More and more brands are dedicating increasing amounts of time to building their fan base on Facebook. This comes as no surprise considering the incredible influence that Facebook has with consumers, who are spending more and more of their time on the platform, interacting with friends and brands and sharing experiences with each other.

In fact, Facebook’s dominance in the activity landscape of users is leading brands to invest heavily in creating Facebook based platforms, hoping to leverage the reach of users’ social graphs and as a result – more agencies are developing tactics to generate traffic to their clients’ brand pages and accumulate a high number of ‘Likes’.

But the fact that many of the brands, and agencies, still seem to neglect is that ‘Like’-ing should not be viewed as the end result but rather as the beginning of a long journey. ‘Like’ is an action easy to perform and as such does not require, nor reflect, any level of commitment from the newly ‘acquired’ fan. With the opportunities for engagement that social media offers, settling for such an action could be regarded as nothing more than a compromise, or miss-understanding of the medium. In fact, after becoming brand fans, many users choose to ‘hide’ brand feeds, ‘un-Like’ the page or simply never bother to visit it again. These fans and their attributed ‘Likes’ are not generating any value to the brand.

Facebook Insights provides much of the required statistics that can give brands and agencies insight into fans behaviour, complemented by companies such as Buddy Media, Fanzila, Socialbakers and FanGager, which puts emphasis on incentivising and measuring fan engagement.

In order to create value, brands must generate and/or facilitate engagements; they must develop a relationship with their fans that will keep them ‘in play’ and will develop their affinity and loyalty. At the end, it all amounts to customer life time value, doesn’t it?

Think of it as a romance: ‘Like’ is merely a flirtation and what we are aiming at is a relationship – a love story!

Having said that, whereas generating a large number of fans is essential to reach engagement of scale (one of social media’s promises), it is that scale that also makes it more difficult to maintain high levels of engagement. Should brands segment their fan bases and develop different and tailored content calendars? Should they divide fan groups between different tabs (appealing to their respective interests)? Or even pages? And how should brands balance between scale and longevity of active fans?

These are some of the challenges brands are facing these days and which we, as agencies, must help them understand.