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New Zealand’s love affair with Facebook

As a team at a social media agency, it was great to hear that digital is now the largest recipient of advertising dollars, according to turnover data compiled by the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority.

Not only that, the World Internet Project New Zealand reports that two-thirds of Kiwi Internet users visit social media every day. 

That’s not a particularly surprising statistic; visit any home, workplace or public place and you’ll see plenty of us focused on our screens, interacting with our friends and whanau via one social network or another.

But not all social networks are created equal. Here’s how the main players stack up in New Zealand, according to Nielsen Online Ratings: 

Facebook is New Zealand’s second most popular online destination (after Google Search) – and the place where Kiwis spend more time online than anywhere else: an average of 10 hours and 43 minutes per month, according to Nielsen Online Ratings (June 2017).

All these statistics make Facebook one of New Zealand’s most significant advertising media – as well as the reason we’ve developed The New Zealand Facebook Report, which takes an in-depth look at Facebook from the perspective of over 24,000 New Zealand businesses.

In the report, we cover a wide range of Facebook-related topics, including: 

  • What New Zealand businesses most want to know about Facebook
  • How New Zealand marketers are using Facebook
  • The most effective Facebook marketing strategies
  • The latest Facebook developments, and how New Zealand businesses can take advantage of these capabilities 

You can download the full report free from our website at mosh.co.nz/facebook-report, but here we’ve included some of the highlights. 

New Zealand Businesses and their three Key Questions about Facebook

We’ve found that Kiwi businesses typically want to know the answers to three key questions before deciding what to do about Facebook. 

Q 1 Why should my business use Facebook?

We’ve already begun to touch on the logic of why your business should be on Facebook. But let’s take a moment to spell out some of the more compelling reasons why you are really missing out if you aren’t actively promoting your products and services on New Zealand’s favourite social network.

1 ) Your prospects and customers are on Facebook every day
We’ve already seen that New Zealanders visit Facebook regularly and in large numbers. These days, all age groups are well represented on Facebook. 

2) Your competitors are on Facebook, too
We track the performance of more than 24,000 New Zealand Facebook pages, across 700 product and service categories.

On average, each page has attracted 4,785 followers (as at August 2017). That’s across our whole database. The top 100 New Zealand pages average 450,818 followers and the most popular New Zealand Facebook page, for our very own All Blacks, has 4.4 million followers.

If you’re not already active on Facebook, you can be sure that your competitors are.

3) People are talking
Facebook has a metric called PTAT (‘People Talking About This’), which tracks consumer engagement with pages on a weekly basis.

According to the PTAT metric, in late August 2017 the New Zealand Facebook pages in our database averaged 135 weekly interactions (representing 2.82 percent engagement by the 4785 followers of the average page). The Top 100 most-talked-about New Zealand Facebook pages averaged 18,307 “talks”, led by the NZ Herald with 281,264 interactions.

That’s a whole lot of conversations in which you simply aren’t participating if you’re not on Facebook. 

Q 2 How are New Zealand businesses using Facebook effectively?

We have observed a wide range of smart Facebook strategies over the years, but here are two (of the many approaches we cover in the NZ Facebook Report) that are really resonating in 2017. 

1) Leveraging Passionate Followers
Blenheim Dive Centre, despite having only 1,355 followers, achieves 984 reactions, 594 shares, 416 comments and 92,000 video views with this single post showing crays in action – simple, but massively appealing to those who love diving. 

2) Cater to your audience
Similarly, Choppers Auto Body Shop on Auckland’s North Shore really understands what its audience wants to see, and delivers a drool-worthy set of photographs to its eager followers.

Q 3 What types of posts really work on Facebook?
Businesses that simply post randomly on Facebook soon discover that their followers really aren’t interested in an ongoing stream of self-promotional announcements.

To connect with your customers or prospects, you need to create posts that are both interesting and relevant (to your followers).

So what types of posts do actually work?

We have identified some twenty different approaches that connect with, and engage, consumers both in New Zealand and around the world. 

Here are two of those approaches: 

1 ) Behind the scenes
Surveys show that consumers follow brand pages on Facebook (1) to receive special offers and deals; (2) to show their support for the brand; and (3) to be in-the-know and find out about brand-related activities first.

An effective Facebook posting strategy to capitalise on that interest: provide sneak peeks to your followers. Here’s an example from an extreme sporting event: 

2) Useful Advice and Tips
Another approach, which is more consistent and repeatable: provide useful, helpful advice and information that is both appropriate for your brand and relevant for your customers.

Here is an example from a local builder, which meets both those criteria: 

Want more Facebook nerdery?

Looking at the data from over 24,000 New Zealand Facebook pages has uncovered a heap of insights, as well as being a nice way to see which brands are killing it and which are in need of help. It’s likely that brands you follow, manage or indeed own, will be in the analysis, so to see how they stack up, check out the complete NZ Facebook Report on our website at mosh.co.nz 

About Mosh

Mosh has been a specialist social media marketing agency since 2009, serving a client list that includes some of New Zealand’s biggest brands. “Everything we do, every piece of content we produce, has a purpose, and we can trace that back to your brand’s objectives,” says Jeremy Marks, managing director. “We pride ourselves on delivering those measurable outcomes, which so many other forms of marketing can’t do”. 

  • This story is part of a content partnership with Mosh.

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