By: Stacey Furtado
When Facebook launched Pages in 2007, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that, “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.” That bold statement has certainly been born out by the staggering adoption of nearly every major brand setting up a presence on the site, and in doing so moving from being just a brand to a brand community.
Surprisingly, many of the brands that earned themselves reputations as leaders in the early days of brand pages seem to have fallen behind as standards on the platform have evolved. These pioneering brands established a lead when building a large fanbase, and reaching them with good regular content were the primary measurement of brand success. . There’s been a shift in priorities though, as the medium has evolved and return on investment has moved the focus away from pure fan numbers and into engagement and the ability to drive measurable brand advocacy from core influencers.
These “Benjamin Button Brands” seem to be shrinking away, losing their dominance to a new generation of brands that are prioritizing engagement and identifying and activating their word of mouth Superfans on Facebook.
The Crowdly platform is focused on activating brand fans within Facebook communities, and gives us a unique view into how brands score on driving engagement. Below, we’ll dig deep into Sharpie as one of our “Benjamin Button” brands, and lessons learned on how they’ve lost some mojo, and then highlight best practices we’re seeing from brands that are taking the lead.
Sharpie
Considered a dependable utility product, the Sharpie brand has always enjoyed a loyal following. However, despite a strong core of customers, Sharpie fans didn’t have a place to congregate until the brand started embracing social media as a part of its ad strategy. Its fans responded in droves, growing an average of 800,000 a year since Sharpie joined Facebook in 2009. This growth has built a colorful community with a focus on highlighting the creativity of its customers. Unfortunately, while Sharpie’s customers continue to create art and content using the product, they’ve stopped speaking up about it. Here’s why:
Don’t broadcast content, start conversations
As of late, Sharpie has suffered low engagement in their community as a result of Content Dead-Ends, or brand posts that don’t drive action from their fans. An anemic 5,000 users are “Talking About” (the number of unique users who have created a “story” about a page in a seven-day period) the brand out of 4.1 million fans. Comparatively, Lexus has 43,000 users “Talking About It” with half the fans (2.1 million) – a tribute to the clear and compelling conversations it’s starting (or effective strategy for using content to start great conversations).
In a recent post, Sharpie highlights fan artwork with the line, “You’re an original.” Sharing the artwork was a step in the right direction, but doesn’t make an attractive ask to get fans to engage. Adding a prompt like, “[fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][fan name] is an original. What makes you different?” immediately opens the post up to comments, shares and likes, as fans get to talk about the brand by making it personal and expressing themselves, Without a prompt to participate, the brand is broadcasting to an audience, not engaging a community.
Clearly prompted questions drive fan engagement, but how does a brand keep the conversation going? The well-crafted brand post is the first step, but how they respond to those engaged fans is equally important.
Participate actively in the conversations you start
Facebook has greatly facilitated replies for brand pages. They presented the feature as a way to “improve conversations,” and it does exactly that within a brand community. Without enabling replies, a brand must reply to fans in the form of a comment, a very clunky substitute that is much worse at fostering conversations or advocate re-engagement. Our research shows that when a brand replies to a fan comment, a fan is a staggeringly 425% more likely to make positive reengagements within a ten-day window.
Brands like Nilla Wafers (pictured above) do an excellent job of using replies to bring their Influencers back. 11% of fans that engaged in the Nilla community last week came back this week to engage with the brand again. Compare that to Sharpie, who only saw a 1% retention and it’s clear to see that replies do make a difference. At Crowdly, we call this an Advocate Retention Score and consider it one of the marquee signs of a healthy community. Enabling replies is the first step, as it allows a direct line of response to a brand’s fans.
While it’s clear that the age of engagement is upon us in Facebook brand communities, it’s still too early to crown the winners. One thing is certain; the ultimate judges will be the fans of those communities. Where brand fans take their engagement, advocacy and participation will determine which Facebook brand communities continue to activate influential consumers and which shrink into irrelevancy.
Want to learn about the steps your brand can take for successful Facebook Influencer Marketing?
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