Up to this point, the consensus among marketers was that Facebook users were very fickle in their brand love—post one status too many and they will “like” you no more—and best practices had pointed to 2-3 status posts per week as the sweet spot for engaging, but not annoying fans.
Of course there were always exceptions to this rule, like the incredibly successful Skittles Facebook page, which posts its random messages, most unrelated to the product, every day.
Knowing that the majority of FB users have never un-liked a brand, and seeing more brands have success with a Skittles-like model, other marketers may start to reconsider the 2-3 posts per week guideline.
Another tidbit of information released in this report was that people interact with their favorite brands on Facebook more than any other social network.
No, this is not surprising. What is surprising is that following Facebook, online community forums are the next place people go to interact with the favorite brands (9%). Twitter comes in third, at surprisingly small 4%, and that what brands should take note of.
Many brands have been on the Facebook bandwagon for sometime now and are anxious not to miss the next hot thing. Because of all of the buzz in the media, many believe that is Twitter and they are pushing their Ad/PR agencies to start tweeting for them.
Yet if only 4% of consumers are interacting with brands on Twitter, maybe marketers should take a deeper look at what kind of brands successfully engage on the platform (are there certain industries that have more success) and what targets are the most active on the site. The likelihood is that Twitter isn’t a good fit for every brand.
For those who manage social media, you may find yourself wanting to use these findings to optimize your strategy. With relatively little research out there still I don't blame you, but take this all with a grain of salt since the study collected data from only 1,491 U.S. consumers.
The sample size, in relation to the Facebook audience of 600 million visitors per month, is very small and only accounts for the behaviors of U.S citizens, which is something to consider for global brands.
That is not to say that these findings don’t hold merit. This industry is young and there is no set formula for success yet. Using these results may help you or they may not.
And I guess that is the exciting thing about social media: there are no rules and it is still one big experiment.
I appreciate your disclosure of the size of the study cited. It has been my experience that, with the exception of some medical
ReplyDeletestudies, it is rarely done. The size a does make a difference to the predictability of reproducing the outcomes. (See, I did learn something in my Statistics class.)