A couple of years ago (late 2009) I first heard the term ‘Facebook Cull’. This involves removing Facebook friends that you are no longer in contact with, no longer like, no longer remember who they are etc.
A couple of months ago I was thinking about carrying out my own ‘Cull’. I began to scroll through my newsfeed to see who should be on my hit list, or who was boring me with their self indulgent status updates. This is when I realised that most of my newsfeed consists of brand Page status updates. Perhaps this is because I work in social media, so keep a close eye on some of the country’s top brands.
However, soon after this a blog post by Adam Field, Head of Social at PokerStars, appeared on one of my favourites, The Wall Blog.
‘Are brands taking over Facebook?’ Adam asked. He said: “I am actually a fan of over 100 different brand pages on Facebook, which sounds a lot but some statistics from 2010 say that 20 million users become fans of pages every single day, so in the grand scheme of things, it’s probably a reasonable number.” So he agrees with me, but then he works in the same industry so perhaps we have a skewed view over newsfeeds.
Today, I noticed an article on Mashable about how consumers are interacting with brands on Facebook. The study, conducted by Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey, stated that 56% of those under 35 interact with their favourite brands on Facebook.
The study said that when it comes to ‘liking’ brands on Facebook, the main reason respondents said they ‘like’ a brand on Facebook is because they are a customer (58%) or because they want to receive discounts and promotions (57%). These are the same reasons as me, but I also tend to ‘like’ competitor brands to my clients, brands that are running exciting competitions or breaking boundaries, or brands that are likely to produce some relevant content for my clients.
Contrary to my theory, the study claimed that 78% of consumers who ‘like’ brands on Facebook said they ‘like’ fewer than ten brands. Does this mean that their newsfeed is not clogged up with brands, and is a nice mix?
I’ve been meaning to write a blog about this subject for a while, so apologies if you feel this has been discussed already, but I’d really like to hear my readers’ thoughts on this. What makes you like a Facebook Page? And is your newsfeed mainly friends or brands?
A taster of my Facebook newsfeed
Interesting post. I agree, lately it seems that most of my Facebook stream is brands too. But I am also probably not a good sample as I’ve added a lot due of work. However, for shops that I have ‘liked’, I have mainly added them because of promotions or because they made me ‘like’ their page to enter a competition. For other pages such as BBC or ‘The British Monarchy’ page, I have ‘liked’ them to get information or pictures.
I think it would depend entirely on the industry the brand is in. For instance i agree people would follow someone like Asos or fashion related on Facebook to get the latest deals and news, but in terms of things like B2B journalism i would think linkedin and twitter would be higher percentages. I feel Facebook has become networking amongst friends, rather than business associates.
Love the blog btw. Keep up the good work.