marketing – Page 83 – Andy writes!

The findings or a recent study on how brands use Facebook should cause all of us in higher ed to rethink how we use the social media giant for our marketing efforts.

The study, conducted by Facebook itself and recently reported in Ad Age, suggests that the “touchy-feely” approaches many brands (including higher ed brands) take on Facebook aren’t all that effective. (Thanks to Inigral’s Brandon Croke for sharing that Ad Age article via Twitter.) Analyzing 1,200 posts from 23 different brands, Facebook’s researchers found that for those brands, getting a lot of “likes” or comments on posts may be less effective than Facebook “shares,” which redistribute a brand’s post into users’ timelines and is viewable by all of their Facebook pals.

“Compared with likes, shares represent a bigger investment from the consumer and occur less frequently,” writes Ad Age’s Matt Creamer. “Thus, shares are often going to be more meaningful from a marketing perspective. After all, they suggest the brand is tapping into that friend-of-fan network that’s central to Facebook’s viral proposition.”

Good point. Not that there’s anything wrong with getting a thumbs up on your Facebook post, but that like is little more than a simple nod of approval from someone who is already connected to your brand. Wouldn’t you rather have members of your Facebook community avidly share your posts with their own networks. This moves people into more of a brand ambassador role, sharing information from your organization with others who may then choose to get on board with you.

But whether you’re talking about likes, comments or shares, the best brands share information that is relative to the brand as well as to their Facebook community, Sean Bruich, head of measurement platforms and standards at Facebook, told Ad Age.

“By far, the biggest predictor of engagement was that the post was on a topic relevant to the brand,” said Bruich. “It impacts everything, from lightweight likes to more invested shares. It’s actually one of the most important things a brand can do. People are seeing the content because they liked the brand, and it makes sense that content about the brand will get them engaged.”

On a related topic, Brandon Croke’s recent blog post, What Prospective Students Think About Your Facebook Page, is worth a read.

Image via birgirking on Flickr/Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/birgerking/5600215736/

© Paulprescott | <a href="http://www.stockfreeimages.com/">Stock Free Images</a> & <a href="http://www.dreamstime.com/">Dreamstime Stock Photos</a> — © Paulprescott | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Last fall, Seth Godin released We Are All Weird, a book that celebrates the oddball individuality of humanity. In the blog post announcing the release of this book, Godin wrote, “During the age of mass (mass marketing, mass manufacturing, mass schooling, mass movements) the key was normal. Normal was important because you needed (were required) to fit into your slot. … But what happens when mass disappears? When we can connect everyone, customize and optimize — then what happens to normal?”

Godin adds that:

Normal is so ingrained in what we do every day that it’s difficult to notice that your tendency toward the normal is now obsolete.

So recently, when Guy Kawasaki posted an infographic comparing how marketing people use social media compared to the rest of the world, I thought again about Godin’s book, and about weirdness and the abnormal.

Clearly, when it comes to social media usage, marketing types are out of the mainstream. According to the infographic (created by SF Heat), we’ve flocked to Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify and Instagram in greater proportion than the “normal” social media user. (Case in point: 53 percent of us are on Instagram, versus 6 percent of the “normals.”) The majority of us (63 percent) strongly agree that brands should be using social media more to connect with customers, while just 23 percent of the normals believe the same thing. Ninety-three percent of us marketing types follow brands on Twitter, compared to just 33 percent of the normal population.

We can look at these stats in a couple of ways:

We are spending far too much time focusing on social media as a tool to connect with customers; or
We are ahead of the curve, early adopters who are establishing outposts in new corners of the social media universe where the rest of the online world will eventually catch up with us

I think we need to be out of the mainstream in our experimentation with social media. But we also need to be mindful that many of those we hope to reach — among our customers, in our audiences — aren’t quite where we are yet, and may not catch up for a while, if ever. Leaders should lead, yes, but they should not get so far ahead of their followers that they lose sight of them.

Besides, some of us marketers aren’t exactly on the vanguard, as a peek at my dormant Pinterest account would confirm.

Getting back to Seth Godin’s point, the Internet is where the weirdness takes root. He writes in We Are All Weird (excerpted here) that:

… [T]he Internet permit[s] a different sort of power, one of silos and smaller but tighter networks. Now, there’s an incentive to fragment instead of coalesce. And given the choice, given the chance to be weird, more and more of us are taking that chance.

Is there any doubt at all that we’re going to get weirder?

So, my fellow marketers, branding and PR types, enjoy your statistical outlier-ness while you can. The rest of the world will soon catch up. And it will be up to us to push help explore the next levels of weirdness, to lead the way for the others.