Ditch Your Fans and Find Your Lovers

Audience 2.0, Smart Bloggers, Social Media, Strategy

UPDATED: Almost any article about social media that you read will focus on “likes”, “fans” and “friends”. At first glance, “social” media appears to have equated positive relationship terminology with relationship.

But when you look at the motivation behind “liking” a brand on Facebook – it’s decidedly transactional. There is a focus on discount and promotion, exclusive content and so on. Now, while a strategy addressing these desires will build your “fan base”, I’m increasingly sceptical that it will build you anything more than a glorified mailing list. In fact, researcher Dan Zarella has shown "The amount of 'conversation' that happens on your Facebook posts has nothing to do with the number of people who will see it" – suggesting Facebook Conversations Don't Achieve The Marketing Boost You Desire.

For those brands that want a little more from the investment they are making in social media, you need to dig a little deeper.  You need to look for those whose pupils dilate at the mention of your name.

It’s time to ditch your fans and find your lovers.

This is no easy task. You need to listen. Monitor. Pay attention. Dig. Analyse. Engage. Converse. Respond. And measure. You need to rinse and repeat. What I call continuous digital strategy.

But thanks to Sean Howard, you can now follow a step-by-step guide to using social media monitoring to find the people who already love your brand. The approach uses live data to help you truly understand who your real brand advocates are – and as is almost always the case (as is shown in the Nikon case study) – your most powerful advocates are rarely those with high klout scores or large follower bases. They are the people who consistently generate content and comment around your brand properties and digital assets.

I know this will make you cry – we all love the large numbers and the occasional mention from a social media superstar. But if you want to build lasting social media value for your digital properties, it’s time to ditch your addiction to “fans” – because when it comes to social media, it’s all about the love. Baby.

Social Media Monitoring – Finding Relationships

7 thoughts on “Ditch Your Fans and Find Your Lovers”

  2. Thanks for the kind words. And the better words!
    “But if you want to build lasting social media value for your digital properties, it’s time to ditch your addiction to “fans” – because when it comes to social media, it’s all about the love. Baby.”
    You rock. And a shout out to the team that worked on the deck. Couldn’t have done it without them.

  3. It seems to me this is very much inline with what Mark Zuckerberg was saying yesterday, that the next 5 years will not be about measuring active user growth.

  4. I hate to say I agree with Zuckerberg, but in this case I think you are dead on. 🙂
    The problem is that all of the tools we have at our disposal edge us towards measuring the most “influential” or how many mentions or fans we have.
    I was getting into a conversation yesterday where there is value in not only finding those who love your brand, but also those who hate your brand. The method we came up with above (we believe) will do both sides of the equation. 😉

  6. Thanks for the good post Gavin and as I said in a blog post earlier this week in relation to Tiger Airways – social data is a goldmine but if you don’t extract the gold its just a hill like any other.
    Regards, Michael

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