{"id":613,"date":"2014-12-09T19:05:05","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T19:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/?p=613"},"modified":"2015-01-04T19:12:33","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T19:12:33","slug":"how-much-advocacy-is-going-on-in-social","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/?p=613","title":{"rendered":"How Much Advocacy is Going On in Social?"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much does Social advocacy influence what people do? And what\u2019s the value to brands?<\/em><\/p>\n

Rob Blackie<\/a>, Director of Social at OgilvyOne UK, has investigated the topic further. The following look at the influencing power of Social advocacy appeared on his blog<\/a> on December 5, 2014, and a second post discussing the value to brands will follow.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The first thing to disentangle is how much Social advocacy goes on. Here I\u2019m defining Social advocacy as any content sharing from or through Social channels, or a recommendation (e.g. \u2018Innocent\u2019s new Thai curry is great!\u2019) that happens in Social.<\/p>\n

Unprompted advocacy of brands is often low\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s quickly dispose of the second of these.\u00a0Our global brand advocacy study in 2013<\/b><\/a>\u00a0found that\u00a0unprompted\u00a0recommendation in Social is generally relatively small. For instance hotels typically only have one positive piece of advocacy for every 100 mentions in Social, even when some of the hotels we studied had 80% customer satisfaction scores.<\/p>\n

Anecdotally from many listening studies I\u2019ve seen or done over the last 8 years I\u2019ve worked in Social, it is also the case that unprompted advocacy is often low.<\/p>\n

On the other hand prompted recommendation is now huge. Whether it\u2019s content programmes in Social channels, or product reviews on websites like Tripadvisor, there is a lot of this content online.<\/p>\n

How much though?<\/p>\n

Obviously it\u2019s very hard to track how much offline advocacy results from Social, but it is increasingly possible to get a handle on how much advocacy drives website traffic through people sharing links to it.<\/p>\n

How significant is Social sharing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s now well accepted* that standard website analytics doesn\u2019t give a complete picture of how many people visit a website because they have been passed a link. This is because many Social shares that refer website traffic are not recognised by analytics packages. This is called \u2018Dark Social\u2019.<\/p>\n

Chartbeat have handily summarised these challenges in their latest \u2018State of Dark Social<\/b><\/a>\u2019 report.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Chartbeat, 4th December 2014<\/p>\n

The upshot is that lots of traffic data that currently shows up in analytics as Direct traffic (i.e. typed in or bookmarked by a user) is probably resulting from a Social share.<\/p>\n

In turn this means that the proportion of website traffic resulting from Social sharing behaviours is dramatically higher than previously thought.<\/p>\n

I asked RadiumOne if we could have their UK data on Dark Social, and they have very kindly shared it. If you don\u2019t know\u00a0RadiumOne<\/b><\/a>, they are a Social CRM technology, largely used by media buyers and publishers, and their link sharing technology PO.ST (you\u2019ll have seen it used as a URL shortener) gathers data from 100,000 websites.<\/p>\n

Finding one: Social is three times as important as you thought<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dark Social accounts for 71% of UK Social traffic. \u00a0This is a pretty dramatic finding.<\/p>\n

\"png;base64454b11e75bd5a44f\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: RadiumOne data for the UK<\/p>\n

In fact for some categories this is even more extreme. For one category I\u2019m currently working on there are nine Dark Social visits to websites for each one traditionally measured Social visit.<\/p>\n

Finding two: Social is now competing with Search as the leading source of website traffic<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shareaholic recently suggested that\u00a0Social drives 31% of total website traffic<\/b><\/a>. Buzzfeed, obviously a publisher optimised for sharing, so at the extreme end of the spectrum now find that Socialdrives five times as much traffic as search<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

Source: Shareaholic, October 2014<\/p>\n

Conclusion: OK Social is a lot of traffic – but what\u2019s it worth?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social sharing isn\u2019t just a common behaviour now, it\u2019s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, source of traffic for many websites. And it\u2019s being prompted by content in Social channels.<\/p>\n

So if there\u2019s so much sharing going on, what\u2019s it worth?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what the next blog post will examine.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/p>\n

*For more reading on Dark Social see Alexis Madrigal\u2019s writings on Dark Social\u00a0here<\/b><\/a>\u00a0in 2012,\u00a0here<\/b><\/a>\u00a0following up in 2013 and\u00a0most recently here in 2014<\/b><\/a>, and\u00a0BusinessInsider\u2019s writeup of Chartbeat\u2019s recent data<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How much does Social advocacy influence what people do? And what\u2019s the value to brands? Rob Blackie, Director of Social at OgilvyOne UK, has investigated the topic further. The following look at the influencing power…<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialogilvy","comments-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":614,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions\/614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.timwyatt.ca\/test\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}