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A previous article looked at how to optimally set up your Facebook Page and how to attract as many fans as possible. Another article estimated a fan’s worth, which lies somewhere between a few and nearly 100 dollars (depending on the analyst). But what effect exactly does the bond between brand and Facebook fan have? According to eMarketer, the majority of fans (61%) don’t feel that there purchasing preferences have changed at all, after signing up to a Facebook page. 36% of the respondents say that they feel more inclined to buying the brand’s products, while 3% say that they want to buy the products less.
So what happens when a person doesn’t like the brand anymore or when it feels annoyed by the Facebook page membership? 43% of dissatisfied fans will “unlike” the page, while another 38% will remove all messages from their stream. The remainder simply ignores the news as it shows up on their screen (see also Your fans are fair weather friends).
A new survey by OpinionWay and DDB Paris reveals the reasons why fans start disliking the brand, which they once “liked” (see also Why 2 in 5 Facebook users click ‘unlike’). The prime reason to “unlike” a page was that the brand was no longer interesting to the person (49%). This hardly has anything to do with the Facebook page and more with the brand itself.
The second and third most mentioned reasons, however, are indeed connected to the brand’s communication strategy via the Facebook page. Nearly half of the respondents say that the information communicated by the brand was not interesting. And more than a third think that information was published too often. This is a clear sign to online brand managers that just by talking a lot people will pay attention. This is probably more the case with traditional push messages, such as television commercials or wall posters, where it’s harder to ignore or fade out the advertisements. In the highly personalized activity stream of a Facebook user, however, it’s very easy to completely ban any communication of a particular company. In fact, it takes only seconds and a few clicks at maximum.
Consequently, brands have to pay much more attention to who are their fans, and what they might be interested in. A good way to measure the success of your posts is to match them against three elements:
- Number of likes of that particular post
- Number of comments to that post
- Amount of “unlikes” on the day that post occurred
Monitoring tools such as HootSuite are a good way to track such numbers. Since many fans complain that information is sent too frequently, companies would do better by investing less time in quantity and more into quality. More research would have to show what type of posting yields the desired effects of increased purchase likelihoods. What is clear is that social networks do not eliminate marketing efforts–it seems that they rather make the marketer’s life more complicated, yet more exciting.