The Misguided Rationale Behind Facebook "Likes"

The Need For A Paradigm Shift In Your Marketing Approach
If you follow Social Media and the conversations around it you will hear a common refrain that many, even most, brands/businesses are doing social media incorrectly. I believe there is a lot of truth in that statement and I think the underlying reason for that truth is that social media, really all digital media, requires a paradigm shift in the thinking behind how to build a brand vs. how marketers have traditionally used media vehicles to do so.

Since ages past the basic premise of marketing, in simplified terms, has been: define your target consumer, identify the media vehicles that consumer uses and craft your brand message so that it interrupts the content on those media vehicles and thus “reaches” your consumer. Over time as the types of available media expanded, the concept of “surrounding” your target consumer with your message, or of delivering an integrated message across different media types emerged, but the basic premise of reach and interruption remained unchanged.

The challenge with social and digital media is that the concepts of “reach” and “interruption” no longer hold true in the same manner as they do with more traditional media forms. The reason being is that in digital formats the consumer has infinitely more control over whether or not they wish to see your message. Yet many marketers still approach social and digital media through the same lens as they approach traditional media. They have not made the paradigm shift in thinking from reach based messaging to messaging that adds value to a community, which is what is required for effective digital programming. Facebook provides a convenient example to this point.

Facebook Example Of The Misguided Quest For Likes
In my experience most marketers approach their Facebook programming with the goal of gaining “likes”. Although “likes” can be a reasonable metric, unfortunately the motive behind acquiring “likes” is often to create as large a fan base as possible to deliver your marketing message to, or put another way, to create a large consumer population that you can easily reach with your ad message.

That rationale basically applies a traditional “reach” based approach to a social channel. However, the goal of putting your message in front of as many people as possible is not social, it is self serving, and doesn’t necessarily work in social channels.

Instead of thinking about how to acquire likes and thus expand your potential “reach”, you should be thinking about how you can develop something that people will want to discuss and share. The latter is a fundamentally different approach and necessitates the assumption that people are not automatically going to like your brand or message simply because you are on Facebook and saying something. Rather it requires you to think about how to earn their likes by creating content that provides genuine value to the people you want to follow your brand.

This thinking holds true for all types of social media vehicles, not just Facebook. Beyond evolving their approach to digital/social channels, marketers will also benefit from correctly defining their goals & adapting their message to the medium, both of which I will explore in future posts.

Social Spam Brand Building

Father’s Day recently passed, and similar to what happens during every holiday in our digitally social age, Facebook was alight with posts addressing the festivities and the importance of the day. Alas, not to let an opportunity pass them by, opportunistic brands and marketers everywhere also tried to capitalize on the holiday, like they do every other holiday, by posting calendar-related nonsense, like this example from Old Spice, in the hope that the timely relevance of their post will inspire fans to like or respond in kind, thus sharing the brand’s message with their respective fan bases.

This got me thinking about how brands communicate on Facebook in general, and more specifically, it got me thinking about a problem I have long had with how most brands utilize Facebook to deliver brand messages.

Take this post from Coca-Cola for example. They are not offering anything of value here, either from a content, offer or enhanced experience perspective. Breaking it down to the most base motives, Coca-Cola is essentially delivering a lowest common denominator message to try to exploit their fanbase into propagating their brand. And this is certainly not exclusive to Coca-Cola, it is status quo across most brands utilizing Facebook to engage people.  

Am I crazy or is this approach no different than the spam about purchasing Viagra and cheap prescription pills that we receive in our inboxes daily? Put another way, when savvy brands look to do email based CRM programs they perform rigorous exercises to ensure that the content they provide is valuable, that the frequency of delivery is palatable and that people opt-in to receive their messages so the brands are not providing them with messages that they don’t want. Why should Facebook or social media be any different? Would you send an email to your opt-in database about broadswords & mobile phone cases and with no other content of value whatsoever?  

I realize that email and social media don’t make for such direct comparisons as illustrated above, but I can’t help but feel that in the digital social space many brands are taking advantage of the connections they have built with people. I also realize that when brands first started popping up on Facebook there may have been a novelty to interacting with a brand or having a brand comment on a post. However I have to believe, now that brands have more or less saturated the space, that people don’t really care when a brand asks them what their favorite color is, nor do they believe that the brand cares about their answer.

To that point, I am linked to a number of brands on Facebook for professional tracking purposes, one of which happens to be Old Spice, and when Old Spice’s randomly comical posts like, “Is your mind currently generating mastodon steak recipes while your body is rescuing a baby panda from a pack of angry cougars?” first started appearing in my newsfeed, I admit I found them entertaining. However, after a few weeks they quickly lost their novelty and began to annoy me in their frequency and repetitiveness.  A sprinkling of these posts within the larger context of content with actual value I might have been able to handle, but in the absence of that content it simply grew old quickly.

Am I alone in this thinking? Am I giving people too much credit in what they should expect out of brands in social media? Am I being too idealistic in how I think a brand should activate on Facebook and other social channels, which is to say, to provide content of value, however that may be defined by the specific brand in question?

There are definitely brands out there that are doing just that, and doing it well, unfortunately most are focused on lowest common denominator nonsense. And to their credit, Coca-Cola is actually creating deeper based content which they share off of their Facebook page, such as this and this. Which in turn begs the question - is it worth it?

I truly believe that it is, yet still I question whether that is correct. This is something I will continue to explore in this blog.