Community is no longer where you live but where you spend your time online, in many ways at least. Monoculture is declining and fragmentation is the norm. That fragmentation has put a massive value on consolidation or anything that resembles it.
Read MoreSocial media has been viewed as a place where a brand can build up a community of advocates, but anymore, a community it definitely is not. Brands can’t reach their fans or followers without paying, and attention is fleeting in feeds filled with content from friends, family, publishers and competitive brands. This isn’t community. This is media.
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What is a social network anymore? Facebook used to be focused on connecting with “friends,” but today it, along with Twitter, Snapchat and other social networks are about much, much more. It's really not about connecting with friends, at least not exclusively. 63% of Facebook’s and Twitter’s users get their news from those platforms. Snapchat uses its Discover platform to aggregate exclusive content from publishers like ESPN, CNN and BuzzFeed. It's a gateway to news and information as well as a messaging platform. Facebook is also just announced live streaming for celebrities, giving these personalities one more way to promote themselves with their fans.
Social networks are not exactly places to keep up with and update friends and family. Social networks are akin to TV channels and magazines that you’re watching and sharing with your friends.
Brands Have to Be Loud
For marketers that means understanding that there is a lot of clutter and a ton of information to break through, which means the days of just using social to connect on a one-to-one level and optimize content for engagement are coming to an end. That’s not saying those approaches are going away, but their days of being the focus are fading.
Marketers, instead, must overcome the clutter and actually adopt a broadcast mindset. Blasphemy, I know. But if marketers are going to get their messages seen, at least some of their content needs to be a brand (vs. unbranded) message with dollars behind it to get in front of audiences.
That broadcast mindset is kept in check by balancing it with a community mindset that involves social customer service, community management and content meant to engage existing customers and keep a brand top-of-mind for them. So cater to your community but get your message out to the masses. That's the real power of these social networks. Targeted reach to a large audience.
Find the Balance
Social networks aren’t just social networks anymore. They’re kind of social networks and kind of media entities that require marketers to sometimes shout to be heard. That balanced with an approach designed to nurture a community allows marketers to live and thrive in both worlds.
Community management isn't what it used to be. The skills of posting content, responding to questions and inciting conversation are still critical and at the heart of any social media marketing program, but these skills somehow seem quaint by today's standards.
Marketers are now challenged with delivering compelling creative content that stops people in their tracks, while simultaneously monitoring how content is performing and then allocating dollars to boost performance. This is a far cry from what community management used to mean.
Read MorePlatforms grow up. We’ve seen social networks like Facebook and Twitter evolve from being communities for people to connect, share content and consume each other’s content to being media platforms supported by ad dollars and always working to strike a careful balance between meeting financial goals and keeping users happy enough to continue using the service.
Tumblr and Reddit are the latest platforms to start this evolution. Tumblr just launched Sponsored Web Posts that will place up to four ads per day in user content feeds. Reddit is now working with advertisers to integrate their products and services in original video programming. Both platforms have built massive user bases. Now, they’re ready to monetize them.
Still, what makes Reddit and Tumblr special is their organic, “do this our way” mentality that seems counter to what advertising brings to the table. Both argue that they’re working to stay true to their roots and not alienate users. That same argument has been made by Facebook. However, users notice more ads, and they complain about those ads more and more.
That begs the question: can these platforms successfully evolve from being social communities to media platforms?
Read MoreSource: stock.xchngIn an effort to maintain its position as a “genuine advertising platform” and give brands a more accurate measure of their Facebook fans, Facebook has announced that it is working to remove fraudulent Likes from spammers, malware and fake accounts. All of this follows a recent and disturbing trend of people and brands purchasing fake Likes and Twitter followers.
According to Facebook, this will likely result in about a 1% decrease in Page Likes. That’s right. Brands will likely experience a decline in the number of people who ‘Like’ their Pages. I know. This is unacceptable! …I’m kidding, of course.
This Shouldn’t Matter
It shouldn’t have to be said, but this doesn’t matter. In fact, it’s a very good thing. Whether brands encouraged it or not, there’s a very good chance that across all of their marketing channels, they have ‘dead’ leads—email addresses that are no longer active, Twitter followers who are spammers, blog subscribers who no longer pay attention and so on.
Facebook’s doing us a favor. As marketers, we should constantly work to ‘weed out’ the dead leads. This includes removing fake followers on every channel. They give a brand a false sense of where it stands and who its reaching. In fact, some bloggers actually move their blog RSS feeds by announcing it on their blogs. The people who move to the new feed are the real followers. The people who don’t weren’t paying attention anyways.
Look Beyond Vanity Metrics
All of this goes to show that metrics like ‘likes’ and followers are merely vanity metrics. They’re nice to put on a slide and to bring up at a conference, but they lack substance. In fact, as Facebook has shown, they may not truly be accurate.
The true value lies in a brand’s ability to measure the activity those numbers represent. What buyer behavior do fans and followers exhibit that others do not? Do they share more brand content? Are they more likely to buy?
Facebook Pages Should Be Communities
Facebook’s actions should help to refocus some brands out there that have gotten distracted by vanity metrics. Facebook allows brands to tap into the largest group of users ever on one platform to hopefully gain their attention, earn a ‘like’ and turn them into something more—a community of people invested in the brand and helping it succeed by sharing their personal thoughts and opinions with the brand and social connections (what a sentence!).
A marketer looking to grow a community doesn’t want vanity metrics. It wants the brand’s closest advocates to build the foundation of a community that can maximize Facebook’s potential.