Earlier this month, late night TV host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel declared November 17th as National UnFriend Day, a day for getting rid of “friends who are not really friends.”
A user named Maktar on UrbanDictionary defined “unfriend” as the following:
“The act of removing a friend from your Facebook account. Compulsive people prune their friend list periodically, removing people that they no longer have contact with. More often though, unfriending is only done when a particular friend’s updates and self-promotions become so annoying that you can no longer stand hearing about them. Or you might unfriend someone when they piss you off, however, this is not very effective since the person who is unfriended is not notified that you unfriended them and you’d be better off to keep them as a friend and plot your revenge.”
As much glee as we might get from whittling down those so-called “non-friend friends,” unfortunately for marketers the same principles above can be applied to product/brand pages.
When a company’s Facebook page fails to interact with their fans in the right way– not posting in a timely manner, not posting relevant content, not making actual interactions at all– not only does it reflect on the company’s lack of social media savvy, but on the company’s services and products as well.
Recently, Beyond completed a study analyzing over 14,000 posts on the corporate Facebook Fan pages of the world’s 100 most valuable brands, as well as a consumer poll of near 4,000 people based in the UK and the US. The purpose of the study was to find out why people become Fans, what keeps them engaged on Fan pages, what the true sentiment of people’s contributions are, and how users can become brand advocates.
After analyzing all this information, we’ve developed a list of guidelines to help brands develop their own digital brand interaction strategies. We call this list…
The Facebook Four
1) Provide fans with offers and discounts
Our study found that 42% of people friend a brand to get a discount or offer. Putting together an incentive program for your loyal fans to run with the rest of your content can be crucial to success. Promoting your page as a channel for reward distribution as well as a place for conversation must be done with a clear strategy. Posting a coupon is far different than actually maintaining consumer loyalty. Making sure to follow up customer questions and comments about different offers is inherent to a continued relationship.
2) Your reputational risk is lower than you think, so don’t just focus on managing the negative
We found that only 5% of all comments were negative. While there is always the ability to monitor and delete this kinds of responses, sometimes the better response is a public one. If you find a complaint, address it, and if you can, direct an extended conversation in private, away from the main page. On the other hand, sometimes other fans might be the people coming to the rescue…
3) Empower your fans!
Our study showed that fans are 9 times more likely to help another fan than a brand itself. This isn’t to say that brands are lazy, it’s that a fan page is more successful if it remains exactly that: a page for fans. Our data suggests that fans may feel uncomfortable on pages where brands appear to be closely monitoring conversations. While it is okay to start a conversation by posting a question to all fans, for example, it appears to be off-putting when companies respond too often to fan comments. As you begin to amass more followers, aim for a ratio of brand comments to fan comments of 1:10. You can do this by using polls to increase comment levels as well as asking fans for content ideas.
4) Fans prefer images over video
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, it’s also worth much more time. Posts that contained a mixture of media types (e.g., an image and text) tended to receive the most likes. This may have to do with the time it takes to watch video versus seeing a quick photo with an accompanying quote, as well as embeddability across different channels. That said, don’t dismiss fancy applications altogether. Higher fan count was correlated with a greater number of tabs, including applications, on a company’s page. Leveraging the two can be the key to rich and active brand community.
David Hargreaves, our CEO had this to say about consumer engagement and social media:
“Brands are clearly struggling to embrace the new rules of conversational marketing which requires them to act as catalysts of the conversation and not control it. This research clearly shows that those brands that focus on empowering fans, creating interesting content to spark conversations and providing a light corporate touch not only have more fans but those fans are more engaged.”
In short, make sure your page is a publisher, purveyor, and proponent of your brand.
Watch the video:
Want to read the whole whitepaper? Find it in the sidebar or right-click, save-as here.
Bonus! As part of conducting the Brand Interaction Study and sharing its findings with brands, we are offering a limited number of two-hour workshops with brands where we’ll share insights with brands and provide some simple, easy to follow recommendations for increasing engagement across their social platforms.