The Truth About Fans

When it comes to figuring out whether or not your efforts on Facebook are paying off what metrics do you turn to?  Is it the number of “fans” your page has?  More often or not this is what I hear.  From non-profit organizations to for profit companies this is what people rattle off when I ask them questions to guage whether or not their social media efforts are succeeding.

Here’s the thing though.  This metric in no way can truly measure all that it means for your organization to succeed in it’s mission across the social media.  It’s easy to believe that this is all that it comes down to, (I mean, it’s easy to think that you’re doing well if you have hundreds of new people wanting to hear what you have to say every week) but unless you’re making the connection and turning these new fans into new customers, donors, or members how does is it really helping your organzation reach it’s goals?

Most people would say you need to start by defining the goals you hope to reach buy engaging in social media.  i totally agree with this.  But I’d like to take a step back and touch on a basic point that often goes overlooked.  Do you understand what a “Facebook Fan” is?

Here’s the truth about Facebook fans.

• Fans don’t like everything about you, they may like only one thing about you, or nothing about you.
• Fans don’t necessarily want to know what’s going on with your organization
• Fans don’t like to leave facebook to read your information
• Fans don’t like to be marketed to, and they can smell it coming from a mile away
• Fans are finnickey.  It only took 1-2 clicks to “Like” your page, and it only takes 1 click to hide your updates from their news feed forever.
• The easiest thing you’ll ever get your fans to do is “Unlike’” your page or “Hide” your updates.

So there it is.  The relationship a brand has with their facebook fans is a little like the relationship we all have with our Kindgergarten teacher.  We all can remember who he/she was, we generally have some warm fuzzy feelings associated with the Kindergarten experience but we don’t care to be reminded about those warm fuzzies or the kindergarten experience every day.  In general we don’t care about knowing what’s going on in the life of our Kindergarten teacher, and for the most part we are not all that interested in having a conversation or sharing life with him/her.   There was a time and place for kindergarten and now that time is over.  It’s nice to say we went to kindergarten though, and it’s fun to connect with all of the other people who we shared that experience with, but the truth is we don’t care about talking with our kindergarten teacher about it.

It is what it is.  Understand your fans first, then you’ll have an idea of what you can ask them to do.