January 10, 2012

Does Facebook Work?

With 800 million active members, as many as 25% accessing the network using a mobile device, and hundreds of millions spent by brands to attract and engage fans, clients are starting the New Year by asking, “Does Facebook work?” 

The short answer is … it depends on what you want Facebook to do.

With massive reach, strong frequency and cultural integration, marketers expect Facebook to be a persuasive tool to reach and engage customers and prospects. Yet on a basic level, the jury is still out on these fundamental questions.

Some clients want to build brand awareness and amass large numbers of fans hoping to better engage customers and prospects in conversation leading to brand preference, loyalty and maybe goose a few more sales. Others want to reduce the distance between a brand and its clientele quickly and build intimacy necessary to accelerate the number, frequency and value of sales.  Measuring these desired results is not clear or easy.

For the most part, brands don’t really know who their fans are. There is no way to crosstab Facebook fans or likes with customer databases or purchase histories. So we don’t know if we are reaching new customers or saturating existing customers by using Facebook as a secondary or tertiary channel.

From a direct marketing standpoint, F-commerce is in its infancy, though Facebook has become an effective vehicle to tout deals or specials and is becoming a significant force in coupon distribution. But nobody is harvesting significant sales on Facebook … yet.

In the absence of customer tracking or direct sales, brands developed content, games, promotions and on-going dialogues to engage customers. Marketers convinced themselves, with a little help from Facebook, that some combination of interactions, likes, clicks, plays, comments, time spent on apps and original posts constitutes engagement which mysteriously translates into brand awareness, preference and advocacy. But there is no consensus on these measures and nobody has documented this phenomenon in a credible way.

There are lots of correlations but little proven causation. Consider the stats that are bandied about brazenly.

  • 86% of American women have a social network profile
  • 95% of them are on Facebook
  • 50% of female social networkers bought products based on information they found on social networking sites.  
  • The average user spends 7 hours a month on Facebook,
  • Roughly half (49%) of Facebook brand followers want sales and offers  

In spite of these data points, we don’t know who our fans are or their relative value to our brands or our business. We aren’t selling them much that we can track or directly attribute to Facebook. And we think consumers like us and engage with us.

But there’s evidence that brands and customers expectations are out of sync with each other. And Facebook itself has filtered access to the followers we’ve amassed and their friends, which limits our reach and frequency.  To confound things further, we don’t really have a way to translate discrete actions on Facebook by individuals or in aggregate into meaningful behaviors affecting brand or revenue growth.

If we are honest with each other the answer to the question of Facebook’s marketing efficacy is … we don’t really know.

Maybe we are in the infancy of Facebook marketing experimentation or maybe, as Catherine Boera of Active International argues users see Facebook as a social rather than as a marketing medium.

 

 

 

 

Jan 10, 2012 3:52:41 PM | Online Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA

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Danny Flamberg

I am a veteran marketing consultant working with leading and emerging brands

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