Tag Archives: Engagement

engagement vs fan count, the Facebook brand page dilemma

For the last few years, brands have had the opportunity to showcase themselves on Facebook by way of a page.  The businesses with any amount of foresight jumped aboard, some waited a bit but eventually joined the party, and amazingly enough – there are still some companies that haven’t yet made the social leap.  The brands that have been in the Facebook game for more than two years have seen several different versions of business pages and should be seasoned veterans by now.

Everyone had to start over to some extent when Timeline hit the scene a few months ago, on February 29.  And when I say start over I am referring to the new layout and aesthetics, the new functionality like highlighting and pinning posts, the admin panel, and the ability for brand pages to respond to fans through private messages.  However, the original ole’ concepts and theories remain strong, based on your brand’s Facebook strategy.

There has been the argument that timeline hopes to cause fans to spend more time on the actual brand page, thus, increasing engagement.  But, this original thought has proved to not necessarily be the case.  In many brands’ experiences it has actually been the opposite.  On the flip side, there has been data showing that it has in fact increased page engagement.  So, who the hell knows?  Let’s give it some more time…especially if Mashable is going to put these two conflicting articles out only a month apart.

Anyway, what’s the big dilemma?  If you manage a brand page you know what I’m talking about.  It’s the age old (not really very old at all) argument of engagement with fans versus the number of fans that you have.  What’s the right way to go?

The correct answer: both.  Totally depends on your business, what your strategy is, and why you are doing it.  Maybe you want to build the crap out of your fan base right now so that you can roll out a huge engagement plan in 6 months.  Being completely honest, growing a large fan base organically is hard.  Great content definitely helps, but sometimes you need a boost.  And, like Major League Baseball over the last twenty years, if everyone’s doing it you kind of have to play along, too, if you want to stay in the competition.  That was a steroids joke.  It’s really not that different.  It’s all cheating.  The difference, buying Facebook fans is legal and is now to some extent the norm.  Steroids land you in an empty house hanging out with Jose Canseco.

There was a bomb dropped on Facebook a few weeks ago when General Motors announced they’re pulling $10 Million of Facebook advertising due to ineffectiveness.  That’s a perfect example of Facebook paid products being part of an overall strategy for an end goal as it affects their business.  They weren’t seeing results in that end goal from the Facebook ads; people buying more cars.  They knew what they were doing and didn’t see it working.  Pull the plug.

Some brands get bashed for spending a lot of money on fans, but you know what?  If they’re spending a lot of money then they probably know what they are doing, or at least their agency does.  They more than likely have an “after we buy all the fans” plan.  If they don’t and really are just buying fans strictly for a big number, well, then, that is just kind of silly.  That is not technically a strategy.  That is just doing it to look good.  But you know what else?  Even just looking good with a huge number could be considered a strategy.  Brand awareness.

I am personally not a huge fan of ruthlessly acquiring fans, as I think the actual number should not be the goal.  A big number is great, but it doesn’t matter if those fans don’t engage with your content and connect with your brand.  That is the whole point of being on Facebook, to connect people with your brand, socially; humanizing your brand by way of completely new kinds of interactions and content.  There are brands on Facebook that literally don’t spend any money and have a very solid fan base with very engaging fans.  More power to them.

It should all stem from content, first and foremost.

Using paid acquisition Facebook products to gain new fans is fine and can be part of a very successful social strategy and/or campaign, but it shouldn’t be the strategy.  Disclaimer: unless you fall into the category I mention above and truly are out to just be #1.

To sum it up, engagement is huge and should really be the end goal, and fan acquisition can play a vital role in following through with part of a social strategy or campaign.  So, both sides of the argument can be the correct answer – it depends on your business, and what you are doing with your presence on Facebook (voice, content, strategy and beyond).

Everyone has a different social strategy, and everyone has an argument.  That’s the fun – at this point there really isn’t a “right” or “wrong” answer, only right and wrong ways to go about doing it.   But even those could be argued.  Ah, this is a blast.

****Note: I wrote this in about 15 minutes.  I write what comes to mind and hit “post.”  This could be WAY longer if I wanted to get into TAT scores, engagement rates (depending on which analytics tool you are using), all the other non-acquisition-driving Facebook paid products that are now available, and probably a slew of other things that would be relevant to what I wrote about above.  But, I am tired and don’t want to dive that deep today.  My kid got me up at 5:15 AM.  Done.

Twitter…slowing down while trying to grow

No, I am not leaving Twitter. Yet.  I will at least wait this one out.  And that wait, in my opinion, is getting shorter and shorter.

Before I get into any kind of facts or numbers I’ll just throw out some observations, which are completely not based on any solid fact or number.  Imagine that?  Over the last several months it looks as though the Twitterverse is slowing down.  This is based on what feels like a huge decrease in activity from my own personal followers and friends and way less mentions.  I know that you are probably thinking, “Well, then don’t put out terrible content.”  Ha.  This could be true, but what I am saying about it slowing down could also be true.

I have 350 followers.  Not huge, but a solid number made up of personal friends, business colleagues, industry experts and of course some randoms.  This group in the past had consistently been interactive and engaging.  Not so much anymore. I also follow many of these people, many of which barely even tweet now.  Just here and there, random updates.  Nothing like 2009-2011.  The entertainment factor of Twitter has taken a huge hit, at least for me, that’s for sure.

Now on to some numbers and facts.

A recent article by TechCrunch had some big news- Pinterest has now passed Twitter on the referral traffic generating scale.  In other words, Pinterest is now simply moving people around the web more than Twitter.  Businesses should take note.

The use has definitely declined by the tweeps on Twitter.  Mashable’s visual history of Twitter infograph lays out exactly that point.  150 million of the 200 million registered users do not log in to Twitter by day, and half of its registered users only log in once a month.  Of every 100 accounts, 20 are completely inactive, dead accounts.  And spammers?  Yeah, the accounts where people are following no one and also have no followers, and they mention you in a tweet with a random link?  Yeah.  Those. Are. Sweet.

Twitter isn’t exactly the log in once a month kind of social platform.  If you’re doing that, you’re kind of missing the point.

As I was thinking about this subject for a blog, I saw a Lowe’s TV commercial.  I found this very interesting and right on par with what I’m saying…at the end they flashed their social platform icons: Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.  No Twitter.  They do still have it on their website, but what does that say that they’d scrap Twitter from their social priorities to their television audience?  I think it says a lot.

There is also a flip-side to this argument, and Twitter is doing everything they can to keep it strong.  They recently launched brand pages for some hand-picked lucky companies to test out.  To be honest, at this point it isn’t much to get excited about.  Check out Coca-cola’s brand Twitter page; not really many bells and whistles.  There is space for a larger image or expanded video links with a thumbnail, and then a banner at the top where you can feature a hashtag or tagline.  Exciting.  Sarcasm.

Some folks do believe Twitter is doing more and more to enhance the brand pages.  I guess it’s yet to be seen, but simply upping the monetization of Twitter advertising doesn’t really cut it, in my opinion.

We’ll see.

I have always been a huge fan of Twitter and have it used it consistently for the last several years.  I completely believe in the power and virality of Twitter and absolutely love it from a business perspective for putting out news and updates, but that’s so one-sided.  However, with the ever-increasing “dead” accounts and spammers, and the decrease in use by the actually active accounts, it just seems to be moving in the wrong direction.  I will leave you with this last thought: Twitter will slowing fade away for personal, active users and will grow for businesses and celebrities.  People will simply follow along and it will continue to move in the direction of one-sided broadcasts as opposed to interaction and engagement.  This is an area where Facebook will leave Twitter in the dust in the year to come.