A Like Is Not A Contract, But It’s Very Nice
More and more I’m getting the feeling brand marketers hold the assumption that when a person clicks “like” on your page or site that it is the equivalent of subscribing to you, like email or Twitter. In reality, it’s a lot like this Flight of the Conchords song:
When a person likes a brand page, it only heavily weights the appearance of that page content for a short amount of time in the persons top news feed. During this window, if that person or their friends doesn’t engage in that content in any way (expanding comments or likes, liking, commenting, visiting the page, looking at a picture), the page content stops appearing.
The upside is that you do have a window in which to present content that your audience cares about. This is where content strategy, and having a participation framework to continue conversations (interactions to the system) mean so much.
It’s also where we start to see facebook’s separation between likes, which is quickly becoming a paid and app development metric, and active users / impressions as measures of retention. Based on what I’ve seen among clients over the past year is that the cost per like has risen dramatically: from an average of $1/like to $2.50 or so recently. And the window to retain attention lasts about a week.
If you’re ready for that week with updates that matter to the audience, not only will you retain and engage them, you’ll start showing up in the top news of their friends, actually using the system to help propel the brand to exponential exposure (ComScore / Facebook study says a multiplier between 32 and 81 friends of fans), and provide a compounding return on the paid media.
What do you think? Add your perspective in the comments or @mleis!
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