“Everybody’s talking at me. I don’t hear a word they’re saying,” observed Harry Nilsson in 1969. 45 years on, it seems a lot of people are still not listening – but brands should be. New findings from Gallup suggests marketers may be pinning the wrong hopes on social media.
Most brands would say they want to be popular and many of them would see social media as a way to achieve that. But recently David McInnis wrote this in a comment: “You can have all the social pieces in place but doing so does not make you likeable. Most companies that have a social strategy should not. They should focus instead on being likeable first.”
Brands today obsessively seek massive social followings. The driver of that social activity is content marketing. Today most content marketing is nothing more than disguised brand advertising–and customers and consumers mostly ignore it. To gain a massive following in social channels requires a sophisticated understanding and disciplined application of Brand Voice.
Speculation remains on what a “fan” is worth to a business. In light of that, it’s important for marketers to revisit the difference between volume and intensity when thinking through the value a ‘fan’ brings to a brand.
Aegis Media has conducted an interesting experiment to identify the value of the number of “likes” a brand has on Facebook. Its basic conclusion is that a high number of likes do help improve brand perceptions. But that raises a chicken and egg question. Where do the likes come from in the first place?
