How should a brand use Facebook?

In October 2011 I was in Istanbul speaking at the Digital Age conference.  The title of my presentation was “Stop wasting money on social media” and its main theme was a critique of the way many brands were failing because they were trying to make social media work like traditional media.  I was especially critical of some organisations’ usage of Facebook.  In the lunch break after my presentation, the marketing director of a large retail chain (I wish I could remember her name or the name of the retailer) came up to me and said, “I love Facebook because it tells me what people think of my latest ad.”  I think this is possibly the most sensible thing I have heard any marketing director say about Facebook, or indeed social media, and if this marketing director is reading this article, I would love for you to get in touch, so I can give you the credit you deserve when I tell this story in presentations and training workshops.

The insight that this statement captured was that Facebook is best used as a way of understanding what your consumers think, rather than telling them what they should think.  This can be an understanding of what they think about your advertising, or better still, about your brand – or even about the brands of your competitors.  However many organisations I deal with have failed to grasp this insight and this leads them to make two basic mistakes.

Social media is not about channels or reach

The first mistake is to assume that a social media strategy is a channel strategy – like a traditional media strategy.  The starting point is therefore an assessment of what are believed to be channels (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc.) with a view to selecting those that will be most appropriate.   Facebook is usually the ‘channel’ of preference because this is seen to be the biggest and most important, especially for consumer brands, for the simple reason that most consumers are on Facebook.  It is also something which looks reasonably similar to a traditional website, unlike say Twitter, and therefore an environment brands’ (and their digital agencies) feel most comfortable operating with.  Indeed, before Facebook introduced its Timeline format, many organisations spent lots of money trying to make their Facebook page look like their website.  For this reason, many organisations define their journey into social media by thinking that they will focus on the Facebook ‘channel’ and then move on to Twitter and then maybe experiment with one of the more recent additions to the available ‘channels’, such as Pinterest.

The second mistake is to then assume that the objective, for their Facebook (or Twitter, or Pinterest) strategy, is to maximise the reach and engagement of their presence, through the production of ‘engaging content’.   Measurement of success is defined by how much reach is achieved, measured in ‘likes’ or ‘shares’, or by looking at the levels of engagement with each particular piece of content, in order to define which type of content works most effectively.

The key question: why are you doing this?

At this point, I always ask organisations to answer a simple question, which is “why are you doing this?”  This always draws a puzzled response, as though the answer to such a simple question is so obvious as to not make it worth asking, let alone answering.  So I go on to ask for two things: first, the evidence that shows how their Facebook activity is actually contributing to the business – in terms of increased sales or measurable improvements in brand image and reputation – in such a way as to make the time and money spent creating all this activity actually worthwhile.  Organisations are inevitably unable to answer this question, not because it is very hard to do this, but mostly because they cannot find this evidence, because the evidence doesn’t exist.  They are forced to face the uncomfortable conclusion that all their efforts in Facebook are having almost no impact on any meaningful external brand metric.  Most social media measurement strategies are designed to prevent organisations reaching this unpleasant conclusion because they operate within a closed loop.  They simply measure increases in engagement with the activity – how fast the wheels are spinning if you like – without looking outside to see how these spinning wheels are impacting on engagement with the organisation.  The reason organisations embrace these approaches to measurement (or are encouraged to embrace them by their agencies) is because it can trick them into believing that their social media strategy is working.

I then ask a further question, which is how are they measuring the link between all the content they are producing and the metrics they are pursuing, such as ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.  This is usually an easier question to answer, but what it often uncovers is that most engagement with a Facebook page is not generated by activities the brand is doing ‘in’ Facebook.  It is being created by other marketing activities, such as the launch of a new advertising campaign, as the marketing director I referred to earlier highlighted, or as a result of people finding fault with the brand’s product or service or asking the brand a question.

So this leaves us with a situation where an organisation is doing a lot of activity ‘in’ Facebook, whose impact on the brand it is not able to measure, nor is it able to demonstrate a link between this activity and the thing it can actually measure.   And we are also left with the situation where a brand’s Facebook presence is being is being driven by factors which are often outside of its control – in fact one of the most common questions I get asked is “how do we increase engagement with our Facebook page and how do we stop people saying negative things on it?”

Facebook is the place where consumers should be encouraged to be negative

Fortunately, the answer to this issue about negative comments actually provides the answer to the wider question about how to use Facebook effectively.  This is because the way you solve both issues is to position your Facebook page as a place where people can go to raise complaints, or any other issues they might wish to discuss.  It is a place which allows consumers to talk to a brand, rather than being a ‘channel’ through which brands can talk at consumers.  Thus your Facebook page and how you manage it becomes a highly visible indication of how seriously your brand takes its’ commitment to listening and responding to its’ consumers.  At the same time, it also solves the content problem, because you only ever post content which directly relates to the issues consumers raise – you never post content which is simply an extension of advertising or any other form of promotional or campaign driven message.

This approach to Facebook is something which can have a direct and measurable impact on brand reputation as well as delivering value through its ability to give a brand real-time intelligence about what their consumers are thinking (e.g. knowing what people think about the latest ad, to return again to our marketing director).

There is a further advantage, which is that once a brand starts using Facebook in this way it will realise that it is senseless to not extend this approach to other channels such as Twitter.  After all – why would you wish to restrict your ability to listen and respond to your consumers by locking this up in Facebook?  And, to return to the mistake raised at the start of this article, this also has the effect of breaking the incorrect belief that a social media strategy is a channel strategy, creating the recognition that a social media strategy is a behaviour identification and response challenge, not a channel and message challenge.

And once organisations have come to this realisation, they are ready to enter the world of social media in a way which will allow them to have a convincing answer when someone asks the question “why are you doing this?”