Nielsen + Facebook Study

Definitions:
Live-Stream: A continuous news-feed that highlights what a Facebook user’s friend is doing. Examples of items that may appear on the live stream is “Sarah and Johnny ended their relationship” or “Sarah → Johnny: I never want to see your ugly face again”.
Social Ads: Advertisements on Facebook that entice a user to click by mentioning that one or more of their friends are fans of the brand highlighted in the advertisement.
Hybrid: A mixture or a something that is created by combining two or more different elements.

An article recently posted on AdAge discusses a study conducted by Nielsen and Facebook. The study was the first of its kind and focused on advertising recall, brand awareness and purchase intent. The findings of the study are below:


1. For the control group Facebook homepage ads averaged:
a. 10 percent increase in ad recall
b. 4 percent increase in brand awareness
c. 2 percent increase in purchase intent


2. When friends were mentioned in advertisements (social ads) ads averaged:
a. 16 percent increase in ad recall and a 30 percent increase when it was in a live stream
b. 8 percent increase in brand awareness when there was a social ad and a 13 percent increase when the mention was included in the live stream (organically)
c. 8 percent increase in purchase intent either with social ads mentioning friends or in the live stream


The take away:
The results are pretty straight forward - by achieving organic results via the live-stream, advertisements have a better chance at increasing advertising recall, brand awareness and purchase intent. This is pretty obvious. For example, if I went on Facebook and saw that 25 of my friends were fans of a brand that I was unaware of I would definitely click on the associated ad. Why? I trust my friends and I want to find out what great new item my friends are into, and why I have not heard about it. However, using the live-stream cannot stand-alone. It is too risky to assume that your brand is automatically going to be the talk of the town, instead advertisers need to create a hybrid and use both paid advertisements along with the added boost of organic mentions. Lets say one of my friends’ mentions a brand and I’ve never heard of it, this would not create a lasting impression and I probably would not search out the brand. Yet, if one of my friend mentioned a brand and a few hours later a “social-ad” appeared on my homepage with the same brand highlighted I believe that I would be much more likely to click on the ad, remember the brand and I would be more likely to intend to purchase the band.