relegated to strangers; with it, depending on your efforts, you can potentially upgrade your relationship to that of casual acquaintances, and even, in time, to friends. The power of that relationship can go so far as to convert a casual browser into a committed buyer, or a buyer into an advocate.” (pg 54-55).

This idea of turning strangers into friends works great in libraries, too. The goal is simply this – become casual acquaintances, or even friends, with our customers. We have done that for years in our buildings – I’d say that’s business as usual.

Online? We can do the same thing by using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. Start friending people in your community. Your customers. That’s how you start turning strangers into friends … and into customers of your library.

Here’s what Gary did – he created Twitter alerts for wine words like Merlot. When someone had a question about that term, he answered it … and started growing a reputation about actually knowing something about wine.

We know stuff too – we are librarians, after all! Use a tool like Twitter. Do a zip code search for your local area or a town search … then add some words to that search, like book, reading, etc. Or business terms … or whatever the hot issues in your town happen to be.

Then start answering questions or making comments as they seem relevant. Point to your stuff, like the book that answers it, when it makes sense. Be helpful … like you already are in your building.

It’s a way to get out in the community without actually leaving the air conditioning!

Pic by Steven Rosenbaum

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Podcamp Topeka – Social Media ROI

by David Lee King on November 8, 2010

Social Media ROI – presented by Eric Melin at Spiral16

Who owns social media?

public relations – crisis management
marketing – brand reputation management
sales/bizDev – lead generation
customer service – engagement/retention
product development – competitive intelligence
IT – deployment/integrating new solutions

IE – everyone owns social media

Social Media isn’t free – it takes valuable time
You need human resources for planning, creative insight, content creation, product management, measurement, etc

What does ROI mean?
It’s challenging to define gains and costs with social media efforts

There is no way to calculate social media ROI with a one size fits all equation. People who claim that really just made a tool for their business and goals – not everyone.

Needs to be specific to your business.

ROI is difficult because it’s a financial metric. Hard to define that with social media, because it’s not based on financial gains inherently

Make sure you have clearly defined business objectives first. Then make sure your social media initiatives support your business goals.

Common metrics (like twitter follower number) – ask yourselves which ones matter to your business

2 ways to implement:
- figure out how SM can support existing company initiatives
- create new sum initiatives that help

Online data that matters:
- semantic results
- sentiment
- volume/frequency
- where does it live

Developing strategy – set up timelines and expectations – help measure if you reached your goals or not

He likes correlating traditional metrics with online metrics
Ex – actual sales = positive/negative sentiment
Retail traffic = message reach
etc

Can you see spikes in sales in correlation to your social media efforts

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CIL2009: What is the Return on Investment for Your Library?

by David Lee King on April 1, 2009

Speakers: Neal K. Kaske, Mary Lou Cumberpatch, Guy Dobson

Key questions:

  • what are the levels of use made of the electronic resources offered by your library
  • what are the estimated cost savings fromt he use of these electronic resources

Assumptions:

  • value of staff time saved can be estimated
  • using only direct labor costs provides conservative estimates
  • value of the public’s time can also be estimated! conservative estimate for general public’s time is placed at $6 an hour, below minimum wage – so if patron uses library website for 10 minutes, that’s $1 in value.
  • levels of use measured by standard web metric packages is accurate
  • usage numbers are local numbers…
  • some search/time numbers are estimated… ie., time to search for phone calls is 15 minutes (so it’s a rough average)

Must know what we are counting: looks like they defined what a search was for each database they included in the count and equated that with a patron coming into the library, pulling out an index, and doing a search. That type of stuff…

aside … I’m sitting 15 feet from the screen, and I can’t read the slide! at least 15 points, with sub-points, in small font, all text… break that slide up!

Showing an example of data and $$ values associated with that data – ie., website visited 3 million times, dollar value = $322,000 – page views = 1 minute = $.10 each…

Guy Dobson:

He is figuring total value by mining SIRSI records on borrowing use and an averaged item price. Nice. Some patron’s library cards are worth more than $10,000 per year, because they check out so much!

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