Are brands taking over Facebook?
It’s been a while since I last posted, which is pretty bad, but I have good reasons. In June I took the plunge to the dark side and left the agency world to go and work client side. I was told pretty terrible things about being on “that side” of the business, but despite all the negative pessimists out there, I joined PokerStars in late June to become their Head of Social Media. So as you can imagine, it’s been a crazy few months but I decided that I needed to get back in the game & vent a little.
I’ve actually spent the past few months trying to understand a few things about the relationship between a brand and a consumer (or in my instance, a player). It’s been interesting working alongside some truly passionate poker geeks who live & breathe the game but it’s also thrown up some incredibly interesting learnings too.
It was probably in my first week in the new job where I saw something that a friend had posted in my news feed on Facebook and wanted to share it with someone. When I went to return to the post a little while later, it became lost amongst a sea of other posts which were mainly those made by brand pages I am a fan of. I am actually a fan of over 100 different brand pages on Facebook, which sounds a lot but some statistics from 2010 say that 20 million users become fans of pages every single day, so in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a reasonable number.
Does it not seem that brands are becoming more dominant than users nowadays? I remember when the site first launched and I become a user in 2007. It was always very much focused on me as the user, and the ability for me to engage with my friends online. That was all. Nothing complicated. Now, I log-in to Facebook to find that most of my friends aren’t using the site as much as they used to, and in some instances friends are leaving all together.
Here is a great example of a friend @craigelder who decided to leave Facebook because he simply had enough.
This worries me and at the same time it doesn’t surprise me.
As someone overseeing a brand community of over 500,000 poker enthusiasts, it worries me because what if these users feel the same? I need to make sure that as a brand, we are careful about how we interact & engage with our community. When I look at some of the brands that I’m a fan of, it does worry me about how often they post irrelevant content into my news feed & how often I “unlike” a page because of it.
I’m not saying it’s a bad thing that Facebook allow my brand to have an active presence on the site, but is it getting to a stage where there is more branded content than user content? I’ve noticed in the past 12 months that most of my friends are using Facebook less & less, and we’re communicating through channels like WhatsApp, BBM & old school methods like texting (would you believe it). I’m not saying that they are going to competitor platforms, because most of them don’t have Twitter & Google+ accounts, but they present their own issues for brands which I won’t go into now.
I know there will be a lot of people out there who will question my argument & simply point out that users are the ones who actively decide to like a page, and therefore it’s their choice. But let’s be honest about this. The Facebook algorithm is pretty clever and doesn’t hold back in trying to “recommend” new brands a user should engage with. Having said that, it still is the user’s choice at the end of the day, but it does worry me to think that as a brand trying to be innovative in this space, how can we get that balance right between engaging with those enthusiasts without overpowering them with too much, therefore driving them away. As more platforms develop their brand proposition, it’s going to be even more important to get the balance right or potentially risk having any kind of authentic community in the long-term.
Until then, a message to other brands… think twice about your approach to using a platform like Facebook. If we are collectively smart about this, we can create experiences for our customers that they will embrace, or we risk losing them altogether because they just become fed up with a platform that cares less about real people & more about their next multi-million dollar deal.
@adamfield83
All Comments
Nicely put Adam. You’ve definitely hit the nail on the head in regards to the newsfeed. Far too often my newsfeed is broadcast from a mix of brand fan pages, user created fan pages and FB powerusers who spam me about their Farmville.
Gone are the days where people upload photos from the night before (now it’s photos of their kids – perhaps a generation thing?). People’s status updates are less funny and personal – instead usually reverberating what’s on the TV, what their children are doing or desperate cries for some item for their social game.
The newsfeed simply isn’t interesting anymore. And now Facebook has decided to aggregate conversations into topics it feels even less social.
I think an important aspect of this – is the fact that I get constant updates from fan pages set up by normal users. I liked them at the time because they were funny but now it’s just a joke that has gone on far too long. Too much broadcast. The same goes for brand Facebook pages. At least on Twitter you can see the interaction with real people, see brands RT their followers and ultimately be able to follow the conversation more easily. The threaded nature of FB comments is just far too laborious.
Perhaps FB should bring in a Reddit up-voting mechanism to wall threads?
Anyway, mini rant over!
definitely agree on this one, I “liked” lots of brand pages & made sure my profile was up to date so I could suss out how well facebook’s ads were targeting me. Now I can barely see updates from friends and family due to the brand postings…
Perhaps brands need to stop “pushing” those messages out there and take more of a personal approach. Lets face it, most of us have blocked / hidden friends on facebook as a result of their continuous posting of endless drivel.
Are brands at risk of the same thing happening to them? They should be joining in the conversations, not flooding our social networks with “me me me” messages
My feed is exactly the same – but rather than disliking a page i simply hide its posts from my news feed. this way i can see the content on my terms and not have it pushed in my face. could be worth investigating how many others do this – esp as so many facebook metrics are based on total number of fans – but what if the fans are never even seeing the message?
Thanks for the comment Liz, and it’s interesting you say that because that makes it even worse for brands. I’ve taken a snap shot of pages that I’ve managed before now, and in most instances there are only around 40-50% active users within the page, because the others are ones like you & I who hide or un-subscribe from the page to avoid being spammed with updates. But ask yourself this; Do you actively go searching for those pages that you hide from the newsfeed or are you just contempt in the knowledge that you don’t need to interact with that brand on Facebook?
My feeds is pretty much the same as well. While I look at a lot of brand pages for work I unlike most of them pretty quickly – as on a day to day basis I don’t care enough about any of them or what they have to say on Facebook.
It is impressive that so many brands manage to hang onto their followers. I also don’t notice a lot of my friends becoming fans of brands.
I read Craig’s piece which is fair enough, but FB is useful as i have a bunch of people on there that i can stay in contact with and it doesn’t cause me any problems. I’m not sure why some people have such an issue. It is (privacy settings aside) pretty benign.
I must be the first to disagree. I use FB to keep in touch with my friend and therefore don’t ‘like’ pages. All my updates in the news feed are rom friends. I would not become friend with someone if I don’t want to know what they are up to. I guess the same goes with ‘likeing’ brands.
Facebook algorthym is clever, agree. Adam, I hear what you are saying, as I use facebook more and more I like over 100 pages or so, this is all for client based work and research. So people like us may see more ‘brands’!
I think an ‘average’ user will have less interactions with brands.
The is no real best practice when it comes to FB pages and that is where the problem starts. I always advise clients to remember Facebook is a social platform not a business platfrom, by all means build a community and share content. I think if I started posting status updates on my personal profile more than twice a day I would lose a few friends too. The same rules must apply – Gemma, think you have explained that really well!
It is hard for me to be objective here.
But great post adam, I hope some people/brands will rethink their strategies after reading this.
It is social fatigue and irrelevance – follow the trends – ICQ, FriendsReunited, MySpace, now Facebook.
Companies see a channel to reach their audience (adverts) and other companies see investment opportunities (selling more adverts) which, as you point out, leads to boredom with the site and lack of ‘real’ interaction within the users of the site.
(I cover it a bit in one of my blogs:
http://warriordeg.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/how-brands-can-become-more-social-future-innovations-in-social-marketing/
but it needs one to itself I think!)
Social Sites need to represent our physical personal space online – ‘virtual space’ for want of a better (and more accurate) moniker.
To put it in a more media friendly context – Facebook is now like a TV channel with 90% adverts and 10% programming – who would tune in to watch that channel – well… the people who tune in to watch QVC and the like.
(Incidentally this is why a lot of TV and music is consumed online and illegally – no adverts! Yet the music and TV companies see their profits dropping and so push out more… adverts!)
Facebook may be growing, but it is with the aunts, uncles, mums and dads (and grans) of the original users (‘digital natives’) of Facebook – the real audience is moving on… but to where?
As a social marketer and social media user I believe and recognise adverts are necessary, and can be made relevant (targeting) and interesting but in order to keep the platforms relevant, we need to respect the user AND the bottom line – not keep bombarding them until they get sick of the adverts and so the brands we represent.
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