Question for the future – does the number of Facebook users who “like” a radio station give a reliable measure of the number of people who actually listen to a radio station? – at least for the under 50 crowd that are of most interest to advertisers?
I’ve started the process of gathering Facebook information – with 12,368 stations having a web site, it will take a while to have representative data unless I turned a script loose to gather it automatically, and I’m not sure that the data is worth the effort.
What do you think?
Here are some early results – let me know if you see anything interesting:
Could this data be a reliable indicator? Possibly, but I have a few doubts as to whether it’s worth spending much time on.
1. Look at the way people friend each other. With tons of people out there claiming hundreds (or thousands? I dunno) of friends, the ease of confirming a friend status with someone and the sheer number of “friends” seems to devalue the concept. It doesn’t seem like a big stretch to imagine that sort of behavior applying to “likes” for radio stations.
2. How often do the radio stations in question run promotions that say “We will if you like us on Facebook.” They may not necessarily like the station, just the possibility of winning a contest. Judging by the number of listings for AMFM Radio Licenses, LLC, I’d say some companies are using this strategy quite a bit.
3. How much longer will Facebook be THE social network everyone is using? It’s been king of the hill for sometime now, and Google seems to be encroaching on their territory. (This reason has less to do with the value of the data, and more to do the future value of your time spent mining the data.)
Just my two cents
AMFM is one of names Clear Channel uses…. So most of the list is Clear Channel
Cleaned up a bit more – the script is still doing its work…. basically working from major markets to small:
I note that News/Talk is barely using Facebook. That matches up with the notion that News/Talk has the bulk of its listeners in the 50+ age group.
KFAN-AM is misleading – it just switched from Sports to News/Talk on Monday
And Sports
I’m not in the radio business, but this seems to be lining up pretty well with things I read about whcih stations have strong ratings. In radio jargon, stations want a large P1 rating – a P1 is a person who always listens to the same radio station and is the type of person probably most likely to interact with the station via Facebook