Programming and Management Consulting Services for terrestrial and on-line radio in the U.S. and Canada with veteran Consultant/Programmer Dave Lange. Help with music strategy, research, talent coaching, promotions and web integration.
Here are some observations and data from monitoring the Facebook posts of 14 selected stations.
This week the News Feed for the stations came up with:
157 posts dating back 60 hours that's up from the 85 posts we had last week.
Types of Posts
Station Liners - Plugs for contests, music features, etc - 16 or 10%
Questions - "Are you watching American Idol" etc -48 or 30%
News/Info - Links to Videos, funny Pictures or News facts - 74 or 47%
Personality Posts - 'On my 2nd cup of Coffee need more' - 14 or 9%
Music News - Posts on upcoming releases, artist news -- 4 or 3%
Top 5 Posts with most Likes
652 - A pic of Limp Biscuit - Pillsbury Dough can breaks - also 139 comments and 141 shares
285 - Paterno dies - news in Pittsburgh
262 - Penguins win #500 in Pittsburgh
258 - Go Pats in Boston
229 - German gets 110,000 tax refund in error.
Top 5 Posts with most Comments
196 - Stars you've seen or movies filmed in our city
163 - Pick superbowl in Pittsburgh
139 - Pic of Limp Biscuit
125 - Taco Bell for Breakfast
94- What did you do this weekend
Sports really picks up a lot more content this past week with the Superbowl teams all set. There wasn't much on the Oscar nominations and no posts on political issues. Remember we have Rock, AC, Country and CHR stations in this mix. Rock stations had the most active and highest number of posts this week. By the way the pic of the Limp Biscuit just in case you wanted to know:
So what does Radio's overall Facebook Presence look like?
How are we using the social network?
What are we posting and what is working?
All of these are questions I'm sure everyone is asking as they decide how much effort and time Facebook is worth. To get a picture I built a Facebook Page that only I can access and it is tracking 14 stations in Rock, CHR, Country, and AC formats to get a picture of what is posted each week and what the audience reaction in Likes and Comments is.
Let's take a look at Wednesday 1/18/12 with an analysis taken around 10a Eastern. The tracking on my Newsfeed here goes back to Sunday posts - so around 60 hours. Here are some tracking facts:
There were 85 posts in the News Feed - that's an average of 6 posts per station in the roughly 2 day period - so maybe 3-4 posts a day on the average.
Here is a rundown of the type of posts in the News Feed:
Station Liners - Plugs for contests, music features, etc - 27 or 32%
Questions - "Are you watching American Idol" etc - 12 or 14%
News/Info - Links to Videos, funny Pictures or News facts - 30 or 35%
Personality Posts - 'On my 2nd cup of Coffee need more' - 8 or 9%
Music News - Posts on upcoming releases, artist news -- 8 or 9%
Top 5 reaction posts:
Station Contest - Trip to Hawaii in LA - 152 Likes
News - Kholhe K's ex gets cheers at Lakers Game in LA - 436 Like
News - Pop bands logos in Heavy/Death Metal Fonts - 184 Like, 61 Comment, 38 Shares
Question - State wants to ban PJs in Public - 70 Likes and 185 Comments
I tried to pick stations that did a fair amount of postings and had big Like numbers. The big markets like LA, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, Boston, and Philly are there but there are some smaller markets like Madison and Grand Rapids. I plan on adding to the panel now that we have a trial run out there and track more of the content. Of course I can't track all the metrics that are available to the Admin users at the stations, but we can at least see the Likes, Comments and Shares to get a basic picture. If you have any suggestions on stations to add or other types of posts to track let me know via email- dlange210@att.net or with comments below. Thanks.
Overall when you just look at a News Feed of Radio Brands it's a strange mix of posts. The biggest reactions here are mostly for News and Questions. The Station Liners really didn't do much in likes or comments unless they were contests that forced the audience to Facebook to win. The most reactions came from the active evening personalities and their posts with Questions and News/web bits. Is there a real strategy here to focus on the types of posts that get reaction or are we just throwing posts out there?
The other fact here was the lack of interaction from the Personalities in their posts. Once they put it up there they rarely came back in to keep the conversation going or react to the audience.
The reality of interacting with your audience on Social Networks like Twitter and Facebook is that you can go un-noticed pretty quickly.
Right now Facebook claims over 800 million active users with around 50% of them logging on in any given day. The average Facebook user has 130 friends and in an average day more than 250 million photos are uploaded everyday.
In the Twitter world there are over a billion tweets posted every week. Twitter users welcomed in 2012 with over 16,000 tweets per second on New Years Eve last weekend!!
While some grumbled at the changes from the Facebook F8 conference last fall to the News Feed - face it something had to be done. We are all drowning in the posts from our friends and also from the many celebrities, movies, TV shows, Radio stations, products, stores, and political pages and Twitter accounts we follow.
When I look at my news feed with around 500 friends and maybe 30 brands/personality pages I'm linked to I end up with around 20 posts an hour during the day. My full news feed page maybe covers 2-3 hours. In Twitter it can move even faster. Of course every week I add new friends and followers so in a year these numbers will climb a lot.
Also keep in mind that Facebook IS filtering what hits my news feed. They are looking at my past interaction (reading, linking, sharing, or commenting) with each of my friends and brand likes and deciding who is important. They are also looking at what is posted by each of my friends/brands and deciding if it might be interesting to me on a long list of priorities. Just as Google looks at my search history and sorts out what might be the best sites for me Facebook is also doing that for what appears on my News Feed.
So now you are getting set to do some posts on your station's Facebook page or hit the Twitter button. Is your message going to breakthrough? Or are you just wasting your time?
To get better at interacting with the audience on Social Media you need some feedback. Yes some metrics or statistics or ratings that tell you what the audience is doing with your interaction. And you need to develop a strategy behind the data to make sure what you post or tweet has a chance. The other challenge is that the listener's News Feed is filling up every minute with more stuff and even with good content you can fall off the feed before they even see it.
Some have taken to posting all the time to stay on the news feed, but remember that you don't want to become the 'evil' spam-master of Facebook. Yes, the News Feed filter also looks for 'spam' and filters it out. We also have the ultimate goal of getting the audience to interact with the ultimate source here - the broadcast signal. Perhaps down the road we'll be important enough in the Social Media Web to make all our dollars from the digital side, but for now (and probably forever) we need to get them to tune in or stream in.
The key is getting good feedback. Know how many people saw your post, how many hit any links, looked at the pic, rolled the video, commented, shared and also who they are. You can get most of this info if you have a Facebook analytic program, although many programs can be hard to read or navigate. Even bigger than just having the data you need to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Once you have this data - now you have a chance to build a strategy to become more effective. But, we have to hurry - next New Year there will probably be 50,000 tweets a second and we'll have 500 Facebook friends to keep up with and 5 times the posts we have today.
