Social Media Marketing: It’s Not About Why You Need To Be Social, But How To Be Social
So you have set up your Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn page, either through an agency or in house community manager, and you have the likes. What’s next though? What was the strategy to having some social media presence to begin with?
Last year, around March, Facebook updated their brand pages to adopt the more general Timeline look, and with these changes came a lot of strategic changes on how businesses changed the way they approached social media marketing. Gone were the days of landing pages, and therefore creating impressions through tab apps default.
Now you sitting there thinking, well I got a million Likes, means I’m successful and my million fans see my posts right? Not with Edgerank playing double dutch with your pages.
EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what articles should be displayed in a user’s News Feed.
Like Google, Facebook now wants more engagement/content from users on their product, to differentiate fake accounts and brand pages with inflated likes, from real pages that are actually getting in touch with their fans and actually provide necessary content to use. The strategy is to have your website as your online HQ’s, your social media pages become your promotional stalls that need to direct leads or interest to your brand and HQ. With Edgerank making sure unpaid posts reach only 10%-15% of your fans, over inflated dormant likes become Reach suicide.
The key is constant, consistent presence that “draws” your fans in. If you create generic, once in a while posts, disappear for huge stretches of time – your followers might just get bored and forget about you completely.
Brands need to understand Total Likes != Success any more online, it’s how you translate your Insights and how to leverage those likes to conversions, be it leads, traffic or just general interest in what you have to say or sell.
Just like everyone else, businesses need to make sure they stay abreast of their social media etiquette. Use social networking sites the way they were made to be used and your business will butterfly.