A September 2009 article on “The Situation,” a blog for entertainment marketers, illustrates an early example of successfully using analytic tools to gain an understanding of a target audience in order to craft a social media strategy. While the article is already outdated in its discussion on whether or not a brand should be on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, its methods for tracking consumers’ social media usage are still applicable to many industries.
The study examines how Broadway ticket buyers differ in their usage of social media and whether or not these users are new audiences or just the same ticket buyers already targeted through other marketing efforts.
The part of the study most relevant to our discussions on analytic tools centers on trying to discover how the behaviors of those social networking users varies from other online users. Using analytic tools, the researchers tracked how users on Facebook and Twitter acted after clicking on a link that directed them to the official Broadway musical website. They compared these statistics against general web traffic to the musical’s websites via regular Internet usage.
Those visitors to the official websites that clicked through from Facebook or Twitter visited 30% more pages per visit and spent 40% more of their time on the page compared to regular Internet visitors. Also, visitors through social networking were more actively engaged in all aspects of the site, checking out information about the cast, the show’s story, and news before moving into the ticketing phase. Twitter was responsible for more referral visits to the official website than Facebook, although Twitter users spent the least time on the website. This is really not surprising considering the very nature of Twitter is speed and brevity. The Facebook visitors proved to be an audience that was looking to learn something new and become engaged, while Twitter users are “all about quick hits of actionable content.”
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