"Yaoi911" Facebook Engagement

Hello Dennis,

After following the instructions for Dennis’ AppSumo video, I was able to build a following of 3,775 fans of my FB page (from 300). That’s good news. When I post a link to a new page of my webcomic or something, my “Feedback” percentage tends to be in the 3-4% range. Also good news. But sadly, when I look at my impressions, they tend to hover around 1500, less than half of my followers. And I often get complaints from followers who are missing my FB updates in their feed and wish that they weren’t. (Sometimes the number of impressions goes up to 2,400 when I’m posting a non-link update, so maybe FB doesn’t like me linking to my new webcomic page updates so much? Even still, 2,400 is a far cry from 3,775. And when I first got all the followers, I’d consistently exceed the number of followers with impression numbers.)

I’m wondering if there is some way you can help me figure out why FB is sharing my links with so few people even though the feedback has been consistently good. I don’t have a ton of marketing budget—and I’m having success in terms of connecting with new fans with traditional advertising and on twitter—but this FB weirdness is baffling me.

Is there any way you can help? Even if it’s to point me at an article or something…

Dennis Replies:

This is a common problem with small business owners– either they have so few fans that content won’t matter, or they have a moderately sized audience, but no engagement. His feedback rate of 3-4% is far higher than the 1% we typically see, likely because his fans are so passionate about his content.

We like to Facebook as a reflection of the health of your overall brand power, evidenced by how many people know about you in real life or come to your website. While Alex is getting a few hundred visits a day from Facebook to his website, Facebook traffic represents only 2.67% of his overall traffic

Continued Correspondence:

Comic Author of Yaoi911

My ultimate goal for my Facebook page is to build readership for my webcomic. I’d love for it to be a vehicle for new readers looking for strong plot-character based gay romance comics to discover my work. Because of the limited reach I seem to be getting with my FB posts, this part feels like what I need the most help with. Google Analytics tells me I’m getting about 100 to 400 hits from FB each day, which ain’t awful, but isn’t fantastic. (Facebook comprised just 2.67% of my total visits over the last month.)

My secondary goal is to serve as a way to connect with my fan base and to make myself accessible as a creator in a way that’s convenient and fun for them (and for the most part this seems to be working.)

My tertiary goal for my Facebook page is the same as for all my outlets (my blog, Twitter, etc.)—to use it as a venue that promotes tolerance for those who are different and for building the self-esteem of those who have been marginalized unfairly. If there is a central tenet to the “Yaoi 911″ brand, it’s that everyone is worthy of being treated with respect and dignity and that love between consenting adults is something we all should be able to celebrate regardless of whether it matches our own sexuality.  As such, my demographics have pretty much always evenly broken down 50/50 between straight women and gay men (with a not small number of cool straight guy followers.)

Interestingly, after my ad campaign at the end of May (which I started after watching your AppSumo video), I developed a much larger following of gay men (that demographic responded the best to my ads), so that 50/50 balance has gotten a bit skewed on the FB page. Still, looking at the comments and my interactions on the webcomic and blog, women and men seem fairly evenly balanced in terms of the response.

You’ll see from the reports that after I saw your video, I ran two campaigns, spending about $600 and going from 350 followers to just under 3000. (Since then I’ve organically grown to about 3,782 total likes.) For my campaign, I only targeted friends of fans who had interests in comics and gay equality issues. (Hopefully the reports point out what tags I used; if not I can try to copy-paste them).  I sub-divided individual ads into comics-loving, gay-rights supporting women and also to men “who are interested in men” who liked comics. I tried my best to keep the cost of each actual conversion to a “like” as close to 20 cents as possible, thus why my $600 got me somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 new likes. This is where your advice in the video was super-awesome—I know that some other folks find it can cost as much as a dollar per conversion.

The ads that seemed the most successful were the ones that asked the question: “I say comics with gay heroes can be just as good as comics with straight heroes! What do you think?” when coupled with a close-up drawn picture of one of my characters with a strong expression (such as anger or indignation). I tried creating some ads with cartoon images of a couple of my characters that were shirtless (only shown above the nipple line, so bare shoulders) but those were immediately refused by Facebook. I’ve seen far more provocative images of real-life women in FB ads so there might be a double-standard there, but as the CU images of my characters seemed to be successful, I decided not to try to fight city hall on that issue. (And frankly, even though shirtless images of my characters are successful with my mainstream ads in terms of getting clicks, the whole vibe of my stories is as I said more about heroism and good story-telling than erotic elements, so it felt like I’d be more likely to attract an appropriate audience if I didn’t emphasize the shirtless aspect anyway.)

Ads that were least successful were ones that included a photographic picture of my face (big surprise there—who cares about me? It’s the promise of a good story that would draw people in). And ones that just asked the question “Can comics with gay heroes be just as good as comics with straight heroes?” without the introductory declaration “I say comics with gay heroes can be just as good as comics with straight heroes! What do you think?” My guess here is that the former bare question just evoked shrugs while the latter with the bold statement encouraged folks to hit the Like button attached to the ad itself to agree with my bold statement.

Likewise, another bit of copy I tried that failed was “I make comics that are great stories first and then bring the sexy. Click to learn more!” Not surprisingly, that awful bit of writing was a big fail. I think other variations of “Click to learn more” were also losers. Again, my success seemed to be about giving folks with similar interests a rallying cry to Like.

Dennis Replies:

Here we learn that the best way to attract other folks to gay comic is to message similar interests directly. We know that “sexy” ads get the most attention– Click-Through Rates as high as 0.3% and fans under 20 cents. We’ve found that Facebook disapproves most sexy ads, no matter what type, probably because of the abuse by dating companies from 2007 and even still to some degree today.

And to no surprise, when you explicitly ask for engagement, such as asking for opinions, the audience responds. Running ads to existing posts, such as via Sponsored Post Stories, you can amplify your organic power. In other words, most people are just not going to see your wall posts, no matter how clever. The life of a post is getting shorter and shorter– from a couple days now to perhaps a couple hours. So if you’re not running ads to pump up your content’s visibility, your precious time creating content is wasted.

Looking at his ad performance, we see that his social clicks are over 80%. In other words, the people who clicked had friends who were existing fans of the page. He used the “friends of fans” targeting to generate ads that automatically showed the names and images of friends that had liked his page. CTR is often twice as high when using social connections. Facebook now shows social impressions in the ad reporting, which is a huge incentive to run traffic to your Facebook page instead of your website.

In summary, small businesses with limited budgets can still be successful if they target the right audiences, carefully optimize their ad campaigns, and understand the connection between the website and Facebook page.

The price of moving fast is that you have more mistakes. So you may have noticed some weird stats in your Facebook analytics. For example, today is November 26, but we have a post that is on December 1st:

And then there’s one of our client pages that reports almost 300,000 new fans in one day:

Though we all wish we did get 300,000 new fans in one day, it turns out to be a bug.

Sometimes there are holes in the data. In this case, we show a zero for one metric for one day.  The impact of this is that it looks like we lost all our fans in one day and then gained them back:

Moral of the story– watch your stats carefully. Don’t trust data blindly. If you see one stat that is off, check the related stats to corroborate. For example, if we really did get 300,000 new fans in one day, you’d see a massive increase in impressions, likes, storytellers, and other metrics.

This is a common issue with pulling data Facebook API data, as well as what you see in the web-based insights. But a strong data analyst won’t be fooled.Two of the above images come from our tool, which pulls from the various Facebook APIs, while one is a screenshot from the web insights.

What have you seen in the data?

Congratulations! You’ve been promoted to manage your very first project. You’ve demonstrated that you’re a good worker bee— you can make campaigns, prepare reports, and do whatever else you’ve been assigned.

But managing a project is a completely different matter. Now, instead of dutifully doing what you’re told, you have to figure out what the client wants, build project plans, coordinate between multiple people, and make sure things happen on time and in the right way. Being new in the position and perhaps even young (which makes it harder), you’re afraid that your co-workers and client might not respect you or that you don’t have authority.

Relax—use these simple techniques and it will be hard to fail.

First, get organized. If you are not organized yourself, there’s no way you can begin to think about tracking all the things that your teammates are doing. Are you using basecamp to track who is doing what? Every task should have a description, be assigned to a person, and have a due date. These 3 items are the building blocks of project management—who is doing it, what they’re doing, when is it due.

Use it for anything you could potentially forget about—people you have to call, stuff you need to read, even personal errands. You don’t need Microsoft Project Central or any fancy software—even the Tasks feature in Gmail is sufficient. Even a simple spiral notebook works just fine.

When you’re organized, you don’t have to worry about that one thing you know you were told a few weeks ago, but lost track of. Terrible feeling to be lost and behind—it’s like drowning. So don’t let yourself get there. Check your email twice per day and quickly take care of things by doing one of the following—do it, delete it, or delegate it.

There’s no other option. Don’t read it and then mark it unread. Don’t skim over things with the thinking that you’ll come back to it later. You gain massive efficiency by taking care of things just once—the first time. Plus, when you take care of things right away, they don’t fester into bigger problems that result in all sorts of drama later. I can’t tell you how many people I see complain about being busy or having too many emails, when all they’re really doing is just moving sand from one pile to another, getting nothing done.

Second, create a specific statement of the goal. If you’re lucky enough to have just one project to manage, this is easy. The client may want a website to do X in Y amount of time for Z dollars. Then you break down X into minute little measurable tasks that you assign out to people. Perhaps there is a Statement of Work you can reference where most of the work is already done for you.

In either case, you should check back with the client to affirm the requirements, if for no other reason that to show them that you care and to start building a relationship. Many first time project managers fail by hiding from the start, letting their project go down in flames while they bite their lips in silence. Perhaps they are afraid of looking stupid or whatever reason, but the net result of these good intentions is failure, all the same.

Establishing with the client that you are the lead—the person they can go to for anything—is critical to get you off on the right foot. It then takes the burden off your boss, who likely doesn’t want to step in and do your job for you. Your boss is busy doing other things and if they’re a good boss, will only want to step in if you are in trouble. If the client feels the need to relay requirements or other project communication with your boss, then they are saying you have failed to do your job. So you want to establish the requirements early and make it clear you are responsible.

Third, communicate actively with your project stakeholders. We like to use the RACI model, which stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

You are the R— meaning that you’re Responsible for the project success. Completely. The buck stops with you, even if so-and-so didn’t reply to your email or give you access to that particular system. It’s your job to stay on top of dependencies, as opposed to having a great set of excuses later when someone else fails in silence. There is only one R, else you have too many cooks in the kitchen.A is Accountable, which covers multiple people that are accountable for doing particular tasks. Sometimes you are the R and the A for smaller projects. But more often, you delegate tasks to engineers and designers who are on the hook for various things. And these folks will forget to do their things, do them improperly, provide excuses why it was someone else’s responsibility, and so forth. You are there to resolve these issues before they become visible to the client—you want to monitor this BEFORE you have slipped the schedule irreparably, and before the big emergency. A great project manager can see problems in advance, then escalate as needed.C is consulted, which means that you might need the expertise, advice, or permission of others to proceed. The C role is dangerous here, since a lot of people will want to be involved in your project, especially if it’s high profile and involves social media—something that everyone feels they are an expert in. To prevent meeting madness, where you’re unable to hold meetings because of too many people wanting to attend, make it super clear who is doing what in the Accountable section—the list of tasks.You’ll come across many corporate folks who will say they are responsible in some vague sort of way, upon which you politely explain your role, who else is accountable for certain tasks, and then ask them what exactly they would like to do in this project. If you’re suave, you can pacify these backseat drivers. If you’re too blunt, you’ll offend these people, even if it’s clear that they have no specific useful skills to the project or add any type of value.I is Informed. These are folks who you should keep updated, usually AFTER you have made a decision and have taken action. Only the Consulted people need to be asked in advance of a decision. Because most corporate folks attribute their value in direct proportion to how many meetings they attend (if you’re busy, then you must be in high demand and very important), you’ll have to fight to keep most folks in the I bucket versus somewhere else.The easiest way to ward off these folks is to publish meeting minutes. That way, they’re not afraid of missing something juicy from not having attended—they can merely read the summary. Ask yourself how many project managers are guilty of not publishing the meeting minutes? They’re the ones who are struggling and haven’t even gotten around to placing people in the RACI roles. Ironically, their excuse is that they’re too busy. The reason they’re too busy is that they’re wasting time doing nonsensical things to actually have time to produce things of value.There you have it. Nothing magical. But it sure works like magic. When you make it clear that you have a goal, specified the team and specific tasks needed to get to your goal, the waters will part. The cubicle dwellers will respect that you have a mission. Those who want to know what’s going on don’t have to call a meeting to waste the precious time of your team—they can just log into basecamp or read the latest meeting minutes.If the big boss decides to derail you because of the latest fire drill, you can confidently say “yes” to any of her requests, because you at the same time mention the impact to the work schedule you’re already on.

If the client decides to change his mind and increase the scope of the project (they would never do that!), then you can say “yes”—AND the impact is $X and Y days to the timeline. You never say “yes, but”, which is arguing with them. You say “yes, and”. Let them trade off between time, money, and scope—pick two, as they say.

If you follow these three steps I this orders— to get organized, be clear on your goals, and run the RACI project management model—you’re well-protected from every angle. People will marvel and how well you manage and what a good job you do. By making the model clear, everyone knows what is expected, so there’s little room to hide. The typical corporate cubicle monsters who are looking for a big company to hide in will know they are not welcome. And you’ll be spending less time dealing with the same old excuses, and more time doing things that you enjoy.

How do you fare against this model? Are there certain techniques that work well for you? Perhaps you have a horror story to share (names kept anonymous to protect the guilty)?

Here are the top tips from Web 2.0 NYC:

• Be real.
• More interactions are key- responding to comments generates more of the same.
• Size and engagement are key metrics, although engagement is more important than raw size.
• Don’t buy fans– it’s poison.
• Social affects search because of a Google overweighting on social results, especially real-time.
• Don’t autopost to Facebook from twitter– Facebook is shutting it down.
• Customize your message to each platform.
• Use the data– you now have fan-level data to inform your marketing and be more personalized.
• Be real-time– don’t sit for a week.

Yesterday, Google Analytics released a premium version of their analytics, aimed straight at the heart of Omniture and Webtrends. Looking at the fact sheet, it seems to be not only better in functionality than these enterprise packages, but nicer looking, too. Now that they have support, advanced tagging, real-time analytics, and the typical Google beauty, the end is near for players who have done web analytics a long time, but haven’t adapted.  Go see for yourself.

The next stage of the game will be in creating unified dashboards that measure owned, earned, and paid.  Easy to say and easy to understand, but nobody has it yet.  Earned is channels such as Facebook, which can only be tracked via the graph API.  Omniture, Webtrends, and Coremetrics have yet to figure it out, while neither has Google.  Paid is advertising, which Google is pretty good at.  But nobody ties all three together yet, which is a headache for advertisers and agencies.

Watch the social analytics and web analytics players come together this year. Even the free version of Google Analytics now has multi-channel attribution, which is critical to measuring the value of social.

Today I was over at the offices of ICOSA Magazine, a Denver-based publisher that is sponsored by CAP Logistics.  Who would have thought that a logistics company could produce such high quality content?  Here are some things I’ve learned about their efforts to make the world a better place:

• They interview world leaders (presidents of countries and CEOs of major corporations) to get their opinion on the state of the economy. They don’t charge for this or charge for the magazine– there is no catch.
• Recently, they interviewed Bishop Desmond Tutu about his perspectives on hope and optimism.
• They have an entire issue dedicated to infrastructure– improving water, architecture, roads, bridges, electrical grids– highlighting the efforts of individuals and businesses to improve the world.

Collaborative leadership is about getting different people in the community to work together to grow the pie for everyone.  These are weighty topics, but are worth engaging in.  Kudos to ICOSA for making it happen and not taking a dime on it.

Here’s the other part to understand– by interviewing the heads of mining companies, heavy equipment, and other firms that are clients or potential clients, their magazine also has great business value.  If you’re the CEO of a mining company that has less than stellar reputation with green community, this good PR is something you’d want. And you’d be quite inclined to do business with CAP when they put that shiny magazine in your hands.

Thank you to Gayle Dendinger, founder of CAP Logistics, and Eli Regalado, for having us over at their facilities to share.

I had a chance to catch up with PJ Glassey– a world class stair climbing athlete (yes, he bounds to the top of tall buildings across the globe) and the owner of X Gym in Seattle.  PJ is also the personal trainer of Gillian Muessig, who introduced me to PJ and helped me get my butt kicked many an early morning.  So PJ….

DY: I’m an internet geek, like many of the folks here, whether they admit it or not. We spend a lot of time in front of a computer, butts in the seat of a chair in an office or in the sky.  What advice do you have for us regarding fitness?

PJ: Exercise is great, and we do have the best exercise methods, but proper nutrition is key to getting lean, staying healthy, and having a clear mind. My book “Cracking Your Calorie Code”  spells out what the latest science has to say about that and my DVD “X Gym Workout Protocol #1″ shows the best new concept for exercise. It is truly the first legit fitness revolution since traditional training was invented back in 1891.

// By the way– the picture here is real, not photo shopped. PJ actually looks like this.

You should have attended to learn the secrets. Let me summarize a few:

• Like your competitors so that your likes are on their page– not removable by them.
• Like your own posts, since it boosts EdgeRank.
• Always respond to comments and posts on your wall to demonstrate reciprocity to your users and to Facebook for EdgeRank.
• Facebook Insights on the web sucks, but the API rules, as you have more data.
• Facebook wants you to have SSL certificates on your landing tabs, else you throw security errors.

You ever been to one of those gas stations along the highway– the one that can charge $7 a gallon because the nearest gas is 40 miles away?  They can charge whatever they want.

Until recently, there was no other place in Boulder for stringing tennis racquets. 22 year old CU grad, Matt Prater, has a love for tennis. He made his high school varsity team as a freshman and hasn’t put his racquet down since.  Now, 8 years later, Matt is a professional tennis instructor teaching his students twice a day, seven days a week. On top of that, he strings tennis racquets for his students.

His tennis stringing business naturally evolved. He started by stringing his fellow high school teammates to make a little extra cash.  Soon, he bought a stringing machine, purchased various reels of string, and found himself with a business.

Whether his business was buoyed by his love or perhaps the lack of competition from the only other Boulder tennis shop in town, it’s hard to tell what drove his growth. Part of what irked Matt was that the competition took over a week to do a restringing.  For kids that have only one racquet and didn’t want to go a week without playing, that was unacceptable.

So he started Next Day Racquets to set a new standard in town. Not only is is service better, but he charges only $20 plus the cost of strings. And as any young entrepreneur, he has put his business on Facebook, to tap into the social crowd.

Have you been a happy customer of Matt or perhaps have some advice to provide him? We look forward to your thoughts!