Here is what you need to know… STOP COLLECTING FACEBOOK FANS!
SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — Companies have spent millions gathering fans on their Facebook pages and being “liked” all across the web. But what started as a volume play — call it Facebook marketing 1.0 — is shifting. Increasingly, it’s not so much how many people are liking your brand, but who those people are and how many are engaging with you once you’ve got them.
According to Facebook strategist and CEO of Buddy Media Michael Lazerow, numbers are relative. “If you have 100,000 fans and only 1,000 are engaging with you over the week, that’s not as good as having 10,000 fans and having 1,000 engage with you,” said Mr. Lazerow, whose company works with some of the biggest brands on Facebook. Mr. Lazerow calls it the “engagement index,” a measure of effectiveness on Facebook beyond sheer numbers. It is, in a sense, a reality check on the real value of a fan and a reminder that not all fans are equal.
As Facebook speeds past 600 million global users, the sheer numbers can be staggering enough to send any rational CMO into hyper-competitive overdrive. Some company Facebook pages rack up numbers so large they’d qualify as social networks in and of themselves — Starbucks has 18 million fans and Coca- Cola has 21 million. (Arguably mass brands are more likely to generate a mass of fans — but not all. McDonald’s has 6 million and Pepsi has 3 million, in comparison.)
But other global companies, such as Starwood Hotels, which has millions of people who stay daily in its hotel rooms in the Westins, Sheratons and W’s of the world, has only 20,000 fans — but boy are they engaged. A check of the W Hotel South Beach page (close to 5,000 fans) shows some active locally relevant fans.
So how to grow engage fans and better tap the fans you have? Marketers have employed several strategies.
Read the Rest via It’s Time to Stop Collecting Facebook Fans – Advertising Age – Digital.
Good article!
Great post Michael – like I say in my “New Media Made Easy” seminars it’s not about “how many” read you; it’s about “who” reads you.