2 reasons why Facebook sucks for branding

In these early days of social media branding, we often hear loud voices telling us the awesomeness of Facebook for building brands. The social media gurus say Facebook is great for building community, the page management companies tell us that companies must engage on Facebook, and Facebook tells us we can increase hard sales numbers with Facebook Marketing.

I believe that all these loud voices have merit, but my problem is they drown out the quieter murmurs of marketers managing Facebook Pages of a couple hundred or thousand fans for massive international brands asking the question “What am I doing wrong? Why don’t people seem to care?” We need to answer this question.

My answer: You aren’t doing anything wrong. Facebook wasn’t built for you.

I’m sure you are a competent marketer and share interesting and relevant content with your fan base, but there are two reasons your fan base isn’t growing.

Reason #1: Facebook is a general interest network

Facebook connections are glued together by emotional human relationships. We are connected for many emotional reasons: we have spent time together, we care for eachother, we are family, we live nearby,… Our connections are not based on interests, professions, religions, ideologies, or localities. These niche interests are all correlated with our Facebook connections but not the basis for. For this reason, any content that resonates with a smaller segment of the population will have difficulty spreading virally.

Example: A non-profit such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure will have no problem spreading their cause (breast cancer awareness) virally because nearly 100% of the United States population has had some personal and strongly emotional experience with breast cancer. Chances are you know a woman, your mom, aunt, grandmother, or friends mom/aunt/grandmother who has been affected by breast cancer. On the other hand, a smaller “niche” cause such as the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition will  only be relevant to a small percentage of the population.

Niche interest content doesn’t spread on Facebook because of the math behind the viral loop. Each Facebook user has an average of 140 friends. Say 20% of my friends care about bicycle advocacy in San Francisco. In general interest viral apps, we expect click-rates between 2-5 clicks/newsfeed story. If I post a bicycle advocacy story that only resonates with 20% of my friends, I have instantly cut the expected click rate by a factor of 5. My expected click rates drop to 0.4 - 1 click/newsfeed story. These click rates make it impossible for this app to ‘go viral’ as we explained here.

This rule applies to causes, brands, politicians, sports teams, etc… Facebook requires you message resonate with nearly 100% of the population or it will never go viral.

Reason #2: On Facebook people share content they are highly emotional about.

There are many brands that are widely known, Haliburton, Exxon, and Q-Tips for example, that still have difficulty being viral on Facebook. Put simply, these brands are boring. Josh Bernoff talks about marketing for boring and exciting brands here, and we have covered the topic here and here.

People will barely consume content they are not excited about, and they certainly won’t share that content.

Recommendations

So, if your brand is niche interest or boring, we have developed two techniques you can use.

First, you can continue marketing on Facebook but affiliate yourself with a general interest and exciting topic. See how to do this in our article 4 Ways to Make Boring Brands Viral on Facebook.

Secondly, you can find a viral network that doesn’t have these two draw backs for your brand. For example, a B2B marketing consultancy would have difficulty marketing on Facebook because likely 0.1% of the population cares about B2B marketing, and most people aren’t too passionate to share B2B marketing techniques with their Facebook relationships. We would recommend this company to focus its efforts on a niche focused Linkedin group, B2B Marketing. Here 100% of the population is interested in the topic and they are likely to be passionate enough to want to share B2B marketing related content. The company will still need to carefully choose a message that resonates deeply with this niche population, but virality is possible.

We are extremely interested in talking with brands that may be niche or less exciting and are having difficulty marketing on Facebook. Please reach out to us at [email protected] to talk about how to make your brand viral.

cateogories: App Development, Blog