Opinion: Facebook just isn’t working for brands
Facebook has added some updates in the last couple of days that haven't gone down well at all with its users. Paul Fabretti, head of digital for Origin discusses why the site just isn't working for brands.
You probably don’t need me to tell you that the use of any social media channel needs to be considered carefully – and by that I don’t just mean “should you, shouldn’t you”, I mean “what are you trying to get out of it”.
Anybody can (and frequently does) create a Facebook Page, gain some kind of traction through a promotion, then things stutter. Or, perhaps they’ve launched an app, enjoyed a massive spike in interest and then back to normality. But what about every day in between? Factor in weekends, evenings or even holiday periods and you have a tough time getting people engaged.
But is it right to blame the agency or community manager for failures to grow user bases and engagement? What if fans are simply interested in what they can get OUT of the Page AND THAT IS IT?
If the loosest of all reasons a brand should be on Facebook is to increase audience engagement – then the figures uncovered by conversation monitoring and insights company here in the UK, Market Sentinel are a worrying sight.
Research provided by their Skyttle Friends (Facebook Page analysis) tool shows that even the mega-celebrities are struggling to engage fans in anything like the volumes you would expect from such significant fan bases – so what chance do brands with less than 30,000 have for example. And note, that there is not ONE brand in this top 20 list.
The KEY statistic here is the tiny number of CORE fans each Page has, or rather does NOT have. It effectively tells us how many fans interact more than the Page average (which is generally once). As such, in most cases, engagement levels are so low, an individual only needs to interact with the Page a couple of times to interact more then almost 99.99% of the whole fans base.
So, if the goal of your Facebook efforts is to increase engagement and you are not looking at these figures, you are failing on a MASSIVE scale.
Don’t forget too, that with the way Edgerank works, if people don’t interact with your Page regularly, you disappear off their walls. Bad times.
nb. To calculate the core fan count, the average number of posts-per-contributing fan is calculated. This number ranges from 1.14 for Bob Marley to 2.03 for Bob Marley. Any fan whose comment count is higher than the average is a “core fan”.
So what are YOU going to do to get people coming back for more?