Are you attracting a Fan or a Like? The mistaken rush to buy social visibility

As the buzz around social becomes stronger, many corporations coming from the era of tv and print just finished struggling through online advertising and are now finding themselves facing something completely transformative that pushes aside the principles decades of marketing experience has taught them. This has caused a reactionary response where marketers have been tasked with hitting metrics to claim victory to the stock holders, the board or just the executive team. The buying of a like has become a quick fix.

You can’t claim engagement if you’re buying it

Whether it’s a flier in a newspaper with a Facebook coupon, a tv spot with a Twitter url for a contest or an outright offer to buy fandom with a deep discount (see “Did This National Restaurant Chain Put Too Much Love Into the Like?” by Jay Baer) the result a purchase of a like rather than a connection with a customer. As this sort of buying becomes more common place, it’s not surprising that even as brands talk about wonderful ideas like engaging and building community, research from the Get Satisfaction blog shows that 43.5% of consumers are following brands for offers — and why not, that’s what they’re being told they’ll get.

Already missing the mark on relevancy, social sites penalize poor relevancy

With hundreds of connections per user noise has become so high that systems like Facebook’s EdgeRank now exist to tune down what a user, their friends, and even the overall “like” audience see from a brand page. Even on systems like Twitter that don’t have scoring of responses, the mere amount of information makes the less than relevant disappear into the bottom of a long stream. Thus the more a brand buys it’s following, the less each follower sees, or cares to pay attention to the brand. This becomes a cold reality when you discover that some brands are suppressed to over 80% of their audience.

This doesn’t mean abandoning growth goals, but rather settingt expectations about what they lead too

A brand that decides “I’m going to go out and advertise my page to build up” is wrong to use the word engage to refer to that program. Conversation is gone and while the activity is on a social channel, it is as much broadcast marketing as an email list or a weekly mailer… Even worse with virtually no segmentation offered by social networks, the existing loyal fan base is lumped in with the prospecting effort. Everyone becomes one jumbled mess.

On the other hand, a brand that says let’s insert a flier with orders to share a comment, or posts a sign inside our stores with a mention that you’ll find expert product insights, company updates and occasional offers on their social pages is building the expectation of dialogue and is attracting loyalty and certainly customers. A discount may be associated but the qualification is that you want to be an insider, a participant first, and get a little something in return for it in access and savings.

Bigger counts do not actually mean bigger reach or results

It’s a critical realization and once you step down the paid like road it’s very difficult to get back up the relevancy ladder.

Stop adding bad Facebook fans! Relevancy could be killing 60% of your Facebook traffic

Pageviews, visitors, time on site have all been eclipsed by fans as the go to metrics for digital engagement. For most digital / social managers, management is looking at one thing and one thing alone to gauge success: how many fans do we have on Facebook?! But if pageviews were a misleading indicator for websites, fan counts could be a killer robbing your company of a chance to succeed in the social space due to a little system known as EdgeRank that at this very minute is reducing the impact of your every post! How’s that for an intro?

Before I explain what EdgeRank is and how it could be killing your Facebook program, we have to look at the history of Facebook. When the site was new people connected with their direct network, whether that was fellow students or good friends, but now the joke is about how your grandma, the geek from high school, even your middle school gym teacher are all your Facebook friends. Add to that tens of thousands of businesses, charities and organizations all vying for your “LIKE” and the network has become awfully big – too big to just show you everything at once.

Enter EdgeRank, Facebook’s system for devising the first posts to show a user when they login and look at their news feed. Contrary to popular belief, the feed is not rank ordered on time and even if a user clicks the “view most recent” override, it is still personalizing out updates. Exact figures aren’t published [nor is the full details of how EdgeRank works so everything is a bit of conjecture] but I’ve seen estimates that place as few as 40% of brand posts as “viewable” to a given user on their news feed. 6 out of 10 never have a chance.

Now consider that something in the realm of 90%++ of all action on Facebook starts via the news feed. Pretty important to be seen there.

Just how potent is EdgeRank? Recently I’ve been working with a page for a company where we are talking about literally giving up on adding fans and working to re-engage or even replace who they already have. Why? Effectiveness. When this brand had just 150,000 “fans” their views ratio was 2:1 meaning that for every post nearly 300,000 impressions were generated – awesome exposure. Growth accelerated significantly thanks to ads and viral momentum but quality took a dive and the ratio has flipped to 1:3. Today with 600k fans they get fewer views with 5 times the users.

So how do you influence your EdgeRank to keep your posts in the top news feed, getting seen and doing their job? You think about your page the same way Facebook does — like a user. Continue to part II for 10 tips on what to do, and what to avoid, to maximize your Facebook views.

Become a fan is not a call to action. Create better social following campaigns.

So much emphasis is being placed on driving Facebook “likes”, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers these days that we seem to be forgetting the user in the drive to grow, grow, grow. In the earl[ier] days of social networking it was fairly novel just to have a brand page that you promoted, regularly posted too, and *gasp* replied on. Now that’s the norm. That and a lot more. So standing out requires doing more than raising your hand and saying “I’m here”.

People may love your product but is that enough to get you selected as the brand they follow if you don't tell them why?

Step back and think about it… the call to action “become a fan” has got to be one of the most loaded statements in the history of marketing.

- A lifetime of purchases and evangelizing, was I not a fan before I joined your Facebook page?

- Is my “like” that strong of an endorsement that it makes me a fan versus just a follower?

- What is a fan? What’s so special about being one?

We can do better.

Exclusives, Useful Updates, Coupons, and even Just Brand Affinity can all be reasons to join up. But we have to spell them out so people know what they're getting.

Joining your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or other channels may joining something on a “social” site but it’s still a conversion action just like any other to the user. They’re a person, you’re a business. Thankfully, all that time we spend in building content strategies, making the right branded applications and offering a strong combination of “value” from discounts to inside looks to contests is all the ammo to sell joining up. It just needs to be sold.

So let’s stop telling people just to “fan” or “follow” or “like” us and tell them the full message.

  1. What is it you want them to do exactly?
  2. What does they get for doing this? What’s in it for them?
  3. What does becoming a fan really mean? What do you expect out of a fan? What can they do?

Without a defined offering for why someone should join it’s hard to know their value as a business either. How are you measuring likes versus loyalty in Facebook if the only goal is one action?

Thankfully the YouTube community has held onto some sense here and I’ve found a great video explaining how you get followers by PhilipDeFranco, a top followed channel. Not surprisingly, aside from a few gimmick ideas it all comes back down to having a clear offering that lets you stand out. Surprised?

Later this week I’ll be posting up a few examples of campaigns that successful brands are using to drive social interaction but if you have your own story, leave a comment.