So how valuable are your facebook fans? Do you really need to make them bigger in number? Are they worth it? What if they are just a bunch of trolls and spoiled teenagers? Do they really engage with you via your Facebook Page? Do they really want to purchase your products or just badmouthing your brand?
These questions are what usually come to mind when marketers think of the usefulness of facebook fans. However, we still believe in one simple principle: if you want to build a lot of Facebook fans, advertising is not the right move.
It is true that we cannot see the concrete value of a fan, but having a bunch of loyal followers surely compromises bigger advantages. Imagine that you own your own army of marketers (that will be more reliable for customers since these people are customers too).
There is a quick disclaimer at this point that Facebook advertising can be very useful. There are times that you may need to increase your level of exposure very quickly, and advertising can give the best results with the support of a well constructed and engaging campaign. What people need to realise is that engaging content is far more crucial ingredient, thanks to the ‘content marketing revolution’ that is really more buzzwords than it is a new and unique concept.
Let’s take a look at the “Boss Hunting” Facebook page. It delivers what it describes as “visual gratification”. Content is almost exclusively high quality photography, gleaned from a variety of sources across the interweb. The page pushes out content on average 3 times a day.
The Page has never needed to advertise, its large fan base of 156,000 people can be attributed exclusively to the team’s dedication to sourcing and sharing the high quality content for which the Page has become known. The Page’s growth has been rapid (Boss Hunting began in early 2012). They do something exceptional and let the people come to you. The admin team is also very loose with the “banning” issue that drives away people with bad attitude from commenting.
The Page has an exceptionally high engagement rating, often between 15%-20% talking about this. The number of likes has reached more than 160,000 marks. The number of shares ranges from hundreds to thousands.
As a point of contrast, examine one of the most popular Pages on Facebook: MTV. The Page boasts just over 41 million followers however, of that number the engagement level sits just over 1%.
Because of its success, Boss Hunting has only just begun to take the first few steps in commercial direction, curating special offers from businesses who have, in much the same way as the fans, been drawn to Boss Hunting. However the real value of the Page lies in the community sense of ownership and their direct engagement. In April 2012, the Boss Hunting team ran a ‘crowd sourced’ campaign for what would become their logo. The result was 142 entries of (mostly) high quality design work from within the Boss Hunting fan-base. There was no prize within the campaign, no iPad giveaways, simply the opportunity to exhibit work within the community.
This is what we call as the value of a strong community. It is not about how many products they buy from you (if they’ve come to you because they legitimately like you then chances are they already enjoy your product). The value of a community from a commercial perspective lies in how that community can be harnessed. If the community is strong, it can accomplish some fairly impressive things. In this regard, Boss Hunting has only hit the tip of the iceberg. There’s gold in them that hills.
The caveat is that Boss Hunting is still in the early stages of identifying what its business model is: should it be another advertising channel? Is it a business to itself – could it work from affiliate payments for advertising the services of the photographers it shares the images of? Only time will tell.
Yes, Boss Hunting has its differences to most commercial organisations, but there is absolutely no reason why most, with a little creative thinking can’t endeavour to take the Boss Hunting approach and slowly work to build a strong community. Shift your expenditure from advertising and focus on the creation of high quality, relevant content and campaigns that focus on user-experience. You may just find that your audience finds you, and we can all agree that earned communities are far more valuable than bought communities.