The difference of social media between Turkish brands & global brands

What did we do wrong on social media?

I watched a case study of a global brand on Youtube yesterday. It’s a great story and great content. The case study has watched by millions and it’s a Facebook application with 248 Facebook user competitors. If this was a Turkish brand, the brand would cancel the contract with the advertising agency.

It was 2009 when big brands in Turkey started to appear on social media. The brands were so used to ATL marketing and so used to talk about only themselves. What I mean by this is, they thought social media as a channel with no feedback just like TV. So they just skipped creating useful contents for users and they just started to talk about only themselves. They just took care of complaints on social media but they just put press releases, event photos, sale announcements. They’ve never thought of content marketing so Turkish internet users got used to following only brands that they use in real life for sale announcements. They also treated bloggers like publicists and they sent presents to write about them.

Then the subject was “followers”. Turkish brands asked: “Our competitors have x followers, why don’t we have that much? We want thousands of followers, it doesn’t matter if they really care about us, we just want to show people that everybody loves us!”

So marketing people who are experts of ATL thought and they solved the problem: “Let’s give prizes to people who like us!”

There was a programme on TV named “Çarkıfelek” (Wheel of Fortune) when I was a little child. People were calling the programme and winning prizes. So marketing ppl thought that social media was like Çarkıfelek and people would like us if we give prizes.

It has been about 5 years that I’m working in the advertising sector and the only question of brands before an internet campaign is “how many people will like us?”

Most of the applications on Facebook, people are forced to like the page, call their friends to like the page, collect votes to win prizes.

So now, Turkish brands are obsessed about engagement. They have thousands of likes but there’s no engagement.

What did Turkish brands do wrong? Everything.