What do you think of advertising on Reddit?

I've been increasingly interested in exploring advertising options on social media sites over the past year or so. Facebook ads whetted my appetite, I'm fascinated by the possibilities of StumbleUpon's Paid Discovery service and now I want to learn more about advertising on Reddit. If you're a Reddit user, how do you feel about Sponsored Links at the top of your favourite website?

If you're an advertiser, have you advertised on Reddit before? How did it work out for you?

Thanks to everyone who responds!

-Parker

Data is so hot right now

Infographics are hot right now - it sees like everyone is getting in on them. And why not? They're fun. These days though, I'm more interested in the data behind the infographics. Maybe it is just because I've been heads-down doing a ton of online research to inform creative ideas for clients, or maybe its just because I like data. I especially like the large data sets that are made easily accessible thanks to social media.

Here are a couple of my favorite pieces of data mining (and I think all of them could make for great infographics):

TorrentFreak predicts Inception will clean up at the Oscars

Per their blog post: "After crunching the numbers, taken from thousands of publicly available torrents, this awards race turned out to be an easy win for Inception. With a staggering 13,780,000 downloads Christopher Nolan’s movie was the clear winner." Note: based on previous years, these torrent-based predictions don't necessarily hold true.

Stumbling During the Super Bowl

StumbleUpon is easily my favourite social media site/tool/distraction, and it was really cool to see the way they analyzed the way people were using the site over the course of the Super Bowl.

Music Download Analysis Reveals Mood of Bahrain

I loved this post that BoingBoing made over the weekend about judging the national mood of countries based on the music that was being downloaded. How has this changed over time? What would it look like compared the current economy?

Comment Profanity By Lanuage

In this little study, someone compared the amount of swear words included in different types of computer code.

Have you seen any other cool bits of data mining and analysis like this?

-Parker

When is the best time to post a Facebook Page status?

I’ve often wondered when the best time of day to post an official Facebook Page update was. To find out, I analyzed some of the top Canadian Facebook Pages and the posts they made during the month of November.

What did I do?

I took a look at official Facebook Pages for iTunes Canada, Starbucks Canada, Gatorade Canada, Smirnoff Canada, Bauer Hockey, Nike Training, Reebok Hockey, Best Buy and Doritos. This was a not-quite-random sample of some of the top Canadian Facebook Pages, as per this list published by Social Bakers.

I looked at every official update posted by the page during the month of November, and wrote down what time (Eastern Time) the post was made and how many Likes and Comments the post received. I then took an average of these responses per hour, and created the fun little graph below.

What didn’t I do?

I didn’t analyze the sentiment of the responses, nor did I compare the different types of posts made by the pages (photo, video, external link, etc). I also didn’t look at comments made by users on the wall and not as a response to an official update from the Page.

This study also didn’t take into account any other strategies these pages might have had. If the page was encouraging their users to upload photos, or engage with an application or contest in a separate tab, I didn’t measure that.

What did I find?

It appears that the best time to post a status update from an official page is either early in the work day (9-10am) or in the early evening. Though I don’t have any data on when people are checking Facebook the most, I suspect that they are checking when they wake up or get into work in the morning, and again when are leaving for the day or arriving home. While they might check during other times, these might be the best times for users to interact with their favourite brands.

However, the outlier post at 7:58am one day received 180 responses, far more than that brand’s average. It made me think that perhaps earlier posts like this have a way of breaking through the cluttered Facebook newsfeed.

At the end of the day, you should know your audience and what will resonate best with them. This includes both the types of posts (should they include photos or video? Should they be questions, or encourage action?) and the time of day to post them.

Analyzing and thinking about this data was time well spent, as I’m confident that looking so closely at what all these pages are doing, what has been working for them and what hasn’t been working will provide me with some insight into what I can do for my own clients. ( I’m also confident that this would have been way easier to do with a desk and dual monitors instead of small laptop screen and a notebook on a folding seat-back tray during a cross-country flight.)

Note: I’m not a trained statistician. There are probably all sorts of “standard deviation” and “relevant sample” size things I’m not taking into account here. If you’ve got a better way analyze or present this data I’m not stopping (you). -I purposely did not look at any Facebook pages that I am currently or have previously worked on. -As in the “What I didn’t do” section above, there are lots of factors I didn’t look at. These might have resulted in different conclusions.

What could I have done differently or better with this study? What do you think of the results?

I’ve certainly got some ideas for how this type research could be improved. If you’ve got some spare time on your hands (ahem, students going into break?) and want to help BlogCampaigning, shoot me an email: parker (at) blogcampaigning.com.

-Parker

PS: Next up: an analysis of Facebook pages managed by PR agencies compared to those managed by ad agencies?

Pure Performance

Sometimes you get handed a project at work, and you're the only one on it. You see it through from every step and when its finished, for better or worse, it was all you. Sometimes though, you're just a small cog in a big machine, a player on the team.

Either way, it feels amazing when things come together and you see some success.

When you're working in social media, sometimes that success looks like seeing your clients' content on some of the biggest blogs in the world, then shared across dozens of different social networks.

Sometimes it is just hundreds of thousands of views.

Sometimes its both:

And the making of:

A lot of hands when into making these videos and letting them out into the wild, but I think most of the credit goes to creative forces here at DDB Canada.