From www.dane101.com

Election time is here, and Pandemic Labs is marking the occasion with some good ol’ fashioned data.

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve been on a real data kick lately; that’s what having a tool like Watchtower will do to you.

If you’ve missed some of our other infographics, check them out here.

So we decided to compare the Facebook presences of our two Presidential Candidates and see how they stack up. The results are below. Have we correctly predicted the winner of the election? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Because the PR & Marketing departments are typically where social media campaigns tend to be managed, I’ll use the familiar terms of paid, owned and earned to contextualize how you should go about running a successful fan acquisition campaign on Facebook. If your brand places social media in the hands of the Sales team, you might replace these with terms like “calls”, “qualified leads” or “pipe-line”.

Start thinking about your Facebook Fans as your owned audience. Sure, you might pay for them; but rather than rent them (as you do with traditional advertising), once they opt in, you can consider that audience owned. Your messages can reach them in perpetuity, as long as you’re creative, non-obtrusive and provide them with value.

Let’s get something out of the way: there is no static measure or definition of engagement. The word is amorphous, and inherently resistant to a hardline definition. Anyone that tells you that Engagement = X+Y with a  dash of Z mixed in is either deluded or deceitful. The definition cannot be static, by virtue of the varying metrics of success placed on a social media campaign by the brand running it.

In the past hour, while doing my daily blog crawl for news & notes, I’ve come across FIVE articles that address “Facebook Engagement” or “Driving Twitter Engagements” or “Pinning for Success”. All of them lost me within the first two lines of text. I’m done with articles that start out telling me “Social Media is here to stay!” or that “People are 10 Trillion times more likely to engage with PHOTOS on Facebook”. Really? This is still news?

There is a fundamental misnomer attached to the paid placements employed by brands on Facebook. The platform itself has contributed healthily to this misnomer’s errant drift into the lingua franca of social media managers the world over. Facebook Ads, as they are called, do little to live up to the name. The problem is a bifurcated one of what I’ll call New Puppy Syndrome and an almost-global misunderstanding of how to make Facebook’s paid placements actually work.

First consider this: no-one is on Facebook to connect with your brand. People are on Facebook to connect with other Facebookers. Those might be long-lost friends, classmates from days-of-old, co-workers and even the person sitting across the room from them. No-one is on Facebook because they are dying to know what Starbucks has to say, or because they simply must have more Target in their lives. This isn’t a guess, nor is it an opinion. This is fact. This is truth. Pandemic Labs’ own proprietary analytics tool – Watchtower – maps Facebook user behavior down to individual hours of the day. The hours people are most actively engaging on Facebook don’t correlate with peak shopping hours or flash-sale dates. Nope. They correlate with things like “breakfast” and “the weekend” or “after the kids are asleep”.

There are fundamental drivers of every human action. Many people are aware of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but there are other theories about our innate motivations as well, such as William Glasser’s ‘Choice Theory’. I’d venture a bet that 95% of readers have encountered one of these lists at least once in their lives. Interestingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, in almost all lists of the basic human needs there is a need called “Love/Belonging”, the need that is fulfilled by acceptance of family, friends, and society at large.

This need to be accepted and respected by others is powerful and universal. We all feel it, and now social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare have thrown us all quite a curve ball in terms of what must occur for us to feel fulfilled in this area. As a result, what was once a genuine effort to fulfill our need for love/belonging has mutated into the most widespread and deep-seated epidemic of narcissism the world has ever seen.