Want The Best Social Media Engagement? Don’t Buy Likes, Fans, Or Follower

Want The Best Social Media Engagement? Don’t Buy Likes, Fans, Or Follower

The author of the article emphasize that marketers make the mistake of believing that the likes and follows they purchase are real people. These are not potential leads. the author states that marketers shouldn't expect fans/followers to share or link your content, and views these social media accounts as robots doing the same thing for everybody.

With emergence of the new digital media channels like Facebook, Twitter, it gave a voice to the customers and made it possible for them to create and easily share their own web content. Thus, each individual has now the opportunity to become a media producer, an author, a reviewer, or engage in many other kinds of behaviors that can be consumed by others on the Internet. In this regard, many advertisers gradually seem to realize that they have to change their way of looking at the customer, and the concept of engagement appeared to be the key to success. Customer engagement is critical as a way to create deeper customer brand relationships. However, the rules of measuring audience engagement are new to the marketers and require some major changes in the conventional marketing thinking.

As discussed in the article, in social media channels, engagement is misinterpreted with the amount of fans a brand acquired in a given time period, in particular, how many likes or shares a piece of content received. However, what really needs to be addressed is how does the number relate to past performance of brand, or what does it mean in terms of perceptual increase.

Moreover, I have seen some marketers started using IPM (Interaction per mile) as the way to measure engagement for social network site. However, this only tells us the average chance of engagement per fan/follower. However, it seems like many marketers are still blindly jumped into this metric and started using it as measuring their social performance. My rationale behind this assertion is that we can’t determine if all your fans actually saw your content. Moreover, the way Facebook and Twitter etc show content to fans/followers would change over time.

To be successful, as author suggests, implementing following two core activities should be concerned.

- Creating great content that begs to be shared (emotional content wins)

- Building large and engaged social networks with Unique Audience

Tapping into the business power of social media is not an approach that focuses solely on capturing more Facebook likes and Twitter followers. It is about building a brand through a multifaceted approach of creativity, multimedia, and publishing content that begs to be shared. When a user shares brand’s content, they are exposing it to others outside of typical reach and in essence are attracting new leads to brand.

In short, purchasing fans on social media may not have much of a positive effect on company’s bottom line, and instead could be detrimental to future exposure.

<Source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/want-best-social-media-engagement-dont-buy-likes-fans-followers-01027518#QheSK7mSIs7OSAcL.99>