Don't Be A Turn Off...

As highlighted in previous articles, the brand adoption of social media platforms in 2010 was broadly characterised by a land grab of available fans. Through engagement programmes, competitions, incentives and paid media support, leading brands amassed huge armies of followers across their social media platforms (and most notably, Facebook), establishing themselves in effect, as significant, major publishers (compare brand audiences on Facebook numbering 1-10m fans against the declining circulations of established print newspapers).

Whilst it was of course crucial for brands to ensure that there was suitably engaging content on their platforms to support their ambitious acquisition strategies, in the majority of cases, the balance favoured rapid acquisition strategies over content. In assessment, that was probably the right strategy. It was necessary to act fast and build the audience before those fans were snapped up by other brands, or chatted up by competitor brands. (Of course, fans on Facebook like more than one brand, but it was a question of saturation and as a result the onus was on brands to get in check and sign up fans before fan lethargy crept in).

However, with the land grab effectively over, the absolute priority for brands is to engage and interact with fans through the provision of entertaining, relevant and continually evolving content – or risk losing fans to competitors. Furthermore, given the amount of content being published into user’s news feeds, Facebook is looking to streamline that content to only the brands / sites that fans engage with most; the message being that if your content is not good enough to get fans to interact, you risk having your communication stream turned down – fans will still be numbered as fans on brand sites, but they won’t get brand messages, which has major implications. There is little value in shouting about an audience in the millions if no-one can hear what you are saying.