Will Facebook “Fans” be Missed?
By Jason Hornik | Senior Director, Product Marketing
In the end, probably not. As of this week, Facebook has done away with the act of Becoming a Fan of a business, brand, band, or celebrity and swapped in a more universally-used Like button (such as on Green Giant Fresh’s brand page below).
The change might seem trivial, but brand marketers are commenting on and evaluating whether the shift in vernacular will substantially affect their efforts to interact with people engaged with their brand on Facebook.
Facebook’s intent is that more of its 400 million users will like businesses or brands as it implies a lower level of commitment than actually becoming a fan. And in theory this should result in an increased number of users that a brand can directly speak with through a user’s news feed.
Although the effort to build a sizeable audience on Facebook has merit, the number of users that like your brand now or became a fan prior to this week is not an ultimate measure of success. Instead, brand marketers should be focusing on ways to determine whether their content and messages are resonating and adding value to their relationship with their Facebook community. Such metrics can be redemptions of product offers that you post on Facebook, the number of users that further engage with your brand by joining your loyalty program, or by the number of users that are sharing your content with friends. The key is to be moving towards a more complete view of your brand advocates by understanding their interactions on Facebook (and other social networks) and mapping that to their purchasing behaviors for your brand over time.
