Facebook Pages are a great way for brands and companies to interact with their fans and customer bases, and with the new metrics recently introduced, there’s more information being collated about what your audience are saying about your product than ever before.
In many ways Pages are a marketer’s dream: free advertising space for companies to showcase new products and features, and with a captive audience who ‘like’ your brand you can quickly and easily carry out market research without having to pay a third-party to conduct a survey. The new ‘People Talking About‘ metric gives more of an insight into how much user-initiated activity is going on, compared to the rather arbitrary number of people who have merely clicked ‘Like’, and then have no further input.
An example of this is McDonalds. A household name and global presence, they are ranked 18th on Facebook [among consumer brand pages] in terms of the amount of people who ‘like’ their page . However, when it comes to engagement, they jump all the way up to 2nd when the numbers for ‘People Talking About’ are stacked up. What does this mean?
Well, in short, their Facebook fan page is proving to be more response provoking than everyone else’s (with the exception of Starbucks). By having the second highest level of ‘People Talking About’, but only the 18th highest number of likes, the content they are posting and the environment they are creating on their page is much more conducive to user engagement.
But with all of this user-initiated sharing and activity, what can you, as a brand, do with it? Whilst I initially said that the ‘People Talking About’ figure gives a better idea of who is having a greater impact than the simple number of Likes a page receives, it is still just an automated tally of posts, comments, Likes, mentions, shares, poll votes, photo tags and check-ins. There is no sentiment attached to the ‘Talking About’ value that allows proper analysis. The Devil is in the detail as they say, and what your target consumers are saying about your brand could – and should – be a factor that is considered when planning future developments or delivery of your product or service.
Having a way to search through all of this information and analyse it for trends – both good and bad – should be a high priority for brands, or whoever is outsourced to manage their social media presence. It is with this in mind that we set about designing and developing SocialSafe Enterprise as a social media backup tool for businesses. Facebook Pages and Twitter account information and content can be backed up to a searchable offline store, and from there it can be exported into CSV format so the number crunchers and analysts can have their fun with it.
If your brand is hoping to capture the attention and engagement of your consumers in the social networking landscape, then it is important to know and understand what they are actually saying, rather than the simple fact that you know X-amount of people are saying something about you.