It was strange that I came across 3 relevant articles on a particular topic I had earmarked for today’s post.
First, an AdAge piece titled, ‘When It Comes to Facebook, Relevance May Be Redefined‘. The relevant point for this post?
There’s increasing evidence that the most-effective kinds of marketing communications on these websites are simple, random, even banal statements or questions driven by the calendar or the whim of a writer that may not have anything to do with the brand in question.
Second, on Social Media Today, a piece titled, ‘Social media metrics: Engagement alone is not a good metric to follow‘. Relevant excerpt,
Engagement is when somebody cares and interacts. Both are necessary if youâ??re going to measure your social media marketing.  You can interact with videos, games, jokes, the weather, etc. and not really care about the brand. If you do it enough, you may grow an affection for the brand, but you wouldnâ??t go out of your way to hunt it down if it changed its name and left no forwarding address.
Third, Jay Baer’s review of the book, ‘Content Rules’, a new book by Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs) and C.C. Chapman (founder of DigitalDads).
While content of any type can help your company (provided itâ??s search optimized well), the best content marketing programs are based on engaging content that makes you think, laugh, share, or all three. As cited in Content Rules, a survey by MarketingProfs of 5,000+ businesses found that â??producing engaging contentâ? is the top challenge for content marketing programs. Even a cursory browse of the Web will underscore that finding, as inane Web pages, videos, and Webinars are omnipresent like gypsies with a â??likeâ? button.
These three pieces help me in framing my post today better. The AdAge piece cites the kind of success such simple, random content have produced, while the social media today piece says something that mildly mocks the AdAge conclusion – engagement is of course something which people care and interact with/for, but the banal content that generates a lot of comments/likes is engagement of a different kind – engagement for engagement’s sake, not all for the brand’s sake. Jay’s review of the book talks of what is best and the ones that makes us ‘think, laugh, share, or all three’ may not apply to the banal, attention-seeking content variety.
I (and we, at Edelman Digital) have come across this phenomenon myself – a rather innocuous and seemingly-pointless question about which color the community prefers (of any product the client makes) perhaps got us more responses and ‘likes’ on Facebook, than a meaningful question seeking feedback on a particular facet of the product! The numbers in the former do give us (and the client) a minor high, but it is essential to remember and explain to the client the value of what it means.
It no doubt gets us more likes, more fans, more comments and more everything, but it is only part of the picture. For instance, at Edelman Digital, such kinds of content is part of a larger content plan which includes other types of content as well. We bucket the content for assorted purposes – so, for instance, a simple/banal question to drive engagement/comments/likes; a thoughtful question to get genuine feedback; an information-based nugget to create awareness; an opinion-based content to know how the community reacts to it…and so on.
Just because a dumbed-down, random piece of content gives us a LOT of likes/comments, it does not become the mainstay of a content strategy for a brand. In fact, we evaluate the reactions of the various content buckets we create to ascertain specific insights on each and advice clients on the performance and future of each content bucket. This helps us understand and create content in the future.
For instance, we look at the percentage of community members who respond to a question specifically intended to increase purchase consideration/intent – this, as a percentage of the ones of who responded to the banal/random content is a decent metric to create a new category of users who are more likely to opt for the brand’s product/service in the short-to-medium term.
Dumbing down content to drive engagement is only part of the strategy. Done too often, it may trivialize the purpose and intent of the community. Done right, it can help the overall content framework and the brand.
Remember that there has to be a larger plot to content creation – using obviously crowd-pleasing content too often is more like making a film that has every scene that plays to the gallery. It could get boring soon and in fact, reduce engagement in the long run by being predictable.
Picture courtesy, Kate Andrews, via Flickr.