The sometimes skewed approach that many brands have when they carry out activity in social media, is to think about what particular product or content they want to push onto consumers. It’s very tempting to become obsessed with how your brand appears that you try and push the boundaries of social media to the limit, until you end up with the most complicated campaign that uses all the latest technology. The only problem is that you’ve become so obsessed with how to portray your brand as a leader in social technologies that you’ve forgotten to ask what it is your customers actually want from you.
The first thing to remember is that people don’t actually want to be your friend. They’re not following you on Twitter or Facebook because they want to have a one on one conversation about the weather or your thoughts on who should have won X Factor. What people actually want from brands is a mixture of news, promotions and just generally to get a query sorted as quickly as possible. Indeed, a recent survey by emarketer found that while 25% of people wanted to follow a brand for promotions, just 4% wanted to feel part of that brand’s community. So as much as you can focus on building the coolest community around your brand with impressive apps and social tools, it’s the relatively unsexy things such as discounts and offers that customers actually want.
People don’t care how popular you are
There is a huge obsession with numbers at the moment and I was struck by how big this had become, when I tried out a new tool by Wildfire that compared brands on Facebook. Now the tool is completely free to use and this is not Wildfire’s primary focus. But when I used it I was disappointed that all you got was a graph that compared the growth of Likes/fans over time :
As nice as this is and undoubtedly it will be used by many marketers, it’s not really all that important for brands. In his recent article on social media stats, Andrew Hanley found that while 38% of users trusted a brand based on the size of their following, a far higher percentage – 64% trusted brands based on the openness of their dialogue. This may come as a huge eye opener to many brands who have become fixated on the numbers race. The temptation to pursue numbers comes at the risk that you forget the dialogue that is central to your community.
Knowing when not to talk
This is a difficult one for many brands : sometimes it’s better to not say anything at all. Just as much as people unfollow friends because they’re too noisy, the same applies for companies. In a survey into why consumers unfollowed brands, 58% said it was due to brands sending too many messages or simply producing too much content to sift through. To put this into context, it’s exactly the same percentage as people that unfollowed brands due to irresponsible business practices. How you’re communicating is just as important as what you’re communicating.
Good user experience
It’s important to remember that the basics of web design and web usability still apply for social media channels. So many times I’ll be using a nice application and the link to the website is broken, or there’s an error screen, or I can’t actually find out how I start using an app. People still want a streamlined user experience whether they’re on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or your blog. They’ll still be looking for the usual things such as contact information and working links. If you can preserve this user experience then visitors to your social profile will likely stick around for longer and you’ll look more trustworthy in the long run. Consumers are also looking for continuity – if you suddenly stop tweeting one day but haven’t given a reason for it, then you’re not managing consumer expectation and customers will likely become frustrated and vent this frustration online!
Shareable content
Often it’s the case that a brand can be popular in a social media channel without actually having a presence in there. This can be seen most starkly on Twitter, where the likelihood of a brand being spoken about depends more on the content they’ve produced, than a particular activity they’ve taken out themselves. Twitter is fast turning into a news channel, so what brands need to give consumers is good, shareable content and importantly to include mechanics by which people can actually share that content, such as a Tweet button. A company’s strategy for Twitter for example, may not involve a Twitter account at all, but rather building a promotion, blog post or app that users want to share and talk about. This is how you build up your social currency, not necessarily posting 50 messages a day where you ask your followers how their weekends were.
Bonus – what do you want from your customers?
It’s still an important question to ask as this is ultimately what will shape your social media strategy. There can be a bit of a feeling that in social media you’re only supposed to listen to what people want and give it to them. That’s nonsense, and both research and everyday behaviour shows that people are receptive to companies being original, so long as you’re not abusing your community at the expense. If you lose sight of what it is you want from your customers, you risk listening to what every friend or follower is telling you and you forget what you wanted in the first place. Aside from ‘more sales’ break it down into the actual actions that you want to drive. Do you want brand enthusiasts, or to encourage more people to recommend your brand, or people sharing a particular offer? This should be a constant throughout – your consumers will appreciate if you have a focused strategy after all.
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