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Quick: What’s a four-letter word for Trojan Horse? How about Facebook’s “Like” button? Yes, it’s a big piece of a big play for social media dominance, but… practically speaking, what does it all mean?
Bottom line, Like means different things to different people. And that’s the rub. Whether called Like or Fan, Facebook head counts quickly became one of those numbers marketers tended to both publicly tout and privately ridicule. 162,917 people are fans of Paris Hilton! 53,361 raised their hands for the Toyota Prius! 7,721 are pro Peanut Butter!
The tendency is to imply that more equals better, though when push comes to shove, we know the situation is more complicated than that. Are those 7,721 folks hard core peanut butter fans that a clever marketer can do something with, or are they mostly people who thought, at least for a moment, that it would be funny to post “I Like Peanut Butter” and have never given the matter another thought?
Divining the percentage of people that click a Fan/Like button and promptly forget about it or otherwise may not be activate-able in any meaningful way adds some vagary to tracking. Yet it’s not nearly so bad as the flip side—when companies build up a following for a profile only to abandon it after a campaign has run its course.
The elephant graveyard of abandoned fan profiles is virtual clutter at best, a betrayal that could come back to haunt marketers at worst. A marketing team that hews to a campaign mentality moves on to the next program, while core fans often continue to visit these pages. The end result is that they either own the conversation, cutting the original corporate sponsor out of the loop, or they get fed up and take their community elsewhere, making it that much harder for marketers to win them over the next time.
We’ve been tracking a number of abandoned profiles for movies and brands, each with tens-to-hundreds of thousands of fans and, amazingly, month-to-month growth despite the lack of new “official” content or support. Hello? Can you say missed opportunity? If not for ongoing merchandising/licensing efforts, then for someone in the organization with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit? Or are we to conclude that, in the end, the franchise holders simply don’t Like their customers all that much?
If you want an example of someone doing it right, take a gander at tiny Iceland and it’s 31,067 Facebook fans. Why be friends with a country? Well, it turns out that the Iceland profile is charming, funny, and almost always interesting (during the volcano mess, they posted “Iceland apologizes for the inconvenience”). They post great photos. They don’t overdo it. Pretty much all the things one looks for in an online friend. It’s hard to say if we’ll ever visit Iceland as a result of being Facebook buds—though the relationship has almost certainly increased the odds from zero to something better than that—but we do know one thing for sure: Iceland? We Like it.
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