Our view at SMG is that one of the most important measures of success for a brand on Facebook draws from the actual number of interactions by people against its content, rather than just ‘likes’.

This week, I have looked at the total number of comments each supermarket has received against all its posts over the last seven days, and compared this total with how many ‘likes’ the supermarket has.

The results are very revealing. For every one hundred followers Waitrose has, it received 1.82 comments against all of the supermarket's posts this week. This is nearly three times the number of comments ASDA got, in second place. The question for other supermarkets is what is Waitrose doing from which they can learn?

Comments per 100 followers made against Facebook posts between 17-23 August

This is a copy of an article I have written for MediaTel, published on its site today.

Tesco announced on Monday it is going to create 20,000 jobs over the next two years, and invite existing staff to do apprenticeship placements as part of their current roles.

This is the first attempt by Richard Brasher, Tesco UK CEO, to revitalise the supermarket following its first profit warning in twenty years, and it is coupled with plans for the supermarket to redesign some of the stores in view of declining shopper satisfaction with the shopping experience.

Research we have conducted shows just how much this is needed. As I reported back in December, a gap has been growing between people’s experiences of the supermarket and their desires for a more pleasurable shopping environment and for more enjoyable communications from the brand.

Another topic we picked up is around the importance that Tesco shoppers give to community. Creating 20,000 new jobs is a statement of commitment to local communities. More than a million 16-24 year olds are unemployed, and Tesco has stressed that some of the new jobs would include apprenticeship placements to young unemployed people.

To get a view of what people think about Tesco’s job creation, I had a look at a selection of Twitter Tweets about this news from over the last five days.

The first thing I learned was about what not to tweet. Nearly all of them merely related the news. Given that most people will have already heard about this announcement, these Tweets didn’t add anything new. My guess is that tweets that included a short opinion were much more likely to be interesting to readers.

The most common theme was the opinion was that the news is a smokescreen for recent bad publicity over the Government's work placement scheme. The timing might look slightly suspicious, but this is disingenuous. Talk has been around for a couple of months that Tesco had plans to revive its stores and customer service, and this is good news for old, and hopefully new, Tesco shoppers, as well as for the unemployed.

The second most common theme was the question of how many of these are new jobs? In an interview with Sky News, Richard Brasher stressed that this figure is a net figure and does not include people moving around the business. They are a also a mix of full time and part time posts. This is good news for government in its pursuit of getting lone mums into the workplace, for whom full time jobs are not always suitable. However it is less good news for a job market in which people are predominantly looking for full time jobs.

The third theme, although much smaller, was around how much should Tesco’s investors be concerned? Providing better customer experiences through redesigning interiors and creating all these new jobs will be expensive, and is likely to wipe out profit growth this year. However, Tesco’s moves are strategic. By providing better in-store experiences, the supermarket hopes to keep its existing customers and bring in new, loyal, customers. This means more money moving through the tills and therefore profit growth.

One thing I find interesting about this last theme is just how much investors have become accustomed to short termism. We used to look froward to annual reports. Now we look forward to quarterly reports and minute by minute share movements. It is interesting that following the announcement, the Tesco share price dropped 2%. The good news investors should be taking however is that the supermarket is making important decisions that are likely to impact customer satisfaction, bring in new customers, create loyalty and therefore create future profit growth.

This is a version of an article I recently wrote for MediaTel

Connecting with people used to be a case of, 'Here is a product; here is some advertising. We hope you enjoy them'.

Today, brand owners increasingly understand they need to connect with people in order to enter into a dialogue with them, which can then be extended to friends and family. One way of achieving this is through the creation of meaningful experiences in social media, which people are then likely to share.

Nike is a brand that understands the power of establishing connections, which are then likely to multiply across people's networks. In 2010 alone, Nike spent nearly US$800 million on 'non-traditional' advertising. Before social media, the biggest audience Nike could achieve was during the Super Bowl, when it could reach 200 million people. Yet today, it reaches this number any day across all its sites and social media.

Yet until now it has been unclear to brand owners just how many people invite others into conversations through the experiences they have on brands' social media. Of course, once someone comments on a brand page, some of their Facebook friends will receive a message. Nevertheless, not everyone will read this update, and in any case, research consistently shows that face to face talk and recommendations about a brand, reinforced with meaningful content, are likely to have greater impacts.

Using our Social Media Behaviour Index application, we looked at the likelihood of people who post positive comments on the Facebook pages of different UK supermarkets to then recommend those pages to other people. An interesting set of findings emerged that should inform the kinds of experiences that supermarkets provide to their visitors.

People who are likely to post a positive comment on Waitrose's Facebook page are most likely to introduce other people to the conversation (i.e. recommend the page). For every one hundred people who are likely to post a positive comment, 88 of them are likely to recommend the page to at least one other person.

At the other end of the spectrum only 62 out of every 100 people who are likely to post a positive comment on Sainsbury's Facebook page are then likely to introduce other people to recommend the page.

The implication here for Sainsbury's is this. Although the experiences it provides on Facebook are successful at inviting people into a conversation with it, the supermarket needs to do more to create experiences for people that are relevant to their friends and families. If it does this, these people are then likely to share those experiences. The following are five things Sainsbury's should consider:

• Provide inspirational, entertaining and simple cooking videos. Waitrose does this, which is one reason its social media did so well at Christmas. Waitrose even has the caption against its videos, 'Share our love of food'
• Provide recipes, which people can also give away. Both Waitrose and Tesco do this. Tesco even invites people to upload and share their own recipes, and so share in the conversation
• Create competitions through which fans can include Facebook friends. For example, 'win a week's shopping for you and five of your Facebook friends'. To be included, these friends have to 'like' the supermarket.
• Provide vouchers that Facebook fans can give away. Better still, give additional reductions if they can show they have shared money off vouchers with friends on Facebook. For example, 'Double your discount if you share with ten of your Facebook friends'
• Give Facebook fans fuel vouchers to share with friends and family. Many are likely to visit the store to do a shop at the same time they fill their tanks