For many brands, the social media ‘strategy’ can be summed up to: a race to “Likes” and fans – with Facebook as central point. The results are up to their strategy: poor. After having met a dozen of marketing and social media manager in recent years, we have observed the following diseases:
- “Collectibles obsession”, unstoppable desire to have more fans to competition, most having no affinity with the brand, but acquired thanks to advertising and competition to win yet another iPad. Their commitment ensures low or almost total invisibility of the brand’s posts (because Facebook punishes posts with little or no engagement, thanks to its infamous ‘Edgerank algorithm’).
- “Like-ahoolism” : race Like with posts with no link to the brands or its values, are without doubts, useful for the community manager’s ego, but less to help this brand to sell better.
- “Colonialism” : tendency to ‘occupy territories’ such as forgotten networks or niche networks at the moment, like Pinterest, Instagram,… Like a cat, spread the odor of the brand a bit everywhere, cannot be bad – or it is ? Except that, because of a lack of audience, those territories are a bit like a construction site, which is not really useful for the brand, quite the opposite. Light disease we will agree.
- “Apps- ite” : absurd belief in ‘Deus Ex Machina’ – the creation of a Facebook application will be enough to make an incredible ‘viral buzz’. Unfortunately, most apps die without having seen other users than the agency, the brand & the community managers and their families.
- “Socialophobia” : tendency to think that of course, nothing good could come out of social media, space of 1001 criticism and fronds, and to isolate any social project as much as possible from the rest of the company’s activities: no sending of recruitment email, no presence on the website, no reference in campaigns. Typical of brands that are scared of their own shadow, and by fear of doing nothing risky, are especially likely to die, forgotten.
Almost all brands have been touched by one of these diseases. The worst is, without doubts, having none of them, to be indifferent. Because, as long as the human being will be a social animal, and that the digital will matter, social media will keep on playing a role in commerce and media. Make your teething and learn from them is probably the best advice we can give.
But, if fever has been important and you’re thinking to quit everything, think twice ! It is more than ever the time to reinvent your social presence, and make it really a revenue & audience generating machine, not a simple media tool for ‘the buzz’.
We will see how in a following article !