At the Path Interactive offices in New York City, we bleed Big Blue. That’s why we couldn’t help but be a little gleeful when we concluded after our week-long Super Bowl sentiment analysis that New York Giants fans bring it hardest when it comes to smack talk. It’s also why we weren’t surprised when all that expert Boston-bashing ended up working in the Giants’ favor, helping New York come out on top 21-17 in Indianapolis this weekend.

We’ve put together a handy infographic to summarize last week’s findings, updated with stats from Super Bowl Sunday. We weren’t surprised to see that Patriots fans finally woke up on game day, just edging out New York in the storm of insults that peaked that day. We don’t begrudge them that, though…they’re just sore losers.

Like this infographic? There’s more where that came from: follow our very own @sammirbb. Follow @PathInteractive for more digital marketing news and insights.

To learn more about Path Interactive’s industry-leading social media marketing tools and techniques, just call or contact us.

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On our 5^th day of analyzing Super Bowl social media sentiments and general fan bashing, we’re starting to get a nice picture of how people tweet, blog, and snap their hatred of the other team and its players. Predictably, things are starting to heat up as we get closer and closer to Super Bowl Sunday and New York fans are looking unstoppable.

Fans were laying down the smack talk at a fairly equal pace for most of the week, with Patriots haters just edging out the Bostonites Sunday through Wednesday. But around Thursday evening, Patriots fans began turning up the heat on New Yorkers:

But while Giants-team haters may be taking the lead, those with grudges against Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Rob Gronkowski have been dominating social media all week long. With peaks last Sunday night and Friday morning, it’s apparent once again that Twitter loves to hate the Brady Bunch.

You can see the volume of vitriol in the pie charts from the past 5 days below, as well.

So we’ve finally got a resolution to the question we set out to answer: Who talks the best trash, New England or New York? And it turns out New York Giants fans hate the Patriots more than Patriots fans hate the Giants.

We also learned that Boston’s team quarterback makes quite a handsome target, which didn’t help matters much for the Patriots. To head coach Belichick: next time, draft a quarterback who’s not quite so pretty or maritally blessed, and you may avoid some of the internet’s most colorful contempt.

Predicting Winners with Social Media

In the week running up to the Super Bowl XLVI the Patriots were losing roundly to the Giants in our smack-talk-off. Some think that social buzz volume could be an indicator of future athletic triumphs…and if that’s the case, we’ll be betting on our very own scorching, slandering, and slamming New York Giants.

Stay tuned, we’ve got one more bonus post for you coming up on Monday with a wrap-up of the weekend’s Super Bowl-related social activity and a handy infograph to show your friends!

Follow @PathInteractive or @sarahvnyc to see the latest on our study of the Super Bowl haterade parade.

After taking a look at the most-talked about Super Bowl players yesterday, we’re going a little deeper to examine how much heat the top 2 players and their coaches are taking.

We chose the choicest insulting keywords from Monday’s overview (“suck,” “hate,” and “f**k”) and looked at how often they were associated with each team’s quarterback, their second-most popular player, and their coach.

Over the past 3 days, Patriots team members have taken the most heat by far. Most of this ire is directed at quarterback Tom Brady, whose last name was associated with 820 of the nastiest insults over the past week. Giants quarterback Eli Manning came in second, followed by tight end Gronkowski of the Patriots. Both coaches and Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz got off fairly easy, coming in far behind the two quarterbacks.

While most nastiness is directed at the quarterbacks in the week preceding the Super Bowl, it’s likely that during Sunday’s game key players and coaches will get their turn to sweat under the wrath of the public. We expect to see a lot more abuses thrown at Coach Bill Belichick, for instance – a character many football fans love to hate.

Individual players aside, the team-bashing tides are starting to turn as the week progresses, with Giants fans dominating negative conversations about the Patriots yesterday. It looks like this trend might continue, so look out for quite a bit of Brady-hate to come in the next few days!

Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up our pre-Super Bowl sentiment analysis with some nice infographics and predictions for the weekend’s big game. We’ll have to wait until Monday to see which team actually won this Super Bowl social media face-off. Stay tuned!

Day 5: Yeah, New Yorkers Really Are Rude

Follow @PathInteractive or @sarahvnyc to see the latest on our study of the Super Bowl haterade parade.

We’re taking a mid-week break from all the negativity in our Super Bowl sentiment analysis to take a closer look at how fans are talking about their (or their rival) team players.

We focused on individual players today because most of our negative sentiment monitoring for the past few days has revealed that when fans sound off about a rival team, they often single out one of the team’s players. In fact, sometimes the existence of that player can be the sole reason they hate the other team.

We started today by weighing which players were talked about most consistently. To do this, we created a search that included the every player from each team’s active roster (including special teams). We also included a few common nickname variations (for instance, Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski often goes by “Gronk”). In total, we surveyed the social buzz around 108 players.

The first thing we noticed? Patriots players are far more buzz-worthy than Giants players.

In just one day (Tuesday, January 31), there were 112,637 mentions of New England Patriots team members, 70% of which were on Twitter alone. By comparison, New York Giants team members received only 31,430 mentions during the same time frame. Patriots players enjoy 3.5 times more conversations than their New York counterparts!

So we can surmise from these findings that while fans tend to bash each other’s teams at much more comparable rates, overall mention rates (positive and negative) for the players themselves are drastically different. It’s also interesting to note that Twitter plays a much larger role when discussing players themselves, compared to the teams as a whole.

Using the Radian6 monitoring tool, we then created word clouds to illustrate the conversation subjects around each team’s player roster over the past 3 days (since we began this sentiment analysis). With these word clouds, it was pretty clear which team members featured most in the many tweets, blogs, status updates, and discussions of Super Bowl fans:

New England Patriots players

For the New England Patriots, who own most of the social conversations, quarterback Tom Brady is the obvious dominating topic. Other Patriots players with notable buzz were tight end Rob Gronkowski, wide receivers Wes Welker and Chad Ochocinco, and linebacker Dane Fletcher.

For the New York Giants, conversations generally centered around quarterback Eli Manning, wide receiver Victor Cruz, running back Ahmad Bradshaw, defensive end Osi Umenyiora, and running back Brandon Jacobs.

From this data we can infer that in general, the two quarterbacks of each team are making up the bulk of social conversations. (This isn’t surprising, since quarterbacks tend to be the driving force and personality behind every football team. It’s not uncommon for them to become lighting rods for fans’ ire.)

Tomorrow we’ll be measuring Super Bowl sentiments around quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning, the most popular alternative team members (as deduced from today’s study) Ron Gronkowski and Victor Cruz, and the coaches of each team. Our bet: as team figureheads, quarterbacks and their coaches will endure the harshest abuse as the Super Bowl draws closer. Stay tuned!

Day 4: In Pre-#SuperBowl Social Buzz, Brady-Bashing Getting Out of Hand

Follow @PathInteractive or @sarahvnyc to see the latest on our study of the Super Bowl haterade parade.

This week, there are thousands of Super Bowl related comments, and they are likely going to increase as we draw closer to the Super Bowl, but how many of them are negative towards the other team?  In our week-long series, and as mentioned in our first post about super bowl negative sentiment, we are taking a look at negative sentiment, users who are posting on social media sites with a negative slant towards the other team when it comes to Super Bowl XLVI.  Watch out for our full analysis on Friday.

Who’s the best at trash talking – New Yorkers, or Bostonians?

With Super Bowl Sunday coming up in just a few days, our office decided to take a look at the conversations happening around the big game and prove exactly how well each team’s fan base talks trash.

To do this, we started the week running up to the Superbowl by examining conversations happening on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, news sites, and other social hubs. We specifically were interested in how much (and how brutally) fans from each East Coast team were dissing and dismissing each other, so we first got to work identifying the most common insults.

It turns out the most common football insults are pretty predictable. “Suck,” “lose,” “beat,” “hate,” as well as a few choice four-letter words turn out to be the most common themes in sports-themed internet dissing, so we formulated a study that looked for each team’s name in conjunction with these specific negative word associations. Also included in our net were team-specific put-downs, such as fans calling the New England Patriots the “Patsies,” or the New York Giants the “Midgets.”

Forming these studies turns out to be a lot harder than we imagined, since most fans tend to mention both teams in the same sentence along with at least one negative keyword. That makes it hard to filter negative sentiments aimed towards one specific team, since comments like “Patriots suck! Giants will win!” looks similar in search to “Giants suck! Patriots will win!” This makes the ordering of keywords in these queries vital.

It also turns out that quite a few people aren’t excited to see either team. We saw quite a few angry commenters upset that the Cowboys, 49ers, or Packers weren’t in the Superbowl. (We decided to count equal-opportunity trash-talkers for the purposes of our study.)

On Day 1 of our study (the Monday before Superbowl Sunday), both fan bases seem to be laying down the smack talk with equal passion. Patriots fans appear to have a slight edge today, with ONE extra negative comment to take the win.Vengeful Patriots fans also seem to take to Twitter more than Giants fans, while more ruthless Giants fans than Patriots use Facebook.

Stay tuned this week as the Superbowl XLVI gets closer – we’ll be watching to see how the insults start flying, and we’ll be sharing or favorites along with ongoing social insights.

Day 2: Patriots Fans Ramp Up Insults As Super Bowl Gets Closer

Day 3: Patriots Players Much More Interesting Than Giants Players…

Day 4: All This Brady-Bashing Getting Out of Hand

Day 5: Yeah, New Yorkers Really Are Rude

Facebook is well on its way to being profitable, posting 1.86 billion in Ad revenue last year alone.  With that type of growth, Facebook is demanding more on it’s cost per clicks.  Earlier this year, there was a 54% quarter over quarter increase on cost per clicks via the platform, and a projected 30-40% increase in the next year.

So how much does it cost?  Im going to have to pull out the “It depends” card.  Based on our portfolio over the last year, we are currently are experiencing an average 1-$2 per click on a typical campaign, but have gone as low as 13 cents a click on a campaign we did featuring Lady Gaga.  We also run CPM campaigns as well, which in all cases are well under a $1.00 per thousand.  Although these costs are a lot lower than Google, click thru rates are much lower, and is also a metric that affects your costs per clicks on Facebook.  Managing your ads can lead to long term savings.

There are a number of ways you can impact and manage your facebook ad costs, below are a few.

Break up your likes and interests into micro targeted groups.  The more targeted you are, the more relevant.  The more relevant, the less you are spending on broader interests that may not perform as well.  Breaking it out gives you this insight as to who is converting into a like, engagement, visit, etc.  Even if this may lead to a higher per click cost, your desired actions will be more favorable.

Concentrate on images, and have multiple variations of them.  Facebook ads are highly dependent on images, and they can make or break your campaign.  Images on FB can  lead to “ad fatigue” or “ad blindness”, a reaction, or lack of reaction in this case, to seeing the same ad with the same image popping up multiple times.  Invest time in the selection of your images and have multiple ads with different images.  Keep an eye on the frequency of times uniques saw the ad as well as the length of time it has been running.  Switching it up with another image can improve your click thru rate which assists in managing the costs per click.

For some more upcoming tactics, be sure to like our page and keep an eye out for some upcoming content related to Facebook Ad Management and other Digital tips.

@rubenq

 Changes to Facebook Ads

There are three immediately obvious ad changes: position, number of ads, and duration.  Here’s a screenshot of the current ad layout:

There are 3 ads, and they are pretty much lost on the page, as there’s nothing to make them stand out from recommendations, people you know, etc.  Also, if one scrolls down the page, the ads disappear.

Here’s how ads look in the Timeline:

There are now only two ads.  They stand out from the rest of the page’s content much better, and they stay visible as one scrolls down the page:

 Effects of the New Facebook Ads

So, the Timeline pages have fewer ads, and those ads stay visible for a longer period of time.  This will result in a significant drop in total impressions.  Taken by itself, this drop would naturally result in an overall increase in bids and costs per click (CPCs), as advertisers fight over less inventory.  However, the change to a much more visible place on the page, as well as the increased duration of each impression, will most likely result in higher click through rates (CTRs) which, taken alone, would result in lower CPCs.  At an account level, these competing forces may simply cancel each other out, leaving account-level costs & clicks unchanged.  That said, the lower level of competition and longer duration for each individual impression should result in a wider range of separation between good ads & bad, enabling better optimization.

One variable we will be watching with interest in the Timeline is the effect of ad copy length on CTR.  We have typically found that shorter ad copy works better than long ad copy, all else being equal.  On the Timeline, however, we suspect that shorter ad copy may be less effective.  Especially if the ad is in top position, shorter ad copy will mean less separation between your title and image and the other ad’s title and image.  We will be testing this heavily in the coming weeks, watch this space for more analysis.

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1) Many of these were done several years ago, before the fast-impending age of social media marketing fatigue. It’s difficult to know if the same engagement levels would occur with these campaigns now, now that social media spaces are becoming more and more saturated by brands. For instance, we have yet to see a social marketing campaign for movies with the same level of success as The Blair Witch Project in 1999, which many say marks one of the very first-ever viral campaigns.

2) Most of these campaigns included some element of personalization. Whether it’s VitaminWater’s create-your-own-flavor campaign, BMW’s “What drives you?” graffiti contest, or OfficeMax’s Elf Yourself, the best social media campaigns usually have some element of advanced engagement. “Views” don’t always cut it; for a campaign to work, users have to be able to own it in some way. In fact, the Old Spice Guy’s biggest success was not just in video/commercial views, but through popular question-and-answer engagements on Twitter and other outlets.

In Pictures: Best-Ever Social Media Campaigns – Forbes.com

After years of figuring out and then connecting with mom bloggers, I think that Tumblr could change not only the way moms blog, but also who blogs and who reads them.

MediaPost Publications 4 Reasons To Watch Tumblr 09/07/2011

Related Reading:
Dads On Tech – Featuring Ramon B. Nuez Jr.
Introducing Twitter Moms Seal of Approval
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