Marketers are trying hard to increase their number of fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter. This makes sense. It gives them an audience of people who expressed an interest in what they have to offer.
The question marketers need to ask is what they are going to do with all these new fans and followers. How will having someone as a fan or follower fundamentally improve the relationships between the brand and the customer? Adverts often say “Follow us on Twitter!” “Become a fan on Facebook!”. But they never say why.
What’s worse, some marketers are trying all sorts of tricks to get people to fan or follow them. There is an arms race for the most fans or followers. But the question is whether quantity or quality of fans is a better goal. I’d argue for the latter, yet many are going for the former. Bing is a case in point.
[Disclaimer: I work for Google. I'd prefer to use a different example but this is the best one I've got]
Bing ran an ad inside Farmville, offering Farmville users “Farm cash” (real money that can be used to buy stuff in the game) in exchange for becoming a fan of Bing on Facebook.
Farmville users were motivated to act, and Bing had 400,000 new fans in 24 hours. This gave them more fans on Facebook than Google. But so what? What does that mean? The quality of those fans is questionable. Are those people really fans of Bing? Or are they fans of Farmville? Many people filled Bing’s Facebook wall with questions about Farmville, and whether Bing were handing out any more free cash. Was this what Bing had hoped for? I don’t know Bing’s goals with this marketing activity, so I can’t comment on whether it was a success. I can only look at their wall, and conclude that the content and quality of conversation there, is unlikely to be what Bing had hoped for.
Before you try and collect as many fans and followers as possible, think long and hard about who you want as a fan/follower, and what value you’re going to give them when they follow you.
You don’t want the most fans. You want the best fans.
on Apr 18th, 2010 at 9:07 am
Where can we become fans of you, Paul?
on Apr 19th, 2010 at 7:40 am
Deciding what you’re going to do with them requires engagement metrics though. It’s so much easy to just track a transactional metric
I can imagine the agency in the room telling them what they would do and how many new fans they’d get. Sadly, I suspect this (and many other similar campaigns) are rapidly declared successes - feeding the frenzy for more of them - ugh.
This posted reminded of other discussions I’ve had lately where people have shown me fan or follower counts with some excitement until I point out they have fewer followers (by half) than employees in their company. I realize my flip comment could lead to the bad behavior of focusing on quantity over quality - so I’ll use with caution, but the overall point is still one of “so what”, meaning “so WHAT are you going to do with these fans/followers now that you have their attention.
Sean O’Driscoll
CEO
Ant’s Eye View
(disclaimer - former long time MSFT employee who thinks this Bing example is a great illustration of what not to do:))
on Apr 25th, 2010 at 12:55 pm
@Ron Right here
@Sean The key (as with many clients and contexts) is to push people on their goals. Often, people jump in with the activities (”Let’s get 1000s of fans!), without thinking through their goals.
This is an interesting research paper which looks at brand advertising and social networks, and suggests ways to measure engagement in a novel way.
http://www.adsafemedia.com/pdf/Audience_Selection.pdf
on May 8th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Having an active community of folks discussing things can be a boon even if they’re not entirely focused on the actual hosting page.
Amazon.com’s Gold Box discussion list is a great example of this:
* Lots of people go to the discussion board.
* Lots of chatter is generated.
* There are many reasons for folks to return (either for good deals; for rejoinders to intense discussions they’re involved in; or both).
And, Amazon benefits from having people come back more frequently than they already would. Maybe the folks who return aren’t the “best” fans, but still they probably like to shop and will certainly be exposed to ads and product offerings.
In general, though, I agree with your basic point: Quality is important. But I also think that you can get pretty far with quantity in certain circumstances.
on Jul 13th, 2010 at 11:37 am
I agree with Jason : the Bing campaign did attract many people, and the real job is starting now : they have to be smart enough to catch the intention and to prove that their product is worse. The best target will emerge by itself !
on Jul 13th, 2010 at 11:38 am
please read “worth” and not “worse”