Why no one cares about your Facebook fan page.

• Author: Matthew Jackson
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Facebook isn’t new or trendy any more, even my 86 year old grandmother has a profile these days. It’s still a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with your distant friends and relatives, but as far as defining youth culture goes, it’s slowly starting to lose it’s edge. I mean, who wants to cut loose on a platform where your mom will step in and chide you for your choice of language, or your inappropriate behaviour on a Saturday night?

In recent years digital marketing agencies have bandied the term ‘social media’ about like some sort of magic silver bullet. A quick fix for ailing brands, that involves minimal input and maximum return. Needless to say, every dog and its CEO rushed out to harness the power of the interwebs and create its very own Facebook fan page.

But here’s the rub; nobody cares about the majority of Facebook fan pages clogging up the internet.

For good reason: People, inspite of these easy-to-use marketing tools, don’t really like companies. Who cares if your industrial steel tube manufacturing plant has a fan page? I mean sure, I like pipes – I love how they bring water straight into my kitchen – but do I like them enough to track down their manufacturer and ‘like’ their fan page? Of course not! Neither do yo.

I’m not saying that social media is not without its uses when it comes to digital marketing, but it’s certainly not appropriate to many of the brands and companies it’s been applied to. The thing about social media is that, well, um… it’s about being social. It’s not about sticking up some random page and getting your employees to like it.

If you start to think about what it means to be social, the word conversation comes to mind. In an age where finding out what every single one of your friends is doing takes nothing more than a quick glance at your phone, brands have to work exceptionally hard at getting their users to engage. You simply can’t achieve this with a Facebook fan page. Well, I guess you can, but you have to have something more to offer than your latest range of chrome plated tap fittings.

I recently engaged in a marketing campaign run for Diemersfontein, a local wine manufacturer, on Twitter. What struck me about the campaign was not the product – which is excellent, by the way – or the company’s branding, specials or competitions. No, what really inspired me about the Diemersfontein twitter campaign was the fact that it was run by real people, not pseudo-brands. They engaged their target market in a one-on-one conversation. Now wine, as a product is something with social connotations already attached to it. It lends itself to an effective social marketing campaign.

The lesson we can take from the Diemersfontein campaign is that it is possible to engage your target market in a social media setting, it just takes a lot of hard work from people who have a social inclination to begin with. I guess it boils down to the age old adage of content, and it being king.

If you’re considering embarking upon a social media campaign, find out what you’re going to be offering your users before you start spending time, money and effort on the campaign. Why should they care about what you’ve got to offer? Why should they want to talk to your brand instead of their friends? A good social media marketing team will be able to help you find the right direction, but if you’ve got nothing worth talking about – and by that I mean you’ve got to have something more engaging to say than your users’ friends – then perhaps you should be thinking about using slightly more traditional digital marketing channels.