Are you surrendering your search juice to social media?

Yes, certain things do work better in social media sites. Voter polls, contest etc… However, simply being on Facebook won’t maximize a brand’s revenue and traffic. Businesses must stop surrendering their online juice – content to social media first and take what works on Facebook and other social media sites and apply it to their own sites and the wider web in general.

Brands Need Friends, Not Fans on Facebook

Facebook and social media offers brands access to its vast audience with minimal  cost of entry. Therefore, one would presume that brands would develop strategic and forward-thinking campaigns to maximize their reach. Not so.

Instead, brands being gullible quickly entered a popularity contest for the most facebook Likes. It seemed companies were simply content with growing audience numbers. Until lately, they’ve been comfortable measuring ROI by the number of fans alone. Now they’re beginning to question the value of such a one-dimensional strategy.

An interesting example is Starbucks, one of the most popular brands on Facebook, has startlingly discovered low engagement numbers, despite its 26 million fans. A recent announcement from Starbucks mentioned the company’s popular red holiday cups. Yet, its engagement rate (the number of gestures on the post divided by the total number fans at the time of this writing) only calculated to 0.28% Likes and 0.02% comments.

The challenge now is for brands to evolve from simply being a company with a product to sell to becoming a valuable source for interesting, entertaining and useful content. The real measurement of a brand’s Facebook success is relevance.

Brands would do best to approach the problem differently or, more specifically, to start acting like those super connected Facebook friends we all have. These individuals not only broadcast their status updates, connect with review sites like everybusinessreview.com, and Like frequently; they also frequently engage friends in one-to-one discussions and promote social events, thereby building broader community circles.

To date, most brand activity has focused on building a brand’s audience base and then using a simple content strategy to engage fans via Likes and comments.

Brands must learn how to create and control human sharing behaviors. Individuals strive to be the first to break news, to post photos proving “they were there,” to beat another friend in a social game, etc. Brands that mirror such activity will prove more relevant to fans. By acting like a friend first and foremost, brands will collect – and ultimately engage with – more people.