An article to looking at how brands ought to approach social media engagement in 2011.
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.
Account Director Philip Keightley is a specialist in Technology PR at Search, Social and PR Agency Punch Communications. For more information, visit punchcomms.com
