It gave me the creeps. It annoyed me. It even made me a bit angry.
I saw that a Facebook friend of mine had commented on an FM radio station’s page (that I was not a Facebook fan of). The post included a slightly distorted image and promised that my mind would be blown if I just typed the word Club in the comment box.
There’s no secret—all community managers want their Facebook communities to thrive. Comments and shares are the currency of social media. The question plaguing community managers every day is “How do I generate more engagement on my Facebook posts?”
Since the advent of the Internet, blogs have provided the masses with a way to publish content. By the early 2000s, brands were catching on to the benefits of blogging, and those who embraced this new type of content marketing were seen as being ahead of the social-media curve.
Not only did blogs help businesses rank better for SEO, they also permitted customers and brands to have meaningful dialogue. In early 2006, noted tech gurus Robert Scoble and Shel Israel wrote about the power of blogs to “humanize communication, bringing companies and their constituencies together in a way that improves both image and bottom line” in their book Naked Conversations.
The most successful brands on Facebook Pages aren't the ones you'd think. If I told you that Coca-Cola’s Facebook Page has an engagement rate of less than one percent, would you believe me? Well, it’s true. After calculating the ratio of Coke’s total Likes to total engagement (“Talking About This”), the Page clocks in at a meager score of 0.7%.
But this is not unusually low for Facebook Pages; in fact, it’s quite average. Most brands are very successful in generating Likes but fail to keep their fans talking. When it comes to real success for a brand on Facebook, in the end, engagement numbers mean a lot more than total Likes—a number that often speaks more to the size of the brand’s media buy and not to the quality of their content. As such, Talking About This is actually a far more valuable metric and tool than total Likes are. Here’s why.
Have you heard of the second screen? If not and you’re a marketer of media, you’d better listen up and learn fast; a number of television networks and individual programs have started taking this concept seriously and are, as a result, tightly weaving audiences into a more dynamic viewing experience. If fantastic recent examples like NBC’s The Voice, CBS’s 54th Grammy Award ceremonies and WGN America’s syndication work continue to crop up, the second screen will soon enough become your new first priority.
It’s late November, and UK Lord Chancellor Sir John Simon has just told Parliament that Britons have sent watches, jewelry and gold to help the government pay for war. According to Sir John, “One girl sent a small envelope, asking me to accept her ‘peace offering.’ Inside was her engagement ring.” Incredible. Particularly because I just learned of this from a tweet chronicling the world war that’s raging in Europe right now.
You didn’t know there was a war going on in Europe? That’s because it took place in 1939. It’s the beginning of the Second World War, and it’s being retold on this date and at this time by the Twitter account @RealTimeWWII. After tweeting for only three months, @RealTimeWWII, which according to Mashable is maintained by Oxford graduate Alwyn Collinson, has already exceeded 150,000 followers. Why can't brands be this inventive?
There's no questioning the power of Facebook, quite new in the grand scheme of marketing, as a tool to engage with fans on a deeper level and with more regularity than anything before it. Typical advertisement media—radio, TV, print, billboards—were always one-way. Social media now allows near-real-time two-way engagement that has the ability to turn lukewarm consumers into brand advocates. New social media tools such as Facebook have allowed those brands we hold dearest to be treated as family.
But what about the brands we aren't familiar with? Is the Facebook environment, complete with hyper-targeted ads, a good place to find new customers? According to a recent study by DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research (as reported by Ad Age), 84% of a typical brand's Facebook fans are existing customers. The implied meaning is that Facebook, while an incredibly effective customer retention and engagement tool, is much less of a customer acquisition tool than most brands have thought.
This post originally appeared in our August issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Most marketing agencies approach their content with the standard brush. They take a look at the latest tools and trends, and pull together a few tips here and there. That subtle approach is not necessarily a bad thing, but in this difficult economy, that’s no longer good enough. Desperate times call for bold strokes. That's why we at Story Worldwide have decided to put our money where our mouth is — we're not only outlining five key ideas for the future of content marketing, we’re currently investing in them.
Any brand participating in social media (and we’ve reached the point where it is nearly every brand) faces the daunting task of creating and cultivating a community on a near-daily basis. With this constant requirement comes the need for a community manager to consistently provide unique and timely content that entertains, informs, and engages.
And there’s a reason the term “Community Manager” exists instead of “Facebook Page Writer.” Social media provides a place where communities of people with common interests can congregate, and its up to the Community Manager to keep those groups alive and flourishing. For a week, it’s no problem. After a month, you’re still doing fine. But what happens after a year? Two years? How can community managers keep their fans engaged over the long haul?
