At the start of the year, the Digital Buzz blog published the results of a survey looking at social media penetration and engagement. I found the following statistics to be incredibly relevant to the average business professional…
- 51 percent of people who follow a brand on Facebook currently buy from that brand
- 41 percent of Facebook users login every single day
- 40 percent of all Facebook users follow at least one brand
- 30 percent of Facebook users login via mobile device
- 12 percent update their status on a daily basis
So what we see here is that less than half of Facebook users are engaging with brands at all. Perhaps the incentives to “follow” a brand need to be juicier. The average Facebook user is thinking, “Life is complicated! Why would I want to add another voice into the mix? Won’t it be like spam in my Facebook feed?” As a business owner, you need to consort with objective third party consultants to find out what holds value for current and prospective customers.
For example, YOU may think it’s “totally cool OMG!!!!!!” that your company is holding a sale on cargo shorts this weekend. On the other hand, your customers might be thinking, “So what? They have sales like that all the time.” Or you may be excited to announce that the brand has a new marketing manager. Ho hum, who cares? You need to find, not only topics that people will care about, but ways to elicit a response and show that your fan page is a lively community where people can interact with the brand. In other words: social media is a soft-sell. You can’t overdo it with self-aggrandizing or shameless promotion or people won’t want anything to do with you.
The other day, I saw a feed from the History Channel Facebook page that posted three compelling historic photos and posed the question, “Which decade had the biggest impact on American history?” Not surprisingly, this post was “liked” by over 5,000 people and solicited more than 400 comments. I was awestruck by their engagement, but when I perused the rest of the site, I could see why they had so many passionate fans. Their Facebook page was full of relevant information – not just promoting History Channel DVDs or shows, but promoting historical facts and stories. They had themed posts on “This Day In History,” “History in the Headlines,” “History Quizzes” and random historical facts with links to more information. Perhaps we can all learn something from the History Channel page about engagement.
Courtesy of guest blogger Jennfusion
