Brand engagement is plummeting on Facebook
contently.com
contently.com
Why do people "become a fan" of a brand on fb? What value do people get from publicly declaring they like gatorade? I contrast this with the implicit declaration that occurs when I carry a gatorade bottle around, because in that situation presumably I'm enjoying drinking it.
I cannot see how doing so would benefit a) me or b) my friends who might see that I like gatorade.
It just seems like I'm a) giving fb more information about me and b) inviting gatorade to try and sell me things.
Am I wrong or is becoming a fan of a brand just all bad for the user and all good for fb/the brand?
IE I like GoPro on Facebook. Ultimately they want me to buy a $400 camera and all the accessories, but they also inspire me with images and photos to get me outdoors enjoying things I also love.
So...complicated thoughts are complicated.
Gmail, Google Search, Twitter, Facebook etc are all widely used.
There's a similar effect on Twitter with brands asking for retweets, but I see less of those, presumably because the kind of people I follow on Twitter are less likely to get sucked into that.
Either way I'm glad I have nothing to do with that sort of work anymore. Having quite a few friends in agencies I see the X likes Y posts all the time because they have to like a load of brands for their jobs. What a miserable waste of time.
1) discounts / promotions / contests and other forms of bribery
2) upcoming products you want to hear about as soon as they're ready
3) products you genuinely love and want your friends to know about
4) companies you support for ideological reasons (they support some charity/cause you like)
5) social signaling / status (mark yourself as an Apple customer, or a Coach bag owner, or whatever.)
6) the brand puts out genuinely entertaining advertising (some people really like the Old Spice "smell like a man" commercials)
I personally follow a few kiteboarding brands that publish great pictures that I enjoy having in my feed.
A few brands that I have very high affinity towards: Crumpler, Nike, and Canon.
Maybe a subtle unconscious change about how one is thought of might possibly be a result? (I don't know, but I don't think I can rule it out as a possibility that could be desirable to some.)
Awesome.
Hey we're going to grab coffee next friday, you should come along!
They do it because it's a way to socialize.
Also when you like a page, you will be following it. That is, you will see news from that brand's page on your news feed.
Also: 99.9% of people who use Facebook don't think at all about how much information they're giving Facebook. They don't care. So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy. And?
This. While in general privacy is definitely a concern, I see "don't give your information" way too often and it's becoming sort of a cliche.
How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future? No one is going to blackmail me for the fact that I liked Wu Tang Clan. I won't get denied some visa or whatever because I liked Donnie Darko movie.
Privacy is important but let's stop from making it a cliche or some 'easy win'.
If you commonly display $information in all sorts of settings, then $information is not ipso facto private and leaking that information further is not a privacy threat.
(Of course, it can be used as an input to deanonymize you in some data-mining system, so there's that...).
Once it has been on the internet, it is forever.
Not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it is exactly the same.
Maybe tattoos?
If that were truly the case, we wouldn't be so worried about NSA retention of data.
In one scenario, you have full control over when you signal that information and when you stop. In the other, once you send out the signal... congratulations, you're now in several databases and have opened yourself to all sorts of soliciting.
That does not mean we must treat every single personal preference as top secret material.
We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, set the limits of tolerable pollution by consent. We have socially established standard of cleanliness, which everybody has to meet.
Environmental law is not law about consent. But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool ourselves.
What is actually a subject of environmental regulation has been sold to us as a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. The facts show this is completely untrue" -- Eben Moglen
Constellations of consumer interests might be enough to create a high likelihood that you're gay, a drug user, sympathize with anti-tax protesters, or with anti-globalization protests. The next algorithm to be run over your profile might benefit greatly from this initial filtering, and depending on the distinctness of the constellation, may not result in very many false negatives.
The second algorithm auto-authorizes full text email and full audio telephone collection and review. </dystopia>
What if the FBI decides to categorize your band fandom as a form of gang affiliation?
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/08/showbiz/juggalo-gang-lawsu...
I see how they would know that you like Bob's Burgers, but how would they know that you dislike The Family Guy? Or, were you saying that they know you haven't declared you like Family Guy at this point in time? I ask is cause I was missing a way they could track the former, and also because I think Facebook is missing the boat by not having a way to dislike something.
If I were looking to by Brand A and saw a lot of my negative sentiment for that brand Brand B would need less positive sentiment for me to be sawed to it. In that scenario they start to displace services like Yelp.
I really want all ad platforms to give me the choice to opt out from some advertisers -- especially from alcohol and gambling.
I feel like this could very much be a case of http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fa...
US spending on science, space, and technology has a 0.992 correlation with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation
Public interest is probably best served by making sure that lending markets are healthy enough that making meaningless distinctions based on silly data is not a viable practice (rather than fretting over exactly what data is allowed to be considered).
I also follow Fox Soccer and ESPN FC because it's easier to have content pushed specific to my interests rather than go to espn.com and click on the soccer tab.
I follow businesses as my business because I want to build a profile. I also follow competitors and peers because I want to stay in the loop.
It's just a large RSS feed really.
The black-boxiness of the algorithm is non-ideal, but some algorithm is required.
This is a problem that Facebook has created, and one they will wrestle with until they either fix it and save their business, or are displaced by an upstart.
Facebook is constantly recommending to me things I should like. I ignore them all. I drink a Diet Coke from time to time, but I don't need the latest Diet Coke news.
This assumes that giving Facebook information to deliver ads for things you actually want is a bad thing, a position I disagree with. No matter how hard I try, I will be advertised to. I'd prefer to get ads for things I might actually want than a return to the lowest common denominator ads of the past (which tend to be things like diploma mills, insurance, or payday loans).
On a related note, recently my group of close friends created a group on Facebook, which was originally to help with organising events/activities (because group messaging was becoming unweildy and distracting). The requirement for adding someone to the group is 'would anyone else be upset if the new member invited themselves along to anything posted here', so it's relatively small - about 20 members. But we've been using it for about 3 months, and it has almost become a social network in itself - people post things during the day, we interact without worrying how it looks to outsiders, and there are no posts which are 'showing off' the way facebook status updates sometimes do. I'm not being constantly marketed to. Facebook is fun again - like it was in university.
Some time ago there were a few posts now and then from a few pages. Now there are dozens of posts per day from basically everything. And people have more likes because more pages exists.
So more content -> facebook trims it -> page owners see a decrease in page view and push more content of lower quality -> interactions decrease -> push even more lower quality content...
On the other hand, there are organisations that want to use the system as originally conceived, just like your friends: they post an update every now and then when they actually have something of genuine interest to share with their "fans". These days, most of the fans won't actually see it unless the organisation pays FB a fortune to promote every post they make. Probably no big deal if you're Coke or Ford or something, but more so if you're the Friends of St Paul's Church and you're just trying to tell your local congregation about the summer fete next weekend so they can come along.
This seems like a short-sighted bait-and-switch from FB to me. They're removing most of the value from the "like" mechanism for both the liker and the likee, just to try and squeeze a bit more advertising revenue out of the mega-advertisers who can afford it... until everyone decides the game is up, takes their ball, and goes home, presumably.
These teams had to prove their value, especially a few years ago when it was one or two people justifying their existence to upper management. These teams today have to work to get paid, work involves canvasing media sites. At this stage so many companies have invested so heavily in social spaces that they can't admit defeat to their investors whom they assured "social is the future!". This is why it's so bad these days, the number of canvassers has exponentially grown and they have to constantly prove their worth to their employers.
But what do I know? I don't use social media or willingly look at ads.
That's just me, though.
The brand messages that were mixed in my news feed would usually be disruptive to me. I'd rather have them be an ad so that I can distinguish them more easily. It's a better user experience, which results in a larger supply of eyeballs.
Boo hoo for the brands. This seems like a win for the user, in my eyes.
People need to burn their hands before they watch out for fire.
As an example if I post something to facebook is it the sharpneli that loves to fish? Is it the one who plays esports at somewhat competitive level? Is it the one who posts an example how to do something with OpenCL?
All of those circles are mutually exclusive and frankly posting something regarding esports would bore majority of my friends. Same applying to any other subset.
That's why my own postings are always in sites that are very specific and focused on a certain topic.
Facebook's usefulness is limited to friends and family. Twitter is good as a fine-tuned information feed. I've also tried using Twitter for two-way communication on very specific topics, but there's an immediate problem: I have many and varied interests, so I know that most of my followers won't be interested in most of my tweets. The character limit is also a significant handicap (and makes little sense now that SMS is being replaced by IM).
Google+ with its circles seemed like a perfect solution to this problem, but unfortunately, except for topics related to technology, there seems to be very little interaction going on. So this means I'm limited to specialist websites or sites like Reddit. While this isn't awful, I think that having a genuine interest-based social network (that isn't just a mouthpiece for the powerful and famous) would offer several improvements.
For a start, I'd have control over my 'circles', eliminating the troll problem that plagues all forum-based websites. I could make my circles as large or small, and as specialised or general as I wished. This ideal social network would emphasize mutual following and active participation, and provide many tools for discovery of relevant connections.
Maybe there just isn't the demand for this, I don't know.
Any feedback welcome.
My friends aren't going to pay your stupid "Promote your content" fees. Stop asking.
"The total number of likes, comments, and shares on Brand Posts that occurred during the reporting period." -- SM Help Docs
I'm guessing that it wasn't spelled out in the post because Contently and our original article are primarily aimed at Social Media Marketers, and the definition is fairly well established.
While the definition is established, we've published some articles that dig deeper into engagement:
Looking into the different pieces/parts: http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/11/18/likes-are-passive-...
and looking at a more relative number: http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2014/02/19/facebook-engagemen...
Facebook has always been a very weird communication medium, it's the only algorithmic communication medium that people actually use. One truth about this is, that 99% of all brands and companies are not able to use this, because optimizing your communication and ads for an algorithmic model is too complex. Brand Communication has always been quite simple: Find some values you want to attach to your brand, find something creative that sticks and mix these values and your brand... then publish.
Facebook is insanely complex, because you have a third layer: find something users want to interact with. Now you have three layers and those three are mutually exclusive for many brands. A Toilet paper company may find some ideas people want to interact with, but those ideas will probably not match their idea for their brand or values. And even if a brand finds a sweet spot between those three coordinates, they have to use right technique and be insanely creative to stay in that spot.
This is something brands and companies are learning very very slowly, so Facebook is not really changing anything in a way, it's just adapting to the situation.
Inevitably when one of these articles crops up, someone "in the business" comes out of the woodwork to say, "Everything is fine, these brands just don't know what they're doing."
I'm not sure I buy it. I dabbled in the space a few years ago, so spent more time than I ever intended reading about FB advertising. It seems to me that a long predicted issue is slowly developing: ad space and eyeball time are limited, so as people "like" more and more material over time, Facebook will have to cull and restrict to keep the news feed relevant to its users, most of which don't really want advertising.
Facebook is not really changing? Am I to assume that with another year experience these social media teams got worse at doing the things you suggest? That's hard to believe.
Sure, I'll bet that these teams can be doing some things better. On the other hand, how many brands are going to continue to spend money on a constantly evolving, unpredictable advertising platform that requires outside consultants to navigate properly?
The small amount of such brand engagement I've witnessed has reminded me of the rule of thumb: "just pretend comment systems on large websites don't exist."
Are people simple interacting less and this is a general trend across FB? Or are people just getting better at ignoring corporate posts?
Also do we have a finite interest/time to interact? As every company flogs the FB horse, have we hit a limit to the number of posts we will interact with in total and this is just being distributed over a wider no. of companies?
I was looking at FB social media marketshare the other day and was impressed how they continue to grow market share. Less engagement or not they remain completely dominent in this space: http://gs.statcounter.com/#all-social_media-ww-monthly-20090...
Alas, FB doesn't expose views on normal posts, so we'll never know the actual numbers.
The consensus seems to be that Brands should post more often, as their posts are only being shown to legitimate followers half as often... :-(
Umm.... Buzzfeed's audience doesn't belong to FB. Neither does Upworthy's. Anyone can visit BuzzFeed.com without going thru FB. Anyone can receive an email link to BuzzFeed.com without FB. FB is just ANOTHER distribution method. It's a bonus, like search engines. Of course everyone wants to take advantage of it, if it's there. What the hell is this article even saying? Don't go to FB. It's an additional distribution method, that's all! Nobody is putting all their eggs in it.
What are all the aspirational car brands doing up there?
And Intel?
I doubt BMW or Intel is selling any more cars or chips because of facebook engagement.
Their products mostly sell themselves.
More info in the study we released last year: http://simplymeasured.com/blog/2013/07/23/facebook-study/ (click the 'Download' to get to the PDF, look at last page.)
I think what you're asking is, why care about these companies, when there isn't a single post that'll make a sale. The difference is the line between Advertising and Marketing... These are companies that had created content compelling enough to convince the public to engage with their Facebook Brand. They aren't there because they post the most, or because they spend the most... it's because their content engages the most.
And it's the companies that were the best that were hit hardest. While these companies certainly use advertising, their brands had been strong enough to sustain engagement numbers that make you pause, and wonder what the hell is Intel doing that gets people to like/share/comment their posts more than BMW, Harley-Davidson or Starbucks. But you're right... ALL of these products mostly sell themselves... because they've built such a brand that it's hard to imagine anyone making a decision to NOT buy their product.
For any practical use, the cars will do an equally good job. So am I a "BMW guy" or a "Mercedes guy"? Facebook is a great place to create and exhibit that sort of public identity.