Dear Brand, are you losing me ?

My First article which I wrote after joining here :) Thought I should share the same on my own blog as well!

A little different from my usual blog posts!!

So here it goes...

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Deeksha Rajpal

Okay, I confess, I am a Facebook-aholic! Social Networking is a very important part of my life that I find hard to do without! Sounds familiar? May be you are also one of my partners-in-crime. A crime which has nothing to do with the run-of-the-mill murders!

So what crime is it exactly that I am going gaga about? Let me share with you a small story. This story has me, the consumer, it has got most of the brands under the sun today and it has got a small button. A small innocent LIKE button! So easy it is to click that button that without even realizing it, I am responsible for changing a brand’s identity!

When I joined Facebook ages ago, it was just something new and exciting. It gave me the freedom to share my life with the people I care about-my friends, my long-distance extended family and many more people who make my life what it is. It was so exciting to share my new look with everyone instantly as soon as I got a haircut!

Soon, some of the others things that are a part of my life started springing up. Things like a coffee-chain who’s Irish coffee I swear by. And the particular brand of jeans I’ve been wearing since I was a teenager! The brands which were oh-so-far-away soon started interacting with me! So exciting! I could actually talk to the brands. Who thought such a day would arrive?

Then the harsh reality bit me. HARD! An year down the line, when more and more of my friends, colleagues, families started FACEBOOKing, all I could see on my wall were the all too frequent messages from X, Y, Z brand. Where have the people I care about gone? Why can’t I see their messages? Soon, I got to know who the real culprit was! It was the thousands of community managers who were taking care of multiple brands and working overtime to ensure it was their brand that I saw whenever I logged in to my Facebook page. As a result, my homepage was flooded by TV channels, too many apparel brands, tech pages and more than a few arbit pages.

So, I started doing what many other poor mortal souls would surely be doing. I either deleted half the pages from the 356 brand pages I liked or I simply hid their posts. So sure was I that I won’t be missed that I didn’t even think twice before UNLIKing a page!

And I was not disappointed! My ex-brand pages went on with their lives, adding thousands of LIKERS or followers every month, losing a large chunk of them at the same time. While they must surely be overjoyed by the continued followers, they didn’t care two hoots about those who were no longer a part of their social media journey.

Do you know there are 55% of the Facebook users who are just like me, unliking a page after liking it, simply because they no longer wanted to see the brand/company’s posts! The even worse case is that, there are only 57% of these people who bother to formally unlike the pages. The rest either simply ignore the posts or delete posts from their newsfeed!

Have you, as a brand or an advertiser, ever missed my absence? Ever realized that I was once a part of your journey too? Ever tried to find out what exactly was it that broke us apart? Or are you just too busy accumulating the number of followers and comments?

Anyways, that is one part of the story. The other part involves those friends of mine who keep on adding every brand page on earth, without EVER interacting with those brands. WHY? They simply don’t care. Facebook is just a medium for them to interact with their friends or fellow strangers! So why exactly are these people a part of the brand’s community page? Well, they could be among those lakhs of people who add a page simply because everyone else is doing it. Because my best friend LIKED page, I automatically assume it would be something interesting. I add it as well, and then simply forget about it.

After liking a page, I’ll again go back to my life, throwing the page out of my memory, never even bothering to even once visit the company’s pages after liking it. Why? One, I may not be interested. Neither interested in what the brand has to say, nor interested in sharing my views.

Do you know that 51% fans confess that they RARELY or NEVER visit a brand’s page after liking it? In fact, 26% of consumers have liked a page because they were interested in a one-time offer and they simply unlike the page after getting what they wanted. How do we retain these fans?

Companies have to realize that every lost fan is impacting the brand? Because I don’t talk to you, I’m in simple words a dead follower. And hence, the other 1000 people I have in my friend’s list, the potential brand followers, are now automatically out of the radar. Why don’t you try to reach out to me? To interest and engage me?

Mapping the behaviour of a Facebook fan should give a heart-attack to any brand or advertiser worth his salt because of so many gory facts. Right now, shockingly, these advertisers aren’t even aware that such a trend is happening!

Facts prove that 19% of the Facebook fans simply ignore posts. They are too lazy to bother hiding a post or deleting a brand’s page. 38% of the fans might bother to click the small “x” button in their news feeds to remove irrelevant feeds or posts from their wall! A staggering 71% of Facebook fans say they have become more selective about liking companies of Facebook. Mostly because, their wall is peppered with brand communications, they feel suffocated by the humongous number of brands, each trying hard to gain the poor guy’s attention or because their expectations as a fan aren’t being met.

Why? May be you are giving them content which is irrelevant to them. Or maybe, your posts are too frequent and are simply crowding their news feed. One may also argue that it is because you have tried to smother them with your brand name and your product with every communication of yours. I would request you to please not drive your fans away.

Now, another thing that can be heard oft repeated is the problem of fake profiles which are crawling all over Facebook. You might be doing great as a brand on social media, you might be shelving out great content and engagement activities to your consumer, but how do you distinguish which of these fans are real and not just a fake profile? Why these fake profiles are there in the first place, one can’t really comment. But statistics prove that if taken on a case by case basis, at least 3-4% of the followers are just fake or bogus profiles. So if even 40,000 out of a million followers are a bogus profile, that doesn’t really bear well for the brand.

Why don’t you brand custodians send me your views on this trend? You know the brands, you understand the prospective consumers.

What do you think you can do to counter this gnawing problem which might just prove to be a slow poison for your brand?

At the end of the day, are you interested in forming a life-long lasting relationship with your consumer or are you just interested in a one-night stand? I’d love to hear your part of your story.