As Paul covered earlier this month in his post on social media campaigns, use of the broadcasting platform Twitter in New Zealand has seen huge growth in 2009 as its public profile has benefitted from media exposure and celebrity endorsement and interest in using it to express & connect has compounded.
Given Twitter is a potential source of traffic and links to your website, it makes sense that those looking to leverage Twitter would be interested in how many people are following them. And that got First Rate interested: Just who is the most followed New Zealander on Twitter…?
Of the Top 10 New Zealanders list we had only heard of Team Ellen because of the exposure they got on TV. But have you heard of any of the others who make up the top ten? Probably not. And are they worth following? Well, maybe. If you’re programming in Ruby on Rails you might follow @nzkoz, and if you’re into Apple computers, iPods & iPhones you could follow @dankando. But overall it isn’t the most exciting top ten.
The number of followers is less useful as a measurement of quality than you might think.
Some reasons people on Twitter might have a lot of followers are because they are an international authority in their niche. Another reason is in the early days auto follow was default so a lot of people who got in early and followed a lot of people ended up with a lot of followers automatically.
So what did you think about our Top 10 lists? Wefollow.com ranks Twitter accounts in two ways: influence & followers. Are followers even a useful measure when it comes to deciding whether you should follow someone? How should influence be measured? Tell us by commenting on this post.
We have updated the Top 10 New Zealand Company/Brand Twitter accounts list. Some great feedback in the comments means we have correctly added @WeLikeBike42 as a Company/Brand, making it the only Twitter account present on both our lists! We’ve also added @diyfather, @BusinessTalk and @purenewzealand who we missed the first time round.
UPDATE (Monday, November 9th 2009)
The Top 10 New Zealand Company/Brand Twitter accounts list has been updated! A sharp observer spotted we had @grabaseat but not @flyairnz, so @flyairnz vaults into 5th place! Well done Air New Zealand.
UPDATE (Friday, November 13th 2009)
The New Zealand Herald has published an article on First Rate’s top 10 Twitter lists. View our blog entry on this here: Twitter Marketing tool of the future.
Kevin Francis, Chief Executive Officer of Q NZ Ltd, spoke to Patrick O’Meara at Radio New Zealand on the Tuesday business segment.
Kevin outlined the online marketing growth potential in New Zealand, the various opportunities created by First Rate being owned by ASX listed Q Ltd, and how First Rate is delivering specialist Search & Performance marketing services, including search engine optimisation, under the Q Group umbrella.
For further information on how First Rate can drive your online marketing strategy further and achieve greater ROI, please contact us.
There are more Kiwi women on Facebook than men (57.5% female vs 42.5% male) and
Most of the New Zealand users of Facebook are in the 18-24 or 25-34 age range.
This led me to wonder, what is the percentage of each gender in each age range? Are there any interesting trends? Are there any age ranges where men are more common?
And also, now that Facebook is the most popular site in NZ (aside from Google), what percentage of the NZ population is on Facebook now, and how does that change for each age range?
Graph of visits to Trademe.co.nz and Facebook.co.nz (New Zealand visitors only)
So, let’s use the demographic information from the Facebook advert tool to understand New Zealand’s Facebook demographics a bit better:
The gender gap is strongest for older users
The younger age ranges are much closer to gender parity than the older age ranges. The 20-24 age range has the highest proportion of men, with 47% male and 53% female. As the age increases though, the percentage of men decreases. The 50-54 age range has the lowest proportion of men, 35% male and 65% female.
% of each gender on Facebook, by age range (% of those who stated a gender)
Nearly all young kiwis are on Facebook
A famous quote about Tolkien’s The Lord of Rings is that the world is divided into two types of people, those who have read it, and those who are going to read it. It could be that the same is true of Facebook in New Zealand – kiwis are divided into those who are on Facebook already, and those who are going to be on Facebook soon!
Dividing the number of Facebook users at each age range (from Facebook’s advert tool) by the total number of New Zealanders in each age range (from the NZ census website) shows that the younger age ranges are almost totally assimilated already. Nearly 90% of the 20-24 age range is on Facebook already. The percentage of Kiwis on Facebook falls quickly as age increases – only 30% of 40-44 year olds are on Facebook. And the percentage continues to fall slowly as age increases – only 17% of the over 60’s are on Facebook.
Estimated percentage of the NZ population on Facebook, at each age range, for each gender and total.
Of course this is just an estimate, and in particular there is no guarantee that the number of users reported by Facebook is indeed correct. But given the popularity of Facebook in New Zealand, it can’t be too far wrong.
Facebook allows advertising on a cost-per-click basis as we illustrated last time. And these adverts can be targeted by age, city, gender, education, relationship status and keyword, allowing very strong demographic targeting. The advert tool has these options for the advert targeting:
Demographic targeting options for adverts on Facebook
As you can see, the estimated number of people is shown, and this is where I got the estimated number of NZ Facebook users at each age range from, including gender:
Estimated total number of people in NZ on Facebook
Estimated number of women over 30 in NZ on Facebook
Estimated number of married women over 30 in NZ on Facebook
P.S. Plenty of other blogs have used the same trick to get useful insights about the demographics on Facebook. Here are a selection of some of the best:
New Zealand’s largest search marketing agency, First Rate, has announced some new appointments and promotions. With offices in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne, it is the fastest growing online direct response agency in Australasia.
From left to right: Kevin Francis, Grant Osborne, Samuel Stadler and Jon Ostler
Former chief operating officer Kevin Francis has been promoted to chief executive officer. His opinion piece on search marketing for StopPress is a good read if you haven’t clicked already.
First Rate’s founder and former CEO, Jon Ostler, moves into a strategic role in Q Group, the owner of First Rate and other leading Australasian companies providing interactive advertising and digital marketing services. His new role involves heading up search and performance across Q Group’s portfolio.
Former Sydney-based consulting director Samuel Stadler returns to Auckland to become chief operating officer. Stadler joined the agency in 2003 and was responsible for launching the Sydney office in 2006.
Returning to First Rate is Grant Osborne, who takes up the role of director of strategy and performance. He rejoins First Rate after 15 months with Accor Hotels NZ and Fiji where he was e-marketing manager.
Forsyth Thompson is the new business development manager. Most recently Thompson was group advertising manager at APN.
As the demand for search marketing grows, Kevin Francis believes First Rate is well, first rate. “Our mission is to bring more advanced paid search, performance advertising, analytics and conversion optimisation approaches to the local market as it matures in its approach to search marketing.”
Online marketing is becoming a two-way conversation and the consumer now owns more of the conversation than ever before.
In traditional media marketing, the brand retained control of the conversation. The brand told you what it wanted you to hear and when and where it wanted you to hear it: At a certain time of the day on the TV, a carefully positioned billboard by the side of the road or in a direct mail pack that was delivered to your house on the exact day they wanted you to receive it. Email newsletters can now be sent using powerful eCRM tools based on segmentation information about the products recipients prefer to receive – and the best time the email should land in their inbox to increase the chances of a subsequent purchase.
Then Web 2.0 arrived.
First came customer reviews of products on websites such as Amazon, Dell and Wal-Mart, and seller feedback and reviews on eBay and TradeMe. And this sort of functionality certainly influences purchase behaviour: In a recent TNS poll, 28% of Kiwis bought goods as a result of reviews and 34% changed their mind after reading a review online!
We now have blogs, forums, Facebook and LinkedIn (plus other social networks such as MySpace and Bebo to an ever decreasing extent), and of course, the ubiquitous Twitter. Twitter is one of the fastest growing websites on the Internet – traffic has increased by 1000% in a year, and that’s not counting all those Twitterers using apps such as TweetDeck and Seismic.
Traditional advertising appears to have lost its influence, especially with one of the most desirable consumer groups – the young and the rich – and personal recommendations from friends are now more important than ever.
When you convince your customers to talk about you, you can capture the attention of potential new customers in a quick and effective manner. Twitter and Facebook give the consumer a voice in which not only to vent their frustration but, alternatively, satisfaction with a company or brand.
Dell recently announced that they have made over US$3m just through their adoption of Twitter and their collection of 1.3m followers. Obviously, to measure ROI from social media campaigns a web analytics tool like Google Analytics needs to be utilised, with all Twitter links tracked through to the sale conversion point.
And a recent study (PDF) by Penn State University found that 19% of tweets concerned brands, and 20% of those held sentiments about those brands. 50% of the tweets were positive and 33% were critical. It is imperative for brands to react to the criticism and turn those negatives into positives.
Here are a few example industries where Social Media is having an impact between a brand and its customers:
Airline Industry: Twitter and YouTube campaigns
Twitter is starting to make an impact upon the US airline industry – 1 in 5 visitors to JetBlue, Southwest and United Airlines also visit Twitter. Between them, these 3 sites have over 2 million Twitter followers (JetBlue makes up 65% of the followers).
JetBlue do a particularly impressive job – they have a JetBlue Twitter account (used mainly for customer service), the JetBlue Cheeps Twitter account where the latest deals are posted which then links through to a Twitter-specific landing page. Talk about adding value specifically for the Twitter followers!
The reason for the low number of United Airlines followers (35,000) compared to their competitors could be that they took to Social Media too late. It was only until their realisation of a video on YouTube did they take social media seriously. The video, titled “United Breaks Guitars” has had over 5.5m views which can’t have helped their brand image very much:
In contrast, the GrabaSeat promotion from Air New Zealand has almost 10,000 followers and Air New Zealand update their special deals around 7am every morning. Does it help the SEO for their site at all? Not directly (all Twitter posts are no-followed), but the buzz around the Twittersphere should help assist inbound links and act as a form of link bait, and undoubtedly, this will result in a traffic increase as well.
So, would I actually follow GrabaSeat (or JetBlue in the US) to hear about the latest deals…? – You bet your life I would. And would I tell my friends…? – I’m telling you now, aren’t I?
FMCGs: Facebook campaigns
Cadbury is a company in particular that listens to their customers within social media outlets and have responded twice in 2 high-profile turnarounds.
The first of these was when tens of thousands of chocolate aficionados in the UK lobbied on Facebook for Cadbury to bring back the Wispa chocolate bar. Cadbury ultimately succumbed because of this massive consumer demand, and they indeed brought back the much-loved bar.
More recently, thousands of Kiwis encouraged the company to remove Palm Oil from all their chocolate, in turn potentially preventing the deaths of thousands of Orang-Utans in Indonesia and Malaysia. Cadbury again succumbed to consumer pressure and the majority of those consumers with a previously negative perception, were turned into brand advocates telling their friends about the news on blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter and the most old-fashioned method, by talking to them in person.
Telecommunication Industry: Facebook and Twitter Campaigns
Vodafone UK took two approaches to social media and looked closely at how customers were describing their brand online.
Firstly, they discovered that the Vodafone brand was associated with negative comments on blog posts and forums. Their marketing team signed up on these blogs and forums, fully open and honest about who they were. They engaged with their critics, turned the negative feedback into positive feedback and now Vodafone frequently use forums and blogs to engage with and include customers in their marketing activities. They even interact with customers in this way online to gauge feedback on proposed products, services changes and enhancements. This has resulted in a drop in the negative perception of the company and has enhanced a ‘caring’ brand profile within the digital landscape.
In a separate initiative, Vodafone attracted users to their Facebook page by employing a team of customer service staff who could respond immediately to queries, resulting in authentic and transparent conversations with customers and prospects. Since then, Vodafone have rolled out the same program to Twitter which they have found to be equally successful. The Vodafone NZ arm now has a Twitter account with almost 5,000 followers and recently 2Degrees also implemented this strategy, gaining 2,000 followers.
Film and Cinema: Twitter Reputation Management
Did you know that the film Brüno saw a drop of almost 40% in ticket sales from opening day Friday to Saturday, and then even more into Sunday? The next 5 grossing films that weekend (Ice Age 3, Transformers 2, Public Enemies, The Proposal and The Hangover) all saw substantial increases in ticket sales from Friday to Saturday.
The only thing that changed was those that went to see Brüno then jumped on the Social Media “wagon”, twittering about how shocked, offended or even bored they were with it. Brüno was a trending topic for several days, with some Twitterers reported to have tweeted their dissatisfaction whilst actually watching the film. Brüno has been dubbed the first movie to be defeated by the Twitter effect.
Most marketers worry about unhappy customers telling friends about their negative experiences. But realise that users now have so many more ways of telling others about their positive brand experiences, too!
And what’s the opportunity cost of not engaging with consumers and turning the negative experiences into a positive ones…? If you won’t – your competitors will.
So what do we make of all of this?
Even if your brand is not willing to undertake a social media marketing “campaign” per se, monitoring what consumers are saying about your brand online needs to be a priority. (Quick tip – give SocialMention a spin).
Be prepared to engage on the customer’s terms at all times, including choice of social platform.
Understand what consumers say they actually want.
By getting involved first-hand, brands can improve their public perception and create brand champions for free.
