Facebook | Qube Media

One of the first questions any marketer will ask in the first stages of setting up a business Facebook page is ‘how many fans should we have?’ or ‘how many fans do we need?’

This is a more complicated question than you might think and it’s not just a numbers game. Competitor fan pages offer a wealth of insight for any brand and it is easy to get distracted by the number of fans a competitor has and use this benchmark as the sole measure of success.

However, it’s difficult to see the tactics they employed to get those fans – and how much money they spent to get them. High fan numbers don’t necessarily mean a brand has a large and loyal following.

Advertising for fans

Some campaigns are less about true brand popularity and more about the budget a company puts behind pushing a page via Facebook ads.

75% of Facebook fans have signed up with pages after invitations or ads from brands (DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research in September 2010). If this is the route you are going down, the benchmark amount of fans you ‘should’ have can most accurately be calculated using estimated CPC’s and conversion rates.

Buying fans

Something to be avoided, this less scrupulous technique uses third party companies to buy a set number of fans. The dangers here are twofold, firstly, the fans often aren’t real people, just fake or automated accounts and secondly, even if they are real you are ultimately buying someone who isn’t interested in your brand. It’s a quick win and it will make your account ‘appear’ more popular in the short term – but ultimately, it’s a meaningless ‘big’ number.

Targeting is key

Targeting is key to growing real fans. You may get more get more fans quickly and cheaply by blanket targeting everybody but ideally, you want to attract your target market. Promote your page via your existing communication channels and if you are utilising advertising be very specific with your demographic criteria and interest selection.

All about the engagement

Rather than focusing on the numbers alone, your resources are better invested developing a meaningful relationship with the ‘true’ fans you do have. Providing them with great content will ultimately increase your interaction rates, and therefore the reach of your page allowing for organic growth. You are also more likely to identify your brand advocates who will happily share your content with their network.

The benefits to the marketer of having a thriving community of fans and advocates are countless. Instead of sifting through spam, irrelevant posts and comments you can learn about your customers and what they think about your brand, conduct real time customer service and most importantly develop a long term relationship with the people who matter.

So how many fans should we have on our facebook page? Simply however many want to be there.

I have been thinking a lot recently about online ratings systems and how we use them to express our feelings about a piece of content.

It is quite old news but I think Youtube’s decision to move away from a 5 star rating system to a simple thumbs up thumbs down system was really interesting.

The 5 star rating system largely resulted in viewers voting videos 5 star or 1 star. The graph of star ratings for Youtube was so binary it made a lot of sense to change the rating system to reflect that. Even now the majority of videos you will see on Youtube will have like votes far outweighing the dislike votes.

I guess the response to a video you don’t like is more likely to be closing the tab rather than spending the time to rate it.

A graph showing how votes in a five star rating system were distributed on Youtube

Facebook has taken this system even further and only offers a like button with no option for negative feedback. Presumably this is because Facebook wants to encourage positive behavior and is aware that more people will rate something positively than will take the time to be negative.

These two networks might lead you to thinking the 5 star rating system is dead and that simplification is the answer. However it really depends on the type of content and the presentation of the system. For example Trip advisor’s five star rating system is presented with the semantic terms and radio buttons rather than a clear set of stars. As you can see below the ratings of a typical item tend to have a wider distribution spread.

Trip Advisor uses semantics to anchor it’s rating system

By anchoring the rating system with emotional terms it makes the rater think about which word best aligns with their feelings towards their experience rather than simply if they liked it or not.

It is also worth noting the vast difference between experience a 2 minute Youtube video and spending several days on holiday. The holiday is much more likely to create a variety of opinions that requires a finer degree of scale as opposed to the consumption of a short video.

The rating system can also be integral to the experience of the content itself. For example a new social network Canv.as has an interesting take on the like/dislike rating system.

Canvas upvote rating system

Canv.as is a network about images with users posting funny/interesting pictures and then remixing, editing and responding to them in kind. Users can downvote any item with a thumbs down but are given a choice from 9 upvotes.

Each upvote is worth the same and in terms of rating it is no different to the thumbs up of a Youtube video. However by giving each upvote it’s own visual identity the user is able to reflect the reason for their rating without needing to leave a comment.

Whether the rated image made them happy, shocked or laugh out loud it can all be encompassed with one vote. It allows for a wider range of expression without needing the user to think of where the piece of content ranks in comparison to others.

It is also worth noting that these are not just buttons to click on each image but must be dragged and dropped onto the content which is a much more deliberate and satisfying experience than pressing a button.

Giving your users a rating system can be much more than giving them a set of numbers with which to rate your content. The experience of how they can rate and how the system is presented can dramatically change behaviour. I would be really interested to hear if you have seen any sites that have a unique or different system for rating content.

This blog post was written by Glenn White while at Qube Media. Glenn now works for Brandwatch.

Achieving results in social media for 9 years

Tag Archives: Facebook