Forrester found that visiting a company’s website is the number one way fans prefer to stay in touch with the brands [/inlinetweet]they love, outranking Facebook all the way down at number five. While their Facebook pages are brimming with exciting, yet unseen content, brand websites may be neglected – at a high cost to community interaction.
Livefyre’s Jordan Kretchmer writes..”the time has come for social media marketers to refocus and control their owned channels. Gone are the days when it was worth investing quality content and energy accumulating thousands of likes and followers on social networks. You used to be able to more or less rely on Facebook and Twitter to generate chatter, increase brand awareness, and engage users to share your content. And it used to be free.”
So then why in the hell are brand still investing so much time and energy in social media?
1ne: They have been taken in by con men who masquerade as social media experts.
2wo: Their Facebook reps tell them to “spend more money” to get better results on ads.
3hree: They feel that their brand websites are OK when in reality they have never done usability testing and don’t look at bounce rates.
4our: They are convinced that consumers actually want to have a relationship with them.
Consumers do use social media to interact with companies, but only 27 percent of research and development/product development and 37 percent of product management departments read social media comments from consumers on a regular basis.
With little control over the way our customers experience our brand on sites like Facebook, differentiating ourselves becomes problematic. That’s the problem with social media that we don’t own – its value is constantly at risk. Unlike Facebook pages, online communities are customer networks, we own and the way our social customers experience them is entirely up to us.
If we expect to remain competitive today, it’s deeply important that we do more than simply show up on popular social networks. It’s critical that we build insight into the needs and wants of our customers and use that insight to build predictable forecasts for our business. Without the ability to innovate the social customer experience, that insight remains out of our grasp.
